Asheville City Board of Education Special Called Meeting - 01/28/2022

001dodge frame ma'am no ma'am you're not staff only if you have a parent or legal guardian sign my legal guardian's at my house good morning everyone and welcome to the january 28 special call board meeting of the asheville city school board i'd like to call the meeting to order we do have a quorum um can i have a motion to adopt our agenda so moved you have a second second all in favor and you opposed okay all right we are going to excuse me start with our public comment and i'm going to read off our public comment guidelines before we get started uh for those who are watching we do not have anyone in the room to do in-person public comment today but we do have individuals who are going to be presenting their public

002comment online all right the board of education greatly appreciates your interest in the asheville city schools and we welcome your comments to the board please be mindful of the following guidelines unless otherwise approved by the board the total time for public comment shall not exceed 30 minutes for in person and 15 minutes for virtual speakers members of the public may speak for three minutes the time remaining is indicated by lights directly in front of you on the podium or on your camera multiple speakers from a group who are presenting on the same topic may choose to elect one speaker for the group if a single speaker is used by any group they shall be allotted five allocated sorry five minutes instead of three minutes to address the board if your group chooses this option please

003identify everyone in the group when you're signed up to speak uh if not well if an unusually large number of people wish to speak the board may decide to a reduce the time allotted free speaker or b require a designation of a group spokesperson substitute speakers will not be permitted and speakers may not donate their time to another speaker please be respectful a disruption of any per by any person or persons of a public meeting will not be tolerated and will result in removal from the meeting incorrect or misleading information presented by a speaker may be responded to at the direction of the chairperson public comment allows you to provide the board of education with your thoughts and or relevant information concerning asheville city schools therefore board members will not normally respond to individuals who

004address the board except to request clarification we all know that the school board will be elected coming this november with that in mind i'd like to please remind all people giving public comment that we would like for your comments to be focused on issues facing the school board please do not use our public comment time as a campaign speech in order to make public comment individuals must be president and make their comments in person or virtually online all right dylan who is our first person we we had four people sign up for virtual public comment we have three present and the first is pepe acebo if you want to unmute yourself you have three minutes board members uh can you hear me yes okay i will begin now um i want to call your attention

005to general statute uh pull out your pen uh 115c dash 105.27 development and approval of school improvement plans at the very beginning it says that the principal of each school representatives of the assistant principles instructional personnel instructional support personnel and teacher assistants assigned to school buildings and parents of children enrolled in the school shall constitute a school improvement team this is a north carolina general statute uh it goes on to say representatives of the assistant principals instructional personnel instructional support personnel and teacher assistants shall be elected by their respective groups by secret ballot notice it does not include a parent-teacher organization representatives in the secret ballot requirement it goes on to say unless the board of education has adopted an election policy parents shall be elected by or yet by parents of children enrolled in

006the school in an election conducted by the parent-teacher organization of the school or if none exists by the largest organization of parents formed for this purpose parents serving on school improvement teams shall reflect the racial and economic composition of the students enrolled in the school and shall not be members of the building level staff it goes on to say parent or parental involvement is crucial it's a crucial component of school success and positive student achievement therefore it is the intent of the general assembly that parents along with teachers have a substantial role in developing school improvement plans to this end school improvement team meetings shall be held at a time at a convenient time to assure substantial parent participation to my knowledge well we have a procedure but not a policy and we at montford

007north star academy uh communicated with our principal who communicated with miss hep who let us know that because it's a procedure and not a policy the secret ballot requirement is not uh enforceable because it's superseded by state law additionally to my knowledge no school improvement team in the district is meeting the requirements for having according to the board policy two parent representatives uh that are representative of the parent-teacher organization or the parent teacher body and the parent body as a whole and uh meeting the requirement for a time convenient to meet all right thank you you hit your three minutes sorry but thank you for that information and you can please send us that information in an email as well to the board absolutely thank you very much chair carter thank you next up is

008sabria lundy if you want to unmute yourself and turn your camera on you've got three minutes hello and good morning about a generation ago there was a brilliant and beautiful thinker he used to champion these radical ideas such as people should be judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin sadly these ideas were far too progressive then and unfortunately i guess they still are today when i was first told that the merit of what parents had to say about the best interest of their children was being dismissed out of hand on the basis of skin color i thought surely this had to be an exaggeration this was 2021 at the time and i thought we at long last collectively acknowledged as a society that allowing skin color to be

009the basis of decisions was a harmful and unsustainable practice but then i heard with my own ears openly stated disregard for the concerns of white parents so i have to ask is this progress my name is sabria lindy i am the formerly incarcerated low-income mother of a biracial special needs child so i ask can you hear me now my daughter has positively blossomed in the mere months she has spent at aps it hasn't just been her specific developmental classroom but is nurturing and progressive environment as a whole that has fostered her explosion of growth these teachers this program and this school should be held high as a shining example of what is possible i for one don't want my children programmed and indoctrinated with a standardized education that was custom designed by majority males i

010would much rather prefer that they were taught how to think for themselves i took personal pride in the fact i was part of a community that had made the same montessori education style preferred by the rich and elite accessible to all so the building isn't viable cool let's talk about that the widening of 26 is going to increase pollution let's focus on that instead of my express lack of melanin this school this program created a space for equity by simply existing even if it was sadly underutilized and maybe we can apply our attention on how to fix that issue instead of just shutting the program down thank you miss lundy lastly we have jensen gelfand if you want to um unmute and turn your camera on you've got three minutes hello my name is jensen

011gelfond i live in west asheville and yeah i'm here to talk about asheville primary school and specifically montessori education for our town uh it's my understanding that multiple people on the school board have family members who have enjoyed a private montessori education people on the school board have the resources to go pay for that private montessori education and it's something that's enjoyed by many people who have means here in nashville uh asheville primary school was the ability for the asheville city school system to provide that highly desired method of education to people who might not otherwise have the means for it so when i realized that the school board voted to not only discontinue asheville primary school but also to discontinue the montessori program in general it was difficult to process understanding how people who

012would send their own families and support their own families in a private montessori school are denying that same opportunity for people in the public school system it was really uncomfortable and saddening to understand that our school board is denying the opportunities that they're taking for their own children because they're people of means i hear our superintendent talking about the mcdonald's style of productivity and uh the industrial type school system that he wants for our children where there is an expected quality of the system that quality is given to everybody and there's no difference in how the school system should treat anybody regardless of their needs you know that's great for people who have the opportunity to get out of the school system when they need to to provide for their children's special needs but it

013doesn't work for people who are forced into using the school system because that is the only opportunity they can afford and then have those needs taken away from them so i don't think that because you've voted to remove asheville primary school that uh this can't be reversed and you can reverse it you can take make the right choice and continue offering montessori and continue offering more opportunities not fewer opportunities to those who need them most in our public school system thank you mr galphon chairman carter that's the last of our public commenters all right thank you very much for everyone who gave public comment today we're going to jump into our action items action and information items the first person i have up is susannah smith with a preschool update and georgia you're with preschool

014funding so you might as well go over that way as well good morning and good morning members of the board dr freeman oh let me get this so first i want to give you an update of our preschool program and first i want to highlight lucia's herring preschool on january the 21st we had our final licensing and meeting with our licensing consultant for our five stars that was held virtually due to the high number high transmission cases of covid and so she recommended a five-star license for lucy herron we have not received it yet it's in the final stages of review at the state and that five stars is based on their echo score they completed a modified eckers assessment and right before the chris the winter break in december and they scored 5.89 out

015of 7 which is a very high score and then for the 5 star license they scored 15 out of 15 points that they look at for that license so a perfect score so we do not see why we would not get a five stars but we just wanted to highlight them in their hard work and so here is a picture of the staff and children when we surprise them with their equal score awesome that's great okay so demographics across 11 classrooms right now just wanted to highlight our demographics we have 191 of 201 slots field we're holding those remainder slots for any staff members and for nc pre-k those are the slots that are not field we are fully enrolled for head start at the time with 65 children and so we're receiving full funding

016and then i wanted to highlight our first benchmark program y data this was collected in november and in december we completed a full staff data dive so that staff could look at our as a we could look as a program what we could do to move our children forward but also so that we could look um each classroom could look individually at their classroom data so that they can move their children forward and this was actually the second time that we've been able to do a full staff data dive and we are meeting our staff is meeting each quarter once in the evenings this year and it's been very productive we've been able to do some training and then do some full staff data dives and so as you see our um our data is

017not where we want it but just keep in mind this was our first benchmark that occurred in november our second benchmark is march the 7th and our last benchmark will be may the 31st and so in may we hope to do a growth report so we can see where how much growth our children had so i have a question with the benchmark um so we're seeing a issue with math is that yes okay yes we're seeing an issue with math our social emotional data the data this year was really strong for the first benchmark um because our teachers focus on that so we are working we're going to um we're working with paige and the teachers are working with paige um during plc so that we can increase our math scores math is typically who

018yes paige is the district math director thank you and then we are also focusing on literacy this year um as part with partnering with the kindergarten teachers and so our teachers have been have incorporated hegerty framework we just started back our storytelling story acting framework which is a we contract with pat tuttle to do that and it's based on vivien paley's work and then our teachers will also be going through fundations training in february and they had had the hegerty's training prior to this first benchmark so i really feel that's why our literacy scores are good here and our teachers love the hegerties will you remind me what what is hagerty's equities is based on feminine awareness and so for preschool it focuses on blending and blending sounds and it's basically like 10 minute quick

019games that the teachers play with children a lot of our teachers are doing it during transitions instead of pulling them all together they use it as transition games like if they're lining up to transition outside they'll do a couple of the quick little games with them but there is an early learning curriculum that is out there for hegerty's so integrities and and foundations can work and work together and then pat with storytelling story acting she's also pulled and has some of the heggerty's work into that as she coaches she's in the classroom coaching our teachers through storytelling story acting and just to give you a little bit about storytelling story acting it's based on vivian paley's work and it's um the kids tell a story to their teacher and the teacher writes it so they're

020watching the and it's their words and then um then the teacher gets they make a stage in the classroom which usually is like just with tape and then the kids act out that story and so you know they're learning the beginning to end they're learning left to right they're learning that my words make up a story um and then when they act it out they get to see their story in action and so in the beginning stories are really short and they're quite funny but as the as it goes on that the stories get longer um last year we had a child who came in he was so excited because it was his story day and he came in with a little bitty piece of paper and had scribbled down just scribbles on it and

021he handed it to his teacher he said i know it's my story today i didn't want to forget my story so here it is so he was able to take that same concept and bring it to her and so then he gave her his story so that day so it's really great the kids love it and then we wanted i wanted to come to you with some proposals um as we're looking for direction for the preschool program for next year these proposals are based on 10 months of revenue just because our summer revenue is not predicted but it's not predictable and so this these projections are based on 10 months revenue and so i worked with georgia and so for five classrooms which would be the number of classrooms that we are required that would

022be required to serve the current children who are enrolled as three-year-olds which is 82 children this five classrooms would give us slots for 84 children it would take three hundred and twelve thousand dollars in local funds for seven classrooms which would include the number of classrooms that we have located at other schools and other than asheville primary this does not include any of the classrooms at asheville primary these are just the seven classrooms at other schools it's about five hundred and ninety six thousand dollars in local funds for nine classrooms which includes our current pre-clay classrooms at other sites and two classrooms from aps you're looking at about eight hundred and eighteen thousand dollars and then for eleven classrooms which is our current um number of classrooms that we have across all campuses you're looking

023at 1.7 million dollars and so the last slide here has it broken down by the number of classrooms the overall cost the requirement of local funds and the number of slots each of those scenarios would house so i guess the question is do we have money georgia's going to follow up with this but let me ask you one question suzanne if i make why does it jump from eight hundred and eighteen thousand for nine to one point seven million for eleven you're talking about two extra classrooms right so in order to serve our children and that is a huge jump in order to keep quality in ratios it takes a number of staff members and with the current staff increases in salaries and benefits that number is huge i have been just recently since the

024winter break have been looking at ways that we can have more money increase our money flow in other ways i have been looking at local centers private care private child care centers and how they're supporting their staff salaries the average cost for the six highest the six strongest centers in our area the average cost for their private pay is 944 dollars if you take them and average them together we only charge 775 dollars for private pay and i know we were looking at affordability and our rates have not increased since 2018. how how many private pay do we have how many private pay do we have currently we have 67 out of the 191 yes georgia maybe you can explain because i want the community to understand this why is there such a difference between

025nine and eleven it is it the administrative costs that go into that or do we need that's just a double up for two extra classrooms it's doubling if i'm not mistaken susanna said that some of the staff could not be shared if you have additional classrooms gotcha okay thank you so it is more staff susanna do we accept childcare vouchers we do we have 15 kids that we receive subsidy for but the state calculates subsidy rate based on the market rate and that is calculated for each county and this is something that all the early childhood committee community in ash in buncombe county has been working towards is advocating our state rate is not 775 where you've got other counties across the state that receive a thousand dollars subsidy reimbursement and a lot of times

026our families that utilize subsidy also utilize nc pre-k and head start and so in that case we get a blended rate which makes it an even lower reimbursement rate for us so we are advocating at the state level for a higher rate and the reason and it's something that and i don't know the exact formula that the state uses to calculate that rate for each county but what i learned from the partnership is that it's because we have buncombe county has a very high number of non-profit centers which pulls that rate down well i think it's good for the community to hear that so you said 775 for the state child care vouchers is the max and that's what we charge but it also speaks to the systemic racism and how it's not always just

027the school district that's it's the system that's creating barriers because you're saying our most our most our students that are the most underserved and the most needy they're spending the less the least amount of money for and then if they qualify for two of the programs then you get even less so that speaks to why we're right continuing to go backwards when it comes to racial and economic equity yeah and i'll say i've said this before but i'll say it again um since we are we since we are a program that's a part of a dpi program and a part of a dpi we do not qualify for a lot of grants that private child care centers qualify for and so for instance the stabilization grants that are came down to the state from the

028federal government that dcde put out there we did not qualify for those grants and some of our some of our local partners are getting hundreds and thousands of dollars to support their programs what's the reasoning behind that because they say that school districts have other resources they can utilize to support preschool programs so really what they're saying is you pull money from k-12 funding which is what we've been doing correct georgia we are one of the only districts that we've researched right around us that have been pulling funding from k-12 funding for pre-k which we know pre-k is invaluable that is correct most um i don't know of another lea that funds their pre any pre-k program out of their general fund and if i can add uh to martha's question i don't think the

029question for anything that we do is do we have the money i think the question has to be can we sustain it because you know we have a few million in the bank right now but that doesn't mean we can sustain and i'm just talk not talking about this i'm talking about whatever we look at is it sustainable going forward so excuse me georgia go ahead oh and i have another question um so the nine classrooms so we have we have a total of 11 right now correct so the nine would be uh because we know there are four at aps where would those four go to either keep us at 11 or what is the minimum that we want to stay at as a district we are are there spots for at least two

030of those four to stay at nine at least nine yes there's there there is room at lucy herron and half fletcher so that we could stay at nine so i will say that right now i'm in the process of writing our grants for the buncombe county early childhood committee fund and so that's why i'm asking you all for guidance so they'll know which direction to write those grants so then as a board we need to come up with our what what we feel would be a good sustainable number well could we could you give us how much we've been given extra from the early childhood please join the early childhood fund well there's this idea that we're funded eight hundred thousand yes no that's not accurate that's not accurate um we received two grants from

031the early childhood fund the first grant and i know george has got the numbers right here the first year we received the grant it was to fund the opening of the second classroom at hall fletcher and we received 193 147 dollars for that classroom and that grant was enough to cover that classroom at the time and then the second year which yes was during covid we requested the same amount of money but then they came back to us and asked us what could you do on less funding so we received 159 thousand dollars then for this current year we received zero dollars so what are we looking at uh for and ask than in not well never mind strike that do we did they give us a reason why we got nothing last year i'm

032sorry i couldn't did we get an explanation of why we got nothing last year we did not so we george are you gonna do you have anything that you wanna okay so i was asked to do a historical look back for the pre-k funds so this first slide it shows revenues the first column shows other shows revenues that came in through smart start nc pre-k head start developmental day and tuition federal grants these we we receive two small pots of money specifically for pre-k and they go for salaries for a psychologist and ec support the early childhood education grant that amounts that um susannah just shared with you you'll see that we receive those two and then the foundation 7 500 over the years so um that is our sources of revenue expenses we've got

033total expenditures showing this specifically to show that over 80 percent of the expenses are in salary this is pretty much a summary of your revenues and total expenditures of course the first line is this year to date as of 125. if you look at the column on the far right uh right k-12 funding difference i'd like to point out that that is what asheville city schools pulls out of our general fund for k-12 funding to support pre-k these figures do not include things like maintenance insurance fees utilities and those type things these strictly supplies materials and contracts and salaries so our trend for this year is 1.5 out of our general fund and we expect it to if everything maintains and you choose to keep the same number of classrooms we're looking at 1.7 with

034no additional funding from any sources that's not taking into account the opportunities of getting more funding from um the for the ece yes correct so if we got no funding from ece or any other source it would be 1.7 out of local but there are are we we also looked at any of the like dogwood trust or anything like that as an opportunity to help with us um i i know there's been other looks but from a financial viewpoint unless it is guaranteed sustainment the my recommendation is you look strongly at what we can afford right with with the revenue we bring in any further questions so i guess that good goes back to the previous slides of well actually i do have a question what in the world happened from our federal grants to

035you know we started in fiscal year 17 at 86 and it i mean it steadily went down year over year over year so correct was that because of our program growing what was that do we know it's federal funding um across the board has decreased every year and it is not guaranteed year to year right okay with that of that f uh fiscal year 21 it did go up seven thousand dollars from fiscal year twenty would that would have been seventy seven thousand dollars would that been maybe from the um stimulus monies possibly a small portion okay so when you look at what we've received historically it really doesn't matter if we get the grant funding or not we're still going to be spending over a million dollars for child care even if we did

036get the ec or other federal grants we we then the best scenario is that the ece grant would fund us the 1.7 right but if we look at what they funded us thus far we shouldn't bank on that right correct when we look at that million dollar expenditure that that shonda just brought up has there been any effort to tie that to return on investment for the district like how much is it saving us and other interventions for children that wouldn't have that pre-k funding and so what does that look like more comprehensively um i think the benchmarking that we're doing now can give some reflection of that i don't know what we've done historically here to make that value point um peyton that's been a goal of mine since i became director and before

