001Is there a motion to approve electronic participation by a school board member? >> Motion. >> Second. >> Madam clerk, would you please call the role? >> Mr. Alen? >> Yes. >> Mrs. Lori? >> Yes. >> Mr. Connor? >> Yes. >> Dr. Gupta? >> Yes. >> Mr. Depal? >> Yes. >> Dr. Farmer? >> Yes. Motion passes. Mr. Mike, you're there. Can you hear us? You can just say thumbs up. Good. >> All right. Next is pledge of allegiance. Mr. Connor. >> I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God. indivisible with liberty and justice for all. >> Thank you, sir. >> Is there a motion to approve the agenda? >> One moment. >> Motion. >> Uh, Mrs. Lowry, second. Madame clerk,
002would you please call the role? >> Well, we were I was asking it. Yeah. >> Okay. Never mind. Never mind. >> Okay. >> Mrs. Lowry, you second the vote. >> Yes. Yes. That's fine. >> Would you please call the role? >> Mr. Baron, >> I don't think he can hear you. I can move to this. >> Mr. Alen, >> yes. >> Mrs. Lori, >> yes. >> Mr. Connor, >> yes. >> Dr. Gupta, >> yes. >> Mr. Depal, >> yes. >> Dr. Palmer, >> yes. >> Mr. Poe, >> yes. >> Motion passes. >> Maybe we can talk to the staff. He's not able to hear us. Uh, next is the U >> Consent agenda. Is a motion to approve the consent agenda. >> Motion. Second. >> Madam clerk, would you please call the role? >> Mr.
003Baron. >> Mr. Alen? >> Yes. >> Mrs. Lori? >> Yes. >> Mr. Connor? >> Yes. >> Dr. Gupta? >> Yes. >> Mr. Depal? >> Yes. >> Dr. Farmer? >> Yes. >> Mr. Poe? >> Yes. >> Motion passes. >> And just so you know, he just said no. He cannot hear us. >> She she she'll text the staff downstairs. >> Next is public comment. Budget agenda items only. Hey, Mr. Connor. >> Hey. Um, public comments. Tonight's public comments will be limited to the budget agenda items only. Budget agenda items only. In accordance with policy BDDH, public participation, members of the community are invited and encouraged to attend meetings of the Lynchburg City School Board to observe its deliberations. Any member of the community may address the board on matters related to Lynchburg City Schools at any
004regular meeting. Persons or groups wishing to address the school board may do so by choosing one of the following. Leave a voice message on the school board clerk's phone at 434-5155077. Messages will be played during the public comment section of the schoolboard meeting. address the board in person during the public meeting. Persons desiring to address the school board by voicemail message shall commit the voicemail to the school board no later than 3:30 p.m. on the day of the board meeting. Persons desiring to address the school board in person shall contact the clerk of the board no later than 3:30 p.m. on the day of the board meeting or by signing the public comment form which shall be available to the public 15 minutes before the meeting starts. Each person requesting to speak shall identify the
005subject they want to address. And the speaker, if the speaker represents a group, the speaker must identify the group. Persons appearing before the school board will not be allowed to campaign for public office or promote private business ventures and should not use profanity or vulgar language or gestures, make comments about a public official or an employee that are not related to the public official or employees official duties. Engage in behavior that disrupts the meeting or intimidates others. or address the school board on issues that do not concern the services, policies, roles, and/or responsibilities of the school board. Individual speakers may limit their comments to three minutes. A speaker representing a group shall limit their comments to five minutes. The representative shall identify the group at the beginning of their presentation. A group may have no
006more than one spokesperson. The total allotted time for public comments at schoolboard meetings is 30 minutes. Voicemail messages to be played are also limited to three minutes for individuals and five minutes for speakers representing a group. Priority will be given to in-person comments before voicemail messages in the following order. Students, staff, parents, guardians, community members. Public comments are reserved for the public to provide input. The board does not respond to comments, answer questions, or otherwise engage in discussion at this time. >> Go ahead. >> Also, are there any additional speakers tonight? Right now I have a Aaron Reed who's a staff member and a Aftonan I think it's Hagen a student >> missing the first one Amber >> I got a Aaron Reed should be typed right there >> is Miss Amber here Oh, [laughter]
007pray for me. Amber Dempsey, educational interpreter, who's also a staff member. Are there anyone else here who wants to comment on budget items for the school board tonight? What's your name? >> Alton Quinn. >> Is that >> No, that's somebody else. >> Okay. And where do you what are you a student or >> student? >> I'm a student. >> Where at? >> ECass High School. >> Anyone else? >> Colleen Lens. I'm a parent representing Save Our Schools. >> That's good. >> Anyone else? Right now we have five speakers. Start with the student. [clears throat and cough] >> Our first speaker will be student um Afton Hagen. >> No, Alton Quinn. >> So you Okay. Are you >> Good morning. >> Come on. >> I misunderstood the only one spokesperson. >> Go ahead. >> Okay. I'm
