Durham Public Schools Board of Education Monthly Meeting October 21, 2021 6:30 PM

001good evening everyone the durham public schools board of education monthly meeting is now in session at this time we wish to extend a warm welcome to everyone who's joining us this evening the purpose of this meeting is to inform our parents staff and constituents about the work aligned with our mission to embrace educate and empower every student to innovate to serve and to lead tonight the administration will be presenting information to keep you up to date on our strategic plan the interpreters for tonight are martha romo aguiles and tonita flowers thank you for taking the time to join us we started a little late at 6 45 tonight because we had a public hearing before this uh time so i want to say thank you all for being with us and your patience the next

002item on our agenda is a moment of silence um we are getting ready to put a closure onto hispanic heritage month latinx heritage month so in this moment of silence i would love for us just to consider all the ways that our latinx community has been celebrated and contributed to our community during this time thank you the next item on our agenda is celebrations we have our student of the month mr sutter it's already started with applause i love it the best part of our school board meetings happens right at the beginning when we celebrate and today we have a fantastic student of the month uh her mom is here her current principal is here her former principal is here we're happy to have all of them here our october student of the month comes

003to us from city of medicine academy and i'd like to introduce interim principal dr ronita griffin-jordan who will introduce the rest of the mary band good evening distinguished board members superintendent mubinga and all guests gathered here this evening i am dr griffin jordan principal of the city of medicine health and life science magnet academy and it is my great pleasure to introduce durham public schools october student of the month our student leader miss lauren futrell is indeed an outstanding young scholar who deserves recognition during her time at city of medicine we have seen her exhibit strong moral character leadership and an exceptional ability to connect and build solid relationships with students and staff alike please allow me to expound upon what makes her so exceptional ms futrell is currently a senior at city of medicine

004maintaining over a 4.0 gpa in class while engaging in several extracurricular activities at school and in the community some include serving as our student government association vice president a cma student ambassador a member of cma school improvement team national honor society and hosa a duke ahead participant a junior coach and mentor with the duke program females excelling morton math engineering and science and she has obtained her american red cross cpr certification in addition she also works as a team lead cashier at the neighborhood harris teeter miss butrell is a reflective learner and works diligently to seek opportunities to enhance her skills she has proven her leadership ability by continuously being involved in her school community additionally she strategically engages participates and volunteers in organizations and out activities outside the school that add value to her

005end goal having a rewarding career in the medical field she will graduate with her emt certification in spring 2022. miss butrell is a thinker a decision maker and a team player she exhibits the characteristics to become a great scholar when she pursues collegiate education and has the potential to become a dynamic medical professional in the future it is with honor and pride that the cma family has chosen miss lauren futrell as dps october student of the month [Applause] thank you dr jordan and dr tobias my colleagues at cma and the durham public schools for this nomination and recognition i appreciate all of your support being a dps student since second grade has been a journey that i will never forget i look forward to giving back to my dps community my school and throughout my

006future service thank you [Applause] so we have to acknowledge the former and current principal in the room dr jackie tobias and pointing a camera uncomfortably in my direction is lauren's mother and lauren we have a few uh things to celebrate you to celebrate you with we have a certificate for you and a spark pin we give these spark pins to people who demonstrate leadership in durham public schools and that includes student leaders thank you and then we have a little something for you from trying from larry hurst of triangle e cycling a powerful laptop of your very own from uh from triangle e-cycling um says pro windows i think it's for a pro and they are definitely qualified congratulations and thank you for being our student of the month thank you you may walk around

007the table and do the ritual elbow bumps in the time of coped and congratulations [Laughter] sure and that concludes our celebrations for the evening what a wonderful celebration i love student of the month kicking off our meetings with that reminds us of why we're doing the work that we do and we have amazing students i think the county will probably offer her a job as a emt as soon as she's certified um and so we're really appreciative of the great work of our educators here in the district the next item on our agenda is the superintendent's update thank you madam chair um members of the board it's always my uh pleasure to be able to give these rewards on on our regular board meeting tonight i'm gonna start with uh opening with a couple of

008observances the first one is about national school bus safety week our bus drivers and transportation employees keep our buses safe for our students every day especially through increasing bus driver salaries and implementing our transportation improvement plan we will make our bus operation more efficient and higher and retain more drivers being fully staffed will increase safety even more i encourage durham drivers to be observant obey the stop on and the flashing lights and help our bus drivers and keep our students safe dps is the teacher of excellence it was my pl privilege last week i was able to visit quickside elementary school and surprise erin richie bps 21 22 ec teacher of excellence her practice as ec resource teacher is based on respect and caring for her students and families she's patient she's kind and she

009sees student strength and builds up on them she also work closely with families to ensure they understand their rights as advocates she will be celebrated at the state conference on exceptional children this november we are proud of her and everything she has accomplished finally some words are about employee appreciation i want to follow up on our board's decision to avoid retention bonuses to our permanent employees we have been with us through the pandemic you challenge us to do more than we propose and to ensure that every qualified permanent full full-time employee receive as close as we can manage to a thousand dollars take home pay after taxes as a retention bonus all members i'm happy to say that we are able to do so and our permanent employees will receive the retention bonuses of thousands

010exactly thousand dollars by november 19th i don't want to minimize your generosity as a school board however we know that we and most importantly our state government have a lot more to do to support our employees europe is becoming more expensive to live in our county government has been called upon year after year to cover funding needs that the state should be meeting we are so grateful for the support of our commissioners sr funding has given us a real opportunity to help us retain our employees but we don't have all the resources that we need the state has to help us i have recently met with some of our instructional assistants and they have shared concerns about compensation for their position specifically we have work to do i remember few board meetings you have entrusted

011me to be able to bring some consultant to be able to work on our salary studies and we are working on that but we also have work to do to support our employees morale in even more ways especially after so many months of kobe i promise you i will continue to work with our teachers and staff to ensure that dps continues to be great place for working teaching and learning thank you thank you dr mabinga the next item on our agenda is agenda review and approval madam chair i would ask that we add the introduction of a resolution of the durham public schools board of education supporting a transition to renewable energy in durham public schools for introduction at maybe item 10a okay would you take 10c since we've already got a um i would

012hope that we could um cons like start to introduce the topic before we get into the 10-year cip which is why i picked that at a spot but um and bump other things down thank you um said um i would also uh like to amend the agenda um to introduce our resolution that was sent to us by isla it's the letter of support and resolution regarding english learner language english language learners and i'm looking at item 11 academic services i wonder if we can put it after the covet 19 update indeed right thank you the other changes to the agenda what move approval of the agenda as amended second the move of his buyer seconded by miss valliadares all in favor say aye aye all right any opposed please use this on day pass this

013unanimously the next item on our agenda is the board of education monthly meeting minutes from september 23rd 2021 move approval of the minutes second been moved by mr steer seconded by ms fire any other discussion all in favor say aye aye any oppose passes unanimously the next item on our agenda is general public comment before we get started i'm going to do a quick review of the rules first please state your name if speaking for an organization please state your name and the name of the organization second speakers are asked to present their comments in specified time we'll do three minutes tonight when the yellow light comes on on our podium um you will have one minute left to start winding up your remarks when the red light comes on it will take a it

014will beep that indicates your time is up complaints about named staff students or parents should not be voiced in open session however we are very interested in hearing your concerns with regard to public education safety of students or to the operations of the school system this evening we received a public comment that identifies a school employee by name and we invite that person to resubmit the public comment to avoid the use of the employee's name dps also has a grievance and compliance complaint policy that allows members of the public in school employees to raise concerns about specific school employees for more information see district policy 2310 c finally the board members will listen carefully and consider the comments but we do not engage in a discussion with our speakers so our first public comment will

015be sunny gerardo next we'll have jennifer cauldron and i apologize if i'm mispronouncing your names hi my name is sunny euraldo i am the president of durham public schools instructional assistants and i'm at southwest elementary um i would just like to start by saying thank you to the county commissioners for raising all the classified staff paid to fifteen dollars an hour this was a big step towards creating a school system that supports our employees unfortunately in this post-covered world dps employees are continuing to struggle to make ends meet and many are considering leaving for higher pay a recent survey sent out to dpsias revealed that 73 of responding ias were considering living the school system due to low wages and 60 percent work an additional one to two jobs these numbers do not lie dps

016is still not paying ies a true living wage in our area the same can be said for all dps classified staff dpsias are a critical part of our children's education we work side by side with teachers to assist in daily instruction we work one-on-one with students who need additional assistance we address behavioral challenges in the classroom we drive tears bandage scrapes offer emotional support and give caring elbow bones formerly known as hugs to our students ias put in long hours each week and are regularly pulled from their classes to sub for teachers the pandemic and resulting staff shortages have further complicated an ih job as teachers get sick or resign last week the ia board met with dr robinga to ask for pay increase for ias and a call for the board to evaluate the

017wages of all gps classified staff we are very grateful that he took the time to listen to our concerns and is open to considering an additional pay increase ias have not had received a pay increase that would significantly improve their financial standing in durham a community where the cost of living is 4.3 higher than the national average and many are having to consider leaving for higher pay dps simply cannot risk losing more staff during a time when staff shortages are making headlines and impacting the quality of education dps offers today i'm here on behalf of gps instructional assistants asking that the board raised the starting salary for our age to 18 dollars per hour and the increase be through all existing ias and their respective step levels we would like to see a three-year plan

018developed to further increase wages to 22 an hour for all classified staff throughout dps a wage increase like this would help ias focus entirely on their jobs at dps improve morale district-wide reduce turnover among faculty and staff help attract and recruit to fill growing vacancies i ask that the board seriously consider our request and take time to visit our schools to see our amazing ias and other classified staff in action thank you thank you next we have jenner jennifer cauldron up next will be phyllis massenburg and andre robinson good evening board i'm jenny cauldron a couple weeks ago when a mother stood in this exact same place telling you a heartbreaking story of how her child was denied access to the bathroom i was shocked i knew this used to be a common practice especially

019in dps but after the 2013 ocr complaint i really thought we were beyond this following that board meeting i had dozens of conversations with teachers students and parents and it seems that these sort of bathroom policies are widespread within the district and they're an attempt to manage behavior but they actually do the opposite students are less likely to drink enough water when their bathroom usage is being policed and research along with every parent ever can tell us that this actually makes students less productive in the classroom and puts them in terrible moods as well i don't know how compliant y'all's children are when they're moody but mine are not denying access to the bathroom may prevent bathroom vandalism like we see on tick tock but it won't help those children feel emotionally and physically safe

020at school it won't address diverse learning needs and it certainly won't engage students in learning children are endlessly creative in subverting authority and this disciplinary practice does nothing to promote discipline but actually hurts children instead in fact trauma has been shown to cause a disconnect between the body and the mind meaning that the children who are most likely to only know that they need to use the bathroom when it's urgent are those children who've been touched by trauma which is one of the most vulnerable populations in our district dps has had nearly eight years to address this matter on a school-by-school basis and quite frankly has failed to do so so my request today is simple a clear district-wide policy that allows students access to the bathroom when they request it to do anything else

021is to turn a blind eye to what we know is not best practice in our schools and just in case there's any doubt in what i'm saying i will be sending research to the board members before this meeting is even over thank you thank you phyllis massenberg then andre robinson and crystal moore good afternoon chairwoman umstead durham school board members my name is phyllis mastenberg and i'm here to represent the family of betty aretha harris mastenburg i have a question before i start and i realize i have three minutes i'm looking for those lights you were talking about okay right here okay has a decision been made on the name of elementary school f because that's why i'm here i'm here to talk about that and so if that decision has been made it's a

022moot point okay all right in my allotted time i would like to share with you why betty deretha mastenburg elementary school is right or at durham public school educational building such as an elementary school her name was submitted in the ideas website and so therefore i'm following up on information about her i must admit that three minutes is not enough time to talk about her i had a prepared two-minute video to share with you about her but i understand that's not appropriate now but i must say that she has a website it's www.bettymasenberg.com what you will find on that website is her resume and what i'm most proud of on that website is an audio a video of minnie fort brown who did a eulogy basically at her funeral and she included all of her

023information it was just amazing how she summed up all of her information at that time she was the first african-american female principal in durham public schools back in 1975. how do we acknowledge the first african-american female school principal because in her world that was the highest position that she was able would be able to achieve at that time she realized that she was making history because she archived her information at duke and north carolina central university i would love for you to take a look at her information and would be pleased if on behalf of her family you would strongly consider her name for that school take a look at her thank you very much thank you miss smith our next speaker can come on in andre robinson next will be crystal moore and deborah

024garrison good evening my name is mr andre robinson and i'm the pre-kindergarten exceptional children extra instructional assistant for lakewood elementary school and a dps instructional assistant representative for my school to the superintendent of the school board of durham public schools good evening and buenos noches and it's an honor and a privilege to speak in front of this gallery this is my first year working for durham public schools and i've worked in schools in virginia north carolina the two issues i will address are the over the limit of 150 hours per month for our work schedule and the availability of com time for teacher assistance from discussion of all the instructional assistants almost all are working above their hours to the on to the amount from 15 to 20 hours per month bus duties for example

025at some high schools where the students are dismissed at four o'clock but sometimes the bus arrives at 5 30. this pattern accumulates into five to seven and a half hours per week over the limit also some are being pulled out to help out in classes where not many substitutes that are not available for the school day and receivers have to pay with could which could be given or not given depending on the school cafeteria which is now changed to outdoor lunch or in the classroom in case of inclement weather could not could be another example of how teachers or sisters are being pulled out and not receiving time time from my understanding is being implemented from school to school how come tom may look for instance for a liquid middle would be different for liquid

026landers another instance would was the continent could be not reused except for when foods are not in class and cop time couldn't not be used a month after is accrued the plan that we have discussed with dr babanga and ms bear from the board is that comp time will be implemented across the board in every school in the 55 schools of durham public schools and how comp time is used when it's accrued to us we have 471 instructional assistants of the the the best and the brightest of durham public schools we are dps and we put in the spark in every classroom and ignite limitless potential some have part-time jobs children elderly to look after and other commitments we are the hands and feet of every school before i take my seat i would like

027to thank dr lubanga and the board for the opportunity to work with the um students of durham public schools and listen to our concerns that are being addressed to help us to be the best for our students up during public schools have a blessed dps evening and carpe diem and adios adios crystal moore deborah garrison and then next will be rachel owens good evening i'm crystal moore i am a ecia at riverside high school and i am the representative for the um instructional assistance association at riverside um tonight you're going to hear a lot of us talk about pay and time and comp time and the tax system and compensation um i'm here to talk about that but not in the traditional way you would expect classified staff in durham public schools make up a

028very large portion of very important roles in our school system i'm sure that you've seen classified staff in schools you meet secretaries as soon as you come in the office they are the kingpin of their school they know everything that's going on in their school and where everyone is you walk past custodians who work tireless tirelessly and are often understaffed throughout the pandemic making sure that all touch surfaces and classrooms are clean and sanitary you may not see the lunch staff but students do and they are challenged each day to provide a nourishing meal to students and miss a national shortage and manage to somehow do it to the best of their abilities every day but you may not see an ia in a classroom and if you do you may not actually know what

