LCS School Board Meeting: December 7, 2021

001[Music] all right we would like to call to order our december the 7th school board meeting and as we call our meeting to order tonight i do want to ask that the board and the public would take just a moment of silence in remembrance of the four students who were killed six other students and teacher who were wounded by gunfire in michigan at oxford high we certainly recognized that mental health and socio-emotional needs are rampant across our nation and we certainly want to do all that we can to remember to reflect but also to be as strong as we need to be here in lynchburg let us pause for a moment of silence thank you we will now move to section b of our school board meeting and that will be our approval of the

002agenda and each of the board members you have had the agenda and the necessary attachments and board docs is there a motion to approve the agenda for tonight's school board meeting i moved to approve the agenda in moved by miss morris and seconded by dr carter any further questions or discussion hearing none we will now ask our clerk to call the role yes before we move into public comments we will now stand and pledge allegiance to our flag in honor of our nation and community liberty and justice for all we certainly welcome everyone to tonight's meeting and we will now move into the uh public comment section of our meeting tonight and we do want the public to a function in accordance with our policy bddh and all of the protocols that we have established

003for our public comments we will now entertain those comments but allow me to first read this statement 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 their official duties engage in behavior that disrupts the meeting or intimidates others or addresses the school board on issues that do not concern the services policies role and or responsibilities of the school board individual speakers shall 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 more than one spokesperson the

004total allotted time for public comments at school board meetings is 30 minutes public comments are reserved for the public to provide input the board does not respond to comments answers questions or otherwise engaged in discussions at this time there are no written comments tonight board nor uh calls in and so all of the comments will be in public uh public comments and we will go in the order as we have received them our first speaker for tonight is katie stevens and she is representing a group band booster president booster club at glass and she wants to address four by four block scheduling uh welcome uh miss stevens thank you so much hello my name is katie stevens i have a band student at ec glass high school a band student at lincoln middle school and

005i'm the band booster president at ec glass i've spent hours weekly volunteering with these kids i know them and their love for music so i feel like i'm a voice that deserves to be heard and considered and i thank you for that opportunity i'm also a band student from the 90s who whose high school changed to a 4x4 block system my music education was so detrimentally impacted to continue i had to leave my high school and travel 30 minutes where i could continue learning all year long this helped me to secure a music scholarship to the university of south carolina very few students have a grandmother willing to drive an hour twice a day or access to their own car to get them to another school system as i did in my youth how does

006block scheduling affect the arts to put it simply it really kills our programs band is not something that one can be successful at a few months out of the year music is not an on and off switch to be successful musicians our kids practice daily sometime sometimes hours daily to honor their commitments to their band program and to make themselves better musicians band is not an elective class for these kids band is who they are it's the family they fit into they thrive and they work towards common goals together band provides so many of these kids with their only opportunity for a higher education through partial and full scholarships one of the first things colleges and universities look at in an individual band student is their participation in all district and all-state competitions are you

007aware that by moving to block scheduling our students ability to participate in these opportunities will be severely impacted the lack of instruction will greatly affect the students abilities to successfully audition and earn a spot in these ensembles making them less valuable to colleges a flute player who has had instruction every day throughout the year has a huge advantage over someone who has had no instruction for the last six months you're limiting scholarship possibilities for students who have no others i understand that schools are not judged by the success of their elected elective courses but sadly by the numbers received on standardized tests this is the climate under which teachers are forced to work and are pressured to achieve certain numbers in order to be deemed successful in the eyes of the public and the government

008our kids are more than a number by moving to block scheduling you will be failing to educate the whole student and instead sending them the message they are not that they are only the number they score on a test let's be honest not every individual is gifted in math and science but their natural abilities lie in music and the arts those are the types of people that go on to conduct the score for the mandalorian and will be conducting at carnegie hall this spring like anthony parther who is an ec glass alum or grammy award-winning saxophonist max abrams from heritage high school or how about charles sydney ec glass alum and film composer for malcolm in the middle if they had been forced to drop music for a semester in high school would they be

009where they are today band is not our only program at risk at risk orchestra theater art cte all of these things have a huge role in keeping at-risk students involved and successful in school we witnessed decline in student involvement in these programs in the fall and spring of 2020 because teachers in the arts were limited in how the arts could be taught in schools at that time this change would be worse we were catastrophic for participation i'd like to share a story from our band banquet last night we had a drum line donated to the school and it was dedicated to three special students these boys were products of the ec glass band they weren't athletes they weren't great at math and science but they loved band they worked hard they practiced and band was

010what kept them coming to school and motivated they ended up all graduating with honors these three boys are all now outstanding citizens and still involved in music one produces music for local rap artists in the charlottesville area the other two work with musicians right here at lynchburg city schools one works with one that works with the drumline at heritage high school while the other with the drumline at ec glass as well as working with students at hutcherson early learning center two fine young men are role models for our youth both in the high school and the primary level these young men are full circle example of why our music program is successful they have come back to put in what they have received for the program and give back to other students i hope you

011can hear our students outside these are band students from heritage ec glass and lms they are very concerned about the idea of losing a year-long music program and have come to share their voices their music with you you all know high school kids and the value of their free time but they are choosing to spend theirs to help you understand how much they care about this even my seniors who are leaving care so much about the program they've loved the last four years are willing to stand outside and let you hear what they love please hear them please honor their talents their success and what drives them help them nurture their talent they so dearly love and go on to be successful in their futures thank you all so much for the opportunity to speak

012today thank you miss stevens thank you david um our next uh speaker for it tonight thank you dr edwards it's lindley crosby uh an individual and i believe uh also on 4x4 block scheduling right ahead hi i'm lindley crosby i'm a freshman at ec glass i'm concerned about this proposed change because it could have a huge impact on my next years in high school one of the extracurriculars that i am taking this year's orchestra i have taken orchestra through lynchburg city schools since first grade orchestra is a very important part of my life year-round orchestra allows us to connect and develop stronger skills as musicians a 4x4 schedule would restrict our ability to go on orchestra trips and assessments which have made such a positive impact on my growth the orchestra community at my school

013is a safe place where myself and others are more understood and welcome and have a chance to talk about what's going on in our lives it's also important for me to be in core classes and foreign language classes year round so that i can better understand the material as well as retain it for future classes a gap of six months or more would make this difficult for me i like the current schedule because i appreciate the variation between school days and the chance for interactions with more of my classmates thank you for listening to my concerns next speaker jeffrey wuters uh individual 4x4 uh scheduling good evening my name is jeffrey wuters i'm a senior at ec glass high school in central virginia governor's school at the risk of sounding cliche students in lynchburg city

014schools have been going through some pretty uncertain times it's been nearly two years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic since then lynchburg students have performed admirably adapting to our new reality however what students need now stability and certainty so far lynchburg city schools has not provided that stability this year we were thrown into a new a b block schedule without any students being consulted it's taken me and many of my friends until now to fully get used to this new system now a new schedule is being proposed to switch lynchburg city schools to a four by four block system four classes during the first semester and four during the second i as well as students parents and teachers across the city i'm firmly opposed to this change having three schedule changes in as many

015years will throw students off even more than we already are however there are many other reasons why i oppose the proposed schedule students are already experiencing massive learning loss from the pandemic and this new system will exacerbate an existing problem students taking a course in the fall semester would have an entire semester without instruction before having to take a test or exam in the spring worse some students will have learning gaps of up to 13 months between classes if they take one class fall semester and have to wait until the following school year spring semester to take the next this is a major problem for sequential classes in math and science like algebra 1 and algebra 2. however my biggest problem with the new schedule is the incredibly harmful impact it would have on the

016cultural arts orchestra has been by far my favorite class i've met some of my closest friends and had some of the greatest experiences of my life thanks to music i want every single student in lynchburg city schools to have that opportunity but switching to a 4x4 schedule deprived many students of those experiences speaking as an orchestra student our regional and statewide competitions along with bands are only open to those currently enrolled in an orchestra class so whatever semester we'd have orchestra would be locked out of the other semester's event i can't stress enough how wonderful these opportunities are they allow students and schools to show off their best talent across the state last year ec glass sent the first place piccolo and second place violin to the all virginia event where hundreds of students compete

017for limited seats against the best of the best additionally many students only connection to music is cultural arts classes since they can't afford private lessons or instruments so they're locked out of music during off semesters there are many other problems with the 4x4 schedule that i can't discuss in three minutes but i urge you don't harm your students learning or take away their opportunities with the new system you might have seen a petition circulating in opposition to the change i've signed it and so far over 1100 people agree with me we urge you don't change the schedule again and listen to your students we're the people you serve thank you mr wuters our next speaker is mr carl luth who is coming to talk to us about student discipline and representing the lynchburg education association

018is he here i think he might be trying to come in welcome carl come in today right ahead all right good evening to all of you thank you for your service for the lynchburg community and for the opportunity to speak tonight my name is carl lewis i'm president of the lynchburg education association and i'm thrilled to see that student behavior management is on the agenda tonight because the division is a tipping point with regards to this issue there's no need to talk about educational programs or initiatives no need to discuss test scores or data until we have an environment in which learning can take place consistently let me tell you a story a student throws a full bottle of lotion across the room to another student when the teacher corrects the behavior he's cussed out

019by the offending student another a teaching assistant is helping a child when another student throws food at her and hits her in the same class after being stolen from a student's backpack a full bottle of tea is thrown across the room hitting the wall on the other side in the same class on the same day a teacher is hit with food while helping a student with an assignment how about the story where two students received referrals for disruptive classroom behavior which included throwing a phone and smashing it on the floor arguing and using profanity only to get in a fight in the stairwell after class nearly pulling the principal down the stairs maybe you'd like to hear about students who walk out of class without permission who refuse to follow any direction complete any assignment

020or sit quietly during testing who pull out chairs so other students fall in the floor who slam artwork into the face of the student who created it who run out of the classroom knocking over every trash can in the hallway breaking pencils throwing them around the room stealing prizes purchased with a teacher's own money to support lcs pbis initiatives or maybe you'd just like to hear about the student who said she was going to have her parents shoot her teacher the fact that these stories are all true is probably not surprising to you but it might be surprising to know that all these stories came from one floor of one building in one school in one week's time and it's a school that has strong leadership veteran staff and few vacancies as you look at

021student behavior management tonight look at with a discerning eye i mean the charts and graphs all look really great but is it a plan that addresses the needs of the students who are not exhibiting challenging behaviors in class is it a plan that will provide positive learning environment for students in a positive working environment for teachers and staff is it a plan that includes discipline peace that challenging students so desperately need as well as support and services for them is it a plan that the board is fully supporting in lcs most importantly is it a plan that's working what do we need to make it work one of the key things we need is a learning environment that is successful for all of our students we've asked these kids to come back to full-time instruction

022five days a week but did nothing to fully prepare them for it we don't have places for students who are struggling in a traditional learning environment to go your students are struggling your staff is struggling we need you to provide lcs with the means to properly place students in the right setting if you don't your student population will continue to dwindle and your staff shortage will continue to grow because no one deserves to come to school every day and to be treated like that thank you [Applause] thank you mr lewis our next speaker is kelly and i hope i get have this wonderful name right purdy if i don't i'll be corrected and you're going to talk to us about 4x4 block scheduling okay good evening my name is kelly perdue i have three children

023in the lcs system our city of lynchburg is one that thrives on the performing arts participation in fine arts and performing programs enhances and enriches enriches all pieces of one's life no matter the level of involvement think about the daily activities we perform with the influence of arts the simple act of turning on the radio in the car is enjoyment of fine arts it's music turning on the tv in the evening is the influence of fine arts the performing arts and the art of technical theater recently parents learned that administration at ec glass and heritage high schools are proposing to implement a new schedule and haven't communicated how this will affect our students the schedule being proposed is a 4x4 block schedule which typically means students attend four semester-long classes every day each class lasting

02490 minutes this would mean that students would have less opportunity for year-long courses such as band orchestra theater and other fine arts programs here are some advantages to a 4x4 block schedule more intense study within each course better rapport between students and teachers because of the amount of time they spend together each day helping students who are behind to catch up since the student teacher has more time to focus with them during the 90-minute block period but then we parents learned about the negative effects of of a schedule like this it's a year's worth of material condensed into one semester the probability that fine arts students aren't able to consistently nurture their talent throughout the year due to scheduling conflicts there's a decreased ability to have graduated levels of subject matter there's less ability to

025have beginner intermediate and advanced level courses there's an increased difficulty learning foreign language and any other subject when schedule conflicts prohibit the immediate progression to the next level lowered test scores especially for ap level courses when students who complete the course in the fall don't take the ap exam until the end of the spring semester there's a limited ability for district and statewide ensemble opportunities for example a student must be currently enrolled in a band class to be able to audition and then perform with the district or state band ensemble if a student is unable to continue the next semester with his or her band class they will no longer be eligible for those district and state opportunities this is the case across all of the fine arts disciplines as parents of fine arts inclined

026students we aren't rejecting change while scary sometimes change can be good without change there is no growth what we are asking for is specific consideration for all students to be able to participate in cultural arts programs and that these programs are considered as essential as any other course in the required courses needed for graduation we recognize that teachers and educational administrators are the professionals in this area and we trust that they have the best interests of all of our students in mind and heart but we ask that educators work with students and parents to come up with a change that benefits all programs thank you [Applause] thank you very much miss uh purdue we will now hear from jennifer citizen uh 4x4 block as an individual hello my name is jennifer citizen i have a

027freshman at ec glass high school and a sixth grader at lankford middle school i want to first of all say that i appreciate the opportunity to present my concerns regarding the proposed 4x4 block scheduling i also want to thank principal floor for taking the time to call me today speaking with her did he some of my anxiety that this decision was being made in haste and without consideration and input from parents and teachers i hope that this means that we will be heard and you will consider our recommendations aside from the impact that the 4x4 block schedule would have on our highly accomplished cultural arts program there are negative implications that affect all students with the current ab schedule students and teachers are struggling with this year with the longer class periods studies have shown

028that students these days have shorter attention spans due to the instant gratification they get from technology also real life teachers are not as stimulating as video games but even if that weren't the case are students even developmentally mature enough at age 11 to focus on the subject for 90 minutes i say age 11 because the ab schedule is also in place at the middle school level my children do not have attention deficit disorders and yet they are struggling to stay focused for the entire class period how then are students who do have attention disorders performing my sixth grader mentioned that not only is it difficult to remain focused for so long but there are also more discipline issues in class because the students are bored the only reason i've heard to support the 4x4 block

029scheduling and the reason it was proposed was for remediation to allow students the chance to repeat a class if they failed at the first semester but will those students who are low performing be able to focus and do well in courses that are designed to move at a more accelerated pace when it's consolidated from one year into a semester going from a seven period day to the a b sketch going from a seven period day to the av or four by four model has also added another period to the excuse me going from a seven period day to the a b or the four by four has added another period to the schedule will students be offered more elective courses or will they continue to have to sit in a 90-minute advisory or study hall

030class for that eighth period as they do now at the middle school level my daughter has two such classes if the schools are already short staffed how will they accomplish adding additional classes to fill these schedules after two years of a teaching nightmare are we really going to ask the teachers to redesign their curriculums for the 4x4 model are the teachers prepared to do that the teachers were not trained or equipped to adjust to the 90 minute periods this year and therefore the time is not always used effectively in all classes it seems many are teaching their normal period and then giving students the extra time to complete their work the expectation that a teacher can keep students again ages 11 through 18 engaged for 90 minutes of class time is unrealistic has anyone considered

