School Board Meeting - February 21, 2022

001okay i just wanted to make sure that someone could um that you all could hear me i'm sorry to bobby doesn't want to make sure you can hear me okay thank you so much 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 had uh held after the board adopts tonight's agenda although actually we are going to

002have um a slight change in our agenda this evening we have to move up a work session and a recognition before public comment 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 avoid disruptions during the meeting if you would please stand and join me for the pledge of allegiance 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 community to work to undo decades of racial harm and to build to the best of our ability

003a community that fosters a sense of belonging for all of our students so that they may thrive and succeed do i have a motion to adopt tonight's agenda so moved i have a motion from a smiley and a second from this hauser miss mckenzie um yes um dr moore yes miss smiley yes vice chair stevens yes mr atherton yes uh i vote yes miss houser yes thank you and dr felder i'm going to turn it to you madam chair oh are we not doing a moment of silence but did i skip the moment of silence itself yes it's okay i was just asking yeah we can do the moment of silence take a moment sure thank you okay dr pablo yes so good evening chair doyle vice chair stevens to all board members of staff

004families and community members good evening tonight we have dr danny benjamin joining us dr benjamin is co-chair of the abc science collaborative and distinguished professor of pediatrics with duke university school of medicine if you can advance to keep going next slide next slide there we are thank you so much and so as he said uh he would return to share the results from the abc science collaborative's masking study so dr benjamin is here to to do so tonight and in this time frame to accommodate uh his speaking schedule so after public comments staff will present three items for the board's discussion and action and other items for discussion related to covet 19 updates but before i turn things over to dr benjamin i would like to take just a few minutes to provide the following

005context and so as noted on the slides on february 16 state legislation was proposed to make indoor masking optional on the 17th governor cooper suggested schools begin lifting indoor masking by march 7. on february 18 the orange county government issued a statement informing the public that indoor masking mandate is still in effect in the county and so also wanted to note that orange county schools continues to consult heavily with our medical professionals from the abc science collaborative and the orange county health department in order to make science-based decisions as recently as this afternoon we met again with dr benjamin and consulted with ms stewart who is the director for the orange county health department and based on updated guidance from both dr benjamin and ms stewart as well as realizing that what is proposed in

006the abstract for tonight with regards to covet 19 mitigation strategies is very layered especially regarding indoor masking so we've made some revisions to the recommendations that will be presented tonight next slide please and so at a very high level these are the revised recommendations that will be shared with the board in more detail tonight so the updated recommendations include orange county schools will begin shifting to optional indoor masking within 72 hours of the orange county government lifting its indoor masking mandate that we would remove restrictions for meal times locations and procedures effective march first and discontinue all required covet testing for student athletes on march 1st again these updated recommendations were based on consultations with the abc science collaborative and the orange county health department just this afternoon so at this time i want to

007turn things over to dr danny benjamin great thank you if i could have the first slide please i'll go ahead next slide please go ahead so uh from time to time i'm going to be using vocabulary interchangeably that's sometimes casual for example i'll say coved rather than sars kobe 2. i might say quarantine rather than exclusion from school please keep in mind that we tend to use more lay friendly and less precise language when we do these presentations the abc science collaborative is funded by the national institute of health and has not taken any money from any school district ever the role of the science collaborative is to provide the science um and uh tonight i'm just going to cover two items that i'm frequently asked this month the four the first in some detail

008and the second will be uh blessedly brief uh the first is demas work and i'll provide the data on that and the second should a particular school system and i'm i'm sorry here for having iredell statesville schools abbreviated rather than orange county schools abbreviated you can imagine that in the state of north carolina we have board we don't have board meetings on friday saturday and sunday because that's the weekend we didn't have board meetings in south carolina from on wednesday nights because we went to church then too i don't i don't know how that works in north carolina but most the board meetings in this state are monday and tuesday so i apologize for that type of regardless we don't advise on whether or not a school district should be doing masking go ahead next

009slide please um this was last accessed in the week of february 7th cases continue to go down they're now down below the peak nationally of the delta surge in the fall well below last winter's surge and in fact orange county on the last seven days is running between 100 and 200 cases per 100 000 population per seven days go ahead skip the next slide and go on all right now um just something to get us all on the same page about morbidity this has well while sarge kovi2 or covet infections have been devastating on the older population and some of the most vulnerable children the probability of hospitalization following infection for children is provided here to compare with influenza so regular flu that's the far right hand column rsv respiratory also known as respiratory synthevirus

010very common infant virus really causes a lot of hospitalizations for a hundred thousand and infants but only several dozen per hundred thousand in uh school-aged children um the left-hand column has got the age brackets uh infants preschoolers uh five to eleven-year-olds and teenagers coveted in an unvaccinated child has a similar hospitalization of cases per hundred thousand as rsv and influenza i often get asked well is that um how many of those are children with covet versus sick from coven typically when we look at hospitalizations and infection rates um we measure those in covid uh the same way we do with rsv or influenza or other viruses some of those children are just happen to have the infection some of those children are sick from the infection with covid based on an mmwr that's morbidity mortality

011weekly report published in mid-december of 2021 it's if you have approximately 900 children from six children's hospitals were admitted coveted test positive 750 of those 900 were actually sick from coven they were on oxygen on breathing machines in the picu um getting room desevere getting steroids and they were sick from covid it's about my personal experience with um with covet i've taken care of a lot of kids with coven in the past 20 some odd months um i would say that you know somewhere between two thirds and three-fourths of the time the child really is sick from covid um and then about about a fourth of the time maybe sometimes as often as a third of a time the child has got just a a positive test for the vaccinated child these numbers for the

