Asheville City Board of Education Work Session -- 11/01/21

001good good afternoon everyone uh welcome to our november first work session and i'm going to call the meeting to order we do have a quorum uh can i have a motion to adopt our agenda do i have a second i can't all in favor aye any opposed all right so thank you all again for coming out um we're going to start off our agenda with our resolution in support of our i a lgbtqia youth and their families and i'm actually going to ask board member payton to ask to speak on this so if you'll give me two seconds to pull up presentation real fast i just need to read and do we have the text of the resolution yeah the copy of the resolution is under is under tab one and our notebooks i will

002not belabor um what the the board already has in front of them thank you um the biggest thing is that um there have recently been a number of negative remarks made up about the lgbtqia community some of which focus on an education setting so i thought it was important for us to to make a statement as a board particularly one of the things that i found really profound was that in recent research the trevor project has found that 68 of our lgbtq youth hear negative things being said about that population uh by their elected leaders so i think it's important that um we make a statement about the profound impact that has on youth that may or already identify as being part of that community or will in the future um and ask for the

003board support and moving that resolution forward and i'd be happy to answer any questions perfect well and you know actually for those who are listening and watching um who may not have uh downloaded the materials for today if you wouldn't mind go ahead and read it okay so the title is a resolution in support of lgbtqia plus youth and their families whereas increasing numbers of youth are identifying as part of the lgbtqia plus community with recent surveys showing that four percent of the global generation z population identify as transgender non-binary gender conforming or gender fluid with one-fifth of individuals within that same population identifying within an orientation other than heterosexual whereas the human rights campaign is an identified 2021 is the worst year in recent history for lgbtq individuals the state legislatures around the country

004have signed an unprecedent unprecedented number of anti-lgbtq measures into law whereas the trevor project has noted suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people with lgbtq youth being four times more likely to seriously consider suicide to make a plan for suicide and to attempt suicide versus their peers therefore be it resolved the asheville city board of education affirms that every person deserves to be treated with dignity and respect the board also stands behind our lgbtqia plus students faculty staff and their families as being treasured and valued members of our community and furthermore the board asserts the implant that inflammatory and bigoted language is dehumanizing toward all of our faculty staff students and families as a board we respectfully ask that our public officials to consider the harms created by divisive and vitriolic

005vitriolic language and its impact on our students perfect thank you so much we'll be taking action on this next week but wanted to make sure that everyone heard the resolution and also the reasons behind us putting it forward so thank you for doing that next we have does anyone have any questions any board members okay next we have feedback from our budget questionnaire and that's going to be with miss ashley michelle who is putting the camera in the right position all right good evening board members um as we begin i just wanted to uh make sure that you were aware that the survey did indeed close last night um so it closed 1 59 p.m so we've had a little bit less than 24 hours to examine all this data so just please understand that

006it's where prison ticket um in total we were incredibly fortunate uh we received 382 responses and you'll see that the largest percentage of those responses did come from our current parents as for the survey demographics the majority of those that responded to the survey um that y'all asked us to put out on your behalf about the finances did come from those within the 30 to 40 and 41 to 50 range and that would make sense because those are predominantly our families like i said those are the largest group that responded to the survey as for ethnicity the group that was most represented are our are those that identify as white our second largest were those that preferred not to answer at 17.3 percent and our third highest was um did self-identify as black all right

007so as i gave to each of y'all um in your big packet we have 42 pages of responses we have 382 to the question what thoughts or feelings would you like to share with the asheville city board of education about the complex budget issues we are facing and we will had me one second 269 total responses um asking if there they had additional questions for you so those are what we shared with y'all as part of your presentation package and all of those answers will be included as part of our board brief as well so we receive responses from eight students and in the y'all have access like i said to all of the responses but i've also created an analysis that examines some of these and then from that analysis i've put some of

008these on the presentation just so we aren't here until midnight looking at all of our responses but from students we did have eight responses and two that i wanted to point out where that our students said that you should give bonuses to teachers and staff and that the budget crisis is being seen and felt by everyone in the district which i thought was especially pointing at coming from our students from those living within the asheville city schools district we had 19 responses a few of note are i suggest raising the salaries for teachers and all staff including bus drivers as well as as unpopular as it may be i believe it is time to close actual primary we cannot let a small population of parents and students dictate the financial direction of the school district

009acs should not close or emerge any existing schools central office is over funded we are tired of outside vendors and consultants coming in from our current staff well current staff and those that have worked for asheville city schools we had 63 responses is my job safe whatever decisions are made should be fully vetted and completely transparent please make a decision based on facts and not parent emotions please make a decision before december regarding the collapsing of schools we need time to prepare for the 22 23 school year and cannot proceed without knowing what schools remain open no matter what the board decides many many people are going to be upset and expressing it loudly and as i said the bulk of our responses did come from our parents or those that currently have students within

010asheville study schools we had 292 responses again reduce central office staff and increase budget transparency why are we increasing pre-k offerings if required k-12 cannot be funded i think the consolidation with buncombe county schools is inevitable i believe a hiring freeze is the last thing that should happen considering many schools or short staff to begin with the board should provide clear information on how districts can our district compares to other districts in the area and similar size districts across the state hiring freeze is not the answer i'm really hoping we can find a way to let our out-of-district students who were already enrolled continue their education in asheville city schools so again those are just a small sampling of nearly 400 responses to that question and then we have the 269 responses to do you

011have any questions about our current financial situation from students we receive five responses how can i raise money to keep my school open from those living within asheville city schools district we had 13 responses why haven't you addressed this sooner when are you going to reduce the central office are funds for all programs currently accounted for 42 from current and former staff members who is reviewing the budget and determining where cost cutting measures are made how do we get more funding especially from the state do the new hires for asheville city schools need to worry about keeping their jobs and what are the financial impacts we've seen from continuous leadership changeovers again our biggest responses for this question did come from our parents some of their key concerns were how much of the money issued

012is tied to enrollment why haven't school repaired needs been monitored regularly and addressed so we aren't facing these huge repair bills why is asheville city schools in crisis when i pay more than if i lived in the county and one that was surprising that we did see quite a bit was i did not know that asheville city schools had a current financial situation again you all have access to all of the responses and then as well as the analysis of their responses and if you have any questions i'm happy to answer them does anyone have any questions for ashley michelle or comments i just wanted to reiterate i know you just said it but we do have here every single response that was submitted yes you all have access to every single response and as

013part of our board brief we will be risk we will be providing every single response um as we did share as part of the forum itself when we were sending it out to our staff and our families we are redacting of someone specifically named a person but everything else will be listed and they'll have access to both of both all responses and the analysis yes sir so my question is not neces because i don't think ashley i don't think ashley was here but um you may have been we had staff pull the numbers for central office like the historical data for the numbers can we get those historical numbers again for how many ever years you can go back to now because a couple years ago it showed that our numbers decreased actually at central

014office and they're still going down so i think it's good for people to see that it's not what they think it is that is more than ever because actually even then it was less than it had ever been with that for clarification just when miss harvey and i are talking about different things when we get different media requests can you please explain what you mean when you say central office do you mean people that work here are people that support the district as a whole the people that work at central office okay i think that's what we keep hearing about is the people that work at central office those that work at 85 mountain street and all people that work at central office because i think there's a misunderstanding when people look at other districts

015on their ceo numbers they don't always show every single person that works at single central office if i may um for example we have a close uh neighbor that has a low central office number however there's 200 people within the central office building i mean is nathan part of central office um he's he's very valuable but he's not part of central office team that i deal with on a daily basis he's technology do we count technology at central office because then you start increasing now we could put we could put technology in a building so for me i think we need to define what central office is and i'm not trying to confuse people but there's a lot of people here that aren't part of the central office administrative duties no i agree i understand

016what you're saying and i think that data that we got before was like your central office staff not like your technology department and departments like that i don't think it was but you can figure that out we'll get you a scale and look at historically but you know what we have also mentioned before is within the the last six months we've reduced the central office that i'm talking about in terms of salaries by 500 000 people have taken on other duties so and we're going to continue to do that as people retire in some spaces but we'll get the numbers i think that's a good thing to have a comparison i just want to add that i think there is a lot of confusion about titles um i think that that has caused some concern

017in the community because they don't understand what a particular title might mean so if we need to define those with job descriptions that might be helpful the other thing is is if we could actually as shonda said show what central office looked like five years ago 10 years ago and today i've been around for a long time and i know i know that it's smaller now than it was when i first started and two it's like uh i'm just april dockery now is doing covid i mean a large part of her day is spent on covet if covet had not happened she would have not had that duty you've got cadada who's doing athletics you've got sarah who is over elementary education but who also does all the title work which is massive right to

018do so you've got people doing a lot more duties with fewer people we can show that and if if we could see what people are actually doing because that helps for people to understand what the jobs are and what they are expected to do and let's face it we have had a year and a half that's been most unusual with covet and a lot of things have come up so i think for the community to understand exactly what these people are doing it would be helpful to have a comparison and then an actual job description so people can see i do want to remind you dr dickerson cannot be i just want to make sure okay i do want to remind people since the day i started i said we had too many people at

019central office yes you did and we have reduced those through uh retirements and staff leaving and we'll continue to do that until it begins to affect what we can do for students all right yeah i appreciate that dr gene yeah i think um to that point given that there have been so many changes over a year of the pandemic what martha's asking for i think would be very helpful we can certainly do that is there anything else i can support you with on it from the data analysis i want to thank you for doing this because this is a lot of work and that's what we get paid to do a lot of work but i also want to thank the community members who took part in putting these things down and giving us their

020ideas any other questions for ashley michelle or her comments thank you this is great information and we'll definitely be taking into account as we go through our information information session and looking what we're going to do with our budget all right next we have a preschool presentation from miss susannah smith good evening can y'all hear me good evening mr carter board members and dr freeman thank you for the opportunity to share about the preschool program with you this evening so first i just want to remind everyone that the preschool has a vision and a mission statement our vision statement is that asheville city schools preschool program prepares children for lifelong success and our mission statement is that asheville city schools preschool program prepares children to reach their full potential through developing appropriate and family guided

021education so just a little history about the preschool program just to bring everyone to the same to the front preschool program started in 1980 through the ec program to screen and evaluate children in the community in 1992 the program moved to the current building with asheville primary school or asheville primary school building and it housed eight classrooms serving children birth to five years in 1993 we secured a double a child care license and then in 2000 we received the first five star child care rated license in buckham county that's when the state switched over from the double a to the five-star program the star-rated license that we see today in 2001 we received more at 4 funding which is now the nc pre-k program and then things to note that have happened in most recent

022history is in 2015 the district decided to relinquish the early head start grant and expand the three and five three to four year old slots through that grant some things to note that the early head start grant was able to bring to the district into the asheville primary school building we were able to secure two buses for priests for the preschool program which we still own today the elevator the building was upgraded with an elevator that was part of the early head start grant that we were able to do and then we were able to do upgrades to five classrooms which three are currently being used for um montessori pre-k in kindergarten and two are being currently used for preschool and we were able to upgrade two playgrounds in the early 2000s in 2015 we

023opened a preschool classroom at hall fletcher and then in 2016 we opened classrooms at dixon and jones in 2018 we opened up our developmental day classroom at aps and then as you know now last year we had the impact of covid and this year we're kind of in covert recovery i also want to note that the play and learn grant that you'll hear me talk about some tonight originated from the family literacy grant and we've maintained this grant for 15 years it's a self-supported grant the district does not put any money into this grant and then i would like to also note that in 2015 the strategic plan the first goal was to assess preschool programs and to ensure that our preschool students met the district achievement goals and to expand our preschool classrooms out

024into the district into all elementary schools we're in all the elementary schools currently except for claxton so just a little bit about us and some of our initiatives that we're focusing on this year as you'll see there are our curriculum is listed there our screening and our assessment tools are listed there this year and in multiple years leading up to this we've always focused on social emotional learning because we believe that setting that foundation for children leads to lifelong success we do that through conscious discipline and paula weaver who is one of our coordinators leads our conscious discipline effort and is also a national helper for the conscious discipline institute we also receive funding through the nc preschool pyramid model this is only open to dpi led preschool programs this year we are enhancing our

