001[Music] wow summer was fun but i'm so excited to start a new school year [Music] so [Music] good afternoon welcome to our august 8 2022 board work session i want to welcome everybody back to an exciting school year hope you had a wonderful break and we are off to a great start according to those smiles that i saw so we'll go right ahead into our agenda you want to mean to do something dr lewis yes just like take a moment of personal privilege and officially welcome miss tanya carter our new chief human resource officer welcome to our cabinet [Applause] thank you all right thank you very much our public agenda does not have any requests and i do like to take this opportunity to still read our disclaimer all official meetings of the board shall
002be open to the press and the public however the board may meet in executive session citizens are encouraged to address items on the board agenda or to initiate presentations of issues appropriate for school board consideration the board meeting is not the appropriate place to review individual employee performance or individual parent complaints that have not been addressed by the principal or superintendent citizens are encouraged to follow our normal channels to address such concerns which would be on our website calling the superintendent's office or miss jones ms karen jones to schedule or request to be on the public agenda with that we'll move into our committees miss buckner did tell me she was on her way she locked the keys yeah we'll skip over her miss tillery oh i'm sorry miss tillery i would like to present
0034.01 this is the new policy ikbb divisive concepts complaint resolution process the recommended action is approved new board policy ikbb divisive concepts complaint resolution process and weigh the 30 days as required by board policy bdc the background and rationale prudent administration of the school system demands continual review and updating of board policies in compliance with hb divisive concepts the administration recommends new board policy ikbb divisive concepts complaint resolution process the new policy will provide a compliance compliant resolution to address complaints alleging violations of the statute the new policy is not to be confused with the long-standing federal requirements for local boards to adopt policies that prohibit discriminations against employees the gaa equal opportunity employment and students jaa equal educational opportunities in all federally protected areas which includes race superintendent's recommendation is to approve the new
004board policy ikbb divisive concept complaint revolution process and waive the 30 days is required by board policy bdc do we have any questions just simply i will the waiver is simply because uh the state legislature had passed this with the intent that we would have this in place for the start of the school year so that's why we are requesting the waiver of the 30-day this is in line with the state statutes so obviously it's there's not a lot of revisions to this but this is based off the gsba sample policy and then we just made some tweaks to make sure aligned with muscular county policy and practices okay i'd like to present 4.02 policy ieda revised the recommend recommended action approved the revision of the board policy ieda unstructured break time to align with
005current legislation hb 1283 as dictated by board policy bdc policy adoption this policy has been on the table for 30 days and is read ready for the final adoption in accordance with existing needs of the school district the administration recommends the revision of board policy ieda unstructured break time to align with current legislation hb 1283 the revision is related to recess each day for students in kindergarten and grades one through five in the revised policy schools are not required to schedule recess in their physical education or other structured activities happening that day and any circumstances that are out of control of the school such as emergencies disasters or acts of god also recess cannot be withheld due to disciplinary or academic reasons the policy has been reviewed by the gsba thank you miss hillary so
006both of we will be voting on both of those next next week up next is property committee 5.01 you will see the amended um mou for the museum project we needed to have the language specific to the intent and so that's why it's back up for before us so that we can amend it are there any questions about the mou is that you miss mcgregor yes okay i don't know if he had a chance yet but i think mr ellington was gonna get with miss bloodworth because i i thought some language in it was kind of vague and was hoping we could kind of clarify it some more so i don't think that's in this document though i don't think that that revision has been i sent it to him at about two o'clock today
007so yeah we talked about it there might be a little more cleanup on it okay because i think greg agreed with what i said and said he was going to get with it is related to the 2.3 million dollars just clarifying that yeah trying to make it crystal clear that that was as much as we were obligating accounting to do yeah and it's and actually as we talked it was going to be slightly more than that 2.3 million um just based on how much is left in the line item for the splost that originally three million dollars was um allocated to the museum and they've spent some of that money and we haven't finished the project that they are using those funds for so i didn't have a definite number but it will be a
008little bit higher than the 2.3 but will not exceed it yeah i think that was just there were a couple of places where it mentioned you know that we were giving what we got for um infrastructure money and i just thought that was kind of vague and wanted to kind of tie it back to the actual number so that would be good okay thank you amy okay are there any other questions all right 5.02 ms williams thank you madam chair i'm uh pleased and honored to bring 5.02 before you it is to ask next week for the board consideration to approve the naming of the auditorium at william henry spencer high school in honor of mr william r fluellen and if i may i'd like to read the memo attached with reasoning mr william rutledge
009flew ellen was a 1969 graduate of william henry spencer high school while a student at spencer mr fluellen developed a lasting love for education and the institution of spencer high school its values and those trailblazers such as mr william henry spencer for whom the school is named mr fluellen believed that those who have been affiliated with the school had much to offer by reaching back to those coming behind them after graduation in 1969 mr flue allen became an ever-present cheerleader and advocate for spencer high and all things related to spencer he took seriously his responsibilities to live out the charge to stay connected with other spin syrians since alumni are stronger together if he knew of a graduate experiencing illness or death he was there to speak a word of comfort if he knew of
010a student with a special need he was there to offer financial and other assistance he reminded each graduate that they were spencerians and that was something to be proud of with this came a charge to never forget the rich educational foundation afforded them and the obligation to stand strong for future generations of spencerians in 1973 consideration was given to closing spencer high school located on shepard drive it was proposed to construct a new school at another location with different a different name and school colors to replace spencer mr flew ellen was made aware of this situation he joined the golden owls a local group of spencer alumni in a campaign to save william henry spencer high school in 1978 the muskogee county school board in the city decided not to eliminate the name of spencer
011high school and the school moved to its third location on victory drive the original location had been on 10th avenue to advocate for spencer and to ensure the perpetuity of the school mr fluellen envisioned a national alumni association with chapters in every city where there were spencerians this organization of spencer high alumni would be an asset and formidable presence to benefit the school its students and the entire spencer community as a result on february 15 1990 mr flue ellen established the spencer high school national alumni association of 501c3 organization and became its first president this was a position he held for more than 20 years until his death in 2008 comprised of generations of former and current alumni the organization has been very active for the last 32 years member of the members of the
012spencer high alumni association are very active in the columbus community and sponsored numerous activities to encourage and support spencer high for example in 2007 under the leadership of mr fluellen the national alumni association completed a fundraising drive to to purchase banned uniforms at the cost of thirty thousand dollars in 2008 mr william r flue ellen scholarship was established to assist students with college or vocational training presented annually this scholarship aids students in their pursuit of higher education beyond spencer whether it be a university college or technical school additionally the current members of the alumni association remain actively committed to provide enduring support to the aims and goals of educational excellence at spencer the name mr william r fluellen epitomizes the spencer spirit the countless selfless acts benefiting the william henry spencer high school community initiated
013and implemented by and through mr fluellen have had a profound impact on the students staff parents and wider global spencer community for this reason naming the auditorium at spencer high school would symbolize selfless and dedication while honoring an alumnus whose forced forethought wisdom and actions continue to positively impact william henry spencer high school i am a proud life member of the spencer high school alumni association and thank you for allowing me to present this thank you so much miss williams and i see the the green and gold shirts and the spencer alum and the principal dr freeman out there we'll see you guys back next week as we take our vote we'll take our official action on there all right we do have our two reports attached as well from the library report and the
014museum report for the library report all 19 of our mcsd pre-k classes participated in the summer reading group challenge which served approximately 219 children this was a six week program um teachers recorded a combined 521 books which is that's great every class earned a prize book and both teach and parapros earn appreciation prizes the bias inside of us inside us exhibit was during the month of july with over a thousand people who walked through this exhibit customers told staff with one quote this exhibit is awesome this was uh their third visit for a mother and daughter so that was great love has no labels video which was a favorite part from one of our patrons at the the library and so that was very good and i hope that everyone had a chance to get
015out there and experience that for the museum report july reached 1074 people through public programs with the alma w thomas everything is beautiful exhibit which opened on july the first on july the 8th there was a family festival which saw approximately 320 participants they there was also two summer camps focusing on the alma thomas's life and work for different all different age groups in addition to hold their monthly yoga in the galleries program the inaugural summer teacher institute for muskogee county educators used the exhibition as a jumping off point to teach arts integration strategies so that's the good news that's going on with our partners with the muscular county library as well as the museum ms tillery and on a side note i volunteered a program called victory mission and the library and the museum
016went out of their way to help those kids this summer it was a small group that um we were really trying to focus on their reading and they did they went out of their way to make sure that um those kids were exposed and they brought books and it was just amazing so i just want to say thank you thank you so much all right good deal up next is our personnel report ms jackson report there let me get on here two attachments are there any questions miss botner my questions are um not uh concerning the um what we have here on the personnel but it's about personnel matter um i don't know if dr lewis if you've gone over how uh how many short we are how we doing at the beginning of the
017school year is that going to be at the end or how are we going to do that how she's going to present that to okay very good she can address that thank you good evening i am glad you brought that up uh the report that you have is not the most recent uh the report details come out a little after the board docs are available for you and but you'll have this report the more detailed report next uh for the next meeting we currently have you saw from july there were four professionals and 64 support staff that were hired but we've actually hired also uh in august 199 professionals and six substitutes and 91 support staff as well as one temp so you can see we're making progress there are currently in the west there
018are 33 vacancies there are 31 in the east and 25 central so again we're making progress we'll continue to provide that update and show that progress over time as we have a pretty aggressive approach to filling those vacancies we understand how much everyone needs help and although this is a nationwide concern that we are holding it very serious and we're working on creative ways to close those positions and i know you've just gotten here but um and you've given us the stats on where we are in the west east and central how are we in terms of staff for your department uh what i'm hearing is that um we can't accommodate accommodate the people who are applying and i'm hearing this just from people saying uh that they've turned in all the stuff they've called
019nobody's there to answer the phone and that's not your i mean we've had if we don't have enough staff what's the status of our uh our h hr department anyway how many how many do we have how many do we have positions do we have to feel and and can you at this point maybe you can't address whether we are adequately responding to the applications that are coming in and if we are having people who can um uh man the phone i know uh because i understand that people are saying that they never get to talk to anybody you know and the teachers actually come down here the people who are employed they say they can come down but people who are unemployed who are applying initially they're saying that they can't get anybody so
020can you address that please yes i can we are definitely making progress in that area as well we are down to four vacancies we have two uh very strong candidates in mind for two of the four there's also a transition when you bring on new new hires from a learning perspective but that's also in the works as well it's making sure that everyone is qualified to do the job everyone who has been doing the job even understaffed at this point has not been allowing for any serious discrepancies or time in support of those who are calling in it may take a little bit longer because there's fewer people initially but that that is also changing so i'm i'm excited for what i'm seeing it's very promising and you have a very very special staff in
