BOE Meeting 4/25/2022

001good evening tonight is monday april 25th 2022 and i'm calling this meeting to order the orange county schools board of education pledges to our families students staff and the greater community to conduct our business in a courteous and productive manner showing respect for fellow board members staff and citizens the board asks its citizens to conduct themselves with the same courtesy towards all staff members and each other as per board policy robert's rules of order will be used to conduct meetings following the pledge of allegiance a moment of silence will be observed before we begin our business public comment will be held after the board adopts tonight's agenda the board also asks that you check your cell phones and other electronic devices to be sure that they are turned off or on vibrate in order to

002avoid disruptions during the meeting if you would please stand and join me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all as we begin our work this evening i would like to recognize that orange county schools was established on land previously settled by the ancestors of the okunichi band of the saponi nation this board has made a commitment to honor and respect the heritage of indigenous and all members of our ocs community to work to undo decades of racial harm and to build the best of our ability a community that fosters a sense of belonging for all of our students so that they may thrive and succeed please

003join me now for a moment of silence thank you dr felder i'm gonna pass to you for recognitions thank you so much chair doyle so good evening chair doyle vice chair stevens to the entire board to our staff our families students and members of the community well uh may is brimming with recognitions and celebrations and so tonight we will highlight several actually a few more than several but starting uh with this first one a recognition of may as asian uh american and pacific islander heritage month so in 1990 president george w bush designated the month of may as asian american pacific islander heritage month the month of may was chosen to commemorate commemorate the immigration of the first japanese to the united states on may 7 1843 and to mark the anniversary of the completion

004of the transcontinental railroad on may 10 1869. the majority of the workers who laid the tracts were chinese immigrants in 2019 it was estimated that there are 5.2 million asian residents in the united states and 1.6 is the estimate number of native hawaiian and other pacific islander residents in the united uh as part of the united states asian american specific islander heritage month recognizes the contributions and influences of asian americans and pacific islander americans to the history culture and achievement of the united states we are honored to recognize and celebrate them this month well next week uh while the board won't be meeting we will be celebrating national teacher appreciation week and so we wanted to highlight this tonight so that's may 2nd through may 6th at the last board meeting we recognize the district's

005extraordinary teachers of the year at tonight's meeting and throughout the year we recognize all of the district's extraordinary educators all 520 of them our teachers have all worked tirelessly with students families and each other to keep things moving forward despite another unpredictable year through all the challenges we've faced this year educators and families continue to stick together to show students a bright path forward this teacher appreciation week will be just another opportunity to acknowledge the lengths that orange county schools educators will go to ensure each and every student has the tools to learn to grow and thrive we couldn't be more thankful to all of the educators and staff in orange county schools for their outstanding efforts this year we applaud each and every one of them and we'll be distributing a sweet treat to

006all as a small token of our appreciation next week so thank you to all of our teachers and so speaking of teachers tonight we want to recognize cedar ridge high school's family and consumer science teacher mrs monique holmes oh yeah she has a chairing section there this is this haul [Applause] sit down while i continue to avoid you and so she was chosen by her cte peers to represent orange county schools as the 2021-20 uh nccatce teacher of the year nominee in the coming weeks she will represent our district as a contender for the title of 2021 2022 nccat which stands for north carolina center for the advancement of teaching cte teacher of the year in the state of north carolina this is nccat's inaugural year so they've not done this before honoring a cte

007teacher of the year we are thrilled to have miss holmes serve as the nominee for orange county schools next ms holmes will prepare a portfolio for the nccat judging and the cte teacher of the year selection process which will happen over the summer finalists for the title will be named in august and the soul winner will be announced at a special nccat event in october so congratulations and good luck to miss holmes she is here as you can see tonight and we would like to give her an opportunity to say a few words she is joined i understand by her husband her two sons and her sister as well as ms shannon braxton director of cte in the arts for the district so congratulations [Applause] thank you all um thank you wonderful orange county school

008sport for the opportunity i want to say thank you to my awesome director miss shannon braxton um miss melinda forms um and everyone here um i just really feel blessed to have this opportunity to represent orange county schools um orange county schools has been awesome to me as an educator and as a parent as well i too have two kids there so i look forward to moving forward and submitting my wonderful portfolio to represent orange county schools and i am just thankful for the opportunity thank you again [Applause] all right wonderful well the recognitions continue so next week we will be celebrating our teachers but we'll also celebrate our school nurses um as it is national school nurse week and so this week is uh will be a step is established to foster a better

009understanding of the role of school nurses in the educational setting school nurses serve as a critical health hub for students ensuring that students are ready for learning by managing complex chronic conditions identifying and addressing mental health issues leveling the field on health disparities promoting healthy behaviors connecting families to health care providers handling medical emergencies and now by helping students families and the district continue to navigate the pandemic so it has been said that for every dollar spent on a full-time school nurse society would get at least two dollars and twenty cents back talk about a good return on an investment so indeed uh school nurses are essential for healthy students healthy schools and healthy communities so orange county schools is so fortunate to have school nurses and we applaud each and every one of them

010today and every day so thank you to our school nurses all right so the next celebration is for our after school program so after school professional appreciation week aims to recognize those who work with youth during out of school hours the week is marked by celebrations to encourage people to thank our after-school professionals who make a difference in the lives of young people in their communities at this time i would like to invite our director of after-school programs ms tamara mathis to read a proclamation regarding after-school professionals appreciation week and the proclamation is from orange county's mayor miss weaver good afternoon board or chair vice chair dr felder orange county school staff orange county school employees parents and especially our kids this is a proclamation recognizing after school professionals appreciation week which starts today april

01125th through the 29th 2022 whereas the town of hillsboro fully recognizes that after school professionals those who work with children and youth in a wide variety of programs settings to provide extended learning opportunities during out of school hours which is before school after school and summer have a positive effect on our children families community and businesses and whereas after-school professionals are a decisive element in children's access to high-quality relationships and expanding opportunities beyond what they have access at school and at home which they need to reach their full potential and whereas after school professionals deserve appreciation for all that they do for children to enhance their education promote physical health and emotional health provide a safe environment and expose them to new experiences and whereas the town of hillsboro north carolina is committed to supporting

012the professionals who provide expanded learning opportunities that will help close the achievement gap nurture the next generation of engaged community members and prepare young people to compete the global economy to compete in the global economy now therefore i gene weaver mayor of the town of hillsboro do hereby proclaim april 25th through 29th 2022 as after school professionals week in the town of hillsboro in witness whereof i have hearing to set my hand and cause this seal of the town of hillsboro to be affixed the eleventh day of april in the year 2022 signed gin weaver mayor town of hillsboro [Applause] right all right our next recognition is for four um orange high school um faa members who recently won the state ffa horse evaluation career development event which was held on april 9th in martin

013county these students took the top honors from among 26 teens and 89 individual competitors orange high school's team members are samantha durham ali wilkerson chloe hoffman and haley whip samantha durham and orange high school junior had the highest score for the entire contest in horse evaluation the team of four will be preparing for nationals this october by attending horse shows speaking with industry professionals and putting in a lot of practice hours from now until then the national competition will take place in indianapolis indiana in the fall we are so proud of their accomplishment congratulations to the team and to the orange high school ag teacher alexis gates well at this time we want to say thank you a big thank you to all of our volunteers as governor cooper recently acknowledged uh that this is

014national volunteer week in north carolina with an official proclamation so orange county schools appreciates all of its dedicated school volunteers without the help of those who selfishly step in to help meet staff and student needs there is much that would have gone undone we want you to know your efforts are not uh unnoticed and we appreciate you and your sacrifices so thank you for all you do to assist our staff and students each and every day [Applause] may is also mental health awareness month uh and so uh mental health awareness month also referred to as mental health month has been observed in may in the united states since 1949 we will show our support hopefully in the next board meeting by wearing green to help raise awareness of trauma and the impact it can have

015on the physical emotional and mental well-being of our children families and communities each year millions of americans face the reality of living with mental illness just as this slide states you cannot tell by looking at someone what they are going through as a district we have to help fight the stigma provide support educate the public and advocate for policies that support people with mental illness and their families and so we will have a special section on our website devoted to mental health events and resources uh via orange county schools and our community partners during may yes that's worth applauding absolutely right thank you for that uh and so may is also a better hearing and speech month the better speech and hearing month was founded in 1927 by american speech language hearing association the aim

016of better speech and hearing month is to raise awareness around both speech and hearing problems also known as communication disorders while encouraging people to assess and address their speech and hearing needs if there is a problem with speech and language disorders among the most common conditions that young children experience we stress the importance of early intervention and so families should contact kelly lair leads speech language pathologist for orange county schools if they have any concerns or questions and last but not least as we get a head start on may we want to acknowledge that may is also older american month and so this is a formal recognition of older americans which began with president kennedy in 1963 at the time only 17 million americans reached their 65th birthday in comparison to over 40 million today

017so for everyone celebrating their 65th or beyond birthday next month congratulations and we appreciate you oh great all right so with that uh that concludes the recognitions for tonight's board meeting thank you dr felder and um just a quick shout out to miss so and her team it looks like the mental health special web page is already live and it has a lot of great resources on there um okay it's time for agenda adoption and i know there are i know of two requests to make changes so actually sarah you mentioned one first yeah so um i was thinking that we could move up the action item around the school bus transportation and put it after the student transporters discussion i know mr albert is here and would probably want to be able to go

018back it's actually a work the last one is a work session item is that what you mean move the work session item oh it is a work session yeah did i say action item you did yeah so so the work session item a move it after the other thing related to transportation which is discussion action a um so that we could hit both of those at once if there aren't any objections just so does anyone have any objections out of here sooner i know will also have a change before we vote on right not uh the modified agenda yeah i would just like to agend the uh agenda with um five ten minutes max talking about our joint meeting on thursday with the county commissioners for talking about our budget request this is not really

019a budget request meeting right but that's what i wanted to talk about but that's where we give them that okay we can that's that's actually not the purpose of thursday's meeting but that's not the topics for thursday's meeting but we can talk about what the topics of thursday meeting are that's exactly why we'll talk about it okay all right okay we need to discuss it all right so um we are i would like a motion to uh approve the agenda with two changes one is moving up our information session item to after um is that our is that after our first action item yes yes okay and then to have um basically a second information session topic at the end without what you're saying will yes just if i could the the i think we

020um realized that the second read of new policy is yeah i should actually say first read can we just approve an agenda with those changes and where it says first reading of new policy right that's and that can get pulled out of the consent agenda i think it's already been pulled out for discussion so i'll make that motion for a second okay all right so i have a motion from a smiley in a second from ms mckenzie on favor and he opposed right okay now is the time for public comments after each speaker has been recognized they will have three minutes to speak the board will not have a discussion with any speaker no profane or vulgar language will be permitted nor any personal abuse against any person any speaker that uses threatening language will

021not be permitted to continue public comment should not address any specific confidential student or personnel matter complaints concerning any specific employee or students are not permissible during public comments speakers must conclude their remarks at the end of their three minutes stuff i have that we have five speakers six speakers okay and our first is miss laurie tupper good evening first i want to address the gender support policy that was voted in unanimously by this board on december 14th of 2020 one small section of the policy states quote the school principal or their designee should speak with the student first to ascertain concerns a student may have what support may be needed to keep the student safe at school and how to involve the student's parents if at all unquote so i repeat that if at

022all you voted to hide information from the parents regarding a life-changing event in the child's life that has lifelong consequences where is transparency and where are you working with the parents for the good of the child would you as a parent want anything hidden from you about your child i would like to know if the new candidates who are running for orange county school board approve of this plan and are they willing to go public with their supporting or opposing view maybe we can have a board that we can trust secondly as an orange county resident a vast majority of my taxes go towards education so i'm interested in how how my money is spent congratulations to mr xavier adams who received the nccat beginning teacher of the year award he received five thousand dollars

