001and call so there are four of us though in person so we should be okay all right I would like to call this meeting at this work session to order is there a motion to authorize participa electronic participation motion to approve Second. All right. All those in favor of allowing, I believe it is Dr. Chase, Ms. Hollerbeck, and Ms. Young to participate electronically in this work session. Aye. Aye. Aye. All right. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Ms. Hall, if you would like to just read the names so we can. Yes, ma'am. Dr. Chase. Ms. Hazard? Ms. Healy? Ms. Hollerback? Ms. Randall? Dr. Warner? And Ms. Young? She may be trying to get it. Okay. So before we move to the approval of the agenda, I would ask that we... eliminate initially the closed session so
002that we may hear the presentation by Mr. Davis. Then if there are follow on questions of specific legal, we would either go into closed session or have those as follow up questions. Is that all right with the board? Yes. All right. Yes. All right. So is there a motion to approve the work session agenda? Motion to approve the work session agenda with reserving the right to go into closed session if there are questions of a legal nature on the proffers. Second. All right, it's been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, motion carries unanimously. At this time, I'm going to recognize Mr. Landon Davis to come forward and give us everything we ever wanted to know about proffers. Give us an overview because there's been some questions
003and I know that this is a area of the law that has Changed over time. So thank you for coming this evening. Yeah. Well, thank you miss hazard And thank you members of the board for having me here and for the opportunity to speak with you today My name is Landon Davis. I'm a partner at parish need Franklin Simpson in Fredericksburg, Virginia my partner Jennifer parish works with the board a lot and I'm grateful for the opportunity to share what I know about proffers tonight with you. I'll try to keep my remarks fairly brief and, you know, at a high level because you could teach a semester-long class on proffers, honestly, with the amount of changes that have been going on and with the amount of case law and stuff that has been involved with
004this topic. Just generally, I'll start with going over just very basic what is a proffer. The second part, we'll just talk about the evolution of the law as Ms. Hazard. you know insinuated there have been a lot a lot of changes here especially over the last five years to the laws regarding proffers and then finally i'll talk about you know something that i'd actually had a very good time researching and learning about which is what happens after things are approved you know a lot of my experiences dealt with negotiating proffers or drafting proffers or reading proffers after they've been you know executed but i didn't you know, have a ton of experience dealing with proffers after the project's been approved and figuring out how that process works and things like that. So this was a
005good opportunity for me to learn more about that. And again, thank you for the opportunity to do so. So starting just with the very basics, what is a proffer? It's an offer by an applicant during the rezoning process to perform an act, donate money, a product or services to justify the proprietary propriety of a proposed rezoning. It's really part of what's called the conditional zoning process and there's the statutory sites there kind of in parentheses that are the main statutes in Virginia that talk about conditional zoning and that authorize the conditional zoning regime kind of in Virginia. Conditional zoning is a local government's authority to condition a proposed rezoning on certain restrictions, conditions, or donations. And it's always in addition to what is already required by the applicable zoning ordinance. And that's kind of an
006important point to keep in mind. I think proffers are always in addition to what's already. the zoning district the restrictions that are in the district you can't use proffers to lessen restrictions that are in a zoning district so I couldn't take you know if the r3 district and Stafford allows eight units per acre i couldn't proffer that i'm going to get 10 units per acre out of it but i could proffer that i'd only use get five units an acre so i could always proffers are used to make to make the development more restrictive uh never less restrictive and once proffers are accepted by the county they become actually become part of the zoning ordinance they're enforced like they're just part of the zoning ordinance and they're tracked the same way with the zoning map
007which i'll talk about a little later and i think the idea behind conditional zoning and proffers is that you it would allow a proposed redevelopment or a proposed development to become acceptable when it otherwise might not be acceptable for the zoning district that is proposed and so this project may just not fit into the standard zoning district regulations that are in the ordinance so you can use proffers to kind of shave things down and make it fit and you know make a rezoning or make a project that wouldn't work under the normal conditions work by adding these additional restrictions and conditions and the proffers are those conditions and restrictions examples of proffers you know I won't go over all these but you know some there's some simple ones and some cheap ones and some you
008know complicated ones and expensive ones but you know you could proffer additional landscaping additional buffers Noise reduction measures are big around, you know, the military bases, especially up around Quantico and stuff like that. You know, you often see amenities being proffered, community centers, either off-site amenities like community centers or on-site amenities like clubhouses and pools for the actual neighborhood or development that's being built. Phasing is another big proffer you see a lot so that the county won't get all 500 houses at one time. The developer will proffer that they'll just do 50 a year or something like that to kind of ease their way into the ease the impact on the county. And of course the most popular proffer and the one that's most at issue all the time is money. And so that's the
009majority of the presentation will kind of be focused with the monetary proffers in mind. So you know there are certain conditions and certain requirements that and laws that underlie proffers that have been in effect since the beginning of conditional zoning in Virginia and they still continue to apply today. There's a couple easy ones for example they must you know the proffers must be in writing they must be signed by the applicant and the landowner. And then there's some more complicated ones they must be voluntary and again we could spend hours talking about what that means exactly but In a nutshell, it essentially means that the county can't force proffers. It can't be a quid pro quo situation, you know, where the county basically says, okay, we'll rezone this project as you requested if and only
010if you give us. ten million dollars or whatever it is that is that is not allowed so what the locality can do and what has really become an art form is that they can identify impacts the locality can identify impacts that are going to be created by the proposed project and can deny the rezoning if the locality doesn't feel the impacts have been adequately addressed and then of course there's you know a whole lot that goes along with that and there's certain there's certain reasons you can't deny a rezoning and we'll we'll get into those later here along with being voluntary the profits must be reasonable and yeah again you could spend hours talking about these basically It's hard to look at the case law and kind of separate these three different conditions out, but
011they're embedded in the Virginia Constitution and in the statutory law and in case law. But basically, I think the most important thing is that the rezoning and the proffers being made have to be related to the development. There has to be a substantial nexus or a substantial connection there. The project has to give rise to the need for the proffers. um and you know we'll talk more about reasonableness as we go on here it's as i said it's kind of a complicated area of the law there's there's a lot um there's a lot that goes into that another another kind of basic uh foundational aspect about proffers are the timing or the triggering of what uh when does the proffer have to be paid or when does the proffer have to be done and in
012some cases when you're talking about like a specific type of building material noise reduction or you know an up upgraded stormwater management system that you've proffered that's easy it just would you know that proffer would kick in when it's time to build the building or when it's time to build the stormwater management system amenities such as a clubhouse or a pool are typically tied to the issuance of a certain number of building permits or occupancy permits and cash proffers are typically paid at the time you know just before the issuance of the occupancy permit it's kind of a final condition to getting that occupancy permit issued is you know you got to pay your your proffer although recently we have been seeing kind of a hybrid where some developers will proffer a large sum of
013cash up front and then kind of a per door smaller amount as the development kind of develops but that's it's really just kind of a point of negotiation or up to the developer the practical impact of this is that you know there's usually a delay at least with the cash there's a delay in the payment so just because you hear a rezoning getting approved or a project getting approved as part of rezoning and this developers proffered five million dollars worth of cash proffers to schools or something like that you know don't think that that five million dollars is now sitting in the account you know it could be years or you know decades or even you know might not ever happen depending on how the market is or depending on how the development goes so
014just because something's been proffered doesn't mean that money is going to be there um but i mean that goes back to it being tied to the occupancy permits and stuff because the proffers are the the the purpose of the proffer is to offset impact so if the houses aren't built and the proffers aren't paid so essentially the i guess ostensibly the county's in the same place it was you know before the proffers were made So the next topic I wanted to discuss is the evolution of proffer law in Virginia. I'm going to start with prior to 2016. So this goes back to 1975. There was a Virginia Supreme Court case which made exactions illegal and that is kind of where conditional zoning and proffers kind of first started. The court in that case found that
015a locality could not condition approval of a proposed development on providing a public improvement if the public improvement was not related to the proposed development. So you couldn't have a locality say, you know, this You want to build this development over here, build us a school way over here on the other side of the county that these kids won't ever go to or something like that. It had to be related to the proposed development. Virginia was actually ahead of the curve on this. There was a Supreme Court of the United States case in 2013 that found essentially the same thing. So since 1975, Virginia has developed a relatively robust kind of proffer system and there's a lot of case law about this and there's been a lot of cases and a lot of statutes drafted
016and a lot of talk amongst smart people about how to refine this and it's kind of, it's been evolving. What... happened here was because the exactions were outlawed, what it led was kind of to an understanding between developers and the localities that the localities would identify impacts and the developers would volunteer, and I kind of say that with air quotes around it, would volunteer to make voluntary payments to offset those impacts. And this developed to the point that You know, a lot of localities started publishing proffer guidelines, which was something that was common prior to 2016. Here's one from Stafford. I think this is maybe like 2008 or 9 that I found on the internet. But, you know, right here you can kind of see that this was, if you wanted to have a development,
017here were the proffer guidelines that were recommended. You know, if you were going to build a single family home, fire it, you needed to proffer $1,769 for fire and rescue, $1,777 for general government, $649 for the library. $2,837 for parks and $18,028 for schools for a total of $25,060 per single family door that you were going to add to the county. Townhouses were a little bit less because they typically have less people, less children in them, and multifamily were significantly less because, again, it's... I guess research has proven that there's just less impact with apartment dwellers than there are with single-family homes. There's less use of the county's resources. So, you know, most counties had, especially high-growth counties, had proffer guidelines. You know, I pulled some that I found on the Internet from 2013, just
018to give you kind of an idea. Frederick County's guidelines in 2013 were 19,583. Loudoun was 45. Spotsey was 33. Stafford was 50. And what this did is they just kept increasing and increasing. It led to increasing amounts of cash proffers. In 2003, there was $37 million worth of cash proffers. proffered in Virginia and in 2014 there was over 100 million so you can see that there's you know kind of some exponential growth going on there as far as the proffers go. This of course irritated developers and builders to no end and the cost as the cost of development increased and they thought it was unfair and they thought it was you know kind of an exaction really kind of a They weren't getting they were fearful that they weren't getting their developments and approved if
019they didn't you know Pay up what the county said they needed to pay up So in 2013, the General Assembly made a change to the law that provided that cash proffers couldn't be used for improvements to existing facilities unless the improvements increased the capacity of those facilities, and that still actually applies today. I think the hope was this would somehow reduce the proffer guidelines that counties were publishing. But it didn't. They continued to increase and eventually the developers lobby or builders lobby kind of won out and it led to a very large sweeping change in 2016 in the form of the proffer reform bill which was passed in 2016. It only affected developments with a residential component so purely commercial developments. We didn't have to follow this law. The new law barred localities from accepting
020or requesting unreasonable proffers. And it also divided proffers into two categories, on-site and off-site proffers. For the purposes of this presentation, on-site proffers are just what it sounds like, within the boundary of the property that's being redeveloped. So you'd proffer your stormwater management system or your phasing or your pool that you're going to build or whatever. Off-site proffers. address impacts outside the boundary of the property and that includes cash proffers that you're making to the county So in order for off-site proffers to be deemed reasonable they had to be specifically attributable to the proposed development They could only address impacts to four categories whereas before you know on that Proffer guidelines we looked at they had libraries and general government proffer categories now that off-site proffers can only be used to address impacts to transportation
021public safety schools or parks And they would only be deemed reasonable to the extent that the rezoning creates a need for one or more public facility improvements in excess of existing public facility capacity, and that's important, and I'll discuss that in more detail in the next slide or the two slides from now. And finally... the offsite proffers wouldn't be deemed reasonable unless the development received a direct and material benefit from the proffers. So this unintentionally kind of created a few problems or maybe intentionally created a few problems. I don't know, but it definitely created some problems. uh first the locality could not accept unreasonable proffers so even if the developer made the proffers and offered the proffers and said hey i want to do this and i think this is reasonable the according to this
022law the county could not accept unreasonable proffers so It led to it kind of flipped the burden back onto the county and now the county had to kind of do their own research and figure out if these proffers being offered were were reasonable and you know, I think they It turned out they were erring on the side of caution and were very scared to do anything. Second, a locality could not request unreasonable proffers. So not only could they not accept them or require them, but they couldn't even request them. So, I mean, I think in... I had some experience dealing with some rezonings during this time and you know my experience was that the staff wouldn't even talk to you almost. They were so scared about saying something that could be deemed to be unreasonable
023and it just really limited communication and conversations and negotiations and thinking outside of the box. Third, no one, I think the law hadn't been fleshed out enough at that point and no one was really sure what an unreasonable proffer was there was no guidance on what specifically attributable or what direct and material benefit meant so again everybody was just kind of scared not knowing you know what was reasonable and what wasn't reasonable and then this last one which i was talking about which was it's you know an off-site proffer could only be reasonable to the extent that the rezoning created a need for one or more public facility improvements in excess of existing public facility capacity so you know the best way to kind of Delve down into this one is I think in hypothetical
024if a proposed development would create a hundred new elementary school students and the local elementary school that served that development had capacity for 99 new students then it would be deemed unreasonable under this law for the county to accept or request cash proffers to offset the impact of more than one student that would be created by that development. So it only took in, it kind of just took a picture of what was happening right then at that time versus what might be happening, you know, in the future. If there was capacity at the school, for example, you couldn't accept or request a, you know, proffer, cash offsite cash proffer to offset the impact of these new students that would be created by this development. Finally, if a locality breached this law, it meant that the
025developer was entitled to his attorney's fees, cost, and immediate approval of the rezoning application without the unreasonable proffers. So that's a pretty serious... pretty serious end result for the county if they messed up there that's a bad result for them so again the effect of this was there was a rush of applications before July 1st 2016 which was the date that the law kicked in so everybody every developer in the world was trying to get their application in before July 1st 2016 so they could be under the old proffer regime which everybody knew and understood and was comfortable with which led to a much greater chance of your application being approved than under the law after 2016. As I mentioned, I think at least my experience was staff was just scared or very hesitant. They
026would not even talk to you about basic stuff. Some localities, I think Fairfax was the most widely publicized. flat out refused to accept new rezoning applications until the law was clarified rezoning applications dramatically were reduced which some people including some stafford supervisors thought was great you know the people who don't like growth thought that was awesome and They were fine with that. However, you know, a lot of other people weren't. So the law was revised in 2019, which brings us kind of to the present, 2019 to the present in our current proffer law. So the Proffer Reform Act was modified. The word request was changed to require. There's also this which I think is probably the most important thing in the whole The whole bill here was that the applicant can submit in a locality
027can accept any proffer The applicant deems reasonable as evidenced by the sign proffer So now at this point if the applicant makes a proffer and signs the proffer and says I think this is reasonable Then the count the analysis can stop there. The county doesn't have to worry that it's not reasonable. You know the applicant basically waives their right to contest that. There's also some catch-all language that was added to promote open discussion between a developer and the localities. So just kind of in summary here the current proffer law probably you know there's still a lot of the Holdovers from the case law and the Constitution of Virginia and some of the statutes that I cited at the very beginning. You know, a couple easy ones. Proffers must be in writing. Proffers must be signed.
028Proffers must be voluntary, no quid pro quo. Proffers must be reasonable. meaning there has to be this essential nexus to the development that the rezoning must actually give rise to the need for the proffers. And for residential developments, that's kind of all proffers. For residential developments, that Proffer Reform Act as modified in 2019 now provides that a locality cannot require unreasonable proffers or deny a rezoning application based on the applicant's failure to provide an unreasonable proffer. for residential developments off-site proffers will be deemed unreasonable if the proffers are not still have all this language specifically attributable to the development the proposed development does not receive a direct and material benefit and unless the development creates a need in excess of existing capacity so that existing capacity issue is still there the off-site proffers can still
029only be made with respect to those four categories and proffers made for existing public facilities are only reasonable if it expands capacity of an existing facility and that's that 2013 law we talked about. So again that's still a lot of restrictions, still a lot of uncertainty, but again this has been, you know, again it's been mitigated somewhat by the ability of the applicant to consent to the reasonableness of it, in which case the analysis doesn't really matter after that, after they consent to it, the specific language to allow for the open discussion. So... What does this really mean in practice? Again, I tried to summarize it and give a few examples here. A locality can't require or premise a denial on the failure of the applicant to include an unreasonable proper. So if a rezoning
030is denied, the denial has to be tied to the failure of the development to sufficiently offset impacts. and it has to be done in such a way as to not violate restrictions so the board couldn't deny a garrison bill project based on the failure of the proffers to address a school capacity issue in hartwood you couldn't deny a project that was creating 100 students based on the failure of the applicant to proffer money to expand school capacity if the school capacity in that you know area would allow for an additional 100 students you couldn't deny a project or the board couldn't deny a project that failed to proffer funds for schools based on a perceived need to upgrade the sports facilities at the applicable school again if it's an existing facility you have to you
031have to be expanding the capacity of that facility and you couldn't deny a project that failed to proffer funds for the library system because you're limited to those four categories of off-site proffers So that was kind of a summary of the law and how it's evolved and how it currently stands. The next section is what happens to proffers after a project's been approved. How can proffered funds be used and how are they accounted for? I underlined for there because I ended my sentence in a preposition and I know I'm in front of the school board here. So how can how can profit fund be used? If the proffers that are written actually call for a specific purpose then the proffers have to be used for that specific purpose. So if a proffer says hey you
032know this is we're proffering ten million dollars to offset impacts and to you know contribute to the construction of high school number six or something like that then you know they have to be used to construct high school high school number six the specific use that's being called out must already be in the capital improvements plans there's some exceptions to this which are you know pretty narrow but I won't go into but for the for the most part the the capital improvements have to be in the the purpose has to be in the capital improvements plan and if it's used to upgrade an existing facility it must expand capacity again that's a 2013 amendment uh there are two exceptions to that um one is if the cash proffer is made for road improvements it can
033be used as the county's matching funds for the smart scale and the second is cash proffers can be used for an alternative improvement so if you have specifically called out a use in your proffer statement the county can choose to use it for something else only if the funds can no longer be used for the original purpose in a timely manner where the original use is no longer applicable so if you know it was for a new height school and they for some reason are not building a new high school anymore then you can build then you can use that money for a different use alternative improvements the alternative improvements have to be within the vicinity of the original proffered purpose so it has to be kind of in the same district or the same
034area and alternative improvements have to be in the public have to be in the public interest If a specific purpose is not set forth, so a specific use is not called out as, you know, the use of these funds have to be used for this specific thing, then you kind of just fall back to the overarching principles we've been discussing, the reasonableness factors, the essential nexus, the location, things like that. Accounting for proffered funds. So upon approval of rezoning the zoning map has to be amended to account for the conditionally zoned land The zoning administrator must keep a conditional zoning index setting forth the properties with proffers and a record of all cash proffered received cash proffers and expended expenditures Each year the locality must submit a report to the Commission on local government, which
035is run by the Department of Housing and Community Development And the capital improvement plan has to include a listing of all the cash proffers received during the most recent fiscal year. And each capital budget must include the amount of proffered cash payments projected to be appropriated for capital improvements in the ensuing year. The funds must be used within 12 years from the date that all funds are received. If they're not, they get forfeited to the Virginia Transportation Board, I believe. But again, given that you can use all things for alternative purposes, usually that's not really an issue for localities. So in summary... The funds have to be accounted for and disclosed to the public in numerous ways the Board of Supervisors can appropriate the funds for permissible purposes the permissible purposes would be if a
036cash proffers been made for a specific purpose then it has to be Used for that purpose unless the locality can demonstrate that one of those alternative uses is appropriate And if the cash proffer is not provided for a specific poor purpose then the board can appropriate it provided that you meet all the reasonableness conditions, the essential nexus, benefit to the project. To me, this essentially means that those funds have to be used for within the vicinity of the proposed project. if it's of the proposed project the improvements that they're being used for have to be set forth in the CIP and if you're using it in condition with existing facilities again you can only use those to expand the capacity of those facilities so that's my presentation on proffers again I appreciate the opportunity to
037research that don't go anywhere I think we'll have some questions I'm going to see up here if there's somebody here and then I'll go to somebody who's online any questions from in person here Ms. Healy where oh no I thought sorry I thought you were waving anybody questions if not I can yeah okay anyone who's online have a question yeah I do okay is that is that Dr. Chase I'm sorry it is okay go ahead so you spoke a lot about cash proffers and I was curious about land proffers you said that the cash proffers for the most part had to be used for this stated purpose so if land site is proffered for say a middle school can it be used for some other purpose Yeah, you know, I think you'd have to look
038at that on a case-by-case basis, and you'd really have to get into the details of that, so I hesitate to give just a general answer to that. I think, but to not totally cop out of answering the question, I'll say that I think, you know, you would definitely have to use it if it was proffered for a new middle school. You'd have to use it for schools, I would, you know, I think, based on everything I've read and researched here. So you don't think you could use it for a park and fitness center? You can if the Board of Supervisors approves it which they did as you are as we all know in Embry-Mill so so but I didn't see anything from the presentation that said that the Board of Supervisors could choose to change
039the purpose after it had been proffered but maybe that's new to the law yeah you know I hesitate to question the decision-making of you know and the advice that I'm sure the county attorney gave and the board's you know the board's decision there without having the full set of facts At a high level, that sounds questionable to me, but again, I would need to look at everything. There are plenty of caveats in this area of the law and plenty of loopholes and things like that. I would hate to just affirmatively give you an answer that might not be accurate without looking more into it. and Dr. Chase I'll be sure that I share with the board the letter that was sent to the board of supervisors when that was done concerning the suitability of the
040swapped piece of land for the middle school at Embrey Mill I'll make sure that's sent to the board great and then I had a second question just when we when you were talking about capacity and sort of cash for for students. So let's say that the school has 50 seats left and this subdivision is going to add 100 students. So we're short 50 seats. If we redistrict to move some kids out in order to make room for these new students. add capacity to a school that's further away that is going to take the 50 students that are being displaced by this new subdivision. Yeah, I'm sorry. Could you ask that again, please? I'm not sure. Yeah, I know. No problem. So let's say that I have a school and the school only has 50 seats
041and the new subdivision is being built in that district and we'll add 100 students. So we're going to be 50 seats short. Yeah. So we redistrict. the way we want to solve this problem is to redistrict and move some of these students to another school but we have to add say a wing to that school would that be allowed or would we need to add the wing to the school that that's in that district that's a good question I think once the You know again This is just very high level without knowing the details. I couldn't give you a sure answer on that But I think once it was redistricted then that new district would you know essentially qualify as being the same as the The old district which I know is a weird way
042to say it. But yeah, I think you could I think you could do that I don't think you'd have to build the wing first. That's my off-the-cuff answer to that without having more facts It's just hypothetical. Thank you I'm gonna jump in and then I'll go back to those online because my question sort of follows that question to me the most problematic part about proffers is we're picking capacity on a day that we approve a rezoning the problem is many times or what has happened in Stafford it's not built for seven years ten years maybe next year but more than likely it's been many years later so the capacity question is very different seven years later how do we can that be handled in proffers because I know their future or can do they have
043to be set at that Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, that's something that capacity issue is maybe you picked up on was something that really kind of stood out to me and kind of was something that surprised me a little bit, to be honest with you, as I really got deep, you know, into the specifics of what was allowed to be, you know, what was a reasonable proffer and what was an unreasonable proffer. I think there is probably an issue, you know, just again, me just not having. experience with designing school districts or you know worrying about capacity and stuff like that but i think just common sense tells you there's going to be a lag there or something like that and it's going to be you know you're going to be always a
044little bit behind it felt like you know those those proffers that are supposed to end up you know uh offset those impacts might not be there at the exact time that you know it's just kind of this weird balancing act that i think the schools unfortunately might end up on the short side of a lot um So is that something to me that we need to consider from a legislative fix? Because you need to get you want to be accurate. They seem to want to make sure that it's accurate, but it's not accurate. If five years later this is approved, that school may look completely different in five years. If you live in Stafford, it's completely different. So I'm trying to also say, how do we solve some of these? Because when we get the
045proffers for 50 students later we may be at 150 students and then my other comment and we can this is something we can work on legislatively when we talk about that that new subdivision generates a hundred kids and they say oh but there's only 50 in there How can we also say but there's five other new neighborhoods that have been approved over the last five years who are also generating 25 or 75 more kids It's not accurate to me especially do you see what I'm saying? We're only and I believe they take that into I believe they take the other developments capacity, you know addition into account when they're when they're Analyzing the new development. I believe that the additional kids from those previous developments that haven't come online yet are taken into account There
046are 25 kids in Development a that was approved six months ago We come in with 100 kids and there's another 50. If you're only doing it based on the new one, your numbers are completely off. Does that make sense? It does make sense. And, you know, to be honest with you, I had kind of the same question, and I think that might be something we should dig into a little deeper, maybe talk to Mr. Harvey or something like that and just see exactly from a practical standpoint how that is, you know, handled by the county. Because I had, truthfully, the same question. if it's the way you feel that it is then that's a real problem I think obviously just again me not having any special knowledge about you know designing school systems for the
047youth and stuff like that but just from a common sense standpoint it would seem like that would be a problem so yeah I what you're saying makes sense I guess is the all right is there anybody else who's online and then I'll switch back yes yes go ahead Yes, thank you so much. I've been beaten proffers over the head for a while. So thank you so much for the presentation. It was refreshing to hear some questions and answers that I already had in my head and gotten the answers. But I just wanted to go back. to something you said. I'm not going to question you again on some of the things that I heard, but I think that we may, you may have to go and revisit and get some more information on what Dr.