025literacy development we are utilizing the hegerty's curriculum which is in framework which is also being utilized in elementary schools and then we also do storytelling story acting and that is a vivian paley work and then as you'll see the kaleidoscope play and learn that's a grant through the bunk on partnership for children that not only serves asheville city schools children but that serves children within buncombe county schools and then you'll see that we also have our partnership with head start and nc pre-k i'd like to also share that our staff does data dives three times a year looking at our child development data and outcomes for our students and those data dives lead our initiatives each week each tricorder and so for example last year and in year 1920 we noticed that math was a

026low level for us and so we had support from paige within the district to help increase some of our math initiatives in the classrooms so i'd like to also share with you these are just some of the demographic data which i believe you all have copies of so in 2018 2019 we served 192 children these demographics do include our montessori pre-k students that are within the montessori kindergarten classrooms and also note because you may add up the funding source slots note that children can utilize multiple funding sources so sometimes we have children who are enrolled in nc pre-k head start and subsidy so they may be utilizing three or four funding sources so you've got the demographics for 2018-19 in 2019-20 um we served 219 children across the district and then i did not give

027you the data breakdown for 2021 because that was the year of covid but we did serve 136 children last year so these numbers are these are all the kids not just at the primary school but these are all the kids all the kids across the district these are kids across the district and just keep in mind for 2021 due to covid we reduced our class sizes down to 12 and we also had a reduction in staff and so we served 136 children in 20 20 and 20 20 20 21 and so currently you'll see currently we're serving 179 children and you'll see the breakdown there our current demographics reflect the demographics of the city of asheville and as we continuously say best practice is to serve children through inclusive diverse environments or we utilize heterogeneous

028groupings so we explain that as we don't just have a single standalone nc pre-k classroom we don't have a single standalone head start classroom we blend our funding across the district into all of our classrooms so currently we have 23 slots available across the district that does include the asheville high child care classroom that we have taken under the preschool umbrella this year to support asheville high with that classroom so we are in the process of filling all of those slots with grant funded slots which means nc pre-k and head start we do have two children in process and we have seven additional children who had were waiting on head start to help us with the process in them so we are continuing to enroll in our enrollment changes daily so are there any questions

029this far you you have um you said that we're at 179 this year so i mean we did go up uh we did go up in terms of the covet year but there was a kind of a substantial drop from 2019 2020 is that more because we just haven't had a lot of kids come back because we haven't had a lot of kids come back and we also we were at the same number of classrooms we were pre-covered to now but one of those classrooms is the ashford high classroom which only serves nine children versus eighteen children i am am planning i am working with stacy bailey with the partnership bunker partnership for children who oversees the nc pre-k program and we're going to have a meeting hopefully next week with myself and buncombe county

030schools to see what we can do to turn the asheville high classroom into an nc pre-k classroom a question when we reopened on um when we were trying to say enrollment how many kids did we pick up when we opened enrollment this year we yeah we went back and opened reopened enrollment for montessori oh from montessori on the preschool side we didn't pick up any additional children we got none okay because our enrollment's open all year long and we do have some slots pre-k slots in montessori okay i think they did gain more and miss williams can give us more information but i think she did gain some more kindergarteners with that open enrollment but as far as preschoolers it's been the same okay and just one other question do you have you seen kids

031moving out of the district or out of the city limits or out of our scope of going to get them and things like that as a possible loss yes so this year we're losing a lot of kids due to parents are fearful of coba they'll enroll them and then there may be an exposure to covet or something happen and it's they're fearful so then they withdraw but we are seeing children move out of district when our kids move out of district we commit to serve them for the rest of that school year to give that child consistency unless they can find child care closer to their home and in most cases the kids that we have lost to that move have been head start kids and they've been able to transfer to a head start

032center that's closer to them thank you okay moving into our revenue and expenditures um so this is 2019 2020. you'll see on the left side that's our revenue and when you're looking when you're looking at the pie chart this is every source of revenue that we received for that year so we received a grant through buncombe county government through the early childhood education grant we receive title 1 funding the 119 funding that is for our nc school pyramid model that averages about three to six thousand dollars a year that's mostly used for training and supplies and materials you'll see our head start funding you'll see nc pre-k funding you'll see our plans learned funding you'll see um sfq which is sustaining facility quality that is a grant that buncombe county partnership for children puts out

033to all four and five-star licensed child care centers in the county and every year we apply for that grant it's based on your numbers for your licensure through dcdee which is the division of child development that oversees our program it averages thirty thousand dollars a year that we receive for that and so we use that money for training and supplies and materials and it can that is one grant that can be carried over each year and then you'll see our revenue which revenue includes tuition paying any subsidy that we receive from the state and developmental day and then you'll see the local funds that we receive so all in all you'll see how much our revenues and our grants brings in and then you'll see how much local funds the districts puts in to support

034our program one thing to note is that head start and nc pre-k were based paid based on slot allocation not on child attendance and so most so that's why we pushed to fill those grants funded slots because pre-covered that was the case they we had so like for instance for a head start we have 55 slots for nc pre-k pre-coded we had 84 slots we had to fill those 84 slots by october in order to receive the full funding so and when you say you're filling those slots how do you go about advertising getting out the word that we have those opportunities available we do a lot of word of mouth advertising and we do a lot on social media as well we work with ashley michelle to do some advertising as well we go

035and hang up flyers we this past summer we did a community event and that was highly successful for us as well i will also note as we get into more revenue and expenditures this past year for the first time we were a head start had some covert relief funds and so we were able to serve 19 head start children over the summer who otherwise would have just been home to help prepare these children for kindergarten and so we received on about twenty thousand dollars for that this summer so looking at 2021 revenue you'll see that there was a decrease in our revenues and our grants and that's mostly because we served 136 children versus 219. our tuition revenue drops drastically because of the amount of children that we served head start and nc pre-k did

036pay us for the amount of slots that we were allocated and did not look at attendance so that was a big plus for us so looking at our projected budget for this school year we project that um we'll need 1.1 million dollars in local funds and we have now our revenue pr that's just a projection that's just based on the amount of kids we have enrolled right now our subsidy and um subsidy payment each month varies like in september from the state we receive nine thousand dollars in october we receive thirty two thousand dollars so it varies each month on what we get from the state for subsidy so um currently as a program we are assessing every funding source that's available to us outside of the school system there is and just to give

037you an example since we are part of a dpi since we're a child care program part of dpi program meaning that we fall underneath asheville city schools currently the there was a sustainability grants that the division of child development put out in the month of october we did not qualify because dcde told me that since we're part of the school system the school system has over other coveted relief funds that can be used to support preschool so therefore they did not give us i was not even allowed for us to apply for those grants so looking at our projections for 2021 and 2022 i will note and you will not see here that we did not receive a grant from buncombe county governor for the early childhood education fund and we are not receiving title

038one which between those two um funding sources that's five positions that we're having to absorb with local funds i will also note that stacey bailey with the buncombe partnership for children who oversees the nc pre-k program for buncombe county is a huge advocate on on behalf of us and because of her advocacy and the partnerships advocacy as an lea reimbursement we receive a higher reimbursement rate for nc pre-k students at 530 dollars a month whereas all other lease across the state receive 470 dollars and that's a rate just because the cost of living and the cost of providing child care in asheville is higher in buncombe county so she advocated on the level at the state level for us and was able to get that higher rate for us i will also note that as

039of three o'clock today she got word from the state and sent it out to all nc pre-k providers we were worried that the state was going to have our nc pre-k allotments were not going to be based on funded allotment but be based on child attendance and that is not the case the state is going to pay us based on allotment this year instead of attendance so we will receive the full 384 thousand dollars from nc pre-k this year okay are there any questions about the budget i did want to just bring y'all back to what christy coats presented last week about the cost and the funding the repairs needed to asheville primary school which has housed the preschool program for 20 plus years so i did just want to bring you back to that

040slide that she shared last week this is her slide so looking at our staffing as you'll see i prepared a chart from 2018-19 all the way through to this year for the past four years and you'll see our staffing level our cl our non-classroom staff includes myself our coordinators a custodian and a secretary and bookkeeper these staff members do not i did not include the play and learn staff here because they're fully supported by their grant and so but that does include two certified teachers who work in the play and learn program and so as you can see we had in 2018-19 we had 10 certified staff we went up to 11 in 1920 last year we had six but we did have three on leave and then now this year we're back up to

04110 and as you'll see there's been a huge reduction in classified staff which is our teacher assistance in 2018-19 and in 1920 we had a one teacher two teacher assistant model per classroom and so with covid we realized that we could go to one teacher one teacher assistant and one teacher assistant floating between two classrooms to reduce the staff and still maintain high quality and so as you as you know just keep in mind when you're looking at these numbers that we are supporting a year-round 9 to 10 hour program based on what site the staff chooses so it takes it takes a lot of manpower to maintain high quality at all of our sites and ratio requirements and so that's where we utilize our part-time staff they work 29 hours a week for us

042so that we can help meet those ratios in the afternoons so just some of our staff roles and responsibilities we have an enrollment engagement coordinator and she focuses on enrollment and enrollment and attendance and any family and community engagement we have an operations coordinator who oversees the licensing component and also helps myself with some of that we have to write lots of reports to grants funders each each month and she also helps with the licensing component we have a teaching and learning coordinator who i talked about earlier who is um oversees our curriculum and assessment but she's also our nc preschool pyramid and our conscious discipline coach and helps support classrooms with that social emotional learning and then you also see we have lead teachers teacher assistants our teacher assistants who are assigned to one

043classroom they have to meet nc pre-k qualifications educational qualifications which is pretty high whereas our teacher assistants who are floating do not have to meet those qualifications so we have a little bit more leniency with them um and just to know we are regulated and monitored by every single funding source that sends us money and they all have different regulations and so it's just kind of helping us keep compliance sometimes it gets tough and for example back in october early october we had six inspections across two days at all of our sites and literally leanne who's our operations coordinator myself we were just running and going to help to support those classrooms so that the teachers can focus on the children and we focus on the inspectors that's how we put it out there another

044thing another perk that our teacher assistants get there is a program called wages and this is through the north carolina child care services association and they have to apply for this and what it basically gives them is a supplement based on their educational level and they receive this twice a year it can be up to three thousand dollars based on their education level the north carolina child care services association is actually getting ready to raise that rate for them and it's kind of fun because they email me to get clarification and ask me all these questions and the staff don't and it's just like a surprise they don't know when their money's coming and they're like oh i got my money and so that's been a big perk now our teachers don't qualify for it

045because they make too much their salaries are too high but most of our teacher assistants do qualify for that source and they have to apply for that they have to apply for it and so that's something i'm constantly giving them fill this out fill this out send in your transcripts it's free easy money for them and it's based on their education level it's kind of like a step scale and again that doesn't come out of our budget it does not come out very many comes from the states thank you yes it does not come from us one question that has come up often is what are other local lease doing that are neighboring us and so i looked at haywood county henderson county buncombe county madison county mcdowell county and transylvania county schools this information

046i received from their websites miss harvey did reach out to all of these leas and to see how many of them are using local funds to support their preschool classrooms she only heard back from mcdowell county schools and at this time they are not using local funds and what i've learned to most of these school systems are the um they are the nc pre-k and the head and the head start grantee for their county so they have control over that money that comes into their county whereas that money for our county goes to the bunker partnership for children or to community action could you follow up with myself and board members or ms harvey on these other counties if they any of the others use local funds yes when we get those answers when we

047get those answers yes and then so the last thing i want to leave you with is things to consider so asheville city schools preschool is a braided funded funding and is a model in the state and region we're one of the few as you can see with ellie local leas that does do the heterogeneous fund groupings of their classrooms and it also provides a high quality early childhood education environment for students post-pandemic we should assess the evolving community needs we have always taken a continuous improvement approach to serving young children we've shared our history the pandemic has exturbated and created many inequities for young children and families and we need an accurate assessment of what the community needs are and so that we can continue to grow continue to ensure enrollment is diverse and inclusive

