LCS School Board Meeting: November 3, 2021

001[Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] do [Music] on november the 3rd 2021 school board meeting and we're delighted to have everyone here and delighted to have our viewing audience and certainly one day after all of the goings on yesterday we look forward to public education moving forward in virginia at this time i would like to move to section b which is our agenda approval and i do want the board to know that dr nillas did inform me that he will not be here tonight as he is just mending himself in a certain way but certainly does give us his best but the agenda is before you that is on board docs and has been featured is there a motion to approve the agenda for tonight's school board meeting i moved to approve

002the school board agenda for tonight it's been moved by ms morrison seconded by dr carter that we will approve the agenda as presented before you tonight any questions or discussion hearing none madam clerk if you would please call the role school board member trust 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 gupta yes school but mr harvey yes thank you we will now stand for our pledge of allegiance is so important at this hour of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all again thank everyone kenya here tonight and we will now move to section c which is

003a section regarding a closed meeting pursuant to the code of virginia section 2.2-3711a1 the school board needs to convene a closed meeting for the purpose of discussing the following specific matters a personnel matter involving the demotion discipline or resignation of a specific staff member this is for action obviously is there a motion for us to go into closed meeting a move that we going to close meeting the move by dr carter is there a second a second second by dr brennan is there any questions or discussion then madam clerk please call the roll school board member trust yes scoop up remember dr brennan yes school board member mrs morrison yes school but remember dr carter yes scoop up mumma dr coleman yes scoop up mom and dr gupta yes school but mr harvey yes motion

004current seven to zero all right we will now be going to close meetings upstairs we'll be right back to everybody [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] all right i now need a motion to come out of closed meeting a move that we come out of closed meetings yeah second second the move by dr carter seconded by ms morrison that we come out of close meeting no further questions or discussion all those quick would you yes scoop a mama dr brennan yes scoop up mince morrison yes scoop up mom and dr carter yes school but mama dr coleman yes school book mama dr sennha yes scoop up mama dr gupta yes scoop up my mr harvey yes ocean 8-0 thank you pursuant to the cove of virginia's section 2.2371181 the school board needs now to

005uh certify that all of the matters that were discussed were pertaining to what was aforementioned i'm going to now ask um the clerk to please call the rule google mama trust yes scoop up woman dr brennan yes school board member ms morrison yes scuba moment dr carter yes school but mama dr coleman yes school board member doctor sennheiser yes google about women dr gupta yes scoop up my busta hobby yes mushing curry's eight to zero thank you boy we'll now move to section d which is our special presentation and uh we are delighted tonight to have representatives from dominion 7 architects that will give us an update on the work of the team conducting facilities studies welcome good evening uh yes tonight we have a update on the facility study that is being conducted by

006dominion 7 architects and so tonight we have blair smith and jacob caldwell to do their presentation thank you steve and thank you for letting us have this opportunity to work with you on this project taking care of buildings is hard i mean teaching's hard taking care of buildings is hard finding the money for it it's hard everything about it's hard so we want to try to do today is kind of give you an update of what we've done and where we're going um so with that in mind uh just kind of a quick agenda for tonight we'll talk about what we are you know supposed to be doing we're going to talk about um where we're going down the road and what we need to do next so you know it's kind of been interesting

007because my entire career i've been kind of doing school work for the lynchburg city schools and the first real project i ever did for the school system was the addition at paul monroe and i hadn't been in that building in 31 years and it was really kind of fun to kind of go back and it was really a deja vu to go back into that back in september when we started working so it was a nice feeling to be back into that school again so i'm an architect and jacob's an architect and gary harvey's an architect and i don't know if it's a privilege or maybe i may use all different types of words but one of the things we had to do in architectural school was to present our designs right and we had

008to present it to our with our peers in front of faculty and they told us how bad we were basically um gary you remember those fun days right so a lot of times you'd have a professor after you presented would come back around say you know yeah you know you got some criticism here some critique but you know these were the good things about it and that's kind of how i want to start tonight is to talk about um it looks like we're not moving forward very well you got some technical difficulties here i'll just kind of i don't want to i don't want this to come off that i think there's a difference between being critical and critiquing okay and i think that's kind of an important thing to to do uh as we

009move forward and so we're not really pointing fingers so it's not that the school board today or the school board 20 years ago or steve gaske or city council or the architects you've worked with we're not saying that they haven't done their job because as i started it's really hard to do this okay and so we're not really pointing fingers at at anyone with this we are going to point out some negative things that we're finding but that's not really the emphasis of what we're doing okay so our goal is really to point out both the positive and the negatives and to kind of assist you in how to improve your facilities as we go down the road and the other thing i would give you this as a perspective is we were just talking

010to the lobby and steve says he has nothing to do at home over his christmas break i got plenty of things at my house for steve to do over christmas break i just got to get him there and that's one of the challenges is even our own homes or perhaps our own office there are facility needs there that we just haven't gotten to right and so that's the perspective i think we need to kind of kind of keep i don't know where our presentation is just text to see if we have a tech who can come and assist do you have a hard copy because i have a hard copy i i i have a hard copy with me but only one yeah i can make copies for the board but let's see here we

011got we got physical facebook yeah yes yes because you have some nice photos in here we want to make sure we see them so this point presentation dr edwards is going to give a song and dance all right so that was a special part of this presentation that you didn't know about i'm glad you didn't ask me to sing everybody all right so i think the first question as we start to talk about these things and we've got our video back now is who is our client you're going to go duh it's lynchburg city schools and we're still not moving forward so i don't know if you can text your guy again it's not advancing let's just get the paper copies enrolled and i mean all right if you are just giving us a minute

012or two and we'll pause can we just skip this item on the agenda and come back to it um we just lost we'll keep going so anyway it looks like we got something back for the time being so you're going to say obviously lynchburg city schools is our client but the reality is the city as a whole is also a client because they're invested partner in all this that's really not who we're doing this for we're doing it for these folks okay that's what this is all about it's not only for your kids for today but also for the kids tomorrow of all different types and regardless of their needs another thing i think this is important and i would say personally i feel like education is really a key to getting out of poverty

013and if this is an initiative by the city i think improving your school facilities and the offerings that you do have as far as programs is a way to kind of bridge that gap to get folks out of poverty so with that i will let jacob take over and kind of tell you where we have started so our four main tasks that we're going to talk very briefly about tonight are the facility condition assessment a little bit about educational programming some on different demographics and a couple recommendations as we move forward and i'd just like to reflect that we're not talking about classrooms uh back when a lot of these schools were built like the picture there in the upper right but the classrooms of today are very much different very colorful very flexible for

014the learning environment that's taking place there so our four tasks first of all is the study condition assessment survey so the the team we assembled is not only seven we used locally hurt and profit civil engineers and also southern air teamed up with us to help out with the mep portions so we've completed all of our school visits and field work the kind of gather phase gathering information phase of the project and we're still working on project narratives for each of the schools that is an ongoing topic educational programming we've met with principal and staff at each of the schools to discuss that and again we've kind of completed the gathering information phase on that still working on narratives and looking at capacity of different schools and classrooms how spaces are being utilized are they

015being used in an efficient manner can we do anything to improve that moving on demographics we hired a national firm proper gis has done work not only in virginia a lot up and down the east coast and throughout the nation they are the expert when it comes to demographics their work just began here the first part of november and will be ongoing and as far as recommendations we have provided some cost estimating to date most of that has been in relation to development of a 10-year cip which will go to city council here very shortly and we'll touch on a couple of future recommendations that we've gotten to so far so many of you might wonder what a facility condition assessment is we've looked at at each school site looking at traffic flow both pedestrian

016human traffic bus traffic also vehicular traffic landscaping there's a lot of trees bushes shrubs that have to be taken care of yards have to be mowed parking what happens with all the storm water runoff at the different sites as you know lynchburg is the hill city so that can be a challenge at some of the sites that you guys have heard profit has helped out here with a lot of this portion of the work moving on to the buildings we looked at not only the outside exterior envelope roofing walls windows doors how are the buildings performing thermally are they efficient are they up to code also some interior features as well do they meet ada there's some life safety building code things that we looked at regulations and of course security southern air helped with

017mep systems here plumbing hvac electrical low voltage systems again being i.t and cameras and that kind of thing they're also looking at energy usage what kind of power bills utility bills they're reviewing all that information to see if things are functioning like they were designed if not why and what can be done to make them function more efficiently in the future so to date this is what we've done we've assembled all the existing drawings not only from the original buildings but any of your buildings have at least one addition or renovation if not multiple renovation or additions over the years we've taken all those drawings we've got those scanned they're in pdf format they will be shared with the school system we've also drawn each of the schools in 3d that helps us with our

018calculations for mep with volumes of rooms and also square footages for classrooms and other spaces we've completed site visits and field work and we've completed school evaluations that moves us to what is left to do school narratives as far as the facilities go that's an ongoing topic we are currently wrapping those up we expect to have elementary school rankings to you by mid-november we'll follow up with middle and high school by the end of the month there's a couple of key meetings that we still need to set up with school staff an i.t meeting with john collins and a food service meeting with beth mars so the facility condition assessment what you're going to get out of this are easy to read charts like the one that you see here they are color coded based

019on the conditions of things at the school any item in red is something you want to pay attention to that is something that needs immediate attention or is out of its useful lifespan these vary from school to school this is an actual chart from one of the schools that you see here southern air is going to also provide a similar type charge for mep systems again with the same color coding red being key items that need immediate attention or items where the estimated life remaining has expired all right thank you jacob uh we're also looking at programming of the schools and so as jacob mentioned we've met with everybody we're trying to figure out you know a school was designed you know back whenever the date was but things have changed and so uh we

020want to find out how you're currently operating that school um and we'll talk more specifically in a few minutes about some things that have come up we're we're figuring out okay you've got a first grade classroom that's 800 square feet how does that compare to the guidelines from the department of education and then how does that compare to what our recommendations are going to be because those three things are very different we're also looking at if you take up if you take all the usable spaces so example you take the square footage of this room and you add all these rooms together you have usable space like this and then you have non-usable space like quarters right and stairs and the thickness of walls and so we're looking at those comparisons or how efficient the

021school is in terms of usable space we're also determining the capacity of a school and comparing that to how many students you have in the school to see if you're over you know over capacity or under capacity because that's that's been a question that's been out there so this is an example of a space program that we've done so what you're seeing the floor plan is bedford hills okay so bedford hills was a school that we worked on um it was originally l-shaped like the bottom there the bottom bar in the top left bar there was a fire in november of 91 it burned that bottom bar down so we got hired to put it back together so the bottom bar was rebuilt there was addition put on the off of that to kind of

022create this u-shaped thing right so the advantage that bedford hills has is it was basically reconfigured in the early 90s and so if you look at the space program you see the spaces that you would typically find the core classrooms in a elementary school there's no pre-car pre-kindergarten classroom there but it has kindergarten through fifth and we also have some extended learning areas that we'll talk about in a bit if you look down the bottom you'll see a total square footage of the net usable space is about 20 441 versus what the state department of education recommends is about 20 000. you're right in line there right but it's because this school was fully renovated here's derrington if you look at the same thing down the bottom it's a smaller school granite but the usable

023space for the classrooms the core classrooms is only about 9 400. versus what it should be per the state is around 11 000. so you may have enough classrooms but they may not be the right size okay extended learning areas is something that we're finding is occurring it was a it was a higher education trend that has trickled down to the k-12 level at first you saw it in in high schools but it's now trickled down to middle and elementary schools and basically it's a space where you can take a child out of a classroom and do one-on-one instruction or maybe it's a small group out of a classroom that can get out of the classroom and do some specialized instruction you don't have those spaces except the sandusky elementary school which is kind of

024interesting everybody else gets pulled into a hallway and depending on how the school is configured uh if it has narrow corridors it's hard to do that tc miller is doing a really good job of creating spaces in their school to do that and so that is something as we move forward we probably need to try to create in these schools jacob also mentioned flexibility we need different ways to teach in the classroom because students learn differently and we need spaces that can be set up in electric style and group style and individual you know kind of work spaces and and one of the keys there's is is furniture frankly but the classroom needs to be a big enough classroom like what you have at bedford hills versus deerington to be able to do these things

025just because you have nice furniture in there that's flexible if you don't have enough room it's hard to do these things this is a quick chart on capacity and utilization now we don't want like the picture at the bottom left where everybody's just in there like a bunch of sardines once again we have things that are color coded here right so this is kind of a review of your elementary schools the third column is your 2012-2013 enrollment okay the fourth column is is what i was told the how many students were at the school when we went and visited them it may not match your fall membership i haven't i just haven't processed that information yet so my numbers may be slightly off the functional capacity is the second column and so i have then

026calculated the utilization rate okay so if you were to look at bass elementary school which is the second one down in 2012 it was you know it was approaching being over over capacity but now based on the enrollment that's currently out there it's adequate and so what you're seeing with that 2012 2013 column is there's a lot of yellow in there which tells us there was adequate room there at sandusky and sheffield there were and bass that were getting full bedford hills was over capacity then when you start to look at the current numbers you're starting to see a lot of greens and blues and what that means is you don't have enough kids in those schools but i caution you that this year and last year are not great years because of covid to

027judge whether your schools are being fully utilized okay we're just in you know we live in a weird world and that's kind of where we are right now okay so that's something we'll have to talk about moving down the road tonight just interrupt you in this let board members know i was able to upload this to board docs so if you go back in and for the public too if you log out and log back in you should be able to get a copy of this thank you chris presentation the demographics work just began on november the 1st and the reason for that is we were waiting on fall membership numbers those numbers are usually not posted until late october so that's kind of a normal timeline of events there i mentioned cropper has done

028work in other parts other than virginia here's an actual chart from some of their work and you will be getting something similar to this they're going to both look at a division wide forecast which i believe is what you see here and everything in the green are actual numbers based on information collected and then the on the right side the numbers in blue are projected numbers again you'll receive something very similar to this later on once they have completed their work and then also you'll receive a per school forecast again the numbers on the left side and the green are actual numbers of attendance numbers on the right side and the blue are projected or forecast numbers so what's going to drive the decisions that you guys make is it going to be facility assessment

