001there you are so yes one two and just okay foreign we are waiting for one more arrival and we will begin shortly thank you for holding okay good morning everyone i hope you all can hear me just fine [Music] and uh we uh we're still waiting for one more member but we can get uh the meeting necessities out of the way so we can start the real uh meet of the event so calling the meeting to order of the legislative advocacy and committee relations committee and i would like a motion to approve the agenda so move that we approve our agenda for the legislative advocacy committee prosecutors all right all those in favor you too all right all right uh and we do have the issue of electronic participation by a school board member for
002policy bdd i recommend that the school board approve the electronic participation of school board member dr atul gupta due to disability medical condition is outlined in policy bdd do i have a motion mr trust all right all in favor aye aye okay great all right then we will move on to our presentation and i will share my screen just one second and is that showing this main slide great so welcome the members of the legislative advocacy and community relations committee our board members myself kim cena mr gary harvey mr randall trost and representing the lcs administration on the committee our superintendent edwards and ms ethel reeves of the communication and community community relations department school board members are appointed by district from city council we have ms susan morrison dr robert brennan mr randy trolls
003from district one sharon carter myself and mr harvey from district two michael nilas james coleman chair of the board and atul gupta from district 3. members of the lcs administration in attendance today are superintendent edwards members of her top leadership team and several principals from the various schools and school resource officer mr mike smith just have a few opening comments to set the stage and then we'll get on with our presentations as you know parents have been understandably frustrated and worried about the coronavirus related impacts on their children's education these concerns have metastasized into culture war battles that are disrupting school board meetings across the country although there have been numerous accounts of menacing behavior towards school board members around the country the lynchburg city school board has largely been spared with the exception of
004a disruptive stunt or two and frequent attention seeking behavior by select of india i apologize sorry through a disruptive stunt or two the frequent attention sinking behavior by select individuals the public has acted with civility toward this board we are grateful we are grateful for that and it speaks well for our community the antics and stunts that have been brought to our chamber would never be labeled domestic terrorism and certainly not by the nine of us likewise the virginia school boards association disagrees with the national school board association's letter to president biden a frequent refrain of unhappy parents is that this board is not accountable that we do not listen but we do listen and we do hear in most of these instances our hands have been tied and we cannot do what parents would
005like us to do for example through the 2020-21 school year there were parents who begged and pleaded at times becoming quite shrill that lcs returned to five days a week of in-classroom learning it didn't matter that we were bound by rules sometimes contradictory set forth by the governor virginia department of education virginia department of health the cdc and so on because these constraints made it impossible to do what some families demanded we do we were accused of not listening of not caring or even ignoring what the pandemic was doing to our children the learning laws performance gaps and the social emotional toll on students or the problems experienced by parents and families we are keenly aware of the problems and we are doing the best we are able with the resources we've been given to
006rectify these problems oops the biggest challenges we face today are not unique to lynchburg the pandemic created a surge in online commerce sweeping up all available cdl operators to deliver packages leaving few to supply our school transportation needs teachers were in short supply before the pandemic and that short shortage has worsened and this includes the the availability of substitute teachers and now supply chain backlogs are affecting school nutrition programs these are just a few of the things we face and now for an update on covid mitigation factors and how it's affecting the schools i turn it over to superintendent edwards good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today i appreciate the opportunity to just take a little time and talk about our children and yes while we are in the middle of a
007public health crisis we have some educational concerns that we are also dealing with right now our current reality across our country is that we have seen learning loss for our students our statewide sol scores show that pass rates were about 69 for reading 54 for math and 59 for science our lcs scores show similar as we do see the same across the commonwealth so one of the first things we have to do is just acknowledge our current reality our students need us now to address some of the academic learning loss that has occurred but there's other laws and i'll get to that in a second so let's talk about remediation and recovery and while we can spend a lot of time talking about what the pandemic did to us our real message message today is
008what are we doing about it so our students we first did a diagnostic assessment to see where they are and while that was a little bit sobering and the information we saw showed trends that our students did suffer in reading and in math but we're ready we're doing something about it over the past couple months we've put in a comprehensive assessment system that allows us to see student growth and that's exactly where we want to be right now seeing our students make progress and make growth we also have a new literacy plan and a literacy program which is working we are seeing our students get back to where they were and beyond that um we also have put in things like fundations and orton gillingham and wilson we are using the best practice strategies to
009work with our kids because they absolutely deserve it and as i say that i must give a huge thank you to every teacher every staff member every support staff member every bus driver custodian nurse assistant school nutrition worker and everyone in lynchburg city schools because it is taking a community effort to really get our students back but in addition to academic learning loss we are also seeing some issues with behaviors with mental health and quite frankly one that we may not have predicted stamina last year although many schools were completely remote lynchburg city schools was still open for two days a week and while that was important in getting our kids in-person instruction it is very different now that we we are open for five days a week so our children were in school two
010days a week six hours a day and now they're in school five days a week for seven hours a day and what we're seeing is we have to rebuild their stamina for school we have to rebuild their resiliency for school and that is something that our teachers are facing while they're also addressing academic learning loss and during the pandemic many of our families had many experiences that we are now seeing in schools we are seeing some of the trauma that some of our students have experienced during this pandemic and again in addition to being responsible for making sure our children are caught up in reading and math and science our staff is working diligently to address social emotional mental health and mental wellness needs of our kids we are a full service agency taking care
011of children and managing it very well as we move forward to looking at student growth so what are we in need of we need your support the teaching and learning platform is different now some of the things that we saw that worked last year when we were in a hybrid mode were small class sizes where teachers could really build relationships with their students and families and get to know their kids and really hone in on our mission every child by name by need to graduation and beyond but we've put class sizes back to where they were pre-pandemic teachers have also last year they had a day that they could use to prep to get ready to spend quality time with students and families and we are now bolted back to the old schedules that we
012had pre-pandemic so we are trying to use old methods to address the current problem and we are struggling in doing that so what do we need we need more supports in school we need more mental health and clinicians to take the load off the teaching force so that kids can get their needs met we need additional teachers and substitutes and staff members if we can make a dent in making the class sizes smaller so that teachers can really dig deep and work with their students it would assist us tremendously we need to have a high quality staff and that only works when you look at the working conditions for our educators we need higher salaries for our staff we need better working conditions for our staff so as we look forward to developing next year's
