School Board Meeting 10/14/21

001this time we will reconvene into our open session certification of resolution of compliance please thank you madam chair motion the closed meeting was conducted in the conformity with the provisions of the virginia freedom information act as required by section 2.2-3712-d of the code of virginia and certify that only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements were discussed and only such public business matters as were identified in the motion by which the closed meeting was convened were heard disgust all considered okay motion made second please a second that motion okay so okay motion carry i want to welcome everyone to our school board meeting tonight i want to also remind you that masks are required and if someone came without a mask there are masks up here at the front okay this time i'd

002like to ask our vice chair miss tines to lead us in the pledge in the moment of silence i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of for america it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you this time we're ready for our olive white achievers [Applause] good evening the vision for isle of wight county schools is to create a learning environment that will enable every child to discover his or her unique gifts and talents the isle of wight achievers section of our board meeting gives us an opportunity to recognize and celebrate our students and staff for their unique talents and gifts our first recognitions are actually some of you the virginia school board association recognizes board members with an award for their commitment to effective school

003board governance through their participation in the vsba school board academy during the 2019-2020 2021 school school year school board members earn academy credits through participation in vsba meetings and other academy sessions and through vsba governance and service activities receiving awards of achievement in a bronze vsba pin are jackie carr julia perkins and dr jim thornton and i've already put your certificates and pins at your seats so thank you and congratulations here we go i just wanted to let people know that denise times did not receive an award because when i came back to the school board of course we all know we went into the pandemic and the virginia school board association they do that over a two-year period i've only been here two years and they shut down so i have uh attended a

004couple of their virtual sessions yes but hopefully next year things will be different thank you miss briggs yes ma'am miss science next we're going to have our seniors of the month it's we're back to doing our seniors in the month for the new school year so that's exciting uh each month we recognize a student from windsor high and smith ohio senior of the month and our first honoree tonight from windsor high school is connor carmolovit nope karmalovich did i get it i knew i was going to trip myself up connor carmelovich connor is a standout student because he goes above and beyond he challenges himself by asking deep questions taking initiative in his learning and demonstrating curiosity this month alone connor was placed in quarantine he took his it was a couple weeks ago he

005took ownership of his education by seeking out and asking if teachers would zoom with him during his quarantine so that he didn't get too far behind this spoke volumes about his character and his drive quote conor's work ethic and attention to detail make him a joy to have in the learning environment he is a free thinker with the ability to translate what he has learned and the ideas that can be applied outside of the classroom and that comes from science teacher at windsor high deb mcmanaway connor plans to attend virginia tech which always gets a big thumbs up from me and study computer science and connor we want to congratulate you and if you would stand maybe between where ms dial and his car are we're going to ask our boards that's here to stand

006at your seat and uh neely and dr thornton i don't know if we need to squeeze in a little but david's going to get a photo and if there's any family members that want a picture this is the perfect time yes okay so the motion carried okay during the public comments we're asking that there be no applauding for whatever said um we ask that whoever comes up to speak please address the board and at this time we will hear from our first speaker okay so madam chair i need to make an announcement someone i think has accidentally picked up page two of the sign-in sheet so if you could check your papers because i have an electronic copy but i'm missing numbers 17 through 24. so if anyone signed up i don't have those on

007my electronic copy because they were here so they then go out with the other pictures red sheet like this okay guys did we find it that's okay as long as we found it that's all that matters thank you appreciate it okay so okay so there weren't any through there okay [Applause] so so in accordance to policy bdd-e presentations of information on any subject will be concluded at the discretion of the board no person will be recognized to speak more than once citizens scheduled to speak on the agenda will be permitted three three minutes maximum time for their presentations delegations are requested to limit their speakers to two a maximum of 30 minutes will be designated but that's been amended correct right that's been waived for today yes persons speaking are asked to be specific state

008the issues for the board's consideration and attach a copy of your prepared remarks if you have any prepared remarks they should be given to the board clerk please do not approach the board members the school board requests that speakers refrain from referring to specific individuals and that any matter related to a specific student or individual be discussed in a closed meeting speakers are addressing the school board and will face the board while at the podium and not interact with members of the audience all right so first i'm not sure if he's here with chad smith okay yeah i wasn't sure okay mr boykin opie boy can cause the district and i'd like to preface this by saying some of it especially for the people watching is not for the ears of children even though it

009is a dictate by the school board so if anybody's got children address the best anybody's got children they don't want to hear i would suggest they plug their ears up um i've got a lot but i'm not going to take up a lot of time these are excerpts from books recommended by the schools to the students this one's from the hate u give the crowds are too thick we climb on top of the bus stop bench to get a better view of everything going on king lords and gray bandanas and garden disciples and green bandanas standing on a police car in the middle of the street chanting justice for khalil people gathered around the car record the scene with their phones and throw rocks at the windows that cop bro guy says gripping a baseball

010bat killed him over nothing he slams it back into the driver's side window shattering the glass it's on the king lords and gds stomp out the front windows and somebody else flip that the gang bangers jump off people line up on the side of the car and i stare at the lights on top remember the ones that flash behind me and khalil and watch them disappear as they flip the car into its back someone shouts watch out a molotov cocktail sails towards the card and woof it bursts into flame to cry cheers people say misery loves company but i think that's like with anger too and it goes on people hurl rocks and glass bottles at the cops yo seven says stop throwing objects at law enforcement the officer says exit the streets immediately or

011you'll be subject to arrest the rocks and balls continue to fly seven hops off the bench come on he says chris and climb off too we need to get out of here the police the police devonta continue to devonte man come on says seven i ain't scared of them the police there's a light pop and an object sells into there and lands in the military um one more excerpt from another book really quick this is from out of darkness by actually hope perez recommended by the schools he shifted in his pajamas into part of him that made him a man stuck out reddish purple and frightening she had never seen one before except on a baby this was different he lifted her hand to his mouth and licked it then he lowered her hand down

012and closed it around hardness his hand moved around hers she watched her hand move back and forth like it didn't belong to her there's worse plenty of it you all should be very proud all right we ask that there be no applauding for or against whatever is spoken we ask that we remain quiet mr thomas dubois promised boys let's take a two minute recess so i can talk to you okay a two minute recess so hasn't been two minutes okay we're going to go ahead and proceed okay jason marsh jason marsh windsor virginia chairman carr the book that mr boykin just read this is a picture of it sitting in georgia tyler middle school classroom library right here last month mrs times and mrs perkins endorsed the reed woke challenge this book is on the

013reed woke challenge mrs times said we're training our high school students to survive and added that these books are for high school not middle school or elementary your words here it is middle school lord knows where else it is it's out there mrs perkins i don't know where she sits tonight i hope she's well she went so far as to say high school students need to explore their own sexuality she didn't want censorship she's a proponent of the read work books so here's another one of your read woke books it's called out of darkness and i quote kids close your ears for the boys or the idea of or the idea of the idea of a mexican is a mexican is a mexican she said plenty loud for the rest of us to hear the

014girls among us followed miranda's lead and began to tally flaws close from five years ago a brave long out of style patch on the back of the hem of her dress and also how come her name is smith when smith isn't mexican look at her making eyes at fred not wasting any time boys among us had no trouble getting past the playing clothes and laying down plans take her out back we boys figured then hands on the titties put it in a coin box put it in the corn hole grab a hold of that braid and rub that calico there's your woke get read woke that's what you got in our schools it's what you put in our schools a shame on every one of you that endorses is garbage kids deserve better we're going

015to sit up here later and we're going to watch this man get up here and try to tell us how it's too difficult to track these books it's too difficult too hard not worth the effort instead it's just ridiculous too hard to track them i've already seen the agenda on top of that we're gonna let it come up here and tell us that adult content drugs and hate are not allowed on it systems in our schools but we allow this garbage in our libraries in our classrooms so why are we taking such a hard line on the i.t we let it go in the books why there's no answer for it you don't have one i want this man fired and i want you to take some accountability for it miss arlene williams yeah sorry

016i mean my daughter kept her ears open by the way okay all right um i did want to just talk about and i'm an english teacher i want to talk on um the attack on authors um or shall i say rather the attack on the community because while we're focusing on words um within a book i'm focusing on something a little bit different in my classroom that i'm seeing that um the teachers that just spoke um are not seeing um first i want to start by talking about the word sick which carries the definition of a physical or mental illness feeling of nauseous or wanting to vomit or to bring something up from vomit and if i'm not mistaken this word was used at the last school board meeting to describe the character trace of

017a specific author i think that our world has been shifted so much from disagreements and the lack of understanding that we are afraid of what might come up from the vomit and it is far more than the words from the books that we have in our schools the vomit that i speak of today is racism discrimination and the hate that you ultimately give sometimes it comes back to you division false characterization and hurt as a respectful person with morals and values you know my children are watching me so i want to publicly state that each one of you may represent a different district but i do respect your position my mom taught me that um as an english teacher i wanted to pull some lines from some of my favorite authors that i respect because

018of their transparency i will push montagues against the wall and thrust their maids against the wall famous line from a play that i teach in my english class the women in most famous peace literature that depicts a journey or an epic of a man however the women of this epic are not seen for who they are but they're seen for their affairs that they have oh we've been teaching that for years by the way i don't have time to talk about the spicy scenes the author creates with the words the famous piece of literature from a man that lost his father mother died in two married his cousin his famous story speaks of a character who got a man drunk and chained to a wall due to jealousy yet i respect the author for his

019transparency to help the mindset of my students in my classroom who may be dealing with so many issues while i would not read out of the darkness as a class set in my classroom it is an excellent individual read that reflects the tensions between school home and community you do know that your children talk about these tensions in the classroom one minute you just don't know because the sickness and the illnesses of a traditional corrupt mindset of our community but i love the many facets of the english language um it has been two weeks since my seniors in my classroom have been teaching life lessons and so here are the questions that they have for us they don't hear us why do they disregard our feelings as a child why is your respect immediately given

020and mine has to be earned why do you never ever ask me how i am or who i am and why do you not listen but we are forced to listen to you why do you cast aside who i am for you in the community when you look silly on the tv fussing at the school board meetings so i said all this to say that as teachers we are faced with so many underlying issues and i'm not here and i don't represent any side except for the side of my children and my students i don't pick sides for anyone at all we have been sitting in these board meetings acting like babies and i believe that words change atmospheres and it can also harm the atmosphere as well what are your solutions give me some

021strategies to address the vaping in the schools give me some strategies that i had this morning when i held my student time and in the um in the classroom and said that i love you so those are the things give me some strategies and not just speaking points thank you jennifer williams carrollton district um it just seemed like what people were doing and why not tyrone he was fine he was older and mostly nice to me at least i convinced myself it he was and most important he wanted me he could have sex with any girl but he wanted me the day i lost my virginity i had half day of school and tyrone skipped the rest of his classes to meet up with me i was so nervous about a busy a busybody neighbor

022seeing me bring a boy home that we went all the way to his house my first impression of sex it was a lot more technical than i expected he kept struggling with the condom and i laughed because i was nervous as he was fumbling so much apparently laughing is not the move at such a critical moment because his face got real tight around the mouth and the fumbling got worse he was supposed to be the expert at this when he finally shoved in me it stung for a second i wasn't sure if i wanted to push him away or pull him closer and then he was panting and sweating on my chest and apologizing and i kept telling him it was okay thinking he was apologizing for hurting me until i realized he was apologizing

023because it was over all i could keep thinking was that he definitely didn't have any sweet words or niceness in the moment that i needed it most i cleaned myself up put on my pants and left he didn't even say goodbye each one of you approved this book in our children's schools and miss carr you might possibly be the biggest appointment disappointment of them all because once you heard about the contents of these books one minute you opposed it then you received opposition from the rest of the board and you let it silence you you were our only voice and now we have no one to fight this for us i'm not opposed to the idea of the read woke challenge i am opposed to these the books some of the books on this list

024not all of them actually um i'm opposed to the pornograph the pornography the drug use and the violence that you have allowed in this county school libraries i ask you to the to adopt the same process as fairfax and virginia beach school systems remove the books from the library circulation and electronically until an audit can be done audit the books and any containing materials like this remove them please remove them we don't need these in our kids hands they have enough to fight against this is not something that we need to add to thank you heidi schwartz [Applause] heidi schwartz so we've heard some passages from books found at both the high and middle school in iowa county this includes the sixth grade virginia law and involving morals and decency and obscene items in regards

025to minors obscene and i'll define this as dr thornton stated previously who defines books well the law does it defines when it appears in books as a theme or purpose interest in sex that is shameful or moral interest and nudity sexual content and sexual excitement that's the law it states that it's a crime to write to provide a book with sex to children but we live in a state of virginia so we have a former governor who's currently running for office and he allowed it in 2016 to be in schools does that make it moral and decency no it still doesn't but it allows it to be in the schools if someone else were to hand these books to my child it would be a crime but in the school it's not so you guys

026are fortunate enough to have that exemption in the state of virginia but this is from a man who just stated he does not think parents should tell schools what to teach their children so let's turn to the success in our schools under dr thornton in 2014 we ranked at number 16 by 2019 we dropped to number 45. dr thornton does not like us to compare numbers unless we are looking at his 13th i will wait i will stop bored comments if you don't remind remain respectful go ahead um dr thornton does not like us to compare numbers unless we are looking at his 13 percent raise dr thornton has also finally done research on the books and he'll tell you that students are mature enough and should have a right to privacy in their library

027usage at the same same time tonight they'll discuss governing the students devices and usage dr thornton will propose to pass the book to parents to monitor their kids library usage because he will propose it's too hard for the school but i'll direct you to please check out the database database school not that's with the k-n-o-t it's that the number one minute pool management and software i also propose a resolution that i sent to both ms style and ms carr as a school board are you willing to denounce the letter that the national school board association sent to president biden requesting that he direct federal law enforcement to investigate parents if so have you contacted the sba and the u.s department of justice have you seen anything from the con the constituents especially us who have

028been showing up at meetings for the last six months that has described us as a domestic terrorist and if so something that local law enforcement would not be able to handle can you please tell us how the school board and superintendent define words of intimidation harassment and threat and i kindly request that the board pass a resolution supported parents rights to free expression under the first amendment without fear of retribution just as our board of supervisors made us a constitutional county in december of 2019 that includes the first amendment we ask that you formally announce this to the nsba i also request a detailed financial audit on the school system and dr thornton spending for the last two years time miss vanderbreak hello so i have some more um pieces to the book um first

029is the poem x and it states so i press my lips at his his mouth is soft against mine gently he bites my bottom lip and then his tongue slides in my mouth it's messier than i thought it'd be he must notice because his tongue slows down and my heart is one of the darwin's finches learning to fly then out of out of darkness he he undid the bottom of her dress and until he could slide a hand inside the top of her slip there was a small roll of fabric nestled warm and tight there he leaned over her and tugged it free with his teeth when he had it she could feel him smiling mischief at her what can i say i save this and keep looking to see what other treasures i find