008here representing the EC Glass High School marching band and concert band programs. This October 25th, the EC Glass marching band won seventh place overall at grand finals VNBC and first place in their 3A class, also getting a record-breaking score. And for do for doing this marching band, it is very expensive. Like all things, we we get to pay for transportation. We'd pay for lunches and dinners during band camp and before football games and during competitions, instrument repairs, all kinds of things. The instruments are very expensive. Percussion instruments can be up to $10,000. And usually just normal instruments, like if you wanted a woodwind or a brass instrument, those are around $1,000 each. What we have currently, some of them are decades old even. They've been through so much use that they're unplayable. And repair is
009not cheap. It can be thousands of dollars as well. So this coming from the budget that we currently have affects other extracurricular programs outside of just concert band such as the marching band, the indoor drum line and guard. Along with this, EClass and Heritage both host musical events like the Lynchburg Classic competition. We have to pay for concessions. We to hire the judges and pay them VNBC official judges. That's the Virginia marching band cooperation. And those are very expensive, but it gets official scores along with trailer renting trailers to bring equipment up to the field for performers. Heritage last year hosted assessment and this year that's concert assessment. That's a yearly evaluation of the bands in their concert band performance. And this year EClass is hosting the middle school all districts. We had to buy
010music stands for all districts since many of ours are in disrepair. They're either they slant like this and music stands fall off and the music folders, sorry, fall off or they just are crooked and you can't do anything with them. And the music stands, we bought maybe 12 to 15, I'm not sure, but it cost around $800. So, in order for us to keep pursuing this high standard that we function at, we need more funding because of all these things I've mentioned. And it is very expensive, but it builds cognitive skills, memory, and stuff that benefits other fields of our academic performance as musicians and students. >> That's it. >> Thank you. [clears throat] >> Our next speaker will be Amber Dempsey, staff member. [clears throat] Good evening, members of the school board, Dr. Summerville
011Majette, and members of the community. My name is Amber Dempsey, and I'm the lead educational interpreter for Lynchburg City Schools, having proudly served this district for 20 years. I stand before you tonight to advocate for the essential educational interpreting team and urge you to adjust their pay scales in the upcoming budget. I first want to acknowledge and celebrate a profound achievement that Lynchburg City Schools has maintained a phenomenal 100% graduation rate for its deaf and heart of hearing students for the last 27 years. This incredible record is a direct result of the highquality consistent services provided by this dedicated team and we're here tonight to ensure that that success continues. Educational interpreters are legally mandated members of the IEP team and function as direct academic service providers. They are the indispensable link that allows these
012students to access their education. Imagine every single morning your student walks into a dark classroom, not dim, but pitch black. The teacher is there, the books are there, the smartboard is there, but the light switch is permanently installed on the ceiling 12 feet high. That light switch is the educational interpreter. The deaf student has the intelligence, the motivated motivation and the mandated right to learn. But they cannot access that environment until the professional is there to flip the switch and illuminate the instruction. Without them, the environment is functionally inaccessible. This team is not just meeting minimum standards. We are leaders in expertise, professional development, and community impact. As a collective team, we dedicate ourselves to ongoing excellence, earning a minimum approximate yearly total of 3,600 hours of professional training and development. This proactive commitment to
013professional growth is the hallmark of a licensed staff, not a classified support position. We provide specialized services like shadow interpreting for the theater and our program is highly sought after by university interpreting interns. Our team is on its way towards having a fully nationally certified staff which means that we are certified to work in any of the 50 states in any area of the field. Yet we are choosing to invest our time talent here. [snorts] Members of the board, I must point out that the critical issue of placing interpreters on an appropriate competitive pay scale is not new. This subject has been raised with the administration and budget discussions the last two years but [snorts] was not acted upon. Today we are seeing the direct inevitable consequences of that past decision. The current placement of
014this highly qualified and motivated team on the classified PACE schedule grade H is actively and immediately undermining this historic success. In the last year alone, we lost three interpreters, a significant portion of our staff, to surrounding districts or career changes driven by non-competitive pay. Each of us on our current team have secondary and some third jobs. We [snorts] expect the level of professionalism, investment, mentorship, and advanced skill at a classified pay rate. Competitive districts offer salaries reaching over $73,000 annually. We're essentially subsidizing and training the talent for these higher paying regions. This cycle of turnover disrupts student learning and creates financial and legal risk for the schoolboard in providing the free and appropriate public education mandated by law. [snorts] To protect this 27-year legacy of student success and retain our dedicated credentiing staff, I urge
