#DPSCommunity | Board of Education | Monthly Meeting | 2/24/22

001all right good evening everyone good evening everyone good evening the durham public schools monthly board of education session is now in session this is our february 24 2022 meeting at this time we wish to send a warm welcome to everyone who is joining us this evening those in person and virtually the purpose of this meeting is to inform our students parents and constituents about the work aligned with our mission to embrace educate and empower every student to innovate serve and lead tonight this administration will be presenting information to keep you up to date on the strategic plan the interpreters for tonight are martha romo iguiles and marty ramirez thank you for taking the time to join us we're going to start our meeting with a moment of silence many of us know today um there

002was attacks in ukraine so i hope that we can in this moment of silence keep the people of ukraine in our thoughts thank you the next item on our agenda is celebrations we'll start with uh mr sutter student of the month good evening we have a couple of students of the month as well as a couple of employee spark awards that we want to give out tonight uh let's start with the students because the students come first shall we and presenting our students of the month tonight are two principals that are new to their positions and i would like to begin with jd clement early college high school and dr bruce and dr bruce will present our student of the month for jd clement early college high school good evening everyone as a new leader

003of the jd clement early college high school i am absolutely thrilled that one of our best and brightest seniors have been chosen for recognition amongst all students within durham public schools miss victoria morris has faced the challenges of being a high school and college student during remote learning and all that came with it victoria has been on the honor roll for all semesters during her high school career including the dean's list at north carolina central throughout her junior and senior years she is a well-rounded student with hobbies extending beyond academics including graphic and visual design music interpretive dance and competitive chess where she has placed in local regional and state tournaments victoria has participated in many early college activities including serving as vice president of the national honor society the golden key international honors society

004at north carolina central and most recently invited into membership into the alpha kappa mu honor society also at north carolina central she was a recipient of the soar academic achievement award for her performance in honors math 3 and a science olympiad competitor meddling in two events in the district competition victoria is an active member of the white rock baptist church member of jack and jill of america incorporated recipient of the community service award for the national charity league she's been a member of the girl scouts of america since she was five years old and interned with the durham committee of the affairs of black people where she was a member of the creative arts expression advisory council it has been an absolute pleasure hearing about her future goals and undergraduate plans to major in chemistry

005with an emphasis in material science now i can say that's an achievement because i barely passed high school chemistry but good for you victoria she is one of five students awarded a full presidential scholarship to attend spelman college and has received nearly full scholarships absolutely absolutely and received nearly full scholarships to both hampton university and xavier university of louisiana in addition to merit scholarships to agnes scott college university of maryland baltimore county and holland's university in addition to all of that she has been accepted to north carolina's north carolina unc chapel hill georgia tech nc state north carolina a t and of course north carolina central university congratulations victoria from the jd clement early college and north carolina central university eagle family we know that you will continue to make all of us and your

006family very proud mario we'd like you to say a few words if you would of course hi everyone i just wanted to start off by saying thank you so much for this honor dps has done so much for me which i'm so grateful for from morehead montessori elementary school to lakewood montessori middle school and lastly to jd clement early college high school i am so thankful for my teachers my professors at nccu and my friends and my family thank you so much small certificate of recognition for you and then some other goods trying to figure out that whole smiling but with the eyes thing i also would like to present you with a spark pen uh these are uh pins that we present to students staff community members who have demonstrated leadership in within or

007in support of durham public schools and i hope that you will wear this with pride and our friends at triangle e cycling would like you to have this hp computer and it's a it's a pretty powerful one so that you can take it forward in your studies and uh we appreciate everything that you have given to your school family and we are so proud of everything that you have accomplished thank you now i'm going to hold all of this for a minute because we have a red carpet that we would like you and your family to walk so that you can uh give the fist bump or elbow bump or whatever to our school board members so they can congratulate you okay hmm let us please continue in that mode and i would like to

008invite in dr jackie tobias our newer new principal at durham school of the arts to introduce a senior student of the month thank you good evening everybody i'd like to take this moment first of all to thank you all for allowing me to be here um our student of the month is jasmine parker and as a new leader to durham school of the arts one of the things that i did make the promise that i was going to do was i was going to listen to all the constituents um i was going to make sure that all the voices were heard within a week this young lady sat in my office she represented the voice of tsa she's our student body president she's also on the superintendent's advisory committee and when i tell you this

009is an amazing young woman she and i meet once a month and we sit and we have deep conversation about the things that we need to do differently at our school we also talk about the fun things what are we going to do for the seniors what are the things that students want so some of the changes or some of the things that are going to be continued to be great at dsa is due to this young lady it is rare that you have a moment to hear the voice of babes and i think as leaders we owe them especially coming out of covet and i'm going to be proactive and say we're coming out of covid we owe them the opportunity to listen to them because it has been a struggle for our students

010so i sit and i listen she does the announcements with me every morning so in the mornings it's good morning dsa and it's jasmine's voice she represents the students in such a manner of grace and when she comes in front of you you will see exactly what i mean she's going to attend william peace university she's going to major in biology in addition she's going to also join the national guard to serve our country what more can you ask for a student such as this i am so proud to have been in her presence for these few months and to continue to see her walk across the stage in june it has been such a pleasure to be with you jasmine [Applause] i first like to say hello everyone i'm jasmine parker i am a

011senior at durham school of the arts i am the president of student council i am also the senior representative as dr tobias said through this first year coming back from kovic it's been revolutionary like it's been so motivational to be in the presence of my peers because it was a struggle i'm going to be completely honest but i have to communicate not only my emotions but my peers emotions at the same time every day i have to come along and just be a guiding hand for my peers because i know i feel some type of way yes but there's also different emotions every day when it comes to tests when it comes to ap exams anything of that nature even mental health issues i've talked to the faculty with my helping hand of dr tobias

012and even in the transition of mr keith i had to make and network with everyone to make sure that i hit every mark that i needed to to represent my peers and myself as well with the help of my support system mainly my mother and that's what i love because of the connections i make with people regardless of how i feel one day i know i'm helping my future self because i do do research at duke university with um intersecting brain stem and i love that it's just a matter of balance in everything that i do and making sure i stay on top of like prom committee because we are trying to vouch and get our sponsors for prom and we did because we had my talk with dr tobias other than that i just

013loved the energy of dsa and i've been there since sixth grade and right now i'm in the process of visiting classrooms for the seventh and eighth graders to be a representative for them because for a long time i didn't see myself in a school i don't want that for my peers i want to be that for my peers now that i'm in a position where i can be because it's not virtual anymore so that's all i have to say and i thank you all now justin this will probably not come as a surprise to you but i have a certificate of appreciation and a spark pin for you if uh we could have a quick uh photograph of the certificate here is your certificate here is your spark pin for showing leadership at durham school

014of the arts and yes thanks to our friends at triangle e cycling you have an hp laptop as well thank you [Applause] and of course now i need to take it away from you because we need to take some more pictures and you need to shake some hands on this metaphorically yes right there okay oh i'd like to shift now to the spark pin recognition stage of the of the evening and we're going to begin with somebody who did yeoman's work in academic services during a time of transition and i'd like to turn this over to deputy superintendent dr nakia hardy thank you board members this evening i would like to recognize dr laura dewalt dr dewalt stepped up and filled in as executive director during the transition that we had between miss sidberry and

015dr canelano she did this all while continuing her regular job which was coordinator in addition to this was also during another transition in the department where we did not have an administrative assistant not a single ball was dropped we were able to continue forward with our secondary math adoption she was able to juggle all of those duties while keeping what's most important our children first she has always been able to be willing to take on anything that she needed to do to get the job done it's my pleasure for us to recognize dr tawal this evening thank you so much um first of all i want to thank dr hardy um for her professional mentorship and support um during the transition was much needed and very much appreciated i'm very grateful for the opportunity to

016lead and really my pleasure to serve the students of durham public schools i also want to thank my cni team they are always always willing to go above and beyond for the staff and students so they're my success is their success and we did it together as a team um as many of you know i returned from texas two years ago i'm so glad to be back home in durham public schools and i just very much appreciate the opportunities and uh look forward to continuing to lead here in the district so thank you and our final spark award comes to us as a nomination of a teacher uh there's felicia jeffries from spring valley elementary saw an opportunity to celebrate black history month by combining a study of black history in an academic competition that

017is tied to the north carolina social studies essential standards and as a reminder the 2021 north carolina social studies essential standards were written to be intentionally representative of marginalized groups so that our students see others that look like themselves represented in the history that they are studying ms jeffrey jeffries created a black history month quiz bowl and you'll hear a little bit more about that in a few minutes complete with study guide as students prepared for the bold they learned about prominent african-american figures both locally and nationally and their contributions to society since this is the inaugural year she aimed to start small and began with three dps elementary schools spring valley w.g pearson and morehead competing via zoom against each other she hopes to expand this to additional elementary schools in future years until

018we have all of our dps elementary schools participating now this note here says ms jeffries is unable to attend this evening due to prior obligations that she was unable to adjust she adjusted them ms jeffries would you please come in oh wait you're right behind me miss jeffries we want to present this spark pin to you in recognition of your leadership and service to our students thank you please say a few if you would like to say a few words and then receive the fist bumps of support from our school board absolutely i want to first thank my principal mrs gwendolyn wilson at spring valley elementary school for allowing me to chair the black history committee i would also like to thank the good brothers of omega scifi the durham chapter for presenting this idea

019to us and every member of the black history committee at spring valley elementary school i also appreciate these w.j pearson and morehead who agreed we reached out to several schools so i appreciate them for agreeing to meet with us and do this black history quiz bowl and to all of durham public schools families i wish you a happy black history month okay board members that completes our celebrations thank you mr the next item on our agenda is the superintendent's update dr mabinga thank you madam chair madam chair members of the board good evening we have a lot of public comments tonight i want to reserve a bit of time for my remarks to talk about our black history month so that i will be briefed tonight first i want to thank you for authorizing our

020relocation of asl funding for staff retention bonuses at our last work session these bring a total of four thousand five hundred and thirty eight and fifty cents in bonuses for full-time staff out of coffee relief funding while continuing to allow our sl fund to make critical air quality infrastructure improvement and supporting student learning of course the work must continue to ensure that our students and staff feel supported as we hope for our community continue recovering from this pandemic second i want to reiterate our commitment to supporting the health and safety of our student and staff according to board policy and to the fullest extent permitted by law you expect us to lead we have done so i continue to strongly urge everyone in our community to get vaccinated and boosted especially our students who are

021eligible next i want to thank our board and our county commissioners for their continued support to our school building program we have had strong community engagement in recent weeks including a parent meeting for new lion forms with principal james hopkins an information session with durham school of the art families and staff about our plan to their new campus on duke amp state while the support of our community we will continue to renovate to build and build to ensure that we are prepared for durham clinic growth and our student and our teacher have outstanding school campuses this month we celebrated both love the bus month and bus driver appreciation week we have been telling the stories on our website of outstanding bus drivers we have and our bus monitors and other professionals i want to thank

022our transportation employees and the leaders the leadership team for serving our student and our school with grace and pride finally if you will give me a point of privilege i would like to turn over my remarks with dr hardy and mr sardis and to share information about dps black history month mr sadif dr hardy thank you dr ravinga dps celebrates was created during remote learning time of the pandemic as an opportunity to share knowledge empower and promote awareness through remote learning district-wide in 2021 dps celebrates announced a plan to grow what was started in 2020 by offering more frequent live events that have been coined beyond the celebrations during each month there is a focus on a character trait as well as other designated celebrations that are in response to our dps student population decided

023upon by the dps celebrates committee which is comprised of members of various departments and cultural backgrounds within dps dps celebrates provides resources related to each monthly celebration for use by dps teachers students families and stakeholders with a monthly beyond the celebrations live event every second monday broadcasts are available in english spanish and with american sign language translation for black history month specifically dps celebrates in collaboration with our office of equity affairs weekly live events on mondays each week focuses on a specific topic that is related to the black experience and honor and celebration of black history month we open the celebration with a panel of guests to have a conversation about empowering boys of color featuring black male figures from the durham community to discuss the fortification of the black community through the work and

024impact of black men on valentine's day dps showed love for black history month by showcasing events occurring in our dps schools that were shared with the dps celebrates committee now i'll turn it over to mr sutter to speak to some specific school events that's right because the deep the dps celebrates team wanted to highlight schools i wanted to take a moment to give you a few examples it's not comprehensive but some of the things that particularly our elementary middle schools were doing in support of black history month if we could go to the next slide please burton magnet elementary kicked off black history month with a community leaders read-a-thon including dr mabinga a black heritage day with suggested attire a drive-by chorus performance during morning carpool an african-american history quiz bowl and a community-friendly black

025business and food truck expo that included student fine arts next slide please club boulevard elementary students visited the school's black history mural that had been created by previous third graders fayetteville street elementary students enjoyed a read-a-thon with chair umstead vice chair lewis reverend dr william barber joshua gunn and others next slide please glenn elementary students participated in many hands-on activities highlighted the explosion of books in the past few years by phenomenal black authors and they are holding a black history celebration tonight that started at 6 00 p.m glenn teachers incorporated black history into social emotional learning lessons about identity as well and students are contributing to a school-wide black history timeline next slide please bolt elementary students are holding a fifth grade wax museum and the black history quiz bowl tomorrow on friday and then

026on the next slide you'll see spring valley elementary students presenting black history month projects about martin luther king jesse owens and thurgood marshall with principal gwen wilson there on the leftmost picture next slide please finally to wrap up uh our highlights carrington middle middle school is holding their black history month spirit week this week encouraging a tire ranging from historical figures african attire and hbcu days neil middle began their annual black history month celebration virtually at 6 p.m this evening and this is shepherd middle's black history month spirit week as well including an hbcu and greek life day tomorrow honoring black education and service lots of phenomenal things happening at our schools this just scratches the surface now i'd like to turn it back over to dr hardy for more on dps celebrates in our

027district response the dps celebrates conversation also continued with a conversation about the influence of race and culture and media featuring long-time wral journalist gilbert baez and reedsville high school journalism student victoria alcindor we wrap up the month with an in-person event at hillside high school on the presence power and politics of crown the crown act panel will feature students from hillside high school's drama department who will present a segment of their play state of urgency which was created to amplify student voices around social justice issues in america the panelists will affirm the beauty power and resilience of black hair and highlight the importance of dove and the crown coalition's 2019 crown act and what it necessitated in its creation the crown act was designated to protect women from discrimination against race-based hairstyles by extending statutory

028protection to hair texture and protective styles such as braids locks twists and knots in the workplace and public schools the panel event will include the reading of a crown resolution and an inspirational question question and answer session with the steam panelists who will share a range of information including what they love about their hair advocacy for wearing the natural hairstyles in the workplace and in public and how natural hair has become politicized and policed the program will culminate with a crown charge issued by durham's mayor elaine o'neill in dps we believe that black history month cannot be contained in just 28 days so we have expanded to combine black history with women's history month in march and are currently securing additional local guests some of whom will be dps alumni for continued weekly live events

029we encourage everyone to visit celebrate.dpsnc.net for more information and to learn about featured guests thank you madam chair that's pretty much concluded my reports thank you all thank you dr modinga i have had a chance to do some of the read-ins at schools and it's been a pleasure so wonderful to know that our schools are celebrating black history month i know there's been emphasis on it this month but i also know that they celebrate black history all throughout the school year so thank you all for those presentations folks at home tune in to dps celebrates it's a really awesome program that's streaming on our youtube channel the next item on our agenda is agenda review and approval i like to add an item um i think to give the board an update on the safety

030and wellness task force to fill the vacant educator seat that's for that task force i have a plan to propose and share with you all this evening we can add that at 9b also i'd like to bring back to the board for discussion and possible decision around naming elementary school f it was originally on the agenda on october 21st the due diligence has been done and we can vote this up or down but i'm hoping that we can address it today and possibly adding that at 9c yeah i have some unreadiness about naming the elementary school i hadn't been informed of that ahead of time but i i would certainly welcome the update on safety and wellness second well you put emotion did you put emotion there was not emotion i think we would need

031to motion them separately because they are two separate issues to be added to the agenda that's correct um we may not make a decision tonight if there is unreadiness but i would like to have the discussion because it has been on since october 9th november 18th and december 9th um so yeah maybe we can have some discussion about it but we would vote each one by motion i knew that we had the update on the safety task force item second the move by mr second if i'm inspired any other discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign passes unanimously and i'd like to move that we add elementary school f a second the move by mr raven seconded by miss lewis any other discussion could i get clarification on

032your motion as to whether you're um moving for an action item or for discussion for discussion thank you been moved i believe yes by mr raven seconded by ms lewis any other discussion all right all in favor say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign right so it passes five two all right so do we need to do a full appro uh motion with the full now amended agenda or those okay remove approval of the agenda as amended second it's been moved by misfires seconded by miss lewis any other discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign it passes unanimously the next item on the agenda is board of education monthly meeting minutes with approval of the minutes as presented second the move by ms buyer seconded

033by ms lewis any other discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign the minutes pass unanimously the next item on our agenda is general public comment i have some rules that i want to read before we get started uh for those who are speaking we ask that you first please that your name is speaking for an organization please state your name and the name of the organization second speakers are asked to present their comments in the specified time when the yellow light comes on you have one minute left to start winding up your comments when the red light comes on it will beep and that indicates that your time is up complaints about named staff students or parents should not be voiced in open session however we are very

034interested in hearing your concerns with regard to the public education safety of students or the operation of the school system finally board members will listen carefully and consider the comments but we do not engage with speakers our first speaker will be this dana carpenter and we'll give each speaker three minutes good evening board members and dr mabenga thank you all very much um for all you do i would like to speak to you on behalf of veteran ias and how the pay raise needs to be across the board for all ias my i myself have been an educator for over 25 years and i love what i do i myself have to do more than one job to help support my family because i may what i make is not enough ias need to be

035looked at as educators also over the years i've helped guide many new teachers with my years of experience new teachers look at us for help with running classrooms which include helping with small groups helping identify the students with special needs and other support throughout the day also now with the um pandemic we're asked to sub i mean i sub over five or six times um a month sometimes up to five times in one week not doing my job to help my teacher we're also included on parent-teacher conferences um we also have been um i'm sorry we also have been told that the school could not run without us so i'm asking for your help for the pay to reflect that please help us veteranize a's with the pay to raise so we can be able