031a citizen we have some others that and i really would we would like to hear from everyone yes but the time has expired for your yes version of the presentation sure may i say one more thing just that the lcs summer calendar has already been shortened to minimize learning loss and that's why i don't understand why this would be an acceptable form of scheduling thank you thank you deputy uh deputy superintendent uh how much time do we have left in the 30 minutes we have used 22 minutes so you have eight minutes left okay so um we'll do the best we can we will have to conclude in 30 minutes all right i think the next person i have here is ted or hardin uh president of the lynchburg orchestra good evening my name is

032ted harden and i speak tonight not only as an educator and a parent of two students at ec class but also as president of the board of directors for the lynchburg symphony orchestra one of many long-standing arts organizations supported by our community and numerous local businesses that recognize the value of a strong arts culture as a barometer of a city's success and its attractiveness to potential residents i want to start by relaying a comment made by one of our recent guest artists a grammy award-winning cellist who after rehearsing with our musicians and after spending a day with lcs students at three different schools and after learning about our landmark k through 12 strings program which is about to celebrate its 50th year he said to me you realize don't you how rare this is the

033size of this town and all that it offers in the arts that's not normal that's a remarkable legacy certainly there is more to consider than just the arts as this plan for block scheduling has the potential to disrupt and unnecessarily complicate multiple portions of the curriculum without a clear or compelling rationale but i thought it was important to convey this community's overwhelming concern and disappointment at the lack of communication lack of transparency and lack of regard for the significant amount of time and care that it takes to implement a change of this magnitude which has a widespread proven track record of weakening the cultural arts and our neighbors in bedford county implemented this plan not long ago and abandoned it within a year and while there has been so much focus on catching up from

034covid i think we need to be mindful of the fact that it is not just grades and test scores that should concern us the emotional and psychological well-being of our children should be of utmost importance to us which is why i am baffled that any administrator would hastily implement new scheduling systems not once but two years in a row daring to put at risk the courses and activities that students value most the places where they have found their peer group and feel safe the arts programs in particular managed to consistently attract many of our highest achievers while also drawing many struggling students who have gone on to say that it was their participation in band choir theater or orchestra that gave them purpose and got them across the finish line it would therefore seem that

035if you truly strive to help every child by name and by need to graduation with a tradition of excellence for all the arts should be at the top of your list of programs to protect we therefore ask that you halt this effort to implement 4x4 block scheduling and instead help lay the groundwork for a better conceived plan that involves healthy collaborations and quality research of better approaches rather than hastily designed cookie cutter systems so that our schools can grow develop and improve for the benefit of all students thank you thank you mr hardin [Applause] putnam individual 4x4 blog schedule hello my name is carl putnam i am i have two students at ec glass one a senior and one a freshman i am a professional engineer and i want to talk about some of one

036of the things that we're talking about is that it hurts the arts a lot to me as an engineer with an advanced degree it's going to hurt stem just as well math requires a continuity of learning if you take algebra 1 and then you're going to take into geometry and then go to algebra 2 and you have 6 8 9 months between there a semester in on a summer it's going to be a very delatorious and you're going to have to relearn all the stuff you you're supposed to learn algebra 1 and it's going to be a big problem i also think that you're going in taking for the uh of students who are performing academically or struggle academically my children are gonna be able to deal with it my wife has an advanced degree

037i have an advanced degree we can easily help them and and help them get through these things people who struggle academically students who struggle academically probably have parents who have struggled academically and they are not going to be able to get through that they're going to have a much harder time they're going to have no idea what they're talking about when they're trying to factor you know a polynomial or something like that they're not going to deal with them help them as much deal with working with an essay being able to make an argument and different things like that uh so the continent of learning is very very important i also agree with everything that's been said about the arts and about the one and a half hour classes i think it's just too long

038and also goes into what mr liu said about the about the i'm sorry the behavior problems that seem to be happening a lot so for those reasons i'd like you to consider abandoning the 4x4 block scheduling person i'd like to see going back to the seven class schedule that you had before thank you very much [Applause] thank you mr hardin is there any time left all right three minutes uh come on up aaron read and talk to us about collective bargaining and aaron if there's any time that's spared we'll allow skylar cow what i believe an hhs student but if not we'll have to shut down good evening my name is aaron reed i am a graduate of ec glass high school and a teacher of 24 years for lynchburg city schools and tonight i

039come to you representing the lynchburg education association last month i stood at this podium and introduced the concept of collective bargaining to you you saw a small sample of employees in this room who supported the measure but they were symbolic of the vast number of teachers and ias and secretaries and custodial workers who support this move but could not be here in person tonight my goal is to convince you that not only will be agreeing to collective bargaining enhance and support the professional lives of your employees but they will enhance yours as well let's start with the people who are the undisputed backbones of any school division the custodial staff i believe that each one of you wants the best possible working conditions for arts tireless custodians through a collective bargaining agreement you would know

040the working conditions the time requirements and the pay schedule that would permit them to do their best work for you they would have a voice in each of these things and by having that voice they would feel more in control of their professional life they would feel heard not just by the genuine platitudes issued here but through their paycheck and through their working conditions i watch every day as the head custodian at my school greta ford leads her staff to be efficient mindful and thorough in everything that they do i watch as miss ford interacts with students in a way that makes her literally second to none miss ford does not want your words she needs to see your support in the form of a bargain that allows her voice and her concerns about job

041safety requirements to be heard let's talk about our bus drivers and our transportation staff we have long known that public school transportation represents many challenges from the conditions on the bus to the hours to the pay only a few weeks ago you saw a local division announced that some bus routes just wouldn't run children with the ability to attend school were told that they needed to find another way to get there as though we had regressed in times the 19th century and they should walk across the county to get there lynchburg city has the ability here to set the opposite tone by valuing and supporting our bus drivers and other staff collective bargaining is the way for those employees to get the conditions by which our transportation can run people like gracie mormon who can

042greet our kids every day and not only be friendly and welcoming to the kids first thing but they can keep the environment on the bus safe and supportive you want her to feel empowered over the conditions of her workplace especially because it is moving along lynchburg city roads ms moorman asks only that you empower her with the ability to affect that environment for the better what about you is that my time yeah yes mr reed thank you thank you very much [Applause] we're going to ask the schuyler unless the board says otherwise would be willing to come back the next time and uh we appreciate everyone who has made your comments uh school board member harvey mr chairman i would like to allow the skyler to speak what is the pleasure to board i check

043in there all right well that's sufficient then uh mr uh skylar come on up please and share briefly with us skyla are you here coward all right well we did make an effort thank you all for coming and we appreciate it we will now move to the next item in our agenda and that will move us to uh section d student representative comments and our first uh presentation for tonight is going to come from jaden scott if i'm reading this correctly [Music] hi everyone um we are back with the lcs well recg 12 days of holiday spirit so each year and every year the faculty and staff organized this event it lasts for 12 days and it's just like a spirit week for a countdown to the holiday season so we've already had um like

044our pajama day and then our flannel day so we still have some more days up and coming so if you go to glass make sure to check um maybe instagram or your emails or your announcements from miss laura y so that you can participate in the upcoming days and then next we have a special thank you to the lcs education foundation um on friday november 19th the esl students from ec glass and heritage high school were invited to amazement square for a day of learning and exploration they worked in a lab to identify physical and chemical changes and learned a lot about virginia's history they also had fun exploring the rest of the museum so we do want to say thank you to the lcs education foundation for making this possibility for making this a

045possibility for our students and we are very appreciative of that and then next i do want to highlight our visit from um governor elect glenn youngkin at ec glass so we were we had a basketball game and when you know we walked in and i went through the doors and there was our governor-elect standing right there so that was quite the shock in the pictures i have included one of dr brennan and mr young ken as well as myself and mr yonkin so that was definitely a nice surprise and then i also want to highlight our thanksgiving drive hosted by the sca this was yet another successful thanksgiving food and clothing drive to benefit the parkview community mission so we do want to say thank you to the ecg family to anybody and everybody who

046donated because we were able to donate over 400 pounds of coats and warm clothing as well as 450 pounds of food and so as far as our ecg community goes inside the school we do want to thank the german national honor society key club nhs and as well as sca we had a lot of volunteers from everywhere so if i miss yours we thank you too now i want to move into virginia college application week this was during november 15th through the 19th and the purpose of this week was to just give students the opportunity to apply to one call at least one college and to get their name out get the foot get their foot on the pedal start getting there to where we should be and applying to our colleges we had a

047lot of participants and we had a lot of colleges come down and we had also had um on-site admissions through zoom so i do want to say thank you to the beacon of hope and any and everybody who helped to um to help to get that set up and started so yes i want to say thank you for that and then i do want to give out a big congratulations to our orchestra ec glass orchestra it has definitely been brought up a lot today in this meeting so i do want to make sure that we give them a special shout out miss gina dicarlo as well as the members of our glass orchestra on friday and saturday november 12th and 13th the south central regional orchestra was held at ec glass 120 of the finest

048musicians in this part of the state converged from the glass auditorium to prepare a challenging program performed saturday afternoon congratulations to ec glass students who auditioned and secured spots in this in this honorary event these students are now all qualified to audition for the all-state in february and so i do want to take a second to say their names um axel lawrence brady mandeville elliott putnam isaac hardin jeffrey wuters and zachary hardin i also like that a couple of those people are in the crowd today so jeffrey came and spoke and then mr putnam was here so congratulations to all of you all that's an amazing amazing opportunity and then once again i do want to say thank you to the parkview community mission and all that they do for our school um every weekend

049every friday they've been providing meals weekend food options for the students and so i do want to say thank you to all of the people involved in this this is such an amazing opportunity and it's so thoughtful so generous so thank you so much for that and that concludes my presentation today so um i just wanted to wrap it up with together we keep climbing that's our slogan at glass and so i hope that you all enjoyed this presentation i hope you all have a great rest of your meeting thank you all right thank you so much jayden and uh madame clerk our representative from heritage tonight eugene all right eugene go right ahead can everybody hear me yes okay well hello everyone my name is eugene kim and i am the school board representative

050from heritage high school once again it is such an honor to be here speaking to you all i just wanted to say happy holidays i know we can feel the holiday spirit in the air i know i can feel it in the weather and i hope everyone is staying warm um i wanted to emphasize on the heritage high school arts who has the heritage high school arts department has been very busy the orchestra has a holiday concert next monday and the heritage high school band has a holiday concert next tuesday both of these events are at 7pm in the heritage auditorium heritage high school theater has been very busy they have their state's competition today december 7th and they also have a holiday celebration which is over the span of three days december 10th through

051the 12th in the heritage high school auditorium at 7 00 pm um just a little note for the pioneer theater they are moving on to the regional competition and congratulations to basic jacob for winning best actor that is amazing and we are all so proud of you heritage high school and ec glass they had both environmental clubs of those schools had a joint collaborative volunteer opportunity to clean up miller park and pick trash up and in these pictures you can see here it's high school students and ec glass students and i think this was so awesome and we are so proud of all our students the heritage high school scholastic bowl team has their first competition tomorrow at heritage good luck to them and the heritage high school literary magazine is ex still accepting art

052or literary submissions and our big topic this year is culture and please email any of your submissions to this email address now before we move on to our my next section i just wanted to honor all our seniors from the band cheerleading team football and cross country teams they were honored on november 5th and i just wanted to show their pictures up here these pictures were taken by renee stuart chilton and these wonderful posters were also created by her once again congratulations to all our seniors now moving on to jonathan baker congratulations to him he was the winner of the thirteen thousand dollar student excel scholarship we are all very proud of him this is an amazing opportunity so great job jonathan moving on to heritage athletics the heritage high school wrestling team placed warth

053at the perry mcclure round robin invitational congratulations to them they also have an upcoming competition this saturday so good luck to our pioneers the heritage high school basketball teams have been busy as well the jv and varsity girls teams girls teams have games this wednesday and thursday of both away games and the boys team has an away game on the seventh and a home game versus rosberg on thursday the harry high school indoor track team has started and they have an invitational meet at this this saturday at 8 30 am so good luck to our pioneers the heritage high school swim team has also started they just had their first meet last friday versus lca savannah and rusberg they placed third and we are so proud of them and they have upcoming meets at halifax

054today and this friday versus prince edward and brookville at the downtown ymca now before i end my presentation i wanted to make sure to honor our very own elijah oaks who is here today as the heritage high school alternate representative she has committed to stanford university through their track and field program both indoor and outdoor and she is planning on majoring in internet tricks and quantitative economics we are so so proud of her and we're so happy for her and we wish her the best of luck in all her future endeavors amazing job elijah that's it from me thank you so much to you all for your attention eugene and jaden we want to thank both of you for your outstanding presentations and letting us know the fine work that is going on and we

055also want to commend both of you for your wonderful comments in a recent article featured in the news in advance for our student reps and so thank you both for the fine work that you're doing and for your reports today we will now move to section e which is our finance report and we're going to ask dr edwards to move us through that absolutely and um this is our standard financial report although we did also add some health care information so i'm going to ask ms laconic who should be on the screen to join us and go over the financial report missile carnage can you hear me yes through october 31st 2021 our operating budget the adjusted budget is 102 million 487 and one cent that is the same amount as the previous report as

056of september 2021 the revenue we've received 27.07 of our revenue we have received 27.44 excuse me we've spent 27.4 percent of our budget and our expenditure including our encumbrances is at 84.71 i've included detailed revenue and expenditure reports for that time period i have also included just an update to the health insurance we have the amounts through october 31st for our balances as well as the comparison to the prior year i'm bringing it to your attention a month earlier than normal and that's just to let you just to show that it's something that we have on our radar because our claims have been high um do you have any questions any questions for mr carnage from members of the board dr brennan mr just as as an individual board member can you hear me okay

057i'm not i'm going to come into the boardwalk okay i apologize it was broken i couldn't hear the question yeah no that's fine there you go mr chairman please dr brennan so i just wanted to make a comment as an individual board member that i along with dr gupta has been a thorn on your side regarding the the cost for the health care insurance so thank you very much for including that in the report today and i know you made a comment about the expenses i know you've made comments in the past about how you lose sleep as these charges come in and the money goes out but any other comments for us as far as the fluctuations or is it just a normal variation that we're going to see as time goes on it's

058really too early to really know for sure now at this point you know through october i'm not concerned because we still have health insurance expenditures that that were that's been budgeted but not expensed so and that amount is just under 320 000 and that includes the amount that was allocated to the board members so you know worst case we could we could draw on that i will say november is trending higher but often you'll see that in december you know it dips back down so it's just something that we're monitoring and we also still have the money from at the city or the health insurance reserve if needed but as we all know we have we have a lot of vacancies um at the beginning of the year maybe not so many right now but

059we have vacancies that does provide some excess that if we needed to tap into that to cover it we could do so as well great well thank you very much and thank you for keeping that on your radar and giving us the report intermittently i really appreciate it dr gupta this isn't a normal trend people normally like to expense before the deductibles end on december 31st so this time of the year you do see this higher than normal expenditure that is a very good point you are correct because we're getting close to the end of the plan year so towards the end you do see it it's just when you look at it compared to the prior year it is it is a little bit higher and we did not carry over as much as

060at the beginning of the year because that's a calculation based off of what is considered prior year services so we sort of started off lower than we had the prior year so we're seeing that effect now so at this point i just want to make sure you all have it on your radar we certainly have it on our radar and we'll keep monitoring that further questions from miss la carnage all right thank you mr leconic for your finance report thank you dr edwards we will now move to section f which is our consent agenda and per recommendations from the board previously the items for tonight are the school board minutes from november the 3rd human resources report and the fiscal agent authorization for the virginia state operated programs in our 2122 budgets is there a

