001welcome everybody i hope everybody has had a great day we're excited to see you here at our croatan high school today is wednesday july 28 2021 and y'all are at a special cold meeting for the corey county board of education um we are going to do the pledge and our invocation and miss katie stapler will lead that [Music] let us pray dear lord thank you for allowing us to meet here and providing us a place to meet thank you for each family that's represented here um please help us to have open and respectful conversation and keep the best interests of our students and staff at the forefront of every decision we make in jesus name thank you all right we are moving right along and i need a consideration for approval of the meeting agenda
002i move we approve the agenda we have a uh first by reverend goodwin do i have a second second we have a second by mr mclean all in favor raise your right hand very good that passed unanimously we will move on to the first item which is receive the policy revision for first read for mr clear approach is just one policy tonight is possibly the board is asked to be revised it is policy 77-20 employee political activities since there's only one policy and there's a request for revision i am going to actually read the portion that has been revised the question that has been revised is the previous is the ending policy and that particular policy says or that particular phrase or portion of it says this policy should not be construed as prohibitive impartial
003study and discussion of political or other controversial issues in the classroom setting the revision includes the remaining part of that sentence which says including the dissemination of factual information about serious problems the school system or community may be facing because of political actions where such teaching or information reasonably relates to the standards of the course both sides of political issues shall be presented supported by primary or balanced secondary sources so that students are provided an opportunity to be well informed and to be able to make their own decisions regarding political or other controversial issues further these policies shall ensure that social theories of any kind holocaust denial theory 9 11 theory critical race theory those are examples are not presented to students unless approved by the parliament county board of education it is the responsibility
004of the board to ensure that curricular standards are taught using well-documented factual resources and not any and that is the only edit to that policy however i will say i've had conversations with mr whitford and prior to the second um read before the board he intends to make a few adjustments to that policy and i'll highlight those next time it comes before you would be in september fantastic any questions any questions i think we're good thank you mr thank you all right dr jackson is up for considerable visions to the north carolina department of health strong schools nc public health okay thank you mr chair good evening board members good evening all who are gathered we certainly appreciate that in some ways i've got to tell you that i'm having a feeling of deja vu
005when it comes to presenting revisions to the north carolina safe schools toolkit and our return to learn plan as you know we've had to make many changes from the time that i arrived july 1st over a year ago in fact we've been guided by four primary sources the first the strong schools north carolina public health toolkit that's published by the north carolina department of health and human services the second is the lighting our way forward document that's published by the state board of education the third is governor's executive orders that have come and gone and then the fourth was session law 2021-220 that came into being last spring and that was actually the session law that allowed our middle schoolers and high schoolers to return to school and so this evening i want to share
006with you an overview of the latest revisions this is actually by my count the 11th revision to this document since this started this revision was dated july 21st primaries primarily as a starting point i want to highlight this quote from the very front of the toolkit in fact it's on page one and it says quote added language on the importance of offering in-person learning regardless of whether all the prevention strategies can be implemented at the school and so in this statement they're saying we have added to the toolkit language that says being in person with our teachers elbow to elbow face to face is incredibly important even when all of the prevention strategies cannot be implemented and so i very much appreciated that because that absolutely aligned with our board of education's philosophy about our
007students being in school as much as they say safely could and certainly a point of pride for our school system has been our students being in school over the course of the year much more so than some children unfortunately in other parts of the state and so certainly a point of pride for us and i appreciate the toolkit launching off with the acknowledgement of that is so very important for our children to be in the classroom the toolkit has been revised in a substantial way one of the biggest revisions is that what was called plan a plan b and plan c is no more you'll recall last year about this time we had a meeting that was just over six hours i believe we had over 70 employees on seven different committees who had gathered
008together over the summer to create plans a b and c for our school system as required by the governor because of that work we were able to move nimbly through the year as changes came about and so we very much appreciate that work but in this moment i very much appreciate that we don't have to have a plan a b and c going into the new school year among those things no longer required in the toolkit based on where we are in the pandemic we're no longer required to have daily wellness checks we were able to suspend those last spring so we will not be taking temperatures or asking the wellness questions at the front door before students get on the bus there's no longer a requirement that we offer remote learning as a standalone