012child vaccinated for cova these numbers plummet such that covet is much less of a public health threat to the vaccinated child than even routine winter viruses that they've experienced in years past the vaccines substantially reduce infection but their greatest impact is on morbidity or illness by substantially reduced infection um it's obviously less of an impact with omicron less of a benefit with uh with vaccination but it's still a non-trivial um difference with vaccination a prior infection as with other coronaviruses typically gives three months of pretty good uh protection and usually with coronaviruses it's still too new with this particular coronavirus to provide speculation on this particular coronavirus with covet it's too new to to provide that speculation but usually with other coronaviruses protection has has lasted on the order of 9 12 15 months and

013we now have antiviral medicines that are becoming more and more available in the community that reduce hospitalizations substantially the merck product has been hitting about 50 percent and the pfizer product of paxil that has been up to 90 percent there's also monoclonal antibodies available go ahead next slide please um covet however is not a trivial concern for children it's a top 10 leading cause of death for children under 21 go ahead masking clearly works we were the group to essentially define what is now the primary endpoint as it relates to mitigation measures within schools that is if i come to school with a case i'm a primary case i get that case in the community that's primary infection if i'm in third grade class with another student and i give that infection to another student

014that's a secondary infection those are infections acquired at school in typical typically with the alpha variant and the delta variant on average i might infect another two people in the community for if i'm infected in schools however with masking it takes about 20 to 25 children who are infected to infect one other child and um eight different research groups um essentially came to this very similar uh estimate of efficacy of masking we worked independently of each other throughout 2020 and 2021 and published although we were first here in north carolina for a bunch of these publications our colleagues independently of us working independently found very similar results and so doing the we refuted the hypothesis of 2020 that school was higher risk than the community we also showed that if you mask in school you

015essentially drive your transmission of covet to very very low levels relative to the community or essentially anywhere else other than the hospital system however one of the criticisms of this data was that we did not have a control group none of the research groups did go ahead next slide please and so we assembled a cohort of um over the summer we contacted all 13 800 school districts in the country uh about 150 140 of them expressed some kind of interest 61 of those districts were able to consistently provide or differentiate between primary infections and secondary or within school infections most of those districts were masking universally a group of those districts were doing voluntary masking for the entire period of study and then a group of districts did what we called either variable or partial

016masking and what they did was maybe they had a few weeks in august or september where they went with voluntary masking and then they had say nine weeks where they did universal masking or they masked for eight or nine weeks to start the semester when we hit that nice little nader in november they took off matt go ahead next slide please so masking of course no surprise reduced within school transmission or secondary transmission masking works it reduces that by 70 to 80 percent you can see that in this graph here essentially if um if you're gonna in order to generate 30 cases of within school transmission you need about a thousand primary cases if you're fully masked as a district you need about 150 if you're not masking as a as a district and in

017between is districts that sometimes mask and sometimes don't so this is the unadjusted analysis the in the adjusted analysis which is adjusted for size of school district and vaccination and uh uh vaccination rates in the different schools and um uh uh other other factors such as lunch policies and quarantine um the difference is actually um is is greater in the adjusted analysis masking is actually more effective ironically we thought that vaccination rates would be higher in the districts that had universal masking somewhat to our surprise the school districts that were doing voluntary masking um had a touch higher uh vaccination rates than the uh in the mass school districts um we um when we looked back over that and talked with that with the superintendents and one of the things they said was well when

018we announced that we were going to go without mass the families um started to vaccinate more frequently um go ahead next slide please so how do we use this well um it's been our goal to be able to give school districts essentially these these type of data so that you can decide for yourself um how much covid you're going to drive into the community depending on your various policies so this is a hypothetical school district of 10 000 attendees so this would be not not quite twice as big as as orange county schools but um 10 000 attendees with a universal masking approach is above the black line and a voluntary masking approach is below the black line and uh the column the first column is infections in the community and that's cases per hundred

019thousand per seven days now uh right now if you go on dhhs website for orange county schools i think uh the cases per hundred thousand for seven days is between 150 and 200 so right it would be right there between uh 100 and 250 on this particular slide um i've given you the time frame so you can kind of um get a sense for yourself the feel for when it was in the pandemic those types of numbers occurred in a school district of you know 10 000 cases i mean uh uh 250 cases per 100 000 population you're going to bring about 25 primary cases into the school system per week if you do universal masking you'll generate about one case of uh of covid within the classroom i've rounded here that's why one plus

020zero on this um on this row is going to equal two this is this is a rounding item from uh from the excel spreadsheet that's copy pasted here on average the case is back into the community from the school system each child of course an eight-year-old does not drive themselves to the harris teeter to pick up groceries they live with at least one adult that transmission rate based on a study we've just completed that transmission rate is about 30 percent for school household contacts so children will typically in fact another person in their household when they um when they uh when they bring cove at home so the infections in the community per week caused by in-person schooling when we're between 100 and 250 cases per hundred thousand for seven days very very extraordinarily low

021in the universal mass environment at those types of levels you'll see below your uh you know a school district the size of orange county is going to generate somewhere around a half a dozen cases half a dozen additional cases per week as a result of uh not masking so again you can look at your own metrics within your own county and make the decision for yourselves what you would like to do some of the school districts um upon seeing this that i've discussed in the last two weeks i log off and they immediately um vote to go without masking some districts that same night that i present vote to go with masking for another month um we don't have any opinion on that one way or another we what we want to be able to

