August 10, 2021, Board of Education Meeting

001and it is 6 39 apologize for starting a little late this evening but thank you again everyone that is joining us through zoom and everyone that has joined us in person today um so we will start with a moment of silence and if we want to take a moment and just think about uh our country and our state and our city and our world that's experiencing this huge hike again and and covered numbers in the delta variants and just just take a moment to think about those who are struggling with it today and this evening and just hoping that they get through another day okay for all those who are able please stand we'll say the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic

002for which it stands one nation the individual will deliver to you all right and just looking at the agenda that we have for this evening has there been any revision um or changes made none all right and then the minutes for our last meetings any changes or discussion on that all right so would you approve the minutes the way that they are all approved all right okay thank you so we will get into my uh favorite time of the evening on the spotlight dr herman well welcome everyone and our spotlight this month is talley street up for elementary we're gonna welcome principal billy heaton thank you billy [Laughter] thank you for having me um i'm here tonight to talk about uh our school improvement and things that we're doing around equities since we are at

003the beginning of the year this is mainly going to be a looking back to what we've done over the two years that tally's been in existence and then what we are planning to do for this upcoming school year as you know we struggle a little bit with consistency because tally opened in august of 2019 and we still haven't had a school year where we started in march and we were able to finish up anything but even so i feel like that we've been able to do some um some really good work at tally and have done a lot of great things so one of the things that we're doing this year uh we're finishing up our book study on how to be an anti-racist by ivory kindy we started that last year virtually with the

004faculty and staff we didn't quite finish because we took our time and we had some great conversations using the courageous conversations protocol that's lots of really good conversations as soon as we finish uh this book we're going to be moving on to we want to do more than to survive by the tunnel up so we're really excited about that as well so we should be finishing that we're starting that in a couple of months some things that we've done that we feel really important is collaborating with our cto we have an amazing diversity and inclusion committee at talley we started in august of 2019 actually it was in september but they had a wonderful welcome back uh social fall social for tally it was our first big event it was tremendous we had bands and

005you know kids were there running around it was wonderful that year they also did a peace and pie event where we had different members of our community coming around and having conversations getting to know each other and having specific conversations in february of 2020 we had our wax museum during black history month which was probably one of the best events that i i had ever been as a prince to you as a principal a lot of conversations that we're having as a as a nation and especially here in decatur around critical race theory and the 1619 project this wax museum night really brought that home to me because um as a white male who grew up in smyrna georgia who attended the university of georgia as a history major for my bachelor's degree i was

006stunned the night that i walked around town street at the wax museum and there were so many historical figures that i had not that i did not know so pretty embarrassing as as a principal but also pretty embarrassing as a nothing against uga but obviously as a history major there were a lot of historical events so i'm looking forward to those conversations and i do believe it's important conversations that we need to have we continued the wax museum last year we did it virtually and it still was a great success at 2020 uh pto also had a black history month that night and then two or three weeks later is when when we shut down so that was the most that we had done during that time last year the most important work i feel

007like that we undertook was the year-long study around the midst of racism and beyond uh charlie cobb and elliot robertson facilitated um this year-long study so we had tally staff and palliative parents come together once a month to have some really powerful conversations and then we ended the year with a musical evolution virtual field trip which was really neat because it took a lot of southern um music and it tied into like black history and it was really a powerful event at the end of the year i met with my three uh equity leads and i want to give them a shout out ashley long she's the media specialist tiffany long is my title one teacher and then vera jemison is my uh one of my efb teachers the three of us sat down and

008we just sort of reflected on you know what have we done since we've opened tally in terms of equity and um where do we feel like we need to go to next and something that really stood out to me was they all and i agreed with them saying it said we've been doing all this powerful learning everyone on our staff has trained and beyond diversity we've been having these book studies but what are we really doing that's impacting the kids in the classroom so we agreed that as we looked and turned into our school improvement plan it was time to put words into actions so this summer i did a lot of personal uh study around equity and read several books one of them was street data the next generation model for equity pedagogy and

009school transformation and one of the quotes that really stood out to me was equity first and foremost is pedagogical so as we started having conversations as a staff during pre-planning we're like how can we impact our kids and we immediately said well that's the instruction in the classroom continuing with the powerful conversations that we're having around with our book studies and collaboration with our pto but what do we need to do in the classroom and that is changing what's going on instructionally in our classrooms okay as i read a few other books this summer serena hammond mentioned john hattie's research and um another book that the forward was written by glenn singleton they all mentioned john hattie's research and i don't know if you're familiar with it but john hattie is someone that i have

010really been following for quite a quite a while i really believe in his work and think it's very very powerful i never have made the connection to his work and closing the achievement or opportunity gap between our white and our kids of color and so i was very excited when i was seeing in some of the equity books i was reading that they were referencing his his research just to summa you know to give you a little bit of a summary about it uh it's like 30 years now uh it started when he first introduced it there was like 195 meta analyses about 200 million students worldwide were involved in the research now it's up to over 340 440 million meta or students involved and many many many more meta-analyses but what he has done

011is looked at all the things that schools do to impact student achievement in the classroom and he developed what he calls the pinch point which is point four so he and you know what i was reading this summer was that schools really need to look at anything that teachers do in the classroom that has more of an impact 0.4 or higher so some of the things that you see over on the right are some of the things that have tremendously high impact teacher collective efficacy so with our professional learning communities when teachers really believe that they can impact the achievement of a student teacher clarity goes to us opening our lessons with um learning targets and learning attention so the students truly know what it is that they're supposed to be learning 0.75 providing feedback

012to our kids 0.73 doing our formative assessments which i know the curriculum office is getting ready to start doing a lot of work around assessment 0.90 and then teacher-student relationships developing that classroom culture where kids know that they can take a risk that if they make a mistake it's okay teachers will learn from that and help help guide them so what does that mean for cultural relief responsive teaching again listening some of these that came from some of loretta hammond's work these are also some of the strategies that you would see in hattie's work learning intentions developing challenging success criteria success or criteria being that the kids know is what it is that they're supposed to be able to do so you're really building that student agency where students can be the leaders of their

013own learning just using a wide range of strategies feedback connecting students culture languages and life experiences what they're learning in the classroom and then also just not using traditional forms of assessment but alternate like performance tasks and other things like that so what our next step at tally we want to as a school to develop a walkthrough tool to monitor the implementation of culturally responsive teaching strategies we have a really strong equity committee and the equity committee is really invested in developing this tool and doing monthly walkthroughs through our classrooms to see how we covered that school we're going to obviously have to do our first one to collect baseline and from that baseline we'll set goals and then we'll analyze that data to see what professional development needs that we need to do as

014a staff and then finally ultimately our goal is to close the opportunity gap between our white students and our students of color because it's still there um you know we're in our tally we have um you know high-ready data we have some map data we have you know classroom data and our our kids of color are still underperformed so that's not acceptable us and so these are the things that we want to do when we feel like we're really making an impact thank you so many questions for mr heaton i don't have any questions but i'm excited about the walkthrough tool um the culturally responsive uh evaluation tool less exciting um dr banks did the first cre training with tally staff yesterday and she mentioned a walkthrough tool that would be used so that's something