061motion to approve the consent agenda i move that we approve the consent agenda there's a motion by dr carter it's their second second by ms morris and then further questions or discussion hearing none madam clerk if you would please call the room school board member trust yes school but mama dr vernon yes school but miss morrison yes school board member dr carter yes google mama dr coleman yes school board member dr nellis yes scoop up mum or dr seunghae yes mama dr gupta yes yes motion cursing nine to zero thank you madam clerk now move to section g our school board member reports and our first report finance and facilities committee chair dr nillas the finance and facilities committee met um on the 22nd and was top of discussion was the uh fund balance and

062how that fits into the capital plan expenditure i believe is a topic for later so i won't spoil the give away the ending thank you dr nellis any questions all right the governor's school committee uh dr gupta i have a report here for the bundle which was handed out so beyond this the couple of pieces of information is that we have three new uh board members who will be joining january there is no meeting it will be in february uh three of the five districts have uh during the election replace their board members so other than appomattox and lynchburg you can figure out what the other three districts are there'll be a new representative on the graph school uh and the second takeaway is i'm the only guy asking questions there so no surprise keep

063asking but i think there will be i ask for the demographic variables they don't have it for the applicants so as they make these tours as you see the dates in december he said he'll have a better idea about what the profile of our applicants are because we were worried about the diversity of the applicants going into gov school thank you dr gupta that's very socratic of you to raise questions and we thank you for that at this time we will now move forward to our law regional school chair dr carter the laurel regional school board meeting was december the 1st at 10 o'clock at the school and what we're now waiting for is the assessment by dr asip and that should be coming shortly probably next week or before the end of this month

064also we discuss some of the challenges with other school systems staff should shortages staff morale also proactive discussion regarding the budget salaries and also how we can best work with other systems and other schools to meet the needs of the changing profiles of a student and their needs that they have thank you dr carter and the questions for dr carla all right we will now move to the stem academy dr nillas stem academy met virtually on november 9th it was a routine business meeting and update on progress for the year everything is good expenses are in line the students are doing well and it was like i said it was a routine meeting thank you and questions for dr nilas thank you sir legislative advocacy and community relations committee chair dr sinha no report we

065did not meet other than the legislative breakfast in november and i believe the december meeting will be canceled because it was to be the same day as our next work session okay thank you dr sinha and the chair and the board superintendent and staff want to thank you for a well put together session with our legislators and local representatives thank you so much for that uh the education task force uh we will be under unfinished business hearing a discussion on that unless dr gupta has something to say there's no meeting so thank you so kindly all right partners in education dr brenner a partner's education there's not yet been a meeting but i have been in contact with mr frank hubbard or hank hubbard who was the chair of that group and and they did

066have a very productive meeting with lynchburg c-schools administration as far as reviewing their charter and other issues and my understanding is there's going to be another upcoming meeting in response from lynchburg administration to continue that process and hopefully have partners education back on track again very soon thank you sir any questions now move on to uh the education foundation uh dr sinha and mr truth no report thank you so kind and lastly the beacon of hope dr nillas and dr sinha well nothing to report all right thank you all um for what you're doing and of course as groups are meeting we will hear from those uh as they begin to meet now move to section h of our agenda for tonight our comprehensive strategic plan and the first item that we're going to deal

067with there is our recruitment strategic plan 2.2.1 uh dr edwards yes this is the part of the meeting where we just give you an update on some of the progress on some of the goals and objectives and strategies in our strategic plan and i just wanted to take a moment to look at 2.2.1 which talks about our recruitment strategies and efforts to hire diverse staff across job categories and a couple of things that it talked about that we would work with the economic development and tourism under marjet and you guys know that we have done some collaborative work with her and her team in terms of bringing traffic to our city and then once we get traffic to our city of course to lynchburg city schools so we continue to partner with her as well

068as go out to job fairs and college tours so i just want to mention i know the board is aware but the public may not be aware of what our talent acquisition team has been doing in terms of recruitment on august 19th they went out for one lynchburg mini opportunities august 12th longwork longwood university career fair we had an education that was october 12th sorry october 22nd an education fair october 26th they partnered with virginia career works october 27th norfolk state university career fair as well as sending another partner to virginia commonwealth university diversity career fair october 28th howard university november 9th we had a teacher education and psychology career fair november 12th old dominion university uh also on november 12th focusing on speech and language pathology fair and then on november 17th working with

069virginia career works so that's just in the last couple weeks that our team has been out and about working with various organizations as well as colleges and universities hbcus to increase the attention here at lynchburg city schools and as our marketing team says we want to make lcs your employer of choice so that's just a little bit of what we're doing we are gearing up for a very aggressive hiring season in the spring in february so plans are already being made um in terms of just having our teams tour various organizations they're getting signed up right now a lot of these things fill up rather quickly so kudos to the team for getting lynchburg city in there and named and what we have done and i've shared this with the school board in terms of

070our hr system that we can start to track where we're getting our candidates from and getting some metrics in terms of you know where are people where are these applicants coming from not only just which colleges but if they were at a career fair that we picked them up in addition to applying we're bringing back resumes and using all kinds of recruiting strategies including linkedin glassdoor indeed so not just posting on our website we recognize as you've heard from various businesses that there are worker shortages all over the place so we're doing a lot to go out and recruit people to come to lynchburg city schools so i wanted to share uh that one for you for uh number one do you want me to keep going questions i'm just glad to hear it i

071mean i i have plenty of questions but i think we can deal with that at a different time i think that's really reflective of the work we would like to see ms morrison i saw some names on the personnel report the human resources report of some new hires from those schools and so i think that demonstrates some success yes absolutely and we're going to continue doing it so i i just want to make sure that the community heard what was said and so that is being done and it looks like as ms morrison is suggesting that there's some fruit that can come from that as we move on uh dr edwards you can move on to item two okay item two let me just turn my page here um also under goal two which is

072a an investment in our personnel um is our compensation program and um compensation package and some of the things that we have as strategies is um we are working in collaboration with the lcs foundation for the signing bonus so we i think we successfully talked about our first signing bonus candidate that we had last month in addition we are working with the business alliance and um opportunity lynchburg to get more traffic about our jobs and our postings and the things that we are doing but we also made a commitment to increase salaries and start looking at pay tables so a couple years ago this board reinstated pay schedules and then we had a freeze but we unfroze it mid-year and continued and just to give you an example and i'll just i'll just use the

073bus drivers of what's happened over the last couple years if i just pick random driver at the lowest rate and at the highest rate so i'll give you some stats over the last four years um since i've been here um looking at let's call them driver number one at the lowest rate in the hourly rate was 10.86 cents per hour in 2019 this board raised it to 11.75 and then we sort of had a freeze in the middle of 2021 um which we unfroze to be uh 12.11 cents and we just added another dollar to the current year to make the bus driver the starting salary at entry level one 13.46 so over the last four years it's gone from 10.86 an hour to 13.46 an hour which is about a 23.9 percent increase over

074the four years and we continue to invest in our bus drivers and in our transportation department we also in the current year added 50 cents an hour so if you go to our website and pick under departments for hr and look at employee pay scales you will see that our pay scales have been updated as of november 30th even though the changes went into effect november 1st so we did add the dollar an hour to the bus drivers and and transportation as well as the 50 cents an hour to the bus aides and once we finished uh with the bus drivers for the current year now this has nothing to do with the upcoming budget because we still have to do the budget proposal for next year um but we are looking at our classroom

075instructional assistants so also updated on our pay tables if you were to go to our website and look at the classified employees because that's also in our strategic plan to start looking at classified employees you will see that the instructional assistants and the therapeutic educational assistants are on c plus and e plus which are the pay schedules and we added a dollar an hour to those pay schedules as well in the current year so we continue to work particularly at our employees um who are making under 12 an hour to bring that wage up as we move along as well as prepare for the upcoming budget season when we're looking at everybody but what we can do in the current year to help our employees to make obviously lcs the employer of choice we're going

076to do you heard mr mr loose or actually mr reed speak about our custodial staff our secretary of staff if you look at our pay tables you will see that they are all within that first tier of the first set of pay tables and we continue to look at that and let that be the next starting spot of where we're going in terms of trying to address our employee compensation as well as moving forward but i did want to bring to the board's attention and to the public's attention some of the work that we have already been doing and that we continue to do as we um improve our pay schedules and and our compensation for our staff all right i know there's some input here on this very important matter dr gupta dr edwards

077thank you for sharing this information as you know when i came on board we asked for a living wage and we got at a time under chair morrison and what i'm seeing right now is the the hourly clock is running ahead of us you know you raised by a dollar but when i drive on 29 there's a company offering 17 as a starting wage mcdonald and is paying a lot more money than people who are driving are precious assets in the back of their bus so what could we do because i look at a dollar increase brings about six thousand dollars a year after tax that'll be about three thousand six hundred dollars when i go to kroger thirty dollars just barely gets me milk and yogurt nowadays the inflation is way way ahead of

078us that's the reality of life so not giving speeches what could we do in this current budget to bring these people up where they can have a new living wage yeah so we're kind of fixed in the current budget because we're not getting any additional revenue outside of what ms laconic proposed that's cares revenue aside so i'm not talking about anything with cares with the operating budget so as we're looking at our vacancies and where we haven't filled staff and i think that's one of the places where go back to our old thing reinvest in lcs we're seeing that money that we can put back into our own staff particularly the staff that are um at the wages and if you actually look at our pay tables you'll see while um you know our bus

079drivers are up and and some other folks are up there are still some some um positions that are under 12 an hour um so it is not it is a it is a concern of mine across multiple groups of individuals and you're right i too look around and see what other places are offering as a starting wage and they are outpacing us as we continue to do it so step number one is to be faithful to at least putting in the step-wide increases that we continue to do while we try to make the changes that we're making right now where we can add the dollar when we can add the 50 cents when we can go back and look at each group and each opportunity that we get that we can do that we are

080committed to investing that money back in our staff later we'll talk a little bit about cares and just one of the particular cares act for transportation in terms of signing bonuses and retention bonuses now that's different because that's not that's a one-time thing and it's not the salary that you're going to build on year after year the changes that we're making are we're trying to make them permanent changes for which we build on year after year although the bonus is nice too i don't want to downplay that but the compensation would be great as well and we as a board are going to have our work cut out for us um not only looking at next year's budget but what we're going to do this year is try to forecast a multi-year how do we

081get up to you know a dollar amount 15 an hour at minimum if we're going to remain competitive and it's going to take all of us to really put that together and look at that because we are as i said if you go on and look at our pay tables right now page one with the exception of the drivers um who we adjusted and the um instructional assistants are all under 12 an hour at that base level and that's with living wage what we did a couple years ago in compression any other statements at this time i think this certainly will have the resolve to handle this matter we must attend it mr truth yes what are we able to do with the cares money in terms of a retention bonus what restriction do we

082have on those even if you know maybe we can wait them for some of these people i know it's just one shot in the arm but at least that's one shot nothing we can do there's a section on our agenda under lcs update that talks about cares funding and we're going to address what we are doing in terms of that when we when we get there so coming soon excellent very good point mr truth thank you any other statements at this time all right doctor at once you can move to item three okay item three um also under our strategic plan under section 1.7.2 in the student services department talks about student behavior management and again hearing some of the comments and some of the things that mr luz has shared and just some of

083the things that we're seeing not just in our schools but across this area and just nationally with children and behavior one of the things that i asked director brown to do is to share with us some of the things that we are doing here at lynchburg city schools in terms of um managing student behavior both in the classroom tier one instruction tier two and tier three and then for those who may not be aware we do have alternative school programs although those programs are increasingly becoming full with students with that so i am going to ask director brown to turn up there she is all right director brown i'm turning it over to you and we can see your screen but if you are speaking you might be muted there we go okay i apologize

084um good afternoon board and i'd like to introduce you to my three new um team members here on the screen um tracy peachtrack who uh who is our new homeless education liaison zoe wickham stokes she's a supervisor of student services primarily primarily over social emotional learning and megan arthur our division case manager they're important because as we work through our specific objective of 1.7.2 they've been tasked with either providing positive behavior intervention and supports mental health services social emotional learning or starting to develop the framework for restorative practices so what you have before you is virginia tiered systems of supports and this is the model that we use across the division in regards to how we support our students in the lower green tier one supports we basically use this as an instructional support to

085give all support to students across all grade levels of all ages regardless of what school they are in and within this chart you can see the various levels of supports that have been implementing and then also what we will be trying to do with restorative practices and if you notice um the supports are layered for tier one tier two in which we focus on small group and target students whether they're individual or two or three or four or five in a group when we do small group of instruction it can be done through a social worker a counselor or a board certified behavior analysis um designated person for behavior it can also be service can also be offered through our behavior coaches and those targeted areas focus on the deficit areas in terms of behavior

086social emotional or the mental health needs of the students tier three behaviors are our students that have the most intensive need for interventions this might be one-on-one services this might be us referring to outside agencies in terms of mental health or other evaluations for our students that are in crisis mode or headed towards crisis mode um at that time so this is just kind of an overview for anyone that's new on the board or from the committee in terms of the level of services that we offer and then some of the things that we offer in terms of support services as a whole as a division in regard to specific strategies within the objective in tier one just as an overview right now we posted for three intervention specialists at the middle school level to

087help align instruction in terms of academics behavior and that social emotional support um we saw the most need there so trying to get them additional layer uh support to wrap around on them and being instructional with the delivery of service that we're offering not only for staff and professional development but also the media services of the students in regards to behavior management at the beginning of each school year we do a new teacher training that focuses solely on classroom management skills with the teachers and we follow up with them throughout the school year being very intentional and realistic in the approaches that other scenarios that we teach based specifically on the behaviors that we see here within lynchburg city schools trying to give them a tool built of multiple resources responses and strategies of how

088to interact with the students and how to de-escalate situations and trying to keep that classroom management within the classroom and not coming out of that classroom as an office referral and i'm just highlighting some of the things that we have um done this school year and that we are currently doing all right next one um some another strategy would be g um training our support staff for tier two behaviors currently we are getting ready to do some professional development for trauma informed practices we will be using the train the trainer model with our staff so that we can train all of our staff eventually on how to deal with the social emotional needs of our students and that will be an ongoing process until we have all of our staff trained within trauma informed decision

089making another highlight in tier 2 would be as having calm down in chill rooms this was implemented this year through cares funding in all of the schools all of our non-elementary schools have a calm down area or room that's been set up so students can de-escalate in real time once they're de-escalated the goal is for them to return to their class and finish out the remainder of the day this is a preventative measure and an intervention measure because we do not like sending our students home we want to keep as many students in school as possible and so as we've learned over covet our students have dealt with a lot of tragedy um and trauma um and so we're having to coach reteach and model some behaviors and if we can get them into a

090safe space and work with them to learn how to de-escalate and use some mindfulness techniques to regulate themselves we tend to find that they can go back to class and finish out for the remainder of the day and eventually our goal would be to see the students less and less as we're teaching them these self-regulatory skills as i'm saying i'm just giving a highlight of some of the things that we've done um and are doing in regards to tier three an example would be um alternatives to suspension um for objective um excuse me for strategy t looking at different ways to handle a student other than suspending a student can we do community service can we work a student to fire through the fire prevention program if they set a fire within a school what

091is something that we can do other than just suspending a student we know that when we suspend a student most of our students go home they do not do work they do not complete their work they do not log in online so how do we still provide educational services to our students but also hold them accountable for some of those actions um that they have done that might have been inappropriate or you know something that we need to redirect as well for the long term we will be conducting a school survey facility survey for alternative education we know that right now we have a spacing concern and problem with our students and being able to move students into alternative ed right now we do have limited space and that has been a subject of concern