013school budgets and budgets across the common world let's keep this this challenge right in front of us let's remember what we need to do for our students let's make virginia the state where we are the educator of the employer of choice when it comes to education we need high quality staff in front of our kids our kids absolutely deserve it so some of the things that we're going to ask for it from the general assembly and from our legislators is to take a look at our funding formulas to take a look at our support cap to take a look at what's funded in soq and help us rebuild better and build a better system that can support our kids this pandemic has not gone away like we thought it would the delta variant threw us
014a curveball but we're always up and ready for the challenge and now we need you and your support to continue giving our kids the excellent service that they absolutely deserve so that we can help them soar to their potential and beyond thank you dr edwards and now um i should say that often the high point of our school board meetings is presentations by our student representative so we have a brief presentation from one of them now all right good morning everyone um when asked to speak i was told that i needed to serve as the bridge between the acg student body and administration and give um just a brief presentation on what they think that we need to see in the schools right now so when i reached out the first thing that came to
015mind was lunch systems they have changed due to the covet 19 protocol and that is completely understood we understand that there was a pandemic so we do need to have changes in place everything will not be normal however the lunch system does not require does not allow for the amount of socialization that we were used to and the amount of socialization that we need we come in with our class we sit with our class and we leave with our class there's no room to mix and mingle between other classes other class levels or grades and then moving on into the next topic this one is not unique to ecg this is just a topic that's nationwide it's going all around and that's critical race theory when i reached out to the student body we came
016to the conclusion that there's just too much emphasis being put on the term critical race theory the upwards should not be whether or not this is intentionally embedded in our curriculum rather than just teaching american history um we just want to learn what happened in america if one is enrolled in an american history course true american history is what needs to be taught and american history is not pretty and this is where many educators will stray away from the topic however if we don't take the time to learn and understand and see where we went left in our past we're not going to be able to move forward and so i did include a quote by george santayana and he says those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it and i think
017that that just sums that up perfectly and then lastly bringing it full circle right back to ecg it's just school maintenance a lot of our students are realizing that we're seeing new tvs being put in place to do away with the older smart board technology which is amazing we love enhanced technology that's definitely a step in the right direction however there are hallways that are struggling with ac um the bathrooms are not um guaranteed to be up to par every day so we do think that that is an amazing stride the new tvs the new technologies however we do think that there should be a little priority in there where just basic things are fixed and um suitable for us and so that does conclude my presentation i thank you all so much for this
018opportunity i thank you all for your time and your patience and i hope you have a great rest of your day thank you so much and now we'll get on with our legislative priorities good morning i'm going to be discussing early childhood education within lcs lcs supports stable funding to support public publicly subsidized early pre-k childhood child care and public education for at-risk individuals ages three to four years it is imperative that such programs once established be maintained to provide a reliable source for providing disadvantaged students and their families additional support future education success as we talk about the economics of early childhood care many families require multiple earning incomes to make ends meet and and which this creates a need for child care within the family structure parents cannot work unless they have child
019care for every working lynchburg for every working uh lynchburg parent nine of them there is only one available child care spot for infants and toddlers within our city working parents are essential to lynchburg's labor force and maintaining a healthy economy and our tax base nationally it is estimated that a lack of affordable child care costs in the u.s will cost us approximately 57 billion annually in lost production when we address the a child's brain development develops more during the first five years than any other time in their life early brain development has a lasting impact on a child's ability to learn and succeed in school and in life the quality of a child's experience in the first few years of life positively or negatively help to shape how their brain develops it reduces the need
020for long-term special and behavioral needs services i.e saving higher cost services throughout a child's education within the system a child's social development also depends on early childhood education early childhood education provides opportunities and experiences that impact the development of a child's cognitive social emotional physical and language development early childhood education helps to reduce behavioral and social emotional problems later in school and improves a child's social skills in relating to teachers and other students several studies have suggested that a child denied an early childhood education has a 70 percent greater probability of being arrested for violent crime later on in life so funding these are just a few examples of the current funding sources i would like to bring your attention to not to the number one source and then i ask you to ask yourselves
021how do parents who are economically challenged pay for early childhood education tuition without any outside assistance so finally what can our legislators do we can pass legislation or policies that encourage and support early childhood education programs in the lynchburg community we can provide additional funding for programs such as head start and we can provide additional assistance to low-income families to encourage encourage early childhood education so uh good morning guys i apologize i'm late i just wondered uh guys if you all wanted to have questions while we go or do you want me to just wait till when they're done senator newman we will have time for questions and discussions at the end of the presentation good morning the three associations the american academy of pediatrics the american academy of child and adolescent psychiatry and the
022children's hospital association which together represents approximately for over 77 000 physicians in more than 200 hospitals they have declared the state of children's mental health a national emergency dr beer the president of the american academy of pediatrics of pediatrician excuse me stated and i quote children's mental health must be treated like any other emergency and dr carlson coulson president of the american academy of child battle child and adolescent psychiatric stated we cannot sit idly by this is a national emergency in the time for swift and deliberate action is now and the declaration is advocating for policy makers at every local every level of government that they will step up and also make sure that all families have access to mental health services to improved or to increase telemedicine access support for school-based mental health services
023as well as efforts increase efforts to decrease suicide suicide risk children have experienced difficult times in the year 2020 and 2021 we had the pandemic disruption of education the divisive election the murder of george floyd and more were due to covet covet loss children experienced at least 140 000 deaths of their caregivers primary and or secondary all these events are taking and have taken a toll on children's mental health children's ages 5 to 11 have seen a the emergency department has seen an increase of 24 a hospital visits and 31 in ages 12 to and this year alone at least 50 percent of the girls who presented to the emergency room presented with suicide suspected injuries in the u.s the emergency departments are seeing not only high school and middle school students but an increase
024in elementary school students that are presenting for significant mental health issues such as depression anxiety suicide ideation and in need of mental health hospitalizations if you don't believe this just if you happen unfortunately to be in an emergency department i was a couple of weeks ago ago and just saw a strong presence of a significant presence of the police force and i was trying to figure out what is going on and then i saw where they weren't together but they were sitting on the outside of bays and as you walk walk through you will see that some of these people or children there were elementary kids waiting or needing an eco or emergency custody order or or a temporary detention order and thanks to the proactive mindset of our board and our superintendent last year