021hr that's already been doing a wonderful job so far we're just trying to get him some help thank you ms chambers and yes i just have a point of clarity question um on the attachments there's a list of inactive employees what can you just explain what it means inactive i did see that as well and i but i didn't see it in time to be able to get the details but i can ask my partner in crime i just hadn't and that may have been on there before i just have not um recognized that as inactive oh brenda yes answer but i think you'll find out these are people who've been terminated or in some state is that correct correct these are individuals that have left our employment and we put inactive because sometimes it
022gets confusing because when you put terminated people may think they've done something wrong have been terminated but they could have resigned so that's why we've changed it to be inactive and those are individuals that have left our employment in the month of july and what about like transportation how are we with transportation it timed out welcome all right let me get back to that one while she's looking at that i will say we currently have and correct me if i'm wrong mr anderson but i believe we have 14 that are in some process in the process of completing their requirements that should be coming into play in the next several weeks and then we have another group of somewhere around 18 i think they're in some of the initial process steps is that correct roughly
023mr jackson yes mr jackson godfrey johnson is our director of transportation we have a total of 24 that is the new total 24 drivers who are actively in training who will be coming out of training over the next two months and ready to transport our students awesome yeah that's really good are there any more questions okay so i'm going to answer the question on on vacancies we currently not including our new incoming drivers we have 63 vacancies for regular bus drivers 63 63 63. not including the 20 not including the 24. 40 ish but those are for our regular bus drivers for our special needs bus drivers we have a total of 14 vacancies and out of those that are currently working we have 15 that are on fmla or other things so technically those
024routes aren't being covered either those spaces are not vacant but they're not driving at this moment so we are experiencing a significant shortage with our drivers has increased right that we have more students this year yes i'll be addressing that a little bit later in the any more questions hearing on back to you madam chair thank you ma'am dr slide discipline committee no items mr cantrell construction committee thank you madam chair move down to 8.01 the construction status report lots of wonderful things going on with our school district first on the columbus high school interior in exterior of grades at columbus high school um the estimated completion because of all the different things at columbus will be 2 million thousand dollars the construction department is evaluating the estimated budget that aligns with construction documents from
025the architect prior to the bidding process next is jordan vocational high school college and career academy estimated completion issue in fall of the construction showing 7 million 469 thousand so a lot of stuff going on at jordan right now construction for the grant funded portion of this project is substantially complete and the punch list items are being addressed construction on the 2020 esplance funded portion of the project the site is being prepared to receive staff and students for the 22-23 school year construction will continue unmodified to limit disruption at the school next is the jordan vocational high school college career academy heating ventilation and air conditioning renovation the price so far showing 6 million 319 thousand courses hvac equipment is being installed in multiple buildings on campus as equipment arrives daily the next project is
026four classroom additions renovations at matthews elementary school the 2020 east floss project to add four classrooms and address interior renovations as described by the local five-year facility plans this cost is 1 million excuse me 2 million 685 000 with an adjustment lowering the price came in at 1 million 767 000 so it looks like it was about close to a million dollars less than what they first came out with the next one is middle school fields upgrades phase one at baker east columbus and rothschild middle school construction estimate completion was summer 2022 the total cost was 1 million 442 thousand dollars the summary of work was baker and east columbus middle schools are receiving and sod rothschild middle school sidewalks informed of ready to receive concrete all three schools have their exterior bleachers and bleacher
027pants the construction department is moving the projects to behind schedule because the facade is not rooted yet so they're waiting for it to root in the projects expect to be back on the schedule students at all three schools will have athletic practices in alternative locations while the sod takes root new elementary school number eight combining dawson elementary school along kennedy street estimated completion is summer of 2024. the total amount estimated so far is 37 million 890 thousand the heavy equipment has been mobilized and sealed fence is being installed property clearing has begun and the construction department is still planning the groundbreaking ceremony the next project going on is the otis spencer stadium system-wide multi-sport athletic complex the spencer multi-sport complex includes the otis spencer stadium is being developed on 38 acres with approximately it will
028hold six thousand spectators following the ghsa standards the multi-sport athletic complex is designed for the events that include football flag football lacrosse soccer and other district events the site also includes five tennis courts and amenities the total project the budget on it is 27 million six hundred and nine thousand summer upgrade projects upgrades to brewer jd davis key lonnie jackson academy and raw child leadership academy the project's estimated completion was summer 2022 the total budget was two million four hundred thousand yes ma'am go ahead um dr liz i don't know who you want to there you go i have a couple of questions on this item for the upgrades or refreshes or whatever we want to call them on on these schools i've had an opportunity to visit a couple that are in my district
029and um boy it doesn't take much to just improve the the air in in a in a little school an elementary school like new paint and new flooring and um it just looked absolutely terrific i know i know there were a couple of a pro couple of items that were delayed because of the supply line what are we last time i was there and i wasn't there last week but the last time i was there they had not installed the partition that was between the exterior entrance and the interior entrance into the classroom areas what is the status of that those are i imagine it's the same at all of them that's that's right but key or all the the material delays um still be around thanksgiving when we receive the for the secure vestibules
030at each of those schools okay i understand that there were some there were a couple of things that still needed to be accommodated and those are going to be scheduled at the end of the year during the christmas parade yes ma'am okay great thank you kia um i have a question about the jordan high school the heating ventilation and air conditioning renovation i know originally it says in 2020 we approved a 6.3 million dollar budget for that can you explain to me i'm assuming that we're not paying six million dollars just for what seven acs i'm assuming that is it's more to it than just the hvac can you explain to me that's correct what's included in the 6.3 million okay the entire hvac system at jordan's been changed out and that was on two
031applications the 22 000 the 2018 year and then the reapply for 2023 so the entire hvac system is for six million dollars that journey not just one or two pieces but the entire system and every one of the buildings every one of the buildings okay every unit in jordan are they moving the center air conditioners from the center of the school you know what i'm talking about are they moving them onto the rooftops or that is no sir the chillers they're going out between the baseball field and the building and then a screen brick screens have been built around those so they moved out of the courtyard to make it quieter for the students when it goes out there we move some some equipment that was out there and then put the new chiller system
032with the old uh i was wondering where they was putting them yeah if that was changed it's been there since the 70s i know i don't know if we've had new new units since then but it was that way back in 77 at least yes and it is uh very cool out there so they're loving the new hvac any more questions kia um i think that's it can you give me a breakdown of this like when we originally bid it on it i just don't remember it being that much for hvac's before we'll send it to you um it was back in december the 14th 2020 or maybe miss jones can send that to me okay we'll send you the data okay sounds good thank you any more questions now ladies and gentlemen if not
033middle school fields upgrade phase one will be at baker east columbus and rothschild middle school and thank you for the voters for our east floss field renovation projects include but not limited new school boards goal posts soccer goals bleachers and grading baker in east columbus are receiving sod middle raw child sidewalks informed and ready to receive concrete total cost for this to show in one point 442 million 1 million 442 000. i think it brought up the elementary school at this time is 37 million 890 thousand upgrades to brewer jd davis key lonnie jackson academy and raw child leadership academy of 2.4 million all locations are receiving upgrade work which includes painting flooring ceiling tile work brewer and jd davis receiving new gym flooring by the end of the project each site will have a
034secure work will continue after the school year starts the delay materials for the cure caused the schedule to fall behind carver columbus northside high school increasing the size and layout of the weight rooms at carver columbus and northside total cost is one million three hundred and sixty eight thousand the punch lists are being completed for carver clemson north side construction is 95 percent complete the remaining five percent are identified issues on the punch list a lot of stuff veteran veterans band room expansion and renovation at veterans memorial middle school total cost is showing 1.5 million dollars construction items is 95 percent complete the remaining 5 is identified as a punch list and added scope and that's what we've got a whole lot of stuff going on in columbus at all of our schools to upgrade
035them probably the best they've ever been in history and maybe since they're brand new thank you to all of our folks out there muskogee county for the east loss we couldn't have done it without your vote thank you so much that's all madam chair i just want to remind everyone we have a couple of dates upcoming regarding some of those projects on uh august the 27th saturday august 27th we have the groundbreaking for elementary school e it'll be taking place i believe it's at 9 30 on the site of the construction and then on october 15th that's also a saturday we'll have the ribbon cutting for otis spencer stadium two important dates in the history of our school district and looking forward to both thank you very much ms buckner education committee thank you mr
036screen we have two items the first item is 3.01 that's the comprehensive lea improvement plan and mr smith has given that for us get your mic hit the microphone good evening dr lewis sorry dr smith dr smith has given that for us sorry about that that's okay um good evening dr lewis members of the board i'm just going to go through a brief overview of our comprehensive basically our district improvement plan but our comprehensive lea improvement plan for this coming year all right so this is our graphic the state uses for school improvement plans for district improvement plans and basically we're just centering everything we put it within that plan around this the whole child through those five components in the middle and then in the green on the outside is a continuous improvement process
037and so that really just drives how we approach this there's four different components to the clip one is the needs assessment and the second one is the improvement plan and then the parent and family engagement policy which all of you have a copy of and then also the foster care transportation plan so we're going to talk through each of those briefly so next school year cognia who is our accreditation review organization they changed our five-year accreditation cycle to a six-year cycle so we're going to realign the needs assessment and the improvement plan process around that six year cycle i'm going forward and so we delayed the needs assessment we would have done last spring to this coming spring because of that six year cycle so this coming spring we'll do the comprehensive needs assessment in
038in conjunction with the self-assessment for cogna for accreditation and then we'll have a new district improvement plan based on the outcomes of those assessments and then you see the next two years after that we'll just revise the district improvement plan and we're going to line the school improvement plan process as well so that's why you see the sip there listed and then in fy 26 we'll do another needs assessment and then another new improvement plan and then three years later we'll be right back to the accreditation six year cycle so that's what the every six years will look like going forward so our overarching needs um the only revision we made to this for this coming year was instead of leadership development as that first overarching need we just changed that to employee development because
039we need to focus more on retaining who we have and developing those people second need is individual student needs and then need for monitoring and culture of kindness and those are all still the same so our four goals um first one is around employee development second one is personalized learning and this is a kind of a flip from last the last couple years we used to have it as tier one instruction and now we flip the personalized learning because that's our primer that's our big focus and tier one instruction is um it's a component of personalized learning so that's that's an action step within the plan and then mtss are our tiered systems of supports for students and then mission vision and values which is around a culture of kindness goal i'm not going to
040read through this goal but it's it's on the online if you want to read through that but that's this is for the employee development and so the action steps for that we're going to continue with leadership development work we've got first and second year principles that we're going to introduce some training for this year we've got 12 i believe it's 12 principals in our first two years and so we need to provide some supports there our aspiring principal cohort we've we've done some realignment with that because of feedback from the cohorts that we've had we've had two cohorts so far and based on that feedback we're going to extend that to a two-year cohort so we've had a number of the two cohorts be promoted two principles so we're going to combine the first two