022provide you with is a number so that you uh can make an informed decision with your uh community so it's a combination of some factors that we'll get into go ahead next slide please so um we we understand that a large fraction of people don't test we understand that some people are asymptomatic and during the month of january we actually um the the fraction of americans get infected each day is almost one percent per day there's only so long you can do that so some of these transmission dynamics of course will change as a greater greater fraction of folks are infected with omicron and so this is why we don't we call this a conceptual model rather than any kind of precise modeling because covet is such that you know you're probably not going to

023get into a nice steady state given the complexity of immunology so masking has much different implication rates when when much different implications when community rates are high and during the month of january masking was very effective at keeping schools open and children in school due to quarantine requirements but contact tracing and quarantine requirements or isolation from school requirements have been recently changed as of today go ahead in this state as of today go ahead next slide so in 2021 we were able to say confidently that masking provides individual protection and it is fundamentally masking as a bridge to vaccines but we now have vaccines vaccine and jan masking in january was fundamentally about keeping kids in school due to contact tracing and quarantine or exclusion from school or requirements it is one thing school districts

024should keep in mind is that children under five are not eligible to vaccinate as of february 2022 so there are districts throughout the country that are taking this particular bullet point as a as a reason why some of the school districts are continuing to um to mask um hospitalizations we had stopped elected procedures in january of 2022 but this has a duke but this has since eased i don't have clinical privileges at unc chapel hillside i don't want to speak to the that institution but as far as your local hospitalizations if you're if your local institutions are not doing elective procedures as was the case in january that's typically not wise to go without masking however that's since stopped at least for duke i can't speak again to unc chapel hill um so community rates

025of infection should not be used as a decision to close schools uh that was kind of conventional wisdom of 2020 or or a decision to do hybrid education and that's reflected in senate bill 654 but infections should be used to help guide uh mitigation policies and infections are dropping substantially not only nationally not only in the state of north carolina but also in orange county go ahead next slide please so uh masking definitively you know reduces the spread of infection of cobalt 19. this is why you wear a mask if you're a visitor or a patient at a major hospital in the united states masking reduces the spread of covet in schools the data aren't perfect but are consistent with data from hospitals and as the pandemic recedes in 2022 you know schools and school

026districts can use our data to determine for themselves what's right for um schools to require mass as you as you just as a friendly reminder you know we do have a national program so we're dealing with some schools particularly west of the rocky mountains where um you know covet rates right now are higher than they were here uh a month and a half ago they're at 300 and cases per hundred thousand per day um and so we you know we've got we have we have a national program for research we have a national program for slides and so this is not meant to be a set of advice for ocs specifically and ultimately schools can make a deca declining case count to make an informed decision that fits their school system and their community best

027and with that next slide i think that's it okay well thank you dr benjamin at this time board members if you have questions or and just remind our board members to speak into um like we're gonna have to lean in to speak into our mics tonight sarah go ahead great um thank you very much for that presentation dr benjamin um i have well my first question is um do you have any sense of where we are on vaccines for children under five any sort of sense of what the timeline might be now that that's continued to be delayed um what's on my mind is that a lot of students have younger siblings at home and we have staff members with kids under the age of five and we have kids in in pre-k classrooms as

028well right so complete vaccination completing the vaccine series for children under five is something that would be achievable my hope is during the summer but is unlikely to occur uh before um before the summer uh here's why the third dose needs to be given to all the children who are enrolled they need to get data collection from all those children they need to clean and query and make sure all those data are correct then they submit those data to fda then a one month kind of time clock starts then the doses are given um this assumes that everything works well with that third dose the doses then get given every three to four weeks apart presumably there'll be three doses kind of best case scenario you're you're looking at this summer before that happens before

029that two weeks after the after the final dose is given and and full protection is on board you're probably looking at the summer thank you bonnie do you have a question yes um i have a club thank you so much dr benjamin this is great um with so many vaccinated adults and children getting coveted um how does that affect you know we've had bifurcated policies saying you know we're going to test people that are unvaccinated not test people have vaccinated does that make sense to do anymore do we just treat people the same it's a closer call than it was with the delta variant and and with the alpha variant um you've probably got about a two fold difference still depending on which study you read um between um omicron for for omicron vaccinated versus

030unvaccinated this is just infection now obviously the difference in hospitalization is is 15 or 20-fold it's it's a much much greater difference but it gets it starts to get closer with omicron um the length of jetting and uh infectious viral um uh infectious enough viral load to infect another human being is continues to be um a different between um vaccinated and unvaccinated but um it is um so so i think um we will see um nationally a trend to those policies starting to merge to look more like each other um i think that i suspect that we'll see that with this with this particular area go ahead bonnie one more um do you have any sense of when we me what it looks like when we reach that magic moment where we say it's no

031longer a pandemic it's now endemic your first slide suggested that we were getting close given the comparison of cova to flu and and other other diseases yeah i think for children i think for school-aged children um you know going to school now with uh covet is essentially the same or less risk than um influenza or rsv in 2018 or 2019. for very very high risk children for example uh for hi sorry for high-risk children um the vaccine brings their risk down well down below flu and rsv for low risk children or kind of typical children if you will the vaccine brings their risk way way down below influenza our rsv special care is still needed for children who've had stem cell transplant children have had solid organ transplants certainly patients with who've had a heart