030he nuzzled her neck and kissed her behind the ear he smelled of wood and pepper she exhaled slowly and buttoned her dress back up with shaky fingers it's not as beautiful as a ring but i did make it for you then at the end of out of darkness then henry [Music] crossed oh henry's fist slamming into his sister's face once twice three times henry shouted do you like that keep it up boy every time you holler i'm gonna punch her again wash his silence the rustle of dry leaves his father rapid breathing on agony of waiting his sister crying out in pain and then the end of it henry shut her grunt and gasp naomi sobbing when beto could look henry was standing up and zipping his pants with one hand i'll be damned girl

031he said pushing his hair back off his brow you were telling the truth this is when she's getting raped at the end and it goes further on but i'm not going to read all of that so i had sent um an email to everybody and i don't know who all one minute reads their email but i encourage you to read it and it talks about the articles about emotional decent citatization in relation to abnormal child psychology so i know that censorship is an issue but so is desensitizing the kids because it does lead to more violent behavior due to the lack of transparency in the use of the taxpayer fund school system i as a tax taxpaying resident of alawite and parent of children in the public school system to which these funds belong i

032formally call on the alawite county school board to have a detailed audit of all the spending by the school board and superintendent thornton from 2018-2019 year to prison jason moore good evening everyone thank you for having me here appreciate it um good evening my name is jason moore and i'm the proud father of three children currently enrolled within the alawite county school system and the proud son of a retired educator of over 30 years experience first let me say thank you to the school board for allowing me to speak this evening to voice my concerns it is my goal this evening to articulate in a manner that promotes both honest and open dialogue we began our journey with alawite county schools in the fall of 2019 with our eldest child in hopes of providing him

033with a more sound and safe learning environment versus the current academic options provided by suffolk city schools we took a tour windsor high school and were so impressed with the quality of educational opportunities we had no issues moving forward in paying out of district tuition to this point my family has been impressed with the broad spectrum of courses offered by the accessibility to teachers and staff alike and we are eternally grateful for that since the commencement of this academic year certain things have caught my attention regarding what is being taught to our children and the criteria by which these materials have been selected i just want to ensure that our elected officials are not making any unilateral or bias-based decisions that will affect the educational process or alter the thought process of any student in

034any negative way i truly believe that the education of our children is a partnership between parents school faculty and board members with the end goal providing students a quality education free from any violence when materials are selected and taught in the classroom it should be free from any personal political or social bias and vetted properly prior to any implementation i truly want our children to succeed which i believe is the goal of every person here and this is why we are here we need to be aware of any materials that breaks down categorizes or promotes siloed thinking by accepting any type of forced studies from any viewpoint we automatically alienate ostracize and limit free thought and handicap our children from forming their own opinions we should strive for education without any type of indoctrination and

035maintain parental rights to oversee our children's education without any type of government overreach i do understand that there are children from all backgrounds who struggle in the world of academia and is incumbent upon all of us to provide every student a quality education regardless of race sex or religion i hope that we keep our focus on our children curb any indignations that we have and truly will become a beacon of community and educational excellence that will be a success story for years to come i hope my words do not fall upon deaf ears and pricks the hearts of those willing to listen again thank you for allowing me to speak and may we all be mindful and respectful of one another and keep our children at the forefront thank you [Applause] todd meyer no okay

036charles haskett am i saying that right half hey good evening everybody i did pass these around thank you actually one okay all right my name is charles haskett i'm here from from the windsor district i don't have a child in school yet but he may or may not start next year depending on how the concerns i have are addressed it seems these concerns are shared with many other parents as well before you now is a proposal for resolution that i would like to see become policy to save time i will skip the mission or the whereas sentences and get down to the resolution or now therefore be resolved sentence one any school school-based program activity or entity that is operated controlled paid for or under the jurisdiction of the school board shall refrain from training

037teaching providing material or promoting the following students and employees a that any race is inherently superior or inferior to any other race b that any individual by virtue of his or race or skin color is inherently racist privileged or oppressive whether consciously or unconsciously c that an individual by virtue of his or race or skin color bears responsibility for the actions committed by other members of his or her race skin color or religion d an individual's more moral character or worth is determined by his or race or skin color e that the united states is a fundamentally and inherently racist country f that capitalism is racist g socialist communist ideologies and political indoctrination or affiliation h sexually explicit sexually explicit reading materials this resolution could be more clearly stated and defined so i can't see

038why that any of you would have objections to signing this and making this a policy i and almost every other parent in here could now be labeled extremist or domestic terrorist by simply speaking out against this socialist indoctrination in critical race ideology and if that isn't proof that there is an agenda going on you are either complacent or supportive of these destructive agendas and do not deserve the continued support of alawite county residents all right [Applause] sabrina barnes [Applause] good evening madam chair board members dr thornton my name is sabrina barnes from the smithfield district i'm a retired isle of wight county schools special education teacher school counselor in the 2015 division teacher of the year i'm here to speak on the social emotional needs of the students particularly as they relate to the school

039counseling program students are experiencing many negative influences and hardships including pandemic issues dangerous and destructive tick tock challenges academic pressures and more as a result students are in critical need of support guidance and resources now more than ever unfortunately counselors far too often find themselves unable to respond to students needs and requests for assistance in a timely manner much less does deliver a comprehensive preventative guidance program to enhance the learning process for all students when i first began my role as the school counselor at windsor middle now georgie tyler middle school isle elephant school counselor's duties were in alignment with the best practice recommendation that counselors spend 80 percent of their time providing direct and indirect services to students over the years however school counselors have become tasked with many administrative and clerical duties which

040are unrelated to their training and their unique skill set this has led to diminishing amounts of time to build meaningful relationships with students and to implement programs that support student growth and achievement to illustrate the impact i'll share a personal example during my last year as a school counselor i was assigned the duty of being the building sol test coordinator in the midst of sol testing while sitting in the conference room surrounded by buckets upon buckets of testing materials one minute secured testing tickets and a long line of teachers waiting to check out supplies a student was brought to the door to see me because his parent had passed away the night before test security requirements and testing due duties prevented me from being able to be present with my student when he needed me

041most that evening i went home and told my husband i would be asking to return to the classroom position i left a profession that was my calling and passion i have more examples to say but to try to sum it up the last school board meeting presentation was made on social emotional learning counselors were absent from that presentation we're hiring instructional assistants with maybe two-year degrees in training them over the summer to provide services that counselors could and should be providing they have many times advanced degrees training and coursework in psychology and we can do better they deserve they deserve it thank you laura fletcher [Applause] sorry about that good evening ladies and gentlemen i'm bored and dr thornton my name is laura fletcher and i'm a resident of isle of wight county wife and

042mother of three children all graduates of smithfield high school for many years i've volunteered many hours in our schools and every moment was special i enjoyed relationships with our school board members administrators teachers parents and students i'm proud of those years and the time spent working with others toward the shared goal of enriching the educational experiences of children in isle of wight county but terry mcauliffe dismisses parent involvement preferring decisions regarding educating our children to be left to the government last night i attended the candidate meet and greet midway through the event a black gentleman asked a powerful even stunning question of all the candidates he asked have you considered the socio-economic and political impact of race-based politics and if so what are your thoughts i don't believe anyone was prepared for this question but

043in my mind it was the most succinct important and timely question of the evening organizations political parties academia education unions media even some ministries are profiting from the continual stirring of race-based politics this brings me to the dangerous divisive and especially profitable american marxist ideology critical race theory isla white county schools though denying has purchased crt curriculum under the guise of equity and is paying the exorbitant salary of our equity coordinator so yes even locally race-based politics is proving profitable the politics of race crt has now been nationally highlighted and that just 10 days ago the attorney general of the united states wrote a memorandum authorizing the use of federal authorities against american parents i'll continue to go on down um race-based politics is harming our children wreaking havoc in our schools affecting the very

044foundations of american society giving power to the undeserving and making the unscrupulous millions in the process and we reject this evil before anything else i'm a follower of jesus i'm here to appeal to anyone on this board or anyone in the audience professing a biblical faith to reject the ideology of critical race theory crt is anti-gospel it has no place in the life of believers it condemns and shames without forgiveness or the opportunity of redemption racism is a heart issue and is an affront to the majesty and creativity of god he made the races he loves variety each of us is a living testimony to the beauty and excellence of the living god all men are due respect and civility and as americans we must return to our foundations all men are created equal and

045endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights jennifer napier so let's start with transportation we have a shortage of drivers now we hear that the head of transportation has resigned wonder why but anyway what are the plans to rectify this issue something has to happen now let's discuss the books there have been quite a few snarky comments made by certain people in this room and we've seen the emails from certain principles about it so let me make this clear these are minors we are talking about if no one in the school system is going to take a stand then we as parents will and trust me regardless of what thornton has said there is a lot more than 20 of us that are concerned like my mom always says no one is going to stick

046up for you or fight for your kids the way you will she did it for me and i'm doing it for mine that's my job your job is to protect and educate our children not indoctrinate them if you have any reading materials made available to underage students that have graphic pictures descriptions of sex then each and every one of you are promoting pornography to minors bottom line the definition of pornography excuse me of child pornography under federal law is child pornography under federal law is defined as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor someone under the age of 18. child pornography is illegal under federal law in all states and is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of five thousand dollars we are aware that mcauliffe put

047this trust in the schools to choose appropriate literary and artistic works however there are seven literary standards that should be used in determining literary value universality art artistry intellectual values suggestiveness spiritual value permanence and style it appears that someone may have used these standards in the loosest way possible or not at all are all of you guilty of this we as parents will of course be watching like a hawk however your job is to keep it out of the schools to begin with the parents of clark county schools in nevada have served a 200 million dollar lawsuit against the county school district for six violations as of now and we will be more than willing to move in that direction if necessary this will also include any coveted violations any civil rights violations and any

048human rights violations thornton became superintendent in isla white county schools in 2015 our school rating has dropped from 16th to 45th from 2015 to 2019 yet he received a 13 raise please explain this because i've seen from all i've seen from him is gaslighting blowing smoke and failure to do his job as he was hired to do along with the rest of the school board that we're elected to properly educate our children and in a responsible way it is also worthy of note that if a coveted vaccine mandate is pushed on these children you need to be prepared for what could possibly be a mass exodus which will translate to less funding in conclusion i also request a detailed financial audit on the school system and thornton spending for the last two years reverend willie

049williams good evening madam chair and board members dr thornton and uh i believe mr johnson from westside uh elementary school i commend him on what he was able to present you know the bible says in as much as some people want to talk about religion the bible says along with wisdom yet understanding i want to talk just for a brief moment about organizational cultural change and when individuals can't get you one way they'll come at you a different way and i warn you all from the onset uh that if you implement on the the initiative of equity and inclusion you're talking about a culture of change and it's not going to be well received and people who don't want to change uh will naturally fight against it they'll demonstrate all kinds of negative attitude when

050i speak of cultural i'm talking about folk ways i'm talking about custom i'm talking about the reason why we behave the way we do and no organization will change for no reason and it's been recognized in our white county uh that we have inequity we have it at the administrative level we have it at the staff level we have it at the teacher's level one minute and we have it at the student level and in order uh to make a change equity and inclusion could possibly help change the culture the culture is the most difficult part of any organization to change all of these things that being pulled up about woke i guarantee you every author that's in that walk program is someone with a minority background and the only reason why it's being pulled

051up is to pull a wool over your eyes to make you think and focus your attention on the walk program but that's not what it's about it's about getting rid of dr thorne getting rid of uh miss jones uh that they may destroy the enact the equity and inclusion program because they don't want to change thank you mr john collick thanks let's put my glasses on real quick this will not be long but good evening everybody as you know my name is john collick from carsville now i was recently asked about the demographics of our schools both students and staff i found significant disparities between the students versus teachers folks who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of our students money on equity inclusion why can't we make sure our staff is reflective of

052the community we don't need a program to tell us what's right especially since much that's in that program we believe is wrong every single one of us in this room knows what's right and knows what's not so as a community let's focus on fixing this issue but not by wasting our children's money on programs we simply don't need let's take our kids money that's being spent on equity and let's hire teachers teachers assistants and tutors and guidance counselors that we need to help every child achieve not only a passing grade for their grade level but also to build the confidence they need to continue moving forward it's their money after all let's purchase anything at all that's going to help an individual child even if we only buy one product for one child if a

053child needs help reading let's give them hooked on phonics every child is different and every child learns differently and every single child can reach their potential but some with a little extra help and we need to identify exactly what every child particularly those who are not doing well needs and provide it to them and let's not leave our gifted students behind either some of what we purchase will have to consider consumable and a child will not return it when he's finished with it more expensive items such as a computer or even a cellular internet modem must be returned so it can be used again and yes i said cellular modem and that would be that would do more to help our struggling students than continuing to spend money on our equity programs that don't have

054any positive effect on our students i want to ensure that every student is given an opportunity to succeed when they graduate from alawite schools if they could have the capacity to be a doctor then we need to give them the education that will get them into medical school if their abilities lead them to work in the fast food industry let's ensure they have the education and the mindset they need to move up and eventually own their own store our goal is to help students reach their full potential nothing more and nothing less as i close i'm asking the school board to consider actively recruiting teachers and administrators who are fully qualified and would be good mentors and good role models for all of our students please go to job fairs as well as military bases

055to recruit good men and women and i will help in any way i can thank you very much [Applause] thank you sorry hi good evening my name is nell jones sear and i've been a resident of isle of wight county my entire life and was educated in the school system first of all i'd like to thank each of you for your dedication and service to our students and staff serving on the school board should never be pursued to gain power but to serve if you have any other goal than serving the students of this county then you are in the wrong place i may be slightly prejudiced but i still consider isle of wight the fight one of the finest school systems in the area i don't know a lot about crt in fact i

056don't really know much about it at all but i do imagine that in years to come we may even look back on that and think we've been sold a bill of goods and it'll line the pockets of book writers and theorists and philosophers but in the end be of little substance and value like so many things but here's something i do know about i know about the school year 1969 to 70. that was a monumental year in this county for both black and white children that year probably means nothing to most of you but it was embroiled in controversy see that was my senior year and it was the year that alawite county schools became fully integrated and oh my goodness the fear the anxiety the nail-biting as i look back on it i don't

057know what our parents thought was going to happen to us but to make this three minutes i can tell you that we got into school we sized each other up and by the end of the year we were playing sports together we were in clubs together we had a co-presidence of our class one ended up being president of a bank and won a doctor and you can guess which it doesn't make any difference we really had nothing to fear but we thought we did however these days i can tell you that with all the even tonight the visceral insulting and downright despicable things i hear and listening to these meetings and being here tonight i can tell you that perhaps if more people would reach out to school board members and ask how can we

058come along beside you to make changes for the betterment of our children we wouldn't be where we are tonight the bible says the court of three strands cannot easily be broken a lot of you apparently read your bible so go look that up imagine the difference it would make to be courted together and working together to affect positive change i really believe that parents and school board members really do only want what is good and best for our children and i realize after watching many of these meetings because i'm a domestic violent sexual assault victims advocate what i see a lot is bullying because when you're the loudest you're talking to the weak and defenseless and these people sit here and can say absolutely nothing yes these words hurt like errors maybe it's time you