041cohorts and make this their their year two and then after this year it'll be a two-year cohort going forward and then we're also going to start um an aspiring assistant principal cohort training so that will be patterned will be different focuses but pattern the same kind of approach to your focus application based blind application reviews so we'll have that going out in january as a target for having the information or having that in place we continue having assistance principles training monthly pretty much all the months except we start in september we do september october november and then we skip december through january february and march and so those trainings are provided by different departments and divisions around just things they just need to know going into the principalship whether it's something around budgeting special education
042and so on so that's been we've had some good good feedback from that for the last couple years and then we've got teacher quality specialists that are funded through title two they provide um their biggest focus is really around induction teachers the the teachers in their first three years but they're also do things as well for other other teachers we started this past summer the first teacher leader cohort and that is a two-year cohort as well so that will continue on this year and we're looking at an additional cohorts we are continuing the teacher support and coaching endorsement that's something we offer through muskogee county and when teachers finish that they that's added to their certificate through the psc because we're endorsed provider through the bsc we will our georgia tap program uh continues on
043and we've had very good results from that overall and so we will have we've got a cohort that just started this fall we'll have another cohort to start in the spring and typically we have two cohorts a year coming through we've got academic coaches in title 1 schools some schools have opted for additional coaches so that's just depending on funding and availability of personnel teacher teacher observations that's more when we hear about teachers that just could use some other perspectives from other classrooms we find subs for them to be able to do that and then focus on recruiting teachers and paraprofessionals and then certification assistance as well for those employees again there's a second goal i'm not going to read through that one but that's focused on personalized learning for personalized learning we're looking at
044content specific resources and training we've got new textbook adoptions that have been coming through for last couple years so there's trainings lined up to acclimate teachers and leaders to those resources personalized learning training that is probably one of the biggest examples of a district role that i've seen we've got people from teaching and learning from dis who are involved in supporting schools through that process and so they're kind of coaches for that we've got web-based resources that support student learning it's a long list i'm not going to try to go through them but that's like the achieve lexia xl we're piloting another one this year as well so there's just there's also art music on resources as well that we purchase in drama we've got the one-to-one student devices that are continuing after-school tutoring or
045extended day that is something that we fund through our our instructional extension program funds and then also subsidized with title one we've got title one school specific parent and family engagement sessions so one of the focuses this year is to acclimate parents to the personalized learning focus since that is such a big big project right now we've got new teacher training we had new teacher orientation last week within power we had the first two days with our new new employees and then we had days three and four with our other all employees but we had new teachers involved with those last two days as well we will have feedback to schools through the live meetings process walkthroughs there's a variety of walk throughs whether it's personalized learning pbis and then we have multiple dean positions
046across the district and schools some of those are ones that have been in place others of those are additional ones the schools have requested and put into place with a variety of funding sources here's our third goal which i'm not going to read but dr smith if i may just want to also interject based on the baseline scores we now have received in the milestones that will are kind of connected to the next presentation uh you'll be hearing about an initiative that's connected to our personalized learning called p3 2025 we'll be bringing more details that setting new targets for proficiency uh for reading and math by the end of third grade and we'll be hearing more about that in the future meetings but i just want to connect that to you now going forward as
047part of the personalized learning initiative thank you and that's a revision we actually need to add i'm glad you said that all right so mtss action steps for their third goal still working on a common understanding of mtss across the district and expanding it out farther in schools having clear district expectations written procedures processes and other documentation for mtss to support that that rollout and then data collection analysis procedures for district and school-based teams we're building a resource list of evidence-based strategies for instructional and behavioral needs so that's something that teachers can go will be able to go to that list for assistance and then there's a fidelity of implementation rubric that's aligned with teks and leaks the evaluation system for our teachers and leaders that will be used to monitor how well the implementation
048is going for mtss uh finishing the training curriculum for that and implementing that there's three state mtss training modules that's available through slds which is a state longitudinal data system um so the purpose of those modules is for everyone all certified staff to go through those three modules and so they don't do that each year they'll do that one year and so the next year all new employees will go through those modules mtss youth mental health first aid and pbis training that's been ongoing and will continue and then again the feedback to schools through live meetings and walk throughs and then we'd like to establish model mtss and pbis schools so that schools within our district can go to schools and leaders are familiar with and and learn from them with esser funds we're implementing
049district and school level prevention and intervention specialist the district level will be actual positions and the school level will be supple stipends supplements to people in the school who are helping roll out that work we've got universal screeners that we've been using for several years in our continuing renaissance for star and reading the starting reading math assessments and then we've got the best or is the best screener for behavior that we will continue to use we're continuing continuing our yes well newcomers academy four english learners in six through 12 who are coming who are new to the country um they're at least two years behind academically in their native language and where were flipping they were going to midland academy from their various locations in the afternoon we're flipping out to the mornings to help
050with so we had some issues with students not wanting to be there in afternoon because they're missing things at their school in the afternoon so we flipped it through the morning so they could participate better in the afternoon activities and then again the dean's piece because they influenced the academic and the behavioral side and then there's our goal for culture of kindness and so our action steps there we will continue pushing into mission vision and i don't want to say pushing expanding that out in our practices and conversations and training need to have some customer service training and then continue to promote mission envision values through a variety of methods i want to again increase school participation the great kindness challenge there was an increase last year we'd like to continue that additional increase this
051year and then increase participation in stakeholder surveys we know we do a lot of surveys but surveys do give us good information that can be used for improvement we want to use crucial conversations training for we're actually looking at this for a couple different areas but want to use this with some leaders employee wellness activities will continue to be a focus relationship building amongst the staff and students and then supports the students on topics of suicide prevention drug drug and alcohol abstinence and avoiding violence i have a question so with this crucial conversation training for leaders meaning the district-level people principals school level okay so is this also a part of that goal one for employee development or the the multi-layered professional development that's going to be tailored to different specific groups of employees it
052could absolutely be listed there yes okay one of the groups we're talking about implementing that the only one i've heard at this point would be academic coaches because we're we're re focusing on the work of the academic coach and they have to have crucial conversations and support so right but i'm i'm mainly interested in the training that would be for leaders um do you have is there a plan and has it been mapped out the type of strategic training for leaders yes and do you know if it's going to be beyond the crucial conversation or in addition to the crucial conversation is and are you going to have outside trainers for the leaders yes and the leaders i'm talking about the district level up this is being the crucial con crystal conversations training is being
053conducted by the state georgia department of education they're trainers right and so i'm asking about additional training for leaders they will all be part of this training is there is it just so you the only training you're providing is the crucial conversation training that's it that in this particular piece yes okay and that's for all building leaders and for district leaders okay all right the third component of the clip is the parent and family engagement policy which um you have a copy of but these are the the key pieces that it focuses on as building schools capacity there's requirement in our title one schools that we have training for our staff around parent and family engagement and that's done through their parent family engagement person at the school and then also building parent capacity for
054through workshops each school has to have four workshops a year and then we typically do two district parent workshops as well throughout during the year it is focused on the pta national standards for family school partnership and then we and within that would define title one and parent and family engagement what those things are do all schools have ptas i'm sorry do all schools have ptas do they all have employees ptas i don't know the answer to that pta national standards okay we just aligned it with that just because that's you know best practices around parent and family engagement for the schools that do not have pta how will they how will you align what they're doing for the schools that do not have pta so this this is really separate from pta function we
055just wanted to align it with how what the pta does with their work it's just the standards right i don't think i don't that answers your question we also talk about the reservation of funds we have to do a one percent parent parent and family engagement set aside from title one funds and so those funds are allocated down to the schools where parents do an annual survey or have the opportunity to take a survey where they give feedback on what they would like to see that money used for and so we cannot spend that money just on anything it has to be on things that parents said this is a need for us to support our kids learning um and then the diff goals are in there and then how we evaluate as well so
056that's their vip goal the district improvement plan goals say it again the district improvement plan thank you and then our foster care transportation plan this is something we have to do in collaboration every year with defacts and so the goal of that is to keep a foster care student at the school of origin as much as possible so we get a good number of foster care students that come from out of the county so that's not possible in those situations but when they're within the county just for example if a student is at brewer and goes into foster care and they're moved over to say their their foster home is in the mlk zone they'll keep them a brewer to minimize the the change and things going on in their lives at that point so
057that's the point behind the plan defects will temporarily arrange transportation to the school of assignment while we're setting up a bus route if a bus ride is needed i have a question about that so before the funding for this was it not mckinney-vento federal funds for the transportation so i have not seen where we've gotten funding yet the way it's built into the plan is we're only reimbursed from by defects if the costs are more than negligible um do you want to speak to that dr nelson we'll be here got my steps in today good evening uh mckinney bento in 2015 they realigned uh the funding when we moved from every child's disease from no child left behind to every child's disease act foster care was actually pulled out of mckinney-vento okay and so that's
058why now the funding is kind of funneled through so now the funding will come from the school district so we don't get direct funding for it so if we're if it got to where we are it's a hardship on a district to provide that route then dfax will reimburse us for those costs okay thank you all right and that is that is our clip so any other questions okay miss chambers thank you miss buckner um dr smith just a couple of questions about the academic coaches and academic deans can you specify for me the difference in those two roles i know we added academic deans recently but so what are the differences in those two positions so the role of the academic coach ideally i mean we've just gone through covet so there's been some
059a little more flexibility there than normal but ideally the role the coach is to work with teachers directly so and we tell the coaches you know teachers work with students you work with teachers um and so their sole purpose is supposed to be to improve teacher pedagogy and practice that could be through supporting classroom management that could be through model lessons through observations of feedback and so on the deans some of that may happen in some of the non-title one schools but typically deans are more doing some of the some administrative duties they can't do things like takes evaluations because they're not an assistant principal but they are helping support administration in a variety of things so how many deans do we have actually assigned to schools and they're just there as a support personnel