032transplant they omicron is not mild experience for those patients so i would say for children it's um it's it's an experience much like as far as individual risk we're talking about an experience much like 2018 and 2019 and decisions on masking here as we move into 2022 are much more of a community type decisions okay other board members i see sarah's hand anybody else sarah great thank you um so one thing um that i've noticed is that we're seeing more cases in orange county schools and more transmission in schools than the projections in that table right so um you know the the assumptions about if the community rate is this then this is how many cases we'll have um our our sort of rate of cases in schools in orange county you know last week

033we would have been expected to have 24 25 cases last week we actually had 51. um and and the the secondary transmission estimates in a fully mass environment which we are right now in our last board meeting um we'd seen the for the previous period you know we had 60 primary cases causing 30 secondary cases and so in a fully mass environment and so there are certain places where we're seeing sort of worse numbers than i think that chart would suggest and i'm curious about how you think that might influence our thinking and sort of interpretation of that like how should we sort of take that local reality and the chart together yeah one thing you can certainly see with coke not nuts canned one thing that we've seen over and over and over again

034with covet route the 200 school districts and throughout the i don't know 20 months is um schools and districts will run hot if you will for a while so they will run and then they'll then they'll cool relative to their community for a while or relative to what you would expect so i'm not surprised at all that you would have variation relative to what's shown there that's a population average over um you know over 1.3 million children and about 3 000 schools and just to drive that point home a little further the secondary cases have tended to cluster with compliance around or adherence to masking so we have a school district it was a quite quite large of a school district got more than more than 50 000 children in that school district of their

035within school trent excuse me 5 of their schools accounted for over a third of their within school transmission during the month of uh of august and september to the point that they needed to go to um district leadership needed to bring in monitoring into the school uh which rectified the problem so you're seeing kind of three forces uh there that would be my differential number one sometimes schools simply do run a little hotter or cooler than the community number two you've got natural variation in a school district of you know 6 000 students compared to a study population of 1.3 million and we certainly saw a much greater variation across the study um than than what you've what you've um described and third is um if you are getting uh secondary cases really adherence we

036have we have an active study comparing cloth mass to do surgical procedural mass and slash kn 95 slices in 95 ms we have a couple school districts that have participated in that in the month of january and february those data are not ready for public consumption but i can say that we when we look when we can offer adherence it's really adherence that's the key to predict whether or not there's within school transmission not so much the type of mass now as you're thinking about your own cases and your own policies paradoxically if you're having a lot of transmission with masking you're driving oh you know kind of toward the null as a difference between a masking and a universal uh between universal masking and voluntary masking you know the difference to unmasking um in

037the in the school districts that we see without uh masking uh that we'll see a secondary attack rate that's you know fourfold or five-fold higher than universal mass across the country if you're you're approaching that in your universal masking state um i would either take a look at adherence or that gosh how much worse is taking mask off going to be for us getting close to each other thank you will dr mitchell i just wanted to say thank you for your time thank you for giving us the perspectives especially where we were to where we are all of the changes the data that helps us and definitely working with our superintendent and staff to come up with you know last-minute recommendations or i should say up-to-date recommendations um but i just wanted to you know

038say thank you thanks for having me and i really appreciate the work y'all y'all do i know the superintendent staff from the in the boards and in this state and and through many states around the country have just done been under um a tremendous amount of um of strain and i really appreciate the work that you all are doing and thanks for having me it's a privilege to um it's a privilege certainly to be a citizen of the county and uh of the state thanks so much dr benjamin all right at this time dr felder i believe we're doing recognitions indeed we are chair doyle next slide please so this is orange county schools so not surprisingly we have a number of recognitions tonight at our last meeting we recognize spelling bee champions and have

039three more students to recognize tonight so congratulations to owen isaacs the pathways elementary school spelling bee champion to aaron torres the effluent cheeks global elementary school spelling bee champion and to maxwell stern the middle grades representative from the orange county schools online academy as a reminder for grades three to eight each student participates in a classroom spelling bee one winner from each classroom advances to the school level spelling bee where they compete to represent their school at a regional duke spelling bee this year due to covid protocols the regional duke spelling bee will be held virtually on saturday march 26 for each school spelling bee winner has been recognized by the orange county schools literacy team and you saw a picture of them at the last meeting all decked out with their little bee outfits

040on and so they received they were presented with a trophy and an award certificate so congratulations again to all of our spelling bee winners all right so next slide please if you recall at the january 10th board meeting mr xavier adams who is a teacher at orange high school was recognized as a finalist for the 2022 prudential north carolina beginning teacher of the year award well i'm not a betting woman if you recall at that time i said i think we'll be back well we are because mr xavier as he is known to his students was named the north carolina center for the advancement of teaching 2021 prudential beginning teacher of the year on thursday february 17th receive this honor after being selected from among 27 finalists from across the state for his dedication innovation

041and ability to inspire students to achieve mr xavier is more than deserving of this award as the winner he received 5 000 in cash prize participation in go global nc which includes a trip in 2023 to australia instructional supply funds for his school and a piece of fine jewelry from diamonds direct mr xavier excels excels in the classroom for the betterment of all students at orange high school and we are so so proud and so honored to have him as part of the orange county schools family so congratulations to mr xavier who is participating virtually and we welcome him to share remarks at this time so mr xavier there he is hello thank you dr felder it's the members of the orange county school board of education i'm grateful for y'all extending me this opportunity

042and just recognizing the work that i'm doing alongside so many great educators here at orange high school i also want to give a quick congratulations to all those spelling bee winners i remember in sixth grade when uh i lost in the spelling bee very early on i was not nearly as talented as these students were but i lost very early on when i failed to spell the word pain it was like window pane and i spelled it as p-a-i-n rather than p-a-n-e so a huge congrats to those young scholars that are excelling with the spelling bee and just kind of as my general remarks and accepting this award and grateful for the recognition right now i'm really excited to be a part of this school district that is doing so many incredible things for students