015the school board to act decisively in this budget cycle. I asked the board to remove the educational interpreting team from the classified pay schedule and instead place them on a scale that recognizes their licensed professional status as related service providers. Thank you. Code of FE federal regulation chapter 34 section 300.34A. It defines [snorts] related service providers as support services that are required to assist a child with a disability to benefit from special education and this includes but is not limited to education [clears throat] language pathology, occupational therapy and interpreting services. We ask that you align our compensation with a comparable specialized licensed staff scale such as administrative pay scale schedule 5 with the fellow related service providers. This would immediately recognize the national certification and the 3600 hours of annual training as equivalent to other
016professional lensure requirements. This would bring LCS salaries into regional alignment, securing our talent pool and ensure that we can sustain the high quality program that maintains our 100% graduation rate. Thank [snorts] you very much for your time. >> Thank you. Our next speaker is Aaron Reed representing the Lynchberg Education Association. >> Good evening, chairman, members of the board, superintendent. My name is Aaron Reid. I am a 28-year teaching veteran, 22 years here in Lynburg City Schools. I'm speaking for the Lynchburg Education Association tonight, but I'm also the department chair for the EClass English Department, as well as a teacher in the AP language program, as well as the AP Capstone program. I'm the pilot teacher in Virginia for AP African-American Studies. I want to draw your attention to three ideas tonight that will help you
017focus on your budget concerns. You've already heard from two esteemed individuals up here who are asking for you to allocate funds in a better way. The three topics I want to talk about are going to help you rethink whether we're allocating funds to all the things that sort of matter. Here are the three things. They are testing, technology, and alternative education. Now, we've talked about testing already. You may remember that we talked in August, and we've made some strides, some small strides in making sure that the testing that we're asking our youngest kids to do is appropriate for their age. Small strides. There's more that can be done. One of the ways that you and I, you mostly can think about trimming the budget to help things like our band program and our interpreters is
018are we spending money on testing that doesn't necessarily tell us anything valid about our students or worse that it's redundant in terms of what we already know about those students. So, back in August, you might remember one of the things I advocated to you all for was every time that you are presented with testing data, certainly talk about it, certainly analyze it. But the next question is, how long did this take? How long did kids have to take this test? Because every minute spent taking a test is a minute spent not learning material. And no one's going to say that we shouldn't check for understanding, but some of this testing is not necessary. I promise you if Alton got back up here, he would tell you what he felt about and he probably wouldn't hold
019back. The second thing is technology. Look, we're coming up on a year of the governor's cell phone ban. And what we're seeing at the high school levels is having those cellular devices out of students hands is a net benefit. We are seeing better discussions. We're seeing a cafeteria in which kids are talking to each other. But there's a second problem which is screen time all the way around. You've probably read the research, right? that it is problematic for both our youngest kids as well as our high school kids. And while our our personal students would like to have cell phones in their hands, the reality is screen time in LCS comes from another place and that is the Chromebooks in front of their faces every day. Now, I'm not saying that the Chromebook is not
020an important tool in some ways. What I am saying is that the amount of money we are allocating for technology screens in front of kids' faces is a detriment in many ways to the education that's happening in those classrooms. If you were to come to EC Glass, you would see my ninth grade team have entire weeks of time in which nobody opens a Chromebook. Because here's the thing about an English class, and I think you know this, don't you? We want the kids reading. We want them writing. And most importantly, we want them talking about the things that they have read. Friends, none of that requires a Chromebook. None of it. It requires you and me and kids in a room talking about something. So, when we're talking about where money should be going, we
021also need to talk about where maybe it doesn't need to be going. And I'm not saying we don't need technology. What I'm saying is, are we being careful about how much money is being allocated toward those technology functions? Because the reality is there are a lot of for-profit companies out there, testing companies and technology companies that are super happy to take your money. You know this, everybody behind me knows this. So, if you're willing to give money to testing and technology companies, what you're not doing is putting it to good use for things like our interpreters and our band program where we have some really seen results. The last thing that I want to mention with my last minute is the alternative education dilemma that Lynchburg City Schools is facing. And look, it's dire on