092for the last couple of years so bringing in outside company is a goal of ours for the school year to do some research and exploration of our facilities and giving us some recommendations in terms of alternative af programming but also better use of our facilities for alternative and programming as well and lastly with this um the last tier three 3 as we're looking at this developing and implementing the school transition action plans we're doing this making sure that we're meeting each other students needs and working with them on a case-by-case scenario this will be geared for individual students based upon the behaviors or the mental health needs that each of these students needs at this time this can be done at the school level and it also can be done as at the division level

093but we also work with outside agencies to help build support for our students um as needed excuse me i got happy clicking um overall our anticipated outcomes would be to reduce suspensions reduce exclusionary practices but more importantly to make our classrooms manageable so that instructions can occur and that there's a positive learning environment going on at this time we do know that we have had an increase of behaviors we've had increase of aggressive behaviors this school year and i can come back to the board and give more data on that but we are working diligently to train up our behavior coaches our registered behavior technicians for them to go into the classrooms and to work closely with the teachers work closely with the students to de-escalate behaviors and also to provide strategies as well in

094regards to mental health we have a services on site in which they provide therapeutic services we also use an online telehealth service that we're giving our students immediate mental health services in real time they can log in during a school day and they can also log in after school hours and these are just i just gave a basic overview i know it was a lot i apologize but just giving you an overview of what we're basically covering in objective 1.7.2 are there any questions all right ms morrison when we uh received the first report from the facility consultants i think i asked at that time if we could include alternative ad because it's certainly a need as we know that we have more students that benefit from that kind of um facility and interaction with

095teachers so were we not able to do that or add it to our ongoing study we didn't in terms of just the actual facilities for the building but as we're looking at enrollment and demographics which we're about to get into some meetings that is where we're going to have those comments i agree yeah dr carter i was kind of surprised to hear that we that other students from the other surrounding counties are also using the space at our some of our alternative programs because i know that we're going to need all the space we can get are we looking at that to see what when we have an increased need to make sure that we have placements for our students yeah i think that is we we haven't had that concern up until this year

096where we're seeing behaviors which is one of the reasons why we're looking at space not only just at the alternative programs and the ones that are like part of fort hill is a regional program is what you're talking about but um what can we do internally as well so yes it is up for discussion in terms of looking at it but right now because we're committed to the contracts and how we're our partnerships with those outside school divisions we're going to honor that dr carter and i think also just the fact that we have a homeless educational liaison says a lot that's i just it's just hard to just fathom that a lot of our number of our students are homeless and what all that entails and the needs and supports they need but the

097other thing too is just recently doing the disciplinary committee is we're just running into i believe in every student by name and by need and to make sure that every student is supported but we're seeing now that a lot of students it's the quad ones that are reacting to being bullied or harassed and how we can get a handle on that so that we don't have students that sit quietly and are just yeah they're just taking they're just taking all they can and then it's like anyone that's quiet you know you always say be careful if a quiet person really goes off or has a problem you're going to see and we're seeing this so but how do we make sure that every child gets an education but then at the same time that one

098child doesn't interfere with the education of another yeah and then there is a major problem yeah and and i think that is at essence the the challenge that we have as you're trying to walk that line between being supportive of the child in crisis so to speak but also being in supportive of the other children in the room while you have a child in crisis or the other children who might be the target of a child in crisis and a lot of the work that latanya's team is doing is is that in terms of the counseling and trying to get in front of it preventative so that we don't have kids who have these sessions where they just can't take it anymore and i think this was behind the essence of having counselors if you

099remember school counselors their structure changed so that they would spend more time with kids which is great on on paper in terms of what you what we want to have happen but also consider everything else that is going on that we're also managing and particularly our student support group is managing just with provide and mitigation and strategies and absenteeism and then you know put that burden on our staff um in terms of that i think one of the things that latonya shared and we're going to do it with our cares funding is is the uh behavioral interventionist the secondary interventionist where we can and if we can we are posting for positions to get the adult help that's needed in the buildings um and that particular one is the adult help that is focused on

100behavior and learning um because you know if you do have these behaviors it's interfering with your learning but maybe also the the students in the classroom so we're trying to get some folks who may be interested in these jobs and using the cares funding to post for these positions and i will say i mean as much as we're pretty much if you go on our website you will see lots of postings what we're not seeing is lots of people who are um interested in the posting so we're trying to be creative in ways that we can like we were with the lunch monitors making it a midday opportunity for folks who maybe i'm a parent my kids go to school i can do four hours in the middle of the day to help out and

101do some things so we are really looking at um the requirements and how we can just get talent in here to help our staff because it is it is needed the other thing um that we i have to continue continually be mindful of is in many cases we are dealing with trauma we're not dealing with i don't want to you know do my lesson we're dealing with trauma and as talented as my staff is and it's educated and trained and you can go through all their colleges and look at their backgrounds very few classroom teachers are also dually certified in trauma and what we're asking classroom teachers to do is yes know your orton gillingham reading strategies and your foundations but also deal with trauma while you're trying to teach content and it is becoming

102increasingly difficult which is why the partnerships with outside agencies are so much needed we need to help with the trauma from those who are already trained in dealing with it particularly with children and younger children were seeing it with our our youngest students and you know five-year-olds and kindergarten students and first grade students but as latonya said i mean she started with showing you the new folks who have joined our team we are very grateful to have those people and we continue to be grateful for people who have decided i am going to make lynchburg city schools my employer of choice to come and join us but we still have work to do when it comes to that thank you dr mr harvey thank you mr chairman director around thank you very much for your

103presentation there's a lot of a lot of information here and as i was preparing for the meeting i was just trying to chew on all of this information one thing that i pre that i really picked up in your presentation which which does have me concerned a little and it ties in a little bit with what dr edwards is saying is that the impact on our staff with this we're requiring our staff to have all of this training we're talking about how to deal with all these situations all of this trauma and we heard earlier tonight some examples of some pretty volatile behavior in the classroom directed specifically at our staff and so i was a little bit concerned when i when i heard we're going to take a student send them to a room

104so they can de-escalate and then try to get them back into the same classroom that to me just seems like we're we're asking for a continued disruption in the classroom which disrupts the other students and also the the bearing that that has on the teacher dealing with that they've just had this traumatic experience where where we where we talked about throwing things and cursing our teachers out i mean think about that for a minute having food thrown at you and being cursed at and then that student is sent out for 15 minutes to de-escalate in another room and be brought back into the room and then you have to deal with that once again i think i think we've we really need to be looking at this a little bit deeper i would be i

105would be one to say that that student needs to to remain there in that de-escalation room at least for that class i think it's disruptive to have to go through all of that send that student out and then that student to come back in in the classroom again and have the teacher to have to deal with that so i i just i really want us to to i understand our first and foremost focus is on our students but we also have to focus on the mental health and well-being of our staff and show that we support them as well in in how we address behavior and i do believe that is what the lynchburg education foundation has come and presented us talking about classroom behavior and how it's managed that's something that ultimately comes comes

106to us as a board to oversee how our classrooms can be managed so that we protect and support our staff as well as our students all of them all right so dr coleman can i respond to that please director brown okay so um mr harvey we have classroom managed behaviors and we also have office managed behaviors and there's a separation in those behaviors and i would be more than glad to come to a workshop and train the board on those two separate behaviors and so your classroom managed behaviors are your lower level behaviors that should be managed within the classroom when we're talking about a student that is using excessive inappropriate language custom teachers out that isn't office managed behaviors that is not a managed behavior that i expect to see that student immediately back

107in that student i mean in that teacher's classroom for any office managed behavior it's up to that principle when they get them to interview the student see what happened prior to the incident and how they responded during the incident and the intent of the incident when we're talking about classroom managed behaviors we're talking about redirecting students for things like turning around in the sea or turning around and talking to joey we're not talking about those higher level of incident behaviors in which mr loose and the lea has mentioned in these in regards to those higher levels of behaviors we do have systems in place to manage those behaviors well so it's up to our office and our team to go back out hearing that and seeing what we can do to better support in terms

108of checks and balances and resources and making sure that the schools are able to implement some of those strategies um within their schools some of our offenses is the teacher gets hit there's a zero tolerance for that if it's intentional and it's causing harm for that teacher i have not waived on that or wavered on that since i've been here at lynchburg city schools however with our new s bar practices as a school division we do practice prevention and intervention with modeling teaching and re-teaching for classroom behaviors and if that behavior is that egregious um and the schools go over level systems they go over expectations and they have diagrams what is a classroom management expectation or behavior and what is an office managed classroom management expectation or behavior those are the things you have

109to delineate between and even for long-term suspensions we sit there and we go through them what is a 10-day suspension and is what is something more that we should recommend to the board um for that you know extra eye and also so the board can be aware and also so the board can see if it warrants more than 10 days as well so you know as we're going through these scenarios each one of them we handle as a case by case scenario as well based upon the intent of the infraction and also what else is going on with the student with the goal of getting the student services that they need whether it's us providing group sessions individual therapy or referring them out for services as well or working with social services or their probation

110office to meet the needs of the students i i would welcome that opportunity to to have that information shared with us on those different you know how how we handle some of these different cases i think that would be helpful thank you director brown thank you mr harvey dr gupta ms brown thank you very much uh doing an excellent job and uh in one of the previous board meetings you mentioned that we have 126 homeless kids so i'm hoping you'll share with us tonight that none of them are sitting out in cold they have a warm safe space after school to go to that's michael um and just to be fully transparent um dr gupta i just hired on tracy peacetrack and when she came on board i do know that we still had one

111family that was still choosing to live out of the car and i can say that um dr edwards just signed off for us to receive additional funding for our population i'm here in lynchburg and i can tell you that we have purchased warm clothes we can also with the grant monies that we will be receiving put families in hotels up to two weeks as needed and provide additional services and i can tell you my home my new homeless liaison has done this before um a couple of years ago and she's been hitting the ground running meeting with all of the families and making sure that their needs are being met but it's up to the family in terms of where they choose to shelter and we as a school division can support them and their

112children as best as we can all right um dr gupta did you have a friend just have one more follow-up the former colleague of mine dr stump uh asked about restorative justice are we working on that uh he said there was some discussion in the equity task force about it would you share where do we stand on that so in regards to restorative practices or restorative justices we have implemented circle time through our social workers and through some of our english classes and we also have morning meetings at the elementary level in terms of a greater scope of things um it will be inclusive of funding so right now i can tell you our new um supervisor zoe whitcomb stokes is working on a plan along with our board certified behavior analyst that's over behavior

113rich ferguson and i've asked them to develop a long-term plan but know that funding would have to be considered when we're looking at the long-term implementation plan of restorative practices our principals um that have been here three years or more has had the restorative practices training um and been through that training so that's something that we would like to bring through again and offer to all of our administrators and start to implement on a broader level and so right now we're at the developmental plan um the excuse me developmental phase of a strategic plan for that that we will submit to senior leadership very soon thank you director brown mr truth thank you director brown i want to thank you for presentation i think you're uh on the correct track and fantastic could you just

114give me an idea of the roles and responsibilities of an interventional i guess interventionist or interventional specialist i don't know is that is that a soft term for for a disciplinarian or is it something that's more of a uh a counseling level and just curious no it's not a counselor by far and dr edwards and miss pugh if any of y'all want to jump in as well so the intervention specialist would be someone that's looking at the systematic approach for instruction in terms of academics um behavior and social emotional making sure that the school that they are at has a systematic approach to implementation but also providing professional development and supports and also helping to monitor on the data making data-driven decisions to see if the strategies that they are implementing are being effective for

115example if math 180 is the academic instructional approach for that middle school making sure that the students know what it is making sure that the families know what it is we're working with the other offices within lynchburg city schools making sure we're getting that information out but making sure that they are reviewing the data and that the program is actually increasing the scores and the academic performance of our students in terms of math in regards to behavior making sure that the school has behavior expectations in place routines in place and making sure that it's a system in place for positive rewards if that's the reward system or incentive system for that school but again also looking at office referrals and helping the school making data-driven decisions looking at the time of the incidents of the

116referrals the location the teacher the number of events that occurred say for example on tuesdays if it's fights every time at the cafeteria doing third lunch we're looking at what's occurring before lunch after lunch and the day before and looking at a preventative way to quickly go in there redirect those behaviors and also lessen the the chance that that would occur again in terms of social emotional it's knowing your school what community what neighborhoods are these students for that particular school coming from high social media i'm having an impact what is their emotional well-being and how do you address it um as a school um as a family as a whole so that person will be assisting the principal um and all of their leads in that school we're making sure that there's a systematic

117approach um professional development in helping with the data for the intervention and prevention that's needed dr edwards tell me if i you've done a great job and anybody out there listening who wants to apply this is on our website you can apply there is a job description on our website it is an administrative position that is cares funded so it goes back to what we're doing with our cares money but also we purposely labeled it as an interventionist because and i think it was said tonight that if my behavior is interfering with my learning what can we do to stop that from occurring and and this person is sort of a slide between both the behavioral world the connection with the family if we need to connect them with outside resources this person can work

118with latonya's staff as well as the school staff to help get those resources because the goal is to get learning back to the maximum track and we wanted to provide the administrative teams particularly at the secondary levels some additional support to help them in dealing with some of the things that we are seeing particularly at the middle school level that our children are facing do you have additional questions please please and i know when i was going through the school system we had something called in-school suspension do we have that and we still have that and then as a and as a follow-up our alternative education um programs what is our capacity if you know you may not even get i i don't need to put you on the spot right now but get back

119to me and then how what what our level that capacity has been utilized by lynchburg city schools and the reason i'm asking these questions is because if we need to frame something going forward to get additional capacity i want to be in a position to help the school system do that because that may be one of our solutions to this as uh i think sharon brought that up but just certain certain environments may be better for other for students and uh other environments so that's all and so i can get you the most up-to-date data because one of our programs has shifted but our transition program which is our elementary tier 2 tier 3 program that's housed at sheffield on the highest number of students that we can house there would be up to 16

120to 18 depending on the type of behaviors that we are serving at that time and the level of aggression within those students that we are serving at that time if it's minimum level of aggressions then we can serve more students but if there's high levels of regressions we tend to put less within a classroom so that would be for your elementary level in regards to fort hill community school that serves middle school and high school students and that is the one site that um has our regional auto ed program and when then the regional alternative ed program there are slots that are allocated by the state and it's a sliding index in which each division get a certain number of allocated slots lynchburg has the highest slots everyone else has um 10 or less slots

121in terms of the local cap localities that we serve around us and i can say in the past one locality had never used any slots and so lynchburg of course got those additional slots however this year with the extreme behaviors they did use um their eight slots that they were given by the state as a whole last year in and out students um because fort hill has a morning program a afternoon program and we used to have a after-school average program which we do not have at this current time last year they served approximately in and out 200 um students throughout that program um that cert that we served for them so when we're looking at space if we're going to run a full day program that's something we're going to have to look at

122the number of classrooms that's in that building and you know the number of students we can serve full day and we typically do not run that program for a day because we tend to saw more behaviors occur if we ran more than a half a day program with most of our all-day students and so we could chunk in that material chunk in that information and run them through a half day and then also give them additional work if need be um to make that happen but as we said altair alternative ed is something that we do need to review our programming and our facilities and lastly we have empowerment academy that has a new home a new location at rci right now formally it held about 50 students right now it can house approximately 30

123students within the program comfortably as of right now thank you all right dr brennan director brown i have a couple of questions but first i want to thank you and and your your team for the job they're doing in this area but also the whole area of covid19 and what the responsibilities you're taking there and i think it's interesting that i think we all know that how these two have overlapped the coven 19 epidemic taking children out of school bringing them back into school has resulted in a lot of the issues that you're dealing with so thank you so much for this work on all levels and i also thought your response to dr gupta's comment about that homeless family thank you for taking the list of everything else dealing with a pandemic and that