060for administrators for the school i mean not just the principal and aps but they're they're doing support work within the school i don't know the number i could i can send a list okay sounds good and i i like the fact that you've added to the building of the leadership um the assistant principles so my question is how do we determine who is allowed to enter the program either for an assistant principal or you know a incoming training for a principalship how do we select those so for the aspiring principal cohort which which is consisted of assistant principles it's an application based process so they'll file an application they have to have references with it as well and then there's a group that will review i say a group there's three typically three administrators will
061use um to review the applications and then we we make them anonymous we take out their names and their locations from the application so they don't know who's they're reviewing and that was based on feedback from a year or two ago i can't remember but then it's just based on they have a rubric that they complete based on how you guys are going through it and then that rubric just allows it to you know score it and then we're just looking at it's based on scores at that point if we're taking 10 um like last cohort we had 10 people so it's a top 10 scores that were taken for that cohort okay and last question about the program have we done any type of evaluation on perhaps those individuals who've gone through the leadership
062development program gotten a principalship and are now actively running a school have we done any type of feedback survey just to see how effective the program is so at the end of each year we we get served we get feedback from what we do at the end of trainings but at the end of the year with it's more holistically you know what can we do to improve it going forward um what went well that kind of thing so those are conversations we have throughout the year and changes we've made like for instance the making a two-year cohort that was based on feedback and so feedback's an important part of it okay i have uh two questions and um the first uh was a follow-up for from mrs uh chamber's question is about the uh coaches
063and i was making a note here about some time back we had um mentor teachers and i was thinking as school is starting i'm sorry as school is starting um most new teachers are overwhelmed when they come to school it's um it's just so much it's so much to do and a while back we had mentor teachers and each new teacher was assigned a mentor teacher and that teacher could go directly to that mentor teacher so you also mentioned something called specialized teacher i'm not quite sure what that is but i saw it somewhere in your report and i was thinking is that something like a mentor teacher and um so how do we accommodate these very new teachers who uh probably have all the academic skills or and have had you know have had
064good training in school but when you go in a classroom it's it's totally different so how are we um accommodating them i know we have the coaches you know and that's very good so um they learn lesson plans in school they learn all this stuff in school they learn classroom management they learn everything they practice they have student teaching so who who's in that gap that helps them directly so the teacher support and coaching endorsement that was one of the action steps there that is something that to go through that process they have to mentor teachers to get the endorsement that's that's part of the culminating activities they have to participate in there are there are what we call tscs teacher supporting coaching endorsements we call them tscs into schools schools have tscs in their
065building now and so it's you know some schools have more than others um that's just depend that just is based on you know how many slots we have movement of teachers in between years and so on but those tscs each year are for the most part they are participating in mentor activities with new teachers so we have that piece and they have to provide documentation about that tsc support to us and there's some so how many are there in a school it varies by school okay usually you could have anywhere from one or two to some may have five or six one or two i mean i could we can get you a list of how many by school i really you know before i want what i'm going what what i'm where i'm going
066to you don't have to give me a list i'm just what i want is that this piece to be taken care of uh or what i'm trying to get to is that we need to make sure when we put teachers in a school we have enough support that's why we're talking everybody's talking about why teachers are leaving recruiting teaches a problem all over the nation why teachers are leaving so when they come we need to be able to accommodate them we need to have somebody there to help them along because it's very hard it's very difficult as a new teacher going into school so this is a way of maintaining the teachers that we have if we could have somebody um you know if we can make sure we have a you know a piece
067of we can just think about that and follow up on looking at our schools seeing how many we have y'all checking to make sure the principals are having enough so that we can have this piece taken care of we're already short and teach short with teachers so we can have this piece taken care of that will be okay then there's a couple other things going on that lines up with what you're talking about one is the teacher leader cohort where we're trying to build teacher leaders in the point of being a teacher leader so that you can help other teachers in your building do you remember i think you've been here a minute because when i was we used to have mentors and actually the state paid for them like they were mentor teachers each
068new teacher was assigned a mentor that's what the tsc is that's what the tsc is it's just it's changed verbiage over the years so we don't so they don't assign mentor teachers anymore it's just changed they used to be called teacher mentors now they're changed too see but the way your teacher support coach if you have like one two or three see when they had the teacher mentorships each teacher had a mentor so this this year saying you have one or two or one to five to six at a teacher but at that time each teacher had his or her own mentor teacher and i'm just saying uh which you know which was uh to me in my opinion was could help a new teacher better than having maybe one teacher here or two or
069five or six year old there this is just something for us to be thinking about yeah i'm just saying that's an ongoing it's an ongoing process we train teacher uh support coaches uh we have a cohort right now i think we have 27 um trainees that will go out and that are currently in schools uh and they're being trained right now we send those people out when somebody's having trouble like correct when a teacher is in trouble we don't want the teacher to get in trouble they want to be proactive what i'm talking about is something at the very beginning like somewhere if we don't have mentor teachers or some something where um teachers at the very beginning they can be kind of relaxed you know and know that they have somebody that they can
070go to you know when they don't know when they get stuck with something and this is what i'm saying while we're in this stage we can be looking at what we have to kind of uh help our our young teachers better we have multiple support mechanisms for for uh teachers we have teacher support coaches we have academic coaches that will help support them uh there are um obviously the um staffs at the school that will help them we have content specialists uh teacher quality specialists if there's a need they're gonna be supported we're not we're not gonna let them flounder out there i hope so i mean i'm just saying and i know we're always trying because i just know when i was a teacher everybody everybody actually is overwhelmed at school so when you
071talk about the content teacher everybody's trying to do their own work you know i'm just saying and everybody with the work to be done almost everybody is overwhelmed it's a lot of work it's a lot of work for you teachers job is a lot of work so so when you say we have the content teachers and these teachers that still to me is leaving something open because most of the times now they are experienced teachers but they still have a lot to do and sometimes they're trying to get their own stuff done and i'm just saying and we're just going back and forth i know everybody is trying everybody wants to do the right thing everybody wants to help the teacher i'm just saying let's just look at this let's have our principals look at
072and make sure we have all this stuff that y'all saying sounds good but just let's just make sure that we have something in place for our very new teachers because what we got talking about every day you turn the tv on they're talking about why what's happening to teachers they are not going into the field how can we recruit and maintain teachers that's all i'm saying at this point and we look at that every day okay yep we do and i hope we just look at it more and my second question uh the second question is how do we as we make this comprehensive our improvement plan um and we have our goals you know and i noticed their measurable goals where do we go to like if i wanted to um when you're majoring
073and you do have the short objectives you know you're checking them off i'm assuming so where do we go to if we wanted to see where we were like if a boardman wanted to see where we were on this plan so last year we started mirroring what the schools are doing with their improvement plans where we've got short-term action plans for the fall and spring so last semester or last year we had one for each semester we're continuing that on so you'll see you know if you lined up short-term action plans in a row you'd see a progression of you know things getting accomplished new things that and things coming off that kind of thing and y'all still put this i know it's going us this is on this is on our website where do
074we where you know like we should be able to tap into this will be that's not the new one's not on the website in 2023 you were saying there will be added to the website it will be added to the website and you and every when you say you you'll check for the um your measure where we are you said we fall every at the end of every semester we could we we've got four different goal teams and each goal team's got a lead who is responsible for that short-term action plan and so in december and in may they submit their short-term action plan and it'll show each of the action steps and then assess where it is whether it's completed progressing at expected rate not progressing unexpected rate and so on okay this is
075per school schools do that with school improvement plans but then we also do with the district improvement plan yeah with the district plan that's that's the one i'm trying to see so we do those like quarter uh every semester twice a year okay and we'll be able to access that where you can see you can just ask for that we don't post those on the website we just post a plan but you know if you ever want to see it just you can shoot me an email so y'all will present that to this thing maybe i'm just trying to get out how how um i know y'all are doing it i'm just saying i would like it we would just have to ask for it to see if we want to see where we were
076with what we are we also have to report to the state twice a year on earth as well they have a progress monitoring tool be it built into slds so um that's really the same thing that each action step is in there we just go into market okay and just mark it that's what i'm saying yeah so we can see we can we'll just have to ask you to see it all right thank you are there any more questions okay thank you doctors yes this time and uh our next goal uh next item is 3.02 and that's our spring assessment update great thank you good evening uh patrick noff director of research accountability assessment here to bring you the georgia milestones results from last year i do want to start with a couple of things
077one being sort of a reminder of where we are in terms of our previous test administrations if you'll remember the 1920 testing was cancelled due to the pandemic and so because everyone went home we didn't have testing the following year the state applied for and was granted a waiver um well they asked for the waiver because the waiver had been given that first year for 20. the next year we requested a waiver twice and actually were denied the waiver and remember that's the year where we had our students half of them were home virtual half of them were here in school the guidance we got from the state was that we weren't going to bring students in to test so those virtual students didn't come into test and so remember we only had results for
078roughly about half of our students about 55 of our students tested that year and so that was kind of what would have been our comparison year to this year but again because of the large variability um and i'm going to go to that because of the high degree of variability between this year and last year or this past year i mean we're not using this as a comparison the state actually um if you'll notice in their press release they they noted that um that it was not advisable to do that i know some districts may have done that and that's in a case where they had enough of a representation both years or they felt confident that their year-to-year results were comparable but again because we only had 55 percent of our students test the
079prior year we knew ours were not comparable so we're using these as a baseline to go from this point forward the state actually is not going to be using this for composite ccrpi scores again those are those scores that the state the governor's office would use to assign report card grades to schools that's not going to happen they've actually modified the way that students are identified for comprehensive or targeted support again based on the fact that we know that these results are not directly comparable and in addition to that we're not even it won't be used for teacher evaluations so again you can see the state as they've advised us not to use it for a year to your comparison have avoided doing that in places where it really required a year-to-year comparison so again
080for us this is a baseline year moving forward so let's jump in if you'll look you'll see that our third grade test results for the number of students that are reading at grade level or above was 54.8 and our students that are proficient and above for ela and again this is reading and writing so there's a writing portion and a reading portion in there was 27.7 and for math it was 27.6 mr no yes you said the percentage of students that were on grade level was what four grade level for reading is 54.8 percent percent of reading great level at above okay so in that percentage uh so 54.8 met the goals the states go met in your categories you have yes the lex well there's the state you have those at me like you