015that we're going to like try to take a look at and get obviously her input and see if that's something that we can use and maybe tweak and uh for you know for our class in one place this is a great update thank you and you know the work of equities is definitely a continuum and so everything has to happen things have to happen first before the next thing happens and so it's good to see that you all are in that space of saying um you know how can we put this to action but you had to do all the things before in order to get where you are right now and sometimes you want to jump the gun and just make it happen and now you have the buy-in of all of your teachers

016all of your staff they've all had the training and so now you're ready um so thank you just for updating us on that and i look forward to hearing hearing more updates from your school and i appreciate your work i remember when you did a lot of innovative work with reading at claremont and just your ability to really dig in and understand where where what's happening in the classroom during school and you even did things after school for those children to really help them and get them where they needed to be so i'm excited now that you're you know one level higher at the now three through five seeing where those kids are coming and being able to help them um and carry forward a lot of the work that you already have been doing

017at you know claremont previously and now at towie so i really appreciate that yeah i'm pleased to call myself a tally dad um and my first introduction to billy was in an interview where you shared your passion for title one education your desire to be a tally and from my perspective at least that's carried through as you've opened up that school and i want to thank you for all you've done for my family and our community and let's keep working thank you billy is one of our um amazing principals and is one of those uh things we're prioritizing is building a culture of data and billy is a leader of leaders among that area so he's definitely an example to watch so thank you mr heaton you do a great job thank you okay so

018now we're moving on to our public comments we'll have three minutes for public comment please let us know um give us your name and let us know how you're affiliated with the school district and just remember if there's anything that is that needs to be dealt with on a personal matter either with um one of the board members or the superintendent we will definitely um schedule some time so that we can address your issue individually um so do we have we have two commenters some comments all right the first will be overnight all right thank you thank you so [Laughter] everybody in person and i'm glad we're all still standing my name is i'm a parent of uh two children in the school system they get a high school and run from first topic i

019want to bring up is on crisis management i have communicated to the board in the past i feel like our attorneys were efficient their role as advisors when it came to crisis management we were very amateurish earlier in the year with all the nonsense that went around there was no reason for that we could have things could have been ended very quickly i don't know that i as a taxpayer have faith in their abilities uh i think you guys should query them again do they know what they are doing when it comes to crisis management i'm not speaking about their legal abilities but as crisis management from there we were just laughing stock of the state in my opinion uh second comment is how i'd love to see if next month we could get a

020presentation from the schools from the administration on how we are preparing our students for the emerging industries of this 21st century cyber security big data cloud aviation technology renewable energies virtual realities these careers no longer require the traditional four-year college route we have the opportunity to transform lives and generations by encouraging the students who have the interest they desire the aptitude to go into these professions and i'd love as a school district to be intentional about that because there's no need to go that traditional you know take a college loan go to four years college and wait there are opportunities now certificate programs uh community college programs that will take people into high paying careers so i bring that up and hope that we can talk to the administration and see if we can have

021a presentation around that thank you good to see you thank you thank you next up is that i'll do live decatur has often been described as a community that possesses a vast majority of key values needed to make a city a pleasant place for both the citizens and students like key values such as the likes of acceptance diversity equality justice and open-minded policy all the fundamental values that most people can agree make a community just that a community when words can only do so much can only go so far and mean so much to truly hold meaning they need to be aligned with action actions speak louder than words could have for all those for all those values to be rooted in truth you need to be reflected throughout the case while i do agree

022that for the most part decatur does a relatively good job of living up to those standards and values i also believe is left in a few areas the historical remnants of our flawed past are constant minors of the work still needed to go to get done to achieve our calls regarding the progress of people's clothes carl du renzo the individual our middle school name after served as a superintendent for city schools of decatur from 1959 to 1975. although runfore became superintendent after the browns vs board of education case was settled renfrew resisted desegregating city schools and is remembered by residents for racially biased decisions while the university schools were part of the country's mother to defeat her easter related across the nation they're frustrating the central role in the delaying east segregation stating that he

023was against the merging of black voices in school environments it was decided that the school would take after the meeting until the sense of appearance of accidents intended to make a point to let them know that contrary to their belief their promises will be made for their equity and equality they were still powered to be held over their heads and no matter what they would still never be fitting enough to deserve equal treatment in their eyes but the scientist is hypocritical that behaviors drastic equality diversity justice that's the only school to be named after an individual is a man whose views or a personal weapon he was ever directly opposed or weakened to advocate for this district i begin to question what does this send for you with especially with the club in light of

024these revelations we'd like to propose the review of renaming your school into something more suitable something that would more accurately detect when we stand for as a community our petition advocating for the renaming of this school that was put in put out 48 hours ago has already gained traction within the community meaning almost 550 signatures this leads us to believe that the best course of action would be to name the score after a prominent a prominent black historical figure with the industry this would ensure that the school will be named after someone who the entire community believes we should honor but simultaneously sending positive messages thank you that's all trainer yes okay thank you all right so uh we will move on to the superintendent comment and you ready oh a quicker yay that'll make

025life so much easier thank you if i can do you think it'll reach back there look at this okay well i have to say here we go oh see too many clicks um just a couple of things for me to share tonight i just want to commend our school district for a great first week of school i'm gonna um talk about our two-way communication channels and share some of our covet updates so the first day of school last week i can't believe it was just last tuesday i made it to every single one of our schools and got to spend great time with our staff with our students with our teachers our principals and it was just such a fun day for me to get back into classrooms with our students um one of some

026of my favorite things that happened i went to glenwood and um as i was walking in the students were eating lunch outside a classic kindergarten student and i just had a conversation with one of the little girls and she was eating lunch and asked what she was in her bento box and the next thing i knew there was a line of students all ready to show me what was in their lunch so that was awesome winona park this girl just ran up and gave me the biggest hug it was so sweet it was just such a great day westchester i was so amazed i went into this freak's classroom and the kids were already learning how to graph i was like way to hit the ground running it was amazing or not work um so

027just a great day overall really enjoyed seeing our students and for me just love watching the kids walk to school um seeing them in this you know on the sidewalks heading to school there was just such joy in the community on last tuesday and then every day since um now i'll tell you the traffic you have to get used to again and leave a little bit early um but um i will put up with that to have our kids in the buildings there the teachers and the students are doing a great job so i made it to all the schools it was so much fun i really enjoyed it here's some pictures from high school and one of our other elementary schools and the kids were just doing a great job with their masks teachers

028are just helping the kids remember to stay socially distant and to keep up with that all of our mitigation protocols um so just to share with our community and this is some of this is new two-way communication some of this is uh just a reminder of what we already have um so one of our two-way communications that i implement as a superintendent is i meet monthly with our system school level leadership team and they are representatives from each of the school leadership team so all of our schools have leadership teams the principal and another member serve on the system level leadership team and they bring information to me i share information with them that they take back to their schools and share with their local community so that's one of our two-way communication channels the

029other one is our teacher advisory council so every school has a teacher that serves on this council i meet with them once a month and they have been instrumental in taking information back to our schools and getting feedback from the teachers and i've really tasked them with helping support the principles share information gather the feedback review that feedback from the teachers and bring it back to me and that has been so helpful as we were looking at several things as we were planning for this upcoming school year a new one coming up for next year is our s squared a 18 so this is a student advisory council so superintendent student advisory team this will be new for next year so students we will be sending out communication on how you can serve on this