029it is that we do each role that is provided by a certified staff member of durham public schools is important but instructional assistants seem to be a kind of enigma as a role i'm not going to stand here and try to list off all of the many duties that i do each day there just isn't enough time in three minutes but i'll do my best to create an abstract of what my day looks like as an ecia a job that i love and what providing duties as needed and boy are there a lot of them there is bus lot duty and carpool duty and breakfast and lunch duty there are the secretarial duties of copying and filing and answering classroom phones there is the luxury chauffeur service of escorting students to bathrooms and specials media

030the media center pe the front office there's nursing duties of toileting and tube feedings and catheterizations the actual instructional duties of one-on-one in small group instruction and of course the endless covering for teachers to attend meetings go to ieps be sick pick their children up from school or other duties as needed and somehow we managed to do this and more and do it in five and a half hours because we aren't compensated for more than that even if we end up clocking out at eight or so hours due to said as needed duties it feels like sisyphus is stone because you clock out and the tax system says 7.5 even if you've been there for longer after all com time we are only given calm time and it can only be used when students aren't

031in the building i would challenge the board to please come into our classrooms and see what we do thank you thank you deborah garrison or deborah i'm not sure and then the next person will be rachel owens hey good evening all good evening my name is rachel owens i am a teacher at northern high school and i'm also one of the architects of the proposed resolution for dps to transition to renewables that you guys were emailed earlier this week as a high school science teacher of 22 years i have watched this issue of climate change come into the consciousness of my students slowly but surely over the years and in a way no other issue has during my career it is the defining issue of their time they understand that we as a society have

032to make huge changes in the way we consume they understand that industry has to care more about the welfare of the people who buy their products than they do the bottom line they understand that as pre-consumers in their young adult age they are not able to make the decisions in their households as to what products their parents buy for them they understand that the healthier safer more environmentally friendly products are usually the more expensive ones and that families don't always have the option to choose them over their more over sorry over their less healthy counterparts they understand that they didn't create this problem but they are the ones dealing with the brunt of its effects they understand a lot more than we give them credit for what they don't understand is why some in older

033generations refuse to comprehend how important this issue is and how their decisions and choices supremely and overwhelmingly will determine their quality of life for the rest of their life they do not understand how the least we can do like recycling and adjusting the thermostat a few degrees here and there are so difficult for society they don't understand why the simple things like clean air and clean water aren't a priority they don't understand why we can't elect leaders who care more about their welfare than making money for the fossil fuel companies that are funding their campaigns actually they kind of do understand that one but they don't like it they don't understand why this issue is not at the forefront of every single economic societal and policy driven conversation on the streets in every household in

034every boardroom and at every level of corporate and governmental decision making on this planet we must do better we cannot let these precious children down any longer they didn't ask to be here in this time in this mess that we made it is time that durham public schools transitions to renewables and it is time that we match the city of durham and the county of durham's commitment to transition as well so please please please take this consideration for our children this consideration this resolution to to your heart and please we asked for your consideration thank you thank you next we have dale everetts or evarts and tom campbell will be after that right the first time thank you thank you thank you dr mubenga madam chair and the dps school board for extraordinary service and

035leadership during these extraordinary times i my heart goes out to you all for what you've had to deal with in terms of health equity inclusion during a global pandemic and pay attention to education so my name is dale evarts i'm my wife betsy and i live close to where i was born at watts hospital i met with the climate reality group solar schools team that rachel just spoke about and i'm speaking as a former dps parent and fingers crossed maybe a grandparent at some point and supported the resolution of transitioning to renewable energy that you just added to your agenda so i worked for 30 years at the environmental protection agency we're at the air quality office the clean air office where we were charged charged with setting clean air policy for the u.s for

036the entire u.s it's not just a regional office here during the last third of my career i've had a group focused on air pollution and climate change so i learned a lot about how air pollution affects children's health and and we also developed tools that illustrated the disproportionate impact that air pollution has on disadvantaged communities of color what we now call and refer to as environmental justice michael regan who you may know got his start in this office and became north carolina's secretary of environment environmental quality and is now the epa administration administrator the good news is that powering our schools with clean renewable energy reduces climate pollution that disproportionately impacts low-income communities it provides students the tools and experience that they need for the new green energy economy the one that they're going to

037run by saving money on utility bills there's money more money for staff teaching resources extracurricular programming in schools serving low-income neighborhoods and it creates the possibility for resilient emergency shelters that can be safe havens in the time when the lights go out because of extreme weather in terms of health schools powered by clean energy help to reduce cancer heart disease asthma and other respiratory diseases in children they create healthier environments for physical activity and outdoor learning more than 50 000 students in north carolina suffer from asthma and this is the main reason they miss school global warming increases air pollution and airborne allergens and with that the rates of childhood asthma and of course the days they will miss school so i know you want these health and equity benefits for durham schools and this

038resolution will help you get there thank you tom campbell and then next up will be bob thomas uh good evening my name is tom campbell and uh i am also here to speak to the proposed renewable energy resolution that you recently received in an email i am the proud father of three durham public school graduates and um i also way back in the 1980s when most of you were probably still in school yourselves served on the durham city council from 1981 to 1989 and from 1984 until i retired from the council in 1989 i served as chair of the council's finance committee and from that experience i'm guessing that you're sitting here now rightfully thinking to yourselves well this idea of transitioning to renewable energy is all very well and good but how on earth

039are we expected to pay for this when we already can't pay for so many of the things that our schools and our students need so i've looked into some ideas of how to pay for this and the two handouts i've given you are part of what i've found so far the first based on a cost estimate from one of the largest solar companies shows that you would likely save money if you use bond funding to pay for solar installations the same calculation would almost certainly hold true if you use bond funding to pay for energy efficiency upgrades in our school buildings so i hope that you will join us in asking the county to include funding for solar installations and energy efficiency in the upcoming bond issue the second handout comes from a report made

040at monday night's city council meeting with the chart showing that the city government can reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80 percent by 2040 at a net cost of 4.6 million or less than 250 000 a year so i hope you can see that transitioning to renewable energy is not going to be mission impossible and it's not going to break the bank school districts all across the country are setting similar goals so there will be plenty of opportunity to learn from what other folks are doing and with the increasingly dire warnings that we are getting about global warming your students will surely thank you in the coming years for taking these actions now thank you for your service hello i'm bob thomas uh i'm a constituent i don't have any kids in the

041durham public schools uh thank you madam chairman wherever you are there you are and uh over there yes there you are and uh but i have a nephew who's gone through the public schools like my girlfriend's daughter went through the public schools and i believe school is very important and uh last time in the last election i ran for congress on the republican ticket for this district and planning to do so again and i'm very interested in unity i believe we're never so strong as when we're united and i consider that some of the recent things i've seen in school boards have been divisive and i would like to make sure that there's nothing like that going on in durham public schools and for that i'm interested in seeing whether or not there's anything with

042critical race theory going on in our schools so i'm interested in finding out about curricula i'm interested in finding out about what books are being taught and i'd like to know how i can do that and for this i brought this and i will give it to you so that i can be contacted about what's be going on because i'm very interested in contributing to unity thank you very much thank you the last public speaker for in person is jessica vandy hi it's actually jessica bondi but thanks um so tonight i come to you because i have no understanding of how the young men in our durham public school system can be treated with such discrimination as they are i come to you because of an incident that was on september 15th at my son's

043high school where an athletic director walked into the locker room of these young men nothing's been done that i can see nothing's been done that these boys can see you can't tell me that the same thing would have happened had a man walked into our female football player's locker room our female football player who is amazing gets the utmost respect from the players as well as the rest of the staff in the school the boys don't get that same respect they didn't that day and because there's no visible consequence they're still not getting the respect they deserve they're still not getting treated with the same rights that they deserve to be treated with that's it thank you i believe our administration is working on that issue um we have since we have exhausted our time

044for public comment we did have some that were submitted online those have been sent to the board and they also are available on our website so we won't have time to read those tonight mr cetera if you'll get a break but they are available on the website and have been sent to the board the next item on our agenda is our consent items we have two tonight a purchase agreement with tent and table and hillside right of way with temporary construction easement for a new go triangle bus stop as soon as the review those consent items have been sent and reviewed to board members in advance move approval of the consent items second been moved by mr seer second obama's vallyadares any other discussion yes i do have some discussion points um a lot of

045gratitude uh for everyone who is making the outdoor uh lunches the outdoor eating a success i know it takes a lot of work but you know we're adding more tents and so this is this is a good thing because i know every school was allocated for in the original order and there's additional uh tents that are being asked for um and just a point of clarification these are schools that want more tents than the ones that were originally allocated correct so the um initials initial survey um garnet 45 tents that were requested um this is for 60 so that'll bring us a total of 105 tenths that's enough for each one of our schools as a matter of fact a couple for each one of our schools thank you so much for all that and

046i also just want to thank a lot of folks who have been emailing us just in support of outdoor eating and learning um i did say i was gonna just say some something about all the the the things they were saying so you know the the folks from bike dura the folks from the center for environmental farming systems i met with them as well college of design at nc state um and we got letters of support for outdoor learning from individuals within the environmental affairs board that submitted a letter of support for outdoor learning and eating and so all these retro all these installations will help with outdoor learning so they're being used right now for eating but the idea is that you know it will also facilitate out their learning so we got a

047lot of letters and i just wanted to make sure i did right by um cefs the core in between and all these other folks um but the bike durham uh folks that also submitted support thank you all right so all in favor say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign passes unanimously the next item on our agenda is the board of education mask mandate vote as you all know by state law we are required to vote monthly to keep face coverings in our schools i move we continue how do i move this we continue the mass mandate for durham public schools okay it's been moved by mr lee seconded by miss byer any discussion all in favor say aye aye any applause any opposed please use the sunday that passes unanimously the next

048item on our agenda is operation services we'll start with the resolution um ms buyer would like to bring ms smith also has a copy so if you could project it for us so thank you for adding this to the agenda and thank you to the speakers that came to speak on this mass valley virus and i had a chance to meet with some of the folks that are bringing this to our attention and i think it's so so important that as we consider new construction as we consider our vision for the future that we consider how we can lead in this area and really set targets for ourselves that are strong and that lead us forward both in how we're building how we're powering how we're emitting how we're teaching children and i think this

049is probably too lengthy of a resolution for tonight but um i was hoping that we could just introduce it i have sent it to dr monk and mr schnitzer for their feedback and i was hoping that y'all might take the next week or two and look through it and see um you all received it as well um from groups community leaders and then i hope we could take action on it at our november fourth work session is that ms iadars you probably had things to add to that i just wanted to introduce that briefly yes um just just wanted to say that um the the main point is that the city and the county have already passed resolutions there is a goal that the city has that by 2030 will be um uh 20 there's

050goals for 2030 and 2050 by 2050 it'll be 100 and so the city and the county have already done this and they have asked you know whether dps as another governing body will also align with the city and the county's support of this and one of the things is also speaking of cost speaking of some of the ways that that the documents of financial documents over time i know that we we have duke energy um there were conversations about the um franchise agreement with duke and that that was that there were a lot of there was a lot of advocacy of the franchise agreement still a lot of work to be done in terms of not having dependency on energy it's going to get costlier over the years and so one of the things is

051how do we take back ownership of our own energy which is going to go up everything is going up right now and so this is a long-term planning and they provided a lot of numbers in terms of bonds also there are a lot of people moving into durham who have yet to contribute to education a bond would mean that that they also get to contribute to what is to what is happening and so we want everybody we don't want it to be taxing everybody who's been living here and paying into it but we want everybody who's coming in to to do that so that that is one of the conversations that have been said but um the resolution itself just kind of aligns us with city and county goals for renewable energy thank you thank

052you miss validaris and ms buyer for bringing this to us the resolution is about three pages so i would suggest that we ask the administration to review it and then bring it back for our work session where we could read um it did you have a comment mr lee i did um so you know reading through this i i support this uh this work absolutely um however i want to make sure that you know as a resolution on the board level that we make sure that we keep it generalized there are some specific directives in this um resolution that may become a problem you know you know like our funding comes from the county and uh having requirements stated in a in a resolution can get kind of tricky if it's not funded right so

053i want to make sure that we use language as in like compelling and you know asking and so forth to be included in planning and things like that i want to make sure that we keep it on the governance level instead of the action level so that it could be successful so we can successfully pass the resolution we can successfully ask the administration to make these adjustments in there but again that's my input on it but i do support i love the idea when we were in the uh signing of the beam at lions farm you know um there was conversation about with elementary school f trying to put solar panels on the top right and so i thought that was a really good idea i wish we could do that for every single school

054but i don't want at this level at a resolution level i don't want to say you have to you do that to every single plan every single as i want to make sure that we move it up to more of a governance level in in the language thank you mr lee bring that back to our november 4th work session the next item on our agenda will be the durham public schools 10-year cip update i'll pass it over to dr monk and his team thank you and good evening uh chairwoman homestead dr mabenga and staff and other board members um tonight staff is going to do a presentation at the end for consideration of the board make a recommendation and we approve this updated cip plan that was first developed in 2020 in conjunction with durham

055county and then authorized us to work collaboratively with the county to incorporate it into durham county's larger um as you will recall the first cip that we did in 2020 was for about 500 million dollars this is from the cummins report that was commissioned in 2019 which actually indicated a capital improvement need of 757 million dollars 500 million dollars which was deferred maintenance um tonight i was just quite a bit more but mr davis is going to walk through the rationale of why we're seeing some of these increases and just to remind the board that this is also coming at the behest of the county whenever you all met as a joint body in august for staffs to work together to update that cip due to some of the rising construction costs as well as

056to add additional projects to it and extend it out for a couple more years so for with that i'm going to turn it over to mr davis to walk through the presentation thank you dr monka he pretty much gave you the cliff notes of this presentation but i want to highlight a couple of things good evening madam chair vice chair board of education dr mobinga in administration i'm frederick davis director of construction capital planning i'm here to give you an update on our 10-year cip for those who may not be aware the cip stands for our capital improvement plan next slide please so why a capital improvement or 10-year cip the cip not only tackles the much needed improvements to our building portfolio but as a part of our five-year strategic plan under priority five

057the cip aligns without your strategic goals uh by 2023 and those are to have adequate appropriate classroom spaces as well as improve our physical environments for safety and learning next slide please we measure these goals and benchmarks to address classroom and capacity sizes and we're doing that now with lions farm which is under construction and will be opening in 2022 elementary f or soon to be named thereof opening in 2023 as well as our six elementary schools renovations and additions will address our strategic goals in terms of education suitability one of the joint goals that we heard from both our boards of education and county commissioners was to have universal pre-k and ec programs district-wide with the renovations and the modernization of our school buildings we're designing and constructing schools to address safety and security

