ACPS School Board Meeting -2.25.2021

001the cafeteria manager here at Amherst Middle School. And we're proud to say that we've been able to reach out in our community and provide our children not only with hot nutritious meals here at school during the day, but also with meal packets in the afternoons to take home. We also have remote pickups at several of our schools where AR families can drive up and pick up meals for home. I'm really excited about what we've been able to provide and I'm really proud of Amherst County Public Schools in the way they have provided for not only their students but for their families as well. Hi, my name is Jennifer Fitzgerald and I am the art teacher here at Amherst Middle School. This year has definitely been a challenge, but I feel that a lot of the

002teachers here at our school have risen to that challenge. In the art department, of course, it's been a real challenge to teach hybrid, face-to-face a couple of days and virtual a couple of days each week. So back when I was making our unit plans for this semester, I was really thinking hard about how we were going to manage that in the art department. And one of the main commitments that I wanted to make to my students was to give them the best opportunities they can to experience as many art supplies and art materials and a wide range of art ideas as they could this year. However, I kind of wanted to pull back a little bit from doing a lot of digital art and using a lot of their technology that we do have access

003to because the students are on their Chromebooks for every other class. They need to be on those Chromebooks to download their modules and do their schoolwork virtually. So I hit it really hard with planning this project-based learning this year. Everything that all of our projects that we have done this year have been hands-on, tangible. The kids are getting into the paint. They're getting into the markers. They're making messes. They're creating beautiful art projects that are actually... in that they can hold and that we can put up for display and not everything on the computer and I really do think that it has worked out really well. They're learning a lot, they're using different parts of their brains, they're learning to think creatively as we all are, finding new solutions to new problems and we've just

004had a really great semester so far here at Amherst Middle School. This is one display of our most recent projects from our sixth graders. We did some birch trees. We studied about how they look and the nature aspect of it. We did this great whole big display cabinet. The kids actually got out here and helped me cut out some of the trees and put them up as a three-dimensional display. And their paintings are done with watercolor. and oil pastels. We talked about color families, we talked about color theory and how we mixed art materials together. We did a masking technique. They've learned a really lot in something that looks kind of simple, but they turned out really looking a lot of really beautiful. So we've had a really great time here and thank you guys

005so much for everything you've done to support us and assist us in this semester. Hi, I'm Mary Allison Fitzgerald, eighth grade language arts teacher at Amherst Middle School. I am also the coach for the Virginia tiered support system that we have taken part of with the district. The Virginia Tiered System of Supports, or VTSS, aligns both academic, behavioral, and social-emotional wellness into one decision-making framework to create an environment that is conducive for the best overall learning experience for our students. Here at Amherst Middle School, our foundation is built upon the Big Three, and our Big Three are respect, responsibility, and resilience. We strive throughout our day to make sure that we are enabling our students to meet those big three. Our job is to teach, to model, and to promote students being respectful, responsible, and

006resilient. Our students seem to be doing a very good job of modeling and mastering the big three. Another idea that we have that we use for the VTSS is Positive Behavior Interventions, or PBIS. We look to promote the positive things that our students do within the school building. We try not to fixate on negative things. When we see a student that is doing some great things, we try to catch them at that, make sure that we acknowledge them, make sure that other students see students being acknowledged, and we continue to try and promote those positive behaviors that our students are engaged in. One of the best features of the VTSS and PBIS is the buy-in from your staff and to see the family that is built for our students. Amherst Middle School is an extremely

007special place to be. And welcome to Eland Elementary School. I am Mrs. Scott, the principal, and joining me today... Hello, Mrs. Lillia Saunders, the assistant principal. And we're just so happy to have yet another opportunity to share with you guys the wonderful things that are happening here at Eland Elementary School. So we just wanted to start out in recognition of National School Counselors Week, we wanted to start off by recognizing our wonderful school counselor, Ms. Paige Bree. So Ms. Saunders, let's brag just a little bit before we turn it over to our wonderful school counselor. Tell them all about Mrs. Breeden. Absolutely. Mrs. Breeden is a vibrant, vibrant person. She is full of energy and loves to get things started every day, mostly with our kindergartners, loves all grade levels, and especially school initiatives. Mrs.

008Breeden has started the kindness challenge with us and many other things. We're very grateful to have her here at EWL. All right and so without further ado again we want to wish Ms. Breeden a happy National School Counselors Week and at this time we're going to turn it over to Ms. Breeden to highlight one of our activities for this month that we'd like to feature. Last week our school participated in the Great Kindness Challenge. Students had an opportunity to promote kindness throughout the school and were given checklists to complete these kind acts. Our school is also going to be collecting fine coins throughout the month of February to raise money for the Amherst Humane Society. I'm so excited that our school has been so eager to participate in this challenge and I can't wait to

009see how much money we're able to raise. Joining us now we have 3rd grade teacher Ms. Melissa Bussey to tell you all about our fabulous parents here at Elan Elementary School. We are very grateful for our parents here at Elan and all they do for our students and our community, especially recently with all of their donations for our indoor recess program. As it begins to get colder and we have to social distance, we are very grateful for that and now Ms. Melissa Bussey is going to tell us all about it. Hi, I'm Melissa Bussey and I'm a third grade teacher at Elan and I just wanted to express our gratitude to Ms. Lise King, an amazing Elan parent who spearheaded a program to get each class, each teacher, individual recess equipment. So it's been a

010challenge this year since we haven't been able to use the playground equipment for recess. So Ms. Fink decided to ask all of our generous parents for some money to purchase kickball, jump ropes, basketballs, and lots of different equipment to play with outside every day. So we now, each teacher has enough equipment for their class to play by itself to stay safe and socially distanced, as well as indoor recess equipment to little individual bocky games, Legos that kids can play with too. So we are so grateful to Ms. Lisey Fink and all of our generous parents who have supported us here at ULIS. All right, and next up we have coming before you guys, Ms. Alex Goins. who is one of our wonderful paraprofessionals who heads up our kindergarten hybrid location here. She's done a phenomenal

011job and she is now heading up our cultural diversity committee here at Eland Elementary School and has some wonderful activities and opportunities in store for our students as we are now in the month of Black History Month for February. So at this time I'm going to turn it over to Miss Alex Goins. This month at Elon Elementary, as part of the cultural diversity committee, we will be celebrating and acknowledging Black History Month and some of the activities that we have planned is a bulletin board trivia of important people who have made such a huge impact in the world and the kids can interact with this trivia and we also want to make sure that we make Black History Month tangible and relatable by tapping in with our community and we will be collaborating with the

012Woodruff family who own Woodruff's Pie Shop and they will be doing a video for us and we will also have other activities planned to celebrate Black History Month. We would like to thank Mrs. Frieden and Mrs. Bussey and Mrs. Goins for sharing all that information with you today and we do appreciate you school board and citizens of Amherst County. Very proud of our Elan Eagles. Yes, and again, thank you guys so much for the opportunity to allow us to share the great things that are happening. We know despite the circumstances that it has been a challenge, but as always we rise to the occasion and we're very grateful for the opportunity and again very appreciative to our school board. We also want to give a shout out and want to thank Ms. Linda Moorfield for

013these cool t-shirts that you guys see. As you can see, our students stole our hearts. And if you haven't had an opportunity to check us out, we also have some hearts hanging here in our building in honor of Black History Month. But also know that our hearts thrive for our students each and every day. So again, we're so grateful. And thank you again for joining us here at Ewing Elementary School. With approval by majority vote of the members present at the primary meeting location. In order to offer this opportunity to the remote board member, a quorum of the board must be physically present at the primary location and an arrangement have been made for the voice of the remote participant to be heard by all. Do we have a quorum of the board at this

014time, Madam Clerk? Yes, ma'am, we do. Okay, I looked around. Thank you. Mrs. Wright and Mr. Cassisi, are you able to hear us? Yes, ma'am. Yes, I can hear you. Thank you. At this time, please respond. Okay. Seeing that we have met both the criteria stipulated within policy BDD, at this time, I ask for a motion from the board that Ms. Amanda Wright and Mr. David Cassisi be allowed to participate in this meeting remotely with all the rights of discussion and voting afforded to them. So moved. I have a motion by Ms. Thompson. Second. I have a second by Ms. Berg. She was faster. Okay. All in favor? Aye. Okay. It has been properly moved and seconded unanimously carried that the board has approved to have Mrs. Wright and Mr. Cassisi participate in the electronic

015meeting from a remote location with all the rights of discussion and voting afforded to them. Thank you so much. At this time, well. I will now call this meeting to order and we will have a moment of silence and Dr. Arnold you have something to add to that moment of silence. Yeah, so before we go to a moment of silence I'd like for you guys to keep the family of Howard Anderson in your thoughts and prayers. Mr. Anderson was a longtime employee of Amherst County. He was the principal at Amherst Junior High in 1976, and he opened Manelis in middle school as the principal in 1977 and was there until 1983. Then went to Temperance and Pleasant for you to become the principal there from 84 to 90. And he passed away earlier this week.

016And visitation is this Saturday at Witten from 10 to 5. And I just want you to think about him during the moment of silence. Thank you so much. At this time, we shall stand for our pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you so much. At this time, board members, we've asked if you have looked at the agenda and you see things are in order. We ask at this time for an approval of the agenda for tonight. Madam Chair, I make a motion that we approve tonight's agenda. Thank you, Ms. Thompson. Do we have a second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Any not? Okay, we do have

017an agenda this time. Dr. Arnold, we shall turn this over to you for recognitions. Yes, ma'am. 2.01. Each February, we recognize the efforts and the dedication that school board members play in... making the lives of our students better and this year it strikes me as even more important to appreciate the work that you guys are doing. You know, we have lots of school divisions in this state that there have been school boards that have refused to allow students to come back to school. You guys trusted that we would do it safely and I think we've done that and so we appreciate you allowing us and supporting our return to school. You've also allowed us to adjust as necessary because as much planning as we did, there were always. ways that this could go sideways and

018we needed we needed your support to make sure we could adjust and make make the right decisions and you also made sure that we remembered that we had funds available and y'all would make funds available to add the necessary resources that each school needed and you continue to to push us to make sure that we did that and I know our schools appreciate that Each of our schools has done something for all of you today. You had a large group of gifts in front of you from each of our schools. And we also, because normally we have students show up and they like to do things and we love to see them do that, but they were unable to do that this year. But we do have two videos that were made that we would

019like for you all to watch first. Good evening, members of the school board. Temperance Elementary School would like to say thank you and happy school board appreciation month. We know that your job is a difficult one and we also know that there are tough decisions but we know that all of those decisions are made with our children's best interest in mind. Speaking of children, I think they might have something to say. Thank you for working to keep your school safe. Thank you for caring about our students. Thank you for caring about our kids. Thank you for leading the way in ACPS. Thank you for making a difference. Thank you for helping us reach our goals. Thank you for visiting the schools. Thank you for believing in us. Thank you. Socrates once said, the secret of

020change is to focus all of your energy not on finding the old but on building the new. The Amherst County Public Schools under the leadership of... Because you opened school, we are just a new way to learn. Canvas. Hybrid Location. Google Meets. Synchronous Learning. Because you open schools, we change from cooperative learning projects to solving challenges individually, but we can still share our results. Look at that! We use our creativity to invent new games at recess. Tag. Ah! Because you open schools, we are focusing our energy on building the new. Thank you. Thank you for opening the school. Thank you for opening the school. Thank you for opening the school. Thank you for opening the school. Our staff, everybody involved with Amherst County Public Schools, thank you all for your dedication to the young people

021here. All right, let's see. I was excited with that. I like that. Oops. Okay. Was that all the recognitions, or did I say something else? Yes, ma'am. Okay. All right. At this time, then, we will look at our public comments. Do we have anyone in the audience at this time that would like to address the school board? Okay. Yes, ma'am. I really don't have any specific comments, but my daughter-in-law and I are here tonight. We kind of wanted to see what you guys were doing, you know, about getting the kids back to five days a week. I've got a high school grandson that is really struggling, bordering depression, not feeling like he's really in school. So we're here tonight as interested. people to see what you guys have planned. Is that something we'll find out

022tonight? Well, maybe not all of that, but we're willing to listen to, uh, first of all, I apologize. Could you give me your name and address? Uh, Irene Dean. And, uh, I live in Madison, uh, in Monroe, Virginia. Okay. Okay. Ms. Dean, thank you for your comments. Is there any other citizen in the audience that would like to talk to the school board tonight? Okay, if not, I do have two letters, email letters that were sent to me, and because of my slight off-reading situation, I've asked Natalia if she would be so kind to read them on my behalf. Dear Amherst County School Board members, after reviewing the transgender policy being presented before the school board, I am deeply concerned about what this would mean for the Amherst County community. I know that there are

023comprehensive policies in place for bullying and treating students in a fair manner. This policy, however, will infringe on students, parents, and teachers' rights under the state law and constitution. The fact that information about a student can be withheld from a parent or possibly reported to social services is a violation of Virginia's parental rights. It is completely disregarding the rights of religious freedom for those who believe in Christian principles. This policy is directed against students, parents, and teachers' rights who believe in the biblical view of male and female. It is an attempt to force one viewpoint on everyone of transgender policy as the only correct viewpoint. Enforcing students and teachers to use pronouns rather than their given name is a violation of free speech. When has using a person's given name been a violation of their

024rights? It seems that this policy is creating a problem where it does not exist, except for a few students in specific situations. There should be other solutions possible in a school to give privacy and modesty to all females. Forcing transgender students into female bathrooms, showers, and changing areas is not a fair or protecting their rights in our school system. This policy does not promote tolerance for the majority of our female students, whether they have a Christian belief system or not. I hope that you will carefully consider the consequences of this policy. Many Virginians spoke out about this enrichment and a majority were against it. I strongly believe that when Amherst parents are faced with the reality of what this policy means, they will be questioning your concern for their child. This may be a trust

025issue between this board and the community. Sincerely, Jeanette Arrington. I request this email be read. I would like to publicly request a commitment from the school board. that 2021-2020 school year start back with some pre-pandemic norms. This may seem premature since we are only halfway through the school year. However, if the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that it takes time to pivot into new environments. By addressing these issues now instead of later, we can hopefully eliminate the need for additional staff planning during much needed student instructional time. My suggestions are as follows. Post and stick to a start date. Traditionally, the ACPS first day of school is published months ahead of time and does not change. Families plan vacations and childcare around this information. Delaying and or moving the start date several times

026does not provide the structure and consistency families and students need. Convert to a full week, full day schedule for all students. It is no question our students are behind academically. However, they are behind in social and emotional development also. Going back to a full week schedule for all students may help bridge some of these gaps in the coming year. Lift mask mandate. For most, the mask requirement seems simple, but to others it is far from simple. Wearing a mask can sometimes mean deciding between wearing their doctor prescribed glasses or a mask. Some sensory sensitive students are even forced to choose between attending face-to-face learning with a distracting and unbearable mask or staying at home. Wearing a mask is easy and becoming second nature for some, but others are struggling and fear the mask more than

027the pandemic itself. These students are becoming isolated and are being left behind. Please allow these students back into the school buildings. Whatever the decision is regarding next school year, I encourage the board to make these decisions early, preferably before the end of the school year. Vaccines are being administered, numbers are lowering. I know we can't predict the future, but we can make certain commitments if certain factors are met between now and August. We need to know what to expect and when to expect it. Give us something to look forward to. Give us hope. Melissa Mays, 1171 Sugar Hill Tunnel Road, Amherst, Virginia. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. And I have read those when we were scheduled to read those at our last board meeting when it was rescheduled. So I did have a

028chance to read those, and we will have some comments on that later. Are there any other citizen comments before we move on? If not, at this time, Dr. Arnold, I'm going to turn this over to you for the presentation of your operational budget. So this is. regularly scheduled to be the only thing that happens at this board meeting but since we had to postpone last one this will be just embedded into this historically this is just a presentation and I will I will take you through the presentation. We will give you the full budget book so you will have the entire week to dig into it. And then next March 4th, we will have our retreat here in this room starting at 8.30 and we'll be able to go into... all of these things in