059dropped your arrows and came to the table and said what can we do to help personally i'd like to thank each of you for serving because i can assure you that not many of us would sit here and take this abuse every month and may god bless each [Applause] ethan schwartz i'm here to talk about the bus issues uh we all know that there has been a shortage of drivers but where policies differed because of lack of staff whose fault is this i have to sit three feet apart from every kid in my classes and make sure that i don't get too close to them but in the bus we're sitting two to three in a seat i'm sitting there with my face squished against the wall while another person sits right next to me

060with 25 pounds in my lap my bus driver this week was diagnosed with coppa 19 and i was left for an hour on the side of the road to a quarter of a mile away from my house because the bus is doesn't like to turn around in my driveway thankfully someone from transportation sent a car out for me the cafeteria everyone gets a free lunch now which is great but the schools do not have the timing down right so the students a lot of the times end up waiting in line their whole lunch period times times of because of how long the lines are and if you try to bring something to heat it up there there's one microwave that there is usually a line that's just as long as the normal lunch line and

061most days and some days i do go home hungry because i'm unable to get food for the day um i've been just some days i have been bringing snacks and stuff like that but you know i mean i'm growing you can't live off of just snacks alone also please pay pay the bus drivers and the teachers who are missing work due to quarantine covered it impacts me as well as them because to know that they don't get paid after they're done with their sick days it's just disheartening speaking of paying um you guys have spent more than hundreds of thousands of dollars on crt that could have gone towards more security in the schools to protect the bathrooms from this what ungodly things have happened um it could have paid for scholarships gone into the

062sports team paid paid for giving teachers more salaries so that my teachers don't have to work two jobs because dealing with me is enough um excellent i'm just saying i'm just saying that indoctrination isn't worth them isn't worth how much money you guys have spent on it and what that could do for the community that is awful [Applause] herb de gras herb de groff hmm madam chair and board members i'm here to talk about uh virginia law 2201-253 decimal 13. this states the curriculum adopted by the local school division shall be aligned to the standards of learning at your 28 july meeting dr thornton and you the board reviewed and discussed 15 existing iwcs board policies specifically iwcs policy instructional goals and objectives that iwcs develops and implements a program of instruction for grades kindergarten

063through 12 that is aligned to the standards of learning number two iwcs policy iaf curriculum development and adoption the school board curriculus on meter exceed the requirements of the code of virginia regulation of the board of education and at minimum shall be aligned to the standards of learning during the 12 august board meeting dr thornton who oversees planning and evaluation of the curriculum and instruction and enforces school laws and susan getz the executive director who coordinates curriculum instruction programs presented two powerpoints titled curriculum alignment their presentation we're about iwcs is purchasing hampton skitties schools curriculum at a cost of sixty six thousand six hundred and ninety two dollars to ensure quote the iwcs school system now has its curriculum aligned with that with virginia's sols gets commented during the presentation quote with a small instructional

064staff has been proven difficult to create a wrong curriculum if you were a new teacher coming into our schools you did not have a curriculum you had the standards of learning and some resources but you did not have a curriculum you could follow we have an alignment issue some of our standards are not aligned as they need to be and this will help fix that by guest's statement she told us all that this iwcs board in this school division has not been in compliance with virginia law and this has existed since the first of july 2015 when cats and thorpe began working together why madam chair have already submitted these you all in an email earlier this afternoon but there's five questions why did dr thornton and mrs getz not developed this curriculum aligned with

065the sol for these past six years what have they been doing for six years worth of salaries and why have you not ensured this has been done dr thornton gets personally if a child failed an sol test subject or grade and didn't graduate because their teacher didn't have a curriculum align with sols required by law or policy what teach their child should they sue y'all mrs uh perkins said during the 28th july school board meeting if the division doesn't follow along we're asking for a lawsuit and asking the community as a whole to not have any faith in what we're doing we're not following law we're not doing our job so me thanks madam chair with this sol soq report that was sent inside by you and him back on the 18th of august we

066have a violation of virginia law you and dr thornton to sign an soq verification report that is falsely reported on this subject of curriculum aligning with virginia's osol so who's going to resign tonight from iwcs you should and you should time [Applause] let's see i'm sorry i cannot read this person's name it's um no um last name begins with a b clause yes yes thank you sorry don't call us we will call you and could you spell it for me again k-a-r-l-u-s and the last name bailey got it don't call us we will call you call you i got it thank you carlos baylor carlsfield virginia it worked crt let me get some eyes on woke is an anti-christian anti-white anti-american anti-western pro-socialist and perverse it's iconic that our schools are left-wing propaganda meals that's

067exactly what ms amaya's spanish one is about and i have a copy of that with me tonight now we're going to spend 66 thousand dollars for equity audit maybe we'll find that we're not teaching them to be a democrat racist fast enough critical race there is a marxist poison his primarily objective is to separate child from child child from parent child from teacher parent from teacher and the taxpayer from all of you we are going to bribe students with the name on the wall a button or a pen on your clothing and a t-shirt so let me guess what's on the button or the t-shirt being the newspaper didn't say i don't work i know i hate white people and cops i'm woke i'm now a chicago thug jackie you remind me of john curry

068when he said i voted for it before i voted against it should have done your homework i'm voting for john colley mccullough said he was against parents having any say about what our schools are teaching i recommend a vote for glenn yonkin and you jim probably need to move to chicago would the school board like to take time to apologize to this officer right here for the anti-police rhetoric that's in your workbooks hello i hear nothing but crickets jim there's one book in there that reminds me of you when i read the work 70 books the title is lipstick on a fat boy thank you boy that's a hard act to follow but ladies and gentlemen let me tell you something this didn't start in the last six months it didn't start in the last

069two years it started four and a half years ago easter pardon me would y'all be quiet so we can hear the gentleman that's speaking now it started four years and some months ago when this country got stupid enough to elect a guy like donald j trump an idiot a con artist and the biggest liar that walks on the face of the earth as far as i'm concerned and i got plenty of damn proof for that excuse me for my language but don't be misled by this activity you're seeing here this is political it's racist and that crt was something picked up by the hard right extremists in this country to create exactly what they're doing with it racism to separate us again look we've come a long way but we still have a hell of

070a long way to go to get through this garbage now my advice to the parents and that are here if you're going to get rid of your books the first thing you should do is throw your cell phone away or your kid's cell phone away and throw the computer away because if they think some of that garbage they said here tonight is tough i guarantee you their kids can get on the internet and pick up more garbage than they've ever seen in their life before i can tell you right now and don't forget this is political that's all we are and it started about three years ago when one of the individuals that was speaking tonight started attacking that man there because he didn't agree with some of his idiotic ideas about what education is

071so i'm here to tell you it's politics and that's all you're going to hear from this group from now on thank you very much [Applause] okay that's all of the speakers tonight next is the board member committee reports and information do you have anything for comments um madam chair excuse me it needs to be quiet in the board room so we can hear what's being said thank you go ahead mama chair i attended um two meetings since our last meeting uh the first one was uh ciac which is here um that's special ed advisory committee for alawite county public schools and that in that particular meeting uh they spoke about we actually had a presentation from the director of the parent resource uh department at georgia tyler middle school they have moved it to georgia

072tower middle school and if you would like if you're a parent please go by to visit that it's for any child in alawite county school but it's not just for the special needs students but if you have a child in a regular program and you feel that you need some extra resources to assist them please stop by georgia tower middle school but prior to going uh call to the school to make sure the director is there that particular day because she has specific hours when she's in the building the second meeting i attended was the um oh this is one of my new ones uh hereta and this is for those of you that are not familiar with herreta uh years ago we used to call it the whro this is the uh group with

073the whro and then that particular meeting they discussed the children's services which was the um education advisory committee and and uh that particular day and they discussed all of the services they had for the children uh school-aged children and they really concentrated on the one that i thought was very an excellent one was a resource was the the environmental van is a stem environmental van and you can invite them as a school district to come out to your schools especially the elementary level schools and work with the students and they will on stem type a stem curriculum stem curriculum and it's a van so i did contact one of our principals um i it was hardly elementary because i took i thought about them because in a i guess about a month a few days

074i'm not even gonna say i'm on a few days they're gonna start construction at hardy elementary and the students you know may be a little displaced with some of the noise and things that's going on around them and this would be a nice um resource to have there for the students not just hardy but any student even the students on uh carl carrollton windsor all of them could invite the van but i thought about hardy since they're going to be going through the constructions and that was it for this month as far as you know attending um some of the meetings i did have an opportunity to do some virtual things with virginia school board association okay i also virtually attended the governor's school of arts and we had 26 students audition and while they

075auditioned virtually on october the 6th there will be a few saturdays where some will be invited to audition in person so we look forward to the results of those students i also attended virtually the sea sea set which is southeastern cooperative educational programs and they gave an uh overview of the enrollment and there's a slight decrease which they seem to think that's because of covid but they also share it shared of their carryover funds they have um they're going to use about 293 000 to purchase two bands for the i.t support and then they will disperse the remaining 1 million 62 000 among the divisions that are involved in the the csep programs and the next meeting for both the governor's school of arts and the csep is february 2nd and also i need to

076read a letter from our school board member miss julia perkins dear fellow i love white school board members it is with mixed emotions that i am resigning from my position on the alawite school board being a teacher has been my life's work and i am grateful for the honor of serving on the board with you as my colleagues i know that you will continue our important work serving the best interest of the wonderful students families teachers administrators and staff for our district i feel it is time for me to retire from being a board member just as it was once time for me to retire from teaching that i loved so much i look forward to spending more of my time between my home in windsor my grandchild's home in richmond and my family farm

077in louisa county sincerely julia w perkins so with that we will be accepting letters of interest to fill this position anyone that lives in the windsor district may email or mail a letter of interest including some of your background and reasons interested in filling the position to tracy ruik the school board clerk and then a special called meeting date and time will be communicated in which interviews will be held to determine a new school board member to represent the windsor district [Applause] next on the agenda agenda is um state of schools and this is one month in so madam chair and board members we were very excited at the end of last school year knowing and thinking we are going to get back to hopefully almost normal and we're excited and as things progress through

078the summer and we have made plans uh things have changed and uh with kobe and we're not back to normal and it's it's a different year than last year and that we have all students back and we have been going around we've been talking to staff whether it's a bus driver a cafeteria worker um structural aid teacher administrators and we just want to describe where we are and kind of set the tone for some of the initiatives or requests that i'll be making tonight too i do want to say we're going to go over each area but there is a a level of stress for every individual every individual's job no matter what it is has changed significantly and it it's having an impact on on everyone and the in the students as well so

079we just wanted to go over some of the information and so the first slide is just covering the areas we want to do we worked with vdoe vdh to plan for this year just like we did the year before with the shutdown we consulted our plans from last year many of our plans were to stay in place and um and we turned it to five days but we have had many challenges and bdh's virginia department of health in anyone who might think what is that yeah we have a lot of acronyms yes we do yeah so as dr thornton said we definitely had a plan going into this year we were hoping that we might have have not have to use it as much but that has not proven the case so um once again

080we are back to lots of covered stuff so just to review quarantines so people who have had close contact so unvaccinated persons have had close contact with the positive have to be quarantined we are doing the modified quarantine which is ten days or a negative test after day five returning on day eight we have had many many many hundreds of quarantines this year isolation would be a person who's displaying code symptoms and maybe test positive those people have to isolate for 10 days we are working very closely with the western tidewater vdh we consult with them regularly when we have questions if we're not sure about things they give us guidance so we do really appreciate the close working relationship that we've built with them this year we have closed two classrooms due to cases

081and quarantines it was a large number of students who ended up having to be out of the classroom when we looked at close contacts so we did end up having to close two classrooms we monitor it daily we look at the number of cases where they are occurring and we make those decisions based on that so our nurses have experienced a lot of stress i'm just going to say it they they have a lot of stress they have a lot of things happening in the clinic so contact tracing it is extensive so once we identify a person who is positive we have to determine now it's who was within three feet were they properly wearing a mask on the bus we look at six feet and so you have to determine who those students are

082who are identified as close contacts so it's a lot of documentation we have very extensive record keeping so in order for us to know if we have um a large number of positives or quarantines occurring in a classroom we have to keep documentation of where those cases are happening and so that falls on our nurses and our administrators to document those things we also i mean the clinic hasn't stopped just because of covid so you have kids coming that don't feel well for other reasons or who need medication daily or have a bump you know scraped knee or something out at recess so the clinics are so busy um constantly parents are frustrated and we know that people when we have to send home the students who are quarantined it's frustrating parents have to take

083off work they're worried about their students being out of school sometimes kids come back they become in close contact again they have to be quarantined and so there's a lot of frustrated parents out there and so our nurses are dealing with that and our administrators are dealing that with that on a daily basis we continue to monitor the health guidelines and we are also preparing for covid vaccinations and testing on the horizon and i'm going to talk to you more about that later but i'm just going to give that a little teaser and we'll talk about that again so as far as teachers you know again this year that teachers continue to do an amazing job um not just teaching the children but caring for the children in so many different ways and that maybe

084this year is as difficult or maybe more difficult than even we've experienced to this point as far as the work that teachers are doing it's just incredible um so it's proven to be extremely difficult for a multitude of reasons and we've identified a few things here that i'd just like to touch on teachers are continuously they're the they're right there in the classrooms with the children so they are truly the ones who are constantly reinforcing the safety protocols that have been put in place collaboratively with the department of health and those mitigation strategies the masks distancing so on and so forth they're having to identify and close gaps from the previous year's learning loss some of that teachers have always done we know that but now we're talking about extensive gaps and so whether you're

085an elementary teacher and you're having to make up for that spiraling curriculum let's say in reading or math there could be significant gaps from the previous year or you're a high school teacher and you're having to fill in gaps from a prerequisite course and we're seeing it preschool through 12th grade that type of work occurring there's additional planning and preparation obviously due to those types of recovery efforts in addition to what a teacher would have already been doing with their course curriculum or their grade level their the teachers are dealing with and working through disruptions to the instructional flow due to student absences so what ms getz was just describing students going out for a quarantine coming back maybe some of those students going out again the teachers are constantly having to figure out which

086students are with them which are gone which have been gone and they are that is just exhaustive work and they're doing it um also just again dealing with the revolving door of students so you have that disruption to the flow of your classroom and and the units that you're teaching so and so forth but it's also that disruption to individual students and really keeping track of where they are teachers are doing all of those additional things that they've always done but this year and i think we have some information on this dr thornton will touch on in a subsequent slide but they're assisting with arrival and dismissal responsibilities we're seeing maybe twice as many car riders um as we had prior to the pandemic and so that's put an extra strain on school staff and

087the way that staff are being utilized to help do that in a safe manner also the i think in maybe the september school board meeting from remembering correctly i talked to the board about the um the assessment the state assessments that uh uh sort of an update on those and accreditation well a part of what i shared with you then were the growth assessments and this fall we started that so teachers were involved in implementing those brand new department of education growth assessments we think that'll be a good thing for our kids but also now they're having to go through and take a look at how do i analyze the data to inform construction and my recovery efforts so those are all new pieces for the teachers and they've taken that on as well so