058along with our learning environment guidelines which is what we use as our design standards to employ new construction renovation of our projects as well as ensuring 21st century learning those 21st century learning will be found in northern high school with common areas and pullout spaces that in a traditional classroom program you would not find that next slide please so here is a recap of our 2020 cip approved in february of 2020 as dr monk has stated again this program and estimates were based on the 2019 long-range facility assessments this list is prioritized again based on our pr strategic goal in mind the total again over the next 10 years was 508 million dollars and as dr monk stated this covers the deferred maintenance costs as well as new construction but in the report of the

059750 million 550 was solely for deferred maintenance so you see that we still have a gap in which to achieve next slide please so this evening we're here to provide you an update uh based on a few considerations uh these considerations are broken up into academics and operations uh uh in an august meeting with the joint uh county board as well as our board of of education the county spoke or addressed a relevance to updating our cip based on some of the findings that they saw in their construction plan due to construction costs escalating as well as labor shortages universal pre-k was also mentioned as a highlight as a goal for both boards at that time cip due to increased construction costs has led us to look at how we can re-evaluate and prioritize with

060the onset of covet indoor air quality considerations additional program space outdoor learning classrooms an increase in administrative space and the need for sustainability goals we are going to work with our county finance department to understand and reflect those adjustments next slide please so if you remember in august we came to you with an update on the six elementary schools as well as elementary f of the current design and the request for an overall total budget increase due to some of the considerations that i mentioned in the previous slide the commerce report was the basis of design for our original project budgets and in the cummins report it really was a life cycle tabletop meaning that if the school was built or if the chiller was replaced in 2020 and being that it's 2020 one now

061based on the life cycle costs you would want to look to replace that so it really did not get up under the hood for an analogy to really look at what we would face in these particular schools and so in february of 2021 of the county commissioners and finance team provided us initial funds for design of elementary f as well as these six elementary schools as well as the feasibility studies for both jordan high school as well as durham school of the arts during the initial design of the discovery phase we identified additional opportunities and further aligning our district's goals under these projects in the discovery phase our consultants did a more detailed analysis of just what was need to be considered and thus you have the new proposed budgets next slide please so our

062new updated cip currently has the first round of projects which include northern high school next and it concludes with new renovations allocation for space utilization school needs such as the new ignite academy as well as much needed administrative space next please these updates totally reflect the marketing conditions both now and the anticipated construction dollar increases due to yearly escalation um as you see the estimated roughly 860 million dollars worth of knee over the next 10 years by 2031. the cash flow was indicated in your initial packages on how the money will be broken out over the next 10 years next slide please click please so this evening also along with the updated cip we are here to bring you findings from one of the feasibility studies of durham school of the arts which was included

063in the first round of prioritized projects i have with us today nema management who over this course of the summer did a deep dive in looking at the opportunities the risks and challenges for durham school of arts as well as durham public schools we have with us today mr stephen hess as well as rob everett who will give you a deeper dive in their findings i'll be more than happy to answer any questions regarding the cip uh as they conclude their presentation next slide please thank you good evening everybody my name is steve hess i'm with nema management i had the pleasure of working with the staff of dps dtw architects barnhill construction and raimi kemp to do this feasibility study of the construction options for the durham school of the arts next slide please

064so we during our study we came up with two questions and the the first question or the primary question was does the gregson street campus best support the mission and vision of a 21st century modern school of the arts the campus the gregson street campus was designed and built in 1906 it served several different reconfigurations for 90 years in 1996 it was reconfigured for the durham school of the arts so it was a 90 year old campus when it was re renovated for the durham school of the arts it's been served as a campus for the durham school of the arts for 25 years you know some of the examples and challenges that we saw the black box theater used to be an auto body shop um there's challenges of the site again as basically

065a 20th century site trying to ensure that it can meet 21st century standards with stormwater control traffic carpooling and there's multiple building levels that make it challenging to secure and provide access the buildings also box in opportunities the the challenges of the older buildings make it hard structurally to integrate new technology new hvac day lighting and classroom side size next slide please the secondary question was how will external constraints impact the design of the gregson street campus and the external constraints that we're talking about are accessibility ada requirements impervious surface limits how we manage and control storm water security and safety best practices and then the ncdot carpool stacking requirements next slide please so the accessibility and security challenges we did a site survey and there are over 68 exterior doors to secure makes it

066challenging to visit the campus it makes it extremely challenging to lock down the campus during an active shooter situation and there are 69 stairs and ramps to navigate designers can create ramps and work the site to meet the different elevations but at the end of the day there are five or six buildings that are at different floor levels that you can't raise or lower so that's really hard to overcome next slide please and then external carpool stacking this uh these photos were taken uh september 2nd of this year and what i discovered and i waited three or four red light cycles because i couldn't quite believe my eyes the carpool stacking goes all the way back to west uh to uh chapel hill street and i i checked and waited and you can see the

067in the set in the middle slide there's an empty lane folks who know where they're going go through that lane everybody else in that lane was stacked all the way back up to west chapel hill street if we renovate the gregson street campus ncdot will require us to make sure that all those purple lines are stacked inside the green box next slide please so we looked at four different options for dsa we looked at option one which is a phase renovation on the gregson street campus option 1b was using old northern with current northern as a swing space allowing us to do one a single phase renovation of the grayson street campus option 1c was to go to the market and find a commercial space and use that as a swing space and then option

068two was to build a new campus on the duke homestead site the duke homstead site was purchased five or uh five to ten years ago for the purpose of building a new school next slide please the cr the construction criteria that we looked at were schedule design schedules zoning and permitting construction cost phasing schedule and market escalation affect costs obviously the more phases the longer time it takes the more construction management fees you pay and then risk we looked at risk as far as safety of children and staff of dps we looked at risk to scheduling cost zoning environmental analysis and approvals and then the risk of ncdot traffic requirements next slide please next slide so our schedule summary um we recommended duke homestead uh both duke homestead in the old northern swing space are

06923-month schedules which would allow us to occupy in fall of 2025 we chose duke homestead because it has a higher certainty of schedule there's no unforeseen conditions it's a brand new greenfield site the old northern swing space is the same time frame but we have uncertainty and risk in the schedule due to renovation both the renovation of old northern swing space and the renovation of the gregson street campus and then an occupied renovation would take 48 47 48 months and we'd be able to occupy the gregson street campus in 2027. the challenge with that is we don't know what we don't know uh there's so many unforeseen conditions that we really won't understand that until we get into it so there's several challenges next slide please next slide the costs were we looked at costs

070we um looked at uh we worked with barnhill and came up with some conceptual square foot cost we weighted those costs based on schedule extended general conditions cost per square foot for renovations versus new we increased the contingency for the renovation to try to address the unforeseen conditions but again that was just an approximation and we recommend a duke homestead site as the best use of uh dps's money it's it's 120 million dollars projected it's four million dollars more than uh option 1b the old northern swing space but there's higher cost certainty because it's a new school and not a renovation and for the extra four million dollars you get a modern school and you still retain the gregson street campus for conversion to highest and best use the commercial swing space was is is

071red it was expensive 150 million dollars and the challenge with that was basically the leasing cost and the the upfit cost next next slide next slide so with risk we looked at several things the first one was uh four years of of logistics on an already tight site if you can imagine if you've visited the s the gregson street campus or during carpooling imagine carpooling and construction trucks and concrete trucks and stone trucks all happening at the same time it'd be extremely challenging the other thing is this is this broke this diagram broke up this the campus into four phases the challenge of separating students and allowing and providing that clear accessible safe path for the students from one phase across a construction site would be extremely challenging it could be done but it would

072be challenging the other issue that we found that we discovered is the risk of accessibility the 68 stairs and ramps that we we'd have to deal with and also um uh the car pulling and security risk next slide please so dsa the the gregson street campus infrastructure has had deferred maintenance for quite a long time and we can identify certain issues on the surface crack concrete walls that are bleaching and may not be um weather type the challenge is we don't know what we don't know um the the picture in the upper right i just pulled a grate up and looked at a storm drain that storm drain just at the surface is over 60 blocked um so i did provide a contingency for some of this stuff but there's no way that we can

073identify all the costs with these next slide please and then we talk about traffic impactors and traffic impact factors and if you remember the the side of the carpool stacking we worked with rainey kemp they did a traffic study for us it was just a high-level traffic study but what they told us is for 2000 students uh ncdot requires 1.87 miles of carpool stacking so i did a sketch that sketch in the upper right corner that would if you can imagine carpool stacking all the way up to demeria street and around that's what's required dot would not let us do that externally we would have to figure out how to do that on the site the lower left-hand corner image is a 50-acre site 58-acre site at duke homestead which would allow us to stack

074the carpool the other issue that we have is gregson street and duke street have a capacity of 10 000 vehicle trips per day and the dsa adds 2 000 vehicle trips per day uh greg since the duke homestead campus there's plenty of capacity in that neighborhood i think it's um guest road has a capacity of 25 000 vehicle trips per day and current well in 2017 there was a survey done that showed that it was only being used by 23 000 cars a day which showed a capacity of 2 000 cars next slide please so far risk conclusion we recommend duke homestead for the reasons that we outlined earlier it's it's new construction we can quantify the risk um the occupied renovation has the highest risk due to student safety traffic and environmental concerns next

075slide so in conclusion we we did a graphic uh score you know red yellow green and then we put some numbers to them just to make sure that our intuition was right and duke homestead was the best suggestion as far as schedule cost and risk and then the uh the phase renovation had the most risk any questions thank you so much for this presentation board members any questions it this is all like logical like and i appreciate the depth of logic that you're at i don't know how to quantify and include the voices within the dsa community and the the love for that site as you know troubled as it is and multi-access points and you know the rich rich history um i don't know dr monk is this a question for you where are

076we at with this decision and engaging you know the dsa community as part of this decision so um we have met with dsa leadership to discuss um the opportunities that will come from this uh recommendations and some of the challenges um that we will face if we remain there i would like to also point to the cash flow that's at the end of this presentation as a part of an attachment with this item that speaks to our plans for dsa in the future um even though with the site the building itself for all the historic value that it has um keeping it in the dps family and using it for a higher use as um as mr has spoke to i think that there are some things that are going to be challenging to get

077around as it relates to the building as it is this the traffic is um is is one that i mean that's going to be driven by codes ordinances things like that um if we were to remain on campus then our goal of have of expanding dsa to 2000 students we're going to be looking to shrink it um maybe to a thousand or so students um because recall we're talking about putting the queuing on the campus so that's going to be more of the campus being used for roadway versus new facilities for our students to learn in the other challenge is the the building itself um while historic um was not built to be a performing arts school we have an opportunity to do all the things that we say that we want to do as

078it relates to um to performing arts and build the types of spaces that are going to give our students the opportunities that other students are having in other districts that are that are doing these performing arts schools we also have hillside new check which i believe we're going to be talking about a little bit later on tonight that is growing and hillside is also growing and those groves have come together dramatically this year as they struggle to try to coexist on the same campus this gives us an opportunity for hillside new tech to have a home of its own so to speak and continue to grow and provide those students with an opportunity to excel we also have ignite right now they're split between a couple of different campuses and the e-learning centers is we

079don't call them necessary classrooms the e-learning centers um are being run out of mobile classrooms that we have reclaimed from carrington for the time being but those spaces as we continue on with that school will need a place to grow and then just administrative spaces that that the district needs as it grows we renovated the many fort brown center to increase for our multilingual resource center but one of the things that we're learning through the pandemic is having more of a mixed use type of facility where people can come and talk about transportation and school nutrition and have someone there from multilingual resource to um to address their needs is beneficial that helps parents from having to go all across the district and have a one-stop shop so i say all that to say the

080opportunities are great on a number of um of ways and we may not get this opportunity again this is not that often that the county actually comes to us and say hey add more things to your your cip as we we look to um increase your capital funding no that's that's a great answer and a lot to consider i guess i'm unclear are you asking us to make this decision tonight without any input from the dsa community like other than you've talked with leadership like this is the first that they will have heard of it and we will have made this decision y'all are vacating your campuses and we're building you and is that where we are with this decision because i i feel some unease about that um sure so what we would say

081is um this is a capital improvement plan recommendation from from from staff much like we did the original 500 million we set out the criteria that we were going to use to prioritize the uh the schools and as you would note many of the schools as a matter of fact all of the schools that were on there originally remain because that's what the board said was a priority dsa is still up there and in the same slot the thing that must be considered as we continue to uh to move forward with this is is that there's about a four million dollar difference between the path that we were going before which is renovating and trying to do additions on the site and what we're proposing with the new facility what we know more now than

082what we did then is because we've had funding to to have someone to go out and look at the site is that we will likely not have 2 000 students at dsa if we decide to remain on the site it will be something much less than that the board along with working with the county put dsa high on the priority they funded enough for us to do this research and we have a meeting with the county next month to talk about moving forward with what that cip is going to look like which is also going to spark conversation about how much the next bond is going to be and when that needs to be on the ballot so time is certainly of the essence here um i think that what staff is saying to the

083to the board is um and and i get the the community input certainly um but what staff is saying is that we're going to keep the building in the family and that but there is a decision to be made to you know spend 116 million for less students in a building that's you know i don't believe personally um is the best use for uh school of the arts um or spend the additional four million which will be a part of the cip and um and really build a state of art facility for the school of arts and that's that's really where we're at as it relates to dsa but tonight we do need to get a sense from the board where we want to go because there's some information that we need to get to

084county staff and stand with the spirit of what both boys asked us to do into working together and to um to come up with this cip number but let me just uh add these to miss bias concern as we all know crp is a fluid document and as you all know we've been able to add two more years as a matter of fact i had a meeting yesterday with uh our interim county manager so definitely we really want to respect um our dsa families and the community as well for that reason that's why before even bringing this plane to the board we met with the leadership team to to present this plan but this is not going to hurt um as long as uh the body will give us the pleasure to proceed i think

085uh our community should be able to provide the input uh feedback as we presented tonight and we'll be able to bring those uh inputs or feedback that will receive from the community uh probably at our next board that's going to be the will or if we're going to give it another month to be able to gather those feedbacks that'll be fun but the crp document is pretty much fluid we're working with our county staff and we can bring this back to you at any time let's go with mr lee next to them you miss valedars uh thank you all for this presentation um anyone who has uh driven anywhere in the vicinity of dsa during around four o'clock we all understand the pain of that and anyone who's been inside we all understand the pain

086of uh the toughness of this of the school inside um i am actually really excited about this duke homestead option um dsa is a highly ranked school that's nationally recognized and we have the opportunity to build a true arts school of the arts campus on duke homestead i've been out to the duke homestead site just for field trips for my my little ones and i know we're not going to be on that part but just the duke homestead area i can imagine a campus fit for a nationally ranked school the openness you know and possible i'm just throwing stuff out there possible amphitheater outside you know just green grass you know just areas for photography areas for outdoor chorus i mean just a true of the arts like you know just a national example of

087what a school of the arts could be and i'm i'm sure there there will be feelings for hanging on to the to the site but i think there'll be more excitement about the possibility of moving this program to a school befitting a campus and a building befitting of the program that it has become um i just i get excited when i think about you know what the building can look like what the area could look like what the experience would be now i live in north durham so i recognize that there will be more traffic up there we use carver all the time but looking at you know you know we're talking about outdoor learning spaces outdoor lunch moving forward into the future and i just feel it would be safer for this campus to