023in cash instructional supply funds for his school a piece of fine jewelry from diamonds direct and a go global nc trip in 2023 go global is a company specializing in upscale sports travel packages with tickets to the world's greatest events isn't that special so now teachers do deserve recognition and i have no problem rewarding them with instructional supply funds for the school and maybe even throw in a gift certificate to a nice restaurant but isn't the cash trip and jewelry a bit lavish and according to ncdpi over the course of two thousand eighteen two thousand twenty one orange county spent ten thousand six hundred and fifty dollars more per student than a statewide average yet the graduation rate is 2.8 percent lower than the state average most grade school students are not proficient in math

024or reading across all grades and subjects chapel hill carlboro city schools art performs orange county schools including racial groups by significant margins how about getting back to the basics of education like arithmetic and learning to read with phonics writing geography science technology and history and i mean real history as it happened politics and ideology indoctrination have no place in any school and i want my tax dollars to go towards actually educating the students thank you pepper this kelby brown is our second speaker sorry mr brown good evening um i'd like to comment on a regulation 1710 gender support guidelines referring to gender transitions it reads quote some some transgender students have not talked to their parents about their gender identity they do not wish to want their parent or want their parents to know about

025their transgender status based on safety concerns or concerns about a lack of acceptance i like to focus on a parent's lack of acceptance when over 70 percent of adolescents who express a desire to change genders ultimately reverse that decision of course parents are not going to simply accept their children's desire to transition it's irresponsible beyond comprehension for the school to take on the role of trying to decipher what children are going through regarding sexuality this is exclusively the parents role code 7010 goes on to state quote the school principal or designee should speak with the student first to ascertain concerns the student may have what support may be needed to keep the students safe at school and how to involve students students parents if at all again if at all those three words it clearly

026indicates you're willing to exclude parents it's not only irresponsible it's criminal for anyone who is not apparent to play any part in this process as a citizen of orange county school orange county i demand that you reverse this regulation it it it not only if not the district will most definitely be drawn into unwinnable legal battles and that would place additional tax burdens on all of us you should know if you don't that madison county wisconsin attempted to put in a place regulations like yours in september of 2020 dane county circuit court judge frank remington issued a partial injunction that prevents school districts from quote applying or enforcing any policy guideline or practice that allows or requires district staff to conceal information or to answer untruthfully in response to any question that parents ask about

027their child at school and more recently january 13 2022 the wisconsin supreme court granted the case and will determine whether judge remington's injunction goes far enough so it's imperative that the district reverse these policies to avoid costly legal battles that you have no chance of winning but more importantly to no longer infringe on parents rights the children of orange county are not wards of orange county schools children belong to parents and guardians alone get back to your job and teach academics you're not social engineers our next speaker is ms sarah snipes good evening i'm a parent of two students in orange county i'd like to share some background 12 years ago my husband and i lived in durham and had to decide where to send our kids to school at the time durham county schools

028had terrible scores so i did research i looked at neighboring counties and found orange county had much higher scores than durham or wake so we prayed and we asked for god's guidance and we ended up moving to orange county we were very pleased at the level of care and education our kids received initially that was until about four years ago when i started seeing noticeable changes in the curriculums teacher attrition staffing challenges and a political polarity that seemed to be plaguing all of the orange county schools three months before covet hit my youngest child had three teachers leave right in the middle of his middle school year the problem was here before covid while my kids were at home is when i noticed a huge learning gap my youngest a seventh grader didn't know the

029difference between a noun and a verb ocs is now failing my students my oldest son is now a senior when he entered orange county schools they were the best in the state now he's graduating and now they're the worst in the state information that i saw on the ocstruth.org website should make every citizen in this county gasp i looked at it i verified the sources does this board know that orange county spends ten thousand dollars more per student than the state average over a four year period but the graduation rates are three percent lower again ten grand more per student and we can't even keep up with the state average how is it that we spend three times more but get three percent lower results of our students graduating most people in orange county used

030to pride themselves on spending more tax dollars on education because it used to mean better scores better students better teachers a better community and better outcomes the board is hired to do a job educate our kids and spend our tax dollars wisely you have not done that it's time for a change let me ask the people in this room and listening are you okay with spending three times more of your money to get worse results and a community that is more polarized than we've ever seen in our history our county can do better that time has come education needs to come first again i urge all citizens teachers and parents to vote for change in the upcoming may 17th board elections it's time for new leadership it's time for new leadership that will make education

031a priority again thank you miss our next speaker is miss gretchen schmidt good evening uh heather burkhauer nationally and globally recognized creator of parenting safe children teaches parents and families through workshops classes and books among other things not to keep secrets from their parents people who tell children to keep secrets from their parents do not have the child's best interest in view it doesn't take too much thought to see the web of damage this policy can cause for a child and their family not only is it detrimental to keep a secret on a topic of the child's health what other damage is this type of guidance from adults at schools setting up this child and family for with a president for keeping a secret as an okay practice in december of 2020 when this body

032unanimously passed gender support policy previously mentioned the high court in london ruled in favor of kyra bell a young woman in her early twenties who had undergone a course of hormone and surgical treatments to transition when she was 16. protocol is identical to those being used here in the us she was asking for a review of such protocols the clinic had no explanation for the sudden surge of girls showing up at the clinic for hormones and surgeries and not one minor teen was ever turned away for the inability to provide informed consent at that time in london the detransitioners as they self-identified on their own social media channels had already grown to over 17 000 women who had been led down a path with social media and societal pressures cheering them on to join an

033experiment permanently changing their bodies with the high court's decision came this council the hormonal treatments came with serious health serious health risks which might include loss of fertility and sexual dysfunction and that the evidence base for this treatment is yet highly uncertain and by the clinic's own admission the young women who had begun the process of transition had shown no overall improvement in mood or psychological well-being using standardized psychological measures all media in london held this landmark case and the beginning as the beginning of legislation to protect minors from these protocols what role did education play in this case and what role is it playing here in this county where were the adults aside from the clinicians whose employment and opportunity for a whole new class of patients may have been too much a conflict

034of interest for sounding sound reasoning children and youth have very limited perspective and no ability for truly understanding long-range permanent consequences from the leadership in this county we are seeing a full buy-in to what experts are now identifying as a behavioral or social contagion instead of standing as pillars to support the youth through what has always been a turbulent roller coaster of years the public school system paid for by its customers the taxpayers is charged with providing a basic education children are being taught as young as kindergarten and up ideas about gender identity and sexuality which are dire in direct opposition to deeply held religious beliefs for many who attend orange county schools for one children and youth to varying ages are naturally asexual so why is there support for a social idea that pressures

035children to have an overly myopic view of their ever changing and developing self as asexual as if something is different or a miss as children grow and mature we all know throughout all time many different identities are tried on the adults in this space holding such a short-term vision especially now that there is a body of evidence to refute the idea that lack of affirming surely means a tragic end and that affirmation surely means schmidt thank you thank you our next speaker is miss claire good brennan this is my first meeting here in front of the school board so thanks for the opportunity for public comment i'm here tonight because i looked over the agenda online and i saw uh item h number nine titled cultural responsive leadership again it was item h number nine

036i don't know if the board intentionally buried the lead on this but this is a pretty hot topic now and i was surprised that this didn't get a little bit more of a headline in your agenda today so it's a little disappointing to see this way down the bottom again item h number nine in this item you're asking for sixty thousand dollars tonight for this board to approve for um i believe it's uh teaching from the leadership academy with the mission statement that says you want to disrupt system inequities basically teaching teachers how to dismantle system inequities i went back and looked at the board's policy 1030 which is entitled equity and education and i was somewhat horrified and dismayed to see that the very first sentence said that orange county schools acknowledges persistent racial

037intolerance and i said to myself where am i living that this is happening in orange county i don't believe that that's a true statement so my question for the board is can you provide us some transparency as to who drafted that statement was the public available to comment on that statement in your policy and when will be the opportunity to amend this policy and edit that statement that's all i have thank you thank you our last speaker is mr david kolbinsky this is a nice room good evening orange county board of education i've got a soft heart soft place in my heart for orange county schools i had five kids go through in the 90s and steve was the principal he was a good principal my kids had an excellent education trish randall was an

038excellent employee and real quick the oldest son went off to school science and math the oldest daughter was that your co valedictorian the other daughter who went off to play basketball if you remember any of that now a nurse supervisor over in some hospital my youngest son is still trying to find himself i became alarmed when i saw a video on youtube in which a lady came to the orange county board of education and said this is a statistic for this group of people this is a statistic for this other group of people and without real my critical thinking about it two of two board members i expected very high respected very highly changed their votes and they voted to pass a revolution a resolution which i don't think people really they learned to pass

039a resolution that said that orange county school were historically and systemically racist [Music] i don't know that every taxpayer in orange county every teacher in orange county knows that maybe the teachers do but do you realize the implication of that i took it harder because i was where you are in the 90s i was asked to run for school work twice and it was a wonderful experience but what you don't know probably before your time is after hiring william harrison he went on down to cumberland county ended up running the education system for his assistant was andy bridges a wonderful guy he was there for most of the time that i was still involved here for two terms after i left shirley carraway that was the name took over she was still there when they

040were building gravely middle school did i fail to mention they were both african-american i served with keith cook uh dolores simpson and my good friend brenda yeah uh 90 of the american people say the country's headed in the wrong direction if you go online you'll see parents addressing school boards all across the country what's happening they rolled out a political agenda called equity they're trying to take over local school boards your three minutes are up now thank you thank you 90 of americans say you're going in the wrong direction you may step outside if you want to hear it but we're continuing with the meeting thank you all right and that concludes public comment and so it's time to discuss our consent agenda um we had originally 10 items on the consent agenda we have

041moved off the second reading of new policies because uh it's actually our first reading for those two policies and so dr felder would you like that to be the last discussion action item it could be yeah sure okay and so let's see we have minutes personnel report third quarter financial service contracts and enterprise financials historically underutilized business third quarter reporting equipment materials and supplies report contract approval for shi technology and the culturally responsive leadership professional development for school-based and central office leaders are there any items that board members would like to move to the regular agenda for further discussion any opposed great thank you okay dr felder we're on to our first discussion an action item about student transporters and then that's going to be followed by the information item also with um mr albert

042is that correct that is absolutely correct thank you [Music] get even members of the board in public i'm going to turn over um to mr albert our transportation director and then i'll pick up with the second topic here so thank you good evening everyone terry vice chair board dr phil everybody in attendance here everybody listening um so we're here to um advocate a little bit change and uh some incentives for our drivers and student transporters um this uh this portion of the district is uh struggling a little bit right now like it is all over the country i mean it's it's kind of i hate saying it like this so it just it is what it is right now and these incentives i believe will help pull pull um some more employees in the orange

043county schools um so our number we'll just kind of hit the hot topics and stuff on here if you have any questions while i'm talking just please please ask them those school bus uh transfer switching on me school bus transportation is it's an essential component of effective and successful uh schools you know our school bus drivers and safety assistants they play such a huge role in uh social and emotional um it's i could just stand up here and talk all day but i'm not gonna do that because i don't have a lot of time so but um the orange county schools is committed to providing a safe and effective on-time transportation for all of our students here in orange county so in order for us to to remain competitive we need to recruit more personnel

044so this where we get into uh the incentive change for this year um to say rundown of our department overview is a fully operational fleet in orange county it's 61 drivers and nine safety assistants so we currently have 44 drivers in the district and it's not hard to do the math on that one our bus has traveled 5164 miles a day running 162 routes with 41 buses right now currently and 44 drivers and seven safety assistants transporting 3532 students so our plate is extremely extremely full we'll need at least 17 plus drivers and two plus one safety assistants to be fully staffed for the upcoming year so we have hired nine new drivers this year and three new safety assistants so the incentives are working uh so we would just propose a little change to

045the incentives to give a little more meat and potatoes if you will um a lot of this kind of mirrors the incentives they're in place right now with the some minor changes paid medical uh examination fees reimbursement for cdl license annual retention bonuses for drivers entry level in one to two years of 250 dollars three to four year drivers at 505 year plus drivers receive a thousand dollars for annual retention bonus um the 500 referral bonus is something that that has been utilized but i think it could be utilized in greater detail um i really don't think the district really knew how uh that everyone in orange county every employee in orange county qualifies for this incentive so um the referral bonuses are 500 employees worked over 90 days uh 250 perfect attendance bonuses and