036to make a living without having to have more than one job just support our school thank you the next speaker is jessica schaefer i apologize if i'm meant to pronounce your name one this is fiona she's here too um i'm just a concerned parent and i'm with the group of other parents in my neighborhood we are all at our base school where i live which is the title one we have had a extremely and extremely rough year we are losing teachers left and right the slide has been boarded up all year long the kids aren't getting recess they're being sat to watch television for lunch and recess many days because they don't have the staff to support many times the teachers are watching two and three classrooms across the hallways we've got teachers i'm being

037told last friday by multiple children that came home from school as we sometimes take a group walk to school and walk home and we take them fishing and we try to have the community sense as i said we have a trail from our neighborhood to the school i'm we were told by multiple children in different classrooms that one of the specialist teachers was incredibly ill all day coughing and hacking all day that had to come because they did not have any other way any other subs to watch they are having you know they're having administrative staff watching classrooms not teachers all year has been a revolving door of different people just covering classrooms babysitting basically i'm now paying magnesium 320 a month because my daughter's iep is basically a couple weeks it'll some she'll get

038intervention then things will come up she doesn't get intervention now the interventionist is leaving who can blame her so now we're getting a new interventionist and my daughter who's finally outgrown her rare disease that has had a neuro degenerative regressive effect from integrates kindergarten through fourth is now needing services more than ever because she is retaining and we're not going to get him this year we're go we've gone outside of the public schools what i'm scared of and i'm seeing this in durham everywhere this city is changing quickly very rapidly i lived in san francisco for five years they did not have public schools that's going to happen here if we are not careful in growth i'm sorry in my neighborhood i have convinced many families to turn to our community school this year despite

039the scores citing you know there's a highest sale population it's very low income that's why we're having the scores we have come come anyway you know let's form a pta let's do what we can do we're getting no cooperation from the school 30 seconds oh thanks babe um she knows i talk um it's rough it's been a really rough year and now i'm looking elsewhere and i have been the strongest advocate for base schools but we're talking about 400 500 000 homes that are being bought in cash people coming into our neighborhood to be in this zip code and they're turning away from this community school that their neighborhood is right next to and they're they're not going to come back the problem is as the money comes in we are going to when i

040lived in san francisco there was that your pleas your firefighters your teachers i'm sorry they all lived outside the city they could not afford to live in their city that's happening here it has to change and if it's taking it to city council we take it to city council it has to change because we are going to lose these schools and those children who are esl families and low income will not have a voice anymore because the parents that do care are leaving thank you so much sorry thanks everyone thank you thank you educators for your fight right the next up is jenny cauldron cauldron good evening board members dr mubanga many of us remember a distinct start to this pandemic perhaps it was a phone call from the beloved chipsetters telling us not to

041send our children back to school on monday but there's another pandemic raging in our schools that didn't have such a clear start for years teacher pay compared to cost of living has dwindled working conditions have become unworkable and then there's a covet 19 pandemic layered on top of that through all of it teachers have found a way they've adapted covered classes for absent colleagues and cared for our children's increased social and emotional needs teachers have done what teachers have always done they have prioritized children above all else and while i am so very thankful for that i don't want their superhuman efforts to make us blind to what's really happening teachers are becoming the proverbial empty cups that you can no longer pour from one of my children's teachers quit a couple of weeks ago

042and there's been a revolving door of substitutes since meanwhile the ec resource teachers at my other child's school are so thoroughly tapped the self-contained ec teacher is pulling groups during her downtime it's super human but also completely unsustainable and selfishly i want it to end if only because nobody is going to respond patiently to our children they were up at 2 a.m drafting an iep because there's no such thing as a planning period anymore i know this is complicated and it's not your fault but the pandemic wasn't our teacher's fault and yet they found a way now i'm asking you to do the same get just as creative as our educators and find a way find a way to fund more positions so teachers can get back their planning periods find a way to increase

043the salary supplement find a way to increase base pay for classified staff to a living wage do for our teachers what they have done for our children be just as creative as teachers were in finding a way to engage students in online learning they did it for us and now it's our turn to return the favor thank you next we have millicent rogers and after millicent will be neil spinner good evening it's budget season i'm here as a parent in this community the advocate historically you put together a budget that allocates federal and state funds and develops a request for the county to fill in the gaps with where the state is unwilling and then you take your budget and present it to county leaders only a fraction of that budget is filled i'm hopeful

044that this year will be different county staff has expressed an increased willingness to more fully fund the needs of dps but we're going to need to work together the board and dps leadership must create a budget that is reflective of every durham family when families are centered and their voices are heard our whole community can stand together to support that budget and ask the county commissioners to make fully funding it a priority as a parent my priorities are simple that our local supplement and instructional assistant pay reflect the good work happening in our classrooms and provide the dps family with a living wage based on the kept hours for our classified staff that works out to just over seventeen dollars an hour a rate that under current pay scales durham instructional assistance won't be until

04517 years of experience starting at 17 is a step in the right direction to ensuring that our classified staff is not overburdened with second and third jobs and are able to focus on the children in our classrooms similarly the local supplement for our teachers needs to meet or exceed the supplements elsewhere in the triangle our talented teachers will opt to teach elsewhere in order to attract and retain quality teachers we have to pay them accordingly even if surrounding school systems do not increase their local supplements this year the proposed increase in teacher supplement only keeps durham ahead of chapel hill cardboard cities until year 20. at which point teachers are incentivized to take their experience and acquired expertise elsewhere i understand the challenges before the board especially as north carolina has systematically underfunded schools in

046recent years nonetheless i'm ready and willing to stand in partnership to advocate for what is best for our children create a budget that reflects our families and our families will stand before that budget thanks you next neil spinner hello dps board members and thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight i'm the father of two children in durham public schools i deeply care and i love this school district and i'm also a phd scientist i have extensive experience in analyzing scientific data and i also care deeply about my children's education along both of these lines i'm here to insist that the face mask mandate be removed during your vote tonight this is purely about science medicine and empirical evidence this is not about politics left versus right or personal freedom despite our hopes that masks

047would be an effective mitigation strategy the overwhelming body of evidence suggests otherwise in addition masking kids in schools for an extended period of time has caused other unforeseen problems such as social emotional distress delayed development and learning loss and i'm not here to convince anybody or claim that kobet is not a serious illness obviously it is or to say that all the mitigation strategies have been poor i i for one am very appreciative of the eating outside policy that's a very good idea however regarding face masks in particular here's a list of evidence from the cdc in may of 2020 quote there is limited evidence for face mask effectiveness in preventing virus transmission either when worn by the infected person or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure our systematic review found no significant

048if no significant effect of face masks on transmission similar findings have been reported from the world health organization the european cdc the international journal of public health another cdc report from may of 2021 involving 90 000 students in georgia public schools as well as the german biology professor who in august of 2020 noted that improper use of masks may actually increase infections excuse me sir yeah if you can make sure it's above your nose thank you now even in spite of this evidence that clearly shows face masks do not work as we hoped they would a common counter argument is that it's no big deal it's just a mask it's not hurting anybody and to that argument i can say as the father of two young developing children i've already witnessed firsthand how being masked

049for well over a year has hindered their educational and social emotional development in fact the cdc recently lowered its speech standards for young children due to mask wearing after previously claiming that masks would have no effect this has also negatively affected non-english speakers and they've admitted as as much in particular which is critical in our community and parents and counselors know well that we've seen mental health anxiety suicide and depression rates skyrocket over the past couple years as we've forced the least vulnerable population children to become more detached from their peers than ever before in summary i'm here to tell you that the evidence nowhere near supports a mass mandate and it's more clear that the negatives outweigh the positives moving forward parents should have the choice to mask or not mask their children please

050follow the science and vote to remove the dps mass mandate thank you very much thank you our next speaker is i think it's kayla's decante i apologize if i mispronounced your name uh it's kayla stacanto thank you um i'm a student i'm a junior in high school right now and i think i speak for a lot of people and i'm reiterating what other people have said when i say pay teachers more teenagers are often seen as very self-absorbed and unempathetic but we definitely do notice when teachers are struggling not just when they stay up too late grading assignments trying to get all of their work done but also when you've taken a class with them for the past three years and they seem exhausted and emotionally drained and depressed and like they hate life a

051teacher's attitude can and does impact how responsive we are in class and between having to cope with stress low wages and a pandemic i'm genuinely shocked that my favorite teachers have managed to still teach for in some cases two decades i've no idea how they find the energy to do so and i'm genuinely impressed by all of them i'm not an adult so i don't understand the stress of having to work a second job to pay a mortgage while simultaneously having the mental capacity to check in on depressed students but i would imagine it takes a toll on someone pay needs to increase with cost of living and as others have said durham is quickly becoming gentrified and has been for a while poverty is definitely not a uniquely american issue but american education does

052continue to lag behind that of our peers low pay makes teaching less competitive and unappealing to potentially great educators without teachers nobody gets an education without an education there are no doctors there are no lawyers there are no artists there are no people who found their passions with the encouragement of a mentor you went on to do great things even if for them great things just means finding happiness without my greatest teachers i would not be the person i am today there's also a very large chance i wouldn't be here at all and i guarantee there are other students who feel the same i refuse to allow myself the possibility of regret for not defending the people who care the most take apathetic students like me and turn them into concerned citizens spend every ounce

053of their energy expressing compassion and empathy for even the most disillusioned and disruptive students imaginable a single teacher has the power to shape the lives of dozens of students each year but it cannot be expected to support others while they themselves are not supported i urge everyone in here to consider the impact teachers have and to remember the teachers are human beings with that i yield my time and good night thank you did we have one additional public speaker they can state their name absolutely my name is matt haney it's a pleasure to be with everyone uh it's my first time in a school board meeting it's reassuring to see how many people are so passionate about her our children's education um so i'm a physician here in durham and i appreciate some time to

054help to promote the health and well-being of our kids we all know and talk about often that kids have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic in many ways very little in the case of children of that has had to do with infection with covet itself i think we know that a lot of that has been from their inability to be in regular in-person schooling um to interact with other children in meaningful and normal ways and to be involved in the activities that i think they cherish and find fulfillment in i have four children two of which are in durham public schools and are surrounded by excellent staff and teachers they love every day of it i understand and and hear often about the culture of the pandemic in the classroom and at the school um

055so there's a few things that i want to just make a little more clear um regarding the pandemic and the first one may have a little more to do with with future policy uh in regards to vaccines um because i very strongly feel that the children should never be burdened with uh any sort of division uh or distinction or difference in treatment based on vaccination or or not um i'm supportive of the copa vaccine i was vaccinated almost a year and a half ago pretty quickly after it came out but i'm very much against any sort of vaccine mandates especially in the pediatric population children rarely contract serious illness from kovid there are case reports and there's some who are more effective than others but those are quite rare and the push for child food

056vaccination initially seemed to be more more towards the goal of trying to prevent spread of illness in the population and i think the recent omicron wave has shown us that vaccines um don't fully prevent that transmission although we are fortunate that it does protect those who are at risk of serious infection um so i just want to encourage that we don't ever think poorly of parents who are concerned about vaccinating their children um because i think those are concerns that come from a from a caring and loving reason and we venture down sort of a dangerous road if we if we begin to mandate this vaccine for children um i think that sort of segregation and treatment would would cause more harm than good uh the second thing i wanted to stress is the masking

057which i think it's about time that we make optional for children for many of the same reasons i've already mentioned by and large it's not our children who need protecting from cobit and those who are in need have vaccine options and masking options should they feel to do so teachers are no longer at risk of serious illness from spread of disease by children and the burden of protecting the vulnerable vulnerable population really should not be placed on our children during much of the pandemic the leading hypothesis was that the school setting was higher risk than the community and that's been refuted many many times and the risk of of other infections and those under the age of five are much higher for hospitalization than covet so i appreciate your time um i encourage you to

058take those thoughts in mind as you make the vote tonight and and thank you again for everything that you do thank you and that concludes our public comment the next item on our agendas are consent items we have items a through f consent items have been sent to um board members in advance and we have had the opportunity to review those items i just wondered did you mention earlier about the comments that are online we had a significant number and i didn't know if i apologize no you're fine we i'm sorry we did have a significant number of online comments i think with people in person it just took me back to when we only had in-person comments so um mr sutter could you share a little bit about the online comments we do not

059have um additional time at this point for to read those but if you could give us a little highlight summary absolutely we've received 191 online public comments that have been posted to the dps website on the page for this meeting this very meeting the vast majority of those public comments were about the question of a masked mandate and the and a significant majority of those comments were asking that the masked mandate be continued there were several emails uh several comments asking for the mass mandate to be lifted but the majority wanted it continued there were also a few comments in support of uh teachers requests the asks that were part of the rally uh downstairs this evening there were a few comments about the proposed changes to our bell schedules generally it's either expressing personal

060difficulty or asking about the availability of after school care in those circumstances again all of those comments are available in all 191 of them all 75 pdf pages of them on the dps website thank you mr sutter at the miss buyer for that reminder those public comments have also been sent to board members so we have had an opportunity to review those as well i had a question mr uh i don't chair um and this may be for our our attorney so when you're in person you have to give your name address and so forth however many times on online submissions is anonymous do we have to accept anonymous i'll let the attorney answer but i believe the answer is yes i believe your policy does request that people provide their name and the topic

061i i would not recommend that you turn someone away from written public comments because they fail to provide that but in terms of coming here and speaking i think that is a reasonable request for those comments in person i would like to add that we use a google form submission process we do not have any way of knowing um that the actual identity of a person who submits i read a name and an address when i'm given it is that the actual name of the person who submitted we don't have a good way to control for the identities of the people who are submitting okay thank you thank you so now we'll move to our consent agenda items these items have been sent to board members in advance to review and also have time to

062discuss with the administration for it i'll accept a motion i move approval of the consent items listed on the agenda second the moves by miss vagidarya seconded by misfire any discussion all those in favor say ah any opposed please use the same sign it passes unanimously the next item on our agenda is the board of education uh mask mandate vote i move we continue to mass mandate second it's been moved by mr lee seconded by misfire any other discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign it passes unanimously the next item on our agenda is a community wellness safety update yes 9b uh the safety wellness task force has been working amazingly well and hard unfortunately one of the seats designated for dps educator to feel has been vacant

063miss tanya leathers has stepped down for personal reasons and i would like to propose that we open an application period for february 28th so beginning on monday through march 28th and then on april the 7th at our board work session we would vote on the applicant to fill the seat based on the applications that we receive so i'm bringing this to the board's attention if there's any questions or suggestions or recommendations of another process i'm open for the discussion i appreciate it i think it sounds like a great plan i appreciate your um keeping on top of it and keeping us informed i think this work is so so important thank you chad my shirles i want to thank uh former principal uh leathers and her work on the task force and so just a

064lot of gratitude and definitely uh you know that's that's let's get that position filled thank you this item is just for information um so any other questions thank you vice chair lewis for your service on the community wellness task force we really appreciate that any other questions that was just for information i thought it wasn't a proposal to how to feel or i'll turn to the attorney i don't believe so i think that was just for information it was just for information yes yeah okay thank you all right with any other questions we'll move to our next discussion item elementary school f uh vice lewis yeah i brought that um to the floor as well um ultimately as i shared before the administration brought this item to us on october 21st um it was introduced

065under operations and then it was on our agenda again on november the 18th we had 12 items on our agenda that day so it had gotten removed even though some community comments were here that we did hear about the topic and then on december 9th it was on the public agenda but it was just before our meeting the due diligence has been done the community has weighed in i think that would be good for us to re-hear what the community has shared for us and that we're also transparent to having the conversation it's important that the school has an identity it's important that this was important to administration four months ago for a reason and school is not opening tomorrow but there's something that goes with naming a school and what does that mean this

066week i had the opportunity to visit at least five schools one was for the spelling bee competition at bethesda elementary school and another one was for the black history quiz bowl at lakewood elementary school those students at every school did an outstanding job learning their lessons being able to regurgitate information that they had learned and one question during the black history bowl was name the seven schools in durham named after influential black leaders from the durham community a third grader was able to name every single one and with further conversation he was able to share a fact about each one and their contribution to durham to hear everything that we are doing to support black history month in this school system it's just been really important to me that we consider history the way history's

067been made here in durham and one of the names that's on the that's on for a decision is dorothy is betty dorothea mastenburg there's something about naming a school after a person that is not just a great principal but the first black female principal in the city schools that did not see poverty-stricken children but saw their potential the community has brought this name forward and i would be honored to use her name for this school and i know there were some questions about this was she the first how many people have weighed in i don't know if chip is mr suddenth is available to give us some of that information that he had given before but i definitely want us to bring it back to the community back to the table back to this board

068for conversation so the community knows we're being transparent we are doing our due diligence and we're ready to make a decision to give the school an identity as it's being built and moving forward i know this item was just added tonight so i don't know mr sutter if your office has had time to pull that information i can speak generally about it i don't have exact numbers before me but i can speak generally about the process and where we were on um on october 21st uh i brought to you uh the results the initial results of our community engagement process uh seeking uh suggestions for the name of elementary school f um we brought to you four options three of which were geographic and one of which was uh his historical figure pauline murray was

069by far the most popular recommendation in the online process we recommended murray elementary school there was a sense among some staff that they prefer names to not include the first name a la lucas middle school but there was interest in paulie murray elementary school at the same time we heard from the family of uh betty daritha massenburg whose they one submission had been made on the um on in the online process but they came recommending that name but the family came and spoke eloquently about it and the board elected to defer that decision and we heard from and you heard uh through email correspondence uh from other members of our community advocating for that name your policy doesn't put it up to a uh to uh vote where the number one uh recommendation uh goes

070forward um your policy is for us to give you recommendations and for you to consider it um and um we know that the we know that the process encouraged uh being encouraged the name of paulie murray elementary school but the response to that um included a very uh substantial uh subsequent public uh support for betty daritha masenberg uh prince uh i'm looking at the website that the family set up uh prior to that trailblazing educator trailblazing business owner author motivational speaker poet community servant so that is the background of the of the decision that uh is before you thank you mr cedric remember is there any additional discussion we added this item for discussion tonight mr raven i think one thing that we really have to think about is when we when we name schools

071who we naming the schools for and what is the intention behind the names what emotions are evoked from the naming of schools from the connections that individuals who will be students in that school that they'll have with it with the familiarity of families that have grown up in cities and communities how does how do names on schools resonate for instance we have north carolina central founded by james e shepherd and we have shepherd middle school and it's actually nccu is actually the newest the youngest hbcu in north carolina but it's actually one of the largest in the country i believe it's tied for number six if i'm not mistaken but he was a revolutionary we have other leaders like like aaron harris um we have merrick moore which is the combination of two um two