029condition of facilities is it going to be the demographics or is it going to be the future of education and how things are going to be taught that's actually a trick question it's really going to be all three of those all three of those are coming into play in this facility assessment and how decisions are going to be made so that leads us to our last task which are the recommendations and so we've been working on uh helping steve with his cip which is now going to be for 10 years versus the traditional five and that's been a big effort here in the last several weeks as we've moved through this one of the things we are going to give steve is a a maintenance repair list these will be things that are an immediate

030need of repair these will be more things like roofs and heating and cooling systems more so than do we build an addition at a school or something like that we also um want to talk about attendance zones okay so i know i'm getting the groans so jacob mentioned we've got this national firm doing demographic projections for us and you share this with them and they go oh my gosh i've never seen anything like that in my life and there's a history behind it that you know when the schools were desegregated there were some requirements put onto the school system to kind of to create a fair and equitable type of arrangement the problem is is back in the 70s you had a primary school and an elementary school and you no longer have that so

031that's one problem to keep the racial balance in the schools you kind of created innovation centers at several of your schools to kind of help improve those require the the the makeup of the schools that uh the feds wanted you to have when things were desegregated desegregated but the problem with this is you have students and i think heritage which is in the uh down the bottom that regis color down the bottom you know they're they're pulling kids from their area but then they're pulling kids from downtown and the problem with that is i i get the the racial mix i get that but the problem is a kid downtown their friends may not go to that school or there is a school there's an apartment complex and i think it's in the that orangy

032yellow color that depending on where you live in the apartment complex you go to one school and everybody else goes to the other school and they just that's something we'd like to kind of see what we can do to kind of clean things up for you and so that'll be one of the things we'll look at and the reason i bring that up is our demographic expert has worked for the city of richmond and so this is a map from the city of richmond this happens to be a recommendation uh one of the options in terms of how to kind of redistrict and do things and once they're processing all the data that you have sent and appreciate amy sending all that to them because they can take these options and then they can look

033at the racial makeup of the schools okay so we're kind of meeting all the requirements so this is just something that people i mean this is hard this when we talk about this is hard we start redistricting it's hard right i'm not going to deny that but it's just it's one of the things we probably should look at and so it's one of our tasks um the other thing i was going to mention to you um is some things that kind of we have discovered and the reality is we have been through all of your schools and all of them need work okay when i when we first started pursuing this job because there's a public job we have to you know submit our qualifications to everything my brain is telling me you know the

034elementary schools are in pretty good shape because i worked on a lot of them but then i realized i'm getting old and i mentioned to you earlier that my first project was kind of dealing with you know an addition to a school 31 years ago and jacob's going to talk about the problems associated with that a little bit the other issue that you have is there are some schools that have had a complete renovation like bedford hills like sheffield but there are others that haven't been touched okay and so that becomes a problem we have ada which is accessibility issues in a lot of schools we have storage issues or maybe you got too much stuff i don't know what it is we don't have hot water there uh in a lot of the sinks

035in the in the elementary schools the other thing we noticed is you don't have computer labs anymore and so a lot of these schools were designed with computer labs i did them and so if you go to bass elementary school today you will notice that the old computer lab is now being used as an art classroom well if we were designing an art classroom for an elementary school it wouldn't look like a computer lab okay and you're using chromebooks now and so the other thing that we've noticed and even a school like sandusky middle school which our firm designed is about 10 years old now it was never designed to have the amount of support space for like behavior coaches psychologists these types of people and you you have a lot of those types of

036people in your schools now and they're not using an appropriate space they're not using an office or maybe a space that's a little bigger than office you may have two of them in a full-size classroom okay so there's some problems with that obviously we live in a in a world that's scary and added security vestibules we now have coveted requirements and we have rooms that are set up for quarantine um and so that's kind of where it is so here's some more things and this is kind of let's say this is kind of sobering news these are the fourth challenges that we kind of see right now and granted we're not we've just started but declining enrollment with changing demographics the adrian facilities falling behind with major improvements that's kind of interesting that we've one

037we've been talking about and in cost increase let me talk about the the enrollment little piece first and then i'm going to turn it back over to jacob uh once again i haven't i haven't processed your fall membership numbers yet okay so we'll we'll get there the blue bars are from the 2003-2004 screen here the orange bars are from 2019 to 2020. and what you see here is if you if you tallied all this up overall your your membership or your enrollment is declining you do have some schools heritage elementary robert s payne a little bit of dunbar middle school that on sheffield that are increasing in population but the balance of them especially at the middle and high school level are really declining here's another interesting graph so once again the top two pies

038are from the same school years and when we look at the racial makeup of your schools comparing 2003 four to 1920 on the top the the yellow or or the white students all the other colors or your your minority races and what you see with this is that the population of your school from the for the white students is declining the african-american students are basically staying the same what's increasing are the hispanic population and the ones in that lighter blue color which are a multi-race students okay but then if you look at how that compares to the city and you see that the the city's population once again i don't have those exact years because of the census i got 2000 to 2010 but it still tells the story your populations for the city don't

039match the populations in your school okay and so that's really the point of the the slide here i don't have that answer why okay i'm not there yet i don't have that answer but i just want to make sure that you understand and you probably do understand this the other thing and i'm i guess i will tell you this hopefully there's somebody from city council listening okay you know parents who are better off a lot of times will send their kids to private schools okay they may homeschool them as well well they may move to the county the reality is if you have a student who has some sort of challenge special need disability whatever the case may be they always stay in the public school system in most cases and so what that means

040from a funding situation for the city is it's more expensive to teach those kids provide the services for those kids than it would be someone like me when i was growing up and that's kind of the reality where you are in terms of your operational costs you've you've got a lot of special needs kids that are expensive to take care of and we need to take care of them so i know you know that i'm just i'm telling it for city council how about that so the age of your schools if you look at these three statistics that are up here just remember 70 50 and 36 70 is the average age of the original construction of your elementary schools 50 is the middle and then 36 for the high schools so the five ages

041of school facilities the first one here there's basically i'm just going to kind of summarize i'm not going to read word for word but there's limited maintenance very minor improvements that occurs within the first 20 years years 20 to 30 phase two there's increasing amount of maintenance maybe some things start to wear out that's kind of to be expected phase 3 in the 30 to 40 year maintenance needs increase very rapidly during this point 40 to 50 phase four again there's increasing amounts of maintenance and more frequent replacement of worn out parts and usually after the 50-year mark the building should either be reconstructed abandoned renovated some type of major improvement so if you look at the age of original construction this has all your schools that we visited excuse me with the elementary coming

042first and then middle and high school down at the end of the end of the graph at the bottom so your average age again is around between 60 and 70 and you'll see and what we're going to kind of call the red zone being the 50-year plus mark there's a lot of schools that fall into that category if you look at the age of your school renovations or new construction you'll see there's a as blair i think alluded to earlier yes a lot of schools have had renovations some have not had a full-blown renovation they've kind of been pieces and parts but even those that have been renovated it's been a long time and that's what this chart is illustrating again with the red zone out on the far right you may wonder while there's

043a few up there that there's no bar those have not received a major or full-blown renovation since they were built and that brings up the next topic the falling behind with the major improvements you can see here this is an early timeline i think we go back to 1980 through about 2000 and this is just kind of an overview of major construction work so you'll see some renovations on here uh renovation edition i'll just point out a couple highlights here ec glass renovation edition happened in the early 80s that was a pretty substantial project again about a five-year project and then moving down to something more recent at the very bottom with sheffield and it's somewhat recent renovation edition but now about 20 years old so the problem here is that scheduling gaps start to

044appear so looking at this timeline here for for example here the sandusky middle school new building the proposed versus the actual so proposed it was first talked about in approximately 0.506 it actually did not happen until 2010 or so so again there's a small gap there not necessarily something to throw up a red flag other than just bringing to your attention there is a little bit of a scheduling gap we see the same thing happening again with heritage high school the very last one and this is the new building that was just somewhat recently completed it was actually proposed in about 08 or so again not really taking ground until approximately 2015 about eight years or so after initially showing up scheduling gaps become worse over time you can see here in the timeline the

045gaps between the the lighter colors versus the darker colors are more and again with these projects here the first proposed date is the lighter color and as you move down the current proposal such as rs payne elementary the very bottom one the current proposal has that out at almost 20 30 right now i i had someone here in the audience look said we had the wrong dates for easy glass and that's not really true there was work in the 80s and then there was a work again in the in the 2000s so you know it's a big school has happened twice there um the challenge that we're having is as these as jacob just showed you on those graphs real quick is as we have these gaps in these projects the cost just keeps going

046up and up okay and so we have conversations you know now with our clients and they go there's no way that something will cost that much and they just they think we're crazy i mean i i don't know what else to tell you and so they think that cost increases are a covet issue because that's all we hear about now but the reality is the the annual year-to-year inflation of construction the cost of construction has always exceeded the cost of living always by far it also has increased on what the city of lynchburg or any other locality can take in from a revenue standpoint and so what you have you have this graph construction costs going like this and the revenue generated by the city is here and you've got this huge graph i mean

047who's space in between and what happens is as we push a school down the road and so sandusky elementary supposed to be replaced in that's 2026 16 years later and as we keep pushing it down the road and i step on somebody over here it just the cost just get out of control and that's a challenge yes covet has impacted what we're doing i'm not going to deny that but it's not a big thing in terms of the you know the long look we also have talked about improving you know the the quality of people's wages in this country and increasing the minimum wage so everything that we have heard is covetous created cost increases right with construction or anything else and what's going to happen is the material costs are going to start to

048flatten but the labor rate is going to keep going up okay so you know the good example of that is if somebody right now works at mcdonald's for ten dollars an hour and we bump them to 15 then you got to bump the manager from 15 to 20 and the big mac's just going to cost more i mean this is kind of the math the way it works labor shortages and supply chain issues are going to continue i was i had a contractor in the office today and he said hey we can good news is we can finally get overhead doors yay we can't get the track so i don't know what they're using duct tape to put them up i don't know how they're doing it he also told me if he orders a

049pre-engineered building today something that used to take eight to ten weeks two years ago takes a year to get all the parts so these things are going to continue and you've heard about on the news and we don't need to reiterate that this is a chart showing construction calls if you start on the left hand side there are three bars a green one a blue and a grayish blue one the green is elementary the blue in the middle is the middle school cost and the next one is the high school cost so if you look at 1962 which is the far left an elementary school costs you 12 dollars a square foot that's when the first addition at lincoln elementary school was built that octagonal thing i don't know what it costs but the state

050average and these numbers are from the state they're not mine made up so you can see this dramatic increase and the last four bars are are annual the last several years but the bottom line is an elementary school that cost you 12 dollars in 1962 based on last year's numbers is almost 300 a square foot and i mentioned how much of a gap it was between the cost of living well look at this there's your cost of living increased bar it's just how do you keep up is is a problem i mean it's a real problem and as we push school improvements down the road it's not like it's going to get better we saw this chart i'll put this up in terms of kind of labor shortages in terms of how it relates to

051construction calls i won't it's pretty obvious that laborious shortages are creating a problem in the construction industry so i kind of finalize this with kind of the next steps we need to do some work on our ren but we need a committee to kind of help review some of the information we have and kind of talk about big picture stuff talk about you know what we do about attendance zones what's the future of education we need to develop priorities we're the consultant this is your school system i need your input and um i shouldn't give dr edwards a to-do list but i would like for her to take charge of that to put that group together we need to kind of finish up our stuff um kind of curious what the demographic stuff is going

052to come back from our consultants that will probably be towards the end of the year um the other thing we need to talk about is early childhood education um i i don't want to get into politics it's just i'm sick of it i hate the news and i realize you know at the federal level they're talking about putting some money into early childhood education what i can tell you is i think the future regardless of who pays for it is getting more three-year-olds into the school system is going to be the future okay and so if we have more three-year-olds in the schools where are they gonna go and so right now you have some pre-k school classes at uh i think three elementary schools plus you've got hutcherson and their pros and cons for

053putting them in the elementary schools and their pros and cons to having separate early childhood education schools right it's just something we need to talk about and i put some information here from as a john friedman study and and we're thinking about poverty in our school system but if we can get if we can get more kids into an early learning education environment whether it's parents doing it on their own or it's public i don't want to get into that abatement but i mean to think that they'll have a better likelihood of going to college they're going to earn more money less likely be a single parent more likely to save for retirement and be less of a burden on the public down the road i mean my gosh what else would you want to

054do i mean it just seems like it's pretty obvious to me so with that jacob and i will kind of open it up for questions um and go from there once again we're not gonna have all the answers that you may have but that's where we are first of all we want to thank you for this very comprehensive we've been looking forward to this report and with uh even more anticipation we're looking forward to the findings and so board members any questions dr edwards any comments that you would like to make i would like to just say thank you too for the in-depth study and similar to our our data presentation sometimes we hear some things that just make you draw drop and make you wonder and in here it was a very honest straightforward

055assessment of where we are right now and that's our motto this year where are we right now in terms of what we're experiencing with our students staff and our facility so i do appreciate you just bringing it all to us so that we can start from here and i will definitely work with you to get a committee together i've been waiting for this data so that's great and i'm sure i'm looking out i see some of my staff right now who are probably eager and excited to participate as well so looking forward to staff participation members of the board any questions that you would like to raise uh attorney trolls yes thank you uh mr smith mr caldwell thank you outstanding presentation appreciate your work a couple questions for you um jacob did you assess

056whether have you used the geographic information system to assess where the students are coming from to attend the schools i think they call this part of the demographic study okay we're waiting to get the fall membership stuff which has it doesn't have a student name but it has their has their student id and their location and that pertinent information so that's all been sent to our demographic person and they're using the city gis they use the same software to kind of do their work and then superimposed upon that data for whatever it's worth and it may be very little is there any way you can assign i mean obviously that information you're looking at is looking at okay where can we maybe potentially change enrollment in schools i'm guessing is there any way to superimpose