025we made sure that we budgeted for this increased needs and mental health services with social workers psychologists behavioral support system and also just to increase emphasis on social emotional learning oh [Music] good morning sorry for i was very excited when i was given the chance to talk about student success i was so excited that i reached out to the principals and to staff to give me information about how successful we were last year under operating under the pandemic however i then went back and read our legislative positions and they are much more specific and i'm going to talk about student success in our department of student services covet 19 pandemic has certainly accelerated the need for additional support for our students and families for not only have we suffered an academic learning laws but a
026social and emotional learning laws as well according to director for student services mrs brown dr director brown our needs are critical we need trained behavioral coaches for each of our two high schools to assist with preventing and addressing misbehaviors these individuals are trained to intervene redirect de-escalate behaviors that could lead to suspensions or expulsions we need registered behavioral technicians for general education population with oppositional defiant disorders or other defiant disorders such as mood or anxiety disorders conduct disorders add or adhe we need social workers at each of our secondary schools and additional ones at several elementary schools social workers assess individual home school and community factors that may affect a student's ability to learn they provide consultation with school staff regarding social and emotional needs of our students they collaborate with community agencies to find
027appropriate resources for students and family our social workers also maintain an lcs community resource guide that includes detailed information for llcs student services on our website we need licensed clinicians on site for every school level for social emotional learning to address anxiety depression and trauma due to covet or sexual assault in addition to identifying these needs in our students lunchbox city needs more local beds in our community for students in crisis remember lcs provides for students in every possible way during the seven hours a day that they are under our care and supervision but we are working with our community partners to make it work in the other 17 hours of the day this comes with a price tag the second area that i want to address is uh the broadband the need for broadband
028services in our community i reached out to doc director john collins to talk about find out exactly what we have done lcs provided an additional three great levels worth of devices during the pandemic so students would have something at home that's in addition to the six through 12 that we all already provided that was around two thousand devices in the twenty twenty one twenty two school year we started with devices for all students in grades through two two through twelve we partnered with t-mobile and project ten million to provide hot spots to families of the 750 hot spots upon approximately 500 have been provided to family we partnered with area churches community centers and groups to provide internet access at locations around the city we have installed additional wireless access to provide coverage in our
029school parking lots so families have to drive up can drive up to internet access but they have to be able to get there and they have to be have the ability to stay in that parking lot safely we distributed 350 devices so instruction to instructional assistants and office staff who have the ability to could give them the ability to work remotely the other thing that we did last year was to establish the electric city virtual academy we currently have 229 students with 192 students on the waiting list we are currently expanding invitations to students for second semester current numbers will be going up but will we have the space for those students and right now we do not we've also started a wish project which is wireless service at home and we're funding that with
030a 3.2 million dollar investment from cares money we will we are doing it in four um phases phase one is downtown we will provide wireless service to sixteen hundred students phase two uh downtown midtown and college park to eighteen hundred students phase three west lynchburg and northwest lynchburg a thousand students boonsboro and rivermont phase four one thousand one hundred total of five thousand five hundred students that we were be providing wireless service in their homes this comes with an additional price tag we have to be able to continue to offer this we don't have the money in our system to be able to maintain it at this point we also recognize that we need the supplies to make this work a lot of these supplies are sitting on barges in our harbors and we cannot
031get them unloaded into the places and to the individuals that can make this happen in our communities and this is something that you can help us with you can find a way to activate the national guard or our army and navies know how to unload barges and get them to locations help us get the supplies to the communities the third thing excuse me the third area that i want to talk about is developing programs to help our commitment to equity and inclusiveness in our communities november is national family engagement month family engagement in the schools is a vital part of student success research has shown that the engagement between schools and families involve attendance inc improves attendance test scores behavior social skills and a host of other positive feedbacks we highlight different areas and give
032ideas on how to best engage our family in our community we partner with lynchburg city police to try to engage our family and to provide a safe community we have seen that the community spills over into our schools what's happening in the communities happens in our schools we have a strong support system in our sro program and we need to continue that to help us engage our families not only in our schools but in our cities why do we feel that this is so important in order to help all our students be successful we feel that we have to recognize celebrate and support all members of our school community we and our colleagues across the country are doing this as aggressively as we can we need your help to lead by example in your actions
033and your deeds we need you to be a part of the village to help pull our students and families through this pandemic and the ones that we were experienced prior to covet 19 we were experiencing a pandemic of poverty we were a community in need and we still are we have long a very strong city council support to helping our community move forward we are as a school system and city are not sitting back in the all the challenges that come with poverty define us we have our partners attacking hunger like parkview mission and food for thought along with our nutrition program deliver meals on our buses and and vans to each child in our community not just those enrolled in lynchburg city schools we have uh wellness checks we offer dental vision and hearing
034screenings and are offering covet screenings and testing as well we reach out to our families with community conversations our next one at st john's episcopal church is on october 24th please feel free to reach out and join us in this our families and our students have watched the capital riots demonstrations that were powerful in the spread of hatred and negativity we have also watched the power of positive interaction that were peaceful celebrations and that is what we need for you as our leaders in the city in the state and in our nation to continue to help us to be positive about what we have to accomplish dr brennan myself good morning this is bob brennan and i just wanted to thank susan for her enthusiasm and for many years of dedication lintsburg city schools i
035am the baby boomer on the committee so please put up with my poor i.t talents um as you read my introduction i will give you a little background which is that in august of 2019 governor ralph northam announced the formation of the african-american history education commission of which our esteemed lynchburg city school superintendent dr chris edwards was an active participant the commission was charged with examining the teaching of afro-american history in virginia public schools and to make recommendations for improving and enhancing the teaching and learning experience the governor also directed the virginia department of education to work with committees of with the committee of history and social science public school educators um college professors to develop a new african-american history course for high school students and come back in my next slide the 58 page
036document was released in april of this year and is an extensive description of the curriculum for this new high school elective next live kim briefly first i want to point out that this is an elective it's not a required course it surveys african-american history from pre-colonial africa through today it introduces students to key concepts in afro-american history from early beginnings in africa through the trade of enslaved africans the agency and resilience of african-americans during the civil war emancipation and recons reconstruction to the modern civil rights era the joy celebrations and collaborations in the art history and culture of the past and modern black america next slide susan this course like many other courses are all courses that we do in lynchburg city schools and public schools throughout the state is based on a practice called