048Chase and Ms. Hazard asked, because I'm not sure if that's accurate, actually, because if you think about it, that... you know, if we're redistricting every time, every three or four years, because we don't have enough seats in the school, and that you cannot track the number of kids coming in and out and say, yes, we could build here, but you can't build there. Especially the developers are stating, okay, this proffers is for this particular district. And now you're crossing districts. and saying okay now this other district could use that money so i think that needs to be some kind of approval process in there right and so i'm trying to figure out if there was approval process when they took um the land of the um elementary and i'm not sure if it's the middle
049school also and used it for the the rouser center and now that that land that is not it's now uh available for the elementary and the middle school it's not adequate because it's the wrong grade what happens to the new school and the proffers if that proffers were supposed to go to that elementary school and now it's not going to be there because the land is not good so i'm not sure if you can answer that question but that's something that has been um you know one of my concerns that We are busting out the seams at Park Ridge and we put all the kids together as we're supposed to, but now... What do we do from here? And then that was one question I'll give you some time to answer. Yeah. And thank you
050for bringing that up. And I just, I do want to say, you know, I'm a real estate attorney. You start talking about redistricting and stuff like that. That's a fairly specialized area and not one that I came prepared to talk about. So you may very well be right. You know, to the extent I gave an answer, I just kind of gave it off the top of my head based on, you know, what I've been seeing here. So, you know, I'm sure there's, like I said, I'm sure the county attorney and the board studied that issue. You know, I hate to substitute my judgment for theirs. And I guess I'm caught a little flat footed by that question. So please don't. you know, take anything I'm saying as absolute gospel or anything like that. Yeah, yeah,
051yeah, sure. And again, if anybody wants to provide me with these questions in writing after the fact, I'm more than happy to, you know, have a little time to research them and look into it and stuff like that and get back to you with a more substantial and probably, you know, well-placed answer than the one I gave. This one is straightforward. This one is straightforward. The 2013 amendment, right? What, if anything, so I'm hearing some things we could get authorized and some things we can't. Off of the three R list, and I don't like the fact that it's on there and that we could probably use it for, what is it called, buildings? So that is something that increases capacity automatically, right? You're talking about the 2013 amendment? We place and add storage buildings, which
052are, you know, what those are, right? So that could be covered, right? You know, again, I'd have to look into the very specific, you know, cases that apply to that. You know, to me, capacity meant human capacity, but you know how lawyers are. They can make things. make words mean, you know, you have different meanings. So I would have to really delve deeper into that specific law and that specific how the courts and how the General Assembly has been defining that to give you a fair answer on that, I think. Okay. And another question I had was, okay, so that the time we cannot build because we have certain years that we want to build a school or, you know, we want. we want to be built by like, as Hazard mentioned, you know, we
053look at capacity, we look at the seating itself and how many kids that we actually have that are coming on. And so if we don't have a school and we have the kids, but yet we are ready, but the county isn't, does that count? Like, so is the count going by? the county years versus when we need it. So say for example, we're saying we need it now and it's within that year that is eligible. So, you know, year nine, for example, and year 10 comes and year 11 is when they're saying, okay, you know, we could build it in 11, but we're saying we need it and we want it built in nine and the profits are available. Will we lose the profits if at the 11th year and if that's something that, I'm
054not saying that is purposefully done, But if that's the case, do we have some elect to stand and argue and say, you know, we've had this already, we've wanted it, and it should have been here, we were ready for it kind of thing. So you're talking about the 12 years you have to use the profits before they're lost to the Department of Transportation? Yeah. Yeah, so on that, one thing I'll say about that is the first thing I'd like to point out is that it's 12 years from the date that all the money is collected, not just the first money is collected. So, you know, if you have a relatively large development, those proffers, you know, a lot of those developments get built out in, you know, five or ten or even more, you know,
055you know. I know like Lee's Park, for example, in Spotsylvania has been going on for 20 some odd years now. Fawn Lake in Spotsylvania County has been going on for 40 years or something like that. So, I mean, you know, you have a lot of time. If you're worried about some nefarious actors trying to purposefully delay it so they can use the money for something else, you know. if the if the profit is specifically for a specific capital improvement and not just a general you know to offset the impact on schools but it's specifically for building a specific school or something like that then that money has to be spent on that specific project within the 12 years from the date the last payment is all the money is collected. And it can be spent
056on anything from engineering to site work to, you know, it doesn't have to be actual, you know, hammer and nails construction. It can be, you know, a lot of pre-development work or, you know, studies and things like that. But again, I guess if somebody was really trying to delay that on purpose so they could use it for something else, that might not save you. So, I mean, to be honest with you, the Board of Supervisors has a lot of power here. I guess that's the extent of my answer there. You're welcome. So I'd like to say to Board, Dr. Warner, and then we're going to try and keep an eye on our time that we may have this come back, but I want to certainly give you a chance. Yeah, I'm sorry. It was just
057a lot of information to process. So to piggyback on what Ms. Young said, you talked about the 12 years. That clock starts ticking when the last of the proffers are. are paid in so if in capacity then we start measuring from that date so say half the houses are built and we have 100 students but we anticipate that when all 500 of those houses are built we'll have you know a thousand students so we can't we can't start planning for that school until all the proffers are in or can we start planning for that capacity using the proffers that we have you can you can start you they can appropriate they don't have to wait till all the proffers are collected they can use the proffers as they can we start planning for the anticipated
058capacity even if all those proffers aren't in I don't see why you couldn't start planning for it again this might be a little out of my wheelhouse here, but you might want to just be careful doing that based on, you know, if the market changes and, you know, there's a lot of developments, you know, especially maybe not in Stafford might not be as necessarily as prone to this as some other, you know, more rural localities, but, you know, there were tons of proffers and tons of neighborhoods in like Caroline County and, you know, the further reaches of Spotsylvania, lots of money proffered for those subdivisions back, you know, before 2008. they're still sitting there with not a single house built. So I don't know if you'd want to base your... Too much, you know, you
059want to base your entire long-term planning on that You're definitely going to get this money because you might not yeah, I think it's a takeaway that In my second question, it says to upgrade existing facilities. This is also piggybacking on something miss young said Upgrading existing facilities must expand capacity if we add say a fine arts wing or something like that and we repurpose other space in the building and it now becomes capacity. Does that count? I would think so. Again, please, I'm just, you know, I would think it would. It did when we expanded Mountain View, Brook Point, and Colonial Forge. Those were all, and proffers were used for some portion of those expansions. I'm looking at Mr. Fulmer. I'm pretty sure that that was correct. At least for two of them, I was
060on the board and approved it. Some portion of proffers went to the expansion at Mountain View and Brook Point. And I'm pretty sure Colonial Forge, but I know the other two were because I voted on it. I think you could read that pretty broadly, I think, that term. So it doesn't have to necessarily be just seats in classrooms or something like that. I mean, if you're adding space so you can repurpose other areas, I think that would more than apply to that. So what I'm going to say to the board, I know we may still have additional questions. I will pull the board so you may come back when we do that. I would just want to draw the board's attention to the attachment that shows in the FY 2020 proffer balance, there's about $5
061million, a little over $5 million. Of course, we recently received a document within the last month or two. um in one of our recessions that actually the current balance now as of today is closer to over six million dollars that we have in the available proffer and it's just in the bulk number so Mr Davis thank you for coming you may be back yeah thank you all very much for the opportunity and i appreciate it and i hope it was helpful yes thank you tonight he might be back because i'd say if anybody has questions let's just take advantage now I mean, I know we're going to be running late on the other parts, but I don't want to ask Mr. Landon-Davis to sit here while we're going through redistricting. Madam Chair, his email address
062is part of this document. I'm wondering if it wouldn't be more prudent to send questions in writing and give him time to maybe get more. To the extent that the questions are more specific, as some of them have been, I would appreciate the opportunity maybe to have a little time to look into that and not say something that I regret later. Well, and for everybody, some of this was a lot to take in, but it was very helpful. We may think of questions later. I would ask the board if, as you think on this and you come up with your questions, let's send them to Ms. Hall. We'll coordinate with Mrs. Boatwright and such on how we would want to go forward with any future work. That would be great. I appreciate it. Thank you
063for coming. Okay. Thank you all very much for having me. I appreciate it. All right, our next issue as we move forward is about revisions to the redistricting policy of 1403. Let's see. All right, there was. included in this is the board's current policy there is also an example from Fairfax as well I know this was requested to come back any Ms. Randall, any comments? Yeah. So governance committee came up, had this policy come through as we were doing our regular policy updates. And in this was an administrative change to change the percent of enrollment that was allowed to be moved. And that seemed to be. little bit of a sticky point so one of the things that we did was we went back we were asked to bring it to a work session and
064so we went back and we looked at some other school policies and one of them that we kind of landed on was Fairfax's policy because it broke down the the ability for the superintendent to, and also notification. That was another thing, was making sure board members were notified of these changes, especially if it affected their district. So we brought forward the traditional policy that we have. We brought forward a Fairfax policy, but we also know that there were some board members that had suggested maybe we could do the 5% for middle and high and the 10 for elementary. But then there was a little pause on that as well because as we look forward to next year and the conversation is going to be coming, I believe we said October, I think end of October
065after we get the September 30 numbers, I think we talked about this in FAB, and where we would have an idea of what schools might need some redistricting and so i guess the cause for pause was how many schools would be up for redistricting without the benefit of a public hearing and if it was maybe just two schools that were involved that was a little bit more okay than to maybe have six schools involved and 10% of six schools versus 10% of two schools. So this is up for discussion for our board for some thoughtful conversation and solutions. Ms. Healy? Looking at the Fairfax policy here, and that seems to be in line with our current policy in terms of the administrative boundary adjustment, less than 5% of the enrollment of each school will be
066affected. an analysis indicates a change will prove the operating efficiency of the school division isn't that but then there's the okay but look look well but but if you look closely and i i just glanced at this so i haven't done a close read but looking at it it says that the administrative boundary adjustment is where the superintendent is authorized to administratively adjust school attendance areas and that's the less than 5% on each one. The expedited boundary adjustment says that the superintendent is authorized to recommend expedited adjustments to school attendance area. So I would say that that is really still our emergency. Well, but the point is that the superintendent on his or her own cannot administratively adjust in Fairfax. Anything that's going to have, if I'm reading this correctly and I've just seen it
067now, anything that would affect 5% or more of each school. This is to recommend versus to administratively adjust. So I'm just curious as to how this was interpreted. I think we were looking at possibly trying to figure out what are some other percent numbers that would be acceptable or looking at what other districts are doing. But definitely it's not anything that we would say, let's just do this. It would more or less just be just a topic of conversation as to where someone else is doing something. And I think in that regard, it sort of fits what we've said, even with our Oh, I think it's been so long since I've looked at this, but I think it was the emergency option that our superintendent would have if he needed to do more than the
0685%. Oh, yeah. Emergency requires such a change. OK. But this is very different from what was proposed to our board. that the superintendent could, on his or her own authority, make those adjustments. This says that the superintendent can recommend it to the school board, and the school board is the one that takes action. I was the one that was most concerned with that, what I would consider a substantive change in the policy. So I don't. I mean, I don't see this as that much different from what we have. I mean, if we want to give an opportunity for recommendation, certainly in an emergency situation, I wouldn't have a problem. But I am not in favor of giving authority to anyone in an administrative, albeit a superintendent position, to just unilaterally make those changes that affect
069more than. 5% of our students you know in the schools so. Ms. Healy can I can I ask you a question I guess the concern that you had was not having public comment or a public hearing on any of this stuff. Well my that's part of it it's not following the process my concern is just doing it unilaterally. and the school board making the ultimate decision and even even in what's given to us here in Fairfax the school board makes that decision not the superintendent gotcha okay thanks and we also have to keep in mind a few months from now we're going to have three brand new members to this board who have to my knowledge, not been on a school board before. So that's another factor that's going to have to be taken into
070consideration, I think, as well. We don't want to be changing policies without having a valid reason. And this is not a reflection on the governance committee, but I think on the governance committee was three pretty new members as well who hadn't gone through this. this whole redistricting process and had a opportunity to feel the impact on the community from any of these redistrictings. I think that one of the things that we discussed as part of the governance committee, and this was a while ago, is that I understand and I agree with you about giving unilateral authority to an individual to make these adjustments that clearly have an impact on the community. I think what we were trying to do is find some wording that was a little bit more expansive so that we had, for
071example, the expedited boundary adjustment. proposal is made to the school board the school board has to vote on it as an action item I think that's different from the policy we currently have but it puts the decision-making in the hands of the school board so that when we have because we're going to have more overcrowding at more of our elementary schools and and we're going to have to make some of these expedited adjustments because It seems very likely, given when we look at Rocky Run, we had to add the trailers. We've got overcrowding at Park Ridge. Moncure is bursting at the seams. We have a lot of schools that are going to fall into that category. I think what the governance committee was trying to do is find a way to expand the policy we
072have so that it reflected the issues that we're going to be facing but still left. the power in the school board's hands of making the final decision so I kind of like the Fairfax policy just because it does expand on that but I agree with you that it shouldn't be a unilateral decision but I don't know that we want to be redistricting every year until we get a new elementary school which we may not get for a decade I have a recommendation or just a comment chairwoman Sure, go ahead. Yeah, so say... the superintendent, he or she recommends a change, regardless if it's 5%, 10%. And it comes to the board and the board has, you know, public, you know, a public meeting. And we have parents that come in and, you know, make their,
073you know, tell us what it is that they're thinking. And we then decide what we are going to continue with what we're doing. Or do we then reconsider and say, yeah, the superintendent, he knows, he or she knows what's going on. And it looks like, you know, a good idea. So I'm not saying that we're wasting the time. But when would we then... say no to the superintendent because the public that came out and voiced their opinion um that we went along with that opinion and not with those individuals that actually are on the ground and know what's going on so how do we balance that and is that any language in there in this documentation here and i'm looking to see if we have anything to say we could, what emergency means. Like, you
074know, when is it considered an emergency that it shouldn't have come to the board or even be open to public comment? I'll take just a quick comment on it. But one of the few specified duties of the school board, we pass a budget, we pick a superintendent and we redistrict. All wonderful things. so for me knowing that that is an actual specified duty i think that that is the whole point of redistricting is how to balance those and that is what the school board is elected to do how that is worked out among the board is is how this works that balancing the hearing and recommendations I believe that's why I think there is some recognition that in certain circumstances over a small amount five percent is what's been used I believe in the past
075that there would be board involvement it may be on a more expedited basis potentially or at least that's how i read the fairfax example that it may not require the three months or so that we have done through other redistricting because there may be circumstances but I believe that is actually what the point of this policy is trying to figure out that right balance and whether we should change what the balance is right now So I guess the question being posed is our board members currently fine with the language that we have or do we feel like we need to raise that percentage knowing that we're you know we are going to be redistricting a little more often with the lack of schools with the slow pace of schools being built so I guess I'm
076just questioning What is the will of the board to stick with current policy or to make any kind of a change? So I will go first. Okay. I would say that at this point in time with new board members coming on board one, two, we are getting a new superintendent and the fact that we have in many locations that have to do small redistricting, that there could be some additional language in there that, okay, the superintendent has he or she has the authority for the certain percentage, even if it's 5% at this point in time, but that he could come. to the board, either to the chairwoman with two or how many else folks that he needs to get this in an emergency situation. But it shouldn't be something that we drag out for weeks,
077especially if it's something that involves our students that he or she is in charge, that we don't prolong that process. Madam Chair, may I ask a question? Sure. So and this question is for our acting superintendent. Do we anticipate that we will need to do some kind of redistricting before next year? I think the answer is yes, but I'm going to defer to Chris Fuller. Good evening. So Ms. Randall mentioned, you know, coming back when we discussed this. in the spring we probably got too close to the summer time and rolling into the next year and we delayed any any potential discussion for redistricting so mr white will start taking our september 30 numbers he's going to build our next projections you mentioned october it's probably closer to november december before we come back to
078the board because it takes a good month just to get those projections done based on our new enrollment numbers but we will come with more in a suggestion and we're going to do that earlier this year so we're looking at that December January time frame which is three or four five four months earlier than we did last year but the answer is yes right now we believe that we're going to have to do some sort of shifts the question is are they easy shifts or are they big shifts because right now with the schools that are impacted that we or over capacity in the current year there is no quick fix there because there aren't schools bordering that that provide us an option of just moving from one school to another school so it might
079involve multiple schools of shifting to create space for those students So I just want to note that you've said you'll come to the board in December and that seems ridiculous given Ms. Healy's comment that there will be three brand new board members in January who will not be privy potentially to what is I mean I guess they technically get elected in November but I would hate for to have too much discussion before the board members who are actually going to vote on it are seated and I guess I'm just does staff have any kind of recommendation with respect to this policy because yeah I'm just trying to figure out do we just leave it the way it is or should we be making some adjustments with an understanding of what's coming down the pike So
080your first comment about the timing, you know, I said December, January kind of intentionally knowing that we're not going to have our projections until the end of November, early September, October, November, you know, mid-November is when we'll probably have those projections and then we'll present those to the board as what those projections are. I believe actually when we came back last year, we actually set the January-February timeframe, so it probably will line up better with when the new board members come on board. As far as this policy... The 5% is definitely a restriction when we're trying to shift students in those emergency situations or those quick situations if we're going to bring it back to the board and that's the role of the board then whether it's 5% or 10% is really up to the
081school board. You know with reading that Fairfax policy, you're right. It's still you know with the they have the The regular change that the superintendent can do that's 5%, that is actually very similar to what ours is. And then the second level was that emergency change that goes up to 15%. It looks like that's just a condensed schedule where it doesn't require as much of the public hearings, but still requires coming to the board for approval. And then they have their regular administrative change. So I think that policy is a little bit more detailed and provides a little bit more guidance to staff the way it's written, but it doesn't provide a whole lot more flexibility than that kind of emergency situation that Ms. Randall and everybody's been discussing that provides a little bit of
082leeway for staff to to come back in a an expedited manner all right well so that that sounds to me like something that that maybe Ms. Randall we should seriously consider looking at and I understand the comment about new board members but we're not restricting ourselves on interviewing candidates for a new superintendent that three board members will not have interviewed so I don't think that that should hold us back Ms. Healy First, I want to clarify my comment with respect to new board members is we're going to have new board members who are coming on the board who have been elected to represent their districts. And I believe, as Ms. Hazard discussed, that this is a responsibility of the school board. And I consider it very serious responsibility to represent my district. for example in
083a redistricting and if we were to triple or double the amount of administrative authority I feel that's taking something away from me speaking for myself as a board member to represent my district now you mentioned emergency emergency is different emergency is if over the course of the summer we bring in a significant number of students that is going to you know over load one of the schools that would be an emergency and in fact that's what we had a couple summers ago and the superintendent used this authority and did the administrative redistricting it worked out just fine if we know in November December time frame that we're going to be over capacity in some schools and need to redistrict I would not consider that an emergency that we couldn't follow our procedures. So, you know,
084this is apples and oranges, really. The issue is whether this board wants to delegate responsibility for redistricting to a superintendent who would have administrative authority. And I say even Fairfax did not do that. You know, Fairfax said, well, we'll take your recommendation, but we reserve the right to make that final decision. So I think maybe what the governance committee needs to look at is under what circumstances would there be an emergency that would require a change in the process that we're using? Unless the board, unless the majority of the board, and I suggest in that case it should be the new board because they're the ones that are going to have to live with this, wants to change it and give away certain... authority or what I would say responsibility with respect to redistricting. This
085is a, this is just, this is very difficult subject and I don't think I have either one of you, you've never gone through it. Well, I can tell you it's hard to survive in many cases, but we do it, but we hear heart wrenching stories of impact and it's something that needs to be considered. under all circumstances. So I'm the one that objected to it. I appreciate you looking into it. I'm still gonna object to doubling this administrative board. I have no issue with staying at the 5% if that's what the will of the board is comfortable right now. We can add the language of the 15% with recommending of the superintendent. We can add that if we want to. It does still have to come to us. for the decision, but I have no
086problems staying with the 5% if that is the will of the board. I think that I have to agree. I have no problem with staying at the 5% giving the superintendent discretion. I just like the idea of adding an expedited level that has to come to the board for approval, especially if it's just like a handful of schools. It's three or four schools. The school board members. for those districts should be responsible for the decision but staff should be able to come to us and say we want to do this boundary adjustment or we want to move these students in order to accommodate overcrowding and then we have the right to vote on it I think that language still puts it in our responsibility and makes us accountable for that decision but I don't want
087to be having I don't want to be having redistricting every year or two because our school boundaries you know I but that's part of the job I don't think that is the job we can't say we don't like to do this and we don't want to do that and that's necessary then it's the job I'm saying that it's being as disruptive as it is if there are boundary adjustments we can make in an expedited way then we should have the opportunity to do that if we don't approve it then we will have to go to redistricting and if we if that can't solve the problem then we still have to go to redistricting it's not really alleviating us of the responsibility I'm saying it gives us another interim step if we need to because one
088of the fundamental questions that's never been answered is when do we when do we do a redistricting at what percentage overcrowding do we do a redistricting I think Ms. Randall asked that at the beginning it's never really been answered well and if we end up following in the footsteps of Fairfax County and and Loudoun County, we are going to end up redistricting every year. If I could make a broad, I know we have a few more minutes on something else. I think there's been a lot discussed here to give guidance to the governance committee, but let me just state this and Mr. Fulmer, see if I have taken this. The goal of staff, when we get our projections finalized and our final numbers, that's an opportunity for staff to bring to the board hotspot areas,
089problem areas, they're usually in red or. orange or some other color it's probably not going to take the board long to figure out a little bit where the problems are but if there are as mr white always knows who's coming still to identify those just because we identify those in october or november that may give guidance to staff on where we're going one thing that we have called it in the past was called spot redistricting and spot redistricting usually was between like two schools i will be up front when it involves more than two schools for me that's difficult because that's a domino effect which most people know i have spoken years about it i can't stand the domino taking kids out of a school to make room for more kids to move kids out
090of another school that's very very difficult for me to do and when we involve three or four schools I am always fearful of dominoes. So I call it dominoing. I don't know if that's the best word, but that's the one I use. So I think that the governance committee has some work to do, maybe bringing some alternatives to the board to consider. Is that acceptable? Madam Chair? Yes. I just had one one other thing I wanted to add and I'm not sure if Dr. Warner misspoke or not but she indicated that the decision would be made by the board members who were in those districts and I just want to make sure that I'm clear that decisions are made by the entire board I apologize I just meant that the staff in in consultation with
091the affected board members would then bring it to the board for a full vote Right that that's what that's how I would have it would interpret it but what you said suggested otherwise so I just wanted clarification thank you All right board members we have a third item on our agenda regarding the transportation I'm sorry let me close my the formation of the one-year ad hoc transportation advisory committee I'm not sure who was taking the lead me okay okay so In the FAB meeting, we were discussing, Sarah brought, or Dr. Chase brought it forward to us as an idea, and I know Ms. Healy has alluded to it as well, in trying to get in front of transportation, but also, I know advisory committees in the past, how I started serving in the community after
092teaching was through advisories. And so the... school board members in their different districts would ask people in their districts to serve. It's done a little differently now. But that way there was representation from each of the districts and that's actually how I got to know current board members and other people throughout the county was serving that way. And so one of the things that we thought was having an ad hoc transportation committee to come we had a really great presentation earlier in the year with this transportation assessment. And Dr. Kisner has alluded that and Dr. Jones, I'm sure, would be able to reach out to him as well, is the man who put together our stakeholders and put together this transportation assessment, which is available on board docs and gave us basically a briefing that
093with some ideas in here and some of them I can see have been touched on, but what would be really helpful is working with Mr. Baldwin and his administrative staff and along with drivers, working with stakeholder parents from each of the different districts and staff. and to come together and looking over this transportation audit in addition to community experience in addition to driver experience putting all of these thoughts together and making sure that we have a product or an um a process of understanding Obviously we know that there are problems but understanding the reasons for those problems and solutions for those problems using a community effort because this has been a community problem and we've tried to solve it in different silos and this is an opportunity for us to broaden that silo and include
094our families, include our current drivers, staff, because it does show you a broader picture that what you're experiencing as a parent of the bus stop can have a different ramification from a technical and even from a staffing point. So this is an opportunity for us to discuss. the agreement in agreement or in some sort of agreement an opportunity to put together this type of committee all right Is the FAB committee seeking input from board members tonight so we may have an agenda item in September to vote on? I know we're not ready certainly tonight because regarding the format of the committee. Yes. We would like to, obviously we're trying not to operate in a silo in and of ourselves. So we wanted to bring it forth to the board and you have the, the transportation
095audit presentation, as well as the actual audit report, which gives five different decisions and how to implement these decisions. So it like I said, there's some things in here that definitely We've already started, but maybe we can work better with a community member, better with all the different agents in our community to put something together and implementation and who's going to do what by when. So is this that there would be certain members from each district I'm really trying to get what the format would be because I think that's what we would need to bring to the board for the creation of an ad hoc committee I believe we thought it would be kind of like an advisory committee but with a more specific focus to bring something back to the board and I think
096we were trying to get it started around the same time as the other advisory committees which is why it's it's been brought up today Ms Healey I would like to see this scope of this committee expanded to include county representatives perhaps Sheriff's Department VDOT you know other entities outside the school system that could help us address the issue. I mean the question is, is the purpose of this committee to address the issues brought out in the transportation assessment or can we expand that to include the current Not sure what the what the word is challenge challenge Thank You miss Randall that that we are in and and I assume that part of this is going to be to come up with recommendations so that we do not face this particular challenge again in the future.