057the transportation cost um on that so for instance okay now we're going to have a a bus route that used to be three miles gonna be eight miles and it may be insignificant if it's insignificant then obviously we don't need to study that if the transportation cost is so minimal who cares but i'm just curious i don't know number one if that would be insignificant and number two is there a way to superimpose that additional cost if we modify or where the students are going to attend schools just just to throw it out there right so i'm going to talk a little bit at ignorance but my understanding is the transportation has a software package they use to kind of manage their their routes okay that's a different i think it's a different system than

058the gis that's my understanding yeah i'm sure it's a different system but steve i would i want to know if i want to know if the uh what we're looking at is you know saving costs obviously i am anyway um and improving the utilization of the schools part of that is going to be okay the if there's additional transportation costs associated with taking you know johnny from this school to that school are we able to capture that and if you tell me it's so insignificant relatively speaking a small percentage that i don't care but i don't i don't know those those answers and i wonder if there's an easy way to get to it and then it kind of being superimposed on any redistribution of children that we may be looking at that's all i

059don't know whether it would be insignificant or not either at this point and tell you the truth um that question never even came up yet but just knowing enough about transportation of how we route and where these buses are going my guess is that there would be some some savings there by consolidating attendance zones and whatever because as as blair pointed out we have buses running from um one side of town to the other side of town and that's happening every day twice a day um and so i i would say that so we will have to look at that that's that's one all right thank you um the 3d renderings i mean so these are all have you you guys have done uh created cad cad 3d renderings of every school these are 3d

060mainly for floor plan i mean we don't take the time to draw the roof and get that kind of thing accurately but mainly for square footages and looking at volumes of rooms for mep interior interior obviously which is all i care about so i'm wondering if we can utilize i mean so these we're going to have interior cad um files of every room and every school is that true that's correct floor plan yes okay that can be useful lots of things all right very good i think one one um one school had asked about i know always the you are here or how to get out of the classroom type things a lot of those are just kind of in block format we are going to share those with those schools so that they can

061have a very clear picture of how to get out of school for visitors for students and that kind of thing so there's multiple benefits to having these floor plans and are you going to utilize the 3d renderings to help optimization help as an input parameter optimization of the facility primarily classroom optimization i mean we're going to use them it's just going to be a tool that we can then kind of make our recommendations from yeah it's the simplest thing i mean i would throw out this 3d part everything we draw it's in 3d but it'll be a planned view but if we wanted to make a classroom larger we could literally move a wall from here to here and it recalculates things so great um you talked about elementary school rankings what do you mean

062by that so what we've done is jacob's focus has been on the condition of the building from architectural standpoint i've been looking at the educational programming piece southern air has been looking at the mechanical electrical plumbing pieces and hurt and profits have been looking at the sites all four of those groups or individuals are giving rankings for their particular area and so they're grading them out and then we will take and create an average for the condition of the school and so you'll be able to see a spreadsheet of the elementary schools and how good the electrical system is there you know the educational programming and then what the average for the school is so that we can objectively kind of rank them in terms of the conditions so i can tell you sheffield is

063going to be your your highest ranked school elementary school i can tell you that right now because it was the most recent one that was renovated it was also a full renovation the second chart that jacob showed you on the existing conditions were the mechanical electrical systems i mean it was just the mechanical systems from lincoln lincoln has the the heating air conditioning systems in that school the worst elementary school you got and that's the reason all that was in orange and red so it's kind of a way of objectively kind of grading the schools to see where they fall from a condition standpoint okay and that's an actual facilities ranking correct that's correct um will you be able to give me a utilization ranking in terms of we have this many students yeah okay

064and then associated with that are you going to be able to provide us a an overhead basically what's the cost of keeping this building open not personnel cost in terms of teachers and teaching staff but you know elementary you know this elementary school has a very it's very expensive to just keep the doors open because maybe it doesn't have proper insulation you know who knows what it is but basically keep the doors open over here overhead cost ranking of these different schools right so southern air they haven't done it yet we'll be looking at all the utility bills whether it's water gas power and so we'll have an understanding and then you can kind of work it out on a square footage basis right determine it by the number of kids i mean it's all

065different ways you could kind of come up with a multiple but yeah we'll be able to rank those schools in terms of how much of an energy hog they are and you're a good perfect segue because really i want to know what is the overhead of cost associated per school for each facility if it costs you know a hundred dollars a day for this elementary school to just the overhead cost for a student but this one's 50 a day you know i want to know that because that's going to help with some of our not only utilization but if we do consolidation or divestiture of the schools correct okay and so the other challenge you have is you have like a school like you know we talk about utilization rs payne was designed as a

066junior high school and you're using it as an elementary school and the two just don't jive okay and so it has a lot of wasted space in it to be perfectly honest with you it's also going to be 100 years old in a few years and so all those things there's a whole series of things we're going to have to take into account when we start talking about priorities down the road in terms of energy usage all those things come into play and what i'm asking is hopefully we have a report from you that takes some of that potentially subjective factors and to the point that we can make objective rankings is what we want to what we're after and i mean that's your business right though okay all right well i got two more

067one on one all right no that wasn't that was just a comment for myself actually that's it my last question was over i appreciate it again very good work thank you thank you mr trust if we need to we can come back to you ms morrison thank you so much for your presentation i assume that you're also evaluating our sites for alternative education we have several places you're not that's not part of our scope of work we talked about that possibly adding that down the road but like ford hill um you know pride center none of those none of those auxiliary sites this building is not included in that that's something you want us to do we certainly can and i think one of one of the things we ran across so it's sheffield um

068at one point in time there were trailers added out there because of the enrollment and those trailers that are out there no longer are part of the school they are an alternative program those trailers need to be replaced first of all um but where do you put that and that's a piece of the information that i think at some point in time as we think about big picture how we're going to rebuild this puzzle that we're going to need some of that information the other thing that we found and i didn't address this is you know you've had some issues in this building and so you have some central staff that would be here that are in your schools now and so an ideal world i would assume you want them back here in the

069ideal world but i don't know that but that's another thing we uncovered i just think that with our focus on student suspension and expulsions and finding alternative education for to meet needs that's a big part of what we need to look at whether we move it to schools or or expand our programs i just think it's important thank you ms morrison for noting that madam clerk if you could please know that in whatever the scope is we may have to rethink that because i know we have been having ongoing challenges and that's a very vital part of what we do and need to do going forward other board members that would have a question or comment to me mr harvey thank you blair and jacob i appreciate your presentation very very thorough very complete my

070question would be for you and this might be something that's outside of your scope is as part of your recommendations will there be a master plan so to speak from your recommendations or is it really going to be more of a sort of a narrative just digesting the data that's been that's been sort of crunched or is there going to be you know master planning yeah so i think yeah we're going to come back with recommendations but i think the recommendations are going to be tied to what happens with the attendance zone at the elementary schools so we can do this we can do that we do this and depending on each one of those options you may have different scenarios well you need to build a new elementary school here or if you put

071an addition on this school that would take care that's going to have to come out of that so that we can do cost adjustments yeah so i think you know we'll probably have three options and it may include you know attendance zones and then the potential major construction work that would come out of that okay all right thank you answer your question yes dr gupta now you provided a sort of a scary scenario for me all these buildings are falling apart when do you expect the solution to come to the school board so i i mentioned that probably demographics we probably will be the end of the year before we get that final report from them our goal is to kind of get through our initial evaluations the reality is is once we get to

072thanksgiving it's going to be hard to do anything because staff is not here schools are shut down jacob wants to go home be with his family i have no idea why he don't want to work on saturdays and sundays i just i don't understand but anyway um i think it's going to be the end of the year kind of getting our initial evaluations done then we'll be moving into the next phase which is really recommendations and just depending on how quickly we can get you know meetings scheduled and start those of those evaluations we had hoped to have a final report back to you in january and make a presentation in january it's just it's been so slow going with school opening and things like that it's just been kind of hard to kind of

073move forward i think probably a reality it's probably going to be closer to march before we have something back to you that you can really digest you may continue dr gupta so you pointed out that some of these elementary schools don't even have hot water they don't have hot water to some of the classrooms and most classrooms and elementary schools do not have hot water so it's kind of interesting that we're in this covered world and you don't have hot water how many schools uh did you find i would say the majority i don't i don't have a i don't i don't know if it's seven eight of the 11 i don't know i'd have to go back and look at our numbers back when these buildings were designed and built hot water was not

074put into them they were not designed with hot water going to the classrooms over the years we have added hot water using instantaneous heaters and and things of that nature so a lot of a lot of the classrooms have them in there but as blair pointed out many still do not and just so we're clear these are the sinks within the i think kindergarten maybe first grade classroom this is not to the school as a whole so this is a very limited number of facilities i think another big question is what do you want to do with kitchens how do you want which and that's where you want to meet with beth is how do you how do you want to provide food especially the elementary school level is it shipped in or is it

075a full-blown kitchen and that has implications too because a good example that is bad enough is bedford hills where the kitchen was removed you know food is kind of brought in via satellite or either they're just warming things there and that kitchen area is being used as academic space now so this is a host of things they have questions yet doctor gupta so some of your hvac system as per your report is almost to its final stages of funeral so in your report i'm assuming that's an unsafe space for these kids to have when the air ventilation systems are in poor shape am i right so steve's going to talk to you a little bit later about capital improvement stuff and there's some keras money for looking at heating and ventilation systems so i mean

076yeah i mean there this y'all have made some changes i mean there's some things that you can add on to the existing systems to to kind of kill the the virus which i've been doing um but yeah overall big changes and the only things i'll caution you about is i mean in that chart that jacob showed you that how many of these schools are at least 50 years old and frankly the renovations are getting past getting close to that 30-year mark so you have paint elementary school which was renovated in the 1980s when i first started working it was being renovated those systems are ready for replacement now but i don't want you to waste money just to replace the system are you replacing them in kind are you putting in a more efficient system

077back in its place or you know what's what's the the long-term view there you know if you keep that school it really needs to be reconfigured on the inside so it's hard it's just not easy to say just go put the new mechanical system in there all right man this is huge and we all know it it is so important so i want to just ask dr cena anything you want to ask or state at this time dr carter i just want clarification there is hot water in the restrooms yes okay that's cool just one i don't so we don't have to get emails regarding that the other thing is a lot of times we continue to struggle with the fact that we question whether or not we should go ahead with the gym or

078whether we should go ahead with hvac's updates and then we don't know for sure whether or not we're going to receive funding for a new school so if we didn't put things in place and sometimes you say well that could be a waste of money but if you don't do it then the study gets kicked down or the new school as you've already pointed out we know gets delayed delayed delayed and we can't just keep a chiller that's not functioning in there so you have to you you know sometimes it's five or six hundred thousand dollars half a million or more so we've really struggled with that too how to look at that whether can we continue to wait to put things in to a school when it may not be in existence or we

079may need to renovate or or should we go ahead and do that so that's some of our struggles but thank you a wonderful presentation very honest thank you dr carl dr brennan did you no thank you sir all right so uh dr edwards i think we've heard a little bit about maybe a committee you're going to work on that i thank mr gasket and of course your your presentation today has helped us to appreciate some of a time somewhat of a timeline and we are trying to be good partners with city council our appropriating body so i think we've received a wonderful report tonight and we'll just each of us do our due diligence to make sure that we get this report and move forward in the best way to deliver public education going forward

080and so um i want to give you all a hand for bringing this to us [Applause] with any further comments um no but i do want to just remind the board that this facility study is part of our strategic plan and what we had in our plan as well as meeting parts of the requirement for standard six there was a lot of conversation about our obligation with that in terms of looking at enrollment and demographics so i do appreciate that you all did a very thorough study of everything so that we can move forward and make some decisions about the education and i also want to just say on behalf of the staff that are here and the staff that are watching i think they salute you because what you have shared today is are

081the conditions and facilities that they live in every day and to some degree while we may not like to see some of those things it is comforting to have acknowledgement that yes the building is almost 100 years old and yes the hva system does need to to be repaired and as much as we stay focused on the financial cost of what you know renovating billings and making decisions let's also remember that we're in the business of people so sometimes people need to be weighed in along with what's financially best we don't always want to make decisions that are just financially efficient our students deserve a wonderful learning environment our staff deserve working conditions and wonderful places to come every day it will help with the marketing and making lynchburg city schools the employer of choice

082so as this board does its work i'm going to hold us all accountable to yes we are looking at the bottom line of dollar but our real bottom line is our staff our students and our families and what they deserve in terms of quality educational facilities and let's keep that in front of us as we make decisions going forward and i will close with this your principals staff and the teachers have been great i mean they've been very willing to share and you know kudos to your custodial staff because they've been they've been great well well said dr edwards i do want to just uh say in closing one of our board members dr nellis is not here tonight but i'm sure if he has any comments or thoughts he will email them and so

083that you can have his reflections and thoughts as well and then i know dr sinha and then full board that we'll be keeping a close eye on what's happening at the state level with modernization efforts and other kinds of supports that may be available to us so thank you all very much and the work continues all right that now moves us aboard to our next section of our meeting for tonight which is e public comment and we do want to acknowledge tonight uh that we are somewhat operating under the realities of our covet dynamics but at the same time we're proceeding as we have uh gone forward and so tonight uh we do have three persons that have signed in and we do have one written uh comment that has been given then dr carter

084will be reading that for us tonight and so um i think that uh the best way to proceed is to let those who are in person go first and then dr carter will read our public comment that is in writing and we have no phone uh situations tonight and so 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 employee that are not related to their official duties engage in behavior that disrupts the meeting or intimidates others or address the school board on issues that do not concern the services policies role and or responsibilities of the school board individual speakers shall limit their comments to three minutes a