030team i will meet with these students once a month i'm going to be meeting with i think i can't remember if i selected if we'll select three or four students from each grade level at the high school as well as students from eighth grade so i'll meet with the students at the high school once a month and then i'll have a separate meeting with students at the middle school and similar to what i do with teacher advisory council share with them any upcoming decisions that are kind of on the on the cusp of being made getting their input getting their feedback on things and just getting to hear the voices of our students for how our school system is for our students we know that our students are our first customers of the school system

031and we want to hear i want to hear directly from our students to hear how they experience school on a daily basis another new team that we are forming is a classified staff advisory committee so we have our teacher advisory council but i also want to make sure i'm hearing the voices of our classified staff our custodians our bus drivers our clerical staff anyone that's not necessarily quote a teacher paraprofessionals to make sure that they also have their voice at the table as we make decisions and that i'm hearing their perspectives as well and things that concern those members of our teams that aren't necessarily in the teaching profession um just yet so and then our other one is i also meet with our admin council and that is district and school leaders and similar

032protocols is the information we talk about as a group they take back to their teams get it for feedback and bring it back to me what that feedback has been um the other kind of retool we've had these committees in the past and we are brushing them off and breathing life back into these committees um so each of our departments at the wilson center will have an advisory team that they will be meeting with parents and teachers that will serve on these teams just to make sure as a department that we are transparent with our communication we're engaging stakeholders in the decision making process so that we can make well-informed decisions that we've heard multiple perspectives as we move forward and make decisions so some of the two-way communication channels just wanted to give people

033a heads up about that and as well as the boards so that you you hear about these and we bring feedback and we say this came from our s squared a t meeting you know that we're talking about our student advisory team okay next thing i wanted to dive into some coded updates and protocol so first i want to share on our webpage and i'll share this with the board as well and let's see click on that yeah could you open that link thank you okay so um all of our information the most up-to-date information is on our health and safety web page so we have reformatted and we're still in the process of cleaning up our overall school system web page and we have a health and safety tab and in that tab you

034will see all the up-to-date information and one of the pages in there is our coded communication and in that you will have oh here we go and there you will see a link for all of our mitigation strategies and in there is linked are just our general code mitigation strategies which is kind of a table of uh the summary of all of our mitigation strategies and then we also added in there our big healthy healthy facilities and schools manual which is a nice 30 page manual if you get tired and you want to try to get some sleep start reading our healthy schools manual and that will put you to sleep but it is lots of great information about all the specific things very much in detail on protocols for our schools to follow um

035so for parents listening for everyone this is your webpage is the place to go for the most updated information that's where we will be housing everything over the summer we had some drafts with google docs we've turned those off so you can't access those anymore because we want to keep make sure people are going to the most recent information which is on our web page also on there there is information about our binox now testing and that is the testings that we give at schools people are symptomatic um the other um item on there are our screeners just so people can remember hey here's another review of what symptoms may be showing or demonstrating the likelihood that someone has covered and the other thing that's on there espn if you can pull up our covid

036report and what i want to talk about a little bit and help make sure that the board has any questions about our covid report um so on the covid report we are updating this weekly so um there was some questions about why not updated every day and there's a couple reasons why we don't update it every day is it takes a long time to get all the information so last year we were updating it every day we would information would change hourly sometimes on covet information and because we are dedicated to being transparent and to make sure we're building trust with our communication um i talked with dr huddleston and her team and we really felt that it's a weekly update was the best way to make sure that that data is constant and we're

037not trying to chase our tails updating information all the time on a regular basis um so on the data we will update it um once a week mondays at noon is when we will present that data and what you'll see in the data is we've listed every all of our schools as well as our facilities and then we have two things that we're tracking we're tracking people that test positive while they if they were on school grounds so if someone came to school let's say today they went home with symptoms they didn't feel well they tested at home they stay home tomorrow and they tested positive for covid those that information is what we track in our dashboard if it is someone who was out of town for a week um came back from their

038trip on friday night then they didn't feel well and on saturday they get tested they get their results saturday night and they um have were positive for covered we don't put information on here those that person's data would not show up on our dashboard we're only tracking data for cases that happen in our school um so that's the data you will see there for positive cases and so last week we had a total of ten positive cases um seven students and three staff members now i get to get emails after we put this data on and parents saying hey my kid tested positive at this school and i don't see their data on there and i said was your child ever in a building before they tested positive no they were not so no they're

039not going to show up on this data we're only interested in tracking the data in our school we are tracking school code data we are not tracking community covered data and that's the difference for what schools have to report um then so and also to note here the students or staff members that are in the positive category those are isolations so there's a difference between isolation and those under quarantine and that's another question that i was getting several emails about this week was hey i know that this person tested positive but no one's quarantining well actually the person that tested positive is isolating the people that were deemed in close contact those are the people that quarantine so a good example of this is if you look at the claremont line we had one student

040test positive we had two students that were quarantined you can infer from this is that there were two students in close contact at claremont to that one two student that tested positive so that's then the total is three students have been taken out of the school setting because of either one testing positive and the two that um were in close contact so that's some of the clarification on that we will post updates every monday by noon if not sooner but no sooner than monday morning so we will do this update and then just to also clarify um for this information friday afternoon we were still contact tracing for a positive student at westchester um so we posted by noon our data but we knew that we would have some lingering data for westchester when it

041related as it related to close contact so we put that disclaimer on there hey just so you know the quarantine data may change because we're still identifying students that were in close contact that monday morning so there is a little bit of a lag we know it's not the up-to-date information on a daily basis but it is good data that we can stand behind when we share it with our community the other thing to note is we do share information in real time with the school so anytime there is a student that tests positive we let the whole school community know so at westchester that school knew immediately that there was a student that had tested positive for covid and that we were completing contact tracing so that they were informed of that so that's

042the communication that happens in real time for our covet positive students but also to note is we track and we monitor this data as a school system constantly so lily and i are in constant communication about possible cases probable cases positive cases quarantined and our nurses do a really phenomenal job with the contact tracing protocol i had a conversation with a nurse yesterday about the protocol and her contact tracing and just getting her expertise and that's one of the things that's really beneficial to have fully certified nurses in our schools is because they can make those expert decisions in real time and i she was asking me a question and i said i'm relying on you as the expert so you tell me as the medical expert in that building what is your recommendation and

043i'm standing behind what they recommend because they are the medical experts in our schools so that is our coveted data let me go back to my presentation um so the next thing um in our you pull up my presentation again thank you um is we are beginning surveillance testing coming soon so surveillance testing is um we will be screening students and staff once a week in our schools um we're still working on the logistics so we've been kind of working on this behind the scenes for a while we hadn't shared this publicly because we wanted to make sure we had all the resources and the things lined up so that we could do surveillance testing the department of health for georgia is supporting this initiative for school districts so we were able to use resources

044from the state so we do not have to pay for these resources but it doesn't take a lot of logistical planning and figuring out how do we do the surveillance testing so because we have almost 6 000 students and over a thousand staff members just logistically getting all those swabs collecting the data looking at the data reviewing the data and then we'll have to contact traits based on the any positive information that we get that takes a lot of planning to make sure we've got all those kinks worked out so we can launch it successfully so it's coming soon and it has been in the works for a while we just didn't want to put it out there before we were 100 sure when we were getting close um so we are getting closer to