081have percent of developing and above yes ma'am and then you have the percent proficient and above yes ma'am okay so um and uh proficient is the high where where where's the category that that uh where they met yes ma'am there's two different things going on here the first thing that you're looking at the 54.8 percent are the number the percentage of students that are reading on grade level meaning their lexile score fell within their lexile band for their grade level the second thing that's happening on this is for ela we combine the percent of students that are developing proficient and distinguished all together and then we also just combine the proficient and distinguish together so what's the percentage that met the goals 54.8 percent of the students met the reading goal but the other two
082numbers include writing as well that makes sense it's for english language arts as a whole so we get two metrics out of english language arts we get the number of students who were beginning developing proficient distinguished we also get a second measure based on their lexile which is the percentage of students reading on grade level so for ela in all these cases i present you with percentage of students reading on grade level and then their overall mastery of standards for ela reading and writing so they are presented to us as the state states as the state presents them yes ma'am okay so the beginning learners for not not in that category no ma'am when the state presented it out when we're following the template that we used we're following the template that we used last
083year to present the data which was one that the state had given us last year to use and so we use that again just as a single year just to give you as much information without crowding it with too much information okay so these these this is the way we presented so according to when the state has that categories what are the states categories the beginning learner so how the beginning when the state presents it they present where is our brazilian learners there sorry okay if we were if they were presented to us as where where is our beginning learning category well the beginning learner would be why did we decide not to use it in the presentation i'm just trying to figure out why we decided not to use it when we were presented
084with it it was presented as one long spreadsheet we were just trying to simplify this this is the same template that we presented last year yeah i know but i'm i'm i'm trying to figure out why we presented that way last year we presented because we we were you know when they if if you were trying to present as uh much information the reason i'm asking about this is because somebody called i read that's the reason i'm late i had several people calling me and they were saying something about our test scores or if we're trying to skew our test scores or if we're okay if we were trying to skew our test scores and why weren't representing all of the categories because it's as if we were trying to and i'm just doing uh
085and that's why i'm asking you why are we not presenting all the categories as presented by the state because this is what i was asking so if we were trying to um uh skew our actual performance you know and which we we do realize you know what has happened you know we do realize that yeah but i'm just trying to sense you know that that's actually why i was late i was trying to get out of the house and left my person had to get a ride but anyway so that's that's why i'm asking well sure we don't present those because usually when i went where i worked we did so a couple of things one we're not trying to obfuscate anything okay because we're presenting the number of proficient honestly at the end of
086the day what we want to see what the state says makes a student ready for the next grade level is proficient or above so we're not hiding anything we're presenting here that 27.7 percent of our students were ready based on the state's metric of proficient or above they also include or present together developing and above but if you look at the proficient or the percent developing and above that tells you right there the number of students already beginning learners are the other part of that that adds up to 100 so no one's trying to hide anything we just used the template that the state used for simplicity's sake because that's the template that we used last year when we presented just one year's worth of data as opposed to multiple year over year which in
087the past is what we have done when they come in to us yes ma'am it was it was published to the whole public i mean it was presented to the entire state so there's nothing there's no hiding anything because there's nothing nothing to hide sure but again at the end of the day what we want to see is 27.2 0.7 percent we're not we're not trying to hide anything because we're presenting exactly what we want in terms of proficiency we want that bottom number that bottom right number is the number we're shooting for the bottom right number is the number there 27.7 percent that's the number we want to be better than that what it is yes ma'am that's that's where that's that's readiness for the next grade yeah so we're not hiding anything because
088it's right there i mean we we want to see more than 27.7 percent of our students proficient or above do we know how many is proficient no man but i can get you that i'm just saying that yeah because that because well because again the goal is proficient or above okay so that that is the goal so maybe three percent not not proficient 70 is if you subtract it yes ma'am 72.3 72.3 and it might help mr uh if we talk about percent reading on grade level versus percent proficient and above yes sir i think there's some confusion yeah because that's a wholly different met yeah that 54.8 percent is a wholly different metric and again don't don't forget that the other the other numbers for ela include writing as well which we know expressive
089language is trails receptive language the students are better readers often than they are writers and it takes time to catch up and develop that skill so often we may see students read on a better level than they might write um which is another reason the way that's tested is a lot that's tested with a lot of reading one has to read a lot and interpret the reading and then do the writing so the ela is a reading test i mean it's a language test it it's it's yes it's a language test they're very long passages that they have to learn and then they ask questions about that but the writing portion itself is just strictly writing it's a very it's it's some passages short passages that are read and then they they jump into writing
090based on the reading passage which means that that's where they say ela that's that's really that's language yes ma'am all right i have a question um and i know i i definitely want you to finish the presentation but can you send us just a a copy of the breakdown where it lists just proficient just developing and just above because i think just for me that and above sort of gives us a gray area but if you can break it up then we can definitely um you know really see where we are in comparative to the state standard and you know what they're saying if you can just send that afterwards that would be great to do that thank you so for fourth grade again you can see for reading proficiency this is just lexile you
091can see 46.1 are reading on grade level and 25.3 of students are proficient or distinguished and for math it's 26.8 percent of students are proficient or distinguished next for fifth grade and again fifth grade includes the science test but does not include social studies just ela math and science for the percentage of students that we're reading at grade level meaning just that lexile score you can see it's 65.2 percent which is very close to the state which hits 69.7 and again at the bottom right you'll see our proficient and above those are proficient distinguished students are at 32.2 percent for math proficiency we were at 21.7 and for science proficiency we're at 29.4 and again when i say proficiency i'm i'm not meaning just the proficient level but readiness for the next grade level as
092in proficient or distinguished so for sixth grade the reading percentages on lexile were 45.3 and again proficiency for ela which is the writing and reading was at 28.4 and for math we were at a 16.9 definitely some room for growth there so for seventh grade our proficient or above is a 57.1 that's not proficient i apologize that's reading on grade levels of 57.1 and our proficiency is 26 even and for math we were at a 21.8 percent proficiency and now for eighth grade now there's a few things going on with eighth grade these are the students who also take algebra and we have some of those students who take the physical science so for ela our reading proficiency and dr lewis and i've talked about this but relatively speaking this group of eighth graders relative
093to other grade levels is actually fairly strong all things considered you look at their proficiency they were at a 63.3 percent overall reading on grade level and 32.9 percent proficiency in ela reading and writing the math here includes all students it's 25.8 proficiency and again those students who take algebra had to take the math and had to take the algebra so we will actually see those students again some of those students for social studies yes ma'am the math they did because we don't have a waiver they're required to have a math in high school and because the test that's used for that is algebra but we allow students to take it in eighth grade we don't have a waiver and it requires that they take both the algebra and then they had to go back
094and take the eighth grade math because we don't have a waiver for that subject we do for science which is why those students because high school physical science is not the tested science in high school it doesn't require them to go back and take a second test but for math they did so for science you'll see here just this eog science is 8th grade science the proficiency overall was 22.1 if you take a look at our high school physical science again these are the eighth graders that are hand-picked to take the advanced high school course you'll see that their proficiency was actually 66.1 which is was above the state's level of proficiency so it's a really strong group there for high school physical science and again these are eighth graders um taking those students were
095those they are the ones that took the physical um i don't know off top of my head i can get you that number it was a small group right um we had a decent size number of students take it um i don't know what proportion of the overall population but i mean it was more than just a couple hundred i mean we had a we had a number of students take the high school course and and do well not just take it but take it so for high schools you'll see here that we again uh for american lit we again get that lexile score for those students you can see there again 66.4 of those students were reading on grade level which again is pretty close to the state's 69.1 overall proficiency for american lit
096was 39.8 percent which again was close to the state's proficiency level of 42. looking at the biology overall 36.7 of students were proficient this algebra again you'll notice the asterisks i'm what i'm referencing here is this is where they put the high school or the eighth grade students that took the high school course are also included in these scores overall um the proficiency proficiency for that was 22.6 percent and then for u.s history it's 24.1 a note about the us history uh there students who take ap us history or dual enrollment actually substitute that score for the end of course for history so our strongest students are not actually included in this number because they were taking advanced coursework so that had did have an overall impact in the overall u.s history scores just because
097again our our strongest testers were taking ap courses where they can substitute the grade for that but that's not included in this so now moving on to our tier two cities these are the cities that are most closely matched to us in terms of size demographics poverty these are the districts that look most like us um actually the one that matches us the closest or it did in the in the past when we when we did this was savannah chatham was our closest match but again you can see here we were to 27.7 overall and i'll just give you sort of a overall um view of this we beat the tier two cities and eighty percent of the categories um that we tested in matched with them so 16 out of the 20 we surpassed
098their scores you can see here again for math we're at 27.6 so we were just over chatham there for fourth grade it was at 25.3 percent for ela and a 26.8 which was down 1.3 to savannah so that that fourth grade math is one of the categories and actually fifth grade math also is the second elementary category where savannah chatham edged us out by half a point 32.2 percent for ela in fifth grade overall and you can see compared to the other districts our ela was very strong overall and again looking at science overall a good showing there as well for sixth grade you can see there is a 28.4 overall which was again top in that category and a 16.9 for math in sixth grade which again surpassed the other districts for seventh grade
099we're at a 26.0 overall and again surpassing those districts in a 21.8 for math and now getting into the eighth grade is a little bit busier but again this includes all those subjects that we looked at on the other slide and again you can see a 32.9 for ela 25.8 and a 22.1 but if you look at the high school physical science again a very strong showing there compared to those other districts we had the 66.1 um that were at proficiency or above compared to um the closest one was bib with 38 and again for the social studies we were to 26 high school end of course uh we were at a 39.8 percent for the amlet um 22.6 for algebra savannah beat us out there and they also beat us out with history but
100again that history does not include our ap and dual enrollment testers and the bio was close there with 36.7 but we we beat them there so yes ma'am why can't we find a way to incorporate the ap and the other classes in order to get a full picture of what our school system is actually doing if there are areas we're accelerating in then we should be able to show those as well as the areas that we're not so great question we will get an opportunity to do that when they include them in our ccrpi calculations when i said we're not going to get a composite we're not going to get a composite but what we will get is we will get those content areas and so we will get an opportunity because they will take
101those and match them back and say okay here's all the students that had a's here's all the students that had b's and they will do that so we'll have that opportunity to see overall what did it look like so we will get a better idea comparison-wise we'll be able to kind of glean from that what was the impact in terms of these other districts because i don't know what their ap offerings are i don't know you know if all of their kids are testing and there's very few of them doing ap i know we have a lot of kids here doing ap because we push it so i know that we i know that we're seeing a lot of our stronger testers taking ap courses but we will get that opportunity and we will be