085speaker 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 told 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 answer questions or otherwise engage in discussion at this time we welcome now for public comments tonight hope i have this right um dara hill uh which is addressing the quarantine policy hi my name is dara hill i'm a parent of a freshman and a senior at ec glass i've also worked in the past as a teacher for lynchburg city schools for six years i mentioned this because i've never felt the need so obvious that

086i needed to speak with you all tonight for the first time i'm not a doctor but an english teacher so instead i'll quote mark twain there are three kinds of lies lies damned lies and statistics i could stand up here and quote multiple articles and studies i've read but i know that will fall on deaf ears i'm sure you also have articles and studies you prefer to quote instead i'll state what should be the obvious you all are in the business of education not health care your job is to teach children curriculum to get children in school not out let me give you a snippet of what's happening under your noses for the sake of health my son has played football for easy glass for four years not to mention three years at dunbar last

087friday night he was supposed to be honored before the game for senior night instead he had to quarantine due to being exposed in a class it didn't matter that my son was wearing a mask it didn't matter that he was in school two full days after exposure before finding out it didn't matter that my son had two negative covet tests and he even got his antibodies retested on the day first day of his quarantine he's positive for coveted antibodies meaning he's got natural immunity still but because i chose not to get him vaccinated he was required to miss three days of school and his senior night football game by the way he would have been allowed to return to school saturday morning if there was school on saturday so within a few inches and a

088few hours it kept him from such an important part in his life such an important night in his life in this same situation a student who was vaccinated wouldn't have had to miss one day or event it doesn't matter that we all know and as stated on the cdc guidelines that people with vaccinations to still get and give covid yet they don't even have to provide a negative test so here we are in 2001 still segregating students i was told by the director of student services that they were doing this for the sake of health there is so much more that goes into the health of every child including their mental health and for you to not consider the whole child to not apply best practices you're failing him and many others like him i

089hope you don't hear this and think it's out of your control you're following vdh which is what i continually hear every day in my job currently as a teacher my question is has our school system lost all autonomy are you not able to make any considerations for the individual student what can you do to change these nonsensical rules i'm doing my part by speaking tonight or at least trying to get my point across by speaking to the principal and the superintendent will you do your part and if you continue to sit by and let unscientific rules continue to do destroy lynchburg city schools then please remove your slogan from your websites and your paraphernalia every child by name and by need to graduation because it's false advert false advertising thank you mrs hill for coming

090and bringing your uh comments to us tonight our next uh speaker will be aaron reed who is going to talk to us about collective bargaining representing the lynchburg education association good evening my name is aaron reed and i am a graduate of lynchburg city schools and a veteran teacher of 24 years and tonight i come to you representing the lynchburg education association it is appropriate tonight as we experience the changing seasons outside that we talk about the changing educational landscape inside for almost half a century the state of virginia has forbid localities from engaging in the act of collective bargaining with their employees this represented a sizable obstacle to you having an important partner at the table when making important decisions but in the past two years the winds of change have swept away those

091old and inflexible laws governing bargaining so tonight we come to you seeking to forge a new and more meaningful relationship one that provides you with the most critical voice of all your professional dedicated and hardworking employees in short we seek to enter into an agreement that enables us to collectively bargain with you now the ramifications of what i have just proposed and the ripples of opinion throughout our community indeed outside that door right now are not things you and i can control all that we can seek to do is be as clear honest and genuine with each other as possible so in the hopes of earning your respect and your trust and your agreement i come to you tonight with this proposition because the truth is you know me each of you i have taught

092your children your nieces i have been a teacher under your administrative care i have engaged with you by email and conversation on a variety of topics you know me so hear me now while we can get rid of all the weight of the old dialogue surrounding collective bargaining in the past i we seek to help you make the best possible decision in the most challenging of times because the truth is that the challenges will not evaporate as we emerge from this pandemic constructing the best calendar that prioritizes student learning and staff collaboration setting fair and competitive pay schedules for employees determining productive staff development these are all ongoing challenges for this division and a bargaining partner would be ideally suited to help you navigate those things the truth is that too many assumptions about collective

093bargaining are born from hearsay and ignorance voices that have an ideological interest in resisting the employee's voice will whisper to you that collective bargaining is nothing but a pathway to dangerous capitulation the meeting that some of you are attending next month on december 7th will seek to do just that so i'm here tonight to clarify as a teacher is often asked to do what collective bargaining can mean for you and the community here in lynchburg the power to collectively bargain simply means that those employees secretaries and bus drivers and cafeteria workers and instructional aides and more will have an organizational unit that can speak on their behalf on all the issues that affect their professional life why would you wish this because when your employees can help set the conversation around benefits around safety conditions

094in schools and more will your entire problem-solving mechanism get stronger as you consider the challenges of education in the 21st century you can go through solutions knowing that your employees have already contributed to the process in fact the solution is likely their idea because those are the people in the classrooms at the front desk and they know those problems best now you're going to hear a lot from other voices on this subject and that's a good thing the lea welcomes parents and the greater lynchburg community to be engaged in the best practices for students in this city because this proposal is the dawn of a fantastic new day a time for leaders and staff to come together for the future of city schools thank you for letting me speak to you today thank you mr

095reed for your comments tonight we appreciate it and our last speaker that we have for public comments tonight in person is andrew glover who wants to talk to us tonight about equity representing conservative parents of lynchburg good evening lynchburg city school board my name is andrew glover and tonight i represent the conservative parents of lynchburg a group of nearly 350 concerned parents and caregivers in the lynchburg community last night lynchburg city participated in a monumental election process where a majority of lynchburg residents voted to change voted for a change in leadership it values parents participation in their children's education which exit polls showed was the single largest issue in this race while i understand that you the lynchburg city school board are above elections and have no accountability to anyone in this room i pray

096that you reflect deeply on the clear direction that citizens of lynchburg showed that you that we want to go our concerns are not a manufactured crisis as some in this room have stated but are real legitimate concerns that are shared by a large majority in this community over the last two years our group has come before you trying to help present solutions all of which have been ignored however in the spirit of continually seeking positive change i am here to once again present a positive solution that will help our school grow stronger over the last few weeks i've sent several of you emails requesting that the lynchburg city school board clarify your position on equity training and teaching now we are not seeking to get into a fight on what is critical race theory or

097if critical race theory is taught in schools but rather requesting that you all take a stand on what is and is not appropriate in our school system as such i have here a draft resolution for the clarity of equity training and teaching it reads this now therefore let it be resolved that any school school-based program activity or entity that is operated controlled paid for or under the jurisdiction of the school board shall refrain shall refrain from training teaching or promoting the following to students and employees one that any race is inherently or superior or inferior to any other race two that any individual by virtue of his or her race or skin color is inherently racist biased privileged or oppressive whether consciously or unconsciously that three that any individual by virtue of his race or

098skin color bears the responsibilities for the actions committed by other members of his race skin color or religion or an individual's moral character or worth is determined by his or her own skin color five that the united states is a fundamentally and inherently racist country six the capitalism is racist and seven no book dividing people or race and no books dividing people by race and scapegoating them should ever be used in the schools or in teacher training and educational evaluations let it therefore be resolved that material promoting unity and understanding and equal opportunity should be promoted and finally let it be resolved that any violation to the above mentioned be reported to the chair of the school board or their dedicated knees through the applicable policies regulations and procedures for resolving complaints by parents students

099or staff individuals reporting any such violation will not be retaliated against that's the end of the resolution that's it that's the entire resolution that we are seeking for the school board to commit to not one mention of critical race theory and written in plain simple english with clear definitions and expectations the lynchburg community wants change that change requires your action not your inaction the ball is now in your court and i urge you to take up this resolution otherwise your silence will speak louder than your words thank you mr glover appreciate your comments tonight thank all three of the persons who in person gave your comments uh to us tonight very clearly we have one written comment that will be read now by vice chair dr carter and this is from jeffrey reuters supporting teachers

100good evening my name is jeffrey wuters i am a senior at ec glass high school in central virginia governor's school as i write this message on wednesday morning i can't help but worry about the future of our schools we are living through deeply divided times and the quality of lynchburg public education is at stake as our teachers increasingly come under attack from conservative interests and possibly from the state government it is important it is important than ever to support our teachers they are the backbone of our schools and the ones ensuring a good future for our students but we can and must and do better we can and must do better to ensure that the quality of lynchburg education remains high and we attract and retain the best teachers in the region to that end

101i believe there are two areas in the lynchburg city school in in which lynchwork city schools has to do better the first is the covent mitigation i continue to be happy to report that mass compliance is excellent at easy glass despite the ongoing inexplicable community backlash to masking students at glass cheerfully wear their masks correctly and for long periods of time without any issues despite the sabre rattlings by some glass students have no issues and suffer no ill side effects for masking however we can still do more the fisa vaccine is now approved for children ages five and up therefore there is now no reason not to require vaccines for all lcs students and staff this is the best way to keep our students families and teachers safe avrakovic is not the only problem faces

102are facing our schools we are facing a teacher crisis in the united states and indeed in lynchburg teachers are already criminally underpaid overworked and overstressed these problems have often these problems have only gotten worse since covey began lynchburg city school pays our teachers a lot of lip service in this regard telling them how valuable they are and how much they are appreciated however there has been no material change to make the lives of teachers better this school board and lynchburg city schools must listen to the demands of teachers most importantly we must increase teacher pay to be both livable and competitive we also must listen to the lynchburg education association whose ideals and goals to support teachers are worth supporting i am behind the lea 100 i am so thankful for my teachers and i

103want the best for them possible members of the school board urge you to do even better for your teachers but especially for your students who whose interests you serve thank you wooten for the written public comment this concludes our public comments section for tonight and again please know in the public that your comments are valuable and we appreciate them uh members of the board i would like us to get through the consent agenda if possible before we take a little break and i think we can accomplish that we'll move now to section f our student representative comments and we are always delighted to have representatives to share i know it's been a little lengthy getting to you tonight and we do apologize for that but first we have eugene kim from heritage high school followed

104by jayden scott from ec glass high school hello everyone my name is eugene kim and i am a senior at heritage high school and central virginia governor school this is my second time speaking to everyone and once again it is such an honor to be here so thank you at heritage high school we always start off with our motto we are pioneers and the we are is an acronym that stands for welcoming encouraging achieving responsible and engaged this is just a brief overview of what a day-to-day schedule at heritage looks like heritage is now on a block schedule eight days versus b days on a days we attend periods one through four in 90-minute blocks and on b days we attend periods five through 8 in 90 minute blocks and this is so that the

105amount of traffic in the hallways during transition periods are decreased and that's part of the cobin 19 regulations that heritage it also results in more instructional time in classrooms now for this meeting i sent out a google forms asking for students opinions to the student body at heritage and i received many responses and i'm going to include many more responses in the legislative meeting on friday but i wanted to do a brief overview today some questions i asked the students were what do you like most about the current school year and some students said that they like the eight days and b days they like the football games and i will discuss our football team later and they also liked how our teachers are putting their effort and dedication into every day which i'm sure

106is felt every day and other students said they did not like the scheduling of what the block schedules like eight days to b days they didn't be like that and they didn't like the kobit regulations we had in place they did not like the masks and they didn't like the e-hall passes and the e-hall policy that we have at heritage now other students did say that they appreciate the regulations in place so the answer had the answers had a very wide range so these few that i've picked over here they're not a very active sample if you take into account that there are many more answers and other other students mentioned that they did not like the scheduling in general for example the lunch scheduling some students felt that they could be a bit longer

107so once again a wide range of answers some upcoming dates starting next week every wednesday excluding the thanksgiving and winter breaks up on up until january 12th every wednesday there will be a two-hour earlier release for lcs students um i know a lot of seniors can relate to this we are in the middle of college application season and we're actually in the middle of college of just supply month and the beacon of hope at heritage is always open and welcoming to any students who have any questions about college or just about school in general and some important dates coming up are onsite admissions during the virginia college application week which is on november 17th and just a side note many of the colleges their early action then deadline excuse me um passed on november 1st

108moving on to our extracurriculars the heritage high school environmental club has been hard at work their first club meeting was on october 7th and their first volunteer opportunity was on october 23rd and this was organized through the lynchburg parks and recreation this was actually a joint effort with the ec glass environment action club in this picture over here there are members of the heritage high school environmental club and of the ec glass club and we picked up trash painted benches and cleaned bleachers at pixie park and it was an amazing experience and another project that the environmental club is working on is the pollinator garden project and i will make sure to update everyone in future meetings pioneer theater so the pioneer theater the pioneer theater has been working very hard and performing the fantastic

109throughout october and now they're moving on to this year's competition piece called the lost girl and they will perform this on thursday at 7 p.m in the heritage high school auditorium and i mentioned this in my last presentation but the heritage high school literary magazine is continuing to accept submissions and if you want if you're a heritage student and want to submit something please email it to this email address our topic is culture and there are multiple weekly topics moving on to our homecoming game the homecoming game was the culmination of our spirit week and it was on october 22nd heritage versus jefferson forest and heritage 1 61-8 congratulations to all their members of our homecoming court and our homecoming team queen and king asia preston and kenneth deuce crawford now this is the spirit

110week and it was during the week october 18th through the 22nd students were asked to show their school prize through theme days so for example mondays were monday was sweats and crazy socks tuesdays students could bring their school stuff in anything but a backpack and on wednesday it was squad day thursday was halloween rehearsal day as you can see here and friday was pink out and friday was our homecoming game moving on to our athletics heritage high school volleyball had their senior night on october 19th and their last game on october 21st congratulations to all our volleyball players football has been having an amazing season this year they jv won against jf 62-7 on october 25th and varsity won against liberty 55-7 on the 29th of october some upcoming games if you are interested this

111friday varsity is playing amherst at a home game at 7 00 pm and next monday jv is playing russeberg at an away game at 6 30 p.m our cross country team had their regional meet yesterday and just congratulations to all our runners we really appreciate how hard you work during the season last but not least our cheerleaders they did a great they had a great competition on october 23rd and they placed in top five at regionals so great job to them that's it from me thank you so much for listening and i will see you next time thank you that was very good thank you all right [Music] um i am about to share my screen name all right so to start off i just want to say hi thank you all for having me