037culturally responsive teaching and this is based on the fact that it is student-centered it identifies and nurtures students cultural strengths to promote student achievement it affirms cultural and individual identity it utilizes students culture as a vehicle for learning and establishes high expectations for all students and provide support to ensure success why do we need these programs this data gives us an idea of why we need this on the left is a pie graph that shows us the demographics of our city which is obviously majority white about 62 percent about 28 african-american our school system over the years has changed significantly in our demographic demographics where we are about 50 percent afro-american we are about 31 white and we are 9.6 multi-racial and 7.1 hispanic we have many ethnicities we have many cultures in our city
038that we want to celebrate and this is one way that we can do that we've talked about culturally responsive teaching i just want to say that this is a guide that we use in all our courses and it directs us to our mission which is to take every child by name and by need to graduation thank you so much for spending your time with us this morning and i will pass on the baton to my colleague [Music] good morning i'm randall trost and if dr brennan is the baby boomer i'm the newbie on the school board in any event um with that i get the opportunity to ask for uh or to approach the teacher retention and recruitment issues and that answer is easy um at least it looks easy throw more money at the
039situation so just a few statistics to get you going with respect to lcs and our board we have three primary objectives number one is to raise teacher salaries to the national average right now our national our our salaries are far below the national average and in fact if you look at those numbers and we'll go to the next slide we'll do that in just a moment um lynchburg is actually far below what we would see as the average of from virginia next is going to come up with innovative ideas to increase teacher net income and then finally we want to continue to incentivize teachers to work in urban school districts slide so let's look at uh virginia teacher savvy average salaries average salary in virginia just under 54 000 now this is what's interesting the
040teachers make an average of 10.4 less than the virginia wage average now of course we get some skewing because of the uh increased wages in northern virginia but even if you pull out some of those outliers still teachers are making 10 you know significantly less than the average wage in virginia in addition to that um us teachers as a whole across the nation make less than 60 cents for every dollar paid to people of the same education we'll go back same education um level and other professions so what we have here is we have teachers who are educated professionals getting paid far below what their other types of colleagues with similar education levels across our nation most importantly and i think very significantly a statewide teacher salaries have dropped 9.14 percent since 2010. now that's
041adjusted for inflation but that is just eye-opening to see to think that across our uh our state their their uh wage adjusted or inflation-adjusted salaries have dropped since 2010. thanks a lot another uh look at that data is virginia is one of the worst paying states for teachers across our nation we're only bested or worsted if you will by washington dc um with respect to our uh average wage uh unfortunately uh it's something that has to be attributed to and it's something that we have to come and ask for money and those of you guys that know me many of you guys uh listening and do know me number one i'm cheap i don't like to spend money unless i'm getting a good value and i love to invest and i see paying the teachers
042additional income boots on the ground people that are actually making a direct impact to our students is it a foreign investing and they're investing in the future of the state and we're investing in the future of their children and uh if we don't invest now we're going to pay more later and i think that's what we're headed next slide so in summary what i want to uh talk about is how are we going to achieve these types of uh increases in salaries number one i think we're looking at efficiencies in our school system um right now we have a facility study going on hopefully we'll see some good results from that we can find some additional efficiencies in addition locally here we have a task force i think is important that we continue to support
043and let them do their work i know there's been on delay because of the pandemic let them do their work let's not only uh just ask for more money but let's see how we can better utilize the money we have and i'm a big proponent of giving more money to the boots on the ground people that are actually talking to our students teaching our students and dealing with our students appreciate your time thank you thank you good morning my name is before i move any forward i'd like to i see on screen senator peake senator newman uh vice mayor wright and councilman ferrari if i'm missing anybody i apologize and i like to say thank you to miss sarah for joining us too she is a warrior behind the scenes but i'm going to say
044and we all know senator newman is on the senate finance committee so he is the key player for all of us what i am going to my part is on state funding state funding uh the lynchburg city school like vas has been asking and i'm sorry i missed delegate wendell walker so we we are asking to remove the cap uh for this uh for sop positions they have been there for last 10 years but this is the time to take them out and move that funding the revenues to us for other educational purposes we need because as you know in commonwealth we need an increase in teacher salaries and this will allow us to retain and bring in quality educational teachers we need quality teachers and quality teachers need high salaries and that has been
045the thing which is hurting virginia virginia is number one in doing business so why can't virginia be number one in providing educational public education services to our students so that's the message we should take to the general assembly this year is that we want to be number one in education now and that won't happen until we do these minor things like taking the cap off from the support staff and the other things my colleagues are talking about thank you very much okay good morning uh i'm mike nellis i'm going to elaborate a little more on funding formula we have three main topics dr guptas already discussed the funding funding cap or the cap on support staff the two things particularly important for lynchburg affects us due to our local economic situation is the funding calculation
046that uses the local composite index and then the other is the did you go back thank you this virginia association of school superintendents requests that due to the covet impacts and significant changes in in student enrollment that we be held uh harmless for the for the next couple years for free benchmarking okay next slide thank you so lynchburg uh has very has a high fiscal stress index and this is a this is i'm going to discuss this from 2019 the overall stress index for lynchburg is number 13. there's 133 localities in the state so we're pretty high in that respect and the map shows all the different localities and for your convenience i pointed out where lynchburg is although i'm sure you all know that um and the fiscal stress index really is a way
047to kind of rank uh revenue generating capacity uh revenue collection and median household income lynchburg ranks uh and is number 14 and this really should be revenue capacity per capita and that's the so we're um we're generating a lot of revenue per capita is really what this is uh more so than a lot of other localities on a proportional basis and that shows up in that we're number eight in revenue generation effort so that goes to taxing and funding and fees and all of that uh but we are overall in the state we're number 88 and median household income so i think uh the city uh it was is doing it uh being aggressive in terms of collecting revenue and supporting the needs for services and support for the citizens lynchburg but the funding formula
048for education doesn't take into account um really the the situation where we're at next slide so we're support an increase in state funding to really emphasize uh differential funding for individual schools as mentioned before were over 50 percent economically disadvantaged uh that exceeds the state average uh this population of lynchburg is you know majority white but are the public schools uh have a high uh proportion of economically disadvantaged students and the the reality is there are a lot of challenges that that come with that so the local composite index um really is a reflection is this how the state formed the state formula to determine what proportion of the locality uh should be to fund the total for total funding for the for the schools and it's a weighted weighted ranking of real estate property