088building administrators there's high stress on this almost everything we do when we talk about teacher stress or an aid stress and we try to come up with a plan how can we implement this it ends affecting the building administrators so they're dealing with more stress than they ever have in the past the the discipline issues as i talked to teachers and in smithfield high school and i talked to some windsor high school this morning the sentiment is and i've seen it myself students have forgotten how to go to school they've forgotten the structures we it's a very structured place and you have to have rules and you have to have procedures and you have to have protocols for a year and a half many of the students haven't had to have those and some of

089the teachers i spoke to recently at smithfield high school said it's starting to settle down and we're getting there and so it really hit me when in the conversation some of the teachers we focused so much on elementary and remediation and that loss but when i spoke to the high school teachers and they said dr thornton do you realize when we left a year and a half ago those seventh graders are now our freshman in high school yeah they might have come last year for two days but they never really were orientated into the normal cycle and now you're in high school and then the juniors and seniors who have it under control they know the system they help the young people learn the system those juniors and seniors a year and a half ago

090were freshmen and sophomore they haven't gone through the normal cycle of high school and growth and and that full experience so that was a unique perspective to hear so that is why we were struggling too at the high school and you know we were kind of kind of the older kids they they're going to have it but when you start looking at those factors it's caused some concerns and and they're working through them and but that is on top of everything else that we have to do and it's a struggle and i'm sure neil could chime in at some point for for our students it is frustrating for students i saw one this morning who was out in quarantine and is coming up and the volunteer ball team got quarantined and homecoming's coming up all

091these things take away from their wonderful experience so there's so much stress out there that it's just unbelievable i did not think we could be worse than than last year's condition not having our kids but this first month has been a struggle so there there are obvious impacts on instruction and so if you think about sort of what we view as the normal flow of classroom activities and a school day and the normal operation of a school day we were obviously very hopeful this year that we could get a little closer to that but there are still tremendous impacts this thing is distancing itself if you think about maybe where we were with deeper learning prior to the pandemic collaborative work project-based learning and the way a classroom might be set up and look it

092looks very different right now because of the distancing that needs to be in place with mitigation um lunch looks differently we're trying to utilize classroom spaces and lunchrooms in some settings or like at smithfield high school they're using some of their collaborative areas to to so that they can spread out and have a safe space to eat so lunch looks a little different recess the kids are out playing but like if you go by west side for instance you'll notice that a teacher might take her class or his class to a grassy area maybe there's another class a little different and you'll see maybe a larger group on the playground spread out but even that looks a little bit different than it would in a in a regular school year certainly the recovering of learning

093loss and our instructional framework helps out a great deal with that during the flow of instruction but that has changed the normal flow for most teachers the grade level or the course that they teach and then there's a pretty dramatic impact on deeper learning when you think about collaborative work group work project-based learning authentic experiences some of the things that we want our students to have um a great deal of our teachers are doing an amazing job of giving deeper learning experiences but they're certainly being impacted by the pandemic and the continued mitigation and other factors so transportation this is not new and this is really not associated to the pandemic it's been worsened by it um we have a major shortage in transportation across the country across virginia some of my colleagues are still

094running three runs and have changed their school times just to get kids to school and that is after people have they're bringing their own kids and the lines are lined up out of schools and police forces across virginia trying to help um so this pandemic has not helped with that and i met with drivers this week on the north end and the southern end and discuss the different issues and the challenges and uh we've asked for no double runs that's why we asked you last month to give our drivers a thousand dollar stipend because we're going to work new runs longer runs so that we don't have to do double runs we're still trying to get i think we have two that we're still working through and we've asked drivers to come in and help

095that still hasn't solved the problem because if one driver calls in we have no subs our mechanics are driving almost every single day we're paying them overtime after all they working on the buses and preparing our buses and our vans to then go drive a bus and thank goodness they're they're doing so and but like in the morning if we get a call and our drivers sick we have to instantly then try to contact all parents that we're going to have to do a double run we're not going to be able to pick up your child on time and that is so hard to organize at the last second but that's happening it's not going to stop we're not going to fill those vacancies we're not going to stop trying but there's also a shortage

096of people transporting goods they're hiring our drivers at a much higher rate so we keep trying to do the best we can and let me tell you our drivers were great but some of the things that they're asking for too is their safety and protection the mass mandate for the bus was always going to be on at the start of the year that was not in question and then it ended up through the state that we all had to wear mass at all times but on the bus we can't space out our buses are more crowded than ever before because we have few and i'll tell you some of my students are not wearing their masks they're constantly pulling them down they're not telling the driver what their name is when the driver is asking

097them i need you to pull your mask up now because they're just getting to know some of the routes because they keep changing these are some serious things they're not sitting in their assigned seat so we can contact trace which we have to do to provide safety and i'll tell you i assured the drivers that we are working on a memo and we're going to send it to parents and we're going to send it to principals and we talk to principals because if there's a breakdown between our drivers and our principals then the problem's not going to be solved for safety reasons i can't have drivers looking constantly to see who has their mask on and keep fighting an issue that is ridiculous we need parents help in this they need to wear their mask

098on the bus they need to be respectful on the bus and don't come screaming when that bus is in a ditch you need to help us but i know what i'm going to do in place and i've told the drivers and we're doing it if a student does not wear that mask does not give the name to the driver or does not sit in their assigned seat they're being suspended one day off the bus they're not returning on the bus until their parent comes in and meets with our administration and tells us their child is going to follow that rule they don't have to ride the bus the bus is a privilege and it's a major safety concern and we have to follow through and we're not going to have any drivers we need to

099support our drivers who try to do the best they can every day so we're going to continue to work we're meeting monthly with our drivers trying to support them some of them in the meeting said what can you do for our mental stress we need to speak to a counselor and and we have access to our hr where they can have i think it's four or five free set free sessions the stress is real and many of our drivers are older and we have to protect them so the student drop-off and up we we have doubled maybe more than double the amount of drivers and and that's fine that takes some pressure off the buses but it has created some problems and we are trying to work on those west side was was one of

100the first and i know miss getz missile barter myself and mr coleman we went out there and bore the flags and waved the flags and we rerouted all the buses in the back of west side and we've asked parents to not bring your child to a certain time and the smithfield police department has been a great help and it's been a great success it's still issued they're still backed up on that road not as long and we're getting them out quicker but if the police are called off for for some reason we're kind of back and we're kind of stuck again it's it's still not as bad but we're working on it i was told windsor elementary school that they're blocking the buses from coming out so we're gonna go down there and look at

101how can we fix those solutions because the schools and the driver they weren't designed for that they weren't designed to bring half the kids to school so but we we are having some success and we do really want to thank the local police for for helping us and supporting us so time for the staff i'll tell you so many of our teachers as i walked through one of our teachers said i teach dual enrollment dr thornton and i'm blessed but i have covered more classes this year during my planning time than i do in an entire year in the first three weeks of school we have no subs we have nowhere to go and they they have no time to plan you heard all the what's required of them and now we have nothing to

102do we have to like rotate and and take some of their planning so we did give staff november 12th at work day from home and as an in-person work day and one of the things that i'm going to be proposing tonight is to give teachers a day october 29th and december 10th which is already an elementary school holiday and and make those teacher work days which means no students will come to school those days and i do know that that's a tough decision too because now your kids are at home those days and a lot of schools are doing things like this uh we have to give our teachers time to plan and catch up and catch a breath one of the teachers i spoke to georgie tyler today said i just need to catch

103a breath i listened to her for 35 minutes i met with bus drivers down there i was going to go through several teachers classrooms and informally just talk i didn't get past her classroom but you know what i saw she needed to talk to me that whole time she needed someone to hear her and just listen and that's where we're at so when i hear this stress and morale issues in the past you know i don't like to do this or that these are real and uh just want to share where we're going all right so vaccinations for students ages 5 to 11 are likely going to become available early november so we have been told to prepare and we will work with vdh to offer them just like we did last spring we plan

104to offer vaccinations for five to eleven-year-olds as well um before we go to that next slide i i do just want to bring up too um and and i am not promoting any direction or anything i believe in choice but choices have consequences and some of the things i've heard and some of the anger i've heard from some parents and i ran across one today is my child has to go home for quarantine because they were exposed then they came back to school and went to another class and they had to be quarantined these were high school age students a high school age student can get the vaccination if you have the vaccination you don't need to be quarantined i'm not promoting getting the vaccination but you need to to process all that as a

105family and make your decision if if you are so frustrated and there is that high possibility of getting quarantined then you need to consider the effect of your child and you need to consider vaccination you you need to to have that discussion i'm bringing that up because now the same thing is going to be available at the elementary level and i do want to mention i neglected to the last time we are hiring clinic assistants for our nurses to assist in the clinic they will do things like helping with the contact tracing helping with making phone calls helping to document some of the paperwork so you don't have to have medical experience we're going to train you we've hired three so far we are looking um so if anyone's interested in being a clinic assistant

106or you know someone please encourage them to apply again we have lots of positions that are available we just don't have the applicants so is this for every school um it or there may be some shared positions but we have a number of positions available but i talked to the lead nurse today and she was so thankful that we're able to do that and we're going to do it through cares funds and it's great to have those funds to be flexible and make these changes we need to do but we we said we could do this and we started advertising three weeks ago we've only filled three positions uh the only other applicant they're interviewing we're all from the franklin area but the jobs in the southern end are we don't know if they'll drive

107all the way to the northern end i don't know why there's not hit applicants here we have nine special ed uh ias open we still have one first grade second grade ia position open the the jobs are there we can fix some of it because of the cares funds but if there's no one applying it's it's really not a solution so there's a it's easy to say oh hire some more aides and they can cover for some of the teachers we would love to but uh they're not out there we're gonna keep trying um excuse me yes ma'am the the jobs with the nurses assistants these are temporary positions uh as you said you were doing about the camera i'm doing it on the fly so as i'm going through and i'm talking to people

108and this is like crisis mode i gave authority to hr until the lead nurse was interviewing them that we will put them on in the budget as an ongoing thing our nurses even before covert were overwhelmed so i plan on these being continual jobs in our division okay and we're telling them that and we i told them to leave nurse that so when they do apply yeah it's not one and out all right that's a good question okay so moving on i'm talking about testing so we have joined vista and as you can see it's virginia school screen testing for assurance we ddh has contracted with e-med to get test kits they're called buy next now they are rapid test kits you get results within 15 minutes it's through a nasal swab you have an

109on-demand tele-health person to proctor they watch you they watch the swabbing to make sure you're doing it accurately and then they read your test results for you and then you get a copy electronically of what your test results are it's available for our in-person students and staff and these are this would be for someone who's showing symptoms and we think they might have covered they could take the test and within 15 minutes we would know it can also be used for those students who are identified as a close contact close contacts can test day five um they have to wait until day five of their exposure but day five they can test their negative they can return on day eight um so we do already have a supply of these um and so our next

110thing is we are exploring how are we going to use them and we are reaching out to our school nurses and our school administrators to get feedback from them but here are some options we can test in school we do have to have written parent permission on file before we could test any child if it's a student who's 15 or older they can self swap students under it must be swab by staff member it does not have to be a clinic person it doesn't be a nurse it can be any staff member however if you are swabbing someone who you think has covered you do have to have full ppe on testing can also be done at home so we can have the test kits available parents can come pick them up we give them

111to the parent the parent goes home logs in to the um telehealth proctor and the test can be proctored that way and then the results can be submitted from the parent to us we can also look at doing a combination of testing depending on you know do we want to test those who are showing symptoms because if we test you and you're negative you go right back to class we don't have to send you home um in close contact maybe we send home but we're getting feedback we don't want to make that decision without talking to our nurses and our administrators so they are in the process of kind of digesting all the options they're going to give us feedback and we're going to make decisions within the next week so we can start this

112in school questions so but the tests are free to the division yes so um once you enroll in vista you get the test i will also say that there is a grant and we have also applied for the grant where we could receive up to four positions to assist us with the test coordination documentation all of it so we have applied for that we have not heard yet but we should be able to get some positions but again we need the people i was going to say once again we got to have this and the position yeah straight formula based on our size our size of our division so so we're hopeful that we can get we'll get those and find some good people to put in those positions again trying to help take some

113of the pressure off of our nurses and our administrators our administrators are spending hours upon hours upon hours all day long contact tracing that's not why we pay them we pay them to be the instructional leaders and they are not able to do that right now all righty thank you thank you okay next is covet leave yes so as you're aware and in your packet you saw a kobe leave proposal there's no longer any legal requirement to provide covertly for employees but due to staff being out and talking to the staff this was one of the things they asked if there's something we could do we've investigated what others are doing and and this was our proposal we're proposing that employees be given 10 days maximum of covert leave we're asking that it be retroactive

114for those who have already had to use 10 days and but following the reasons in the proposal so the employee is vaccinated has proof of vaccination and test positive for covet employees who are medically unable to receive the vaccine must provide medical documentation in order to be eligible for covered leave and then next the employee is vaccinated and is identified as a closed contact through school contact tracing begins to show symptoms they'll need to be quarantined and the employee has to stay home to care for a child who is tested positive for covert or has to quarantine after being identified so we do have some stipulations but we we think this is fair and reasonable and we're actually asking this would have to be an action item from the board and we are at asking

115that you approve the kobe leave for a maximum of 10 days and make it retroactive question i just heard what you said so just for instance i'm a teacher and i had i have code test positive tomorrow so i get 10 dates okay all right let's say i come back to school everything's fine and then i find out that i get covered again in december so they received 10 more days because this has been this has been the concern of a lot of our staff members especially their teachers because they're around the students constantly and they have come they have used up their 10 days and just like you said what if they have a child and this is in our system child comes down with uh covet or the child is sent home for

116five days because of the contact tracing uh and they don't have consider what are there to do that is their biggest concern i i would like to see something in place that would assist them i mean you know if they're sick they're sick and especially if this illness came because of their job and you know normally if you're injured or get an illness from your job uh what is it virginia um work with compensation but they they don't that's not a part of this so they could use 10 days up next week and then the next time they're out and this is the concern if they do not have those days built in especially if it's a beginning teacher they're out there without any pay you know for those times they're taking off that's what

117that's why we're recommending this because there's no covert leave anymore okay and we're trying to put this in to at least give them the 10 days and and then many of our teachers do have sick days and majority brand new teachers do not uh but we have front loaded this year those days so this will give so they do have leave a total of now i don't want to get it right now with the days that they have coming in as a teacher and they accumulate this is an additional they would use this first so they have it wouldn't affect that i got you so they could leave that aside for like i need a doctor's appointment i just need a medical leave okay okay all right okay so we need a motion all right