102able to look at the other districts when they publish and see what happened with them and you know if we are significantly better than the answer is it was those students that weren't included and they just didn't have as many of them as we might have so our areas of focus um dr lewis mentioned uh the early literacy initiative that will be coming later um so obviously we're focusing on pre-kindergarten through third grade literacy skills while those skid those kids don't necessarily test they don't just show up in third grade ready if we're not getting them ready so we're looking back to focus on that written and written in language across all grade levels so again focus on that receptive language as miss buckner said it ela is language whether it's receptive or expressive language
103it's it's all language um operations and algebraic thinking at all levels because again algebra is not just going to happen on its own we've got to prepare them along the way and again with statistics and probability geometry we also looked at some of these other areas in the sciences for middle school and again dr smith mentioned it in his presentation for our district improvement plan but personalized learning multi-tiered systems of supports uh are a huge part of that you know and focusing on tier one instruction are a huge part of what we're doing moving forward because again this is a baseline this is our jumping off point and it's our straight line to compare ourselves to going forward and and these other processes are the things and focuses or the things in place to get
104us moving in the right direction so questions yes okay i'm gonna be pretty direct i'm sure it's not gonna win me any friends and i get that you're um you're the deliverer of it you did the test but i'm kind of like miss buckner i mean you know my biggest concern is who is not at grade level and you know i had to use quite the math ability to deduct that from this presentation and based on what i saw across the board we're looking at 30 to 40 even 50 percent of our population not at grade level so my concerns are i know we're not retaining children anywhere near that percentage i know our graduation rate is really really high which kind of concerns me how many people were graduating that are not near the
105level they should be um so i guess i just want to know more about how we're going to make these numbers better because i mean this really concerned me i mean hurt my heart you know whatever we want to call it um because again and i know some of this is pandemic based but to me the pandemic if we don't want to make it a long-term problem for these children then they've got to take a step back if they're not ready if we keep promoting them own it is a long-term effect on them because they're never going to catch up whereas we all know it's pandemic we know we've all had setbacks in areas maybe the setback is they repeat a grade so that they can get to where they need to be because i
106mean it this is daunting to me and very concerning and i i just i think and i feel like we breezed past that we talked about who's where they should be not who is not at all where they need to be so so i do want to say again you know not trying to obfuscate anything the schools have a lot of information we took this information along with other data elements that we have at the student by student level to make sure that they had exactly what they needed in terms of all of the the curricular supports that we have and those types of things that we began even you know this summer making sure that we were running data in a way that they have the information that they need to identify those students
107so i agree it is daunting you know and that's not lost on any of us i mean we we recognize that we see it and we're equally concerned about it as far as looking at it on an individual student level um i mean we're we're doing that schools are doing that um and you know like we've shared that data with and in addition to to that to um these are my impressions as i read the school it's the same as uh lori's you know as you've made your presentation about our uh to your groups and that's very good you know we're in terms of our tier groups you know we're doing okay but we don't want to get complacent in that we are doing okay with our tear groups we want you know as dr
108lewis said we want to be a premier district so we want to do well in our peer group care roots but we want to go beyond beyond that and um and as i was reading the scores and and you know i took some solace with the cheer groups but it occurred to me that we don't want to be complacent we want to go beyond you know i'm sorry it's chambers um sort of weigh in i think we all are sort of um shocked and concerned with the um rate of proficiency um i don't think retention is the answer because if you're looking at 70 percent of the student body that didn't meet the mark then to me we need to look at what resources we're providing for the students and what can we do differently
109to ensure that 50 or more of the students are meeting the mark and so um i would be interested in hearing more about what you just mentioned at the school level they should get a greater breakdown on what skill set the students were unable to perform at proficiency and so are we looking at those skill sets and coming up with a plan on here are the gaps here are the trends and how do we fill in those gaps and so that's what i would be more interested in seeing before we like start retention because statistics show that that doesn't always help and it and in most cases it hurts definitely the older the child gets but we have to do something to fill in the gap so so that's the information i'm interested in hearing
110more about mr and i know the stup the school level will have that it's hillary have we thought about i mean just restructuring the expectations even of the teachers because of the you know i just feel like the students should be you know rewarded for the progress that they made they may have gained two grade levels but they're still not at grade level however that needs to be celebrated because right now i feel like the teachers go to school feeling defeated because they can't get that whole class to grade level and then the students come in and they're walking into this test knowing that they can't read well and knowing that they're not going to do well in math so i just i do feel like one of the benefits and they're not any of
111us having this new starting point with covid is we can blame it all on covet it's not the child's fault it's not the teacher's fault it's not the school district's fault but we can now throw the old business plan away a little bit and start focusing on these babies have to be able to get a job they have to be able to support themselves and their future children and everything else is icing on the cake but when we're at 27 have we thought about restructuring the classroom a little bit to be able to reach these needs a little better because these teachers and students are just completely i mean they need a little white flag they need some help is that ms williams mike yes i'm going to turn the mic on one second um
112what dr lewis what i'm hearing um it seems that what the board wants you to bring back is the district-wide um approach because i it seems to me that we just kind of went on even though we were in a pandemic window we were shut down and we just kind of went on a business as usual even though it's a new grade a new year we may need to understand that we're operating in the deficit i'm sure that you are but the presentation really needs to come back to talk about that approach to closing that academic gap or achievement gap um so that we can have a better understanding of how we are dealing with these numbers you know the results of these numbers that that that are here and then did you want to
113miss williams add too so dr lewis you can answer all at once i would like to go back to something that miss mcrae mentioned in her first comments because it's something i've been concerned about but i'm not sure that this data really gets there and i know there's you know data geeks can crunch numbers to give us what we want so i'm not sure this is what i need to ask this question but miss mcrae alluded to how we are allowing students to progress out of a class if they're not ready this proficiency or above doesn't necessarily mean they're not eligible to advance and that's kind of where my concern is i want to know how many students we're advancing that are not ready to advance because i know we're doing it we've we've done
114it through history okay sometimes we've done it less sometimes we've done it more i i agree with miss tillery it's it is easy to say it's the pandemic driven but i think from for for for me from from this representative i want to know how many students are between that let's retain them and proficiency and what does that look like is that measurable because you know i understand having children you know that have gone through four children gone through muskogee county and i i went through it i know that there's that level of good enough let's let's move them on which isn't isn't necessarily doing an injustice to that student but i know that there are some students that are being advanced that are not ready and that is an injustice it's an injustice to
115that child and it's an injustice to our teachers and our system so if that's measurable i would love to see that now um i don't know kathy you were saying of course you also put a historic uh perspective that that's always been done that students um may not be proficient or meet the goals to advance to the next group ms chambers has already said that holding kids back um is a detriment to them and um as we've listened today that we have we try to have various pro after-school programs or we have various we have the summer school programs we have we have a lot of different ways that we are trying to help students and we also know that everybody is working hard teachers are working hard everybody's working hard but uh what i'm
116saying is that when we get these results results i see for me a sense of urgency and for me i'm not saying that nobody's working everybody's working what i'm just saying is that let's reevaluate let's see so we do what we're doing analyze what we're doing uh see what's working uh see how we can improve the things and just keep working keep working on the work you know just to you know just to see what we can do everybody's working we just need to figure it out we need to keep working we you know we have you know everybody's working but to me like i said it's to me now it's just uh kathy said we need to know how many according to most of these things that were presented to us tonight uh seven
117on most of them 70 at least 70 or 65 of the people were were not proficient so we we can't keep 65 people back you know retain them we just need to see what we're going to be doing that's all so i think it's good now that we are classifying more you know beginning you know developing proficient distinguish because to me developing means you're not there yet but you are showing a trend that you are getting better and that you you can hopefully catch up my biggest concern is that percentage that we didn't talk much about and that is that are staying in the beginning you know and and our numbers kind of across all these grades stay anywhere between 30 and 40 percent so i'm a little more than that they're still in the
118beginning stage and that's that's my biggest concern so a couple of things to address some of that one is that you're right with the beginning and actually the beginning there's a wide swath there are kids who may be very close to developing developing students or students by definition who can go to the next grade level with support and we talked about multi-tiered systems of supports we talked about personalized learnings those are the specific initiatives that are in place to look at exactly each student because it's not a cookie cutter we can't say that this is going to work for all of them we have to look at the skill deficits and where they are a couple of other things you mentioned you know we we can't miss we can't get every student at proficiency immediately
119we can look at the growth and that's one thing looking forward next year that we will have we will actually get growth data using this year as a baseline the state will calculate growth so we can see where were kids in terms of growth because again a student who was a beginning learner who's now almost a developing learner who was very low beginning that's a huge amount of growth we won't see kids move from beginning to proficient and if we do then something the state will be down here wanting to know what we did so yeah so the growth is going to be incremental and again it is daunting there are definitely some gaps we know that um but again we also know and i'm not talking about just pandemic but we know that we've
120had two years of students who've had significant challenges and so it is going to take some time to get them there we do have things in place um because there is a wide swath of beginning even beginning learners so let me just clarify a couple things just to make sure we all understand using any kind of data from this past year is difficult to do because bottom line is we have some kids who are coming in sitting in second grade that had not been in school anywhere for two years by whatever decision made by the parents that we're the state also told us not to make any promotion retention decisions based on this data because i think they recognized up front there were some problems with this obviously the other thing too is i want
121to be careful we don't start deciding and or at least i need direction because if we start making promotion decisions or retention decisions based on one score on a given day we're going to be that's no no let me finish please let me finish i'm just saying that there are multiple factors that we looked at before we promote or retain a student that needs to be considered on that not a given test score on a given day this is just simply it was always meant to be a assessment of where you are on a given day at a given time all that said we we do i mentioned earlier the p3 2025 it's a plan we've been working on for months now that we'll be bringing to you to talk about how we're going to
122look at this if you're the other part about this is to start thinking about retention a different way does anybody in here think that a kid needs to be retained for an entire year after efficient deficient in one particular area for a period of time but that's how the school system has always thought about retention it's a sentence for another year and maybe it's appropriate for a small segment of students but it's not appropriate for a large number of students who maybe it's not yet at the end of the year maybe we need one of the things we're looking at regrouping kids that are not proficient at the end of the year with a teacher who's got ability to work with that student but at the same time continue to introduce the next grade otherwise