037i was director when i was teaching learning coordinator to look at where our kids end up when they go and especially to third fourth and fifth grade and so but one of the things the state is doing with nc pre-k we all across the state utilize teaching strategies our curriculum is creative curriculum and our assessments teaching strategies the state is now paying for that license for us which has saved us five thousand dollars um but their goal with that is the kindergarten classrooms are using the eli assessment the early learning inventory assessment which is part of teaching strategy so that and i don't know if it's going to happen this year they're looking at it for this year so that when kids enter kindergarten they will see their preschool assessment data so that data will

038go with them in years past we've always had to just print it out and give it to the kindergarten teacher so they have it um but the goal with the state taking over that license is they'll be able to make that bridge for those preschool classrooms yeah and i just hate because like a million dollars is a big figure but i think when you really look at what that's doing for the district i don't want us to just look at the million dollars like i think it really is allowing us to have an opportunity for a lot of kids to have a success platform that they can go on from so i'd like us to capture that so thank you i would like to make one other point the um general fund that we get

039from buncombe county as you know we get it they have a a set amount that goes to education and we get a percentage of that based on adm with buncombe county schools and nashville city schools the money we receive again is for k-12 education buncombe county schools does not use any of their general money for pre-k education like we do we do not receive additional to be able to support this thank you for that clarifying info as well so i if i just may if somebody can clarify then why aren't we doing what buncombe does where they don't pull any money out of k-12 i think historically asheville city schools has chosen to do this given our financial forecast so i guess thank you georgia i guess my question is are there venues if we

040don't want to spend k-12 doing this are there other venues that these kids will not go unserviced uh does this one yeah okay so there is a high waiting list across the across the county but i will say that buncombe county schools utilize this community action and head start to serve their children in their schools they go underneath a partnership with them and so that is something that we could look at if needed this is also pre-k though in our schools was a highlight and a really a big part of our strategic plan from five years ago so and i think you know i'm not diminishing that the of you know the thought of maybe outsourcing or something like that but um i i i know in the spring and in the last fall we've

041we've heard that you know our number our kids do better uh than other groups and i've heard it anecdotally from outside the co level and and in the community as well so i just want to make sure that we're not that we're we're taking all of that into account as we're looking at this because i think it's a it's a valuable resource um for our district so i guess i would want to look at who is the value too how does keeping the pre-k classrooms that we have now impact our achievement gap and our ultimate goal of racial equity within our district historically have we been serving those students and are they showing to do better in the classroom so are we really utilizing the resources to the best in the best way and if

042we were to use this money how are we going to use that to make sure that all students are being successful meaning our black students just as well as our white students because they are the ones who are mostly impacted at this point um in terms of their academics yeah so i will say historically about six years ago we went to the heterogeneous blended classrooms which is where we blended our funding tuition head start nc pre-k i mean our kids are blended we don't just have a standalone head start classroom and when we did that when we did that we noticed that our disadvantaged children were making stronger growths within our preschool classrooms and some and many times the growth at the end of the year we did not see an achievement gap amongst our

043preschool students and in some areas our black students were outperforming our white students now with the years of covid that's not been the case and so our hope this year is that we can have a zero achievement gap come may so when you say disadvantage do you mean economically economically and children of color because economically doesn't equate to black right right a lot of people do make them one in the same they're not and we have data that shows us our black children who live in or who are experiencing poverty and our white children who experience poverty our white students who are experienced in poverty still pass the end of the year test whereas our black students experience and poverty don't so we have to be intentional about our language and what what is our

044goal ultimately um of course for all students to be success successful i'm sorry but we know that we're not doing that for all of our students yes and i'll also say that in writing the grants for the county every year i look at with our ec department currently this year we're serving 68 of the preschool ec population in our classrooms which is so we're serving which is a very high number of children with disabilities that we are serving in our classrooms in an inclusive environment so does that mean okay so i know we have our developmental day classes over at jones so do you have are you saying that those the children that are in those classes are are doing better as they come into kindergarten yes okay so i guess i go back to

045the board needs to give you direction on basically how many classrooms we want is that what you're asking yes sir so we have uh i i know i personally uh would like for us to not go below the nine um if we can keep at least the two of the four classrooms from from the uh from aps could we possibly do a third somewhere you have room for uh to maybe keep us at ten we've been looking for spaces the third one but there is space available we just got to nail those spaces down okay and i know there was a talk at one point of maybe having something even here at central office and that was um i think y'all are still talking about that yes that's still on the table okay but oh

046gene what is your recommendation in terms of what we should keep and not keep since you're the one operating the day-to-day and looking at these numbers on a regular basis well i think susannah and her team is doing a great job with aligning the curriculum to our k-12 curriculum i think using our benchmarks you're going to see some difference down the road it's hard to argue that we don't need pre-k classrooms that have accountability and that we see outcomes coming from so i'm for pre-k but i will tell you um i know i sound like a downer uh but we're gonna have to make some choices elsewhere uh based on and i know people don't want to believe this because they want to say we have essers et cetera or we don't have a plan

047well the budget has a plan and in 23 at the end of spring and 23 georgia and i were just going over this we're basically going to have zero even with aps closing uh it may get us through next year where we don't have any bumps but we just can't keep saying we're going to do everything the way we've been doing it because it's wonderful and i hear everybody say that but i'm not sure it resonates with everybody and we have independent financial auditors who are saying the same thing so i'm for this and you can't argue that a quality pre-k program is bad for anybody but if whatever we start doing we really have to be very reflective of we're going we're going to be down the road um i would like to hear

048from the board you know at some point what are we going to do about our finances i've heard from the county they want to expand pre-k but they never bring us a dollar figure they never say how much they we can't keep doing this on our back so i'm for it and it should be assessed every year to make sure because our gap hasn't gotten any smaller to this point we should be assessing everything but i can't say this is bad and you know peyton said you know it's a million dollars that's a lot of money but there's a lot of value for these children in that but we're gonna have to make hard decisions elsewhere and the board has to recognize that although we may have 2.7 million in reserves that's not going to

049be here that we're essentially going to go to a zero balance if we don't get revenues and expenses in line it's just like your house budget and and i don't know i you know if nobody else is going to worry about that and i don't mean that disrespectful i just want to know who's going to fund us when we run out because we're headed in that direction yeah it seems to me that i mean i can't remember what month it was when we looked at the reserves and the decline over the years um in that in those reserve funds but i'm not saying that those reserve funds have gone exclusively to pre-k but it seems like those things correlate and so once once we run out of that reserve fund then we're pulling directly from

050our k through 12 programming and our k-12 teachers and students to pay for the pre-k and um i'm curious so there's not another district in the state that does what we do that you've been able to find out there is another district in the state asheboro city schools is has a very similar model but there's not another district in western north carolina that georgia and i have found and look and talking with other districts and researching now i will point out that last year with covid we were able to restructure our program and our staffing and so we were able to reduce numbers and it was kind of forced because you know the workforce went down and that model is working for us in our classrooms and so instead of having three full-time people in

051each classroom we have two full-time people a and then a fifth full-time we pair our classrooms together so there's a fifth full-time person that floats between those classrooms and that model has worked for us and then we hire part-time people who come in and work after care for us in that model and so like at hall fletcher at jones at aps that's working for us you know whereas the classroom at dixon is a standalone classroom so we do have to have three people because in order i mean in order for our staff to go to the bathroom there has to be somebody there that can relieve them due to our ratio requirements um a question if we kept right now seven classrooms that would be that's kind of where we can maintain is that kind

052of correct even with even with five uh we will still be utilizing local funds to support it okay if we were to receive more money from universal pre-k or or whatever we could add classrooms going forward correct okay so in all honesty what is the magic number here i mean we all want every single preschool classroom we can possibly have that's something that we've known for a hundred thousand years but what is the magic number here from a finance standpoint five okay susan give her from my standpoint seven or nine okay so okay and my reason for that is so that we can keep our current nc pre-k and head start funding and serve those children so if we had seven we could keep the funding if we go to nine we could keep the

053funding anything over that we there's no way we can even look at that that's just absolutely too much money correct okay and we could also look at the developmental day with seven and nine classrooms developmental day brings us in the most money monthly okay uh i hate to say this but i guess we're kind of we're on the horns of a dilemma and we don't know what the county is going to be able to give us and i understand five is what we can legitimately do as far as finances are concerned seven is what we can legitimately do in other ways okay that's not what i want to hear but you have to have a decision today what's the latest that we can make that decision and gene is it possible for you to meet

054with the county commissioners to talk about that and show them the same information and let them know we have met with them and talked to them but we haven't said you know this is what we're going to do unless we get more money um i can certainly do that but we're going to have to know susanna how when do you have to know so the grant is due february the 11th well for the february 11th grant i think you should ask for everything that's what they keep saying yeah we're going back i mean if you go big on your february it's not that it's not that it's the enrollment the enrollment of enrollment and licensing um because we'll have to do some licensing adjustments at herring and at hall fletcher and even if we came

055here to central office we need to know by the first of february because i mean like with herring we knew in february and we got that license like two days before we opened so if we if for the early childhood grant if you're this as gene said i think in other people my degree let's ask for the stars but we need to know i think we need to have kind of come to a consensus on what's the lowest that we're willing to do yeah because that's the county their history with us writing these grants and they do this with all everybody who writes the grants they come back to us and say what's the lowest you can go so if we're looking at this gene what you're looking at the at the four models here

056uh we know susannah said nine seven or nine seven would be the absolute lowest to still serve all of the students that we have correct five would serve the current three-year-olds who are enrolled okay that doesn't include four-year-olds no because the four-year-olds will go to kindergarten oh okay really if you're asking me what i would do and georgia you can hit me later um i would probably go seven or nine and we can always reduce if we have to it's harder to build up when you don't have the enrollment um i and i think the board's going to have to go to the county commissioners and say if we want to expand this if the county sees this as their initiative and they they like our model then they should be giving us above the

05715 that we get for k-12 funding and i'd like to say on that like i i would just like to kind of voice my consternation with the county and continuing to ask us to make decisions moving forward on our funding model that aligns with their strategic plan objectives and really serves the children of this district in buncombe county but we're being told to guess and hope that we nail it and that's not how we should be serving our children i think we need a more open process that allows us to make decisions and i'll say again i don't think that the grant process is the way to do that because that does not allow us to make decisions for the children and the educators that are going to be involved because these are people's lives

058that we're playing with and i'm not happy and this is not directed toward anybody on asheville city school staff that this is the decision before us because the county refuses to align its funding model with something that allows us to balance our budget so i think that that needs to be said out loud and i'll take the hit on it thank you peyton you have something um i think um i also [Music] running the numbers is not going to be a huge amount but looking at what we're charging in our tuition it needs to get in line with what folks can get out there in the private sector um and you know there are certain things we can control that's one we can we can't control how the state reimburses for vouchers that kind of

059stuff but that's another thing that i would encourage people listening to um we need i feel like we need to be more on top of general assembly and asking for some changes but we certainly can can increase what we charge um for our preschool and i think that's a really valid point because we have discussed this for years and honestly and truly we we're going to have to do that that's just not i think we should i think i think george is right that's something we have to do yeah i'm in agreement i when i was pulling these numbers i was in shock like i mean when i was pulling them because a couple of them have them on their websites but i had to call several of the directors and i was just i

060was in shock so mr chairman i guess the um either my recommendation is either seven or nine whatever the we're gonna do whatever you guys ask us to do but um instead of five i think i would go seven or nine and then we can always reduce if if the board so decides later all right i hope we don't have to do that and you know we can certainly get by but again you know it's going to take a hit somewhere else but in terms of the early childhood grant when you're writing your grant again everything go ask for ask for everything and i'm actually writing two grants i'm separating the asheville high classroom out okay because it's a different model over there with the workforce development that they do with the high school students

061so that's a separate grant and then the program as a whole and i think you and that's something also for people who are listening and hopefully the city will listen to this as well you know we have i know susannah has shared that there are three students three employees that were actually our students through the see uh the program over at asheville high cte program so you know we're building our own workers um i actually tried to hire one that's graduating early but she's not old enough because they changed our regulations we used to be able to hire um 16 to 18 year olds as long as they are supervised by an adult but that's now we can only hire 18 and up and she's only 17. i so i hope she doesn't find another

062job somewhere and i can snag her when she turns 18. i tried gene i'd like to clarify if we go nine and we find that that is not really an option for us if we we say we're gonna do nine and we say we see that it is not an option would that really mess things up for you susanna would it really mess things up for us yes it would be hard it would be to say you know to say we're not going to open nine if you i think seven i'm looking at the board and it's i think seven is for me probably something we could sustain without any help for at least for one year um and so we would we would as peyton has said have to depend on the county to

063jump in and help us to facilitate any of the classrooms if if that is the county goal to create a universal pre-k it should they should be contributing beyond our k-12 budget okay so it sounds like and i agree with peyton it shouldn't be a grant issue no it shouldn't be well not only that i think it's important to reflect back to the county that if they want to do universal pre-k like we're looking at one of the problems that they're going to run into here when you start looking at those jumps between classrooms which is the infrastructure itself is very very expensive we have that in place and are we going to go ahead and because of their refusal to come up with a a coherent plan moving forward that actually does that because

064i feel like we're still dancing around piecemeal like we're burning up that infrastructure cost and both our organization and the county's organization is spending money in a way that is not serving students currently and i think we need to really really push back and say we need a plan we need to move forward and we need to know are we an active partner in this process or can we start backing out and focusing on kc-12 okay and so if we say seven our elementary sites are in place we already have that that's something that we we're good yeah and that includes the high school and that does include the heist and what i would do at lucy herring because right now that's in a small classroom that only houses 12 i would move them to

065the larger classroom so we could put 18. so you could increase the student number almost almost going to a nine what would serve nine in a seven group because at high school we're going to increase that number to 12 from 9 to 12 to 2. yes that makes perfect sense okay yeah so then you're saying seven is the base yeah but that gives us direction of what we should be planning right seven is the base okay does the staff understand that that will actually be working with this too susanna you everybody okay so seven and you're still gonna have a meeting with the commissioners because i know i knew you went to meet with the commissioners but i know that they were confused on some things so i think you and your staff need to

066meet with them and their staff so they're clear because there are commissioners that know that we don't get funding for preschool and they know why they didn't give us the money the last time because if racial equity is truly your goal then make it your goal and show us some impact because we didn't get the funding because they didn't want to go into the communities that weren't serving the ones that they serve i guess that that typically those voices um that determine the trajectory of the community so i would highly suggest that this board go to a county commissioner meeting and get on the agenda to talk about this with all county commissioners i think our abortion we james will have to yeah approve or not approve prior to covet we were going to have

067a meeting with our board the commissioners and the city council because the city council has funding as well they started getting money from the city and we haven't tapped into that either put all that together yeah it can just be one big meeting we can do that but i mean and we need our parents and all these people that love to send us all these emails and phone calls we need them to start going to the commissioners and city council and because we don't have the money we don't have any power over how they spend their money so they need to you know go that direction and start emailing them and calling them like they'd love to do with us and i think you made a really good point because people are always asking what

068can we do to help that's what you can do to help is go to the county commissioners and go to the city council and show that this is something that's really important to us and that pre-k is really one of our biggest initiatives so people if you want to help that's what you can do start emailing go to meetings do that all right any other questions or comments for susannah georgia um not for suzanne and georgia but just a comment you know you had mentioned james and and i appreciate what peyton said about county commissioners but this idea of of meeting with commissioners meeting with city council um the the word strategic plan came up but we're still sitting with an old strategic plan i mean i think we this feels like this is um

069right smack dab in the middle of a decision that should involve a strategic plan um so and using the resources we have here on this you know on the board and this room but also with commissioners and city council working in consort um to make sure that we come up with a plan that is sustainable we don't have to keep having this discussion every year perfect all right thank you all right so i'm hearing seven seven seven is okay okay seven is the base yeah number but writing the grant hit it out the park all right next we have a update with uh lacrosse i've got um dr freeman and our a.d mrs anita why don't you just come up here you probably don't have well you might have a lot to say i don't

070know because usually you have a lot to say but miss anita and i have talked about this and i think lacrosse is great uh i think it's a wonderful uh sport for kids um but i just recommended previously to close a school a large part of it to deal the majority to deal with finances i just gave a speech about our finances i cannot recommend well i don't have to recommend but i can't see funding lacrosse at this point we can keep lacrosse the parents can fund it uh but right now we can't do that ms anita do you have any no sir i agree i agree with you well one so i have a question um i know there um because the board started getting well gene and i started getting emails uh number

071one the elimination or creation of this was not a board thing so i think the only thing that the board did was and chris you can correct me if i'm wrong with the mou for the for the understanding that this was going to happen but in terms of funding a sport or funding anything like that that is strictly up to the administration and the central office and the staff to to bring to us is that correct can you hear me yep that is correct the agreement that was struck with the lacrosse group was that they would fund the program that the administration would look with best efforts as to whether or not the program could be continued the program uh the agreement actually expires on its own and there was no requirement for the board

072of education to do anything it's just for the administration for the school administration to look and see if they believed they had the funding to continue the program so no action is required by this board and when does that expire do you do you know i believe it's the end of this school year yeah this season yeah and just want to hear your thoughts as the a.d yes the thing is is fiscally there's no way that we are able to fund any more sports at this time we get a lump sum from central office in our budget each year and then everything else is supplemented from gate receipts and when you're looking at that our biggest money makers would be football basketball and then baseball is kind of on the table with that but that

073is also predicated like if we have a football game and there's bad weather we don't get anybody there for football games and that's a huge money maker for us as far as trying to sustain our athletic program then you couple that in with the covet years that we've had to deal with and we've had to use our funds for some other things right now we're depleted and we're trying to it's going to take us a while to get out of the hole that we have from covet alone and not having the fan participation that we had because during the first covet year we could only have 25 fans that come in to see the sporting events so um budgetary-wise there's no way that i'm able to do it um we're trying to figure out how