097So I would like to see this much broader. I don't disagree. And one of the things that having served on CIP when we came and we were just looking at a renovation versus a rebuild of Stafford High School, one of the things that we found was there was information that came forward early. And so we came before the board in February, even though reports aren't done until later. We came in front of the board in February with our recommendations because it was going to be impacting budget and CIP concerns. And so, you know, we would assume, too, that if transportation folks and I wouldn't have any problems definitely expanding using this as maybe a springboard for. things that have already been done. We've, you know, we paid for this report. And if you look at
098some of the assessment results in the briefing, you can see a lot of the things that we are still currently facing are in here. with some solutions on how to. So I think it kind of gives it a springboard, but then takes it, I think, an extra level when you invite the county representatives, police department. I mean, because they're all helping us with this already. And there might be a reason for this board to come or for this committee to come before the board early. And that would, in fact, the affect the county representatives as well as our board, maybe in the budget. as well so I wouldn't have a problem with that I have a comment Dr. Werner I'm just going to make it quick thank you Ms. Randall for for discussing that we
099given the The transportation problems that we have are not single faceted. There's a lot of different issues going on. We have the transportation study, which is sort of gives us an introduction into what the experts have told us. I agree. I think that it would be nice to have county representative and a sheriff department representative advising our committee. But one of the things that we wanted to do is try to get it started. use the report as a springboard into that and get this ad hoc advisory committee started with our other advisory committees that start in September. So we were trying to expedite that a little bit given the transportation problems that we're currently having and the ones that we anticipate to have in the future because this isn't just a local issue. This is
100actually national, a lot of the transportation issues. So I think that we need to... decide who should be on it and I think that if we can get a county representative sheriffs and our parent advisors and bus drivers and staff I think that would give us a good start with the transportation report that we already have and then hopefully they could even expand on this in say January I keep hearing the word expedite however it is still unclear to me of how the members are selected is this going to be an application process and then there is capped at a certain number that there are some per district the only reason I'm asking is if we really want to turn this around we have to know what we're asking for from the public if those
101who want to be involved I thought we were going to ask each board member to recommend or to appoint somebody to the board from their district. And I have a comment I'm waiting to make known. Sure, go ahead Ms. Young. So I think this transportation study is the same transportation study that we requested a while back, right? This is not a new one. Correct. Okay. So I just wanted to make sure. So that was something that definitely was helpful then. And so now we're seeing the same problems, right? And we're putting a committee together and we're inviting additional individuals, be it sheriff's office and, you know, all of that. That's great. I wanted to take it a step further also. We could be like Dr. Chase said, targeted right now and resolve the transportation problems
102that we currently see, which is nationwide. But I think that the committee that you develop and think about it for a little bit. We just don't have transportation issues. And not only transportation individuals should be involved, yes, county, but there should be parents just that are not doing anything with transportation, but they could say they could put in some kind of some idea of what it is that they're looking at from their perspective also. So what I was thinking is not just only individuals for the transportation resolve, but have a committee that look at issues in general for the school. because we have internal, we have the gifted advisory, we have the E-Doc, we have all of these different ones, but which one is it that a group of parents are coming together to look
103at issues that are ongoing? So if a new issue come up, they may or may not necessarily be the same individuals, but... You want an advisory committee that will last, right? Transportation problems are going to continue, but they will become seasoned. But I think that you should have other individuals in there and put it as a committee that is going to solve. concurrent issues, issues that are timely. It could be COVID, could be transportation, but you have those seasoned individuals that know about that specific problem. So right now it's targeted transportation, but in a month or two, it could be something different, virtual. We need a teacher involved in this advisory committee, bring individuals in. So try to make it broad, but not too broad. but that you could use that ongoing it's just an
104idea if I could make a suggestion to the board it seems like there is not complete clarity on I think there is clarity that we need to do this I'm just going to give a potential direction this ad hoc committee i believe needs to be um for those who decide that they would like to be involved and it would know that there is a sometimes a somewhat short turnaround on when the board will expect results we have talked about a february march presentation i would like to be very upfront with anybody who applies to this committee saying you're going to be working with these people over a three-month period that's what to me ad hoc dealing with a specific issue. I do believe that then there are follow-on advisory committee, other things we can do
105with regard to transportation. But if the goal of the board is what I'm hearing is that we want community input on two studies that have already been done to get recommendations. Ad hoc to me means, you know, potentially you've gotten it at work. You've got a two, three to four month, here's your window. That does not mean that that committee cannot be expanded or changed over time but if the committee if the board has a specific request which to me is to respond to the two attachments that are on this I would prefer that the board be very targeted in the type of individual, I would prefer to bring that to the September 14th meeting showing exactly what the turnaround will be and that people can either apply to the board or have a specific
106because anyone involved in this is going to have to be committed to that timeframe. And I would not, I have served on advisory committee meetings and we've had 42 people on the first night. And then by the time we get to the third meeting, there's four. So this is not that committee, in my opinion. We have a lot. So I am going to be seeking, if we are doing it by district, someone who is committed and understands the timeframe. And I would like the board to have that fleshed out at the 14th meeting, September 14th, which I believe is our next meeting. I think that is fairest to those who get involved in the committee and to our community to make sure that we reach out to the right people. Is that a possible solution?
107Can that work for the board? Yes. All right. I know we are 10 minutes late. I am going to adjourn this meeting, give the board a five-minute break, and we will be back at 7, 15, 7, 17. Thank you. Good evening, and welcome to the Tuesday, August 24th, regular meeting of the Stafford County School Board. I am going to ask if there is a motion to authorize three members to participate electorate. Second. It's been moved and seconded. For those in attendance in the meeting room, please vote. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Three members are authorized to participate electronically. Ms. Hall, if you can do the roll call, please. Dr. Chase? Here. Ms. Hazard? Here. Ms. Healy? Here. Ms. Hollerback? Here. Ms. Randall? Here. Dr. Warner? Here. And
108Ms. Young? Chair. Madam Chair, you have a quorum. Thank you. If you all will rise for the Pledge of Allegiance, please. Madam Chair, motion to approve the agenda with two adjustments. First, I'd like to move the consent items up to 4.01. And second, I would like to add an action item 10.02 to discuss canceling or repurposing the September 21st board meeting in light of recent developments. Is there a second? Second. All right. It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. All right. We will be starting then with our consent items. Is there a motion to approve? Motion to approve our consent items. Second. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. This evening we will have
109a staff announcement. I'm going to first recognize Dr. Jones and then you may turn it over as well. Madam Chair, members of the board, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to invite Mr. Burnett to introduce one of our newest team members. Come on down. Good. Good evening, Madam Chair, members of the board. I'm pleased tonight to introduce Ms. Del Gimeno, who will be joining the Human Resources Office as our supervisor for HR operations and support staffing. Ms. Gimeno comes to us from the American Diabetes Association, where she started 22 years ago as an analyst in their HR office, but currently is the director of HR Information Systems. She is, I like to say, a Jill of all trades in her current role, led implementation of new policies and systems for payroll, for timekeeping, employee onboarding, employee
110records. an organizational effort to codify their policies and practices done training for employees and supervisors and launched an employee focused learning management system we're thrilled to have her coming to scps she has a bachelor's degree in computer information systems from australia university and she is an scps parent to a brookpoint high school grad and a current stafford middle spartan so please welcome me please join me in welcoming mr minnow thanks I'm so happy you're here and I can see that Mr. Burnett is exuberant here to have so thank you for joining our team welcome all right all right our next item is our awards and recognitions we've had a lot of community partners assisting us over the last few weeks and we would like to make sure that we recognize them so come on up
111Ms. Osborne Good evening, Madam Chair, school board members, and Dr. Jones. I'm here this evening to thank the business partners and community members who coordinated with the Office of Strategic Communication and Community Engagement to support the New Teacher Institute, Transportation Services Institute, and Collect for Kids Back to School Supply Drive. All were very successful this year. Each year community partners are invited to participate in the new teacher Institute welcoming new teachers to the Stafford County community Partners were provided several opportunities to participate in NTI this year to include attending the in-person vendor fair Providing items for gift bags and raffle giveaways or sponsoring breakfast for our new teachers At this time, I'd like to recognize each of our community partners who participated in the new teacher Institute Certificates of recognition will be mailed to each
112of the recipients. Adventure Brewing Company, Aloha Design and Tea, American Heart Association, Apple Federal Credit Union, Better For You Juices, Central Rappahannock Regional Library, Chandra Jork Consulting, Ebenezer United Methodist Church, Embrace FTC. George Mason University College of Education and Human Development, Guaranteed Rate, the Jeff Rouse Women's Sports Center, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Liberty University, Mary Washington Healthcare, McDonald's Wellburn Management, Nova Laser and Aesthetics Training, Orange Theory Fitness of Stafford, Pear Deck, Rappahannock United Way, Rappahannock YMCA, Rappahannock Area Community Service Board, Rappahannock Orthodontics, Stafford Education Foundation, Stafford County Fire and Rescue, Stafford County Sheriff's Office, Stafford County Tourism and Economic Development, Staples of Stafford, Strayer University, Sylvan Learning Center of Stafford, T-Mobile, Topside Federal Credit Union, Walden University. Thank you all for your support. Nearly 400 transportation staff, bus drivers, and attendants gathered for a full day
113of training, professional development, and workshops on Friday, July 30th at the University of Mary Washington Stafford campus. The event was well attended and received by staff, with many participating in the event's theme this year of Superheroes Rule. Businesses and organizations were invited to sponsor portions of the event. At this time, I'd like to recognize each of our community sponsors. Certificates of recognition will be mailed to each of the recipients. ABM Education, Kingmore Supply, and Sunny Marison. Thank you for your support. The Collect for Kids Back to School Supply Drive concluded on Tuesday, August 3rd, following the distribution event at the North Star Early Childhood Education Center. Approximately 45 volunteers organized and sorted more than $45,000 in supplies and more than 800 backpacks that were collected to ensure students have the necessary supplies for a successful
114start to the school year. This year was the second that 100% of the supplies requested were fulfilled. Collect for Kids is a true community event that involves many organizations and community members. We could not have done it without all of their support. A special thank you goes to the operations and maintenance team for moving all of the supplies and tables from the professional development center to North Star. An additional thank you to the Stafford County Sheriff's Office cadets who helped move boxes into school representative vehicles. A final thank you to all of the anonymous donors who gave school supply donations for students in need. At this time, I'd like to recognize each of our community partners who participated in Collect for Kids this year. Certificates of recognition will be mailed to each of the recipients.
115Apple Federal Credit Union, Aquia Evening Lions Club, Country Inn & Suites by Radisson, Downtown Dolls, Hildrup, Geico Insurance, Jeff Ross Women's Sports Center, Jenkins Donaldson Foundation, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Lidl of Warrington Road, Life Active Nutrition and Energy, Marcos Pizza, Mount Ararat Church, National Panhellenic Council of Greater Fredericksburg, Rappahannock Orthodontics, Stafford American Legion Post 290. Stafford County Fire and Rescue, Stafford County Sheriff's Office, Stafford Education Foundation, Stafford Rotary Club, Staples of Stafford, Strayer University, Sylvan Learning Center of Stafford, Target of Stafford Marketplace, Target of South Stafford, the Give Back Team at Coldwell Banker Elite, Triton Fitness, Walmart Supercenter 2520 in Ferry Farm. again thank you to all of our donors to all of our community partners for your support and we look forward to many more partnerships in the future thank you if anybody ever wonders
116about the support in our community at least this list i would just ask if maybe we could make an honor roll that we could put on our website of just all those that contributed because i know that's not why they do it but it's nice to recognize them publicly so Yes, we'll put it on the social media. All right. Our next one are our staff reports. Our first one is our COVID-19 update. So I believe I see Dr. Hummer running to the podium. Good evening. I'm going to get the presentation up here and I will introduce Colette. okay good evening madam chair school board dr jones we have an update for you all in regards to where we're at with our covid numbers as well as when to isolate and quarantine we know we've received
117a lot of questions about our current mitigation strategies so mrs hokana is going to go through that as well and then at the end we'll be available for any questions so without further ado this is colette hokana our nurse manager Ms. Hockan, if you can hold on just a second. I would just ask board members, those online and up here, I would like to have her go through the entire presentation. And then if you all will take notes, we will go around for any questions. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening, Madam Chair, board members, and Dr. Jones. So this has been a very trying time for our community and for our world because of this pandemic. And we understand that. Sorry. Only a foot. So, you know, our nurses, our principals, our teachers, our staff
118have been working very hard to try to make sure that our children are safe in school. And so, you know, that is our goal and that's what we're going to talk about this evening. hopefully we'll be able to clear up some confusion. So when we have a positive case report, it's a confirmed case of COVID-19. A person is tested and is positive using either an antigen test, which is a rapid test or the PCR test. Another test that's come out that has been validated by the VDH is the COVID home test that has to be reported by smartphone to the health department, but then also to their, or to their health provider. to then report it to the health department for confirmation. A person that is symptomatic and waiting testing we could presume as positive
119and we ask them to stay at home until we get that test result. This is to facilitate not having it spread. Isolation is done if the person is considered positive and we do that for 10 days. It is found that after 10 days, the viral load and the virus ability to multiply is decreased enough that there is no longer considered contagious. Day one is the onset of symptoms and then we count 10 days from there. If they've had a A positive test, the 10 days occurs and they've had no fever for 24 hours. They're not using any kind of medications. Their symptoms are improving. Then they can return to work or to school. So it's kind of a three-fold process. People need to quarantine if they've been exposed to someone. That quarantine is done after
120we do contact tracing to determine who is in close contact to that person. for 15 minutes of exposure over the course of a 24 hour period. 14 day quarantine is what we use when we have somebody that is exposed. It is a gold standard from the CDC and from the health department. So that is the timeframe that we use as does the rest of the Rappahannock Area Health District. Day zero is the last day of exposure. So if they were last with that positive person on August 1st. Then day one is August 2nd and they quarantine for the 14 days till August 15th and they return to school then on the 16th. So that adds kind of a little layer of confusion because there is a day zero with quarantine. So how do we determine
121who primary contact is? With our children, it is a zero to three feet rule. So if they are within zero to three feet, regardless of whether they're masked, they need to quarantine. If they're fully masked and they're three feet or more apart, we do not need to quarantine them. If they're unmasked and they're less than six feet, then we have to quarantine children. Staff or adults do not receive that exemption. The guidance is that if they're, we use the six foot rule, if they're within six feet of a positive person, regardless of mask, an adult would have to quarantine. So that's the exemption through the CDC guidance as well as the VDH. try to determine who is a contact and who is not. We also look at the vaccine status of that person. If it's
122a staff member and they're fully vaccinated, which we'll get into in a minute, they're less than three, you know, zero to three feet of a positive person for that cumulative 15 minutes, but they're fully vaccinated. They don't need to quarantine. However, they need to fully mask for the next 14 days and monitor for symptoms. And then if they become symptomatic, they need to get tested right away to see if they do have COVID. If it's a student and they're three to six feet of a positive case for that cumulative 15 minutes in a 24 hour period indoors, and everyone is consistently and correctly wearing masks, they don't need to quarantine. We can have them stay in school. Staff is greater than six feet from that person for that 24 hour, 15 minutes and 24 hour
123period. They also do not need to quarantine. Fully vaccinated is a status that is a little bit different than some people think. Fully vaccinated is with the Johnson and Johnson and the Johnson and Johnson vaccine is one dose vaccine. So 14 days after that vaccine, you're considered fully vaccinated. With the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccine, it is 14 days after the second dose of vaccine that you are considered fully vaccinated. So fully vaccinated staff and students don't have to quarantine. um if they're determined to be that primary contact but they do need to monitor for symptoms for that 14 days and mask in all settings that's the recommendation at day three to day five it's recommended that a fully vaccinated person after an exposure get tested if they're negative they no longer need to do
124the masking in the outdoor area obviously in the school setting we're going to have them continue to use the masking because that's our mandate right now Children under the age of 12 cannot be vaccinated. It's not approved at this point. This week, the FDA did fully authorize the Pfizer vaccine for 16 and up. So it's no longer under emergency use. We continue to use our dashboard. It's open to the public. It's on our website. It's updated weekly, but it covers the week prior to the date that we post it. So we gather our data from Monday to Sunday. It's accumulated on Monday morning. That's verified by the staff and then it's posted to the website. We're currently working on updating our list faster than we have been for the public, but it's also one of
125the nurses to get that done. So it does take a little bit of time to get the data collected and collated and put into the program that we use to do that. So it also includes the number of cases, both staff and students, the number of quarantines and the number of transmissions that occurred due to school exposure. It's listed by school. If there is an asterisk next to a number on spot on that website, that is indicative of less than five cases in that building for that particular data point. And that's to help, and that was under the guidance of the health department to continue to help prevent revealing the source cases. So outbreak determination is done by the health department. If you have two or more cases that are found to be linked, epidemiologically
126linked, meaning if they are in the same area for the exposure time, and that is the only link between those two persons is whether it's a dance studio or the school setting, that would make them epidemiologically linked. And that would be considered an outbreak. The Health Department will determine if that is truly a outbreak and they make that declaration. Starting, I think it's today, they were putting up their outbreak dashboard again on the website to the Virginia Health Department. So that's something new this week as well. You all had asked about vaccine clinics. The health department continues to host vaccine clinics on a daily basis. Wednesday, it's done at the Stafford Health Department. It is free and open to the public from 8 to 4.30. No appointments are necessary. It is recommended that you do
127call for an appointment, but it's not necessary. They do take walk-ins. They're also holding weekly clinics throughout the region on a scheduled basis in Spotsylvania, Fredericksburg, Caroline, King George. So they are trying to make sure our region is covered with the ability to receive vaccine. And we're working on the health department to host more vaccines clinics in the school setting as well. And we're also collaborating as advised with one of the local pharmacies. So does anybody have any questions at this time? Who wants to start? I do. Okay, let me start with Ms. Healy and then I'll jump to Dr. Chase. We'll go back and forth. How about that? Could you go back to the slides five and six? I'm trying to figure this primary contact and when you have to quarantine because it's... Is
128that the right one that you're looking at? Yes. Okay. So when does a primary contact? So for a student, if they're within less than three feet for 15 minutes cumulatively in a 24 hour period. then they're considered a primary contact. That's regardless of mask use. The other time that we have to look closely at is when they're unmasked, like at lunch, if they're less than six feet to the person that is a primary contact for 15 minutes, you know, and if that 15 minutes, if they're next to that person and they're in their class and then they're with them again at lunch, we add that time together. So it's a cumulative 15 minutes throughout a 24 hour period in those spacings. So a quarantine is required if there's a primary contact and there was an
129exception for the exception. Yes. This is what I'm trying to figure out, because if I mean, it is confusing. If I don't understand it and I've been sitting through these briefings for many months, I don't know how, you know, the average person looking on our Web site and not having the advantage of, you know, having you to explain it is going to get through it. So so. The primary contact that meets these requirements must quarantine. Is that? That's the recommendation, yes. Okay. And then what, then the next one. Is that a continuation of that page or is this something else? Well, this is talking about when you do not have to quarantine. So you're not considered a primary contact if you're fully vaccinated and you have no symptoms. If you are greater than three feet
130as a student, you're not considered a primary contact or six feet if you're unmasked, if you're greater than six feet and unmasked near the person that is. a primary con is a sick person with COVID-19. If you're less, if you're three feet or more or masked or unmasked six feet, you do not have to quarantine. And then for adults, you look at six feet in all cases. Yeah, I think what's partially confusing me on this next slide, I mean, when I read this one, I read these zero to three feet of positive, that one's pretty simple. because that's- You're exposed. Okay. But more than three feet is not required to- For children, it's not. Students, it's not required to quarantine. That's correct. That's the exemption for schools from the CDC and the VDH. But then
131go to the next slide. And I wish we could put one on one screen and one on another because it's fully vaccinated staff and students. don't have to quarantine if they're a primary contact. Correct. So that first one is not everybody. I mean, there's an, what can I say? This is confusing. At least the way this is presented, if I read this directly, it says they don't have to quarantine if they're primary contact, but they must monitor their symptoms. But then on the other one, it says, Any staff that is less than six feet is a primary contact. I don't know. This is hard. It's a combination of both the distance, the time, and then their vaccine status. So we look at the time and the distance to determine if we need to call that
132person. And then if they're an adult or a student that's age 12 or over, we're gonna ask their vaccine status, find out the dates of those vaccines. because if you are vaccinated and you've had both doses of the vaccine for the Pfizer or the Moderna, or you've had your dose of Johnson and Johnson, and it's less than 14 days since that second dose of Pfizer or Moderna, or since your Johnson and Johnson, you do have to quarantine. But if it's 14 days after that one dose of Johnson and Johnson or the two doses of Pfizer, then you don't have to quarantine. So there is a lot of back and forth. I mean, I get it, but it takes me a while to get to that bottom line. And I'm not sure that these slides by
133themselves are enough to just go. I mean, is there an easy way to say you have to quarantine if this and you don't have to quarantine if this, but you have to check your or is that what this is intended to say? Because I don't. I read this as more confusing than clear. So I think you're seeing the difficulty with the contact tracing because it's very involved. It's not just the 30-second phone call that we're having with families. We want to make sure we're able to answer all the questions that they have. So when we have our contact tracing phone calls, we go through each of these pieces and then they will follow up with either Colette or myself or one of our other health officials to go through those questions. Because as you're saying,
134Mrs. Healy, we understand this is a lot to process and we understand as Colette just started off with this presentation, we know this is a very stressful process for all of our families and our students. So we want to be able to answer those questions. We tried to make this as very clear through this presentation. It's also very clear on our website. And we also took this directly from our VDH website. So this isn't numbers or a process that we've made up. So it's explained in each of those areas. But we encourage all of our families that if they are asked to quarantine or if they are asked to isolate, to please reach out to us and we can explain this process to them. Because as Colette just said, there's... in some cases there's sometimes
135up to 10 variables that we have to talk through like this is we're trying to make this as simple as possible and I think you're seeing it's it's not simple because one variable can throw off this entire process and again we want to make sure that we're informing our parents as best we can because again it is it's a matter of one variable or two if they have to stay home for 14 days or not so we want to make sure almost correct so we just want to make sure that we get all the variables correct and we're talking through it correctly so i think that's what cled is trying to say is we can make this as simple as possible but every case is complicated it's not as simple as were you three to
136foot were you having a mask okay you have to it's a lot of different pieces and questions that we have to ask and who's making this determination about 15 minutes in a 24-hour period i mean we only see the children when they're in school I mean, 24 hours includes time outside of school. We are only contact tracing the school setting. We then take the positive case and that line list of students that we've determined to be those primary contacts and turn it over to the health department. The health department contact tracers then will call the family and will look at the community setting at large. You know, what dance studio they go to, what church group they go to, what family members have they been with. And the contact tracing... when you include the community
137setting can take over an hour to do with each family member so it is very detailed and it is a process and we are focused only on the school setting as asked to by the health department and we also are looking at the buses and that kind of transmission as well so it is very complicated and each family comes with their own variables variables So just one more question. I know there's a lot, but this last one, staff is six feet for cumulative 15 minutes and 24 hour period while wearing a mask. That's going to require quarantine. So if staff is, if there's six feet and two inches or one inch, they're good. They don't have to quarantine. If they're less than six feet, they have to quarantine. If they're six feet or more, they
138do not. Okay all right that helps some thank you no problem absolutely Dr. Chase I believe you were next yeah just to I have a couple questions but just to piggyback on what Ms. Healy said is that also the case if the staff member is vaccinated The vaccine status of the person determines whether they need to quarantine, whether they're staff or students. So if they're fully vaccinated 14 days after that last dose, or to complete that series, they do not have to quarantine. If it's less- So they're six feet and, if they're five feet and 11 inches, they don't have to quarantine if they've been vaccinated. That is correct. If they're less than six feet and they're fully vaccinated, they do not have to quarantine they do need to monitor their symptoms wear the mask
139got it got it okay and then I sort of had just two questions one is how are we verifying vaccination status for staff and for students and then also what about the case where an individual has already had Covid do they have to quarantine and if not how do we verify that they have had Covid So to your first question about how do we verify vaccine? We're asking for the dates. The health department does need to know the date of vaccine. So they're giving us the date of both doses or the date of the single dose that they received. And the health department can verify that again, then through their Virginia immunization system. The other part of your question was if they've had COVID, do they need to quarantine? If they've had COVID within the