123you're going to condemn him to failure the next grade so we've got to find those teachers and maybe pay them more or maybe give them a smaller class size or whatever it might be we've been talking about this for some time we've got to look at that from the standpoint we've got a plan that we're working on to do that and it's totally out of the box thinking from what most school districts do because usually it's all or nothing to your point retain them or pass them and passing is not an answer however i want to be more on a triangulated basis of data not on one gmat score because i can tell you there are some problems with the g mass for example somebody mentioned the skills we have been asking for domain we
124get domain big but we don't get finite skills none of the gmass data would and we could speak that later on but that's one of the concerns that i've had since i've been here in georgia is that we don't get discreet skills that are necessary for us to be able to work on from gmass that's why we can't use that data to help us really drill down on what the needs are that's why we have to develop different assessments to try and look at that from that level the granular level that we need so that's one of the things we're working on we're also looking at new material right now our when we look at lexile levels because to me lexile tells you about being able to read lexile tells you where you can read
125if you look at the higher number that is a lexile score it's when you take that and transfer that into writing that becomes problematic for some kids being able to translate and if you saw i can assure you if you saw what some of the kids have to do as far as read this passage then transfer that into some kind of written response that sounds like something that's easy to do but for some of our kids who come from a less than verbal rich environment or print rich environment that's why the things we're doing with the chamber about the basics are so important to get those kids ready to come into pre-k what kimberly thomas is doing with her team all those things get making sure that we get those kids ready for school because
126at when they come to school they all come at different levels and when the gun goes off on day one the gun at the finish line goes off on day 180 for some kids they need to have a lexile growth of we think 100 points is a year's worth of growth for some kids they're going to need more than 100 points to catch up they might need 115 120 125 that's why personalized learning is so important because the kids can do that in virtually anytime any place we're giving them the resources the web-based resources that they can have that access it doesn't require a teacher in the classroom it's great that they have that but they can go beyond that these are all things are part of the plan to help kids really be able
127to accelerate their learning we're not talking about remediation we've got to accelerate and i want people to stop thinking about a deficit model of remediation and think about how do we accelerate kids not to promote them but to get them where they need to be and it doesn't necessarily mean that it has to happen with a whole year's retention it might be okay you might demonstrate mastery that year or at um you know the third week the fifth week the sixth week and then go ahead and promote them then but it's more of a not yet not all or nothing if that makes sense or yeah terminology but but there is that that but we've got to look at not looking at that's the concern that i've always had about a standardized test being used
128as a benchmark be all end all i'm going to consider continue to look at where we are with districts who are similar to ourselves because to compare us with an affluent district somewhere is not or a small district who it fluctuates from one year to the next you've got to look at size you've got to look at similar demographics to where you are benchmark against that but then by all means trying to push them push the metric for your students and give them more time with a teacher who's got expertise in working with those students who are struggling because not all teachers have that expertise but the trade-off might be you might have a little larger class but you don't have anybody who's really struggling in that area or vice versa to make sure so
129these are all things that are part of our pt p3 2025 that we bring to you but we're making sure we're making a very uh diligent approach to this and we'll bring that plan to you and i feel really comfortable that's going to be a very effective means and we're setting just so you'll know we're looking at setting targets school specific grade specific targets for the next three years to 2025. so let me just let me just so we can move on with our agenda you hear all of the the types of questions and they're becoming similar questions now in the future when you bring this type of raw data couple it with your plan on how we are addressing it so that it will help make sense to us because even though standardized tests
130don't drill down to the skill sets the schools are doing that right they know who what is what by the child and so from the board perspective we want to make sure that we are providing the resources that are needed to support the the work that they're doing along with your plan that says when we have these when this data shows that kind of deficit this is what we have in place to address this um achievement gap because we can go on and on because this is what we are supposed to be doing at the board and so we have tons and tons of questions and i think that you're going to answer them at another time with the with the presentation hearing our concerns hopefully you will fill in the gaps if there are
131any in your presentation to address what we're doing about this specific data can we can we agree to move on to the next item another thing i just want to make real point this is why it is so important for kids to be in school on time every day i will hold schools accountable but the kids have to be in attendance a minimum of 170 days a year to be able to get the benefit of what they're doing if you're missing if you miss 10 a day 18 days if you miss more than 18 days a year chances are you're not going to be moving forward and we have or when we treat and we teach reading the research is real clear you teach reading first time first thing in the morning when teachers or
132when parents bring kids to school late 30 minutes 45 minutes they've missed the most important class of the day because everything is a reading test make no mistake you might be sitting for a math test but everything is a reading test so even the math tests are read as a reading component the math test you have to be able to read so as mr greene said we're looking forward to what you what you bring because even though they drill down in the schools we've had the summer learning we need to drill down more and i'm looking i'm anxiously waiting for this this whatever you say you're going to bring and i know what you were saying about the smaller students because chanco and harris county they're smaller districts they perform fairly well on these uh
133these well they did this time they they performed fairly well on this test and maybe by them being small as you said the smaller district they performed fairly well but we're going to just have to figure out uh what we're going to do and we're looking forward to what is that thing the pp whatever you see it are you looking forward to the question are the lights just on i just want to say one of the biggest things this did for me is like laura i mean i texted her immediately because we did get the email that broke down everything i mean we have that and i emailed her immediately and i was like my heart is broken but the thing that i really want all of y'all to realize think about how these teachers
134and these kids feel when they see these scores so what we have to bring back i feel like the most important is their confidence and celebrate the small goals even the ones that are below and are not to even almost at grade level we have got to celebrate their growth and we have got to make it where they feel confident walking into this classroom that we're on their team and we're not upset with them that we you know we've got this we're a team we're going to work together it is i don't care what chatham county is doing i'm worried about you and that's what we've got to do because they're so defeated and these teachers feel like it's their fault and it's not we've all got to work together and celebrate small wins that's
135my biggest thing is we've got to bring back the confidence of these kids and these teachers and that's my biggest thing is if we can do the growth the individual growth then that's all we can you know that's all we can hope for miss chambers so so i know we've been talking about um the state needed to measure growth for for years now because that is important for the individual child but i also think it's important that we keep assessment in perspective and i thank you for working with the teachers to do that the assessment is like a diagnostic and the prescription is whatever plan we're going to use to fill in these gaps and so that's the piece that's important to me and i know like ms green said they're doing it at the
136school level but a little bit of that i think needs to be shared with the board so that when we're making a decision on a new reading series or math series or writing series that is specific to the needs of the students and we're not just sort of passing um you know something that comes up here but it all aligns to the strategic plan and to what we're trying to do to fill in the gaps for the kids and so um i think bringing us at least a little snippet of what skills we're lacking in will help us make a better decision as a board on where we're going to use our resources thank you okay okay any more questions or comments mr screen thank you so very much all right finance committee ms williams
137thank you madam chair most of the 11 items you have before you are standard the only one 9.01 is new it's a class coverage extended pay pay proposal excuse me 10 times fast this is in response to our teacher shortage and in recognition that a lot of our unfilled uh teacher absences are are being filled in by teachers that are present in the building often in their planning period they fill in for another empty classroom and this is a way to tell to acknowledge them acknowledge what they're doing on behalf of their students to thank them and to just give them a little bit of extra money in their paycheck to uh tell them that they're valued treat them like a professional try to bring them like professionals absolutely any questions uh what miss buckner
138first uh i was just curious about how did the the amounts came up how did y'all decide on the amounts we looked at what we're currently paying our substitutes and what we could afford in our budget and split it out that way afforded the budget okay yeah with the teachers the teacher split class is that a teacher that like have two different classes that split it would be like what we're thinking there is like for example if the teachers out this day we couldn't find the subs so they'd split the class in half and halfway to go to this teacher and have them go to this teacher and both teachers get the 100 they split the hundred dollars so it's 50 each okay all right thank you and then we have something for pears as
139well when they take on additional assignments okay right and that was part of i had reached out to you a while back and was very glad to hear that this was already underway i would like to see more for the paraprofessional stipend i feel like you know i i maybe i need to understand better why theirs is so much less and why they're not getting something if they just do one period one class period if they get pulled into something for one class period maybe that never happens but if they do i just want to make sure because again they i know they get paid substantially less and because they do not have certain certifications but when they are getting pulled and put in front of a class and having to take on the role
140and responsibilities of a teacher i think their pay should be more equitable to what that is and um so i would like to see the paraprofessional number go up some and i think my other question i was just trying to kind of get how the 2 million budget is that really what we think just for this program or is that kind of a substitutes in general because that's like 11 000 a day well um basically the way i was looking at that number was looking at how much we have budgeted currently for our subs and have been keeping it about that amount that we've been budgeting and looking at the fact that um we are budgeting at a fill rate of about 40 percent now we're going to a fill rate of a hundred percent
141because classes are being covered and it's probably not 100 because i'm sure there's a time that a principal is in a classroom um subbing um so um but that's what it is it's looking at going from that forty percent fill rate to a hundred percent fill rate okay i guess um sorry i lost my thoughts and and as far as the budget i have not done any sort of budget adjustment related to that and i'll be watching this as the year goes on looking at the fact that we do have the vacancies that those vacancies that's the reason we're having to pay this extra money so we do have those vacancies available to offset this amount then that's why there's no budget adjustment that is coming along with this proposal so i guess you know
142my one take was just two again this is only coming when we cannot find a substitute our first step is always to get a substitute but um and i get that i can't change anything so others would have to agree to with it but i i would like to see more for the paraprofessionals if they're having to take a day and remember to have the role of the teacher and if they are actually having to do it sometimes for one hour that they get compensated additional money even if it's for one pay period and remember board this is what we asked for yeah all right miss bookman i was just wondering uh at one time a paraprofessional could not take have could not substitute for a classroom a teacher classroom now is that's legal i
143guess it's legal for paraprofessionals to have a classroom are there any are there any other questions oh i'm sorry i thought you said i was asking can a paraprofessional take over for a teacher at one time we couldn't do that at one time parapros could not be in charge of a classroom mr bell have you ever had a class teacher fire pro in charge of a classroom you're a principal i mean i'm just just dr yes okay so i i'll i just want to know if it's legal then you know and then we can do that later i'm not aware of that okay at all okay now we bring in people to substitute who don't have the same qualifications some of our parents so yeah i'm not aware of that [Music] okay i i'm just
144saying that was when i was you know i was there for like 42 years so parapros could not be even they even uh like uh a t uh parapro a t um well let me let me i only own i've only known one pair that was actually a certified teacher that chose to be a parent so that may be some offset but the superintendent is asking for direction are we asking him to change anything about this group or are we just making comments i'm asking something in regard to this can a parapro be uh over in a classroom can is it legal for a parapro to be in charge a teacher maybe this doctor listen to that and get it back he's not aware of so that we can move on from that but i