043last week getting to collaborate and learn with 26 other educators from across the state it just really humbled me made me incredibly grateful to be a part of orange county schools knowing that we genuinely are ahead of the curve in a lot of ways in terms of equity in terms of supporting students in terms of just the way that people show up to love the students here and i'm also just super grateful again for the students at orange high school in particular that i've been able to work with but all the people here at orange high school that have just been incredibly kind to me and welcoming me in my first two years here so once again thank you to the school board to dr felder to to all my admin at ohs as well

044as to my colleagues and students thank you so much for this opportunity thank you again okay well we're not done so a big round of applause and congratulations next slide please also goes out to katie bell sykes for winning the state championship in the 50-yard freestyle swim on february 11th at the nchsaa 3a state meet hosted by cumberland county schools katie is the first i repeat the first women's state champion for orange high school and she is a sophomore katie is participating virtually and we welcome her remarks but first let's give her a huge round everyone thank you so much um i just like to thank my coach for everything that he did for our team and you know he organized all the meets for our conference and he gave us a really great season

045and he also kept us safe with everything going on with covid and i also wanted to say thank you to the hillsborough sports jeff hamlin for everything that he did he covered a lot of our meats which i was really appreciative of and he also covered a lot of other high schools meets i was very grateful for that um and yeah i just thank you guys so much for inviting me to come speak i really appreciate it okay well congratulations again all right next slide please so the tables were turned last week at orange high school what on earth does that mean you ask well after hearing that 55 of students did not feel a sense of belonging members of community organizations such as boomerang youth grow your world i'm so terria and community works

046decided what better way to show belonging than through art these community members came together and wrote a grant which was funded by the hillsborough arts council the result a partnership with orange county schools on a turning the table a belonging project orange county school students were asked to create a visual representation answering the question what does belonging look like beck tiani a student artist at orange high school was the winner of the art contest vex vex calls their design a love letter to black and lgbtq students and the picnic table will forever remind students staff in the community at large that every person regardless of who they are where they come from that they are welcome and they belong next slide please the unveiling of the final piece was held in a special ceremony at

047orange high school on wednesday last week beck was joined by family friends their favorite school staff and those who helped launch the project and see it through to the end guests included the contest organizers art patrons a representative from the orange county arts commission board members and staff from orange high school in orange county schools district leadership just to name a few next and last slide as mr johnson principal of orange high school said we want the orange high school to be a place of healing and we are striving to ensure that everybody feels like they belong this collaboration of talent and passion which we see in bec combined with the power of using art to effect change and influence culture is something that orange county schools is beyond proud to play part n so

048congratulations to beck we wish them well as they embrace new opportunities to create and to unite people through their art beck is joining us tonight meeting virtually and we welcome their remarks back hello so i'd like to thank um all my friends and family for helping me out and getting this done because it was a lot of work and i couldn't have done it without them i'd like to thank everyone at the school and at the eno arts mill for helping me out and all the artists i met there and most of all i'd like to thank soperia shepherdson who created the project and she's been my biggest cheerleader and supporter all the way and she's awesome and i couldn't have gotten this far or gotten this opportunity without her well thank you beck and

049congratulations slide please so last week was bus driver appreciation week shared also at the last board meeting this is a appreciation that celebrated throughout the country we enjoyed celebrating all of our transportation staff at a special event last thursday our transportation staff safely transports almost 4 000 students every day we appreciate our bus drivers we appreciate our mechanics we appreciate our tens coordinators and each and every member of the transportation team and we continue to thank them for their amazing service to our children next slide please so i shared at the last board meeting february is black history month and we said we'd come back and share how schools are celebrating uh black history month so all month long staff and students in our schools have been learning about black history and exploring african american

050excellence and accomplishment both past and present from people of interest legendary landmarks civil rights milestones and countless significant contributions to american history by black people staff and students in every single school in orange county have been engaged this month in celebrating black cultures traditions contributions and talents and there are many for example elementary art teachers have been sharing the works of famous black artists in having students create their own art based upon the themes and styles of the artist in the middle grades students have chosen black people of interest and are writing reports to present to one another high school students are also engaged in important projects like the videography students at cedar ridge who are digitizing 16 millimeter film from the civil rights era the list goes on and on and on at this

051monthly meeting at this monthly board meeting we normally feature an equity warrior for the month of february february but this time it will be a little different tonight we will elevate the efforts of the school equity team members and the student-led bulletin board creations in grades three to five at new hope elementary school the equity team and there's an equity team at each and every school in our district at new hope elementary school designed a complete curriculum for celebrating black history month at the elementary grades it was already packaged differentiated at every level and ready to go for staff to use at every elementary school in orange county schools to celebrate black history month all month long and it was the equity team members who came up with the idea to have students create bulletin

052boards to honor black history and to celebrate the very things that the students themselves said they want celebrated about being black this shows this slide shows the bulletin board by third and fifth graders titled young black excellence and black girl magic black boy joy next slide please the fourth grade bulletin board at new hope elementary school features a timeline of accomplishments of black people with each historical figure moment and milestone hand-picked by the students for display the bulletin board is also interactive it invites you to lift up the paper to uncover the details that the students found noteworthy there is a full feature on new hope located on the equity tab on the district's website the feature includes details about student student-led new hope news broadcast which is a tool that introduces little bytes of