046we have paid out our right many perfect attendance bonus um money there so that's that's been a good thing um sign on bonus tiers is uh twenty five hundred dollars for sign-on bonus for drivers uh twelve hundred fifty dollars paid within the first 30 days of employment and the next 1250 dollars paid after the 90 day time frame being employed 1250 sign-on bonus for safety assistant safety assistants who uh can and will obtain a cdl driver's license so they can drive as well they split that into two installments as well there six hundred dollar sign-on bonus for safety assistance some drivers just can't obtain the cdl due to multiple reasons but we still need employees like that as well and the thousand dollar technician tool allowance to be paid five hundred dollars or two installments

047we'd like to keep that going as well is there any questions thank you mr albert i have questions um and i just really appreciate um all the bus drivers and transportation staff do and have done throughout the pandemic and i'm so pleased we are growing um what we offer them but i have specific questions but do other board members have specific questions bonnie yeah so thank you for this and thank you for what you do and um looks good to me i have just a couple of simple questions one is um how will it be funded and then second right now you have this very creative thing that you do where you let our bus drivers work in the cafeterias and they get paid so they can have a more hours in the day and

048are you planning to continue that and if i'm not so right now this year we had incentive packages um in place using um additional federal dollars that were received specific to um assisting in the schools it's scheduled to end at the end of this school year we've not had any discussions yet as far as the need to continue on as mr albert mentioned not only a shortage with bus drivers but we've also had a shortage of staff members with our child nutrition department and other vacancies within the schools and so many of our classified staff this year had the ability to be able to pick up additional hours what you mentioned was one of the areas in which we had drivers who absolutely did that and they had done it during the pandemic they had

049delivered food they knew many of our families our community and our students um delivering meals so it was really natural fit for them to work daily in the in the cafeterias as well but we've not discussed as far as having additional incentives for them to be able to work additional hours during the day our focus will be for drivers who need additional hours is picking up those additional full-time drivers and and getting them a full-time position within the transportation department to the extent possible okay because the the essence of my question is that program really we were one of the few districts that wasn't having problems with bus drivers and we have a shortage but we you did really fantastic actually so just curious if um we're going to have to do more than this

050that's really so uh sarah i just want to echo the thanks first of all um for what all of the drivers are doing and i um i guess i was surprised to see that we had sort of a shortage in bus driver because my impression had been you know we have like these other places in the organization that have been really hard to fill but like in transportation we were kind of doing okay so um is this more about sort of meeting the needs of next year or are we you know yeah i guess i'm surprised because i thought that we were doing all right i think um we're doing the best we can considering the situation because we have a dedicated transportation staff who stop what they're doing on a daily basis and we'll

051drive a bus because they're all commercial drivers our mechanics have driven buses for us to get kids to and from school our fuel truck driver has driven buses to get students to and from school mr albert has driven buses to get students to and from schools we certainly have had our struggles we have not had to close any schools or shut down operations or schools based on the shortage of being able to operate i think it goes to the dedication of employees in the orange county schools it's one thing that's always impressed me we have individuals who love this community who love this school system who want to make sure their job is done the best they can and they have struggled through this as we look the next year we just know we can't

052sustain that we know we need to have a full fleet we need to have drivers we can't ask office staff to do their work at nights and on the weekends to catch back up after they get off buses and so um we we've really made it through due to that we've had safety assistants who have stopped being safety assistant to be drivers and um really support staff at the school level as well helping and assisting so yes it certainly will not help us in the in the short term um the incentive package we currently have which is the majority of what you saw on the screen is but what we're really making sure we're focusing on months in advance is being prepared for the next school year making sure that we're bringing a fully staffed

053full fleet of individuals within the transportation department i mean just daily um our team is is awesome i mean the quick thinking on our feet thinking outside the box just to to complete our task each and every day has been a joy to watch and to work with these individuals because they truly are dedicated and awesome so just just we might make it look easy but it's been tough i appreciate that candor and i just want to say um how much i appreciate your leadership of that department i mean you know the department used to have a lot of sort of turnover and things like that and being able to see in the personnel reports you know the safety assistance turning into bus full-time bus drivers and all that stuff happening um as opposed to

054dealing with a lot of constant turnover has been really awesome so thank you for that i know will had a question yeah so first and foremost thank you for your leadership and thank you for everybody in the transportation department whether you're working on a bus driving a bus it's just incredible to be able to maintain the fleet the question i had is you know fortunately we are now seeing students go on field trips and so now we have activity buses and i'm curious how those are being filled to do those activities is it harder to get people to do activities should there be incentives to make sure our students are going to be able to go on these field trips and and be able to you know learn outside the school typically providing drivers for

055field trips and things like that's a little out of my wheelhouse it goes through another department but as you say yes it is getting tougher because my phone is starting to ring for help you know do i have anyone that can help with this field trip do i have it you know so on and so forth so yes that is a that's a portion of it that's struggling as well so yes i would i would recommend it so is there something for activity bus drivers as well is there something we should be doing here to help i think what we presented this evening were minimum recommendations certainly the board can add to and we certainly you make a great point about as we look at incentives for drivers any other drivers that are driving for

056us activity buses etc put an incentive in what i'd like to do rather than just throw out a number this evening is if we can bring that back to that but i do think that's an area that we could review and get more feedback um as to what that might look like or should look like to be appropriate that sounds good thank you so much welcome i had a question about the number of drivers my understanding was one reason why we want those additional drivers like the 17 drivers is that we're wanting to shorten like bus route times right so it's not like we're short 17 drivers but if we want to improve um you know our longest route so it's not as long we want to have more drivers and so if i take

057that number um that we would want 17 drivers to do that ideally and the fact that we hired nine new drivers in the past year is that net did we net nine new drivers or did we like hire nine but lose some we netted nine new drivers um we hired nine we lost a couple to retirement we've gone to um ta positions in the district so the county didn't lose these awesome employees they just kind of shifted around but yes man we hired nine but we have lost or uh shifted around a couple others so like we might almost need to be maybe we're trying to hire three times as many as we successfully hired us well that's what our department has typically held that is a fully staffed department that's how many buses the

058dpi deems that we need to to transport the number of students that we transport in this county um [Music] so what you said about the ride times and things of that nature yes ma'am that directly impacts all of that our ride times are our arrival and departure times being you know efficient and effective being on time it's been a very big struggle this year to uh to get the students to school on time and then in turn get them and get them home on time as well right and to not have them have to wait so early in the morning for a long time about 85 plus percent of my drivers right now are are getting overtime every week and they are working very hard thank you and then another question just for understanding for

059me um i'm thinking that we also need two plus safety um assistance and so what does it mean that um there are some safety assistants who are also drivers and there are some safety safety how are assistants who aren't drivers so how if you're a driver do you also have time to be a safety assistant how does that work so our safety assistants that we have um [Music] some of them have or they still can't obtain a cdl driver's license but they just choose not to drive daily they're like in emergencies they can legally get behind the wheel and transport students as well not yet but they just choose not to be an everyday driver and these safety assistants are on um our buses that transport our exceptional students who have medical needs or other

060needs and so we need that second trained adult on those buses and so they don't ever perform both both positions at the same time but there are different excuse me different pay scales and so we wanted to recognize and clarify this year upcoming with these incentives based on that tier that you fall whether you're a full-time driver you're a driver and safety assistant or just a safety assistant that doesn't have the driving ability that there was a difference in the breakdown great thank you so much other questions sarah are we going to do a big like marketing push around this after we approve these and get the word out and good because these are you know these are nice sign-on bonuses i'm a little nervous about giving half of the sign-on bonus to the drivers

061in the first 30 days like that seems a little early but if that's what other districts do that's i'll just say if we find drivers or like sticking around for 30 days and then leaving we might want to think about that well a couple of things there i mean we certainly talked about this several years ago when we went to the bi-monthly payroll and you know when drivers are onboarded missing a cycle on pay and then how long it takes them actually start receiving their first paychecks and knowing that our drivers also who have part-time jobs sometimes two and three jobs and they're stopping that employment in order to start driving for us it really does help to get that income incentive very early on for them um we monitor and we also um don't

062repetitively pay sign-on bonuses for people who come and then leave and then come and leave so just there are some um safeguards built into that okay well if we don't have any further questions or comments um i take a motion to approve um again this is just the bottom line you feel you know we can take what you get uh vice chair stevens in a second from his house our own favor any opposed thank you very much and we look forward to future updates and potential requests thank you thank you so much mr albert mr l abele sorry i'm trying to get to my next item mr albert i i just have to comment you know when we were all out for teacher for bus driver appreciation day it was amazing to see the team

063that you've created of the transporters and you know the the camaraderie with each other and with you it's just um really amazing and it's wonderful to see thank you so much for that yes ma'am thank you okay we're doing the work session item now right that's okay yes all right so uh leading into we've talked about our school transportation fleet um we'll dive into a little more detail about on-time service delivery and a couple areas that we're addressing i just want to make sure a very clear for the public that's listening or any of our staff that's hearing about this agenda item tonight this is just a draft it's a work session no voting will take place on this item this evening what we try to do when we have topics that we know have

064a broad reach and impact especially like this it doesn't matter whether you're a parent you're a staff member member of the community grandparent caregiver individual in the schools or outside of the schools when we start talking about bell times we know there's an impact across the board we try not to have information going out in the community or asking individuals for feedback before we've had an opportunity to even bring the item or agenda before the board so that you're aware of the information and the problem that we're trying to solve so this evening's draft is about talking through why this is an important topic for us the work that's going on behind the scenes and then potential next steps that would take place of how we propose to address this problem the goal being that

065we're a better organization and our schools are able to operate more efficiently and especially our students who ride buses every day are able to get to and from school on time and so we'll talk about that this evening this is a tied to our strategic plan and strategic plan goals as mr albert said transportation is an essential component for us and we want to make sure that we're meeting the needs of the schools and our students but especially our parents we know many parents rely on school bus transportation over 3 500 students half of our school district rides some form of school bus transportation for our students either morning or afternoon some students ride both they ride in the morning and the afternoon and so we want to make sure that we have bus driver

066vacancies that are filled that's what that last agenda item was about making sure that we were fully staffed we're able to roll but the second thing is making sure buses arrive to school on time each morning and making sure our buses are able to be at the school to pick up students on time in the afternoon there is a domino effect with that as we start our routing and we'll we'll discuss that in a little more detail but it's not only important for families who are waiting on students to get home it's important to staff members who have to monitor and supervise students while they're waiting for school buses to come on the campus in the afternoon to pick students up complicate that with inclement weather complicate that with students who are tired they've had

067a long day they've got homework to do they've got jobs they've got other activities and things to get to and it starts interrupting schedules very very quickly and we know from social emotional health how that can impact you day after day after day if that's an issue transportation services are directly related to bail times so we're going to talk a little bit about bell times and drivers for bell times and we also want to look at academic performance of students those students who continually miss the starting of the school day due to being late to school our average performance and these service indicators are pre-covered we have not received an updated service indicator report if you go online to actual abstract for this information if you're viewing or listening there's a link to the north

068carolina transportation information management system tims there's a service level indicator report this information this data points taken directly from that the last one compiled across the state looks at all school districts across the state student ride times in orange county schools was 85 minutes one way it has not gotten any better with the pandemic so 85 minutes was the average um first dude just to clarify i think it i think it isn't i think that's our longest okay it's it's on a later slide and i was like that's the average that's our longest which is higher than the state average for the longest our average time is more like uh is 28 minutes okay great thank you for that clarification holy so even as we look at the ride times we want to shorten those

069as much as possible for students so that we can quickly get them from point a to point b and make sure that we're not causing any additional impacts as we move forward school bell times are set based on the academic calendar to ensure the state law is met for student instructional hours over the course of a school year for the 2022-2023 school year the academic calendar in the orange county schools is 174 student days we've looked at an average instructional day of six hours and that helps us make sure that we're meeting the minimum instructional hours of 1025 hours school districts have two options you can go by number of days 185 days or hours it's very difficult to get the number of days in if you're just going by days does it really give