074we can get back to where we need to be a lot of people throw out booster club booster club all booster club does is supplement us if they make money but then in the covid year two when we didn't have sports we didn't have any refreshments or anything going on concessions so they didn't make money so that too is not an ample source of revenue for an athletic program yet but we're all trying to get back to where we need to be all right thank you so this really comes really comes down to you and coach sunita making that decision and it's not a great decision we don't revel in it but i i just can't see funding more things right now but it's also one of those things that we have to look at

075because the group that brought that to the board and we didn't have to make that decision those parents are now gone their kids have graduated and moved on and that's why you don't fund things just for a certain group of people for a certain amount of time because eventually they're gone and then you have to do the next group of parents expect the same thing and so on and so on so that group of parents said oh yeah we'll get the funding and we'll make sure that they have everything they need we're fine with practicing at a different location but then when they leave it's like oh you told us we could use the football field nobody ever said you could use a football field to practice or whatever it is and then it it

076just kind of cycles out of control that you promised us this and you promised us that because the next group wants something different than the first group wanted so it it it's just kind of like a mess with a lot of things and it represents a lot of things that we do financially for certain groups because they want what they want and it's not always what's best for the district as a whole and i'll be honest i wanted this to be discussed a little bit here because there are only two people on the board currently that were on the board when all this went down the first time when it first happened and i i i just you weren't even here yet either and i had just come onto the board i think when the

077ladies was approved and i just you know there was not a whole lot of discussion so i wanted the rest of the world george you look like you were going to say something yeah i was just going to yeah i don't know that that total history i mean i just know that one day i had an email um because my daughter was about to go into middle school or into high school and hey have you thought about lacrosse and so that's about all i know so how has it sustained itself over the last four years the parents or that group that brought it i can't remember if it was boss alliance well i think georgia we do pay the coaches don't we georgia no they pay for they pay they put the money into our

078fund to pay their coaches right so they fund everything we didn't have the money then either that's why they funded everything so we that's why the board or chris advised us to have the superintendent at that time to work it out with them as long as we didn't have to pay anything because that's not something we could it wasn't it's not an income generating going over georgia you look like yeah georgia wasn't here either i don't know no georgia wasn't here either now is in co in terms of cost for the sport itself um is it where is it rank in our list uh on our on our sports teams it's out of curiosity uh i called a former district that i was superintendent in and they said to start it up would be at

079least 100 to 125 000. okay but what's it costing like in in terms of our sports how like football basketball that's what i'm asking is funded i don't know um we had gotten a um an email stating that for the operating costs for next year if we were to take it over would be 35 000 and that is equivalent or actually more than what we do for football and that's not taking into consideration the fact that we pay about fourteen thousand dollars in helmet reconditioning for football which eventually you would have to do for lacrosse also on top of those operating costs so and i don't get that's like more than half of just the budget that i get from from central office for a year to operate the athletic program so the coaches pay

080i'm curious what's going on with that georgia so the initial payment for the lacrosse coaches is through the central office we charge back to the high school if they do not have funds then we of course absorb that okay all right any other questions concerns thank you thank you for coming today i appreciate it thank you all right next uh we have school improvement plans with sarah kane and i know there were two uh plans that had not been presented so we were going to wait uh to do all the approving of those and we will have the safety component that we'll be listening to during our closed session yes i'm going to have them present i just want to introduce since last time i was a little loud apparently when i tried to do

081this i just really wanted to reinforce that our schools are using nc star which is a tool that helps them guide through this school improvement process and i think as we mentioned last time we do have seven schools who are considered tsi or targeted support and improvement and those schools are required to use nc star so when you see their goals they are coming from that list of transformational school goals that help to improve student outcomes so mr johnson is going to join us and we'll look and you should hear him okay good morning uh dr freeman and uh chairman carter and rest of the board of education can you hear me all right yes sir thank you okay good uh well i wanted to one thank you for the opportunity to share our school

082improvement plan or two components of this plan and also just want to make a little allowance we have lots of teachers that are knocking on the door because this is an abnormal day and so i'm going to be shooing them away as i go through this our first goal really is about monitoring what's happening in the classroom and that is something that we do or i do every single day i'm in classrooms making sure that we are aligning instruction to the student needs and that it's also aligned with our standards and that observation and that fear that um information that i gather is really not useful unless it's shared in a timely way with our staff so i meet with staff regularly one of the things that we do uh we started to do and

083we really weren't able to get it off the ground last year because of covid and have really implemented this year is what we call a walk through team and what our walkthrough team does is there's about four of us on that team and we ask at the beginning of the month teachers to provide us with suggestions for what they would like us to see and then also we take a look at what is happening with regard to the math instruction ela instruction or the caring school community component that you'll hear about a little bit later and we walk in for about 10 or 15 minutes and then provide quick feedback in the past we've looked for things like is a learning target posted do kids have is it in kid-friendly language um the number of

084positive the negative interactions and uh with students uh how many students and and what students are called um our roost are rules posted are they fair are they consistently enforced um and then things is like questioning is it lower level questioning are we praying kids to infer things which is really a higher order and that's what we want our students to be able to do so we go through those and then we come back weekly and we share our feedback and it helps provide kind of trend data provides immediate feedback to our teachers and then from there i'm able to really on a specific teacher by teacher basis know what folks will need specific support and then i align that effort with our instructional facilitator or if there's something in the way of technology and

085often that's related uh that's something that really uh teachers need a little bit of help with we'll have jessie emery our digital lead teacher and he'll provide support and ideas about how teachers can improve instruction in that arena the next slide is really surrounding social or i'm sorry sel social emotional learning and just to give you a little bit of background knowledge we adopted a social emotional learning curriculum called caring schools community hearing school community as a well researched well-vetted resource that we use to provide intentional instruction for our students around social emotional learning we felt it was important in our school one with covet and just in general the need for that instruction was apparent we needed consistent expectations across the school most importantly we needed consistent language among the school between classrooms we

086also wanted to have a similar process and in the process that we have they have a morning meeting they have a midday check-in and then they have a closing meeting in which they reflect on what they were working on that week all of it has been research-based and just to give you an example the first quarter the whole school does um age appropriate so it's different but they all do similar things for their establishing community um how they come in the room how they greet each other how they interact with each other and then from there it's dependent upon the teacher um to determine what they really need to work on if she sees or he sees that a child or that a group of children are struggling uh because of substitutes in uh then

087there's a whole week's worth of work on how to prepare for a sub and what their behavior should look like so we've been working on that um and implementing that and the next component really is related uh to this slide and that's involving parents and making sure that the parents understand what we're teaching and why we're teaching one of the most important things that we can do is is help our kids with their social emotional learning so that they're able to access instruction but we help our kids understand and manage their emotions we help help them set and achieve positive goals help them show their feelings and empathy for others establish positive relationships and make good decisions and one of the things that we had our action statements but what we needed to do is

088we needed to gather feedback and we're in the process of doing that gathering feedback from parents we are creating a community school council which will be a group of parents that will help direct this work and we're soliciting their input through surveys that are electronic and paper there's been one kind of preliminary meeting and then we've also solicited input from the teachers during their plcs to be able to find parents that would be involved or would be interested in being involved we've also planned a couple events one is and this is all predicated upon us at being able to have events at the school but an experienced dixon night because we really feel that it's important to have our teachers be able to interact with their families and for the last couple years they really

089have not in an authentic way so an experienced dixon night a spring social and then a caring school community information night many of the parents have asked questions about it and we've provided lots of information and written form but being able to sit down with folks and be able to talk with them is really most important the other thing that we did is we created a student leadership team for uh our student leadership team for students of color um so that we can ask what what their experience is and they can help direct us and we also feel like uh by having this committee um we'll be able to also involve parents that might otherwise not be able or feel comfortable and so this is a real opportunity for our kids to take on some

090leadership roles and again you know we're soliciting um participation through surveys and through both in written and virtually the other thing that we do is we make sure that we provide uh regular communication to our parents one is through the parent link as part of the caring school community there's this parent link where we're able to send a little a couple pages home every week so that parents can work proactively and they know what's going to happen in the upcoming week and there's little exercises that they can do at home with their kids so that their kids um are able to come into school uh and just have a perspective of home and this is the way we do things at home we also provide a monthly newsletter the teachers include a component of sel

091education and then i provide weekly education our weekly communication to parents and pretty much that said um you know we've we're working in and i feel like we've got a good start on the implementation of the program itself and this is the the other crucial component is involving parents in you know helping us steer the ship to where we need to go um and working on partnership with them because they know you know what their kids need and and it would really help inform our process but uh that's really where we are with those two goals at this point and i'm happy to answer any questions that you might have do you have any questions i guess i just want to know i think the plans sound good on paper but i really want to

092know how are we intentionally addressing the and not just for brad this is not just um for dixon i guess i would want every principal or whoever's speaking for that school i want to know what are we intentionally doing to address the discipline and behavior that's going on in the schools because i get calls every day that the discipline is out of control and it may not show up in our data but those buildings are out of control and we got to do something different than we've been doing because it's getting worse not better well let me say we're going to hear more about discipline in a little bit but a lot of that is change and you can't have reduced discipline and continue to do it the same way that we're doing it so

093we're going to have some more conversation about that but it is asking people to change is it perfect no but we can't keep doing we can't have 8 000 referrals right but we can't i'd i'd expect to have 10 000 referrals because we're changing not less referrals we're doing less referrals and we're not disciplining the children which is creating it's not creating boundaries and structure for them we're not telling people don't give black kids referrals we're saying the black kids aren't the only ones who have behavior issues if they're doing something wrong they get in a fight or something yes you send them home just like you would any other student and they do it right no yeah yeah uh if i could address it i can only speak from my perspective here at dixon

094i do think that this program that we're using uh has really helped uh drop our numbers and i am telling you that we are not cooking the books i am not saying i'm not writing anything down and we're we're pretending there are things that are happening that i'm not recording our referrals are down significantly i think i have 20 referrals and maybe 40 you know i'd have to look at the numbers maybe 39 or 40 um just uh documentation uh that are there but i do think that when there is a research-based program that is instituted that everyone has a shared vocabulary and shared expectations and it's all and the kids are at the center then i think that you know you start to build steps towards students being successful in school and we've only

095been doing it you know to be honest it was in fits and starts in march and this was the first year of implementation and across the board we see a huge improvement and i would welcome anyone on the school board to come in and talk with our teachers or talk with me i'd be happy to show you you know how we're doing this um and we're using loretta hammond is on the board um and she has helped influence how this uh program works and it is working for us um and i just welcome any of you to come in i'd be happy to speak with any of you about it and show us i can show you all of our numbers and uh you know you can speak to our teachers well and i don't

096want to get into discipline here but i know there have been some issues because we're feeling our way through it but give me specific examples and i we don't have to do it a board meeting but instead of anecdotal give me specifics and we'll go in there and make sure our wrong is righted but i have heard that some kids are getting away with uh you know things but i want specific examples but we can't change the referral process and the discipline if we don't start doing things differently does that mean we're not making mistakes no but it is a change factor and i think when you see what we're going to show you it's going to make a difference but again we're not perfect and we're getting we're feeling our way through it okay

097i'll give you some specific a lot of specific examples when we leave and i'm and i'm not saying that people are not doing the best they can because i understand that the coveted fatigue is real and that teachers are like at the end of their thread because of the lack of staffing and resources and all of that but our students are real really struggling and i don't the beauty of being a native of asheville and growing up in the city of asheville and in the neighborhoods and knowing a lot of people in the buildings and having relatives at probably every school in the district is i don't have to step into school because they call and let me know every day or whenever something's going on so and we we just have to do better

098and i know that a lot of the staff are doing the best they can but we we can't expect the people that are in the midst and in crisis to be the ones to resolve the problems we need to figure out how we can support them and it may be community coming people from the community coming out pushing into the buildings to help with some of those students but my fear is that i know students are getting hurt and and my fear is is going to get worse a lot worse before it gets better and we need to have some things put in place so that our staff and our students are safe here you go brad thank you very much for joining us and giving that update uh looked like your frost your hot

099chocolate run went well this past weekend so i hope you raise lots of money we did thank you and certainly uh i welcome anyone to come by and i'm happy to answer any questions that you might have thank you and i hope you have a good afternoon thank you who do we have next we have carrie buchanan ready to join us and scary good morning can you guys hear me yes ma'am all right well i want to say hello to the board members and dr jean um so looking at my school improvement plan i'm going to talk about two things that we're focusing on this year the first one is to meet the needs of all students our school is focused on implementing a tiered instructional system that is focused on core curriculum and meeting

100students needs this year we are implementing the core curriculum that our district has chosen and of course our teachers are participating monthly in those professional developments for math and for reading um we are also making sure that our teachers are implementing implementing strategy groups in every grade level we are having ongoing mtss pd um each month we have a data share and problem solving time during our plc's with each grade level we also meet weekly with our swat team which consists of ad administration our social worker our guidance counselor and our student support to make sure that we're meeting the needs of all students not just academics and then also we meet with parents with those students who are struggling and need extra supports to keep the parents updated on what we're doing at school

101and then also to give them support of things that they can help their student do at home also deering through all of this we teachers are constantly progress monitoring students to make sure that they're making growth through the interventions that we are putting in place for students we hired two title one tutors to work with our students for reading and math our academic coaches and administration are also doing small groups with students who need extra support and we're just making sure that this is in place throughout our whole entire school and that teachers realize that this is just that it is not just on their backs but it is a shared responsibility for everyone in our school and our so sarah if you'll skip to the third slide no you're good i can't see what

102you're doing sorry um also this year we're focused on social and emotional learning we have implemented a morning meeting time that is um every morning from 8 to 8 20 8 25 for every single classroom our morning meeting consists of a curriculum that was created by a former teacher from hall fledger that we implemented last year so this is our second year implementing that we do ongoing training for that we have resources called a cougar cave that one of our former ec teachers and our guidance counselor laura alexander created for us that cougar cave is a really cool um it's a google slides and within that cougar cave students or teachers can go in if they need a time to um decompress or just to calm down there are different rooms within that cougar cave

103and within that cougar cave you can go into a room that just kind of helps settle you you can listen to you know books being read online there's one um room that's one of my favorites kind of like a dance room you know and it has different music playing um so that that resource is absolutely phenomenal and i'll show it to anyone who wants to see it um each month we focus on a different cougar trait such as determination and we talk about that with all the students we let parents know what we're talking about and we send home things that they can do and we talk about that we also do um we have a piece pass that ms alexander works with each class on how to use and so students can use that

104we have those throughout the school and then of course we do restorative circles also with our students um and those can be led by the guidance counselor our student support trinette back um or administration and then also we have quarterly training for our staff for all of these things so it's not like we just say we're going to implement them and we don't do anything we have you know we make sure that teachers are provided professional development and we talk through those different things um yeah so any questions anyone have any questions for kerry i know i saw your peace path when i was over at the school one day and i thought it was really cool and uh i think that cougar caves uh idea is really a great idea maybe that's something that

105we can get out for other teachers as well uh are you seeing a lot of uh good response from that we are because the great thing about it is is that older students can use it independently um and then our teachers can also use it with our students um i know my my child who's in first grade loves it like even on the weekends he's like mom can you get me onto cougar cave because it's just a time for them to be able to um to focus on them and what they need and how they're feeling awesome all right well if there are no questions thank you so much carrie for uh presenting today yeah absolutely thank you guys have a great afternoon and a good weekend you too all right next uh we have

106uh letters training with uh sarah kane again okay thank you so much and i am joined here i'm kind of a co-presenter this is carly stein and i'm gonna let her do a little introduction about herself as we move on you also have a blue folder that has some handouts so that you can go back and reference it later so that we can keep moving all right good morning everybody i see some familiar faces i'm real quickly my name's carly stein i'm a career educator and just so you know the most important thing about me is my why literacy is power i used to have a sign in my classroom that said this a handmade sign and that's what i believe that's why i do what i do i believe that giving our students um

107strong literacy skills gives them to pop the power to make choices and to affect change i believe that literacy is one of our biggest tools to undo systemic racism and um to move towards every student sharing their potential so that's that's the why so again that's the most important thing about me and carly's been working with us this year through title one um to support a lot of our literacy initiatives in national city schools we're going to give you guys a really quick background for how this training came to be the letters introduction that we're doing letters is an acronym because we needed another acronym in education right it stands for well we'll talk about that language essentials for teachers of reading and spelling but we'll very briefly tell you about why this letters training

108came to be for our teachers so um the nation's report card the nape you guys familiar with this this is a national assessment sometimes again you hear it called the nation's report card it's given throughout the country to 4th graders 8th graders and 12th graders and i just want to show you guys some historical data about reading and fourth grade reading scores all right so you have some data here from 92 to 2019 looking at four different scores the nape rates students as either basic below basic proficient or advanced okay and so again looking at this data as a career educator who's been in this game you know almost all of these years it's it's really sobering so as you can see despite all of the all of the wonderful initiatives all the wonderful learning

109and the hard work that we've done we really as a nation haven't made huge gains in terms of moving the dial for students right we see that right around that 33 percent of our nation's fourth graders are not even reading at a basic level and unfortunately in case you were hoping north carolina is doing a lot better north carolina scores really mirror the nation scores okay again these are all in your packet so what about that how much progress have we made not a lot right all right so here's what happened um i i grew up in mississippi so this is always encouraging to me to see that um mississippi is actually in the news for something good in this case mississippi um passed the literacy-based promotion act in 2013 and that act i really

110did a lot of revolutionary things that first of all required that all k3 teachers would have some really strong training in the science of reading and not just kind of teaching how we think reading should be i mean you know just based on what we think common sense would show us but really showing what the science says and bringing that science into the classroom and and also one of the big things that mississippi did is that they mandated that college prep classes included the science of reading the biggest thing and the reason that so many other states in the nation are looking at mississippi is that mississippi was the only state in the nation to show significant gains in the nape in 2019. they were the only ones able to move that dial significantly okay

111all right so enter north carolina so last year our state legislatures our state board of education and our state school superintendent truitt um really focused on how to prioritize literacy in north carolina so first what i want to emphasize is this is state law that was passed last year and it is about teachers in pre-k through fifth grade being required to take and pass a third party reading course that's aligned with the science of reading which the state has endorsed is our official guidance in how we can better understand how children read and that scientific research behind it so um this this happened just this past year so we started this new school year with lots of things in place okay great and so now we're going into kind of what we're just trying to