053information on sel cultural awareness and the need to appreciate and celebrate diversity in every segment the new segments each tie back to feedback from staff earlier in the year from the cultural proficiency survey the new hope news is exclusively broadcasted for new hope students so not everyone can view its earrings but you won't want to miss the write-up that tells more about the equity team there the student bulletin board creative process and the new hope news so congratulations to the student staff and equity team in particular at new hope elementary school doyle that concludes the recognitions for this evening thank you so much dr felder and to congratulations to everyone who was recognized tonight that's a wonderful collection of people and i hadn't learned that yet about new hope elementary okay now is the time

054for public comment after each speaker has been recognized and unmuted they will have three minutes to speak or not unmuted we're not virtual tonight the board will not have a discussion with any speaker no profane or vulgar language will be permitted nor personal abuse against any person any speaker that uses threatening language will not 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 and i just like to ask everyone to be courteous tonight we're all part of one community and regardless of what your opinion is please express it respectfully our first speaker tonight is miss laurie tepper good evening i want to address

055the current covid mandate set forth in the schools please end all mandates and give people the freedom and the right to choose parents have a right to make health care and educational decisions for their minor children the following is some research regarding mass mandates in the state of florida schools in florida including those that did not require students to be masked did not drive community transmission of coven 19. there is no statistically significant evidence to suggest that counties with mass requirements have fared any better than those without mask requirements during the 2020-21 school year masking children may lead to negative health and societal ramifications and studies have shown that children are at low risk of contracting a serious illness due to covet-19 given the historical data on cover 19 and the ongoing debate over whether

056mass are more harmful than beneficial to children and to school environments in general we should protect the freedoms and statutory rights of students and parents by allowing parents to make the decision whether their children should wear mass in school governor desantis and youngton stood up for parents and did the right thing when will north carolina follow suit the current mandate of twice a week overtesting for unvaccinated students athletes is discriminatory coaches and teammates alike are pressuring athletes to get the shot doesn't that qualify as bullying given the fact that we now know vaccinated people get and spread the virus why do you require unvaccinated kids to test could it be related to funding north carolina recognizes a person's fundamental right to make his or her own health care decisions force vaccination on anyone is unethical

057this shot is still experimental thousands of people have had reactions and or died from the vaccine i watched several testimonies attributing to these facts so where are those studies that you are producing the original variant of covant is logged on which the vaccine was originally made for and remember it was for the elderly obese and those with comorbidities children were not affected by it two years later we have learned a lot yet our schools and government refuse to change stop the ridiculous mandates and allow these kids to get back to normal you already rob them of precious years i'll end with a quote from barbara lowe fisher co-founder and president of the national vaccine information center she states quote parents are responsible for their children's welfare and we are the ones who bear the grief

058and the burden when they are injured or die from any cause we are their voice and by all that is right in this great country and in the moral universe we should be allowed to make a rational informed voluntary decision about which diseases and which vaccines we are willing to risk their lives for and i totally agree with her and i also want to just call you out for this last minute virtual uh your time is up miss tupper are you afraid to hear from those who want to oppose you thank you your time is up miss jacqueline barker good evening um dr benjamin said would you put your mask on please oh i thought if we were given a broadcast or a speech we didn't need to wear one that's we're not 20 feet

059away i'm sorry that's just i'm sorry can't hear you no we do not have that exception in our school system at school so the school overrides the county this is a school board meeting okay sorry i just that's just what i was under please don't interrupt the lady in the yellow sweater it's not your turn uh okay can i just start over please yes go ahead you can start maybe a few minutes thank you dr benjamin said when referring to the reduction of oxygen from mass quote what children will do when they get a little bit less oxygen they will do the same thing adults do they'll breathe faster and they'll breathe harder and they'll blow more air outside the mask end quote when the narrative is being that students are presumed infected unless proven

060healthy this is concerning i would imagine a mask would hold a large concentration of the virus after seven hours more unknowns about mass but let's keep doing it anyway keep in mind dr benjamin is only providing you information he holds a medical license and is not advising or prescribing students to wear a mask or take bi-weekly tests no one wants to be liable for any harm caused from these non-fda approved medical devices as none of you hold a license to practice medicine you are putting yourself liable for continuing to prescribe masks and tests what what does orange county schools now define as fully vaccinated for 12 and up booster or no booster there is conflicting information on the cdc's website with terms fully vaccinated optimally protected and up to date and it does not align

061with the high school newsletter that was sent out yesterday so if that could be cleared up tonight that would be very helpful i'm glad to see the school will no longer participate in the abc collaborative test estate research study that baited families to take part or their healthy children will have to sit at home in quarantine they receive three million dollars from the nih so when the main source you take advice from is at the same time running a study funded by the government that seems to be a conflict of interest the excuse that the study was opt-in doesn't make it right just like the bi-weekly testing on only unvaccinated students doing extracurriculars there are no cova tests that have fda approval at this time they're all under eua so why start testing or why

062why wasn't there any testing um during the omicron search like the effort now doesn't make any sense with the virus 99 survival so since there wasn't an effort it seems it's kind of irrational to it now i don't think it's ethically right to experiment on our children as you see these experimental tests and devices are trial and error tests are being recalled and data is incomplete and changing all the while using our children as test subjects knowing they are not they are the least likely group to suffer severe disease and death your decision to test these students with experimental tests is not righteous just because you think extracurriculars are voluntarily does not change the fact it's all an experiment these students have lost more than i can express in the last two years and now