022a lot of levels. You and I want kids to learn how to emotionally regulate themselves, how to conflict resolve without it escalating. We want all these things, but in many ways, in many of your schools, that's not happening right now. Elementary restore got closed because it wasn't giving good results. But I have teachers who are coming to me in the Lynchburg Education Association and administrators who are saying things like, "Well, TAP is closed." So these kids who need some counseling and help, there's nowhere for them to go. I do think that it is worth allocating funds and creating alternative solutions for these kids. But we've got to stop paying money to the for-profit testing and technology industries. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Miss Carlen Lkins who is representing Save Our Schools. >>
023Hello. It has been a little while since I've stood at this podium. What a different place we are at this year than last year when it comes to budgeting. I'm so happy to see so many of you new faces and to have new leadership at LCS. Um, before I get into what I wanted to say, I have to agree is a very dirty word in my house. My kids have hated it since they were in kindergarten. Um, they don't find it helpful or useful. So, that's just from a parent. Um, and the Chromebooks are something that have continually, so I have a high schooler, middle schooler that have continually caused problems in my uh home when they bring them home and also at school. Um, so those are definitely two things as a parent I
024can echo and confirm could be things you guys could look at. Uh, but there are tons of things we could talk about giving funding to our amazing teachers who we all know are the backbone of LCS. Our bus drivers who get our kids to school safe each and every day who have to deal with a lot. Our our staff at the schools that feed our kids. We're so thankful for them. Or the front office staff. I don't know if you've ever been into a middle school, high school, or elementary school during the day, but they are chaos coordinators. They make sure that the kids get called down and that when the kids come in who's sick and I mean they're I don't know how they do their jobs. They're truly amazing. If you ever go
025sit and watch them each and every one of those people and all the staff members that I as a parent don't interact with and and don't honestly know what they do, but I know they help keep the school running. They all deserve more money than they're making. They all deserve more than they've been given. And and I know that the desire in this room is to give them more. Um, I've sat through many schoolboard meetings where that has been a conversation. And so, the thing that I want to say to you guys tonight is as we move forward and we look into the future, there are two really important things from my perspective, from the parents perspective, and honestly from the political uh perspective that need to happen. And one of them is transparency. That
026has been a continued conversation between city council, the community, and the school board. how can there be more transparency with the school budget so that when we go and advocate for funding there aren't a lot of questions there they're not asking well what about this or what about that or is it being spent wisely those questions are already answered so that I know for me when I go stand in front of city council and ask for more money because I will uh that I can do it with confidence and the other parents can do it with confidence as well and say we need every cent of this money we need it for the band which is an amazing ing program if you've seen them march. If you haven't, go watch the kids. They're truly amazing
027for the interpreters with such passion. So many of our staff members and our teachers have that passion. They love our kids deeply. They deserve to be advocated for, not just from you all, but from us. And the best way that we can do that is when there's transparency. And the other part of this is making sure that every eye is dotted and every tea is crossed so that there are true asks for funding. What is the funding really going towards? What are we working towards? And what is the future of Lynchburg City School? I have great faith and hope in this school board and in our new leader that that will that will be possible. we will have a way forward and that Lynchburg City Schools will become better each and every year. And I
028just want to take a quick second and thank you guys for what you're doing. When you see people standing up here advocating, it's because we love our school district. We know that without Lynchburg City Schools, our community would not thrive and we want to make it the best place possible. So, from a very different place this time than I think I've addressed you guys in the past. Um, thank you and I look forward to the future. Thank you. >> Thank you. That is the conclusion of our public hearing. Is there a motion to adjourn the public hearing section? >> Motion. >> Second. >> Madam Cler, would you please call the role? >> Mr. Baron? >> Yes. >> Mr. Alen? >> Yes. >> Mrs. Lori? >> Yes. >> Mr. Connor? >> Yes. >> Mr. Dr. Gupta?
029>> Yes. >> Mr. Depal? >> Yes. >> Dr. Farmer? Yes, >> Mr. Pow. >> Yes. >> Motion passes. >> Next [clears throat] one isformational items. December 9th is finance and facilities at 3:30. December 11th is discipline review at 3:30. December 16th is LCR at 3:30. December 16th, school board meeting here at 5:00 p.m. And December 10th, 3:30 is the academic success. >> Actually, it's been changed to December 18th, we said, right? >> December 18th. >> 16th. It was the change. Oh, never mind. [laughter] >> December 10th, 3:30, academic success committee. The meeting is adjourned. Thank you.