072pathfinders within the community they even founded a local chapter kappapasad the durham chapter um there were two of the charter members so the historical context that you place on names it means a lot and it means a lot not just in a presence but in the future when you're telling the story of who we are and who we see ourselves to be the one thing that people can always say about durham is if you look on tv you watch anything you will always see something somehow come back to durham because we've been the first in so many ways and historically we've done that because we know where we need to go we know where we want to go and we always have an idea of how to get there and in retrospect it's always easy

073to say yeah we did this we knew where things were going we didn't but but we're always willing to take that chance so i think just us being able to have discussions about this and about how we perceive the benefits and the values behind names in schools i think it means a lot and i think it says a lot about us as as board members when we're able to actually take the time just to communicate how we feel not so much what we're going to do but at least letting everyone know how we think so they could kind of follow that logic so thank you thank you mr raven there any other discussion all right thank oh miss valuedares yeah i um i just want to say that we are um just really grateful for

074our community's input um the way that the community has engaged us around naming schools and particularly showcasing women in leadership when mr shutter went up and talked about going back to october and that there were three geographic locations and by far um paulie murray had you know more votes than the other geographic locations that was kind of putting us in a direction that there's definitely um connections that uh community members have and then since then the option for betty mastenburg has been on the table as well we've gotten engagements through emails calls and uh and i know that mr sutterth when you were mentioning um the feedback up until october since october we're we're now a couple months in and we've gotten more feedback um and so [Music] i i definitely do think that there

075is something to be said about connection and naming of schools where families can be engaged and this level of engagement is always great i'm always great grateful for it so i'd be interested in seeing the community engagement since october and for us to have a process by which we can see the engagement and definitely match it um mr raven mentioned merrick moore being two names you know be having merrick and more two pathfinders um there's there's considerations i i would not if we were to vote today i would be in support of um betty mastenberg um and and that that is something that i think i would have no qualms in supporting a name that matches leadership entrepreneurship and um highlighting a community connection to community uh paulie murray if we had been voting october

07621st and paulie murray is the top name in that process that we had and we didn't have any other name to go on based on that engagement poly murray would be the name that we would be choosing if if that were our process but our process is not just one thing or the other so what i'm saying with this is that i think that this discussion doesn't need to be drawn out too much um i would be in support of a motion for betty masenberg i would also be supportive if this board decided to do murray mastenburg as well so those are my thoughts for this thank you miss valedares this was added to the agenda for discussion and not for action tonight so we won't be able to make any action but i appreciate

077the discussion any other conversation chris lewis i'm curious as we're discussing it um it's been a while since it's been up for a vote i'm not sure what would um impede us from making a motion to vote on this today and move forward with it so i would like to know like what what are some of the things that the other board members need to be able to move on this what we have these two or three names before us and just like to have the conversation are any board members yeah i i have nothing that stops me from voting tonight i'm on the same page as uh board member value daras i just want to say it again this was added to the agenda for discussion and not for action so we are not

078be able to take action on it tonight is there any other discussion right i'm gonna close this agenda item and this is i guess for the attorney although we added it for a discussion are we able to vote um one way or the other if it's not from the administration but as a board it's because there's a board decision you can make a motion to amend the agenda to add this as an action item i think the you know the board voted earlier today to keep this as a discussion i know so i would like to keep that as a discussion fine with the discussion um i've heard we've heard from less than half and i'm just not sure why we're not moving forward or when is it going to be on the next agenda

079for us to vote on it i know the community has weighed in it has been since october and i'm just not getting any feedback for what we're waiting on so that we can have the conversation that's what i'm asking for the conversation if we're not going to move on i'm not sure why we're stuck here thank you miss lewis i think i've heard everything that's been shared so far and it sounds like we do want action soon we can look as we plan our agendas for march or april to see when the right time to bring it to action will be right thank you all for having this discussion the next item on our agenda we're going to go to operational services dps bail schedule alignment uh thank you chair umstead and good evening to

080the board of education dr mabenga um i'm joined here tonight uh by mr matthew palmer and mr joe harris we're going to be discussing staff's recommendation to realign our bail schedules to fit within school levels this is not only going to help us with our operational efficiencies but also provide benefits to some of our youngest students and most vulnerable and without further ado i'll ask mr palmer and mr harris to walk us through the presentation and then we'll answer any questions that you may have thank you dr monk good evening chair umstead board members dr mabenga and the durham community it's pleasure to be here this evening we have a unique opportunity director harris and i to bring to you all a recommendation that will actually do a few things a benefit for our school

081community not only is it relates to operations but in support of some of the research around the benefits of start times for particularly our middle school and high school students so with that we would ask to go ahead and start to the next slide and we'll share with you an overview of the pillars of our dps transportation plan again this is looking big picture at all the different efforts that our team in transportation is undertaking to improve service consistency and resilience of our transportation department for dps students i will tie it briefly to the strategic plan party goal 5e talk about the connection between bell times and transportation again this is for information as well as for action this evening our recommendations in his administration and then any certainly leave space for any considerations or

082questions that you all may have that we'll be prepared to answer this evening next slide please so we want to start with some good news and if you would next slide we have been working very hard since really last summer to prepare ourselves for a full remember back in the day when we talked about plan a plan b plan c well we are definitely aware heading into this year the transportation will be a challenge and it is and it remains a challenge to reset the board and the community's minds we used to have 300 bus drivers on any given day now we have less than 150. so half of your supply and demand is stable we realize that many families have necessarily chosen to drive to school historically our bus ridership rates are at sixty

083percent currently they're at forty percent that shift has gone to our car cues which is a separate related topic about challenges at schools right now we'll walk through our efforts around safety equity efficiency and sustainability again along safety we have received submissions for an rfp for school bus technology platform that will modernize our service around school bus transportation in durham i won't go into the details tonight that's a coming presentation in march in addition dpi is now endorsing seat belts on school buses moving forward and we're going to take full advantage of that here in durham around equity we have now identified positions and personnel for each of our transportation offices to receive calls we got a lot of feedback that folks were having to drive school buses because of the staffing shortage and there

084were folks at the office to receive the calls we have people there as well as to support schools that are trying to connect with the regional offices growing together which of course we'll be working on this spring and that is really about not only simplifying improving access to school from eligibility perspective around student assignment but also around transportation those long bus rides that's one of the best things that we can possibly do we'll talk about that efficiency i mentioned 60 of our students are either driven to school walk bike or take transit effective february of this year 2022 we have our first transportation planner in durham public schools mr christian brookshire we alluded to at the last meeting she's already hit the ground running and working to support our school campuses that are in desperate

085need of support the last point here around bell schedules back in 2016-17 we started on a path of adjusting the bell times for our high schools and we got part of the way we adjusted high schools we didn't adjust all of the elementaries or middle schools there's a lot of reasons for that the pre-date are certainly our arrival in these seats part of what we're bringing to you tonight is the completion of that step so that we can bring forth a modern sustainable transportation system of service for our children the last point i want to make is that sustainability does underwrite these other three pillars we're always trying to bring sustainability forward when we can but we're driven by safety equity and efficiency next slide please so very briefly to to remind the public and

086the board the 2018 strategic plan for dps identified priority goal 5b is transportation efficiency in accordance with the ncdpi annual scorecard and on the next slide we'll go through that our benchmark status in that first year was 92.2 percent our goal is 95.8 we've been held harmless these last two years both last year and this year because of covet they will score us next year and that is our that is going to be our primary benchmark to determine did we hit this goal so we're deploying all of our strategies to make sure that we're able to achieve this strategic goal that we see as being beneficial for our students as well as our administration next slide please so our strategies around that include reducing mileage making sure we're maximizing the number of students we can

087carry on a bus while also being responsible standardizing our stops optimizing our routes and looking at school programming and it's that last point school programming has to do yes with the placement of our application programs we talked about growing together but also those start times where do they need to be what are the logistical constraints on a daily basis next slide please so just to tie together these strategies with our tactics to achieve we have growing together school boundaries will be a part of that project that's going to help a lot with the mileage um bell times directly and we'll talk about how we're going to tie back to the number of miles we have to travel every day and what kind of miles because there's different whether we have students or they're empty buses

088high utilization relates back to our how good is our data we're working with research and accountability to update those data inputs so that they're consistent with what we observe every day standardizing our stops and this is no secret for our community there is a wide variability on how we provide service and we need to make sure that we're consistent in how we do so optimizing routes includes yes growing together and boundaries but again bell times and the last piece here is really talking about bell times touching on mileage and rat efficiency so want to tie these threads together about the connection of when we start school our goals around transportation and why we're talking about bell times as a connected piece next slide please next slide so in total we have a little over 30

089000 students enrolled in dps of which two-thirds in our data system powerschool are listed as a yes for ridership the challenge there is that's six thousand five hundred more than actually rise so i talked about our efforts with research and i got accountability to bring those into alignment we're gonna need our parents help and our school leaders help to make sure if we're yes in power school we have a route for you but if we have students with route requests that aren't writing we're driving by and picking up students that aren't riding and you can see how that leads to inefficiency ultimately we have 429 routes that we carry to support nineteen thousand five hundred and seventeen ride requests the challenge we only have 160 drivers and of those on a daily rolling average we

090better than about 120. so doing the quick math on that every driver has to carry over three routes in the morning and the afternoon irrespective of how long that route is so we have to do some reconfigurations to make that work next slide please now back in the day some will remember we used to employ high school students to be bus drivers and there's a lot of reasons we don't do that now but big picture we can't just give buses over to schools right we would need 429 buses to achieve this goal of a high cost high service system right it's not possible we have 160 rolling buses not 429 next slide please where we are right now is a bit in the middle we're improving our service we're designed to improve our service but

091we are still inefficient so when we say high costs we're talking about efficiency it's unsustainable because of the variability school by school and by level elementary middle and high school we have inconsistent rules and that leads to a lot of the daily burn that transportation feels those calls that we can't answer because we're out on the routes so it's unsustainable and that's where we are right now where we're trying to get to on the next slide is a low-cost high service system we need to be looking at our stops and the assignments there at a neighborhood level and we'll be doing that this spring but we really need the standards and planning to make sure that if that's our goal we have the support for transportation aligned so that we're asking our buses can actually

092do what we're requesting right now that's not the case the delays the phone calls the delayed arrivals and the rest of it is mostly because the demand exceeds our supply of drivers we'll stop there can i get the idea next slide please so we use a lot of terms here optimization there are three pieces of optimization the first one is tiered routing right can we take one bus to service multiple schools the second point is about school bell times are they standardized and are they staggered or are they all at eight a.m we'll show you an example and then regional planning does the bus have to go from western durham to eastern durham or can an area of durham be serviced by a fleet of buses all at once next slide please so just an

093example here and if you'll tab one here thank you a scenario we have an elementary school a middle school and a high school and they all start at 8 am if that's the case and this sounds like one of those math problems from back in elementary school right three schools same time we need three buses by staggering on the next slide if you would please oh there you go by taking that same scenario elementary middle and high school and putting them at 7 45 8 30 and 9 15 now one bus and one bus driver can service those three schools that's what we mean when we talk about staggering times now one of the questions we've gotten is can we shrink those times remember you've got to drop off students then go get the other

094batch of students and bring them to school before it starts so compressing anything less than 45 minutes is too much compression on the pivot next slide please this is just graphing it out another illustrative example you can see here we have nine routes if they all start at the same time we need nine buses next slide this is just another way to show the same thing if we stagger them in time you can see now we need five buses rather than nine buses next slide please that red block is your pivot time that's going to get the next batch of students right okay so this is what it looks like in our world this is what we call tim's the transportation information management system it is unique to north carolina and we are blessed to

095have it in this state it gives us the ability to plan consistent routes geocode our students we are really the pioneer in school bus transportation in the united states i just want to say that because we sometimes forget it we're very lucky to have this resource on the next slide this is what it looks like in the tabular form when we break it open and do a lot of what mr harris does every day wrap sheets and coverage boards right next slide please so here's where we are today we would say publicly we're a three-tiered system those three staggered times because we do have schools that start at 7 30 to 8 o'clock toronto schools that start at 8 30 and other schools that start between 8 50 and 9 15. but look at the

096numbers right it's very heavy in that first year we have to carry 187 routes to start the day and they're middle school routes so those are long routes that's not a quick out and back route those are long regional middle school routes then we have a couple of elementary schools that started that 8 30 window which were quick runs and then our high schools and other elementaries at that third tier so even though we say we're third tier we're really a two-tier system based on how we structured it the hardest window for us to serve is that third leg when we have 200 routes and remember a rolling average of 120 bus drivers that means in that window those bus drivers have to carry two routes just in that window alone next slide please so

097to address the students remember we talked about the over subscription we have a school bus technology platform coming online that's going to allow drivers and students and families all to be on the same page on who's riding the bus next tab the design miles what that means is right now we have 2 689 miles that are empty miles that means every day 25 of our miles are just empty buses right and that's as a function of again regional planning that's growing together next slide the piece that we're focused on with bell schedules is about taking our 429 routes and allocating them across three windows of time right now they're dominantly allocated over two so if we can smooth this out you'll see in a second here what that looks like when we begin to reduce

098the peak demand of the time window next slide again just a reminder there is a lot of literature out there that we won't go into from cdc and beyond on the benefits of later start times for middle and high school students leave that alone only to say we believe there was a reason that the community and the board was interested in this some years ago and we were asked as administration to operationalize that you begin on that journey and this is a part of that piece next slide so just to reset the math we have 429 routes 19 500 riders a rolling average of 120 drivers a day you would tab again on the next slide there you can see the number of routes we could carry if every driver carried three routes in the

099morning would only be 360. so we're short already out of the gate you're at 69 rounds short just to begin the day right if we ran the two tiers we could only carry 240 routes so you can begin to see how this math is misaligned next tab we either need more drivers which we're actively working with our human resources leadership and we're appreciative of that partnership and support as well as with finance we do need to find ways to reduce our number of routes which we can do when we clean up our data and the last piece is we need to get to a three-tiered schedule but a full three-tier schedule next slide go ahead next slide so at baseline our elementaries are serviced at three time windows 7 45 8 30 and 9 or

1009 15. our middle schools are serviced at 7 20 and our high schools again are at 9 00 9 depending on if it's a specialty or regional high school here's just an illustration of the variability at our elementary school start times okay we can go quickly through this slide if you would tab one more time again our objective here is to smooth out the number of routes across three tiers rather than two thank you okay mr harris would you like to make the recommendation good evening so the recommendations that we have brought forth tonight is as you can see here will we go as follows elementary school will be at 7 45 a.m start time middle school would be a 8 30 start time and high schools would be a 9 15 start time you

101can notice in between each one of those school level there's a time of 45 minutes some acts water we need 45 minutes that's the time that we've got to get into the schools get the students unloaded and get started on the next run so um there has been questions about um can we condense the time that would be almost impossible for this to be effective and be efficient in routing our students on the three-tier system so again 7 45 8 30 and 9 15. all right next you can see under this three-tier restructured design with these new start times remember our demand was 200 routes at one window we've dropped that to 170 but those are elementary routes which are shorter they're about 22 miles versus the middle and high schools are about 28 miles

102that gives us the ability even though it's 170 to get an early start and do double runs when and where needed okay thank you okay so joe would you like to read through some of the benefits so in doing so of the recommendation of the 30 7 45 start time 8 30 and 9 15. benefits will will be many we've done some some um leg work we've done a lot of things investigating we've talked with some other counties we've done those things that some of the other counties are currently on this platform right now in their service and their students they'll be better service for all students we're maybe to use buses to service long routes for like dsa creative studies and satellite magnet start programs consistency students will be serviced at the same time

103across the district at all great levels okay also we'll be able to reduce ride times and improve geographic neighborhood schools by parents so i'm going to stop right there for a minute and just kind of give you a little information insight on that so currently and i use for the example murkmore elementary school which is a 7 45 start time glenn elementary school which is an 8 30 a.m start time they're less than one mile apart they're on two separate schedules if they want the same build schedule we'll be able to use some of those buses to combo those students and especially as we talk about combo and shortening ride times we can look to our special needs population right now currently we have those two schools we have buses going in the same area

104but they can't ride together why because the times are different the bell schedules are not the same if we had the same build schedule what happens we're able to transport and meet the needs and guess what the rise will be shorter so this is our objective tonight this is why we brought forth this information we work hard to try to put this together and give you as much information as possible so that you can really see and visualize with us the goal we're trying to accomplish is to get our students in their seats in time each and every day our goal every day is 100 to be able to get our students to school so they can be fed and learn that's what we've been tasked to do so if we're able to produce this

105model here tonight and be able to get this in place you'll see changes positive changes that will happen for the district which will help meet the needs of our students of durham public schools and also on the last slide there improve we talked about it again to prove the special needs capacity but also we will be able to prove all students there are some long ride times why because we have students that live in the northernmost part of the county that attend schools magnet programs in the southern part of the county what does that mean for example we have students that live up towards person county line they go to art in harris in moorhead we know how long that takes by car just traveling when we factor in time of picking up any students

106that are along the way you see why our ride time increases so in conjunction with the things that we're trying to do moving forward this will help us reduce some of those things so our students won't be on the bus for so long so they'll be able to get home get what they need and that they won't be as long and they'll be able to be more effective in the classroom all right next slide so we pause for questions consideration all right thank you mr harris mr palmer for that presentation uh i have mr sears first and i'll come to you miss lewis i want to thank the administration for for bringing this and i'm not sure it was this presentation was this presentation and and so the community knows we work on these things

107ahead of time with agenda planning and getting ready to bring these to the public i was this and and several others that i think demonstrated to me that the administration we have today is really walking and chewing gum at the same time we are working on efficiency we are working on many things to support our schools all while a pandemic is is overwhelming everyone and i'm very appreciative of the administration all elements of the administration that are able to do that um i'm ready to to make a motion to um adopt this change um but i would just make a few comments before that um several of us were on the board when we flip-flopped our elementary and high school times driven largely for the health benefits of high schoolers starting later and not not

108seeing harm in younger students starting earlier given their sleep patterns so to me this is step two as the administration laid out i don't have any concerns about it i do want to acknowledge the community members for whom this will be a significant change those 8 30 and 9 15 schools it's a big deal this does not minimize that i happen to have two children at a 7 45 school and have for the last six years and it's it isn't easy uh but it's it's what needs to be done so that those high schoolers can go at a more appropriate time and so we don't lose the after-school programs that high schoolers need to benefit from our education so my one request to the administration and this is not targeted at our presenters is that