140last 90 days, there's an implied immunity for that 90 day period so they do not have to quarantine if it has been more than 90 days they have to quarantine and then how do you establish that they had COVID within the last 90 days do we just is it an honor system or do we ask for when the test was done how what are we doing there it's a combination of things some families are willingly providing their test results for us we're asking them for dates we can call the health department and get confirmation as well but we you know we don't want to unnecessarily quarantine people who have had covid in the last 90 days so we are checking that out and we've had a couple of instances of that recently great thank you
141very much no problem Back to the board or still online? I was going to go in person and then I'll go to online. I'm going to have Ms. Randall, then Ms. Young, you'll be in the batter's box, all right? Okay. Okay, so I have mine is just a little more complicated based on information that we've been given. So according, I understand we're following CDC and BDH is sort of following CDC as well. And one of the recommendations is it is recommended for fully vaccinated people who have known exposure to someone with suspected or confirmed COVID to be tested. three to five days after exposure are we are we saying that or is that in the letter that we're giving or both we're when we're making contact with those primary contacts we are letting giving them
142that information okay and um the other thing is is that um the cdc also has on their website um an alternate uh uh quarantine schedule because when we say quarantine 14 days and now we're saying today it's 15 days it's you know the number one thing that we're getting at is in-person instruction is the most important thing and please please please I am so not attacking I'm so not this is just me just asking understand and I'm in the same boat as everyone with this frustration thing right because I have kids in school too so When you have mitigation strategies, and I feel like the gold standard isn't about quarantine. To me, there's no gold standard for that. The gold standard for me is in-person instruction. That's the gold standard that we want. And the
143next thing is the other part of the... is the mitigation strategies. And we have, like you have told us and Dr. Kisner shared with us, that we have the layered approach. We have the ventilation systems. We have the hand washing. We have hand sanitizing. We have masking. We have distancing when we can. We've done all of these. I can think of layered of gold standard. So to me, I just feel like You know, looking at our total number of cases in staff last year was 247 that tested positive. 699 quarantined. 12 of those quarantined, as I understand, please correct me if I'm wrong, 12 of those quarantined ended up being positive from school transmission. That's from staff. From students, we had 492 that tested positive. We had 1,782 who had to quarantine. And this is
144when we're like less than 50%. And, you know, so therefore more distance. I get it. And then 15 total students tested positive in school transmissions. When I calculated this out. For staff, we had .017 staff that quarantined because of exposure. And we had .008 of our students that tested positive. Currently, and just I understand we're like we always operate a week behind on our dashboard and we're trying to change that too. But from 8-9 to 8-15, we had 76 students test positive. 377 quarantined and three ended up positive transmission, which again comes out to .008. So to me, I feel like we are. over quarantining some of these kids. Please don't make any noise in the audience. We are over quarantining some of our students and maybe because we have, and I'm just suggesting, and
145I can totally be blown out of the water with anything you say, but is there any way that we could consider going to a 10-day and they even have on here suggestion, and I know it's not in a school setting, but a suggestion of being able to come back after day seven, receiving a negative test result, which must occur on day five or later. And so I'm just wondering if that we could find a better standard. And I understand VDH and localities are kind of saying, no, this, no, this. But I'm just saying based on our science, and again, I could be totally not doing this very well. I just would wonder if we couldn't even suggest to them, based on all of our others, rather than them recommending to us, maybe we could recommend
146to them this idea, because our numbers say something may be a little different, I think, but I could be wrong. But that's just one of my questions. Our numbers are changing. We got our data together and we posted it today for last week. And as I said, we do it Monday to Sunday. Right. I did the 8-9 to 8-15. So looking at 8-16 to 8-22, we had four staff positive, four staff quarantined, and one staff that was exposed in school that became positive. Then students, we had 78 students positive. We had 324 that were quarantined and now we have eight students this last week that converted to positive from a school exposure. So you're always gonna have a slight lag with your school exposure becoming positive because it can take up to 14 days for
147someone to convert to positive. We did discuss this with the health department today and our region is still everybody in our region is using the 14-day standard except king george we are in high transmission our neighbors neighboring health districts are also in high transmission they're not back at school yet prince william i think goes back next week is what i was told so um we don't know what that that is going to look like but our numbers are increasing still So there is a one to 10% potential for conversion from day 11 to day 14 is what the health department had told us today as well. I can understand that, but like I said, I'm just going based on our numbers and yeah, the transmission for this week. And it'd be interesting to see again,
148how being back in school setting, because I mean, we've said it all along that. the basically our kids that do end up positive are not from a school setting they are from more of a community setting and so you know but school is the place where they get their academic learning and school is the place where they can get their food and their social emotional comfort and honestly you know um i care a lot and i've said this many many times is about the social emotional and there's reading some of the you know the teachers are like this is so hard but I am so glad to have them back. And, you know, and even my kids were a little like all angst about it. And as soon as they got into their classes, they're
149like, oh, my gosh, mom, this is so much better. You know, so I just I would like to do, if we can, if it could be considered the opportunity to lower based on. our numbers and how they've been going and I understand you know we may have this week may be anomaly this week may not be one I don't know but I'm just asking if it could be asked for that sorry so in addition to that Mrs. Randall we are asking the health department in collaboration with looking at our numbers looking at our current situation yes we try to stay consistent with the rest of the school divisions in the Rappahannock region about when we can start to reduce some of these restrictions and it's been something that's come up every week in regards to
150the 14 days because as we just talked about we get it we know 14 days is a long time so reducing that we want to make sure that we're able to get the students back in sooner with where our high transmission rates are that's why we decided as a region today that sticking with the 14 days for now is appropriate but like you said if the numbers go down we can then reduce that and then you know in collaboration with dr jones if that's something that we want to consider reducing sooner than that then that's something that we could talk about further as well but where where we stand that 14 days is was considered today well and and you know like um dr kisner gave us an article and and um so did um
151Dr. Warner about how, you know, with masking that the transmission between one foot, three foot and six foot is negligible. And so that's, you know, that was a study out of Duke and that was American Academy of Pediatrics. And so, again, that's just another, you know, I can understand the exceptional measures that we go to keep kids safe. But the other part of safe for them is getting them in school in person, teachers eyes on them around their peers, you know, food security. And then the ultimate thing is their education. So that that's to me is a little bit more of my can we please. And, you know, that's why I asked this. And I just, you know, I took the information that I've been given and things that I've seen and. And I just,
152you know, I feel like Stafford has done, you know, over and above and beyond in their health mitigations. And the other piece that I would like to know is we have asked, as you guys have been, or nurses have been tasked more with trying to get contact tracing put on their plate when they really don't have. any more room not even a dessert plate on the side room have you had any luck in getting contact tracers you did get the five we haven't gotten the full five we're still doing interviews but um we offered to three people that have experience in contact tracing up in front Fairfax. Okay. And two have appointments to do their fingerprinting and come on board. And the third one I need to reach out to and see what happened, but
153she was supposed to come on board as well. Okay. And, you know, we're trying to get those positions filled as soon as possible. And the health department does collaborate with us really well. To us in Spotsylvania, they have MRC Medical Reserve Corps volunteers that are contact tracers. Okay. but they can't use them at the health department because they don't have access to a program that they use to alert the area of these positive cases so they've offered for us to be able to use them until we can get our contact races up and running so i've asked them to allow us to do that and i'm working with hr to get them cleared to be able to come help us okay and my last question is this Do we have a form letter that goes
154home to these families that are either isolating or quarantining that says this is your start date, this is your return date and things like here's vaccine clinic information and also you're hereby required to report to your classroom online because I guess there's absentee challenges and I just want to remind parents that. you know your kids home or your kids at school they got to be in class so um but are we just making because that's another i guess level of this school wrote this letter and they put these parameters you know and they said three to six and this school said zero to three just like one county letter that is administered to all so the confusion and the well the confusion and frustration are going to stay there but just maybe one layer less
155i don't know well the letter that we we originated these letters back in march of 2020 they have been evolving as mitigation strategy and guidelines have come out the latest guideline came out the beginning of august for the three foot less than three foot to quarantine in the school setting. So that was one adjustment that came out recently. But that is the standard letter that we're using. We don't have one that has their end date of quarantine and return to school date, but we're working with the health department to get that kind of a letter, because parents are also asking for a letter for work. just to clarify that one piece of get my kid come back okay all right sorry about the thing and it just came up today and quarantine is based on
156the last day of contact with that positive person and so if we get told today that you know mrs smith is positive for covet 19 and the last time she was at work was on i don't know the 16th of of August, we contact trace back two days prior to that symptom onset or that test date. So if she was at work on the 16th and that's the last day the student had contact with her, the clock starts on the 17th for that 14 days. It's because it's the last day of exposure is when that 14 day clock starts. It's from when you were exposed. It's not from the day that you get told. That's day zero. Cause it's an incubation timeframe. And that's why it's day one is the following day. No problem. Ms.
157Young. Hold on. Ms. Hollerback, you'll be next. Ms. Young is in the batter's box. Let her go first. Patient-based. So thank you so much team for keeping our students safe these past 18 months and more. And personally, I will respectfully disagree to try to push the CDC or the Rav Hanech Health Department. to change what it is that they're doing. They're doing it based on the trends and based on numbers. And just because our numbers are low today, that does not mean that it's going to be low always. All it is is .08, .01 does not matter. All it takes is one child, one student to die. And I don't care how many mitigations we have, keep the layers on. Yes, it could be a nuisance at times, but you know what? You kept the
158children safe, and I'm sure you kept Ms. Randall's children safe also up there in Stafford schools. But so that's one. Two. I heard about the under six feet. I've seen emails about parents concerned that the three feet is not adhered to and they're bunching up. And so my question for middle school and high school, and here's another idea. I don't want any emails asking me about my thoughts and what am I thinking. All my thoughts and all the points that I've been making all this year are coming through and some of you are implementing these same things. So here's another one. Middle school and high school, right? Should we, could we randomly test with permission when you talk about form, that's something that we should do, send a form home and say, we're going to
159be doing random testing because you want to ensure that the kids are safe. The simple nose test or whatever it is that we could do because we're talking about vaccination. Some parents don't want the vaccine, their kids. And so, but yes, they go on vacation. Yes, Ms. Randall is right that the percentage of vaccination, that percentage of, Those individuals that contracting the COVID are from outside in. And so, you know, we are doing a lot of work. trying to keep the kids safe and so parents are helping us, right? So I'm thinking that's a way of randomly testing to see what we have because what I don't want is that we have to quarantine class after class or close down a school. And that could be coming if we don't continue the mitigation strategies that
160we have. And so it's something to think about. It might be new to you, but think about it. It may not be in Prince William yet or Spotsylvania, but, you know, listen, it's just a trend. It's something that you can look at and be new on it, right? Another thing that I was thinking about is there are parents that, yes, they're online. And I see... All we do right here, what you do and your team do is interpreting the regs and the regulations that are given to you. So I'm not going to ask you any questions about those, right? Because I know that that's what you're doing right now. When they change, you change with it. For those parents that are not online, and Ms. Healy brought it up, like it takes me a little
161while to read it, and I'm in it. And sometimes I'm like, okay, what is it? Which one is it? Let me compare this with that. Okay, I got this. But for parents that are working, for parents that are not online, for parents that are not into this COVID and are just living their lives and don't know if, the kids contracted and they may think it's a you know it's just a cold or something how and what are we doing in the classroom and I know teachers are not you know doctors or nurses but when we see a runny nose or whatever we send them to the nurse what are we doing in terms of looking for you know signs or are we taking temperature on the way in still? You know, are we still doing
162that? Because I've been in the school and nobody asked me to take a temperature recently. So I'm just trying to see what there is that we could help with. for those parents that may or may not be aware, may or may not go online, may or may not be into this COVID rules and regulations and interpretation that we could help them with. Easy, you know, I hate for y'all to do more work and say these are the easy steps because like you said, there's too many variables involved. And so I'm just trying to try to see if there is something that we could help them with to navigate. this difficult road that we are on right now because, and then I'll finalize with this, it is going to get a little bit worse because of
163this Delta. So continuing to mitigate is a good thing, regardless if three feet or six feet of nullify masks help. Otherwise we'll be like, I'm not mentioning any other state or we'll be like other states. So if you have any answers for me, fine. If not, those are my comments. Thank you. all right Dr. Warner any quick oh I think oh yeah Ms. Hollerback I think you were next if you have a question yeah I just have a it's a quick question I assume that the CDC recommendation for three feet is still it still stands is that correct yes ma'am it does Okay. Are we, I mean, our community is growing. We talked about this last week about growth. We talk about growth at every meeting. And we know we're getting a lot more students
164than we have in the past. Are we able to meet that three-foot threshold in all of our classrooms at all of our school levels? um hello miss hollaback the three foot rule it also there's a caveat to that to say the greatest extent possible because we can't use that as an indicator to not bring students back into school however we've been working very closely with the instructional leadership team to determine when we would have to pivot so we are currently working on that process but we work very closely with our nurses very closely with our teachers to make sure that we are sticking to that three to six foot rule and they're going to be there are going to be some instances where they go below that three foot but as as mrs randall was
165saying where you know happy that the students are back into school and we want to make sure that we continue with that but we're trying to keep that three to six foot as as best we can in all of our settings and our scenarios how how are we doing with that thus far do we have do we have some major challenges in some of our schools where there's absolutely no way we're meeting the three feet that we're that we're supposed to be doing I'm trying to think of how to best answer your question you also have to remember the 15 minute window so there are instances where students are within each other on less than three feet but generally not within a 15 minute more than 15 minutes Generally. Okay. I guess I'm thinking more
166along the lines of, you know, during instruction time when kids are seated in their seats and it's more than 15 minutes, especially at the middle school and the high school level where they're sitting, you know, they've got 35 kids in a classroom and we know that our classrooms aren't all necessarily that big. You know. That's a concern of mine, and I think it's a concern of some of our parents. And I'm just doing a little quick check on how, and I'm not pointing fingers, and I'm not suggesting anybody's not doing their job. I know the situation that we're in with space and everything else. I just want to know, for the community, you know, and again, this goes back to... you know high school number six and goes back to our needs of space and
167all this other stuff do we have some challenges out there that need to be addressed by the school board well let me let me just remind you of one thing last year one of the things that we learned over the last 18 months is we had instances in classrooms where we had too much stuff in classrooms so we spent the last 18 months basically moving things out of our classroom so that we can maximize the uses of classroom space so yeah there are instances And not to deflect this, but if we were, let's say we were a system that was losing enrollment, and there are some in the state of Virginia, they have an advantage because they have the same square footage, but they're not growing. So the short answer to your question is as
168long as we continue to grow, yes, we're going to continue to have challenges. Okay. And I guess the message here is I'm hopeful that the leadership in central office will come to the school board, whether it's a month from now or next year, and let the school board know how they can help to mitigate those issues. So let me just mention two other things real quick. First of all, as Dr. Hummer mentioned, we are developing a pivot plan in the event that we have to go virtual. And I don't want to create panic there, but I think the community wants us to plan accordingly. So we are doing that. We're hoping that we don't have to do that. I will just mention, if we get to that point, we will not make that decision in
169isolation. We will confer with the Virginia Department of Health. So we will continue to bring plans, recommendations, et cetera, to the board as needed in terms of, as we think about a growing school division with limited space, we will continue to do that. understand and and i appreciate that i'm a big fan of having a plan b thanks madam chair Dr. Warner. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Dr. Hummer. Collette, thank you for all you do. I know this has been a real challenging 18 months for everybody. I'm curious about the contact tracing. So, you know, the one thing that I want to emphasize is there is no quarantine if the student or staff is fully vaccinated and even if they're less than three feet apart for a cumulative 15 minutes, especially if they're masked.
170Students three to six feet apart. of somebody who has COVID for more than 15 minutes if everybody's consistently correctly wearing masks no quarantine staff greater than six feet no quarantine my question is how effectively are we able to contact trace for that 15 minutes and determine if you know maybe are we how how accurately can we do that because I think one of the reasons we have so many students on quarantine is that we're probably air we're airing on the side of possible exposure and I'm wondering if there's any any software or apps or anything that we could use I know they use them in other other places that could allow us to do a more accurate contact tracing that might even make it easier for some of our staff to follow up because then
171you know if our cell phones come within three feet of each other and they're together for 15 minutes, we can pretty much tell that. And I know they do have apps that do that. I don't know if it's something that might be useful into looking at, especially for high school and middle school students, because I know that's where a lot of our crowding might be. So that was, so my questions, I guess, relate to just the... contact tracing how accurately are we getting that 15 minutes so the nurses are looking at the class schedule of the students where they're sitting in that classroom how close they are I have nurses going out with yardsticks to measure mid-seat to mid-seat to see if they're really three feet or not we've asked the staff to on their
172seating plans to note these seating distance using that mid-seat to mid-seat three foot ruler so we're trying to be as accurate as we possibly can we're asking especially middle and high school students who they're sitting with at lunch and how close they're sitting if they're less than six feet we're also you know in the in the elementary school it's a little bit more adult driven the actual contact time they're helping us to determine that using the teacher staff to help us with that part they're at least cohorted so yeah let me also give you a couple of examples i know i know dr nichols would say this if he was at the mic we had several of our high schools who actually have developed apps so that we can track kids so you know if
173you eat lunch you you see there's a qr code you scan that qr so we have developed some of that innovation in our schools and then there is still the covid white app through the virginia department of health that families can go to the virginia department of health and download that and that will where app works in the school setting, in the community setting, wherever you're going. Some people have concerns about privacy with that, with any of these apps, but they are available and readily, easily used. Well, I just think that if we could be accurate in our contact tracing, we can reduce the number of students that are in quarantine because maybe their exposure wasn't enough to really put them at risk. My follow-up to what Dr. Warner was saying is if staff identifies
174these types of either software or other mechanisms, the FAB committee members, there are two here, there's one virtually, because that to me is exactly what the COVID and CareX, and I know it's got all different names, but that money is meant to cover. Now, saying that, I also, Do not I tend not to buy the first year model of any car because I know what sort of happens I really like it on the last year before they change Because it's worked out the bug so I don't want to follow the new and shiny however I would like to say I'm open to additional ways as Dr. Warner and others are saying if we can be more accurate. So but like I said with the let's not always do the first year either. But just to
175be open to that if there are tools that come along that our technology folks and others feel comfortable with please you know bring those because those to me are the items we should be spending some of that money on besides of course recovery. But and other- Madam Chair, I just wanna comment on what you just said in terms of the apps. Hold on just a second. Let me just finish my questions first and then I'll move on. The next one is regarding our nurses. I know that- Ms. Hokanna and Dr. Kisner at the time and Dr. Jones received that wonderful call from me that day. So I appreciate that we are maximizing that because this is a huge job. I'm glad you explained to me. I still believe that there is potentially an inordinate additional
176burden being put on our nurses at this time, no matter how many contact tracers we have. looking back at Mr. Burnett in the back I please know it is not that I have money to burn however having read reports our personnel reports we have a lot of resignations in the nurse and health care field in schools I think I can say that So I just would like to make sure with Mr. Burnett and others that if our turnover in our nursing staff or other support services in nursing becomes a panic, because this is a service we can't not do. Our nurses that are in our schools, I know Ms. Healy and I have talked about this for ages, the importance of a... qualified nurse in our building one thing i will tell you about stafford
177county schools we have not budged on that even before it became somewhat required so i am actually very proud of that however i also do not want to burn out these nurses because to be a school nurse you have to be a really amazing person on back to school nights i saw the line out the door and the kids ran up Okay, and wanted to hug their nurse because they monitor their medication. The nurses have other duties in these buildings. And so I am just saying to this board, Mr. Burnett, he's probably hiding in the back from me, but if we are seeing huge burnout loss in this area, this may be an area we as a board would need to address. I personally, I see Mr. Fulmer's not here, so I'm gonna, oh, he
178is, I'm sorry. Mr. Fulmer, I think this is exactly what CARES Act money could be used for in a staffing perspective because of what the duties we are asking our nurses to perform. So, board members, I just put that for your consideration because I have grave concerns looking at the... data how about I say it that way so I am certainly open to that Ms. Young is next then I'll come back real quick just about the apps and some of the mitigation strategies I know for a fact that individuals that I'm familiar with went back and tested you know they were positive and then they tested negative and then they were not released they were told especially in the Pentagon they were told to quarantine four more days and guess what one of the tests
179came back positive so we just need to be careful even with apps and accuracy that you know we just need to be careful because like I said all it takes is one so I'd rather be careful and then sorry Ms. Randall did you oh sorry the danger of leaving this before me I keep I'm still trying to figure this out. Does that say that no contact, no quarantine, that means anyone that meets any of those three categories doesn't have to quarantine. So if we have a student who is fully vaccinated, regardless of how close they were and regardless of whether they were wearing a mask. does not have to quarantine. That's correct. We need to advertise that when we advertise these clinics because, you know, if I were a parent, I would do what I
180could to make sure my child didn't have to quarantine because, as Ms. Randall said, and my heart's with you because this is an incredible hardship. on students through no fault of their own who are being required to quarantine. And I went to the open houses in my district and the middle and high schools, they didn't have three feet between his desk. The elementary were probably, you know, there, but the middle and high, I mean, that it's through no fault of the students that they're less than three feet in the class. But, but if that's the case, so, so we're saying that. You don't have to be masked. You don't have to have any distance. You could be, you know, we could be on top of each other and no mask. And we're exposed, but there's
181no quarantine. Correct. As long as it's been after two weeks. As long as it's two weeks after that vaccine, you have to be fully vaccinated. Yeah, I get that. But then the other thing is that for that two weeks after that exposure, you need to wear a mask in all settings. And at day three to five, if you get tested and you're negative, you can relax the mask use. Right. But that would be a real benefit. That's why I reiterated those things, because the vaccine is really the ticket to freedom. that's that's how we get that's how we get free but what's interesting is no mask is required the second one well I'm not saying we're not requiring a mask but the health department says you don't need a mask you don't have to be
182masked if you're fully vaccinated on on this slide because the next one says everyone and everyone is consistently in correcting wearing masks, but the first one doesn't require that. So if I'm reading that correctly, is that correct? No mask doesn't matter if you're masked or not. As long as you're fully vaccinated student, the amount of distance doesn't matter. Correct. Okay. I think I get it now. That's pretty interesting. No mask. You're fully vaccinated. Thank you. I don't know. I don't want to ask anymore. All right. I just want to say thank you to the team. And I know it's not just you two. I know it's Chris and Dr. Jones and Tom and Andy and Carrie to take on all of these parents' calls and concerns. You can turn that off. I just really, really,
183yeah, turn it off before she asks another one, would you? I'm a player now. That's what I'm trying to do. I just because honestly I think that in some days you probably feel like human punching bags in dealing with you know an upset parent and at the same time parents are seeing Stafford County Schools come up on their phone and play hot potato with it like I'm not going to answer you answer it and so I just want to tell you all thank you for the immense amount of time and effort I know you're helping your nurses. I know you're trying to help our students and our and our school district remain safe, remain in school, which is like I said, what I've considered the gold standard is to be in school and help our
184community. My one question I have, though, is Senate Bill 1303 says we have to be in school offer in school five days a week. So. Is it ever, whose decision will it be if we pivot to virtual? Will that be a governor's decision to supersede that? School board, Rappahannock area health department, who gets that hot potato, if you will? I would encourage you to read the entire law because it also says we must consult with the local health department. So if we make a decision to pivot, it will be in consultation with the local health department. There's a lot in that law. And also folks need to know that law expires in August of 22. Thank you. All right. Thank you to our team on our COVID-19 update. All right. Mr. Burnett coming down for
185our update on recruitment and retention of staff and faculty. I've already given you an intro on that one. So thank you for coming down. So just one second while I'm loading this, I'll just note the... Your note around the nurses is well heard, and we'll talk about that a little bit in here. If you could, whoever's on, can you mute your background noise, please? Go ahead, Mr. All right. So, Madam Chair, members of the board, glad to be here this evening to share an update with you on our staffing so far for this school year. Goals of the presentation tonight, I'm going to try to keep my own remarks brief so that I can answer your questions. uh to both talk about our goals going into this year as well as the context the environment