112give you guys a little prep to see what's coming because as you're going to see this is going to really figure heavily into the lives of teachers schools for the following two years all right we're going to show you a little quick video again about the the letters program and i have to kind of practice this myself but anyways letters is language essentials for teachers of reading and spelling this is just a very quick video for more than 15 years letters has helped develop more knowledgeable more insightful and more effective teachers of reading it gave the teachers the why but also the how so why students are struggling why is reading complex but then this is how you plan for it this is something that our teachers are missing and i'm not just talking about

113hilldale teachers i'm talking about teachers everywhere since letters beginnings dr louisa motes and her colleagues of reading researchers and practitioners have examined the most significant research into how children learn to read i remember well when i was a teacher how much i and my students would have benefited if i had known what i know now after finally learning these language essentials myself i wondered why all teachers weren't required to know them so letters began now letters is available in multiple professional development options to fit your building and district needs the newest version of letters is available in a blended model of engaging online delivery printed manuals and face-to-face support created for teachers of students in grades k through three as well as for grades four and five intervention and special education teachers letters knowledge is

114delivered in a rich online environment that includes interactive exercises videos of exemplary instruction and online assignments printed materials provide a complete reference of letters program content teachers acquire knowledge a learning community develops and new insights are applied and we just start asking why is this not in colleges why do teachers who are entering the field not all take this it truly was life-changing [Music] okay so again we expect that this is something that we're going to hear more about so i just want to clarify for you guys what letters is and what it isn't okay it's course based on research right it's focused on teaching the science behind how children learn to read how we teach them most effectively and how we intervene when they fall behind right also it's intended to make teachers more

115effective using the curriculum we already have it's not a curriculum okay so that's a really key point okay it's not a curriculum it's going to help us get better at using the wonderful curriculum that the districts already adopted it's not a curriculum it's not scripted it's not an assessment system okay but it is about professional development absolutely we feel very strongly that we want to begin introducing this initiative to you all because this is going to be a tremendous time commitment for our teachers next year actually the next two years and so you know if you're wondering kind of why we're here with you all first we feel it's really important that we have your support and backing as we implement this state required initiative so teacher requirements are 33 hours of online modules 15

116hours of readings this is estimated but by the company by the company yeah so we we all know how good those estimates might be a little more uh 15 hours of case study and practical applications so they'll be taking that information and applying it directly into their classroom with students and 24 hours of face-to-face right now via zoom that's 87 hours one year so we're not here to scare anybody but we want to make sure that you understand what we're facing moving forward so that we can support our district not only in implementing this but getting this amazing opportunity for our children and our teachers because this is gonna ensure that every pre-k through fifth grade teacher has that same amount of knowledge about how children read does that 87 hours does that align with

117their existing cu requirements or is this in addition to see that they're that that is in addition they have to have so many literacy this will fulfill that tenfold so but they will be required to have this um dr decant through hr is going to be working with us on compliance because as teachers come in from other districts we have to check to see where they are in this continuum we have to ensure that all of our teachers are brought in and that we onboard them and get them going in letters if they've not had this background and the letters training is this is what is being was put forth by the state this is required by the state there are three cohorts one already started in october two has started mid-year and we're in

118cohort three so next year we will launch this for in national city schools but again this is across the state every single district pre-k through five do we know are they looking at possibly uh putting this into the college level um for teacher certification absolutely so we work really closely with the universities around us too so actually a lot of the university professors are participating in some early training as well but yes that is the goal to also have teachers that are equipped when they leave school that already have this experience all right so now i'm going to sort of give you guys what i think of as the elevator pitch sort of what what we want to think of about this so here's how i'd like to frame it in the positive right this

119is a great opportunity for our teachers uh to make and it has the potential to make a positive impact on student achievement we know that teacher clarity teacher efficacy have some of the highest effect sizes in terms of influencing student outcomes right also because we're real realists we know that this is going to take extra time and extra effort and we really want to let teachers know from the beginning that we have a plan to support them that we want to uh that this we want to make this uh the effort that they're going to be required to put in we want to make it worth their while we want to support them every step of the way so part of our implementation plan includes kind of an early group so we do have a

120leadership group who will be taking letters training starting in february i'm part of that so there's eight of us that will experience the full letters training we'll just be half a year ahead of our staff so that way we understand what it's going to take how much work a lot of the pitfalls but also how to adequately support everybody we are also working with the calendar committee to make sure that we have dedicated time next year so that our teachers can find time within the calendar within our work days to work on their letters coursework we also will be planning ongoing school-based support and carly's a part of that too as kind of an implementation coach so that we are providing help sessions and support for teachers but also the the plc the professional learning

121community is going to be a big piece of this so teachers have opportunities to talk about what they're reading and studying in the course how it applies to their classroom and certainly the outcomes they're seeing with students and then i will say that even today there was more information from the state about providing additional funding to districts to use for stipends but i will tell you what i've heard so far is it is not very much and so we probably will be having to have some conversations at the district about how we are going to provide that additional support again 87 hours of time is a lot and we want to make sure that we set this up for success from the very beginning and then as we take this leadership team we will come

122back and share more information with you okay and so again the reason that we're introducing this to you we just we wanted you guys to hear about it first we're going to be going and talking to principals and individual schools and answering teacher questions but i'm just just knowing that this extra workload is is going to be mandated by the state and that this is going to be reality for our teachers for the next two years i'm also understanding that you're going to see letters mentioned a lot in school improvement plans and we certainly as peyton mentioned want to try and align it with what's already going on right i mean we don't want teachers doing extra when they're already doing extra also we might need you guys to provide some leadership about the implementation

123like the calendar is going to be influenced by letters and also maybe some stipends and then we've talked more about learning more about the science of reading which which is exciting and and to thank you because you've been very supportive and dr freeman has been amazingly supportive of our curriculum choices and that we now have elementary schools sharing the same curriculum that is steeped in the science of reading and it's a line to all of these things that we're going to be learning more about so we appreciate your commitment and the financial resources that it's taken to make that happen okay i have a question um this is an enormous amount of time it certainly is and as a former teacher i would be absolutely horrified just being completely honest okay so to me um

124we are looking at the time and it appears to me that the calendar is going to be an incredibly important part of this a question has the state said anything at all about perhaps changing hours required in order for teachers to participate new nothing has been said so this is completely either during planning or plc's or late start time so trying to get as much as we can in for those synchronous activities so that we're supporting teachers you know from the beginning okay we're gonna have to provide a lot of time okay um [Music] yeah okay it's fascinating but it is terrifying i did and i put this because i know you martha and um and i know i knew you would be interested in it they're in your folder is a specific handout that

125breaks down each section so you can see what they would be learning and working on and then that's matched with some approximate hours that that's the company estimate but i think once you get into it and you see what they're actually learning um it's very interesting and i think that you will appreciate that as an educator okay are these 87 hours the company saying that this is what it's going to take or the state saying the company so so it's not the state saying we have to do letters it's the state saying we have to do this and letters is the state says we have to do letters and this is what is required to complete the coursework those 87 hours okay so have we looked at other companies that are also doing this so

126it's it's it's specific so the letters is mandated by the state yes this is a great question that piece where they looked at different models and they looked at the mississippi model that's why they selected letters so it is the only company they've contracted with in looking at your data i don't see any demographic breakdown and since our achievement gap is black do they have any data to support that this model helps the growth of black students or supports the black growth of black students i have not seen any specific data like that and um you know i should i should qualify that the mississippi data just to be completely honest mississippi lagged behind the rest of the nation in their scores and so in the growth that they showed they were really just able

127to catch up to the rest of the nation and so i'm really waiting to see and hoping that their data will continue to be strong but um regardless this is you know this is just a decision that's happened you know from the camera with the legislature or somebody to make sure that teachers are paid for their time because that's a lot of hours i know that's yeah that's why that's why we wanted to make sure we just introduced this to you guys as soon as we could because there are a lot of factors that are going to go in to try and plan this again my my thought is and my sort of stance is let's do everything we can given that you have to do this as teachers you know let's do everything we

128can to support you to make it as meaningful and as to make you feel supported as possible so that we can show some you know some gains for our students yes george are there consequences for not doing it i'm just curious like what's the i haven't heard i'm yeah i don't i don't know i would have to be we do have to provide and i mean let me see how to phrase that so teacher outcomes cannot be held as an accountability for them it's not a performance but we do have to submit the data that each teacher has participated in this and that's gonna that would be in there how many hours have been completed that they've done each of the checks so that has to be submitted to the company who directly submits it

129to the state so this isn't an opt-out for us we know we have to do it so we're going to do everything we can work with every group we can create every opportunity for teachers to be able to move through this and and apply it to their classroom because the outcomes are going to be tremendous for us having every teacher in our district with that same base knowledge around foundational skills and how to teach reading is going to impact our children you should sit in one of these trainings i think you'd maybe get a you would certainly have a different perspective i would like to see that very very good process um how how quickly do you have to do the 87 hours that's um all in one year so they're two years about the

130same time commitment so i'm what we're hearing and again it's it's an advantage to be in the third cohort in some ways because we get to go to some of these round tables and hear from districts who are already in it we're hearing two hours a week at minimum okay the concept is amazing i mean this is something we've been screaming about for years so to me the concept my concern is the number of hours but my major concern here is our teachers and the reason is because i think if we hit them with you know it's going to be a minimum of 87 hours have we started explaining this to our teachers so that's why we're here first because we want to make sure because this initiative is so tremendous we felt obligated to

131make sure that we start at the top which is the board of education that you understand this we will next within the next month we have a timeline meet with principals and meet with staff to talk about this to start laying that groundwork so that we can explain how this will kind of and a lot of it's going to mirror with what they're already doing it's reading literacy professional development so that's our job is to go out and build everybody up and and show how we can do this and by having eight of us go ahead and start taking this course that's going to give us a lot of information too and we'll be able to build our own scope and sequence and kind of plot it out as to how much we can do

132and work with our teachers and to bring in carly as an implementation coach so she can meet with teachers she's going to offer help sessions and sit with them you know she's going to help us as a district to accomplish this i think the big thing here is for teachers to understand that this is not a directive from the superintendent or the school board that this is exactly initiated i think that's a huge piece absolutely and and i know that you would take care of that when are the trainees i would very much like to be a part of one of them just to see what's going on will we be invited to join those can they they are online there is an administrative one through risa that i might be able to get you

133in if you're interested in that course work it's uh i don't want to do the course i just want to see one of those yeah no i'm too old to do that we will make sure you have all the information and you can participate in some of the plc's and the trainings that we have a group for thank you i would and i will say that cohort one or cohort three that will be our cohort and asheville city school i mean and buncombe county buncombe county so we're in conjunction with them okay thank you i would support staff required to attend these as well so they have a very prescribed list of who at each school can receive this training that stated by the and that is the classroom teachers one administrator one coach but

134i'm getting them in early so that'll give us one option and then two ec resource teachers anybody beyond that we have to pay to put them in a different cohort which we'll do we'll bring in other staff as we need it what we want to look at is other literacy trainings that we did this year that was that we can offer to support staff that would not have this level of time commitment and rigor but yet equip them to do the things they need to do this year for the first time we did trainings around fundations and hegarty's and geodes for our support staff and they really appreciated that and have used the tools what's the cost i i don't know the full cost i'm paying for resa for the reese's agreed to split us

135for this initial group and we're paying four hundred dollars per staff person and so i guess it's around eight or nine hundred dollars because reese is picking up a piece of it the state is only paying for that prescribed list that i gave you the classroom teachers the administrator two ec and one coach okay and i mean they're really like adamant that's that's their list that i had to submit it's all teachers k-12 i'm just k5 a5 that i'm looking at but preschool including nc preschool they all have to have it so buncombe county partnership for children is actually coordinating the nc pre-k teachers but this is exciting this is the first time that pre-k has also had this level of literacy training so does the is the training like specific to each grade level

136no so the the pre-k there's a separate pre-k training and a k-5 training except for pre-k training yes i do think that pre-k is less it's not it is seven hours i asked that because i had missed a miss griffin moment because she since edges since academics is not my thing and she always said that i guess k2 they should be learning to read and then three three and two learning to learn classic right seems like it would be split up for the younger kids versus the three you know they referenced in the video that k2 versus or k3 which would be considered the early literacy and then the four and five but the state is requiring all of these groups to have it thank you thank you ladies any other questions comments all right

137thank you so much i think it's a wonderful idea i really do thank you all right uh next uh we have attorney chris campbell uh i've asked him if he would do a history for us an information session on our desegregation order we've not actually had a formal presentation on this since i've been on the board and thought it would be helpful for the board members and the community to find out more about what it actually is and what it what we are supposed to be doing uh yes actually um do i have to uh just just recess all right um i'd like to call a recess to the meeting for a 10-minute bathroom break i'm just calling it as a recess all right we're back from recess dylan are we good all right we're

138good all right so i have asked uh attorney chris campbell to give us a history and some information on our desegregation order so mr campbell very good thank you mr chairman board members and dr freeman good morning so this is an update on the desegregation order and the current status of the desegregation order and before i begin i of course have to give the caveat that i am more than happy to stand here and answer as many questions as the board may have but uh some questions might fall under the category of attorney-client advice so obviously that would be need to be done in the closed session so this was not intended to be a session of possible changes to the dseg order or anything related to that issue this was intended just to be

139an update for the board and for the community to kind of know what the status of the desegregation order currently is so a couple of things and this is a memo that of course will be publicly available after the board meeting as well the current desegregation order that we are operating off of really comes from the 1991 order it was approved by the federal court a couple of key quotes from that order appropriate and reasonable racial balance in individual schools and efficient utilization of existing facilities are sound educational objectives which will help provide more positive educational experiences for children who come from various socioeconomic racial and ethnic backgrounds these continue to be major commitments of the asheville city schools and are essential to the fair legal and responsible operation of the school system so that's

140a direct quote from the board's plan submitted to the federal court in 1991. the plan at the heart of the plan is a goal not a quota system but a goal for the district when it comes to minority balancing and here is the direct quote again from the plan approved by the court for individual schools the goal of the asheville city schools is that minority enrollment be no more than 15 percent above or below the system-wide minority enrollment and whenever possible minority enrollment be no more than 10 above or below that same enrollment so it's a 15 goal with an intended 10 floor it shouldn't deviate uh more than 10 and certainly 15 being the goal that's actually in the document itself when the desegregation order was originally adopted in 1970 i believe the order

141reflected that the asheville city schools was approximately 70 percent white and 30 black i think your current percentages are somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 or so percent sub uh white 20 percent other minorities uh and just less than 20 black so that's how the districts change since the original 1970s and certainly your staff has those specific numbers if you want them the plan also said that building capacity classroom capacity and maintenance of the appropriate racial ballots are all factors in consideration of requests from transfers from one school to another so race not only for the balancing of the schools at the beginning of each school year but also transfer requests let's talk about a few milestones in the lawsuit again the lawsuit is captioned b lee allen at all versus the asheville city schools

142the order was originally filed january 7th 1970. it approved the desegregation plan that was required by brown versus board and its progeny i find it important for this board to know that brown was decided by the united states supreme court in 1955 and until 1965 10 years later all black students in the county and city attended stevens lee high school and other schools in both districts continued to be illegally segregated for 10 years after brown versus board was adopted the desegregation plan adopted by the board of education was found by the court to achieve the directive of quote there be no all black schools and no all-white schools and school faculty's staff would be assigned to the various schools on a completely non-racial balance so that was the reason for the original dseg order this

143school district had all black and all white schools essentially this school district had been using one high school for all black students in cooperation with the county system and this district this school board had not adopted a desegregation plan in compliance with brown versus board of education so that was the impetus for the original desegregation order the plan was challenged shortly after it was approved into the u.s district court level at the u.s court of appeals for the fourth circuit which is one step below the supreme court on the basis that closing livingston street school and herring school discriminated against black students so part of the plan was that two schools would be closed those were predominantly or almost exclusively schools for black students and those were the only two schools closed so the plaintiffs

144challenged that and the court ruled that the plan overall was designed to end discrimination and rejected the claim that closing those two schools in some way violated the equal protection clause to the 14th amendment since then it's been amended several times and this is where some of the confusion comes from but it's pretty straightforward we have the original order in 1970 then in 1972 the david miller school was closed so the order was amended to reflect that then in 1991 you had your magnet school plan and your major recon uh restructuring and i've spoken to the goal of the 15 with minority enrollment that's why the 1991 order is still the operative order that's the order this board operates off of that's the order your administration uses when it comes to school assignment in 1996

145the plan was amended to reflect that the district had created the alc or i believe that was the accelerated learning center and then also metro school and then in 1997 it was amended again to reflect that francine delaney new school for children a charter school would be operating within the asheville city school district at all times the federal court has retained jurisdiction which means that the federal district court in the western district of north carolina still has jurisdiction over your desegregation order however there has been no review requested by this board or by the plaintiffs or by the court since 1997 and by the explicit wording of the orders the federal court has not required this board to come back to federal court every single time a change has been made so yes historically the

146board did go back to federal court when changes were made to the district but we don't see that in the orders as a legal requirement so that's where you are right now you're operating under the dictates of that 1991 order and it has that gold that's in it so that's kind of an overview and i'm happy to answer any questions any questions for chris so if this board wanted a review of the desegregation order for whatever reason and really again remember that the major dictate that you are under more or less is that the 15 10 then you would need to go back to federal court and the way to handle that would be to have a discussion with plaintiff's council james ferguson is still practicing in charlotte was a nashville high student or stevens

147lee i can't remember exactly which just a wonderful person and a fabulous lawyer he is still practicing in charlotte so discussions would typically be had with the plaintiff's representative because if there were changes the board wanted to make then if the plaintiffs folks agree with that then you could go to the court with a consent order to seek changes to the deseg and that would certainly be better than an adversarial process so if we just wanted to change some of the language if we wanted to change if we wanted to use minority instead of black actually here's the good news it apparently uses minority it does but when you look at the 1991 order does use the word minority i see that yeah but but but we are you're saying if you wanted to specify