063we want to end the school year by taking away more students do not want to take part in experimental vaccines and tests to participate the testing policy is already creating division bullying and discrimination between the students when the cure is creating more harm than the virus it seems the time has come we need to stand up and start saying no i know you all are good people and you're just in a bad situation here please do what is right and let the parents have the decision in what is best for their children and don't forget that our high school seniors can vote this year thank you thank you ms barker parker hello my name is brennan barker and i'm a high school sophomore i wanted to share some of my experience since school started this

064year i have a new medical condition that is developed over time constant heavy nosebleeds a few a week i have to take a test when i take a test i get anxious and need to breathe harder but i can't i can't with the mask on so it often affects my test scores i've missed many days of school because i have allergies and i'm not allowed on campus if i have any symptoms which include my allergies if i have to leave school early it's because i have a hard time breathing in masks and of course all of us teenagers have bad acne from these masks these masks are creating division in my community and i want it to end also i'm a boy scout from 2438 on my honor i'll do my best to do my

065duty to god in my country and to obey the scout law to help the people at all times to keep myself physically strong mentally awake and morally straight this is my scout oath i uphold it every day and with in every decision i make i would hope that the board upholds their oath as well when they took their stance in office thank you brennan they're ready good evening as a resident of orange county i would like to thank the orange county board of education along with district administrators teachers and staff for your unrelenting commitment to keeping students safe both physically and emotionally in our schools you are being asked to make nearly impossible decisions and i appreciate that in many instances there are no hard right or wrong answers this evening as counties and schools

066across north carolina are re-evaluating their indoor mask mandates i would like to encourage you to continue following the science in your decision-making process as you are well aware we have excellent public health and medical experts in our state whose data-driven empirical recommendations should be your guide i say this not because i believe you are doing otherwise but because there's so much distracting noise from groups like moms against liberty or whatever they're called that are trying to mute school districts by cultivating moral panic and gaslighting for example a chapter of moms against liberty in tennessee tried to ban the book ruby bridges goes to school the true story which was actually written by ruby bridges herself along with the i have a dream speech by dr martin luther king jr while the group here in orange

067county may be small other chapters across the state and other organizations they are aligned with promote homophobic transphobic and racist ideologies they would have republic schools looking like 1950s which was a dangerous and oppressive time for anyone not white cisgender heterosexual and christian moms against liberty isn't just about masks but they are repackaging and rebranding dangerous right-wing ideologies into a so-called parents rights group in reality this is an organization that can't stomach the notion that education isn't focused solely on a whitewashed narrative of american history and that education doesn't always revolve around white and heterosexual and privileged children with carefully crafted propaganda right-wing scare tactics and a decent social media presence this group will continue trying to oppress our children by attacking and gutting school boards please do not ignore such groups as moms against

068liberty as they are as much a threat to our community as other far-right groups but do not and i hope you do not let their propaganda steer you away from inclusivity and equity initiatives from science from research and from data-driven policy-making i do believe in the near future masks will have to be optional but please make that call based on public health experts and the medical community and not fear-based propaganda thank you for all you do for our students and for our community thank you ms reading ms gretchen schmidt good evening um i just wanted to point out another inconsistency between referring to the county as the reason to limit the public in an open public meeting where other committees that i know meet in the same building in a packed room also under the

069county so we're blaming the county that we have to have severely limited public in here but then we're saying we don't have the exception of the county to take off the massive republic speaking so blaming around the county in some instances we don't have that we didn't make that exception to the county's rule in this instance so it's kind of all over the place throughout history governments have unfortunately at times created bad policy based on false beliefs but beliefs nonetheless that were sold as truth by the government which created them false ideas proclaimed as true about the characteristics and very unhuman the humanness of people based on the color of their skin or the worthiness of a people based on their religious practice or their personal beliefs truth is the conformity to fact or reality

070we've been hearing all about the experts so much the expert now carries the weight of a doctor terminus a peace dragon or a doctor death traveling from town to town with a cure-all concoction sticking around until the truth begins to speak for itself the abc science experts have shown a tendency for citing studies which they cite themselves in when the state and local government have signed for funds that invoke looking locking children and their families into policies that are only informed by the government allowed scientific results which exclude obvious facts in opposition bad policies follow upon more bad policies when questioned on the recent announcement concerning unvaccinated athletes mr rebels said they determined what accommodation can be provided without creating a threat to the health and safety of others the false belief which is propagated

071here is that unvaccinated athletes even with no symptoms practicing outside create a threat to the health and safety of others and by the discriminatory testing requirement vaccinated and unvaccinated students inside school all day are not a threat even if they have symptoms we don't need a doctor terminus to see plainly that this is not true just as we surely do not need any of you telling us anything about a person's character or humanist due to the color of their skin everyone who cares to look at public information can see that there is no overall difference in coveted measures and outcomes and deaths and hospitalizations in cities and states that employed restrictive coven measures and who still are and those who let life carry on once the true emergency was obviously over where the big difference

072is seen in areas like orange county with overreaching government officials manipulating the public and abusing their position by acting under the color of law is all the unfortunate collateral damage of which i have an inbox full of as i know you all do too where it is good to hear that sense and reason have landed the negative impact has already happened with lists going around to students police comments with unvaccinated thank you like to remind everyone that complaints concerning any specific employees or students are not permissible during public comments cooper thin hello my name is cooper zen i am 16 years old and a junior at orange high school where i play soccer and was looking forward to playing on the golf team i'm here speaking on behalf of myself and a large portion of