118adam shea i would like to make a motion that we um what is it oh okay all right let me get my glasses and read it right the promotion to approve the alawite county employees who meet the covet leave qualifiers be given 10 days maximum of covet leave do i have a second a second that motion okay we have a motion it has been second vote please you passed okay motion carried next on the agenda is the academic calendar yes so so madam chair i hit on this in the last presentation um the the calendar and altering the school calendar again needs to be voted on by the school board and we've asked that october 29th and december 10th the staff work days in student holidays to provide additional planning time for teachers who are

119covering classes during their planning time okay this is an action item need a motion please okay mama chair approved the october the 29th and december 10 2021 as staff work days no staff work days and student holiday to provide additional planning time for teachers who are covering classes during their planning time okay we have a motion do i have a second a second that motion okay we have a motion and it has been second vote please so motion carried next on the agenda is the october financial reports good evening madam chair members of the board dr thornton excuse me [Music] in your packet was the september check register closing out the month of september i want to start with asking were there any questions on the check register um the howard rondelle shannon it was

120ten thousand two hundred and fifty dollars could you kind of explain what that was uh we have a local contractor howard janet and there's that in reference is in reference to two of the projects that he's working on at smithfield high school one he was running um he was repairing a floor where he had to chip up the floor and and report um i don't know if it's concrete but to redo the flooring and then secondly he's renovating the locker rooms at the high school okay so those two made up the 10 000 250. and the only other question i know on the amazon and the bank of america there was a lot of instructional materials and of course that's what we're here for instruction but are all of these listings things ordered from various

121schools or just from central office and i did see the question and i i missed the piece of instructional material i answered the question i'm professional i apologize for that it is from various schools in the coding if you know which series represents the location you would be able to see that those the location number changes and that tells you whether central office ordered it and if central office orders it it's not for central office necessarily they would supply they will buy and supply supplies to the schools and then many of those were directly ordered by the schools so there's a code for schools there's there's yes there's a three-digit code that references the location okay yes and at the top of your check register um i do believe let me just double check yes

122on the first page um it's it says fun year fund loc for location okay thank you yes it won't mean anything to you but as they change that's a different school yes because you don't know the the school numbers so any other questions on on the check register do you have any any questions regard i'm sorry no okay regarding the financial i was happily surprised the percentage of budget that we have spent is actually less this time of year than last year and we're in full steam mode so i was surprised to see that i thought we would have spent a higher percentage than last year at this time so in your financial report you'll see 23.6 percent versus last year at this time 27.2 so to me that's a good thing so let me

123move on if there's no more questions onto your budget calendar sorry that's all right no problem and i have it on the phone so i'm just calling it up i didn't print it out i should have so in your packet is referencing the proposed budget calendar beginning next week i'll be getting um notification out to the schools different offices to begin planning for the 22 23 school year if you can believe that crazy neely will be in college at that point we'll miss you but we're not planning for your college freshman year um and it's it's many dates that that have the board approving there's workshop work sessions tentative and then it does end based on virginia code with the board of supervisors approving the appropriations so if you take a look at that you

124can hang it on the fridge or not but we'll be following that plan and this is very similar to the schedule we've had previous years yes okay this is an action item okay 15.2 are you asking yeah he's trying to get hit but this got it there you go okay madam chair i would like to uh make a motion that we approve the proposed budget calendar for the school year 22 2022 2023 a second a second that motion okay vote please yes and then next we is we received additional funds we continue to receive these um and this one is additional funds through the american rescue plan federal act during these coveted times but these funds have to be directly applied through the idea grant individuals with disabilities education act or for special ed students

125and they they give it to us in two allocations so you'll see the first code idea 611 is for the law states for to be applied towards chil special education students ages 3 to 21 and then the second code 619 has to specifically be applied to students three to five or preschoolers we got significantly more and which is typical in idea you'll see the larger amount in the code of 611 279 000 and the 619 20 000. so we're receiving just over 300 000 that we would like again it's another application so we're coming to you to approve the spending plan then we'll go to the board of supervisors and ask them for appropriating as such thank you so with the 611 plan um the first suggestion in terms of buses we're we're recommending two

126buses full-size buses 54 seat buses which actually become fewer seats to put the wheelchairs in because it takes up seats so we're recommending two buses each with a wheelchair lift and it does allow us to social distance or special ed students and that's not the full allocation so the balance of that it would go towards various curricula which allows us to apply additional resources to support our special needs students whether it's remedial or not we would apply these funds the 23 000 to the american reading company spire and number worlds which are reading and math curriculum with the 619 we are recommending specialized furniture for the early childhood special ed classrooms which again allows them the social distance allows them to move the furniture around it comes at about yay high so it's very practical

127for those classrooms and it'll give them a whole lot of flexibility so assuming the board approves that spending plan we would then request of the board of supervisors that they appropriate the funds the 200 000 would be in the transportation functional category and the others would be in the instructional functional category which is how they approve it and then lastly with their we put in for the state who then has to approve the plan and then we spend the money so are there any questions on that grant okay very good i would like to make a motion to approve the individuals with disability education act american rescue plan spending plan authorize the superintendent to request appropriations by the county board of supervisors a second that motion okay we have a motion it has been second

128vote please okay the mission carried now we are on technology update thank you mr thank you katniss good evening good evening madam chair board dr thornton uh i just wanted to do a quick technology update for everyone today uh as the request to dr thornton this is um just to keep in line with what discussions are going on around town um so first off i just wanted to go through the policies regulations and laws that really define the decisions that we make in general for the tech department uh one is cipa which is the child internet protection act in general you follow it or you don't get your e-rate funding kappa which isn't so much us but we do need to be aware of it which is the child online protection privacy rule this is

129what companies like facebook and things have to follow the saying that no one under the age of 13 is creating an account on their site ferpa which is a family education rights and privacy act there's nothing in the context of this discussion but it is something we always keep in mind again family education family education rights and privacy act it's basically saying that um from my side of the house it basically says that if somebody wants access to students data a parent has the right to access it right so i can pull logs for parents should it be requested their own students their own children not anybody else's no exactly okay to clarify yes you are correct hippo which is not anything involving this context whatsoever but it is something we also keep in mind

130uh we have two policy and regulation i i b e a g a b which was recently reapproved which is extensive and talks about lots of code which i recorded here in case you really want it it's super exciting information um and then i i b e a i-i-b-e-a-r-g-a-b-r which is a local policy which is basically our definitions and expectations and repercussions should you violate any of the above so usually i come up and i spout a lot of numbers at you guys and it's relatively only exciting to me which is fine um but today i wanted to tell a story so today a child is at home and they've been home for a long period of time and this has been around for a very long period of time and eventually these things called

131schools came around and the child went to school and then many years passed and the internet was developed i skipped a few things in there but schools got internet and they were one of the first early adopters and then people like me got jobs which is exciting again for me but then people also wanted to go home and get internet and so internet was provided to people's houses after schools and so then you have kids and they're at school and they're at home and they're getting internet and then many many more people want internet like staff and you know people who do jobs and so we have to do things like firewalls which protects those users from all the little baddies out there um it also filters uh certain website types um such as adult

132content gambling and jugs social media streaming media streaming audio games and and my emails car correct many times i've had to allow pax emails past the filters many many times um and so when you were at school staff and students we blocked those things as defined by all the rules that we just talked about now streaming video and audio is not necessarily blocked by one of those but it does violate many other laws out there like copyright and things like that so we block them in general it also is tremendously expensive to open that up to 5000 students at a time so some decisions are made at a local level just because we need to for fiscal sake and other things are made for classroom management's sake and then others are made for laws but

133when they go home we didn't know what they did not really because that was your home but that was work we dealt with school so then students started going to more places than home because cell phones yay um they went everywhere in the world um they got access at the starbucks with their machines that we gave them they got access at mcdonald's they got access on buses that we provide all kinds of different access out there and so we had to start increasing our visibility and so we moved where the internet was and we installed something called a global web filter and moved how we filter things so that teachers and staff get filtered when they're on site but students get filtered from everywhere so you go home you get filtered you're at school you

134get filtered and at one time all those rules were the same so they went home and we got lots of angry complaints about how they couldn't play minecraft at home and we were almost sad but not really almost but we do grow and so we have gotten the ability in the past couple of years um my network administrator and i turned out quite well um starting december 2019 we started evaluating a global filter that allowed for alternate policies at home so we were almost done that evaluation and covet hit so we kind of had to rush that decision we have since grown that extensively and so we've done things like we might block social media at home it all depends on decisions and age that sort of thing um streaming audio on video we do

135allow at home games we do a lot at home others it all depends on the website but we still block adult content gambling and drugs everywhere so it also has now started sending all these nice alerts to our administrators who absolutely adore them i'm sure eric when did that start when did they start getting these alerts because i didn't know that they were getting alerts so our chromebook started last year uh our pr our original choice for a global web filter didn't really have that option it was my network administrator and i who were sending all those through which kept us very very busy but we've actually been able we switched global filters this year and that one actually has automated alerts built in so they just went right to the administrator bypassing my network

136administrator and i which we liked they didn't for a while but we adjusted because that's more discipline yes ma'am for the building administrators yes ma'am that they're not even at school but they got i mean they could be at home they could the child tries to access something the principal gets an alert and then the principal has to deal with that alert so they do so the thing to keep in mind there is many alerts go off that are completely accidental or unintentional just because of the way things are classified and it's things you wouldn't necessarily think about either there are forums out there which you could think as a general you oh i go to that forum and i read about whatever i want to read about but in that forum there might be

137some adult areas and so the entire website thing gets classified as adult and so it can get overwhelming in a hurry if you're not very choosy about which alerts that you are being notified on the random here and there type stuff you just let it go you have to because it's continuous but that can like if someone hits it over and over and over again trying to bypass that's when an alert will go off right so they can contact the parent to let the parent know their child's trying to go on to a website that is not allowed and there's also ai built into it which i'd say right now although ms denson would disagree with me it's probably about a 70 success rate with the ai now what that ai is doing is trying

138to detect skin tones trying to detect words on a that might not even be visible on a web page and it'll send an alert through and so the administrator does need to take that moment to evaluate what that alert is see whether or not it's actually a valid concern they can dismiss that alert immediately which a lot of them are because um this one video that the kids are watching at hardy is setting off the alerts over and over and over again it's perfectly fine i've watched it my network administrator has watched it ms denson's watched it we all agree it's perfectly fine but it really annoys her that it keeps setting the alarms off so she keeps having to dismiss it can you fix it i have contacted the company repeatedly and uh what

139they keep telling us is you keep answering every alert and what the system does is learns over time that this one is okay there's like a little is this explicit button you choose that and then whatever action you want to do from that point on so what we've actually managed to do in recent years is grow beyond just standard rules as well so you'll see that we now have it broken down by grade level as to what they can do and where they can do it um as well as staff so you'll see that i have a little maybe symbol on games and streaming media that's because k2 pk2 elementary they can't do anything anywhere they can do what we tell them they can do and that's it but three through six do have access

140to games and streaming media at home um other than that it's either blocked globally or blocked only at school and then the other is a maybe because we can always add in websites or remove websites from those filters at the request of instruction so what do administrators do mrs getz wanted to speak on that all right so as eric said we do get um our administrators are getting lots of alerts um so what's the first thing we do is we investigate and determine is this something that we really need to be concerned about or is it not sometimes things get alerted when it's actually students researching something for school and i can talk about some examples of that but that does happen quite often it's legit the student isn't doing anything wrong but it is

141causing an alert on our system if we find the student is trying to do something that they should not be doing we can do anything from we warn them we typically call the parents let the parents know we can suspend their technology privileges for a period of time and then sometimes it is severe and we have to suspend them from school and maybe even remove their technology privileges so it all depends on the severity what part the thing that i just got working this week sure uh this week also actually it was might have been yesterday we also got what's referred to as a global penalty box running for all levels so that say a high schooler does do something that isn't a repeated concern but maybe that first concern you can put on what's

142called the penalty box which locks down things more so it instead of being high school students are allowed to use games at home but not at school you can put them in the penalty box and it'll block those high schoolers from accessing games at home as well so that's at the request of admin hey put this person in the penalty box no problem we've had that for chromebooks um since we got them but we've never had it for the macbooks until yesterday um so obviously things like cyber bullying um when we that is also things that are detected sometimes through messaging um we've we've had that this year we're dealing with that um the harmful communications back and forth between students or not students necessarily but again we are getting alerts and obviously nudity is

143something else that is problematic um it all takes time for principals to investigate determine is this really a valid concern then take action if we need to um you know we have received things like with students wanting to hurt themselves and they actually um google how to kill myself and we'll get those alerts this has happened um students not at school the students at home we may get alert we call the parent immediately we can't get the parent we send the police these things all put a tremendous amount of responsibility on our administrators and we cannot police students computers 24 hours a day we are doing the very best we can when we get the alerts we we do investigate and we take them seriously but we're not tied to our computer like i said

14424 hours a day so when the devices are home that also the parents need to partner with us um and and and monitor miss dial i see you sitting up so i appreciate that yeah so we need our parents to partner with us on this anything good i'm good uh any questions i do have one more slide that i added in yesterday um so you may recall let's see if i can get it to go yes we talked in august about the ecf and the ebb which ecf is the emergency communications fund ebb is emergency broadband benefit i just wanted to update you on two those two so the ebb is being sent home with all free and reduced packets which is a program by the federal government that they will pay for your internet

145if you are below a certain income level the ecf was a general is a general catch-all i guess fund that they released that was for devices and or internet if it was under very specific rules so it had to have filtering built into the internet it had to have cellular signal above a certain level i mean there was some interesting stuff in there but we submitted in august for that um i think i had mentioned it then that i just submitted that information we're expecting a little money back from that hopefully um we got more than i expected honestly um the award that we received on tuesday is one million six thousand eight hundred and forty one dollars i'll say that again one million six thousand eight hundred forty one dollars which what we submitted

146on we use the survey that we had sent out to parents yes we do use that information every time we ask for it and sent it up to the federal government with everything that i put on the list which includes k2 ipads allocations towards freshman laptops allocations towards chromebooks as well as expanding our bus wi-fi capability so i just wanted to let you know that that was some fun news any questions on that so i'd like to thank eric and his staff it's something we didn't highlight when we were going through the one month in but uh some of eric's staff has been affected by covert as well and short staff some have found a much higher paying job and we haven't been able to fill that and part of it is eric hasn't had

147time to take a breath to interview someone it's like a double-edged sword and uh to give you an idea one day we actually had three people in the department it was super fun so it again another example of it's been a challenge and uh to write the grant and do this and get it funded that's not an easy process either and uh definitely applaud him and his staff for a million dollars that would be football thank you [Applause] before you leave um eric i can remember it was what about a year or two ago when we first went into the pandemic and i asked you to reach out to our local provider spectrum for this area to see if they could do anything yes ma'am nothing happened but thank you they do so spectrum does

148provide not only a discounted rate right ever since covet started i think it's twenty dollars but they stopped it i think this month uh it might be uh but the uh the ebb which we just so that will cover charter is part of that charter spectrum is part of that program so should someone be in that income range the federal government will pay that through june of 2022. okay thank you very much okay yes ma'am oh transportation can't walk away next is the transportation i'm going to cover that tonight okay and you have you have the fuel report in there as normal but um wanted to talk about uh this proposal uh as i've been talking to drivers and since uh last month where you gave the thousand dollar stipend for the extended runs um