045getting that surveillance testing up and going so feel like that we can share with our community we are going to be implementing that i don't have a start date just yet we're still finalizing a few things before they give us a start date but i'm really excited about that i know that's a protocol being used in many school districts around us and i'm glad we're able to start doing that this year as well also coveted vaccination data we are still collecting this data so we have kind of trying to chase down people to give us this data to turn it in but once we do finalize this data for staff and students we will share this as well um and we will just publicly share this is the percent of staff vaccinated this is the

046percent of students vaccinated um so that information will be shared as well once we finish collecting that um also a question that we get a lot is people asking can we require vaccinations for staff and students and that is something that we are working on the board has been shared with we've shared some information with the board we're looking at this with our legal counsel to determine if this is something that city schools of decatur can do we do know that vaccinations are the first and best defense against covid and we definitely want to do what we can as a school district to protect our students but this is more than just saying wear a mask so a mask is a very unobtrusive mitigation strategy it gets a little bit different when you're talking about

047putting medication and shots in people's arms so we want to make sure we're following us advice that we can find so we're viewing this but more information will come out about this as we make that decision as a board um then the last question i get i've been getting a lot is do we have a tipping point for when the district would switch to full virtual and what i'll say is the cdc along with the american academy of pediatrics prioritizes in-person learning so they have said when you have rigor when you have actually they didn't say rigorous so when it's you know multi-layered mitigation strategies in place in-person learning is safe and we have a very rigorous mitigation strategy many many layers within our school system so i feel like we will be able to

048continue offering in-person learning safely for our students and staff and we review the effects uh efficacy of these mitigation strategies and we adjust them as needed so like we like i said with surveillance testing we didn't have it in place at first but now that we have seen the data we see the numbers going up feel comfortable like yes let's add another layer to our mitigation plan so that we can enhance that and further identify any possible positive students and make sure that we are not having students that may be co or staff members that may be covet positive within our building so we continually monitor this our operations team does building walks they collect data on how our mitigation strategies are being implemented and we review that data we haven't pulled the data yet

049but once we do we will look at that data and determine hey is there more training that's needed for a staff or do we need more supports in a certain area to make sure that those mitigation strategies are 100 effective um so that's our coveted update um oh and i did i put this graphic in here just for our parents and for the board to notice like this is our plan when we uh when we're contact tracing and how we communicate um so when we learn that there's a possible a probable or positive case the contact tracing begins we identify people that were in close contact we notify staff and anyone else that was directly affected including the school community which is here number four they all get an email and then as we get

050that information together we update that once contact tracing has been completed and just a big shout out shonda moore has done such a phenomenal job organizing these vaccination events with the cab department of health we've had two successful events already we have another one scheduled for this friday um so this friday um it's a 5 pm to 7 pm again at the high school and it's free for everyone in the community so please come out if you have questions about the vaccine they have people there that can help answer those questions and talk to you about vaccines um so we are encouraging as many people as possible to come and get their vaccination or covid we just feel like that is the best defense against covid and to make sure we can continue to operate

051our schools um safely for our students is getting as many people vaccinated as possible um so it's gonna be a great year i think we've had a good start already and i know we're going to see more great things to come thank you very much appreciate that um so they're just a couple of items i wanted to first just give a thank you to adina walker and her team they've really done a phenomenal job with hiring and onboarding all of our new staff members and just kind of helping everyone get acclimated to our new kind of normal back to life type of living and so i just thank you and your department and all the departments as well for the work that they've been putting in returning to full days um thank you very much

052for that i wanted to thank um dr fuhrman for the covid dashboard and for the update and all of the information that we're gathering all the work that the nurses are doing um and i really appreciate all the time that it takes all the data and time that it takes to put out and make it available for our parents so i just want to thank you and your staff for staying on top of that and i'm also listening and adjusting when when necessary i'm super excited about this first week of school me personally being able to walk my youngest and last child to school and be amongst the parents and the hustle and the bustle again and the topping and the dog walking and people carrying their coffee and um you know i don't think

053i realized how much i missed it until i had an opportunity to do it again um and my you know high schooler does not want me to walk with him to school so at least i get to experience with her for a couple more years maybe but i know from just some of the principles and hearing from the principals they're all excited about being back in the building the teachers are excited about being back in the buildings i know that the kids are and the parents are and so it just it does feel good to just continue to to be in this space together and work together um to make it you know a very positive situation so we will along with dr fuhrman um some of us board members will also be doing some

054school visits as well just so that we can also get um get a bird's eye as to how things are going not to check on you or make sure you're doing everything right but just so that we can show you that we support you we support our teachers we know how hard last year was and we just want to be able to come and say thank you for all that you do and also listen if there's anything that you need to talk to us about um so hopefully you'll be okay with seeing our faces in your schools in the upcoming weeks i'm definitely looking forward to it it's been a while since i've been in all of the buildings so i'm very excited about that and lastly i just wanted to give a thank you

055and a shout out to our community members and our and specifically our parents um you know we get a lot of emails and we've always gotten a lot of emails which is okay but there was a time frame when they were they were very hard to read and they came from positions of that felt like positions of confrontation and we know how personal your children are and so when there's something going on with our children we get very personal but what i appreciate is that we're still hearing from parents so we're hearing from parents in a more collaborative way there's still something going on there's still an issue that we need to address there's still an item that they're worried about but they're coming to us knowing that we're on the same team and that

056our goal is to make your the experience with your kids the best that we can and if we're falling short of that we need to hear about it but we also want to work together to solve it and i'm really seeing such a shift in how all of us are communicating with each other and just being able to listen to one another and address the real issues that are happening and so i just want to give you know i definitely want to say that to all the parents that are listening now or any that are in the room to just thank you for working with us and continuing to bring to us what you need to bring to us so that we can we can do a better job and continue to improve every day

057um so you all rock stars we love working with all of you and just keep keep it up uh so board members do you all have anything that you wanted to to touch on before we moved to consensus i um stopped by the um i don't know what the official name of it was but the the cab would have helped truck was out there that day and um beacon hill was giving away school supplies and there were haircuts um being given to um students who needed you know who wanted a haircut and they were free um and then there was a food truck that was out there that was just um wonderful um to see an experience um you know and folks were you know socially distant distance yes we were outside though and most

058people had on math but it was just um it was great to see the community come together again and so um just want to thank those folks who helped put that event together and def i know was a key partner in that um that was on opening day and um thanks to the barbers and um beacon hill and i don't know who the um food truck vendors were but they were a big hit and um so it was a great event thank you gina um i i just want to say that it was so much fun to attend opening day um and it was an in-person and virtual hybrid event and kudos to maggie and the principals and everyone who was involved in pulling that off because it was really awesome each school had their

059own kind of back-to-school opening day tier session and we were collaborating virtually with all the schools being able to share and just to be able to be you know in person to the degree that we were and share that energy was so much fun to kick off the school year so that was fun and then that same day uh with the ice cream truck social that traveled around the district another really fun way to just be out and and connect and see each other um and i too stopped by the vaccination clinic which i think is phenomenal and and kudos to shonda moore and her team for for leading that effort to get vaccinations easily accessible to our students and our faculty and teachers and anyone in our community so it's not limited just to

060school people it's open to the whole community so anyone can go and also um just a note to parents it's super convenient they also offer sports physicals so any student who needs that you know they can show up and get that done as well so it's it's a great service to our community to bring that closer and to lower that threshold for many to be able to access the vaccine i also want to say that i do serve as the board liaison to the decatur education foundation and we just had our you know annual retreat kickoff meeting last night where the entire cef board met and dr kerman attended and it was also our first meeting in person since i've even been on that board so that's how long it's been and just being able