009educational opportunity certainly if a student is in school and then is has to be out we will do everything we can to work with that child and so there potentially could be some remote learning but there's no requirement that there has to be a standalone remote learning program the prohibition against field trips and assemblies as you know we weren't able to participate in those items last year that has gone away so going into the new year we will be able to participate in field trips and have assemblies we no longer have to have one-way hallways and one-way stairways as we discovered this summer and are still discovering it is very hard work to get that tape back up off of our halls and they're lining all of our homes and our custodians are working hard
010to get the hallways stripped and waxed and to get that adhesive back off the floors but we won't have to do that this year again the daily symptom screening we do not have to do and social distancing on the buses has also been required removed as a requirement perhaps the biggest change in the language and i'm just going to touch on this briefly and then in just a few moments mr whitford will go in further depth is that the toolkit prior to this revision use the words required and recommended the school system is required to fill in the blank the school system is recommended to do fill in the blank those words primarily have been taken out of the toolkit and now words of should and could have replaced them and so the school system
011should consider implementing these strategies the school system could consider implementing these strategies and so again mr whitford will go into greater detail about the legal requirements behind should and could in terms of the educational experience for our students going into the 2021 year first of all the biggest celebration the thing i am happiest about is that all of our students will be on a full academic schedule so all of our students pre-k through high school will be attending school five days a week we were close to that by the end of the year last year but some of our high school students were still on four day a week schedules and so all of our students will be on a full academic schedule five days a week we will have a standard bell schedule we've
012been advertising that and of course that'll go out with back to school information appearance sander bell's schedule simply means that our elementary schools all will start at the same time our middle schools start at the same time the high schools start at the same time and our special schools have scheduled for them and that's primarily to avoid traffic issues for example on this campus we had some issues between both sound and croatian with both schools having parents coming to pick up our drop-off students at about the same time and by going to that standard bell schedule we've been able to mitigate that so again we'll be on a five day a week standard bail schedule we will have face-to-face instruction in all of our schools and looking forward to that and then we will social
013distance to the extent possible in all of our public spaces and so here in the media center in the hallways and the gymnasium in the classrooms we'll continue to social existence to the extent possible and so we won't state that that will be x inches or x feet because it's not always possible in every space we'll do our very best in space and with the limits we have in terms of our health and wellness protocols going into next year again with bill social distance the extent possible we'll continue to have hand sanitizer readily available i don't see that ever going away we will continue to emphasize hand washing particularly with our youngest students but all of our students will continue with our ongoing disinfection of high touch areas our teachers and staff members all pitched
014in throughout the year last year to clean desks between classes and to make sure that door handles were sanitized or disinfected on a regular basis we'll continue to do that a big change for us will be the ability to allow visitors and volunteers to resume normal activities one of the losses we had last year was that our volunteers are so very important to our academic program weren't allowed to come into the building to read to children or serve in the media center and so with the revisions to the toolkit we'll now be allowed to allow visitors and volunteers to resume normal activities in support of our students and their academics in terms of transportation again the wellness checks and the seating requirements are no longer in place in the latest revision of the toolkit we
015will social distance to the extent possible on our buses we will continue to keep hand sanitizer readily available and will continue to disinfect high-touch areas throughout the school bus in terms of child nutrition we'll be resuming the use of our serving lines we did not do that last year we'll be able to presume using the survey lines in our schools the individual schools will make determinations about some schools this past year had all students eating in their classrooms some schools had some students in the classroom some in the cafeteria we're going to allow the school-based site-based management teams to make that determination based on what works best for the school and for their schedule because we did find some value to having the students actually eating in their classrooms and so we'll let the schools
016make that determination but we will resume the use of our serving lines again hand sanitizer readily available and continuing to disinfect high-touch areas the next area is cloth face coverings the north carolina department of health and human services the cdc and the american academy of pediatricians recommend the use of cloth cloth face coverings in k-8 schools for all persons in kindergarten through eighth grade pre-kindergarten three eighth grade and then in our high schools for all unvaccinated persons the toolkit though goes on to say this is a direct quote with a link here on the slide if a school does not require individuals who are not fully vaccinated to wear a mask they should ensure a layered mitigation strategy including physical distancing ventilation hand hygiene adequate access to diagnostic and screening testing and closely monitoring for
017increases in cova 19 cases and so share with the board regardless of the decision that you make this evening we will certainly be embracing and engaging in a layered mitigation strategy another point of pride for for me and for our school system has been our sharing of information around cases of coca-19 throughout and so on our website all of the cases are listed actually listed by school by date a weekly report has appeared on our website on fridays and we'll continue to do that so we will continue to monitor covet 19 cases going forward we'll certainly continue physical distancing in all of our spaces our ventilation is we're very blessed our ventilation systems will continue to monitor and improve on that and then hand hygiene we've talked about as well the last area to touch