109the after school support for our children has to improve it needed to improve six months ago a year ago and i'm talking about our programming we have wait lists at several after-school programs i think we know that um it's a hard job to fill just like bus driving can be a hard job to fill that part time with the different hours so we're going to need a re-commitment from our administration i think to develop those programs build them out provide a lot more seats we had the conversation the video still exists of what about the older students watching the younger students um the other way around you know the yes the no one at home issue um and and i think we're we're okay there so thanks for hearing me out and i'll be ready

110to make a motion whenever uh miss lewis and then mr lee i thank so much to the administration for this presentation it really is powerful to see the visual and to see that it seemed very complicated with the graph that you shared i think you call it teams um the work that to see what all the routes look like and how to be more efficient you all have been tasked with that and done an amazing job presenting it presenting it and still relying on the data getting to that 95 percent and it sounds like this is what's going to get there i concur with many things that mr sears just said in regards to the concerns that parents will have the personal um concerns that was shared in the public comment definitely acknowledge those things

111i also want to charge the administration to have a after-school program because there will be greater needs there will be a shift from those who had before care will be needing more aftercare so i would like administration to bring a really well laid plan on how we're going to get those increases and they'll see so there's not a wait list and that improves services for our family who will need that uh making these changes so that we can our transportation can be more efficient they do really um build on each other yes yes yes ma'am and to speak to the part of the before school after school we're currently working with the community education department to ensure that we have the coverage um we've actually been working with them there are after school and before

112school and things in place in many of our schools some schools do not actually have it on site they share with another school examples you have eastway elementary and white smith white smith does not have an actual program on site but those students are still able to be serviced by going to eastway elementary school for that care that's needed so again we have been in contact we've worked we're working with them right now to ensure we have all those things you know working to be in place to be able to offer our families thank you board thank you mr harris so we look forward to bringing you a comprehensive plan when it comes to our early and after school programs thank you and i just want to say thank you for that feedback again there's

113so many systems that are in interplay and this is a a plus team to take those into considerations and already have looked into it and coming back with the plan so thank you all for this presentation when i saw it first in our two by two meetings i really enjoyed the thoroughness and how you cover it the different pieces and the explanations of why we're doing this as matt mentioned mr sears mentioned some of us were on the board when we switched the first phase of this it was always the intention of doing the second phase of this much of it was because of you know transportation efficiency but a lot of it was about you know the medical industry recommendations and how things are across the nation we see this time schedule across the

114nation my points here are you know we get a lot of we've gotten a lot of emails there were public comments about it and i want to tell those who who wrote in are still or are still having uh some uneasiness about it um i hear you i totally understand where you're coming from it's completely different it is a different idea it's a different it's a change for everyone in your household no matter if they go to school or not um i hear this because when we made our change you know my school schedule the the school schedule of my child it was just one child in school at that time uh changed drastically it was at the very it was the polar ends of the switch so sandy ridge uh was at 9 15.

115we started at 9 15. and when i tell you we were rushing to get him there at 9 15 would be an understatement i mean like we were coming in on two wheels coming around the curve if you know sandy ridge there's a big curve and so uh we were trying to get around there and um we would barely make it sometimes and so the thought of switching to a 745 was unimaginable i was on the board and obviously i have to think about all of the students in the district i can't necessarily make the decision that's best for just my family so my me and my wife we disagreed we [Music] she vehement vehemently disagreed with me to the point to where we stopped talking about it at home because it was causing a

116problem you know and sometimes you have to put stuff put stuff aside it was it was just that different fast forward to us switching um and although it was tough it was not impossible and um it actually ended up being a little better for us for us with our work i mean just because now i'm not saying everybody's work is the same but just getting the kids there and being able to get into the office or whatever it is um i i never say i told you so or anything like that and i hope she's not watching but it was a it ended up being a good decision i'm saying this because they're stressed looking at the change looking forward but i do believe you will recognize what we the research that we saw the

117information we were receiving about the the alertness of younger children earlier in the morning um through early afternoon uh it's just irreplaceable uh we heard from teachers across the district saying i finally have my children well she just texted me and said she's watching she just she did she just texted me it says she was watching yeah i thought i didn't think she was watching anyway um so we were hearing from teachers across the district in the elementary saying we finally have our children longer right we have their attention longer and in the high schools when they switched from 7 20 or 7 30 in the morning the high school teachers were saying our children are the students are awake by the time first period comes around because it started at nine o'clock so overall

118we had we had data surrounded we actually had reports a couple of reports surrounding it and it ended up being better so i'm asking those parents who are concerned to you know give it a try it's going to be a little difficult but i do think you will see a difference in your children their experience at school i think you know they the younger children fade away in the afternoon and when you're at school until three or four that starts to become pretty late for a child for a younger child so i think you'll see a different experience and i do think it will fit into your family just as it did out my family and it would be okay it will be okay i know it's stressful but please know this is not just

119to make a change there are a lot of things that go into a stark change like this we do have your families in mind and it is i do believe this is an equitable decision a decision to help with equity with travel and alertness and food and all those kinds of things but it also helps the district as we navigate the challenges with our with our transportation so thank you thank you all for listening i appreciate it just know we are thinking about your the families that have to um work with this change thanks thank you mr lee miss valedares and then ms buyer thank you so much i also echo gratitude for this work this is uh data driven solutions and um and also optimization it's all the components of what a school district

120especially large-scale school district um you know has to work on and it's not easy i mean we were talking about the number of routes that we need you know um knowing that even at a three-tiered system we would still fall short we're not for it's like layer upon layer of work you know once you get to um 360 routes and we know that we're in the 400s it's actually what we need but then you're figuring out how to combine routes and um and do that and i just want to uh echo appreciation and also i i also appreciate it working with you all uh you know when you all presented this uh with in the two by twos and some of the comments from families uh whose children are in the buses for two hours

121you know it is not an easy thing and i get calls you know it's like especially when it comes to children with disabilities and we have to be very mindful that we are not putting students in in predicaments you know that that are going to exacerbate um you know whether they're sensory you can imagine the number of things you have to be very mindful of and so this is a this is very important uh important work that you have done i am in full support uh also um the number of emails from parents uh trying to get as much information like here comes the bus and that was something else that i'm super excited that we have a system and uh mike this is this is um a comment but it's also just when when

122it comes to the school bus technology system that you all are going to be rolling out um you know just to keep in mind language access and you know you know usability which you know we know that our families depend on that information um so i'm very grateful i'm super excited about about this and when it comes to safety i have i have seen and i have heard about uh safety being an issue um safety concerns and i'm glad we're gonna have seat belts i wish that we could say that there are no accidents in the road i wish that we could say that our roads are a hundred percent great and you know right turn lanes are perfect like everything is perfect that's not the case and so um thank you for taking into

123account your your presentation is very comprehensive and i just want to thank you for all that for laying it all out from safety to uh using innovative tools technology so that our families have the information they need and also reducing the times because i'm still hearing from families you know complaining about those long bus routes so thank you for all this work yeah i'd also like to echo just gratitude for our planning staff this is the second part and second phase of what the work that we started and work that we believe will have tremendous impact on student achievement and equity in this community and i also like mike's wife aaron like have concerns about early mornings i it is a huge responsibility to take on when people's alarm clocks go off in this community

124and this is not a decision we take lightly um what we said when we talked about it before was it was it would be great if every school could start at eight or later right that's and frankly we're at 7 45 so we're as close as we can be to that um and still get this three-tiered route more efficiently moving through our community and having children on the bus for shorter times which is so so important for their well-being as well i think in our small group meetings we all must have expressed dr movinga the concern about after-school care for elementary students and needing i would love a community where we had no waiting list ever that where every family that needed school care was able to achieve it at their school hopefully um and

125that we had scholarships for families that needed so i look forward to hopefully within two months you all bringing us that plan for a robust deepening of the number of slots and the quality of the programming at in community ed because i believe we're shifting the need deep into the afternoon sector to cover for families i also wanted to ask if we had learned from doing breakfast in the classroom at least through the pandemic and otherwise can we we used to be picking up kids early so they got there in time to eat breakfast in the cafeteria before school and that was why they were out earlier at their stops have we learned enough from nutrition to do breakfast in the classroom that would prevent us from those extra early pickups did i ask that

126well mr harris let me ask it a different way because i'm getting some quizzical looks part of why we said with kids had to be picked up and arrive at school a good 20 to 30 minutes before the start of school was so they had a chance to have breakfast before school but when we're doing breakfast in the classroom doesn't that let us shift that back so that we hopefully won't have children out at bus stops at anything like 6 30 in the morning does that make any sense so i understand your question um so in regards to getting in and getting out and then still having some double low capacities at some school we will still need that cushion to be able to come in and drop the first load and be able to

127effectively get out and get the second load coming in so we will still need that 30 minute window just because we need to make sure that everybody's in their seat before the bail missile said this our school administrators don't make sure that uh students whenever the time that they drop off 7 45 8 30 that's a lunch or breakfast will be available for them and they will be able to accommodate the time to make sure every student that deserves breakfast they will they'll make them available yeah that was news to me though about double routes in the morning you're talking about double routes only when it's a really compact area neighborhood close to the school absolutely that's exactly what we're talking about less than a mile from the school you've got some areas that have

12850 60 70 and sometimes 100 kids prime example um whole valley right across the street there's more than 200 kids that we bust and we use five buses so those are the pockets of double runs that we talk about when we talk about double runs i appreciate it and then the the last question is the the when we did this shift before we had the luxury of taking you know families to having notification for an entire year um and had a lot of time to get used to it even mike's wife had a little time to get used to it um we're doing this in a shorter window can can y'all let us know kind of why that's so important i think it largely is the staffing issues that we've encountered and and the need

129to actually get this efficiency in place before we start the year yeah let me go ahead respond to that question um i know we only giving our families we're talking about august here right so we should have we still have about yeah july for our year around schools they have another six months to be able to plan early and after school programs to accommodate our families uh miss buyers and the board members as you saw we have which 120 bus drivers and hopefully we're getting this pandemic we're claiming this behind us and everybody will be able to be back in person by this shortage of bus drivers it's not a problem that we will resolving tomorrow even though the pandemics will be going away so we really want to be proficient we really want to

130be proactive that's what we hope and in the next five or six months that should be enough time to give our family heads up and to be implemented on this academic year thank you and do you all have plans for over the summer to actually i know you're working on recruiting folks all the time but is the district sponsoring um commercial licenses for folks and recruiting in that way can you speak to that if you have thoughts on it yes the district we are currently offering those incentives to employees that are coming on we actually um work every single day recruiting bus drivers bus monitors we actually are working with dr lesan and her team we have already scheduled upcoming job fairs in place in different places to be able to help recruit employees for

131our department in addition to that we're also looking at our um school nutrition our part-time employees to be able to bring them in as a full-time if they can have a dual employment so we're looking at everything as possible to get us to a better place where we can have 170 average a day instead of 120. mr raven i want to thank you all again for this um i always like to look at things through through my own personal lens and kind of kind of put things in context i remember when i was at oak grove elementary school and we're talking about back in like 86 87 i remember even back then and this is this is durham county schools they had two busloads in the morning and i guess i i grew up in

132greenwood so i wasn't too far away from it so i used to always think to myself like i thought i got there early so who were these other kids that were having to get here earlier because they had another second second set of buses and this is back in the days so you all have been able to do an amazing job and and i and i like how you all are pivoting even though we've been hit with a pandemic you're you're you're using this opportunity to make improvements and while we're still moving forward um and even when we're looking at the designations of where we're actually busting kids from back in i guess it was like 89 1990 and i was in fourth or fifth grade in my one neighborhood we had buses from oak

133grove bethesda and merritt moore all coming to that one neighborhood this is before magnet schools right and i and i don't i don't know what what how the jurisdictions were done at that time but it seemed a lot to me when i had friends that were on my same street that went to a different elementary school so um so and kids do remember this you know we we do have to remember that if i'm able to remember this there are kids right now that are going through these struggles themselves so this is this is something that will stick with them so i'm glad we're making these adjustments and making these pivots as i said and i'll i even talk from from mister i'll follow mr lee's um lead and just talk from personal experience this

1347 30 7 7 30 7 45 start times for elementary school it's it's a little early you know like myself personally this morning my my daughter was my alarm clock at six o'clock she was she was right there beside me she woke me up before my alarm clock even went off that's how i had to go upstairs and wake my kids up for school because they go to oak grove and i don't know about you know i don't know about this new generation i felt like i made my own pancakes you know i got myself dressed in the water i have to coach still through all of this so it's a little bit different for for uh some parents nowadays but it it you you adjust you know um we have wit which is a

135preschool and and right when the pandemic began my youngest was there and my oldest was at oak grove so i never got to drop the otis off to school that entire school year so a lot of families do have to have to be able to get this information early so they can figure out how they're going to make these adjustments with work and everything else so i'm glad that we're able to bring this to them so early and for the parents that are just hearing this and looking at this and thinking to themself how are we going to do this how are these times these times changing the way they are it doesn't feel fair to me if you were one of these parents that are taking your kid to school every morning not to

136say that that you're privileged economically but you have been privileged to be able to make sure that you're able to do that for your child we have a situation in which so many of our children don't have that that ability to get to school with somebody dropping them off they that that bus is their only way to get to school to get that breakfast on time before the school starts i know every day when i take my kids to school even if i'm a little late even if it's 7 50 you know the staff is still there making sure the kids have access to a breakfast before they get to class so it's so it's appreciative i know a lot of people may object and and we want to acknowledge that we we do hear

137that you know we we do hear the objections and we acknowledge it we want to make sure you all know that your voices are heard but at some point we have to try to make adjustments to improve services for everyone as best we can and this is one of these things that you all have done so i'm appreciative for that so thank you uh miss fayadahs um just really quickly so this is this is a uh going to be implemented in 2023 2022 2023 school year i really have a lot of gratitude uh for the troubleshooting that we're doing because i know that while we wait for this wonderful upgrade of a plan to be in effect there are families that reach out and i just want to thank you both because i know that

138you know those emails come in send them to you and you're all figuring out solutions even as you're troubleshooting and trying to figure out things so i just also have a lot of gratitude because you know there are parents who are watching this board meeting and you know just a lot of appreciation for even attention to you know those situations that come because as we wait you know 2022 2023 is going to be better and we know it but in the meantime thank you for all you do i think our administrators are working so hard and as our community can see um it's pretty evident one more thing i just wanted to say is just and i mentioned this to you all when i met there's this this um sense that some schools have buses

139assigned to them and that they have uh the benefit of a bus the buses belong to dps uh they're all of the schools like there isn't a school that has a bus that owns a bus so i just wanted to also name that because those are some of the concerns that families have and i just wanted to you know i mentioned it to you all that time that i'm hearing like that school has a bus and that that bus is having to come all the way over here but the buses dps buses serve all our schools and there isn't a school that has prioritization or any type of priority or has an assigned bus that that is always your best thank you so much for everything you do thank you thank you miss fagudaris um

140many of the things that i was going to say have already been said so i appreciate you all for this presentation i think that i know that this will be a shift for families but the idea that more students are getting to school on time we can shorten rides from some of our most vulnerable students like these are all places for our community so i'm just grateful for the work that you all did to put this on it is up for action this evening move approval removed by mr sierra seconded by mr raven any other discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign passes unanimously thank you all the next item on our agenda is the budget update for 2022 2023 good evening cherumstead board members dr mabinga [Laughter]

141we're in the throes of budget season numbers are being thrown over all over the thrown around all over the place all over the country and so tonight we're really starting this process to get us to the point where we're going to make our budget request next month to you all superintendent budget proposal will come out so tonight mr modesto is going to present to you where we are we'll be talking about enrollment the projections as well as our local budget request and teacher supplements and where we go from here so i'm gonna turn it over to mr modesto to to bring you through the slides all right good evening board members i see about half of the academic services team out there so i'll try to uh not take too long but just wanted to

142provide you all uh with an update of where we are in the budget development process for the 22-23 academic year and based on the way that state and federal funding works enrollment really drives the bulk of a school budget and so that enrollment projection is a critical piece for us on a financial side as well as on a school planning side and that's a fantastic collaborative team that we have with school planning operational services and several of the specialized academic services programs we've seen both statewide and in durham public schools approximately a four percent decline in enrollment in the current academic year compared to that pre coven 20 19 20 levels um this is something that based on our modeling we expect to continue in the near term some of our other peer districts uh

143in their planning processes they've sort of seen the same thing so we expect to stay about four percent below our uh our high water mark of 2019-20 enrollment for the 22-23 academic year because the funding is based on the number of students that we have we have to take that into account from a state and federal level and be somewhat conservative it is possible that if certain opt-out decisions that were made either from people who previously were attending dps or would have otherwise attended uh if those decisions reverse uh in this next year to a greater extent than we've seen statewide and nationwide that uh you know we could uh be under undershooting but we have to be somewhat conservative from a financial planning basis but this is um this sort of four percent um

144decline is uh we're seeing that in some of our peer districts such as uh wake county as well um and just as a reminder we have no expectation uh well we've been given guidance from dpi and we haven't seen anything from the state of any expectation of the whole harmless provision we were held harmless to our planning allotment this year which was significantly less than 20 1920 but we've been told you know expect none of uh no harmless in 22 23 so we have to keep that in mind and miss uh smith if you jump to the next slide um so what does this mean for us in terms of budget planning we are looking at about a thousand students less than uh in terms of dps and charters combined uh less than our 2019-20

145uh peak and that's going to produce some cost savings when we look at our allotments and all the various categories for each school uh when you lose enrollment we're losing significant state funds and there are a lot of fixed costs at each site that do not decrease if you have a drop of 20 or 15 or 10 or even uh 30 students that you don't have a a fraction of a treasurer or or a bookkeeper or a school assistant principal a media coordinator a professional school counselor et cetera there's fixed costs like this as well as uh more tangible fixed cost utilities uh custodial services all these kinds of things at our schools so when we lose enrollment we lose a significant chunk of state dollars we still have to absorb all those fixed costs