070much flexibility especially with inclement weather or teacher work days or additional time needed within the calendar and so most school districts utilize the hour option because it does give a little bit more flexibility but those instructional hours don't count things like meal times and they don't count things like the changing of classes changing of the periods and so we we want to make sure we're always meeting our instructional hours and then having a little bit of time and i think next year we have a little bit of time built in up to three days for inclement weather and that was prior to option two that we'll discuss tonight and we're still reviewing with the principles to make sure we're meeting our instructional hours with the a little bit extra built in and then state transportation

071efficiency is based on our routing and based on how we're utilizing our transportation services primarily student travel times fleet transportation how many students are we actually putting on a bus you know it's not very efficient you all can understand certainly if you have a 72 passenger bus and it's driving hundreds of miles a day and only traveling with two or three passengers each trip that just would not be very efficient and so that impacts our rating the state only recognizes one transportation agency per county in orange county we're unique because we have both a county school district the orange county schools and we have a city school district at chapel hill cargo city schools the transportation department is the fleet management for both school districts when it comes to transportation so we not only larry's

072crew not only maintains the fleet for the orange county schools but also the buses in the chapel hill cardboard city schools which is another 80-some buses that are there and so we supply the mechanics of fuel etc all that comes through the orange county schools they supply their own operation staff for routing their own bus drivers etc when i reference information and thank you ms smiley for that correction when we reference information to orange county schools transportation fleet or transportation routing we're only talking about orange county schools so i just wanted to recognize that so when you look at that service report it does break down chapel hill carver of city schools as a separate local education agency but we are combined when it comes to some state regulations so the problems we're trying to

073address again getting the students to school on time making sure we have drivers we're being efficient in our routing we're not losing funding based on how we're operating but there's we also know there's a whole there's many other factors that impact transportation on the daily basis i'm not going to go through all of those that are on your screen but you can imagine on any given day we're dealing with multiple issues on that list not just one multiple ones and when we talk about growth and development in orange county um you know you can think about the impacts that this have this has on transportation services and then as we have carpools and other traffic within school zones it just it creates an issue for us trying to get buses on the campus and off

074the campus and so when we talk about transportation routing we also have to consider all of this a good analogy i've never been in a flight control center in an faa tower at an airport but i can imagine it's quite a busy place that's what it's like on a daily basis in the transportation department trying to route buses make sure stops are taken care of and then make sure all of these things are addressed our current bail times for this school year you can see on the screen elementary 750 to 250 middle school 8 30 to 3 45 high school died a.m to 4 15. there were additional minutes added to the high school calendar ending time a couple years ago and then i mentioned that service indicator report so we did an analysis larry's

075team spent time over six to eight weeks running different scenarios and looking at different options as we think about how can we route and how can we make some changes within the current transportation fleet we also heard feedback from schools and principals over the course of the school year about those additional minutes at the high school and could we roll those back when we look at bell times we also looked at combining middle school and high school tiers as one solution combining those so rather than running three tiers all buses are running for elementary and they go pick up drop students off at school pick up middle school drop them off go pick up high school drop them off rather than running three tiers because we run two tiers and we call that option one

076we're not recommending that but that was one option we also looked at geographical build times not having the same belt times across the district many school districts operate based on the region and based on the area different bell times that may fluctuate among schools we know in a small community like orange county schools plus having staff members in multiple buildings and parents who have students in multiple buildings whether those are choice programs or traditional programs makes it a little bit more difficult to reverse the district if there were different uh bell times and then the district also reviewed making adjustments to the current bell time schedule that's the one we propose making additional tweaks to which keeps the three-tier system but makes the improvements we talked about the driver incentives but also our routing as

077well so when we look at the two-tier system again we're not recommending that but you can see there's a host of issues there and one of the biggest ones that stood out from feedback with school administrators that we talked about was the continual issue with traffic on high school road not only would we have carpool students and staff all trying to come into those campuses and leave at the same time buses our transportation fleet um primarily uses the middle access roads in between we have buses staged and parked and then we also think about high school drivers who would also be caught in this traffic pattern back and forth the roadway congestion is already difficult let alone if we were trying to have both schools on the same schedule i think you'd probably hear from

078every constituent and local authorities as well as to the difficulty that might include although it still should be noted we will continue to review and look at ways to assess and address the traffic issues on high school road aside from this discussion with our local law enforcement partners we've already been in discussion with d.o.t and looking at transportation and the service road and can we reroute traffic as well so that will be a continued discussion to address on that issue any questions about option one because i'm going to skip it since we're not recommending it okay option two is the kind of recommended draft at this point in time would be to make some adjustments to the bell times start the elementary school five minutes earlier i know five minutes makes a bit a difference

079for some families we're trying to get those students to the campus they would not still arrive any earlier our mark right now we use is 7 15 am that's the point when buses arrive on campus and we start unloading our elementary students we need to get those students off the buses in get their breakfast get them settled down so those buses can get out of carpool traffic and off to picking up the middle school students if we try getting those buses there any later in the morning they'll have difficulty getting on the campus and they won't be able to get off the campus with the amount of traffic the instructional hours are changed we do recognize that for elementary we're still working with elementary principals so i'm not you know it may not the final

080recommendation may not be exactly 225 it could be 230 or 235 but 225 would be the earliest we feel that we would we would be able to recommend based on what we know today middle school um just again a minor adjustment there 8 30 to 3 30 and then high school 9 a.m to 4 p.m taking those 15 minutes off and um you know that really is the the option to continue to tweak now mr albert has done other things looking at how we can better be more efficient in this scenario with the right-hand turns right-hand stops left-hand stops the the number of back-trackings that we're doing and we're still looking at are there any areas where it makes sense to pick up or we could pick up students from multiple ages right now we

081don't pick up students we that for elementary and middle school obviously because the bell times are different but in the future that may be one option we would look at um especially if that would help ease some of the traffic at some of our schools but that we're not recommending that um at this point in time but it is something we did look at so you know our proposal is we wanted to bring this information before the board tonight get your feedback and then we would send out surveys to staff and parents and get those comments back through the middle of may and then bring final recommendations um draft version one to the board on may 23rd and then any approvals in june so we would have time to get those announced before hillsborough elementary

082school starts in july so with that i'll kind of back up because option two was the one we we landed at for starting to make drafts to we recognize it's not easy changing bell times it's not easy changing school pickup times for buses it's difficult um but what we're looking at is trying to make sure we're making improvements because we cannot rely on the results that we're getting which is students showing up at school late questions or comments thank you mr alpine mr albert and so questions sarah and then will thank you um well first of all i am thrilled that we're going to be moving back the high school time to an earlier end time i know that's been a big um challenge so i'm glad to see that we're making that change um

083i you know i i just have some concern about the elementary time being cut so much um you know the loss of the 20 minutes there um when i think about the meal recess transition to and from a special and then just frankly like the lost time at the end of the day to like get the coats on and go to the you know dismissal and everything i just really worry about the total amount of instructional time that we'd have there and losing that 20 minutes a day feels challenging um so i think really relying on what we're hearing from from school based staff i think is big um but yeah i have i have some you know having i'm just not sure that 40 minutes is enough in an elementary school day for the

084meal recess and transitions um so but i am not an expert on it i just wanted to flag that that seems very tight and i don't know that we have the like levels of like speedy transitions every time at the elementary school level to like make that work i will make just one brief comment about recess so several years ago the state board passed a policy recognizing and asking schools to ensure there's daily healthful living and there's daily exercise and things that are happening for students as a way to keep kids healthy in schools at that point in time they removed recess as the disclaimer of instructional time it used to be when you calculate instruction time it clearly said not including recess that reference is no longer there because it's a healthful component to

085a safe school day an effective school day as part of the curriculum we do utilize instructional minutes can be counted towards that helpful thank you yes other questions will so i know one of the feedback that i've gotten a lot is the original 415 time and beyond that high school used to get out at 3 45 which is severely beneficial to our teachers and also students that are participating in extracurricular activities because normally they have to leave their class so they're missing class um and i would personally like to see us try to get back to 345 to be beneficial at our high school and also allow our students to have more class time and not miss that when they have to go on athletic or other other trips and i do think it will

086help us attract and retain high school teachers especially given the environment we're in right now thank you okay honey so thank you for this i i want a plus one on sarah's comment on the 20 minutes and um and actually it's more than that it's not just the recess on our crowded elementary schools those kids are getting ready at 2 30 for 250 bell time so they're really losing a lot of time so i'd like to see if we can protect that and you know their teachers are trying to figure out how to get their curriculum done in their time now i also want to plus one on will's comment on 3 45 if we can get our high school kids out sooner so they can you know because the teachers are complaining that sports

087is interfering with their and their last class of the day that that's a so instructional we don't want instructional time to to have to operate at the on the belt on the bus schedule right um so that's that's one thing i'm i'm fascinated by your the decision to simplify the routes if i'm reading it correctly or we're cutting off some of the i think of them as the the capillaries on the roots so that you don't have to make as many stops and i'm curious how much we have been able to reduce the route times that longest 85 minute or so route time yes ma'am um so the right hand pickups that's whenever we we put into teams and create a route it has an option right hand pickups left-hand pickups both things of that

088nature so we always try to lean towards right-hand pickups especially well it's not leaning towards high traffic volume roads we pick up on the right-hand side and drop off on the right-hand side because it's safe you don't have to cross the road yeah so in the more rural areas in the low traffic volume areas we're going to start transitioning into both whichever makes the route more feasible and short and more efficient and then more corner stops as well instead of going you know two houses down to pick another student up go to another house picking those two and making a corner stop and things of that nature and yes that will in turn shorten right right and so i was curious if we had any idea of how much we're going to cut and whether

089it will help us i remember with all the inclement weather days bus service was a big issue and i wondered if we've been able to cut out some of the roads that tend to get iced up and so that we can keep school no no okay that would be just if i could um can i keep going when work um orange middle school and maybe it's really a dr felder question um one of the orange high school road concerns is that with that middle school used to open at 7 30 for kids to drop off and now it's opening at eight and if we could open up school earlier we could people can drop kids off sooner and parents believe that will help with the with the traffic and then finally is there a way

090to com combines you know you've heard this loud many times can we combine a couple of the orange middle orange high school routes no more questions thank you okay do you have i know stevens also has a question given he answers for bonnie before yeah just i want to follow up on the high school at 3 45 so over the years this is my 26th year the calendar law has changed many times it used to be a thousand hours or 180 days of instruction it's now 185 or 1025 hours so the requirements that the additional five days has made a difference in the ending bell times but certainly we can review that as far as the looking at how we can open schools earlier that's really a principal school-based decision i know with covid it

091has been very difficult to have any services extended extended just for the simple fact the hours of students on the campus and having students gather and collaborate in being in one location it used to be when i was a principal many many years ago sure i took students in because i had a before school care program but they went into the cafeteria we only needed a several state staff members where they went in the media center but they weren't in classrooms with an adult in every classroom because i wouldn't have had the staff to do that um but with covid you just we really can't concentrate or want concentrating students together so i think there just would need to be some more discussion about what that could look like and i don't know if i'd

092answered all your questions sorry right so my question is um would revisiting that 3 45 time affect the time that we're banking you know because we're banking and we haven't had to concern ourselves for years about saturday school or makeup time and that was because we were banking the time but if we move our time to 3.45 will that affect that yes absolutely and it will impact the entire buses needed to reach the high school students because again with the middle school getting out at 3 30 we we're relying on the elementary buses for high school routes at that point because there's not enough time at 3 30 release it middle school to route students home and then go get them we might be able to look at a couple buses take in the middle

093school students but then we have to hold them on the buses until the high school students get out which the feedback was that's not realistic to be doing that every day to hold students um and so yes there will be a direct impact that's why when i put the presentation together we wanted to make sure there was an understanding of how much bell times impact and drive the ability for us to be able to transport students and get the buses routed in time at each level thank you i appreciate that because those of us who were around some time ago and and with the superintendent trying to figure out makeup days and and and saturdays and such that is a heavy lift and parents get really twisted about that so just like us to be