112i'm so happy to be here and i want to start today's um presentation with unity day and this was a day that was dedicated to show our support and our stance on bullying and we do want to just reiterate that glass is a safe space we want this to be a place where students feel included where they feel accepted and so we all wore orange to show our stance and our pride for this and so we were just really happy with our turnout we had a banner made teachers and students both participated and then campus beautification this was done on october 16th and so we had a lot of students come out to give back to the community to get back to our school and kind of spruce everything up we relayed some mulch we

113picked up trash pulled tree limbs down and it was just a really good experience and so i do want to thank all of the students that came out we had representatives from sca from national honor society from the environmental action club key club um we had sports teams there we had basketball on track so and if i'm missing anybody thank you as well so we just want to say thank you to everybody as well as our faculty who came out too and then for cultural arts we're going to start with the glass theater we're celebrating 40 years of excellence this year and so we started out with i hate hamlet which opened on october 21st and this show was directed by ecg alum mr jim ackley and then our show also featured and highlighted a

114lot of ec glass alumni as well whether they were in the play or where they were backstage doing technical things and we also had our current students there as well and then for abandoned orchestra i thought it was really important to point them out because they um well our marching band has been named the grand champions of the glenbard high school celtic classic this past month and they swept all awards in all captions from the class 2a band so congratulations to all of you all what an amazing job you have done and on to athletics football both are jv and varsity football teams are having a great season currently having a record of eight to one and the varsity team has its last regular season game this friday at lca and then as for volleyball

115um our varsity team has moved on to the first round of regionals and last night they hosted amherst county high school and as a little update we did win so we're now moving on to the next place and also at that game i wasn't aware when i was making this but i wish i was so i could have added it um aaron johnson she is on our varsity team and she has reached her a thousandth assist last night so i do want to give a great big shout out to her that is amazing and then also moving over and moving on to national principles month i do want to take the time out to say that we appreciate all of our principles all of our administration um we could not be where we are today

116without them we do know that there is no school without a principle so we do want to thank each and every one of them and to show our thanks for them our culinary arts team they came in and made a meal for them so and i included a picture down here at the bottom it looks really good y'all um they came in made a meal and um were able to do an administrative dinner so we do want to say thank you to them and while we're giving out congratulations and thank yous i also do want to recognize our toppers students um the first quarter has just wrapped up we just finished that and so with that being said i want to say congratulations to the 1172 students that earned a total of 57 of 5701

117a's and or b's i do want to say that's amazing um we are coming back from such rough times and this is a new transition for us so during this period just to see so much positivity going on i am super proud about that so congratulations to all the toppers keep up the amazing work and i thought that would be the great way to end everything and end on a high note so thank you all so much for your time and i will see you next meeting thank you these claps represent the approval and appreciation of the board thank you eugen and uh for outstanding information that you've shared to us we're very appreciative and to both principals we want to encourage you that we are thankful for the work that you're doing and your

118staffs we do want to acknowledge that i believe both of them madam clerk will be attending the student rep session of the sba this year we're very proud of that so let's let's go that's the first all right fantastic thank everybody for your hard work and encouragement all right uh at this time we will now move to if if we could unless i want to go now i was going to try to get us to the consent agenda but if we do that all right the finance report dr edwards okay uh miss laconic if you are ready to be teed up for the financial report we will turn it over to you good evening tonight i'm going to be presenting the financial report through september 30th our adopted budget has increased we have increased it

119by due to two items the first being we have our prior year open pos and the second is the addition of the of us recognizing the donation the value of the donation from the virginia education foundation of those books so we have to have those on our record um as both an expenditure and a revenue so our adjusted budget has increased it's a hundred and two million four hundred and eighty seven thousand nine hundred and forty three dollars and one cent our revenue received to date we have received 19.08 and we have provided a detailed report of the revenue as well as the expenditures today we have spent 19.27 percent we also have the expenditure detail our expenditures included the encumbrances and just a reminder the encumbrances are our current year open pos and also

120our obligated contracted payrolls is making up a spending 80.66 percent so again i have detailed reports if you have any questions mr connors your shared board members any questions for the finance report dr gupta go right here mr just curious the revenue received to date is 19.08 and the expense is 19.27 so where do we get money to pay off is it you dip into a reserve fund or is it just we have we still have um fund balance return and we still have it's one account at the city so we have multiple funds and then the city will give us the appropriation is needed so it does look a little strange when you see that also when you think about the prior year encumbrances those are funds that were held out of the prior

121year so the 19.08 is what we received in this year's funding so there is funds that were left over from the prior year thank you dr gupta any other question for mr carnage finance report all right thank you so much mr carnage for that report and that will move us to uh section eight for the consent agenda and i do want to acknowledge that you have before you uh tonight each of the items for the consent agenda and some of which we wanted to be on from last meeting and so h1 school board meeting minutes from october the 5th h2 school board work session minutes october the 19th uh h3 the fiscal agent authorization for the 2021-2022 budget mr carnage for our human resource report h5 human report addendum november the 1st and age 6

122instruction and program policy updates and then age seven operation policy updates is there a motion to approve the consent agenda i'd like to make a motion to approve the consent agenda motion being made by dr brendan seconded by dr carter any further questions or discussion madam clerk please call the roll scoop i'm on my trust yes who bought member dr brennan yes school board ms morrison yes school board member dr carter yes school board member dr coleman yes school but mama dr sinha yes scoop up my doctor gupta yes scoop up member mr harvey yes motion carries eight to zero all right if we could take about a six or seven minute break and then we'll be right back all i right viewing audience we'll now move on with our school board meeting and we

123will now move into section i school board member reports and uh the first report would be from our finance committee and facilities finance committee and facilities committed chair and dr nils is not here but someone who was at that meeting and said anything to report all right thank you so much uh i too the governor school committee uh dr gupta we cancelled the november meeting so i don't have anything to report thank you so much uh i-3 the law regional school committee dr carter thank you dr carter uh the stem academy uh dr nils is here tonight uh and now we'll move to i stem committee um dr nellis is not here so legislative advocacy and community relations committee uh chair dr sinha well things are rolling to get ready for our breakfast with the

124legislators friday morning starting at 9. most everybody has gotten in touch with me regarding their three minutes to shine including our student representatives who are putting together really fine presentations and as i mentioned you don't need to do a powerpoint that's just fine um and i appreciate those who have sent me their content and continue to work with me to get it right so that's good um see what else i'll be sending out the invitation with the revised agenda or finalized agenda tomorrow to all invitees i guess i've emailed you multiple times but we will meet here the reason we need our own devices is to pick up the audio when you do your presentation to make things easier technically wise we will run the slides through my desktop so that we're not switching having

125to switch back and forth and so i'm looking forward to a a good a good breakfast i hope we have good discussion productive discussion from our participants most of the invitees responded and you know as you can understand they have very busy schedules so many will be sending their local representative legislative assistant so nevertheless it should still be a worthwhile conversation and i really appreciate the work that everybody's put into their assignments mr harvey i was just going to ask is there any way if you're going to run the slides from your computer that they could be tagged in there so we can keep up with the slide to make sure we talk to austin about okay thank you gonna try to send the slides to everybody before the meeting so you'll have them and

126get them uploaded at the last minute i'll be working on them more tonight to get them uploaded into uh board docs so look for that to come thank you and dr sinha the public can can participate there should be there should have been a press release about that yes the public can attend hopefully that release will have the zoom link or they can reach out and provide it um this will be simulcast on our um on our youtube channel just like this meeting is going now so people will be able to participate at that time and again it's just a conversation with our legislators to share with them some of our priorities that we would like to see them work on over the next year or so all right dr sinha thank you excellent work

127to you and your team and everybody we're looking forward to friday just a question dr sinha is there any way i can get a list of the attendees i know i saw the invitation just so i know who my audience is for my show terry thank you all right thank you mr truth all right we'll now move on to uh i six which is the education task force and i do want the board to be aware that we didn't have a city uh leadership school board leadership meeting and as a result of that meeting we would like to acknowledge that there is an effort up front for us to see how we will get both boards or groups to make decisions and so in doing that realizing the difficulty to get reliable data and all

128that kovit uh suggests to us uh we are going to uh ask dr carter and myself dr gupta who is a part of the steering committee of course ms morrison originally was and now i am we're going to kind of survey our board around a couple of things and be able to get that feedback and in our december meeting we will schedule an opportunity for the board to make a decision around a couple of options that would be presented to us and we will have some conversation with the members of council uh on the steering committee uh dr gupta and myself and then we will have that before you for the december meeting and so that is as much as i can share today mr harvey dr coleman respectfully i i would like a little

129more understanding of what is being proposed to take place this body as a as a board uh voted to approve the work of this task force and my understanding is now that three members of this body will meet we'll meet with members of the council's body and then come back to this board with a with a motion to do something let me just try to do it this way it would be two the two representatives at present would be dr gupta and myself dr carter is the vice chair and i as the chair of the board well at the advice of council leadership we will deal with some questions with our board members engage in some conversation with the individuals from council and then bring a recommendation to this board on our meeting in december

130and so we have had conversations with mike gillette we've had conversations with individuals um related to counsel and so this is the best approach for us to take ms targa again um with we're trying to recognize reliable data we're trying to recognize what covett has done for us and we're trying to give this facility studies and demographic studies a good chance to be able to move forward effectively so you you will be having those types of interactions with each other leading up to the december meeting mr harvey if i could a follow-up again respectfully sir i feel that those discussions should be held by this board this board is a body voted for that task force and it sounds to me like two members of this task force are gonna our two members of this

131board are meeting with another group to make a decision and come back with a with a vote before this board determine this this board will make a decision conceivably at the december meeting no decision will be made but to get alignment when you're dealing with two bodies and you're dealing with the realities of covet and how do we get reliable data that will be meaningful for us 10 20 years down the road uh this is the wisdom is the best way for us to do this but this board will deliberate in the december meeting it will not be a decision made by one or two of us that conversation is to try to move us to alignment so that when we have our meeting in december we can dispatch of this in a in a

132positive way uh dr gupta just to clarify you and i have not met with anybody no there's no plan to meet anybody no it's the leadership team which regularly meets as the board chair vice chair superintendent and the others in the city so just for clarification you and i have not met and there is no plan for any such meeting that is correct but we will be communicating getting the thoughts of board members dr sinha so just checking my understanding so what you're saying is between now and the next board meeting you will be having conversations with all the board members collect information that's right dr sinha that's what we're going to summarize that for us at the december meeting where we will deliberate as a full body is that what you're that's exactly what

133i'm saying and that's when we will make a decision mr harvey respectfully mr chairman why are we not as a board deliberating that as a board why is it individual to individual why not consider this as a body we are as a body vote not as individuals we do not have no particular board member has any more power than any other board member and we only have power when we are aboard i think that's what's going to happen on december i just don't have the date in front of me but i think i don't think that's what's going to happen in december and leading up to that time we will have uh the conversations developing but all of that will be presented at the december i would recommend um i think to get what mr

134harvey's concerned about is that if when you have these conversations as a way of collecting information that you summarize them all rather than give us a distilled summary because so that we would so that everybody can know what you heard from each other and we have all that information disclosed for that december meeting when we then deliberate all that information and come to whatever conclusion we're being asked to reach is that fair that's fair to me the date is december the 7th is that the correct date uh madam clerk so so i hold i'm just trying to get clarification on the day yes december the 7th dr carter that you want to say i was going to say in the nothing individual it's just we always talk to each other and just get a feel

135sense for where everyone is and then we come here and deliberate and you're free to say whatever you said prior to this i mean we're not going to withhold any information or alter anything because we'll all be here and we'll all be discussing this again i will forgo any for i will forego any further comments at this point all right miss morrison and that's from the beginning that's kind of how we worked it we started out with city and school leaders we worked out what we thought we were doing we did then we took it back to each respective organization and brainstorm but we had conversations about it and i think the conversation we need to have from my point of view is is pretty clear we either say the task force ends because we

136started it two years ago when we're not in the same place or we modify what it is that task force focuses on as opposed to is it um what we're dealing with now and i can't remember what the third one is or we we select a new task force to meet the needs of what we are so i think those are the kind of discussions that we need to have i think it's a good idea to to figure out where people are looking so that you have the time to think about what you want to do that's just from my perspective it's been 20 months and i can concur with the tool we've had no meetings with anyone else thank you ms morrison and and again in those discussions the same thing will be presented

137to every board member and again we having discussions with council leadership some of the things have developed since our meeting that we had and we just want to be able to share all of that in a in a very powerful and positive way with each board member then have a deliberation i also want to indicate that this is going to be a board decision we are not asking our superintendent i can't speak for the other side or city manager for that matter this will be a boring decision this isn't something that dr edwards is driving in fact uh her involvement in the steering committee member's involvement was not at the level of committed work and there were no recommendations brought from any of the committees anyway and so we just want to make that clear

138whatever we're going to do that's coming from the board and it will it will work itself out mr harvey as you're suggesting one way or the other at the december meeting all right thank you all so very much for that and your patience with it our seven partners in education dr brennan if you could share there's been no meeting so far since our last meeting thank you dr brennan all right i ate education foundation dr sinha and mr trost no report no report all right and lastly uh beacon of hope no report thank you so kindly all right we will now move to section j comprehensive strategic plan school board objective 2.5.1 dr edwards so we heard earlier the facility study which is a big part of our comprehensive strategic plan but we do want

139to be purposeful and pause and acknowledge when we do achieve some of our objectives so two five one is implement high performing school board practices that support positive outcomes for students so i just want to take a moment to acknowledge this board for all of the professional training that board members have had and the sba would also like to acknowledge the board for all of the professional training and support of all that you do for students so receiving an award of recognition is dr gupta pass that down there also from vsba receiving an award of recognition dr sinha and she may be listening for her service last year but another award of recognition is one of our former school board members miss belle evans and we'll make sure that she gets that um and then