149i'm just about we forgot about the bus assistance they're driving those buses too they're driving the driving on those or in cars for extended runs and we would like to give them a 500 stipend um uh also for our bus assistants move their pay from 950 pro to 10 per hour and also drivers we have really worked hard at increasing the minimum for drivers and got to 14.50 an hour we'd like to recommend a one dollar per hour raise for all drivers and that's car drivers special ed bus drivers and so the minimum would be 15.50 but everyone would receive a dollar an hour now as we're going through the these items and proposals we're really looking at can we fund this and can we fund it with existing dollars in the budget so as

150i as we fund these uh increases do i have to go next year and add that same total to the budget and then go to the board of supervisors to ask additional funds i'm trying to stay away from that commitment so we are able to fund this and we're able to fund it because we didn't fill all our bus driver positions so that money that was budgeted for that would be dispersed to the drivers so we could fund that ongoing expense without having to go to the county and ask for money next year and and also we looked a few and some other items um and historical data so we feel confident we can do this now i also talked to drivers and it's been a recurring theme about three years ago we talked to

151drivers and depending who was the superintendent at the time and who was the hr director they made decisions when a new employee came in they counted their years experience or they didn't count their years experience in another school division where they didn't count their cdl truck driving experience whatever it may be and we are committed to whether they drove with us for 10 years or with suffolk they have 10 years experience we want to pay them for that experience we value that experience because they're driving our kids uh we also want to value the fact that they're a cdo and maybe they've driven on the highway with trucks that's experienced driving it's a little different than driving 50 kids screaming but we want to value that experience we weren't able to fund it three years

152ago and we decided at that point we gave bus drivers a 13.9 percent raise and they've gotten a raise every year probably two percent more like a cola but we think it's time again to move and cheryl is working in hr on finding out the year's experience because often they'll apply and they don't put those years experience so we're going to do with what we have as a year experience send it to them individually is this correct if you have proof of more years experience bring that in once we do that we're going to see what it would cost to give them their years experience i don't know what that will cost i don't know if we can fund that this year that may be a request we have to do next year but i'm

153committed to bring that cost to you and i'm committed to bring that across to our bus drivers we have to continually battle this issue and we we talk to the driver money doesn't solve everything but it does help in a fair living wage helps so we are asking this is an action item tonight that you approve the stipends for the bus assistance the 50 cent raise for the bus assistance per hour and the dollar per hour raise for our drivers any questions with that or well i would just like to say um as well deserved with what the transportation department goes through daily i know we sit here but and i'm sure a lot of us if we had their jobs probably would not have made it through the first week of school and i

154know listening to the public out there listening to us giving raises giving raises these are some of the things that i i agree to it because it's well deserved these people are out there every day and they are putting their lives in jeopardy for the sake of all of us because they are transporting our student students back and forth to school every day so at this time i would like to make a motion for bus drivers to receive one dollar per hour increase beginning november the first and bus aides get 50 cents per hour plus one time a one-time 500 dollar stipend for extended runs my second that motion okay we have a motion and it has been second vote please okay motion carry next on the agenda is support services and operations full report

155all right madam chair school board members dr thornton sports services for i mean up support services operations report first we want to take a peek at the fire inspections that actually occurred on september 26 to all the schools in the division on september 26th they ended with four schools in violation and there was on one at west side two at georgia tower two at winds elementary and four at windsor high school since then all of the corrections have been made the actual fire inspector came back out and checked it and we have the actual reports here when those reports did come out just wanted to note that all the violations were very mana sticky doors and door knobs and different things of that nature so i did want to pinpoint that next will be the

156lockdown procedures will be modified for the modified lockdown and just a general overview we had uh every school has done over 10 practice lockdowns throughout the division and after every single lockdown we have a aar after action review a lot of times this is with local law enforcement ems and different individuals that nature and with the input from those individuals what we actually did was modify some of the modify the modified lockdown there's two there's a full lockdown and there's a modified lockdown and the modified lockdowns are less severe everyone actually has to stay in the building and then there's movement within the building so we just want to let you know that every crisis plan will change that information will be sent out to every school and they will update that information as it

157goes next i want to bring to your attention the collegeville monitor classroom the actual ifb have come to an end the actual cars real modular classroom has come to an end for the bid review three contractors submitted bids for the carsville modular classroom project and yeah i'm gonna interrupt you because i i uh took that slide out we cannot show uh all of the bids of all of the contractors we we show the awarding bid and it is on um it is the ifb it is online on eva and you can look there we don't do that as a normal practice and some modular technologies had the low bid and there were no errors found in the bed no and it was 137 807.12 and they were selected uh for the project so it's an

158information item and we're yes sir and we're moving on we we did an ifb because they had the potential to be over 200 000 right which you would have to vote on so we were very fortunate that this came in much lower and i believe miss carl you asked me about checking what would it cost to build two classrooms and i think chris found that out to be yes it's gonna be almost for a million dollars yeah it's gonna be a million dollar classes build two classrooms i know and i asked because the school was um it was built so that from those fifth grade classrooms it could go straight out yes and when you build the classrooms they're going to be there as long as the building's there and you know how the modular

159classrooms do so that was my reason for for asking but we're talking 130 some thousand versus a million dollars right and with the building materials at this point i'm sure right that's cool i do think we should probably look at it in the future in a future cip that we send through the county uh as we go down the road you know we're focusing next on westside but out in the future that's what the cip is it's a 10-year program eventually yeah we want to eliminate any trailers and cars will probably need to be expanded thank you all right that concludes the actual support services and operations full report next i'd like to just take talk about the actual it's a action item that you will have and it's another auction item this will be

160a van has over 250 000 miles and um it will cost at this time four thousand dollars in repairs to the actual body so the actual repairs to the body is actually more than what the van is worth so we seek to put that in auction and uh move forward with that and that is an action item all right i'm sure i'll make a motion to approve the auction of one transportation maintenance vehicle second that motion we have a motion it has been second can we have a vote please okay motion carry and next is the amended limited notice to proceed here next is once again the amended notice to proceed i just want to let you know that the amended lntp limited notice should receive it is an interim agreement that allows mbcon to

161actually proceed with making commitments to all of the subcontractors that they have at this time now this is done in order to secure the most favorable pricing as a reminder all of the savings under this gmp remain with iwcs and this is for the new hardy elementary school to make it clear for everyone yes ma'am okay this is an action item an action item also okay motion to approve the amended limited notice to proceed lntp which includes a guaranteed maximum of 36 36 860 36 36 hundred and thirty nine but it's one word that i miss oh i got it i got it okay maximum price of thirty six million eight hundred and sixty eight thousand six hundred thirty 639 a second that motion we have a motion it has been second vote please okay

162mission carry next is the ground breaking for h hardy elementary school i am delighted to be up here to announce that we have scheduled the groundbreaking for the new hardy elementary school it will be october 28th at 1 30 in the afternoon we have some guest speakers lined up very brief speakers because we're not hearing about hearing them that day are we we are going to have in addition to some adults flipping over some soil we are going to have students that will be out there as well with their little hard hats and shovels helping us flip over some soil to officially start the construction of the new hardy elementary school so of course we're partnering with envycon heartland and rrm on this project and they are very actively involved in planning this so we

163are delighted to announce publicly october 28th at 1 30 we are going to have the groundbreaking and i believe board members you may have received your invitations to that event today are there any questions about the ceremony and what we're planning you know i have one i don't know i don't have a question mrs bricks but if you would get with mrs uh den denson there was a a student in her building and uh we received the letter from a grandparent last year and i mentioned to her because i thought at that time we were going to be having the groundbreaking earlier uh if we could have that student and i even told her the student could assist me with my shovel if they were not going and then we thought and i thought about

164uh we have the uh the past the present and the future of students there okay of hardy elementary students and i and and it was this one student and i she probably remembered the parent the grandparent they wrote the letter and what they had she had to say about her grandchild and i thought it was you know it's beautiful i will certainly do that i can say ms denson has reached out to some of her retired teachers so we're very actively involved in speaking out in support of this so they are delighted um they're invited to attend as well so we're excited about it i look forward to it and fingers crossed for great weather okay thank you and madam chair if you know i'd just like to add too you know dick rice worked

165on the committee to help uh through this process uh also tom dorr who's on the planning commission and i've attended several meetings uh with the board of supervisors who have helped with this process and have found a way to fund this school and really were crunching numbers and randy keaton the kind of administrator trying to not cause a tax increase to to do this and uh last time i saw i think they were at that point of no tax increase or maybe a penny i forgot and they're still working on other things to hopefully help for the next stage because westside middle school needs to be built to fix the full plan of growth so hardy will house close to 900 students it will be our largest elementary school we'll have to redistrict and carrollton

166will become k-4 i just want to remind the public of that and and your work as board members we'll start probably in a year or so looking at redistricting and and what fits best so that we leave some growth in carrollton and we leave growth in our new hardy and we have a good solid plan so i want to thank all of those individuals who helped and when dr thornton say redistrict that's just the school's redistricting not the uh county yes i know they're going through that process right now i don't want to get it confused [Laughter] you're right okay next on the agenda is the the ssc contract change again so this is a another error we looked at and we're losing custodial staff and when i say we we have partners ssc who

167do our custodial and grounds and our maintenance and they're losing employees and they're having trouble and the continuity of staff that knows our buildings know how to clean our building they have to constantly be training it's a major problem and i know target i think is offering uh more money i'm not even gonna say i want to advertise for target but we have challenges everywhere in in other industries so that's why it's difficult to find people we want to keep our people so uh with the the state mandate is the minimum wage is going to be moved to 11 an hour in january and we had that built into our contract but and the 15 an hour minimum wage does not go into effect until 2026. we can't wait till 2026. 15 an hour is

168a good target for a they want to say a livable wage i'm not sure that is a livable wage i don't know but i know some of these custodians who aren't even making 11 an hour now is not a livable wage these are essential people our bus drivers uh our custodians our grounds people we're going to talk about cafeteria tonight these are essential workers that serve over 5 000 kids and we need them and we need to stay whole so it's about staying whole so part of the presentation this year of a month in we're going to do the best we can to give their kids the best education this year with all the challenges but in doing so we can't drive every employer away we need to keep our employees whole and we need

169to keep them with us and and i know we're going to eventually get out of this and get back to normal and when we do that 15 an hour is going to make it a lot easier to keep employees and sustain the system for a long time so i am recommending that we amend the contract with ssc ssc itself is not going to receive any additional money the money is all going to go towards the increase to the actual employees and um that's quite a few employees i believe i had that number i'm not sure where i put it oh 52 custodians and four grounds and uh that cost is in your packet in in the motion uh uh three hundred eighteen thousand three hundred sixty dollars it's a large amount of money that's the

170increase yes that's that's the majority the majority of a school budget is people and right um again i don't want this to have to be paid for sometime later in the future so i've worked with finance and we sat down and we've gone through the maintenance budget and we had already identified areas that traditionally would come out of our budget that the esser funds can pay for and the million-dollar hvac grant that has come out so the fact that we can shift money within our operational budget and make this happen and again not have to go next year and ask for 318 000 from the county i think it's a win-win and and we have to support our essential workers and i know this is going to cause others to say dr thornton we need

171a raise too whether it be teachers or administrators or whoever we can't do i'm trying to do it where we can pay our bills in the future but also go to our most neediest people and take care of them and so that because they take care of us and they take care of our kids and i want to keep them and i do value the partnership we have with ssc it's a great partnership and hopefully we can sustain that through the years as well i have a question you said that we it was um as far as the staff are do we have enough staff right now with ssc to cover our needs especially keeping the students safe keeping areas clean where the students will be safe so we have had our challenges and there

172are some dirty areas and they'll tell you it's been a struggle because same thing people out with covet and not having subs and so we had already authorized temps and paid them much higher but their temp workers for ssc and they don't receive benefits and and that could cause problems with the other staff too but uh they've implemented that in other divisions where they're you have to do something because you're right you've got to keep them safe and clean so and we and we'll look at that too we we look at that all the time when we discuss and chris meets with them do we have enough staff and if we don't we we can add staff to the contract but when you add this amount again over two hundred thousand dollars this requires your

173action to do okay it is an action item okay i don't chair make a motion to amend the ssc maintenance and grounds contract to move all employees to a minimum of fifteen dollars per hour starting november 1st 2021 and the amount of 318 360 dollars a second that motion okay we have a motion it has been second vote please yes we're at the um 16.8 food service update madam chair again looking at our essential staff uh chartwells is our partner for food service and in our contract with chartwells when we first began we kept our employees so we have a combination of chartwell employees and we have a combination of our our employees still that work under the management of chartwells to service our our children they are now we are hoping to serve all

174children in the cafeteria i think we still do in the high school but i know in the elementaries we are feeding kids in classrooms again and in the cafeteria and that staff is stepping up to the plate as well as they prepare that food and they've done a great job due to the pandemic and we're serving meals to everyone our budget is very solid for our cafeteria that's a self-funded program separate than the regular operating budget and we definitely have the money to move those those individuals to 15 an hour as well that also they have cooks and they also have managers and that would shift them out out of whack by by moving the others to 15. so in cooperation with chartwells we looked at what people pay and chartwells was recommending 15 an

175hour for cafeteria worker 18 an hour for the cooks and 21 for the manager we we don't have our pay in line between the two there's some differences i don't want one of our employees to be on the line and say hey i make 15 an hour and a char will employees say hey i make 13.50 and and then get a bunch of emails or a phone call what's going on and that currently we do have some discrepancies they're doing the same job it doesn't matter what company they work for they work for us and so we want to get that in line in your packet was a letter uh to me from the regional vice president supporting this and and when he's saying he support this too they have a guaranteed uh contract that

176if they don't meet they have to pay us a certain penalty back so he feels like they can do this and they're in agreement we should move forward with that so that also would be an action item for the board i have a question for you before we act on it uh majority of these workers in this category a lot of them are part-time workers yes so therefore they're not getting benefits like the other staff now i don't have the strategies but the majority do work like six hours don't they yeah they have to work at least six hours a day to get benefits okay six versus eight hours okay all right we have a couple five hours okay so majority of them are uh six hour workers okay all right and the chartwell employee

177is under chartwell benefits yeah yeah right but we would pay chartwell the the contracted price and then they are the ones who determine their pay but they're saying their minimum would be 15. yes we're going to be in alignment right okay all right make a motion to increase minimum food service worker pay to 15 dollars per hour cooks 18 per hour and managers to 21 per hour a second that motion all right before we vote i got a question like when we were doing ssc we saw the increase do we know what the increase is for chartwell it was on i believe it was about 140 000 i think our employees were around 76 and [Music] i think theirs were similar because we have about the same amount of staff but it was under the