018on is quarantines quarantines are actually the purview of the local health department i had the opportunity to meet with our health director miss oliver the director of consolidated services and the director of nursing for the health department and we we had a great conversation carteret county health department has been a wonderful partner for the school system they very quickly pick up the phone our school nurses have many many many conversations with the health department so i certainly want to highlight what great partners they've been the quarantine determination though is made by the local health department and as it's written in the tool kit quarantines are required continue to be required for an individual to spend close contact which continues to be defined as within six feet or at least 15 minutes cumulatively over a 24-hour
019period of someone who's determined to be positive with coca-19 either through testing or symptoms consistent with diagnosis with the following three exceptions individuals who are fully vaccinated and do not have symptoms do not need to quarantine after a close contact my recommendation to the board would be that we not um try to continually track who's been vaccinated or not vaccinated but when a situation might come up then the question might be asked at that point so um not trying to in any way create a situation where we've got those who have and those who haven't or any of that sort of thing but to keep that a private conversation between the nurses and perhaps the administrators and the families the second exception is people who've tested positive for coca-19 within the past three months and
020recovered or do not have symptoms they do not have to quarantine the third is students who are not fully vaccinated after close contact in a classroom or other school setting if masks were being worn appropriately and consistently by both the person with copic 19 and potentially exposed persons they would not need to quarantine either there is an additional potential exception to the quarantine and that's for persons who are not fully vaccinated and have tested antibiotic positive within three months before immediately following close contact they may not need to quarantine if they have limited or no contact with persons at high risk for severe cover 19 illness including older adults and persons with certain medical conditions exemption from quarantine is based on a recent positive antibody test can be considered on a case-by-case basis if approved
021by the local health department and so i'll pause here and simply reiterate again my great pride and our school system staff who work so very hard to implement our health and wellness protocols throughout the year last year with great fidelity i can't tell you how many thousands of times i had my temperature checked because every time i walked into a school my temperature was checked and that's a credit to our staff because they were doing exactly what they were supposed to do and so i do believe that we contributed to the low number of cases in our county because of the hard work in our school system and we'll continue to do that and certainly appreciate the board's leadership and so this time i'd like to recognize mr whitford who will share with the board
022a legal update with regards to the toolkit prevention mr chairman and board members as the attorney for the school system i have been researching any legal mandates relating to claude face coverings which we all refer to as math in public schools beginning july 31st 2021. based on this research it is now clear that local school boards in north carolina have the authority to make decisions regarding whether to require masks or not as of july 31st the state has removed the previous statewide mandate requiring masks and essentially delegated to local school boards the authority to make these decisions now this status of the law could be temporary um over the last few days we've seen authorities in many states rethinking relaxed preventative measures as coded cases again are on the rise and perhaps more importantly that
023hospitalizations are increasing the news yesterday was that the center for disease control guidelines changed once again to where the cdc was recommending mass wearing for everyone in schools whether vaccinated or not so on i think we then we also heard that i think tomorrow uh dhhs is uh potentially going to revisit this issue or issue some statement about it so so whatever we say today it might not actually be in place tomorrow we need to keep that in mind the um the origin of the previous mass mandates at least started with the governor's order issued last year under a set of the general statute those were the laws of the state of north carolina that were on that are called the emergency management act and again the governor acted in a series of what are
024called emergency executive orders the governor in his uh in one of his first orders with respect to schools delegated to the nc department of health and human services the authority to issue protocols consistent with his emergency orders pertaining to various public health measures to be taken in school now it's interesting to note and it does become important in some of these issues that under a different body of statutory roles called the public health law of north carolina dhhs has rather sweeping powers independent of the governor to take measures to protect the public from infectious disease but at least as this got started the governor took the lead but then he brought in dhhs and dhss responded with what dr jackson put up on the screen a minute ago the the publication called strong schools nc
025public health toolkit k-12 on it was originally published in june of 2020 revised as superintendent indicated and for the most part the governor's emergency order and the toolkit lined up and went forward together then moved to june of this year by executive order 220 which was dated june 11th the governor removed the mass mandate in schools that he had previously issued and completely delegated the decision to dhhs to be addressed in the toolkit the toolkit at that time continued to reflect the governor's previous mastermind debt but then on july 21st to be effective july 30th dhhs revised the toolkit in important ways an explanatory note states that toolkit has been updated to provide school leaders with greater flexibility in implementing the layered preventative strategy strategies based on current code trends and updated cdc guidelines guidance