186in which we've been hiring the outcomes we've achieved the good the bad the ugly where we are right now and we're going to be doing as a result so The context that I want to start with, these are headlines that I pulled all within the last week from various news sources around the Commonwealth. I mostly wanted to share this because we've spent a lot of time talking about our own challenges in staffing, whether it's bus drivers or other positions, and this is not a unique Stafford challenge. Even our friends from the North and all across the state have found different challenges along the way. But at the same time, These are not actually the headlines that grab me the most, citing that there are hundreds of openings. One that did was a study I actually
187read earlier this year. that was released from the Rand Corporation that does an annual State of the US Teacher Survey. And the thing that really struck me from that survey, and even though it's specific to teachers, I think it applies well to any of our staff that are working within our school buildings, that they were experiencing job-related stressors through the last year, and that in their study, one in four teachers were considering leaving their positions at the end of the year and leaving the profession at the end of the year. compared to in a typical year it's closer to one out of six and that's the national context in which we're working and again while this is specific to teachers i believe this applies to anyone who was working within our buildings and dealing with
188the challenges in our schools last year So we also knew that that study was released in April May and so throughout our recruitment season we did have some idea going in that it was going to be a season where our hiring needs were going to be quite high and we had some targets set out along the way to guide our work. First was I know a evergreen topic of boosting our candidate pool for our hardest staff positions. We invested in some new technology this year, new for us, to be able to target online campaigns to non-education majors. We've always relied on recruitment at education job fairs and then we try to capture non-ed majors along the way. We try to be very intentional about recruiting people who might have the subject background, might have the
189interest but haven't done the formal training. We also work very hard to cultivate the folks that we already have in our buildings, our paraprofessionals, our substitutes, and our student teachers. We took some steps to invest in the retention of our staff. We brought back the wellness initiatives that I know were here for a number of years, stepped away for a while. We brought them back with site-based initiatives. And thanks to this board and Dr. Kishner's support, we're able to expand tuition reimbursement to just support the ongoing growth of our current staff. Our goal is to diversify our candidate pool. especially for those identifying as black and or Hispanic. And again, using some of the new tools we had, we were able to target recruitment campaigns not just to HBCUs or HSIs, Hispanic Serving Institutions, but
190also to fraternities that are often members of, you'll hear of the Divine Nine, that are the traditionally black fraternities and sororities, to target members of those associations and clubs. We try to diversify our pool of interviewers. So we always look to use our administrators. first and foremost we try to reach out to more teachers as well to cultivate candidates and also we worked hard to revise our interview rubric to try to mitigate bias and that's not just bias on cultural identity lines but it was also bias against inexperienced teachers we found we looked back at our interview rubric and it was a rubric where if you had never been through a formal education program you would not hit the buzzwords that would be asked for in that interview so we wanted to go through and
191find your instincts to better understand what people will be walking into whether they've been through a formal prep program or not. As Dr. Eberg in my office likes to say, I can't teach you to love kids, but I can teach you a lot of the rest. So we tried to focus our interviews on that. And this is actually the exact same text as last year, but that's intentional to constantly evaluate how we were doing and what we needed to tweak going forward. We saw some real successes. Our overall hiring returned to pre-pandemic levels after dipping last year. which was a great relief. We also retained a much higher or rather hired a much higher rate of our student teachers through some intentional engagement. About a third of our new licensed hires had five or more
192years of experience and something I'm particularly pleased with almost 20 percent of them almost one out of five were folks that were already our employees either substitutes paraprofessionals a couple of admin support who became licensed teachers for us they qualified it shows that we're bringing the people who are hard. indoor buildings. We also had some tremendous success in diversifying the hires that we're bringing in with a tremendous increase as you can see here and the number of people of new licensed hires who identify as people of color. we're very pleased those outcomes and i want to take a moment just to thank the members of the human resources committee on the equity diversity and opportunity committee i know that we presented here i really thank those community members for helping to push us through the
193year on this work a couple positive influences here i mentioned the emphasis on the retention of student teachers we undertook some efforts this year to take the time to engage with our student teachers not just the programs that spy them but do the direct outreach to the student teachers themselves to understand their experience and try to better understand what we could be doing to cultivate them and their host teachers their cooperating teachers to see what other support we could provide to make sure it's a beneficial experience for them we started a new program with mary washington we're calling an apprentice teacher program that tries to be mutually beneficial for all parties to take folks who might leave their program in the fifth year because they want to go get a paycheck and they can get
194provisionally licensed but they would benefit from staying in the program and getting that continued coaching to be able to bring them in hire them put them in classrooms they can get that paycheck but continue in their program and continue to get that support this was a pilot year for it every single person who was hired as an apprentice teacher is now a licensed teacher in our classrooms this year so it was a huge win and thank you to our partners at umw for that We also took advantage of the virtual instruction, try to find silver linings and clouds to develop partnerships with institutions well outside of this area, including Virginia State and West Virginia University, to develop stronger partnerships with those institutions through virtual observations for their teachers. I mentioned the investment in our online
195recruitment platforms and the targeting that we were able to do. The other thing that I really like about this and that we want to continue to double down on as we're able to get back out on the road is just to increase our visibility. You know, we know Stafford. There are some folks that know Stafford. Not everyone knows Stafford. And having that opportunity to get out and tell our story more proactively, more consistently to get our name out there is very important to us. and was a success this year and the last thing i want to point out is the education support benefits that this board again supported again no he's not here tonight but if dr gisner is watching at home and i hope he is just to thank him for his support again
196and for this board for the supporting the funding not only of the expanded tuition reimbursement which again facilitated bringing more of our service staff into licensed positions but the student loan repayment benefit which we know because they have told us was an influence for a number of our new hires to choose us over other places The first enrollment period for that just started. We saw a little more than 10% of our new hires sign up. We're going to see what happens in the second one. There's a lot of setup that people were doing right at the same time you had to sign up for this. So we're hoping to see a higher uptick for the September sign-up period. But it is not all rosy, and I'll be very honest about that. As strong as our
197hiring was, our struggle this year was in retaining our licensed staff. And that goes back to that study that I shared earlier. compared to last year last year was a good year for retention of our licensed staff but this year was rough with 18 of our licensed staff not returning to the division and the internal transfers were about comparable to past years but that transfer out of the division was challenging and it meant that we had a lot of holes to fill across the division as a result We are open this year with more open positions, licensed positions, than we did last year. This is not a number that I'm okay with. It's not a number that my department's okay with. And it's something that we take very seriously and that we hold ourselves accountable
198for as we continue our work with schools. So what influenced that increased rate of attrition? some of it I don't really think I need to get into detail of because of the context that we're all familiar with the challenges that our educators experienced last year while we didn't see as many specific mentions of COVID in the exit surveys of staff they were leaving we did see a lot of things that were I would say COVID adjacent constant change of schedules you know constantly having to shift the challenges of concurrent instruction These are things that were cited over and over again and folks that just said you know what I think I'm just done I think one thing that really struck me. I'm jumping ahead a little bit is that in past years when we've looked
199at the most commonly cited reasons people say that they're leaving a position here, the most commonly cited is relocation. It's people who are leaving the area. And then usually there's a trail off, and the next most commonly cited are retirement and taking a job in another school division. This year, personal and health reasons was cited just as often as relocation was, and about 50% more often than retirement or taking a position in another school division was. And what that says to me was people that just said, I just have to walk away. And I don't know to what degree we could have prevented that attrition because after the year that our staff had, I don't know if we could have stopped that. I do wish that if there wasn't one that we had done it.
200And I do hope that many of those who maybe just needed to walk away for a bit will come back. We will be in touch. But that was a particular challenge that we faced. because I know that it's of interest to some members here. I will also share that as has been the case in past years, we did see that those who did share with us where they were going to teach next, they were twice as many of them going north as going to the surrounding divisions other than Prince William. And there were about as many going out of state. as going to the divisions right around us. We were just as likely to see people go to North Carolina as we were to see them go to Spotse, but substantially more likely to be
201going to Prince William and further north. The other thing I'll note, and a member asked this in requesting this report, was that we did still see an uptick in late resignations. I mentioned this when I did this report last year. Pre-pandemic, it was pretty rare for us to see a substantial number of resignations after June 15th. June 15th is the statutory deadline for folks who are on continuing contracts to inform their employer if they're going to remain or not. So in prior years, licensed staff would be somewhere in the 15 to 20 range. Last year, it spiked up to 50. And that really set us back because the later you learn about a vacancy, the harder it is to fill it. This year wasn't quite that high, but it was still pretty high. It was
202about 38 licensed folks. So still substantially higher than what we had experienced pre-pandemic. So where we are now, the figure that I shared earlier said 92. This says 91. The 92 slide was based on the data we had on the first day of school. This is as of today as I prepared this. I always say that whenever I'm sharing vacancy data that it is a fact that is true at the moment that I finished preparing this slide. And I'm pretty sure that I got a note from someone in my office saying, hey, but wait a second. I just offered someone. I was like, I already sent the slides to Ms. Hall. We're done. It will not surprise anyone to see the positions where we have the most openings right now in special education and in
203math. So, yes, those are quite high numbers. I want to provide a pause and some assurance, though, and that's the reason I have the table over on the right of what do those open positions mean. You'll see the overwhelming majority of them, we have a long-term substitute in the classroom, and I don't have a precise number for this, but a good chunk of those long-term substitutes are folks that are currently pursuing coursework. to be able to become certified teachers. So these are folks that we are looking to cultivate to become licensed teachers down the road. um we also have a combination of what i call internal coverage which is where the students are this is more often with uh esl positions and with counselors where caseloads are distributed and then for extra block coverage most
204typically at the high school level but we see it at other grades as well where teachers for additional compensation will pick up an extra block and so that for the extra block ftes they're still students are still seeing a licensed teacher for that period We do also use, particularly for our more specialized support positions, some external contractors. And then we have a couple of vacancies where actually the person, we know they're leaving, but they're not leaving for another several weeks. So that's still included in the total here, but that person's still in their role right now. So we don't know what the resolution of those vacancies will be yet. I also wanted to share last year when I did this report I focused just on licensed staff but I did want to talk about our
205service staff as well. These numbers look quite high. I want to pause and note that yes we have a lot of open paraprofessional positions. We also added 110 paraprofessional positions less than a month ago with ESSER funding. And so that is where the majority of these paraprofessional positions and openings come from. And I think many of our elementary principals that have been working very hard to bring folks into those roles to provide the small group instruction that was the intent of those positions. We are keeping a particular eye on the nurse and health services position, as mentioned. So we have nurse openings in there as well as the remaining contact tracer positions. As Ms. Akana mentioned, we've had three people accept. the contact tracer role we have one other offer out there and we will
206work diligently to fill those and work diligently with her to fill the open nurse positions as well we've been working myself mr fulmer dr hummer with dr jones and dr kisner on ensuring that we're able to take some steps to not to for lack of a better way to put it to staunch the bleeding in what we are asking of our nurses and i want to thank them for that i also want to make a note now of uh thank miss o'brien the director of payroll and benefits her team the payroll representatives and buildings they are also taking on some pieces to try to reduce the administrative burden on nurses as well so i want to make sure to thank them tonight as well In terms of where those, you'll note that transportation is not
207listed on here. I do want to note that Mr. Baldwin and I did talk today. We do still see the number of vacancies that has been discussed, about 35 driver vacancies. I feel like we've had a lot of transportation talk, and we'll be able to talk about that a little bit more in the next report, but excited to talk about the efforts we're going to take on that. the last notes i want to make on the service position we again saw some high turnover close to the school year our overall turnover in para positions was about the same as it has been in years past around 12 percent we saw 23 drop off between that june 15th date and the start of the school year about a third of the overall turnover and you know
208if you if you go back and look at your personnel reports over the last several board meetings there's paraprofessionals are pretty cyclical it's a lot of in and out and I think that one of the challenges we have with the paraprofessional positions is that they are rewarding, but also hard positions that are not terrifically remunerative. These positions don't pay great. And the other night I sent a picture to my team as I was walking into Aldi late at night, and the sign outside was hiring associates for about $2 an hour more than what we pay first-year paraprofessionals. that's tough to compete with when you go to any number of retail establishments that are offering more per hour offering a signing bonus etc puts us behind the eight ball in the same way we talked about
209with bus drivers So I would be remiss if I didn't point that out, as well as point out the continuing to drop unemployment rate in this area as a whole. It's not quite a pre-pandemic rates, but it's dropping pretty quickly. But the labor force participation remains pretty low. And a large driver of that is the challenge of people finding secure daycare or secure childcare. So as we talk about the imperative of keeping our schools open, it's this feedback loop that we're running into. If we want to be able to find people to bring into these positions, these things are interconnected. So to close, I'll just share what our next steps are. We are going to be and already have increased dedicated resources towards service position staffing. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, we are holding our first paraprofessional
210job fair. We have not had to do a job fair for paraprofessionals before. Everything is new. uh and so for folks that may be watching this at home if you've ever thought about being a prepare professional uh please go to our website you can still sign up we'd love to consider you we do have about 50 people that are already signed up to interview so we're very excited for that and we thank our administrators that are going to be helping to interview for that we've also been working very closely with mr baldwin and his team to analyze some processes at transportation to see what we can do to try to help them get folks in faster and target our recruitment there We're going to continue to do work to try to reduce the attrition that
211we see from this year, continue to emphasize recognition of our staff across all positions, continue to work with our leadership in Millings to talk about the low-cost retention strategies that they can engage in, and also to look to take care. of people that I would call are irreplaceables. I think so often we talk of things at large numbers and we should. This is a place that has over 4,000 contracted employees, 5,000 employees in general. We have to talk in large numbers. But when you get down to individual buildings, individual departments, you've got folks that are the veterans, the folks that have taken on leadership responsibility, the department chairs, PLC chairs, the people who are the mentor ambassadors for the building that have always said yes when asked to take on something new. don't always feel
212like that's recognized as well and so looking for ways that we can help make sure they don't always they don't only feel recognized and rewarded for that but that we can do so in enough of a way that we can help them be advocates and recruiters for us as well we're going to continue our work on diversifying our candidate pool not just for licensed positions but across the board we made some great gains this year we're proud of it but uh the continued work we want to do is really expanding both our internal and our external outreach i'm really proud of some of the work already that our teacher in residence dan reichert miss austin i'm still very sorry that we took him out of your classroom but we're very glad to have him in
213human resources for the work that he's been doing with our new teacher mentors with some new teachers directly and if you have not seen the stafford ed talk series that he has been publishing his interviews with other stafford educators is really just a great way to get some sunshine in your day um but he and sadika turner who's our new hr generalist who will be leading some of our wellness initiatives they're going to be tag teaming on some of the work to do internally to help provide areas of connection for our current staff and then again look to convert to advocacy uh externally share more of our story and this is something dr jones spoke about in our edox conversations as well how can we share some of the great successes we've already seen in
214this division around these issues and the last And this is probably the more ambitious of them is to say that this is not a one-year deal, that we have to think about these challenges on the medium and long terms as well, that we're not going to be able to rely on traditional schools of education to supply all the staff that we need. So what do we need to be doing? What do we need to be doing now to have the infrastructure in place for the pipelines we need three to five years from now? That means investing in our current staff to cultivate them towards licensure. And it also means what I think the next frontier is, which is how do you resolve staff that are dedicated, that are interested, that love kids, that have shown
215that interest but don't yet have their degree? It's one thing if someone already has a degree and they have some classes to finish. What if they don't have that degree? That's a little more challenging to solve in a relationship with a higher ed partner, but it's something we're looking forward to taking on as the next frontier. so with that this is just to symbolize that it takes a lot of people to work on this once again i want to thank the whole team and human resources uh particularly teresa aberg jess mernandez uh lorraine klein for their work and hiring uh ariana hranchik and melanie caban ariana for leading our recruitment efforts melanie who took on paraprofessionals with the plum this year but really our whole team so have any good questions all right what i'd
216like to say to the board if you have a specific question about um this uh presentation um if there's some fact factor fact in here that you would like to question um please share those with mr burnett i think much what that is contained in here is going to be um the board needs to keep in mind as we move towards budget and planning. So is there any specific question about the content Mr. Burnett has prepared? And I would like to- No Madam Chair, I just wanted to ask again, are you wanting us to send questions directly to him or to Missy and Dr. Jones? Questions can always be sent to our staff. I'm just asking for tonight if we have anything specific that we keep to the question about this presentation this evening. All
217right. hearing none i'm going to move on to our transportation update sure thank you mr burnett before i give up the day i just do want to recognize that laurie and klein will be retiring on september 15th she has worked with our department for 23 years been a tremendous resource to so many people in the division myself included and while i have the microphone i want to say thank you to her yes thank you laurie ann we will miss you Good evening. I'm going to ask Mr. Baldwin to join me. We've been up here for the last couple of weeks and given you some status updates on transportation and trying to improve that. We wanted to really focus this presentation on kind of the outlook as far as our recruitment and onboarding and some of
218the positive stuff that we've heard since we've implemented the pay scale changes and the incentive for the bonuses. Just very high level. update on you know from last week we've continued to improve communication you know we we still have late buses we we realize that i'm sure you're still getting some emails we are trying to reply to to all and and continue to improve we're also closed out our our survey for bus routing that we sent out although there is on the process now we're still cleaning that up and so we were hoping at this point that we'd have it to transportation so they could start doing their magic on it however there was several thousand responses that we did not receive and i can't just say yes or no to them so we are
219the schools a lot of credit to the schools and their staff. They are calling every single one of these families to try to determine, hey, do you need transportation or not? So the good news is we're getting a lot of new responses that are going to allow us to consolidate some routes. But that and then our drivers, which is what we're gonna talk about tonight and attracting more drivers are the two factors of really getting us out of this. It's not an overnight fix. Kind of been telling you that for a couple of weeks, but we're slowly improving. Hopefully, consolidation of those routes improve, and then we're gonna add some drivers. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Mr. Baldwin to talk about what we have kind of in the pipeline for the
220next few weeks. Good evening Madam Chair, Board Members, Dr. Jones. Thank you again for the opportunity to keep sharing some updates and hopefully each week we get a little better, a little bit more target focus on the task at hand of providing some timely arrivals for our students and our schools. So currently we mentioned last week we had 14 folks in our training class and here is just an update of where we stand. Two drivers have been approved to drive. Actually one started driving this afternoon. One driver is ready to go by the end of the week. a final test and they will do some student driving time and after that we hope to have that person released to drive as well. We have four drivers that are on or that will be approved in
221the next several weeks as they are finishing up their learning and will transition to the actual DMV test, do some student driving and then also be released. So we're hoping that we can keep our timeline. We mentioned that we were hoping to have these drivers ready by the end of August, 1st of September, ready to go. As you see here, that's only about six of our drivers. We have a total of 14. So I still have folks that are still learning to obtain the learners permit before they can be more of the behind the wheel. And I have some others that have decided to pursue other opportunities. That's just a factor of what we do. We try to go in numbers to get folks in and process. So from the The job fair that we
222had back in July. Additionally, we have another class that started on August 20th. There were 16 folks that showed up for this class and within that class to have a current CDL and this is a CDL with a P and S endorsement. That P is passenger, the S stands for school bus. So those are the target groups that we are going after because we can actually move them through class at a faster rate than a person with a non-CDL or just a CDO license would say a class A license. It's very important that we look for folks that have that P&S endorsement for us. So we're going to work with those two folks that are in the current class and really try to, I wouldn't say fast track because there's still a quality and safety
223component of our training that we want. We recognize that we are carrying precious cargo. So we do not want to rest this process, but we do want to make it quality that we can get folks out as quickly as possible. From last Tuesday's announcement, overall we've had 117 applications placed in our system since August 9th. 66 since August 17th. So we are really beginning to work. um, verifying, validating, getting these folks in for interviews. Um, as a matter of fact, today, um, our staff stay late to start the interview process. They interviewed nine folks. From that standpoint, we have 10 set up tomorrow and it will continue through the course of the week to try and tackle or get those 117 folks available. The good thing is still with members out of that 117. We
224had eight that have a current cdl with that pns endorsement. So you know they're the first ones we called and I think we actually interviewed some today and definitely some tomorrow where we're targeting those folks from that standpoint. Plenty of phone calls. That started Wednesday. Staff would keep me updated and just a roundabout number of phone calls that they took. I would love, I'm glad to say this, that we took more calls about the job applications than we did about bus concerns. From that standpoint, I made sure to ask that clarification. We still wouldn't, but to have folks calling and insisting about... coming to work for us and the benefits, that's a good thing. So we want to keep that going. As we start this onboarding process with folks, we are kind of streamlining the
225process between a CDL-endursed driver versus a non-CDL driver. And that's very important because there are certain requirements that we have to follow through the Virginia Department of Education, through the pupil transportation side of it, we have to follow. The key to it is being able to get training records. from current drivers in this state. If we can get current driving records, our training records, excuse me, then it creates this process for training streamlines because now we do not have to do a lot of reteaching from that standpoint. We can focus on the driving side of it and getting them acclimated to what we have, what our requirements are here in Stafford. So we're working on that process. We'll be putting it to the test as we get these folks with CDLs in place. Just remembering,
226I want to put a plug, much like Mr. Bermud, we also will be doing a job fair September 18th. from 9 to 12 at our transportation headquarters. We are doing a pre registration, so that has been placed on our social media contacts on our website. Well, but you don't have to wait until the 18th of september. Just put your application in and we're going through this on a daily basis to make sure that we can pull people in place. And I would like to also just mention, um, Our drivers, again, hats off to them with working to the challenge. They are really stepping up to the plate to handle this. We introduced a term during the in-service, and the theme for that in-service was superheroes rule the day. R-U-L-E. Excuse me for my North Carolina
227twang. But it really goes to stand for what we're trying to make this year like. So when we say we're the day, we are saying we are respecting, we're understanding, we are loyal, and we are efficient. And that's something that I want to propose. to our drivers it's how we operate in our office and it's really the foundation of what we want to implement to our schools our families our students to show that we are about the cause we are about the mission and we care about our students so we want to make sure that we push that out that being said i open up to any questions that you may have right any specific questions from board members I just want to say I'm glad that 117 applications, that's impressive, eight with their CDL
228and endorsements. I'm excited. So hopefully we can get them through the training. Hopefully that'll help. Yes, ma'am. All about the numbers. Thank you for all the hours that you've been putting into this, you and Mr. Fulmer. All right. I just want to say what a difference a week makes. Wow. That's impressive. I really appreciate it. I know that's a lot of hustle, and I know it's a lot of late hours. And, you know, having followed the VSBA articles each day, what's happening in Stafford is not an anomaly. It's just we were first. And so, I mean, others, the school divisions as large as ours and smaller than ours are struggling with the same struggles. And it's just that it came as a really big, I mean, you don't want to be the parent that has
229these struggles, but, or the families that are having to endure them. And I've said what I've said about that, but I just feel that what a difference. what a difference a week makes for us. I'm glad that as a board, we made the decision to change bonuses and starting salaries. And thank you, Patrick, for bringing it to our attention that the service sector needs some response as well. And that's something that we'll continue to work on. And I thank you for bringing things to our attention so that we could help you. help the whole service model of transporting our kids to and from schools and I hope families are definitely giving you know the the kudos to their drivers that are overdoing their overtime and I hope they give them smoothies to drink because they