049values adjusted gross income and taxable retail sales and then even though lynchburg has a high stress index and are doing a good job collecting revenue on a per capita basis then that gets adjusted so if we do a good job we end up actually having to pay more for local education and some other localities it does it also really doesn't reflect um what the needs and demands are for services in the schools and we've heard from our previous presenters a need for actual school more school counselors psychologists and social service providers and that has really been uh come to the forefront with the lockdown with kovid and there are a lot of the reality is in economically disadvantaged areas there's a lot of stress on on the students schools tend to be the first ones
050that see these see that see the behaviors can get services directed uh to students and families but we had a year year and a half where students were on their own and a lot of a lot of things did not get caught and just the stress with with kovitt in general as you heard with dr carter about the need for increased mental health services and and emergency services that's in our schools now and it's a challenge exciting okay thank you thank you doc thank you dr nillas i would uh like to say thank you as well to senator newman and senator peake and delegate walker through councilman ferrari and i would like to thank vice mayor wright and councilman for rowdy and john hughes and others for listening to us today uh i want to
051mention briefly local control and local control supports just about everything that we do lynchburg city schools supports the virginia school boards association's opposition to any attempts to divest local school boards of their constitutional authority to supervise schools lcs supports the virginia school boards association opposition to any efforts that interfere with the day-to-day activities of school boards and performing their constitutional responsibilities local school boards understand the needs of their communities and are best equipped to make decisions that impact the school division virginia is home to a diverse set of localities and issues differ across the commonwealth local control allows school boards the ability to craft policies designed to tackle issues in a manner that best fits community needs therefore the lynchburg city school board and i hope you can appreciate the robust well-rounded depth of this
052board champions local control as we have been under an increased level of scrutiny and pressure involving several issues as we've made difficult decisions on behalf of students our decisions have not always been popular and almost always guarantee disagreements in some portions of the community as appointed school board members we believe we are the closest to the community and are best suited to make the decisions regarding public education in lynchburg i now would like to turn the floor over to our government relations specialist from virginia school boards association j.t kessler thank you dr coleman and and thank you for everybody who is here senator peake and and representatives from your other legislative dela or your legislative delegation as dr coleman stated local control is a very key um legislative position and priority of the virginia school
053boards association and in 2021 we are celebrating our 115th year of advocacy and leadership in support for the 133 school divisions here in the commonwealth we are we were founded and continue to support the constitutional authority of local boards to manage and control the public schools uh in this state and we will continue to oppose any efforts that would divest the local school board's authority a constitutional authority to supervise schools and any efforts that interfere with the day-to-day activities of school boards and performing these constitutional responsibilities um vsba strongly believes local school boards know what is best for their communities and because of the diverse nature of our commonwealth what may work in northern virginia may not work in lynchburg or in lee county and what may work in haswell county may not work in
054northern virginia so some local school board members our best to answer these uh problems and uh you know that locally and and we just will continue to support that uh we thank uh our legislators uh that represent lynchburg for the work that you do and for your service to the public thank you dr coleman thank you jt we would like each of you to know that uh vsva is such a rich contributor to what we do here in lynchburg and across the commonwealth and there was a letter that was disseminated by vsba that indicated a disapproval of the correspondence that was sent out from nsba relating to parents as domestic terrorists the sba does not support that notion and certainly we do not as a local school board we appreciate your ongoing support of local
055control for our lynchburg city school board and school boards across virginia family engagement family involvement this information is from dr karen matt who is one of the founders and really laid the template for in family engagement and also for our own this is peppa ruiz so lcs's family and engagement family and community community engagement director generally when you think of family engagement the first thing you think of if if you get a call from your child's teacher or from the school you probably turn around and say so what did you do or you would say um what's going on or has there is there a quarantine but what family engagement is is any way that a child or caregiver anyway that a child or caregiver or child's caregiver supports learning and healthy development and you
056said so what does that look like families can or parents can engage by being encouragers and this is one of the most effective ways to engage parents to be supporters of their children monitors of their children's time and behavior advocates and a lot of times we hear advocates we're saying oh no we don't want advocates but we do want parents to be advocates because they really will keep us accountable for for education and for the academic practice progress of their students collaborators and partners and the main ingredients or the assistant essential ingredients to family engagement one is that every event that the school holds should be linked to learning every event should be linked to learning so as parents should come to an event and they should leave lead learning and being more educated also
057it's about building relationships building relationships with parents with the community and parents building and that will that will um also enhance parents building relationships with parents and staff building relationships with parents and with community and it also takes education on both sides it's a reciprocal thing where the families have to learn and also the educators or the employees lcs have to learn too and one of the key things is we have to refrain from blaming parents every time we'll say oh they're not engaged they don't do this they don't understand this but we need to really um stay away from that and we also dr karen math has also learned that from doing research she also has at least 18 or 19 other people doing research and they found that some parents are actively disengaging
058and the reason being is because when they do show up at school sometimes they're not treated the best maybe they don't look the way we want them to look or they're not dressed the way we want them to dress and sometimes if you are you still may be greeted with what do you want or what can i do what can i do the other thing is we need to really look at being having an asset mindset which means that we have to value parents as our one of our most valuable capitals of human capital that who knows that child better than anyone but the parents so really to work with the parents to work with our with the students and also the interactive component that parents really want education they want to learn so like
059again anytime there's the event they should be able to actively participate with hands-on experience so they can go back and also share with their students oftentimes when you come to a school event you go away with a lot of different rules and paperwork but little or no interactive behavior or ability to participate and one dr math uses these three types of schools and it's interesting to see where your child's school where we are for the fortress school these are the schools generally that they want you to come when they want you to come and show up when they want you to show up and if not they really aren't interested it's really little um engagement efforts being made and also for engagement you have to really train your your staff from the custodians to the
060attendance clerks to your teachers about the importance the mission of your school to really be a good brand as with the chick-fil-a's or the disney so everyone will know what is your mission and vision and how do we want the two of our students to achieve and again the fortress schools a lot of times she was saying that after you go to 20 doors and finally get to the main door then you're greeted um not in the most positive manner so and then there's little or no ptos or interactions with the parents the open doors school is a more proficient store where you may have one or two programs and there may be some information that's assimilated but the partnership schools these are the ones where if you're looking at any major events or big