026most importantly in the revised toolkit for masks the word required was eliminated and replaced with the word should and should is an interesting word while in past decades the word was considered obligatory and even many current dictionaries defined it to be an obligation the most recent legal trend is to define the term as a recommendation and not a requirement this trend is supported by spring supreme court tax that i have brought to your attention and uh supported by the federal plain language guidelines issued in 2011 which was uh published for the purpose of ensuring clarity and drafting federal regulations and now the the publication was referring to the word shall and uh it goes on to say that uh that when when you're when federal code writers are writing code if they use the word
027should then it is for a recommendation and not a mandatory obligation the toolkit is a legal document and is subject to the rules interpreting legal documents though i have no i have not spoken with anyone at dhhs i can tell you with certain that the change of the previous protocol on masks from required to should was intentional and was designed to give local school boards flexibility to address the pandemic based on local circumstances and this flexibility allows local boards to rescind mass mandates without violating the law and so mr chairman those are my plans thank you mr woodford and thank you dr james so board we're at the moment where if we have got any questions thoughts ideas um well dr jackson of ourselves uh mr whitford now is the time to air them talk
028about them i'm sure it'll probably come as no surprise to most of you that i feel strongly that we should make about past something tonight that allows our kids to have mass options with everybody in our school system to have the option of whether they want to wear masks but beyond that i would also ask i would like to ask that our um that our administration and our board lawyer could at least investigate um continue to research and investigate what flexibility we may have regarding quarantine rules and that isn't something i'm asking for us to make a decision on tonight but i think we should at least investigate it um for uh for example the definition of a close contact still being six foot and things like that so i want to know for certain
029what flexibility we have in tailoring quarantine rules for our particular school system so you know that's something that we can at least look at perfect that's fine but let's let's get some discussion um i just want to be sure that if the delphi were to pick up and something were to happen or we are to have a large outbreak we do still hold the option to go virtual in the event that it's needed to protect our students and staff at any time thank you for the question and so if we were in a situation where we had to quarantine for example a class or we had to quarantine a school or if we had to move back to what was previously called plan c virtual we would certainly be positioned to do that teachers will
030be assigned to class to students just like they always have and then they would begin to instruct their students virtually so although we will not have a separate standalone virtual academy we will continue to have that option and in the event of god forbid inclement weather we may choose to use remote learning during inclement weather to allow our students to continue to progress again academically as well so yes that would certainly be available thank you i agree with mr day i think that we should make masks optional but for therefore if someone feels that they need to wear a mask and not that that is what's keeping them safe then they are there to do so and they're able to do so um but i also think that those parents and students who feel that
031they are comfortable with their meeting no math can be said and i agree and i want to make sure these people know that we're not going to allow bullying on either side if you've got your mask on that's fine if you don't have your mask on that's fine but we're not going to allow to believe whoever share your decision mr chair i'll make a say uh to mr day's emotion but i would like some more discussion well i think before we make a second we have to have the mr chairman technically bubba is correct okay but but with respect to board operations you don't absolutely have to follow everything without god and so it's a learning experience i think it's perfectly fine to have this discussion and then and then have a second if it
032hasn't been seconded by this weekly um but but i think you're fine even though well what we're going to do is we're going to take above a second we've got a second no we'll have discussions i didn't mean to yeah no problem we need to cut off discussion no no no i want to have some more discussions regarding virtual alarm how many um students did we have sign up the first go round approximately 150 grades kindergarten to 12. in some grade levels that was as few as four students in the entire county and that great level now one thing that i would ask as long as it's not a strain on the school system and if the board agrees if we do go mask optional that may push some people back to virtual and instead
033of losing them to a north carolina virtual charter school i would prefer to keep him here can we send out another survey if we decide to go mask optional and see if that changes the numbers what he might be opposed to that okay write another recommendation on that sure we have reached out of course everybody didn't get it what if we made it public newspapers any other way we can where the parents reach out to us we give email addresses phone numbers whatever way like because of the decision of the board i would like my student to be enrolled because we're still going to miss some and it puts a responsibility on parents because part of all this is the parents have ultimate responsibility for their children's welfare and we're we're trying to acknowledge that
034that this is a parental responsibility of the school system that we do care not a state responsibility it's always a parental responsibility and this way it's just a suggestion but we put it out there so they can reach out to us and make it as easy as possible and i'm not even sure what you just said regarding i mean i think that we if we decide to go mask optional the vast majority i think will come back those that aren't are going to homeschool private school virtual school the virtual school if we can keep those children under our school but i don't want to put any undue strain on the system to have to reach out to parents i mean i want to put the information out there if you want your kid to be