146and we have to use more local funds to do that so that's one um piece that we're really trying to balance here when we're looking at our anticipated uh declines in our various state funding um so if you jump to the next slide please so there are a couple other things that are more recent as well that we're trying to grapple with so for example with hb 90 we have to average 18 students kindergarten 16 students in first grade and 17 students in second and third grade district wide and if any of those class sizes exceed three over the average so 21 in kindergarten 19 1st grade and 20 and second and third grade we have to hire an additional teacher we don't get any additional funds for this so if you had 63 students

147let's say in one kindergarten and they have a 64th student now that comes saying the third month you don't get additional uh state money but you have to have a fourth kindergarten teacher and so there's uh additional kind of cost built in that we're trying to account for with that another uh headwind that we're facing is a loss in our state at risk funding which is based on the county poverty levels rather than the school system poverty levels and so durham county as a whole has had decreasing poverty levels we have not seen a commensurate decrease in our dps student poverty levels however we've been losing uh two years in a row now about 860 000. we anticipate that to increase slightly uh in uh annual at-risk state funds that we receive so in addition

148to having to offset the local fixed costs we're seeing these headwinds from hb 90 and our state at-risk funding another headwind the districts have been facing previously before the great recession school districts could use state funds to pay for substitutes for state funded teachers we've lost that flexibility you know hoping that it would eventually come back uh we have no anticipation of that coming back and as we're looking at our absence rates and our substitute costs on a monthly basis really have to plan to make sure we have an adequate buffer of local funds for that and so uh with all those factors combined uh we're not going to be having a decrease in our local funding requests based on this one-time pandemic uh induced and most likely short-term enrollment decline uh because of the

149offsetting uh fixed costs um and other adverse state impact that we're gonna have to absorb locally uh so a bit long-winded but um there's a lot that goes into um whether or not we're able to make uh cuts based on uh the enrollment from year to year uh next slide please uh so some reallocations we wanted to just lift up so in addition to all of our base state funding formulas and and all of the other kind of algorithmic components of building a budget we look at some of our discretionary resource allocation contracts we have other things that we could either continue or or reallocate to more pressing priorities we were able to find about six hundred thousand dollars in expiring contracts in other areas that we could reallocate to some of those top priorities

150that have been lifted up through us to principals uh and other of our um outreach groups uh so one of them is our coaching stipends uh that mr hackney uh and others have championed for some time that has an increase in in about two decades and so we're looking at putting in an additional 350 000 uh for additional middle and high school coaching stipends as well as about 20 000 dollars to make sure that we can support the cost of helmet refurbishing uh given that we've had uh lower uh gate receipts uh which have been helping um our athletic departments um in priors fun things like this but with with those lower receipts we're looking to make sure we can support them we also have uh expanded uh programming for the office of equity affairs

151um limited not or rather not limited just to we are keen's programming expansion but that's uh one of one of their main initiatives uh going from 15 to 60 programs um in our schools 30 uh so well 30 programs uh with kings and queens uh so that's an additional 90 000 that we're going to be allocating to the office of equity affairs and then in warehouse operations um with the additional requirements and support they've been doing for our schools during the pandemic uh we're going to be allocating 113 000 to make sure that they have some additional uh support uh for those program requirements and this is something that we look at on an ongoing basis you know not just uh as we're planning the uh upcoming fiscal year but you know within the fiscal

152year of kind of month to month our variance between what was planned and what's actually expended in all of the areas to see you know how can we strategically pivot to make sure that we're supporting uh our schools and our communities not you know as as needs occur so this is something we you know we do as we plan for each upcoming fiscal year and we try to be nimble uh during the fiscal year to pivot as needed in bringing those changes in budget amendments and budget updates uh uh next slide please um so bringing back to you um the slide we discussed i believe in in january laying out uh the current components of our budget request we have our two and a half percent anticipated increase for classified and certified staff we have

153uh the support uh to make uh recurring funds the uh increase in bus driver pay that we implemented in october to make sure we could have our schools operating in person with sufficient bus drivers we have our retirement and health insurance costs which continue to outpace uh well even even current inflation uh the our retirement and health insurance costs are still outpacing even current uh 40-year record inflation our utilities property liability insurance workers compensation uh and contracts we really see those especially on the uh insurance and workers compensation increasing it at record rates right now the teacher salary supplement we've discussed uh somewhat at length of really continuing to move forward and trying to really be at the top in the state with a new starting supplement of 6 500 per month uh more than

154uh two thousand dollars of an increase from uh when the current uh uh dr mumbangus administration began uh that's a four million dollar line item for lions farm we have to make sure that we are putting in the appropriate costs for the annual operations of a new facility including our custodians our front office staff and assistant principal um when we're looking at information technology you know this is really a down payment uh there's and we'll talk about this you know in in the coming uh year or two as as we're looking at the expiration of the ester funds but uh being a one-to-one district having the annual technology uh device refresh uh personnel uh you know there are a lot of costs to make sure that we're implementing that with fidelity so this is a

155gradual phase in uh of seven of our it workstation technicians that we're currently using esser funds for uh knowing that when the ester funds expire we're going to have you know significant cost we're trying to phase this in gradually uh rather than all at once and as well um just being cognizant that uh our request is for all of our specific items the charter schools aren't obligated to use any additional funds that we receive from the county for those specific items but they must receive their pro-rated share of any additional county funds so we have to build that into our request so running numbers in a bit more detail on looking at the increase in the minimum wage with the anticipated offset of the state moving to a 15 uh per hour minimum we're looking

156now instead of about four million dollars of about 3.7 million dollars uh that it would cost for us to have a minimum wage of 17 per hour rather than 15.76 uh we were hoping it would have been more but the um the offset that we received this year for going from about 11 67 to 13 per hour was only to lift anyone who made less than 13 dollars to to have them be exactly 13 so you know if you were at 13 and you had been there on step 15 you weren't getting any any pay increase and when we implemented our last um compensation adjustments of december 2019 we were uh quite limited in the amount of funding available it was only about one and a half million dollars and so there was uh quite

157a bit of compression and when we moved to the 15 an hour minimum wage uh we actually had more compression in there because again we were uh somewhat limited in funds we we were looking at uh if we moved to 17 an hour uh making sure that we don't uh exacerbate any any wage compression and provide you know a dollar 25 basically across the board um so that would be 3.7 million dollars that's not part of the 12.9 million that you see there and just wanted to lift up we discussed this a bit in our uh joint meeting with the board of county commissioners that we're using our esser funds uh this year and next year to provide 100 school-based support positions uh to address learning law social emotional needs professional school counselors uh esl

158and ec teachers we're utilizing those funds to address some of the urgent needs that we have in our schools and uh while those funds are available to us we haven't included any additional recurring uh funding for those support positions in in our local budget for the 22-23 academic year did uh jump to the next slide so again just showing on this slide the progress that's been made since the 2016-17 academic year in the teacher salary supplements uh wake county has been at the top of the state for a long time so they're in the kind of the orange and the red you don't see much of a spread between them from 2016-17 to current because they were they were already up there uh we've been steadily marching towards um that state leading benchmark and the

159proposal starting at 16 or uh six thousand five hundred dollars per month for an a zero teacher uh would put us above their current salary schedule uh next slide please uh so uh just another kind of historical look of what has been requested and what has been approved from uh very durham county commissioners in our budget in the past 10 years um it's not on the slide so i'll just add a footnote uh here that i want to lift up that the county commissioners did increase our annual capital outlays from 1.37 million to 3.37 million in the uh prior year and then now 6 million in in the current year so that was you know another big uh lift from durham county commissioners but uh putting uh so aside from that lift uh the eight

160million dollars that was for our annual recurring uh appropriations for operating expenses was the the most that we received when you combined it with the annual capital outlays it was million dollars which uh again is the highest we've received by far um and so the things that are driving uh these very large requests that you're seeing in the blue bars in the most recent years so some of them are our aggressive move on teacher salary supplements we're also seeing uh health insurance and retirement costs that are increasing well above even a seven percent annualized inflation inflation rate uh that we've had in the past uh six months or so um we're seeing uh with our increased minimum wage uh putting significant pressure um on us as well as the artificial caps on our english learners

161and our esl students and you know in some counties where you have 80 or 90 percent of the students in that district attending public schools you don't see them exceeding those caps quite as much but you know a district like durham where almost one out of three school-aged children aren't attending dps they're disproportionately not english language learners or our students with ieps and so uh the the ongoing pressure of that on our budget is um to a large extent um helping driving the uh the requests in the past three years and then also moving initially to a three to one district prior to the pandemic into a one-to-one district we have those very significant i.t costs not only have those demands been increasing but at the same time because the funding for school technology technologies

162actually from fines and forfeitures and they've been kind of changing or reallocating the fines of forfeiture some of that now is going to use be used for a state enterprise resource planning uh refresh for all of the districts which is a good thing but we also need information technology support so while our requirements in that area have been increasing our state support for that is is decreasing such that it i think it's less than four hundred thousand dollars a year currently which doesn't cover even the cost of our staff devices um so these are some of the factors that have been driving these uh rather large uh requests that we've been making to the durham county commissioners over the past three or four years next slide please so just looking at the timeline here uh

163it's late february we're working with the uh district leadership to finalize our requests um working with the uh budget update today to really get some guidance from you all to see uh you know what what else or or uh what we can do in march so that we're at a good place from uh board and superintendent standpoint we're gonna be providing enrollment projections to our principals later this month uh we're gonna in march we're gonna be working with them and starting uh the enrollment uh planning allotment process we'll have our budget uh presentation at the regular board meeting and a hearing in in march um april we're gonna have any revisions necessary to the superintendent's proposed budget that we'll bring to you in march uh and we'll be having the bulk of the allotment meetings

164with principals and then we have a lot of important dates uh in may in terms of uh may 9th is when the county is going to present the county manager's proposed budget hearings will be the 17th of may through 8th of june on may 23rd it's going to be a public hearing for the county for their budget and then june 13th is when they are scheduled to adopt uh their budget ordinance for the 22-23 academic year and in june we will pass a continuing resolution while we are awaiting um the state budget so that we can finalize our our budget resolution for 22.23 uh but with that we're really just looking uh for your feedback this evening uh you know just for discussion uh to see um uh what you're looking for for uh our

165budget that we'll bring to you in march thank you mr modesto and mr lester i will start with you ms beyer thank you so much i am want to acknowledge um the excellent work of our finance and budget staff and the awards that we celebrated you all for last month and continue to i really appreciate the development of this budget i also want to acknowledge that we had a great joint meeting with the county commissioners it was the most visionary and heartfelt kind of collaborative meeting that we've had in a long time and i felt we heard loud and clear a commitment from the county budget director to fully fund the dps bond within 10 years and um that that's a significant starting place for these conversations and and so so critical um i appreciate

166alex you reminding us that the six million dollars is in there for um ongoing capital needs and the need for that to continue to recur i think we need to make sure we articulate that in in this ongoing budget ask to them and i i wonder about some of the qualitative things that are in our teachers petitions so we are we acknowledged previously when we did changes to bus drivers that this labor market has shifted around us i'd be very interested in continuing to have the conversation about what it would take to move everyone to a starting pay of 17 an hour rather than 15.76 i'd be interested in us looking to increase subpay because i think we're getting behind in that area around some other districts have gotten savvy and are are outbidding us

167in that so i think we still need to look at that um i think if we need more hr folks to process volunteers through and subs through then we need to kind of support any additional help that we need in those areas and i hope that we can get the affordable housing project for teachers and staff back on the conversation with our county leadership many of the speakers spoke about gentrification in the community and how expensive it is continuing to be for our employees to live here and and we know that is true and that doesn't help us not to push to be the highest teacher supplement area in the state i think we obviously have to do that and and do that aggressively but um i'm worried that what we budgeted in that area

168might not be enough as as the other counties around us adjust i think we talked about it previously and i wanted y'all to make sure that we were above chapel hill and orange as well and i'd love to see those numbers as we plan going forward those are some of my dreams i guess i i didn't ask or hear articulated all the way about the hot spots and and broadband supports we're offering to students and whether those are covered in this budget in an ongoing way or if we're planning to use s or funding for that or how you all are thinking about that i think that connectivity at home for so many of our students is going to continue to be an issue so we want to make sure we can support that so

169um just real quick for the uh hot spots in broadband uh we're currently using our esser funds to support those uh for ignite and then for for other students and families as they need it and we have money built in uh for 22 23 for that as well but not local funds uh i'll make sure to include orange and chapel hill uh dr sanchez probably speak more to this there are some i believe teachers that are still grandfathered in to a certain program that chapel carrboro had beyond 20 years of experience our our our current and proposed supplements are slightly ahead of them uh of chapel hill um and will put us further ahead except for some uh veteran teachers at chapel hill that were there before they had switched to an uh a new

170model um but well um and so they actually don't have um any of that information no on their website anymore uh because it's not for new teachers but we'll make sure to have that included on the um in the march presentation uh miss fagudaris thank you so much we always appreciate the level of detail and also you know just giving us the reality uh in in a very um direct but also letting us know what's in our power uh as board remembers uh what is what is in our power as local leaders and i'm not talking about just the board but also the county um the importance of collaborations i do have um just one thing that was mentioned and this goes back to the discussions that we've had about the need for counselors i

171noticed that because of this the shortage the funds that are um lower from the state and that is a bad condition when the demand is so high for mental health we need more counselors and so we're having to do it at the local level right and so i do notice that if we continue to decrease our enrollment levels we're not going to have enough funds you know um to continue with that unless we secure local monies but um something that was mentioned last time was the ratio of one to 250 students and that was a figure that was thrown out and i did get some emails um just asking some questions about that figure and saying that there are some schools that have say a school has 800 children a lot of the children being

172children who you describe you know have are among our most vulnerable students that one in 400 ratio uh at least in one school that's 800 students there's only two counselors and so um some of our schools don't match that one to 250 ratio and i'm just wondering anything that you all can can tell us about um as we're dealing with this pandemic as we're dealing with uh the conditions and and the reductions of funding coming from the state um what what are some ways that we can continue to have this conversation clarify maybe the one to 250 ratio and ensuring that we can figure out a a plan so that we can meet that ratio if we're not meeting it in some schools yeah so um that's the excellent point um i'll defer a bit

173to dr hardy on this but one of the things that we're looking at uh you know with the esser fund some schools that have needed either a mental health um uh specialist or a professional school counselor the dr hardy principal supervisors they've been looking at that with the esther funds we're also looking at some of the uh vacancies that we've had uh esther positions that haven't been filled and how we could best utilize those resources during the life of those grants and so uh you know in positions like that or where school might not be able to make a conversion to have an additional professional school counselor or where the the numbers don't really um uh work exactly uh in favor uh you know we can uh look at reallocating some of our our esser

174funds uh to meet the unique needs of each school including in that capacity thank you so much let me just uh add one more a couple more elements when it comes to school counselors those are reoccurring um expenses that's asl font will be a spy in the next two years and i would like to borrow the phrase that uh mr lesoil like to use a lot it's most of these items are real estate responsibilities unless our board really want us to be aggressive enough and to bring you a ratio of 250 when it comes to counselors and take this request to our county commissioners i'll say this i work for your pleasure you tell me what to do we'll bring you those numbers and if you feel that this is what the county can do

175we'll be able to collect those numbers and bring them to you and mr lucero will say better it's the state responsibility yeah no i should have brought that up and actually just to reiterate that we just submitted on the 18th of february a very large survey of our instructional port instructional support personnel to the state as that's a key thing that they are looking at it was part of the 2021 uh appropriations act uh was prior to any action to do an extensive survey on that uh when they did the 15 an hour they surveyed all the districts and they looked at what we had already done taking that into account before they added any additional money for districts to get to 15 an hour so sometimes districts are perhaps penalized by by taking the

176local initiative and then the state may not come through with the additional funds uh to support what is uh for our constitution a state requirement i just i just had to follow up and and just um just also just being realistic i mean as as real as you know these numbers are as real as the conditions are in this pandemic the needs for mental health supports are high i mean i am we hear from teachers we hear from students about fatigue about stress about the number of um the exacerbation of social determinants of health and especially as it relates to mental health we have a unique opportunity to serve students who may not have insurance and that's where i'm you know just very i mean this is this is something that i know we've talked

177about i know everybody here cares about all our students but we have to understand the factors that create barriers for certain students to access support outside of our school district so as much as we can if we can at least have more counselors more mental health support specialists and especially in those schools that you know are stating the need that they don't have they're not even close to that ratio if we can prioritize figure out a way to um to get the support at the local level i mean this is this is a real need um and if we need more numbers to back it up we can definitely do more of that uh assessment more of that analysis but based on what we're seeing and based on what we're hearing um we're seeing it

178everywhere stress levels are up it's not it's not a surprise you know that we've been doing two years of plus of a pandemic and um and also dealing with um housing uh crisis dealing with you know food insecurity that that is happening a lot of our students a lot of our schools are title one schools as well and we have growing needs so um i i do appreciate you know just uh you know figuring out how even when we have barriers uh even when the state is not doing their due obligation you know to uh provide for students needs thank you mr raven first i want to say again thank you budgeting is not a simple task i know firsthand that experience and i don't even have to manage a you know five percent of

179what you all do on a normal day-to-day basis so i think the work that you all do really is amazing um the the one thing i also want to do is just follow up on what ms fire mentioned earlier about the county commissioners uh supporting what what we've asked for um i don't know how many of our viewers at home were watching what the county stated but um let's thank the county commissioners the interim county manager and their budget team for essentially saying that they're willing to support up to or it's a little bit over 800 million dollars in our long-term capital needs which means the improvement or bringing up the par some of our buildings in addition to the replacement of buildings and i want to kind of jump on something that vice chair

180jacobs said and just to kind of put a bug in all of our ears on just other ideas to think about we are sitting in a real estate hot spot and it's gonna it's gonna be going up in value for for years and years and years and a lot of times with um with governments across the gamut they don't really have a way to capitalize off of that and and if we are still looking at um i know it hasn't been voted on completely but if we are still looking at moving dsa to a new site and we're thinking about what can we do with the current dsa site it would be amazing to see our our durham school of technology housed on that site and it would be amazing with the county's blessing for

181us to be able to also build a some sort of of commercial hybrid um business center directly beside it on that same school platform and try to lure a company like apple into it right because in a situation like that we're being able to leverage the capital that the county is willing to um provide to us use it to build our school but also use it to facilitate and house a corporate entity that will be able to provide us long-term revenue through leasing option so i just want to kind of drop that now so that's something that we could think about for long-term revenue increases that will go up year after year in addition to that one of the things i i think we also need to think about is i support increasing the wage