061to connect with one another and show that energy um was really wonderful and inspiring and i just want to publicly share how grateful i am for the decatur education foundation and that we have this fantastic partnership with them and i look forward to all the things that we're going to be able to do this year and beyond together with them so awesome gosh i don't have anything along the same lines but um i wanted to make a comment about the superintendent's report um billy just one of the items that you mentioned is the question of whether we can require vaccinations i'm glad we're looking into that and i feel like we should have some discussion about it i thought i'd just put it out there that i think we should lean into it i'm very

062much in favor of acquiring vaccinations to the extent we can i know that there's some equity issues with that i know that there are some legal issues with that but i also so we need to sort that out but to the extent we can find our way to do it i think it's the right thing to do we had an incident at our house recently where we were informed one of our children in an activity that they participated in i've been in close contact with an adult who tested positive and uh and my first question was was that adult vaccinated and the answer was no they they just didn't get vaccinated i was so angry that this irresponsible person exposed not only my daughter but my entire extended extended family that had been in close

063contact by not getting the vaccine just because they didn't do it and it made me reflect that if i were a parent sending my kid to school and a teacher a staff member didn't get the vaccine and then exposed my child i would be livid and um i really don't think that's fair and so i just wanted to put it out there that uh to the extent this is something that we find that we can do and that we can do in a way that's fair it's something that i would support otherwise i also wanted to tell you what i told you the other day was i think you're doing a great job and congratulations our first successful opening week and the communications the entire climate it's it's it's just a breath of fresh air

064and so good work keep it up doctor from past one other question um regarding um you address you know we've been getting the question so what would we do you know are we thinking about what how when we would decide if things need to shut down and if you could just share what we talked about in terms of we are still following the dekalb board of health uh guidance in terms of if there are maybe even because i don't want to mess up if they're too what an outbreak is and how that would have gotten that regatta um so if there is an in-school outbreak there are guidelines set up in our manual um for when we would when we would identify that so um i don't want to say the wrong thing and i

065would have to pull it up to make sure i get the language correct but if we meet the threshold of an outbreak in a school we have protocols that we would follow for the school to close a school for a certain number of days make sure that everything is clean complete contact tracing and go through that protocol so there is possibilities that yes an outbreak if it occurred at a school we would follow the dekalb board of health protocols for that to make sure that we were operating so that is something that is on um you know a possibility we do follow the board of health guidelines for that um so that we have a nice protocol to follow and along the lines of what what lewis was bringing up um do we know of

066other school districts who in georgia who are mandating vaccines not in georgia okay i'm just curious about that not that there aren't i just don't know right we just don't know any at this point okay are there anything else board members what are the i know you don't have a state course for surveillance type thing so what are we working on when could we see something like that let me i've got to touch base with dr huddleston she's been in communications with the companies that are going to be doing that for us and i don't want to give it to you that's working with the company we've checked the boxes for legal person yes exactly okay and for mandating vaccines are we talking about um students and teachers um students that qualify who you know

067he meets the age threshold we're talking about students and staff or just staff that's a good question i think we address staff first as we go through that conversation and then we look at students all right so moving on to consent items we have the personnel report the school nutrition report the financial report a report to approve contracts for additional student devices approve the career and technical education fy 2022 state and federal grant and also the 2022 and 23 school calendar i believe these are a few items that we've already discussed prior correct so they're just uh we're just in the consent form now so um if there aren't any further questions on that do i have a motion to approve the consent items i didn't get a chance to look at the revised calendar

068because there were some changes could we just pull that up real quick would that be possible to look at that together yes yeah there were some typos on that and i did find those and fix those so well we do move that to discussion that item to discussion right okay so move to approve the calendar we're moving that to the discussion item and then we'll go back to the consent items and do i have a motion for the consent items minus the school calendar second all right all in favor uh chair both eye okay so now we can move on to the discussion items and would you like to go ahead and start with the 23 calendar dr firmer do we need two minutes let me let me get it printed for you guys okay

069and so i'll jump into the let me share this with miss bruton all right shayna i just sent you a link to the calendar could you get those printed and then we'll have that public up for discussion thank you all right so then the first item for discussion um we're waiting on the calendar was the future governance training and board priorities yes um district first we're going to do the district improvement plan because that then leads into the priorities okay um okay so [Music] up there and board members you should have a copy of this presentation i'll get a copy of the presentation it's that should be right on one right there it's this presentation right here okay so i'm gonna review with our district improvement plan kind of where we've been where we are

070right now and where we are going so first i want to just talk quickly historically where we've been over the past several months um part of the school year so last february um lily and myself and christy beam and mary banks did a kind of a high level view of our district improvements plan um the work that was coming up really framing some of the big goals that we were setting some of the ambitious goals we were setting and really looked at what are we going to focus on going forward as a school system then in march of 2021 i shared this framework this overview presentation with the public with our stakeholders with our teachers also sent out feedback forms to gather input and feedback from our stakeholders and then in april we shared our

071coherence framework and that is how everything ties together how do we take our vision and mission how do we take a theory of action build a framework for equitable outcomes all the way to create what i call a through line from each individual teacher's classroom to build for district-wide school improvement our district-wide improvement for our students and that was the coherence framework presentation that went out to our public i shared that in a board meeting and then we also gathered feedback on that and then we held some public stakeholder input meetings so i did we did two of those we did may 3rd and may 12th where we presented this information to the public to staff to parents community members gathered their input and feedback and then what we worked on was um for the

072schools it's then getting the schools up and going so they were ready to implement these plans in their school buildings starting august and we started this way back um it may not seem like so long ago but back in may i presented more detailed information about our district and school district improvement plan to our principals they took that information presented it to their teachers and then in june we really dug deeper into unpacking our three pillars which are advancing racial equity accelerating student learning and building and sustaining a positive culture and climate and then at our superintendent staff meeting where we really dug into those three pillars and what do those look like then we gave our staff our schools and departments time to really start working on their individual plan so that they were

073ready to jump in to their plans when students and staff returned in august then in july i took time the principals and departments submitted their plans i took time over july to review those plans give them some feedback on their plans so that we were ready to jump into the start of the school year when our staff returned trainings with professional learning ready to know how we're going to collect and measure data and then just this month i shared it opening day our remarks to all of our schools staff and all of our csd staff about our framework for equitable outcomes for students how that really guides our work that we do every day and how that supports our way to achieve our vision and mission so where are we now so where we are

074now is that we have a very clear very concise and very actionable theory of action along with a coherence framework and a framework for equitable outcomes for our students so you will be seeing this slide a lot as we go forward because this is what frames all of our work as a school district this is what brings us together and helps us understand it are the things that we're doing are they working are they not working and then how do we pivot if they're not working so our theory of action really links really talks about balancing accountability with empowerment so if a teacher is doing it really well and knocking it out of the park and meeting all and exceeding all the expectations we have then we will go ahead and say hey what are

075you doing that you can share with other people instead of micromanaging people we want to empower our teachers to do the best things for students so we want to capture what those teachers are doing and we really feel that through effective leadership at the school and district level we are helping our teachers to ensure that they are delivering that highly effective instruction we also want to support our teachers through their growth and development as professionals and that's how we're going to get equitable outcomes for students so all of that theory of action drives our framework for equitable outcomes for students which encapsules our three pillars achieving racial equity accelerating student learning and building a positive culture and climate and then within those three pillars we have our strategic priorities and initiatives and our strategic priority