029greater detail. What I would ask is that if you have questions prior to, please let us know as soon as possible. We certainly want to make sure we're prepared to help answer any questions. So this presentation is the proposed 2021-22 school operational budget. Last year, we created a roadmap. or two years ago or a year and a half ago, we created a roadmap around our strategic plan. This summer we created another roadmap to get us through this year. And so what our hope is is to get back on that original road again and have the budget that you guys worked very hard on last year that reflected our strategic plan to bring that back forward because we really want to make sure that we can implement the budget that we had originally. So clearly you

030know what our vision and mission is. And so our goal in this budget is to reflect these beliefs, reflect your beliefs. You may have heard today that the General Assembly, the House and the Senate, agreed upon a budget package. They have, and I'm going to read it because I don't want to mess up the language here. What they did is the details of the agreement will be posted sometime this afternoon, allowing legislators at least 48 hours to review them. So it's required under House rules. That would allow the General Assembly to adjourn its special session by Saturday night. The operating rules for the special session, though, allow the assembly to adjourn as late as Monday to act on the budget. So our belief is that that agreed-upon budget will be done by at least Monday

031of next week. So it will look different because what we know in this agreement is that they're calling for a 5% raise for teachers. This budget will not reflect that because we don't have the the it's not official and we don't have the calculation tools to Say that that's what we're going to do so this is this budget is based on that original governor's budget and We know that will this will be the worst case scenario We believe moving forward. It's only going to get better so that being said As I said earlier Our goal last year was to build life ready students. That hasn't changed and so this budget needs to push that forward once again. So we will have added operational expenses this upcoming year. We are currently, based on worst-case scenario, asking

032for a 3% salary increase for all employees. As you know, each percent change costs us about $338,000, so it will add about $1 million in expenditures to our upcoming budget. In dealing with our health care provider and our... The folks that help consult with that, they have brought us a 3.9% increase, and this is for the fully funded option. Each percentage change is $30,000, which will cost us about $120,000. At the budget retreat, though, we will give you options on what self-funded looks like, and this year there is a new product that allows for a kind of an in-between step, which allows both the school system and the insurance company to share the cost, but at the end of the year, you share the profit. So it allows for us to build up kind of

033a nest egg to get to the self-funded that we wanted to get into last year. It's a less risky to do that. Southern Air, which... has our contract to service our HVAC in all of our schools. They have not gone up in their contract, their maintenance contract, in many years. This year they are. And so that looks like about a $166,000 increase yearly to our budget. You know that we have been working very hard on a CTE regional academy through CVCC. And we had talked a lot about the Go Virginia grant and the CVCC receiving $300,000 to get that started. They have put out a course of studies this past week for that program to get started in the fall. of this upcoming year and so we want to make sure that we can support

034those students to go over there that are interested to be included in those programs much like we do with stem much like we do with governor's school so we put a number there of 55 000 and then finally we had some board members ask for us to look at how do we get our elementary and middle schools more engaged in after-school activities, specifically in the areas of STEM. So if you know we have some of our middle schools that are, Manalison that does a robotics, we've done Lego leagues in the past, but we would like to put $5,000. in stipends for elementary and middle school programs because currently we're asking those people just to dedicate their time and we think that if they're going to do these things for our students after school we should

035give them some sort of stipend so that brings the total increases to expenditures for the 21-22 operational budget to 1.3 million dollars So ultimately what that looks like, last year's budget was $44,799,916. The additional 1.3 will take the proposed operational budget up to $46,162,751. So as you know, that, however, is not the only budget. And so we announced last at our last meeting that we were receiving $3.2 million in CARES Act, additional CARES Act funding that we can use through September of 23. So what I want to do is to show you and think of this money. This money is much like federal monies, the title monies that when we purchase something, we get reimbursement. So it flows through our budget. So it's not a part of our operational budget. So what I'd like to

036show you on this slide is we're going to have COVID related expenses again next year. We understand that. We also understand that there might be a need once again for a remote academy. We have several parents and students that are actually flourishing in that environment. So we want to make sure that we use that CARES Act money, a portion of it, to make sure that we get through next year with the added expenses. So this year we had CARES Act I monies that allowed us to... add additional custodians, instructional assistants, substitute teachers. So you see all of these things. Many of these things are things that we started this year, but we want to make sure we account for it in the coming year. And so we are budgeting 2.2 of the $3.6 million in

037CARES Act to help us get through next year from a COVID standpoint. If things improve dramatically and much of this stuff goes away, then we would have to rewrite our grant and use that money on different things. But this is allowing us to get through next year and not knowing what next year is going to look like. This allows us to have that cushion to do that. So when we move to the... But those would be added expenditures, but not to our operational budget. That's very important. So what that looks like then, I've had $46 million for the operational budget. The child nutrition portion of that budget is separate. The federal programs, which are our title programs. our separate expenditures, our adult basic education, and then that's where we show that CARES funding at 2.2.

038So ultimately, when you put all of those together, our proposed operational budget is $53,874,822. So when you look at how we're going to pay for this and make sure that our budget... balances, here's the funding. Here's the funding breakdown. The state revenue increases $1.8 million in state revenues. Right now, it's showing a $450,000 loss in state sales tax, but that's projected. That's still old numbers that the governor was projecting in December. That's going to be a positive number. which adds the 1.3 that you saw in our expenditures to the operational budget. We anticipate then using $2.2 million of the CARES funding, which will give $3.6 million in increased revenue, which is the same as the increased expenditures. So that's how we balance our budget. And once again, This is where we get the funding from.

039So as you know, most of our funding comes from state revenue, and that's almost $27 million comes from the state. 4.8 million comes from state sales tax and 519 comes from other local funds. We are asking the Board of Supervisors to once again give us $13.9 million, which for the third straight year is level funding. We're not asking the Board of Supervisors for any more money. And to get a 3% raise. and pay for some of the things that we have to pay for without asking the board of supervisors for more money, I think is always a win, and it's a win for our community. So this shows, this page just shows how all of that money added up allows our budget to look, our revenues to match our expenditures, and you'll see that in

040greater detail in your book. This year is going to be a little bit different. as ADM is concerned. So you know in the past we do a lot of projections, we do a lot of debating about what we're going to base our next budget on in terms of ADM. This year the budget is going to be based on a specific number that the state has given us. The state is giving us a number because they are including enrollment loss monies in the monies that they're given us. So they don't want us to project a number because they've already calculated this for the whole state and they're recommending every school division to use the number that they have. So if we go lower than this number, then there's going to be money in the budget that

041protects us against any loss of enrollment just because of the numbers across the state that have been lost in enrollment and so one of the really important things that came out of all the versions of the budget was that there was going to be hold harmless monies in that budget and that's why they're they're asking us to use a use a number that's specific to how they've calculated our budget so we won't have a lot to debate in terms of ADM next week That is that is the budget that is the additions and That is where our revenue comes from like I said We will go into great detail next time. I am I'm pleased once again that we are able to add to the Salaries of our staff. That's that's so very important and

042especially after the year that they have all experienced that it's really important to continue to recognize their efforts and increase their salaries. So, Ms. Ligon, that is the budget. We will, as I say, we will talk about it in great detail, but I do encourage you, if you have questions, to make sure we know those before next week so we can have information prepared for you specifically. Thank you. Well, I'd like to thank Dr. Arnall and his staff for giving us the recommended proposed budget. Board members, as you have been instructed, please feel free to examine, look and read, and email and call. I think Dr. Arnall would prefer that you email him, and then he would direct the questions to his staff if appropriate. And then when we come back next week, what is

043it, Thursday? It's Thursday, March the 4th. Yeah, on Thursday we shall unravel this. But at this time, I don't want to just be too forward. Mr. Terry, do you have any direct questions at this time for Dr. Arnold? The only thing I was wondering, you said the state was given a set amount. Is that per student or is that just a set over there? That was it. They want us to use this number. Okay. And then they are giving a specific number for... cushion in case we lose got you down to that number and I'm not sure it's in that it's in the big book that will give you here shortly okay that's fine thank you it would just I guess build on that then because you had three nine four seven right I don't

044get too far into it but that's what y'all would have projected if y'all that was our projection but okay of course the matter if the ADM is going to be higher than That's what the state's given us. Yeah, we're still discussing what that would actually look like. Would they give us more money, too? But I'm thinking because they're already giving us more money, they think they're protecting us one way if we lose, but they've already covered us if we get more. Okay. Thank you. Ms. Burke? Yes, you stated the governor was saying 5% raise for the teachers. Yeah, 5% was what the General Assembly agreed upon yesterday, but they have not voted on that. So we don't know what those numbers look like yet. You have to remember that when the state, the politicians in

045Richmond say that they're giving us a 5% raise, it doesn't look like a 5% raise to us. We locally have to pick up a pretty significant portion of that. Last time I believe it was going to be half. It's a little more than half usually. It might be about 60% from the state and we cover the remaining 40%. Okay, so then we're talking about giving another additional 3%? Well, if it's 5%, then we would see how, if we could get to that 5% number. Okay. Yeah, it would be an additional 2%. Okay. Going from the 3% that we have here to 2% that may show up in the next iteration of this, the budget from the state. Okay. I misunderstood. Thank you. You think of me first? Let me go to our telephone people. Mr.

046Cassisi? But I don't know about the stipends for after school activities. Educational activities, I would make sense to do it for educational things. okay miss ms wright no my question was asked thank you okay ms thompson um i was excited to see the regional cte program in there how many slots would that allow us to have so we believe that's right around 25 but it's it's kind of contingent upon which programs they choose because some of the programs require more hours and some require fewer so we have We have, Mr. Maddox and I worked on that the other day, and we believe that would cover 25 students, which is actually pretty good when you figure in what we pay for governor's schools and the amount of students that we send there. So it's a pretty

047good deal. Good. Thank you. And then I know we're going to get details later, but I know we have a lot of infrastructure work to do, CIP. Is that within our operational budget? And do we have any idea of how much end of the year money that we might anticipate this year? That's fine. Thank you. I appreciate your work. Thank you. No problem. Very good questions so far to lead us into next Thursday. I've chatted with Dr. Arnold and myself, and, of course, we'll also talk about if there are any needed or do we need any more staff in our presentation on Thursday. Do we need to have any more personnel? So if there are no further questions on this, we shall be back on March the 4th to consider the rest of this. Let

048us move on to 501 and 2, the consent agenda. Board members, if you've had time to review that and you have no issues or questions or addendums, I'd ask for an approval. I'm sure I move that we make an approval. Okay. And we'll just do 501 and 502 at the same time. Is that legal? Yeah, that's consent agenda. And it includes 5.03 as well. Okay, 5.03. What's 5.03? It's not there. I'm sorry. I see 5.01. 5.03 was removed everywhere else. Now, that's not nice, Dr. Alney, making me think I can't see. Second. Second, Mr. Grimes. All in favor? Aye. Any negatives? Thank you so much for the consent agenda. We're now moving into administrative information items. So we'll start with 6.01. Yes, ma'am. Madam chair ladies and gentlemen of the board I'll start with administrative

049services and so for this year earlier this year We talked with Crabtree robot associates and they did our facility study They identified the two areas at the Massen Heights elementary school and Amherst middle school that needed some some work So we have contracted with them to the engineering study and preliminary work and right now we're on schedule and We're going to finish that up before it goes out to bid, but we're in that process to getting those schools repaired this summer. And the second on that is at Central Elementary School in late January, we had a water line break right there on the road feeding Central. I just want to thank the town because they were able to get there, located the leak, they repaired the leak, they didn't cause us to stop operations at

050Central, at the Transportation Office, or at Amherst Middle School. And we were afraid they were going to be shutting water down to our schools, but they were able to fix it, didn't impact our operations at all. And I just want to thank the town publicly for getting on that and fixing and repairing that in a timely manner. So it greatly helped our day getting that water main fixed. So I just want to thank them publicly. So any questions on either one of those? Okay. COVID update. We are in a much better place than we were last time we spoke. As of this afternoon, I just got one email here about 20 minutes ago, but we have one positive staff and four quarantined staff. We have three positive students and 44 quarantined students. When we spoke

051in December before holiday break, we had over 400 students quarantined. and over 15 positives. So we're moving in a much better direction and we feel very good about where we are. I know Dr. Arnold's gonna speak more about the local COVID-19 numbers and state and local level there. But as a school system, we're in a much better place now than we were a month or two months ago, as is the region in general. But we feel very good about where we are right now. Any questions on our COVID numbers? Okay. Vaccination information. Um, as you're aware, we've we began our vaccination clinics. I had a first clinic on the 5th of February and we had our second clinic up in Ellison the following week. Um, as of tomorrow afternoon, we anticipate having 324 staff that

052are fully vaccinated through the school system vaccination clinics. Um, we'll have additional 200 staff that are getting their first dose tomorrow. So after tomorrow, we should be pretty much halfway there getting everybody who wants to get vaccinated their vaccination. On the 5th, we operated our first clinic at the high school. We had 343 individuals we were able to vaccinate. On the 10th, we operated at Manalison. We only received a much smaller allotment of doses. We were able to give 39 vaccinations. Tomorrow again, we'll have our largest clinic to date, uh, and which will administer over 500 to 550 doses of vaccination. We have 200 modernas for first dose, and then we have again around 340 second dose Pfizer's that we're scheduled to give tomorrow. As you also are aware that we have to give our

053second dose, Pfizer's three week, 21 day timeframe between the first dose and second dose. So on the 5th of March, we'll administer the second dose of Pfizer at Manalison. And on the 26th of March, we'll give our second dose of Moderna's at the high school. We have about 15 staff members who are not able to get due to conflicts and are recently getting over a COVID-19 that are not eligible to get it now. We're working with the health department to get those individuals a vaccination dose as we can get them done. I also have been in contact with Amherst County Public Safety and BRMS and the Department of Health. And they're trying to figure out if we can do a community based vaccination clinic at in the county. So what we're what we've offered is

054if the health department can allocate the doses, we'll provide our staff and our facilities to get community members in. to get their shots. So this is an issue that we're working with with the health department and Amherst County Public Safety and hopefully we'll get a word some word on that. But you may hear us having a vaccination clinic just for the remaining one bees that are 65 and overs in the county who need their shots and maybe further down the road as it opens up to the next level, then we'll be able to offer shots to those individuals. Well, we have a trained staff, we know how to do it. we feel very confident in our ability to operate a clinic. We just need to doses of accident vaccine to give it to give the

055clinic. Um, but if we can get the doses that we can, we can operate a clinic. We feel very comfortable operating a clinic at our facility. Are there any questions regarding a vaccination information? Okay. Athletics at your place, you will find a copy of the Seminole district press release that was released yesterday and That goes into basically and it goes into it we will the Seminole District has voted to allow spectators at at the fall sporting events Fall sporting events started to start tonight. I know it sounds kind of backwards, but fall starts tonight With football actually we're playing at Rustberg tonight at 7 o'clock We move the game up from tomorrow night to tonight due to the pending weather so We start fall sports season tonight, but the Seminole District principals voted to allow

056spectators. It's up to each school to determine what spectators they allow, but we have to, that 250 limit is basically the governor's limit of where we are now with his restrictions. And it's up to each school to kind of decide what that's going to be. I know the high school is working on their plan now. and they'll be getting in touch with their parents about that. But we'll be allowing some spectators. Typically, though, most schools are going with parents of the athletes or band members and or cheerleaders. And then volleyball and sports as well. So if you have questions on that, I read that at your leisure. If you have questions, feel free to contact me, and I'll be glad to fill you in more on that as we get more details. Winter sports. We

057had... a great winter sports season. I want to compliment our coaches and our students for a successful season. I can tell you right now, and I was sitting here briefing you back in November, December about the possibility of having winter sports. I was a little nervous of what would happen. But we made it through the season pretty much unscathed for the most part. We did have to quarantine a couple teams due to exposures. One of the teams had a referee who tested positive the day after he refereed our game. So therefore, they had to be quarantined. And then we've had some students who became positive during the break, but they were quarantined from their team and so forth. So we had some of those issues. But we didn't have any issues where we had a