140we move up to an award of achievement which comes with a nice brass pin and that goes to dr brennan yeah and another award of achievement goes to mrs morrison and we start to move up in terms of participation in professional learning as a school board member an award of excellence now with a silver pin goes to mr harvey all right and um the next award is an award of honor which is a gold pin and that goes to dr carter okay and um the final the top award and fort hill will love this because they are the starfish school and the whole starfish model but an award of distinction please take a moment to celebrate and pause and say thank you for all of your extra time and effort in learning and governing this

141school that we can do the best that we can for students um the second section if i can continue on the strategic plan while i'm there um is under our financial objectives and we are at 3.11 and 3.12 which talks about staff compensation package and the budget so in this section is our budget calendar it is budget season um and we i had a wonderful meeting with um staff personnel and um parent advisory and we will also use these two groups to to get some budget information budget input for them so they have homework to do that but we're going to pause right now to talk about our next steps so our school administrators will start to meet with school staff to get budget priorities at a school and department level which would move up

142to the administration level which we would bring to the school board level and following our budget calendar there is input session we have two budget hearings one of them is at the end of the budget cycle where we present the budget to the community but this group felt it was important to add another one which is not mandatory at the beginning of the budget cycle to get input from the community for their budget priorities and i know we are in the middle of trying to finalize the date and i don't think we had everybody in it once we get a date for that public budget hearing i'm all except for two all except for two okay we will let the community know but i will tell you it is the opportunity for our community members

143staff members families parents to come out and meet with the board and share what they think should be the budget priorities for the operating budget for next school year so let me give you an example of some of the things that are already in the works um the first one being staff compensation package you know we've done a lot of work this year in trying to make lynchburg city the employer of choice and increase the wages for our staff and our salaries for our staff the most recent change was with the bus drivers i think i shared with you last time that we added a dollar per hour to all of the clusters on the bus driver pay tables and 50 cents per hour to the bus assistance prior to that we made some changes

144in the rn nursing schedule as well as making adjustments for technicians we are continuing to look at that next set of priorities and we are really feeling it with this worker shortage are our instructional assistants secretaries and custodians we continue to look at that in the current um school year and and hope to have some recommendations there but going forward and developing the budget for next year and multiple years out because we are looking at multiple years of how do we sustain and get up to um the proposed minimum wage in several years of 15 an hour all of our employees are not at 15 an hour and i did do just a couple surveys around town there are other jobs that you can take at other organizations with no experience and they start above

14515 an hour and i think you heard from one of our students in support of our staff that we have to get there so we will be presenting staff compensation as one of our top priorities in looking at the budget thank you for all the work you did last year we added some steps for veteran teachers last year we added some things in terms of tuition reimbursement which we're about to kick off for the current year so this board has done a lot to increase the perks for staff but we really are trying to move to make lynchburg city schools more competitive so that is a big budget priority and if you remember in 2018-19 that pretty much took a lot of our budget time when we did that another thing that we want to

146do so let me first go back and give thanks and then i'll tell you how that connects going forward with budget is last year you increased the number of slots for the gov school and then going forward one of the things that we're looking at in our budget proposal is some kind of a credit or agreement for participation in the regional cte academy at cvcc they offer courses in cte that we don't offer such as welding and we want to make sure that our students have an opportunity to take part in courses that they cannot get at lynchburg city schools we don't want to be in competition with ourselves but we do want to expand opportunities for our students so we are looking at putting that in the budget proposal and i said all that

147to say to the community if you have ideas and suggestions that you want us to consider we need you to come out to our budget hearing we need you to be talking to your ptos your presidents i have a parent advisory as well that's going to meet again in december so that we get the input from you thank you all right any questions of dr edwards regarding the finance objectives uh so stated all right very good thank you members of the board thank you dr edwards for both uh parts of our comprehensive strategic plan which is good to see that we're working in harmony with that section k unfinished business uh k1 will be our lcs community update dr edwards absolutely and this is the section of the agenda that i have a full team

148of folks who are going to assist me in discussing that on the agenda we have vaccines boosters the vista program transportation and bus safety community conversations and the calendar so we have a lot to talk about and i'm going to kick it off with vaccines and boosters and i believe deputy superintendent pugh will be kicking us off with that thank you i just want to recognize the hard work of director brown and her team they've been working um tirelessly for the past almost two years um navigating through covid which they are not prepared to do and i just want to acknowledge them for all of their hard work director brown is going to talk to you about vaccines and boosters and then the vista program for random sampling testing thank you good afternoon in collaboration

149with the city of lynchburg munchberk city schools will be offering a pfizer and moderna booster clinic on november the 5th at ec glass high school from 9am to 4pm for all city of lynchburg employees and lynchburg city school staff and their eligible family members to get those two boosters we will also be providing a johnson johnson booster clinic when those vaccines become available to our area staff has already received a message in email to sign up through prepmod to get scheduled for those boosters on friday and if they need any assistance they can reach out to the office of student services and we will be more than glad to assist in regards to the vista program progress as an additional layer to our mitigation plan we have been working closely with the virginia department of

150health and also the virginia department of education to start to implement a free covet screening testing program for our students teachers and staff for um right after um or at thanksgiving break we're currently and diligently working on getting this up and running um the screen and it will be testing with individuals who do not um have covet 19 we will do these testings and screenings excuse me these screenings throughout the schools and it will be on a voluntary basis this will not be mandatory so let me say that again this will be voluntary it is not mandatory we are encouraging all students and staff to participate in this program one of the bonuses if you consent to participate in this program is that if you are exposed to a person that has tested positive for

151covet or if you are displaying signs or symptoms of covet we will have access um to a test that can be sent home with the individual to test within 15 minutes with the proctor and the results be given to that person by email letting them know they're positive and negative this is a strategy to help us reduce the quarantine time for our students and staff but also to give them some rapid results as well and so information went out this afternoon for all students um and staff and their parents and guardians and working with ms reeves and her teams we will be getting out another communication in the next couple of days informing staff how to register and also the consent forms will be there for the screening process and also to participate in the

152take home kits if need be and we will provide more information on within those documents as well um as a video for you to watch for the screening process um the screening process is a simple short q-tip nose tickle that takes less than about 15 seconds to complete on the swab the screening will be done by a company called aegis they will come on site and they will test um all of our students and staff members that have given consent um for us to test them and we will do it weekly please note this this will be a slow implementation we're going to phase it out we're still working with the virginia department of health and working on how to phase it appropriately for our school division but that's the update on our vista programs

153[Music] lastly just to give an update um working on that prevention ideology and methods with covet again we went out the chief of um excuse me chief worms are with the fire department um hope custer director transportation and andrea ryan our nurse coordinator we went back out to the transportation department and we assessed again the buses we got on buses um just as a standard review for cove for practice trying to see what we could do better what we could do differently and what recommendations were made by the fire chief as well i just want you to know that within 24 hours ms custer met with the transportation department and debriefed them based upon what we found our findings with the chief and also reviewed recommendations and strategies and they also installed some new purell

154pump sprayers on the buses and have those up and rolling so that's just a quick coded update just knowing that we are spot checking different places different facilities trying to check on our process and making sure that we're following our health mitigation plan as well well i have a question thank you i in our last covet dashboard i saw that the vaccination vaccination rate in lunch work was 42.3 percent do you do you have any idea what the vaccination rate for staff and employees are our employees for electric city schools for this school year we did not take a new survey um we were going to wait till after the boosters um trying to promote some vaccinations we did a dipstick at the beginning of the year trying to encourage um more people to get

155fascinated last year we were roughly around 76 on percent of staff being vaccinated and so after we do this round of boosters we're going to try again to offer more vaccinations and then we'll have a more accurate um reading before i would say before the first week in december thank you dr brennan director brown thank you so much for the information thank you for the organization of the vista program i think that would be a great idea to be able to try to do voluntary screening and also to have testing available for individuals who have been exposed or have symptoms with the approval of the the the vaccine for children ages five through 11 now and our goal to try to get people vaccinated i i haven't seen the official report but the the comments

156before where they're going to try to encourage pediatricians and local physicians to provide that vaccine i suspect that we have a number of students who probably don't have a primary care person is there is would there be any um would it be appropriate to consider doing a vaccine for our students the way we do it for our staff at some point in the future to try to encourage vaccination for our students i would say dr brennan we would love to fascinate the younger students however we would love to give that up to our local pediatricians and we will work closely with the virginia department of health and our local pediatricians to help with transporting families and getting them there helping with the locations of sites we've asked for sites if they were gonna if the

157city was gonna run or any uh one was gonna run some major health clinics for five to eleven year olds like some other jurisdictions and states that started this morning we were gladly supported but in terms of using our teams of nurses at this time we would rather leave that up to the pediatricians pediatricians in the virginia department of health to vaccinate at this time okay thank you all right continue okay so you you left off with transportation and i um don't know i can't see everybody that's there if miss custer is on to just follow up a little bit more with transportation yes ma'am um director brown uh mentioned that we did meet with the fire chief and he had several recommendations um all of which we've implemented um cracking the every other window

158on the bus and as she stated um distributing the purell sprayers um they're really nice they have a really fine mist that drivers can easily spray an entire bus in just a few minutes uh we also this week welcome a new dispatcher um we will begin interviews for the operations manager here in the next week or two and with these two hires this will give us a fully staffed office this month we also recommended five drivers for hire they're currently pending background checks and dmv checks and all that good stuff [Music] the transportation and hr department have been working hand in hand and been pretty busy but we we're so glad to have you on board um with us and happy to support our transportation department okay moving on community conversations getting out there and

159having real talk director reeves good evening everyone on monday october 25th at the daniels hill center we held the this year's first in a series of many community conversations dr edwards jasmine tucker and i discussed the dual capacity framework of family engagement and we provided guidance for our parents and guardians who were present on interacting with teachers at conferences and in phone calls to make sure that they're getting what they need from their teachers in the spirit of collaboration members of leadership lynchburg 45 joined us to share their family engagement project it's a game board much like the bingo game board but they use the theme unite it is designed to unite students and families by doing activities together during the question and answer period attendees provided us with feedback that will be used to

160help us in the area of family engagement one of the suggestions is to be sure that we continue to promote the great things that are occurring within lcs by showcasing some of our teachers and our staff members i'm pleased to announce that we are who started that process we have asked our faculty and staff members as well as our parents and students to give us feedback to tell us about those top performing teachers who are making an impact in their lives and we're getting that those that feedback um we it's coming in and we're actually very excited about it if i could share with the board just one um get to the spreadsheet here just some of the comments just briefly um because i think that this is what it is that continues to keep

161us focused and grounded on the work that we're doing here in lcs one of the questions is why does a staff member deserve to be recognized as a top performer she loves her students and their families makes a connection with students with special needs we love her she makes virtual learning easy because she goes over and beyond the students and fam goes over and beyond for the students and the families of students and and these are the comments that are coming in about our faculty and staff members uh we have information already on bus drivers and custodians and it's just really exciting to see this come in and also to engage our community members our family members to get their input that's one of the things that we strive to do i'm very excited that

162the next meeting is november 22nd so our next community conversation november 22nd it's a monday at 6 pm at st john's episcopal church located at 2205 elmwood avenue and that topic will be academic all success thank you directories and uh again these community conversations are for everybody so please come out and join us um we welcome your input your feedback and and just meeting with you last on our update is it's time to do the 22-23 school calendar which we do want to have a draft to the board by january and have something approved by february so families know what to expect and when school starts in the summer so some of that work has already begun last week i met with the superintendent's personnel advisory committee which is a member from every school in

163every department and i asked them to give me calendar priorities so let me give you an example of some of the priorities some of the comments were can we start a little bit later in august than we did during the current year august being the hottest month and having the kids outside it was a little challenging other comments were absolutely pleased let us still have two weeks off in december preserve that some other comments were trying to again get out early in may so you can imagine the challenge of starting later and also getting out early for our staff just how we use professional development days and where their place there were some comments about having specific days for instructional personnel transportation personnel in the beginning of the year parents also chimed in at the

164same day i have personnel advisory in the evening i meet with parents um and we have one one or two reps from each school and parents had some similar feedback but what they would like to see is some consistency across the calendars and knowing when is the touching basis meeting or the back to school night they gave a great suggestion for uh the move up so if you are a lincoln middle school kid who is going to ec glass can you start getting those announcements for ec glass a little earlier so that you know when to attend various things so they would like us to see us use our calendar as more of a proactive communication tool in addition to just letting families know what days school begins in school ends so again we welcome

165your feedback i have another parent advisory and personnel advisory i believe it is in december so if you are a school personnel or department personnel please tell your rep and provide your rep with information if you are a parent you can get that information to your pto or to your parent rep thank you to the parents who have already done their homework i gave everybody homework and they sent me back a list of things that families want to consider as priorities for our our calendar and lastly i will reach out to our awesome student reps because the the calendar is for the students so the most important voice or one of the most important voices in a calendar will be our students so we're going to try to get some student input in there as

166well so we can develop the calendar there was also a suggestion that while we develop next year's calendar we do a two-year calendar and always stay two years ahead so that this time next year we will be reviewing what we already put in place making sure that's still accurate and then developing the new calendar two years out so that was a suggestion from um parents and they were absolutely wonderful with regard to that and lastly of course board members please send your input for the calendar and i'll work with tina to make sure that even our board meetings are calendar friendly when we set those up as well ms morrison thank you dr edwards um i also think that this year uh you accommodated testing schedules we revisited dates so that we could make sure

167that students had instruction prior to that i wondered if you had any um questions about start times yes yes there were questions about start times um and i do want to remind the community that we changed our start times um the biggest change in our start times was due to us running three tiers in our transportation for for buses uh and i know we've hired a lot of folks what i don't know is if we're at a point where we can revisit that but that was always on the table to get our our bus driver population back up because we recognized particularly as we're going into the winter that it gets dark early we're gonna have daylight savings next week and it's our youngest pupils that get out the latest i mean our older students