124you can also help a family so thank you for doing that i have a couple of questions which i hope will be will be short with short answers just out of your out of your report which was so thorough i just want to prove that i read it so i just wanted that's really what i'm asking but um when i went around to schools in the fall talking about the status and composition of behavior support teams which are made up of bcbas behavioral cultures counselors how do how do we do with having people in place in the different schools as far as open spots goes or needs for that so that's one question the other is dr edwards mentioned this we've talked about the mentoring based programs we've talked about that a lot and i

125was wondering you know are we at the point where we are initiating some of those programs where there actually are in place yet and if not when would they be in place um and then and then number three which again i think is a short one is one of your goals is to have a hundred percent of students with disabilities with behavior plans with an evidence-based behavior management plan in place which sounds great i i don't know can what where do we stand where's your baseline with that as far as where are you starting to get 100 and then lastly you had mentioned this before which is probably the most important comment is that as far as outcomes go i think sharing outcomes in some way would be really helpful to us and maybe it

126would tie into what mr trolls was saying about what are the available spots and what are our needs and we all know that this has been a very difficult year for the reasons we commented on with covet and otherwise but in some way tracking those the data and the outcomes and trying to tie that into what our resources are to meet those i think would be helpful to the to the board to have that information so thank you for taking those questions in terms of the behavior team we have floating some floating team members that goes into the st excuse excuse me school along with the team members so for example if you had sandusky middle school they have a behavior team okay they can be called a behavior team a vtss one team or

127pbis team as they need additional members whether it's someone from student services someone from cni a social worker they tend to meet in the conference rooms at the school or they can even meet by zoom is up to each school in terms of how they decide to meet and they have the meetings and they staff on the students and the concerns that they have in regards to the students we based upon that we do have a system in place if it's a student of great need we ask that that information funnels up to the director so we can provide assistance and support as you see we have new team members in place um last year we kind of had a well-oiled system working with one of my supervisors who went out every week to the

128schools and with the new team in place we're going to make sure that my new team members still go out and meet the needs and go out every week to the schools as well um so that's number one number two the mentoring program where are we um i just have a new person in place we'll be working with the communications team i'm gonna have to ask dr edwards for a little help and um miss reeves a little help in terms of the mentoring um programs and where we are um right now as the school division um because i know if they have done a little bit more with it than what my office have um right now in regards to that and we'll come back to that one um in regards to special education and

129behavior plans i can tell you we were probably at the 45 percent uh mark for that um the expectation and i don't know if janine has checked out is to make sure that when we are working with our schools and we run into a student that is having behavior challenges making sure that we are working with special education and special education teachers and teams to make sure that we have a behavior implementation plan in place if a functional behavior assessment needs to be held or assessed on a student um working with them to make sure that that's being done to make sure that we find the targeted behavior or the function of the behavior for that student so we can address that immediately so janine did i miss anything on that one no you got

130it all um it's just working to target what those behaviors are um whether it's related to the disability and whether there are other outside entities that need to be involved latonya and i both offices work very closely together in trying to make sure that we're putting those plans in place all right thank you very much miss morrison i just have a quick statement that um i've been reading email from parents about the block scheduling and we heard tonight about the black scheduling and we are dealing with a lot of things that are out of our control the trauma that the kids are experiencing at home the being out of school for long periods of time because of covet we couldn't control the covet but the one thing we can control is if the periods are

131too long for the students and that's impacting behavior in a negative way that is something that the schools can look at and i would hope that they would give us information about how they feel about that that's just a statement all right thank you ms morrison and uh director brown thank you for uh your presentation i'm sure the board member thank you appreciate it and i'm going to ask now that we would take a five minute recess and we can come back and roll through our unfinished and business and new business [Music] four aspects of that cares funding high school block schedules community conversations and equity task force and dr which will lead us through this presentation absolutely so we wanted to give an update just on the various cares esser opera all gear all

132the different names for the additional funding that we received and some recent grant opportunities um in terms of providing some funding for transportation so ms lacontage are you there to talk a little bit about the bus driver cares application that we recently submitted yes there was an opportunity for a bus driver recruitment and retention incentive grant program and we did submit that application um the cap base it's based off of your the school division's enrollment and we would be we would be capped at 50 000 for the division and we were able to submit that we have not um heard back from vdoe but one of the things that can be used for is one time one-time recruitment and retention bonuses or um obtaining some cdl license for prospective drivers so that is something that

133we have submitted and we are optimistic that we will be receiving yeah and we did inquire because you know our transportation department has more than just bus drivers and as this was marketed we did inquire as to how the funds could be used because a lot of times questions come up about what the limitations are so kim when we inquired about the limitations for this particular grant you want to share what we what we'll share with you um yes ma'am so we i did contact the state i actually contacted them twice just to verify and the guidance that we received was that this could only be applied to drivers that had their cdo so that was was a strict limitation on that which for us you know when you're looking at the transportation department we

134know that we have more than just drivers with their with the cdl and we struggled with if it wasn't for all should we do it at all and then of course in these hard times we came to the conclusion of yes we should and find other ways to possibly make up the difference but we didn't want to leave any grant money on the table that could possibly be used as a retention bonus you know a small token of thank you for the hard work that you're doing even if it's limited to the folks that have cdl the other thing that we were exploring with sr3 is similar to the possibility of retention bonuses for existing staff and while we did learn that it is i'll say allowable not necessarily always advisable we do know that

135other school divisions have put in altered their sr3 applications to do that and i've asked miss laconic to look into that for us as well so i don't know if there was anything else you wanted to add about that miss laconte i received the guidance from vdoe um that was actually the you said guidance and i passed it on to the federal grant coordinator so we can look into exploring that option all right so we are looking into those things where possible and i mean that was a change remember when this all first and i'm dating back to may 2020 when we were first getting cares funding or esser funds those types of things were not bonuses were not allowable but over time as things have changed and funding has changed the restrictions have changed

136on different funding and also we will be providing the board with an updated cares chart where we kind of map out all the cares by numbers one through i think the most recent one i have is from october 13 where we were up to one through 10 in terms of the various funds that we were managing each one having its own expiration date and sometimes newer funds were expiring before the exit so we have been shifting funds everything from a lot of the positions if you go on our website you will see things that say cares funded we want to be transparent about some of the people that we're adding on staff because we recognize you know there are some people out there looking and counting how many new staff members are you adding and

137we're being real clear that this is cares funding um so and for a particular need like if you take our interventionist we're hoping that the work that they can do is right now and give us the the benefits and the outcomes right now um because when the cares funding is no longer in existence we cannot continue funding those positions unless we make some additional decisions for that so i wanted to give the board an update on that particularly as we see things in the news about other divisions giving bonuses and just to explain some of the restrictions and funding opportunities for that dr edwards who will be following up on these different grant programs or grant submissions in the coming year in terms of for a transition period or in missile connections office actually we

138have a grants coordinator who does the bulk of it but we do have a fantastic finance team who stays on top of every penny as well as some um very um invested principals who are looking because a lot of the things that are funded are at the school levels very good just to make sure thank you and another input on this first matter all right dr okay next on our list is the high school block schedules which we heard a little bit from public comment and i will just say to all of the people who have emailed me over the last couple days i have been behind closed doors doing lots of interviews so i don't want anyone to think that i'm not responding to their email intentionally but i knew we would be coming

139to this board meeting and having a conversation about the high school block schedules and just giving some more information and i hope that the people who were here earlier are at least watching at home because they had a lot of questions and things to be asked so first let me deal with transparency i want to go back to the beginning of covet 19 where one of our primary goals was transmission and we made some decisions that you know with our seventh period day there were seven opportunities for kids to be mixing in the hallway seven opportunities to spread covet so one of the decisions we made early on with our mitigation plan was to look at our schedule and say how can we sort of cohort kids and we did an a and b cohort

140and then also reduce the amount of interaction that kids were having while passing and changing classes and moving around and and that's the genesis of the start of the modified schedule that we had going into um into this um cova for the pandemic uh then we had that one small what two week period where we were like things are getting better this was before delta decided to uh join us um so we were actually excited about five days a week and looking forward we were still at our proposal for this a b schedule for the upcoming year but in june we did have a team of high school administrators school counseling directors as well as central office folks and middle school representation because it was a secondary thing join us at the june 15th work

141session where that crew did a presentation about the current a b block they talked a little bit about the pros and cons of block scheduling and also the 4x4 block there was some resources that were attached for folks to review and i highly encourage anyone who is especially joining the conversation now who's wondering what where did this come from all of a sudden to to go back and at least watch the june 15th work session where you can actually see the presentation from both schools and central office combined as well as the board's engagement in that presentation so first and foremost i just want to say we try our best to be as transparent as possible so if anyone is feeling like um we didn't communicate or we didn't let you know that this was

142a topic of conversation um i do like i said i urge you to go back and just watch that board meeting since then since june coming into this school year like i said that was at a time where we didn't know delta and then we met delta which slowed us down a little bit but we also had some other challenges which took us offline from our ability to do a lot of the hey let's sit and meet let's have conversation let's talk about this let's review that and if i not that i want to go back to august but i will and say at the beginning of the school year it was all hands on deck for transportation every building administrator was either on the phone with parents if not out watching buses driving vans

143picking up kids i mean that really was our focus at the beginning of the school year and this board was with us all along the way and it took us several weeks to really get transportation to a point where we are not in a position where we're calling parents saying we're canceling roots and not coming to pick up your child i mean we did everything we could but i say that to say my administrative team as well as all of my school staff were dealing with that and there was due diligence and i do have both principles on zoom to have conversations and get feedback and input the original conversations involved did involve school staff there were and there are notes and things like that to talk to school staff um but i do know

144that that was june that was before school ended um and then here we are right now in terms of sitting in the a b block with potential to go to a four by four block one of the things that we did ask our school staff was to really get feedback now you all are familiar with crystal's d's and how we make decisions and i think part of the challenge that we have is when people don't understand how a decision is made it causes confusion so some folks think that i make the decision in terms of what we're doing some folks think that you all are voting on the schedule some folks think that it is the school buildings that do it some folks think we're going to take a vote and majority rule and unless

145we're clear about how we are supporting this decision we can get to confusion and a lot of hurt feelings and i think we're there i think if you hurt our parents and i mean as wonderful as it is to have our band outside playing for us which i thoroughly enjoy because they are awesome their reason for being here is to support their program so we don't want that we don't want people to have misunderstanding we will say that it is a collaborative effort in terms of making decisions that are best for our kids while we're still in covit with the delta variant and a new friend with the what is the omicron variant as well that may be coming our way that we don't know also with the potential for the vaccine and seeing where

146that's going for us so it's still a lot of unknown but the last thing that we want our families and our staff and our administrators or anyone to feel is excluded or not included so one of the things that we're doing is getting additional feedback and additional information and i will say sometimes when you ask the question and i know that i think tomorrow and and um the two principals can confirm that there's a meeting with staff to get some input from staff but sometimes just asking the question and asking people for input puts people on alert like we got to do something we have to shut this down right now because they're asking it's a challenging place to be as a superintendent because you want to ask but you recognize that when you're asking

147and you say how do you feel about the a b block or how do you feel about the 4x4 or how do you feel about scheduling that people are very passionate about how they feel and for various reasons and that they will share but they also there's sometimes fear a decision might have been made has it been made how is it going to be made when is it going to be made and we have not made the decision yet one of the things that we're working with the staff the administrative school staff is to talk about what are we going to do but the decision that we make we want to be mindful thoughtful and definitely not feel rushed into anything so i'm going back to say our original plan was to sit down during

148you know august and september where we were enjoying post delta which didn't happen to actually get some meaningful data about how's it going right now what are we going to do engage our stakeholders and we haven't had that so we're doing it now um and then why it's of concern which to me is um quite poetic as i sit here with a quarter note in one ear and a treble clef in another air having been in the marching band having been drum majorette for east orange high school gold marching 100 having performed at giant stadium as being like the highlight of my life and having won a drum major at competition as a junior um competing against seniors playing in the band playing in jazz band doing a parade on memorial day all of the

149wonderful things that i enjoyed as a musician which made my school experience as a high schooler so great that when i went back i was band director when i was a chemistry teacher which is how much i love the the arts and program and my own children both being both athletes and theater um so those people who are in the theater arts also doing that so the last thing this division wants to convey to any family member anybody is that we don't support the arts we absolutely love our art we love i think our violin program our orchestra program is top-notch as you heard lynchburg synthetic orchestra complementing us our kids are winning awards our theater program is outstanding it is totally supported so for families who are feeling like oh my goodness we're trying

150to decimate the program that is not at all what we're doing and you will never get that from this superintendent who herself is a child of the arts and math and science and stem and i understand the importance of being well-rounded and having these opportunities that being said there is not one single schedule that works for every child at the same time there isn't a single schedule that works for every child at the same time the seventh period day the eighth period day the alternate a b schedule the four by four block the four by four block with a skinny in the middle the alternate a b with a monday that has every day i mean there are so many variations to schedules that we we can explore as we look at the best ways

151to really provide for our children all of them have pros and cons for them and all of them in some way fashion work perfectly for one child and not perfectly for another child so it is best that we work together as a community um to to make this decision and it does affect the secondary schools um and not so much the elementary schools it is not a downtown only behind closed doors we make this decision without consult and discussion with the folks we are not making this this decision we are supporting our schools as they explore how they can mitigate covet because we're still in covit as well as provide excellent instruction for our students across all disciplines i do want to say on the agenda in january is for the team to come back

152to speak to the board one of the things and i remember mr harvey too you had questions at the end of the presentation so we said we'll bring them back well they're scheduled to come back in january but it seemed very timely right now with all of the questions that um that we at least mentioned to our families and i'm not sure i'm not sure how it got to where it is but it is where it is um so i did want to mention it to our families that our team is coming back and there are meetings that are occurring with staff and i don't want staff to feel like they weren't included in a part of it in in certain instances dependent upon staff the counseling staff have reached out the principals have reached

153out the central office staff members that have been working with them have reached out and to some degree we even may have to do one thing for middle school students and one thing for high school students it depends on what's best for the kids so there is a lot of conversation to be had with that but i do want to shut down eliminate all rumors that say we have not been transparent in at least talking about it we did start this conversation last year at the school board level in in notifying both the school board and bringing folks here and being responsive to questions school board members had at that point and bringing back questions that school board and community members have i do appreciate every single person who spoke tonight one everybody was wearing

154a mask who spoke so thank you for that they were polite they were respectful they were passionate about what they felt and they were everything that we want as we have public discourse that is the kind of discourse that we do want we we want to be able to engage in our public um and what great role models and leaders our kids are that come and advocate for themselves so i do appreciate that i do know we have our administrative teams who have been where i have been absent on answering emails i know both principals have been calling have been answering emails you all have been answering emails and being responsive to our family members and i just want to ask um as i look back i see miss flora who is with us if

155there's anything that she would like to share about and i know i think you're meeting with staff tomorrow you and tim separately at your schools but is there anything that you would like to share or at least say to our families because you have been really being responsive to talking to kids and families oh there's mr beatty and mr beatty as well as your own staff members so i'll start with you miss floor well i just want to first of all can everyone hear me okay yes okay again i want to just reiterate what dr edwards said and acknowledge our parents students and community members that took the time to do research and come and express their their concerns through email or tonight i mean yes you are correct both heritage high school and ec