058student athlete catch COVID playing their sport. That includes wrestling where they're, you know. very much in contact with each other. We didn't have any wrestlers contract COVID-19 from wrestling. Again, we may have had some athletes catch it from being at home when their parents and their family members had it, but none of our athletes caught it from their contact, from their interacting in interscholastic sports. So very pleased with that, very pleased with our coaches and our student athletes and how they carried themselves and made sure they were following the mitigation standards that were set by the Junior High School League as well as Amherst County Public Schools. So I thank them for that. Some high points this year, both the men's and women's basketball teams had winning records and they both made it into the

059postseason. The wrestling team won the region and finished fourth in the state. In swimming, we qualified eight swimmers for the state tournament for the first time in school history. And indoor track will compete in the state tournament on Monday at Liberty University. And again, fall sports begin tonight with football versus Rustberg. We also have students participating. cross country golf volleyball sideline cheer and marching band so are there any questions regarding the sports season so this is good news for everybody mr. Terry and I were gonna be joining the chain we don't know anything about where to move we don't figure something out so thank you so much dr. well for that board members any other questions for this Thank you for all the COVID information. And it sounds wonderful that the vaccinations are up and

060running. What percentage of our school system you think off the top of your head we're involved in this? We have roughly a little bit over 700 employees, and we will have given roughly 550 vaccinations. So we're two-thirds, roughly. Actually, I think it's around 72%. It's good. Very good. Thank you for all your hard work on that. Yes, ma'am. Moving forward to 6.05, this is basically information from the superintendent on the student suspensions, which we're happy to see practically null. Yes, ma'am. That's a good thing. Is that correct, Dr. West? Finance, 7.01. Madam Chairman, members of the board, you have at your place the budget monitoring forms, the revenue receipts, enrollment information through January 2021 and budget summary by object code. Everything looks well to this point, and we anticipate a good ending to this school

061year. I will be glad to answer any questions to where we are looking as far as the end of the year. Mr. Cassisi can I give that to you next week at the budget retreat? Absolutely. I'm a little disappointed. I figured you would have the answers. I knew you would be Mr. Cassisi. I'm sorry. Mr. Cassisi she's been preoccupied with the budget this week. For next year not this year. That's good news. Any other questions for Ms. Crouch? Thank you so much. We just like to hear the word in good shape, ending the year in good shape. We're on to instruction, Dr. Norman. Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the board. I have a brief update regarding our transition to second semester. First of all, thank you very much for the week that was used

062significantly by all of our staff. The scheduling at all the schools began as soon as the board approved that the week. And we. did routing of transportation, as well as students switching from remote to in-person. All students ended up with that schedule the Friday before they reported on February the 15th for second semester. I wanted to say thanks to our administrators and our central office staff for the enormous amount of work that that took. They literally worked all the way up until that Monday morning when they started. students into the building. During the transition week, we also held a distribution that we had scheduled to hold the distribution during that week for our ARA students. But the ice got us and we completed it the following Tuesday. We were able to have People, our ARA

063students turn in and pick up all of their books as well as the books from the previous course and pick up books for the new course. Any Chromebooks that needed to be fixed or technology issues that they had, they were able to come in and get those fixed. Work was turned in as well as hot spots were distributed to our ARA students who were going from face-to-face into our ARA. remote academy. We currently have issued over 150 hotspots with over 200 of them being designated specifically for students that are in our remote academy. We are in the process of placing another order for 100 additional hotspots so that we can continue to provide the services to those families that need it. With the issuing of the hot spots, we have been able to now move

064towards a significant portion of our teachers where we are. able to require synchronous learning for any of those students who have been issued hotspots from us, who have turned in that they said that they were had hot internet access available to them. I was just on four classroom observations yesterday in our ARA classrooms, all of them synchronous. And I was very encouraged by our students. and their engagement, as well as the instruction that was taken place by our faculty members and our and our teachers. We also during that week distributed 2488 SD cards. Each of them have been put into the Chromebooks for our students face to face as well as remote. And this allowed for more storage space. So students can download more than one week or two weeks worth of work onto their

065Chromebooks so they can have a variety of work on their devices. And then finally, we continued the process of working with our students who have, we have attendance concerns and participation concerns. We developed a committee led by Dr. Holly Jennings and Marie Patron in regards to attendance. And we have put in another additional layer of that virtual at-home support for kids who are declining in their grades and in their participation. as well as their attendance. The staff has actually reached out and spoken to parents and students in an effort to determine how we can help them and what barriers they have in school and instruction this year. We've completed over 175 home visits, which is... more than I think I've ever had happen in a division before. So I was very pleased about that. And

066I'll be happy to answer any questions that you have in regards to our transition. It was a very smooth transition for our schools. Madam Chair? Yes, sir. All right. Here comes the synchronous learning punch. Here we go. So the synchronous classes, you... Is there any additional ones? Are these still the ones that were carried over from first semester? Because I understand there were some synchronous from the first semester, correct? Yes, sir, there were. Mainly our elementary was doing synchronous learning with our, especially our reading specialists who had smaller groups. But now our secondary, Mr. Crawford, who is the administrator of our secondary ARA, has met with every teacher in regards to synchronous learning. We have a list of those students who have been provided hotspots and have Internet access. Of course, if they don't have

067that, if they haven't accepted that offer from us, we've been reaching out to them to try to get them to do that. But that is something that is going on now with our secondary classes and the synchronous classes, I guess, are recorded. So the those students that are enrolled in that class can can at least view that at a later time if they. They are if we have photo released from the parents in regards to those students. So yes, sir, if the... If you're doing a Google meet, you see the pictures of the students on there. If we record that and that child doesn't have a photo release, that's not something that we can do. But I will say that this year, most of our students have, parents have signed off on that photo release.

068We have very few that have not. Okay. As far as the... a plan and I know in your call, I guess the other recording that you sent out the other week that Dr. Arnold that you mentioned that was what we're pushing toward. Is there is there is there a goal or far as a percentage of classes by the end of the academic year that are synchronous or. Yes, sir. Our goal is for all of them to be. But we know that we have we still have some of our teachers who struggle with technology that we are still providing supports to. We have, we cannot require it for those students who do not have internet access, but we're trying to, that's one of the reasons why we did the SD card, so that it can be

069downloaded onto, if that class is available to be recorded. So the push is for us to move in that direction. We are also having some summer school pilots that we're going to be doing with swivel cameras and things. But that will be coming to you all at a later date and time. I think we had touched on this in the fall, and there wasn't really any kind of motion or anything done. But as far as a progress, I'd like to see at each board meeting at least a percentage of our classes that are synchronous. at that point just just to get an idea because I you know I at least want to feel like or look on paper and see that we're moving in that direction because I mean it's just something I'm passionate about

070because I know when we talk about that social emotional piece for the kids that are choose to learn at home seeing their other classmates at least at some point man that's got to at least be you know encouraging to them and whether it's you know, with the synchronous piece or whatever. But I just I would like to see that and continue pushing towards that. And then as far as the responses that you're getting back from, I guess, the attendance visits and things, what kind of barriers are you all hearing about that are attributing to? The attendance issues. We've had several of them where there's been health concerns in the family, physical health concerns, a lot of COVID, not a lot of COVID cases, but some in regards to that. A lot that they have, both

071parents are working, so they're with their grandparents, and the grandparents don't understand the technology piece of it. We've also had where there have been some mental health issues. And we have dispatched our school counselors and actually provided some supports for that as well. Are there any is anything of all gone into I know with the courts and things, is there any truancy kind of issues that is that being waived? Is that? Yeah, that's what I would think. The courts are not going to touch that this year. And rightfully so. One of the things that's concerning right now is the General Assembly is looking at some legislation that will in the following year allow parents to choose once again to take the remote option without any kind of restrictions around it. Because the way we're looking

072at remote next year is saying that you have to meet some certain criteria. say have internet have reliable internet that you're going to be at every every class and all of those kinds of things and if not we're going to bring you back to in-person learning but I think this legislation if it passes in the next week or so might prohibit us from putting those kinds of restrictions and and we don't have any real accountability because we can't use the courts' intruency. And so what they're doing is just going to the home. We actually have a budget for homebound, right, when students are medically fragile during the year and they have to be at home for three to six weeks, and we send a teacher there. Well, we're not doing that this year because that's

073not been a necessity. And so we're taking part of that budget and assigning some of these kids that are not engaging to a homebound teacher. So we're trying to make that personal connection with them. I've seen more emails from Ms. Kazee asking for this kind of, that kind of clued me up. I missed that. I forgot they were there until just in the last few weeks. So that's okay. And that's what that's in response to some of these, from these, okay. That's good. Thank you, Madam Chair. Dr. Norman, how many students did we have switched from A.R.A. over to in-person and in-person back to over A.R.A.? Do you have it? It was right at a total of going back and forth. It was close to 300. I think it was 270 some. But it it.

074really was more coming back into our schools than it was leaving and going into ARA. We did have quite a few that did that, but most of them came back into the school, which is a testament to us providing a safe learning environment for them. So with the number of students coming back into any of those schools, did we have any of the classrooms that like all of a sudden were like overcrowded now? Because I knew we had had to do special things and we only had so many people bringing them back. All of our schools, our elementary schools, were able to... if they weren't in a hybrid location, then they were able to move into that. So there was the facility was able to they were able to do that. We did provide to

075three of our schools additional supports and instructional aid into three buildings just to make sure that we had the correct personnel with the number of students that were coming into that building. I think it's important to note, too, that the We have not told any student that they could not come back due to space. If they wanted to come back at mid-year, we took them back. So at this point, every student has had the opportunity to say, or families have said, if I want to be here, we've allowed that. So we can still say that. Also, I know we had... many of the school board members had gotten several emails about the PDLs and people were having some some issues with them. So I want to thank you for reaching out to the ones who

076did have have issues and hopefully everything got worked out there. I know the emails kind of subsided after we kind of distribute stuff out. So thank you and your team for helping those students and families out on that. Thank you. I appreciate that. Any other questions to Dr. Norman at this time? Ms. Thompson, Ms. Berg? I had one real quick one. I was just wondering, what kind of services are we offering our students that are suffering right now, either the in-school students or the homebound students? In regards to mental health or in regards to? Academics. Academics? Oh, yes, ma'am. Quite a few. We have had, hang on. I have a piece of paper that tells me all. Sorry. Because we were just compiling it today because we're looking at grades and what that looks like

077for our students. But we established from our instructional department, the home visits, of course, parent surveys as to what they are seeing as some of their weaknesses. Some of our parents are struggling, especially at the high school area in regards to algebra or geometry or trigonometry. Trigonometry. We've done some Google training and with our parents as well as canvas training to help them kind of understand it so they can help their younger kids in regards to remediation. We've opened up remediation for our for our special education students who are coming in on Fridays. That has been going on from the beginning of the school year. But specifically for those kids that are our Gen Ed population that is that is struggling as well. They are coming in as well. We have built into this semester

078second semester remediation programs for math and English inside the school day because, you know, bus drivers and getting kids to stay after school, that's a struggle in and of itself. And getting those activity buses, I guess you'd say to. deliver kids so we're trying to do that within the school day we've done additional pals remediation and title one specialist remediation that's going on for our kids who are struggling at least one or two grade levels below in reading. And then we've done math spirals for our math students where they're continuously going back to concepts and spiraling back so they don't miss those concepts that they missed last year when they were out of school for six months. Our teachers have been very diligent this year and I've been excited to be able to work with

079them on that. Would it be possible to maybe reach out to some of the local colleges to see if some of their students would like to maybe tutor some of ours online? We actually have programs right now with University of Lynchburg, Sweetbriar College, and Liberty University. Okay. Ms. Berg, I think it's important, too, to know that. We're in the middle of planning our summer opportunities as well because as we know, we need to look at this as a long range. process of getting our students back the skills that they need that it's not going to happen right away so we're going to come to you hopefully in the next month or so to give you exactly what summer school is going to look like as well because it's going to be more time and more

080days for us to help our students that way as well okay thank you so much thank you does Tom see anything right now Dr. Norman Well, I think everything that was on my mind has already been stated. I did have some concerns about, you know, we have students that have some instructional gaps and losses and how we're dealing with that. And so you've already talked about that. I'm real concerned and have heard from some parents about students with disabilities and. you know, meeting their needs instructionally, whether that's bringing them in on Fridays. So I wanted to, you know, are we able to meet all of those requirements in our IDPs? And I'm sure, you know, some of the parents that I'm talking about that have had some concerns. Have those been shored up and those

081kids? Absolutely. And ultimately, those are all ongoing processes, as are all of our. cases we're talking about students with disabilities that's one of the hallmarks of what we've been trying to do is constantly evaluating how our students are performing because ultimately as those students move through content if rigger increases we have students that have made that transition either back into school or out into remote settings we just want to make sure we're continuing to track those students and maintaining those needs but the the situations you're referencing specifically yeah we've addressed those and um Our IEPs are all up to date and we're following those and we're good to go on that? Yes, ma'am. Absolutely. Great. I didn't expect anything less, but I just wanted to make sure. And then I wanted to also just ask

082about the PBLs. I know that when the concerns came in. We all shared them. I mean, you guys responded to them very quickly. I know that my response to many parents were the response was, you know, just do the best you can, contact your school, try to find some modification. And I appreciate your efforts to reaching out to those parents, and I applaud you for wanting to try to bring in that critical thinking and that learning process. But I'll tell you my perspective when I talked with parents is I talked to one parent who had one child and they were struggling, you know, but then I got a call from a parent that had four children and that made me realize the burden that was placed on that parent was pretty hard. So I appreciate

083y'all being very patient with the parents and working with them. I'm sure that we can chalk it up to a learning experience as we go down that road again. But, again, thank you for reaching out and trying. You know, sometimes when you try something, if it doesn't work out, it just gets better the next time. Yes, ma'am. So I just appreciate your efforts there. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. Ms. Cassisium is right. Do you have anything for Dr. Norman at this time? I do not. My questions were asked again. Okay, good. And I agree. I was thinking I wrote down the same things that came down the line, some tutoring, what are some of the barriers. Of course, we all watch the news from time to time talking about kids who are not

084excelling in the algebras and the geometries, and I think Ms. Burke hit what I was saying as well. And I would go even less further than not just the college outlook, but if we have some students within our system. seniors or juniors who are just a whiz kid at math, perhaps they wouldn't mind doing some Zoom help. Are we doing that already? Yes, ma'am. Our National Honor Society kids. Okay. So Reagan's, both of Reagan's announcements have been already taken. Dr. Wells took the athletic stuff. Well, that's okay. We'll pretend we didn't. I'd rather hear it from you, Reagan. We'll stop. We got a short memory. Don't worry about that. We got a short memory. Thank you so much, Dr. Norman, for everything. And we all are trying to work our way through the barriers, and

085that home visit, I think, is one of the greatest ideas we could possibly have. None of us are doing as great with this as we could, but I believe in Amherst County we're doing the very best we can. Let us move on to... I lost my thought. Thank you. I'll start with the update on our technology for our help desk. I'd like to ask Mr. Joe Goldman, who oversees our technology department, to come and speak to that. Thank you, Dr. Norman. Members of the board, school administration. guests and the community watching at home. I'm not here tonight as your proud, proud supervisor of technology. I'm here as a proud, proud parent. This is my son, Karcher, family name. And I could go on and on about how proud of him I am, but I'll just

086point out a few things. We've never been called to the principal's office in 13 years, pre-K through 12th. 3.9 GPA. We're still talking about that 1B. And then a 4.0 at the early college program. So he'll be graduating in just a few months with both his high school degree and his associate's degree from CVCC. So I'm so proud of him. I had senioritis so bad, but not him. He just takes on extra. So he's one of the students that's helping us with the student help desk. I'll turn it over to Karcher. Hi, I'm Karcher Goldman. I am a senior at Amherst County High School and I participate in the internship or student help desk at the IT department. So we have one division right now and we plan on adding another. The one division that

087we currently have is on the hardware side. If there's a broken Chromebook, cracked screen, mouse pads gone wonky, or the keyboard doesn't work at all or in a few places, we'll go through, take the Chromebook apart, fix it, and do whatever needs to be done. Students at the school are able to give their Chromebooks to their respective teacher so that it is given to us, most likely through Renee, which is... the head of the student help desk. And then after all is said and done and repaired, if we are able to repair it, we'll put a sticky note on it, fixed, done. If we aren't, we'll put it in a salvage pile in order to save money for other screens that we might not have to buy in the future through salvaging. And then the

088division that we plan to have will be on the software side where... parents, kids all throughout the county, whether ARA or hybrid, will be able to submit a help desk ticket that we will respond to via email or phone. And then the student will walk through whatever steps need to be taken to help fix the problem, whether it could be OS, submitting an assignment through Canvas, Google Classroom, or just general. internet IT issues which may be occurring with maybe hotspots or one of the buses located around the county. And I would like to say that this program not only helps the community but it gives students an opportunity to help the community obviously and also improve themselves through giving them skills that will be useful as technology and society advances. They won't have to go

089and ask for help to fix things. They'll hopefully know more how to do it themselves, and then they will also be able to fill those jobs which need that experience. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer if, well, to the best of my ability. Any questions? I love this stuff. Thank you for doing that. How many students are in the as of now? About six, I believe. About two more have joined. We're at six, maybe seven. Okay. Got good genes, Mr. Goldman. Thank you. I hope so. How much time do you spend a week on this? About two days we can. I usually, when I go, I'll go in the morning and then leave before my afternoon meetings or classes through CVCC. Other students, they have the opportunity to either do it

090in a free period or they can schedule a time like I do and come on an off day. On average, about two days a week. Well, thank you to you and your division, your team. Thank you. We love it. I don't know anything about IT, but I love people who do. Oh, yeah. We're here to help. I'm good. Thank you so much. Any other questions for this gentleman? Thank you. Keep up the good work. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Karcher. Yes, indeed. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right. Next on the agenda is... 8.02 program of studies on board docs I have placed the memo from Mr. Maddox that provides all the information in regards to the changes made in program of studies for next year next school year This is just informational item for

091you. You don't have to do anything with it. We do also have a copy of the program of studies. I would like to point out that the most of the changes that have been made to the program of studies for next year has centered around our elective programs, fine arts and CTE. And that really is basically because we wanted to add some additional courses moving in for that remote learning. to provide some opportunities for those students in those areas, as well as changing some names in regards to our CTE courses that align with Virginia Department of Education and their guidelines and what they're asking us to do with SCAD codes. Mr. Maddox is here as well as myself, and we'll answer any questions if you have those. But basically, it's just information for you. Okay.