230don't have hands to eat because they don't stop long enough and I really really do appreciate the work thank you This is on the other side and I know how much you're working and I really appreciate what your division and Mr. Fulmer and the superintendent's leadership, but where are we with getting the students to school on time? I mean, we've heard we were significantly later. Are all our students getting to school on time or if they're not, how far? away are they from when the school starts and when will we be to a point where their buses are on the scheduled time picking them up and dropping them off So right now we do, we're monitoring the on-time arrival for our buses in our schools. So obviously with the elementary having the earlier tiers, they
231have a better on-time arrival percentage than do the middle school and high schools. And so while that's, I'm hoping to give you some more tangible data to start and that we can have as a reference, there's still work to be done. So our middle schools and our high schools are still getting to school late. But as what Mr. Fulmer said about the transportation survey, once we have all of that data, my team will go to work to try and condense that. And what we're hoping is being able to have a more accurate count of who needs transportation. We consolidate so that we can get the kids to school on a more timely schedule. And so that's where we need the drivers. But also, once we get the data, we have a scheduled time frame that
232we're hoping that we can make this work sooner than later. And that's just part of the final fix. And with the final pieces being hiring of new drivers, which will be an ongoing service throughout the start of the school year or throughout the school year. Is there anybody? I'm sorry. And I appreciate that. Sooner is better than later. But do we have a time frame? I mean, I get emails from parents that say, okay, there's been 11 days of school. I've changed my life and my work schedule to drive my child to school. When am I going to be able to go back to my schedule? Do we have an answer for those parents? Well, it's been on an individual basis. because what our team has been to do in some instances, we can, they've
233already worked to condense that on their own. And so I ask parents to. have a little patience with us. If there's anything I can do, my team will review that we can make an immediate impact or something that we just haven't seen yet, we will do it and we are doing it. But as far as a general, whole scale final date, we can't give that to you yet until I can get the information from the transportation survey. And I'm hoping again, way sooner than later, Ms. Healy. Is there anybody on the call in yeah okay go ahead Dr. Chase yeah so piggybacking on Ms. Healy's question and this really isn't a question for Mr. Baldwin and I guess it's more a request maybe at some later date to hear what we're doing for these students
234who are missing potentially substantial amounts of instructional time so I've received emails from parents whose children are in the STAT program and I don't know how accurate it is but they're saying their child is missing one to two hours of instruction a day and I know one of the things we did in response to COVID was to really push for this a b block schedule so semester-long classes and so if a student has 11 days of missing a class with the class only being a semester long that's huge so at some point not tonight I would like to know what we're doing to help those students get the instruction that they're missing thank you all right is there anyone else Yes, just me, Pam. The only thing, thank you very much for this presentation. It's
235great. The only question I have is I know we've done very well with the transportation and it's subsiding and I'm getting less emails and stuff. But I was wondering, for those individuals that are missing large portions of their block, And I know there's plans of how we're helping these students, but in the long run, if they fall behind to an extent that they need more support, do we have a plan? And again, if you don't right now, you don't have to present it, but just something to think about. We'll have that come back at the next meeting as requested as well by Dr. Chase. I think that those are similar concerns that will be part of the instructional response as well. Is that acceptable, Dr. Jones? Can I ask one more? Okay, hold on. Let
236me give Ms. Hollerback, do you have a comment or a question? I think I hear her. All right. I have some, but do you have one? Just one. go ahead okay um and just kind of piggybacking a little bit with um dr chase so the travel kids and and mrs um healy the travel kids that are are their buses now on time or are there still some issues with getting them to school on time i mean i know there's the instructional component i'm just worried about how are they doing for getting their buses back and forth on time We had a little target focused last week and we've made some adjustments where most of those kids are arriving on time. The problem is the same thing with the stack program is getting there at that
237920 time frame and that's where we're still struggling at times. So we're still working to get buses and that's due to what we can condense. And so we can free up certain buses that will be able to grab those kids and get them to their travel school as soon as possible. Okay. So what I'm hearing. I think Dr. Jones, you've taken note or that we have some instructional questions regarding travel students or loss of instruction time. I think that's to our instructional team. Also, I would just like to, as it sounds like you all are still wrapping up the survey of the number of kids transported, number of routes, when those come available, sort of giving us that. you know report miles driven you know the big context and I know right now right now
238it's making sure we get our kids there but I think that that's useful and how many drivers you need or how many you would want going forward if you would like additional let us know early budgeting process will be coming for myself the question that I have I don't know if sort of the hot spot areas are tracked I'm a visual I put stuff on a map most of you know I track my district a little bit with how I get calls so I kind of group them so I can see where some of the challenges are Once we move a little bit forward I would really like sort of that because I'm sure you're doing the same thing Where are our hardest challenges? Is it the longest routes the shortest route? double routes, which
239I was Hopefully promised we were eliminating and we aren't because I've lived with them for way too long in my district, but I think that that's useful information for us as a division of what what are the hardest kids and i don't want me to transport that may mean we have to cross route one man that's a nightmare on thursday and friday gosh we have to drive down garrisonville road and somebody hits a pole and knocks out everything if anybody has looked on their alert system if you do like i do every day there is some crash somewhere in our division so Hating to say that drivers don't do a great job on Stafford Roads. That's a reality that we have. That to me is what potentially the second prong, as I view it, of
240an ad hoc committee similar to the... young driver task force which was read led by mr rhodes many years ago but it was honored it looked at the big picture of stafford what are our choke points most average people can name them but i think that that needs to be part of our look at this i can tell you i know I drive the district driving around and kids are still standing there. They just are because of where maybe where we live. But I think that that's something important. We as a community need to look at of how those access points or lack thereof impact our transportation system. Because I can tell you 17, Route 1, 95, because everybody bails, is... part of our reality. So what expectation are we setting and what expectation or
241solutions can we be working for knowing that information or confirming that information? So that would be a big picture thought, but I think it's something we need to look at going forward. Absolutely. I appreciate. your work I appreciate I know reaching out to a lot of parents and I know that that is hard but I truly appreciate the work that you all have been doing we've had some good conversations through all of this so all right thank you I know that you'd like to probably get some sleep before the morning begins early again in the morning this is not related to transportation the report that we're going to get on how we're going to make up instructional time can we include all the students not just the travel students and that's at all the levels
242elementary middle and high and I'd go back to the beginning of the school even if they missed say two weeks of instruction you know that's something I assume we're going to be addressing so just a report on whether whether we've got something in place or what we're going to do for all the students that have missed instructional time thank you All right, next we're gonna move on to our public citizen comments. I will talk through how they are handled tonight. Three minutes are allotted to each speaker. Speakers are encouraged to provide a copy of their comments if they have them to our board clerk, or you may also email them to the board. at a later time. Speakers shall identify themselves by name, organizational affiliation, if that applies. You'll also announce the purpose or topic
243of your comment, that helps us. The chair reserves the right to restrict the total citizen comment received at any particular meeting to a predetermined maximum number of minutes with the approval of the board. You will have three minutes. The green light will come on when you start speaking. When the yellow light comes on, that means you have one minute to wrap up. When the red button goes off, we're going to have you stop talking, and then you can certainly submit your comments to the board. Citizen comment which is profane, abusive, or which threatens imminent physical harm shall be ruled out of order. Although the board provides the opportunity for citizen comment, individuals desiring to register complaints against division employees or division programs, services, or activities may also utilize the procedures outlined in Stafford County Public
244School Policy 1113. As of right now, I have four people who have signed up. If you have not signed up and would like to speak, I would ask that you go ahead and get up out of your chair and stand on the side so you can come down quickly and easily to speak. I'm going to name the first four names. If you all will come on down. I have Jody Fagan, Michael Gallant, William Mays, and Chris Lawson. And again, if anybody else is interested, feel free to stand on the sides and then come on down once we finish with those speakers. Come on down. Ms. Hall. Thank you for bringing those. Yes. Good evening. My name is Jody Fagan, and I have two students attending schools here in Stafford County that I am fighting for
245alongside all these parents that are here fighting for their children. I have been a stay-at-home mom for 15 years, and I can tell you I have never. taught nor felt the need to teach them about the inequality of race, racism, oppressors versus victims or gender identity. But what I have taught them is tolerance, love and above all acceptance. What they were when they were small and went to playground, they just played with everyone. When they go to school, they socialize with everyone. When they play sports on teams, they are united as a team. As I have seen this with my children, I have also seen this with children they play with. Race and gender are not the issue for our children. So why are we going to make it one? And rest assured, bringing CRT
246to our schools will be bringing it to the forefront and making it an issue. I have had some hard discussions with my children in the last year and a half, as all parents have, but I never thought I would have to talk to my 10-year-old daughter about what gender is or what pronouns she goes by. Life is so confusing enough without adding to it. I also want you to know that we are a law enforcement family and know that... Whatever is taught in school, I will never teach my children that law officers are bad. What I do teach them is that there are bad people in all walks of life and in every field. I teach them that we all have choices and we have to live with the consequences of our choices and actions
247no matter who we are. I do believe there is a difference between matters that should be taught at home or through our social interactions and matters that should be taught at school. I wholeheartedly believe that theories, philosophical ideations, and personal feelings need to be left out of school teachings. CRT as a philosophical theory based on laws and morals that was created for the use at a collegiate level, not for elementary or middle school education. If you proceed and approve our CRT for our children, I implore that you give the parents the choice to opt out. Please do not continue to take away our parental rights to decide what is best for our children. In hearing tonight, I'm kind of shocked. I'm kind of going off script and I apologize. I am shocked by the impingement
248of or the infringement on our children's freedoms. Whether it's an app for our children's phones to contact trace them. The contact tracing, I'm appalled by it. I understand the reason, but if it comes to the point that you're going to contact trace my children by their phones, they will not have phones in school. If you are going to randomly test my children for COVID, I will pull them from school and I will move. I am shocked. i understand the need and your fear for all of it but you have to give parents some kind of parental rights they're being taken away thank you next speaker come on down you can go in any order it doesn't matter uh good evening dr jones uh good evening to the meetup the school board my name is william
249i go to north stafford i'm in uh i'm a junior and me and my friend Jaren had an idea on how bikes can make a difference for our school county transportation. Since there's a problem for students like me to be stuck in school for an extra 20-30 minutes just to get home. I have to wait, normally I have to wait till 3.50 almost every day for my bus to come when I could take a bike and it would take about five minutes instead of me waiting for extra 30, 20 minutes and like other students waiting almost for 30 to an hour for their bus to come. So normally my bus comes around 9.31 when school starts at 9.20 so I'm always late. to my first block which is takes time for me to do work
250and everything so uh for these bikes as for a different perspective for somebody who lives more or further than 20 minutes away from you know their home and everything they could get home quicker and like they get home quicker at home they don't have to wait for their bus as long as you know 30 minutes when they take a bike like comes with safety equipment like helmets or knee pads if necessary, if they want to. And the way we could use these bikes for these students is by like how we have them registered as for like Chromebooks, we could sign them in for the bikes and know when they'll use it or when they'll like return them, take care of them and not damage them. But if they damage them, they have to pay the
251cost of these bikes. Yeah. You're welcome. Dr. Jones, Madam Chairman, members of the board. My name is Chris Lawson. I live at 517 Glen Eagle Drive. More importantly, I am an educator at North Stafford, the world's greatest high school, home of the Wolverines. I'm also here tonight to address the unfortunate but serious transportation situation that many of our students at North and, as you know, the rest of the county is experiencing. Now I am listed in the math department at North Stafford, but as many of my students may say including Jermaine and William I am NOT a math teacher I use math in order to Help students learn effective problem-solving. We remind each other every single day in my classroom. We only discuss problems with such with solutions simply because otherwise discussing a problem or
252complaining without a solution is just simply a waste of time. So with that being said, after extended discussions with many student leaders like you just heard, and I have to say I'm exploding with pride in them for being here tonight, we believe that if the county could purchase a fleet of bicycles for the students during the school year, it would help all parties involved, staff, parents, students. security. It would help everyone involved and my students and their friends in some of the areas that they live in have expressed a very high keen interest of having a bicycle rather than waiting in their cafeteria. the auditorium for an hour plus when they live in Park Ridge this is with respect to North Stafford you know and this idea has caught many ears of the leaders I
253know Dr. Chase is connecting virtually and I know she's heard from Miss Baumke on the member of the Board of Supervisors and Miss Ms. Bompke is assured that funding for this would not be an issue. I've spoken with many people who have shown full support and ready to assist with this. We're currently working with the Stafford County Sheriff's Department to get them on board. This idea is highly innovative. It's student generated, but it's in its infancy. And unfortunately, I only have 30 seconds left to express. extreme interest in this as a solution. So I'll end with this. During my first year, Dr. Hornick and Dr. Nichols first told me that as long as you put the students first, nothing else matters. And I think with a solution like this, we can put the students first.
254Thank you. Thank you. Hey, good evening, Dr. Jones, Madam Chair, members of the board. my name is kevin heimovicki i live in the garrisonville district i'm here tonight because i've been watching the school board meetings online for past 18 months and i've been compelled to come speak to you this evening i want to qualify that all these statements i make this evening are mine solely mine and my they're not my spouses at all first i'd like to thank dr kistner and dr jones and the hard work the staff did through the pandemic pretty incredible job that they did it was no small effort And sometimes I wondered if the board really appreciated the efforts that the staff made. I've been living in Stafford County nine and a half years. I've watched this county change in
255the short time I've lived here. My youngest is a junior at Colonial Forge. And some things I'm recommending tonight, probably not going to happen in his time, but hopefully it'll help other families. I want to make sure that Stafford County ends up being the county we moved to nine and a half years ago. We moved from overseas, didn't know anything about the area. The reason we moved here was because of the schools, primary reason. The citizens of this county are frustrated with the school board. It's time to change the school board. I know three members I heard today are going to be changed, which is good. But I'll tell you, if the change doesn't come in two years, there's going to have to be more change on the board. And some members are out of
256touch with the reality. We heard it tonight. And, you know, it took 45 minutes for somebody to understand what the slides meant from the nurse. Others need to... seek to understand before being understood. That's clearly not happening. Some people even interrupted the chair tonight because they had to get a comment out. Listen, understand and then be understood. You hire executives right to give you the best advice and you hire contractors, but you don't take their advice. Over the past 18 months, we've witnessed constant questioning of the staff and the facts that have been brought to you, and you've chose not to take action. Either start taking recommendations that you get, right, or hire people that will give you the answers you want. If you're not going to listen to the consultants, please don't spend our
257tax dollars doing that. I just want to close with two recommendations for you. First up, complaining about the Board of Supervisors. How many of you are talking to your counterparts on the board of supervisors to help solve your problems? I'm not quite sure. We never hear about that. Second, stop being influenced solely by phone calls and emails. This is the 21st century. It's 2021. Send us an email, sir, if you would. All right. Come on down. Thank you, Ms. Hazard, people of the board. My name is Jesse Belt. I'm a father of four students here in the United States Marine, which is somewhat immaterial to the conversation, but I have two points I want to bring up. First, to the woman who was talking about the critical race theory, thank you for having the courage
258to talk about the dangers of this socialist nonsense. We know where it came from. It came from socialist schools, and it is tearing this country apart. As an African-American male, I am sickened when I see this sort of stuff come up. Like I said, I'm I'm a United States Marine. People respect me for what I do, not because of my color. I am working on a master's degree, and that's because of what I'm able to do here in this greatest country on earth. And introducing critical race theory and gender theory is going to destroy this country, and I will go against any of you through any method that I can legally if you try to push it forward. On that note, with this COVID stuff, we talked about making science-based decisions, but we're ignoring science.
259Last year, there were sadly 49,000 children that died during the pandemic. 330 of them died from COVID. Now, my heart goes out to those parents. But that is a relatively incredibly small number because we know our children aren't the ones at risk. And this idea that there can be no child that ever dies is not based in reality. That is a euphoric ideal that is unachievable. More kids died from heart disease last year than the coronavirus. Car wrecks, swimming accidents. And now we're talking about randomly screening my kids with a Q-tip? You think I'm going to be okay with you taking my kids' masks down and shoving a Q-tip up their face periodically, putting tracking apps on them. That is ridiculous. I will not tolerate it as a parent. And I will do everything I
260can legally to stop that. I've already looked on how to remove people from a school board, how to replace them. I'm about to retire. I'm going to have time on my hands. To work to remove anyone who tries to test my kids by shoving Q-tips up their faces. Because it's not needed. At this point in time, who's at risk for COVID? It's adults. It's the elderly. People who are more than able to go take care of themselves. You can go to any CVS. You can go to any Walmart. Get the vaccine. You'll be fine. If you can't figure out how to get to the CVS or the Walmart, they're giving it out for free at rallies and at public venues. My kids are not the ones responsible. for a grown-up's safety, and they are not
261the people at risk. So all this talk about 14 days and all this other stuff is ridiculous. Ms. Randall, thank you for asking some common-sense questions about it, and you as well, Ms. Healy. I'm glad to see that there are people who are asking some real questions about it, and we need to do more of that and make real decisions, not these fear-based decisions that some people seem to want to make. Thank you. You all have a good night. can you sign into the sheet if you hadn't signed up before sorry I forgot to make that comment but come on down ma'am you can go ahead and start speaking so that we can keep moving people through all right I want to talk to you about CRT it is in our schools it's being pushed
262by our teachers some days my I have three children whether they're asking whether they're being asked about their pronouns in class Yes, pronouns. Whether they're being told that the American dream doesn't exist and let's talk about how it does not exist and shown videos how it doesn't exist for African Americans. This is not okay. Critical race theory is a theory and it's part of a college level curriculum. It doesn't belong in our K-12 curriculums. Anything that promotes the division of persons by the color of their skin versus the content of their character is divisive and shouldn't be taught. Why would we want to plant these disordered seeds in our children's minds? Does it help our lagging test scores? We all know that we lowered our SOLs last year so kids could pass. Does it equip
263our children with financial literacy? Does it help them prepare for jobs? Does it help our students to value each other? Does it teach our children to have pride in their country? A country where a person can be enslaved or an immigrant or have nothing and then give rise to generations of children who have everything? No. It doesn't give an accurate history. When CRT is mentioned, the average person can't really even define it. Our children can't define it or comprehend its complexities. Teachers are teachers and they're not expected to replace parents. The onus is on parents to explain race to their children as they understand it. Again, the focus of schools should be on core subjects, language arts, math, science, social studies. Your focus should be getting our kids to school on time. In addition, we
264have trades that we could be working on and teaching our children. Let's be clear. The fact is in the country where we're in a county where our kids aren't excelling right now, but it has nothing to do with their race or equity. Let's put the focus on educating America's next generation to compete in the global economy versus poisoning their minds against other races, which in this county may include their family members. We have a lot of children who come from parents of mixed marriages and the idea that we're going to teach children that mom's bad, dad's bad, not happening. Okay? Friends, family, kids have grown up in this kind of area where there is a really great mixing. The superintendent research consultants polled citizens and concluded that the public was strongly against the teaching of
265CRT. So why doesn't the board pass resolutions to ban it? Remember, equity versus equality. Thank you. Don't forget to sign in. Thank you. Come on down. My name is Maureen Sigmund. My family and I live in the Garrisonville district, and I do want to thank you for allowing us to talk about CRT today. CRT is a hot-button but media-fed issue that has citizens concerned about how our precious county resources are being used. Many parents have the privilege of riding shotgun to their children's education over the last year, and with that glimpse combined with media warnings, they have some concerns. The true issue with all of this is transparency. When the public sees something that concerns them, whether in their own child's classroom or in another district they're worried about, Occurring here they raise the question
266and they're told it didn't happen. It's not happening. It won't happen even if they've seen it When our family with four children is very active in our community We talk to a lot of parents all the time from all areas of the county in the region One tenant of CRT is focused on teaching an honest history Everyone I have talked to has zero concerns about children learning complete and honest count of American history. The good, the bad, the ugly. We should and we must teach the absolute facts when it comes to U.S. and world history. However, when it comes to the concept of inherent or intrinsic bias, no one can think of any benefit as to why teaching a K-12 student to believe that they are inherently biased against a certain group of people. We
267can and must not allow cultural indoctrination of our children. We need to teach them how to think, not what to think. Parents want transparency. Citizens want transparency. Family life curriculum, parents can opt out. African American history elective, parents can opt in. But do families get a choice on whether or not they spend $85 on a yearbook that prominently features Black Lives Matter? No. Can faculty opt out of professional development? development that's geared to teach them about their intrinsic bias? Probably not. If we have concerns about the politics our children's teachers are introducing in the content, is there recourse? Why do the equity resource links on the CPS equity page not work? The last thing parents want when it comes to their relationship with their children's school is surprise. We want to know what our kids
268are learning. We want to have a basic level of trust, and I think that's lacking. I'm grateful for this open and honest conversation so we can hopefully help assure citizens that there aren't any surprises. Hopefully we can rebuild the trust and hopefully we can have sound policy on CRT and Stafford, especially in light of what the superintendent search consultant revealed about the public's opinion on this topic. And I have one last question on the COVID stuff. We talked about kids being at home and not having access to meals. Are we doing that? Do they have an opportunity to pick up meals? That was the one thing I got out of your conversation. So, thank you. Good evening. My name is Sarah Taylor. I reside at 1146 James Madison Circle, Fredericksburg in the Falmouth District. This
269is my 20th year as a high school English teacher and my 11th at North Stafford High School. I'm here to comment as a veteran teacher on the agenda item 5.02, the retention of staff and faculty. A few weeks ago at the August 10th school board meeting, pretty much the entire meeting was focused on the bus crisis, as it should have been, but too much attention was given to how we got to this situation, who was to blame, and why the school system didn't ring the alarm bells sooner. Well, the school is opened with 42 unfilled driver positions because that's basically what we do every year. We open with what we've got and do the best we can. We open without licensed teachers in way too many classrooms and have long-term subs teaching some classes for
270the entire course. We open without enough subs, so staff and teachers cover for sick colleagues during their training periods. And staff go to work in pain and in poor health, postponing treatment, etc. Because they know that their absence will cause hardship for their colleagues. We open without enough counselors, admins, desks, rooms, or equipment. We've been told for all the years that I've been teaching in Stafford, do more with less. The staffer teachers, admins, support staff, union reps, and sim-parent advocates have been telling both boards that if the community doesn't better fund their school system and doesn't slow the population growth until the infrastructure catches up, then at some point the cracks in the make-do system would bust wide open. That's what's happened this month. Well, some of this situation is because of the unique circumstances
271created by the pandemic. Most of this is just an amplification of the same problems we've had before COVID. And the corner cutting might do with less mandate that led us here is why teachers leave. Last year, about one fifth of the staff left North. And that's after several years in a row of losing big chunks of our staff. What's left is a staff that's mostly named to Stafford with a core of veterans. And this situation creates a huge burden on the veteran staff who stay. We end up having to bear way more than our fair share of the leadership roles, both formal and informal, mentoring new colleagues, providing familiarity and continuity to students who turn to familiar staff in moments of crisis. One way veterans are compensated for bearing this burden is through step increases,
272but we could take those to other school systems in Virginia and take our experience with us. There needs to be a more significant way to reward these teachers who stay. Maybe a bonus, like $5,000 at the five-year mark or $10,000 at the 10-year mark. I know that's a lot of money, but the cost of recruiting and retaining highly qualified staff is a lot more when you consider the lost investment when they walk out the door. Thank you. Please sign in, ma'am. Good evening. My name is Deanna Fisher. I'm here again tonight because I'm not going to stop fighting for my children. After listening to the discussion tonight, I would just like to implore you to use common sense. These quarantines, masks, school closings, and restrictions cause harm. Yet the risk of a child dying of
273COVID-19 is statistically zero. Zero. Where is the risk-benefit analysis that you would normally do before imposing harmful policies on our children? Please do not hide behind vague laws and illegal mandates. You have the ability and the duty to fight for our kids. Other school boards have done the right thing and you can too. Please look at the actual science. Please look at the court documents from Boone County, Kentucky, where all the governor's COVID mandates were judged illegal. Expert testimony in that case explains that the virus is 1,000 times smaller than the space between the fibers of the mask. The mask cannot stop the aerosol virus. It also explains that the virus stays in the air for an average of 58 hours before falling onto a surface. The six-foot rule does nothing. Please use common sense.