094keep that in mind as we move forward and i will say as far as inclement weather right now the law the legislation that was put in place for the remote learning days for inclement weather was for this year um that is not in the continuation that we know of now and we're waiting to hear if that's going to be an option so we right now don't have and can't just count on remote learning days because that's to be decided that's what i heard okay well so i i appreciate the clarity or the other option is you could add more buses and we could look at the cost offset if that was the trade-off of time versus transportation yes the district can and does have the option to purchase additional school buses off state con or

095off state schedule there's a couple things to keep in mind with that it's not just the bus there's increased costs for drivers maintenance fuel tires all those systems engine replacements that we would then be covering that the state would not if we can find the additional drivers for the additional buses but yes that is a very valid point that school districts do have that option to add to the fleet okay thank you so much for your presentation thank you thank you thank you okay so now we will go back to our discussion action items um and i think we're holding the policy piece till the end i don't think that affects staff as much so we are now on reorganization of student services that's correct okay great so i would like to invite dr doyle

096chief of schools and achievement to lead this discussion good evening chairman doyle vice chair stevens members of the board of education i appreciate the opportunity to speak with you this evening and i'm in the same spot i was in last time not being able to see the screen very well because the older i get the more these are essential and that's not even helping so i'm going to go for my presentation in my notes so i would just ask for a little grace this evening so you'll see on the screen our description of goal 1 which is teaching tomorrow's leaders and this is the goal for our district's strategic plan this goal is not only what our community has asked us for in terms of what they want for student learning what we hear often

097oftentimes in our public comment but it's also what our staff our board of education and our students want for themselves it's aligned to our school goals to improve student achievement and the key strategy in this particular goal is around the multi-tiered system of support and i hear i'm here before you this evening to talk to you about one of the critical components of that multi-tiered system of support and that is our student support services please make no mistake that the work that is being done by our educators in our classrooms every single day is the heart beat of this system but our certified staff who are supporting those teachers in those classrooms as well as in our counseling offices and in our social work offices are also ensuring that our students are successful the work

098of student support services really is kind of in tune with the maslow before blooms and that means we cannot help a student learn until we really make sure that their basic needs are met many times our students come to us and they are struggling with many different challenges and being at school is sometimes a feeling of safety but also sometimes at school they're not feeling as safe not because of the conditions that we we may have created but because of what they're bringing with them to our campuses and so our student support services professionals are the ones that are really the first responders to those students in helping to meet their physiological needs their safety needs and hopefully helping them to get to the point of self-actualization we all know that each of us is

099a work in progress and these needs can be we can be anywhere on the spectrum at any given time but our student support services staff really is focused on ensuring that our students have those basic needs met so that when they're in the classroom they can be attentive to the learning that's being presented to them our student support services really facilitates work in all three of our areas of multi-tiered systems of support it helps to support our students academic development when you think of the school counselor especially the counselor that's in the high school area they are helping students to come into high school understand their credits and get to a point of graduation where they have earned not just the ability to graduate but the ability to move on successfully either in work in

100college or in military service in addition we have support for positive behavior we want our students to be good citizens both in our schools and in their community and obviously when they graduate so that they can be contributors to our communities and finally we want to support the social and emotional health and development of our students as well and so our school counselors and our school social workers really do provide support in every aspect of our multi-tiered system of support this is what that multi-tiered system of support would look like if it had kind of three um legs on a stool on the left-hand side you see our academic supports in the middle you see the positive behavior our classroom management systems and on the right hand side you see the social and emotional learning

101that we want students to be able to leave our school system with the bottom of our triangle is our core what every student gets every single day but then as students express or demonstrate needs uh to have additional support that's when our school social workers our school counselors our mental mental health based support begins to kick in and provide additional guidance support assistance and resources for our students and their families and then at the top is where we have hopefully the smallest number of students needing that very intense support but it also represents a great deal of energy and time to provide those needed resources for students again our school counselors and our school social workers are intimately involved in each aspect of our multi-tiered system of support and we can't really be successful at

102ensuring students learn unless we're it is successful in making sure that they feel comfortable being in our classrooms every single day social and emotional learning is at the right-hand side of that mtss triangle and the core is providing a consistent curriculum which we are working on and i hope to be able to bring you by the end of the may board meetings a recommendation for a core curriculum which will be the first time that we have something that's a systemic k-12 i will tell you that our rfps were due on friday and we had five respondents so that's good and we're getting ready to be in the process of having our teachers and our family members that want to be a part of evaluating that curriculum have the opportunity to give their say that information

103will inform our work moving forward but for the purposes of the public who is listening and i know our board is very familiar with why social and emotional learning is so important i think it's important for our school system to really define what it is we're doing with social and emotional learning and this comes from multiple sources but it includes the department of public instruction our goal with social and emotional learning is to help our young people and our adults that includes me everyone who's in this room to acquire and apply the knowledge skills and attitudes to develop healthy identities do i feel good about myself am i able to operate my life lead my family have strong relationships and be independent manage our emotions and achieve personal and collective goals and this will come

104up in some of the data that i share with you in a few minutes because this is one of the areas that we know we have some challenges with our students particularly since the pandemic has really isolated our students but it's also an opportunity for us to really provide the learning and the resources to students to help them manage those emotions feel and show empathy for others this is an area that all of us can really benefit from but also use some work in establish and maintain supportive relationships and make responsible and caring decisions and the right hand side really is the framework for those key skills that we're trying to develop for students in social and emotional learning for those of us who have been in education for a long time this could be

105best characterized as what used to be called character education but in character education as you may remember for those of us who've been sitting in these meetings for a long time we we were presenting information to students in character traits that seemed external to them what we're doing with social and emotional learning now in our classrooms with our social workers our school counselors with all the staff that are working towards helping our students develop these skills is we are helping our students learn what the skill looks like learn what it looks like to demonstrate that those skills and to really see positive benefits from utilizing those skills in their life so it's not something external it's something that we develop as human beings and so why is social and emotional learning so important each of

106us we work in a public education but as especially at the board level and many of the folks who are watching us can attest as business leaders um and owners and members of other work sectors in our community that social emotional learning is critical to the success of employees if we bring in employees to our business or industry and they can't get along with each other they can't work on a team they can't think critically and they can't manage themselves and their own emotions and reactions to stress or challenges in our workplace they're not going to be successful and that represents a significant lack or a significant investment that is lost when that employee is not successful in that business and so forbes in an article that's linked or cited below makes this statement in

107an article and it says that social and emotional learning can help students better understand and identify their emotions it can help them develop empathy increase self-control and manage stress it also helps them build better relationships and interpersonal skills that will serve them in school and beyond helping them succeed as adults an emerging benefit of explicit sel instruction is that it builds the emotional intelligence and agility that business and industry is starting to name among the most desired workforce skills for both their well-being and their future economic opportunities social and emotional learning is power for our students our state is telling us we are supposed to be helping our students develop these skills but business and industry is telling us that they want graduates who have these skills as well so this data shows the challenges

108however that we've experienced in the last couple of years with regard to the social and emotional health of our students our social workers and school counselors receive referrals for support and assistance for students every single day and to their credit they log this data as a way to improve their work for our schools and for our system but also to see how things are changing and developing in our system with regard to our students what you'll see here is two years of comparison data and that is 2020 21 so last school year and the current school year so please know this data was collected as of last week and it's continuing to be collected however you can see the drastic increases in mental health referrals in specific that's the left hand column is really the

109full total of everything that's to the right but with regard to suicide we have an increase of 93 percent which is alarming it's alarming because it represents students who are feeling like there is no solution um in our in their families in their environment in their communities and in their schools and our um social workers and our counselors really are the first responders to help our students try to manage through those types of crisis and get to the other side healthy and whole and we can all understand with the isolation that has consumed our students over the last um really 18 months of the pandemic and then as we've come back slowly to in-person instruction what that isolation has meant but these numbers really tell the story this work however also is an emotional strain

110on our our staff and it really does represent the challenges that they too are dealing with in trying to respond to these children who need our assistance also i just want to come back to the social and emotional skills that we're trying to develop in our students and the discipline data that we saw a few months ago a couple of meetings ago that really highlighted with the exception of our high schools where attendance just is generally an issue and really specifically tardiness the big concern is student aggression and that is evident in our elementary schools and in our middle schools and this aggression if students are not in classrooms that are serving students with exceptional needs are happening in general education classrooms and again the first responders to support that classroom teacher are often the

111school social worker the school counselor the school principal and any staff that can be of support to assist that teacher but also really most importantly to assist that student in getting back to a point where they can really receive their education and the instruction that's being presented in class in addition to all of this work supporting our students mental health developing our students academic records and helping students to navigate schools so that they can be successful at gra graduating and getting to work going to college or serving in our nation's armed forces our student support services staff is responsible for our 504 compliance and so different from what happens with students with disabilities who are labeled as exceptional children 504 is part of the rehabilitation act of 1973 and it's really a civil rights law

112that requires us to provide services to students who have a handicapping situation and our school counselors are generally the staff on our campuses that are ensuring compliance with these 504 so if a student has a handicapping condition it's creating a challenge or a barrier to learning for them because one they may have to miss school because of appointments or they physically may are be late to class those types of plans are being drawn up in our schools and supporting those students to make sure that those handicapping situations are not stopping them from being successful in their academic work but the compliance around 504s is no less rigorous than what is expected for our students who have exceptional needs and the plans have to be drawn up by the students 504 coordinator at the school as

113well as their teachers have to be a part of that planning and the parents and the student as well as you can see 504s have just recently transitioned to student support services as i said they're managed and facilitated by our school counselors we have 383 active 504s right now and and you can see again by no fault of anyone there we have some of those plans that are overdue because of the pandemic and because of um challenges that have to do with a myriad of things to include um absences um the inability to get up with parents in some regards uh or or just getting the correct paperwork and those things together we don't want those things to lapse we need our students to have every support at the time that they need it so

114they can be making progress through their academic work as successfully as possible you can see here um i've really tried to make a case for the significant work that our school counselors and our school social workers are doing um in the description that i provided we have one staff member who is devoted to student support services and it's not me i want to clarify that i'm just serving in a limited capacity at the absence of miss cobb who did a phenomenal job and until we can get uh dr dreyer who will be joining us in the middle of next month but in my work with ms cobb as well as with my work with my two colleagues who are listening in and a part of this meeting with me miss avis barnes and miss kim

115de graffenreid who are our lead social worker and lead counselor respectively those two staff members who are full-time school-based employees are coordinating the work of student services for orange county schools and have been for more than six years but we have one full-time position i felt it was really important to provide kind of some benchmark data about what student services looks like in comparable districts you may say and i'll look at my illustrious board member ms hauser because she likes to ask this question and i respectfully i respect that she does how did i come up with comparable i came up with comparable based on around a similar number of students and so you can see there is quite a range there but definitely around a similar local per pupil effort and that's the third

116column that is on this chart and there's much more detail i want to tell the public online in the description that was linked at the bottom of this item i encourage folks to read through that you'll see that orange county schools has the third highest local per per-pupil effort in the state of north carolina and the number that's listed up there i want everyone to understand is from the statistical profile which is on the north carolina department of public instruction's website it lists every dollar that is both appropriated and spent in north carolina's public schools and this number does not include our federal funds and it does not include our state funds this is just our local effort [Music] because that often is the differentiator and so you can see orange county schools right now

117has a director of student services you can see that chapel hill carrboro has seven employees that are leveraged to support student support services asheville city schools which is a smaller much smaller school district also has seven um they are also the second highest local per pupil effort in the state of north carolina chatham county schools which is um number i think it's thanks thank you for helping my eyes six chatham county schools they have six employees who are serving uh student services and then mooresville graded schools has three and a half for again a smaller number of students and one of the lowest of the list that i have here of per pupil effort um i make this case because um one we have operated with a very slim staff and student support services for

118a long time but our public our community expects a very high level of service and support for our students and it's not any small work to not just provide the support that's happening in schools but to coordinate the multiple services that our community leverages to support our students from the outside from what everyone would recognize as the department of public or department of social services the orange county health department but goes as far as many more groups in orange county that really support our students to include the juvenile crime prevention council the child fertility fatality task force the adolescent parenting program boomerang and our school-based mental health services and porch hillsboro which supports our district food pantry for which i believe our district really led in during the pandemic in terms of making sure that