148specific minority groups rather than just the overall word minority no because i think what we do and i could be wrong but i think what we do is we use minority as black i don't and then that we can check on i'd like for us to check on that and make sure that that's nice and i think that's a great idea and let me say too that you know the original order was for that purpose was for that right exactly to end discrimination against black students so that's why i always caution when you look at a desegregation order especially one that was adopted as long ago as this was and changes that have been made over time if the school district is confronting the past vestiges of racism against black students then this board is

149in compliance with federal law now clarifying things that great idea but i just don't want folks to think that you take a desegregation order and you read it explicitly almost like a statute of you've got to do these five things that's not the way this works and were it to come before the court one of the questions the court would be looking at from the big picture is overall compliance with desegregation you know so it's not a checklist of here's 14 things that you have to do it's more of a holistic type approach so i really appreciate you asking that question well i think that brings up an important point because when you look at the original date of the desegregation order and its response to the idea of segregation it wouldn't have included other

150minority groups particularly in that and not in this region of the country and so um do we have some ability um as a board since we're not reading this like a statute or ordinance to understand the the current day implications of um yeah just racial disparities sure now i understand your question completely um we start to get into the territory i mentioned earlier that would be attorney-client advice we need to talk about in closed session but certainly over the last number of years looking at different minority groups socioeconomic factors all of those things a lot of school boards have looked at more of a holistic approach the degree to which you could incorporate those types of ideas into a current desegregation order that was entered to end discrimination against black students is an open question

151and that's what we would need to talk about a little further in a closed session there's not a yes or no or an easy answer to that question but i think it's an excellent question yes but it seems like the easy way and i know we i don't want to get it nothing's easy in the law i'll say that real quick but but making sure that we we serve the baseline of what the deseg order was meant to do and then anything um for additional groups is above and beyond that i guess would be the easiest way to look at it that's a good way to look at it and the question becomes then is is going above and beyond in other areas is that part and parcel of your dseg order or is it

152completely separate so we can kind of think through that so if we ask for them we don't just ask for them to review it we would have to say we would have to give them why we want them to review the current d-seg order that's in place meaning we'd have to come up with bullet points or would they just say we'll review it and look at all this sure and when you're asking that you mean the court the court the court yeah the court really is not the court wants to be asked to do something specific when it comes to desegregation orders there is no five year 10-year review of a dseg order that happens naturally so you're exactly right ms sanford the court would actually want us to tell it what do we want

153to change and why do we want to change it and how does it serve the original purposes of a unitary school system and avoiding segregation and that's where you know my recommendation that i don't mind making publicly is for the board to think through that and then if there are changes you want to make get with the plaintiffs of representatives and attorneys and see if there's common ground there to go to the court and i know y'all don't have anything specific in mind today you're asking process questions that's how you would move forward well i think we had conversations with mr ferguson before and he was receptive to changing or eliminating the desegregation order and i think while it was put in place with good intention to desegregate i think unfortunately because of the time

154that it was in it actually is causing more harm at this point and then what happens if when you look at asheville and the gentrification our schools are white um what happens at and black people they even had an article in the citizen times not too long ago we're leaving we're not staying so the numbers are dwindling what happens when you really have totally all white schools and you don't have a choice in the matter because that's in the that you can't have i guess with so many um it can't be all white or all black schools so what happens when the community or the city representation is what it is those are excellent questions and i don't mind addressing those uh in this public session the first one i want to be real careful

155for the public and from mr ferguson he represented to me again a wonderful individual he represented to me that he would be more than happy to review and discuss any ideas from this board so he is not on record and he has said he is not in favor of doing anything to the order including getting rid of it i just want to clarify that for his sake but he is more than happy to discuss any possible changes with this board uh we just need to let him know second question you ask is that that when you look at the percentages that were put into the 1991 order you're exactly right that was a reflection of the demographic makeup of the asheville city schools at that time right and that's kind of why i mentioned that

156i think you're in the 60 percent now white other or multi-racial and then less than 20 percent uh black and i can be corrected on those numbers i think they're close ballpark wise at some point there is a mathematical question that becomes a policy question for this board is in order to obtain racial balancing are you sending minority students to schools that they don't necessarily want to be in because you needed because of math to move that student to a different school and i think that's one of the things your administration is now tracking are black families for example getting their first choice or is there some kind of unintended consequence of the dseg order and then the last question that's being looked at now and then the last question you ask if the city

157of asheville can if the black population for example of the city of asheville will continue to decrease it is not my opinion that a court would feel like that is an issue of racial inequality now there may be legally for a deseg order i'm not speaking to the causes and roots and reasons for that i'm saying a judge sitting on the bench looking at the dseg order the simple fact that the population is decreasing in my opinion is not a basis for a court to take additional action boards are looking at actual active racism and whether or not that there's institutional racism or other issues involved in what's happening in a community the mere percentage drop by itself is not going to be something that i think a court would want to make changes to

158the deseg order and like i said to you before too the court would be looking to us the last point is at some point it just may not be applicable you know at some point this board the court even the plaintiff's attorneys may say the desegregation order has served its purpose and is no longer an applicable document that is a possibility so i guess what i'm thinking even if i'm looking at the statement in the second bullet point for the individual schools the goal of asheville city schools is that minority enrollment be no more than 15 percent and then minority enrollment being no more than 10 percent or above or below the systems minority enrollment to me and i'm not speaking for all black people i'm speaking from shonda that's a racist statement in itself

159so you're saying it's okay to have 70 percent white stu or 80 percent 85 percent white students in a school and only 15 so why is it okay for white people to be surrounded by the people that they're in community because we live segregatedly and i'm not saying people want to segregate i think it just should be a a choice most of the time and especially in asheville it just happens to be that white people get to have groups of more white people than black people but why is it not okay for it to just say 50 50. why does it have to be 15 black 15 black people and then 85 or a 15 minority excuse me and then white to me that's not racial that's not equitable because just because we're the same

160color doesn't mean we couldn't be more different in you know terms of who we are as individuals just because we share the same skin these are fabulous questions that relate to the appropriateness and effectiveness of a 1970 and 1991 court order in 2022. yeah so i know you're you're you're asking rhetorical questions and i will uh tell you that those are the questions this board needs to be asking is you know the effectiveness the appropriateness of this desegregation order in 2022 and you're making a i believe you're making a policy point and also a equity and quality and equal protection comment of if a certain number of black families wanted to be together at a certain school is it fair for a 1991 order to prevent that those are excellent questions for this board and

161that's why i said this is not a static document and it also was written and approved to reflect the conditions and the opinions and the policy of the board in 1991 right that was a long time ago and on that i feel like we're bumping up against something that becomes not that it's not our problem to deal with i'm not trying to pass the book here but looking at racial demographics in the asheville city school district that is something that has changed drastically since this order and like it to me it looks like we're like looking at another legal problem which is more like the westchester housing case in new york where we're not making adequate investments in housing to allow the demographics that would support the the deseg order to continue and at what

162point does that stop being our problem and start becoming another governing body's problem for enabling larger like urban planning forces to perpetuate segregation right and i think the board understands that you know desegregation orders were never intended intended to last forever so what a judge is going to want to know and i'll just because i understand everything you're saying i think everyone in the room does what a judge is going to want to know though if you want to make changes is what specific changes do you want to make and how do those relate to a unitary school system to eliminate the past vestiges of discrimination particularly against black students in the city of asheville and at what point yeah at what point are we allowed to say we no longer have the policy levers

163within our reach to make these changes like what kind of relief can we have not so sorry not so that we can get out of solving the problem but so that we can look at it more holistically with other policy boards or governing boards i think that that is something you can and should do right now and then at the end of that discussion or as part of that discussion is back to that same rhetorical question of does the desegregation order help what we're trying to do does it hurt what we're trying to do and then the final questions of do should we look at amending it or should we look at asking the court to eliminate it all together but you can't ask the answer those last two questions until you confront the policy

164issues you've been discussing here today george okay never mind you look i know you kept reaching for your mic so um any other questions or i'm glad we got to talk about this because again we haven't talked about this and this is something that i know when i first came on the board there was some talk about well we can maybe do it but we just never went any further with it so i'm glad that we got this out so that we could at least have the bones of what we need to start discussing going forward and this was you know something perfect to look at with our strategic planning and things like that as we're moving forward so um well i'm sorry james now i will jump in um and we've got we've got

165that tagline on our website and that we need excellence with equity and i feel like this deseg order fits right in there because as shaun does pointed out like what's the we need to look carefully what the the harm that this order has perpetuated um and center you know if we're we're talking about centering our black community by black students um how can this change so we continue to center or that we did not even continue that we do center those students who have perpetually been minoritized by this perfect so what would next steps look like so my my recommendation to you as a board is to carefully consider what objectives do you have for your minority and specifically black students going forward what are your objectives to address equity and and student success in

166that regard and then ask the question is the desegregation order helping that effort or is it hurting that effort and do we need to change it but i think first you've got to focus on what it is you're trying to do and then ask the question whether the order impacts you don't have to do anything with the dseg order i just want to make sure that's clear it's in place your staff is using the goal right now to do student assignment and has been doing that for three decades so you don't have to do anything but that would be my recommendation on next steps is first look at what you want to do and then ask the question whether the order is helping or hurting or whether it should be modified perfect thank you and

167i i just want to say i understand we don't have to do anything but from my in my opinion if you truly are centering our black students and black people in asheville then you have to make changes to the deseg order at minimum make changes if not do away with so and in a closed session i will address my legal opinion on how far can you go in asking a court to add new things to a desegregation order based on court precedence uh over the last number of years perfect thank you thank you chris thank you very much um i'm actually going to have you hold up there because i think uh i've got amanda rigsby um to think i'm gonna do the first slide and then i'm alternatively the district lines yes and you're

168going to sit back there okay so i also had asked we were looking we've had a lot of discussion and excuse me over the last couple of months of people talking about our district lines and where they live and how we have all these students who are just being born in asheville city limits and that they're just all going to come to our schools but i also wanted to make sure that people knew exactly where our district lines are what they do because i think that there's a lot of misconception out there and i will say this showed up on the agenda and started getting emails uh the board started getting emails from people asking if we could change our district line so this is gonna be a good opportunity to hear what we can

169and cannot do uh with our lines and and a little bit of a background on them as well so go ahead chris very good thank you so the asheville city school district lines are not the same as the boundaries of the asheville city municipal corporation so the boundaries of asheville city are not the same as the asheville city schools and i think everyone who lives in the area knows that because there are a significant number of bunking county schools that are within the city limits of asheville that are not part of your school district that is important and necessary for several reasons first of all when the asheville city school district was formed it was a city district it was a smaller district within a county so the district lines were actually drawn by a

170meets and bounds description and that does not change the other reason that's significant is because as you know you have a supplemental school tax the voters voted to tax themselves for there to be a higher quality of educational opportunities in the city of asheville through funding through a special tax so if you live within the asheville city school district you pay the asheville city school tax so the school district and the tax district are the same they do not grow as the city of asheville changes the district lines were set by statute they don't change one of the most curious events in the history of all this that i believe predates everyone in the room is when beaver lake community was formed in north asheville apparently the owners of the lots were able to choose

171which district they would be part of at the time so they were actually able to choose by lot whether they wanted to be in the county district or the city school district and pay the city school tax so i think a lot of you understand that was probably either an economic decision of the lot owner or maybe they had children and they preferred one school district over the other that has created significant confusion over the years the county worked very hard to designate which lots belong to which system that works all been done i believe it's on the discover buncombe website and some of the slides you'll see in other things but that decision was made so this happens a lot when someone buys a piece of property in that community and it also happens

172other places where people are purchasing property right up next to the asheville school city school district there could be confusion as to where that particular lot is assigned as far as school district county or city and over the years there have been numerous people especially in this beaver lake community who bought thinking they were purchasing a house in the asheville city school district when in fact they were purchasing a house in the buncombe county school district so then that leads to the next um statute which is 115 c 71 the only way to transfer contiguous property from one school district to another is for both boards to agree to transfer that lot and i have been working with both boards now well over 20 almost 25 years in my experience i have never seen either

173board but mostly the requests have gone to the county board be willing to give up part of its school district historically what the buncombe county schools have said to a lot owner is we will allow your child to transfer into the asheville city school district we will release your child from the buncombe county schools and allow your child to go to asheville city schools but we are not going to give up this piece of property to the asheville city schools and i know that can be very frustrating for some folks and i think the practical reason for that everyone in the room understands because where does that stop every it's money exactly uh that affects adm funding and other things but also where does that stop when you give up one piece of property now

174the piece of property next to it is available to be transferred and it's a domino effect and i'm not saying that the buncombe county schools never would approve that but i've never seen them approve that completely discretionary decision lawsuits don't apply here there's not some legal test it's completely within the discretion of the system being asked to give up that piece of property so that's kind of uh you know the bottom line as to why the district lines are the way they are and why folks have not been successfully able to get properties transferred into the school district so just out of curiosity when so we've received a number of emails about a certain community that has nothing the board has no control over extending our district line or anything like that if a person

175was wanting to to do um if a household or a person wanted to have their house paid the tax or they wanted to pay the tax they would have to petition the city the county goes to them it doesn't have anything to do with the district right again if a if a piece of property a tax parcel is in the bank county school district right now then the buncombe county school board would have to agree to release that property and you would have to agree to accept it the law donor cannot do anything unilaterally volunteering to pay the tax anything like that none of that is applicable it would have to be approved by both ports so it's not something for this board yeah but but noting that is there an exception for this to

176be corrected should these homeowners decide to band together and get a piece of local legislation passed through their local delegation that could supersede the entire dual school boards process as i like to say peyton the general assembly of north carolina is the end-all be-all of all decisions in this state so if there were to be some local act presumably the general assembly could make changes but again the details of that would matter uh you're a tax district you've got the dseg order there'd be a lot of issues that have to be looked at but as a general matter yes the legislature has ultimate power over school districts in north carolina my only reason for noting that is that is a direction that we could point those parents in as a possible manner of expedient recourse

177because i feel like that's probably their fastest yeah and typically homeowners have been asked to go to the buncombe county schools first obviously and not come to this board because if the buncombe county schools board is not willing to release a piece of property then there's obviously no reason for this board to make that consideration so following up on what peyton just said which is exactly what i was going to ask if there are a number of parents in a particular area who wish to become part of the asheville city school district rather than buncombe county they would first go to the county rather than us because we have no we have no jurisdiction so they would go to buncombe county they would request whatever and then buncombe county would then make that decision but

178not us that's correct that's correct yep and let me clarify one thing too that uh it has been more of an advantage than a disadvantage and i believe in the 20-something years that our law firms worked with you but if that were to happen if there would be a concentrated effort by a group of folks to actually have a area brought into the asheville city school district just so you all know we would recuse ourselves completely from that entire issue we would get a school attorney to work for you folks if you wanted one we'd get a school attorney to work with the buncombe county schools but that's an area we would have a conflict if there were to be that kind of effort i just want y'all to know that that would be something

179we would step out of again it's never been a legal issue to begin with because it's just a discretionary decision of the county school board but if there were to be an effort at that level we would certainly step aside and i see you have a graphic up there there's your patchwork quilt and this is where i'm going to turn it over to ms rigsby but uh there you go right there all this is available publicly on the buncombe county gis i believe and i'll turn it over to ms rigsby thank you thank you chris were there any other questions on the district on moore district okay perfect miss rigsby good morning i am they're gonna let me drive this they said today so i don't know uh this is just a uh outline of

180our district i think those of us um who know the asheville area the best way i can we don't really have boundaries but to give you an idea of where we go we go as far north as lake shore beaver lake area right up to the woodfin line elk mountain road new bridge area that gives you some direction north we go is uh all the way to the head of beaver dam elk mountain scenic highway then you come back this way we go as far west as sandhill and bear creek road that is as far west as we go and then shelburne road and then kenilworth area and then pretty much if you go into biltmore we don't cross over into biltmore that's if you want an idea of what it kind of where our

181limits are that that is where we are and that this is graphics a little hard to see but this gives you a little bit a bit of idea this is west this is out towards the inca far north is the north bunkelman irwin area and then the biltmore area is tc area and out 240 here's reynolds in our our district uh just so people know when you go through the tunnel here on the tunnel road you're in even if you live in kenilworth on that park you're in what district you are in the reynolds hall creek elementary reynolds district thank you uh this this map and it shows you asheville city schools in comparison to buncombe county schools we're the red dot right there in the middle this just gives you an idea so we

182really are as a district landlocked pretty much um in that in that respect with the district lines so in your packet i did give you all these maps i also gave you our um an extra set of maps that are no transport zones so what are no transport zones i think they're in there if not um they're here yes i did not put them in the presentation i'm saying what are they they're the areas that we do not transport students to certain schools we just didn't include them today that's uh but they were asked for so we just put them in the packet okay so the asheville city schools transportation department um we serve pk through 12 of course all of our ec or 504 students mckinney vento students we are transporting about nine of

183those at this point i mean kenny vento we do have a route to the buncombe county community high school in owen with a student we have midday ec internships those are not active right now of course because of covid that also includes work-study programs that happen during a normal school year all of our other eligible special programs of course are the forte programs summer enrichment we do summer feedings and we support other asheville city schools connected after school programs transportation offers synovia gps we have safety vision camera systems we added on the digital dispatch and in spring we will have here comes the bus app it will be we will start with a small group project timeline at this point will probably be a solid kickoff after we've gotten rid of the kinks maybe for

184august i think that's reasonable once here comes the bus here comes the bus uh is an app that parents will download to their phones or the students can download to their phones they use their power school number and it will tell them how far their bus is from their stock we decided um to push the timeline of that out a little bit just because we have been in such a situation where we've had to do so many dual runs and double the app will not work as effectively with all the additions that we've had and we've with loss of bus drivers we are working on updating our website we are comprised of a transportation fleet and finance coordinator myself and an admin and assistant in dispatch we have 29 drivers and 4 tsas this is

185our audit for this year that i included because it has a lot of information our earliest morning pickup is at 6 41 our latest afternoon drop off is at 4 35 we don't count that's not including traffic and weather and such we carry 1910 riders for a total of about 1400 miles and we have of course the 29 buses in our fleet this year we generated 420 000 based on our efficiency this was an increase of twenty nine thousand dollars um the total at the bottom is 417 904 we do owe we do have to pay for charter school students so they send a list and we have to go through that list and audit who's ours and who belongs to buncombe county and then we have to give back transportation money to charter schools