178200 000 but we're still changing the rate of pay for our workers which is why you haven't understand understand okay yeah all right i'll probably confuse you by why do you have to vote yeah yes i understand now okay so vote please it's not up oh i got it motion carry next is 16.9 instructional assistance update do you have that total do you steve that total cost for instructional assistance i can't even get it to come up there it is okay okay the same okay so again we're going back to the same rationale um the instructional assistant i i a's are not at fifteen dollars an hour they're close what is the minimum now show it was it um 1369 is the minimum right now and we have given uh raises through the year as

179we've tried to fix the ia scale as well and i did a show she would update us on the history of what we've done for the ias over the last few years so you guys have an understanding of that in 2016-17 school year there was a two percent increase for instructional assistance um 2018-19 we did 10 increase for instructional assistance um then in january of 2021 so last january all instructional assistants got a one dollar increase and then um february the next month of 2021 we did a fix based on their years of experience um anybody who is within 200 of being off of our formula we did fix them based on their years and then due to the governor's mandate that instructional assistants get an increase for july of 21 22 they got a

18014 increase thank you so as as we were doing this and and trying to do all this this is our spreadsheet with all of our ias which we have quite a few and can again can we pay for it and not have to ask to pay for it again next year can can we find it so we had to look at what what is that number and i think just to give put things in perspective for for you as board members and for the public uh the increase for this uh increase that i'm asking for which is bringing the minimum to 15 per hour and then everyone that's already at 15 or higher to give them 50 cents per hour will cost us a hundred and thirty six thousand three hundred thirty three dollars and

181that we can do through attrition which means the people we hired uh this year cost less than some of the people that we we had or retired and and that's pretty normal and so we keep putting in the numbers to see what we can afford and right now all of our instructional ias cost the division two million five hundred eighty eight thousand nine hundred thirty nine dollars so when you hear a hundred and thirty three thousand dollar increase uh and it sounds like a huge increase when we're paying about 2.6 million dollars to have ias and that's just in their salaries that doesn't count their benefits and so again when we do teachers and teachers get raised as often because the state mandates it every year and they tell school divisions you can do it

182and give a three percent raise an average three percent raise there are some years we take that teacher scale and we look and the beginning steps are really hurting so we apply that state money and we give a bigger increase at the front end of that scale and then at the back end of the scale the more veteran teachers may not get that there has been years where we've done the opposite and said you know what we've taken care of the front end we really need to take care of our veteran and we've given them a larger raise but it averages three percent sometimes that's going to happen and again i'd love to do it perfectly even so the lowest employee is going to make a dollar 31 cent more and variations of that if

183there's employees that are only that are making 14 70 right now they'll get a 30 cent increase anyone below 15 is going to go to 15. so it's not perfectly even everyone getting the same amount but if we took no action for anyone no one would get a raise again we're trying to get to the 15 minimum and we did fix the year's experience and we've done a lot over the years to get our ias moving in the right direction i believe our ias are one of the highest paid in the region but again i'm not worried about the region i'm worried about a livable wage and keeping good people that we train to work with our kids as long as we can keep them and dr thornton that's what i'm hearing and and i

184heard you when we were talking about you know the bus drivers or the custodians how we value their experience but if we have ias who have been with us for 20 years and they're going to be making the same amount as another instructional assistant that's been you know new to us that's kind of contradicting valuing their experience because we know the importance of our instructional assistants and the training of them and them working with students one that with all the years of experience versus one that just came in and i mean you know we did get a couple of emails how they feel like you know they're they don't feel we value their experience with this is there any other kind of recommendation that we could even if we did so let me talk to

185that okay to kind of clarify so when when our most recent action was to to take all of our our all of our ias just like i said i want to do for bus drivers in the future and give them the year's experience because again some of the ias that had maybe 20 years experience were maybe paid the same as someone with seven years we fixed that last year so last year the group of ias that got the most money were the ones with the years experience they got a big jump compared to this end because we fixed it by year's experience so we did right by them giving them their years experience last year this is about bringing the bottom up to 15 and still giving them a bump to keep them moving so

186we we fixed the problem so there's no one the people who are making 15 um there's especially i mean we have people making right now 18. um yeah do you have the shape yeah no but i remember seeing hourly rates on this sheet we have people making up to twenty thousand six cents an hour a lot of people in the 20s 18 17 16 all that happened last year okay so they did get a large increase so those people will be getting the 50 cent extra per hour okay okay all right any more questions you should answer that's okay practice girl all right at this time no one has any questions i would like to make a motion to increase the minimum pay to fifteen dollars per hour for all instructional assistants and increase all

187ias that are currently at fifteen dollars per hour or higher an additional fifty cents per hour a second that motion okay we have a motion it has been secondly please doctor do we all of these have motions going forward the reason is i need to take off and break right quick i can just step out if we check if you step out we got to take a break the next one is information yeah but we have to have three so we got through three three exactly i'm sorry oh wait keep going keep going okay motion carry next on the agenda we're on the report from the superintendent with the strategic plan vision 2028. okay i'm going to do very little talking and just show a video and just kind of update our first planning session

188this is all about the kids that's why we do this work that is so important that we focus on our kids today and in their future over the next five years what does public education look like a lot of times we get stuck into that was really great when i went to school and this is how i went to school that was for you it's a different time it's a different place it's a different world we need to educate our students for their future not for our past [Music] so we are at the strategic planning committee meeting our first one so today we kind of broke down what our strategic plan was and kind of brainstormed some new ideas on what we wanted to see in our new one and the focuses that we wanted

189to make so basically what we're doing is we're sitting down to create our educational plan for the next five years for the school system we want to make sure that every child gets what they need to be college career and life ready it's super important to have a steering committee like this because not only does it involve educators but it involves non-educators as well and our goal in having these meetings is to talk about not only where do we see as educators where the school system should go but where the community wants to see education go for isle of wake county when you're drafting a document that that's this important that's going to steer the whole entire school district for the next several years i think it's very important to collect as much diverse input

190as possible it's always important to step in someone else's shoes and with having parents administrators teachers all here we all kind of can step into each other's shoes to see the education process through a different set of lenses and the job of a steering committee is to push the limits to explore to take ideas look at them from three dimensions prioritize them against other ideas and kind of set some north stars for your school system as a steering committee our job is to dream big to initially not think about the restrictions or the limitations uh that we've experienced or obstacles that we've seen in the past with education but to see them more as challenges some of those goals are going to seem lofty and unachievable but we have some time to get them done

191it's not something we're going to turn into vdoe and check off a box this is a living breathing document that will drive us forward through 2028. i just hope that we continue to keep the kids [Music] that we teach every day our main focus and not just the students that are enrolled now but the students that will be enrolled in the future i am speaking on behalf of my daughter avery students that i've worked with over the years in regards to their mental health i'm here for my students with disabilities the parent and make sure the parent has the resources and everything that they need those students that kind of get overlooked or told to conform to what everybody else is doing in the classroom students like juliana who's a latina who has cultural expectations

192that we cannot begin to understand the staff and the support for them the student who you know sometimes gets lost in the shuffle because they're not the high and the low our job as a steering committee is a powerful responsibility to navigate complexity to advocate on behalf of those who aren't in the room and to think into the future and to create the conditions that allow for action goal here is for you to know your why and i think you passed that test with flying colors so the first that day was uh really we're setting the protocols of how we're going to work together i'll say we have three students on the steering committee nearly is one we had one that could not be there that day and i will tell you the amos who

193is our facilitator through this process and has done this work he really put neely on the spot the student on the spot and he treated them just like all of us yeah because there's no answer that's wrong it was good to see neily on that on the committee and i was amazed because i was not at nearly table but the other student the male student was at my table and it was really amazing the ideas that they were coming he was coming up with i'm like you know i was so proud you know to see this to see them act on that level and you know their input because most of the time you think students will stay back no they were not they were right involved and you asked the question they answered and

194this process is going to be uh completed by what date uh hopefully in by may with waterproof is that what we're shooting for yeah that's correct we would we would be um some point in the spring probably like april for board approval or i think we have tenant so the next daring committee meeting it was in the board packet october 26th so that that will start having priorities and that's where we'll start probably having to find subcommittees that will be formed again by different staff that may be experts in special ad and then parents who want to be involved in that avenue and so those committees will report back to the steering committee so it's not the staring committee to decide what we're doing uh it's this collective voice and hearing what are the priorities

195and then at some point we'll share where we are with our priorities we hadn't have the community meetings and so they can hear and see and every meeting we're going to follow up with like a video like this david and lynn do an amazing job capturing the day lin took a lot of notes david takes a lot of video and and capture what the day was about so we're trying to share this with the community through this process and i think it's going to be a strong process and and get us to where we're going and it's not how we do it setting what are our priorities and then that will charge me and the staff okay how do we accomplish those priorities that will be our charge after the fact any questions kind of

196where we are all right okay we have a request for a two-minute break and then we'll be right back so y'all are having too much fun okay at this time we're going to have the special education advert advisory committee meeting schedule good evening madam chair members of the board dr thornton um first item i have for you are the seac board names and the tentative meeting schedule you have that in your packet i'm happy to answer any questions the next item too and that would be the um 2021 2022 child find dates and posting locations um so you have the list for the school year and a list of the locations where that information will be disseminated you saw that any question thank you very much thank you this is done twice a year isn't

197it the child finds okay thank you all right thank you okay next on the agenda is the discovery education resources good evening madam chair members of the board dr thornton so i'm going to talk to you a little bit about discovery education and how it is used by our teachers to support deeper learning um so what is discovery education it's really a repository of educational resources it includes videos games articles assessments activities virtual field trips and then even professional learning resources for our teachers if they wanted to learn how to try a new strategy in their classroom it's aligned with the virginia standards of learning in fact i'll even show you how teachers can use the standards to connect to specific content and it's used by 85 of the 136 districts in virginia to support

198their curriculum and deeper learning teachers when they go into discovery education this is kind of the picture there is what it looks like on a student's side and when i go to mine you'll see what it looks like on the teacher side teachers search for content using associated sol or even search terms then they assign that content to their student either via discovery ed or via canvas so it works seamlessly with the canvas platform students log in they can log into their canvas account or they're clever depending on how they log into canvas either way and then they can view and access the content and follow the directions from their teacher for next steps teachers might use this as a way to set up a station in their classroom or they might give a specific

199student something that is just for that kid to help them with something that they're struggling with so it's going to make me log in i'm sure maybe it's after hours mrs dr kells it is it is i don't know if i can fix this issue [Music] all right let's see if i can do it this way there we go all right so if i were a teacher and i am teaching elementary reading i might be looking for a great short story to stick in a station rotation that i've got going on in the classroom so i'm going to go up here to the screen's got a little little glare on it let's see by subject i'm going to click on english language arts i'm going to switch it to k5 because i'm teaching fourth grade

200and maybe i click on reading and then i scroll down and i might find oh didn't find one there let's get another little piece in there maybe i'm really focused on reading comprehension so i click on reading comprehension and it's going to bring up all sorts of different things it'll give me different reading responses if this doesn't work up see that's 9 12 k5 there we go decoding words context clues reading strategies it's going to find different stories i can type in the name of a story that i'm aware of i can select specific things on how to decode words here i can pick any number of different items just based on my search parameters but let's say that i'm a math teacher and i'm in sixth grade math and my kids have been working

201on let's see they've been working on factoring or they've been working on two-digit numbers i'm going to go up here not two-digit numbers but it's late y'all i'm going to click on the specific sol and this is going to help them i can pick these different videos that shows them exactly step by step how to do that so if i had a student that was struggling with some of these things square roots real numbers complex terms then i can assign those to them and then they can practice that at home or in class during their student work period within the instructional framework or if they've been out for or if they've been out for covered that would be an amazing time and teachers when they click on say they click on one of these things

202they can actually get when they click on it a little slow i think it knows it's late too when they click the share button here they can click it directly into their canvas account so straight from the platform it's not like they have to download it to the computer and then go back and upload it to some another platform it goes straight in there so the the two work seamlessly together so it's really a nice resource for our teachers it's been around for a very long time i know that um even i used discovery education when i was teaching science many years ago so do you have any questions about it one quick one hi how friendly is this for parents being that the students can work on it at home um the student platform

203looks a little bit different and everything is narrowed down by the student level so if their student goes in there the parent can use their students clever account and they can access the content as well if they're elementary they'll only get elementary middle school gets elementary middle high gets elementary middle and high it was pretty easy i did it with my kids okay any other questions awesome oh thank you next is the sec secondary summer school update good evening madam chair board members dr thornton i'm dawn carroll and i'm here to share the update from the secondary summer school credit recovery program that we had this summer we held the program at smithfield high i'm sorry at windsor high school it was offered to students who needed to recover a course credit from the 2020

2042021 school year it was housed as i said at windsor high school but both ends of the county came so smithfield high school students as well as windsor high school students the county provided transportation and breakfast and lunch for each day overall 85 students were in attendance so there were 30 from windsor and 55 from smithfield and 111 total courses were taken so in some cases a student took more than one course we were happy to report that a hundred exactly 100 recovery credits were awarded from those weeks this summer and when you say recovery credits is that sol it is and i'm going to get to a slide that talks about sol but the recovery credit was the fact that the student was not successful in a course um throughout the school year and

205so we offered it in a it was about a three week session so that they could recover that credit okay okay so we did have sol testing opportunities every student who attended did not have to have an sol for the course uh that they attended so 15 students did test and out of those 15 12 were awarded a locally verified credit or a verified credit which was past proficient and we had a summer graduate as well which was a lot of fun there was a student who needed a couple of courses for a diploma and on the last day of summer school after he achieved that we did a small celebration in the auditorium his um family and friends were invited he didn't even know and so it was it was really we cried it

206was a nice celebration at the end of that session and the biggest takeaway from the summer school was that relationships are just so powerful we had you know some students were in virtual or hybrid and the engagement that the students felt um they they verbalized their appreciation which was nice um one student brought a gift for her teacher on the last day of school thanking her for all that she did another student sent several of us emails also thanking us for the opportunity she even said that she actually was looking forward to coming back to school in the fall because she had such engagement so again the fact that we were able to have hands-on opportunities build that relationship piece was very powerful does anyone have any questions i just want to thank you so

207much what you i mean you you what you did for that one child and he will never forget it because you could have very well said well it's just one student just give him diploma and let him go you know but no you did it you did that ceremony for him and thank you very much you're welcome it was rewarding for all of us yes and especially his family as well absolutely they they were so incredibly grateful yes thank you thank you next is the approval process for a signed book reading good evening madam chair members of the board and dr thornton um i have the privilege of speaking about two of my favorite things processes and books oh i'm sorry no name haley coop writer thank you mr cooper yeah we have the mask

208on some people you don't recognize someone i'm sorry if you give the name i know right away thank you yeah um processes and books we have recently implemented a new process to for teacher to add new books to their curriculum and our english teachers are absolutely amazing at finding books that are relevant to today's world and that students are going to really find value in reading um and so we want to make sure that this process is super simple not super complicated because that's not fun for anybody the process is the teacher will complete the english text inventory google form after that a committee will review the text and then finally the committee will decide if the text is approved or not and then we'll take a look at the google form which is the