092Madam Chair, I know they're still ironing out the regional piece, but I see on here the welding. What would they offer? I just don't want to repeat, because I know we have a strong welding program, and I hate to see that. So the way that program is set up is that they... They surveyed every school division. So, for example, I think Campbell County doesn't have a welding program. Appomattox, I believe, might not have one. So they want to try to meet as many needs as possible. If we have students that want to be in welding, we want them here. Yes. Right? Because we have a great program, but we don't have them all. So the regional approach is to provide as many opportunities and options for our students. Yeah, like the HVAC and machinist piece.

093That's great. I just saw the wheel and I said, I hate to mess with that. Okay. And so there's going to be some of that kind of crossover for some school divisions. But it's also set up in a way that we can't keep these staff members forever. Oh, no, absolutely. And so if those programs lose staff members and we can't fill it, then we always have those things at that academy. Okay. Thank you. It's a good question. Thank you. Moving on. You also have on board docs information provided concerning Black History Month. Mr. Maddox provided you just a list of activities that were occurring at the schools. Hopefully you've had the opportunity to join in virtually or find out what's going on in those schools. I will tell you that we've had several. like Amherst

094County High School and Elan, they highlighted our locally black owned businesses this month and have had an outcry of just people so excited to not knowing some of the businesses that were out there. They've had presentation to our ARA elementary students on the history of education for blacks in Amherst County, which has been very supported. Lunch movies were shown at Amherst Middle School and Manellison Middle School celebrating leaders within the black community. And then today at Madison Heights Elementary, I wasn't able to attend, but Dr. Arnold did, so he may be able to tell you about it. They had a Freedom Gallery walk that I've heard great things about already so hopefully you were able to join in on some of those items so when you come into the building they basically that that kind

095of foyer area that large area that every inch of wall space was covered with some some form of artwork that reflected Black History Month and so every grade level was represented. They had students that were our guides through the gallery walk and were able to tell us some really interesting things and some different bits of information. Students were going through it as well at the same time so it wasn't just for adults to go through it. Students got to see each other's work and as always the case at Madison Heights, the the feeling and the warmth and the the the staff down there really do a great job of getting the kids engaged in those kinds of things so it was just a really nice nice way to spend part of my day for sure

096thank you Dr. Arnold The last thing on our agenda for my section, I would like to ask Mr. Maddox to come forward. This month is also CTE Awareness Month, and he has provided a memo up on BoardDocs for you, but also would like to share some information regarding our CTE program. Thank you, Doctor. Madam Chair, members of the board, across the nation, Career and Technical Education has celebrated in February to recognize the achievements and accomplishments of CTE programs. But it also gives us an opportunity to communicate the crucial role that CTE plays in preparing a highly skilled workforce. So this year, with the help of Mr. Cargill and his crew, especially Matthew Wells, We produced a video to highlight the benefits of participating in CTE programs. I'd also like to thank the voice of Lance

097Radio, Mr. Tom McBride, for being the narrator in the video. CTE is associated with reduced rates of dropout and higher rates of on-time graduation. Particularly CTE courses taken in the 11th and 12th grades. Employers overwhelmingly say that the most valuable employee skills are soft and employability skills such as professionalism, teamwork, and written and oral communication. The end of technical, academic, and employability skills the CTC programs provide best prepares students for fast-growing and high-earning jobs. CTE parents of three are most likely to report being very satisfied that the real world is the real world and are their education than non-CTE students and parents. Advanced CTE course taking in high school is a high school with higher wages. Workers see a 2% wage increase and will meet each upper level CTE course at a stakes. Occupations in

098skilled trades, sales, and marketing drive market logistics, construction, customer support, and health care. Or some of the job of the employers are having trouble filling and the filling stations. Skills that made the skills committed to an informative and manufacturing jobs. Manufacturing jobs went unpeeled between 2018 and 2028, while 17.7 million workers employed in infrastructure jobs or structured jobs were retired. Many of the 30 million just paying jobs available were out of buy-tasks or grief, but found in skilled or failed health care, health, hospitality, and hospitality. And at your place, you have a neck gaiter that was made in Mr. Presnell's image and technology program. And we just want to thank you for your continued support of our city. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Maddox. That's all I have. Madam Chair. Okay.

099Good stuff. Good things going on. Human resources. Yes, ma'am. Madam Chair, members of the board. Good evening. Good evening. I have a few items tonight. I'm going to start with current vacancy update. Doing pretty well right now. Right now we have school secretary position open. one full-time instructional assistant position, one of our one-year only instructional positions, and a one-year custodian position open. So I appreciate, again, the opportunity to be able to hire some additional staff in some of those areas, but we are pretty fully staffed, and we're online to get those things filled. I do anticipate a number of openings for next year, and after we've had the personnel report go through, we'll begin posting those starting tomorrow, more specifically. To date, we've had some general postings for next year, but we know that we'll

100be opening up in history, science, special education K-12, several reading specialist positions, elementary teacher, school counselor, middle school English, career and technical education. and speech therapists so there's there's a multitude of positions but we're looking forward to the recruiting process and getting those hired this come this season so before I move forward do you have any questions about our our current or projected vacancies quick question madam chair I know that we have some teachers that won't be returning with some additional slots open. Are we continuing to do exit interviews with those teachers? And if so, is there some type of data that you could provide the board on that? Sure. We do continue to do that each and every year. I can certainly provide that to you. I don't have it in front of me,

101but I have the past number of years that I can provide that data because we do review that gives us good information. again about some of the positives but also how to improve moving forward and supporting staff and what some of the reasons are for folks leaving particularly anybody who is leaving in the you know earlier years however the majority the vast majority this year are from retirement And then I know you said that you could get some back data and you may not have some of the exit interview. One of the reasons I'm asking is, you know, we're in an unprecedented time of life and school life. And so my curiosity is, are they some of the teachers leaving because of the demands with COVID? And so even if you don't have it, but

102you will be getting that data once you do, if you could provide that to us, I think it would be helpful. Yes. It'd be interesting to see if there are differences this particular year in that light compared to past years. Right. It would be good to see both. To what degree? I think that's our expectation. Is that usually done just as a face-to-face? Is there any kind of? It's an anonymity element. I know that's hard to do. It is not face to face. That's that's done through survey of those staff who are leaving. But, you know, I anticipate that it is likely that some that may have been on the fence and able to retire, you know, maybe that was one of the factors. But we will find that out. I'm happy to report that

103to the board. Thank you. Any other questions there? All right. You have before you a draft of the currently proposed 2021-2022 school calendar. We had posted that during the earlier February meeting that was canceled. As I think I stated previously, that's been developed in consultation with our ACPS calendar committee. They produced two drafts, the committee did. We sent that to all of our employees. You likely received that email as well so that we could get their input. The committee considered that feedback from all the employees. We had about a 37% response rate to that survey, and 56% of the respondents selected the current draft that you have in front of you. Some of the things that the employees indicated that they valued in the draft that they select for their school year are protected teacher

104planning days, scheduled breaks is a big one, fall, winter, spring. teacher planning or work days at the end of each grading period. We've had those at times, but they ask that those be consistently placed at the end of each grading period. And the later start date to the school year. The committee didn't produce a draft that went even further because it was believed that that would push too far into the summer the next year. And so they did openly select the one that was later of the two drafts, however. We're asking you tonight to review that if you haven't done so already as a first review. and we are looking to bring that back at the March 11 board meeting for you to consider accepting or voting on that to approve. And of course, if

105there's anything that comes up that you wish us to do in examining that further, then you let us know. Do you have any questions at this time? Is that posted anywhere besides what in the agenda is advertised as a proposal? We were giving it to you first. Okay. Yeah, that wouldn't be post publicly until it's an approved calendar. Well, I mean, just just for I mean, I know it's not something like a public reading for, you know, like that, but I like just for public feedback. We can certainly are you talking to public? I mean, I just as a I mean, I know honestly, if I put that out publicly, I would put now they got draft on the output proposed. Yeah. So people could at least kind of get an idea. And if there

106are if there's a massive amount of feedback about something, then maybe we need to take that in consideration when we make a decision. We could post that somewhere on the website. We'll take a look at that. And so now take your direction, Dr. Arnold, on that. If there aren't further questions and if there are happy to take them. The other piece of information that you have in front of you is our 2021 spring recruiting calendar. This year... The recruiting season is a little different. Almost all those events are virtual in nature. The Liberty University is the only one that is in person currently. And we have already participated in two of these virtual events, which are a little bit different. I personally participated in the University of Lynchburg event, which I thought went very smoothly,

107actually. And so that was very promising. It was very different. not meeting with individuals face-to-face. I know we're getting used to that, but it's still a little bit different. And then we have what are called virtual meeting greets at the beginning, which is as if we were standing at our table at the career fair, and we get to discuss some things that we feel are great about Amherst County Public Schools with the potential candidates. Radford is tomorrow, and you can see that the other ones follow throughout the course of the year. I do want to put in a reminder that March 5th, which is next Friday, that is our virtual education career fair that we are hosting. We have been broadcasting that to not only the regional universities and colleges, but throughout the state. We've

108been posting that on social media. There's a radio ad, if you may have heard that, out there. I think it's YYD. I'm not really sure. But it sounds excellent, and we're doing our best to get as many folks to that table as possible. Last year, we held that in person. and it was very successful so we will see what it yields this year currently we have roughly 16 candidates signed up so i'm hoping the next week we get more to join us so all of these things because they're virtual take a lot of coordination there's a lot to that for the planning process so i do want to thank miss brittany mcnerny in my office for helping with the planning side of that because she's done a tremendous job and i thank the our school

109administrators who are participating throughout all these events and particularly on March 5th as we've kind of asked all of them to set aside their time as they're in a lot of different interview panels that we have throughout that day. So if you have any questions about our recruiting events or calendar, I'm happy to take those. I don't have a question, but I'd like to address something on the calendar. I know that you've asked that this be put in for the public to look at. I think one of my concerns is that we have a date that we want to approve this because I think they were asking us to approve this tonight. Next meeting. I'm sorry. As far as the recruiting calendar, that's not something that requires approval. The school calendar. I'm sorry for the

110school calendar. And initially, that may have been a thought, and I apologize. That should have been revised. It is not up for approval this evening unless you all have reviewed it and so choose. my intent was to bring that back in March and that this would be the first review. So I'm sorry if that's confusing. My only concern is, you know, we had two parents that talked about making preparations for next year, doing that early. You know, if there's a way we can get some feedback, get this approved as early as possible. I know we've got several meetings that, you know, the sooner the better for parents to make vacation plans and things like that and teachers as well. But that was my thought. Well, I just thought if we had that gap in between,

111but I mean, if it's been vetted by staff, I don't know. I mean, I'd vote on it tonight, to be honest with you. I've already looked at it, but that's just me. Well, we don't, I mean, like. kind of our philosophy is to make sure that you guys are fully prepared to make a decision and we're not trying to rush this at all. So that's that's certainly up to you guys. What would be the earliest we could get it back in front of us? March 11th. Which is two weeks. That was a couple of weeks ago. OK, well, we'll we'll we'll put out draft out. We can do that tomorrow and just let folks look at it and give us some feedback, and then we can bring that to you or Mr. Gallagher could send

112you what the type of feedback is. Sure. And just so people don't get confused, this isn't about the issue of how many days we're going to be attending. This is just a school calendar. That's right. I mean, sometimes it might get crossed. unnecessary feedback that really doesn't pretend is not germane to what we're asking for. Well, as you know, as we get closer to the actual start of the school year, depending on what's happening in our world, you know, it's always subject to change. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's a good point for me to jump in on one of the questions that have been posed to us either by public comment or email about us. So someone, let's say school board constantly changing things. Well. The reason we had to do a lot of changes

113last season, if you will, was because of COVID. You know, we needed more time to prepare to get back into school. And then we gave some days off for the PBL, if you will, whatever you want to call that week, so that the staff could make that great transition from semester to semester. And then sometimes the staff will come back and ask the board that there's something going on in the community or in this society of COVID that we need to change our opening date. So I understand parents' issues because I know about child care firsthand. Well, I did and still do a little bit. And so we'd like to have a calendar to set in stone. And so we all could govern our lives. But I'm telling you, with this revolving door of this

114pandemic, school boards across the nation are having to make some decisions sometime overnight to change a date. And whereas we in the past, the calendar is voted on. Well, the calendar is proposed and is sent out to the staff and to the teachers. Am I right? And the teachers came back with this proposed. Is that right? That was the majority majority. Yeah. The committee developed. And so after that, This is a draft we're going with. The majority is going with, right? And this is just on our view or is this on the public agenda? No, the public, this is the calendar. Okay, because as I'm sitting here thinking about it, I also don't want to create confusion, which is if it changes. I understand. I'm trying to unravel that. This proposed here with the majority

115of teachers, am I right? That is correct. Voting on it. Yes. That is correct. And now it's come to us, we could alter it if we so desire or not. Am I right? That is correct. And so we can either, like you said, we can look at it. Now, I've seen it since it came out. We could say this is good now. Or if we want to even, I wouldn't wait until the 11th of March. I want to bring it back maybe just quickly on the retreat. If there's a question, we don't want to bog the retreat down. But if the board members want to look at this and maybe come back at the retreat. with whether we want this to go down in history or not. Give yourself some time. Well, I would appreciate

116it if we could maybe vote. by the time of the retreat. I know according to your memo, you came prepared for us to vote. I appreciate, you know, getting, we would give the parents a week to look at it if they had any concerns. So we'll put it out tomorrow with some real specific language about what it is, what's happening, when you guys would act on it, and if you want. the board to consider things they have to let us know. Yeah. And so we quickly. Yeah. And I would just say other than the, you know, requesting time to vote on it, it's the typical process to bring it, you know, for review. And it came later than it typically does this year because we were waiting to anticipate try to get a beat on