048and that in turn also supports our um heterogeneous groupings and as we know inclusion and diversity are paramount to any high quality early childhood education program ensure that we have ready schools as children enter kindergarten so the questions are we need to make sure that we're meeting the children where they are what are elementary schools do and to meet those needs and how can we have a seamless transition to kindergarten consider opportunities for partnerships across district lines so as the demographics are changing within asheville city schools it's having a negative impact on our youngest children preschoolers don't have a school to automatically enroll in when they move across district lines so when parents work across districts lines should we consider partnering more with buncombe county government and buncombe county schools to effectively support all learners

049so you have any other questions any questions for susannah thank you this is a very thorough um and a wonderful report and i just want to make sure that people also although you didn't put it in and you said it 136 students served during covid you guys were in session the entire time even when our schools were not in session right your staff were in session the entire time yeah we were only shut down from that november to february period other than that we were in session and they had big emotions and we were able to work through those big emotions and and it worked well and we only had one positive case last year this year we've had one positive case we do have some siblings who are who tested positive and so kids

050are out because of that quarantined exposure and sometimes our preschool kids have tested we've had two tests positive off their siblings but it didn't affect our classrooms because they were already at home and i've seen the kids with the mask on if if the three to four year olds can wear a mask i would think that some of our high schoolers could wear a mask so um i said it yes i did um thank you for this uh this is again great information there's no other questions for susannah just come visit they're a lot of fun to see the classrooms are fun uh the kids are great and they they are not afraid to come up and hug you well thank you so much for this information thank you all right next we have our

051counseling and support services report with ms kadatawin i'm sorry i'm trying to find good evening everyone i'm coming to bring to you some student services school staff assignments and their job descriptions and then open it up for any questions you may have for me so our school social workers i have a quick blurb for each um job description or our roles and responsibilities the school social workers are trained in providing comprehensive supports and services to address barriers impacting the social emotional academic and physical needs of all students and then i have down at the bottom of school social worker if you click there you give the full description so us we have six school social workers and at ashford high we have miss levitt campbell at jones and claxton we have abigail abigail we call

052her miss abby alawabi at ashford high and ashford middle we have miss kim robinson monfort north star at ashford middle we have misty beck hall fletcher and isaac dixon we have shantay jobs lucy s herron and ashford primary we have imagine montgomery so out of the six social workers they are split between two schools each our school counselors utilize leadership advocacy and collaboration school counselors promote student success provide preventative services and respond to identified student needs by implementing a comprehensive school counseling program that addresses academic career and personal social development for all students and again i have the link down there to get the full school counselors roles and responsibilities and or job descriptions and at ashford high we have miss kali pracillo she is the school counselor for 11th and 12th graders we have

053miss clarissa gilliam she's our 9th grade school counselor mary stewart 10th grade school counselor william al is our 11th and 12th grade school counselor and we have brenda smith who is the school counselor for silsa grades nine through 12. i see on here so i seen on the bottom of the last page that we had jesse pitt who's at ashford middle sixth grade school counselor rachel herrick is the eighth grade school counselor and i think karen thompson was at the bottom of the previous page too and she's our seventh grade school counselor and we have ashley grant who's the school counselor for montford north star grade six through eight at jones we have courtney booth at asheville primary we have lauren graham at hal fletcher we have laura alexander claxton we have brittany kucal lucy

054herron we have heather path and dixon we have brian gillette so in all we have 15 school counselors and then our student support service staff these are our [Music] we have a mckinney-vento student support service staff and we have five student support service staff they were originally known as the mental health tas and again i have all of their job descriptions linked below at ashford high we have federica paisley she's our mckinney-vento support specialist for ashford high and silsa and currently she has 25 mckinney-vento students on her caseload we have the mental health liaison or the student support program manager position open at ashford middle we have angel redmond luke mckenzie at montford north star trinette beck at hall fletcher edward gardner at lucy herring and we have an opening here as well that i

055plan to place at claxton as soon as we can get someone hired i think that's all you guys asked of me if you have any questions okay can you explain the difference i think a lot of times people get our school counselors mixed up with our mental health counselors can you explain the difference i know you have it here but just so people understand the difference our school counselors are recognized by dpi and they have school counseling programs that they implement for instance we have the state mandated implementation plan that our school counselors are taking a lead on and implementing our mental health student support specialists they help triage age i mean they help triage enhance services mental health services needed by our students for instance if we have a students that is exhibiting behaviors

056for a certain amount of time and they need mental health supports they help they combine or collaborate with our outside agencies to help them get the mental health supports they need our school counselors are not licensed clinicians nor do they have the mental health trainings as do our student support specialists so our students support services staff those are the ones again just to make sure i'm hearing it right that if a child is experiencing uh crisis or needs counseling that's who those students work with and you said the outside groups as well what are what are the outside groups that we work like family preservations or mayheck clinical support help so yes so not necessarily in crisis so sometimes our school social workers will call in our mental health rha agency to help when we

057have full for real mental health crisis there's a difference between behavioral health and mental health and we can go down you that road as well but our student support service staff are trained to triage and support the students when they are clearly having a mental health issue or barrier canada how many mckinney-vento kids do we have in the whole district do you know i don't know off the top of my head i know it's over a hundred i just know that there are 25 um identified to ask for high but i can get that information for you a lot of it that would be good information to have okay yes ma'am so kadada am i reading this right and hearing correctly so other than mckinney vento specialist at the high school there is no other

058mental health counselor at the high school no we don't have a mental health couch so our student support service people are not clinic clinical staff either they are just there to help treat our services out to our clinical agencies so we have five school counselors and a social worker there that can triage those services out as well we found that in the elementary class i mean elementary schools we have students that clearly need more of a one-on-one support or reset room type of area where they can go and we can help them ground themselves and reset to go back to class our high school students a lot of times don't want that one-on-one type of support or someone sitting there following them around so we utilize our school counselors and our social workers to call

059in our agencies we do have family preservation and or mayheck there to support when needed thank you and what are you seeing oh well i know i've heard this across the district and across the country that our children are experiencing more and more problems coming back to school and so forth what are our case loads looking like going a lot compared to two years ago not last year but two years ago so they are experiencing what um a lot of trauma and there's a lot of layered trauma so our numbers are up in regards to referring them out and they needing them needing support services we what we see is that they have a lot of heightened behaviors that are causing our staff to say okay they need some more consistent clinical and possibly medical

060medication support so the numbers are up clearly and i can get those numbers for you last year our student support services i mean not last year but before cover we served about 220 something students i'm sure we're way above that now we only have five students support service staff for the entire district and this might be a question for dr dickerson well on the hr side but i know there's cares money esther funds things like that for mental health support um we just aren't able to find those people yet as as we have some positions out there correct or not come up just come on up we have two student support service positions available okay i believe it's the pay that keeps them from not taking or stand with the jobs okay and those aren't

061the cares in in s or fund positions correct we have one position that is just like uh miss win said we're we had it posted but we just haven't had an opportunity to fill it yet so um and which one is that which position is a student so it's a student support specialist position that's posted thank you okay so i know our numbers are up with our students what about our staff because just like our students are have experienced trauma and coded brain and having a transition back into school we have extra supports in place for our staff because i know we're seeing a lot of heightened behaviors and mental health and trauma with our staff as well what do we have in place for them dr dickerson has done a great job of reintroducing

062the ean network the employee assistant network and i know for a fact that some employees are taking advantage of those five free mental health sessions also they are at leaning in to some of our school counselors in regards to if we have any connections with outside private practitioners and we have resourced that out as well we're just trying to create a situation where they feel comfortable enough to come and talk to us [Music] but yes our staff we're trying to wrap services around them as well or at least let them know that they're out there any other questions yeah cadado when you um when you refer people or students out in the community how um how much are we allowed to kind of track how they're doing outside i mean i know there's you know

063confidentiality and all that but i'm just curious how much students are taking advantage of that when we are referring them out um to be honest a lot of times um the parents don't consent to services um and then that just weighs heavy on our student support staff in the schools because we are then having to support the students when we know that they need enhanced services and to be on again there's a hiring crisis right now and that's just that's not just for asheville city schools it's also for our partner community agencies they don't have enough counselors to send us we used to have school-based therapists at every school and that's just not we have one at montfort north star ashford high and they're saying they don't have the the applicants as well so i

064hate to even say this but i think shonda started it for our teachers um i am concerned okay i there is a lot of trauma there's an awful lot that they're dealing with i've had the opportunity to visit a couple of schools in the last week it's important for teachers to know that that particular resource is out there for them and that they will not be penalized if they take advantage of this is there some way that we can make that crystal clear because i people are afraid of that kind of thing and and i want them to be able to take advantage of every opportunity we can have for them well we had a representative come it's also confidential so um we had a representative from the ea the ea n come and let

065the staff know what they offer i was going to say also miss geithner we're incredibly fortunate i'm going to be completely transparent i was supposed to send an email today and i was examining the data and i just didn't have an opportunity to do it but we're actually going to have on thursday afternoon we did it after school of course um but we're having a presentation from a representative from the employee assistance network that is going to be like answering questions and able to just support our our our staff as part of our grace grounding gratitude again it was supposed to go out today and i just did not have an opportunity to send that but we are having that on thursday wonderful okay thank you so i wanted to talk speak to what george

066was asking as well even before covet we really didn't have a mental health um the mental health in the area really wasn't culturally competent to reach a lot of the power and i don't mean by just by race i just mean a lot of the people that come to this area don't really relate well to the students that they serve so we were even having i know when i worked in mental health we were even having trouble then getting enough therapists and qualified professionals to connect with families because families refuse to service because they just don't relate well and then the services that they provide the students usually just come right back after a few months so you can only imagine what that's like now any other questions thank you miss win welcome thank you

067next we have our discipline data with uh well i'm not going to call up everyone you know who you are so good evening board chairman carter superintendent freeman thank you for this opportunity to come and share some disciplined data with you i do need to get that presentation there it is everyone oh it's a pdf can i grab it miss kj and just for those who are listening and watching this is the we haven't had a presentation on our discipline data for a couple of months now and this is just a good snapshot for us for right now we will have a more in-depth presentation in december uh on on some more of the information but just letting everyone know that this is um this is just the start yeah i would say this is

068pretty in-depth i mean when you see all the stats so i'm happy with what this team has done with really pulling a lot of the stats together and on another side note while we're waiting for that to come up i would like to wish miss tanya prashaya happy birthday 21 never looked so good i thought you're going to be transparent she was wearing a really good crown that was being very transparent i know google presentation i'm embarrassed to tell y'all what just happened so i'm just not okay well we will let that stay your little secret thank you so much um we will dylan dylan dylan so i represent the core team but this data was prepared by miss marta alakala williams dr paula dowd tania porche the birthday girl melissa head kadatawin and myself

069we represent the core team here at district office but we do support a larger team that's made up from school representation and our assistant principals and principals i just want to start off this presentation by sharing with the board that the last school year that kova did not interrupt was the 2018-2019 school year in quarter one of that school year we had 834 major referrals not minor but major referrals written for this quarter we have for this 21 22 school year we have had 188 major referrals written that's an 80 reduction in the number of discipline major referrals in the 2018-19 school year 16 of that 834 were white children and 76 of that 834 were black children for this year so far of the 188 are white students and 59 of the 188 are

070black students so although we are not we can just interrupt yes sir and the to me the major point of that is we're working on certainly equalizing what looks like an out of balance discipline report but if you look at 1819 76 of 834 is what about 625 kids 625 black kids were referred for a major incident versus 60 times let's say 200 less than there's a big difference in the number of referrals of of our uh african-american children versus previous and can you define what a major incident would be yes sir so a major incident incident is the term that is used to collect the data for referrals so that can be from insubordination a class cut a fight bringing drug paraphernalia on campus expelling expelling something we would expel someone for i would