168are outside in the morning in the dark as well so yes we if we can adjust start times to be more favorable and still transport students also we have to wait and kind of see you heard a lot about that facility study and what that means in terms of transporting and zoning and a whole bunch of things that we have some decisions on so thank you all right you may continue doctor okay that um that concludes the lcs um community update and i hope to see everybody on november 22nd that wasn't dr edwards oh i'm sorry um that's right it wasn't on the it wasn't on the agenda it was a last-minute ad i just wanted to remind the board and our community members of several policies related to students and instruction the first policy

169is policy j-o-b and that is administration of surveys and questionnaires and just a reminder that all of our policies are available to the public if you go to our website and then to the school board tab you will see a link to board docs and you can search for policies there this policy administration of surveys and questionnaires speaks not only to the participation in surveys and evaluations of our students it also speaks to instructional materials and the um that that parents and um and guardians have the right to request to review instructional materials also the policy talks about participation in surveys and when students are not required to participate in a survey or to submit a survey if it reveals some concerning information or sensitive information on the questionnaire the other thing that i want

170to highlight in this policy is that any questionnaire survey that is administered to our students that does ask questions of a sensitive nature we are going to notify and have notified our parents concerning the administration of the questionnaire at least 30 days prior to that administration so that they can opt out or they are notified of that survey in questionnaire and again i want to highlight in there that students are not required to participate they may certainly opt out of surveys um policies that i wanted to highlight are around instruction and we've updated some of these just recently one is iia and that is instructional materials and this speaks to the selection and the process of how we select uh instructional materials the next is iiab and that is in regards to supplementary materials and

171and how we select those in the adoption of those and again i do want to highlight that parents may inspect on request any instructional material or supplemental materials as part of their students on curriculum and instruction the last policy that i want to highlight tonight is policy klb which is public complaints about learning resources and so if there are concerns from parents or community members about some learning resources this policy spells out the process that we have in place for the an individual that is concerned to submit a complaint so i just wanted to highlight those as some policies that have come to our attention related to students and instruction thank you uh deputy superintendent pugh for uh bringing us those uh policies out there at the end and uh we're going to get right

172to dr sinha we want you to know that we wanted the community to hear that information coming from the board uh through the administration uh dr sinha i just missed which policy what the policy letters were for the surveys which policy is that again uh um one minute that is j-o-b it is under section j of students um and it is policy j-o-b administration of surveys and questionnaires all right thank you so much and of course whenever you're reviewing these meetings you can go to the place on the agenda where certain information can be retrieved very easily and that is under our community updates thank you uh deputy superintendent pew in it no okay well we'll make sure to update that on the agenda too so it's included thank you uh dr edwards lastly as

173we leave this item i do want all of the board members who earlier received an email from vsba and a copy was provided again for you tonight and i will not dare read it but this is the sba statement uh to an nsba letter that was sent out to president biden and that that letter that was disseminated in that manner was without consultation from the virginia school boards association and so the vsba does not support that letter and this will just give you an understanding of the particulars around that all right thank you so much all right at this time k2 capital improvement plan dr edwards absolutely so you heard a little bit about our facilities and um the need for a 10-year plan and i'm going to bring up oh mr gatski it's about

174to look that way for you uh just to go over our c capital improvement plan as well as we have some cares cip project proposals in there tonight we're bringing back the proposed capital improvement plan we previous previously presented the plan at the work session on october 19th the document that was attached to the agenda is a little different the one we had at the work session the projects and the costs remain the same but we did add the yellow column which is the current funded projects uh for the this fiscal year of 2022. just to give you an idea of how this worked how it progresses through another change here also is in discussions with the city it was recommended that we move the capital i mean excuse me the cares funded projects that

175we had in 2023 into 2022 because the money is is there already and that way we can go ahead and get started on those on those projects right away so that was a recommendation from the from the city and so um that's that's what we did we thought that was a good idea gives us a little bit of extra time i have to tell you that um the cares money is a blessing and a curse in that it's a blessing for all the money the additional funding and everything but the time limits that they have put on uh spending this money um is is going to be problematic um as uh blair smith was talking earlier about construction and and everything the lead times that we're hearing on materials and everything anywhere from 12 weeks

176to a year and so all of these projects that are listed under cares um most well most of them involve equipment air handlers and things like that so it's going to be tight trying to get some of these things done in a year two years and even the the third pack or fourth package of cares money which has a 2026 deadline on it it's still for the for the size of those projects it's going to be tough to get those in what we uh what we do now is while we're seeking approval from the board tonight to proceed with this plan the next step is it goes to the uh cip committee which um of of the city which is comprised of representatives from all the city departments plus the schools and we go through

177basically project by project year by year and rank and [Music] hopefully put together a overall city plan and that meeting takes place on november 10th i would are the first meeting i will assume that it's probably going to be more than one meeting um so the the title for this document that i have on is that it is a working document it's a cip working document so this once it goes to the city could change drastically what i feel the most confident about is as i explained at the last meeting that we we kind of look at this as above the line and below the line um the above line the renovation and replacement projects those are the projects that we need funding from the city to accomplish those the ones below the line which

178are the capital maintenance projects are funded primarily or at least historically have been funded primarily through fund balance um return of fund balance from the city those usually are easier to um get approval on because the the money is there they don't it's not we're not having to to compete with the larger city projects that they have going on so um i do also it was brought to my attention that i noticed when i moved stuff the projects from 2023 the cares funded projects into 2022. for whatever reason my spreadsheet here didn't follow along and the total costs in the far right column still show what the cost that that from 23 on through so that needs to be corrected those those costs that are associated with the cares money will come off of that

179total so everybody understand that before i remember okay this is up for action i just have one question okay all right all right thank you mr gasket and so again this is um k2 and it is for action tonight but ms morrison has questioned it what's more of a statement i'm reading a lot about uh containment ships that where materials and food that we need to feed our students are being held off the coast in cargo containers and maybe we should mention to our legislative in our legislative meeting that is something that they could definitely help us with not only with building materials but food supplies and other it's not something that we can do as a school board but i know that we're experiencing across the state and country shortages and they say they're

180sitting off the coast just just an observation thank you miss morrison so noted by the chair of the uh committee and uh madam clerk dr carter i moved that the school board approved the capital improvement plan presented been moved by dr carter by ms morrison that we will advance the cip working uh plan uh in the appropriate manner any further questions or discussion dr gupta mr gatzke i wanted to bring one more thing to your attention i know you have ec glass track and i walk on that heritage track it's wearing out so just bringing it to you i know the baseball turf we walk there is decent shape but the heritage track as an old man i feel the pain in my knees when i walk it's a lot of use yes we'll take

181a look at that and see thank you all right any further questions or discussion on the motion all right hearing none madam clerk if you please call the roll scoop remember trolls yes school board member dr brennan yes school board member ms morrison yes school board member dr carter yes scuba member dr coleman yes school but mama dr sinha yes school board mom and dr gupta yes school board member mr harvey yes motion care is eight to zero thank you thank you mr gretzky thank you mr gasket all right we will now move to section l new business that we have five items the first is the petition for license uh revocation yes revocation so this we have a potential license revocation um and the investigative file i am asking that the board vote to

182approve me sending both the petition and the investigative file for a former lynchburg city school teacher to the state superintendent of public instruction for further action on his part all right this is for action board what is your pleasure their motion i know that the school board the petition it's a replication and the investigative investigative file be forwarded to the state superintendent of public instruction for further action i'll second been moved by dr carter seconded by dr sinha in relationship to the motion any further questions or discussion hearing none madam clerk please call the roll scoop remember mr trost no scoop up moment dr brennan yes school board member mr morrison yes scoop up mom and dr carter yes scoop up mom and dr coleman yes scoop up my doctor sinha yes scoop up mom

183and dr gupta no school but mr harvey yes motion curries thank you boy seven to two seven two i'm sorry thank you so much madam clerk l two is fiscal agent authorization for the virginia state operated program budgets 2122 dr edwards so similarly to the other budgets that we have brought to your attention from laurel and the gov school the turning point academy and the blue ridge jail we serve as fiscal agents for those organizations as well and what you have before you are their budget and mrs laconic is also available to answer any questions you may have any questions regarding this for mr carnage for information tonight it appears all right thank you so very much okay we move this to consent agenda if it is the pledge of the board yes we can

184move that madam clerk to the consent agenda for our next meeting which would be december and of course it can be pulled if necessary thank you miss morrison we'll now move to l3 which is vsva delegate assembly nomination and of doing the vsba annual convention in november we have the opportunity to shape policy direction for the association through the delegate assembly and this body needs to be a vital part of that and appoint an individual from our school board to be the delegate and we need an alternate as well um uh dr gupta i think dr carter represented us last time so like to nominate her name all right we have dr carter as the nominee for our delegate uh madam dr carter and i was just thinking maybe their role needs to go to

185the chair of the legislative committee but i'm willing to do it what are your thoughts on that vice chair's wisdom going forward maybe would be that the chair of the legislative advocacy committee could be the delegate from the board uh prior history suggested that rested with the chair and if the chair did not want to it would go to the next level i cannot serve as a delegate because i'm a member of the vspa board of directors what are your thoughts dr carter is suggesting that that person would then be dr sinha can i comment yeah well i appreciate that but i'm a little bit concerned about my time commitments and my ability to actually do due diligence to that position um so i'm just not so sure i'm the right person for that i

186mean i'm obviously as the chair of the legislative advocacy that does make sense but i just don't think i can take it on to be honest okay then we have the uh dr carter is uh nominated to be the delegate if you all would allow that have to do it separately that's all right could we get the alternate in the same motion it so that we can carry that i have a question is this this is on monday afternoon virtually is that what you do that is thank you for that thank you dr miss morrison uh that was extracted from the actual in-person session so that's going to be a virtual session that is going to take place on monday and i just don't have the time for me right now but it will be

187virtual dr sinha uh not at the actual uh convention itself is that an alternate the alternate is necessary because if in fact dr um carter cannot be in place the alternate and all of this is recorded in the nice booklet that they present dr sinha i mean dr gupta about mr trust if you want mr truth what is it give me about the time commitment it's you have to be one meeting one meeting and what's the preparation i mean and what's the role preparation you're going to vote on different uh amendments or whatever the legislative positions are going to be for the for the year you're going to get a great big packet of information oh my god and you got to i guess i'm just keeping it real and also to read to read

188up or to make sure that you really look at and attend the the meeting but it's recorded and you can get it i'll tell you what i've been here since july i'm not sure i have the uh the foundation and the experience to to really do that position proper justice i mean i don't want to get in there and do and we wouldn't need to represent new york city school systems the best i just don't know if i have i'm honored to be able to be nominated i'm not sure i have the proper um experience okay dr sinha would like to say that we're going to move on this is just to for an alternate yes yes oh i'll do it all right so dr sinha is agreeing to be the alternate and uh mr

189trois we do respect your thoughts but you should be honored that this board would thank you for such a capacity i appreciate it i hope that that that wasn't misguided information okay all right thank you thank you a tool next time we'll give you a special time if i'm not mistaken the gold pin on there dr gupta entered the motion and is there a second for that all right so we moved by dr gupta secondly by ms morrison that uh dr carter will be our delegate and dr sinha would be our alternate for this year's vsba delegate assembly if there's no further question of the discussion madam clerk would you please call the role yes ma'am clerk if you could forward that information in the morning to vsba so that they can have that included

190appropriately uh l4 is our equity task force advisory committee this is for action tonight and dr edwards yes so these are the members of the equity task force um which miss reeves director reeves uh facilitates uh so any comments directories no that's just some submission for membership for the school year thank you all right thank you director reeves and of course you know this is very important and i believe you see the names before you and these are the individuals that would be called to serve um on the task force and then they can move on with their work dr brennan i'd just like to ask a brief question because i'm i'm so impressed by the the job that director reeves is doing with her department and when i look at the responsibilities the six

191things that are listed and and this may be a topic for another time in another manner but for example that the staff that their role is also in recruitment and retention of staff and that they're involved in the students academics and climate as to whether that should be under other another department but i just wanted to bring that out for either discussion now or discussion at another time just seems like they're doing a lot of things that's not what the staff is doing that is the um that's our equitable practices the six areas of equity that we as a school division and i think when director reeves and i first met one of the first things we said was equity is everybody's business not just limited to an office so what you see there is

192an all-inclusive of where are we looking at when we talk about equity we're looking at staff we're looking at students we're looking at training engagement and involvement of our families um cultural diversity and of of course access and um the removal of barriers great thank you very much for that explanation that makes a lot of sense thank you thank you dr britton is there a motion to approve the names i'd like to make a motion to approve the names well i want to i mean discuss this i'm i mean i know a couple of the people here all right well we have any more information on these people oh okay uh mr truth we can have a discussion if there's a second to the motion then we'll have some discussion is there a second doctor

193brenda's motion seconded by ms morris and we'll now have discussion mr trosh you're concerned oh do we have um i mean i know a number of these people are very fine people but i don't know exactly i know i don't know all of them and if they're actually going to be guiding which way our school system is going with respect to this area i'd like to know a little bit more about them director reeve i'm happy to share information i just need to know what it is that you would like to know about them i will just from a very historical perspective let you know that this group came about as a result initially of the concerns that much like were mentioned in our last school board meeting or work session very concerned about the

194success of our students excuse me you all um and so we under the guidance of the office of civil rights created the equity task force many of the members names that you see here are people who have been passionate about the work of equity and learning more even about it as they you know as they help shape and make recommendations to the school board and i'm very happy to present any more information about different individuals as as needed and man dr edwards also just add um since you are a new board member um board policy bcfz which is advisory committees to the board so we have a policy in which which dictates these advisory committees their roles and responsibilities and the equity task force the cte um school health advisory school health advisory which you're