274The answer is our immune systems. We all have one. They work and can be strengthened. If you are really concerned about the health of these kids, why aren't you talking about zinc and vitamin D and giving that out at school for free? I'd also like to say that I was appalled... that my 13-year-old son was asked in his math class what his pronouns are. It's obvious he is a boy, and I don't think it's appropriate for teachers in any grade to try to confuse kids by implying that gender is a choice that they have to ask about what pronouns he uses. I'd just like to ask you to please think about what you are really imposing on our children and for what reasons. Thank you. hi good evening um madam chair and dr jones my
275name is marcia whaley i live in the widewater district and i'm just making some notes um i do have a student that just started high school this year she is in the ninth grade and she's really really excited to be at school my concern tonight on my topic is about a rumor that the schools are going to shut down my daughter has had teachers saying this at her school And another friend of mine I was talking to this evening here at the meeting, a principal at a different high school tonight is telling his teachers to prepare that the school is going to shut down and go virtual. Is this true? I really hope it's not. I hope it's just a rumor. If it is a rumor, if it can be squashed, that seems to be
276what tends to be going around. We have come so far that we just really, just really can't, we just can't go that words. Thank you. All right. Are there any more speakers? I don't see anybody standing to the side. So, all right. If not, then I will close public comment. We will move next to our, thank you all for coming this evening. The board committee reports. Any board committee reports? All right, hearing none. Superintendent comments. I'd like to of course introduce our interim superintendent who was appointed before. So Dr. Jones, welcome. Not that you've been here, but thank you for taking on that role. And tonight you get your comments. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll try not to be long, but I do have several comments. First, I want to... welcome our new hr person
277who's joined us and i want to thank our hr staff um i want to make a statement about critical race theory so if you just bear with me stafford county public schools does not teach nor do we promote the philosophy of critical race theory in any of our schools the stafford county public schools k-12 history and social science program is based on the virginia standards of learning in the accompanying history and social science curriculum framework For the public, in order to assist you in examination of the teaching materials employed in Stafford County Public Schools as well as across the Commonwealth of Virginia, I encourage you to visit our SCPS, History and Social Studies, instruction page. This page will provide you with the standards of learning, the curriculum framework, and additional resources for instruction. Also, I
278have to pause for a minute and thank Scott Kisner. I've known him for a very long time. If I remember correctly, he is the, now he is the longest serving superintendent in the state, even though he's only been in Stafford for three years. So just a couple of comments about Dr. Kisner. I know that it's very difficult for him to walk away from this work. As a matter of fact, I don't think he will. I think he'll always have his hand in it in some way. I think the thing we most admire about Dr. Kisner is that he is grounded in his conviction of what is best for all students. and unwavering in that belief. And I think he's demonstrated that not only in his tenure here in Stafford, but during his entire career. So
279I wish him a very peaceful farewell. I know he's doing this for his health. I hope that he will continue to be a friend and mentor to all of us. That's it. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Jones. I'm going to take a moment for our chairman's privilege regarding. Dr. Kisner who is not joining us this evening to thank him again for our for his service from the school board we are giving him a certain plaque but I didn't go the plaque route because I don't like those it is a statue of kids standing with stars no matter everything that Dr. Kisner has brought to us I know has always been student focused and he cares very deeply for kids. So I wanted to just read for you all what we have on here
280but I want to explain why we have this particular statute. This says, I have a great job in the universe of occupations. What do I do? I'm a star polisher. It's a very important job. If you want to know how important, just go out at night and look at the stars twinkling and sparkling. You see, I'm a superintendent, previously special education teacher, which I know never left. The stars are like the children in my class. My job is to take them in whatever shape they come and shine and buff them and then send them out to take their places as bright twinkling beacons in the sky. So this is to us from the board to Dr. Kisner. As you can see, it is of students standing with stars because he has. he is a star
281polisher and we wish him well in his retirement and certainly good health so he can enjoy hit the first of hopefully many grandchildren which i know he is currently enjoying so i would like to just thank dr kisner as well and i know that his email will work so if there are members of the public if you haven't had your chance to say something to dr kisner i know that those emails will be forwarded to him and i know he reads each one of them and would certainly appreciate your comments so thank you and we have one action item this evening oh oh yes two I'm sorry I'm using my no we'll start with the first action item is regarding our appointment for the head start policy council I believe we agreed on that last
282week madam chair I'd like to appoint Dr Warner to remain as Head Start Policy Council liaison? Second. It's been moved and seconded. Did we decide on an alternate? I couldn't remember, so I'm just clarifying. We did not. It is not required. I'm just concerned. Let's just skip it for now. Excellent. All right. All those in favor of Dr. Warner serving as the board's liaison to the Head Start Policy Council, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? motion carries unanimously all right information oh sorry 10.02 i did not redo my um i didn't refresh as indicated by our super clerk i did not do that so um is there um a motion or discussion motion to cancel the repurpose september 2021 and we can discuss it after a second second All right. Initially, the September 21st meeting
283was scheduled for us to reevaluate the... mask policy and other items which has been somewhat has been superseded through the governor's mandate at least as of this time the board has other pressing also matters as well i was to suggest that our consultants will be ready that week to present some important information to the board at the time I had considered that we would just stay with that 21st date however I know that that may not be the most convenient date so if we could repurpose or reschedule I do think that that week it is critical that we go ahead and meet with our consultants Madam Chair I would like to suggest that we repurpose this meeting to accommodate our consultants for the Tuesday that we scheduled already a lot of people have already seen
284what has been scheduled so let's go with it that date works for me I guess my concern I just I'm not clear on whether Ms. Hollerback and I are on the same page or not I would be happy to have the 21st meeting be a meeting with the consultants correct if we're going to also discuss the mask policy again I would prefer that to be at a regular meeting rather than a special meeting so that's just my thought Dr. Chase I don't think there's any more discussion to be had on the mask mandate because this has already been decided by the Governor and and by the legislation that that was just recently passed don't you agree I do I just didn't know if it was the the entire board was in agreement on that thank
285you thanks I think we should if we've already booked off this time on our calendars I think most of us have used this time to meet with the consultants if that's amenable to everybody the current time for the start of that meeting Ms. Hall is currently six o'clock I would suggest that we do start that early if not even if 5 30 even were to work just because the consultants do travel to us that I'd like to also be cognizant of their time as well Madam Chair I will do the best that I can to get there at that time but if it's the will of the board to have it earlier I will have to be calling into it as well because I've got obligations with my present job I mean we can stick
286with six at six o'clock I was fine I was just trying to see if there was a possibility but I do believe we will start right at six that's fine with me thanks all right So do we need to do you all want to make a motion to repurpose that meeting? Motion to change the meeting on 921 to a meeting with the consultants from BWP to discuss the superintendent search. Second. Second. All right. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. No. Any opposed? I heard I think there was one no. Yes, ma'am. Dr. Chase. We're pulling the board. I know. It took me a minute to get to the button. Aye. Ms. Hazard? Aye. Ms. Healy? Yes. Ms. Hollerback? Yes. Ms. Randall? Yes. And Dr. Warner? Yes. And Ms. Young? That day is
287not good for me to be. It's going to be a long day. So like you all mentioned, masking plus the search is going to take a long night. So if the masking is not, I prefer to start earlier. But if the time is six o'clock, I will do six to eight and that will be it. So I'm not going to go along with the motion that that's what I want. I'm going to say no to that. Thank you. Okay, I believe that the motion carries six to one. This will be solely for the purpose of meeting with the consultant. Madam Chair, I do have one other item before you adjourn. Oh, no, we've got information. Oh, you want to wait? Okay, let's go to our information items first. We have, as seen in our... HR
288report about several of our needs. I don't know if this fills one of those or not about the two vision impaired teachers, were they included as vacancies on the HR report? These are contracts. Right, but that they were vacants. Okay, well, that will be my question. I'm just curious if it's taking the number down. That's where I'm going. I was going to say, Dr. Hummer, now we're just talking about this this afternoon. These are two in the slide that showed where I said the coverage for those open positions, and I said that there were some where they were external contracted. This was in that camp that I was addressing. Okay. Correct. based on these dates here they've technically already started so I think we're being asked to approve them which is not unusual so I'm
289just trying to we're actually approving contracts we're not a program actual through agencies hires right yes ma'am motion to move Information item 1101 to action item 10.03. Second. Second. All right. It's been moved and seconded to move this item to action. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Motion carries unanimously. Is there a follow-on motion? Second. All right. It's been moved and seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. All right, moving on to our 11.02, the award of a contract to train for chiller maintenance with regard to, I'm sorry, I did refresh. I have a couple questions. With regard to chillers. This would be, I believe, Mr. Anderson. Any questions? I do, madam. Good evening, Mr. Anderson. Hello.
290I would like to know, for these chiller maintenance plan that you are proposing, it says that it'll shut down. Is this to do a startup and a shutdown for each? Is it for all 33 sites? Okay. And how long does it take to do the shutdown and startup for each location, or does it depend on how many chillers they have? It depends on what they're actually doing at that particular location. And I don't know exactly how long. I just don't I don't know that. So do we know how long this whole process will take? Like, are we talking weeks, months? No, this is normal maintenance. So it's almost like your car. Right. And if you're if you're going in to take care of your car for maintenance, then you have to. change the oil you
291have to work on the fluids you have to test the temperatures it's a real technical thing that we just do it every year right it's um over a hundred thousand so you'll you all would need to approve the contract and so it does this also potentially mean that there might be emergency or unexpected expenditures because of something that comes up with these You will if you don't do your maintenance and you have more breakdowns and more issues with your chiller. So it's really important work to have done. Okay. Thank you. Dr. Warner. Is this part of a warranty for these or not? No, it's not. Ms. Healy. Is there a program currently in place that this will follow up on so this doesn't need to go forward tonight? It does not, no. Thank you. Any
292of our virtual colleagues, any questions? All right, hearing none. Let's see, the next one is regarding a payment to Tyler Technologies for some maintenance, hardware, and support costs for transportation. This appears to be using budgeted FY22 operating funds. Any questions from board members? Go ahead, Ms. E. Randall. Okay. Was this part, this whole expenditure part, was this part of one of the recommendations that came from this 2020 study? And I notice on here it mentions the app. And I'm wondering, we talked about some of the challenges. Mr. Baldwin, you talked about some of the challenges with the app. And so I'm wondering, are we just going to re-up our app? Or are we going to make the changes that we need to make it personally helpful for our families? Glad you mentioned that. We are
293in talks. We've been talking with the vendor on amongst some other things and that is something that we're hoping that we can work out those kinks. It's really a programming issue with the use of that app and the way that we want to use it versus the way they've programmed it to be used. Yes ma'am. May I? yes Dr. Thomas yeah I just wanted to say to thank parent who reached out to me to talk about how important the app has been for her and her family but she made an excellent suggestion which was she said she's been in the school system for many years and so she can imagine that we might be hearing from new parents because they they may not know how to ignore some of these features that that are providing
294incorrect information so she suggested that we might want to do a training with new parents I'm not talking about right now but maybe as part of back to school we might want to include that in the PSA that that Ms. Randall recommended thank you one quick thing I forgot to mention this last week we did mention an informational flyer that had updates on when to use it, when not to use it. And so we have a working draft of that. I've been hoping that once it's kind of finalized, we will post it on our website for more information for parents to utilize concerning the app and the special situations when you can and when you can't use it. Thank you. All right, our next information item is regarding the purchase of Air Max air purifier
295filters. These funds appear to be using the federal grant funds. All right. Can I ask a question? Sure. Thanks. It says federal grant funds, but do we know when these funds will become available? And how often are we changing the filters and is it recommended that we change them more often and when were they last replaced? Sorry. Yeah, so first off, the funds are available now for the federal grant money. And this is actually designated for the next year as well. We already set aside federal dollars out of the, I think it was the S or three. It might've been, as Ms. Hazard mentioned, there's several different phases of the federal funding. and then the air purifiers actually notify us when the when it's getting ready to need replaced air filter so our light comes
296on maintenance went through and checked all of them prior to the start of the school year before teachers were turning to make sure they weren't returning with big red lights saying hey please replace and so we're stocking up on those filters so that we can replace them regularly i'm not sure the exact time frame i think we can we have to change them once per school year roughly so but there's also multiple filters per air purifier So it's kind of like a rotation. Any other questions? All right, hearing none. Next, we have the award of a professional contract to Grimm and Parker Architects for the Design and Construction Administration Services for High School Number 6. This will be going towards using our Virginia VPSA bond funds. Oh, yes, me? Go ahead. Okay. Do we have
297a CTE direction to give these architects and or otherwise what guidelines are we giving them? We have we've been working on the ed specs updates and so that is being finalized currently it's not quite done yet but we will be providing that direction. OK. I know you're working on your ed specs, but some of like a, I guess, technical part of the building is going to be whatever CTE programs are, I'm assuming. Yes. CTE programs are going in. So I'm just curious. Do we have a direction or a flow? And I'm just hoping that we're not repeating something that we already currently have. There is some of that discussion will go on during the design process. So all of those decisions have not been made. There'll be more detailed discussions about each city lab. Let
298me just add to that. Just remind you that all along we've been looking at CT, including a visit to the academies, Aladdin, Aladdin, which one of our board members attended with us. So we're certainly thinking about what we need to do as a system for CT in that particular school, but we still have plenty of time on the planet. Okay. May I step in for just one moment, please? Because I was the school board member that was part of the whole design of the ed specs for the elementary school. And luckily we had Ms. Randall that stepped up with us as a parent to do this. There was a whole lot of thought and process that went into it. I feel very disengaged at this point going forward. It was staff. It was parents. It
299was teachers and people on the, you know, boots on the ground that came up with the ed specs for Annie Moncure. So I guess my question is, Who's involved in going forward with the high school number six, Ed Specs? There will be additional meetings and also conversation about details of the design. There's been a steering committee as well as several focus groups and other committees that have been involved. And again, it's not finalized, but it's definitely going in a direction. There's a vision for the building and a lot of these. ideas of what to include in the new high school have been discussed again it's not finalized there'll be additional engagement and discussions as the design progresses and I appreciate that so I guess my next question is Is there a school board member involved
300in it? Is there a staff member involved in it? Is there a member of the board of supervisors involved in it? These are the folks in a parent involved in it. These are the things that made Annie Moncure so successful in the rebuild. I just want to make sure that we're repeating stuff that... we were successful at with the last one. Yes, and I can appreciate that. Dr. Warner has been involved. Also, we will send you the list of who's been involved so far so you know who's been on these various committees so far. And again, we're just getting started with a lot of the planning and designing for the project. And that's awesome. Thank you so much for that. You don't have to send me anything. I just want to make sure that our
301community knows who's involved in it. So if Dr. Warner's involved and... I would like to make sure that everybody knows who's involved in it. And if we have central office staff that's involved in it, their names have to be put out there as well because they were so successful in the contributions that they made. And I could name a thousand people right now, but we're getting very late at this point. let's just make sure that you know everything is getting out into the open about who's involved in all of the planning that's all i'm saying yes and we do have quite a bit of involvement and those subject matter experts that were involved with the montcure elementary school project are many of them are involved again so we do have that involvement now That's awesome.
302Thank you so much. I appreciate that Some of the parents that were involved in Moncure are also involved and many of them have high school students and we've also asked for high school student input Yeah, there has been student input as well. That's been very good That's that's wonderful. And if you all haven't tapped into Susan Randall, you might want to do that The when the presentation came before we had talked about that there would be a fall reach out with the community has that been scheduled? We are in the schedule that when we have The design team on board and we can actually start to produce some of the ideas more clearly in that type of format so we are planning that and Some of that is dependent on the contract being approved as
303well as the other aspects of the project moving forward Because I think that that was part of, or at least that's what was presented in there because I know it's something I've very much pushed for because our best advocates are going to be our community. Yes. That they can see it and see what the vision is and where we're going. It is somewhat to Ms. Hollaback's point, but we did promise we would do that at the time we approved it. I believe it was in the fall. I don't think we want to wait too long. Yes. That's my comment. Okay. All right. Yes, Ms. Healy, sorry. This is a funding question. Are these funds currently available to us? They're not part of a future borrow? So some of it is part of a future borrow
304one that is coming to you actually on the next I think it's the next agenda item I saw that was five point some million and this is yeah, and we've talked with the county staff about that. So What do you with them to schedule it? They don't want to borrow any in advance that we don't need it So it's seven million dollars of the total contract, but that's over you know four years because that gets us all the way through you know the end of construction so they will we'll ask the board of supervisors to appropriate the full amount but the funding will come throughout the project because we won't need the actual cash the cash is spent over the four years so we borrow it in increments is that something the supervisors would do
305if it hasn't been borrowed yet i mean it says the force the sources the vspa bonds but if the money hasn't been borrowed yet I don't know how we can ask for it to be. Yes. Yeah. So it's actually been a common practice over the last couple of years and we've worked with their staff on it. So it should be fine. It's they appropriate. We almost we basically use cash and then we replenish the cash with BPSA bond proceeds. Thank you. Dr. Warren. So this funding is for the entire project so it's from start to finish for the planning the design and for the supervision and construction so really is it paid up all up front or is this done over draws over the course of the four years? It's draws and we have a
306schedule of what the invoicing would be over the entire length of the project. So we're not taking that whole lump sum at one time? No. for question I have my hand up but I'm not sure if you could see it um is that Ms. Young I'm sorry I couldn't hear oh you can't hear me hold on let me see no I just wanted to make sure I had my hand up so I wasn't sure if you could actually see it when I'm waving um so I don't know if this passed this question yet but I just wanted to know if we had like a risk register or some kind of assessment issues list of you know, issues that we had, say, for example, with Stafford High School, that when we do the new high school,
307that we don't make those same mistakes. I know Moncler was successful, but we also need to look at what wasn't successful to make sure that we stay in scope. and in budget so I just want to make sure that we are using that as a lessons learned also right yeah I think that is happening for sure as well along with the engagement piece a lot of the questions are what's working well in our existing schools and then what are the issues that you're facing so those questions are already being asked quite a bit perfect all right our next item we are moving into is about our uh resolution requesting uh bond funds in the amount uh i guess net proceeds of eleven million six hundred and ten thousand for the 2021 fall borrow there are
308three oh sorry i'm off one three projects listed as part of that for the um mechanical finishes at north stafford high school upgrade mechanical roof and finishes at ferry farm and high school number six build any comments or questions i have a comment okay it's probably not appropriate but i'm gonna say it just so that my my brook point people know that i'm like kind of behind them whether it's a 3r or a cip Brook Point High School needs to have their chiller's replaced people let's go that's all I'm done well I believe that that would be actually my question are the projects as presented here the most prioritized projects of needs within the school division Well, and maybe we should have a work session on this because apparently, I mean, we're trying to retain
309teachers. I've got teachers emailing me and telling me that they are, they're happy here, except for the fact that they go into school and they're sweating their panties off. That's not a good environment for them to be working in. If I need to send it off to everybody to have them read it, to bring it back to the forefront, then I'll do it. So, Mr. Fulmer. So these are the items that were identified in last year's CIP to be funded in this current year and borrow the proceeds. So we have a lot of pressing needs, and actually, I don't know if it's the next item, it's one of the coming items on the agenda is our CIP and our 3R list, which has been included on that. And so Mr. White and Mr. Anderson will
310speak about that. We have a lot of needs. I would say that these are the ones that we're prepared to move on immediately and move forward with. I know the point chillers and that mechanical work is, I'm saying this, I'm almost positive it's in the NICIP in the coming years. I know it's gotten pushed back in the previous year. So it's in there and it's coming and we've got a lot of unfunded projects on there as well. I totally understand that, Chris, but here's the thing. If you had to choose where your wife was working, would it be Brook Point High School or some other place based on where they were on the 3R list? And I can give you a little more facts about that. But point high school situation, we are rebuilding the
311chillers. The chillers not actually the biggest problem we've had out there. And they had, I think, a lightning strike and there's been some controls issues. The whole system eventually needs to be replaced because of the age of the school, but the chillers are definitely being addressed and that's already been approved by the board. It's a chiller rebuild and that's something that's recommended by the manufacturer. So we have that scheduled to be completed next year. and that's already funded. It's going to be done. So you don't need to worry about the chores at Brook Point High School. We're worried about some of the other components, but we're also addressing these issues as they come up. And then we do have Brook Point included in the 3R list as a phased project. Okay, and I totally appreciate
312that. Thank you so much for sharing that with me. But that just brings me to now, I've just been told about all these other issues that have gone on, a lightning strike and all these other things. I mean, these are things that I have not been informed of. And this is the community that I'm representing. maybe we need to have a conversation a little bit you know later down the road before i vacate my seat so i can inform my predecessor or the person that's going to replace me um about the outstanding issues that we have here Can I piggyback off of what you just said? No, I'm sorry Pam. I just want to help you with a comfortable... Don't scream at me. Please let him answer my question. Okay. Yes, and that was an
313issue that happened on a Sunday. And so the chiller went down and then it was hot on Monday and then it was repaired that day. So we did not report it to the board. We just fixed the chiller and we got the cool air running and then got it back in the right temperature. They still have had some issues in that school and we're addressing it. I can look into that in more detail to see how the situation is right now, but I just know they've given that a lot of attention and our operations and maintenance team reacted really well to the issue that they did have. the controls over there okay and again I apologize I'm not I'm not trying to beat you up and I'm not trying to you know do anything that's
314going to not help my my district what I'm what I'm saying now is is that I'm finding out all of these things that are that are just now coming to light to me as a school board member so I'm a little bit concerned about this so I'm I'm gonna discontinue the conversation right now I would really love to have a conversation with you maybe with Chris maybe with Dr. Jones I would really like to take care of my high school before I vacate my seat and I appreciate all of your work that you're doing for our school division. So I'm going to probably step down now and not talk anymore because I think I've already upset too many people and I apologize. So have a great evening and I will see you probably next week.
315Ms. Young, did you have a comment? Yes, I did. Go ahead. So we talked about profits earlier today. And I was thinking about the proffers that may expire. And I was wondering if we could use, with permission, because I think it's possible, we've used proffers on Moncure. And so I was wondering if we could look into that and see if we could make some of these adjustments or make some of these repairs, chillers at Brook Point, whatever is necessary. That was something that I was going to piggyback off of Miss Irene before she yelled at me. Thank you. I believe that if you go back and review the comments, it has to be a capacity enhancing. It has to add capacity. However, I'm sure we can look into it further, but as I understood Mr.
316Davis, it is a very specific purpose for us to work on current buildings. True, except you could ask, there is permission. There's some things that they've done in the past that I've looked at. And so it's something to consider. That's all. Thank you. All right. I'm not. I think with regard to the only concern that I have, and please know, staff, again, I'm concerned. I'm sure you all know where I'm going to go next, but I'm not there yet. So that we are funding the project that we're most ready to be able to execute. My concern is, is it the one that we need the most? I want to have some. confidence that we can say to the board of supervisors yes we have all these other things failing but we are going forward with
317these three I am not trying to say that but I understand that we can execute those but are those the ones that we should execute so I am sure you all are aware I will talk about it when we get to the 3R list with regards to other aging infrastructure but we all have aging infrastructure and my comment would be in general is keeping the list of the things and this is not certainly again it came out of the discussion with Ms. Hollerback but the list of the things that keep going wrong for us to make the best comments and budget yet decisions but also requests we have to understand what is going on with our infrastructure here and we can say we defer them we defer them because we can move them around and
318we've done this for years but i do think being true to our word these are the things that are failing we need repairs all that i think going forward we need some kind of tracking so we can be and and dr jones i i don't want us to overstep but we also are creating the narrative that goes with what a balance between growth also impacts our buildings the more we run things um all right i'm going to leap there you know i'm going there hartwood got to say it i know that we have we are high in terms of enrollment at hartwood I know that we have water problems, roof problems, and AC problems. Every morning I have been told, thank you for going almost every morning to make sure to find out what happens.