061items that you're looking at new distancing or any or changing schedules that you're really going to involve the parents at the forefront not do the change and then say well let's get the information from the two from the parents but to really make parents a partner in the school system and you're really looking at professional developments for teachers and we're talking about teacher retention and that's one of the things that will help the teacher retention is teachers that have the know that they have family members that if they can call that they will get help then that makes a world of difference and also there was one illustration where a child behaved in one teacher's class and when they went to other teachers they misbehaved and they looked and explored and the fact is the
062teacher where the child behaves she had up-to-date active uh telephones the email address for the parents and she knew she could reach out and call and she just didn't wait till there was a disciplinary problem but she called and reached out all the time for the positive information to see to let the parent know that this child is doing well so when the parent got a call they knew that it didn't necessarily mean there was a disciplinary problem but she was checking on the child see how she can help create the child and the barriers to why isn't this going on more often is sometimes it's the time and time of events the place um again just the history of how some parents have been treated policy so if we really see where policies inhibiting
063partnerships with parents we really need to look at that and we did take a look when we looked at our volunteer policies regarding that issue and also it's the mindset also that we're about learning but learning can really be enhanced if we really work with and advocate and assist with the engagement of our fans and now we will have our final student presentation hello everyone my name is eugene kim i'm a senior at heritage high school and central virginia governor school and i would just like to say it's a huge honor to be here today and be able to speak to you all you can move on to the next slide thank you this is just an overview of the heritage high school day-to-day schedule so we are now on a block schedule with four
064periods one day in minute blocks and this is in order to reduce the amount of traffic in the hallways and to increase instructional time in the classrooms now as jayden mentioned my role is to sort of be an outlet for students and i in order to do this i sent out a google form to the entire student body of heritage and students could anonymously respond to a series of free response questions with their thoughts and one of these questions was how has this school year been so far for you and there was a wide range of answers for all of these questions so i would just like to note that it's not an accurate sample since the answers were very varied so for this question i had a lot of answers and some students said
065it's been good that they liked the block schedules the a days and the b days some students said it was pretty boring and uneventful some students said it was stressful actually many students said that and other students had a more positive outlook on this and they said that we're getting through it and they liked being at school in person as compared to virtually like last year another question they could respond to was what things do you want to change for this school year and some students were happy with everything they didn't want to change anything and there are a lot of complaints about the schedule itself for example having to be at school by 7 25 there was also complaints about the lunch schedule and the lunch system and they really just wanted more activities
066in school which i totally understand and some students didn't really like the covid regulations which i'll go more in depth in the next slide and our last question how do you feel about the current covid19 restrictions many students said that the masks could be uncomfortable and they did not like them and other students did say that they think it is really important to use our masks in the hallways and then some students said that they wanted higher restrictions so once again there was a wide range of answers now i wanted to heritage has a lot of amazing clubs and activities but i wanted to highlight the heritage high school and environmental club because they recently had a volunteer opportunity with the ec glass club and i just wanted to show that the two rival schools
067could work together and make a difference in our community and to finish off we had our spirit week in the week of october 18th through the 22nd and we have theme days for example monday was sweats and crazy socks and thursdays was halloween rehearsal day and friday was our peek out with our homecoming game that evening with our football team which has been having a great season so far in the homecoming game they claim victory against js 61-8 and that is it for me thank you so much and we want to thank everybody for their time and attention for coming today that is the end of our presentations and now we open up the floor for questions and comments so um good morning uh this is steve newman uh thank you for the opportunity to
068uh to come and join you today um a couple of things uh one i really appreciate hearing from your students that was very kind good to see you dr coleman and and the uh the rest of the team we really are grateful for our teachers as you know i'm a little disappointed that we didn't have an opportunity to have communication during the presentation it i think i've been doing this about 30 years and i've had a lot of these right a lot of them and have dealt with campbell and bedford and bonniton amherst and lynchburg and never done it this way i think communication back and forth is really really critical very disappointed that we missed that opportunity this time i think it's an opportunity maybe for improvement next time because there's a lot here
069right there's a lot here and so much i think was missed in the one hour that we could have talked about and we could have spent a good bit of time just going back and forth instead of that on things like the local composite index where i tell you what if we open up that local composite index with northern virginia and others with so many more populations there is an untold amount of damage that could be done to lynchburg city schools and also others out there we could have i think talked a good bit more about some of the broadband money as you know there is over 700 million dollars going in on teacher salaries boy we've had a historic couple of years i think we missed that opportunity to talk a little bit a
070little bit about that because there's never been a time in virginia's history ever where we've made more progress toward doing more for our teachers on teacher salary five percent five percent and then another two percent three percent i mean we are making great progress it doesn't mean there's still not room but well a dialogue right is the way we've normally done this for 30 years we miss that uh that opportunity today the other thing i think we missed is i and because we're friends we're community uh people involved with each other just very disappointed we didn't talk about math history science and english and we talked a lot about the social things and and that type thing and those may have a important place but boy you know when you look at and i used
071to be chairman of the education committee and i'm still the ranking member you look at these scores and we're in trouble we're in trouble on math history science and english we're in trouble we could have had a rich conversation today about uh also about academics that would have been a maybe a topic that we could have maybe with more time or maybe collaboration talked about because we've got to do something different in in math and math is math is a serious problem i know the superintendent lane and i have spent a lot of time on that could have had more of a discussion i think on that uh history there are some changes in history unfortunately we're losing the metric on history we've had that metric in place for about 30 years and we're going
072to lose some of that metric on science you know that the federal government's still pushing down for a metrical data on science and on english so um i am grateful that we've spent this time i think that there is a more historical productive way that some of us can kind of get together and talk about things uh collaboratively uh instead of maybe this way and and it's not you know i still i mean i love the city i love you guys but but i just think that i mean i think we could have talked a lot more about some things that uh were were quite important so anyway i'm grateful for your time um sorry it was a couple minutes late sarah has kind of brought me up to speed but you have some people
073that i think are ranking members in the education committees i know i've been the chairman of the subcommittee on k-12 for a long time and then the last couple of years we've been been working with the democrat leader on that but we've also been working greatly on education local control that's been a big deal in all of our budgets the house and the senate budget as we've gone through and given you more local control love to talk to you at the right time about the possibilities that are now in the state budget on local control local calendar control there's so much more but i think it takes a dialogue to kind of do that and don't think this really is a as a strong criticism it's just i think that another way lets us talk