145need to ask somebody by that because yeah you'll be here thank you so we'll ask the lawyer well we'll see what we can find out and get back yeah all right any other questions i would like to see a higher number what's that number 75 at least 50. tell me what others i just i i feel for what they're having to do for that day they should get more than an extra thirty five dollars and teachers who are already and i get they've got different certifications but when you know they're having to add children to their class again doing the same thing they were doing you know get 100. i would just i'd like to see i don't think anybody's getting 100 i think they're getting 50 right because i understood it when you split
146it to each teacher gets 50 and a pair would get 35. and then my other question well maybe we need to make that read a little better but i would still like to see the para officials make a little bit more than 35 per hour and again just some kind of confirmation that if they're getting pulled for a class period like a teacher is that they would get some kind of additional money for that as well because i feel like i hear that and they get pulled from their lunch to go sit with a class so a teacher can do an answer to your question if anybody else wants to see that happen i'm going to support the recommendation from the superintendent and finance as written is there anyone else that would like finance to
147go back and reevaluate it to get that i mean i'd like to see all the numbers up i'd like to see everybody get paid more but i'm going to demand on finance and the superintendent to determine what our budget can stand we have because you know this isn't just for one year either this is going to be forward and we have put lots and lots of money out there and stipends and and promotionals and you know i just think we kind of need adrenaline this thing kathy and i'm probably going with superintendents uh but i want to understand what what laurie is saying now the pair of pros is at work and the parapro is um is in her cla it's in the teacher's classroom and then she's pulled from her classroom from the teacher's
148classroom to do to cover so how much does parapro make per day per hour per day first because see she's pulling and laura's concern is that it's a whole day so i'm just trying to see how much they make a day the recommendation has you need outside the recommendation but yeah i want to see how much department makes a day because to see if it's more than 35 to see if it's reasonable for the parapro to make more money that's what i'm trying to see if it's uh if i'm missing um it's just under they range from about um 90 um dollars a day to 105 dollars a day i mean there's obviously a range of them okay is that basic because i thought they get paid on a seven and a half hour day
149right okay um okay so this 35 is beyond that daily rate right correct right it's going to be on top of that so it's getting it a little i mean it's actually putting them just slightly above what a normal substitute would make it's about 30 boost in that day's pay okay well maybe my concern would be remedy if we could add at least something where if they have to do it for a period or an hour they get something like a teacher gets because i do think that's happening and right now they're not going to get any additional pay unless they do it for a whole day and they are getting pulled in to cover things for a short time not the way this is written i'm just not the way it's written it'll have
150to be written better if that is including because right now it just says per day and on these other people um it does mention um per period school period so you just probably need to get to get back together i guess my my desire would be in light of we're talking about secondary schools primarily you're looking at this and i really would love the encouragement here was to try and induce a certified teacher to be in the classroom hopefully rather than someone who's not certified in the area i think the principal will still make that decision but if the principal only has a peer pro to pull in there i do think that they should get money for that extra responsibility that they're taking on for that hour or two or whatever it is i
151can see that for consistency consistent with the other other part of your recommendation i'm just trying to think making sure we can focus on the next thing we've got to track all this what i mean it happens a lot and so if i'm just trying to put myself in the principle spot if i have to think about that each time before i move someone um any emergency somebody gets sick have to go home and things of that nature i can see that being a little cumbersome having to track it and keep up with it so and then i can also see us not being able to project the budget for it because we don't know how many times the principal is i'll just say we built this very conservatively because we want to make sure
152we can handle this going forward because whatever we set in place now would be hard you can always go more you can't it's difficult to do less so we're trying to be conservative in what we know is our budget amount that we do know we have available to us and to your point about the pairs if it's i just don't know i i respect them all i love them all i'm just trying to figure out how i can make that and track it appropriately and then we can always add to it a teacher's a whole lot different every year do they get paid if they're in their couple of hours right now that's where i'm confused right now it's reading if they if they cover the entire day not if they go and cover for
153a period that get pulled in for half a period because they're re i mean i just i i don't know how you you want to table this lori or board i think this is a good place to start i think that we can come back and look at it in a year and massage it and say you know we think it would be better to do this or that but i do think this is a good place to get to go i don't mind starting but i do want us to be mindful if you see that this is actually a thing with the payrolls having to cover an hour or two that you will come back and address we'll keep an eye on it okay and we can always go up right correct yeah we
154can always change it okay we can always change it but i think that what we're trying to we're trying to plan our flag on showing respect for our professionals whether they're teachers or parapros and saying we acknowledge that sometimes you're asked to do a little more and this is a good place to start and i would suggest that we come back and look at how uh how it's been received and how it's just cost us and where we might be able to change for some more fairness okay so that moves us to purchase exception a and b 9.02 uh i just want dr lewis to answer this question because somebody called me and so what i won't have to tell them myself so uh what about professionals like counselors when they cover a class for
155an hour do they get paid no okay uh and that's our account this is just for teachers and parapros at this point okay thanks correct all right anything else on that item anything going once going twice okay uh item 9.02 purchase exception a and b these are items that fall under your textbooks films tapes newspapers etc reference materials or seven items are there any questions seeing none that takes us to 9.03 purchase exception c for maintenance you have two items before you uh one is for the chattahoochee valley libraries the other is for school nutrition any question on either one of those saying none that moves us to your standard uh exception f invitation to bid rfp which is under 9.04 you have two items one is for payment one is for floor covering these
156are the items that we get from the state bid list any questions all right i guess that maybe answers my question because it read like we weren't taking bids for this no these have already been bid at the state level or federal level but more likely the state level it's already been competitively bid and then and then they're on a list okay that takes us to 9.05 purchase exception g for professional services yep excuse me you have 10 items before you for um various uh various items i mean from athletic travel to health services to behavioral health these are the your professional services that we don't generally bid out we we go with qualified questions on item number seven dr lewis can you send back in the email or somewhere exactly what professional development services
157means for that consulting number seven on item nine point um four five zero five number one go up to the top is number number seven thanks appreciate it all right that takes us to 9.06 this is your emergency purchases we have um we have emergency purchases for the public work construction contracts that's not right this is for our um facility maintenance right yeah the custodial thank you thank you miss buckner any ques i think we received information on that any other questions all right that takes us to your monthly 9.07 sole source and volatile purchases this is for your um well it's for your fuel and optical scanners and membership renewal any questions it takes us to 9.08 this is your competitively bid uh items there's two items before you one for cisco and one
158for musical instruments any questions on either of those 9.09 is your budget adjustments 9.10 is my favorite we have 10 229 dollars from various individuals companies corporations ptas booster clubs so many different people that just each month shows the commitment to public at the public education center in our community and we thank every one of our donors for their generosity and then last but not least 9.11 is your monthly financial statements any questions on those items that concludes my report thank you so much dr lewis first day of school you have any yes i do um first of all we had a i visited 14 schools on friday i was our first day with a pre-k through two and today another 15 schools and all them seem to be extremely positive about coming back to
159school the teachers were engaged and very happy the students you saw by the opening that many of them they were all smiles they were looking but i didn't want to address one thing i think is important for us because we do know that transportation is going to be a challenge we're not making any bones about that we regret the inconvenience but i do want to say first of all how much i appreciate mr godfrey jackson mr anderson and all their team who's worked throughout the weekend frankly to try and deal with late registrations and how that affects our transportation and mr anderson is going to give us just a very brief synopsis that because it's important for people to know what's happening and why some of that is delayed thank you very much says dr
160lewis said we are working hard to ensure that all of our students are arriving to school on time we even with the bus driver shortage today as the first day with all of our students back we had a fairly good day we with all starts of the school year there will always be challenges in the beginning of the transportation year and so we are experiencing those challenges as parents get used to the bus stop times as bus drivers get used to the routes as our community continues to get used to what they're seeing out there with buses this year we have an increased request for ridership so we are excited that we're able to provide more services for our students in order to get them to schools that is challenging since we have a significant
161bus driver shortage we will be transporting at this point almost nineteen thousand students which is an increase of a little over four thousand students from last year so that's significant increase for us anecdotally from talking with parents we believe there are three primary factors the first one is that there's less anxiety around covet and so they're more willing to have their students on the bus the next one is of course increased gas prices so they don't want to use their own gas to drive to school and then the other is that many parents are having to return to the office and they're no longer working from home and so they're not able to transport their students so we're wanting to accommodate those students and we're working hard to get those in as we have more
162bus drivers come in we'll be able to do that we do know that as we have absent bus drivers and today we had five bus drivers that did not come to work for whatever reason that impacts our delays even more and so we had some students that were delayed more than we expected we're continuing to work with our families so they're aware of that we i just got a confirmation that all students are home which is great they made it home yeah all students made it home with the bus driver shortage that means we have longer routes and when we have absenteeism that's also impacting us one of the things that makes it very difficult in this time to make adjustments to our routes at the last minute when we have late registrants or when
163we have new students move into the community is that we're already being extremely creative with the routes and using our resources to the best of our ability prior to this bus driver shortage we would staff buses at about 75 capacity so if a new student arrived to the community we could just simply add them to the bus because we have bus driver shortages we are staffing the buses at 100 capacity so one new student added to the bus means we don't have a seat for them so we have to start from the from scratch and start all over again which makes the rerouting process very difficult and a new student since we have lots of magnet programs and esol programs and different programs to support our students across the district a new student in the
164north could impact the student in the south because of how we have to route them so it's very difficult i want to thank our routers for doing a phenomenal job and trying to figure this all out they worked over the weekend to add in a lot of new registrants and so we'll continue to do that we'll continue to update that information and we ask that you continue to bear with us and be patient as we get the students to school safely as that is a top priority thank you i just want to just say that the communication adding ramping that up really really made the difference to have that continuous annoying communication and i mean that in a good way it's it's necessary annoying you know um in order for people to for it to
165sink in and be prepared but one one quick point i do need to make for all parents from a standpoint of safety we need to make sure students that are riding the bus know how important it is for them to behave properly because when when they don't it may result in them not being because riding a bus is a privilege it's not a right but when they get put off the bus that for some kids that means it's like a suspension from school so i do want to encourage parents please discuss with your children who ride the bus the importance of respecting the driver as well as maintaining its safety for everyone because at the end of the day we've got to make sure that all children understand that they've got to respect the driver
166and if they don't then they might have to resort to providing their own transportation which for some creates an even bigger hardship and we don't want to have which all affects the performance in the school thank you all right everything everybody's ready to go now purse is in the lap we're adjourned have a good evening [Music] uh [Music] hey [Music] you