088be at a duke homestead site if we're talking about true outdoor learning true outdoor lunches than it would be in downtown durham not that i believe that there's an issue with crime or anything but there's a lot of traffic around around dsa there's a lot of things happening around dsa and so um i do think we can use the current campus as great space i love the idea of moving what is to become of new tech possibly there uh ignite academy there office spaces here i mean this used to be a school correct if i'm if i'm remembering correctly and doing it the same way for administrative we have that is prime real estate and i hope that we can use the the site for you know our administrative pieces but also you know it

089could be a central hub for durham public schools in down in downtown durham so i support the idea and i i like the idea of making sure we're going to the community going to the alumni and you know talking about the plan itself we definitely have to communicate with them you know i'm um i think as we as a board we look at things and we want to make sure that we lead in those decisions and saying this is what's best but we want to get your input how can we honor those who went to this school you know is it you know uh everyone who's gone here even before it was durham school of the arts you know you could buy a brick you know or you can get a big brick transfer to

090the new plate to the new campus or maybe it's a pathway of the bricks of alumni from the building you know have it printed on the those sorts of things to make that connection i'm not saying i mean we wouldn't be tearing it down i know it sounds like that i'm just saying i'm trying to give some examples you know of trying to make the connection between the two and you know i i do think alumni would understand why we want to change uh why we wanted to change to you know move the program to a new space but also there are some historical things that are not pleasant about the building you know and moving the program there to a new build or maybe help to them to grow the community together in the

091program itself so i for one i support i i i truly support fully the uh move to duke homestead but like miss buyer said you know i really would love to get input from alumni families on how to honor the current location with the new new location that's the angle i would love to have that input but i think we as a board we have to we have to come out and lead and say this is the best option based on the information that we get but definitely getting that input about how do we honor the site and alumni with the new location thank you i want to thank um thank you so much for this presentation i do have a couple of questions and i um echo uh you know enthusiasm for um pool

092grounds that are spacious that are wonderful that um you know meet the the expectations of our community um and and also projecting to the future i do have uh questions related to the actual duke homestead um specifically around the the fact that it is on the ellerbee creek watershed and um i just want to know if there are any conversations about impact because anything that we do it's already a given there's going to be great things like we talked about in terms of like you know the space the ability to dream up everything it can be but there's also environmental impacts that are just part of the whole thing and i'd love for your analysis to include more of that environmental impact yeah especially for um thinking a place like duke homestead you know i

093look at all the trees you know it's it's known to be a historic site and what is that conversation about the historic site um about stormwater runoff and the fact that falls lake is already impaired it's considered impaired and it's polluted and so how are we as you know a district uh also being really intentional about you know our own wins and the things that benefit us as a district that is growing but also ensure that in our processes that we are also being environmental stewards and having those direct conversations about how to mitigate and reduce harm um so i'm i'm more interested in if you know down the line if you all can include you know like how are you going to deal with storm water runoff like storage ponds how are you gonna

094ensure that we're not causing uh impact that could uh could harm and i'm also envisioning the connection to the trails being that it's on the early brief watershed and there's already like a trail there's there's a whole lot of uh opportunities for our kids to benefit from you know existing trails and existing things but the impact is also very important to me that's a great question and it's a great point we did not do a deep dive on the 58 acres at duke homestead what i will say is we will need to address the same criteria on the 28 20 acres the gregson street campus and on gregson street campus for instance we'd probably have to do underground precast storage tanks which are extremely expensive i just we just installed one it was a half

095a million dollars on a site that was a quarter of the site of greg's industry so um what i will say is that environmental issues in stormwater will be addressed as they are on the northern high school in every project the 58 acres gives us a lot longer runway to address those and address those well thank you so much yes ma'am uh mr raven i have a question about the durham school of the arts um because i see the cost for that one is 120 million and we're looking at 2 000 students and i'm looking down at the jordan high school also for 2 000 students and that costs is 150 million so i i guess my question is is it a capacity reason um county-wide um as to why we can't engage try to

096engage both of these schools at the same time and if you could just kind of follow my reasoning i'm wondering if that additional 30 million costs is due to the delay in time before we could actually get started on that school and i just wonder if we also maybe even communicate this to the county that there could be a potential cost savings of 30 million dollars by actually engaging in in two projects which i i understand it's a huge undertaking but you know when i when i think back to my mba program we we had a capstone and the capstone um dealt well one of discussions dealt with like the southwest model the southwest model they were actually able to save a lot of cost on a lot of their recurring costs because they had

097all of their planes were essentially similar so your replacement costs and everything else like that it's a it's a big savings when you're having to operate buildings in which they have a similar layout they have similar parts and i'm just wondering is is there that ability to to gain some efficiencies by you know simultaneously trying to engage this i know it's a lot and it kind of goes without saying that i support a new uh durham school of the arts and at a new location just uh uh just just from my family's history my i was in one of the very i think in one of the first three years uh during the the integration of durham high and my mom followed she graduated in 72 so this is back when it was just term

098high and even back then it was old you know and i think to myself i was in the very f i was in the first full class at southern um when we started in the class of 05 so the class of 94 they were there but it was half a semester so the class of the graduating class of 98 we started the 94 95 school year we were the first class that was there in that school that entire school year so it's also important to get the thoughts from the students because a lot of times you know we as adults hold on to history more so than the excitement for students who like something new and they gravitate to all the things that could be and it's a way to kind of also pick their

099brains to see you know what they could actually visualize because they're they're they're they're the future and i would love to see some of the things uh that mr lee mentioned um you know come from the students and and get some of their perspectives on what a campus could really look like but i just think that there's a huge opportunity that if we're looking for two schools both supporting 2000 students if it's a way to save 30 million dollars by some way engaging it even if it's a you know five million dollar cost on each side you know because of the additional costs just because it's so hard to get that get that workforce to be able to engage that i know that's a cost we're dealing with this in real life but that would

100just be something of interest to me but i definitely support a new site for for dsa thank you uh so in short the answer will be probably um and mr hess can speak to the jump that we saw basically between 2019 and now as far as what the construction escalation is typically it's about one to two percent a year we've used for this um scenario five percent uh per year beginning this year with updated cost per square foot cost and then extending out to when construction starts uh when we brought the original 500 million to the county we asked for it all at one time um if you look at the cash flow on page 77 you'll see notes beside each one of the school one note in particular is whole per county request so

101that's why we're not doing all of the elementary schools that we had prioritized initially because the county asked us to start with the first six plus the dsa based off of what we had in priorities we also recognize though that we want to make sure that we can build on the existing jordan property uh because you know we had to move off of northern purchased land and all that that can impact what this construction cost is going to look like as well and so that's why they gave us money up front to do investigative work for the jordan site that work is still ongoing and once we have um that information in hand we would do just like we did with the six elementary schools in august where we're doing the night with dsa bring

102it to the board and say this is what our designers this is what our construction managers are saying it's going to be possible at this site so um i always recommend doing having all money up front so that you keep moving you know one of the things that you all did a couple of weeks ago was we requested to move money from lions farm to do some other capital improvement needs and that was because line farm was already funded with the 2016 bond referendum we go ahead and start we got good bid prices on it we as you all saw last week at the um the topping off ceremony making really good progress we're past the time where we're having large you know funds for change orders and things like that now we can address

103other needs elsewhere so yes to your point the more things that you get to do at one time that does take away some of the uncertainty of what's going on but to dr mabenga's point um you know who thought that we were going to be with 13 you know inflation whenever we were first looking at this in 2019 no one so we don't know what the future holds once you get much past five years or so um it's time for you to be rethinking and pushing out for the next 10 years anyway so um i think that as many projects that we can get up front funding for and begin on the better off we will be um but we were sticking with what the board had agreed to previously as related to putting together

104this cash flow um and then updating um the the number of projects that we were going to do thank you i i again i love everything that i saw i just hope that we could you know take that opportunity and if there is the savings that can be moved elsewhere to some of the other projects because i i i just always have to make that assumption that projects this large there are going to be some costs increase especially like you said once we're dealing a few years down the line and i would love to be able to kind of get that that golden star for us thinking ahead and trying to engage as early as possible so thank you mr sears yeah i just wanted to thank the administration um for the the speed at

105which this is going i i agree with several of the board members that this is rushed uh especially the communication piece with the dsa and i don't want it to be 2070 before we can look at our infrastructure and say okay we're finally you know catching up to all these top 15 lists that we find ourselves on so i i think these these kinds of decisions are going to have to go fast and we're not always going to be able to please every stakeholder that's not a reason not to engage and i i applaud our team for working really quickly i'm looking at the growing together website we just wrapped up the first round of conversations we're about to start the second round where we share out the data so we are working quickly but

106we're working diligently and if we find that we're not getting enough voice that's data for us on the next cycles that we see in the next 10 years of the cip so i can be in favor of moving the dsa site up further north and getting that state-of-the-art campus that i think we all want um and i'll just share what i shared with administration earlier that i also want to see this in a domino plan we have these high-value properties value in history and location and we're sitting on one of them here and you know how are these things going to work together can we generate any revenue can we do some mixed use so that we're not having to put everything in bonds or push maintenance uh needs further and further out so for

107what that's worth thank you thank you mr sears also to want to say thank you to the administration for bringing this it's a very complex issue and i appreciate how you all did your rankings um you know the proximity that the dsa campus has to downtown i always see students walking to get their coffees or do that i think is is nice but i also like mr lee when you talked about what could be at this new campus can't help to be excited about actually a state of the art campus i agree that we do need to have some input from those families and the students that are there but i think if we can talk about what can be and what couldn't be at their current site i think that hopefully could inspire um

108what we need and i also just think about the trying to do renovations on that campus with students there feels like we'll be there forever those like large safety concerns and then even that site when you all talked about the carpool i mean you're exactly right and kids are kind of frogger in their way to get to their cars that's also not safe right um option when you're there during that carpool time so i think we think about safety we think about what can be this new site feels right and the vision for keeping that in the dps family feels good as well also i was at dsa a couple weeks ago and was visiting with some of the um ec teachers in the classroom and their space is down in the basement of dsa

109and i also thought huh as you were talking about a new campus that we designed some of these new spaces with our ec um needs at the forefront we could be having a whole different kind of space right instead of being in the basement of where that dsa is so i think those are where i see opportunities that can better serve our students um but i also i mean i love history i love nostalgia so i was like oh something about the campus not being there but it's still being in the dps family i think makes me feel like okay we can do that we can make that switch and we'll still have some students who'll be enjoying that space adults will be also enjoying that space as well but this is for action it

110sounds like and dr mabing you also mentioned the cip is a plan so we could move or can't move what is the administration's pleasure on this tonight our pledge is uh to get your votes so we can move forward and the same time we'll find ways means and way to be able to engage our community can i get some clarification from dr monk like there is so much unmet need and i wish we had done it years ago we always have that conversation it was cheaper we could have done more with public resources here we are now so we don't have anything in here for middle schools in this plan that i see and then we have a lot of elementary schools listed that have extensive needs but they're all bracketed hold for county requests

111so can you clarify for me what are you prioritizing just those six elementaries 120 million for a replacement dsa high school theater renovate like show me a list that we're actually like gonna take over there and say really really these are our most needed things is that how you're thinking about it and you know i still thought we were looking for land for jordan because i have serious questions about the ability to replace that one on that site as well so maybe i'm missing on this specific slide but what are we going to take over there all right are we at that spot yet where we're going to like have our prioritized list i always think of this as our prioritized list yes this is our prioritized list we have uh 23 prioritized projects on

112it totaling 857 million dollars this is a cash flow that's uh and what the county wants us to do is say if they approve this as a part of their cip what they're saying is um we want to use lobs for some of it we're going to use bonds for some of it and maybe even another bond um four years from now to uh to pay for the rest so the cash flow is more about timing and their ability to cover the debt that they're going to um to be assuming to to fund these projects um but our prioritized list is uh are these 23 projects now we'll say also though um to meet some of those middle school needs um and in other facilities and and even schools up here until we um get

113the comprehensive we are using lottery funds we're using existing labs limited obligation bond funding and the county increased our capital um by to six million dollars annually and committed uh that that's that's a real game changer as it relates to some of the things that we're that we're trying to do and so um those are funds that we didn't necessarily um have in our arsenal to address some of these capital needs before well that's helpful so the conversations you're having are different than ones we've had in the past where we've gotten our list cut severely you're optimistic that the county is going to meet these needs over at least the next two bond cycles that's and lobs in between so that's what we're trying to communicate to our community that that's our optimistic view of

114how it's going to go let me add this in the past the county will work on their own crp and dps will produce their own i think moving forward we've been working together so our staff as well as the county they're working together they're fully aware of what's happening and myself and accounting managers well we know that this bill of 150 million dollars is coming through so we have pretty much on the same page fantastic thank you uh miss valuedaros i just um short comment i want to thank you so much for you know bringing all this to us all the details um i want to highlight that i have heard from community members advocating for southern and i did see southern on there for the theater renovations um there's definitely more needs um the

115southern community has you know over time just been talking about how that that school also needs a lot of renovations as well so yeah you mentioned lottery funds you mentioned all kinds of funding and just just for community members who are concerned about southern um what is down the line with with lottery funds and some of the other ways that we're funding um so one of the things that the board approved a couple of weeks ago was funding for structural improvements and one of the schools is southern looking at making the bleachers handicap accessible at the the football stadium and things like that in addition to that we we'll like to say you look at shepherd middle school carrington middle school [Music] brogdon middle school we've been able to use the increase in capital funds

116that we've received a county from the county to not only address some of the um the infrastructure issues that we have there but also to address some of the educational suitability so if you go to shepherd for instance you'll be able to see the mute court has been um renovated and hopefully we'll see kids in there in action uh very soon we also did a forensics lab there we're doing outdoor learning there we did a maker space there uh that's one of our schools that's the iv uh magnet that we hadn't seen the um the enrollment that uh that we had expected and so uh we're addressing some of those classrooms that students are gonna be learning and so they can come and see what's possible same thing at uh at carrington so that's what

117i'm saying we're going to be using this increase that we've gotten from the county to not only address our infrastructure needs but also some of our programmatic needs as well and just a quick follow-up um bike racks um i did hear from you know we are having our students uh getting training on bike safety and biking as an alternative mode of transportation so i'm really glad about the bus stop at hillside which is in our consent items um but there's no bike racks you know in a lot of these schools and wondering if lottery funds are being used for that as well so just as we're looking at cip and some of the infrastructural uh supports bike racks is something else that folks have been um we would definitely add it to the list board

118members again this is up for action i think we have heard very clearly the administration i believe has heard that we want to make sure we hear durham feedback from durham school of the arts so we can move this tonight but also you know bring revisit if we need to in november if we hear feedback from from the community i think some of this will be also a part of explaining to the community what we see the opportunities are here but this is again up for action to remove approval of the durham public schools 10-year prioritized cip well second the move i'm inspired and seconded by mr lee any other questions discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign passes unanimously thank you all on the team for your