195going to hear from next and what i'm missing special education so those are the four advisory committees they are volunteers who serve on these committees with with task and each usually at the end of the year although throughout the year the advisory committees will present to the board so the board does get a slate of names for each one of those groups you've already approved the first three groups this is the last um group to be approved and remind and remind me how these uh members i mean was there a public call so and these are the people that signed up to be uh volunteers volunteer um but uh and then do they submit resumes or just we take and we how do we um are all these the people the only people that volunteered

196or whether they say hey we're not going to take these people we're going to take well the committee's typically holds 20 20 members um and in some years we've just received 20 members it it isn't uncommon for the 20 members to also just invite folks to sort of i'll say fishbowl you can come to a meeting even though you are not a voting voting member but directories for this particular slate i don't know how many applicants or volunteers you received so what happens is we always ask those who have been anticipating if they'd like to continue many will continue we do have um i want to say it's four new members this year who who participated in that community interest form that was sent out and wanted to participate this year um parents some who

197have been through our school system and now have children in our school system um have have of course issued you know a little statement about why they'd like to do this work i lcs employees we do have a group of lcs employees who attend the meetings as well all right but we're not privy to their statement of why they want to be on the uh on this committee correct the advisory committee you you vetted these people okay all right and that information is not available to us as voting members correct or is it i mean you're asking me to vote on names that i don't know anything about them well other than a few handful um and would be happy to share what it is that you know whatever information we have i i would

198just suggest that if we're going to vet the equity task force members that would be equitable and vet all of them absolutely committee members yeah absolutely i don't i must have been asleep at the wheel okay uh with the other ones but i think that mr trose's questions are legitimate uh obviously going forward this kind of information can be uh looked into prior to when it comes to us for action at that particular night of course if we would if we were to do that for this we would do it for all absolutely but these names are uh reputable persons that are being presented to us tonight all right if there any further questions or discussion on the motion all right madam clerk if you call the roll yes you would approve this list to

199know if you choose not to scoop up my mr trust no scoop up mama dr brennan yes school board member miss morrison yes scoop up mama dr carter yes school board member dr coleman yes goodbye mama dr sendai yes school board member dr gupta yes scoop up mr harvey yes motion carries thank you madam clerk and we'll move now to l5 which is school health advisory update uh dr edwards sure another one of our advisory committees is our school health advisory and they had a meeting on october 27th and i believe miss sherry brown is going to give the update it's going to be director brown latonya brown director brown thank you yes ma'am um like dr edwards said school health advisory met on october the 27th um the nurse coordinator discussed school health updates

200including the upcoming coveted booster clinic that lcs would be hosting at ec glass high school she also introduced the lcs's plans for vista screening testing program and also talked about um mou memorandum of understanding that has been created between the johnson health center and lynchburg city schools to provide the framework for school-based dental programs for the elementary school students that should be starting up very soon being that we just got the mou signed so as soon as they get in and start providing some dental cleanings to our students we will let the board know in addition we have had a company called connexus come in and started vision screening our students this program offers screening for all of our kindergartners first grade third fourth seventh eighth tenth and eleventh graders for potential visiting problems they

201help us identify students and we refer to students out as needed that are having troubles on with their vision if students need assistance with glasses we also refer them to different agencies for assistance to make sure that they all receive the um glasses or whatever needs um that are needed for their visions to be excuse me their vision to be taken care of secondly the school nutrition director discussed working on wellness champions within the individual schools per the policy for student wellness guidelines the policy was discussed including the need for this um school health advisory board committee to review the policy line belong and implement measures to gauge how well the policy is being followed by individual schools the nutrition director reported changes are being made to the menus due to the shortage of healthy

202food supply to the schools and we had a robust conversation about what type of foods would be offered and you know still maintaining a healthy and well-balanced balanced meal the next uh meeting will be november the 17th um and we meet by zoom at 12 o'clock and that's it any questions any questions for director brown thank you all right we want to say thank you to you director brown for that update we appreciate it thank you very much all right we will now move to section m of superintendent's comments oh i am so very sorry dr gupta is miss brown still there has she left director brown go attitude i just wanted to thank you for everything you're doing for this community you have done it for last almost it's like a year and a

203half in running these vaccine clinics so i call you a vaccine warrior you have been god sent to this community thank you thank you it's taken a team and i would say you know my whole lcs team central office the teachers transportation everyone has chipped in even greta ford i don't want to start pitching out names but with help with running clinics school board members and all is truly taking the community to vaccinate and to for the safety of our students and families and just thanks for giving us the opportunity to do so thank you dr gupta that was very well said thank you director brown now we will move you're welcome now we'll move to superintendent comments sure and i'm going to keep it brief given the hour it is a national family engagement

204family and community engagement month in november and we have been engaging in both with families and community um you already heard about the daniels hill and you're going to meet me on november 22nd for our next uh community conversation i've also had the opportunity in the past couple weeks to meet with some of our partners including attending the ed foundation meeting you know they are one of our um our local partners and support our staff and our students in a tremendous way um so thank you to them i've also attended the vcic meeting virginia center for inclusive communities and we have done a lot of work with them including training for our staff as we all work together to create a more inclusive community also attended the ymca board meeting you heard a wonderful report

205about the ymca power scholars program in our summer so we have an excellent partnership with them i sit on the advisory board for the randolph college educator prep program and they started something new with their take two class structure this year as they work with us and student teaching and they have an accredited program but their take two program is focused on having students take fewer courses at the same time and with the hopes that they will be more engaged and more successful and of course graduate on time and the this is the first year they did it and the data looks very very good from that so we're happy to support them um with that uh we too had unity day and wore orange here um so we're glad to celebrate um we could

206all use a little anti-bullying all over the world right about now so it was great to to have that we did have a follow-up press conference to um questions and inquiries that we receive regarding our data so thank you to media one of which is always here um for attending that and let get it giving us an opportunity to tell more about the story of our kids uh this building if you have not had an opportunity to tour this building we have a lot of new folks here so on friday we had a meet greeting maybe treat so we kind of went around and just met everyone we see each other on zoom but just the opportunity to network and and see the new folks particularly the folks from jackson street who have moved in

207here and we're so happy to have them uh lots of professional development i did attend the vast fall conference in charlotte charlottesville which was just packed with information regarding everything from student achievement to budgeting and a whole host of things legislative affairs i also this today and tomorrow attended the national principal supervisors cohort for the aasa meeting which is all about training and working with principals to to ensure that they are excellent instructional leaders which we have here in lynchburg city schools so it's been a busy couple weeks of just mentoring and doing some work and being out in the community and talking with folks and again to the community please please please send us your feedback regarding the budget and also the school calendar thank you thank you dr edwards that was very very

208good and we appreciate all of the work that you are doing at this time we will now move into board comments and we'll start with mr truth well thank you um yeah last meeting as the board knows i was very concerned about the data we saw concerning the reading and writing levels of our children levels of our children since that time i did reach out to some community leaders and i continue to reach out to community leaders i will tell the board that the community leaders are on board to do what they can do to try to help these young children and part of that as i've iterated to some of these community leaders is we really need to get to the children's parents or guardians or caretakers because we have a lot of children

209out there that perhaps don't know how to study or don't have the time to study at home because no one is giving them you know turn off the tv turn off the radio turn off the cell phone and focus and make these children study for an hour two hours or three hours a night to get the work done so we have that i continue to reach out to different people i've got a huge list to give to me to other leaders so if you haven't heard from me i will be calling just asking you to help the students doing whatever i can on that role um in addition i was fortunate enough to uh visit one of the schools and i i talked to some of the boots on the ground people and they've given

210us some ideas which i've shared with crystal and then finally um just by happen chance i've i've met i run into a couple different teachers at the grocery store and out and about and teachers we hear you we we share some of your concerns um and we're pushing to help with those levels number one is uh the salary we hear you and we're working on that it's an uphill battle but i think all of our board members agree with you teachers that you're underpaid and we're doing what we can to try to do to help uh correct that situation um so that's what i have to say and we're there doing it just bear with us thank you mr trolls mr brennan along with uh dr nils and dr carter i had the pleasure of

211attending the community conversations program which i thought was a great start to reach out to the community thanks to director reeves and her team for making that visa successful look forward to future ones i had the really fun opportunity to go to the friendly city string quartet concert a couple weeks ago that was a group of jmu graduates that came together to do a a a a program to support lynchburg city schools and to raise money for violence for them which was a great thing and it was run by greg childress who was one of the strings instructors for lynchburg city schools it was really great um i've started my annual visit to the different schools and uh it's been a little slower this year with with covet and busting and things but i've been

212to glass heritage del mar middle school rs payne sandusky elementary paramount bedford hills paul monroe sheffield fort hill the empowerment academy and stopped by the virtual academy when i was at the empowerment academy and the message i think is pretty much all the same which is the teachers and staff are all working very hard um they're working really hard and it's very difficult to transition from coming from the hybrid system last year to the in person has been difficult for everyone and one of the comments the elementary school principals made which was interesting if you think about that we went that a kindergartner you know went out of school halfway through their kindergarten year and they're coming back now in their second grade it's a huge jump so second and third grade they say particularly

213has been so difficult academically so as mr trust attorney trusted said we support the teachers we think they're great but they clearly need our help and i think the shortened days is going to help some but they need a lot more help um it looks like the delta surge is calming down some but there are still a lot of patients in the hospital who have who are very sick the academy of pediatrics as of the end of october stated there's been about six million cases of covet in children less than less than 18 years old there's been about about 700 deaths in the united states from that we now have a vaccine that's been approved by the fda and the cdc for children ages 5 to 11. so we now have vaccine for children over

214all k through 12. and i hope that will encourage the parents and the children to get those to decrease their risk to children because one death is too much and it decreased their risk of quarantining and losing time in school so i know that our director brown will continue with her good effort thank you dr carl fulman thank you dr brennan mrs morrison i just have three quick things the first is i want to invite you all if you did not see the preschool initiative summary that um they did um they did a slideshow and dr brennan the information from your wife was really powerful and had quite an impact about what preschool programs can do for our students and our community so if you've not had the chance to watch it it's on i

215got an email about it so um the second thing is um if you like show tunes easy glass theater glass theater we'll be doing a kind of cabaret of noted show tunes and there are songs that will appeal to everyone and i think it's next thursday friday and saturday the other thing that i want to say is to echo my colleagues here is that i came on this board five and a half years ago now six years and my objective was that we needed to work on salaries and that has been my calling i started out that way and i will end that way and i will end my career on the school board still fighting for salaries so i appreciate the support and know that um we're going to still do what we can

216do for our staff thank you thank you mr morrison dr carter i had the privilege of going to sandusky elementary past friday and see some of the amazing and creative pumpkins that were on display and the students had a parade i just wanted to say that and also as dr brennan already stated we were at the community conversations and we had a nice group and we hope that more will come out and it's a great opportunity for parents to learn and to ask questions and also just to be engaged we need that engagement and really it was with teacher retention and also with the student learning thank you dr carter dr sinha well i echo pretty much what everybody else has said and i also want to thank director brown and the health advisory for

217coordinating the screenings you know when i was in second grade and i had a last name that started with w so that's back in the days when they set you alphabetically i was at the back of the room and i always got in trouble for getting up over my desk to do this nobody realized i couldn't see until they did a vision screening and realized i need prescription glasses so thank you for that because you know my parents say not like they neglected me they just didn't realize i couldn't see and i didn't realize i couldn't see so anyway that's a good thing so thank you for that um i think other than that i'm good thanks thank you dr sennheiser dr gupta no comments thank you thank you dr guton in the interest of

218time i will simply say i support exactly what my fellow board members have said about our staff and and making that a priority this year the other point that i wanted to make is we talked about proactive communication tools and it's been brought to my attention from several parents that seem surprised about the about the shortening of the the wednesdays of the early dismissals i said that i would share this with the board um i did tell them that emails were sent out prior to our board discussing it to let parents know and invite them to come to the school board to to comment um but it was at the conclusion of all of my conversations where i felt like i i defended the fact that we put this information out there um they asked

219if it could be something that could be some you know somehow repeated i don't know how but i'm just sharing that information because that was presented to me i'm sorry repeated and sent back out to families again yeah i i i don't know if it's in it's in news wasn't it like it wasn't in multiple things in addition to a district-wide distribution and i know i just read like three different principles newsletters they all are i i agree i'm just sharing thank you mr harvey all right i would like to quickly but with some respect and honor for the magnitude of this presentation we recently as a board completed our master board training and this will be further recognized at the vsba annual convention in williamsburg what i do have in front of me a

220very nice plaque and dr edwards i am asking that this will be put somewhere where it can be displayed prominently by the public but it is a plaque that reads the sba leadership advocacy support the sba center for board development awards master board status october 2021 lynchburg city school board and all of our names are here right everybody's name so beautifully presented and so dr edwards i'm going to give this to you and we're expecting this to be put somewhere where it can be seen by all for our great knowledge clauses and each person right there we would like to give uh uh there's a certificate coming from vsba to each of us as a part of the master board for completing the training required to become a vsba master boy completed october 2021 and

221this is signed by gina patterson executive director of virginia school boards and uh that's yours dr edwards d lawrence dr michael j nillis wow dr robert o'brien dr atul gupta dr kimberly a sinha gary e harvey and randy t trose and uh yours uh yours truly so just a handful of boys that have received this distinction and i'm very proud of that [Applause] all right uh that now moves us to informational items and you can see section o that the legislative breakfast and we're excited about that kim the next meeting for the legislative advocacy has been counseled uh for reasons that have already been explained you want to comment on that please it was also canceled because the southern regional that's right meeting is that day that's right at four o'clock right and uh southern

222region chair doing the best he can i guess i'll get the information out to you but you'll get it uh the next school board work session has been canceled due to the fact that we will be making uh strides towards williamsburg the annual convention is the 16th through the 19th the next finance committee is monday november the 22nd at 3 30 and our next school board meeting will be tuesday the 7th at 5 pm here in the administrative building if there are no other thoughts meeting is a journey you