182for durham public school staff over 17 dollars an hour and i i think you have to because the market for jobs across the board is is increasing um and i you know people always kind of fumble over like what that dollar should be but when you're when you're driving by and you're seeing signs at places and this is and understand me this is no disrespect to anybody any jobs but when when i went to when i went to chick-fil-a in durham on roxboro road which is one of the best chick-fil-a's in the country i think everybody could agree with that but they they had starting salaries at the time there was like 16 an hour and i think i took a picture of it and sent it because i was like wow like the demand

183and the supply is dictating what these salaries need to be so we need to figure out a way to continue to communicate this to to our county and and i know we're asking a lot and we're going to probably have to continue to ask a lot but we're not asking it for us we're asking it for for our kids in a school and a staff that supports them so we have to ask for it but the one thing that that we also need to think about is in our requests last year we talked about how important nurses and social workers were and and we asked for them to be able to support that in a phased-in approach and i don't want us to to lose sight of that too much um right now with our

184nurses in that situation spoke with dr mubenga and he confirmed it it's difficult to get nurses so us asking for more nurses and we still can't even feel those current positions that i understand completely but i do know based on what what was provided to us they're still in need of roughly 32 social workers is still needed so any requests that we ask even if we can only ask for two i think that we still need to not lose track of that and just kind of not let that just drop off as if it's not important because it is um but other than that everything else i definitely support and i think it's well done so thank you all i just wanted to chime in on your your comment in regards to wanting to continue

185to raise the salaries of current public schools individuals i applaud that but let's remember that our funding from the state is driven based on enrollment we get more funding we get more ability to to support the state the state positions anytime we have a salary increase the state doesn't give us as much money we're going to have to pick it up locally and we have to be conscientious about that as we continue down the road i just um i want you to all remember that anything we do that uh is above and beyond the state is going to affect us locally even more and and and i i definitely understand that and i i don't want to counter that that this is not my intention one thing i was also thinking about is we're we're

186plagued with a situation in which we're we're losing staff because they're burnt out because we don't have enough support and in turn we're losing families and parents because they feel that we're not able to support our classes because we don't have enough staff so the one thing that we end up having is a finite amount of students that it will start to drop but there but our staff is dropping quicker so is there a way that we can at least have and i'm not asking this for myself but just just having this conversation of looking at what is the what are our vacancy levels looking like and what is the potential in a year only in the current fiscal year cost savings that comes from not paying that staff right and is there some way

187that we can at least have not not quite what i would consider overtime but but coverage time to to essentially be able to reallocate some of these savings to to our staff that's here just to just to convince them to to not leave because you know it's like the dog chasing his tail i don't know which one is is driving is driving this but we have to be a little bit more creative and think of other options that in the short term can help address or limit the amount of um of staffing staff and losses that we're facing all right let me start off on with that question so traditionally we have a lab salary around two million dollars every year as you can see uh there were some departmental needs that were presented almost

188half a million dollars when we said we're gonna shift around funding we always rely on those uh lab salaries and throughout the year they're going to be some unforeseen needs as well positions as well as we did it last year with our school counselors at the high school comprehensive high school we're able to increase them to 12 months so we have to rely on our lab salaries to address those needs that are occurred to be able to address the learning of our students but i'll say this to our board um i just want to be clear my strategy was pretty much when we're looking at certified versus our classified it's pretty much half half that's the reason why we brought to you the increase for our certified employees then we have another half and that

189we didn't want it the other half not just to look at the folks that are making 15 or lower than that comprehensively with central office as well because we're losing them and we're going to go to closed session you're going to see that we lost couple directors and we're losing them as well because other districts are very complete uh competitive with us i really wanted us to bring a comprehensive plan with our salary study but if there is a pressing needs that we feel like we have to get to 17 this year my finance team they have what is going to cost and we can bring it up and i just want to know what's the pleasure of the world so we can move forward with that we've done our due diligence we know how

190much it's gonna cost for seventy dollars an hour paul i'm sorry mr lusher or miss modesto they have the number they can bring it up and then we'll see what the pleasure of the board and we'll be able to move forward so i'm ready to see what's the pleasure of the board so that uh we'll be able to address those needs as we're moving forward you know i understand that it's a state responsibility i think we all do i think we've all lived leandro i would also say that because we we cast that vision school employees and community college employees around the state finally have fifteen dollars an hour in in districts around the state so i think it's durham's responsibility to to cast that vision especially as we see this labor market like no

191other around us um because we're not going to be able to hold folks with just the goodwill in their hearts right i mean gas has gone up inflation is is rising we're frankly might be you know looking at tremendous changes economically because of the russian invasion of ukraine um so it and and i think we don't have the conversation if we don't ask and have it locally there's i'm giving up hope for the state to come together and and cough up their responsibility for these children and we saw it with what they did deliberately to progressive districts by trying to give money to every county but but durham buncombe you know wake mec what was the other one you know i mean yeah just deliberately vile behavior on the behalf of leadership in the general

192assembly so i don't know where else we're going to get it but i don't think our children can wait so i hope that we can have that vision casting thank you any other discussion board members thank you all for bringing this budget again i am dr marvin can you and i don't know if this might be uh doctor was saying talk a little bit about the timeline for the study i know that it's important for us to um to uh increase the uh wages for some of our staff members so what is the timeline are we looking at for doing this study dr listen we'll be bringing a proposal to you next month and if we're going to take our time to do it really well comparing ourselves with other districts and other industries as

193well we should have a plan by the end of this year but the implementation is going to be 23 24. thank you that's something for us to keep in mind i understand so many different changes that are happening um and so it's something for us to continue to consider as we think about this budget is there any other discussion right the next item on our agenda is academic services dr hardy thank you all thank you chair umstead board members and dr rabinga we do have several staff that are in various parts of the building and so i will ask them to make their way to the board room and i'll go ahead and get started if we can pull up the presentation and if you'll go to the next slide tonight we are going to

194have the opportunity to present an update regarding strategic plan priority one in addition to our statistic our traditional strategic plan update we're also going to have two departmental updates so at the end of this presentation we will also have an update on our english learners department as well as our exceptional children's department tonight we'll include a data review of the past school year and our work through the current school year 2021-22 our annual benchmarks were created from a thorough data review and provide a trajectory of improvement for growth and proficiency we will discuss the priority team members and spend time reviewing each goal and the plan for our implemented strategies you'll go forward two slides please i would like to first begin by recognizing our priority lead member who has been helping us with this

195work dr stacy stewart assistant superintendent for school transformation our goal team leads are also here and they have they are entering the building so our gold team leads if you could please stand they include dr chris catalano executive director for k-12 curriculum and instruction ashley stevens director of school innovation dr laverne maddox perry senior executive director for student support services dr kelvin bullock executive director for equity affairs dr julie pack executive director for career and technical education and magnet programs ms joy malone executive director for information technology you also will see on the slide our gold team members in addition to those that are listed on the slide we have intentionally collaborated and gathered information from our teachers our counselors our graduation work groups social workers and teaching and learning based coaches we want to

196make sure that we're using that feedback as we work toward the implementation of our strategies next slide please thank you next we're going to talk about our year three progress and before we go through the data presented here i want us to just take a moment to reflect on the historical year that 2020 21 presented us with we ended the 2019-2020 year surviving the beginning of a global pandemic without the resources or infrastructure needed to support remote or virtual learning yet with the unanimous support of this board our superintendent and our community in the blink of an eye we pivoted to a one-to-one district our skilled leaders teachers support staff school leadership and district staff turned our traditional brick and mortar schools into virtual learning communities throughout all of this a very strong pandemic persisted

197next let's talk about our goals the first 2023 goal is that at least 90 percent of our schools will meet and exceed standards while we met at the first year that information has not yet been determined due to the past two weeks two years and the impact of coven 19. the next 2023 goal is that at least 60 percent of our students will achieve grade level proficiency our benchmark for the 21 school year was 54 based on the students that were captured at the end of our remote year we were at 33 percent in our presentation we will look at this number more closely and discuss the strategies we have implemented to address the impacts of code 19 and accelerate student achievement for our youngsters our next 2023 goal is the dps four year graduation

198rate would be 90 percent we have seen consistent increase since the plan's implementation and a significant increase from 83.5 percent to 87 in the 2021 year our last priority one 2023 goal is that 100 of our teachers leaders and staff will utilize technology for accelerating and personalizing student learning our benchmark was 60 and we surpassed it with 79 next slide with the circumstances given in the 2020-21 school year we are able to find many successes in our work towards our strategic plan goals we will now take a look at the progression we have made as we continue through our fourth year of our 2023 strategic plan it's my pleasure to turn it over and welcome our newest member of our team dr chris catalano executive director of k12 curriculum instruction to take us through goal

1991a and 1b thank you dr hardy that was loud um so um good evening dr mabinga members of the board it is a pleasure to be here with you this evening and share some updates on goal 1a goals 1a and b of the strategic plan so i have spent the bulk of my first two months in dps on a listening and learning journey getting to know the people and the processes and the performance that is durham public schools and i can honestly say that this strategic planning process is really exciting and powerful work goals 1a and 1b both address increasing student achievement the five strategies the five strategies identified for goal 1a aim to increase the percent of schools that meet or exceed growth as measured by the state accountability model we know that if

200we support leaders and teachers in engaging students in quality learning experiences student achievement is going to increase the five strategies outlined in goal 1a do just that and they include the implementation of a school-based coaching model equal access to rich standards-based curriculum resources differentiated and robust professional learning opportunities equitable access to relevant career pathways and support and infrastructure to engage all students in meaningful blended learning opportunities next slide please so the first two goals of the strategic plan focus on academic achievement and measure student growth and proficiency as presented in previous updates to the board in this slide we have outlined the significant overlap between the two goals the success of these goals is really interconnected the three large areas of focus for goals 1a and b include providing instructional coaching and support directly to

201classroom teachers providing high quality instructional resources aligned with standards-based curriculum that are rigorous engaging and culturally relevant for all grade levels and providing differentiated professional learning for all staff next slide so four and a half years ago when determining our benchmark scores to improve student academic achievement these are the goals that we set for monitoring growth targets as dr hardy shared earlier as you can see in year one 2018 we met the mark due to the pandemic growth data is not available for 2019-20 or 20-20-21 our goal this year is 87 which would mean that 45 of our 52 schools need to meet or exceed growth next slide please so the four strategies identified for goal b are intended to support an increase in student proficiency as measured by the end of grade and end-of-course

202assessments these strategies align closely with those in goal 1a and include implementation of a standards-based core curriculum with equal access to high quality print and electronic resources the development of a data dashboard to personalize learning experiences for all students embedding processes for monitoring the fidelity of core resource implementation into the instructional coaching model and implementation of a standard treatment protocol to tier academic supports for students next slide so at the onset of the strategic plan these goals were set for student proficiency this slide has a lot on it as with goal 1a in year 1 2018-19 we met the mark due to the pandemic data is not available for the 2019-20 school year however we do know that of those that tested last year 33.8 percent of the students were proficient our mid-year projection based

203on benchmark data projects that 38.7 percent of our students are on track to be proficient you will see the top trajectory line shows the goal proficiency targets pre-covered the dotted line shows our trajectory with last year as a baseline using the same rate of increase the green line shows what our new targets need to be in order to cheat achieve our goal of 60 proficient next slide so what i know after spending so much of my first days listening and learning to a lot of our really incredible instructional leaders in durham public schools is that the foundation is in place to accomplish each of the goal 1a and 1b strategies the academic this academic year our focus has been on solidifying and in some cases reaffirming the strategies we put forth in the plan for

204goals 1a and 1b this chart details what is in place in progress and what our next steps will be as we work to accomplish one a and one b but i would like to highlight just a few so goal 1a strategies 2 and 4 and goal 1b strategy 1 all require that we provide and support high quality instructional resources aligned with standards-based curriculum that are rigorous engaging in culturally relevant for all grade levels through the generous investment of the board and our superintendent we have in place high quality core resources and aligned curriculum documents in reading for all grade levels k-12 and in mathematics for grades k-5 as you know the adoption and investment in the new mathematics textbook for the 2022-23 school year will round out our resources for secondary mathematics our math leaders

205are working diligently to support teachers in exploring new resources and embedding the materials into our 612 mathematics curriculum documents to support planning and alignment in all of our math classrooms as i mentioned previously previously we know that if we support schools leaders and teachers and engaging students in quality learning experiences student achievement will increase supporting and developing our classroom teachers is paramount and really serves as the foundation of the remaining strategies in goals 1a and 1b through the generous investment of the board and our superintendent we have a variety of instructional support staff based in buildings to build teacher capacity establish systems of support for all of our learners and collaborate to ensure equitable access to differentiated high quality learning experiences in all classrooms across the district i would like to turn it over to

206dr laverne maddox perry senior executive director of student service to take us through goals goal 1c thank you dr catalano and good evening to our school board members dr mubinga and the durham community goal 1c aims to increase our graduation rate to at least 90 percent this goal has five strategies including identifying barriers to the graduation for black males and hispanic males and hispanic females developing an early warning system that allows us to identify and intervene with students who are at risk of disconnecting from school implementing consistent district-wide processes to dismantle those barriers to graduation ensuring every student has a four-year plan and increasing the number of cte completers next slide please even in a year played with uncertainty in a new reality our schools bolstered by the work of school administrators school social workers

207and school counselors have been able to support and accelerate potential graduates who have previously gotten off track to achieve our highest graduation rate of 87 in 2020 2021. if we take a closer look at how far we've gotten on the strategies for goal c we believe we've identified strategy one in year one and two of our strategic plan and now we've begun to shore up the structures policies and practices that will dismantle the barriers to graduation for our targeted groups in black males hispanic males and hispanic females the other strategy is to continue to be in progress each of the strategies require our team and our district to respond to the evolving data as well as changing student needs for example school counselors are building vertical alignment between middle school and high school transition to

208ensure every incoming ninth grade student has a four-year plan however we recognize that four-year planning must be an organic process due to students coming to our district new from private schools and charter schools transfers into our district and students just returning to durham public schools for any number of reasons next slide please a review of the three-year trend for cohort graduation rate provides interesting insights into successes as well as areas for continuous advancement we're pleased that the cgr rate continues to increase from 2018 to 2019. while we see that there were some declines in cohort graduation rate for five of our reported subgroups in 2019-2020 the first interrupted school year due to the pandemic we also see nine of our ten reported sub-groups have recovered from that year's loss and made gains in 2020 our

209academic services office of equity affairs student services exceptional children's and esl departments triangulate this data with student achievement data student climate survey data and social emotional learning screeners as indicators of where our students are how they have expressed or demonstrated their unique needs and as a guide to our future collaboration to support them to graduation next slide please our ongoing work to improve our dps four-year cohort graduation rate is captured on this slide as reactions already in place those in progress and those in planning as next steps we recognize that academic performance social and emotional development and school attendance in the early grades are predictors of a student's matriculation towards graduation currently in place we have a district mtss team that continues district level and school-level collaboration under the leadership of a director of integrated

210academic and behavior systems dr leticia judd manning the district team is finalizing their mtss strategic plan for 2021-20 to launch an early warning system fine-tune our standard treatment protocol or guide to tiered interventions and provide targeted direct support to school teams to safeguard against students falling through the cracks also in place our gold team has partnered with student services curriculum and instruction as well as the office of school innovation to add options for students to earn and recover credits including first-time credits and additional seats for recovery during summer learning and even an expansion of our evening academy to include enrollment in mid-fall and early spring semesters through earlier processes this school year we are also thankful for your support and continued investment in our work through our essar plan that allows us to have student

211success coaches student success coaches are roles that have laser-like focus on students who need additional mentoring counseling and support to remain or get back on track or on cohort for graduation our partners at student u have helped us develop this model and provided training for our student success coaches we look forward to strengthening that partnership for professional development support of the unique service our student success coaches provide in addition to the time limited responsive esser positions we now have high school lead counselors these school counselors operate as a plc meet regularly and provide leadership at their schools beginning with developing a comprehensive counseling program consistent with asca domains for academic development social emotional development and career development in progress we decided to share what we learned from our conversations and input provided by our principals

212when principals were asked about resources or strategies that helped to boost or maintain highest graduation rates they noted credit recovery and the 22 credit diploma immediate outreach and maintaining contact with students who had previously left school a latinx or bilingual counselor who is able to engage latinx or bilingual students and give them great encouragement to attend school and to work out their plan for graduation having an aggressive caring online teacher that was able to keep students focused on completing the necessary work for graduation having a very strong team that included the school social worker and the latinx community liaison person provided by the el excuse me esl department and finally principals noted having an effective mtss team and early identification of missing students helped to maintain highest graduation rates we'll continue to gather input and

213analyze student engagement data during remote learning and our return to in-person to understand the impact each of those things may have had on this year's cohort graduation rate and we're preparing to respond appropriately graduation teams with student success coaches continue to identify students who are off cohort and solidify relationships and develop goals for those students to get back on cohort student services team members and other school staff are making additional outreach efforts and initiating contacts to engage and re-engage our missing or truant students in our next steps we'll continue to examine this impact data closely allocating resources that prioritize student wellness and interventions allows us to administer the universal academic and social emotional screeners mtss school teams continue to use the screening data to effectively examine core instruction supplemental support and provide strengthened tiered interventions

214integration of the evidence-based and anecdotal information from school leaders is a large determinant of our next steps we intend to support what has worked gathering practitioners input examining our structures and analyzing data to make tangible progress every year on each of these strategies is the driving force behind the work of goal 1c we've met our benchmarks each year and are optimistic that the structures we've described this evening will continue to ensure we are on our way to not only meet this year's lofty benchmark but also to attain the 90 cohort graduation rate by 2023 at this time i'd like to introduce dr julie pack to elaborate on the work of goal 1d thank you dr maddox perry and good evening board dr mabinga priority 1d is to ensure that all staff use technology as a

215tool to accelerate and personalize learning for students the strategies in this goal are directly aligned to the north carolina digital learning progress rubric for schools which is a planning tool intended to support north carolina's educators schools districts and communities in the transition to the digital age teaching and learning the components of this rubric align with our strategies and include professional development and learning leadership content and instruction technology infrastructure and devices and data and assessment next slide please our our goal with priority 1d is by 2023 100 of all teachers will use technology as a tool for accelerating and personalized students learning in year one we established a baseline and in years two and three we have stayed on track and met our benchmark goals as of today we are on track to meet our goal