076is to pay the educational debt to students from historically marginalized racial groups and we do that through our major strategic initiatives which are social emotional learning curriculum restorative practices and pbis and really leaning into our instructional framework which talks about the relationship between the content the students and the teachers our core practices for equity and then high leverage instructional practices and tying all that back into the schools is every school and every department then takes those strategic priorities strategic initiatives and develops action plans for how they're going to operationalize those in their school buildings and developing smart goals to track and monitor progress reviewing and tracking data on a regular basis and then also evaluating is our plan going as we hoped it would and then undergirding all of that is our core beliefs of

077um that we need to be as leaders accountable for the equitable outcomes for our students through ethical governance and leadership transparent communication stakeholder engagement and regular progress monitoring and reporting so you will see this slide a lot because we will be putting this on our presentations for the board presentations for our teachers presentations for departments because this is what drives our work this is the core work that we are doing every day as a school district um so where are we going so we've got that big plan now we've got to kind of figure out how do you take it to the next level to break it down to be implemented in the classroom so we are using the cognia tool um that is what's used for accreditation so that once we come to accreditation

078five years from now we just dump all this into the accreditation bucket it's already in there you just click and send it and then they are ready to go for re when we have to do our accreditation again in five years this is a nice data tracking tool to help us go through accreditation even easier the next time around so what we've done is we've created objectives for each of our pillars and then teased out even further our critical initiatives for each of our three areas and then further identified what are the key measures that we are going to use to collect data so we've listed lots of different data pieces for how we are going to track the data so you'll see lots of different um key measures here and this is the the

079areas that we're going to use to collect data so that as we track this progress over time we're making those database decisions and not just kind of waiting to the end of the year see how the students perform and make decisions we're going to be tracking progress throughout the school year so that's where we are so where are we going so we are here in august and we jump we left in august with opening day schools collecting their baseline data and that's where we are going to talk about picking up so the wilson center all of my department chairs all of my leaders at the district office are developing their own department annual goals to make sure that whatever they do supports what we're doing in our strategic plan so we know that our teachers

080and our school leaders are accountable for our students achieving those outcomes that we want them to do i want them to meet but all of our departments serve to support our teachers in their classrooms so i want to make sure that all of the department leaders are really focused on how do we support our teachers how do we remove barriers so that our teachers and school leaders can do their jobs more easily and then in the schools they'll be collecting their baseline data and starting to look at that then in september they'll be reviewing and analyzing their baseline data and then really digging into that implementation of what they put in their action plans and their school improvement plans october is a month of really just data collection and monitoring and in november our k-8

081schools will have reached the end of their first trimester so they will do a very formal report on the progress that they've made so far decatur high school runs on a semester so they're still kind of in their data collection process december is very much a data collection and monitoring month and then when we get into january that's when the school the high school will really give their first half of the year district improvement plan update and also my wilson center department leaders will be giving their mid-year updates as well and then i the last part of this kind of brings us to the end of the school year some more months of data collection and monitoring um going through this um finalizing plans reporting out in may our final data collection and with end

082of the year assessment results june i will present to the board the final um assessment results for the whole school system um and then in july we'll be reviewing our district plans again and deciding what are the next changes or updates that need to be made for the following school year and so that kind of brings us to the next topic which is so what is the board's work so as the superintendent i will make sure that our schools are doing what they need to do implementing these plans collecting the data and we have a good one-year plan i feel very confident that this is a great year of kind of focusing back on our core really making sure that we have addressed any learning loss from covid to really get our students back where

083we know they need to be after a year and a half of kind of turbulent learning environment so the work of the board and that leads into our next agenda item is really reviewing and updating the board strategic priorities and what you see as a board for what comes next for city schools of decatur so is it thinking more innovatively is it thinking more college and career what are the things that the board wants to prioritize for our school system going ahead and setting goals on what we want to achieve as a district and then determining how we're going to measure those priorities so that is the next part of the presentation which really leads into what is in your board packets which was that transcend handout so um before we move on to that

084any questions or comments from the board okay so what i think my recommendation for the board is kind of two-fold is i think we need to set some time as a board to really dig in and i provided this um the transcend packet that is about defining graduate aims because i think for a board looking at what do we want our students graduating after they've been in our system for 12 plus years if they've been at one of our early learning centers what do we want that student to look like where do we want them to go next what do we want them to demonstrate and i love this the transcend packet because it really helps you think about what are the areas that you want to focus on what are some of the outcomes

085you would want to see um so this is a to me a discussion item for the board really to just start the wheels turning so that we can set some time together as a board or either through our next work session if this is the direction you want to go then i will start working through the next phase which is okay chunking this so that we can work through together the board and work sessions and have discussions on setting these priorities as we go because what we really what i would love to see is that by probably march-ish we finalize for these priorities so that we are ready now then to take this one-year district improvement plan look at the priorities and initiatives that the board wants to see to really create the next five-year

086plan so we can start chipping away year after year towards those big ends and those big priorities that the board would set so that is that part of that so any questions or comments about that any discussion all right go ahead okay um this question might be this is a broad question and i keep talking about it but i think it's important to talk about it in the policy governance or framework what we're talking about here are end goals yes where the ultimate priorities for the district could be very important it also happens to be something that we did spend a lot of time on and you know over the past two or three years there's a lot of discussion by bengal and for end goals to work under this framework the basic governing philosophy

087that we've at least adopted previously is that the board's going to set in goals which are the priorities you're going to figure out how to implement them but then there's a next step which is that the board's not only going to determine how the priorities are going to be measured but we're going to monitor them on an ongoing basis and that's where the accountability comes in so we delegate so we set priorities we delegate authority because in the accountability is that it comes back to us on a regular schedule so that um we are fulfilling our responsibility to the community to make sure that the priorities we set are being faithfully implemented and making the progress the way that the what has happened is we've spent a lot of time talking about end goals we

088haven't done anything about policy monitoring and as a result we're currently we have half a model right not a functional board we're not actually doing our job yeah and what i don't want to see is that we go back through visit to rework ends policies before we figure out how the whole thing comes together we did the end policies for three years we need to get the policy monitoring in place now uh this might have to be done in parallel because you're launching a strategic initiative so we need to take another look and so that's fine but what i i just it can't happen that we go back and you can just have this endless discussion about ends and never do the policy because that's delegation without accountability yes it's so that is part of

089the [Music] conversation as well which is the policy monitoring report schedule that goes along with this so you're 100 correct um we've got our charter renewal coming up we need to start thinking strategically about what's going to be in that charter and what kind of flexibility we may ask for but we also need to monitor what we have in place so i worked on a policy monitoring calendar um so i went kind of through our board policy manual broke it out into the sections and each of the policies and then listed the data sources and documentation and then also kind of when we would do those reportings out to the board so some the first section is to end and that really focuses on our district improvement plan the equitable outcomes for students and those

090are reports that you'll get monthly so every month i'm getting reports from the schools i'll be sharing that we'll be doing updates monthly for the board um the second section are the executive limitations and we have some as i was going through this we have so much of this already in place um that i just kind of listed out as i was thinking about these policies what are the indicators or the data sources that we already have ready that we can start pulling for the board as we go through the year and just kind of listed those out and then can give you some updates um either annually in a month or monthly we can do these updates for you so that's part of this discussion as well is how like when you look at