071like just pause just for a moment i know there's going to be lots of depth and different questions but one of the things that happened over the summer very last school year doing remote learning this team met often it was all through google meets so it was a raw environment with a lot of emotion the meetings would go on for hours and over the summer we pulled in small groups like we had open sessions where principals would come in and work together and we tried to create this working document santa like a one pager of a belief so beginning of the school year all of school administration and district office agreed that a major referral will be written if it potentially could harm the safety of the school we did leave that up to the

072principal and assistant principals their discretion because that looks different for different people and different school communities are in different places yes ms geithner okay i i'm delighted to hear that because i think that there has been a lot of discrepancy between what one person would assume his major and what another person would not are you giving kind of an overall outline i mean what would be detrimental to the school is wonderful but are you giving examples i mean i know dr freeman has talked about chewing gum you know chewing gum you can put in a little girl's hair you can stick it under the desk that could be detrimental to some people but it's not a major detriment those we have not seen those and when we're when we're working with principals on their referrals

073we haven't we have not seen that okay um what typically will happen is a principal will call and ask for support on what to do if a child has done something and we just try to coach through that and work with them on that but ultimately it is that school administration's decision but central office and that team is going out and meeting with the principal and trying to come up with solutions because having kids out of classrooms is not the solution right but also i was going to say what um you know along those same lines making sure we have that uniform code of justice across all the elementary schools all the the high schools all the the middle schools will help as well yes we are moving towards an asheville city school's code of

074success there we go so major referrals usually result in suspensions they could they could result into an oss they could result into an out-of-school suspension an in-school suspension um you will see it a little bit later we have used restorative circles different kinds of ways to pull out and support children it could also be a major referral could also result into a parent-teacher conference with administration it could be actually i kind of suspected that question it could be a loss of bus privileges a loss of privileges uh more supervised activities lunch detention refer to community agencies or work with a social worker can you tell me more about this zero suspension policy i keep hearing about yeah yes ma'am um so as mr do we have time [Laughter] we don't have one of those because

075the board sets policies and you guys haven't approved a zero policy we can't we can't create a policy we can only recommend it have we recommended a zero no sir okay all right so go into your discussion your description there please go into the description of zero of what i'm here i guess of what people are considering this zero suspension policy i think that as we are moving towards eliminating exclusionary practices that is our ultimate goal is to keep our students and our staff safe and healthy but keeping them in our classrooms i think people get confused by that do you think that like i do know that last school year we did have principals call they had to call me and dr dowd if it was an ec student and talk to us before

076they processed a major referral because we were trying to keep our kids in a school we'd only had them since march the 8th so i think there is this lot of misconception which i totally understand um people are trying to adjust to this new school year and kind of this new normal still and i think people have it's easier to kind of hold on to things and to feel a little bit afraid that it is open these conversations and talk but the only way we can move forward in our ultimate goal as a school system and have an asheville city school student code of success is to communicate pull roll up our sleeves and do the work acknowledge that we're going to make mistakes and going to have to adjust we're just trying to walk

077this walk with our principals and our school leaders and support them as much as possible it has not been easy it will not be easy it will get harder for sure my concern is the number of teachers who are under the impression that they are not allowed to write referrals um they feel like they've basically been told sort of like under the table that that is not something that they are to do what you're saying is totally different from what i'm hearing so is there some way that we can assure our teachers that discipline is important and one cannot teach if there is not discipline in the classroom and they have to make those kinds of decisions i don't want to speak for our principals in the room but i would i would imagine they

078would want to know if their staff felt that way okay so i would encourage them to go and talk to their school leader and and make sure and if the school leaders feel that they need more support they can call us in and we can help navigate that for them so let's just also um it i'm sorry it's on but i just i'm sorry let's just remind folks i don't have the exact number that the board which has several new members on now was taken aback when they saw 4 000 whatever major and minor referrals i think it was 2 200 major referrals and let's not forget aren't we noted as the what is the term that they use in terms of disproportionality the highest the highest in the state so absolutely we're going to

079do things different unless the board says go back to the way it was we have to have communication about discipline i am so appreciative of what the teachers are doing and what the principals are doing but if the conversation is you know we're not able to discipline that's not accurate but yes we're going to talk about it and take a look at it because that's our job no i for one am always taken back by that data however um what i don't want us to do i want us to make sure we have um an impact on our students in a positive way and in the real world especially with our black students we have to give them consequences that's going to help them be successful in life so if you're not giving them consequences

080for their behaviors you're setting them up for failure because the consequences for them is going to be 10 times worse than it would be for other students in america so i want to make sure that we're sending a student to oss or i even iss you may be doing them a favor because if they aren't engaged or don't have a relationship with their teacher or they're not where they need to be academically they're going to act up just so you will suspend them or put them out if they know that's all you're going to do so i would want to know what those this how those disciplinary practices have changed and what they look like so that we're making an impact in their lives and we're not just not suspending them to make our numbers

081look good because that's what it sounds like and that's what the teachers feel like and a lot of the teacher assistants and even when i hear you say that you're disciplined staff i think that's great that you have them but i didn't hear anything about the teacher assistants being because they are a major part of who disciplines and who those students are sent to on a regular basis and most of them happen to be people of color and they need to be included on those teams with different um and with different scenarios and how they can best support students as well i think i think though the board has to understand that you're going to hear that stuff because this is different but you can't and also whatever we were doing before for students sure

082as heck didn't work because you had thousands of major incidents so we've got to do some things differently and i understand the consequences so you know yes we're looking at the numbers because thousands don't make sense why are we are our kids different than other districts so yeah we're looking and monitoring what's going on and there is going to be conversation about consequences if we don't have some sort of centralized conversation you're going to have thousands of incidents major again and people are going to be uncomfortable and and i understand that and we're trying to do this where we don't make mistakes and doing what's right for kids but the board was not happy with thousands of major incidents we got to monitor this more closely and i think that part of it also was

083the board was not happy with thousands of major incidents but the dispos disproportionality of those incidents and of those referrals that were written that is that was a strong uh impact had a very strong impact on the board so you know i'm i know i've heard some things from some of the schools and i'm old school and um my head just wanted to pop off when i heard some things uh but you know our discipline has to be there has to be equity in our discipline practices so we have to make sure that we are disciplining our students the same way i don't care what color you are you have to have discipline and so we need to make sure that that's happening and i think that's what that was a huge part of what

084was happening before and to see this drop in these numbers is i mean i would love to see the numbers be nothing uh at the end of the day but um to see this this drastic drop is actually uh quite encouraging so i do you have more of a report so uh we'll let you get back i just want to miss jackson you brought up a good point we do have eyes and bus drivers on our team and i would say we have one that is particularly very engaged in this work and has made it really clear that when we suspend a kid it's more important what we do when they come back so it's kind of helped make some things to move that work forward so thank you i apologize for leaving that out

085first i do want to take a moment again like 2018 and 19 was the last time we were not impacted by kovit it seems so long ago but i've had countless conversations with administrators and teachers and parents my own husband about the fact that the last time our junior was in school on a regular what felt like a regular school year was as an 8th grader and there is a huge developmental difference between an 8th grader and a junior in high school and i think it's really important that we recognize that and let it be what it is the 9th and tenth grade is when you learn how to maneuver that 40 acre campus with seven buildings these juniors are kind of moving through so can you can only imagine what a sophomore and a

086freshman are feeling right now the same is true for our younger us learners we're seeing a lot of interesting things happening in fifth grade it's just things we've not seen before the last time they had a full school year with all the things that felt normal was as a second grader and just think about that just for a minute there's a huge difference between a six-year-old and a ten-year-old so i just want this to be in your mind as we kind of go through this presentation and talk about some things and also piggybacks on miss wins presentation to you too where you i heard the questions about are you seeing different behaviors and yes we are and and i'm and i and we all expected to see extreme especially when you've been at home for

087that period of time and then all of a sudden you have to go to a structured environment so it's not that we didn't expect to see the numbers and we're grateful i know i am as a board member that we have a superintendent that's willing to address it because we it's not like we just started having the highest disproportionate it just never was put out there um so we are grateful but we're on trend to have the i was just sitting here doing the math we're on trend for those numbers to look the exact same at the end of the school year so we still have to figure out what's going on and how are we training our teachers to identify their own biases when it comes to how they discipline children of color versus

088white children um because my phone still blows up that's why i ask for this information so we definitely have to look at those practices and how we're interacting with our fam not just our students of color but how we're building relationship with their families because most of our parents it doesn't all it takes is a phone call and a lot of them will be at the school in two seconds you i think a lot of times staff go towards the ones that don't come those few parents that may not show up when you call but i think the majority of parents will show up for their children if you have that relationship for sure before we dig into some of the specific data i just want to bring up the number of students per campus

089i think this is also really important just to remember what our campuses look like and feel like as we go through this data i'm going to go through the instances by school so you can see comparison wise the by race gender and grade and i'll show you a breakdown of some of the actions taken so for example um asheville high school the first quarter of the 2018-2019 school year had 242 major incidences that a referral was written for and this year they have a total so far first quarter of 50. so you can see throughout the pres throughout the schools listed there's been a dramatic increase at least half or more of the number of referrals written i should i should just quantify this or say that a major referral this is the major referrals

090that have been processed i imagine that there are some that have happened at a school level that a principal has said this is not a major incident we're going to convert it to a minor and do this instead this is the number of incidences that involve individual students just if you're tallying up this this number is greater than the 188 i shared with you earlier the 188 incidences could could involve more than one child so this number is like one nine on i think maybe a little bit over 200 i just don't want that to throw you so like if it's a fight it's two children and that one referral just to anybody's doing the math at home sorry april just to clarify is that also the case with 2018-2019 just so we're comparing yes

091sir yes sir yes yes yes thank you any questions about this at all so this number what's happening in 10th grade well the last time those children were in school it was seventh grade they did not transition to that 40 acre campus and do all the freshman experiences which by the way you know fx and salsa does a really good comprehensive programming they missed that they were they were doing that online i'm just guessing but i would imagine that's probably one of the big ones same is true for our seventh and eighth graders that you know they've missed that transition in to middle school and learn how to be a middle school student that's a huge jump from a one teacher to teacher classroom to changing classes and all the things so they're struggling and

092that staff those those staff members are really having a hard time they're doing their best i just want to say that well of this so far this year we've had 168 referral individual referrals written for children so 168 children have had a referral written for them 54 of those 168 have gotten two or more and of that 54 10 students have gotten four or more so we have four children or 10 we have 10 students who have gotten at least four or more referrals this school year so far so every principal knows them by name i know them by name and we and everyone on the core team knows them by name and we're just trying to fill in as much supports in place as we can you can see that we're seeing quite an

093increase the number of referrals by percentage almost 70 percent of our referrals are written on boys with 30 percent for females this just kind of dicks down the the data a little bit deeper than what we went before we got about 60 of our major referrals are written for black children and 20 percent for white what's mhp i'm sorry what is mhp n is mixed-raced h is hispanic and pacific islander thank you yes sir so these are just some of the interventions that we have we were specifically asked for out of school suspension and in-school suspension we've had 46 students place or 46 assignments of in-school suspension that's at least one day or more and 37 assignments of out-of-school suspension we've had eight um bus suspensions but since i also support the transportation department i

094can tell you that the admin have worked really hard to try not to do that like our school administrators are really really reluctant to take but or had to assign bus suspension so how do you ensure those students get to school if they don't have transportation so the principal works with those families and we talk to the social worker and try to make a plan but if the board knows of a specific situation i'm sure that principal would like to know about it okay and what would cause a bus suspension other than i mean is that fighting on the bus is that you know smacking someone it could be any of those things pushing out the bus extreme behaviors um distracting the driver causing harm in some way and are they just suspended for like

095a couple weeks or can they are they suspended for ever what does that look like most of these are short term there is there is um some that are a little bit longer through the rest of the semester but no one so far for this school year but yes that has happened before are parents allowed to review what their children if their child did something on the bus to get suspended are they allowed to see that video footage helps us with that process if parents want to see videos there's a process that we go through to try to do that yes we have had one parent so far this year in particular ask for bus video they contact they need to ask the principal they go they work with their principal in the transportation department