209first step of the process it is initiated by the teacher and is the focus of tonight's presentation so it's four quick slides and we're just showing you the um first couple questions very generic name title author of the text and then what kind of text have you read at grade levels why is this text appropriate we are asking if there are any controversial issues in the text and i'm pleased to explain what might be in there and then finally does your principle and proof does the text need to be purchased and then who is requesting to purchase the book when do you want to use it what's your purpose and then what standards are you planning to use with it i believe that oh and the themes you want your students to learn and then

210why did you choose this book here's the committee that looks at this myself principals media specialist teachers parents committee community members we're that's we're still in negotiation about who should be in that's important to the process yes very so um when will that be determined who's going to be part of the committee to approve this and these are books that aren't already on the list correct that would be added to it yes ma'am okay all right it would just be i hope that we do have a variety you set a variety of people part of that committee so i think it's important to have all stakeholders yes absolutely in the committee to make sure that those decisions are being made okay thank you yeah you're welcome any other questions all right have a wonderful evening

211thank you okay next is public complaints about learning resources yeah i'll be super duper fast so we do have a policy but before the policy um typically if a parent has a complaint any issue with any learning resource a book a novel whatever we ask that that person talk to the teacher talk parents should talk to the teacher talk to the principal a lot of times things can be resolved right there if the parent still does not find resolution we do have a policy in place for them to then refer to and there is klb dash e which is the exhibit they would complete a form submit it to the principal the principal will then follow this committee um where they this policy so sorry where they would convene a committee to look at the

212resources and then ultimately issue a decision of whether we're gonna we're going to keep the resource or not in fact neely just participated on one of these committees recently um and then there is actually an appeal process if the parent still doesn't agree with the principal but like i said most issues you know for years i mean if a parent did not like a novel they'd contact the teacher the teacher would just give another novel if they didn't if the parent had objected to that particular novel so a lot of times they can be resolved before we even have to get to this process but there is a process in place questions yes well yes just a statement yes um you know we've had several like tonight yes several school board meetings have involved complaints

213about learning resources yep and so this policy has already been announced to the parents i did some extra research i made contact with elizabeth ewing the director of legal counsel and policy at virginia department of education i told her some of the things that we were going through with parent complaint citizen complaints about some of the books or learning resources and general software and she she says i've already looked at your policy because i emailed her and she did her research before she called me and she said what we've already said you have policy in place and that policy must be followed so my question is how many committees do we have currently because of all the complaints that we've heard i want to know how many committees how many citizens have filled out the

214form so do we have any right now i can tell you that right now we have two we have two we have one committee that has met we have one committee that has not yet met okay so that's that's good that's right and any parent a citizen that has emailed me their complaints i have told them this is the process that we are to follow yes in fact this lady told me that the school board does not get involved with this that the policy says the procedure to go through but the school board gets involved through the appeals process that would be if the committee approves it but the complainant doesn't like that they can appeal to the superintendent and then it's up to the superintendent to make the decision if they don't like the

215superintendent's decision then they can appeal to the school board that's correct that's when we get involved that's correct okay well i hope there are some people who watch this part of the meeting because this is very important yes ma'am very important yes ma'am i saw a policy for everything so so madam chair before i go to library um we we have had this is not the first time in education we've had issues with uh maybe a teacher taught something this way and i object as a parent or you're doing a novel study i want my child to have a different novel and and we do that and have done that often those are resolved when a parent comes in or picks up the phone and talks to the principal and has a rational conversation and

216we move on and and look into it and resolve the problem and i have repeated to say that i'm not going to work in hypotheticals i have asked over and over if you have a situation that you don't feel like something where you feel like something was presented in a class that was not right for your child it actually happened contact the principal try to resolve with the principle if you don't resolve with the principle go through the form or come to me if it's not a book with a form there's procedures in place that we've solved for years you don't solve anything by screaming and uh so i hope uh people follow through and do the right thing communicate because we are very reasonable people who work in this division um so the next

217thing i was asked to look into our system to see if it would notify the media center parents of the books that their child are taking out and i include in the packet and the public can see this in the packet as well i'm not going to read the whole thing i'm going to highlight some things the current system we have is alexandria and that it does not have a way to send out an email when the student checks out a book it is possible to send one when they have an overdue item and i think that causes confusion well how can you do it with an overdue item but i can't do it with with the books and it explains it in this process and uh and then we did look at what would

218it take our staff to do this work and so we did some research on that and we got information from the librarians we have and they said if we were to do it ourselves it's a multi-step time consuming process including exporting all books checked out for the day because students can check out the book without the librarian it anymore they can do it electronically and looking up the student's number for each book checked out entering the student's number into powerschool and verifying and contacting the primary contact for each student and because we got to make sure they are the contact and this is who i can share this information so they looked at how many books were checked out at the smallest middle school we have which is gtms on september 9th and 10th and

219in those two days 367 books were checked out that's an enormous process for our media specialists who teach and who service students who come into the media center and then the high school uh they were averaging 50 books checked out daily in september 2019. they use that data because of the pandemic and we haven't really been back they've been giving out laptops and that that's been the focus and so my team did more research with other companies and in there there's rationale for why those companies don't do that that's not my rationale i think it was referred to tonight that i said this is research that's not my rationale this is the research from others but it is my conclusion based on all this and what my staff presented to me that there is a

220solution and that parents and guardians can log into the child's alexandria account that's the best option and that's the one i recommend should we decide to move forward with that because it allows parents who want to know what their children are doing to go in at a click of a button and look what they checked out and so they can take responsibility and look at what their child if if they choose to they don't they don't have to now we can't do this instantaneous we still would have to work with the company to get this reconfigured to do this and assign accounts and so there's some work to it but it can be done i don't see any reason why we can't do it because that would provide a parent choice if they want to

221do that so be it even on the elementary level for a parent to say they know their child goes to the library every thursday so they can go log in and see what the book if they choose to so parents would need to know that information on how to do that when it's available how would we inform them about it so we once we once we can do it and we've worked through with the company we'll do a presentation and we'll send out information home i don't think it's going to be difficult is it most of the stuff most of us i'm not saying to get to that point but once we do for parents to log in it will not be a hard process i don't make things hard for people yeah once it's

222in place so i don't want to put air in the spot how long is this going to take and because again it's going to take work from the technology team now working with the company to make it happen but it can be done and it gives parents options and so i would i would recommend that we move forward and do that and make sure it's communicated very well to the parent community so they know that it's something that they can do okay do you need a motion we don't it really doesn't have to be an astronaut and i can put that in place okay and yeah because it didn't it doesn't cost anything right to work on that all right all right thank you very much we will move forward and let you we'll update

223you on that okay the next item on the agenda is um is action on closed session items personnel report and addendum manual share i'd like to make a motion that we approve the personnel report and the addendum as presented a second that motion we have a motion that it has been second so nation kerry next on the agenda is the adoption of consent agenda the meeting minutes donations and financials okay madam chair would like to make a motion to approve the consent agenda as attached and presented a second that motion okay we have a motion and it has been second vote please been up since 4 30. [Music] madam chair before you go to board comments can i ask if you uh could clarify the effective date of julia's resignation because that's a legal process

224okay so many days so we have to make sure that date is i got her letter dated october the 8th okay so is that the official date okay i read it october 14th but i received her letter and asking me to read this october the 8th well we'll have to contact miss perkins to ask her about her effective date okay rather than guessing based on the date of receipt or the date that you read it i think her to confirm perfectly she'd write does she need to write it or just just tell me what what verbal confirmation just let me know and then because we have to make in order to file a petition um for a written election i need to make a certification to the court of when the effective date of the

225resignation was and um verbal confirmation is certainly fine okay all right i'll i'll do that and um and it i mean i think for for purposes of our record if she would like to put that in writing it as well so miss rewitt can um can keep it that would i think that would make it more clear i don't think it's necessary if we get the verbal confirmation but for the purpose of ms ruiz she may appreciate it if miss perkins would also provide that to her so she have it for clear for the record and i didn't get what you said she needs to provide no i i said if if she would like to email you oh okay or some kind of just some kind of confirmation so chris ruitt can have it

226for her record to just say a simple sentence is as of this date yes i yes she resigns she can email you and copy the clerk i can okay i will call her i will take care of that not a problem okay next is the um you ready you're good with that board um requests and comments um yeah so i was gonna speak so i feel like i don't normally talk about anything that i do at the meetings because normally it's budgeting and stuff and that doesn't really concern the high school students um so it's gonna give you guys an update on what i've been doing so mr thrift and i have been very busy doing committee work so i met with him regarding the dress code like miss times had asked about at the

227previous meeting and i was given some points just on maybe making some adjustments with the dress code just because some students see it's outdated with today's like society and how there's not as much wreaths like as many resources for girls when it comes to clothing like if you walk into a target it's all cropped tops like it's not like full length tops um that's just how our generation is it's just what we wear so just um working and seeing if there were minor changes that we could maybe make to accommodate some like of the styles with today's times and then i also met with him like ms getz had mentioned with the literacy app committee and it was me mr thrift a teacher at the high school and a librarian and we met with a

228parent and went over mac and via discovery ed and ted ed and just talked about the apps seeing if they were if we should keep them with our system um or if we should put restrictions on them and just kind of went over um and talked with mr throat about what should we do like looking forward with those apps was there any decisions not that i know of i mean i i emailed him what i thought but i have not gotten any um were there the communication was it um it was just you communicating how you felt and somebody else communicating how they felt yes yeah so that was it and that would have been good if that had happened maybe before we got the program i feel like that we've moved from textbooks to

229technology so quickly with kovid and and it's because everybody's just trying not to drown and we're doing things and i just feel like that you know we have policies in place for textbook adoptions and we might need to look at policies to see what we may need to do to revise it to include the technology piece because when we had textbook adoption there was parents there was teachers there were administrators at each school and then it was communicated to anybody who wanted to come and look at it and give their feedback and i feel like if we you know did a little more of that with um even the software k through 12 that that would really help you know sometimes it's it's not anything but we're just doing what we think we need to

230do you know we got to do this we got to do this and the challenges the unprecedented challenges that has come up with covid i feel like this might be one of the reasons that that this has happened but then sometimes we need to take a step back and say what could we do to make this better next time and so i feel like that's where we're at with that and um about the technology the technology okay yeah i would love to hear so just so you're aware there's um there is some software that we put in place the covet hit and it was react obviously but in general currently we have a process that we've been using for i want to say seven or eight years um that is a sort of a committee

231it's called a client advisory board so a teacher submits that they want to use a piece of software and what happens is it emails every single coordinator instructional coach and the instructional person over software which happens currently be dr kale was susan goetz for many years and then out of that group if 75 vote yes then it goes to direct instructional approval and then if they vote yes then we deploy this offer okay and that's like um parts that aren't k-12 or you know there's some so to give you an idea we've this month i've done 41. okay well i mean that's a lot that's a lot but what i'm saying is like something as big as ted ed and discovery plus i feel like they might have been something we could have treated more

232like textbook adoptions okay i just wanted to let you know how it yeah i mean we would not want to do that 41 times in the parent community i mean there are some things that but i mean these big things that everybody does and everybody uses i think that we need to you know see what we can do that would include you know a committee of diversity that represents everybody to me i'm just letting you know the information okay i appreciate it eric often says he just does all the research she makes no decision i have a question for you when when you meet with your principal do you ever get with uh kylie and maybe the two principals into two students reps uh zoom have a zoom um we definitely could we definitely could

233um the dress code had kind of been a empty meeting just because we had a big spike of dress code like violations and thought smithfield was gonna fall apart for a second but we were all good um we got it all figured out so and it's calmed down a lot um in comparison to like the first two weeks of school so um but it was just some minor changes that um girls throughout the school because he had made a dress code committee with a wide variety of girls like involved in it and i'm sure there were some guys in there but guys don't really care about the dress code it was more of the girls and so it was just some things just to make it more comfortable for them coming to school um and

234just stuff that they wanted me to bring to you guys just to let you know like maybe considering changing some stuff just to kind of fit society's what was some of those things because my daughter's not wearing crop tops i don't wear crop tops i think my mom would come here oh that's not on there okay um so off the shoulder tank tops and bra straps should be permitted um because when you but yeah children need to understand as well when you're in a professional atmosphere you're not gonna be able to wear that that's true so there are rules and dress codes you gotta wear everywhere so they need to learn it in school so when they get in this real world they're not wearing anything yeah and that's what we teach our children you're

235not wearing anything in school so you're not wearing anything to work so i don't know about that i don't know if i'll be okay this is taken directly from the students this is what they're doing my step daughter was in there involved like yes let's do that i'm sure i think we need some parents on that tomorrow i'll be on that one but you know that's i'm glad you are able to get together as a group of students okay at least they had an opportunity to go through the process even if it's denied at least they know there is a process and this is how you do things yeah they just want to make sure that their voice is being heard and that yeah and they are being hurt and that's that's all i ask

236they're being heard and of course we're not going to stamp everything yes it will probably be denied some of the things they want but at least we know how they're thinking okay i heard the jeans with the cut out jeans that was the need i'm okay with the knee yes that was another thing with shorts and holes and jeans so yeah okay did you have anything no i just have to unpack my thoughts i have a lot of them but i have to go home and process some of the things that have happened today um on my own and then yeah miss times uh i don't have anything to say i said all everything i needed to say during the meeting i asked my questions and everything i just again like i always do i

237like to thank the staff for everything they're doing for the students in alawite county schools thank you and i know the stress level is so high for everybody from the custodians to the bus drivers to the ssc to the central office teachers assistants i mean it's just something like no one's ever experienced and and i just really feel for all of you and i will say you're in my prayers um i want to say too about i'm not sure listening to some tonight that some think that the school board approves what goes on in what books are put in libraries or what books are put you know in a classroom we do not approve that so maybe if some of the community could go on the policy and look and see what the school board

238responsibilities are and selecting books for schools is not part of it so you know for someone to say do your homework that's not my homework and with that i will read this serving on the school board for the almost five years has been both an honor and a privilege and while the past 18 months have been quite challenging i never shy away from a challenge i have always given any job i have done a hundred percent and at one time deep down i truly enjoyed the hard work that came along with the school board that's no longer the case and as i reflect i find that over the past few months the things that should have come first in my life i've allowed to take a back seat to the school board one thing i

239don't want to be as a politician and because politics has crept its way in our school this seat is no longer where i want to be this past month i was very sick with covid and i had much time to rethink my priorities life is short and no one is promised tomorrow i know that quite well as my husband passed away with absolutely no warning i will no longer allow my faith and family to take a back seat to school board obligations and time commitments i have chosen to live my last days happy with my faith and my family and my health being where they need to be my top priorities i can't begin to think enough all the supporters that have been by my side and it literally crushes my heart to even think

240that i'll be disappointing many while i will complete my term through the 2021 tonight i officially announce the withdrawal of my name in running for the school board in this november election those who contributed to my campaign will receive your donations back i know who you are and i have your addresses the necessary candidate withdrawal form has been submitted and with that our meeting is adjourned