117what was actually going to be happening next year, which is a little difficult. So that was the purpose of that. Yeah. And I wasn't saying that we don't want community response. No, no. I want to clarify that. We want parents to get an idea of what's going to be proposed. So yes, if possible, but we also want to know that as I put on every schedule that I do now, it's subject to change. We just don't know. We wish that back in the day you knew you were going to start school X day, get out X day, but we're in a different environment right now. But I think here in Amherst County we've done the best we could to try to keep parents abreast. And Mr. Graves, a good idea one more time to put

118this out there for them to look at. Anything else about the calendar? I didn't mean to jump in on that. Mr. Gallagher, I apologize. Oh, no worries whatsoever. Thank you. Okay, what else you got over there, Mr. G? That is all for me this evening. Thank you. All right. Any other questions on human resources? Thank you for the recruiting job and calendar and all those good things. Now, ladies and gentlemen, to my left, Lancer, Lancerland. Let me just stop you just once. Ms. Dean? Yes. Dr. Norma will be following up with your question, okay? I just didn't want you to think we ignored you. We're just going to respond. I wrote it down. Someone will get back to you this week. Well, tomorrow's Friday. Soon, very soon. Okay. Okay? Thank you. Lancer Land. Good evening

119board members, faculty, and parents. I hope everyone enjoyed their snow day and are well rested before the start of the new semester. Luckily this year students were able to participate in sports with the help of Dr. Brown and the school's precautions to keep everyone safe. Some of you may already know this, but I thought it was worth announcing. We had some great achievements this season. Our girls basketball team made it to regionals, and the wrestling team won the regional championship. Also, eight wrestlers qualified for the state final. In addition to the great sporting news, Our National Honor Society students were also doing great things in the community. Although we don't know the exact number yet, we do know that the amount that was raised for the Salvation Army was somewhere between $2,000 to $4,000. Thank

120you. Good evening, Madam Chair and members of the board. Tomorrow, Amherst Theater is doing their first improv night of the year from 1130 to 1230. It's going to be all virtual through Google Meet. And everyone's welcome, it's free, and you're welcome to bring suggestions with you, because we will be taking suggestions from the virtual audience. You know, I think this is a huge step in bringing back old traditions, and I'm just so grateful that I'm, you know, me being a theater kid, I'm grateful that I'm able to do this my senior year. Secondly, Mr. Hamlet and I helped compose a student group to pick and give speeches from notable African American leaders about Black History Month. I'm very grateful again that I was able to be a part of this project because of how fun

121and interesting it was just to choose poems and speeches of our likings about Black History Month. I did two poems from Langston Hughes, which was really cool digging into his... portfolio of poems, which I thought was really interesting. And we recorded and made a video that is going to be shown next week to the students. So we've got a bunch of students to collaborate and we have a video that's going to be shown. And then, yeah, so this was just a lot of fun doing the project with my peers. It had so much meaning behind it. As well as it was a great opportunity for those students to utilize their public speaking skills, which is a great skill to have. Thank you. Any questions for these final answer forecasters? Thank you guys for coming to

122us. It's awesome. Yes. Yes. Good things are going on up there. What time's the improv? There was an email. Yeah. 1130. And the link to Google me is I think email one out. But I think someone at high school will give you an email. I think it's either Miss Clark or Miss Hammer. Either of them. Well, we'll get we'll get it to you. We'll look forward. Okay. It looks like it's time for the superintendent. Yes, ma'am. So my first thing I'd like to talk about is COVID-19 and kind of what it means for us moving forward. I wanted you to see this document. This is what I look at every day on the Department of Health's website. This is Amherst County. This is the number of cases per 100,000. at our last meeting, we had

123peaked at about 120 per 100,000. But today, this is from today, we are down to 15.3 cases per 100,000, which we have not been that low. November. So we're clearly going in a good direction and I just think it's important. Obviously what happens in the community is reflected in what happens in our school and what Dr. Wells talked about with our smaller number of positive cases and quarantines are reflective of this. So I wanted to kind of get that out there to you so you could just see kind of how dramatic the change has been in the last month. Is the yellow line, is that the state average? No, that's our average. It kind of, what they do is they take the seven-day average. Each of those lines going vertically are the number of cases

124on that day, right? So that large, that tall one that's gone like off the page. And what's the yellow one? Say that again? The yellow line. Oh, the yellow line is the average number per seven days, per seven days. Okay. As it correlates among them. Yes. Yes. Right. So, yeah. And I think that 93 was a backlog of, you know, that's how that works. So this, this along the lines of COVID this past week, superintendents had the opportunity to sit and listen to the. representatives from the Association of Pediatrics. It was the Virginia branch of the Association of Pediatrics. And they wanted to... Pass along some data and information that they were receiving to help schools because you all know that Governor Northam came out and said on March 15th he expects all school divisions

125to have some form of in-person learning. Well, you know we've done that since September. That was not aimed at us. But there were well over half of the kids in the state that haven't been in a classroom yet. So we understood why he did that. Some of this information that we received the other day I thought were good because I wanted you guys to know how important it was that we got back. And so what they did is they sought information from pediatricians across the state as to what they're seeing. And of course, they're seeing increases in mental health disorders, suicidal ideation, teen alcohol and drug use, eating disorders, obesity. academic and developmental regression, food and housing insecurity, equity gaps. And we know, right, we know these things, these things are happening in communities across

126the state, and that is why it's so important. for us to continue to work towards getting kids back into school. So this is more validation of the efforts that you guys in this school division have done to help prevent those increases. But it is important, and I know that Mr. Cassisi has talked about it many times as we tried to get back into school, and what he was seeing then is showing up in doctor's offices throughout the state every day. The other piece of information that we got from them was, and this is really hard. You have a document in front of you that shows this, so it's hard to see. But in essence, what these graphs are showing, so if you look at it, what it's trying to show is the effectiveness of mask

127wearing. So if you look at the top, the top row is where both the person that's infected and the one that might be the receiver of COVID-19. That's if no mask is worn by either party. And so there's 100% chance if you're one foot apart and you have no mask on and one person has COVID, that the other person's going to get it, right? So that's how that looks. So if you're three feet apart, it goes all the way down to 17. And if you're six feet apart, it goes down to 3%. So you start to see that's without masks. So that's how important that distance is. But if you get both people wearing masks, which is the very bottom number, it is almost, there is no difference between six feet, three feet, and one

128foot if you're wearing masks, if both parties are wearing masks, that there is less than a 0.5% chance of contracting COVID. And this is really important because We need to start moving towards now. The CDC hasn't recommended this yet. I'm going to say that up front. They still recommend six feet. But the American Association of Pediatrics is trying to make the case here that we can start to get kids closer and closer to one another in the near future because the data is showing that if we keep the mitigation strategy of wearing masks, we can get kids closer to one another. at a much safer than we realized last year, right? And so what we would like to start to work towards, and the reason I'm bringing it up is because this is something we

129want to start talking about because, you know, especially when summer school comes, we'd like to... towards that where we can get our students closer to one another so we can get more students in the classroom. And then hopefully by fall, everybody that wants to come in the building can come in the building. And so I just thought it was important. I'm not recommending we do anything yet because the CDC hasn't recommended that to us yet. But I believe that the more that we see this kind of data and the more that president and governor and politicians are pushing to get students back in school that this data is going to be very, very useful. And I could see that before the end of the year that the CDC might actually change some of their recommendations.

130And once that happens, we certainly want to take advantage of it. Because clearly, Amherst County Public Schools, we've required our students and our staff to wear a mask, and we've had zero transmission. And that looks like, and that's why, right? Because we followed the social distance and they've been wearing masks. So I just want to get that out there. to start thinking about because you know there's still going to be fears about this but we want to like we did last summer we want to start talking about it really early so people can give us feedback and so that's that's part of what I'm trying to do right now is is get that out to our public the folks that are listening at home that this is in fact what we're trying to work towards

131so we can get as many kids back in school as possible. Are there any questions about this information? I think it's very powerful, and you can certainly use it as you move throughout the community. But we'll come back to this as we go. And like I said, we're planning summer school now, and so we would like to be able to start to look at it through this filter as well. That's how it's been so far. But I do believe that if if there are real strong pushes to get kids back into school Then this kind of information has to be looked at sure because we can't do it. Otherwise, that's right Okay My next piece is technology update. So Dr. Norman talked about most of the technology updates, but what I wanted to share is

132that in our comprehensive plan, the community engagement portion, we have three committees that work with me. One is on communication planning. The other is on parent advocacy. And then the third one is on public school advocacy. So if you think about Schools are always requesting certain things and supporting things that we need. But it's my belief that we can find things that are going to be beneficial to the schools that are also beneficial to the community. And so I've put a group of people together that are community members, that are school folks, and we've identified some issues that are both beneficial to schools and to community. The first one we're working on is broadband. And so what this group is doing, they're trying to put a plan together to start to advocate with local boards,

133with politicians, with broadband providers, so that we start to bring positive pressure towards getting reliable, affordable, and... expediting that process because you saw in the paper while we're moving towards this laying of fiber there was also a six-year time frame put on that and I don't think any of us think that that should be the case and so this group is helping us to advocate outside of just schools being the ones that are our folks our legislators and our board of supervisors and even school boards here and so um and actually miss tucker is on that committee and she has been very helpful in in talking about you know that you know we talked the other night about the Elan and the cell towers and the idea that It's harder for them to make decisions

134when they only hear the opposition, right? And so part of this is finding the people that are impacted and support and bringing those people forward so the boards of supervisors and school boards hear a representation of what's going on. And so that was one of the things she brought up, which was very important. But I just think it's a really good thing that we're really involving the community. in pushing some of the things that are important to us forward. And so I'll keep you up to date as we start to do some of that work as well. Any questions about that? Okay. I wanted to provide an update on our equity lesson. I talked to almost all of you individually and determine what the consensus was in terms of issues that you had with the

135timing of the lesson. We also talked a lot about the transparency of the lesson that parents didn't know what they were what their students were going to get ready to do we talked about the ability to provide options to parents and then finding appropriate staff to teach these lessons so what we're doing is the Diversity Council already understands this they'll be meeting tomorrow to do some more specific work but First thing we're going to do is make sure that whatever lessons show up are in the hands of our community and our parents in good time so they can see it and we'll encourage them to communicate with their schools, with the principals, because I want to make sure that things like equity and things like our counseling lessons and our character education things those are

136not SOL driven things that we do in school but they are things that we do in school all of our SOL courses We send out syllabus at the beginning of the year or course expectations with all the resources and all the things that are going to be done so parents know going into the year what's coming their way. And so we want to make sure that the equity and the character ed and those types of things, we are getting that information out as well because we want it to be consistent. the way we do everything else. The second thing we want to get some consistency on is making sure that parents understand that they have options. They have options in English class currently. If they have issue with a book that their child might be

137reading, they can go to the teacher and request an alternate assignment. So what the equity group is going to work on or the diversity group is going to work on will be options as well so parents can choose what they would like ultimately their student to listen to. And they'll be on a much broader spectrum. that some that are, you know, I think one that we were looking at was just about the types of arguments that advertisers use. So for example, advertisers use lots of different mechanisms to change people's opinions about things they use. Sometimes they use fear tactics, sometimes they speak to your emotion, or sometimes they use tactics that say, well, everybody else is doing it, those kinds of things. So that kind of lesson is still getting us to the point. where

138kids understand that they have to be responsible consumers of information and understand that everything is not always the way it's presented. Those are some of the types of lessons that we'll have. So I think by the 11th, we'll be able to have, we'll certainly have it out to... Our parents will have a letter explaining all this to our parents. So those things will be out there and also making sure that we will have the appropriate staff teaching. So if they're history specific, that we have history folks teaching it and so on and so forth. So I just wanted to give you an update on that. And so, like I say, they they've already started work, but they're going to do their meeting again tomorrow to kind of put some more things in place. but I'll

139be willing to answer any questions at this point. Yes, ma'am. I appreciate you digging in and taking time with each one of us to look at the different viewpoints. I know that one of the things that you and I discussed was our policy and whether or not we were following that policy. And it sounds like to me you're going to work really hard to make sure we do. One of the things that our policy states is that we will have community stakeholders who are helping us come up with shared values, that are helping us come up with the lessons. I think if we move forward that from my perspective in order to be in alignment with that policy, we need to not only be transparent with the lessons that we currently have and that work

140that's being developed, but that we find a mechanism to bring in our community around that development. One of the things that came to my attention when this happened was when we talked about our character education, you know, that curriculum. We may have lessons, but. do we have it in a format that can be shared? Like if I were to ask, could I see our curriculum education? That's what I mean. That's what we're talking about. You know, can I see our character education curriculum? Can I see our diversity curriculum? And we don't have that. So I think that is why it seems as if it's not transparent. So as that is being developed, I think it's important that we bring all of our stakeholders together to help develop and create those lessons. as well as definitely

141moving forward, but to have that conversation, at least in order to be in alignment with our policy. And we do make arrangements to bring community members and those kinds of on all of our committees. So the committees I just mentioned 10 minutes ago, we have community representation on those. The Diversity Council has community representation as well. So we continue to strive to do that because we think that it's important to do. And we'll continue to do that. We just need, I think we need some diverse voices to be important. Could I just ask how those community members are chosen? I think the folks on the Diversity Council reach out and ask people if they'd like to be a part of it. Okay, so if we happen to know somebody in the community that would like

142to be on one of these, we can. Sure, you let me know. Okay. Thank you. All right. Number four is FOIA training. So you guys get to be FOIA trained. And on March the 11th, which is our next regular board meeting, we're going to ask that you be here at 5 o'clock. Board Council Frank Wright will be here to lead you through that training. And so that is just a requirement that the board has. And so we're going to provide that training on March the 11th. I just wanted to make sure to provide you with that information and a reminder that that's what we're going to be doing. The next one is virtual. VSBA Spring Forum. So the Spring Forum is something that is held every year. Different school divisions are the host. If you

143remember last year, we were going to be the host, and it got canceled like two days before because everything shut down. We are the host again this year, and so I would like to make sure, and I know you all have received. a bunch of emails from the VSBA on that but if if you if you because sometimes there's so many that it gets it gets lost if you need uh the the link to register uh just let Natalia know we'll get that to you but I would love for everyone to attend it's it's virtual it starts at 5 30 on March the 9th and we will have a performance by the Amaricos. They will do a musical performance for us. There will be the art contest that all the regional school systems will put.

144are into and then the presentation will be about the regional CTE Academy. I will be doing that presentation along with Dr. John Capps who is the president of CVCC. It should take about an hour once we do all of those things and the actual meeting. There's some things that you have to go through from an agenda standpoint. But that will take about an hour and I'd love for you to attend certainly. It's not a requirement, but what time it was. What time? About 30. Can you tell you register us all of us that are going? I think you can. I don't know. OK, so if you'll let her know before we leave, whether you intend to go, then she can do that. Okay, and the last thing I have is at-home learning week school activities.