096the actual videos are housed in my department um principals can see it they just can't extract it and make them blurry like we can and sometimes parents don't want to go to the school they want to come to central office to see the videos which we understand so they should call you instead yeah as a former principal it's always helpful to be the one to know is not the last to know [Music] i left on here too i just wanted you to see that many of our schools are working really hard to use restorative circles as a way to support their school communities and try to heal what has been broken or harmed so we did ask kind of late in the game to add restorative circles as one of the assignments that they can

097put in educators handbook so we can kind of keep track of that and what are other actions uh just out of curiosity just just some examples of other actions these are some of the things that miss sanford asked just a few minutes ago um conferences administrative conference with a parent a student loss of privileges lunch detention okay thank you and what do you do other than restorative circles and because what happens when there's nothing to restore because if you don't ever have a relationship you can't restore something that was never there so that is um well the first step and so we're all we're learning we're on this walk together and people they see this and they want to bring them all together immediately and that's not how restorative circles work like you have to

098meet with the children individually and see if they're open to doing this doing that like a lot of times if marth and i get into a knock down drag out our first day back it is not time for us to sit down and talk about it it is time for a counselor or support staff member to sit down and talk to me and see where i'm at and see if i'm open to that idea what we have found personally what i have found is restorative work circles work better with adults when adults are engaged in it when parents are engaged in it when staff are engaged in it it tends to be more successful so how many schools are using restorative circles or restorative justice do you know i don't know of any school who

099has not all of them are using it trying to go into that direction some are further along okay um some some schools request space up here and have families use this room okay so that's something that we're starting with the littles and we're going all the way through this it's actually more in the secondary is where it's hap right just because the middle school asheville middle school had already implemented that a little bit before the pandemic so it was kind of a natural fee and those children are now in the high school okay those families are used to that okay thank you yes please wait till you get up there sorry kim robinson our lead social worker is the restorative practice um trainer for the district and so primarily all of our social workers who

100happen to be all women of color are trained and they will push into the schools to help establish core restorative practice teams so we have worked really hard with lucy s herring and we are doing reset rooms so we're really trying to implement restorative practices as a district initiative and it's been headed by miss kim robinson who is a national trainer and we're lucky to have her thank you so i know how are we doing with community so i know that we are everybody's seen the little dads on duty video and we had chosen of course coming to do that a couple years ago and i know we have my daddy taught me that now coming into the schools and do that how do we implement more of that into our schools so that we

101have relatable people of color that are from community or that know the population of students that are making up these referrals what are we doing to have more of that in our schools in all of our schools not just the high school because i think it's at the high school in middle school right now so our superintendent said that we can look to community partners such as jumoja and chosen and get parent consent forms signed as we work on mousse for those said agencies and what we're seeing happening is umoja and chosen are pushing in men or women of color to work intensely with our students that are having a hard time in our school so we know that well even next week we have someone pushing in from chosen into claxton and we're excited

102about that so because he said with parental consent we can go ahead and start that here it's called peers support specialist we can go ahead and start that process as we work on mousse so as the community relations person i'm trying to build the capacity or trying to build more relationships with agent outside agencies so how are we using the information we get from those agencies because i so they're disappointed i know in some of the things they're seeing in our school building so how do we debrief with them or how they debrief with you and dr freeman so that you have a fresh set of eyes that's on something coming from a totally different point of view because i understand what it's like being in a school environment and they're used to you know

103what they're used to or whatnot but when you have outside people coming in if they start pushing too hard we know what's going to happen they're not going to be welcomed in the building anymore so how do we build that relationship but also help the staff i guess that they have or whatever it is they're seeing to um kind of find some middle ground to help us better serve our students so i don't mean to call principal mary nichols out but we just had a conversation with a umoja staff that's been working with four students in her school and she and i met with that person and we just listened to her perspective and she had a lot of great information to share with us and we immediately took that information and started it to

104put it in action actually we're going to start a reset room in claxton because of some information that the yamoja community person gave us that's just one you know example but we plan to continue that because great things happen for our students when we listen to outside community people i'm not going to ask no more questions we're also um i mean we're also in the process of doing things differently so we're nowhere near where we need to be but we're certainly on a different path than what we were before so i think you'll see changes coming down the road principals are doing a great job i think they're welcoming us in when there are issues that we need to you know people can tell you things but if you actually see it it's a little

105different and uh but we're in the the process of changing things and we're gonna have some things that work we're gonna have some things that don't work but at least we've got a lot of eyes on it and looking at it anyone from the team have anything else you want to add i just wanted to add to what quedada just said that we're and dr freeman that we're doing things differently and it's like the principal's calling us in and then bringing parents here so that we can have conversations with the principal in april and myself so that we can hear the story or we can hear everything that's happening in a very neutral place that's not the building where the whatever happened happened and just really fully listening and just being present right not wanting

106to fix it not mediating or whatever but just really being present and that's something different because we really have to listen to the adult in that child's life because they're the expert they know their child better than anyone else so i feel like that's something that we're moving in a direction that really causes families that aren't normally up here to feel seen valued and honored for what they do know about their child thank you thank you any quite any other questions for april or anyone on the team thank you for the data again like i said this first time we've seen this in a very long time so thank you all right we're working on we're working ahead uh next i have uh georgia harvey and sarah kane are going to come up and talk

107about our essers money uh for those who are listening and watching this is a question that the board has gotten repeatedly over the last couple of weeks and months and so we wanted to make sure that we had information shared this evening so that we can talk about our esser funds what we can and cannot do with them and make sure that we're all on the same page and this this information will be on our website when after the meeting is done so ms kane thank you um good evening chairman carter and the board and dr jean thank you because i know this is a hot topic and i'm glad that i'm able to provide a little bit information this evening so ashley michelle can you hear me okay i'm gonna be proactive [Laughter] usually

108i'm too loud so that's good um i'm going to give you a little bit of background information and we have talked about different aspects to the essers funding before so i think it's really important in my overview that i just talked about a few very critical pieces that are near and dear to my heart first off funds are about preventing preparing and responding to the coven 19 emergency and that's bolded because i do have to in conversations we have to keep coming back to that and making sure that when we are budgeting things that we are connecting it to those three areas um certainly as a district we're required to follow uniform guidance that would be the federal and state requirements that allow us to use these funds kind of streamlining things the original application

109can be adjusted and we've already made changes to that each time i have to go through an amendment process but that is certainly something that has been and it is doable projected salaries supplies and services may not show as currently encumbered funds and i'm going to talk about that so we've i think all seen lots of things out there in social media and the media about how much money may or may not be in the current accounts we have to also talk about what's projected to come out especially if it's salary um information and guidance from the federal and state level changes so we're constantly getting updates and you know different advice and kind of tighter controls around the sr funds and of course sustainability is a critical part to the budgeting process so we

110are thinking about these funds and when they expire but also in the years beyond sr1 which was originally called cares you may have heard me mention that a few times was and i'll just do kind of an approximate 855 000 plus and as of the end of october we have spent hundred and ten thousand of that with a remaining one hundred and forty five thousand um so that is eighty three percent of those funds that remaining piece is projected out in salaries that are within that budget we have used those funds for replacement of materials this was the original coveted relief funds and so there was a lot of lost materials that first year when we sent students home operations and sanitation technology replacement mental health supports health monitors safety monitors and professional development around

111remote learning so we've had that those funds for quite a while now and we are technically at 83 spent but we also have commitments for that last piece um i did include a graph on there so that visual piece you can see it a little a little differently and sarah the yes sir health mental health supports health monitors and safety monitors so in that first grant we did include that so we originally were looking at bus monitors because we thought we were going to be in school and we needed extra support we had safety monitors at some of the schools when we first returned to on campus they were taking temperatures and checking in staff and then health monitor health supports that very first summer you remember we went home in march that first summer

112we were funding additional mental health supports to check in at the commute within community sites throughout the summer so that was through student services and um portions of their salary came from this fund so how did you determine how you were going to use those funds this is where this is how you use them but how did you determine that you're going to use it we looked at the data we conducted a needs assessment and then we use that needs assessment to drive our action steps the very first application was much more restricted it gave very specific guidelines i think at the time we didn't know what was to come our way and so that very first application it was pretty narrow parameters around what we could spend the funds on and mostly it was

113about response immediate response to coven and sarah you said that the 145 that's remaining has already been allocated i would say that a big piece of that is already allocated towards salaries of someone who or some some staff who may be funded out of that prc which is the funding code so let's talk about sr2 sr2 we received three million one hundred and twenty thousand and as of the end of october we have spent one million three hundred and fifty seven thousand which is forty let's see let me look at my color remaining we have about 56 percent but a reminder that we do have some salaries in there so if we project those money monies out until the end when it expires in september 30th of 23 we have to account for the salaries

114over time so there is a portion of that that already has been projected which would leave us with about look at my little cheating cheat sheet here most of the s or 2 or 171 is not salary based so it's things like summer school learning loss through materials and that's guidance that came from the state professional development air quality sanitation all things that we're going to continue to need um but so right now we still have about so you said this is not the remaining is not going to salaries it's not all there may be a salary in there but it's not in bulk salaries and what type of salaries would those be that type of position as we get into s or three i'm going to talk a little bit more about what positions

115we do have funded okay and then also educational technology which we know and all of these funds we want to remember if something is to happen and we were fully remote or we were on a hybrid model we are projecting those funds out in case that happens sr3 and i know we've heard a lot about this so it was almost seven million dollars in total that we received and we just received those funds fairly recently at the very end of the summer as of the end of october we had only spent 158 000 of those funds however that's two percent if i take into account the salaries that are in there we've already spent 59 percent roughly 59 of s or 3. so we have used funds for learning loss which is required at least

11620 percent must go directly to learning loss in this particular area sr3 continuity of academic and social emotional services educational technology mental health and i gave you a few examples there student support specialists counselors social workers special populations such as ec homeless or english language learners preparation and coordination of covet and response including long-term closure costs and coveted trackers so i think i've shown you a few of the positions that may be in there so how is this so we actually have less like social workers than we had before and i don't think we increased the number of any wh why are we why are we using this money instead why is it just not been consistently used from whatever pot of funds it was used from before as opposed to coming from esther since

117we haven't increased the number of counselors social workers our staff support staff so as enrollment has decreased and we've lost staff that may not mean that we had the formula to support those staff members but at the directive of the board we did fund those positions through esser it's called a continuity of services so we know that because our students mental health and well-being is so important we did not want to drop those services and so from the state's perspective perspective we were allowed to offer a continuity of services so that we're continuing to offer that same high precovered level of service even though we may have decreased that area so then the individuals then that are i know we're getting into pay stuff here but our our counselors are paid out of esser funds

118is that correct so we have two counselors who are funded through esser okay one social worker georgia shonda you ask about um mental health we had some funded last year through grants and other areas that again we wanted to make sure that we kept those services so not being able to obtain those grants again okay thank you does that help you know we keep hearing that other districts are using their money for things that we that's why i asked earlier absolutely so could you respond to that sure um and i'm going to talk a little bit about that um i'm sorry no it's okay so there's allowable areas i just wanted to show you these are the 14 allowable areas that were provided to us with the grant um and i don't want to insult

119you by reading through it but just addressing learning loss is paramount it's number one on the list in sr3 there was a requirement for how much we have to spend out of those funds to address learning loss and that's at a minimal level facility repairs improved air quality coordination of our preparedness and response so there's several that are about specific covert response and preparedness um providing principals and leaders with resources that actually came out of sr2 and that was something that when we did a stakeholder survey that was very much a priority for our stakeholders was to ensure that schools had some funds that they are using again you kind of have to project because you don't want to spend all of that right away you want to stagger that out over the next few