074to each other like we have for the last 30 years so if you don't mind me saying that i know it's uh it's you know it's early in the morning and we want to be all smiles but i think there is a better way for us to communicate that goes back to the more traditional ways and also i i just think we've got to talk about massive math history science and english because those items really matter the numbers are unbelievably bad we i know we've had cobit but we've got to pull through those numbers and how we're going to do that and maybe the social things are important also but they uh maybe uh maybe are something that is a long term great fix but uh we've got to fix these items soon so uh
075forget my long you know discussion here but uh that that's just some of my thoughts senator newman thank you so much for um those comments and uh we will take them into consideration and uh it's difficult to know how best to use the time to get across the message that we want and so um i i apologize for not opening up for discussion and dialogue let's consider this the beginning of the conversation and keep it going because we're not going to solve these problems in 90 minutes so we can keep going forward on this conversation and i really appreciate your time comments suggestions and we are focused on the subject areas we have been monitoring student levels and where they are and we're working hard to bring students back to uh class level where they
076need to be thank you very much it's very kind of just just one last point if you you guys do want to have some discussion maybe even before we go to session on what we're going to do about math history science and english those that would be really really quite helpful and how we kind of attack those issues because ultimately those are the reasons why we go to school and i know that's something that parents care deeply about as well so if you have another time you want to talk about academics that love to do that uh sure did you want to respond dr edwards i appreciate that invitation because that is the area that i spend most of my time in doing can you also hear me okay that is the area that i
077spend most of my time and my staff and you will see many directors and principals were all nodding with you because that is the business that we're in we would love to get out of contact tracing and many of the other distractions and get to the business of teaching kids to read there's a wonderful video on our website about fundations and it just really showcases what we are about in terms of our commitment to get our babies back and you are absolutely right it is the reason why we go to school it is our mission is education first and i think we've been vaulted into this health crisis and distracted so we would love to invite you bring you to our schools and show you some of the wonderful things that we are doing to
078address all of the learning uh concerns that we have particularly in the area of literacy and math and science and social studies as you stated and when you really think through i mean this this one little statistic is mind-boggling when you think of our kindergartners who left us in um march of 2020 they are now in second grade and they had two days a week of first grade fundamental first grade so when i tell you my elementary staff is working hard to fill in the gaps there is so much more we could talk your ear off and take you on tours and we certainly welcome you and our other delegates to come see come help us and join us in this suspicion to really educate our kids so i appreciate your comments thank you yes
079ma'am i'm sorry dr coleman uh i just wanted to echo what the superintendent said and uh thank you dr sinha for putting this together so well today but senator we want to thank you senator newman for for taking time to be with us today that that in my mind is what speaks volumes and of course we're going to champion more opportunities to get with you and senator peake and delegate walker and everyone else but but first of all just thank you for taking the time to be with us today so important dr coleman thank you very much and doc you know i love you i love your family and thank the world of you so anytime i can spend a little time with you you know i'm probably going to do that so good to
080see you anyone else care to chime in or ask questions comment i will join in now following senator newman good morning everyone and uh thank you for putting this together i would just say i really prefer to meet in person i think we do a much better job when we're all in the same room and i guess it was two years ago where we last did that so i really you know i think we could have been in person this year i don't see any reason why not everything else is in person so i hope our next meeting will all be together it's interesting in listening to what's going on and i i just it's inescapable the fact that we did not have our kids in classroom in person has been horribly detrimental to their
081educational process and that's just a fact and it's going to take a lot of work to make up for that lack of time in the classroom and i'm glad that we're all back uh in person full day every day and i just i had one question you know i know we've got the variant going on in that you know has any have we lost any lynchburg city students to covet and during this pandemic not to my knowledge sir and i do not i do too that is great do we know if we've had any serious has anyone been hospitalized any students that we know of um i'm not aware of students i know i have director brown on i do know that we have had some staff that were hospitalized have we lost any let
082me have we lost any staff that would be is any staff a couple staff died yes yes sir how many of those um to our knowledge i know at least one but we had some that had just retired um and we've lost a couple of those as well that is that is unfortunate most unfortunate um i'm glad our our students have not suffered too poorly and i just we've got to get back in person and i don't know if we're going to extend days go into the summer or whatever we're going to have to do to uh to get our as soon as we missed really a year and a half two years uh back back up to speed i would i will tell you and i know we talked about the composite pro uh
083index no one knows that issue better than uh senator newman does who has been involved with it and i've heard senator newman over the years i've heard everyone going back to lacey putney anyone who has folks from roanoke who represents anywhere west of richmond has always been very concerned every legislative republican democrat about changing the composite index because the fear is that we will not fare well when it was put in western virginia southwest virginia had a a much bigger say in how the general assembly operated and so if we change it we need to be you better watch out so that's i i take trust senator newman on that he knows and then some of the other issues it so much is based on behavior and home life when you look at the counselors
084and i forget dr morrison was listed the number of people that she thought we needed to put in school to deal with really hope issues and i just don't see it coming from the state level the national level and i don't know what we can do at the local level to address why so many of our students have problems at home and i think if you look it is always a high indicator of single parent homes if you look at the statistics nationwide of what happens down the road and we seem to do absolutely nothing ever from a statewide level or federal level to address that issue and it's as a parent of five it's very difficult to raise children it's very difficult to educate children and it's a lot of work and it's hard
085and it's also hard to discipline children and if you have them coming to school not behaving not wanting to learn and you can't discipline them you can't remove them from the classroom it disrupts every other child and so i hear all these problems about counselors for this and that and what do we do with children who disrupt classrooms who his parents are not interested in them learning there has to be some kind of a method to reach out and get parents on the hook and get them invested in their kids education and when you see schools where parents are invested in their education you see changes i think i assume all of y'all seen that story in the last month or so about new orleans the high school down there where they had so much
086violence and they said what they got their parents involved they got the dads so the dad started going to school and eliminated the violence in the school and the turnaround was tremendous because they got the dads involved i would like to see something like that in our programs in our school to kind of be a leader look what they did in new orleans see if we can't do something like that to get parents to get fathers involved to set up a learning environment a safe learning environment for our children so that's some of the things that i have seen recently of course we talked about the academics um and and i would just note something that i heard was interesting the last week one of the presenters earlier on said if without the pre-k and
087the early childhood education 70 of them end up going into some type of violent crime when we don't educate them properly at a very young age which we have to get the parents involved to do that and i just i heard a preacher talking he was complaining he said you know they won't let me into the schools to talk with kids when they're 10 11 and 12. instead i have to wait until they go to prison when they're 18 and 19 then let me into the prisons to talk with them and work with them but i can't go into schools to talk with them and work with them just kind of struck me that we wait till they go to prison and i heard somebody say the church has provided broadband but we need mentors