119hard work it's pretty amazing to see the new things that are happening when it comes to schools and facilities um in dps so the next item is naming of elementary school for you good evening board members uh following your district policy uh 9 300 which you uh put into place in august of um administration is bringing before you a menu of options uh for your consideration in naming elementary school f we went to the community using engage.dpsnc.net and encouraging people's participation through social media for their suggestions and ideas about names for the school we reached out to families um and then people in the neighborhood and to the broader durham public schools community just as a quick recap uh your policy uh says that the superintendent shall involve uh students staff and students who have

120been assigned to the facility although that has not yet happened because there is no assignment zone there um and we'll consider the following criteria in bringing recommendations to you the name would not be similar to the names of other facilities this next one is important schools will usually be named after geographical features townships regions community characteristics etc this was a key piece in naming lions farm elementary school the name should include a designation of the type of school schools may be named for individuals upon group nomination um and the the policy has a bias in favor of people who had an impact on durham public schools students in specific and then a couple of other minor points there but those are the highest points of your policy after reviewing the uh community sub the community

121uh submissions through engage.dpsnc.net and looking at the geographical features we bring before you four recommendations they are not prioritized or ranked they are for your consideration the first is third fork creek elementary school which is extremely specific to the geography of elementary school f and it most directly adheres to the letter of your policy third fork creek elementary school it took me several times to practice saying that and that is a significant con when you're talking about an elementary school and children who are learning to try to try to save the name of their very own school in terms of popular support um the name paulie murray came up very frequently on engage.dpsnc.net the most popular suggestion by community members by far and staff recommends if you go this directions considers uh using the just

122the surname murray elementary school in such in somewhat the same way that lucas middle school exists that would recognize a nationally prominent civil rights activist and hillside alumnus however as i said policy 9300 really does favor site-specific naming first and then naming after individuals with significant specific impact on dps and i will note that we had a speaker tonight um as an encounter example betty daritha masenberg was a city of durham city schools educator she did not receive a a large number of nominations but that's an example of a different kind of naming this choice the other two choices that we present to you as options include valley ridge elementary school which is uh geographically on target and it reflects adjacency to hope valley farms without like without being confused with hope valley elementary school

123or rock creek elementary school which is also refers to the general geography it's easy to say especially for children but it's a more generic name a couple of other names that had been considered included beacon ridge there is a ridge on the geographic site but it is um it is the same name as a housing uh development in raleigh so there's potential confusion there um and of course there is always one person who submits school mixed mcschool face as the name of the school bless their hearts so we have so we have four names for your consideration uh here third fourth creek elementary school murray elementary school or paulie murray elementary school valley ridge elementary school rock creek elementary school and uh in this case uh the superintendent and administration do not have a strong

124leaning in any of these four directions we present it to you for your discussion and your creativity mr setters is this for action tonight or just for him from direction it is before action uh i checked the wrong box didn't i um this this could be for action i will defer to um dr monk um and other staff to see if there are any time constraints on this but these are the results of the community engagement that we did thank you no time constraints no time constraints all right mr lee i came in here 100 with murray um the thought of murray however um i'm hoping that we can extend this conversation a little bit more to uh consider um to study a little bit more about miss um honestly before tonight i did not

125know about miss massenburg i looked at the website um it's quite compelling um i know that we our policy favor site specific um but to be honest i think it's important for us to highlight um those are who are important community members as well um i know there's challenges with that however i think we as a board we have the ability to to um to uh to do such a thing as i said i came in fully supporting [Music] paulie murray elementary school murray elementary school because i i supported that as well with lions farm i supported the murray name but when we were thinking about names for lauren lyons farm but you know lions farm actually the story behind the land actually i prevailed and i supported that as well so i'm hoping that

126um me personally i like murray but i like the story behind miss masenberg you know being the first african african-american female principal it was durham city schools at that time i haven't heard many fort brown's comments at her funeral i had i hadn't heard anything like but i did read about her and uh i would compel us to think about that you know it does she does have a significant impact on durham public schools she her her history was significant in durham public schools um and i think paulie murray she was impactful on civil rights in general as well you know for globally so those are two two very strong names that i would like for us to consider um going forward but the more i read about and learn about miss mathenberg um the

127more i'm being pulled in that direction so those are my thoughts about the names and if we don't have necessarily have a strict timeline now i'm hoping that we can narrow it down and have more discussions about the two and come to a conclusion between those two if if others don't have any other suggestions thank you mr sears and then ms lewis so having having lived down in that area and been walking past that future elementary school for i think 18 years in 2003 is when i first saw it i i don't like that just just talking to my fellow board members i don't like the second two names because i don't think anybody in those areas use those terminologies valley ridge or rock creek i'm guessing that's generic it is not it's a creek

128that runs along mlk down there um third four creek is a real thing there's a trail there there's a city station there so i came prepared to say i like third fork creek but dropping the creek i like third fork elementary but i also like paulie murray elementary and i actually like the paulie in there because that's how she's known she's not it's not dr king elementary she's known nationally and is getting some attention as paulie murray um so board members that's my two cents thank you for talking about the geographical names and i agree with those points as far as dropping creek i think that would be helpful with the tongue twister um i was also ready to support paulie murray until the massenburg family came and shared their support and the reason why

129so i hope that we would also consider the mastenburg name as well i do think about i just want to lift up when we're doing surveys we also know what the research shows as far as marginalized communities input with the survey so we can give grace that it may not have the number of names but by the presentation the website and even this that was shared with us by her family members that we would consider that as community support and engagement i also want to just take a quick point of privilege i don't think that this email went to everyone but um for the polly murray i did reach out to the community to get feedback because i know that was a name we had considered before and one of the main things that i

130heard was it cannot be performative that we named the school paulie murray but we really are digging into what she did in civil rights activism um i have a letter from i just read my name is rosetta rosita stevens-hulsey i am an educator working in prince george county maryland i am one of the five living nieces and nephews of the reverend doctor paulie murray the 88 year old matriarchal family is legally blind therefore i usually represent and speak on the family on the immediate family's behalf i'm not sure if members of your group have already made the decision but i thought i would let you know that we would be honored to have a school named after her especially in durham north carolina i could forward i packed it with information and detailed some of

131the highlights of her life and accomplishments so just having that additional engagement really meant a lot as well so and one other point i want to raise is in looking at the landscape of durham public schools we only have one other school that's named after a woman jd clements so i think that i would like to consider what it would be like to name this either mason berry maysenberg paulie murray or the geographical reason region that we're talking about and if we can get more community engagement with the presentation of these names it's really hard to make a decision i would love to see that thank you miss byer i really appreciate the work that staff has done and and the input of my colleagues i actually am feeling really called to pauly murray elementary

132i think there's a reason that our community keeps sharing it with us and i appreciate not only her role as a civil rights leader but as an lgbtq pioneer um and as you know a hillside student it seems a missed opportunity to not have something named after her in in our community um and we have her birthplace that's just gotten some some grant money for renovations so that will be a national attraction um i don't know miss massenberg but i look forward to learning more about her i wonder if there's a way to incorporate her name maybe in the media center or some other thing like there doesn't have to just be one naming opportunity for school we don't get to build enough of them um and so you know my my only hesitation in

133naming after our staff is that we have so many that we could never honor them all right and and clearly the first african-american female principal pioneer is an incredible thing and then the second and then the third like we have amazing people so um i wish we had more things we could name after people that's my only hesitation in in going into families and who we leave out um but i look forward to a decision with you all soon uh we've got miss valedares and then mr raven i want to thank you all so much for setting up a process like engage durham which i think you know it's a process that it's going to take time to for everybody to kind of start using it so i mean i am very open to um

134you know the the results from german also adding you know community involvement and of course this book you know uh betty from roots to the top you know i really think uh the massenburg family and community members who reached out as well you know to to say that you know we can't just rely on one process for now i mean as we start getting some metrics about how many folks are actually contributing to engage germ and we're going to keep building and the momentum is going to increase but at this point you know i definitely want to support um the top choice from the engaged durham which is polymeric and also for us to add um betty d harris matt miss betty d harris mastenburg to um to our engaged german definitely community members um

135this is this is definitely the importance of process and letting us know how to improve our processes because you want we want to be able to hear from the community um and those uh clicks those um those metrics do matter i do want to check with you as our director of communications um is what what is the feasibility of kind of putting it out for more feedback and opening it up with with the choices absolutely and what we can do especially what i am hearing in this moment is i'm hearing movement towards three options um betty doretha massenburg elementary school paulie murray elementary school and third fork not creek elementary school as possibilities and we could refine that we can present those three options through all of our platforms not just engage.dpsnc.net but meeting our

136latino families where they are on facebook primarily um going out into our community with flyers and information about three options and giving people an option to email i'd love it if we could find a way to have a text back platform i'm not sure that we've got one but there are things that we can do having specific options now that we've solicited ideas it focuses people it focuses people to uh engage with something more specific i think we still got a couple more comments to make to see where we where we land um mr rave i i appreciate the opportunity for more feedback i was going to ask a similar question mr raven well i support miss mastenberg being the name of the school representation matters it's one of those things where a lot of

137times if it doesn't necessarily impact you it's a it's a little bit harder to see the net benefits that's why it is so important when you're when you're thinking about the name of a school you're thinking about the lives of the children that you're impacting when they're walking through those doors when i when i look at miss massenberg's resume i see some of myself in it she went to central she took classes at a t she went to payovo state so she's a she's a hbcu student also the very first school that i went to the first elementary school in durham i ever attended before going to oak grove was failure street when you when you find out the elementary schools that she taught at or was the principal of bellevue street is the only

138one that's still open um and if every anybody knows anything about durham you stay with elvis street long enough it turns into fayetteville road you make a right you're on to mlk and the school is going to be right there in that area so i support it um i also i also be well before the meeting it was between that and and um murray elementary school um i definitely see value in that as well it's just as of right now i resonate more with the history in the life of miss matsenberg so that's that's who i would go with if i had to make a choice thank you mr raven um and thank you all administration for the work you you put into this um i agree with some of the tricky names so i

139feel like we can cross um third fork creek if we're gonna do it drop one of those names and rock creek i don't know they just didn't they don't speak to me i will say uh and i live right around that corner i'm like i don't call any of these areas i think i want to direct this though to our policy around naming facilities and it does say that schools may be named for individuals upon a group nomination um and so i just want to make sure that we continue to follow what we've said in our policy so i the the life of miss mastenburg also i think speaks to me and i wonder if we could open up for additional feedback i think uh murray has come because in multiple of our school naming

140sessions that has been continuously from many constituents included and so if we do where to open this back up and maybe have both um i want to make sure again we're following our policies that we stay said and voted for and not veering too far off of that i think also if there are many different ways to honor people and so if the school naming is not the right way how else do we honor her legacy here in durham you know is it putting a plaque up do we rename some of our awards to be after her like what are the other ways that we can honor that legacy i think it's important that we do that so people don't you know forget we need to talk about the history and the amazing things that

141happen in this community so i think we can narrow this list maybe keep one of the directional or geographical places just for people to have that option murray and massenberg and then we could allow for a group nomination to come forward but i do think it's important that we stick to the policy that we that we wrote and we voted on and committed all right that's a long with the board's permission i will bring uh to for further community engagement those three options third fork elementary school betty to aretha massenburg elementary school paulie murray elementary school thank you right do you i'll say do you you don't need to vote on that not not at this not at this point all right we'll ask you for the vote when you decide to name the school

142thank you and to more schools naming academic services we'll go to hillside new tech high school renaming update dr hardy good evening board members madam chair dr rabinga we could have thank you so much dr pack and dr wright perfect and if we can pull up our presentation we'll go forward to the next slide please tonight's presentation is a follow-up from our september board meeting where we updated you on the realignment of hillside new tech high school to the cooperative innovative high school model with a focus on computer science and information technology dr tanya wright proud principal of new tech high school and dr julie pack executive director for career technical education and magnet programs are here to update you on the renaming process dr pack thank you dr hardy and good evening board members

143last month dr wright and i met with you to discuss the upcoming changes to hillside new tech high school as a reminder we plan to end our relationship with the new tech network which will require us to rename the school tonight we're here to discuss the renaming process and as a reminder the renaming process will take into account the status as a cooperative innovative high school with a focus on computer science and information technology next slide please oh sorry next slide please uh based on feedback from you we accelerated the the timeline for renaming the school on the screen is our updated process for bringing a name recommendation to you at the november board meeting at the beginning of october we notified the school community of the intent to rename the school dr wright and

144her team collected input from students faculty and community members and names were suggested they are being compiled as we speak almost and we are in the process of narrowing those names down to the top three to five selections to bring to you at the november board meeting next slide please so after uh the official name selection by you on november 8th 18th we'll share the new name of the school community and began promoting the new name and focus of the school at our november 20th virtual showcase of schools and beyond we will work with the school administration and community as well as our public affairs office to develop new branding and be ready to launch the new name with the school this summer and with that next slide please it would be our honor to

145answer any questions that you have what members are there any questions i just want to say thank you all for taking our feedback and a listening input from students who are at the school i'm sure you'll get some good suggestions maybe some funny ones as well um but i think it's important for the community to have some input on what what their school is going to be so i just want to say thank you for that and no other questions from board members think that might be it awesome thank you thank you all for the great work uh the next item on the agenda will be revised school calendars dr hardy thank you board members this item is in your packet for our technology team if you would like to display the prices for our

146community members this is available for the community as well good evening again dr rabinga chair umstead this evening we are presenting to the board for action tonight revised school calendars for the remainder of the 2021-2022 academic year first staff recommendation reflects a proposed conversion of friday november 12th into a mental health awareness day for durham public schools staff and students this would be a non-instructional day for students and staff would have the option to work remotely asynchronous activities will be made available to encourage mindfulness movement and self-care the second proposed change is to bring alignment between the year-round and traditional school calendars monday january 3rd 2022 and monday february 20 excuse me monday february 28 2022 would be made into teacher work days on the traditional school calendar this would align the number of instructional

147hours offered and both dates correlate and align with our year-round calendars all of our proposed changes are compliant with the north carolina state calendar laws and follow our durham public schools board of education policies this time this is before the i before the board of education for action we're more than happy to take any questions that you may have uh yes i'll start with um mr lee thank you dr hardy for this presentation thank you so much dr hardy um i kind of saw this coming yes with all the news um on the 12th november 12th and i'm sorry i'm not looking back at you my microphone's here so but my heart is with you here on the 12th is a it's a reward remote work day for staff no school for students will we

148be providing food for will food be available for students if you know like sometimes when we're when we're out we do meals or something like that i was just curious i mean no no sir okay everybody will be working when they're mental right mental health yeah um i get that all right thank you that's it any other comments from board members miss lewis i am um i also saw the writing on the wall and glad to see this before us as well and mental health is extremely important for our teachers staff and our students as well i wanted to know a little bit about the the guidelines around our asynchronous days in the statute is it that there's 10 days that's allowed in the calendar year i'm looking at you because i didn't want to