216this school year of 80 next slide please as a critical part of goal 1d durham public schools has invested in canvas as our learning management system in order to implement canvas we have developed k-12 teaching and learning expectations provided professional learning and supported the canvas coach role at each of our schools we will be rolling out our spring 2022 goal 1d survey for teachers and support staff as a next step next slide please through ignite online academy dps can now expand our offerings in e-learning ignite next has developed a catalog of online courses taught by dps teachers that are available to students at dps high schools and middle schools e-learning courses provide students excuse me provide schools flexibility to assist students with challenging schedules help ensure equity of access to unique courses across our schools

217and allow students the opportunity to accelerate their progress towards graduation ignite next is already making an impact across dps this fall ignite next was able to provide scholars at riverside high school the opportunity to access high quality spanish instruction virtually while the school searched for a qualified spanish teacher this spring ignite is partnering with the department of advanced academics to offer the first district-wide ap statistics course ap statistics is one of the most accessible ap math courses and can give many students the opportunity to take an advanced course that might not otherwise be offered at their school since the start of summer learning ignite has provided 584 e-learning courses to dps students these courses had a passing rate of 86 the pass rates for ad options and nc virtual courses were 76 and 52 respectively

218traditionally dps has paid for nc virtual academy and ad options to provide courses that meet the students needs virtually with ignite next we ignite next one we keep those dollars inside of dps and offer more proximity of support to our students in total we expect to keep 197 400 000 inside of dps this year by utilizing at night next at this time i'll turn it back over to dr hardy thank you dr pack i want to thank our team that is here i think i may have missed mr futrell director of student services i apologize um as i was going through before we get into our department updates would like to pause and yield to chair umstead to see if we have questions regarding priority one board members are there any questions uh miss lewis

219thank you so much dr hardy and to our team for this important discussion and transparency where we are where our students are academically uh i do want to go back to slide 189 if we could because that's where my my question one of my questions resides um they're not synced it was the one with the slide with the growth with the yellow line and the green line yeah that one yes the busy one so one of the things that stood out for me um when we worked on the strategic plan i can say we because i was a part of the community members back in 2018 working on this plan and really relying on the data if you look at the projections that we had there to go from 49 to 51 to 54. one

220thing that that stands out to me is that we were projecting two or three percent growth year over year i think that was the expected rate of growth to be seen so we wanted to make some achievable benchmarks and then if you look there in the middle after covet when it first hit we were completely virtual we don't have data the bogs to the middle of the years has been a 5 increase that's evidence that acceleration is happening for whatever hour for all the things not whatever for all things that our administration school staff is doing with our children that is quite impressive a five percent increase from beginning of year to mid-year and getting these children back into school so i just want to commend you for that and acknowledge that that growth that

221is happening right now that is being accelerated i know that we have summer planning happening and you have some plans in place and progressing i would like to just express just having to visit several schools this past weekend the week prior and trying to get a pulse on where our students are and how they're doing what has been consistent across the board is our second graders are the most challenged right now and there are many challenges but if you think about it their kindergarten year was interrupted mid-year they had all of first grade virtual and now they're back so their social emotional um social skills were back in where they were in kindergarten coming back into second grade so that on top of teaching and educating i think again can be commended to all the

222hard work that's happening and all the care for our children so i'm just i'm grateful for the transparency i'm sad to see that this decrease has happened based on the conditions of our nation but growth is occurring i would like to have intentionality around supports around second grade when we hear about what the summer planning looks like i also want to make sure we are showing a reflection of our students in the curriculum as we have been doing also in our summer planning there's curriculum such as freedom schools there's no i can't think of right off the top of my head but we've had freedom schools in our in our schools before and there was growth that was seen with that so if there's any way that that can also be looked at um to

223what that what that would look like for coming into our summer programming to continue this growth that's here and i saw that as part of your next steps and then my last point commending again the work of our student support services having an increased graduation rate last year i do have some concerns um that have been coming to me from the community around truancy and we know when children are truant they're not in school they're not learning they're not growing and there have been some changes with the way up we process truancy since coveting now can someone speak to what is our current process of truancy how we capturing those students back to make sure we keep our graduation rates up um great question you're absolutely right over the last couple of years there have

224been changes in our area as to how we've been able to process truancy as you know we still have a compulsory attendance law for um statute for students under age 16 and so we continue to reiterate to our parents and to students that that exist and our school social workers are probably the our main line in mitigating the truancy you're right there's a lot of truancy and we haven't been able to parse yet how much of that is a result of um some of the the issues with covet and how much of that is disconnecting but we do have a process that um works where we continue the 3 6 and 10 day letters and outreach including home visits those are still happening we also have counselors supporting the work of social workers and they

225are working as a plc to make sure whichever adult has the relationship with the student is a part of contacting the home or sharing information on the whereabouts we continue to track for lack of a better word or monitor where our students are and really we've increased our interventions and when students are absent one or two days you know we immediately begin to uh try to locate that student so it is a process we also um have partnered with and this is just starting this spring we've increased our partnership with elma b spaulding in a conflict resolution center and every school will have an opportunity to refer their chronically absent students we're talking about their their top tier students with you know as many as 15 or more absences to the conflict resolution center to

226do some work around truancy with the family so that's just beginning um this this spring so that's a new step but we are continuing some stuff that we've done before thank you thank you for that update and just to know that um a parent did reach out to me and shared recently that plc has been godson to her and being able to get her child back engaged in school and getting working towards graduation so it's good to hear the success stories as well and then going back one other thing going back to the academics is because our students need to to closing that gap and supporting our teachers can we also get a unified message about what volunteer supports look like in schools i'm getting mixed messages about whether or not volunteers are able to

227come in it volunteers for academic support some feel like they can but then there's some some hesitation so i just want to make sure that we have a unified message about what it looks like to have our volunteers beginning to come into the schools we have allowed volunteers who are directly working with students and supporting our teachers they do need to complete the volunteer at a station form and go through the process that dr lissane's office supports in terms of making sure that their appropriate background checks are in place and then those folks do have access to our schools we want our community to work directly with our students um as long as they're working with our principals to make sure they do have access and follow those processes there aren't any community members who

228want to volunteer and are having any challenges more than happy for them to reach out to my office or to the office of school relations so we can help make sure they navigate the processes so they can complete that ms buyer and then ms validariz i want to um thank you all for this report and um celebrate all the work that you've done and also kind of grieve together that these disproportionalities still very much exist within durham public schools and across the nation so um i just i am frustrated that probably the pandemic set the disproportionalities and increased them i'm frustrated on behalf of families that we don't hear from and you know i appreciate the graduation rates being broken out um i'd love to see them broken out more if you all have breakouts

229by gender and if you have breakouts by specific schools if you have breakouts that show what percentage of our students in each subgroup are actually ready for the community college readiness levels unc system schools what how many ap credits are uh our graduates in each of those categories subcategories finishing school with because it's one thing to give a kid a diploma it's another to have them ready for their future and so i want us to be just as transparent as we can because that holding up holding a mirror up to that holding shining a light on that is is what helps us make progress and the other thing i saw dr bullock here and you know finding and supporting culturally relevant and anti-bias you know and anti-racist curriculum and pedagogy is so so important and

230i know as we have groups looking for that it it also doesn't exist right high quality materials are out there in some small way but certainly with the new attacks on critical race theory and and watering down of history do we need in durham to actually hire some more folks to supplement that within what we're able to provide to our teachers um at the classroom level i i think it's so so important and i don't see any of the publishers kind of stepping up to to address that i don't know dr bullock if you have thoughts on that or anyone else but i just wonder about that as an investment in our children and their future thank you for the board member buyer if you could i guess i had a question for clarity around

231providing professional learning for educators in um obtaining or developing more culturally responsive materials just had a question for clarity i think that training is one part and i think you know you do that and and your team valiantly um probably could use three times the staff that we have but but i wonder about the curriculum materials as we're adopting these and so many times we've said this social studies uh curriculum is the best we could find right there's not really stuff that goes as deeply into into addressing those as we want and we're having a supplement i i don't know i guess i'm thinking about that aspect and whether we should just locally invest in that more as we go forward until better stuff is available yes i i definitely um i think there's room

232to um find more resources to supplement what we have i also just thinking about some of the visits that i've done in schools this week just seeing what the expertise in the educators here in durham what they're able to build out of their knowledge what they know how they're able to incorporate durham history into into what they're teaching i saw some phenomenal things occurring just today in some schools i visited so i do think there is room for us um one sharing the knowledge and expertise that we have right here in durham with each other and making some of the phenomenal things we see more common practice and that's something that i welcome the opportunity in working with curriculum instruction working with student support services and thinking about you know how we work together to

233share that knowledge across the district because we we see some amazing things going on that's my initial thought and i look forward to working with like miss giovanni dr hardy and how we move forward on that hopefully that answers your question yeah i know i think it really does and and it's so so important i'm so appreciative i don't know if ignite next was this the first time for others to hear about it i'm excited about it but i don't know if our families know about it so how would folks learn about that if they weren't watching a school board meeting too late at night are we messaging that to families i'll start and then yield to either dr pack or mr futrell or dr maddox perry so any time as we're working especially our

234high school uh counselors as they're working with our students in their four-year plans and making sure that they have access to high quality courses and depending on the courses that are being able to be offered at their school that is where we look at the digital and virtual opportunities that we have our opportunities were limited pre-covet and so a lot of that was virtual public high school and now with the robust work that we've been able to do with ignite the support that we've had on our board from opening our first k-12 virtual school we've been able to utilize our teachers to provide that support and we've been very intentional to make sure that they are those courses that help accelerate and give access to our students to your point in mentioning earlier you know

235students that are graduating with a the ability to access college-level courses so when you think about taking an ap statistic course it gives you the baseline for some other advanced placement courses but that critical thinking that occurs in that advanced placement course really is going to help them no matter what type of course they take at the community college level at the four-year college level or just in completing an application and going into the workforce right here in durham um dr pack was nodding i'm looking to make sure i hit thank you we're good all right uh next miss val yadares and then mr lee thank you so much for these updates uh dr hardy and everyone who presented this is definitely why we're here you know we have a mandate to serve all our

236students and we are here to ensure that every child has access to sound and basic education um and that education needs to be education um that each child once they leave us they can actually go out and thrive right we should be setting our kids up for success um and so i'm very grateful for all the work all the the benchmarks our five-year strategic plan which is gonna end in 2023 was definitely a step in the right direction in terms of putting out all these goals i'm looking forward to strategic plan 2.0 i think that we can go deeper we can dive deeper and so i'm so glad that we have been working continually towards you know offering professional development and i'm looking for 2.0 being professional development that's very strategic along our weakest links

237and there is no shame in acknowledging where we are you know doing the best and where we're not doing so great i think that that is um that is something i have been thinking about the fact that this data paints a picture of you know how many students we are matriculating graduating and it shows that we're moving in the right direction but i'd like for strategic plan 2.0 to feature disaggregated data and to really have um some of those smart goals uh in terms of growth for the students that we see that are not showing um the proficiency i'm looking i'm looking at some of some of the uh you know the the things that have been outlined and i think that we are we are right in the right step i mean just looking

238at the next steps we talk about uh in progress and next steps in progress we said we want to do continual professional development offerings for all stakeholders we also talk about increasing collaborations for high leverage instructional strategies across and it mentions all our students that that we know could use more supports right we were talking about ec we talk about english learners and so forth and so forth and so on this question of increased collaboration um something else that i'd like to see a little more is and again as i'm projecting for 2.0 right and and and even now we need to start setting that up and working on on on on these collaborations we're going to need community supports especially for the cultural relevant piece our demographics are changing um it's it's no longer

239you know years ago the conversation was about white students black students then we had heart started seeing increase in latinx students we now have such a um a robust beautiful diverse demographic and we're seeing a lot of immigrant families of different languages we have to set up the plan for supporting um our families linguistically and culturally and so i'd like for us to increase collaborations across the board figure out community partners that can help us to provide and help us and guide us also culturally so that we know that we are ensuring um that our practices are culturally relevant for the different for the different groups and um and also on the other along those lines as well um qualitative data is going to be very important i think some of the most wonderful things

240that we as board members we get the privilege and honor is to hear from teachers i actually heard from a teacher you know who is as an esl teacher telling us that you know she's seen growth in her classroom and she's telling us that you know like the masks are not an impediment right she's saying the masks are not an impediment they have a little uh impact because she's seen her her students she's watching this she's very careful and intentional sharing this data and how her students grew 1.2 grade levels she said that you know she was tracking these students and and annual growth and she's an esl teacher and she's talking about the fact that newcomers new rivals have been able to show growth and so these are the kind of patterns that we

241need to start tracking and i'd like for us to ensure that we are going more into into the disaggregated data and the we are painting the picture of what are the barriers that we actually need to reduce and you have all outlined this beautifully here that there are barriers um for some students we want to be able to identify those and paint the picture really clearly we already know that there are factors like you know housing economic status you know disabilities uh and so we definitely will need to be working with our counselors you know the tracking system i'm very excited about the tracking system and just develop some strategies that are going to really work but my main thing is that we can't do this alone dps cannot do this alone and so as

242we work towards really serving all our students we really are going to have to be very intentional about partnering and figuring out what's available and doing that um recognizance of who's out there who cares about the students and can serve them in in the ways that we need and ways that we can also be in collaboration and guidance so that um you know that we can serve our kids the best and reduce those barriers i think i'd like a clearer picture of what are the barriers that we are actually handling and dealing with but um this is excellent work i'm so grateful for all i mean so much of this restorative practices i mean uh scl ongoing um the math curriculum the adoption of a secondary math curriculum and even when you were presenting that

243to us and it was in the consent agenda you mentioned collaborating with esl collaborating pretty much everybody is out there and and so i'm very excited about the math curriculum that we have and i think we just have a lot of work to do but um we're going to need some help and i just would like to see more in terms of strategy for specific barriers or for us to identify it through evaluations analysis assessments figure out what are the various we're actually dealing with thank you so much mr lee all right so um you all know that i i always appreciate um uh strategic plan updates and i really like seeing data so we can see you know how things are going i really like this chart and i won't be long i just

244something stood out to me something caught my eye here and i actually flipped back to the budget presentation i started noticing um so one of the things we as the board in the administration has to do is we have to request you know funds for what we need what we feel we need for to increase student achievement and that's one of the things we always have to go back and forth with the county commissioners accounting manager and so forth and um sometimes that's cut short sometimes it is funded at levels that close to what we need um and one of the ways is sometimes it's hard to justify why we ask for what we ask so i flip back to this um this chart we don't have to flip back to it on the presentation

245it was a like page eight of the the budget and it showed the request local fund and request and funding each year since 2012 2013. uh me and matt joined the board in 2014 so our first budget cycle was 2015 2016. and the last few years the last five years that that are actually showing up here on this that's on the screen it almost correlates with performance that we're seeing here all right there's almost a correlation it's pretty close to it um and the amount of funding that we got the the amount of approved funding that we had to achievement um one of the things we hear and our new board members will hear over the years is you know challenge with challenges with funding and performance and one of the biggest challenges we had

246since i've been on the board is showing that you know we're requesting money to make improvements in our processes in reading math whatever it is and you know this may be a good dissertation for someone you know and educational leadership or whatever it may be but understanding the the correlations and i understand correlation does not mean causation but it's pretty stark here if you're looking at uh when we have when we're funded in the way that we need to be funded or that we feel the administration and the staff and everyone feels we need to be funded for these uh these types of uh programs we see successes we're seeing these successes so when we start to be underfunded or when we get under funded from what it is we need when there's a large

247jump between when there's large distance between what we request and what we're actually funded we're going to see a retraction in that performance and so i wanted to speak on this because as we go into budget season each year we do this and we have to justify some of the things that we're asking for and performance is one of the things we hear from county commissioners now don't get me wrong county commissioners have been very generous you know you can see the increase over the years especially since 2016 2015 2016 and that is much appreciated but we have to keep that up we have to keep pushing if you're asking for higher graduation rates if you're asking for higher proficiency rates or even on here the meet and exceed reading math targets if we want

248to increase that we need funding to increase that we need ways to increase that we can't do it having the cut so you know i appreciate the county commissioners and i appreciate what the administration has done to continue those those requests but i just want um i want to say that there's a pretty stark correlation between these perform the performance numbers and how we're funded so you know i've even heard before you know funding won't change anything you have to change like processes and things yeah that's true but funding helps with that so thank you all very much for this i love these types of measurements um i really i really like these outcomes i look forward to this that number even jumping up to 65 next time i guess it should i hope or

249close to it at some point you know or was that a 63 i think that would be the trend so um yeah thank you all very much i appreciate it but just remember um for those watching um there's a cost to succeed and when we ask for those budgets those numbers that's what we're trying to do the other discussion from board members i want to say thank you all for this presentation um you know when we created the strategic plan and i also participated on that committee we had no idea a global pandemic was coming um and that we would have to spend you know so much uninterrupt or so much interrupted school time so i appreciate one the transparency of putting these numbers out here for members of our community the academic data is

250also on our website and it's broken up demographically um so it's disaggregated if you want to see that and creating plans for growth because we know we kind of have a lot of work to do to get to where we want to be i think one of the other things i was thinking about is like do we need to adjust maybe some of these goals to account for where we're starting from right we're starting from a different place now since we had the pandemic and so i leave that a question for y'all to ponder and bring back to us if you think that's appropriate the other thing i'm going to switch gears a little bit and talk about the culturally relevant pedagogy and anti-bias anti-racist trainings as we're thinking about teachers coming in and out

251of our school district i wonder how we take some of those trainings and make them just practice right you go to your training but the practices of our school the way your teachers are evaluated you know way we're looking for artifacts like all of that is aligned with the pedagogy of being anti-racist being culturally responsive i believe that will help us in some in keeping some sustaining of those practices so it doesn't have to be i have to wait to go to my training at this point and then i do you know many of our educators will say trainings are good but what i do every day builds my practice and so we want to make sure that some of those strategies and skills that are taught in the training are built into the everyday

252practice of what they're doing i think those are my comments doctrine finger dr hardy anything else from on this portion i know we got another portion all right dr hardy i'll pass it back over to you for part two if we will go forward um we really appreciate this the discussion if we'll go forward several slides right there that'd be great and if i can have dr bell come to the podium really appreciate the discussion reflection and questions we did think that it was appropriate as we're thinking about priority one that we provide an opportunity for us to really have a deeper dive into two of our departments so as we work to continue the increase of academic achievement for our students we wanted to provide some specific updates regarding our exceptional children's and english