145So we've talked a bit about the PBLs and some of the things that came with that. But one of the things I want to make sure everybody understands is that we got some pretty amazing products from our students. And even folks that had some real concerns after they spent significant time with... people like Dr. Norman, explaining the process that they became very strong advocates of what was going on because once the students got into it, they became very engaged because it's designed to create something. And when students get the opportunity to create something, it really gets them interested in and they go learn about things that are... are going to help them create that. And so we are going to launch a student showcase website that's going to display a lot of these products that

146came out of the PBLs. We believe it's, I believe, based on what Dr. Norman said, that the website will be live March the 5th, and we'll make sure you have the appropriate link and we get that information out. And that actually came from someone who thought it would be a good idea that had a particular issue to start the week. And so once that person talked to Dr. Norman and they went through it, said... I want what my child did to be shown because it's great. So there were a lot of positives surrounding it, and I don't want that to get lost at all. So those are the last thing I want to talk about, and it's not on here, but I don't want to miss the opportunity to do it. On February 16th, I

147had the opportunity along with... The State Superintendent, Dr. James Lane, and the Virginia Secretary of Education, Secretary Carney, presented the Virginia Kindness Ambassadors Award to Mr. Kelly Holmes, Mr. Matt Giles, and Ms. Kristen Maddox at Amherst Middle School for their efforts to create a culture of kindness at their school. It was all virtual. If you were able to see it, it was a very nice thing to be able to do. Students were able to watch it from their classrooms at Amherst Middle School. And I want to thank Ms. Mollenkamp, who was the one that actually nominated them. and made that happen. I think seven school divisions received in the state received this honor and so very proud of what they've done. And as a matter of fact, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Giles will be here

148at our March 11th meeting to talk about. the VTSS process because the VTSS process is very much in line with what they're trying to do in their building to make sure that kids understand what the expectations are, how to treat each other. And so they want to present that to you guys so you guys also know what's happening in all of our schools from that VTSS model. But I just it came late and it wasn't on the agenda the last time we put this agenda out. But I wanted to make sure you guys knew what was going on with that. Ms. Ligon, that is all I have for tonight. A lot of good stuff, gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, any questions for the superintendent this time on his information? Mr. Masisi, Ms. Wright. All right. Well,

149we are now at what we have to say. Mr. Terry, you want to start us off? Yes, ma'am. So I've got STEM Academy. We had one board meeting this month. Things are still clicking along like always. They've had a few COVID cases like everybody else, quarantined a few classes, but everything's going still as good as it can. I was able to go up to Manelison Middle School for the robotics presentation that the guys did. That's a really neat program if you ever get a chance to see it. My son participated in it many years ago, and it's neat to see it still going. So Peter Garrison is leading it, and he's, I think, a junior this year. So I'm hoping he has somebody who can follow behind him after he graduates and heads on. And

150I did want to thank... I'd like to say congratulations to Kelly Holmes and Matt Giles and Kristen Maddox. That was a neat presentation. I was glad to see them get that well-deserved. And as far as about tonight's meeting, I'm sorry it looks like she had to leave, but Ms. Dean, I want her to know that we are very hopeful that next year brings five days a week. I don't think there's a person in this room who doesn't want to see the kids in the class five days a week. We hope that we can get there next year and hope the governor allows it, hopes the health situation allows it, and let us get back to things. Ms. Mayes also, we got your email. So Ms. Arrington, hope I got that right, the transgender policy that

151you spoke of, We need everybody's input. So thank you very much for reaching out to us. Just let everybody know I got an update. Amherst is winning eight to six at Rustberg. So thanks everyone for allowing sports. I know the kids love it. The parents love it. Coaches love it. I'm not going to say it's what keeps kids in school, but it's a big part of it. And to take that away and to have it lost. especially for the seniors. This is their last year. You hate to see that. But thanks for everybody. Seminole District, Dr. Brown, Mr. Curd, stepping up, trying to get at least some parents in to see some of the games. It means a lot to the parents. It means a lot to the board. It means a lot to the

152school. So thanks for everybody for doing what you could do to help us all out there. Hey, the students, you guys are great bringing things to us. We love hearing about it. We like to try to get to some of the events. And we'll try to log in tomorrow and see the improv stuff. It's a lot of fun. I love watching it. So thanks for all that you do in bringing stuff to us. We love to hear from you. I don't know what to say about all the things that were brought to us tonight. You know, all the different schools have participated. This is awesome. Thank you very much. The presentations that we got on the video, it's it's greatly appreciated. Thank you very much. Yes, sir. No, no committee reports. I'll just kind of

153piggyback off of the gifts. I was actually just telling Ms. Terry before the meeting, I don't like getting this stuff. I'll be honest with you. It's not in my nature, but thankful. It's very thoughtful, and I do appreciate it. We were even bartering some Saunders Market goods up here right before the meeting. But very thoughtful gifts, and thank you all for that. We do this because we want to be involved in our school system, though, but we do appreciate that. The recognition there. I know Mr. Terry already mentioned Mr. Garrison, but he impressed me enough that I want to mention him too. I got the chance, I took my son up to Monolson on the 31st, and we stood there for about an hour and a half or so and talked to the students that

154were participating in the event. And to learn that that was a junior in high school that had the initiative. to keep this program going. I mean, that's that just like Mr. Goldman said, I love I love seeing that because they're the they're the future. And we just see that kind of initiative is very inspiring and. Seeing Ms. Gray there as a teacher, advisor, I guess, for the club, I guess that would be her role, made me think about the STEM stipends, and that's why I brought it up to you because I said, you know, I love sports. I'm a sports guy, but if we can give stipends for sports. Where's our priorities as a school board when we ignore the stem piece? And so that's why I was really encouraged to see that I hoped

155we can get to the point when we start to identify some of the the trades with the CTE that we can adjust our pay scale to represent Market rates for CTE instructors because I think that's the only way we're going to stay competitive with that education So I'll just throw that out there as well Cool video I saw yeah, just see the Henrico County School snow day Man, I want Mr. Wells to do this, but I'll try to share a link with you. They did a really good snow day video that I thought was kind of cool for the kids. Maybe work on a song, and Mr. Wells, I'd like to see maybe your rap skills. Yeah, absolutely. The PBL, I mean, hey, I was up here thumping. I wanted the differentiation piece, and I'll

156still stand behind it. I appreciate it. that, you know, like Ms. Thompson had said, you know, anytime we do something new, you're going to find out the hiccups. The way you guys stepped in and started, you know, the daily messages trying to offer that reinforcement that we're here for you, I thought that was great. I love what my son did. You know, I know not every household in this county has the same benefit to the number of parents and stuff that can devote the time to the students. So I understand the pressure that that committed to a lot of. parents but i hope that they look at the positive piece and the challenge and what the kids got from it i heard stories about how students in middle school uh google met together and worked

157on as a group collaboration so there's innovation there and and opportunities the the last thing i want anybody to do is to see a challenge and balk at it. I mean, that's what we're trying to teach our kids to when they're faced with adversity, when they're faced with a challenge, maybe it may be hard, but we want to teach them to fight through it. At least try it. Don't quit. You know, so I hope we can take that from that, those PBLs. And I look forward to seeing some of those projects. My son did a little flashlight coding thing that I thought was, I loved it, but I can't wait to see the other projects when that comes online. Um, the Reagan, I closed my eyes. I thought I was in the sports center up

158here with the sports updates. Thank you for that. I appreciate y'all's input, and thank you for reminding me. I was originally going to be in Richmond tomorrow, but now I'll be at home, so now I can watch the improv. I'm looking forward to that. And I can't read my handwriting, so I'll just end it at that. But thank you very much. That's good stuff. Mr. Cassisi? This year at some point. That was hilarious. It was so much fun. Anybody that has the opportunity. It's definitely worth your time. 100% central for settings down there. No, it's not. It almost seems a certain cognizance that the system would purpose it. So you guys have done the budget again, it sounds like. Of course, I don't want to get into detail, but the idea of level funding again

159and yet a 3% raise. I know there's some ins and outs, but that is still those that were recognized. That's correct. The state will allow. as we plan the kids in school as much as we can. Ms. Wright? Yes. I have a committee report. Two snow days recently, or snow days and some are remote learning. I guess determines that it's going to be a remote learning day. So what determines that is whether or not we have been in school to download information for our students. So we were able to... So at the end of I guess it was a week and a half ago We knew that that was coming and so we were able to to download information on to all our students and we have to have both Wednesday and Thursday because of

160the a and B days and so We were able to do it on that Thursday that week, but then the following Monday or maybe Tuesday we hadn't had We weren't able to put enough information on there to make it a work at home day. That's one of the reasons why Dr. Norman is working on that SD card as well to put more, because if you know about Chromebooks, there's not a lot of storage space on those things. And so these SD cards are going to allow us to put more information on there so we can go to that. Right now, we want to make sure that we hit our hours that we're required to hit in instruction. And this year, that's been really difficult just with how we're having to go about. And so as

161many opportunities that we can have our students to work from home if there's foul weather, we're going to try to take that. But it really was a function of whether or not students had stuff on their crow book or information. want to say that I know there were some hiccups and there were some really liked how he really expanded our kids with one for their gifts their words of appreciation I know that I appreciate you all and everything you're doing and we are a team working together and I'm proud to be a part of this team thank you ma'am miss Berg Okay, I wanted to say congratulations to our wrestling team, swim team, basketball team. Good luck to our track team this coming Monday. Also, my condolences to Principal Anderson and his family. That was

162sad news to hear today. Also, thank you for the gifts and the videos. They were great. I appreciated to see the videos. Also, thank you to Mrs. Dean for coming up and speaking to us and also to everybody who wrote the emails. I'm trying to see what else I have jotted down here. Oh, a thank you to everyone for the thoughtful gifts to the members. That was greatly appreciated. And also, I was going over some of the agenda earlier today and I came across the... everybody who's retiring and resigning and I just wanted to say we lost a hundred and eight years plus experience and that is going to be greatly missed and it's it's saddening to hear to lose all that that's that's a that's a shame and also congratulations to our ambassadors of

163kindness and I think I Cover just about everything but Thank you to everybody and please keep the emails coming We are here to serve you and to serve you we have to know what you need. Thank you Well, some of this will be redundant But I do want to thank Mr. Holmes and Mr. Giles and Mrs. Maddox for the work that they're doing with VTSS and with their students at school. It was a nice ceremony where they were recognized for their acts of kindness. The reason I wanted to say that was because these were the words that I wrote down in that ceremony and said that they were being recognized for compassion, caring, grace. and understanding that is part of their culture and that they show their students every single day. And I was so

164impressed with that and and their humility. because it wasn't something that they did because they had to. It's who they are. So I was very proud of that. Also, you know, I have realized how much I miss the students today when we got to see Mr. Goldman and we got to. see the videos and see the faces and they're just saying thank you. It's like, all right, made me a little jealous because you guys are out there and you get to see those faces. And it was nice having that brought in. So, you know, the National Honor Society, I had no idea that they had raised that much money for the Salvation Army. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. So I'm just going to say students are awesome. I think that y'all are

165just such making such a difference in our schools and in our community and the sports are ready. The successes that were there, I was just amazed. And I'm going to say right now before I forget, go Lancers, because. You know, I miss the students. I'm missing the football. So it's nice to have that piece and that component. I also want to thank the school system and Dr. Wells just for recognizing once we get our staff taken care of with COVID, just to be willing to open up our schools for the folks that are in the one B category, the 65 and plus. I hear every day how they're just waiting. you know, they're just waiting and the wait list. I was in a Google meet today and finding out that there were only 3000 and

166only half of that went to those that were 65 and above per week in February. So if we're able to do that, I know that our community members would be very, very grateful. I'm just thankful for you considering it. Thank you for all the schools and the thank you gifts. They're just amazing. Every single one of them. When we get home, we're going to dig in. and chow down a little bit, but they're just beautiful. Thank you for that recognition. I know we have a joint board meeting coming up this Monday, Monday, I believe. Yes, ma'am. And I know that you probably have the agenda already set. But when I saw the city video, I'm assuming you're going to do some type of city update about the regional program. I don't know. But if you

167are, that'd be a great video. Yeah, to show I really thought that was well done. And then the last thing is with virtual learning. I know that there's going to be a lot of students who are in that virtual world and they're going to be looking at. almost like an individual learning path. And I just want us to be ready to address that if that comes. I mean, you know, our world could change and next year it's just back to normal. But if it's not and we're continuing down this virtual path, if they're not coming into our school systems and there's some type of. individual think outside the box that we might need to do. Just want to encourage us to do that. We're thinking outside the box with the PBLs. We're seeing great results

168from that. I know video is thinking outside the box. They've adjusted their local verified credits. They've adjusted their seat hours. So as if those type of things come up, I just want us to be prepared of, you know, what kind of process we're going to go through. Some of these kids are whippersnappers and can get quite a lot done in quite a short amount of time. So just something for us to think about. Well, the good thing about being last or not is that you can say ditto. But I don't like to do that. So I'll just say a couple of things here. First of all, Laurel had a board meeting since our last time together. At this point in time, Amherst County has eight students center-based at Laurel. Four are all remote, and four

169are hybrid and blended. Am I right, Mr. Nabors? So Dr. Lewis has continued to do a great job over at Laurel. For VSBA, we are excited on our retreat the first part of the morning. The SBA will be doing a board norms. So we are all excited about that. If you've never been to that, it helps the board quite a bit so we can continue to be as efficient as we possibly can. And I think all of you are getting all the legislative updates daily, nightly, monthly, weekly, hourly, and things are going on. Please be encouraged to contact your senators or your representatives if you see one of those bills that you don't agree with or that the BSPA would encourage you to vote against. So those are my reports right there. I want to

170thank everyone again. I love it when I walk in here. It's like Christmas. I mean that. I don't take it for granted. I don't think any board member takes for granted what we're asked to do, but we do thank you for your gratitude. I learned from my grandmother. She said, don't always say you don't want to say I thank you. And I'm grateful to be here among such wonderful people. I hope I don't kill this beautiful plant. You know, I'm not good with that. But maybe I'll leave it here if somebody can water it. But there's nothing like having a piece of it, especially when I'm going through a little something, something. So Ms. Thompson, you're right. Tonight, you know, we're going to eat, watch some plants, and enjoy ourselves. A couple quick things. We

171are, thank you, Dr. Arnold, for. reviewing some of the things that occurred in our last board meeting and we thank you for the progress that you made. Talking to the board members, also talking to the diversity committee and it's not a word compromise, but having a better understanding. All of us having a better understanding so that we are not going back on what we said. I did say at that meeting that we would be talking about those issues at the retreat, but since you have talked about them to the committee, you have talked about them to the school board. Of course, if the board members have some more questions, we can surely bring that up at the retreat. But we don't want anyone in the public to think that we have kind of pushed this

172under the carpet. So we thank you for what you've done for that. Thank you for the calendar of events. Somebody must have read my mind. I'd like to know what's going on. And all of us are sports people. We can't wait to read and look at all the things that's going on there. And we thank everybody for doing that. And as I conclude, congratulations to Amherst Middle School. That particular day, everything in Madison Heights or my street, Verizon, went completely down. No phone, no internet, so I could not join. But I think, Ms. Molenkamp, or somebody said they might have recorded it. So, Abby, I think you shared some things about that. So we're just doing good things here. CTE with these beautiful videos, the young people up here with the news and update, even

173in a pandemic, we can see some bright lights. I hope you all can agree with that, that people are working hard. And we love, as Ms. Berg said, we love to try to help the community when they email us. As I said before, I may not get back to you that very same day, especially in the last three weeks, but we are reading the letters. We are sending out things like, I thank you for your comments. And that's not meaning that we just ignore you, but I refer those comments to Dr. Arn and his staff so that they can get to the bottom of that. And I think we all want to get back to school as soon as we can, as soon as it's safe to get back. So we are encouraging the community

174to stand by us and stand with us and continue to the transgender, the complaints or not. They're not complaints, they're concerns. So please continue to send them to us and we'll do the best we can to do what we can. Board members, did we miss anything? Mr. Cassisi, Ms. Wright, did we miss anything? Ma'am. What did he say? And as far as the school calendar, let me be clear that we want input from everyone. But we want to get it as soon as we can. Is that right, board? Yes, ma'am. Is that right? Yes, ma'am. So we're going into a closed session. But before we do that, I want the budget. The budget used to be a bad word. You know, the budget now is a good word because we are looking good and we're

175excited about next week digging into the budget. And everybody likes to see what we can afford not to have. So let's bring it on. So we encourage the board members once again to contact the staff and Dr. Arnold if you have pre-budget questions. But come prepared to enjoy the day. For those who have not been to retreat, the new members on the board, we have a wonderful time. Don't we, Abby? We have a wonderful time. And I'm looking at the menu. So, yeah, I'm looking at the menu. Anything else? If not, I'm going to read. I got it. You got it? I got it. Got it. At this time, it is necessary for the board to enter a closed meeting to discuss personnel matters and student matters pursuant to code of Virginia 2.2-3711A1 and A2.