149turn and look this way we do have the ability for our remote remote learning days however those days there are specific guidelines for those particular remote learning days inclement weather and other emergencies and i'm using the language from from the law such as um i don't want to say catastrophic but those significant events for example like power would allow us to deem something a remote learning day and i know mr sue is also here so he could potentially speak to that as well we are using our banked hours for this we have up to six and a half days of bank hours so this does um making this a non-instructional day for students still keeps us in alignment with the minimum hours that we need to provide according to the calendar law and will give

150us flexibility in the event hopefully not but in the event that we have inclement weather or other things that may come up through the remainder of the year thank you for that and um i didn't realize there were the guidelines around the katashi catastrophe and things of that nature um i'm just wondering as i've been hearing a lot of conversation inquiry about wellness um having planned time in the calendar and if the asynchronous days could have been used to schedules to make that more schedule but if not so two questions what happens with the asynchronous days if they're not used at all and then what happens with the bank days if they're not used for banked hours there's nothing that happens if we don't use them but it does put us in a risk a

151vulnerable place not knowing um the prediction of weather mr sears and i were discussing pre-covet i want to say the 18-19 year we unexpectedly i think we used four or five days for inclement weather prior to thanksgiving due to two hurricanes and so not knowing um what would occur when you don't have those hours that you can use or the remote learning days now that we can use with inclement weather we could potentially be out of compliance there are some flexibilities for specific districts and mr sue can speak to this that over a number of years had a certain number of inclement weather days we were not identified as one of those districts so we do need to be cautious in terms of using all of those days not knowing um not being as predictable

152as as i would like you know it's just hard to predict um what could occur yeah i definitely appreciate the caution um and also knowing that now that we are one-to-one district and we have the ability to become asynchronous if there is inclement weather um for those opportunities i would like to to see if not using all the six bank days but maybe half of them keeping some in reserve but to really center what our educators are asking for with mental health and wellness that we can go ahead and put these in a calendar just being proactive but knowing that it's needed we could definitely explore some options thank you dr hardy i really appreciate you um listening to our teachers and um hearing how much they are giving extra and stressed extra and it's

153not just our educators it's all of our staff it's our instructional assistants it's our cafeteria folks it's our custodians it's our bus drivers it's our subs that we don't have enough of you know the whole whole list i think this will go a long way to helping them just reflect heal continue to to push through this year which is like unlike any other year we've had i wonder is as you all continue to listen to them if you've had conversations and thought of other things that we could lift off of them whether it's required meetings or plc's that get taken from the school level like have you had other thoughts that are not just this initiative but other ways that we can continue to kind of peel back some of that unnecessary stuff that feels

154like also cumbersome to them district wide we can definitely continue to explore other options we have been working very carefully in terms of professional learning that may have required our teachers to travel we have really looked at making sure that there are more virtual options for our staff and employees however we do appreciate your feedback and we'll definitely explore other options to be thoughtful regarding our employees yeah i really appreciate it i think if you opened like a quick google survey they would tell you kind of a whole lot of stuff that just feels extra cumbersome this year they say things like if i have to fill out another survey from somebody downtown about something that i don't have any you know they're just keeping their head above water and our children you know the

155same they're they're healing from trauma right and and it's very much a healing rebuilding year so i appreciate you all putting this time in place for them uh dr moving and then mr sears just wanted to comment on mr lee concern about nutritious meal for our students i think our staff have worked really well in the past even giving some frozen food to some of our students who really need those nutritious meals while they will be home for the 11th the holiday and the 12 so definitely will consider that yeah there were two two pieces i heard from the community that i wanted to share one was the potential for a request of one of these days for every month to finish out the year i think we probably all got that one and further

156um [Music] you know the one that made me check in with administration on something like this was uh one rock star teaching teacher telling me that another rock star teacher had just broken down crying and they never would have guessed that that would have ever happened so i appreciate you all taking this seriously and jumping on this thank you mr raven i first wanted to um just you know of course thank the administration for for moving forward with this early on i would also like to even ask our community as a whole to to also remember that the reason for this for this holiday and how it's connected because that that day prior is veterans day so one of the things that the county always provides is uh every november 11th at 11 11 they

157honor the honor veterans who have lost their life during wars many of them who actually attended school in durham public schools and their names are engraved in plaques there there's always um there's always a holiday for them um to celebrate their service so so that's the one thing the this second part is something that that mr sears already alluded to in which i've heard um some educators begin to advocate for more and more um dealing with trauma and resilience they i've heard some mention that you know that wasn't something that they went to school for um that wasn't something that's that was taught and and honestly that's not my area of expertise and i'm not i'm not aware of how you know recent some of these studies have been that have kind of uh touched

158on you know how that is implemented in a during the pandemic and and what tools are are being utilized and i know that's something that that we're already looking looking towards so if there is a way to kind of start looking at that because the you know the trauma is just not there for the students you know the trauma is there for our community as as a whole um but but more specific to the educators that who are asking for this this would be a great opportunity to at least make those types of resources available at times like this so thank you mr raven thank you so much for lifting up the trauma inform training i want to thank the board members you all have approved two contracts that actually helped us train at the

159elementary level tilt which is our trauma informed leadership teams and under the leadership of dr maddox perry our senior executive director for student support services we will have modules that will be available for students and staff during our mental health day for at embrace.dps.nc.net i may have said something out of turn since dr lissane has gotten up so i did i apologize now dr hardy you didn't say anything out of turn at all but i would like to use this as an opportunity to speak to our eap services we have a number of employees who are using we we can see the difference in the numbers in our eap services and we think that this is an awesome opportunity for those who are you know battling anxiety and all of those things to please use

160this day as an opportunity to reach out to those resources and to use them ongoing um through this time we know we recognize that these are hard times and we have had very positive feedback from a number of our employees regarding eap so just wanted to share that you didn't say anything wrong at all dr hardy and eap is free doctor bank if i'm a man chair um said just throwing her that this is for every employee um obviously our educators and our teachers have bent over backwards trying to make up the difference in the covet but i know i talked with the child nutrition person today you know and she was emotional about all that she had been doing through you know feeding children and just making sure they were eating our bus drivers

161everyone i don't want to list it because people you always leave someone off so yes please charge it to my head not my heart if i didn't list what you're doing but every one of our support classified staff are appreciated all of our certified staff so just want to make sure that it's completely anonymous you can call in there like dr lissane doesn't know you called i don't know it's only for our employees and during public well not only it's actually for your families also so um we can post that on the website dr lissette and i've been talking about kind of making sure those resources are more accept accessible to all of our staff so just wanted to add that thank you dr lisa and it is the information is on our website and

162this is not eap services of old there are virtual options there are a number of different resources and options to assist all of our employees doctor was saying before you can you just say what eap is if people are watching and not familiar my apologies you know we are full of acronyms eap is the employee assistance program thank you i do want to say thank you to the administration for considering this i know that our educators in a normal year worked over and above to make sure they meet the needs of our students so we know they're doing even that more in this age of covid and i think not only the stress of teaching but the stress of the needs of the students and the health and everything that's going on i think i'd

163like this as a start but i do want us to think about what our most sustainable ways for moving forward so i agree you know what meetings can we pull back are there no meeting hours at a school you know do we protect making sure we have teachers have planning time and i know people are getting pulled because coverage is needed but i just think about some of those sustainable day-to-day week to week things that help teachers provide a little time to breathe to eat to plan to grade i think another thing that's come up is a grading policy around students need to have a certain amount of grades per week like do we need that right now should that be an impact um if i personally don't know that a student needs five graded

164assignments a week to show that they've mastered a content you know they can be doing assessments that are not graded right in a class so i think some of those things also might be things that we need to look at that are policies that also might be creating more stress for our teachers and may not actually be serving our students in the best way possible so i appreciate this as a first step and i love you already has said you guys will continue to look but i hope we do continue to look for those opportunities to support our staff i have one more question about this work day for our staff that are paid for work classified how does this work out for when it comes to payment for them not sure if dr lesan

165or mr lashur or dr monk want to speak to that but we have discussed to make sure that we can provide that for our employees sorry good evening so one of the things that we need to take into consideration is that employees need to work to get paid without it being a school day and the buses running and food being served there have to be some other opportunities for those individuals to have a either come in or to be doing online training because we have a lot of training that's going on that needs to be done by the end of the year so those opportunities have to be made available for them if they take those trainings and do the work then we would there would be no question that they would be paid but

166those can be done online as well i hope we very clearly communicate that to folks and not just via email but go have those conversations and if some of our staff that aren't assigned devices but might need a device to do some of that training at home i hope that we also provide those opportunities for folks i think it's important to people get paid so i like a work day but i also want to make sure our folks that you know may do a traditional job that's not needed during the work day also have that opportunity thank you all this is up for action i believe i move that we ex i move that we accept the revised calendar as presented second been moved by miss lewis second obama aspire any other discussion all in

167favor say aye uh any opposed we say nay passes unanimously right the next item on our identity agenda is a covet 19 update i believe that's with you dr hardy thank you so much chair umstead and if we can pull up our presentation and we do have some our covet 19 team and so if they are available if they could join us you'll go forward one slide please good evening board members tonight we are going to provide an update on the covid19 team our testing program as well as updated guidance for volunteers athletics extracurricular activities and arts so go to the next slide please tonight we will have here with us members of our coven 19 response team next slide the primary goal of our coven 19 response team is to ensure that we do

168all we can to keep our students and staff safe and productive in our buildings this team meets that challenge both through implementation of our kovid 19 surveillance testing within dps schools but also in a faster more efficient contact tracing method coordinated by one team across the district by centralizing contact tracing and communications across the district this team also reduces the amount of time and energy principals and teachers spend focused on kobit 19 and allows them to return their focus back to helping our students meet their social emotional and academic needs finally to meet the team's first two goals requires educating and informing all of our stakeholders quickly and effectively as to what dps is doing to mitigate and eliminate the spread of copin 19 in our schools having a kobit 19 communications specialist provides that

169opportunity and allows our public affairs office to return to their focus on our district's message and district schools and staff so now it's my pleasure to introduce our team next slide please and i would like to ask miss prince to stand first leading the new covid19 response team is mr lois prince currently a licensed emergency medical technician for the state of north carolina and former dps employee so we are glad she came back home where she should have been always she has spent the last eight years working with blue cross blue shield in their operations and health care divisions as a medical technician for dispatch health miss priss brings a lot logistical and operational expertise to the team she also has two students that are part of the dps family so you can be assured

170that safety in our schools is her top priority welcome miss prince next someone you all know and are very familiar with our lead nurse howard who we would not have made it through working this pandemic without her she serves as our medical liaison to the team and coordinator with durham public health cannot speak highly enough of how much work and time and passion she has spent into building and supporting our coveted response implementation her knowledge and experience has been invaluable to the creation of this team and finally i would like to ask him to stand dr addison pate serves as our communication specialist for the cobin 19 response team dr pate spent nearly a decade in communications before realizing his love was in education and becoming a teacher in this role dr pate will be

171using the skills and experiences from both careers as he's already been instrumental in creating effective media tools to get out the message of our coven 19 testing program thank you dr pate next slide please this slide you have seen before just shows the organizational structure of our covid19 team and the next slide allows us to recognize our contact tracers by coordinating our contact tracers this allows us to provide the most efficient support to our schools when mitigating the spread of cobit 19. the contact racing team has been divided into regions as well as specific departments across the district we currently have five contact tracers on staff our goal is to have 10 and we are making recommendations and dr lissane's department is helping us quickly get our folks hired juanita avery serves as the lead

172contact tracer for the team as well as covers the central region of the district and the facilities maintenance nutritional and custodial departments joining her in the central region is annetta rogers who also covers transportation and has been a great partnership with our transportation department in the northern region we have shaunae and joining us on monday will be your melvis trudeau and and in the southern region we have yolanda moses we will have currently on monday one bilingual and it is our goal to have a total of three bilingual contact tracers these are front line individuals who support our schools and families as we continue to mitigate the spread of covid next slide to help make sure our new staff are identifiable when they visit schools our contact tracers will be wearing our district scrubs we

173were able to work with our operations team and we're actually using the same vendor that provides our scrubs and uniforms to our maintenance departments and they will have you can see on the slide they will it will be identifiable covet 19 response team next slide thank you so this is a model that shows the process of the response for a positive case so from this graphic you'll see there are eight steps between learning when we have a positive case and submitting that information to our health department first a teacher or principal is alerted to a coveted positive case the principal then immediately fills out our code questionnaire to alert the response team from there our contact tracers may be dispatched to the school and begin to assist with contact tracing this includes communicating with our

174families whose students may be considered close contacts and sharing next steps with them of what to do next if they have to quarantine with that information collected and contact tracing complete the covid19 team meets via zoom daily on the covid19 call with the impacted principles and other staff necessary to confirm the details of each particular case and make sure that we have appropriate communication to our families and staff principals are provided scripts to send out or to record robo calls in both english and spanish and our mrc staff are always on the call to help make sure that appropriate interpretation is provided that also includes the individual calls that need to be made to our families of students that may have close contact we have a wonderful partnership that is continuing to grow with our

175health department we meet regularly with them they also send us reconciliation emails daily and we submit that information to our health department to make sure that we are reviewing that information regarding cases that they might find out about each day and then after those eight steps are complete we start again i'm going to pause because the next section goes into testing and so want to see if there's some questions about our coven 19 team about the process that we use for a positive case and we also again have miss prince nurse howard and dr pate that can assist me in any questions you may have before we transition into testing board members are there any questions ms buyer i'm so appreciative of having this team here i'm sorry that we kept you here so late

176um we love you we couldn't do this without you every minute every day what i don't understand in these emails when we get them um is these cases that families are not notifying us about or the health department's not notifying us about can you give us some more clarity on how that happens and how we can help close that loop um surely there's a test somewhere that surely would go to a health department that would alert back to a school like do you know where that where that is getting jammed up and how or what in process we can support that better with so i will start and then nurse howard can add so a couple of things the first thing is is that when a family or a staff member or student does take

177a test if they live in durham county it is likely that that test goes to our health department faster than if you live in another county we want to encourage our staff our families as soon as you are aware of a positive case either if a staff member that may test positive or student to notify your supervisor that is the easiest fastest thing that you can do we have had some delays in communication because there has been a delay in notification from either families that have a youngster that may have tested positive so that's the first piece the second piece is once you do test positive and you are dropped into that health department system we do have two staff that work diligently just on durham public school students and staff and as they are

178reconciliat reconciling those cases as they see they also have access to the positive cases that we have so they will see it's kind of like a red flag right i don't see nikia on the list and so then they send us daily reconciliation emails we get those emails usually it's in the afternoon between 12 and 3 our contact tracing team immediately looks on those emails and identifies the principle to let them know that we have potentially a reconciliation case our contact tracing team also immediately looks in power school we have had some instances where a youngster may be on campus but often we've caught it and we can make sure that we can reconcile that case very quickly and then on the coded call that particular day we make sure if we need to have