319I know the roof is leaking, the pressure water tank, we have to shut down the water. I am very aware of all those issues. i am not trying to say pick my pro it's not my project however these are all our students not having water having the third grade hallway ceilings coming in we have got to get behind aging infrastructure the ac in that building i know it's five systems or four systems so it is difficult i understand that so what i'm saying is if we are hearing in many of our buildings that we are having major issues and usually i know i let dr chase come in on drew because i'm sure there's things there and i know we are coming forward with plans for these buildings by the end of the year however
320i just have to make the comment some of these things also impact our hiring when we don't have rooms when we have I do believe that we want the best infrastructure. So I just have to make sure that we are looking at these issues, making sure we're bringing forward. And I'm not saying I won't approve these, but it does give me pause to make sure we have got to start either prioritizing or bringing these forward because we may not have a lot of time. Because I can tell you, if you have to shut down Hartwood, there is nowhere for those kids to go. Rocky Run can't take them. I don't want any more trailers at Rocky Run. i think that's a sense that i think the board will want to talk about um later and
321work session and i know we're going to talk about it in the second piece here but that's the only part that gives me pause and it's more of a comment there doesn't have to be a response but um we want to be the best school district too we have always prided ourselves on keeping our buildings up and again i think we hit that tipping point with funding in general I just wanted to add though that like the ones that are on this we've kind of paid for plans and already in front so pushing them or holding them actually is costing us I would guess yes yeah so I'm going to answer that, but I'm going to talk actually what I was going to say. So when we get to our CIP and our 3R list,
322because I want it to be that we're not hiding what our issues are because, believe me, if maintenance was here, they'd be jumping up and down asking for more money to do these things at Hartwood, at Brook Point, at Drew, you name it. They want to stay on a schedule. We haven't been able to because we don't have. the funding available and all items are constantly getting pushed back on the three R. So if you look at where they're at in the C. I. P. And they're supposed to be funded in FYI 25. That's what our scheduled maintenance should be. It ends up not getting replaced or funded until FYI 29. That's when you start running into the breakdowns and um, issues that we have that at Brook Point. The reason I know that is
323because as soon as I was alerted that, hey, we're having total problems at whatever morning it was at Brook Point, and I was on the phone with Rob Adams, our maintenance director, he said, hey, this was supposed to be replaced, you know, or rebuilt three years ago, and it's gotten pushed back, and so that's when you start to run into problems. we try to prioritize as much as we can with the funds that we have and you'll see that some things are unfunded and every year that gets shifted to reprioritize so a lot of time goes into a three hour list that you're you know about to see here in a few minutes and so we're not we're not just throwing darts there those are you know scheduled items And now that I've rambled on,
324I forget what your question was. I know I was going to answer it. It's getting late. No, I was just saying that we have already, sorry, now I'm going to get giggles. We have already expended money on these projects to start anyways, and we don't want to necessarily lose the money. But the other thing, though, in speaking similarly to what Ms. Hazard and Ms. Hollerbeck said, too, you know, I think Patrick did an amazing job of telling us, you know, the good, the bad, the ugly of our hirings and losses and that sort of thing. But wellness is another one. And when you are, as Ms. Hazard said, when you're a new hire and you walk into these buildings, you need to make sure you want to see that that building, no matter what the
325date on that building is. is that is you know it's in a good structure safe you know especially now people always worry about that um to make sure that you know we get people and you know that want to work in that building i mean that's the same thing dr warner and i've said several times walking through fairy farm is that you know it's really pretty in the front it's like a bad mullet it's really pretty in the front not so pretty in the back and you know i just kind of want to make sure that if you're a teacher that's been teaching there for you know 10 15 years i want to keep her or him to be able to say well gosh they got all new everything here in the front but let
326me go back to my moldy carpet you know that kind of thing and so or dehumidifiers in my room and so i just think that you know And this isn't just speaking to you, like, you're not doing your job. That's not me. But it's just saying that, you know, this is something that we hear you. We see what you're saying. Evidently, when we go in these buildings, it's evidence that these three-hour projects are making it very difficult and adding another layer of difficulty when it comes to having and maintaining staff. yeah and so what i what i meant to work towards on the last time i spoke was the the three-year list and our 10-year outlook and we schedule things and they're planned and so we design you know some of this work isn't you
327know just you know throwing money at a contractor to go do it there's design work that has to be done in advance so we start to do that design work then we do the actual construction piece and that's the obviously the the hefty price tag is when we get to that so um so you're right there has been some money expended on some of these projects where we get the design work done in advance Just real, you know, you look at the three-hour list and you see item line after line after line is unfunded. I know that just since I've been here, you've submitted design and then we approve, you know, there's always these different, there's multiple steps before we can even get to the point where we can start working on the project. And
328then I think some of those projects get bumped if there's an emergency and we have to fix something else. So I think that Dr. or I'm sorry, Mr. Anderson has done an excellent job at trying to break down our three hour list into priorities. And some of these projects, I mean, by the time we are asking the VVSA for this money, we, I'm sorry, VSP, VPSA, it's late. We have already gone through multiple steps so it's really difficult for us to change course. But I do see that Brook Point is on this list multiple times in phased approach to try to repair these problems. But as Mr. Anderson pointed out, we still fix them when they break. And before there were any comments I was going to ask, which I usually do not do on
329the spot, but if there was... any willingness to move this to action we're on a timeline we can ask VPSA to extend it they've been gracious in the past I actually was scheduled to bring this at the last board meeting we pushed it with talking to the county because we were they wanted to adjust the bond bar and actually borrow a little bit more because it saves them money because the interest rates are so low and so with those discussions it kind of got us off schedule but motion to move item 1105 to Action 10.04 Second Second All right it's been moved and seconded to move this well what are we moving to action 11.06 is what we're on is it not yeah 11.06 oh I thought it moved up one because we'd moved another
330one up already All right so Missy says it keeps its number I don't know if you could hear that 1106 move to to move information item 1106 to action item 1004 second All right it's been moved and seconded are there is there any discussion I will be voting against the motion because I do not believe that we are in the I agree with these projects, but I believe that we have some major issues and I'm not convinced yet that this is the best use of these funds at this time. So all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Those opposed, nay. Dr. Chase? Aye. Ms. Hazard? No. Ms. Healy? No. Ms. Hollerback? Ms. Hollerback? All right. I guess not there. Keep going. Okay. Ms. Randall? Yes. Dr. Warner? Yes. And Ms. Young? Yes. Manager Chair,
331motion passes. All right. Follow-on motion for approval. Motion to approve action item 10.05 for the funding. Is there a second? Okay, I heard a second. Yeah. All right. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, say nay. Nay. All right. If you want to pull the board, Ms. When we have many on, it's hard to hear. Dr. Chase? Aye. Ms. Hazard? No. Ms. Healy? Yes. Ms. Hellerback? Okay. Ms. Randall? Yes. Dr. Warner? Yes. And Ms. Young? Yes. Madam Chair, motion passes. All right. Thank you very much. All right. Moving on to 11.07. So this is the big presentation, I guess, for the CIP. Thank you, Mr. White. Thank you. Good evening. Good evening, Chairperson Hazard, members of the school board, Dr. Jones. Okay, so this evening we're going to review
332the CIP. And so this evening we're going to update you on the CIP report. I'm sure you all have a handy copy of the report, this year's report. Still in draft mode. Besides that, the report is going to be reviewed at a very high level, so this presentation will be extremely high level. Also, we're going to discuss, revisit the update and changes to the inflation factors this year. We're going to revisit the eight large capital projects. As well, we're going to, for the first time, introduce the three R lists. We didn't have that information last time, it's new this time. And we'll finish the presentation with important dates on our CIP calendar. Okay, so big picture, really high in the sky view of the CIP. The purpose of the report is that it outlines school
333capital needs over the next decade. The way how this works for those of you at home still watching, the school board submits the CIP to the board of supervisor for consideration in the county CIP. So this document doesn't just guarantee all of these things are going to happen. Again, it's submitted to the board of supervisors and they have the ability to include these projects in their CIP. The CIP is the plan. includes large capital projects as well as 3R projects. I use the term new large capital projects because it just for me it creates a way of thinking of these projects. These large capital projects are typically new construction, new buildings most of the time or new renovations, newly proposed renovations. Whereas our 3R projects, these are existing projects. existing maintenance renovation repairs on existing
334facilities and so For those of you at home you may see in the report will have dates on when some of these new school New schools will open they're tied to our enrollment projections Whereas the three our projects are based on critical needs and that was something just in the last few minutes of conversation There was this critical need when is this needed? And so again, we'll review that very shortly. And of course the main goal of this is to ensure high quality facilities In this, you know, what I've been hearing is a little bit about teacher recruiting, teacher retention, again, offering student learning. That's what this thing is, that's what the CIP is about, is to make sure we have a good learning environment for our students and staff. Okay. So I'll start first
335by revisiting the county's inflation factors. We know that because of COVID, the costs on construction materials and everything else has gone up. We have broken supply chains and prices are sky high. And so if you look at personnel operating, project inflation, and project management, those inflation factors increased year over year. So the top chart you have there in gray shows last year's FY22 rate. If we look at the inflation factor for FY23, which is the current CIP year, we can see most dramatically there was a big increase in project inflation. It went from 4.5% for the first three years to 12% for the first year. Huge. So obviously this will adjust all the numbers when I get to our large capital project slide here. So on this slide, we have eight large capital projects that
336are being proposed. And this is the order of the project that we have here in its priority. So of these eight projects, you'll notice that five are for new schools. Two are for renovated schools and one is for an addition, a 10 classroom addition for more seats. And if we look at the seats added, if we were to sum them up in our, from this list, there are 7,500 plus more seats being added if it just in this list and this ties to what we talked about earlier, which is our growth. So the reason why these seats are in here is that we're slated to grow and we're slated to grow at all levels, elementary, middle and high. Now with regard to the school requested opening dates, just want to let you know, these are
337tied specifically to the when a school reaches 100% When it's estimated to reach 100% of its program capacity, that's when we'll have the opening date for an elementary school. And then when a middle or high school is projected to reach 100% capacity in aggregate, then that's when we'll have the opening date for those schools. So that's why you see high school six, we're asking that the school open in August of 2025, but in reality, High school six will reach that 100% capacity two years earlier, 2023, but it's just not feasible to get that building done that quickly. So with the exception of that, all the other projects on the list, these are the true dates when we're, when our projections are suggesting they'll reach 100% capacity. Lastly, if we look at the last two columns,
338we'll see the school board estimated costs. from last year, FY22, in comparison to the current year, FY23. And you'll see the difference. When we talked about those inflation factors, you know, you can see what it does to high school, what it does to elementary school. I'll also want to add that there were two additional projects added this year, which is elementary school 19 and high school number seven. They weren't on last year's CIP request from the school board, but they were put on the county's FY22 CIP. And of course, that's the county recognizing that we have this growth and sort of aligning funds to accommodate our students. And so moving on to the next slide. So that's our large capital projects list. Are there any questions or concerns about those? Yes. So high school elementary
339school 19 and high school 7 put on by the county but are those school board requested opening dates still aligning with the the projections yes yes ma'am okay okay all right well wait wait I had this is Dr. Chase so you mentioned that all of the projects except for high school number six have a correct date attached to them Is that true with Drew Middle School? Well... Okay so when we're talking new school openings those are tied to 100% capacity again so for elementary schools it's program capacity at 100% for middle and high school it's design capacity 100% renovations are different. Right and I would just note though that Drew is pretty close to 100% capacity and needs some work so just clarifying that thank you. thank you um okay mr white yeah um um
340checking to see, I don't know if it's helpful or not, that we would have the fact that they put those two schools on and allow you to put the dates that we are requesting it to be open. I don't think we have any room to show what their dates are because they're going by a different statistical analysis than we are in terms of. when to open a school and i wasn't sure if that would be good for at least the audience to know because i don't want them to say oh the school board says august of 2025 and here we are in 2028 and it's still not open yet wonder what's going on so i'm not sure when we're presenting to the audience that it will be nice to have that column there that actually
341shows the dates that the county is thinking that we need it and explain um why it's not so. Okay. So then another question I had, and I'm not sure if I formulated clearly enough, but when we say, and we don't know where it's going to go, the middle school or elementary school number 19, and you have 964 seats there, Are we already analyzing where the growth is? And therefore, it doesn't matter where we put the school. We're saying, okay, this is how many seats we're going to be needing. Right. So those seats are tied to the current, the way we build schools now. And so that's what we know. that's what we know right now how we build schools and if that were to change in the future then that could be adjusted but this
342is a snapshot in time how we the size we build schools currently okay thank you mr mcgraw thank you um miss oh go ahead um and ms young i understand you wanting to put the um because this is our large capital project list, I would really like to just keep the date that we need it and not confuse it with a date that the board of supervisors would- I totally get that. And I made that comment. What I'm also only saying that it will be nice. We don't have to do it, but when we're explaining this, especially the audience are looking to explain. that this is our opening date and that the county has a different opening date based on the way how they calculate their opening date. And so you could do it or
343not. You're not going to be here. I'm not going to be here. So it's something just to clarify and keep in mind. That's all. If I could say Ms. Young thank you that's a good point and I just want to let you know that in our report we do have both so that information is available although it isn't in this slide we do have that information covered in our report. all right so i'm going to thank you mr white in the past when we have done renovations to the fine arts is it because there is truly no additional space in the north stafford area that we could expand um mountain view high school we added the jrotc the orchestra room all that which of course moved it from 1900 or whatever it was to 2150.
344We did the same at Colonial Forge and we did the same at Brooke Point. I believe that we can't do that at North, but I would just, since we were talking capacity earlier as part of our discussion on proffers, I just wanted to see if there's any way that that zero could change. Oh, you're talking about adding classroom seats? well it's it's focused on the fine arts and and just basically improving the fine arts facilities in the school that's what that project is it's not it's not a it doesn't add classrooms i i understand what you're talking about and and ironically years ago we didn't even count uh some of those uh you know fine art classes as adding capacity but what in in the other schools we actually built classrooms and that was why
345yeah is there anything we could do to the renovation that we're doing it that we could potentially we can definitely look at that for next year's request we can we can look at that and see if that makes sense for that school yes ma'am not for this not for this go-round that'll take some time to really look at and discuss with the principal and see where where that would make sense but we can definitely look at that for north stafford high school in the future right because i mean we're taking an old design we're going to re renovate it and potentially we could come up with some economies of spacing there that we could potentially increase capacity and get some credit for it. I know they probably do it anyway when they're doing the design,
346but rather than have a zero there, if in fact we can add some, then that may help. I think that's a good suggestion. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. All right, so I'm going to move on to our additional 3R funding. It's being requested this year. So there are more planned expenditures for 3R projects, and, of course, the purpose is to address deficiencies at our schools, to avoid safety issues. Like we talked about service disruptions from lightning strikes and any other thing like that that could affect our building systems. And of course we want to avoid any extra costs associated with deferred maintenance, not getting to things fast enough and then they break down and then it costs us even more money. So what we have here is our previously submitted 3R list and this is
347for fiscal year 22 so we would have just received those funds and the key things I look at on this is the total bond funds, the 3R set aside and the unfunded. And we can see that in 22, we had 6 million, a little over 6 million in bond funds, 1.4 million in three-year set-asides. That's in line with what we are typically allocated to receive from the county. Key thing for me looking at those total unfunded. If you look at those individual projects, you see their air quality improvements, replacing roofs, replacing HVACs, all these things are very important and they're unfunded. So, you know, we start talking about. If we get about six million bucks, but we have about six million bucks unfunded, well, if we're unable to get extra money through year-end, then that
348pushes things down the list. It starts this cycle of deferred maintenance and things getting bumped down and us reprioritizing based on if something fails. So if I could just... really quickly here. So we've got about 13.5 million in total in our in our request for funds for FY 22 in our plan here. You'll notice in FY 23 that number bumped up a little bit to 15.8 million. And so that's about 2 million more dollars we're asking for in terms of where the need is for all of these very important projects and we see that we have six million in bond funds which is about normal about the 1.4 million in three are set aside but again the total unfunded that number sort of popping up and it's just saying hey we have these urgent projects
349we don't want to forget about them but we want to get it on the list so that everyone sees there They're very much needed ASAP. If we move to FY24, you look at that bottom total number, that number is bumping up again to 19.4 million. So again, we have a lot of deferred maintenance projects. If we look at the unfunded, that's 8.3 million. If we look at a request for bond funds, that's like 9.4. That's higher than what we normally ask for. But again, there's a reason why is we're trying to play catch up and not have service disruptions and inconvenience to our students and anything that will affect learning. So some of the key takeaways from our 3R list. If we add them all up over the 10-year period, and so I only went
350through the first three years because there are, of course, 10 years in the list. I didn't want to take you all the way there. But to summarize, there are over $171 million of projects on the list. And of course these projects will address deficiencies, enhance safety, try to minimize foreseeable service disruptions. We talked about that flat dollar revenue approach that we've been receiving in our allocation. Normally it's about 5 million for bond funds, about 1.4 million for three hour set asides. We feel that funding approach isn't really working very well for us and that we need to develop a new approach that perhaps looks at percentage of tax revenue or school capital construction budget should be considered. The purpose is this may get us more funding. That way we can ensure that our students will
351have optimal learning environments. And, you know, just sort of... A simple way to explain it, if you look at some of the projects in the 3R list, they're tied to HVAC. They're tied to roofs. These are very basic things and it has to do with a student or staff being comfortable. things like heating, air conditioning. So all of these things potentially affect the teaching environment and the learning environment. So we're just asking for very basic things to keep schools and students operating at a very high level. So lastly on our CIP calendar here are some important dates. We see that the next meeting we have will be September 14th. There'll be a school board action item on the large-scale CIP projects in the 3R list. followed by from October 4th through October 15th, we'll have
352that TRC reviewing our proposed projects. And a big date will be October 19th, that joint school board meeting where we'll talk about, we'll present the details of our adopted large-scale projects. And of course, the enrollment projections that came up tonight will be presented to the board October 26th. and then on November 5th they'll be submitted to the TRC for review and then we have that second joint board meeting on December 7th and of course in April 2022 we'll have the school board the board of supervisors adopting the budget in the CIP so then we'll know what projects are approved and how much money we get thank you Mr. White it's late and I appreciate you sticking with us on this I think you make an excellent point about these unfunded projects because every year we
353have a list and I don't think we've ever done everything that's on the list because the other emergencies pop up we have to do that things get bumped down and sometimes it's almost like making a wish list But I mean, not wishlist on things I'd like to have. They're all necessary. So I think we ought to. have some discussion with the Board of Supervisors on this and ask them to work with us in coming up with a plan. If we need to ask community support, do that. And I think that the good starting point would be the three on three. Now, if we don't have any three on three scheduled or coming up, then I would suggest that our chair write to the chair of the Board of Supervisors. when when this goes over i
354think that would be timely you know when this is approved and we can note that you know there's so many unfunded items that it's it's just not probable that we're going to be able to do what we need to do we just keep getting farther behind and you know would they be willing to work with us to to review you know this this this matter I think it's a long-term kind of project, but that is such an accurate but sad observation. you know we we don't get it done and you mentioned the roof leaking at hartwood i didn't see the roof at hartwood anywhere on here so you know what are we going to do about that that's a rhetorical question for tonight you but you know i would expect you know we we'd address
355it but i i look through the next 10 years and i don't see that roof there so if the leaked roof is in fact where the roof it is there repair roof let's see If I could jump in, normally I do. Oh, okay. Well, it's unfunded. But normally I don't jump in. But $330,000, in a budget like ours, and when we're looking at a total of 13 point. 538 million 330,000 is fairly small so my question would be why couldn't we find that money we've certainly found money to do other things recently to take care of a leaking roof I don't care what school it is or whose district it's in we should not have a roof that's leaking that isn't going to be addressed or that is put here and I find this is
356this is not on the staff this this is something on the board so that that I would like to see what we can do The FAB has also, you know, the board's authorized design plans for phased repairs and renovations to Drew and Hartwood. So I'm sure that some of these projects will come up in that design plan. And once the design plans are, you know, done, then it makes it easier for us to start seeking bids to get some of these repairs done so we have a better cost estimate. plan for doing it so hopefully we can get some of these done but I agree with you and it's something that the FAB has talked about is that this is a three on three at least to start with the Board of Supervisors to try
357to get a better way of funding this we're looking at basically 20 million dollars a year for the next 10 years that we need and only about you know a quarter of it is funded Could I ask a quick question are you know when I see air air quality as some of these items it's certainly not going to take care of everything but can CARES Act funds take care of any of the HVAC stuff or would that not qualify as air quality So we're actually the state has identified a large sum of money to allocate to school divisions for specifically for air quality improvements and HVACs and so we're waiting to get the final like soups memo on the dollar amount that we will get allocated to us and I believe there's some matching involved
358today but it's a considerable amount of money potentially for the school division and so I've actually already asked John and his staff to kind of take a look at hey which you know we don't know how much money we're getting yet but to start prioritizing those projects so we can bring those forward once we once we have that funding source locked up great I'm didn't want that not that that should undermine the point that that Mr. White is making but just looking for any help that we can get thank you all right any other comments I have a couple I'm sorry I'm just With regard then to the air quality improvement, let me see if I understand this correctly, Mr. Fulmer and Mr. Anderson. There is potentially state funding for air quality improvements that may
359be available to school districts, but it would have to have a matching portion. Because this to me is a perfect... option of discussion to have with our board of supervisors because potentially a 3.135 and i'm just make i'm just using the number here that doesn't mean that's what we're covering if we could get 3.135 3.1 million dollars worth of improvements by putting in 1.5 that would seem to be a great discussion with at least my counterpart but also to the board because that's 1.5 hopefully we can either you know figure out how to use elsewhere but if there is a matching if we could really understand that program bring that to us I think that would be a wonderful thing and Dr Jones I know you and Mr Presley will be meeting that's a way
360to team resources that's a way to to make an impact Yeah, and to clarify that that funding that we may be getting we are getting used to know how much is in addition to the federal funding and cares act money that we already received and so as soon as we get more more information on that we'll we'll share with you and I've already started brainstorming a little bit I think we can work with the county because we still have money set aside in our capital reserve fund over there so there's cash available to do the match portion when the time comes. Okay, so that's a match portion. With regard to how this is presented, just when we have our previously submitted 3R list, if I was to look at this, and because we got this
361late, I have not had the usual time to machinate on this, but... when we are submitting our FY 2023, and Mr. Fulmer has talked about us a lot in the past, how do we add the ones from 2022? Because if you look at this, then we would be sort of looking like we're taking off. And I know that's not the intent. The air quality improvements, the Mountain View High School roof, it looks like the HVAC North Star has been funded. Is that correct, Mr. Fulmer? I believe that's what the asset says. Yeah, I think we had year-end funding for that. okay then the replace roof area at um rock hill i guess that would be and then the repair the roof at hartwood i want to make sure that we don't if we have to
362carry those forward to 2023 i don't i'm trying to figure out how to best present that there's no need to answer it tonight but i don't want there to be the impression well we submitted these and now we don't need them or something because in our 2023 request i feel like we need to loop in what didn't get funded the year before Is that? And I know we've talked about it and I know it's hard to figure out how to present it, but if these are really the urgent items, they are the urgent items. And I will say, I will be talking more with Mr. Anderson and such. We have a major issue with that roof. I know it every day we get a call on some other portion leaking I know the rain last
363week had more leaking we can't keep having the ceiling tiles come in I just I've hit my my I've hit my on this one. If they're major problems, I don't think you're going to fix them for 330,000. So that's my concern. We need a new look at that since since it was looked at before. I mean, a lot of these roofs are, you know, well over a million. So that sounds like a fairly small repair. Yeah, it's the shingle roof at Heartwood. And it's we've had that estimated. updated recently so that's an accurate number and it's just the shingle roof the flat roof is fairly new and actually they have had a few issues with the flat roof with the storm drain So we're working on that. But that shingle roof definitely needs to be
364replaced. I looked at that this week and it reminds me of an old house that nobody wants that hasn't changed the shingles. It's just kind of sad. So, I mean, it's definitely something that needs to be done. And we have it designed. We have it ready to go. And that number should be accurate. Can we look for that money? I mean, we have a plan. We're finding it. Not you, Mr. And I'm just looking at Mr. Yeah, I'm sorry. We have it planned as a year end project. And Chris has been great about helping us get the money we need for these projects. So that's one we hope to take care of this year. Yeah, we're in FY22. So summer. Yes. So we have it designed. We are ready to go. And that's definitely going
365to be a priority for us this year. So what do we do about the leaks between now and then? It's just something we have to address when it happens. And when you have an old roof that's in that condition, you're going to have that problem. So it's just got to be replaced. And that's something that's definitely on our radar. We're going to get it done. We would want to do it over the summer. It's just we get the bid before. School is out. We have the contractor ready to go and then he can go in and do that work without Disrupting the school. So I think we have that under control and the reason we have the FY 22 list on there Anyway, it's just to show you what we're working on now. These are
366projects We're not asking you to approve now because they've basically been approved by you We just don't want it to be confused that we forgot about Heartwood roof or any of these other projects that we're working on. We're in FY 22 right now because if they say unfunded i think we we can have further discussion i won't keep believing that point but this is unfunded to me means that's on our year-end list so we're going to be working with chris and others to try to get these funded somehow i'm not sure we can wait till year-end but um i will we will continue to move forward because um any other comments At this time, is there a need for the board? Do you want a work session? Are we good? I thought I heard. Is
367there a reason why this letter is dated August 25th when this is not going to be approved until the next meeting? Is that just to show it's a draft? Will that letter be revised and sent out after it's approved? That was me. And I just thought it would be good to have Dr. Kisner's name on it because he worked on it so hard with us and then he's leaving. So we didn't want to put when he's already not the superintendent anymore. We could revise it if that's what you all prefer. I think it needs to go out after it's approved by the board. I don't want to send the report after it's approved by the board. We just have the letter dated. No. While Dr. Kisner is still here. Basically tomorrow. So that was my
368logic, but we can change that if you like. I'm a realist, and we approve it on a certain date, and it goes out the next day. It should go out. That's fine. We'll have Dr. Jones sign the letter after September 14th. All right. We'll request him to. All right. Our next official board meeting is on September 14th. I will be open if there are any needs and desire to have a work session at that point, please let me know. At this point, we will keep it there and we are adjourned. Madam Chair, I did have one. I'm sorry, Dr. Tins did have something. I know you said that. So the Virginia School Board Association. They put together a sheet on critical race theory and educational equity. So I'd like to share that with board members
369and you may want to consider having our clerk post it. Yes. And our board docs. We should go ahead. That is a Virginia School Board Association document that explains what it is. Thank you for sharing that with us tonight. We will have that uploaded. Can we attach that to your comments this evening? All right. Terrific. All right. With that, we are adjourned. Thank you.