120years so what kind of resources would that be just exam just one example tutors okay materials what about subs that's an ongoing conversation if that's the area of need that would probably not be out of that area but we can put that in another area okay so everything is grounded in data and what data we collect and how we match that to covid we have to ensure that it really is coveted related so this is our list of 14 14 different allowable areas where we had to conduct a needs assessment provide data and then create goals to support anything that would be coming out and matched with that at your last one number 14 says other essa eligible activities and that's every student succeeds acts and so let's talk about that wonderful thank you wow

121did we time this out or um so at the directive of the board of education esser did use funding we used funding in esser to include certain positions again as i said to maintain that continuity of services this was not a time to cut back on those services we wanted to make sure that we were looking at pre-coveted services and the high level of need right now salaries funded through sr3 amount to approximately a million per year and are projected through 2024. so big topic any bonuses must be based on data related to covid provide assurances of employment and follow federal and state guidelines that is a conversation we know that more districts are picking that up the guidance i certainly have received from my federal programs administrator at the regional level is be cautious

122take your time and just because your neighbor's doing it doesn't mean that it was done right so we want to ensure that we're doing it the right way because all of those funds have to be supported through data and through compliance with federal and state guidelines so you just can't write it into your application or do the amendment and say we want to use our sr3 funds for bonuses or right so we would connect it to one or two areas primarily recruitment and retention if covet is impacting our recruitment of staff then we can have a conversation and i'm going to be bringing you some more information next week at your board meeting well it's certainly affecting our retention so can we use it for like bonuses or something like that so so now that

123on georgia was at a conference last week i was at a state meeting last week so we do have more information we'll be bringing you next week around those areas but we want to also be good stewards of our funds and ensure that we don't run out of money before we need to and so you know i know that look it's been our conversation along from a central office perspective first we wanted to make sure we were doing what was right for our children so i just want people to hear we are looking at bringing recommendations to the board on uh retention bonuses for all staff um we're gathering data on why people are leaving and that i think is what part of what sarah is going to be bringing back and thank goodness sarah

124is so particular about what we're doing with it but i do want staff to hear that we are looking at that and we'll have more information probably soon we're going to i'm going to come back next week and present some more information and some options um we'll be working i'm sure closely with chris because we're going to have to make sure that we do everything by the book with this and it is a little complicated we've heard stories of other states where they rushed in and said everybody gets a bonus and then the state said no we can't do it that way so i just want to make sure that we're doing it the right way and we have the funds so i wanted to just kind of go back to that in that other

125essa eligible activity i do again i'm aware on the pie chart it shows two percent two percent of funds have been spent however we have staff who are being funded out of that and so we have to make sure we're projecting forward to ensure that we can keep that high level of continuity and keep the staff funded that some examples are academic support assistance instructional assistants counselors social workers digital lead teachers we also have coveted trackers who have been really valuable i know you've heard a good bit about those they've really helped the school level we have the mckinney-vento student specialist that kadata mentioned earlier that has been really important and they have a case that i looked up at it's like 44 at the high school that they're working with so we have these

126these positions and again that's about half of our sr3 funding so for let's say a digital lead teacher what assurances are we putting in place that after 2024 those positions aren't at risk so we certainly want to build a sustainability plan for that and make sure that what's going to happen after that we can pick up either at the local level or we may have to consolidate positions so but right now we can't find people to to take those positions i mean we're back to the recruitment issue we have vacancies but we're still holding those funds and hopes that we can find someone this school year too in those positions excuse me those positions are listed as grant funded correct i just want to make sure that people understand that it is a grant funded

127position and that you know it it might not be here in three years absolutely which may be part of the issue and it could be yeah and i and i i definitely agree with that but also you know who knows what's going to happen and you know sarah could hit the lottery and just gift the unit uh get to school with a bunch of money we can definitely hope um so i hope that you know provides a little light on it um instead of going into each category item by item i wanted to give you that overview i will be back next week with specific options around the recruitment and retention information but just know when we see um kind of splashed on headlines that we have all this money it may look like that

128however we have made commitments and those funds um are technically encumbered because you you don't want to spend what but also not every district is able we you're making sure we don't have to give back money or take money away from people at the end of the day as we're monitored somebody could come in certainly and say that was not eligible you're going to have to use your local funds and repay that amount and we do not want that to happen so if we're extra cautious i think that's a good thing um to be careful and cautious but also to listen and look at what our needs really are we want to support our children first um but also all of our staff in this district and our families wonderful and i and and it's

129not that we just keep pestering you about bonus bonus but when our staff see like other counties getting like i know something was in the paper about wake county and they had i know mark was happy he wasn't in that district like over a thousand openings in their district but then they were talking about giving their staff bonuses and pay raises so our when our staff see that they're like well why's why are we not getting the same thing and we do want to support our students but we need people in in the building to be able to support our students so that may be how we have to i know that's up to you all and chris on how y'all can make that work but we are working to collect the data that will

130support that and make sure that those losses have a connection to covid um it does need to be clear and you know so yes we may be a little bit behind others but we're being cautious and again good stewards of the funds but we are listening and we do know that that is um been a request from our staff and and you're not pestering us you're the eyes and ears of the community that's part of what your job is to bring to the pesticide and uh we appreciate it we appreciate it thanks yes we can pester you we will continue to pester you does anyone have any other questions for sarah i just want to thank you because i've been getting questions that i couldn't answer because i didn't have numbers i didn't truly understand

131there's still a lot i don't understand and i'm sure that's the deal with a lot of people who are listening tonight but this has been incredibly helpful for me and i think going forward especially next week with the presentation you do i think it'll be even more helpful and i think just this presentation in itself gives us a better overview of esser yeah i mean you've given us some presentations before but this is a i like to see where we are and what we've spent and but also knowing that we have things that are tied up in it as well but this presentation i think is very good i hope others will feel the same way i will say that while we focus i focus tonight and we tend to focus more on these three

132big funding areas there have been other coveted relief funds that we've received and are using as well just some of those include for our exceptional children our homeless students digital curricula the gears which was through the governor that was around health mental health summer programming we have two big summer programming ones that are coming our way and school nutrition and i will say that we are submitting a budget and a proposal for school nutrition that will involve bonuses for the staff that are working in child nutrition wonderful and i know that's something that we've talked about is we'd love to see a separate essers budget uh for for those funds so that we can see where they are so separate from our regular budget so we can see what where it plays into and here

133again james said it but it bears repeating this will be on our website at the end of our meeting tonight and if people have the opportunity and the desire to look over it and if you have questions please share with us and we can share with the appropriate people to get answers that i'm sure people will have questions thank you i would also point out that on our district website there is a federal programs page and we do have information in a public comment form that you can fill out it gives you an opportunity to review it was a return to learn plan specifically related to covid and even though we're kind of at the end of that it's still worth reading and there's an opportunity to comment on that fantastic thank you all right

134thank you so much sarah next i have georgia harvey is going to introduce um anderson smith and wike yes board and dr freeman i'd like to introduce mike wike with andrew smith and white for our financial report good evening everyone hi chairman carter i'm dr freeman members of the board i'm here this afternoon like georgia said to present the audit report for the year ending june 30th 2021. i'm going to have the presentation at a pretty high level there's probably a combined 80 pages of documents that you have in front of you so i'm not going to go through that in extreme detail we would be here all night but feel free to ask any questions you may have i'll do my best to answer any of those questions that you might have the first

135thing to notice on the copy of the statements that you all have you'll notice that they're marked draft the only reason they're marked draft is because we submit these to the local government commission the lgc for approval and we got approval for those statements today at 12 30 by chance we we can't really control the timing we won't get their approval so we just stamp it draft before that but there's they've been approved now so you know that but um first and foremost what you're going to see tonight is a very good report in all aspects i want to make sure everybody understands that going into the presentation that i have and i wanted to say also that a lot of the items i'm going to go over are items that sort of touch base

136on what you've already been presented this afternoon and it's items that we're seeing at all the school districts that we audit our firm specializes in school boards essentially that's that's the vast majority of our work we do 68 of 115 districts and from talking to all of our other partners really it's very uniform issues that the districts throughout the state are facing right now but with that said first and foremost within the the thicker copy of the bound reports you have as actual financial statements we issued an unmodified report on the financial statements the balance sheets income statements things like that an unmodified report that's the cleanest under the highest level of assurance we can give commonly referred to as a clean audit report that just means that during the scope of our testing we

137did not run into anything that would cause us to modify the statements where we say everything was in accordance with the accounting standards except for this modification so there were no modifications to be made on that what i want to point out though on this report we are looking back at the year ending june 30th 21. this is something that hopefully you all can use in your budget process you've been talking about that earlier today i've seen that on prior meetings look at it as a tool to help you budgeting going forward but remember what you hear on the investment advertisements on tv that the past performance may not be indicative of future results so use this as a tool to help you go down down that path that you're you're going for the budget

138process this last year the district was able to add within the general fund a little bit over five hundred thousand a fund balance and from our perspective it's more than an inconsequential amount it's not it's more than break even but on a budget your size it's a relatively small addition but still you know from our standpoint going the right direction adding that fund balance a little bit what we would suggest to the districts if at all possible is to try to grow your fund balance during the years where you're you're getting the the care's money the covered money and whatnot but the problem with that is we say that from a conservative accounting you know we're you're an account's never going to say you've got enough money we're going to say save more and more

139have a little bit more fund balance that's that's just how things are but with the virus and coming back to school and whatnot you've got the learning laws that you've been discussing here you've got different um social emotional needs that need to be addressed and those type of items you have um the wage pressure you've talked about that earlier today it's sort of like the notes that i've made everything was was talking about those items as well you've got pressures for tangible items that's being provided to the districts and then you've got the um the uncertainty of state funding that's one thing i haven't really heard a lot yet but the state budget hasn't been passed yet so you've got uncertainty on that going forward so in the end what i'm really saying is we

140would try to recommend to build that fund balance if you can because in year 23 24 when those funds cut out you know there's gonna be certain services that you've provided to the the students and the staff that you would like to keep if at all possible you obviously aren't going to keep all of those but you would rather keep you know be able to have some flexibility to keep a few of those services and whatnot if that makes sense and then again we're seeing that across the the state and it really is a tough decision that you as the board members are facing right now when you you know signed up for this position i'm sure you weren't expecting to have these harsh and hard of decisions to be made dealing with the virus

141and whatnot i wish i knew an answer an easy answer to this but i don't think there is an easy answer on that but with that said then there's also a smaller booklet that you all have and this is the compliance section and again i'm not going to go through it in extreme detail but that small booklet is where we will spend the majority of our time testing this is where we're looking at the internal controls and compliance of the district and we say internal control is what what do you hear that a lot but what does that really mean what we're saying is does the board have good policies and procedures in place that really limit any misappropriation of funds to make sure that you do have those policies and procedures in place and

142then we test to make sure that you're following those policies and procedures making sure that transactions aren't just flowing accurately in compliance with the laws and regulations they're doing it for a reason and you can substantiate those procedures behind that does that make sense to everyone on that but um does anyone have any questions for me like i said i was going to try to do a high level um short and sweet presentation for you but really if you've got any questions feel free to to ask me of those any questions i mean this is a lot to digest um so always we know where georgia is and we know where you are and we can always call you back if we have questions but go ahead peyton and when will this be available for

143public consumption pardon me when will this be available for public consumption um electronically you'll probably have it tomorrow and i don't know your procedures about posting it or what not but it should be available then and can we make sure that happens um board member o'connor as soon as we receive the information i am happy to work with kimberly to add it to the agenda and i will make a note in our board brief that it is not currently available but as soon as it is we will add it to the website yes and our phone number is on the opinion letters so if you have any questions whatsoever just call me directly as well for any of the board members so how does um the allocation of the pension liability why did they do

144that since the state distributes pensions are do they just give everyone the liability each district has that's exactly right okay that's that's the accounting rules coming down from the very top in north carolina i think i may mention this to y'all last year a little bit i personally do not agree with asheville city schools booking a liability for the pension obligation but that's not the rules um so would you explain that because if you read this report and you see that we have a pension liability of what was it 50 million or something close to that huge numbers like everyone in the state well i can tell you my last district in pennsylvania was 143 million so this doesn't seem outrageous but people don't understand that that's an accounting rule and we're not sitting with