176Do we have a motion to go into closed session? I make a motion we go into closed session. Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. In a close, we are in closed session. We shall move to the next room. I'm Donna Gunnels, the cafeteria manager here at Amherst Middle School. And we're proud to say that we've been able to reach out in our community and provide our children not only with hot, nutritious meals here at school during the day, but also with meal packets in the afternoons to take home. We also have remote pickups at several of our schools where AR families can drive up and pick up meals for home. I'm really excited about what we've been able to provide and I'm really proud of Amherst County Public Schools in the way they have provided

177for not only their students but for their families as well. Hi, my name is Jennifer Fitzgerald and I am the art teacher here at Amherst Middle School. This year has definitely been a challenge, but I feel that a lot of the teachers here at our school have risen to that challenge. In the art department, of course, it's been a real challenge to teach hybrid, face-to-face a couple of days and virtual a couple of days each week. So back when I was making our unit plans for this semester, I was really thinking hard about how we were going to manage that in the art department. And one of the main commitments that I wanted to make to my students was to give them the best opportunities they can to experience as many art supplies and art

178materials and a wide range of art ideas as they could this year. However, I kind of wanted to pull back a little bit from doing a lot of digital art and using a lot of their technology that we do have access to because the students are on their Chromebooks for every other class. They need to be on those Chromebooks to download their modules and do their schoolwork virtually. So I hit it really hard with planning this project-based learning this year. Everything that all of our projects that we have done this year have been hands-on, tangible. The kids are getting into the paint. They're getting into the markers. They're making messes. They're creating beautiful art projects that are actually... in that they can hold and that we can put up for display and not everything on

179the computer. And I really do think that it has worked out really well. They're learning a lot. They're using different parts of their brains. They're learning to think creatively, as we all are finding new solutions to new problems. And we've just had a really great semester so far here at Amherst Middle School. This is one display of our most recent projects from our sixth graders. We did some birch trees. We studied about how they look and the nature aspect of it. We did this great whole big display cabinet. The kids actually got out here and helped me cut out some of the trees and put them up as a three-dimensional display. And their paintings are done with watercolor. and oil pastels. We talked about color families, we talked about color theory and how we mixed

180art materials together. We did a masking technique. They've learned a really lot in something that looks kind of simple, but they turned out really looking a lot of really beautiful. So we've had a really great time here and thank you guys so much for everything you've done to support us and assist us in this semester. Hi, I'm Mary Allison Fitzgerald, eighth grade language arts teacher at Amherst Middle School. I am also the coach for the Virginia tiered support system that we have taken part of with the district. The Virginia Tiered System of Supports, or VTSS, aligns both academic, behavioral, and social-emotional wellness into one decision-making framework to create an environment that is conducive for the best overall learning experience for our students. Here at Amherst Middle School, our foundation is built upon the Big Three,

181and our Big Three are respect, responsibility, and resilience. We strive throughout our day to make sure that we are enabling our students to meet those big three. Our job is to teach, to model, and to promote students being respectful, responsible, and resilient. Our students seem to be doing a very good job of modeling and mastering the big three. Another idea that we have that we use for the VTSS is Positive Behavior Interventions, or PBIS. We look to promote the positive things that our students do within the school building. We try not to fixate on negative things. When we see a student that is doing some great things, we try to catch them at that, make sure that we acknowledge them, make sure that other students see students being acknowledged, and we continue to try and

182promote those positive behaviors that our students are engaged in. One of the best features of the VTSS and PBIS is the buy-in from your staff and to see the family that is built for our students. Amherst Middle School is an extremely special place to be. Hi, welcome to Central Elementary School. I'm Mrs. Ferguson, the assistant principal. I wanted to give you a few highlights of some of the exciting things we are focusing on in the month of February. Of course, the week of February 1-5 is School Counselors Week. Our school counselor here, Lauren Kirshner, has our heart and she does a wonderful job of making sure that our students and staff members are safe. Some other things that we have going on at Central this month include our online yearbook sales, as well as starting

183next week in March, we will be having our Scholastic online virtual book sales. Please look forward to more information coming home with your students. Hi, this is Mr. Adam, the principal of Central Elementary School. A couple of things that have been happening here at Central is this past week we've had the Great Kindness Challenge. It was cut short due to the weather, but we've had a jersey day, we had pajama days this past week. We also had students during their counseling resource time, they were writing on paper chains. inspiring messages about love and hope and we are actually joining with students across the entire nation hoping to break a guinness's world book of records for the longest paper chain ever created in history that was pretty neat also coming up in february the week of

184february 15th through the 19th we are going to have the virginia kindness week we're going to have students participate in random acts of kindness so then look out for that at central elementary school Thanks for tuning in with us. Check back next time for the upcoming events. Go Wildcats! Hello, welcome to Madison Heights Elementary School. I'm Dr. McGinnis, the principal. And today I'm just going to share a little bit about where we are here at Madison Heights as the pandemic continues. First of all, let you know that we are being very safe. We've had great success with keeping the COVID away. And so we're going to focus on the positive things that we're doing here. The first thing I wanted to focus you on is what's behind me. We have created a cultural wall. And

185our culture wall basically represents different cultures month that we have going on. We are celebrating Hispanic month, we celebrated American Indian month, and so now we're doing Black History Month. So every month when we get a culture to celebrate, this becomes our culture wall. This is what our students and teachers wanted to create. And so we want to let you know that we celebrate all cultures here at Madison Heights. In addition... which you will be seeing throughout this video. There are several other great things that's going on and each person will talk about. That area of improvement that we've done through the schools and kids have become a part of, one is basically a STEM program, which we have a, each semester we have an all-day STEM instruction going on. And Mr. Hutchinson is going

186to talk a little bit about that. And then we have a, basically, a Washington Redskin grant proposal that Mrs. Hurl is going to talk about. but we actually got a grant to purchase a washer and dryer to help out our nurses and our students and our families within the area. And Mrs. Baker, I'm sorry, Mrs. Baker will be sharing information about that. Okay? The other great thing we have is last year, and we just heard about it this year, we got a grant from Pacific Life. With that grant, it focuses on technology, it focuses on professional development, and it also focuses on basically teacher improvement. And so what we've done with the technology part is basically the kids have learned how to build and operate. many drones. And so as you see our gifted and

187talented teacher Mrs. Brown and our ITR team, Mrs. Howell, will be talking to you and actually the kids will be talking to you and demonstrating our new drone program that we have developed here at the school. So in spite of all the pandemic things that's going on, the kids are doing a great job, the teachers are doing a great job, but we got other things going on so we're not going to let that stop us. we're going to let you see the great things that's going on here at Madison Heights. Hello, my name is Jeremy Hutchinson and I'm the assistant principal here at Madison Heights Elementary School. And I'm so excited to share with you some of the really great opportunities that our students have had over the last few weeks. Recently, our students participated

188in a school-wide STEAM Day event. Preschool through fifth grade students were engaged in the design process. students were engaged in the areas of science, technology, engineering, art, and math. The STEAM day had a theme of a winter wonderland. Students had to build sleds, they had to also build igloos, and they tested those buildings and those designs along the way. They even had the opportunity to race some sleds. Our students really love the school-wide STEAM Day activities and we are so fortunate to be able to continue those this year in a safe manner. Our students are also really looking forward to another STEAM Day, which we're going to have in March. Hi, I'm Jessica Baker, the school counselor here at Madison Heights Elementary. And last week our students got to participate in the Great Kindness Challenge.

189And some of those activities were helping make this kindness bulletin board. We also did a spirit week where they got to dress up and wear different things just to remember to be kind to each other and to those around them. We had classes do other kindness activities like a 28-day kindness challenge. We had other classes that participated in writing notes to health care workers. We also had students have a day where they wrote kindness letters to their teachers. So it really was a great week for everyone just to focus on being kind and thinking about, you know, when we are kind to everyone else it just instills just great feeling in everyone's hearts. And the next thing that we would love to share with you is our laundry system that we have here and this

190was awarded to us from a grant from the Washington Redskins and it's called Loads of Love. So with this grant they provide a washer and dryer to schools and nonprofit programs and so the goal of this is to reduce the barrier that students may have for attendance. and to also increase parent participation in school activities. And so our idea for this is to have parents be able to sign up and come in and do their laundry right here in school at free of charge. And we also have it available for the school when we have spills or students get sick. And so this is a great program that we're really excited of having here at school. This year COVID put a little bit Stanford and us being able to fully get it started but we're

191hoping that soon we'll be able to open it to our families and to our kids here. Welcome to What's Happening at Madison Heights Elementary. My name is Caleb and I would like to show you our drone project. Thanks to Dr. McGinnis we have been able to acquire some grant money for some of our programs. We are going to use the drones for delivering messages, solving PBLs, and learning about drones in the real world. Hi I'm Jerron and this was a part of our STEM project. We assembled the Code Drone remotes thanks to Mrs. Howell in a YouTube video. This is a great project and we also learned skills that will help us with it. Hi, I'm Rachel and this project taught us how to follow directions carefully, patience, and cooperation. We are also learning how

192to code the drones too. We are looking forward to teaching other students how to fly the drones. Would you like to see us fly them? Yes! Okay, welcome back. So you got a chance to see several wonderful things that we have going here at Madison Heights. The Loads of Love program through Washington Rescue and Grant that we've created. Also our drone program, which ITRT and Gift of the Town teacher put together for our students with the Pacific Life Grant that we've done. and also basically what we're doing with STEAM and also our cultural wall. So even though the pandemic might have slowed us down here at Madison Heights, it has not stopped us. So we continue to strive each and every day for each and every student and also to prove that Amherst County Public

193Schools is second to none. Have a great day. Good evening. My name is Joey Crawford and I'm the principal of the Secondary Amherst Remote Academy. I come to you tonight to provide an update on what's been going on in the ARA first semester and what's to come second semester. I'd like to first say thank you to our students for all of the hard work that you've put forth during first semester. You've accomplished great things and you should be very proud of those accomplishments. Thank you very much to their families also for supporting our students while they're at home. And thank you so much to our faculty and staff for the hard work that you put forth to provide such a wonderful educational opportunity for our students. During first semester, we were able to offer a

194variety of courses for our students. We were also able to test our students in many different ways, including map testing and SOL testing. Right now, it's February, and we're celebrating Black History Month. As of right now, we have a writing contest that is going on for our secondary students in the ARA. We'd like you to participate in this and you can go through your teachers to get more information on that context. For everybody in ARA, if you have questions or concerns, you can reach out to your teachers or your administrators. We also have a website. You can go to the Amherst County Public Schools website, click on Schools at the top, and then click on ARA. All of the information that you could need for ARA will be on that website. We've also updated that

195website to contain a calendar, and on that calendar will be dates for testing, paper packet distributions, and much more. Please make sure that you're, as always, reaching out to your teachers and administrators with any specific questions and concerns that you have. We're looking forward to our second semester and what's to come. Please reach out if you need anything. We're here to help. Thank you so much. Welcome to Eland Elementary School. I am Mrs. Scott, the principal, and joining me today... This is Lillia Saunders, the assistant principal. And we're just so happy to have yet another opportunity to share with you guys the wonderful things that are happening here at Elan Elementary School. So we just wanted to start out in recognition of National School Counselors Week, we wanted to start off by recognizing our wonderful

196school counselor, Ms. Paige Breeden. So Ms. Saunders, let's brag just a little bit before we turn it over to our wonderful school counselor. Tell them all about Mrs. Breeden. Absolutely. Mrs. Breeden is a vibrant, vibrant person. She is full of energy and loves to get things started every day, mostly with our kindergartners, loves all grade levels, and especially school initiatives. Mrs. Breeden has started the kindness challenge with us and many other things. We're very grateful to have her here at EWL. Alright, and so without further ado, again we want to wish Ms. Breeden a happy National School Counselors Week. And at this time, we're going to turn it over to Ms. Breeden to highlight one of our activities for this month that we'd like to feature. Last week, our school participated in the Great Kindness

197Challenge. Students had an opportunity to promote kindness throughout the school and were given checklists to complete these kind acts. Our school is also going to be collecting kind coins throughout the month of February to raise money for the Amherst Humane Society. I'm so excited that our school has been so eager to participate in this challenge and I can't wait to see how much money we're able to raise. Joining us now we have third grade teacher, Ms. Melissa Bussey to tell you all about our fabulous parents here at Elan Elementary School. We are very grateful for our parents here at Elan and all they do for our students and our community, especially recently with all of their donations for our indoor recess program as it begins to get colder and we have to social distance. We

198are very grateful for that and now Ms. Melissa Bussey is going to tell us all about it. Hi, I'm Melissa Bussey and I'm a third grade teacher at Elan and I just wanted to express our gratitude to Ms. Lise King, an amazing Elan parent who spearheaded a program to get each class, each teacher, individual recess equipment. So it's been a challenge this year since we haven't been able to use the playground equipment for recess. So Ms. Fink decided to ask all of our generous parents for some money to purchase kickball, jump ropes, basketballs, and lots of different equipment to play with outside every day. So we now each teacher has enough equipment for their class to play by itself to stay safe and socially distance as well as indoor recess equipment to little individual bock

199games, Legos that kids can play with too. So we are so grateful to Miss Lisey Fink and all of our generous parents who have supported us here at ULIF. All right and next up we have coming before you guys Miss Alex Goins who is one of our wonderful paraprofessionals who heads up our kindergarten hybrid location here. She's done a phenomenal job and she is now heading up our cultural diversity committee here at Eland Elementary School and has some wonderful activities and opportunities in store for our students as we are now in the month of Black History Month for February. So at this time I'm going to turn it over to Miss Alex Goins. This month at Elon Elementary, as part of the cultural diversity committee, we will be celebrating and acknowledging Black History Month. And

200some of the activities that we have planned is a bulletin board trivia of important people who have made such a huge impact in the world. And the kids can interact with this trivia. And we also want to make sure that we make Black History Month tangible and relatable by tapping in with our community and we will be collaborating with the Woodruff family who own Woodruff's Pie Shop and they will be doing a video for us and we will also have other activities planned to celebrate Black History Month. We would like to thank Mrs. Frieden and Mrs. Busty and Ms. Goins for sharing all that information with you today. And we do appreciate you, school board and citizens of Amherst County. Very proud of our Elan Eagles. Yes, and again, thank you guys so much for

201the opportunity to allow us to share the great things that are happening. We know despite the circumstances that it has been a challenge, but as always, we rise to the occasion and we're very grateful for the opportunity and again, very appreciative to our school board. We also want to give a shout out and want to thank Ms. Linda Moorfield for these cool t-shirts that you guys see. As you can see, our students stole our hearts. And if you haven't had an opportunity to check us out, we also have some hearts hanging here in our building in honor of Black History Month. But also know that our hearts thrive for our students each and every day. So again, we're so grateful and thank you again for joining us here at Ewen Elementary School. Welcome to Manalison.