156glass high school we are meeting with our teachers tomorrow to provide them with some information and a way for them to give us some feedback as well uh because you're exactly right all of the things that would have gone along with a major schedule change conversations with the community our students our teachers our families we just had to do the daily lifting of keeping kids in school in the fall and those did not happen and back in october representatives from each school that spoke with you and the personal advisory expressed concern about this and because that some other meetings started to happen so just wanted to confirm that and again thank everyone for sharing their concerns yeah and then the last thing i'll add is we just want to provide um our stakeholders and teachers

157with uh information so they can make an informed decision about what's best for um next year's schedule so no decision has been made no decisions been finalized uh we're going to involve our our teachers in decision-making process and we're going to do what's best for our for everyone in our building thank you so i just wanted to take an opportunity to just pause and i didn't want to bring them here in advance of actually having the time to do what they want to do in terms of just working with their staff and giving them until january our january board meeting where they're scheduled to to come back um as a as a team to present but i don't know if the board has any yes and so we'll open up with the clarity that in

158our january board meeting we will have the reporting out of where we are with this matter i think it's very important that the board share whatever thoughts you have and i know some were raising your hands and i guess going to start with mr trust and just if you have something we'll just work our way around the table how viable is the option to go back to the seven period schedule i mean is that is that something we're reviewing i think they're just looking at all possibilities right now um but also being mindful of time right um and the decision because any change you make obviously we want to implement well and make sure that we have all appropriate resources okay dr brenner so i'd like to reiterate what dr edwards has just said that

159in this current era of school board counsels hearing a lot of different things about masks and books and things like this this is so refreshing to have people come and say this is important for our students and for our children and i want to thank everyone who's submitted who's made comments and came tonight and sent emails i also want to say that i think i'm not going to write what's been said multiple times but one comment is i don't think i hope that we won't rush into this decision you know as you have said it was a rocky start for the year i'm sure you wanted to be in a different position i hope there's not going to be a feeling that we have to make a decision just based on time so and i'm

160sure that that won't be done but i just made that comment and lastly i just i think that yeah this this clearly is such an important topic i think it's going to take time for it to develop and to be really meant as a final decision but thank you all for doing that and thank everyone who's been making comments either by email or by in public comments tonight before we go to mrs morris um yeah we don't want to rush the decision but at the same time we've got to begin the process of scheduling students for next school year so our counselors our council directors our counseling staff they need to be able to move forward with something as soon as possible so while we don't want to wrestle the decision we do want to

161involve everyone that there does need to be some timeliness in regards to the decision that needs to be made and mrs morrison's gonna go next but dr brennan uh good point but i was also wondering about the time sensitivity of resolving this matter and i'm sure you all let us know all of those details ms morris well i had the the question about rushing it because we we are into the fifth month and that delays it and i'm and i i know scheduling takes a lot of time and i would rather do it right than make a decision that we then then has to go back and i think i heard about meeting with staff but we also heard parents and students would like to weigh in on that so i'm hoping that part of

162the plan will be discussion either with the student offering opportunities for parents and students and i appreciate dr edwards your statements about transparency this is not something that we are doing behind closed doors and i think that's very important and i think that the level of support for the cultural arts and the we've always been there and we do not want to do anything that would take away that experience for any student in electric city schools dr carter i'm just excited that we're not voting on something that i missed i read the agenda and we read and i said when are we voting and i just questioned how do we get to this point um but i'm also glad that it's not starting in january because i was thinking how's that possible so that's good

163to know and as i initially stated when we had the presentation in june my concern was and even this i'm having more of a concern now with the staff also covering different classes and the length of the class and students being there for such a long period of time how that will impact student discipline that's my concern and also when when the presentation is made i really want to see because i had a difficult time just trying to figure out how this was going to work and i couldn't understand it then i asked for clarification but just how how would this look what a schedule would look like yes and some examples to make sure like if algebra one and then you have algebra two will there be a break and you have to wait

164or with the um foreign languages just different things because i do want students to be able to take the courses they are and is already difficult and just how this impacts students from taking the elective courses they want to but really see some examples for someone that's never scheduled anything i think that would be very helpful for me and also just to caution people not to jump to conclusions somebody had to start this it was it's just um that's that's kind of disturbing how something can go so well a lot of the emails said the rumors they heard so if we can try to squash those rumors that's great but as dr brennan you also stated this was wonderful to hear and people were so respectful and so civil this was just um like old

165days board meetings i really enjoyed it madam clerk if you would so note what dr carter mentioned about what it would look like whenever the report just so that the staff if they may need that recall all right uh dr newest yeah i i guess i'm probably going to repeat a lot of what's already been said i do appreciate everybody's comments and uh being respectful and you know i think um well i'll speak for myself but you know i agree with um you know a lot of the concerns that were expressed you know at the june meeting there was a concern of the board overall with with arts i am not an arts person by any stretch of the imagination but i can appreciate what it does bring students in middle school and high school

166and and that's that's a priority it's a priority for me we're not going to let the arts fall by the wayside that's just not going to happen um so um i don't know what a 4x4 block schedule looks like and how ap classes fit in exam second semester much less with you know the exam schedule and i took two years of foreign language and man it was tough when it was one year at a time to have a year's worth of foreign language in a semesters that would be a challenge for me i'm sure with the great teachers though they'll they'll they'll bring them all along so anyway um i'm rambling on but your points are coming clear thank you dr nellis uh dr sinha well you know i i too recall us raising quite

167a lot of these issues at the time this was discussed and i don't know that we ever returned to it to get satisfactory answers and if we did and i'm just forgetting about that i apologize and i will go back and review i'm concerned about the um claims that you know about like district band and stuff surely there has to be some kind of work around or something in place because block scheduling is not a new invention so i would like to see answers to that question of how students would continue to be eligible for these honorable things that are very important and give us bragging rights as a board and a division so that those things aren't um aren't negatively impacted um and just to look at all you know sort of the uh

168you know the rule what can go wrong and i don't like to be a pessimist but when i always plan for things i always look what's the worst thing that will happen and if i can live with that and it's an acceptable thing then i it's a course i will a course of action i will choose and it sounds like there's quite a lot of concern about a variety of unintended or negative outcomes or potential for problems with the block scheduling that families have raised that i think we really do owe it to them and to the students to explore whether or not those are actually real problems that will happen or if there are workarounds to them or or what's in place to prevent those things from happening madam clerk so noted very good

169observation dr sinha thank you dr gupta so i agree with you dr edwards no schedule is perfect schedule and it's very difficult to find that common ground in scheduling being an academe for a long time but having said that i think all the stakeholders should be on board for any plan to be successful and hearing tonight looks like uh there is some you know fear and as i shared with dr news i'm not an art guy but my daughter was a music major and that's a passion these people she has and they carried and they spend a lot of time building up on that passion and the other concern i saw with those sequential classes like algebra 1 and algebra 2 if there's going to be a break that's not good there'll be a learning

170loss so addressing those issues as we move forward and involving all the stakeholders will be the key thank you thank you um mr harvey thank you mr chairman um as you mentioned in the june meeting i i had some concerns i had some questions and so i started doing a lot of research i've been talking to people in in regarding you know a b blocks 4x4 blocks 4x4 modified all of the different scenarios of these block schedules um i also heard a lot of folks um expressing some concern about what i'm going to call and i'm using this term myself and i'll own it intentional learning loss in terms of we struggle with from year to year the issue of learning loss that's something that this school board talks about all the time and yet

171we're looking at scheduling that could create up to 13 months of that separation so for me i need more information about these different programs first off what we're going to propose and what are the benefits to that system how does it benefit our students how will it benefit our staff all of those things that need to be presented and i'll be the first to say i really appreciate what both of our principals have done they i thought they did an incredible job in june presenting this information i just think that there are a lot of us that still have got to get along to where they have been because they have put so much into this we are stakeholders our students are stakeholders our parents are stakeholders our teachers are stakeholders and all these stakeholders

172are obviously telling us that they have concerned that we might be moving too fast i also hear exactly what mr beatty's saying right now we got a you know there's got to be a decision made for for our counselors to put these class schedules in place for us to prepare students to to formulate their schedules and get everything ready for next year i just think that's way too much we have lost obviously we have lost four to six months of this process after our june meeting for these uh discussions with teachers with parents with students with the school board to look at the pros and cons to do what i call a soft opening you know when restaurants first are built they go through a soft opening for several weeks where they run things through

173the kitchen try to figure out where where things could possibly fail how do you then fix that that problem i think if we don't do that and we rush this through we're going to have a lot of students who are going to have some schedules that are going to be really messed up and we're going to have a lot of parents that are going to be upset about that with all of that being said what i would actually recommend is to the administration that we consider delaying this for a year allowing ourselves at least the rest of this this um this spring summer and into the fall to analyze what went well this year what needs to be improved and and and be able to ease the mind of all of these stakeholders and give

174mr reedy and miss far yeah time to to really be able to do this well because dr airwood you said implement well is the critical thing and so what i kind of heard from a lot of us is a lot of concern even from from from those who are who have been really working on this process it's time and i think we need to put the brakes on this share with them they got more time to make sure we implement this well if at all if if at all if it if if through the process we determined that we need to go back to a seven day we need to go to a four by four we need to go to a b we need to go to a block modified whatever it is let's

175make sure we have done our due diligence before we implement any schedule and and and be fair to our administrators within our school to make sure they have time to implement this well and we did share that with them so exactly what you said we have shared with both administrators or high school principals i will say haven't had as much conversation with remember the middle schools also are on an a b rock they were not considering a four by four because of the impact of the sol growth test made that a little more challenging but that's still not to say that we want to make sure that they're getting the best possible instruction as well so dr brennan dr just quickly you talked before about the decision-making process and crystal decision all can you just

176clarify for us and for the public how this decision or who will make this decision how this will come about so in terms of just looking at it this is one of those things where we would be supporting the schools supporting our building teams i don't want to it's not a principal on an isolation by themselves and i think they are doing due diligence to try to get as much information um because the bottom line is they're at the heart of this learning um and susan you are a building principal so you best can understand the importance of the instructional leaders at the building working with staff and students and families to make those decisions while you know we you we often say downtown can make all kinds of decisions we don't like to we

177we don't like to make all kinds of decisions but we certainly own the responsibility of supporting our schools so whatever decision that they make that we you know talk bring back and discuss our role is to support them if they feel like this is what i need it's similar to other things that they have asked for this is what we need to help students we heard a whole presentation about student behavior there are needs there we need to support them doing this and this is not easy work let me tell you and i'm working on the school calendar by the way we will be getting feedback from everyone if you haven't already contributed feedback about the school calendar as well because it's another thing that impacts everyone but anyone sitting in the seat knows while

178yes the ultimate would have everybody 100 say that one i'm gonna tell you right now that's not going to happen um and just in looking at wow yes the the seven period day a four by four block and a b block i mean even if you look at a seven or eight period day for some students seven classes eight classes seven teachers seven sets of homework seven sets of tests that i have to think about within a given time frame if you told some students how about you just concentrate on four just that thought alone might be well for some students to think i can i can really dive in if i'm really only working on four things at one time so that might be a pro for one student but it might be a

179con for like oh no that's that's too intense for me i like the change i like changing from class to class to class to class to class where other people like a little bit more consistency which is why i say no schedule is perfect for every single student in in your school but i do um support our buildings in terms of they are working hard to meet the needs of all the students in the school and while we can isolate the schedule to being this is how the day the time is organized there and as i tried to say at the beginning there are other things in terms of the movement within the hallways um and whether or not you know there's the covet piece there's the interaction of do you do a data analysis

180of where are your are your problems in the classroom or are they during transition are they during those times when you're looking at behavior there's a lot to look at in terms of making um those decisions with that but we have said that it is a school based decision not one person at a school with us supporting them in the work that they're going to do and i don't think anybody this board this administration those principals those guidance counselors i don't think anybody is like let's pick the thing that's going to do the most harm to everybody no one is doing that everyone on this team and the countless hours that people have spent in just discussing this and vetting us has all been with the best interests of what can we do for our

181students to make you know to continue to provide excellent services while meeting the needs of all of our kids it doesn't go without question dr edwards that both schools would either do or not do the the or can one do and the other network yeah because we share yeah we share staff yeah we share staff across buildings and remember we have some programs like our cte programs which are only offered at one school or the other school so that sort of forces their hand in terms of um what how they work together and they're both here so we already know there is strong collaboration between those schools dr carter and are they given the they're they're they can look at everything they have been they and they're not they're not shy um and i think

182some there was some concern about staffing and i know at least one of them you know was looking at it from the lens of well we may need an extra here or there and again that's where we come in and support them if they if that's um what is needed for our students uh in terms of that and are they able to tell us like what criteria are they looking what are they looking for to see how which schedule matches up i think when they come back in january that's part of what what they want to at least discuss we add it in the ab schedule the students have 90 minutes either day a or day b with a teacher advisor and i'm curious as to how that has been going in the schools and

183how students feel about that i've had missed messages that some like it and some think it's they'd rather take a class and it's i think we've asked for that feedback when we looked at that and that's not part of their but it could be if we're doing an ab schedule if they recommend an ab are are we going to continue with that period advisory the advisory period and i think it's enrichment at uh heritage yeah i want to make one brief comment before i i do make it to dr brennan's question dr edwards are we hearing you clearly that the building principles at the building level will make the decision they will give us a recommendation for schedule typically you guys don't vote on their schedule it's not a voting item for the school board

184it really is [Music] more at the building level we don't even really dictate how they do their schedules and the same thing is for elementary in terms of how they organize staff around instructional period we all owe a due diligence to making sure that our kids are receiving excellent educational services so i don't want anybody out there to think we're you know given away our responsibility in terms of what we do do but we also recognize that this team and and and everybody that's working are professionals who have been doing a great job of working in the schools and meeting all the needs of the kids for the you know the the past couple of months while we've experienced other challenges as well thank you for that clarification dr edwards and i feel good about

185that you know in the past we were dealing with graduation it all worked out beautifully but i just wanted we don't want that to happen i don't want that to happen so thank you dr edwards for that clarification um i also was impressed with the civility demonstrated here tonight inside and out a chance to go outside dr nillas appreciate that i'm not only a fan of stem but i'm a fan of steam and all the other pieces that are out there i just hope as the decisions are made in the time man in which they are made that we also realize that there are a lot of people out there that have something to say about this matter and so we've heard very strongly from those who are presented uh tonight but but there are

186others that may have thoughts about this for varying reasons and i think we have to be able to let people get the big picture or the full picture uh before this matter is resolved mr harvey mr chair could could i ask the question what is the the drop dead date what is the date that the decision has to be made a good question you all have to review the program of studies for the high school and the middle school so you review it at one meeting and then you approve or give us suggestions you know some changes so you need an approval of the program of studies which usually takes two meetings so i would say we want to present the program of studies the latest that january work session so that it could be

187approved the first meeting in in february i would prefer program studies to come that january first board meeting so that it could be approved at the january work session because the longer we wait on improving a program of studies then which is directly tied to the scheduling so there are implications for the program of studies if it is a an a b block or a four by four block or a seven period day there are a few changes that would need to be made in the program of studies the further we push that out the further behind the guide that the school counselors are in terms of scheduling students and providing them the opportunities to schedule they go into classrooms and they meet with the students they talk about the opportunities that they have so

188this is impacting their work we typically have brought the program of studies to you all at this meeting in december so we're already at least a month behind me if i can just follow up so so so respectfully what you're asking for is for you guys to finalize how next year would be by the first board meeting in january which is four weeks away and we have a major holiday in between there and we want to hear from parents students staff i just again i question if if it how can we implement it well if it sounds like it feels like at least to me that this is moving quickly or has to move quickly otherwise we're going to put our staff in a very very difficult position and we certainly don't want to do