253learner departments while we have worked to develop specific strategic goal addendum strategies that provide specific goals and benchmark marks the next few slides really give us an app an opportunity to look at the work that is done in correlation with our strategic plan priority one goals and strategies next slide please for each department update we will provide you with an overview of the programs and services this includes a snapshot of the students that are served a brief overview and a report of the staffing and the supports and then a focus specifically on the intentionality of the strategies to improve student outcomes in that particular area it's my pleasure to turn it over now to dr kristen bell executive director for our exceptional children's department dr bill thank you dr hardy good evening dr mubanga school

254board members i'm always excited to be in front of you talking about exceptional children i want to start with just a big picture overview of ec services in durham public schools as you know our students with disabilities are served along a continuum all of their services are based on each child's needs as outlined in their ieps so one of the requirements of the individuals with disabilities education act the idea which is the federal law which guides the bulk of our work is that we serve students in the least restrictive environment that means that students must be educated with their non-disabled peers to the maximum extent appropriate with the right supports in place so that's the premise of all of our services where we begin to talk about what students needs most of our students are

255supported in the general education program with their non-disabled peers and they may receive push-in services with the ec teacher going into the classroom inclusion or pull out services other known otherwise known as resource and some students have a combination of both throughout the day we also have some students who have more intensive and complex needs and they may require supports from special programs all throughout their day we're also along the continuum there are special schools now durham public schools does not have any special schools that would be like a separate school that just serves students with disabilities and i think that's that's a great thing and i think that's a testament to our value of inclusion honoring our diversity and our commitment to equity finally we have students who may receive hospital or homebound services

256for um varying periods of time some students might need it for a couple months some students might need it for a year or many years depending on their needs and that would be the most restrictive placement next slide all right this slide gives an overview just of some data according to our most recent december 1 child count report bps had 4 292 students with ieps this includes students ages 3 through 22 or pre-k through high school and it can constitutes about 13.1 percent of our total student population in comparison and comparing our previous child count in december of 2020 to our current count we had about 164 fewer students between the two reporting periods this this decrease is directly related to the impacts of the pandemic of the 14 areas of disability eligibility our highest

257incidence categories are learning disabilities autism other health impairments and speech impairments so it's important to note that it's not the disability category that determines what students need and what they receive through their iep the iep the individualized education program is what outlines is the legal document which outlines each student's needs and that's the point it's individualized so some students may need speech therapy a couple times a week to address articulation errors for per se some students may need direct reading and math instruction to address learning disabilities that impact those areas some students may require full days of services from an ec teacher their instructional assistants and various related service providers such as occupational therapy physical therapy or speech therapy some students require one-on-one nursing next slide there are various types of specialty positions allocated to

258the schools to support students with disabilities all of our allocations are made based on the numbers and needs of students at each school needs change from year to year and they often change within the year and we adjust our allocations um as those changes occur our largest number of allocated positions come in the form of ec teachers that could be resource co-teachers special program teachers teachers of the blind and visually impaired teachers of the deaf hard of hearing occupational course of study teachers and preschool this slide here you can see that in addition to teachers those specialty areas related service providers like occupational therapy speech language pt school psychologists are also in our department we also have some ec nerve nurses and spoken language facilitators um and sign language interpreters there are a lot of

259different specialty positions to help implement those ieps next one all right the departmental structure of our ec central office team is designed to provide maximum support to our students parents school and district staff and community stakeholders information here on this slide represents the current positions associated with our leadership teams all of our central office positions provide direct support to students staff and families to varying degrees next slide we have many strategies that are in place to improve outcomes for our students with disabilities and we're constantly analyzing our efforts reviewing data seeking feedback from stakeholders to improve our supports resources and practices one of the greatest areas of need is with recruitment and retention of qualified staff we know that the greatest factor to impact student outcomes is the teacher and those other service providers who

260work directly with the student we continue to provide robust professional learning and to determine where opportunities exist to expand our offerings in our work around educating teams about obligations to serve students in the least restrictive environment it's perpetual and that will always be part of our work and finally we do continue to work to ensure our teachers and staff have access to and that they use research and evidence-based practices and programs in their work with students finally our efforts to work closely with principals to individualize supports for each school continues on a regular basis next slide some additional strategies to address outcomes for our students with disabilities include developing a multi-year instructional framework enhancing our professional learning for instructional assistants and continued close work with our hr colleagues to hire those quality teachers next slide

261all right finally some next steps as i shared while we continue our work to strengthen our existing recruitment and retention strategies we're discussing and identifying new creative ways to address these needs all the time we're also planning for how we can elevate and tighten supports for our beginning ec teachers who may need more intensive support depending on their backgrounds and their experiences and our work with enhancing research and evidence-based practices and programs will always be ongoing as we ensure that the tools and resources that our staff have are meeting the needs of every single child and finally we've been seeking and receiving feedback on how to better support our parents and we're going to be using varying media forces to reach out to seek input and collaborate with parents as critical partners in this work

262and at this point that's my last slide i will turn it over to sashi razem director of english language services well good evening dr mubenga sorry members of the board dr hardy bring to you some of the work of our department the english learner services department as it's known now for short i will term it as el as we're going through the presentation the overarching goal of our department is to ensure empowerment and active participation in students education leading to their social emotional and their academic growth our strategic our strategic strategies align with strategic plan priority goals 1a 1b and 1c and our plan for our students academic successes to improve those academic outcomes where we have our which reflect an asset-based lens that we look at our students because they come to us speaking

263one or more languages and they're in the process of learning english and it's our duty to be able to support them and help them grow and in their endeavors and their dreams when they come to this country durham public schools again in compliance with title iii provides language assistance services on a continuum to elementary middle and high school students this slide summarizes our instructional programming and the continuum of language services dependent on multiple criteria the three main ones being the number of years in u.s schools their prior education background and english language proficiency placements students at all levels of language proficiency are served based on their language needs and may participate in a combination of these services um on these approved models that you can see up here we have over 20 percent of our

264english learners that are in their first two years of u.s schools so many of these students come from grade level education to limited or no schooling and those are the students that need more intense language services because they have to simultaneously meet grade level standards while they're learning english thanks please this is the other part of our all the components of our department that meet the services and the needs and supports for our students so students are welcomed at our registration center where they begin their educational journey and dps through enrollment and assessment and then they are placed in instructional services at their schools in their language services our graduation coaches support high school students to motivate and guide our english learners to own their learning and re-engage students who are at risk of dropping

265out some of the social emotional supports are designed to help students adjust to their new environment and feel a sense of belonging at their schools and in their community students spend a fraction of their day with the esl teachers and english learners are english learners all day long so it is imperative for our teachers to be equipped with the tools and the support to be able to support academic language in our english learners collaboration between multiple departments has key to their success and professional learning for staff is designed to support instruction next slide please so this slide is an overview of the profile of our department the first column that you see on the chart shows our staffing to support english learners from enrollment to instruction to graduation dedicated to strengthen language development for this

266subgroup thanks to the generosity of the board and our district leadership we were able to increase our team by 10 esl teachers to support some of our higher el population schools in the next column of the chart you will see our enrollment numbers and our el numbers i pulled them from 2019 and 2021 because 2020 wasn't a normal year we actually lost about 300 students during that time new arrivals from central america and afghanistan contribute to the increased numbers this year as you can see there's a significant difference in our enrollments from 2019 to now next slide please these are some of their strategies to improve our outcomes so this slide provides uh some of the strategies we discussed in our previous slides in terms of the instructional programming and the other parts and pieces

267i'd also like to highlight some of the components that we have in place and that we continue to grow and one of them is to continue to build capacity in all our teachers and other dps staff through various professional development opportunities as we're in the process of expanding our current professional learning opportunities we continue to add social and emotional supports to meet the needs of our new immigrants as well as our english learners that are provided by our community partners such as the art therapy institute world relief and uscri as well our newcomer academy at plc continues to meet the unique needs of our high school newcomers who come to us with interrupted schooling and this is now in its fifth year we started i think 2017 of november so we're in our fifth year

268of representation and it's been a very successful program thanks please so as part of our next steps our ultimate goal is for a district-wide implementation of psyop otherwise known as sheltered instruction observation protocol which is a nationally renowned evidence-based instructional model targeted toward meeting the needs of english learners these strategies will also be incorporated in our other district initiatives so we can spread the joy in other words as a pathway to do so we're planning on a tiered professional learning approach to provide opportunities to our teachers to meet their needs from where they are and help them grow and we also would like to meet their needs in blended learning settings to reach them in any which way finally english learners make up more than 17 percent of durham public school student body and continues

269to be a growing population this speaks to the need for supporting our schools to make learning a positive experience and provide equitable opportunities for our english learners within which they would thrive thank you very much for your attention and at this time i turned it over to dr hardy thank you so much we are open for questions and discussion thank you all for the presentation uh miss valiadaris thank you so much for this deeper dive into um in into the data there's there's always levels you know we can be at this level and we can always go even even uh into other levels but i'm really encouraged um by all the the things we have set up i know that it is a lot of work you know in all the different areas and spheres

270whether it's sel whether it's you know the curriculum which we're covering the curriculum whether it's providing provisions access testing ensuring that you know uh everybody every student's legal rights to the testing that they need the assessments newcomers there's a lot right there's so many moving pieces um i have a question in terms of like again going in into looking at these numbers 17 of our students um are designated as ell students and we have other figures that we know like 33 percent of our students are spanish-speaking but then we also have an immigrant population that is growing and changing the demographics are changing i i'm interested in knowing at what point do the does the 17 become part of the 33 part of the part of the bigger at what time do esl students matriculate

271or go into um more inclusive uh you know more of the inclusive spheres what is what is our average year for a newcomer and i know that this is there's it's case-by-case basis but overall what are our trends in terms of how many years students are in esl and then to the time that they can become they're no longer in esl right so research says it takes seven to ten years for a student to uh master academic language if they've had interrupted schooling it takes about five to seven years to master academic language if they've had grade level education in their own countries and have equally high quality instruction in the us our state the essa plan that was mapped out provides a six-year window from the time a newcomer starts they take the first

272access test and then there's a six-year path it could be less it just depends upon what their first baseline score is and then there's a set goal that they've got to meet at each point in time this is very insightful especially as we just heard and again going to my colleague mike levin who's talking about the funding and the state cops coming uh capping our supports of students at 10.6 for english language learners i mean this is this is uh uh this is very crippling you know for school districts that are that are serving students especially to be capped at 10.6 however i am very encouraged by the work that i'm seeing and i i do know that we have measures you know um the access testing provides something you know we have uh beginning

273of grade um uh tests and and and middle of grade tests um and then we also have like the ira i ready readings um i am i would like for us to keep track of those i ready readings um as as teachers you know as as we're getting that data i know it's it's a whole lot of data and a whole lot of different measures that we're using but i do see some encouragement and i just want to applaud esl teachers you don't get paid extra money for helping students move on up grade levels if a student moves up to grade levels we're not giving any extra money and that just seems very unfair you know in terms of like you know the labor that goes into um the growth and across the board in

274dps i think all teachers who are working hard to um help our students grow we should be able to compensate them this is this is not the condition that we're in the the conditions are not um enabling us to do as much as we wish that we could do but i just want to just shout out the teachers that are doing this and also just to strategize with community members um again another call to the community we can't do this alone and i am so grateful for those partnerships um mr assam and you're mentioning that you're partnering with different organizations and you listed them and that is that is great that we have those organizations we're going to need more you know we're going to be definitely more even as we're seeing again demographics changing

275um and so i'd just really love to encourage us to continue to resource out because the state is not helping us as much as we need to so we're going to have to like just really map out as many supports as we can but um i'm encouraged by this i'm i'm also would love to continue having dialogue around the years what the research says about the seven to ten years the five to seven years based on this or the six years that is um you know what we're operating under thank you so much other comments or questions from board members i'm aspire i want to thank you all and also apologize for this being the last item on the agenda i feel like you all need to be on our agenda uh at least twice

276a year maybe more often because what you do is so so important to the core of our work and you are reaching marginalized students i hope that you feel heard and represented and at the table in leadership meetings and in conversations because your expertise is so unique that you need to be in the room where it happens whatever that hamilton song is um and if if i'm not wrong there was a on some award that we miss the chance to celebrate hopefully we'll celebrate in the future that dr bell received is that possible it would be the last thing that i think dr bells would want to say but i think her team would want her to at least brag on herself for a minute maybe oh thank you uh thank you for that miss

277buyer appreciate the acknowledgement he has the council for administrators of special education distinguished service award which i was very honored to receive partially i think it's just because i'm old and i've been doing this for a long time um but yeah i i just uh i'm so blessed every single day to work in durham public schools with the people i work with like this nothing about what kristen bell does it's it's the amazing folks on that ec team and the folks at the school teachers ias related service providers this is fantastic people out there that make it worth while coming to work every single day because we know what we're doing for kids so i mean thank you for that it's uh it's the team though it's it's not me but thank you i appreciate

278the opportunity to say something i think you should have a spark plan for that definitely a celebration for our march meeting right uh mr sears yeah briefly i mean my reflections on all of this work is you know this is the goal that that is the promise of public education this is all all means all um both the the final two presentations but but including the work before so i mean this is what makes us special this is why i think all of us are in this space and i'm incredibly grateful for um the work uh the push for progress i'm not a big fan of resetting the goals per for the pandemic but we can have that discussion some more um and i'm glad to see that you all are both acknowledging that and

279also pushing for uh staying on track so thank you all right thank you both let me make a few comments here um thank you staff uh we have top-notch staff uh in the state so i'm grateful that's how you all here doing this great work i think tonight you guys were able to pretty much uh go deeper to show the work that you do that's a lot of folks sometimes think that we only have bureaucrats in our central office uh it takes really good leadership for me all to move our schools forward and i would agree with miss buyer i miss darius as well we need to be having this conversation quite often because this is the core mission of what we're here uh and i will also agree with our educators that um education

280cannot wait right our children cannot wait so we have a lot of work to do due to the pandemic and all that kind of stuff but i would like to celebrate some of the work that we've done here with our strategic plan starting with our 87 percent graduation rates i think when we say 90 some folks do not believe it but i'll say this our high school principals are working with a heart for us to be able to get to that 90 i'm also confident when you look at the work miss park is doing oh dr peck sorry we have a lot of students graduating with associate degree and some of them also graduating with some credentials president baxter and i will be presenting to our colleague superintendent at community college next week about this

281work so we are really forced to be able to scale this up to our comprehensive high school students where president baxter will be able to send instructors to our campuses to remove those barriers of transportation to take those students to durham tech so all our students will have opportunity at least to have few college credit under their belt this is really good we all know some of us all of us that went to college a lot of students don't make it their first year of their colleges because they're in the auditorium with 400 and 500 students but just being able to take those freshmen classes at community college it will serve them really well not to be able to drop out on the first year when they go to colleges i'm really excited about the

282work the foundation that we've been able to lay down with our strategic plan i think next month we have rti they will come we're going to consult with them for our next strategic plan we really want to sit back let independent organization come and all the inputs that i'm hearing from our board and they're going to design how we're going to engage the entire community with your inputs and i'm really excited to see that work coming forward and i'm really excited to see how our community is shifting and that's going to be also the emphasis emphasis of the work that we have ahead of us but i'm really positive with what mr c says i don't want us to change those goals i know it's going to take probably a couple years or three years

283for us really to get where we need to be but i'm confident with our leadership that we have the staff that we have we may not hate those targets but i think we're going to be close to show that we've worked really hard to meet those goals thank you both for your support i remember four years ago we did not have instructional materials now our teachers have those instructional materials it's going to correlate with those student outcomes it's going to make a difference thank you steph thank you both for working with us we have a lot of work to do but i'm really confident that uh we're on the right path thank you uh miss validar i i just also want to shout out i see um miss malone and the i.t department i think

284um when we talk about goal 1d that's one that it says you know we have one to one devices we're on track for many things i think that that goal 1d definitely needs to be highlighted way more and i think that there's more work to be done about digital equity because um there are some families that are still struggling with supporting um you know children there are some students who are still struggling with it with the direction that everyone is moving in digitally but i just wanted to really shout out wendy and um the work that rit department technology we are now one to one district and we weren't you know before the pandemic we now have a learning management system that is standardized implemented throughout um and we are building and adding and i'm

285so grateful dr hardy has worked um and everybody on her team in academic services has really ensured that we have quality uh access like dr maddux perry also adding scl with her team so we have we have access uh through digital means we just have to ensure that those folks who um and those families who need those supports that we we we need more we need more staff over we need more educators um in all the areas but the work here is so comprehensive i mean we would go endless and those are just my comments about celebrating wendy thank you so much for everything you do uh mr raven i can't give you all any other accolades that hasn't already been said so just i'll just say thank you to you all i i did

286just have one request um is that on this slot it has the ec child child count for any of our family members that may look at this online they may not know what the abbreviations uh all stand for so when we post this online if we could just have the the full verbiage on there as well so so they have an accurate idea of the the vastness and the scope of all the students that we're supporting so thank you all again i too do not have any additional accolades that haven't already been said i think i'm thankful and grateful for the work you all doing the strategic plan really set um a plan a guidelines for us and i stand corrected and we will not change the goals um thank you dr mobinga but i

287think it set the goals for us and it created a plan guidelines for us to follow and then with great staff we've been able to implement take strategies i think what i'm constantly seeing is a learning reflection revising process continuous improvement and that's what we need to make sure that we can have a best learning environment for our students and i always say some kids are spending from three years old to 18 22 year old time with us it's our duty to make sure they leave here ready for college or career whatever is next in their lives and i think the work that we're doing tonight highlights how we are preparing our students for that so thank you all i'm sorry that you are still here but i appreciate the presentation and all the hard

288work anything else board members all right that's it thank you i would move we go into closed session madam chair i would move we go into closed session for the reason stayed on the agenda if you're ready for that i need to add one more um reason on our agenda for closed session so board would move that we add considering a confidential student matter protected under general statute 143 318-1186 and general 115 c 402 i would move that with that amendment and we go into closed session for the reason stated yep it's been moved by ms buyer second by mr lee any other discussion all those in favor say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign passes unanimously we are now in closed session we are now back in open session dr mabinga

289madam chair i'm here to seek your approval for the personal report as discussed at the closed session i move approval of the personnel report dated yesterday february 24th 2022 second it's been moved by mr lee seconded by ms fire any other discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign it passes unanimously and with that we are