119our students were fed and taken care of again going back to making sure that our students had their basic needs met so that they could continue to learn so i present all this information and make this case to the board uh to say a few last um things i'm very cognizant and our our superintendent is constantly reminding us about the board's reminders around adding staff and that our citizens tax dollars are critical resources that we are to use at the highest level with the greatest effectiveness and efficiency that's their expectation that is your expectation of us and that's our superintendent's expectation as well as we're discussing these proposals in cabinet which is why you'll see in the next slide that as we recommend two new positions and the expansion of our existing leads as well

120as giving our schools some additional months of employment to support the academic support needed to help students during the summer especially transition into our school district capture the appropriate credits when they're coming from another school system we do not have a large population for example of military students but we do have a significant population and those students come from all over the world and have transcripts that have that take a great deal of time to interpret and to assign the appropriate credit towards graduation [Music] all this work is being done by our student services uh support professionals so we're asking that our two leads are finally recognized on a permanent basis for the work they've been doing for over six years and that is to make them coordinators that is not though to take them

121out of the schools uh we do not advocate for that we're really not advocating um that any of these positions are at the district level they will be in schools every single day as you know miss barnes and mr graffen reed serve individual schools but in this regard we want to make their work much more systematic akin to the work in some regards that i'm doing with making sure that i meet with principals every single month they need that opportunity to provide support to their school counselors or school social workers in the same way one benefit of providing this is that these two staff members have interns every single year and so their schools not only benefit from their expertise but they also benefit from the additional human resources that are leveraged because of those

122interns serving with them we're asking for a position to support 504s because this is a significant lift for our student services staff and because the compliance around it is critical not just to make to satisfy the requirements of the law but more importantly to satisfy the needs of our students that 504 coordinator would also be assisting with supporting our social and emotional learning the curriculum deployment and the coaching around implementing that curriculum in our core and helping our staff and schools develop supplemental support for that social and emotional learning as well and then finally a mental health specialist who will assist our schools in providing support to students who are having significant mental health challenges but who are either one waiting for uh referral for exceptional children services or have a a situation in their

123life that is creating a a crisis that hopefully will not be permanent as we listen to the challenges that our schools are having over the last several months this school year especially this is an area of great need as we've seen many times where students are having crisis and whole groups of staff members are really trying to problem solve to figure out how to support that student before they're ever going to receive services for exceptional children if that is the path for that child and so and sometimes that's not appropriate and the needs for our school staff is to have expertise and additional research resources and strategies to leverage to assist those students and so again um we would ask that these positions are not um funded out of any new funds we are reorganizing

124existing resources to provide this reorganization so first we are leveraging a local position that was allocated elsewhere to assist us with one of the positions that position is not going away the position that we are reallocating from it will just be funded from a different funding force name funding stores namely exceptional children's funds two um any positions in our operations um budget that are leveraged specifically for capital project management can be attributed to the capital outlay resource and so we can allocate those funds to that purpose and then use those local funds that are paying for those positions right now for student services reorganization and then finally this board at the beginning of the school year and for the online academy approved the appropriation of funds to provide an online curriculum for the online academy

125which will no longer be needed as we are not operating that school after this school year those funds can also be leveraged to fill any gaps that might exist once we get this full reorganization completed i do want to recognize that there are two amazing professionals who are way more adept at this work than i am and that is miss barnes and mr graffen reed and they remain available for questions as do i thank you so much dr doyle for that presentation an explanation of the request and board members and i will remind us all to do one question at a time until everyone has an opportunity you would like to go first i i first have a really basic question and it was in the agenda packet about renaissance because part of the problem

126is renaissance can't meet our need and and that's not a district issue that's a school that's a student issue and i was curious if we've looked to see if there are other services and maybe even talk to orange county about counselors that are working with our kids already and if there are other services in community that we can use and i was curious does renaissance how renaissance is paid i don't want to speak incorrectly and so i'm going to look at miss wrath who i said i would look at during my agenda item tonight not for this reason but um who may be able to give me some information if i don't have the if we don't have the correct answer i will get it to you miss houser on the topic of finding other

127services we have been actively looking some of that has been affected a bit by the transition and student services director um and if mr graffen reed or ms barnes has any information on that that they know of i'm happy for them to um to respond and i will get you an answer um if i we don't have anything as far as a budget right now so thank you for all the background on this and information one of the things for me is when i read through this originally i was thinking back several months that we had a discussion about this and i actually found it back in december 13th where we talked about the assessment and backlogs being behind because of school closures and unfilled psychologist positions and at that point we approved four educational

128dietitians and then two primary support tas to monitor students during these assessments and then we also approved back on that 13th a behavioral interventionist specialist so how do all of those fit into this because we've already put those in place did those not meet all the requirements and that's going to be in an in addition to this or are they going away and these new positions are permanent i'm just trying to you know we get a lot of information and i'm just trying to understand as we've talked about it before and how they fit together and that's a great question i do want to clarify i brought this uh slide back up so that you can see the top of this triangle um is on the left-hand side is ieps the middle part is behavior

129intervention plans and the right-hand side are therapy services which really are mental health what you described mr atherton were the exceptional children's services which is separate from the student support services so those students those exceptional children services positions were requested to help get our exceptional children's testing backlog fixed but this 504s are a separate requirement i hope that answers your question it does i thought the original did cover 504 so it didn't it only covered the ieps if you will so 504 plans uh were overseen by ec for a period of time but that is not where they should reside 504 plans and ieps certainly have the same goal and that is to help children thrive but they are under two very different laws and operate differently and so 504s shifted to student services okay

130and so mr atherton no they didn't they were not talking about the 504 backlog at that during that um time it was just for ec testing so i guess the following question i have is once the backlogs are done are these positions going to continue or do we think the backlog is going to be along for a while can i speak to that as we think about you know going into let me speak to student support services right now there's no one who's tasked with specifically coordinating 504s except that it moved to the new director and which is not really sustainable and really to be honest mr graf and reed is the one that's coordinating that work for the entire district um so even though we may not have a backlog and i promise you

131mr graffen reed is a bulldog and she's a taskmaster and she's going to get this fixed she still needs to have the time or someone needs to have the time to really not just focus on compliance but focus on excellent services with regard to our students who have handicapping conditions so that's the 504 answer and in regards to the ec diagnosticians um you know we'll always continue to review the funding source for those positions but ideally what we would like once we're all caught up and and i know there's an update coming up for you on that the hope is that we may keep them on to continue to support our teachers as they are doing the paperwork and all that that entails for iep meetings to help alleviate some of the um work and

132to take some of that lift off of the teachers we're hoping to keep those positions on to be able to support that okay thank you for the clarity thanks sarah and then i have a question also great um i have a number of questions but i will ask my one um first i just want to say that i just i found this um entire presentation to be incredibly incredibly thoughtful and well put together and well reasoned um sort of across the board so thank you very much for that thanks to miss barnes and mr graven reed um thank you so much to both of you i can't see you they're on they're virtually joining us they have children that they're trying to get to bed and those types of things thank you um this was

133yeah it was it was great um i guess one simple clarifying question the um the counselors that are part of the proposal the school level middle school and high school is that adding months of service to existing roles or is it adding additional positions it's adding existing it's adding months of employment to existing counselors okay great thank you so my question was kind of along those lines so um miss barnes is our lead social worker and this degree is our lead school counselor yes that's correct okay and so um i was thinking about the fact that i was just curious how that time works for them i know that we used to have um lead nurses rather than like a district nurse role like the silvia compton fills now and so i was just curious

134about the time demands on them serving both at their school site level and at the district level which apparently they've already been doing for several years yes and so this is recognizing work that they're they're doing okay and and i would also say i would i want them to speak to this issue but i do want to say um their work is 24 hours a day this weekend on saturday i was on a call with mr grafenreid around an issue with a student who was having a significant crisis so these folks are working 24 hours a day to respond to you know crisis around mental health and student support and and even if the school's um assigned counselors not responding responding these two uh women are so i do want to give them a chance

135to respond if they are available i know connie will be next they're gonna miss barnes or mr grafenry do either of you want to respond yes good evening i'm sorry i'm not able to be there with you tonight um i have a six-year-old daughter that i had to get to bed but yes um one of the things you know i've been doing this job for over six years as the lead social worker and um i'm thankful and fortunate enough that every school year in order for me to do the work that i do i always have um two master's level social worker interns working with me that are able to support me as i do the work that and the demands that are necessary for my orange county schools i love orange county um i

136haven't left i bet this is my 22nd year dr doyle is correct my work is seems like 24 7. because i feel that you know my responsibility to orange county is to make sure we put our children first and making sure that their needs are being met thank you miss barnes bonnie yeah so um that i just first i'll say i am completely supportive of the 12-month contract for the lead social worker and lead counselor i think it's a great idea actually um not quite sure on the other but probably probably that but i'm choking a little bit as you can imagine on the two district positions they are not district positions so they will mental health counselor and the 504. they will be based out of school and will be serving schools daily yes

137so here's the problem i'm having we have schools that are really under water on behavior and discipline and that is an everyday occurrence and then just to make things a little bit tougher because of our enrollment decline we're going to be cutting some of the stuff and so we're reducing some of the staff in some of the schools so my question is what and and i don't honestly don't know if they want more counselors or social workers or if they want more tas to just cover the behavior problems and so i'm just hesitant to make to add positions that are not helping them on an every single day basis to do their job you know so i'm that's i'm just gonna miss houser i appreciate your question i appreciate the comment um and i will

138say that uh the expertise that this employee that we hire for this position will have will exceed what the general classroom teacher has in terms of their training in addition i think sometimes we over rely on our teacher assistants to provide support to students for which not only have they not been trained but they are reticent to provide so a teacher assistant serving in a capacity to support a student's significant behavioral challenges is really asking too much in some regards and so we need staff that have the expertise to support those teacher assistants if they're in that position but also to support our teachers with specific strategies to assist them in their classrooms we have staff that provide that service specific to students that have exceptional needs but we do not have that staff to

139provide that support to our staff who are serving students who have mental health challenges for which they don't have a designation of exceptional child [Music] okay sarah i know you had an additional question i did um thank you um so the one okay one is a quick side note the selection of the sel curriculum the ec department is deeply involved in that as well everyone um everyone who wants to be a part will have an opportunity to weigh in on that curriculum we have a group of teachers and some are counselors as well from one person from each school who will be the first committee who will get the presentations in person we hope to do that in the next week and then we will record those presentations and send them out to every school

140and give every staff member the opportunity to review those presentations and rate those curricula and we will use all of that information to inform our recommendation to the board great great it was just occurring to me that the you know for ec students often a curriculum has like special adaptations and you know particular uh modules and thing you know and so wanting to make sure that the and that was something that our teachers brought up as well as our parents did in terms of the feedback that we received from them is that they wanted to make sure that there were differentiations for not just students that have special needs but students who are english as a second language um or students who are advanced what can we do to make sure that we're addressing all

141those needs more questions bonnie you've been the one i i think we're talking about two different things because i understand the counselors and i would love an answer on the renaissance thing because i thought renaissance was being paid through health insurance medicare i'm sorry medicaid or private insurance i didn't think right am i miss rath may not have an answer tonight uh but that's something she okay i didn't know if we were paying for it or versus it was getting paid through and if i have a counselor come in medicaid well for some of our students anyway we'll pay for those services and it's not one person our needs are so great that one person is going to barely make a dent in it but but what i'm hearing in the schools is i mean

142they have kids melting down because they are second in line you know i mean really tough stuff that is not a counselor you know it's before the council intervention it's just behavioral interventions so it just and that is the that is the position that is on the right hand side here which is the mental health case management right and my my point is i don't think one position is nearly going to cover now miss houser if you want to give me 14 well positions i will take that i've got i've got hundreds of people working in the schools absolutely every single one of them needs is doing what and you know it's really so amazing and just just to uh spoiler alert you know i spent years in schools with a dog working with the