179appropriate communication that we have that appropriate communication for the school so scripts as well as robocalls are then provided and then that last step is the board update that you received from chip i'm looking at nurse howard she was nodding i may have okay let's see if i left anything out yeah there's a lot to that it seems like there might be some piece that we still need to continuously communicate with our families about notifying us and why that's important um that's at least one step that we might be able to improve on i don't i don't there's a lot there and y'all are doing the work i trust you all to continue doing it the other thing on social media that was flying around that didn't make sense to me and maybe it was

180misinformation this week was some protocol saying that if a child went home with a headache then their sibling who was vaccinated still had to go home as well until they were could show negative tests and that didn't make sense to any of the families that were circulating is that misinformation that's flying around they said that we changed our policies that's kind of how they were framing it that am i alive all right so the sibling situation has been a difficult conversation for a lot of our families but it has been in place from the very start um when dhhs had their original guidelines it was spelt out in the original toolkit that you were quarantined sick the siblings of sick children we had at the very start a couple of cases where the sick child

181went home the siblings stayed the child tested positive the sibling eventually tested positive but that sibling was on campus for an extended time which now exposed had more exposure and actually the sibling rode the bus so for that reason we've had several cases of that we also have had situations where kid test positive the siblings are being sent to school anyway so while they're waiting a test so this sibling situation has been a stickler that we really have to be very careful about and i have spoken to so many families that i understand the frustration when they don't understand what has led to that but we just have to be super careful that if it just takes one day and that is one of the reasons why i'm such a stickler about those rapid tests

182that if that trial is symptomatic they can get a racket test same day 15 minutes rule alcovid that sibling could go back to school the very next day so that is why the rapid test on a symptomatic kid is going to be so pivotal once we start testing to get everyone back in school i thought we heard from i don't remember who but that the rapid test was and i may be conflating my own word the rapid test is solid for affirming positives but that it is questionable about confirming a negative i believe that was from mako so what the the rapid test is most sensitive when someone is symptomatic so if we have sick children a family could definitely use a rapid to rule out covered if they're negative and symptomatic they should follow

183that up with a pcr and that's exactly what we'll be doing with maple any other questions from board members i'm sorry mr lee uh again thank you all for this um i'm i'm really interested in the contract tracers it looks like we have one for each region what does capacity look like for you know i mean this the circle the positive case response process seems pretty uh involved and yeah go ahead exactly and it is and extraordinarily time-consuming and so um that's why we are extraordinarily appreciative of um dr lissane and our hr department as well as mr freeman and the mrc which is helping us make sure that we identify bilingual contact tracers we're at 50 percent right now and um we will get there um miss prince is actively interviewing and and making

184sure that we're checking references um making a phone call to a family um that takes time it is we we are sharing information and there is often a lot of anxiety and fear that your youngster may have been exposed explaining the quarantine process many of our families have jobs where they may not have flexibility regarding leave so adjusting and making sure that child care is available for the youngster explaining the process our schools many of our schools have some they have different process regarding how you're accessing learning so we want to make sure that we're clear so that each family knows while you are on quarantine or if you're positive when you're isolating that you can access your academics and communicating that so they are spending a lot of time on the phone um it

185is our intent to pull that back 100 from our schools we're not there yet in our questionnaire our principals or whoever is their designee that completes the form they let us know if they need help with specific calls and we also ask that question when we have our daily covid calls our contact tracers also have extended hours so we are covering the morning well into the evening and we've worked very closely with ms malone and dr monk we have a coveted email as well as a coveted cell phone that they carry so our team is available on the weekends and evenings if there is a question so that we can be responsive and that does allow them to call into the evening as well to provide support to our schools so so just for clarification

186so we have uh in the presentation it says meet the contract contact tracers we have annetta shawnee and yolanda and if someone else is going to be starting uh tomorrow are those the only ones doing the con contact tracing or do we have are are these leads does it sound that's what i was asking about capacity is this enough to do all of the contact tracing that we're we that we're seeing we need 10 and that's what we have been allotted okay we have one lead contact tracer and right now our schools are also helping okay that answers my question so this this is the start yes and we're we're trying we have allotment for 10. okay sorry that answers my question thank you and if you are interested please go to our website and

187apply apologize that was not part of the presentation but yes there any other questions from board members while we're on this portion i hope with these new staff members there's a little bit of relief who from some of the folks who've been carrying some of this covert work for so long in addition to all the other responsibilities um and so i'm thankful for the work that's happening so far i'm looking forward to hear a little bit more about what's coming next with the testing and pieces like that um welcome you all to dps just following up i'm sorry but some said i assume there's work on the weekends and i'm hoping that we've got comp pay and overtime and things like that for staff i mean this doesn't stop during the weekdays right i mean

188exactly and miss prince has worked with her contact tracers we have and we've shared with our principals the hours that we are available over the weekend so they can call that number in one of our contact tracers and we're working with them so that um their 40 hours that week is spread over that time early in the morning late in the evening as well as on saturdays and sundays and there was some contract nursing that we approved or have we made are are those people in place in any so we are working with maxim and maxim is a vendor that we use to not only provide our one contract that you approved was for contract nurses to help us with our vacancies we also have we also use maxim to provide individualized nursing services to

189students with disabilities that may have high need they are helping us however as you know there is a crop not only in durham but across the country a shortage of nurses so we are still not yet fully staffed with our nurses and we are continuing um to work with maxim as they send us candidates and then nurse howard bets them before hiring and the county hasn't filled any of those positions yet that we've worked with them on the county has filled their new i don't remember her title and nurse howard you'll have to go to the mic so that it can be recorded so the county has hired a new program manager for their nursing department as well as i believe last i heard there was one supervisor position that was filled as far as

190the updates on the other vacancies i'm not i don't have the latest update just as you all can think of any more creative ways working with our partners at the county if there's part-time folks that can help jump in there some i don't i don't know how we can do something but gracious i've got to get wonder if there's any recruitment that can be happening at some of the schools of nursing that are around we have watts we have nccu we've got dupe unc is not far you know how can we use some of those students or i'm not a health professional but can they intern with us can they do some of those opportunities that you know i'm working with some guys are saying right now that's actually in the works so that's great

191on duke's campus on the 29th the job fair and there's a couple of other recruitment events for nursing so we're working on it that's wonderful always ahead of the game all right thank you for this part of the presentation we'll keep moving so we'll go forward to the next slide we're going to transition so up to this point our primary mitigation strategy has been our education and this week we did begin our second strategy which is implementing surveillance testing so if you'll go forward one more slide surveillance testing is a process where our asymmet asymptomatic individuals are tested regularly to identify any asymptomatic cases within the building the test used is the standard pcr test or that little tickle of the nose test not the one that might be uncomfortable test with a student and

192staff population of close to 40 000 dps and our testing partner mako medical have chosen to use pool testing if you've seen our informational video thanks to dr pate then you already know but pool testing is when the test samples for multiple people are tested together in one pool this helps cut down on the time it takes to get all tests back and in our district it's the difference between close to 40 000 tests versus 6600 tests in a week those that receive a pool positive test will come back to school the next day and have a second individual pcr test to determine if they specifically have covet because they are asymptomatic and wearing their mask consistently and appropriately these students and staff may return to school for their second test once the second tests

193are completed and those are individual tests the second test the individual who tested positive we'll be isolated at home for 10 days and contact tracing will begin immediately of course should anyone show symptoms of covet 19 they should not return to school and should go to one of the testing sites available in durham the goal of this process is to identify asymptomatic cases isolate and reduce the likelihood of spread to individuals who may be more susceptible to the virus this combined with positive case contract tracing will likely continue to reduce the number of cases that we see in our schools next slide please to date we have had um and so just as a reminder to our community we submit our board materials early so the numbers that you see are when we submitted our

194board materials as of today we have 3045 or close to seven percent that have signed up for our voluntary testing since the beginning of october we've been ramping up our communications effort to get the word out as part of phase one which began this week we had five schools that participated in testing they have provided valuable information to help us in preparation for phase two which begins next week we would like to thank brogden middle school city of medicine academy club boulevard elementary northern high school and creekside elementary for their willingness to be the first in implementing our new testing program phase two begins monday to help support schools in the testing process in addition to having mako medical staff on site remember our central office staff members have also been assigned to individual schools

195and they will be there on the testing days to support our schools next slide here are some visual ways that you can see that we have been reaching out to our community it includes social media posting update updated website information informational videos printed in digital publications as well as testing flow charts dr pate is continuing to expand our communication efforts and we look forward to even greater communication and engagement in the coming months next slide i'm going to pause because our next guidance starts to talk about volunteers athletics and extracurriculars are there questions regarding um our testing program what i want to start with a thank you for the enormous amount of work this has been and then i want to express some concern that we don't have more folks signed up for this free

196public health wonder that we are offering in our community that is actually going to help us keep kids in school um i know some schools have pushed it better i think than others and and some have gotten better returns what ideas do you have like our folks are competitive can we do a contest can we make it make their um i don't know like can we do like washington dc where everyone actually has to opt out of testing rather than opt in that's their dr farabe's approach to that district i didn't know if we'd explored that um i don't i don't have a lot of ideas i just want i just want us to be testing the majority of our students on a random basis to keep them safer and in school miss fire thank

197you so much we are regularly monitoring the number of registrants and actually today our kobit 19 team and myself met with some of our principals that are having low registrant participation to talk to them about any other community outreach other ways that we can support them and so we are continuing to work with our families dr pate works closely as well with mr sutterth and as we are sharing this um and from this guidance that um will begin november 1st with you all today in our community we'll also be sharing that information um through social media and our website information as well um beginning tomorrow so we do think some of those efforts will help increase registrants um and we are definitely open to any other suggestions that you we have and we'll continue to

198work closely with our principals and our communities as we get other additional information yeah i wish i had other ideas i'll keep throwing it out to the community because i'm sure they do we have great public health professionals locally i just i think we got to start pushing flu shots y'all know we got to start pushing flu shots we got to start actually collecting vaccination information from students and and you know getting those rates up we got our five-year-olds come in hopefully next month right early next month for vaccinations so i look forward to like any sparks of innovation that we can do to keep keep leading in this area um thank you mr sears yeah i you know local data point doesn't mean much but i'm i was three for three and returning my

199paperwork for my three children who knows what happens right it gets used as a tissue on the bus right does it make it to the i put it in the folder i don't know if it got back right but i've gotten one confirmation right the system says okay your middle child is registered okay that's across two different schools so i can only imagine this is one of the billions of things that is the crush on our staff right now so i i have patience with this it's critical i'm optimistic that the shot coming up is going to be a game changer um i to to go a step further than natalie's point i i just don't think unless it's something like the health service takes it over something that just looks completely different it's gonna

200be in this this bucket of we have to do we're not even perfect at getting outdoors at lunch and breakfast and snacks yet i mean it's just another thing so thank you for doing the best you can keep pushing i'm not letting you off the hook but um thank you this is this is again choosing from the best of the worst options i had a few questions um on the pool testing and then day two students can come to school for testing like are we allowing students to ride the bus to school for testing and then if it does come back negative they'll come back positive their parent needs to come get them i'm just it concerns me a little bit they would ride the bus and i understand it's a pool so we don't

201know and then they get to school they get another test and the parent is like no i gotta come pick them up and i just sent them today so i'm just wondering if there's any troubleshooting that we're already thinking about on that process so um they would actually likely it would be the next day that we would receive that positive result from the second test so it is likely that we would be able to for many of them be able to catch those students that need to isolate while they are at home or not at school because it would be the next day there is a possibility and we have been navigating our situations very carefully and so we have set standard times we learned this is you know we've learned so much from the

202spring so we have most days we have two covid calls there are a couple of days a week where we have one copic call however we monitor the the submissions on an ongoing basis so misprints and the contact tracers as soon as something is submitted they're monitoring and in the event we see something that looks like we might need to discuss a closure we move immediately the team has mobilized they've contacted the principal and we don't let the set time determine so there was an email you all received earlier in the day our our actual call on thursdays is at 3 pm you received an email earlier today that we had to make a decision um and that was because as soon as that principle submitted we recognized that due to that particular situation we

203needed to make a decision quickly and so we mobilized and were able to do that so the team is we've listened to our principals and our staff so that we do have those regular times so that um they they can can adjust their schedules when and if they have a case but at the same time we are flexible enough to be as responsive as we need to to get calls work with families so that if we are aware of something they are not riding the bus to to potentially increase the spread that afternoon thank you and then i know we talked about for our weekly testing also for staff who are not vaccinated is that a pool test are we also going to be requiring the actual individual tests for those staff members so and

204they will be participating in the surveillance testing for mako so that will be a pool test however dr lissane will be working with mako and qualtrics i'll let her come to the podium to speak more about the staff testing so with regarding staff testing we will have a pool of employees who are required to test so those who have received um medical or religious exemptions just as an example those individuals we will have to track their testing so it's not just going to be random they will be assigned weekly testing thank you i think we can move forward to the next section okay so if we go forward to the next slide this next section we'll talk about volunteers extracurricular arts and athletics so if you'll go forward to the next slide currently durham public

205schools allows anyone who is providing a direct service to students and or staff to enter our building this will inc this currently includes professional tutors and other staff such as professional learning from any vendors or partners we have we will expand beginning november first to allow volunteers for such additional duties as supervising lunch in our schools volunteers will follow the process that is currently outlined on our gps website they will go through that particular online process through samaritan and then they will need to provide their volunteer vaccination at a station form at the school showing that they are fully vaccinated course fully vaccinated means at least two weeks out from the last vaccination a two dose with pfizer or moderna or one dose with johnson and johnson when coming on campus all volunteers will be

206screened upon arrival all volunteers on our campus will be required to comply and wear their masks appropriately and consistently at all times and when they have finished their volunteer duty so for example supervising an outdoor lunch we are going to ask that they leave our campus at that time next slide please also this evening with us we have some of our high school staff so we have mr david hackney who is here our director of athletics health and pe and drivers education we have miss drivel bus who is our athletic director at jordan and robert duncan our athletic director at riverside mr danny guilford proud principal of northern high school sean thompson cross country coach at riverside as we continue to talk about updates we are going to talk about our procedures for arts at

207arts and athletics and i am glad um we also have i think i missed one the jordan high school athletic director kristen gillespie and jordan high school softball coach so they can all perfect thank you so much and we can go to our next slide [Music] our athletics program is excited about the opportunity to see our students return to athletics as we safely begin our sports in the winter season so we're now talking about our winter season i know we're still in fall the dps athletic guidance update for winner 2122 has been developed to answer questions about athletics for the winter season this update is based on guidance from the centers for disease control the north carolina department of health and human services the durham county health department and in collaboration with our dps coven