088from every walk of life coming in to work with our kids and we shouldn't restrict anyone those are some things that i thought about thank you senator peake thank you for your violence your commitment to our schools and we absolutely agree this being a family engagement month um we are certainly activated in terms of working with our families um and you know as a public school system we take every family you take the ones who are in schools every single day supporting doing everything that they they can and we also take the ones who are not in schools if they can't be in schools we can't control family circumstance but what we can do is when the kids are with us seven hours a day do our best to educate them and to your point
089of creative programming we do have mentorships in place and we agree we need you know everybody in schools to work with our kids we have a thriving program at the beginning of our schools men to school they come celebrate welcome all of our children to school we have some of our students in older grades acting as role models for students in younger grades in absence of family members that they may not have to do those programs and we do work with our community partners to meet kids where they are and provide services not only in the schools but outside of the schools we are proud of the work that we do with the ymca and the boys and girls club and jubilee and we do have many many um uh church and other religious organizations
090that partner and work with us as a matter of fact our next community conversation on november 22nd is actually going to be held in a religious institution we are getting out and going where the people are because we recognize that for our children to succeed it takes a community to help them so we are committed to be in that community and we're also glad that you are also a partner in this work so thank you and senator peak if i could echo not to repeat what dr edwards just said which was so powerful but once again we want to thank you because you're always responsive when we call on you to come to community events we're familiar with the piece in new orleans i was just there recently but right here in lynchburg we have
091some developing unique pieces like that that just need more and more attention and more support and we thank you dr sinha if it's okay i just wanted to express that uh delegate or delegate walker really did want to be here today but he had to take it a personal day to deal with some family matters and um it's an honor to represent him here and then also wear two caps today um so i'll be sure to relay a lot of this data in this presentation in this discussion to him so he's informed about what's what's happening here and and the discussions associated for my other hat locally you know i i would i would express my commitment to being involved with this in any way i can um especially on the math science and english
092and so on um you know i went back and watched the discussion you all had about where some of the percentages of students are grades three through five i think six through eight and so on with where they are below level and if memory serves i believe it was like 56 percent of students grade three through five were below level in math and 43 percent in reading um grades six through eight 65 percent of students were below level in math and 32 in reading you know those are certainly the core services the core things you know students need to be educated on and i would hope that we could really focus on those items um as as those are the the pieces of education that that are the building blocks for success so i stand
093ready to to be a part of that conversation i know my boss does and again his regrets for for not being here and i'll do my best to get uh get everything to him i i appreciate that and thank you very much and and i'm very familiar with busy schedules and how hard it is to attend everything so thank you for coming and wearing your two hats and we appreciate your support thank you anyone else care to chime in have a comment question i also would like to acknowledge that we have two very strong programs in lynchburg that we that other school systems do not have and that would be beacon of hope who provides a great service to students and families in support of their careers in post high school opportunities um they do
094amazing things and did amazing things for us last year when we were struggling to get students acceptance and uh into colleges the second thing one is that we have an outstanding education foundation that work they work really hard to help our teachers with thousands of dollars in supplies and support and opportunities to do different um activities with their students through scholarships and they also provide a number of scholarships to our students very nice scholarships i think i received information from both um [Music] principals that said our students the class of 2021 received a total over 12 million dollars in scholarships and grants and that's a significant significant amount of amount of of scholarships and opportunities for our students and both those groups help us get our students to those places and we owe them a
095great deal of thanks and would like the opportunity for other school systems across the state to look at these programs and to see the benefits and if they can get them going in their communities as well i forgot one thing that i wanted to talk about i know uh welding electrician our trades how how are we didn't really discuss that but and i know senator newman delegate walker everywhere we've been going our employers in the area are telling us we can't find people to do our jobs hvac southern air i know banker still does some programs how are our tr what are we doing with our vocational education so that's a great question and we have a thriving cte program here at both of our high schools and our middle schools so we are very
096invested in students in the trades and we do recognize and have a partnership with the business alliance where we've learned of some of the shortages in the trades area so if you've ever met any of our trades teachers you know that they are committed to the work that they do with students and students have been extremely successful we work very hard to make sure that before they even leave lynchburg city schools they are credentialed they are passing those skills usa tests they are doing a lot of work and that does not stop we the cbcc recently opened their regional academy cte academy they have a welding program and one of the things that we look forward to doing in our as we craft our budget for the upcoming school year is to make room for
097our students to take pro take part of those courses at that at that regional academy so we are excited to partner with them but also provide opportunities for students to do exactly what you just said um senator peake um our our mission is every child by name by me to graduation and then we add and beyond and and beyond is whatever their next steps are so whether that's going to a two-year a four-year or directly into the trades um we are very supportive of our kids here and then i know we have the programs and it's our fault at the state level we talk about it frequently and how we need to stress that to our students what the opportunities are and how successful they can be uh by learning those trades and getting out
098what the desperate need for welders electricians plumbers auto repair no one can fill those jobs and we just have to stress it at an earlier in an early age and that from the state down so thank you for those programs yes in the southern region for the of the vsba they've been working on a regional uh alliance with the community colleges uh which was interrupted by the covid thing but now it's getting more underway to leverage those resources that the state provides for the community college is sort of like a model of early college but extended to trades and uh having been part of central virginia community college a few years back i can say it's the best bargain in higher education and i'm glad to see us building on that relationship with them as
099a school district very powerful use of resources dr center on a final note from me at least i know that we appreciate safety and good relationships in our schools and we just wanted may have already been stated but just want to thank uh the support from our sros and we're thankful i believe that mr smith uh that is here uh took time out of his schedule to be with us in person uh if there were any questions relating to safety or what we're doing in that area so thank you sir for being with us today well i believe we've gone over our time by quite a bit so um unless there are any more questions please feel free to reach out to any of us on the school board again let's think of this as
100the opening of a dialogue we certainly welcome any opportunities to meet with you personally uh to just further discuss these issues uh get your feedback and provide you with some insights into how things are going here so thank you so much again for your time for your suggestions and uh we look forward to doing this in person next year thank you very much