202I'm Angela Penn, your Dean of Students. I would like to take this time to tell you about some of the exciting things that we have going on at Manalison. All February we will be celebrating Black History Month where students will engage in different lessons and activities and learn about historic African American figures, arts, and music. We will then begin our February month with celebrating our counselors as well. Our theme is superheroes because to us, our school counselors are our superheroes. So we're going to take the week to show appreciation and we're going to dress up as superheroes. On February 15th through 19th, we're going to have kindness week where students and staff are challenged to do random acts of kindness. Students will be able to put their kind acts into a drawing to get a

203prize. As you can see, we have a lot of stuff going on in February. And now we're going to hear from Mr. Jacobs and get a report on our sports and athletics. Winter athletics are going great at Manila in this season. We have successfully tried out for boys and girls basketball. The boys team have played three games this so far this year, winning one and then losing the other two with two more left on the schedule for next week pending of course our upcoming snow. We did not have enough girls to try out for a full girls team but AMS was more than willing to take the girls that did try out. So our girls are actually playing on a combined team at that school. The 15th of February we will be trying out for

204volleyball and having a volleyball season that will run just through March. We are also looking forward to having both cross country and football here at Manila Sync coming up. We have successfully live streamed Facebook live for basketball games. and we look forward to doing that for all athletics going forward so the parents have an opportunity to watch their kids play. If you'd love to check out any of our Manalison athletics, please visit the Manalison Middle School Facebook page. Live streams are going to happen, but you'll only find out about it if you like and follow the page. And that's our athletics report for this month. Thank you for that. Now we're going to hear from Peter Garrison, the coach of our Lego Club, in their upcoming competition. My name is Peter Garrison. I'm the captain

205and the person who started the Trobots team here, which is FIRST LEGO League Robotics. I started it... when I was in eighth grade about three years ago. This is our fourth year total doing it with just some old robots that we found from an old class that got discontinued. Only one out of the four robots worked, but we managed to get an award, the judge's award, that first year and ever since then we've been moving on, being able to continue doing all the challenges and everything and working our hardest to do as well as we can while learning about core values and how to engineer along the way. This year is a pretty big difference from other years. The team is down to six, five or six from 20 last year. So that's two full

206teams. And so this year obviously we're having a little bit less meetings. The competition got moved back a little bit. So we have more time with restrict since we have less time. We've had once a week meetings depending on students on their A or B day. And then just recently we started some Friday meetings for students to come in and work, make sure they have everything as finished as possible. Tomorrow we're going to be recording everything and sending it in for our competition. This is going to be the first year that they've done it virtually. Normally we would spend an entire Saturday at a school about an hour away just competing. It's one of the greatest experiences. Hopefully tomorrow will go just as well, if not as many people, but pretty well nonetheless. Hopefully it'll

207go pretty smoothly. Along with that, next Saturday we'll also have the live reviews where we will find out how we did if we move on to the next level in any awards, if any we got. Along with how a lot of teams did. I'm sure a lot of teams have had more challenges than us not being able to meet at all potentially for part of the year. We've been very lucky to have such a supportive school allowing us to... meet the entire school year since we started. As you can see, we have the table here, which is where the robot does all of the challenges. We get this for the entire season and then basically show it off. Each of these challenges, while they don't look very complicated, pose a unique challenge for the robot.

208Keep in mind that you're using Legos for this. Each of these challenges, the robot has to do a different task for different amounts of points. And if you get enough points in all three categories, being the robot game, core values, which is how you work together as a team, and the innovation project, which is solving a real world problem, you get to move on to the next level and compete from teams around the world. This is an example of one of the robots that the students use. As you can see, it's not quite normal Legos, what you see with most sets, but it's very complicated. As you might be able to see, it has an intelligent brick right here, which is programmed using the students' Chromebooks. Then it has various motors and other things that

209you can be attached to complete some of the larger challenges that require a bit more movement. These are not the easiest thing to build, but they definitely pay off as the students get to design them, adapt them to whatever challenges they have that year, and put other attachments on. So being a STEM club, a lot of what we do is related to mostly engineering and a pretty decent amount of math. We do have to use numerical values for distances and angles that we use for each challenge, whether it's an arm lifting something up a certain amount, but not so far that it hurts the motor, or just turning at a perfect 90 degree angle, which can take a lot of work. A lot of these things are involved in this. It's very project based. Each

210program we kind of treat as their own project as they develop it and work on it for at least a week if not longer. Sometimes they take up to eight hours of pretty much straight work. Each of these challenges, like I said, they look pretty simple, but they can be extremely difficult when you're designing with Legos. A lot of the skills that students can learn with Lego robotics can actually be transferred to a lot of other things. I know personally, I found a lot of help with problem solving and critical thinking after my experience in the club, which is why I like to help continue it in any way I can. Of course, with such a lovely looking robot as this, there are quite a few expenses involved. We are lucky enough to have gotten

211numerous grants and community sponsorships, enough so that each student this year gets their own robot to program. There's no issues with having to wipe the robot down for each individual student or anything like that. But even just the competition itself, as you can imagine, this is a decent amount of Legos right here, and they're not the cheapest. Each year we've managed to do enough fundraising and stuff to get enough money to be able to send the kids to the competition and then have a little bit left over for the next year so we can upgrade the robot just a little bit every year. Each donation and sponsorship is a great help even if it's just getting a single rechargeable battery instead of having to buy 30 AA's every single time the robots get low. Thanks.

212So thanks for coming by. If you're watching this on social media, make sure you like, share, and subscribe, and we will see you in March. Bye! We just need one. Thanks, Matt! Good evening. My name is Joey Crawford, and I'm the principal at Tiprins Elementary School. I'd first like to say thank you to our school board, and happy School Board Appreciation Month. We are so thankful to have you in that position. We know that your job is tough and that there are tough decisions that have to be made, but we know that you always make those decisions with our children's best interest in mind. And for that, we say thank you. I'd like to give you an update on what's been happening at Temperance Elementary School for the last few months. In November and December,

213we had a canned food drive at Temperance, and I'm so proud of our students and our staff for their participation in this event. Just before the holidays, we were able to take boxes and boxes of canned goods to donate them to families in need. I'm so proud of our students and our staff for what they were able to accomplish. During that same time in November and December, I challenged our students. I challenged them to read. And during a five-week span, they read over 300 books. And I'm so proud of them. For their reward, I dressed up like an elf on the last day of school before break. And I think they enjoyed that. And I would do it again if it means they're going to read 300 more books. In January, we were able to

214participate in a math-a-thon to benefit St. Jude's Children's Hospital. Once again, I am just so proud of the effort that our students and our staff put in to helping others. In February, we're celebrating Black History Month and we've got a lot of activities that we've accomplished and that we're planning for the future. And we're so happy to celebrate this month and to celebrate those African Americans who have helped to build not just our community, but our country. I would also like to congratulate our fourth grade class on completing the DARE program. They had their graduation in January and we'd like to give a special thank you to Lieutenant Goldman for all of his hard work with our fourth graders. Congratulations to our fourth grade class. I'd like to say that the end of the first

215semester was as smooth as it could be. And I'm so proud of our students, their families, and our staff for all of the hard work that they've put in to make Temperance as great as it could be. I'm looking forward to the second semester and everything that will come our way. Thank you so much. Hello. Today I'd like to share with you how we as parents can help our child or children succeed in Canvas. In this new age of virtual learning, we have many questions and there are a few things that we can do to help our children stay on top of their learning. The first thing that we can do as parents is to familiarize ourselves with the Canvas Navigation Dashboard. Here we have a dashboard for summer school. And on the left, you'll

216see your account is here, dashboard, the different courses, which this class has five different courses. And your child will have different courses depending on what grade they are in, what school they are in. It will depend on the number of courses that you see here. Then we have the calendar and you can link your assignments to the calendar, which is great. Your inbox for communicating with teachers or students, studio, commons and a help tab. So once you familiarize yourself with these buttons here. You will see the actual courses in the middle, and then your to-do list is on the right-hand side. The to-do list is wonderful for helping your child to pace themselves. This way, they won't forget, oh no, I forgot to do such and such assignment. On the right-hand side, it will tell

217you every assignment that they need to do, and typically, there will be a due date. These have no due date because, again, this is summer school, but there will be a due date that will also populate into their calendar. So help them to pace themselves. Once you are within a module, we're going to visit Miss Howell's module here. And I'm going to go to the student view so you can see what it would look like from your child's viewpoint. So they will have some tabs on the left. It will be modules, grades, and announcements. So in terms of pacing, when your child is within the module, they have to start at the very beginning. It will not make sense for them to jump around, and the modules may not allow them to jump around. So

218they need to start at the very first one that it will allow them to click on. And they will read through the module. If there are videos, they will watch the videos. If there are questions or assignments, they will do those. And then there will be a next button where they can move on to the next module. And that will go all the way through the modules. So it is paced appropriately. Ms. Howell has hers paced per week where the student can go in and get their week's worth of assignments done. As with any course, encourage them not to procrastinate. So follow that to-do list that was out on the homepage and follow the modules as appropriate. The next thing we can do to help our children is to use the tools that Canvas offers.

219Canvas does a great job of helping us understand the content. We know especially for young children, it's a lot to take in, a lot of reading that they need to do. And it's hard to sit still and look at a screen for a long time. So one that I'd like to show you is the immersive reader. There is another video that goes into more detail about the immersive reader, but it is very simple. I just want to point it out. It's this little play button right here on the left hand side. So let's say I am back into my module on integers. I can push play and it will read it aloud to me. You may not be able to hear it on the video. But if you cannot hear that, you can see the

220highlighting and I can hear it clearly on my end. There is a voice reading it and there are a lot of different things you can do there. So if you're interested in that, check out the video on the immersive reader. So take advantage of that, especially for your young students so they don't feel overwhelmed. The next thing I would suggest is don't be afraid to reach out for help. Your child's teacher is there to communicate with you and they are just a simple email away. So you can go to your inbox and you can communicate with them that way or you can click down here on the help tab. And it says, ask your instructor a question. So you could email your instructor right from the help tab. So please don't be afraid to help

221out or to reach out and ask your child's teacher any questions or any concerns that you have. The next thing I would suggest is to keep an eye on your child's progress by viewing their grades regularly. So when you click on the grades button. this I'm in as a test student so I don't have any specific grades but it will total it here on the right hand side it will say 93% or whatever the grade is and it will also show all of the assignments that I have taken quizzes tests things like that and what score I got so you can go in this will also populate to PowerSchool so of course we as parents know we want to be checking PowerSchool on a regular basis to see how our child is doing but you

222can also go in right here and check the grades. And then finally, do your best to give your child a quiet space to work that is free from distractions. I know that can be hard sometimes if there are younger children in the house or mom and dad are at home working, but as best you can to set up a space for them where they can focus and succeed. I hope these tips are helpful for you as parents to be involved in your child's learning and to help them be the best student they can be. Hi everybody. So I'm going to show you how to log into your Canvas account as a student. So what you would do is you would open your Chromebook, be signed into your Chromebook, open a tab in Google. You know

223you're signed in. If you see your little icon right here, for most of you that's going to be the first letter of your first name. So to access Canvas, what you'll do is you'll come over here to this icon right here. This is called the apps launcher, or we call it the waffle because it kind of looks like a waffle. So we click on that. And this is the list of all of the apps that you have access to as an Amherst County Public School student. We'll scroll all the way down to the bottom and click on the app icon right here for Canvas. A new tab will open and what you'll see is called the dashboard in Canvas. This will have a list of all of the classes that you are enrolled in. This

224particular student is only enrolled in this one class right here, but once school starts, there'll be a list of all of the classes that he's enrolled in. What you'll do to get access to your class is just go ahead and click on that tile. What opens will be the home page for that particular class. When you scroll down, you'll see the information from your teacher and then just different important information for your class. If you are a secondary student, so you may be in middle school or high school, you might see buttons for Group A or Group B for whichever group that you're in. Elementary students will either see buttons for days of the week, Monday through Friday, where they would then click on the button for that day of the week to do the

225work that they're assigned, or they might see the different subjects, reading, math, science, and so on. So they would just click on the buttons for that subject to get to the work for that day. To get to other classes in Canvas, you can just click back over here on the left on the word dashboard and that will take you back here very similar to the Google Classroom screen where you can access the other courses that you're enrolled in. So there you go. That's how you access Canvas from the apps launcher and get into your different classes. This public service announcement is brought to you by Amherst County Public Schools. Hello, I'm Rob Arnold, Superintendent of Amherst County Public Schools. Unfortunately, the positive COVID-19 tests in Central Virginia and Amherst County have dramatically increased in the

226last two weeks. That is the bad news. The good news is that we can change these outcomes and get our students back to school by committing as a community to follow several health recommendations. So join me in flattening the curve in Amherst County. Join me in social distancing. This public service announcement is brought to you by Amherst County Public Schools. Madison Heights Elementary School, I'm Dr. McGinnis, the principal, and today I'm just going to share a little bit about where we are here at Madison Heights as the pandemic continues. First of all, let you know that we are being very safe. We've had great success with keeping the COVID away, and so we're going to focus on the positive things that we're doing here. The first thing I want to focus on is what's behind

227me. because we have created a culture wall and our culture wall basically represents different cultures month that we have going on. We are celebrating Hispanic month, we celebrated American Indian month and so now we're doing Black History Month. So every month when we get a culture to celebrate this becomes our culture wall. This is what our students and teachers wanted to create and so we want to let you know that we celebrate all cultures here at Madison Heights. In addition, which you will be seeing throughout this video, there are several other great things that's going on and each person will talk about... That area of improvement that we've done through the schools and the kids have become a part of, one is basically a STEM program, which we have a, each semester we have an

228all-day STEM instruction going on. And Mr. Hutchinson is going to talk a little bit about that. And then we have a, basically a Washington Redskin grant proposal that Mrs. Hurl is going to talk about. But we actually got a one- a grant to purchase a washer and dryer to help out our nurses and our students and our families within the area and Mrs. Baker will be sharing information about that. The other great thing we have is last year and we just heard about it this year we got a grant from Pacific Life. With that grant, it focuses on technology, it focuses on professional development, and it also focuses on basically teacher improvement. And so what we've done with the technology part is basically the kids have learned how to build and operate mini drones. And

229so as you see our gifted and talented teacher Mrs. Brown and our ITR team, Mrs. Howell, will be talking to you and actually the kids will be talking to you and demonstrating our new drone program that we have developed here at the school. So in spite of all the pandemic things that's going on, the kids are doing a great job, the teachers are doing a great job, but we got other things going on so we're not going to let that stop us. we're going to let you see the great things that's going on here at Madison Heights. Hello, my name is Jeremy Hutchinson and I'm the assistant principal here at Madison Heights Elementary School. And I'm so excited to share with you some of the really great opportunities that our students have had over the

230last few weeks. Recently, our students participated in a school-wide STEAM Day event. Preschool through fifth grade students were engaged in the design process and students were engaged in the areas of science, technology, engineering, art, and math. The STEAM day had a theme of a winter wonderland. Students had to build sleds. They had to also build igloos and they tested those buildings and those designs along the way. They even had the opportunity to race some sleds. Our students really love the school-wide STEAM Day activities and we are so fortunate to be able to continue those this year in a safe manner. Our students are also really looking forward to another STEAM Day, which we're going to have in March. Hi, I'm Jessica Baker, the school counselor here at Madison Heights Elementary. And last week our students

231got to participate in the Great Kindness Challenge. And some of those activities were helping make this kindness bulletin board. We also did a spirit week where they got to dress up and wear different things just to remember to be kind to each other and to those around them. We had classes, do other activities. kindness activities like a 28-day kindness challenge. We had other classes that participated in writing notes to health care workers. We also had students have a day where they wrote kindness letters to their teachers. So it really was a great week for everyone just to focus on being kind and thinking about you know when we are kind to everyone else it just instills just great feeling in everyone's heart. And the next thing that we would love to share with you is

232our laundry system that we have here. And this was awarded to us from a grant from the Washington Redskins and it's called Loads of Love. So with this grant, they provide a washer and dryer to schools and nonprofit programs. And so the goal of this is to reduce the barrier that students may have for attendance and to also increase parent participation in school activities. And so our idea for this is to have parents be able to sign up and come in and do their laundry right here in school, it's free of charge. And we also have it available for the school when we have spills or students get sick. And so this is a great program that we're really excited of having here at school. This year COVID put a little bit Stanford and us

233being able to fully get it started, but we're hoping that soon we'll be able to open it to our families and to our kids here. Welcome to What's Happening at Madison Heights Elementary. My name is Caleb and I would like to show you our drone project. Thanks to Dr. McGinnis, we have been able to acquire some grant money for some of our projects. We are going to use the drones for delivering messages, solving PBLs, and learning about drones in the real world. Hi, I'm Jerron and this was a part of our STEM project. We assembled the Code Drone remotes thanks to Mrs. Howell in a YouTube video. This is a great project and we also learned skills that will help us with the future. Hi, I'm Rachel and this project taught us how to follow

234directions carefully, patience, and cooperation. We are also learning how to code the drones too. We are looking forward to teaching other students how to fly the drones. Would you like to see us fly them? Yes! So you got a chance to see several wonderful things that we have going here at Madison Heights. The Loads of Love program through Washington Rescue and Grant that we've created. Also our drone program, which ITRT and Gift in the Town teacher put together for our students with the Pacific Life Grant that we've done. And also basically what we're doing with STEAM and also our cultural wall. So even though the pandemic might have slowed us down here at Madison Heights, it has not stopped us. So we continue to strive each and every day for each and every student and

235also to prove that Elmhurst County Public School is second to none. Have a great day.