186so that was an increase to charter schools of about 1200 i think roughly this year does that fall into the line with i know george's said that we we give budget dollars to charter schools correct so does that fall in that same budget this is transportation money that comes out separately okay so we're giving charters we're working to give them yeah give them that money back so uh we did include this our fiscal year 10 through this year to show the improvements we have made in our department and the amount of money of course that could decrease depending on the number of riders next year we this is all state money we are almost fully funded the three people in our department by state money there are small percentages of local money that we do

187use that we have to use in order to work with white buses and and the fl the fleet that is local and that's in-state policy the activity buses yes okay and then here's just a salary and hr fax that you are welcome to look at i won't go over that but so when when you're doing your routes and everything i know you you presented last time that we've had to double up on routes and we're down drivers um the state's not coming and taking any of our buses or anything like that uh but uh how does that does that play into how much money we get um from the state in terms of like your your numbers i saw that your numbers have gone up but why have they gone up so just let me

188clear up some confusion that that was put out that i don't like we don't the state does not come in and repo anything so that's very misstated and i was bothered by that so i'm glad i had this opportunity um but the state can come in and say you're not using bus 17 you don't need bus 17. so we have to in turn give that back to buncombe county so we have to be very very creative so i'm going to use bus 17 for after school programs as long as i'm putting some miles on that and they see those miles when the fuel trucks roll in and they punch in and they say well you're rolling it you know four miles a week okay that's kind of how that works so we have to be

189very creative in our usage and that means schools have to be flexible and they're great about that so we've been really really fortunate but it's a lot of work it takes um a lot of thinking and a lot of planning and a lot of help from our administrators who are very good at supporting us but i don't know that i fully answered that question but efficiency is based off the number of students that ride the number of miles that we put on buses and of course the size of our fleet we could downsize our fleet um but we would like to keep it where it's at just because it helps in even though we're we do not tr buncombe county covers 660 square miles we are nowhere near that but we're very condensed and with

190a lot of traffic and so it's like covering those 660 rural square miles because we have to pack a lot in to a small area but we're dealing with garbage cans and city buses and and the asheville traffic and especially during tourism and if you get weather so we we have to be very efficient in how we run our routes and we try to be very timely although we have struggled this year and that's you know i'm being very transparent it is getting better so i do want to take this opportunity before i finish to thank the board for their help with our drivers in the incentives um i feel like that was a huge morale booster for them and they are very appreciative of that were you able to pick up any new tsa

191uh tsa people we had a tsa training and we have been we have been able to secure several people we've we've actually not struggled this week last week of course was you know we didn't have much school but this week we've had a lot of need and we've been able to feel that because of that extra 25 dollars that is huge to a lot of people and i think that sometimes we just need to stop and think and that i had to stop and think about that and so we're very appreciative of that thank you any questions for mr xp i know as a as a son of a ex-bus driver who uh drove through rain sleet snow and will not drive her car anywhere on a sunny day um i know the bus drivers

192work really hard shonda knows it um we all know how hard they work so thank you for what you and your staff do perfect next i have miss tanya prashay with an enrollment update good afternoon board members and dr friedman it was requested to give a enrollment update um so that's what i hope i am able to do for you today the things that were requested was the historical and current enrollment by school location uh of students leaving again wanted to see if the locations had changed new students and the district enrollment process currently this is our historical um and where we are uh in october when i gave this uh presentation we were at 4150 we have increased to so we are slowly but surely climbing which is a positive do we know are

193those students coming in from the county or those new people moving into the area what are we moving into the area and coming from the county and the students that are leaving us these numbers have not changed that much the locations is still going to the county they're returning to their home district or they're going to charter school and private is that for the year so far for the year yes so are the kids they're going to private schools and charter schools is that basically middle school children or is this everything that's across that's across the board everybody okay these are not broken down by like it's not a big population you know of high school this is just elementary through high school okay because historically we would lose kids at the middle school level

194and they would come back at the high school so i was just wondering okay the enrollment process as i introduced to the board um i have a fabulous team we looked at our board policies thank you for approving those and we made some slight changes to the enrollment process and we have this posted on our website for parents and we do have some other engagements that we've been invited to to get as many pre-k and other children into the district over the next week i am super super super proud of our new website parents had um gave us some feedback on how to make it user friendly and so this is our new website we have our current video of all of our schools we have our application the enrollment process and what that looks

195like down at the bottom for anybody that is coming from out of district we do not provide transportation the other two things that will be added to the website is all of the enrollment policies so parents will have access to those and our dcig order that will be added as well dylan can you get me back to my paw point thank you so short and sweet any questions i know that we're doing the tours uh there was one yesterday uh at the schools how are those going and how do we think the virtual ones have been going i guess that's for miss miss kane and you and me how are the open houses going uh with open enrollment coming up next week go to chris's mic i don't i don't care if you're on camera

196but go on go to chris's mic we had an open house last night with a great turnout um i was at claxton jones and dixon and we had a lot of people come and that was fantastic dylan hit the other two schools and got a lot of pictures so we're excited we have another open house next week 3 30 to 6 30 and it's a chance for prospective families who are new or transferring to come and check out the campuses perfect thank you sorry we had virtual open houses for the secondary schools um and so we do have recordings for most of those we had technical difficulties at actual middle school but we have also updated our school videos that are live on the enrollment website for this year as well awesome so that we

197had great turnout for all of those but there will be in-person tours at some point so all of our current asheville city schools rising sixth and rising ninth graders have toured four charter and private schools we're working on a date in february for an in-person tour if if that's not possible we'll try to schedule a virtual option um with our visitor and restrictions in the month of january and some inclement weather that did not happen yet wonderful any questions for mrs preshay thank you it's great to hear that our numbers are going up uh with enrollment and hopefully they will continue to rise as we work in the next school year thank you very much next i have a mental health update with ms kadatawin good afternoon everyone i was asked to give a quick

198update about yeah eat the mic i gotta pull it down okay there you go um about mental health so i want to focus on the mouss we currently have in regards to mental health and our newly established reset rooms so currently we have mousse with family preservation services and mayheck they are serving together 131 of our 4 000 plus students k-12 in a clinical capacity 68 of those students are being served on the elementary level and 63 at the secondary level i do want to let you all know that we only have two therapists from mayheck and as of yesterday we only have one from family preservations and we have two interns so they have open positions and are struggling just like we all are in regards to applicants and hiring and the interns can't

199do the in-depth clinical work that our students would need they're mostly there to like interns so we're working with three therapists for 4 000 plus students the developing mou's we have coming forth are with children first we have a couple of private practitioners who specialize in treatment different treatment modalities like art therapy and then we have next chapter counseling that we're looking to um possibly obtain a mou with our hope is that by adding additional mental health mousse we will have the resources to serve many more ashford city school students and families could have typically how long does it take to get an mou so um tracy jenkins has done a beautiful job she has really expedited this because we're in a critical situation so it doesn't take long for once tracy gets it and

200it goes to mr campbell and to you guys we can immediately start i think that process usually takes about three or four weeks so now i want to talk about our ashford city schools reset rooms reset recognize where what you are capable of engage support staff settle the nervous system establish goals and take action these are the things that we're trying to help our students own up to and recognize that they are capable of spending more time in their general classrooms the program description the asheville city schools cougar reset program is designed to address the emotional and behavioral priorities of our students grades k-12 who are experienced some discipline and mental health challenges in examining the suspension data for data from previous years there were a significant number of students whose behavioral and mental health

201supports were not successfully addressed which often resulted in office referrals modified school schedules suspensions and or expulsions the why from a racial equity lens the disparity between national and state data revealed that african american students are three to four times more likely to be suspended from for school misconduct than white students ashford city schools has been charged with the task of developing a plan to better support and positively address this issue hence our reset rooms our goals for 2022 and 2023 we will work to decrease the number of disciplinary infractions and increase mental health supports hold high expectations of students who utilize the reset room programs by holding support staff and students accountable as measured by an increase in the number of mental health assessments and referrals and increasing grades and attendance and a decrease

202in the disciplinary behavioral referrals work to decrease the disproportionate number of black students who are on modified days suspended or receiving numerous office referrals support teachers and staff in understanding the behavioral and emotional priorities of our students by offering mental health trainings and opportunities to spend some time in the reset rooms basically go in and do some hands-on training with their students in a therapeutic space right now our reset rooms are asheville middle school marford northstar paul fletcher claxton and lucy herron we are planning to hire six additional student support specialists and the priorities will be at ashford high in silsa jones elementary and isaac dixon we currently do not have resource rooms at those schools but we do have applicants for those six positions we're going to start interviewing next week resulting in the

203development of the reset program the district has a positive behavior support initiative that will determine the causes and circumstances in which students have been disproportionately underserved in the past we will work with schools in developing the reset room as a space that adequately addresses the mental and behavioral health of our students dr jean and other leadership staff have done a beautiful job of allowing us to implement this reset room pro program and i'm very passionate about it um we started at montford north star and we've seen so many gangs for all students but especially the students that struggle behaviorally and emotionally and we all know that behaviorally most most times that means our minority students so now our two most recent hires were for claxton elementary and monfort north star and luke is now our

204mental health liaison because we currently lost our mental health liaison as well so hopefully by the end of next month february we'll have reset rooms in all of the elementary schools and some support at the high school as well any questions what what kind of numbers have you seen i know i've read it i've seen it on the national news that just schools were having a lot of behavioral problems with covet coming back and things so has there been an uptick or in our district or is it um or has have you started seeing it to ebb some as we've gotten more into the year um behaviorally now we have we did see an uptick when we came from covet or still working through that trauma of having covet or them knowing someone that had

205covet but i think the reset rooms are designed to proact and not react so my hope is that because we know that they're very sensitive right now and the nervous systems are way out of whack that we offer a place where they can go instead of them being expelled and suspended so while we will see an increase in behaviors we're hoping to address that in a supportive way so that we can see a decrease in suspensions so are the the behaviors due to mental health reasons or are they behavioral because most of the time people confuse mental health with behavioral health and most of our black students don't have mental they're either environmental mental health issues that can be if their environment was different would be they wouldn't have the diagnosis or is it just

206the behavior are we seeing more of behavior it's behavior there's sustainability or their capacity to sit down in front of a classroom and listen to a teacher speak and talk for a certain amount of hours has decreased substantially so a lot of it is just wanting to get up and run and hug their classmates and things that are not allowed right now that were allowed before are considered behavior so it mostly and you can see from the numbers on the first slide most of what we see in the reset rooms are because of behaviors not mental health so mental health you have to have a diagnosis established six months and if a diagnosis if we see a behavior in a student for six months it becomes a symptom a symptom of a mental health diagnosis

207and then that's when we refer out to mayhem our family preservations so with them having a very small percentage of our students on their caseload but we see a high percentage of the students in a reset room it's because of behaviors not mental health and i guess the question for me would be do we have any breakdown because like before you even get to mental health and behavioral issues like sometimes cognitive differences are what is inspiring that and are we correctively correctly identifying that early enough in minority students before it's being seen as a behavioral issue rather than something that can be addressed through early interventions absolutely not and it's the gap issue here yeah i mean that's the story oh sorry um that's the gap issue here uh most behavior problems stem from not

208being able to either read well or not understanding the curriculum which is reading that's the problem starting pre-k here so that that's you can't delineate that as a separate item that is it most kids that have behavior issues if it's not a if it's not a diagnosed issue is because they don't know what they can't read i'm even thinking about my own children that bump into that behavior problem but because of this system they've had access to some of the cognitive supports and early interventions and that's that's going away and just wondering like is it that lack of identification that's really setting these students up for a lack of success before they ever enter the classroom on the first time and is there a way that we can identify that and not look at it

209like these children have behavioral issues for something that really at that point is beyond their control because of a lack of intervention and training i think it's a lack of relatable relationships with our children that cause that initially if they don't feel like they belong in a school setting or a school classroom or after school or any in their own homes if they don't feel like they belong you're going to see some behaviors they don't feel like they fit or belong you're going to see some behavior so i think with the lack of relationship building with our students that's what causes what we consider behaviors i think a lot of i agree with you that relationships are extremely important but i'm going to go back and say if you can't read that is going to

210cause a systemic problem throughout and and once kids get out of the third grade this is just gene i i think it's very difficult to get them on the reading path uh so we've really got to do and i think everybody has to do a better job in making sure that kids can read and that's the gap issue that we have here i mean i am hearing staff here i hear people in schools how did these kids get in this grade and they can't read well that is the question how do they get there and can't read uh but yeah and i hear that gene and i appreciate all of you you're talking about belonging i mean to me there's almost a chick in the egg what comes first the the the ability and desire

211to read or or feeling belonging in order to learn to read um so like how how are we as a district doing with with this idea of relationship building and belonging within our classrooms like like what where where do we stand there we've we just had a big presentation about letters and how we're gonna try to improve literacy but but how do we talk about that more holistic side of what it is to be an educator you know with the reset rooms what we've made it our business and we intentionally have a team of people that interview potential reset staff because it's very imperative that we have some lived experienced people in those roles so that they can build those relationships so i think we start there we really can't just put anyone in those

212positions and expect that our children are going to thrive it's our responsibility that they have the opportunity to learn discover and thrive i believe that's what we are that's what we say is asheville city schools district and if we are not intentional who who we put in those positions and sometimes to be frank it had those people some of those people need to look like us so that we are like dismantle some of those barriers and open up to them saying go listen to your teacher so they can teach you how to read so you're right as to what comes first the chicken or the the egg but in my personal opinion it starts with who you put in position to to run this such safe room so the students can't in fact feel safe

213enough to disclose whatever is bothering them so that they can clear their minds and be able to learn so we're doing okay we could do better so the reset room seems as if it puts the responsibility back on the student what are we doing to put the responsibility then back on the adults to help them through the process of what it is to build because they'll say oh i have a relationship with my students but do you have a true authentic positive relationship with your students do you have a authentic relationship with their parents and if not their parents then who is that person in their family that you can call when you know little such and such is in trouble do you have a relationship with anybody that you can text or call you

214know just any type of authentic true positive relationship that can help you reach that student because if their behavior is out of control you can forget teaching them how to read because they have to you have to have the behavior first so that they can sit and learn to read um so how are we working with the staff because that's i understand teaching the kids this coping skills and then also are we implementing those same things in our iss rooms so that they too like those the staff that we already have hired maybe they um train with the staff the support staff you have in the reset room so they learn how to also help implement um whatever curriculum or modality they're using in those rooms to give the kids in the iss rooms the

215tools they need to then be successful and not continuously being i know i asked a lot of things i'm sorry no but i want to say that's okay i want to say that's a great idea for us to team up with the iss teachers i hadn't even thought about that but i think that's a great idea i do want to say initially we only had five student support staff dr freeman has given us the flexibility to hire six more so with that being said our student support staff will be able to work with a student and then follow that student back into the classroom we're going over curriculum of restorative practices reconnect to resiliency and trauma-informed care so while my staff go back into the classroom they're not initially watching the student they're watching the

216reaction and the relationship and the responses from the teacher and the student our peers and the students and we give feedback at our student support staff meetings we can say what we saw and give a different approach maybe next time and we give feedback to the student i mean we give immediate feedback to the students so we do a lot of modeling of how to be trauma informed and how to reconnect and help our students be resilient so are we like reaching out to the community to find those because most of the people in mental health or behavioral health they aren't the relatable people from the communities that know the population of children we're talking about do we have anything in place to where we're reaching to some of those programs like that my daddy

217taught me that or chosen whoever it is so that they can come in and maybe support with some of the because if they support with the behaviors they can also help support with some of the academics during the day are we reaching out to those individuals to come and support and also model for those teachers who think they're doing a good job but a lot of times are triggering our students yes so another barrier dr freeman has dismantled in regards to student supports is he has allowed the parental consent for outside community people to come in and do more like the old school 101 support so if we have parental consent while an agency or a company is trying to establish an mou they are allowed to come in the classroom and really work with

218that student within the school school building so yes we have a few we have chosen we have um umoja we have a few people that have parental consent to come into the schools and work one-on-one while we establish an mou so thank you dr freeman but yes we're working on that too well i i just want to say too and this is unscientific uh covett has exacerbated behavior not only from children but adults i mean it's a very different world before covid um and i just want to say for teachers and i think relationships it's very hard to teach people how to build relationships right it just is it's it's a more of an art than a science but you know there i was in a classroom a few months ago where one kid opened

219their arms and knocked everything down in their path two kids would not follow any directions and then you had other childlike behaviors i think it was a third grade and this teacher was doing everything she could do to teach to maintain that behavior and there was a one-on-one with this uh child um it's hard let me tell you i mean we're up here talking about all this theoretical and philosophical how we when you're trying to teach kids how to read or how to read better and you've got one that's knocking down everything you've got two that's not listen and then you got the rest of them doing other i i just thought this woman deserved a nobel peace prize because i don't know how and it was loving i mean hug the kid that knocked

220down everything i don't think i could have hugged that child at that time uh just embraced everybody i thought this this woman is incredible this is a hard job it's hard when you have these behavior issues um it's just hard i just don't want anybody to think most teachers aren't and i don't think you think that but i don't want it to be thought out there that's listening that it's you know if you do this this and this everything works out it doesn't and these teachers are doing an incredible job and they're taking a lot of stuff that i never had to take when i was a teacher um so let me just kudos to the staff and we do need to get better and i you know i thank your staff kadada for everything

221they're doing but this is hard this coveted stuff is hard you know just keep pull your mask up and most kids are doing a great job but our teachers are doing hard work and i we just can't ever that 87 hours for letters letters is wonderful that's a lot of hours and i hope somebody complains to the state about it big time i was thinking the same thing when she was i was like those teachers i mean it's fabulous but 87 hours they're not thinking about what people are going through during this covet time but i'm thinking about his personal time and that's why i'm wondering why our teachers are working hard and our ais our ias are working hard and our tas are working hard and our principals are working hard uh it's just

222it's hard out there i'm just gonna tell you it's tough it's a collective effort and it also goes back to our community as well because i know thinking back to when i grew up in asheville we actually had things to do if you look in asheville and i'm not talking about a program that's part of the problem is we want to program everybody to death they don't have things to do they don't have a skating rink here you don't have a dave and buster's a topgolf you don't have the things that other communities have they don't have really even a community center with game rooms that they can just go and be their free authentic selves anymore so a lot of that is why the behaviors are showing up at school because they don't have