145the bill for 50 million is that correct that that's definitely how i look at it what the um the accounting standards would tell you is that the pension liability covers the employees of asheville city schools and who's paying the employees of actual city schools is asheville city so they would say if push came to shove would that liability funnel down to the employer which you guys are the employer but if you look at that liability compared to your cash balance you you might be able to pay a tenth of it so i just want people to understand as we talk about our budget that this is not part of the issue of our budget not at all zero percent however salary increases and percentages that we have to pay in for social security etc are

146a part of our budget and those in any issues that we might have your exact same increases exactly right and the other equally as large component of salary increases is the increase in the state mandated contributions that you have to make right in excess of fica the contributions for the retirement system this last year that contribution went up from 18 to 20 just rough numbers but a spike of 10 percent most likely it's going to go up you know foreseeable future and that's where i say it would be in our recommendation to try to build fund balance if you can because those are the type of things that will sneak up on you 23 24. and those are considered unfunded mandates which means we don't get money from the state to do that mandate correct

147they fund it for your positional allotments a teacher very low positional allotments that is funded anyone you pay out of local anyone paid out of federal funds any dollar allotment state funds is correct yeah so yeah and i just want to make sure that's repeated that because we we learned a couple of weeks ago how much of our salary is encumbered through local funds in case there's any increase we are responsible for those increases exactly out of local funds yep which in turn makes our liability number go up yes which could be out of proportion based on other districts that may not have that many people out of local exactly so that was really easy to explain right okay and we all understand it now right no no we don't um no thank you for

148this information and like you said this is information that is going to be vital as we work towards our budget processing um so thank you for that and does anyone have any questions comments one yeah actually i'll also point out i know this will be posted but there were no significant findings right no finance at all and that's something i should have mentioned earlier i always like to mention this to everyone just the cooperation that we receive from everyone at the staff of asheville city schools we received full cooperation we were granted full access to any documents that we asked for and any inquiries we made we received um appropriate responses to those inquiries so we're very appreciative of that not easy on either side they take a lot of time so i appreciate you

149saying that about our staff yeah well thank you all right if y'all have any questions later on let me know thank you thank you so much all right next uh dr freeman just coverings i'll let you um chairman talk about our face coverage all right so um as everyone knows uh prayer state bill 654 the board has to vote every year on every month on face coverings to continue our face coverings at our schools and so we will take a vote on that on next week all right that was easy next we have student releases to buncombe county for 2122 and are in uh with melissa and our enrollment update with miss tanya pershay and miss tanya prashay is going to be doing the student releases to buckingham county and the enrollment update come on

150up birthday girls is she free after that to go celebrate or new weekend she's almost free to go celebrate her birthday after that so we'll see oh yes mine is going to be very quick okay so quick i don't have a powerpoint um good evening we don't have any transfers let's keep keep our students and um following up on the question that you asked about enrollment update the number of students who have come into asheville city schools and these are actually enrolled with us was 891. that's that's the problem across the district for this school year 891 students have yes enrolled enrolled into our okay and that does what is that percentage of out of district and in er that's out of district no that's everything that's everybody has enrolled can we count those based

151on applications of enrollment okay does that make sense how many are out of districts how many yeah how many are we have roughly 600 and nine that are out of district of the total so out of this 891 609 or out of district nope no did i not do that right that's across the board that's it that 891 is people that actually did a application and they actually got enrolled this year okay that's totally different because the they could have already been previous students and we wouldn't count them as applying to our district again they've already went through the enrollment process okay so they just have to go through a release yearly from their previous well their home district so the 891 is new students into our yes sir district okay and how many of

152those new students do you know we're out of district i think that's what we're trying to ask i will find that out okay thank you yeah okay i will find that out yesterday and i'll have that ready for you all right so no releases no releases and the second question you asked was where are they coming from out of those 800. so it was a lot to look at and so we narrowed it down and categorized them a private school charter public school that would be the surrounding area and throughout the state of north carolina out of state and our pre-k programs locally that's what a majority of those 891 came from awesome go ahead and they excuse me the numbers are basically going into high school middle school do we know you know which

153are these kids coming in here as jones all of the above k through 12th grade so we no longer have the situation where we don't have the middle school kids and that everybody comes back at the high school level uh we still have some of that okay because that used to be a huge i mean that was that was the deal but that's no longer what the real story is it's not a huge issue but that does still happen one of the things that we have to consider when we're looking and dr jean and i have talked about it is more and more charter schools are opening in our area and if you just look at the west asheville area that's what the majority of the charter schools are right and so i think we

154have to put that in perspective um when we're looking at our kids we're not the only game in town now and parents have tons of options right right okay thank you any other questions from mr all right and we'll be looking at first read enrollment policies all right okay yes thank you so much all right uh dr dickerson we have our policy uh 6000 series as our second and final reads yes uh once again i'm here to present 6000 series um i need to point out that we need to pull some of the transportation policies out the transportation department identified some language that needed to be included in the policies since we're our magnet school district and buncombe county pays our our drivers the following policies will need to be reviewed further before uh board

155approval and these policies are policy 60 60 300 63 15 63 20 63 21 63 22 and 6305 which is up for first read that's later on um the other six transportation policies are okay to move forward i also want to remind the board about policy uh 6523 which when i presented this earlier i proposed that we delete this policy because this is the use of computers it's an outdated policy i think you remember me talking about that before policies 65 20 65 21 65 22 kind of covers that policy 20. policy 6220 is the operation of school nutrition services uh in section b of this policy uh where it talks about meal charges after talking with the attorney the attorney has adjusted the language where it states the board therefore directs the superintendent to

156develop a procedure to manage situations in which students are unable to pay for their meals we don't have to have this procedure in place right now this year since all student meals are free determining what congress decides for next year will determine if we [Music] have to increase the amount of paid mail so i just wanted to point that out for that policy so should we pull that policy forward well i'm a yield to chris what what i think of instructing the superintendent to come up with a procedure is not a material change so you can wait but i don't see a reason legally to pull it for tonight now okay okay and then one more policy this is the participation of historically underutilized businesses whereas the board affirms the state's commitment to encourage participation

157of historically underutilized businesses in the school district purchase of goods and services in the policy it states the board has adopted the following variable percentage percentage goals for participation in the school district's contracts by women and minority-owned businesses um we need to complete the paragraph that mentions the percent goals for participation this is yet to be determined a check with our finance department and asked what we have done previously or how we previously set those percentages when we're looking at purchasing goods and services in the district the percentage goals range from 0.8 to 13 uh within the past quarter um and then i'm going to yield to chris again on this one um i know he we talked about this a little bit about what we could do as a district in comparison to other

158districts so there's not a statutory requirement for this this is a goal of the board and when it comes to minority uh business participation so when buncombe county schools looked at their historical data they landed on the three percent goal for participation i think as dr dickerson just said your particip your actual participation has ranged anywhere from just under a percent up to 13 depending on the quarter depending on the activity obviously if you don't have many contracts in a quarter and you were to have minority contracts that would spike that number it might be diluted in another quarter so you can continue to do additional research or you could just decide that as a district you want to be slightly more aggressive in your goal than the data from the county so if you

159wanted to set a goal tonight and move forward i certainly think something in the neighborhood of five percent would show your commitment above what the data supported for the county schools or you could defer and ask your administration to do a little more research but it is a goal and it's not statutorily required and if we're going so if we have to fill in that number another question do we pull this one out until we fill that number in you can or if you're comfortable knowing that the county schools had a three percent based on historical county data and you wanted to be the same or slightly more aggressive in your goal you can make that decision tonight you wouldn't have to pull it and uh okay well i'll ask so what are we seeing

160what do you have that if you want more than just one quarter you know it might be a good idea to pull it because in the end you might want to be even more aggressive than five percent so why don't we pull it and then your staff can look at a more longitudinal study so we're pulling 6402 and did we decide on the 16 the 6220 was the section b the mill charges yes yeah that one was fine that one can stay that one can stay all right but yeah so 6402 60 uh 63 22 63 21 6320 6315 will be pulled and we're also gonna you made the suggestion of deleting 6523 use of computers because 65 20 21 and 22 all cover that so um so if you will so do we have

161to oh sorry we have to make the vote to delete 65-23 we should add that to the actions tonight yes okay or excuse me it's your next board meeting that'll be next week's board meeting okay to delete 65-23 but you're going to pull the other ones okay all right and well well you're already up there stay right there uh because we have contracts and mousse uh and then uh just um if anyone there are no mlus okay so there's no contracts no mouse contracts no mousse okay no mousse so one of our contracts so we had this is for information there is not a need for board approval a new contract for manpower group usa christy coates was working with this hopefully to fill our gap with custodians also we have two contracts with carly

162stein for um consulting and literacy training and then um continuing contracts with um heard eisenhower loops okay any questions from anyone about our contracts um uh not about contracts but going back to 6402 um historically underutilized businesses as in addition to looking at longitudinal um is it possible to reach out to let's say black wall street or other communities and find out what's a realistic goal so it's not just us making that decision but also the community being a part of it i think the city the city and county governments in line with your question might also have done some good leg work in that area too and involving so and i'm just concerned that talking to individual businesses is a great idea but i don't know that that's going to necessarily give you the

163data you would need for a percentage hopefully somebody has talked to a lot of businesses and looked at the data i'm just concerned that would take a lot of time to get a really good impression for the percentage but it would be a great idea in deciding the goal and whether or not how aggressive to be with the goal yeah but i was just thinking checking with city and county government be a good idea too yeah it's a really good idea and that would be through the city's minority business office correct okay right so thank you for that uh now dr dickerson um so we pulled also we pulled the 6305 first read for transportation and now we have our first reads for the 41 4000 series it looks like i also have miss perche

164who's going to be speaking on this so this is our enrollment data our enrollment policies yes all right it's my first time in a long time so be a little patient um with me please so the policies that you have before you we as the committee have been meaning to re look at these review them because it needed more clarification on some of them not only for our staff but also our families so we went through and looked at it through a racial equity lens as well um and so those are the changes that you'll see tonight and if i may i have to do a kudos to this committee because they have put a lot of hours and heart and soul into this so if you please stand miss cadada win uh marta aquila

165williams uh laura parks and nelson and our illustrious miss kim jones so we did uh we did a lot of work and we spent at least four or five two hour days looking at this to make sure that we get it right for our students and and families this time and so 4115 uh parents were a little confused about the domicile and residents uh what is living in districts so we clarified that uh definition form um the requirements we clarified that uh and the biggie was all we had was suspension but we're clarifying it by saying long-term suspension so those are the biggies in 4115. and so for those who are listening this goes back to several people have pointed out that all we have to do is uh change our policies for in out

166of district enrollment and that our budget problems will be solved and we'll have tons and tons of students in our schools but we do have a policy in place just so that individuals know 2016 was a was actually not even a revision our last time we revised anything in this policy was 2019 so i just want to make sure that people understand that as well uh but this is what part of the guiding part of how we do our enrollment as mr shea said about three weeks ago when she gave her presentation so just want to make note of that so yes and also specifically uh for out of district there there are rules that we must play by and be good neighbors to our other school district and so um we play nicely and

167here again if anyone would like to see this it is available for anyone in the public to take a look first read yes ma'am and if there are questions please feel free to contact one of us or all of us and let us know what your questions are yes ma'am um the next one will be 41.50 we're asking for that to be repealed and we collapsed it into 41.50 yes 41.40 is being repealed correct yes thank you chris and i'll speak to that one for you tanya since that one's mine so the 4140 change the committee decided instead of having a stand-alone appeals process to collapse that into 4150 which is the school assignment policy so it's there but you'll see ms jones is going to upload a few minor changes after tonight it's the