189that but we also don't want to cut off the any decisions at this point right now so one of the decisions may be when we get to january like okay here's the feedback that we have here are the things that we need to to vet and view here are some things that we've been able to address that were raised it may be and i don't know because i don't want to speak for work that hasn't come to us yet and it could just be we need more time and let's stay put right stay put would be stick where you are in terms of what we have in the current a b a b schedule um i would agree with um deputy superintendent pugh in terms of the timeliness i know our counseling directors are probably

190shaking their heads going yes yes yes we want to get in class but we don't want to rush a decision we also and i know like i said they're meeting this week with staff so we're still in we're still in school right now for the next two weeks in terms of just some of the feedback but the one thing that i want to make sure doesn't get missed because some of the things that i heard was that there was no data that was collected no feedback that was collected and i know that there and and deputy pew and the two principals can share that there have been meetings there is some information that has already been collected there have been some discussions about it this is going to add to that so um when we

191get to january if we are if we feel comfortable that yep we got enough it feels good and they've done due diligence or whatever the case may be we'll make a decision at that point but as i shared with you and i shared with them if it's we want to continue looking at this and i know they also reached out and i didn't say this earlier but they reached out to other schools that have um schedules so when you talked about what does it look like they've spoken with at least one other school that i know of that has schedules possibly more that are in a block schedule format it may just be like let we still want to collect information we still think it's valuable we may not be able to implement it in

192the fall of 2022 but we want to continue the process of doing that so but i just want to give them to time right now because i think it got ahead of us and ahead of them for various reasons one the start of the school year um and just the additional covet things that we dealt with stole some time from us and i'm not mad about that it is what it is i can't go back and get that but two these last couple weeks of of lots of emails have at least made me go what we what happened what is being communicated or what isn't being communicated so that i can at least speak with them about let's get you know let's get clear on the information because i did see a lot of things

193that were like this is the first time this is being discussed and that's not true so i want to give them time to at least work with their staff work with their constituents before we um get into the discussion and allow them to come back and still make time for we're not going to make a rush decision if it's not in the best interest they won't either i mean if they feel like look we've done due diligence we're here we feel good here are all the answers to the questions or not but i do think we need to value the professionalism of our staff and the hard work that they've done and give them time to do that while also valuing voice that we hear from our students and our families dr edwards i think

194that was very well said and dr brittany so i i started making account about not to rush into this i still feel that way and i know i feel good that this decision will be made by the educators at the schools who will take into into uh consideration the staff the students the families and those things but also as a non-educator but involved in the schools for the last several years know that the last two academic years have been so challenging between no school in person and then going back it's been so so hard that i really hope that what we do decide is going to be best for everyone and stability is probably one of the things we really want to consider pretty strong for the for the next year and what i would

195say to that dr brennan as we all sit around this table not one of us has uh kids that with us eight hours seven hours a day and we know it's hard they know it's hard right they deal with it every single day they deal with class coverage when covet hits they deal with trying to run a sports program and have this and fans and all kinds of stuff so exactly what you said in terms of what your our experience has been about the last two years have been hard i would say my school staff would say absolutely and we will capitalize every single letter in the word hard for them so they are they are feeling it and are aware and ultimately still want to do what's best for students at even though they're

196experiencing it thank you so much i just want to also state that in june i wasn't really clear on this but um in january i really do want to hear some of those how it's going to look if i don't understand how it's going to look and have some concrete examples then i won't be able to support it okay well mr harvey yeah if i could just add one more thing i think i think a good gauge would be if we can't answer those concerns that were brought tonight we're not ready all right i think that we have sufficiently discussed this for tonight i do want to thank the superintendent who asked that this would be included for discussion tonight and she was willing to do it came ready to present and listen to each

197of us and so i think that uh the points have been made for this discussion and the principles also doctor and the principals [Applause] all right the next uh pc on community conversations absolutely and again our effort is to be um extremely transparent and engaging in our community whether that's them coming to our schools or a board meeting or us going out and even being responsive as you just saw those two principals just dropped everything and came here on a dime to engage that's how important community engagement is to them and to us um so miss reeves has been planning the tours of community conversations and we've all had to travel with her so i am going to turn it over to her to talk a little bit more about community conversations miss reeves thank

198you good evening everyone as dr edwards mentioned um the community conversation the second uh in our series was held on november 22 at st john's episcopal church and as you all have shared tonight uh you talked about the importance of community engagement involved involving all of our stakeholders this is our mission this is what we're aiming to do is to make sure that we get information out to the community and and not just delivering it but in such a way that they understand it so on the 22nd um we had families parents guardians board members community members come out to talk with mrs pugh about the same information that was shared with you all in october from the academic review but with a little more detail she provided them with some understanding of of the

199data the reports that parents see and just how it is we need support and helping our families understand that information and also talk through strategies that we can use to help them help their children um out of that particular community conversation um we talked about ways that parents can request their reports and get detailed information we talked about providing parents with just the questions to ask what are they asking for and then how is it that they're looking at it and interpreting that um we also recognize that um just as you've mentioned we use every opportunity to provide them with information so we shared with them that the there's the budget hearing coming up and we talk to them about the link that they can use to provide information about the budget things that we

200have to consider and continue working on is just the timing of our community conversations is it possible for us to do a lunch time zoom with some of the parents and guardians who are available during that time we talked about the accessibility accessibility to meetings so making sure that we have them in places that people can actually attend we also talked about improving communication with our middle and high school parents who really need the information in order to help their children and to provide them with strategies that they can use to be successful we're going to continue the work in the area of reaching out to the community our next community conversation is january 24th at the jefferson park community center and that's at six o'clock p.m so if others are soliciting input lcs on

201a continual basis is engaging the community through what we call community conversations there's nothing else to be said now i think we're going to talk about the equity task force yes we are met for the first time for this school year um in order to understand better just where we are as a school division the equity task force received prior to the meeting the academic data review that was presented to you all in october along with the information about the power schools program that we had this summer and the impact report that went along with that we had also done a youtube video that spoke to the fundations program that we're using to promote and to encourage our literacy so they received all of that information prior to the meeting i feel like that was

202a great strategy because they were able to come to the meeting prepared to hear some information and to really discuss it one of the things that we found is that our parents our guardians those who are in the community really want to better understand and it sounds like i'm repeating myself about the community conversation but if we're going to reach all of our stakeholders we have to make sure that they have the same information that you have and and that we can explain it to them in such a way that they can take it to their particular spheres of influence and we can spread the word about where it is that we are achieving and also where we're finding challenges so we used us this meeting to really share information to get feedback we had

203great conversation with those who were in attendance i'm very proud to say that we have some organizations who are well-versed in diversity equity and inclusion who are joining the team and who are helping us get this work done and that our next meeting for the equity task force is a january meeting january 27th thank dr coleman yes dr brennan i just like to make one comment which is that i had the opportunity to join the meeting and i thought it was very well run very well attended i thought there was a lot of great dialogue i really think uh director reeves that it was went all so very well and i think it's clearly on the right track to really provide some great information and help i think the only one constructive comment i would

204make is to try to have a little follow-up as far as i think there are questions that come up in the meeting people request information and and uh that they like to have subsequently i may have missed some of that but i'd love to get on the list for getting some of the follow-up information that occurs after the meeting but i thought the meeting itself was great you did a great job your staff did a great job and i think that the composition of the committee is is tremendous so thank you very much thank you all right thank you director reeves and uh thank you dr edwards for leading us to our community uh update and i think this is a very valuable part of every meeting that we have uh the first meeting in

205the month any further questions on any of those matters members of the board all right that will now bring us to um in our agenda it will move us to uh i2 which is the education task force and i would uh like for the board members to please if you don't already have those documents in front of you uh our clerk attached the uh charter uh you will see one uh june 4th and then you'll see another june the 13th and i would like to just make some brief uh opening comments and then we will open this up our agenda calls for this to be an action item tonight however it does not have to be if there is not uh sufficient uh feeling amongst the board members that there's a level of understanding around

206what it is that we're seeking to do if there is there is a recommendation that you will see in board docs that will conceivably come our way i do want to begin briefly by alerting all board members if you are not aware of it but that on the lynchburg virginia.gov page there is a section that you can go to education task force and it is the task force on the future of education in the city of lynchburg pre-k through 12 and beyond uh we were made aware of this uh we do not have it on ours but they do have this where you can see the charter members meetings minutes community input and links and you will be able to see the the journey of this process i do want to acknowledge that early in

207the year 2019 then chair susan morrison myself as vice chair and the others that would be listed uh began to have discussions around a task force and that was pushed along and then in june of 2019 uh city council actually along with uh the board uh established this task force on the future of education in the city of lynchburg uh pre-k through 12 and beyond and in that process that took place these original charters that you have before you uh on board docs are the only documents that have been approved by that body and um you will see one dated june 4 and then the one uh dated june 13th which was actually passed simply has um nothing substantive but just a few added words to encourage the need for inclusivity or inclusion of diversity

208and things of that nature so both documents are essentially the same if someone needed particulars on that i certainly would walk us through that i don't think you would want me to do that because it's really the same document with a timeline uh at the back or on the last page so that would lead us to the fact that this task force uh engaged in about eight months of work um and at uh at the sufficient point uh there would be an interim report that would have been given but uh that task force uh went on paul's in spring of 2020. and they've been on paul's for approximately 20 months from the spring of 2020 to now which brings us to this point i want to thank our vice chair who i think has provided

209excellent leadership as we have been meeting with our city leadership and our superintendent and others and i would just help us to appreciate that um where we are tonight is not desiring to weigh in on any scope adjustments to what that original charter stated a part of the pause that has occurred has been around matters likely so as a result of it in february of 2021 there was a modified charter we actually took a stab at it and said we were in agreement with modified learning and family engagement technology equities student social and emotional mental health dynamics but council never acted on that so the only charter that has been officially approved is the original charter and so it is the thought pattern of this uh thinking group including yourselves as you might weigh in

210that we want to allow this independent group that has been seeking to do its work to be given an opportunity to do that i have had conversation with dr michael gillette and uh gloria preston and dr gillette would like me to say this to the body tonight as we begin our discussion that the task force was put on hold because of covet by them that the task force thought it not appropriate to add more demands on the already stressed school system during the pandemic but we are eager to re-engage on this project gloria preston's wanted us to know that she wishes us merry christmas and to make sure that it is clear what it is that they would be doing and the original charter indicates that and so this is not about what they need

211to do so much as it is our value for community engagement and to ask the task force to complete the work that they were charted to do and so i'd like to open the floor for discussion at this time uh for those who would like to have any further conversation on this it is possibly tonight our board could make some determination and it may or may not be the council on their december the 14th meeting would make some determination uh but of course that is not up to us uh to decide mr harvey thank you mr chairman uh just seeking clarification for myself this charter has already been voted upon by this board that's correct so the only question i believe that's before this board tonight is us to be authorizing them to just move

212forward that is correct so your clarification was that that group paused for covet this board did not pause that group for covet that is correct so what action does this board really need to take it seems to me that that group could simply restate that they're going to start right back up that could be an option once again this notion of maybe being a quasi independent body at least dr gillette would like to refer to it as that did have some engagement from council and the school board and he was wanting to have clarity of direction ms morrison i think that to support this recommendation which shows support for the task force moving forward and i think that's because we they've been not in together for so long that it's important that we restate our

213support for the work that they can do i would support that one thousand percent i do think it's important that given the amount of work that it could take that we may need to look at providing additional help to get what what they might need from us or the city we did have a person at the city that took notes and and posted meetings and um there was also a budget that was the the city held that was taken back so the task force at this point has they've not been reallocated any money and i think that they were using some of the money to do some of the studies and to to get their work done so i think it's also important that the funding i'm not sure i don't remember until you may

214know better than i do it was like 1.5 or 1.2 million but that money was to implement the suggestions right come out of that house and i think that's important money was not for the day-to-day operations but they did use some of it for the demographic study and some things like that yeah there was some set aside for city managers use right right yeah dr carter and i appreciate dr gillette's statement about not putting demands on the school school skills the school system it's great to make a new word um that's important because especially now with the everyone is doing two and three jobs already so keeping in that spirit i think i will support this motion thank you dr carter i would like also the board to consider as you look at the original

215charter on the last page where it seeks to give somewhat of a timeline that that timeline called for eight months before there would be an interim report and that it would wrap up its work in 15 months uh keep in mind we do have a dominion 7 report that uh is coming forward etc or whatever it is we asked to provide so again uh let's just let that group work out the timeline but just understand that they were operating with some sense of a timeline to accomplish their work dr gupta we got to understand the constraints on the school administrations because when the data is needed as dr carter said people are already working short staff so it puts a lot of pressure on those people to extract that information and provide that so that

216needs to be a conversation between the superintendent and the and the chair of the task force or the steering committee make sure all those things are ironed out so noted dr carter and also the two members that are on from our school board i hope we continue to advocate for that or to make sure that the committee is aware of the strain that our school system is already on well said ms morrison also given the fact that we have the facility studies we're looking at demographics we're looking at this redistricting might be a priority for the members of that city school task force because that's short term and and the more information and more community engagement in that process the better we will get at understanding and having their input and recommendations that's just a

217suggestion but that's up for the members to work out dr gupta as we go forward i think we need to look at also the diversity of that makeup of those communities right because as you mentioned as we go into this facility planning report the neighborhood which will be affected should be represented and should have their voice heard in that process and we'll be doing that as we go too but i think you're right i agree and and like dr brennan i did read these charters so you're going to get queers on these charters i think i do all right and it does allow for the the structure to afford others to be on the subcommittees mr harvey i i i hear what everyone's saying and i and i agree i i would encourage that there

218be communication back and forth between the task force and and our school system about scheduling requesting information and scheduling information to get that information to them but i also want to make sure that we are empowering this task force to do the important work that they are to do i think that we need to as a board it will be up to us and city council to be able to to disseminate this information that comes out of this task force but i think we need to do everything that we can to encourage them in their work to get to the to the heart of the questions that that caused this task force to be created in the first place and i want to make sure that we're not limiting them in their efforts i think

219i think that the charter gives them the scope of which they would do their work and and dr gillette again indicated his awareness that the task force would be making recommendations all right um dr carter i'm ready to make a motion all right the chair would entertain such a motion i move that the school the school board chair uh well i moved there we approve the joint city school education task force to continue the work that they are chartered to complete emotion is on the floor by dr carter it's their second second by mr harvey at one point i was going to think that the motion was going to die we have a second is there any further questions or discussion on this matter dr nillis yeah um i guess since the joint task force

220stopped on their own um i want to make sure it's clear we're not saying okay now you can go i mean it's like you know i'm willing to support it i think it's good to have an independent body take a look at things it is a concern that the request for information from the task force to administration there's a lot going on right now in terms of their time demands and i think that was an issue when they when they got started and that it's certainly gotten worse with with co-ed and staffing shortages and everybody having to step up and fill in multiple roles so i think that just the members of the task force need to keep that front and center and and do the best they can so it's well said dr nellis

221any further discussion on the motion hearing none we're going to ask that the clerk would call the role if you vote yes you are affirming the motion to simply say to the task force continue on with the work that the charter has given you authority to do to make recommendations if you vote no that means that you're not in favor of the motion which would mean maybe there's a discussion around disbanding the task force uh madam clerk please call the rules yes school board member dr brennan yes school board member ms morrison yes school board member dr carter yes school but mama dr coleman yes school board member dr nellis yes let's go back to the seminar yes yes scoop up my mom mr harvey yes ocean carries nine to zero thank you madam clerk