143counselors and the social workers and as resource officers and child protective services and others working with these kids with the kids that and it wasn't nearly what these folks are doing now but to see the way a school community will come together for the students because they know them so well and so and that's that's i i i take that to the i take that to the bank yeah and and ms houser i don't want to make sure i want you to make sure that you know that i'm understanding what you're saying and that the school-based staff has the most knowledge of that student and their their significant needs what i'm what we propose in this particular position is when the school-based um team has they've exceeded the resources or the strategies that that they've

144tried every single thing that they can and they are not getting anything else this person is going to help with case management and to identify additional resources that may go beyond what we're already providing in our district and that's that's the challenge right now is that we do have many students um where that is the situation and our schools really are asking you know for help and and we're we really need the resource to provide to them mad one day yes um bonnie i wanted to share with you i i think this was in a presentation in the fall that renaissance was being prioritized for students who didn't have um private insurance which makes sense in a lot of levels but that means they're still a very profound need in in school building so obviously

145yeah so so that might be helpful yeah thank you the answer is we need it all yes right and so and i apologize that i don't have the exact answer for renaissance and i should have so i will definitely get that information dr felder's truck i have one now and so um [Music] renaissance wellness is funded through gear and gear are the relief funds covet relief funds via the governor which will expire at some point is that correct dr federer yes that's correct so sarah when do those expire [Music] okay so if we don't have any further comments or questions i would take a motion for this recommendation um from the superintendent that we approve the reorganization of student support services i moved second a motion for ms mckenzie a second from vice chair stevens

146all in favor aye aye any opposed great thank you so much for your thorough presentation dr doyle and for ms barnes and mr graff and reid for joining us tonight remotely thank you thank you thank you for having us you're welcome okay dr felder i think we are ready for the conversation about the proposed board meeting calendar and board members that's why we have um calendar several different sheets dr felder are you going to lead this conversation i most certainly can do that so okay for these members you should have a copy three copies of the proposed calendar for next school year we actually have four so we have sorry you have four we have that we have it sort of as is with mondays and then we have if we were to change to

147tuesdays or wednesdays or thursdays right so you have four uh one reflecting meeting dates that would continue on monday the next one reflecting meeting dates on tuesdays wednesdays and thursdays so at your retreat you saw the first one the one that reflects your current meeting day schedule and that's on mondays [Music] these also outline uh winter break dates spring break dates and holidays you will note that on each of these calendars there is one meeting in november and one meeting in december which is the current schedule and we we also noted in our when we discussed this at the retreat that we have the traditional year um spring and winter breaks on here because that is working with our staff schedule so we realize the year-round calendar is not on here at the moment but

148um we're focused on board meetings that we plan with staff um and so we can do more you want to say dr felder do you want to open it up for i would love to open it up for uh any discussion or questions with regards to okay what is being proposed for next school year okay so maybe if each of us could offer a comment it would be good to hear from everybody um in regards to your thoughts on changing to one of these other days of the week will so i after that meeting um i was very hesitant about changing the date and i went back and looked at my calendar for the past year and there are so many school events that occur on thursday band concerts chorus concerts theater productions and stuff

149and so personally i would not want to move the meeting to a thursday because i want parents to be able to come to our meeting i want to go to those events and so that's that's just where i landed based on seeing where where these events normally landed during the week sarah um i agree with will that i think thursdays doesn't make sense um and i think we heard from staff that having it not on a monday could be helpful in terms of their planning and not feeling stressed about it all weekend or working on their presentations all weekend so i am in favor of moving it off of mondays um i have a slight preference for tuesdays not based on much of anything well i didn't hear what you said i said i have

150a slight preference for tuesdays but it's not based on much of anything i'm not quite sure why i like that so it's not a strong opinion i just you know i think tuesdays or wednesdays are where i would go um i definitely wanted to echo the concern from staff i think it makes a lot of sense not to have um monday night meetings um does the bfcc meet on thursdays tuesdays tuesdays okay tomorrow um so i do think that's a consideration because i think there are times that folks are going to want to be able to attend both of those meetings um but really whatever y'all want to do is good with me bonnie well i i would i um i don't mind any of the days i don't like tuesday um and i'm not

151don't like thursday so um on the monday and i really am am hearing the staff concern about monday and i think we all experience it ourselves because we're all reading all this stuff over the weekend you know and i wonder if we could if we did better planning for our meeting so we had less new material coming to the board and more of the new material in committee that it would that ease some of the stress on the staff i appreciate that but i don't think so it would not then i don't care brenda well i believe that we need to stand clear of tuesdays and thursdays tuesdays because if you have it on tuesdays and the commissioners are meeting here we're going to be in in competition for the spot you know so the

152answer would be no because they you know this is their spot and then thursdays for the reason that will um said and i saw i'm gravitating to wednesday but i guess it doesn't make any difference yes it does i was thinking about me being going i'm leaning towards wednesdays okay my thought is i do think it is a benefit to staff to not have it on mondays and we one point we discussed in the retreat is if we were to move it away from mondays that we would want to make sure we still had the materials in advance of the weekend because board members with full-time jobs have a hard time getting through all the material if we're only getting it during the week so i know we had that kind of assurance from dr

153felder that we would still get our materials before the weekend regardless of which day it were picked um so for me um moving it off mondays i definitely hear the concern with tuesdays wednesdays or thursdays are fine i could imagine that some of those concerts um maybe they would schedule them not on thursdays if we have a board meeting but i'm fine with wednesdays or thursdays so um go ahead miss dubison does that work for your schedule oh yes yes either wednesdays or thursdays is that right wednesdays thursdays if my memory serves me correctly and uh ms duversen please correct me i believe you also agreed that monday's uh a more prominent monday would be preferable yeah um okay okay so it looks like more people like wednesdays than thursdays right yeah i'm not a

154fan of moving it off monday just because of my work but i'm willing to do and figure it out for whatever the majority of board would like to do okay thank you well so do we have um further points people want to make for their discussion does someone want to make a motion i just one one additional point which is i see we are we have just one meeting in june which i know we've discussed i do think it's possible that you know as we get closer to that that it'll feel like we have enough business to need to do two meetings in june so i think in the past we've done two meetings in june right now it's just one and it's tricky with the end of school and the professional development for um

155school administrators and teachers and um you know i know there's like a leadership academy of some kind happening for administrators this year um this isn't until next june i'm fine leaving it with the one i just think you know there may be a need for another meeting because there's still a lot happening did you did you say there's one meeting in june in june yes why do i have the 14th and the 27th on the west on the wednesday account well maybe it's just it's maybe it's just planning i'm doing in isolation [Laughter] i also wonder if we should put the reorg in july it would be the i guess it would be the wednesday rather than a monday then that in policy that it's it's in policy that i remember it is in policy

156that's impossible what i don't know is whether that's because it was in your local legislation or if it just says the first board meeting so i'll have you just said the first we just we did that yeah i mean if you have to have it on monday yeah we we just did it ourselves in regards to um june i know we talked about how people thought we maybe would need um a second one but we didn't have it on the calendar because we were avoiding that leadership week and then for example there's juneteenth so i think we just were going to have some conversation around what what day that would be i think we talked about even having two weeks back to back i remember correctly for june what's going on am i remembering that

157correctly hold off until it gets closer to that point personally to think about if you need the second one i i agree but i i would like to officially put the reorg date on there just so it's known right that it's going to be the 10th or the 12th whatever we want to do i think it's okay it makes sense to officially announce okay i'm sorry your board meeting just says it'll be your first meeting in july it doesn't say the first monday right right that's why i was saying i want to set it i don't care what day it is just uh just so it's on our calendar yeah yep okay i did note um as we were looking at these calendars that depending on if you adopt one that's not on mondays that

158the motion should include waiving policy to adopt this calendar and then we'll have to amend your policy because right now it says mondays that's policy 2300. and and and this is july 2023 if somebody put us in here on july 4th no that's actually a holiday that's a holiday day okay because it's a holiday like what what you're gonna come celebrate the holiday with us oh sure that's what i'm going to do i can't wait okay okay how about i make a motion make it july all right so i'm gonna motion to approve the board meeting calendar with the wednesday dates um waiving policy 2300 um to waive the portion about meeting on mondays we're going to meet on wednesdays and including a reorganization meeting organization meeting whatever it's called on july 12th which is

159the first wednesday that's not the day after the fourth of july motion from ms smiley in a second from vice chair stevens all in favor aye any opposed wonderful wonderful great teamwork board oh yeah and um we are right at 27 minutes i know we all want to get out of here on time and so i think we're talking about um the robotics grant that's correct dr felder and uh dr dawson will lead this discussion motion to approve second [Laughter] emotion from um was that for mr atherton yes that was and a second from vice chair stevens all in favor discussion of the item or i i do have one question of a discussion go ahead discussions i just i just wanted to understand i i i know that members of the robotics team were

160very interested in this grant and that you were also interested in this grant so have you collaborated on this grant application you've worked together to submit this yes so um we will the reason why we're bringing it tonight is because we per board policy for any grant submissions above five thousand dollars we need board approval right and the next board meeting will be after the deadline for us and so that's why we're bringing it tonight but we are very much interested in expanding our after-school robotics programming to more schools but it does require collaboration with all of the schools but like we already have a couple schools that have expressed an interest and so we will be collaborating with school teams because we do need their commitment because it will require you know that from

161their schools so yes we'll absolutely collaborate we'll put together a proposal that will be inclusive of all the schools that want to and then put a little bit more um above and beyond just providing equipment so that's why we know for sure it'll be over five thousand dollar request we don't know yet exactly how much but once we are finalized we'll definitely provide an update okay great i just wanted to make sure that this was um being done in collaboration with them and there is already a mentor collaborating mr mitchell right has been working with yes and we do have a number of um staff that are already involved with the first robotics so we will be leaning on their um guidance to support i made the motion miss stephen second any further discussion okay

162oh thank you so much for your support my own favorite shoes hi any opposed great if you want to stay and present something you can but we won't be here [Laughter] 100 support i do too i need to yeah they did win an imagery award at uh worlds on saturday so they got further recognition while they were there um okay so now we just have from our consent agenda the policies that we're were actually not second reads this would be our first read and eva are you taking the lead on these sure that would be great um we have two policies here the first one is 7 100. these are this was part of the backlog of policies that had fallen out of date and so these updates are to match the current school board

163association model policy and in particular to incorporate some new requirements under dcdee for our child care classrooms those are some of our pre-k classrooms are regulated as child care centers rather than as k-12 classrooms and so they have some special rules okay okay any questions about policy sarah um yes i wanted to ask about in the nepotism section um it seems like we have with this language narrowed it so that the sort of disclosure of relationships no longer includes assistant principles but only principles um that and the sort of what may the sort of potential consequences of not um conveying a relationship so i i guess i preferred when it had some it said that there was a consequence and when it also included assistant principles but could could anyone explain so my assumption is

164that the board's prior policy um the board had elected to be stricter than the law you could elect to continue to be stricter than the law this was merely to show what the legal updates you know like the school board association model policy hugs as jonathan would say the statute if you prefer to continue to have a slightly higher standard in orange county schools that is completely fine so and i apologize i wasn't able to come to the committee meeting where you all discussed this but um i mean i prefer to have a higher standard you know to me an assistant principal is also a leader in a building and and it would be helpful you know i think it's important for the board to understand those relationships as well and then you know the

165piece about someone who fails to disclose may be subject to disciplinary action maybe i wouldn't include up to an include i don't know well maybe condition maybe i would leave that just in case um i'm in favor of keeping that and i know not sticking exactly to the model policy makes it more challenging for a board to sort of stay updated but that's my preference about others well i completely agree with having us at a different standard any other comments on that so we would retain the reference to aps and the statement about what happens if you knowingly fail to disclose yeah works for me right okay do we want to um so this is just our first read do we want to talk about the second policy or we want to um entertain a

166motion for this policy first we can take them together you can do them together okay all right second policy then please either sure so policy 4720 is your policy on surveys to students and um the question about revising and updating this one actually came through ms doyle i think from family success alliance um okay so this policy um the request to have this changed has to do with our youth risk behavior survey which is like the nationally used survey in school districts across the country and so this was recommended through our shac committee some of our community partners like diane chambliss with orange partnership and a number of other people in our group advise that other districts in the state [Music] have passive consent so that you'd have to opt out rather than active consent