035virtual let us know by next week dr jackson you we did see that did we how was that so we made um two phone calls to parents to make them aware of the survey replace the survey on our website and on our social media as well that was as the school year was coming to an end so it's possible folks were already going into summer mode but we tried our best to get that word out about the survey and left it open mr mckay actually led that effort for us and then the main reason i broke it up is we do a very good job of communicating i got a couple emails and calls and i think you all have two of people that claim that they never got it so just to be completely
036fair to everybody and i would be interested to know if those numbers change greatly understanding that if we still don't have the numbers to justify then we wouldn't and also realize that it's really short time to ramp up a virtual academy with dedicated teachers as well that's what we're talking about right and dr jackson i would also like to ask um about the possibility or what is where the plans for accommodating students who must be quarantined i want to minimize the amount of quarantine time and students out of school if it isn't absolutely necessary for safety and safety of our kids and everybody else in the school system but for those kids who may have to end up quarantining what what kind of accommodations are we going to have for them to be able to
037make sure they don't fall behind sure so in many ways it's quote unquote business as usual because we've had students who've had to miss school as long as there's been school for a variety of reasons medical and otherwise and so when a student has to be out teachers work with the parents to provide accommodations so that they can either make up work or take work with them or engage in the work while they're out and so teachers work directly with our parents and we're planning to continue to do that i i know that quite a few during this um while we were everybody was away from school we had quite a few teachers that did an excellent job of making sure that they had their classes recorded and it would be available to their um
038to the students who were at home and i know not everybody was able to do that but that was really wonderful i got so many compliments about that from parents the fact that they could actually um feel like their kids weren't totally missing out and they were somewhat still connected and i think that would be a great option if we could kind of investigate some of that those possibilities is there a north carolina virtual academy for all grades right now so there's when we say north carolina virtual there's two different entities that are three different entities that have similar names but they're very different north carolina virtual is a public school that has online classes that's available to all public high schools and so if we had a high school student who wanted to take
039russia and we don't have a russian teacher they could take a russian class online through north carolina virtual through our school system there's also a north carolina virtual public charter school which is like a charter school except that it's completely virtual and then there's one other virtual charter school as well north carolina virtual the classes that are available through the public school system through our high schools are primarily high school classes they've been doing some pilot work around middle school classes but primarily are limited to high schools right now and now mr chairman of board members and captain carswell is here with us tonight should chime in if i one of our students goes to virtual charter school that that per pupil money both state and local almost all of it goes with the stew
040and so that's i think in part why uh mr mcclain would like options to keep schools enrolled with us and to put that in perspective that those 150 kids win and it's i don't know the number five thousand dollars that's you know three quarters of a million dollars that we would lose potentially but we're also talking about losing kids to private schools because they don't want to grant masks we're not going to have to worry about that tomorrow before any other discussion any thoughts before um before we take a vote i'd like to um whatever vote we make tonight is probably going to upset somebody i'm sure i'll give some emails um i won't i don't know what y'all believe out here i don't know i've met any most of y'all but i'm glad y'all
041are here you know i get a lot of emails just let's say you're not a doctor you need to follow the science and i'm a slow play guide research i do my research and but every one of these board members does the same thing and you know it's funny the science actually has pros and cons for masks and that's all finally good but part of our job is to look beyond the sciences to look at the educational aspect to look at the social aspect the um psychological aspect and the emotional aspect so when we make a decision we've got to pull all of that together and we're here for the kids you know we appreciate the parents input whether you're for mask or against bass we appreciate that but we've gotten to look at every
042aspect of it and you know that's what we and i love these people because they make the decisions that way so with that said miss wheatley has made a motion to make a mask optional for this coming school year and mr mclean has seconded it all in favor mr chairman i want to make sure you get this right i believe mr dave made promotion mr mcclain second year i will get good at this because they're trusting us that um we are going to keep their thoughts confidential and sharing with us stuff that you know it does make them nervous to share with the board or the superintendent on their opinions but they are parents also and they are with our kids every day so i really appreciate those teachers that felt um that they could
043trust us with us absolutely and they were powerful emails powerful emails so i will start this again we have a motion on the floor about mr day miss wheatley seconded it or maybe mister mcqueen seconded all in favor raise your right hand any opposed very good that passes unanimously with that said we are done and i need a motion to adjourn second i've got where we're doing in a second by mr mclean i'll pray your right hand if everybody raise your hand if you're good very good we're done thank you