20819 team our dps coaches and principals i'm going to highlight some areas of this guidance i'll start with facility cleaning the district has worked closely with dr monk and operational services to ensure that our athletic departments will have the necessary resources for disinfecting and sanitation facilities and equipment will be cleaned and disinfected before and after each contest face mask bottles of disinfectant boxes of wipes hand sanitizer will be distributed to our schools additional supplies will be provided as needed by the district via mr david hackney the following will also be implemented face coverings players and coaches are required to wear face coverings while not engaged in active activity spectators all spectators indoors are required to wear masks spectators without masks will not be allowed into our venues spectators are expected to remain seated at all

209times congregating in open areas will be strictly prohibited and finally durham public schools will continue the practice of using ticket spigot for online touchless ticket sales next slide concessions concessions will be allowed with the selling and distribution of pre-packaged food and drinks it is also recommended that concession stand operation limits the number of individuals working to accommodate adequate spacing i would like to clarify for our community and our board pre-packaged food means the food is properly packaged and ready for saline and distribution prior to the event not cooking at the event and then packaging there can be no preparation of food including packaging during any event testing of our athletes weekly testing will be required for all unvaccinated athletes to participate and play beginning with our winter season which begins november 1st school security measures

210bags are not going to be allowed in our gps athletic events and spectators may not re-enter any athletic contest after leaving next slide please our arts program is excited about our students already participating and safely performing and creating through the arts just a few weeks ago on october 13th we hosted our first district-wide arts event stage center with our theater teachers at jordan high school mr tucker is working with our arts teachers to ensure that our arts events continue to be offered safely for our youngsters our arts guidance has been developed to answer the questions about our arts program the updated guidance is based on the same guidance that we have received from the cdc north carolina department of health and human services our durham county health department and in collaboration with the dps staff

211the kobit 19 team our arts teachers and principals it aligns very closely to our athletic um update as well facilities and equipment will be clean and disinfected in preparation for rehearsals classes and performances we will continue to work with dr monk and our operational services team to ensure that we have the appropriate tools and resources for disinfecting and sanitation face coverings while outdoors teachers and performers are required to wear face coverings while not engaged in active performing audience capacity all audience members will be required to wear a mask indoors community members without masks will not be allowed or spectators excuse me will not be allowed to um into any venue face mask will be provided for community members if they do not have them as we would do so in our athletic events for attending

212performances our audience members are expected to remain seated at all times congregating in open areas will be strictly prohibited we will use our touchless ticket sales and weekly testing is required for all unvaccinated students to participate in activities at this time we are open for questions i want to thank our our staff for being here and their commitment to supporting our students we also have mr tucker was unable to be with us today but dr debbie pittman is here and will be more than happy to assist um in any questions that we have regarding the arts mr lee uh first thank you all after having a whole day at school being here at 10 o'clock p.m to stand there and wave it was a it was a good wave now it was a good wave

213you know but uh no uh i had a just a question um we frequently this is i guess it kind of has to do with sports uh we frequently rent out facilities to community locate to community groups uh athletic associations and so forth for basketball and other indoor activity cheerleading and so forth but what's the status of that where where are we on that oh facility rentals outside groups are still limited to exterior rentals not interior uh do we foresee um renting uh internal places at all this winter i'm not sure about the winter uh maybe as we go into the spring that may be an option depending on where we are and that's fine either way it's fine i just want to make sure that we um we can communicate that i've been getting

214calls uh just from being involved with different different groups um so we communicate that so they can make other plans so i just want to want to do that also this bags regulation here bags are not allowed in any dps athletic event um is it possible to have like clear bags a clear bag policy or something there there's there may be a need for people to carry something you know like just just something and or maybe we need to describe what bags mean you know does that mean purses does that mean backpacks does that mean just a little more descriptive on that because um i know you know just various people have various reasons to carry some sort of a bag and i want to make sure that people are feeling comfortable carrying their necessities

215in some sort of in some sort of way so i want to make sure we're a little more descriptive on what the term bags means in this policy thank you so much mr lee for that feedback i will work with mr hackney and our principals to make sure that there is some additional clarity thank you gonna jump on that since you were talking about bags micah had a similar thought and i wonder if we need to have a similar policy across events you know it's for athletics but then it's like i can take it to the chorus show so like should we keep a policy across the spaces just to keep some consistency there got a thumbs up from dr hardy other questions from board member uh ms buyer yeah i too want to thank

216you all for everything you've done during the day and i don't know why you're standing here at 10 o'clock at night i apologize for that profusely um i feel like we need to send you all home um a couple a month ago we talked about vaccinations for student athletes were coming and it sounds like y'all have gone a different direction than a vaccine requirement for student athletes and i just wanted to hear like your thinking on that and how we got to where we are um that's what i'm curious about thank you miss bye for that particular question that's the reason why we have our staff here till 10 p.m we really wanted the folks that uh do the work and um interact with our families and uh they'll be the one pretty much just

217planning day where i should now so we'll start with a mr harkney pressing again i was good to go okay good evening everyone um thank you for your question i think the biggest thing is in polling coaches and athletic directors they didn't feel strongly about mandating vaccines for athletes but we wanted to come up with a healthy alternative and i think testing and maximizing random well mandatory testing for unvaccinated athletes will also give us an opportunity to identify symptomatic athletes and then be able to pull them in a timely fashion we were trying to be more proactive in that in that situation so i think that's that's the main reason that we we went with the mandatory testing as opposed to the vaccination we wanted to try to stay away from the i guess the

218political ramifications of trying to mandate back uh vaccinations with so much going on in society today well it does seem that you'll have to collect vaccination status at least you'll start having to collect and you're prepared to do that as a starting point yes because i've also spoken to families actually it's one of your students uh mr gilford whose father said he's not comfortable playing he's at his sport until there's a vaccine mandate like it goes both ways right um so i hope that when you collect you'll find that that our vaccination rates are higher than than i think and that can be an incentive for folks to come back and play i don't know yes ma'am and one of the the initial things that we're going to do is really once teams are selected

219after november the 1st what we're going to do is create a way of identifying each athlete for each sport so that way we can start that screening process i did see the folks behind you had a lot to say and i didn't want to miss anything that went on in that wisdom over there we were just uh commenting on the fact that we already collected a lot of that from our players just for this reason um we were able to identify we had an outbreak as you know we had a positive case on our football team recently and we were able to quickly go through to see who was positive who had already been vaccinated who had been present that day as well so we're already in that process of doing that right do we

220have a district-wide automated system an app anything do we have a tech way to start collecting that for both our students our staff or is it just paper that we're doing i can speak for the staff portion we are using qualtrics to collect the information for our staff and as good of a tool as qualtrics is it takes a lot of manpower in the background to make sure you have everything you need you have to account for the technological skills of everyone who may be utilizing that you have to collate data you have to see if stuff is verified even in the employee process even though the electronic format has helped us tremendously we still have to look at every vaccination card it captures an image and in some cases the image hasn't been a

221vaccination card so part of your verification process requires a tremendous amount of human capital in this fire in regards to our students we created i want to say um three months ago a vaccination at a station formed for families to use for our students that could be vaccinated we do not want to keep those privacy medical records at the school level so they complete the vaccination attestation form and then provide that evidence to school level personnel and that is how principal guilford as well as our other principals and other staff on our trackers will know that if i'm a student at northern once my parent has attested that i'm vaccinated that i am vaccinated and that way we're not keeping those records at the school level but does our contact tracing nursing team have access

222to that in some way absolutely so our trackers and so we actually have regular professional developments with our principals and or their designee and we record those so if they're not able to join we provide that updated information we actually had one this week regarding surveillance testing all of our schools have shared their trackers with our contact tracer so that also helps us monitor kids that may have gone to the sick room for that particular day so that we can also help identify any places we might have some spread at one of our schools other questions mr raven i was um thinking back to what mr lee mentioned about the bag policy and i was thinking back to when i just went to the state fair that was one of the things that we had

223to do so my wife put everything in like a plastic ziploc bag and then put that in her purse but then we got there and realized how many people didn't do that to begin with so um you know we're following the rules but it's so many people from around the state they didn't even know that was a rule that was in place so i'm wondering if you know however we decide to implement this just as a way to communicate it would seem to make sense that if we could at least provide the schools if it's just going to be mainly for middle schools and high schools you just have some sort of imagery at the main entrance points um that's in english spanish and one that has a visual so the even if you're not

224able to read you can still know once you get to the door which you can and can't bring in with you so that could that could help you know reduce the disruption somewhat i want to thank you all again for bringing these proactive measures before our winter sports i think we know it's a tricky time and so having this in place early seems like the right move just a question around the collecting students information i feel like we are we're going to get to a place we're going to need more and more of that and we have hopefully five through 11 vaccinations that are coming soon and we're using it for contact tracing so i guess i'm wondering if there's also a more kind of systemic way we're thinking about how do we collect that

225information because i know it just also makes your job easier when it comes to contact tracing and all of that so nurse howard might can speak to this um currently for for example with immunizations there is a system that allows our schools our nurses to have access so there is actually a statewide system that helps us collect that information and when and if there is a place where that is that is more consistently the case i imagine that some of those statewide tools will collect that information and it would be more accessible the guidance that we've received from mr sue and miss giovanni we do just want to be very cautious in keeping that personal private information and then making sure that we are supporting our schools with tools to help them manage the collection

226of information and track especially with our students as we move forward for winter with our winter athletics right any other questions thank you all so much for the presentation thank you for being here we appreciate it and thank you also to our new covet team this is just for discussion if i'm correct so there's no action needed on this thank you all we greatly appreciate your efforts right the next item is a resolution in support of e-l-l learners um ms valladares do you want to get us started on that one yes yes i just uh want to thank uh isla they did uh write a letter to one minute um you know they were plotting they said we applaud you for finally demonstrating your support for the full implementation of the leandro plan and for

227leading the way to ensure the protection of increasing population of english learn language learners it is vital to acknowledge english language learners disadvantages and struggles to change the status quo it is a pressing matter to continue supporting the protection of their rights and access to accommodations that allow them to receive an equal education in our public schools english language learners in north carolina measured far below any other subgroup in annual measurable objectives data shows that english language learners in all grades perform poor in schools under black hispanic and white peers when proper accommodations were not provided english language learners were simply excluded from participating standard-based tests additionally most english language learners particularly spanish speakers experienced high levels of discrimination in schools based on race accents and country of origin as a consequence english language learners

228are more likely to have higher rates of psychiatric disorders such as depression post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety disorder furthermore uh there is a substantial disparity between different demographic groups regarding educational proficiency and overall life achievement expectancy for these reasons we must pay attention to the areas of improvement that can further benefit english language learners your support has been fundamental to protect english language learners dignity diversity and rights now it is time to ensure that efforts and resources that come to the district are earmarked to address their needs and so we ask you to continue taking decisive steps to protect our community as it is described in the resolution attached to this letter um i wonder if if it's okay to pull up the resolution that um uh ms nicole it's possible we can pull up

229the resolution that um was sent to us by isla and i thank all the board members for the feedback and everybody's contributions and uh engagement with isla as they brought bring this resolution to us this is the letter and the resolution um is uh titled um it is it is a title it's it's in a word document and it says resolution to protect english during public schools boe resolution 2021. thank you so much and and um i also just want to thank this district for a precedent set with um resolution recognizing black lives matter at school month of action um there's a lot in terms of like how we are giving visibility to different groups and so we thank our community for bringing resolutions to us so we can ensure that every community member every

230student feels seen and highlighted and as you get this resolution up just a lot of gratitude for community engagement so it is our tradition to read resolutions and this one is a little shorter than the three pages earlier and has been uh looked at by staff and so i would love we get started um and we could start with ms beyer mr vallidares mr raven i'll go and go around to mr sears resolution to protect english language learner students whereas receiving a sound basic education is a constitutional right and the negative impacts of failing to provide it impacts particularly students of color students from economically disadvantaged families students with disabilities and english language learners ell whereas english language learners in north carolina measured far below any other subgroup in annual measurable objectives perform foreign schools

231under black and white peers and can be excluded from participating in standard-based tests when proper accommodations are not provided whereas elo particularly spanish speakers can experience high levels of discrimination in schools based on race accent and country of origin and are more likely to experience mental health struggles excuse me and uh whereas ell and their family still hesitate to speak their mother tongue due to how they have been historically discriminated against for doing so in public facilities whereas this board has recognized the importance of taking intentional approaches to ensure the access of a sound basic education and is actively working towards meeting the goals set forth on the strategic plan whereas the durham public schools five-year strategic plan was created to ensure that resources and opportunities are informed by equity when educating children and to

232increase the capacity of administrators teachers staff and parents so that they are equipped to support and develop efficacy in instruction and student learning whereas this board is aiming to reduce the disparity between demographic groups regarding educational proficiency and overall life achievement expectancy whereas this board is in agreement with and passed a resolution to fully support the approval and implementation of the leandro plan and it recognizes that adequate education cannot be provided in an environment that does not reject all forms of discrimination whereas the durham public schools board members stand ready to address the struggles of english language learners as one of the groups with the greatest needs and challenges to meet their full potential therefore this sport continues celebrating the multiculturalism and diversity that our ell families bring recognizing it as a core part of

233our child centered approach education be it further resolve that this board continues respecting supporting and promoting diversity within all dps facilities and spaces and will continue to work tirelessly to undermine any form of injustice in our schools particularly against elo be a further result that this board welcomes open conversations activities cultural events and all expressions of unity that help to address the needs of our ell students i have a comment absolutely um so of course it says adopted by the durham board of education the date um would it be um okay with you all if we you know i added and at the end of the clauses it's just easier to read and i think we need to add the therefore be it resolved under by the the first therefore um again for e ease

234of read you know just just to make it nice and round it's easier to uh to digest with those in there just i mean that's just a thought yeah i think i think um the the pretty much everything stays the same as just the formatting and we can pass it with the yeah we can pass it live it's just kind of therefore be it resolved yeah and um putting the answers and behind every clause yeah that sounds good it's just it's like i said it's just easier to read but this is this can be approved here that's just tweak yeah and also at the end of that nicole can you go up just a little bit on the screen to do that child child-centered education approach i think reads better than child-centered approach education approach

235to education yeah or yeah exactly it needs something there to make that one but yeah this i think this is such a strong statement and i so much appreciate you bringing it miss mayadaris those editors don't change the spirit so it doesn't change what it says so i move we approve the resolution to protect english language learner students with the small adjustments okay second every winner gives a second it's been moved by mr lee seconded twice by misfire miss lewis any other discussion uh board members all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed passings unanimously uh i just want to say again thank you to isla for bringing this forward um natalya and janiece we had a great meeting today so i just want to thank them for their partnership and their commitment to

236our students and our community so thank you all all right thank you all board members for uh feedback by email by meetings uh thank you so much i move that we go into closed session for the reasons stated on the agenda second it's been moved i'm inspired seconded by mr sears new discussion all board members in favor say aye aye any opposed passes unanimously we now move into closed session all right i think we are back in open session are we rtt i think we're on all right dr mabinga madam chair i'm here to seek your approval for the personal report as discussed at a closed session i move approval of the personnel report dated october 21st second removed by mr lee's talking about mr sears any discussion all in favor say aye any opposed

237nay passes unanimously and with that we are adjourned happy friday