222and we would ask it as you would report that motion to the clerk of council uh your earliest convenience on tomorrow all right and uh we will now move into new business section j fund balance miss uh dr edwards hey absolutely so um we are here to bring um a discussion around the fund balance um and i have miss laconic who is still here um on standby to really discuss our fund balance and our plan for what we're requesting as we uh send it to the city so ms laconic so our ending adopted i'm sorry adjusted budget for the 2020 21 school year was 101 million eight hundred and eighty six thousand seven hundred sixty nine dollars and ninety seven cents um after we finished up the year and trued up with the city the

223fund balance return was two million three hundred and forty seven thousand 403.65 we had taken to the finance committee just some possible uses and we had set aside you you all had voted on the capital improvement plan and in the fiscal year 2023 you had the 1.9 million dollars of of expenditures and then when we spoke amongst ourselves some of the items that we were proposing was some survey software some board room upgrades and then some transportation equipment upgrades and the student tracker implementation and a lot of those would have to go through the purchasing requirements we don't exactly have the exact cost we have um estimates on that but those were the items that we had determined could be a use in one-time use of fund balance return and this is coming to you

224for information tonight and we would just like to get the board's feedback thank you mr connis feedback from the board [Laughter] i i certainly recommend uh call tricks uh for your survey research needs seems like we're doing more and more of that and the limitations of the um free public use things just don't serve us particularly well and i think you'll be very happy with it it's easy to learn and work with and i use it in my work and it's a it's a great tool so i think that's a good use of the money it is a renewable license uh so there's that but i i think it's it's warranted okay let me just stay over here dr gupta you know at least you'll be able to change the chair in this room uh

225today sometimes it feels like i'm like three feet and other times it thinks i'm six feet tall and look at it it's just at my age it's just keeping me like a teenager and uh so i'll be happy to bring a chair from home i don't mind to put a button on the text page but um for the boardroom update at least chairs will be fixed so thank you very much for listening mr harvey i'm going to round it out i support the transportation equipment upgrade in talking with some of the bus drivers this this equipment could be so beneficial to them um being able to help them with their with their routes it being able to help with dispatch uh so many things so i would i would uh support the the transportation equipment

226and tracker input implications thank you mr hobby on this side uh mr trust anyone i was just going to say it's more simply mr harvey said that i think we've been trying to work that out for a while and it's time to get that finalized all right dr carter is this for action or just for information she said for information tonight it's recommendations back to them we'll bring it back at the work session okay all right dr gupta so the tracker information is that the app we talked about one time having a gps where the parents can see where the bus is they can they can get an estimate of where their kid is as opposed to just following like we have the gps where we could actually follow the bus but they it will

227be specific for their kids so they can see where the child's busted but it also puts a from my understanding there's a console that the bus would yes the bus driver would actually have as well that would help them in coordinating backboard dispatch and help us know that they get on the bus get off the bus so why are we waiting for the next work session this is important for all the families because we know y'all we put everything up for discussion first and then we bring it back for action unless you want to make a motion we'll certainly take it yeah we can make a motion where the chair would entertain the motion of again our practice has been to do it in the manner in which we have of course we did vote

228on the task force tonight dr nellis do you have any objection to us doing that someone like to make a motion mr harvey i'd like to make a motion that we follow the recommendation uh from the i believe this came from the finance committee to utilize a portion of the fund balance for the capital improvement plan for fiscal year 2023 and for the purpose of the transportation equipment upgrade and tracker implementation implementation is there a second to mr harvey's motion second seconded by dr carter any further questions or discussion on the motion aaron nunn madam clerk if you please call the role good work yes yes school board member dr carter yes school but woman dr coleman yes school but mumma dr nellis yes scoop up woman dr sennheiser yes scoop up mama dr gupta

229yes scoop up my mr harvey yes motion courage nine to zero thank you madam clerk we will now move to the superintendent's comments absolutely and given the hour i'm going to be pretty short and just thinking again our student reps if you didn't see the article in the paper it doesn't do them justice in terms of the work that they do outstanding individuals very committed to this board as you can see with what they gave tonight and congratulations to jaden scott for also being the vsba scholarship award we are so very very proud of her and the work that she does and how well she represents um lynchburg city schools and i think both groups did an excellent job of showcasing the talent that's in lynchburg city in terms of just academics athletics and in

230terms of extracurricular activities and also letting you know some fun things that we can do during this holiday season particularly in support of the arts which is always a great time to have that so so very proud of our kids i'd like to give a special shout out to the heritage elementary school flash team for their family graduation ceremony that i had an opportunity to participate in on saturday the 20th and when i say family graduation i mean everyone from diapers up they had a session where they work with families everybody in the family the parents the children and they don't have to be lynchburg city school children the toddlers there was something for everyone what a wonderful wonderful event and you want to see a staff that was committed to excellence you just needed

231to be there from the time that they clap them in and greet them from off the bus we had two bus drivers that went and picked our families up and made sure that they were there thank you golden corral for feeding breakfast to families another partnership but it was celebration of just learning together and what an excellent excellent program and the staff is fantastic in terms of their dedication and what they're doing in support i was just happy they let me do a little speech and be a part of it it's something that we all need to witness and really be see some of the great stuff that's going on in our schools um i did also get to meet with a community member jane white about a historical marker so i have some plans

232that i'll be sharing with the school board ethel and i are really excited about that and of course jonathan baker being the stubance winner i was unable the first one i missed but that is always exciting to just celebrate and surprise our kids and just by the photo i could tell that it was wonderful to be able to do do that i just want to thank our team and everybody for all of the outreach that is going on during this time there's quotes there's books there's everything that's being shared with our community and every time i look out my window sometimes i say well what is so-and-so doing and this morning it was you and i was like what what's she doing loading all the books um so the blizzard of books from the the

233um education foundation that we received are about locked and loaded and about ready to go so we're excited um for that as well um and many other things that are going on in our schools and i'd just like to thank you say thank you to this board as you continue to um just support us in all of the changes and everything that's going on and i know sometimes your emails just get all kind of blown up but you are always responsive and always supportive of us in our efforts in doing that so kudos to you for all that you're doing and looking forward to the next couple weeks where we're going to do the budget hearing and talk about that and while i'm on that i also want to mention that one of the things

234that we do as an administrative team amy's joined me kim's joined me a couple times and even hr is we have a monthly meeting with our lea reps so i get to meet with carl and krista and even tim hickey from vea we have a wonderful relationship with them where we discuss a whole bunch of things including like i said we're going to bring calendar giving get getting their input on things so some of the things that he talked about in terms of just voice we hear them we work with them it's our administrative team that works in collaboration with them so we want to continue having that relationship that we do have with our union leadership and other staff as well as having a personnel advisory committee that i also meet with a couple

235times a year there is a rep from every school and every department on that and when i'm trying to get feedback about something i have two go-to groups personnel advisory which is a rep from every department in every building and parent advisory which is a rep from every school i'm in terms of just doing that the calendar was shared with both groups to get lots of feedback so you're going to have your work cut out for you when we bring that to you but we're in that effort of getting community feedback we want to continue um doing that kind of work with our group so just i just want to say thank you to everybody who has been working with us and providing feedback for them thank you dr edwards and of course it goes

236without question the job that you were doing all right let's start with our board members and uh mr truth thank you um i want to first of all just thank the parents and the comments made with the uh 4x4 block scheduling i think your concerns are valid i appreciate those the emails i've received i tend to agree with mr harvey that um we couldn't put a lot of stress upon our administration the teachers uh and we don't want to rush this and maybe we have to delay it uh number one number two again i want to just give another shout out to director brown um i appreciate what her uh her goals are and i recognize her goals i think this important uh position to be in and it's going to serve our school system

237well and i want to make sure that our board is on board to help her with some of her goals and uh and the achievements that she's set out to make i think it's important for all our school students and the work that she's doing so thank you i'd like to i know with sleep i like to ask the board's patients i'd like to make a comment and ask for their support of maybe adding an item to one of our agendas for a future meeting and this is uh talking about the covid 19 pandemic which unfortunately we're still involved in i mean there's some good news which is our stu our skills our schools are still in person and that's thanks to the wonderful staff that we have and how hard they've worked and director

238brown but also the teachers and the ja and the support staff who've done such a great job so that's pretty phenomenal the other good news is that lynnsburg city schools is offering vaccine clinics for students five years and older as part of one of their processes that we've received information the public has about that so thank you so much for doing that lcs and then the other piece of good news is that there's a wonderful program that's being rolled out for for screening and for testing for covet in the schools and um in the easy glass newsletter that came out this week there's a great description of how that works but really pretty phenomenal so screening with pcr tests for people asymptomatic to identify outbreaks screening with antigen tests for people who want to be

239screened or who are symptomatic and take it home that's really a phenomenal tool that we now have in our schools the bad news is that we have a new variant coming around the corner which we don't know a lot about yet but this worrisome the other bad news is that unfortunately the number of cases in the united states are going up rather than going down so you know we reached a plateau of about 75 000 per day as of this week we're up to about 118 000 per day average in the united states so we're heading the wrong way the other bad news is that you know our country still is only about 60 percent vaccinated fully vaccinated for the united states and um virginia is about 65 vaccinated lynchburg is still about 44 fully

240vaccinated so we still have a ways to go um it's interesting though if we look at our vaccination rate compared to other parts of the state like virginia beach their fully vaccinated population which includes children as well as adults is about 65 percent their adult facts fully vaccinated is 76 which is pretty amazing the reason i bring that up is because it was announced this week that virginia beach public schools their high schools are changing their policy as far as quarantine goes that starting monday yesterday in cooperation with the virginia department of health they've now decided in the high school system if the student's exposed they do not need to quarantine they need to continue to wear masks math they need to stay in the schools and follow that protocol and the reason is when

241they looked at their data they found that transmission in the schools is less than one percent which is pretty phenomenal when you look at their incidence of infection in their air to state it's not too far off from ours i mean they're they're not a whole lot better than we are their vaccination rate is different it's unclear why that difference is in the schools and i don't know what our data is and and you know we may be the same when i hope we are i think it's pretty much been shown that the schools are not the transmission site it's the communities where it gets transmitted comes into our schools um so uh we all know what a problem it is when kids are out of school so this is a huge step for the

242children that isn't high school students only not to be quarantined so i'd like to make a suggestion that that we add to our agenda information about how this process would work in lynchburg city schools to either ask the the health advisory committee which i think is involved in looking at covet issues i know i do not want to give more work to other people but i think this is pretty important as far as you know what would it take us to work with the virginia department of health and decide that we meet the criteria we no longer have to quarantine students because of the loss of learning students and staff that goes on we quarantine this would be a huge impact um and just in closing we know now that kubernetes epidemic is not going

243away right you know it's here to stay we're going to have to we're going to have to deal with it but we now have information for almost two years that is helpful and we know more about transmission we know about the situation in schools we know what helps and what doesn't help we can use that information and we need to get our schools back to this new normal we need to get it so that students can participate both academically in fine arts that they can feel comfortable in the security of our schools to help with discipline and things we've talked about tonight so my request to this board is to see if there's any support that we could add this as an item for an agenda for a future meeting get a report from the

244health advisory committee or whatever the appropriate body to look at what is our incidence of transmission of schools what is vdh asking for that to be to see if in the near future we could try to meet those goals as i said before we've got some great tools now one of which is a screening test in the schools and we can use that as part of this process which would be another encouragement for people to participate in the screening so mr chairman i'll pass that on to you and you can get to the board and follow up at a later time but i would ask that that be added to an agenda item oh the clerk is already so noted in a very able way and we prefer that i'm getting with the i'd just

245like to thank our board clerk for how attentive you are to our requests and needs it is certainly nice to have you working with us thank you [Applause] no no no no no it's 8 45. sorry folks i just want to thank the director of student services and also the engagement especially to encourage everyone to come out to the community conversations we were three of us were at a disciplinary committee meeting weren't able to come but those are just wonderful engaging activities and the parents are going home with information and knowledge which is always good and just a violins at bedford hills will be this thursday night at six o'clock and also on the 15th the wednesday 15th so if you want talking about the arts this is a great time thank you dr carter

246foul for dr nils uh my really only comments were about the block schedule which passed along earlier i did neglect to say i did appreciate the impromptu concert that we were able to enjoy so i appreciate the marching band and uh yep you're good and you know you have my support thank you dr milles dr sinha i do want to thank the people who who reached out to us about the block scheduling particularly the fact that most of them were were clear in their concerns and fears but it was very civil very um collaborative in a manner speaking and i do appreciate that um we have sometimes encountered comments that are quite combative and i have not felt that with this particular issue and so i'm grateful for that i want to thank the board

247for sending me to the vsba annual conference it was very very good i attended quite a few really informative sessions particularly one on data management because that's my thing that was really good and then finally uh i got a chance uh my wife and daughter and i to uh see dunbar middle schools root off the redness reindeer and oh my goodness if you wanted to see a four-year-old at the edge of her seat in wrapped attention that was nora we all loved it but she especially hang along with everything and those middle schoolers they did a fantastic job i am just always so impressed with our our art students and and the way they they just do things so professionally and so well and the faculty teachers and support staff who help them um coach

248them guide them to those wonderful performances so thank you for that dr gupta i don't have anything all right mr harvick thank you mr chairman i also would like to thank director brown also tim and rose our principals at our high school for all the work they put together and in in their presentations not only with the um with student discipline you know planning the block schedules and and so forth so i do appreciate all that although it seems like we're we're we're we're second guessing and questioning but we have concerns and therefore um we're sharing those um and i want to give a personal shout out to to miss mcdaniel ms darlene mcdaniel at tc miller in 2005 she began being the first smiling face that you see when you visit the school and

249she will be retiring on december 17th so i want to send a special shout out to her when i was talking with her about her retirement um you know you you expect to hear i'm going out you know into the sunset and i'm going to play with grandkid you know that sort of thing and she said oh no i'm going to be back i'm going to be volunteering she's she said this is my family these are my kids and i was just i was just so impressed with her and her attitude and i've always enjoyed walking into that to that school and her greeting us with such a smiling uh and warm welcome and so i wanted to congratulate her on her retirement on december 17th after 16 years with lcs thank you mr harvey

250all right very quickly i just am so proud of our board and say it all the time and our bsba annual convention was exceptional and we were called up front to receive the master board of recognition and our president teddy martin uh wanted to say on behalf of the entire esba how proud they are of us and i know that our board clerk has our distinguished plaque and is going to be put out there for full visibility and you all tonight uh demonstrated even the way you deported yourselves prior to the meeting started and dr miller stated we went outside this is indeed in my personal opinion now superintendent a master board you all can clap for yourself sometimes you know you what else will i also would like to acknowledge that i was able

251to go out with sheriff sloane during the thanksgiving and they have established a wonderful partnership with us and through the appropriate people with the etheres and whoever the purchase may be uh 32 families uh just about all of them were connected to kids who are part of lcs and we were able to go out there and give them those meals and even pay for some folks or bill so there's some marvelous things going on out here kids get into fire homes and fire and all of that so i'm just proud of all the great work that is going on last thing i will say i think somebody mentioned virginia beach a little bit ago uh they recently got out of their meeting at 1am in the morning it is 8 51 and we are a

252long way from that but i do repeat 1am in the morning uh m informational items december the 14th our legislative advocacy is scheduled um also on the 14th uh we will have one no no that's not going to happen now now correct that's correct chemistry 14 you see what we have that dr edwards mentioned already the budget hearing in the work session uh winter break will be december the 20th uh through december the 31st and the next school board meeting will be held on tuesday june january the 11th at 5 pm in this room meeting adjourned