223an outlet to get that out even before covet that's why we were seeing the behaviors but i think that in itself is a community issue that people have to continue to take to um sit the city and the county because we need we have all these tourist things coming to asheville well what we can't take our kids up on the mountain to go hiking or to the arts you know shows all the time they actually need things that they can go do that are fun and cost effective for the average family you know there was a thank you for that sean there was there was a idea floated out there a few years ago that a children's master plan for the city um and i'd love for i mean we're central to that right but

224the communities as well like to keep pushing for yeah and faster playing for children in this in this city and i know they do have deborah is working on the youth plan i don't know if it includes what i just said in terms of that i think people need to gear more away from the programming the kids and allow them to be kids and think of things and we're gonna have to actually train the kids to go back to those spaces like the community centers if they do open those back up for um for the community we have to train them to go back because they've not had it in so long it doesn't matter if you just open the doors they're not used to going there so they're not going to show up and

225i think too it's important to note that like as someone that's grown up in asheville we've seen a continued divestment on both local government levels of the types of infrastructure that you're talking about and i think right now when we're looking at still seeing record-breaking tourism revenues we really need to have a discussion about some of that money coming back to invest in the infrastructure of the next generation of australians which is children not things for people coming from outside the community right there's a lot of money that could be directed toward that purpose i was going to say on top of that you know you've got like when you talk about this in disinvestment you've also got a um court case that has gone through the schools for 25 years the android plan i

226mean you've got general assembly refusing to release funds for more funding for our schools and specifically for students that um for our underserved students and we're talking about billions of dollars across the state that the state refuses to release that can also be put toward great use for our students and our staff here um i just want to say kadata also has a new title it's called grandma thank you all right any other questions for miss winn thank you so much for the update i'm looking forward to hearing about the reset rooms more as we go through the rest of the school year and hopefully we won't have to use them a whole lot there we go thank you thank you all right can i have a motion for us to move into closed session

227do i have a second second all in favor aye any opposed all right yeah all right we are back out of close session and before um i i forgot to get uh mr campbell to do his general statute so i'm going to ask him to do that now so that it's actually on the record so mr chairman for the record the motion to go into closed session was pursued to gs 143-318-1181 to discuss confidential personnel headers pursuant to 1563 19 through 321 and under subsection 83 to discuss matters covered by the attorney-client privilege perfect thank you we did all that and now we're back and i'm going to turn the floor over to miss april dockery with our coveted update good afternoon chairman carter board members superintendent freeman thank you for this opportunity to give

228you a quick covet update in our safety protocols in asheville city schools as you know our north carolina public health toolkit is our leading guidance document it was last updated on january the 10th prior to that it was updated on december 30th this is the dashboard that was published last night for our families and staff i just want to remind everyone that the column of the number of students excluded is for that week each number represents a individual child that was excluded from school due to either a positive diagnosis exposures to someone who was positive of coba 19 possible cova 19 symptoms or awaiting test results we are pleased that this number is starting to decline as you know when we first returned from the holiday break it was skyrocketing our positive numbers and our

229exclusion numbers were incredibly high but we are starting to slowly see a decline this is the number of positive cases that we've had confirmed since the beginning of school as of a total we've had 406 since august these are lab confirmed positive which mean they were either given at a doctor's office a laboratory or at one of the asheville city schools campuses it is often confusing because a lot of people hear about a home test positive and they get confused with those numbers we are unable to accept them we have to operate under lab confirmed positives can i answer any questions for the board before i go further okay i do want to give you a quick update when we returned from our holiday break on january the 3rd we were operating under the procedure

230that a individual who attested positive was originally quarantined for or in isolation for 10 days the cdc changed that guidance over the winter break and we reduced that down to five days as long as they are correctly wearing face coverings we also reduce the number of days for non-vaccinated individuals who are deemed close contact from 14 days to five days to as little as five days again as long as we are ensuring that face coverings are worn properly which as a reminder to the board all of our schools and students and staff have universal face coverings as a mandate and i know this has fell into the behavioral issue talk a little bit ago but how are we doing with that across our campuses there are a handful of students who and staff who sometimes

231struggle with this and we support them individually and i invite the board teachers staff parents to please let us know if we can provide more support but our cova coordinators at each level work closely with the administration at the schools and continue to provide support we have had some cases where we had to keep a small amount of people out the entire 10 10 days because it was just too difficult for them thank you the toolkit was updated again on january the 10th there are no big changes to the guidance for individuals who test positive for coven 19 or who have symptoms of covenanting at this time we do anticipate changes from the cdc soon universal face coverings for all staff and students is still recommended by the toolkit the most significant changes are for

232mass exposures they now include extracurricular activities and athletics this this is a new piece and the individuals with an unmasked exposure at school or community exposure can continue to attend school if they're asymptomatic and they have worn their mask we however have decided that we are going to put a pause on that and wait for our community transmission rates to decrease before we not ask students and staff to stay home if they're unvaccinated and exposed to a known case of coping 19. so in this particular situation we are going to be just a little bit stricter in our protocols until our community transmission rates decline do we have a number that we wanted to decline to no i do not have a number i'm sorry we feel like we feel like it's too much for

233our staff and our families coming back from christmas or from winter break to jump from the 10 days to the 5 to now say that if you're asymptomatic you can come to school with our community transmission rates so high just as high as they are right now we want to start seeing a decline and collect a little bit more internal data we haven't had an opportunity to do that with weather and remote days that we've had and we want to see our own school data to make sure that we're providing the safest environment for our staff and students so we are asking the board support we will update you it's a week-to-week day-to-day monitoring okay but i was just i'm just curious like if we get down to 10 community transmission i'm not sure what

234the transmission rate is i saw it but i can't remember what it is it's probably in the 20s right now it is it is incredibly high what we're paying the most attention to is the hospitalization and the number of pediatric cases right so we are still offering rapid tests for our students and staff who are symptomatic but we are now also able to offer tests to anyone who has been deemed a close contact um on day five of their last known contact which is really amazing and we're so fortunate to be able to do that we this is something we just have been able to implement i mean we are still recommending that the school board support us in universal face coverings for all staff and students again these new protocols that are coming from

235the toolkit heavily rely on proper wearing of face coverings do you have any questions for me i guess one question i have is um are is there any talk of us getting uh the m90 n95 or kn95s or anything like that from the state or from the fed since those are supposed to be better quality masks we have this morning secured in 95 mass for our staff we placed the order actually before winter break but we i received the shipment while i was in this meeting this morning oh perfect so we will get those out to our staff monday morning any other any questions april do you know um what other districts across the region or across the state like what their numbers are compared to ours no sir i've been hyper focused on our

236school system yep well i appreciate what you're doing thank you well thank you for all your hard work i know the individuals at the different schools what do you call them again copic coordinators there we go sorry cova coordinators are doing an amazing job as well so you know just looking at the numbers across the state and what i've seen on you know just looking on different websites um you're doing a fantastic job so thank you to you and the staff yes thank you to our staff and families who are working so hard with us perfect thank you all right next i have miss georgia harvey she's gonna give us a finance update okay the um agenda mentioned esser george recruitment pull that mic down i know you're tall but april's a little bit taller

237than you are okay the agenda says esser recruitment bonuses we are not prepared at this time we're still working with dpi and that's for funds and availability for recruitment but i do have an update on our esser allotments and where we're at i'm not going to read each one of them off the first page though this deadline is the 22nd of september and we are um have either spent or encumbered which means it is uh in the process being spent except for the bottom two and those are contracted services we're still working with that department on those when you say contracted services so the mental social um well well that's not that's personal what contract of services would be the supplemental instruction guidance nurses has to be an outside agency esr ii is a review

238of the ones that we have been allotted and um again the contracted services it's one that we're uh having a little difficulty with uh this deadline for this group is september 30th twenty three uh the common competency based assessment the very last one that is planned uh i talked with sarah kane and uh the sixteen thousand is going to go toward us star assessments for this summer okay georgia can you go back one to um i meant to ask there's 354 dollars left for digital curriculum yes we purchased what we um we purchased that and it was very specific what we could purchase okay so there we'll have to refund that part um like on the second page the 1.19 cents that'll revert back to dpi and then sr3 uh the deadline for spending is

239september 30th 2024 um and everything except the 1000 in the homeless one budget has been planned or income has been encumbered what is homeless well what is arp homeless i have to refer to sarah kane to give you specifics as part of covid they gave an additional grant for our homeless program our mckinney-vento students were able to use that for a student support specialist this year who's actually working much more closely with our homeless students to access community resources academic resources at school she's been really helpful so it was something that came through coveted funding but specifically earmarked to help support our homeless students okay so there's a thousand left in there that we may be able to find something has not been encumbered but i'm i'm sure they will spend it okay that's all

240i had on esser georgia um for the first round the ones that the deadline is this year once those once they once this is done for the next school year are we because those funds are gone and spent are we losing any personnel any services that won't that we don't have other ways to pay for from those esser and eer funds so i have to ask dr dickerson to correct me if i'm wrong but those individuals hired with esser funds are well aware that they are that that is a limited amount of time that we have those funds is that correct any other questions for georgia or miss kane thank you for uh keeping us up to date on these now do we have i know this is a long stretch a long shot but

241sr4 have we heard anything yet we have not okay yeah sure yeah okay um oh yes i'm sorry child nutrition update yes states could not be here today um she gave you some information and i'm just going to summarize it the child nutrition department for asheville city schools has not been self-sustaining for at least the last five years our local general fund has had to supplement to be able to balance their budget and due to increasing cost of food supplies and salaries it's more and more difficult to financially to become financially sustainable we have been very fortunate these last two years that we have been able to feed our students for free of course we are sure that that will not continue throughout the ages so our option is to obtain services from a food

242service management company we are looking to enhance to use a food service company to be able to enhance meal offerings service to our stakeholders and eliminate our financial deficit in that area in other words we will not have to use general fund money to support the child nutrition program we have met with ncdpi linda harvey who was who's the director of school nutrition and she has given us direction on proceeding with a rfp for app for a food service management company and it is a very long and detailed process we just want to make sure that the board is in agreement that we go in this direction most importantly though none of our employees will be losing their jobs that's exactly right no current school nutrition staff will lose their job with asheville city schools

243if they choose to move to the food service company then that would be their choice but we have no intent of not continuing to keep those employees on our payroll so i think james gave you the name of a group that we met at a conference do we have anyone in particular in mind for taking if we go this way for taking over this service we cannot show favoritism it's got to be published anyone that is interested must uh completely advertised complete the rfp okay and if they meet our qualifications then then we will eliminate those that meet their qualifications and start the process of um analyzing okay thank you but there are groups in the state that there are other systems in the state that utilize the same type of yes there are school

244systems our size and larger that utilize food service management companies very successfully even some up to um 25-30 years so mr chairman the burke county schools have used this contracted services for years it has been incredibly successful resulting in significant revenues that are pumped back into the child nutrition program every year so no money is needed from the general fund whatsoever and money is actually put back in these companies obviously have access to huge contracts for the purchase of food they hire chefs who actually will take the usda requirements of what we can and can't put into a school lunch and turn it into something incredibly tasty it has been i cannot tell you how successful it's been for that particular client and in their process as ms harvey says you have to put it

245out for a competitive bid the board actually had the groups come present to the board um and that included them presenting their rfp and bringing food to show what they could do so it is a process the board would want to be intimately involved in but it has been financially very successful and ms harvey how much do we spend right now out of local for child nutrition we have averaged between two and four hundred thousand a year in the past years not to include you know that does not include anything that our maintenance and uh incidental cost of maintenance what do most school districts spend for child nutrition what's the average um are they from the general fund yeah from the local funds none yeah they usually make their own money right yes they do

246well yeah and we are we asheville city schools is one of the very few in the last two years that have had to contribute general fund because of the um lack of restrictions for school nutrition to feed because of coven in other words many other leas have made money i got you and just if if we decide to advertise and engage this rfp process um we can disengage at any time we can say this doesn't meet our requirements we didn't get anything that just just i'm sorry like if we go through this rfp process we get a bunch of um rfps returned we can say this is not what we were looking for and pull back and continue business as normal correct yes i'm assuming you don't know this but i would love to know

247like what's in that rfp like what do we do what what are our priorities that kind of thing when we release it that's a great question the rfp is we have a directive from dpi and before we actually advertise they have to approve it so it's a it's basically a fill in the blank we do have some leeway to add things but we cannot take away required they provide us we can add and we can possibly add additions to it but they're going to edit it it's very prescriptive for example the opportunity to continue to keep our employees as our employees that's an option in the rfp all right any other questions thank you for bringing this i know um just want people to make sure that they understand that we're not doing away with

248our child nutrition department we're not firing anyone we're not getting rid of people but we are looking at ways to enhance it and and make it better you know i know some people sit in a room remember when asheville high and asheville junior high had an amazing salad bar and a baked potato bar that you'd kill for so those were the days um and we'd like to get those days back because but also this is another time to tell people and remind people that are listening we get title one funding when you fill out your free and reduced lunch form even if you don't qualify for free and reduced lunch fill out the form this is you people always ask how can i get back to the school this is a great way of doing

249it if you fill out your your free and reduced lunch form that that comes back to us it and it helps with our title one dollars so that's my title one plug for the day um one second george i had a question about the esser funds how many employees have we hired with the additional esther funds have that we've gotten and will we be able to retain those employees once the esser funds are gone considering our budget deficits i cannot give you an exact number i wasn't prepared for that but again those individuals that we are have hired with the esser funds they understand through hr that that that their employment is as good as we are funded can you have that next month could you get that in conjunction with hr for next month

250yes thank you thank you all right next i have miss christy coats with the maintenance update good afternoon before you you have a capital projects updates that's in your packet we're just moving along trying to get a lot of our capital needs completed if you have any questions for me i can help answer those now do you have them you don't have them okay so i'm screaming i'm gonna go ahead and let you look them then i'm sorry about that um so here are the ones we're working on at high you'll notice asheville high is one of our largest um we have a lot of projects going on over there um and in addition to the ones that were budgeted we have found some things that we will need to do also i know you

251don't like hearing that sorry how goes the battle with the groundhogs huh how goes the battle with the groundhogs i know that we've got a lot of drainage issues and sinkholes stuff and everything like that we have we have um we're working on that okay um one of the things i do want to say about the asheville high campus we have a lot of questions about the heat and the air please bear with us that that is a controls issue and we have been working diligently on that um with the company um we're having trouble getting the heat some of the heat to turn off but we are working on that please know that there i'm just going to kind of let you guys look through this please ask me questions if you have any

252go back to north star for a minute is that the wall is that the wall i'm sorry the windows at north star okay uh where are we with the wall construct i saw that they blocked off the street now and they're starting to do stuff with a backhoe but where how are we going with that is that on target we're on target so really we're not on target we wanted to start this way earlier but you know as you all know in construction right now you know they're having coveted issues as we are with employment so we also had the snow yes we did and which has caused some delays in building ge et cetera et cetera so that's some of the problems yes right now with the montreal wall they're trying to get the

253rocks taken off so that they can start to rebuild christy got any issues with um dramatic expense increases because of inflation or because of material increase in pricing yeah i'm sorry i can't hear you yeah um we the things that we already have in progress and have a purchase order in place um the answer is no they can't really increase at all now yes we have seen some injuries like um for instance north slope wall at asheville high school which is where the sinkhole is once that goes out for bid we believe we will see an increase in construction cost on that because it is finished with design now it's in the city permitting i see some of the things say hvac were sums in progress and some aren't do we still have esr funds

254available to tap into for hvac work so we just applied for 14 error handler units for asheville high schools attic that are that need to be replaced and also a gas bowler or a hall fletcher we that it's in design so we won't know anything until we get the drawings and we submit them to the state and then they say if they're going to approve that or not okay but who pays for that i'm sorry who pays for that christie funds okay the design we will pay for just wanted to make sure yeah okay thank you that's all right all right any other any questions we know that this is a a tough tough big task to tackle so thank you for everything that you're doing with this um i do want to say this

255is not just me this is a team the guys are amazing they work really hard and we're coming together as a team and it's been wonderful wonderful thank you so much i'm sorry one more quick thing i'm sorry to put one more thing on your plate but um thinking about the december meeting i think where you showed us that spreadsheet of everything and priority critical needs yeah critical please i'd love to see this information next time you're sharing on that so we can see what like we can start to check off yes this has been done this has been done does that make sense we can do that okay uh the only thing that will that will be different is the things that we've had to add in sure yeah and i can i can

256do that you want that for a win well whenever the next time you present i mean you know it's just that that's helpful for me to see like what we're tackling and what we're still doing thank you all right and no other issues have popped up no we haven't had any other significant issues pop up or anything uh we have had a few yes okay well you're addressing them as we go okay well thank you keeps us on top of everything all right [Music] next i have an it update with uh mr matt whiteside i really gotta get my eyes checked well good afternoon board good to see everybody nice to see everybody in face to face it's been a little while i have prepared an i.t update it's somewhat general and high level if

257there's anything specific you would like to know more about i'd be happy to get that for you our main priority areas providing training for our staff making sure they're growing making sure our students have relevant and engaging instruction because of the way technology is used using our technology systems and devices efficiently and effectively and making sure we are tending to privacy and security first i'd like to talk about improving teaching and outcomes for our students okay this all comes down to our digital lead teachers these are staff members that have at one point in their lives been teachers and they have specialized in coaching other teachers in using technology to improve practice right so they're teaching coaches that have a particular tool chest of technology without these folks a lot of our efforts in technology

258would not go as far this graphic is meant to illustrate how we set a foundation with the resources we provide and that's anything from the infrastructure in the wall and in the ceilings and the closets the devices then we next step up we train people and how to use that equipment and those resources and you can make an analogy here to say a hammer right first you buy the hammer then you show somebody how to bang a nail but that doesn't mean they're a carpenter right that final piece of the pyramid there is you coach somebody and how to use the tools well so they can build something beautiful like a kid who's really successful okay again that's our digital lead teachers and they probably support training and coaching that support might look like anything