168same appeal process if a parent is not happy school assignment if a parent believes that they are truly in district and should be treated as in district or if a parent feels that they were inappropriately denied out of district admission they can appeal to the board so just a reminder that all roads lead to the board of education if someone is upset about an admissions or student assignment issue just refer them back to the central office if they think that they have truly been wronged they can get an appeal before the board of education thank you chris um and that was confusing for a lot of our parents they were going multiple policies to find the appeals so we wanted to streamline that as well um um we did a lot of revision on that

169through an equity lens um it's the discretionary admission for uh out of district um and the interesting thing about this committee everybody had their own uh idea of what this policy uh entailed and so it was good to have robust conversation um so we clarified um a lot of the language and we clarified the revocation right now we do have some out of districts that have not they're not in compliance they have not got release from their home district which is an annual uh requirement and they have not paid the tuition and so we always side on the air of not disrupting the child's education but please know that we have tried everything phones social worker everything to try to bring um those parents into um good standing for their for their students but we

170are at the point that we're gonna have to do um some revocations and we're talking like over a year and a half so uh this policy was to add clarification to that so is it because so if it's a student who um is unable to pay that is that what you're saying like a family didn't pay the three we have did probably so many phone calls miss sanford and we are willing to work with these families like all of that we have tried everything and now it's to the point that they don't even pick up the phone and we're going on a year and a half some families more than that they have never got released from their district from the initial so i am talking with buncombe county schools and i probably will need

171your assistance uh esteem chris campbell on that um because we it would be my point to we want to keep this keep the kids but we also need them just to do those two steps every year and if they haven't been released by buncombe county all right i'll leave that one long okay that's a chris question go ahead okay so i'm going to throw this out which yeah okay um for quite a while we have been discussing raising the admission fee for out-of-district students has that been discussed in your group and is that something that we can look at going forward we have discussed that for some years and year before last i think it was we went up instead of paying 350 per family we did 350 for the initial child and a hundred

172dollars for any additional and that was three four years ago outside of that we have not um looked or talked about tuition um yeah because we just did it probably three years ago but okay i'm just speaking for myself um i wonder if it wouldn't behuvus to take a look at increasing that admission price so here's the conundrum for me if i had children in the district i'm paying city taxes school taxes in the district and the district how is it why it's cheaper if i move out of district as far as a tuition isn't it no no no that's right it depends on the city tax rate it also depends on no okay that's that's that's not a conversation that we want to have right now yeah dr jane are you talking about the

173special tax for us or just the taxes in general does the tuition compare with the taxes that go from the city to the school yes it's around it's about 300 georgia of course it is it is our tuition is lower than i look at my home i look at the property taxes i pay and it would be cheaper if i bought the same house out of county and could get my kids in here so how is that equitable on the other hand are we going to lose kids because if i'm not mistaken aren't there six or 700 kids on our rolls out of district so if we've got 4 100 kids and you've got 600 are we going to make it with a vast majority of those kids can't come here i don't know but

174i think we ought to look into it well are we also going to add something in there for those students because what we also see is a lot of our students of color and our families that can't afford to live in asheville are moving out of districts so how do we make it equitable in a way that they can still come to asheville city schools because if we don't then we won't have to worry about a dc order or anything else because it's going to end up being just an all-white rich district we discussed scholarships in that particular situation why don't we do an income based we could do in english i think this is something we do need to discuss not right now but i do think this is something that we should be

175doing and we have as a group started talking okay so what we'll do is we'll ask the administration to bring their ideas to us for our december work session right and we can have that on the december work session um agenda for december to get the conversation started i i just wanted to chime in real quick um we have had the conversation we're happy to have it again we're happy to engage folks there's a very wide range of ideas um there are folks who think we need to off pay have zero tuition fees to get the masses in there are folks who think we need to take it up to multiple thousand dollars i just want to know that the the mathematically the amount of money we're talking about is you could double the tuition

176rate for next year and you're looking at less than 200 000 so my personal opinion is we can look into it and there's some bigger decisions that are going to have to be made in the next three to six months and i don't want a less than two hundred thousand dollar ticket item to become a distraction for the staff or for the board i agree you know i i do think that the question should be looked at you're looking at it now i personally would be very interested in hearing what you think and what you've come up with we certainly don't want a distraction and we're certainly not saying right now that people that are out of district are going to end up having paid two thousand dollars to go to school here we just

177i'd like to see what it looks like it's been a while since we've you know visited it and i'd like to see what that might look like and it's been something that people have brought up it was actually on the questionnaire uh that that we received this evening that's something that's been brought up multiple times the board has received emails on it and questions about it so we're fine with december of taking a look at it in december once the administration gets a chance to get everything together so yeah and if you don't have it in december because i get what you're saying that there's a lot of things coming up in december maybe that's something we can do in our winter retreat since we have a retreat in january usually we haven't had been

178able to because of covet but maybe that's something that we can look at more in depth in so it doesn't take away from all the other stuff that we're going to be doing in december all right thank you anything else miss purchase just for information purposes 4130p um we had some discussion around uh academics what does that mean when you're in good standing uh what is the meaning of academics what is satisfactory attendance timely arrival and behavior we talked about behavior a lot and so what we narrowed it down to was the 15 reportables for us are non-negotiable in our district and we still and we looked at some of the incidents that we've had or students that we've denied we looked at those and so the group felt really good about this definition that

179parents can actually put a name to it um and i think it's a good start for us the behavior piece is just a really good start with having this any questions about that that was for information the biggie is 41.50 we spent a lot of time on school assignment um [Music] we change the transfer to a 2b transfer of student experiencing that they're experiencing homelessness and we also looked at the requests for appeals and chris has looked at that and gave gave some feedback on adding uh certain parts back to the appeals process the appeals process um is keeping us busy in more ways than one in this district and i'm very excited that families are very adamant about joining us but when we don't have the space there's nothing we can do and i

180try very hard to stick to board policy on transfers [Music] and on the appeals process so like i said we went through this with equity in mind it's not perfect but it is a huge start and the committee was very um happy with what we're bringing to you uh today and changing some of the language from deficit base to asset base and do you have anything just out of curiosity that mentions i know you mentioned it in your presentation three weeks ago but the desegregation order that the district reads under does dictate a lot of your school assignment as well do you have anything in the policy that says that i brought before you okay i just want to make sure people know that that is a driving factor in how we do our our

181uh our placements so and it's something that's not talked about we we don't really discuss it a lot so i want to make sure that people understand that so um when we begin open enrollment this team has come up with some very good ideas and adding a dc order and policies around enrollment on the enrollment website to make sure that we're being transparent and that parents are not having to go hunt and find and so we're really excited about some of the initiatives that this team wants to do so i'm very pleased with them very wonderful yes even having the policies read to us oh good all right are there any questions uh about our 4000 series policies on enrollment thank you mr shay thank you uh next uh have a staffing and substitute update

182with dr dickerson all right this is this information could easily go an hour i'm not going to take an hour but i am going to hit some highlights here i was asked to provide some information about absences and the substitute management system update and resignations we have had since july 1st 39 resignations 20 certified and 19 classified i have reached out to i have conducted seven exit interviews 10 have been scheduled and keep in mind we're going back to july so i've missed a few opportunities to meet with with folks to conduct interviews um so just wanted to point that out um in terms of absences i have provided a copy the first two sheets that i provided are a report from the ess agency and today is our first meeting to to to um

183they gave us gave us an update these are the last 10 days we've been uh using this system since october 18th so what you see is a report from october 18 to october 31st 10 days and real quickly if you look at the top of the first page total onboarded or 44 that serve in our district um district originals 35 of our of our substitute staff were with us first and now they moved to ess ess has only hired nine additional folks so there's a total of 44 um total of 44 substitutes in our district i want to say um again that i knew that this was not going to be um something that's going to solve this problem of absenteeism in our district the the last page and this is this is what's telling

184the last page i provided is a report from october of 2019 the same time [Music] the same time this year at this time the last 10 days we had 299 [Music] absences if you look at the first two or the first page under ess we've had 173 total absences in the last 10 days so let me say that again this year we've had 173 absences in the last 10 days in 2019 we had 299 absences at this time um you don't see silsa on here i'm going to give them a shout out the last 10 days they haven't had any absences that's why you don't see them on this list um you see the unfilled rate you see the field rate um another thing i want to talk about is lead time what lead time

185is is when teachers put in for their absences they haven't broken down into within 24 hours between 12 and 24 hours and less than in less than 12 hours this is important because if you look at when um you look at the percentages of of when they're they're coming in so 54 of the absences submitted are done within 24 hours absences are submitted between 12 and 24 hours and 26 of the absences are submitted less than 12 12 hours so i don't want to go really in depth because again this could be an hour conversation but i do want you to see that this report will be given to you each month as i as we meet with um ess um our field rate our field rates were higher in 2019 because we had more

186subs at the time we had about 100 subs in now we're kind of starting off at um at the bottom again we only have 44 we're hoping to build that up i told you that's going to take some time to build that momentum um this is really really good information and moving forward um and i think that's all i have to say oh in terms of recruiting dr degen has reached out to ess to create a banner that we're going to try to post in the gym of the high school try to attract more substitute teachers and um i do want to also state that um i want to recognize personally that um the social emotional stress is real and within our staff but i also want to say that that we have to be

187present for our students i should say and we want to be present for our students so mark quickly could you tell us what the qualifications are in order to become a sub just one one minute say it again the qualifications for applying to become a sub just real quick what are they okay so you have to right now as it currently stands you have to go through um at least you have to have at least 18. i'm sorry i'm thinking about instructional assistance if you are a high school graduate you can become a substitute teacher you have to come to my our department hr to file an application to substitute um you have to pass a background check um you know we have a substitute teacher training but all this is through eat uh neat

188um saying nieces yes ess so that process is handled by them now so if you want to become a substitute through ess and you're having difficulty please contact my office and we can assist you but we have um directions within our website to get to ess and they are managing all of that right now okay um a good question um thank you scott and i appreciate it um the other thing with parents um this is an opportunity for our parents to become more engaged and and work in our schools so i'm calling out to all substitutes substitute parents who want to become substitute teachers this is an opportunity to help out in that pool and develop our pool as well and that's kind of fast and i'm i want to be respectful everyone's time but

189that's it in a nutshell and we all provide more information next time all right any questions a question for next time what i would like to see what it looks like with our classified staff versus like our certified staff in terms of absences okay good question well typically when you don't make as much money you have to work a little harder and you don't have a choice but to show up so i would just like to see if there's a major difference there okay all right and i and we know that ess it's going to take some time it wasn't going to be a magic bullet that was going to start off right away but um we do appreciate their work uh i mean just getting nine new hires for substitutes we is is awesome

190so all right any other questions for dr dickerson all right next on the the agenda was the budget committee this was information only the board was looking at starting a budget committee but has instead decided to do budget outreach to the community i'm going to actually let george sieberg speak to on this because george is going to be the one who's going to be heading this up yes just in conversation about how a budget committee kite might work considering that there's plenty that we that can't be discussed because of confidentiality um the decision as opposed to forming a budget committee was to take conversations out in the community much in the same way that we did conversations around hiring the superintendent last time so site-based school-based community-based conversations um around the budget and we'll plan

191on getting those started as soon as we can get this coordinated perfect so any questions from the board all right great idea so looking at doing it more of a community-based opportunity here so all right um [Music] can i have a motion to go into closed session so the motion would be pursuant to general statute 143 318-1181 to discuss personnel matters confidential under 115 c 319-2321 and under subsection 83 to discuss matters covered by the attorney-client privilege moved do i have a second second all in favor any opposed all right we're in closed session are we ready all right uh we are coming out of our closed session just going over a future announcement of future meetings and announcements our next regular schedule board meeting is november 8th uh next monday at 5 p.m here

192in the board room uh there is a two hour delay for middle and high school on november 10th there is no school on november 11th veterans day and we are having uh our required teacher work day new school for students and staff on monday the 22nd tuesday the 23rd and that week that will start our holiday for thanksgiving if there is nothing else i will uh entertain a motion to adjourn so i'm gonna have a second all in favor any opposed thank you