091these data sources is there anything that you want to see that i didn't list here and is the reporting schedule appropriate or do you think it needs to happen more frequently so that's part of the discussion i want to um get the board's feedback on so i so appreciate that you're on top of this i know she was talking about it but i said it kind of for the benefit of more than everybody else but um the only i mean i think they plan any plan what we need is a systematic and intentional look at each policy to make sure what this actual schedule is less important um i would note that i wonder if a monthly reporting schedule is realistic the way that we had thought that we were going to do it and

092the way that i understand most other policy governance systems do it is that they devote a place on the calendar to specific policy so you look at okay that is going to be our checking on policy ends policy whatever it is but pick one and just make sure that over the course of the calendar build it um but i don't like i say that to me it just seems overwhelming potentially to have all these reports well so the district improvement plan i think it's it's logical to do that monthly that i'll be getting monthly reports from the schools um it's something for me that academic outcomes for the students are the major reason that we're here in the system so i want to keep a pulse on that monthly and for me that's essential um

093so i think giving a report to the board on hey how are we doing on these metrics it's kind of like an annual a monthly budget update like this it should happen um so i'm okay to me that's feasible that we would be reporting on this stuff monthly um the other stuff some of it's monthly but that's because we already re generating some reports monthly some of it i've targeted is annually in august annually september so some of those kind of more detailed nuances um with reporting and some of it aligns to like when that work gets done like some of the stuff we don't get the data until the end of the year we don't do the sign off until the end of the year with the state that's when we would pull those

094reports and share them with the board did you look at we had a draft of this from previous kind of i don't know if you saw it we did some of that i remember some of the timing we decided on certain reports because it naturally fell when we were doing a budget process or like like we talked about you and i not long ago like the um the safety um emergency preparedness report was always something we did right when we got back to school to have new staff you know that we were training et cetera and by the way i know it says august here but um i would since we aren't doing it today i'm assuming the work then yeah so that's really something i'm excited about um doing especially since we haven't been

095in the building for a year and a half pretty much so i i think some of these will be able to fill in as sort of the calendar year correct it naturally flows with our work yeah i did it i stopped section three because i wasn't sure how the board wanted to report on your own things and then superintendent um i just didn't get to yeah but this is this is excellent and i think it's exactly what we have been building toward and building on what we've been working on in terms of policy governance i have more faith that it's going to be i'm going to have some time in the past okay and for that the board board section policy i would i would think we could probably cover maybe half of those like

096in um in our retreat um and then maybe the other half had a special um work session yeah i think for the board ones too i just i think a conversation with the board about you know authority and delegation the document we use to monitor that is the board policy handbook and it's an annual sign off that you would sign off yes i would support the policy i understand we report out on it um so i think some of those are kind of like an annual just kind of an acknowledgement for the board the work plan is something we definitely need to lean into but i think that goes along with strategic priorities initiatives i didn't see any board work plans out there so i wasn't sure you guys had one so i felt like

097that would kind of be something we could talk about at the work session and move forward on formalizing that piece i think the work plan in the past i know that we don't have one now but the worst plan in the past has been um we developed it in work sessions and it was it was essentially a calendar really primarily identified work sessions we kind of identified topics that needed to be addressed to try to inflate them into these sessions over the course of the year we never actually went all 12 months we thought most of them yeah maybe we can do that for our work session this month to set for the rest of the year yes yes and also for the work plan we're going to do the work session on august we're

098going to do the school safety and security updates um and then i've got our um what's his name zombolia who is our lobbyist he's going to come and walk us through legislative priorities yeah we do zombolia i hired him over the summer yeah he works for marietta city schools he works for fulton county schools already down at the legislative session doing the work and because those are charter systems he's very much in line with what we would prioritize i feel as a charter system so we discuss at that session what what are some of our priorities now so that he can go to the legislative sessions and help make sure that he's putting forward what city schools of decatur wants to see whether it is fully funding the qve formula or fully funding early learning

099for students equity initiatives he's got his finger on the pulse of what's happening at this district at the state level legislative level with culturally responsive education or cre and house you know senators and people from outside are trying to regulate what happens in schools for me i think local control for school boards is a huge legislative priority that should be one that i would recommend we would list restoring austerity cuts yes and yes and i was thinking because i saw i wrote an article about the how well this state budget is looking and i was thinking also it would be nice if we could support fulfilling um kemp's promise to give the full five thousand dollars in and teacher salaries because we're still 2000 short on that [Music] because that didn't happen because of that

100abbreviated legislative session doctor firm and i had um just two comments about the um district improvement district improvement plan and so this is just one thing that has um i've been trying to work with i've been kind of struggling with since i saw it under the last um superintendent's administration and it this was a page that i pulled out of um a packet that we would put online it's not in this case tonight and so under positive culture and climate it says by july 2026 race will not be a predictor of student discipline outcomes and so i have been struggling with that since the first time i read it several months ago because when did i'm trying to figure out when did race become an acceptable predictor of discipline outcomes right i feel like that

101should be reworded um because it's not an acceptable thing and we have some wonderful things down here that we will um to achieve our goals you know that that we will do um comprehensive wrap around supports including integration and uh of behavioral physical and mental health services and these other things but you know those are not specific to um a demographic you know so like those things should happen everyone will benefit from that um but i don't know how these things you know i don't know when race became you know a predictor of discipline outcomes do you understand what i'm saying i do yeah okay yeah okay i'll work with dr huddleston on um looking at that language okay and then the other thing i was just thinking about you know the first time i

102heard that um term uh paying the educational debt was when dr banks introduced and i'm so appreciative to her bringing that to csd and so that's a strategic priority paying the educational debt to students from historically modernized racial groups but the initiatives underneath like restorative practices and pbis you know things that we need i don't know how those pay the educational debt back to marginalized racially marginalized students those are things again that all students benefit from and i i worry that i know that there have been folks in the district who thought that you know pbs was targeted for a specific group of kids and why can't we why can't we just do those things with you know our frequent flyers um when really everyone benefits from both of those um initiatives and so you

103know i just don't know how those pay the education of those practices pay back the educational debt to our great marginalized students so and i'm glad you raised that i made some notes here and then so over the next three months um so next month is september dr banks is going to give a deeper dive into advancing racial equity pillar um and then the following month dr beam will give a deeper dive into the um accelerating student learning pillar and then dr huddleston in november we'll give a much deeper dive into the third pillar building positive culture and climate um so we can make sure we've addressed those and we probably will have a couple follow-up questions for you just to make sure i clearly understand what you're thinking but got some notes here we'll

104work on those and expect a deeper dive into each of those three pillars over the next three months thank you yeah you're welcome i agree with jane i think this graphics the one that she had does do a better job of categorizing right what we're trying to say is eliminate bias but it does read as if we're eliminating a predictor those are very different exactly what you're saying um and the thing that that should not just be creating systems that are equal thing that that means proactively engaging so there are some things on this list that do that such as you know creating a curriculum that you know multi-tier behavioral interventions is not one but implementation of a social media you know learning does all seem very neutral i would like to see if we're