167and it can change participation from like some of the examples they sent like 60 percent of students participate in the survey versus like six percent of students so having this um the policy is only required to apply to department of education surveys i believe and the youth risk behavior survey is outside its of the department of education it's a cdc um so um the this policy reflects in part something called the ppra that well now now i've forgotten what it stands for but the something something rights amendment and it has to do with um as you said department of education funded surveys and that hit on certain topics and um previously the ocs policy extended that those limitations to any survey um again going beyond the minimum requirements of the law and so when this

168topic came up i pulled the most updated version from the school board association just to look and um so the the strikethroughs that you see here reflect converting to their most current format but the the substantive change would be um [Music] that instead of saying before a student is participates in any survey that there had to be active written parent consent that it would be before they participated in a department of education funded survey and it still requires the opportunity to opt out and i don't believe that the youth risky behavior survey is required um it is something i mean and what i mean is students are not you know it's not a grade it's not um it's a voluntary thing but obviously if you have to get an active consent sign that can you

169know children just don't bring them back um so that's that was the origin of this change and the policy committee was in agreement yeah as a parent it took me forever to sign my kids youth risk behavior survey things even though i intended to we almost missed the youth risk behavior survey is not a new thing it's been going on for 20 or 30 years if you went to school in north carolina you probably filled it out i know i did yeah okay bonnie well i uh just i think this one is about trust and um i you know we to me this it's a two-edged sword because um we're not us many of our surveys are not getting to to our hispanic families and not getting to our low wealth wealth families so we're

170not hearing from them um [Music] but you know i also have this thing that we haven't asked for permission so i would so i don't know if we err on the side of communicating better to make sure these parents know that we'd like their kid to participate in a survey or we you know but or do we um just assume that it's okay and i'm not so comfortable assuming that or at least i'd like to hear from them i'd like to talk to our fsa navigators i'd like to talk to our family relations folks i'd like to talk to our school social workers because they have plenty of time right i'd like to talk to our school social workers and counselors and see if they can get a read from parents about how they feel

171about us um assuming that it's okay for them their child to participate in a survey if they haven't opted out so that's one thing panorama is a really interesting situation for me because to me that's more of an assessment than a survey and i wonder that one to me really feels like something that shouldn't be you know that that i feel very comfortable um with an op opt out the youth risk behavior is the other side the youth risk behavior survey which is important um is not a survey for education and it's going out from us so so it gives the impression that it's an educational based survey and i got several and i think it's an important survey but some of the parents were very uncomfortable with the questions being asked of their kids

172so so if so so bottom line if it's educational and it's then i'd like to hear from our parents if they want to opt in or out and on youth on outside surveys things that people are using us to get to our students but it's not for our benefit um our direct benefit i think i'd always like to have that as permission required so that's kind of where i am on it okay other board members for clarity students can still opt out of taking the surveys even if they are okay yep well so i i just want some some clarity around this so the way that i read it and uh this is just a lack of my knowledge around this area is so there are surveys that are mandated and then there are surveys

173that are not mandated right so it is mandated for the school system to administer them or that individual children would be mandated well i'm just reading the wording where it says before a student is required to participate you know concerning protected topics the parents or eligible student must provide written consent but then the the second sentence says if prior written consent is not mandated for the survey involving protected topics how does that get determined that it's not mandated through the because it's not funded by the department of education that would be the category that is mandates prior written consent for other surveys prior written consent is optional but we would always offer opt-out so i'm just going to throw this out here as that means like if a political party came up to us and

174wanted to ask all students about their political affiliation we wouldn't have to ask the parents first based on what that's saying well i think that would violate some other policies yeah well but when you read it that's what it it comes out as right is there i mean because it says it says protected area not requires doesn't require parent um consent and that that doesn't feel good to me to say that no i mean protected information is apparent i i can understand that i do want to say that so that we don't put that out there there are other policies that would prohibit right right you know administering surveys on behalf of a political party and all of these surveys are at the discretion of our superintendent who we trust so that's me i would

175just say it's not about trust of the superintendent it's about making sure that our parents know what we're asking their students to their children to participate in but never administer a survey that parents were not informed about right but it's just the hurdle of um it's just the hurdle of getting people to take the time to do it i don't there was a lot of communication about the youth risk behavior survey i mean i got so many communications as a parent but there's just the hurdle of taking the time as a parent to fill out this form but our spanish parents didn't get nearly that intensity of communication our low wells parents are not getting nearly the intensity they're not checking their emails we've heard this we've heard that many of our families say they

176don't get our emails at all we've heard them say that repeatedly and i think you know so why why are we so sure how do how do we know if if a parent didn't comment is it because it's okay with them or because they didn't they didn't know the survey was happening we we just don't know i'm not the kinder fellow i was going to invite ms stowe to speak to now i'd love to hear the translations of surveys and information to parents right so we worked diligently with partners regarding the survey you just referenced ms doyle and with regards to the email address we so here just an example if i change my phone number and i don't tell someone i've changed my phone number then i will not receive messages and so what's

177happened is that we do have families who have an email address that they no longer use or they have not updated us with a current one we have um as your i hope you're aware but we did approve or you approved ttcs a number of months ago that we combed through all of our email addresses but it is imperative that families if and if you've heard a family member or any family say this is a psa public service announcement if you do not receive emails then you need to let your child's teacher or your school or your principal or me anybody know what that email address is because we do send communications out on a regular basis schools our school principals send out communications every weekend and so if a family is not receiving anything

178then we need to make sure we have that up to date okay so um all right and let me also add there are there are families and there are citizens who requested information from us and they don't use email well that's the point i mean but that is their choice to not use email so they have to notify us and their school and teacher of how they would like to receive those notifications and we do accommodate for that phone text as you're aware we use text website yes and a number of different social media apps and i do want to give credit to our principals because they are also very creative at the school level um in knowing the different avenues that their families prefer and knowing the families that don't get or won't receive

179the email and ensuring that they're using a proper it's a whole plethora of different um avenues to get the information out it's not just a click we sent the email hope you got it and i think that'd be a conversation that could be had at a later date with principals just at the number of things they're doing to reach families so let's see other board members with comments please sarah this is this is a longer term suggestion for this policy but i think it could be helpful at the beginning to have like a few sentences about why the school district administers surveys to students in the first place what are some of the reasons we do that and maybe have a definition of what a survey is because i thought bonnie's point about isn't panorama

180sort of an assessment was i think that there's like an argument for that for sure i will say that i am fully in support of this change because i think it is imperative that we maximize like that youth behavior risk survey which we know is tied to funding and all of these other things not necessarily for us i don't think but it's imperative that we maximize the share of students that we hear from so we have an accurate picture of understanding and i think this needing to return the permission form in advance is a massive barrier to that i think some of the other things in here around parental notification um so the system notifying parents about upcoming surveys and that parents have the right to review any surveys in advance and things like that

181to me addresses concerns about sort of parents being left in the dark or whatever i just think overcoming the low response rates on surveys that are that the district has decided are really important um matters a lot [Music] well so i again i i do have concerns with the wording of this protected information and the opt out is not defined so we do know families don't have smartphones we know families don't have internet we know you know how is this going to get distributed are we going to say we're going to distribute it by paper copy to every family and the student should bring it home to their family my concern is not defining how the op-out procedure is going to happen and there are so many barriers for our families around this and i

182think we owe it to our parents to define that and allow them the opportunity to opt out especially when collecting information that parents are very sensitive about hillary they do have the option to opt out and so do all of the students so like they're still being informed lots of communication is being sent out they can opt out students can opt out so it's you know i i feel like what you're saying is an option i'm just asking define how the opt-out occurs that's all i'm asking for is it gonna be by email is it only gonna it's gonna be by email phone paper we define that i'm i'm okay i'm okay with it i just think we we owe it to say how we're going to do it and then execute to it and

183that way families know they have that that option i just don't like opt out and somebody say oh it was in the uh principal's call this week you didn't hear that yeah i hear what you're saying so that's my concern so i have a question around taking this to first read to second read and wondering about things like protocols eva and how because that's we don't normally put protocols in the policies but we could we or what would that look like to have more information i'll say a couple of things first of all this policy governs more than the yrbs so you know a survey about what new name do you think you should give to our new robotics team may allow and opt out but you're not going to have as robust of communication

184you know i mean so it is going to vary depending on what the survey is about um and so the second question was whether that's appropriate to put in policy i think you can put some level of you know as long as you keep in mind that it a policy is about more than one survey um and and that's probably something that staff would want to give some input on um because i don't know how they i mean they use opt out for a variety of things but you know it varies so i don't know exactly what they would think would be the best way um i will note that since we were talking about the youth risk behavior survey i do want it to be clear on the record that that is anonymous students

185are instructed not to write their name on it so it is not something where their information is being gathered about that student um but sure i mean between first and second reading certainly [Music] something can be added yes and i i was curious if when it comes back if we could have information on what the participation has been in our prior surveys because i believe we're going to find a bias a race and a income bias in our participation and then um the other thing is i was wondering if we could reach out to our family success alliance and maybe our principals and some of the others and and just see how they feel about it i would just like them to say yeah that's fine with us we we're good we're not okay dr

186felder did those requests about what opt-out protocols would look like and some input from principles would that be reasonable to have some of that information um gathered between now and when this comes back that's something we can do okay great so again these were first reads for both of these policies so they will come back before the board for a second read it seems like people didn't really have any concerns about the first policy well except for the the changes that were requested to bring it back to the level that it had been previously um so is anyone comfortable making a motion on um approving the first read of these policies motion to approve the policies on first read with the discuss changes second okay motion from ms smiley a second from vice chair steven's

187all in favor hi any opposed great thank you everybody and thank you for um your help eva thank you um and dr felder for help with staff before we come further can i say madam chair yes ma'am um with the policies it is quite helpful especially if we have concerns and questions if we simply uh attend the policy meetings and we could you know put all our uh thoughts on the table at that point and kind of hammer it out yeah a little more we we did talk about it a lot then but we could just bear that in mind for our next meeting um i'll take a motion it's 9 29 yeah i'll go ahead we'll oh are we on something oh joint meeting oh right right right we're going to discuss the um

188go ahead will what you brought this up would you like to so um so i just the question i had is i i know you've said multiple times this is not a budget discussion but based on our budget timeline that we went through the budget committee this meeting is the only meeting that we get the opportunity to tell the county commissioners what we are wanting and why and i i noticed that we are doing that in the closing remarks in the last 10 minutes is that enough time to share that or i just wanted to get more thoughts around the the meeting and the the small amount of time on the budget part of it which seems like there's not enough time for them to ask us questions are they have they accepted they're just

189going to listen and then we're going to leave i'm just trying to understand so i wasn't at the meeting or the joint collaboration discussion so so my understanding and correct me if i'm wrong uh mrs doyle is that what we would typically bring at the meeting this week will be done at the board of county commissioners work session on may 12th so typically may 12 and i'm looking at the the county's meeting calendar it shows that that meeting is not a joint meeting but a work session for them right so y'all would be y'all meaning staff could speak but the board will not get an opportunity to speak at that meeting my understanding is that we are both school board school districts will bring their recommended budget for next year that is very different than

190anything that's ever been done so i'm glad we are discussing this because i just want to make sure we get the opportunity to speak about it and that's why i asked because when i saw this i was like oh geez only have 10 minutes so okay that makes contextual sense to me and i appreciate the opportunity for us to talk does anybody else have questions just looking at at the meeting you know when we're talking about teacher retention and recruitment is our opportunity to say our budget is designed we you know we're not going to be asking for money for the mental health even though we need it but teacher retention and recruitment doesn't happen if we can't get the the ass for these supplements right and and we we could add the point about

191the allotment could we have an i'm sorry we haven't asked for an increase in the supplement all we've asked for is a fix for the supplement and there's some indication that our supplement is is low but i think we do have to make that case compelling other board members with comments about it okay great dr felder any point you want to make about it not on this topic okay yeah all right well without any further discussion um i would take a motion to adjourn so move madam chair second great motion from vice chair stevens a second from miss hauser all in favor and the opposed we are adjourned i hope everyone has a safe drive home tonight thank you you