259from making sure the one-to-one program is going smoothly and all the students have devices that might look like making sure that the staff know how to put in a help ticket and get their issues resolved right training is going to be where to click when to click which resource to use where those resources are located coaching then becomes how to teach better because you have access to all these great resources i'm not going to read these slides to you i know you have them available i'll talk about the budget and the resources that we do have now the staff we're working with we've got nine technicians four technology assistants a student information coordinator six digital lead teachers and ten media coordinators we do a lot of good work with limited personnel i looked at the

260budget of the last four years i'm gonna give you a summary um as you can see the oranges slot or slice there from 2019-20 that's when kovit first presented and things changed quite a bit and you'll see that reflected in the budget another trend i'll point out from the top level here is prices are going up and we're using more technology so we're going to see over time that bar is going to go up breaking it down by category the capital expense is about half of the i.t budget and that's where we get student devices staff devices servers all the hardware operational expenses are licensing and the smaller bits of equipment and that we'll talk about each of these categories across the next slides operational this is our licensing our software we saw a large

261spike in 2021 as we move to remote teaching we need to buy more services to make that available more small bits and pieces to help the teachers out with teaching from home or chargers for the kids laptops at home all kind of little expenses came up in addition in that school year we spent 135 000 on hotspots for student connectivity and thank you to the board's advocacy and the superintendent in particular we don't have to do that anymore because of the housing authority partnership and the free wi-fi we put in the housing authority so that's a not only a savings to us but that's a boon to those families who now have connectivity at no cost matt yes sir did we was there are there any funds available um again go back to esser or

262federal funds that are available to help with some of the smaller items or like if we have to oh absolutely georgia has been wonderful in any technology expense we've collaborated to find you know cares act paid for quite a few things and esro moving forward is paying for quite a few technology both software and hardware needs absolutely yeah this 135 if i remember correctly all of this was paid through cares if i'm not mistaken um but i did you know add to the i.t spend if you will capital expense again that's our hardware one thing that i'd like to point out is in the past there were certain categories of staff member we did not provide a laptop for we can't get away with that anymore our instructional assistants are taking notes in the data

263systems using laptops right they pretty much all of our staff are now knowledge workers if you'll think about it that way and we need to provide a device that comes down to increased cost of both licensing and just buying the devices uh the remote learning due to cova taught us that we can't get away with buying a cheap low-powered device so we're seeing more devices and more expensive devices it's just the nature of the game these days our students were one to one kindergarten first grade might use an ipad might use a chromebook we're able to refresh student devices at a pretty good rate of about four years and we cycle down the older devices to the younger students we currently have about 9 000 devices but that includes roughly 2 000 that are really

264about six years old and we're just keeping them around in case we have to go remote and need extras look forward to recycling those soon so when you recycle those i mean do we get like refunds back or anything so it depends um at the what the market is doing at the time occasionally we have ability to sell an old student laptop for in the neighborhood of 30 bucks it is and actually that's something i need to work with georgia on to to do that legally we haven't had great success because you use gov deals and a pallet of devices will go for a dollar it's not worth our effort but what we have frequently done in the past is we use an electronics recycler that will give us a certain value for a hard

265drive or a working screen or working card keyboard and so then they'll take all of our electronic waste and give us a small check which is a positive because we don't have to pay for the recycling um i wanted to mention network security this is a big topic these days and what we have done there to make sure we're not victims of malware or ransomware which is shut down some school districts in north carolina and we've implemented two step-off two-step authentication we have a phishing awareness program called no before that i know we've emailed about in the past with some of the board members we're using more restrictive and more careful identity and access management and that's where we have single sign-on for a lot of our big services i'm using classlink or google which

266means that i can disable an account in one place and all of the other services stop working it's a big security concern we have a cyber hygiene assessment from mcnc a couple months ago that we are working through the results of we have a quarterly edge guard vulnerability probe that we get results from and take action and we are moving to a new backup system that will provide what they call air gap immutable backup so it's going to help with our cyber insurance and also make sure that if we are infected with malware our backups are on a separate network and won't be impacted so if we had to do a bare metal restore we could another item in the capital area is classroom audio visual i'm bringing this one up because we're going to

267see some activity here in the next several months when we built asheville middle and dixon they got brand new systems our other schools are kind of lagging behind so we're looking at using some esser dollars to refresh the av in our other schools and what we're talking about is predominantly large touchscreen tvs on the wall that help the teachers teach in a more engaging fashion campus security is a significant slice of the it portfolio what we talking about here are security cameras and door controls and guest campus guest access the trends i see there are we're going to continue to add cameras but i think it's going to slow down a little bit but we're going to add badge access door controls at a very fast rate over the next several years the trends in

268schools now are for every exterior and interior door on the campus to you know have a swipe access you can then track where everybody is you can say who can get where when and you don't have to re-key the campus you can shut down access when you want to that is going to be a significant i.t workload increase as that happens and we'll partner with the maintenance folks to make that a reality we've doubled the number of cameras in four years we have more than tripled the number of controlled doors in the last four years it's going fast printing that became an i.t responsibility a couple years ago i bring that up to let the board know that we have implemented some new printing strategies that are going to save us money and paper and

269as we move forward i anticipate we're going to reduce the total number of printers in the district getting away with the more expensive desktop printers that some teachers really love and you may get some friendly emails about that when we get to the point of removing those so what's next with it a few things that i see on the horizon that i thought it you might want to know are coming it already talked about more campus security um you know we also have an opportunity to use some vape monitors for our bathrooms that's becoming an issue and artificial intelligence looking at our cameras right now our camera footage is typically used to identify who threw the first punch right um but there are some things you can do with cameras to say if after this

270time of night somebody crosses this line in the camera frame an alert goes off or siren sounds or things happen um they are some schools that are experimenting with facial recognition and their cameras and making sure if a unregistered face is detected alarms go off so i think this is an area to watch and see how we can leverage our camera system to be a little bit more proactive now classroom av we talked about that a little bit but another trend that we haven't really done a lot of thinking about in our district but is probably going to come to us before long is cameras in every classroom and a microphone in every classroom teacher wearing a microphone around their neck right so that the students in the classroom get amplified voice from the teacher

271that's going to help with your you know teaching but also so that it's a safety you know we can get that footage and see what's happening in the classroom principals can quickly check in on a lot of classrooms make sure things are going well and it's a professional development tool that those teachers that are doing the great things you don't always do the great thing when the camera's there but it happens so we can capture that and share with other teachers an interesting benefit we already have districts in north carolina that are putting cameras in every single classroom esports we've got a burgeoning esport team at the high school it's really more of a club but over 20 million dollars in college scholarships went to esports players right this is an expensive endeavor endeavor it's

272not the year for it but down the road we need to look at a real esports team i think in our in our district these guys are making bank playing games it's great yeah i just don't get that one but okay you know these kids today augmented reality virtual reality content creation for our students in the virtual sphere is something that we're not doing a lot with but that's where a lot of activity is going to be happening in their future right that's where jobs are going to be and we need to go ahead and help them prepare for that unified communication we we have a million ways for the district the principal the teacher to contact our families it can be a little bit overwhelming i can see us bringing in a unified platform

273so everybody knows the one channel to listen to that's what i have for you today if there's any questions i'll be happy to answer any questions for matt matt um going back to the digital league teachers um my tell me if i'm wrong are they are most dlts paid out of esser no okay we have two open positions that we will pay out of esther if we can find somebody to take positions okay good i'm glad you i appreciate you clarifying that yeah anything else how are you set oh look well our infrastructure how is our how are our servers how is everything or are we looking to need to upgrade in a couple of years or are we good to go so that's something we need to plan for right a lot of that

274infrastructure is funded through what's called e-rate category two and there's a five-year funding cycle with that with e-rate uh we are in year two of the current year cycle or the current cycle there's 750 000 available to us in this cycle that we haven't touched yet because next year i see a big project where we have what's called a core switch and wireless controller we're going to need to change right they're due for refresh that's probably going to cost the neighborhood of 300 000 so i'm just kind of waiting till we have those numbers in place before we spend any of that money um so we'll be able to do that using e-rate no cost to the district and then we'll see what comes next with that budget we'll probably need to look at our

275firewall and perhaps towards the end of that five-year cycle start replacing some of our wireless access points right now we have what's called 802.11 ac which can push a whole lot of data through the air and i think we're in good in good shape any other questions for matt thank you for this it's been a while since we've heard from you thank you for the opportunity glad to hear all the cool things you have coming up all right next do we have a late start late start work update with lara parks afternoon members of the board and dr freeman i'm going to give you guys a quick update on our late start at our secondary schools um just a quick overview this year we scheduled in 12 2-hour delays for our middle and high school

276students they're approximately every two weeks the time is used for collaborative planning for our teachers and they are meeting in both content alike so science social studies math groups and also grade level planning teams in across content our support staff ec counseling media tech dlts that matt just mentioned and administrators are pushing in with teams and in some schools the configuration might change from one late start to another depending on the needs and the week some of our district planning documents this is um just a quick snapshot of a plc core problem solving template that is new for the district this year it is k-12 so it is a huge part of our data and analysis work this year we also have a middle school curriculum hub where all of our pacing guides and resources

277live that our middle school teachers are using at asheville high school the teams are meeting and content alike teams so they're meeting in a consistent team every late start time so for example english two chemistry or math 1 and they are doing collaborative planning and data analysis this is the first year that asheville high school has had their current consistent teaming configurations and dedicated plc time and expectations i can't stress enough how much this has been a huge win for the high school this year and there is a lot of positive feedback that i'll share with you guys in a little bit from our teachers there who really feel like this is the first time they've had dedicated time to collaborate with their peers to talk about instruction this is an example of their agenda

278so you can see they are either working on the planning classroom instruction time so kind of that proactive side of things or doing reflection of what they have done and doing data analysis and looking at core instruction for all students but also supports for individual students as well at silsa they are alternating between core content teams and um grade level teams so because they have one teacher in each area um when they meet in court content teams it's more for vertical alignment between the grade levels rather than all of the math 1 teachers for example this is an example of some of the questions when they meet in vertical alignment on wednesday this week we had a late start and it's also they had their math and science teachers meeting together in their english and

279social studies teachers meeting together to do vertical alignment across grade levels but also across contents at asheville middle school they are primarily in cross content grade level teams they have plc time weekly where they're meeting specifically for like sixth grade ela meets together already so they've done a little bit of a different teaming structure with ela science and social studies in a group separated by grade level and then all of their math teachers together for vertical alignment which is not something they were able to schedule previously they've done planning for both academic and behavioral support during this time and this past wednesday we actually combined asheville middle school and montford teachers and district-wide plc during this time and had a lot of success with that as well and a lot of teachers that would like

280to continue that model moving forward here's an example this is a snapshot from that core the our district core analysis template this is from a 6th grade ela team at asheville middle school so you can see they're really doing a deep dive into standards looking at mastery and then later in the template they look at the specific data for students and then make an instructional plan for students based on the data at montford they are alternating between core content teams again that's going to be more vertical alignment because they do have one teacher per grade level in each content area and grade level teams they are also doing student support teams with their administration and student services staff their counselor and social worker during this time so that they can have some extended student problem

281solving time during the late start they have an mtss workspace i'll just show you this where they have all of their different teaming configurations and documentation on a google site laura i had to stop you for a second with um since mensa and the middle school are meeting together the silsa and the high school ever meet together so this was the first late start this wednesday that we combined the two middle schools we have talked about and looked at with the two high schools potentially combining there as well it is a little bit trickier because they're on asheville high is primarily a semester schedule and still says year long is one of the differences there and because asheville high school is really just getting going with their plc model whereas our middle schools were a

282little bit further along but that is something that we have talked about as well as a need thank you so this is an example this is from an ela meeting that happened in october and you can see they had their ela teachers from all grade level but also ec staff aig staff planning together as well and did pacing together and talked about consistent practices across grade levels in ela so some forward planning these are some some quotes from staff members like i said they found this time very valuable developing common practices compiling resources pacing and prioritizing standards they're really excited to support each other in a new way in these plc models so again a lot of these structures are are team meetings that haven't been able to happen before just because of the time

283and schedules and um they really appreciate the time and just have been very appreciative of the board support with the calendar this year and so i'm planning um for next school year just some things for you guys to consider um i know we talked about the calendar a little bit earlier with the letters training that will be coming from the state level this planning time has been instrumental for our secondary teams as well there are some teams that need additional support and direction both at the district and school level administration and so we have been pushing in and supporting teams i've been joining teams every week and we have other district staff who have been as well as well as our school administration next year we're going to have a greater need for time for

284our teachers to collaborate either in plcs or pd work and so that'll be something that we will be working with the needs of both elementary and secondary when we bring a calendar proposal to you guys and we have representatives on our calendar committee from all different stakeholder groups to really try to build the best calendar we know not there's not a calendar that will make everyone happy or meet all the needs um and we do have a number of constraints from the state level um i will let you guys know we do not have a calendar waiver for next year so if we can start thinking about that as well it means some some more limitations on our days next year and one of the primary challenges that i know you all have heard about

285is with our elementary and secondary schools running on different start times we've had challenges specifically with buses so we have had central office staff pushing into our elementary schools in the times that our elementary staff members have to leave to run their bus routes and so that has been we're not ever able to cover all of the staff members we're getting most of them covered on our late start days but i think when we look at the calendar next year that'll be something that we'll also be hoping to address as well would there be any possibility of doing or i don't know if they wanted a late start for the elementary level so there are three big considerations we're looking at within the calendar constraints next year in order to get this time one option

286would be to do a late start for everyone and to look at how do we do that within our instructional hour requirements the other option would be the flip side of doing more frequent early releases and what that might look like and then more frequent work days and so all of those have a different number of hours attached to them and a different frequency that we could do them so but i think we are probably going to be looking at trying to have the entire district on a similar schedule based on the needs and when would you have the i know this is a little off topic but the calendar you'll bring that to the board by march so our goal is to have that for your regular meeting on february 14th um that's the

287goal so we'll be have a couple of calendar committee meetings planned before then um and hope to have something to present to you at that time and one more question for you um i know one of the things that when this was first proposed and everything people i heard a couple of voices say well how will we know the teachers actually be there and i'm not saying that you know y'all are you know stamping their hands when they walk in or anything but it's how is that working um so it i will say our teachers have really valued the time and so they are they're showing up and starting um on time we are collecting agendas and so those are all examples of agendas and documentations from meetings that happen this fall and i have

288access to those at the district level and our administrators are are checking those as well they're also present in the meetings themselves and i think as well as district staff so we are there meeting with with the teachers and there are some groups like i said that need more support than others but we are working diligently on that wonderful any other questions for laura we've had a lot of co staff in those meetings popping in and heard a lot of good things about them so yeah good thank you all all right next uh we have the uh achievement gap update with melissa head and ian nelson so before they get started i just wanted to add it's starting to snow yeah i'm looking out the window oh do we want to put we're almost and

289honestly we only have one more thing really well two more things and then we gotta vote the most important thing for the district should have been first but since their last you don't think those are gonna take like we're not gonna have conversation and look at data and all of that with this our presentation today is pretty brief and if you if you want to go more in depth then we could we can share the information we have for today it's just a few slides okay and then if you want to go more in-depth you can tell us specifically what you are looking for or we can just whatever you want to do we can go home and drink hot chocolate i was asking the board members oh i i what did my colleagues want

290to do um it doesn't seem to be on the road yet or anything it's too warm for that uh but we can um we have two more things that uh two more presentations three more presentations sorry but then we do have some action items to vote on before we leave i mean it's realistic to say three is going to take at least 45 minutes 15 minutes each so yeah so peyton i'm good either way shonda i'm fine to leave because i feel like i'm going to have more in-depth conversation when it comes to we should be having more in-depth conversation when it comes to the achievement gap and equity because those are our major deficits for the district so we can we what we could um i would like to be able to have enough

291time to discuss several of these if we i mean i don't know if it's sticking or what's happening outside i don't want to get stuck because i'm a delicate flower and i don't want to get hurt all the way home but if it's not sticky [Laughter] but if it's not if it's not sticking what we could do oh george and you and then i'll i'll give it a i'll give an option if yeah i um i think shonda nailed it like i mean these these are important things and and you know if if we do have to delay them i think they need to be at the front i mean you know we put equity update as the very last thing when you know it says equity over everything on our website and that should

292have been number one so um recognizing that there even if the snow doesn't stick if we're kind of halfway thinking about oh can i get home are we going to be able to really put the focus on this that it deserves so what i would like to suggest then uh we have our next board meeting is february 7th that's our work session so that would be a excellent opportunity we've already gotten a lot of other things covered so what we can do is move our achievement gap our equity update and our human resources update to the 7th i will test the board members with looking through the presentation that we all got and formulating questions based off of that and getting those to ian and melissa beforehand so they can actually incorporate it into the

293into the presentation all right and then okay so what we're going to do for those who are watching and listening uh we are going to move our achievement gap update our human resources update and our equity update to our dc our february 7th work session uh slash close session meeting we'll make sure those are at the top of the list when we start so what we do have to vote on today are three different items we have to accept our school improvement plans which have been presented our school safety plans will be presented at a at next month at the february 7th closed session meeting so do i have a motion to accept the school improvement plans that have been presented so moved do i have a second back end all in favor any opposed

294all right next we need to vote on our personnel report number six uh this is a new amended report from what we received at our last meeting so do i have a motion to approve the amended personnel report number six i moved you have a second second all in favor aye aye any opposed and then finally our preschool funding i'm not exactly sure what that was the preschool funding was we were going to vote on number of rooms i think so um the motion well there wasn't really a motion consensus um consensus of the board was to uh go no less than seven rooms but to make our ask for the entire amount for 11. um so with that being said do i have a motion to approve our preschool funding ask i moved do

295i have a second second all in favor aye aye any opposed all right um thank you thank you to all the staff who were here today who were giving the presentations i really appreciate all your hard work uh just for future meetings and announcements our next board meeting will be on monday february 7th at 5 p.m here in the board room there is a two-hour delay for middle and high schools on february 9th wednesday february 9th our then our next regular meeting will be on monday february 14th at 5 pm we have a required teacher work day and no school for students and my birthday on february 21st parent-teacher conference day on february 22nd and then a two-hour delay for middle and high schools on february 23rd uh do i have a motion to adjourn

296so i moved do i have a second second all in favor any oppose we're adjourned thank you