105going to use that language something more forward okay so i think the next thing for us to just suffer aboard i think the next conversation is so are we okay with me kind of calendaring out um some work time in our work point in our work sessions to dig through kind of what are the next phases of strategic priorities and initiatives so that we can work on these in parallel we're continuing the monitoring of what we have but we also need to look forward and think about the next phase for our charter and for what lies ahead for the school system um do you want to discuss the calendar yes okay so updated calendar thank you heather for noticing those errors in there that was my typo as i was translating this to a little

106more user-friendly character for people um so those should be corrected at this point any questions i don't think i have any questions or comments i know that we had some more deeper discussion about it in our last um board meetings i center this is just to make sure that the corrections have been made we will add um calendar back to consent items for september we should just approve it oh we can just prove it okay all right so um heather did you have any other questions or do you want no i mean that's good it's hard to like i'm not really like i can't digest it right because i really did want to like you know take a minute so i i would be more comfortable if we could just do it in the next

107video not that i think there's anything wrong with it but i just haven't had a chance to see it since it looks like it's better if that's not a problem we'll need to move the calendar to our september meeting um you want to do code of conduct next after summer yeah so um dr um huddleston and rodney thomas did a great job um because right as i was gearing up to do my annual code of conduct review and update is when i moved into the superintendent role so lily and rodney have been gracious enough to take on that part of my previous job um so they did the annual code of conduct update and review in your board packet there was a summary of the changes to the code of conduct and this was really

108just to see if you had any questions or um anything you wanted to ask about the updated code i will share rodney is going to be the main contact for code of conduct and processing so the principles and they need someone or a partner to ask about issues with the co or discipline issues they will be reaching out to mr thomas he has taken on that role the big change was really combining rules four and five um really they were the same one was private property one was school property they really were the same we did so we just combined those to make the code a little more succinct i should say they added those combine those to make that a little more succinct they did add a section on student searches which was lacking

109they also on the public website updated the rule matrix and included that so people could see exactly where the code where the rules line up for just different levels of outcomes if you have any questions i know rodney is here to answer any questions you have i have a comment and a couple of questions sure so my comment is all did a really good job i went through and looked at the uh you know you had it made a lot of good clarifying evidence so i appreciate noticing it's evolving and getting better so thank you for taking a thorough look at it i wanted to note that we have corrected the error that we have had that previously we had asserted jurisdiction over off-campus activities incorrectly we should not have done that to begin with

110corrected now to be consistent with state law so i appreciate that correction and i had one um this is just kind of a random thought i didn't study this just all that carefully but one that caught my eye which was not a change it was always in there we list an offense called trespass against like school technology something like that and we call it a trespass if someone uses a school device for something other than school work so for instance if i get my school laptop and play minesweeper which my kids tell me nobody even knows what that is but that we define it as a trespass which i think is kind of ridiculous and it seems to me that it's the kind of thing that we when we worry about discretion and the enforcement

111of vague laws it's kind of like a squatter law that you're only going to enforce against people you want to come down heavy on um to have an offense where it's you know anytime you use your school issued device for something other than strictly school work it's a trespass you're going to invite i think piling on when what people are doing are innocent but they're not school related and you know we're not going to expect to enforce that against most people it's only going to be enforced against people we don't like somebody that's that's what happens when you have a overbroad lawsuit there's none of that and wondering about it so yeah seven or four c is computer trespass um and the rules under it there's three rules and then another um more like dig

112like i think tease out what that means for computer trespass um i'm not sure where we came up with the code name like that name computer trespasses that came from state regulation or you know kind of a an old carryover i i didn't think this hard about it i just thought i would mention it it seems silly and it seems like the kind of code that can lead to inequitable outcomes because it invites people to apply it with bias because you only apply it when you want to apply it and you're not going to you're not going to discipline the kid in order and we even had an example at the school where you might remember a while back one teacher was there's a big brouhaha and one of the things that came up is

113this teacher might have been using the school issue device while at home to browse the internet and that was a was listed as a great offense against the school because this device should only have been used for school work well that's silly i mean it's a device you can look at the internet and so it's really i think a pretty good example where it might be against the agreement but it's it's meaningless and there's danger in putting that kind of thing into code of conduct if you're saying that using the school device do wrong things it's different but if you're just saying i've used my school device for something other than school work that's kind of silly i think to discourage i mean you know this students have so access to so much out there

114as we all know as parents um i assume it was to discourage students from going on websites when they're at home when they don't have the blocker like we do at school to not be using their school device for those other things um and that's the intent i'd think differently about it but that's not what said what it says is it's much broader than that that's kind of seems to be much more specific and you know attempting to delete obstruct interrupt alter damage um so that seems to be really what that encompasses right but the 4ca is very just kind of broad and can be very you know i really didn't mean to make too much of it i understood all right any other any questions or things for rodney um thank lily and rodney

115again they did a great job um they leaned in and really lifted this up and did a great job with stakeholder input as well they got lots and lots of input on the code but they really dug through it and read through the input and took that to heart so they did a wonderful job there i appreciate those that work on this i think it's really critical that we have a code of conduct that we all understand and agree with so that we can do you know make a decision when we have to face difficult disciplinary situations um and also um apply them equitably to our students so thank you for your work there absolutely thank you guys all right the next agenda item is um are you supposed to lose sorry oh um preliminary

116enrollment report and that's really just informational to give you an update on where we are with student enrollment and what our numbers are looking like as they relate to what the projections were um and then kind of where we ended up first day of school just so you can kind of see our numbers um so that was really just for your information any questions or things you uh related to that all right if not oh i do believe i remember i believe it was heather who asked the question the last time when we got when we got more of the final numbers of our enrollment how that would affect us our budget so we're we're held harmless this year oh okay that's right this year's hold harmless um but our whatever counts we have in

117october will impact our budgeting for next year um but i mean we've had we had a rush if we had a line out the door on the first day of school so the numbers keep creeping up there so i think we are definitely seeing a return to more of our anticipated enrollment every day and we also get another rush after labor day i think we're going to inch up there i don't think it i don't think we'll see a huge impact on our budget yeah okay i think that's all for discussion items um yep now moving on to future dates do we have any um do we have any um [Music] [Laughter] um there you go oh here we go okay sorry about that guys all right so we have our um our future board

118meetings that will be on the tuesdays um up through at the end of the school year we're looking at some of our school breaks our labor day remember our fall break will be september 20th the week of september 20th so we'll have our board meeting the week before that and then we'll go into our fall break and we have our professional learning thanksgiving break and holiday break and then some specific school dates just remember like dhs 101 um college heights has a virtual curriculum night um on the 26th so that's coming up um and just a few um for each school so um just be aware of some of the things going on directly at your school my question was for any conferences do we have any um potential virtual conferences coming up gsba or

119msba i know some of them were pushed out because of covid october 22nd there's a ball workshop october 22nd and 23rd there's a fall workshop on fallback consciousness from right now already october and that's the gsta right yeah fall does it say yeah whether it's going to be in person and then there's another workshop november 16th and 17th [Music] you know it's a new board member's orientation and that will be very common and then there's the gsba gssa pre-conference workshop on december 1st and then the annual conference would be on december 2nd 3rd and that's the one that's here in georgia right that one yes you all will be receiving an email tomorrow morning recording perfect thank you shayna i want to get clarification my work sessions start at seven seven seven to nine typically

120they're so hard to stop at nine all right any other future dates we need to discuss all right so that brings our august 10th meeting school board meeting adjourned at 8 19. thank you so much for joining us thank you thank you