073friends who also want to participate in spring sports i appreciate the opportunity to speak to you about my concerns regarding the current policy of bi-weekly testing for cover 19 for non-vaccinated student athletes to set the context according to the ncdhhs and the 0-17 age group there have been 477 383 cases of covid resulting in only 14 deaths which is a zero percent death rate i'm not vaccinated and will not be vaccinated at this time there is no advantage for high school students to be vaccinated this does not yield any gain because both vaccinated and unvaccinated people can spread and contract covet according to the world health organization pcr tests can yield false positives i want my to submit myself to the bi-weekly testing as it opens myself up the potential risk of a false positive

074which would mean i would miss five days of class i'm in ap classes and will never be able to maintain my grades when missing class i've given you some statistics and some considerations to support not continuing with your current policy but most of all i'm here appealing to you as human beings who are elected to position that is supposed to put kids safety well-being and education is the number one priority the truth is covet isn't harming me and my classmates it's lack of any consideration of how many kids are lost dropping out of school not learning to their potential feeling depressed using drugs thinking suicidal thoughts feeling anxious about being singled out for being unvaccinated feeling alone and even feeling anxious about being around other people this isn't acceptable any longer shame on you for

075applying us against each other vaccinated versus non-vaccinated shame on you for taking away our ability to learn and grow we should be making leaps and bounds towards our exciting futures based on our supposed high school foundation shame on you for not allowing us to play team sports without coercion to be vaccinated which shows you're not truly focused on health and safety i want nothing more than to participate and compete on the golf team it's especially ridiculous since it's an outside sport just like soccer track lacrosse baseball and tennis are you didn't enforce this testing requirement on any other sports earlier this school year being unable to play on the golf teams disappointing as i was looking forward to being on the team practicing improving with the expertise of the coach and generally being a well-rounded

076person i do hold you accountable and ask considerably for your reconsideration thank you cooper austin mcclure good evening thank you for the chance to speak i'm here mostly to bear witness to show up in solidarity and to say thank you i can't imagine a more challenging time to be a superintendent or principal or teacher or school board member i'm so grateful that y'all continue to show up that you're having hard conversations i appreciate that you're making decisions based on science it's not cut and dry they're not straightforward decisions i think we all have some sense of that here and yet the emotion and the intensity and the vitriol comes so fast i'm a mom of a fourth grader and a sixth grader i'm also a psychologist and a public health researcher and i just want

077to thank y'all for doing your very best to keep our kids safe to keep our elders safe and to create a place where our kids feel like they belong that presentation about the art at arnchai was so powerful and so i guess i just want to say like i think we're all coming from this place of wanting the best for our kids and wanting the best for our community most of us anyway but i want to ask about how you hold liberty next to justice and love and belonging and listening to y'all in the discussion a few weeks ago about the challenges to books hearing white women and black women leading together courageously and brilliantly and fiercely tackling challenging history makes me so grateful to be in orange county and then this is where my

078children are growing up and get to go to school thank you for being here and doing what you're doing i think the last thing i want to just mention is that i'm part of the pta at both my kids schools and there have been fewer than five parents at each of the meetings that we've had this year and i have not made all of them i'm there as often as i can be show up when i'm able we are all having ups and downs throughout this to be sure in the past week one of the board members convened a meeting of ptas across the district to see how we might come together and support each other and everybody was saying the same thing we can hardly find anybody to volunteer to show up and that

079is just like heartbreaking and kind of maddening and so i'm all for showing up at school board meetings this makes me feel more excited and alive to be here in this way and i'm just asking all of us to show up also with breakfast for teachers or helping out with pick up a drop off in any way that we can thank you thank you so much [Applause] our next speaker is thomas lopez hello my name is thomas locke i am a junior and an orange high school varsity basketball player and golf player this year i plan on attending the state championship as we were not able to make the cut last year and i would like to do this with my team but this policy is placing a barrier between those hopes as a vaccinated

080individual i still stand for those who made the decision not to get vaccinated as governor cooper looks to roll back mass mandates in school orange county is doubling down on restrictions for students this is saddening as i trusted my school system to make decisions that benefited the students not make it harder for them to play the sports they want those who are unvaccinated as well as vaccinated have the ability to contract and spread coven so why are we singling out these students my friends for mandatory tests twice twice a week if this is a true concern about spreading coven this rule does not make sense the reason i'm here today is to ask for your reconsideration of this policy and allow those who wish to play sports do so regardless of their vaccination status thank

081you thomas next speaker is mr kevin reese uh good evening chairman doyle board members dr felder so my son is a sixth grader at l standback he's attended orange county school since kindergarten and i'm here to speak in support of continuing mandatory masking in our schools wearing a mask in the classroom is not fun it's uncomfortable to speak it's hard to breathe your glasses fog up i teach at unc greensboro we've been in person since august and i've taught every class every day in a mask it's not great i miss as do all teachers being able to see my students faces and my students being able to see mine but i still think that masking is the right call numbers are falling and we can help keep them that way with the reduced transmissions that

082mass still ensure none of us enjoys wearing masks but doing so is nothing more than an inconvenience i've heard a lot of talk about the social and educational harm that masks inflict on students in school i've seen no evidence of that in my son or in the students that i teach we all just wear the masks to contribute to reducing the spread of the virus it's a pain but that's all it is the omicron variant is by some measures the most second most transmissible virus in the history of humanity just after measles just a few weeks ago we were being encouraged to get better masks to protect ourselves against this more trans transmissible version of covid and we're already talking about doing away with masks entirely what's the rush aren't we worried about long covet

083let's not inject politics into a public health issue let's stick with masks along with fall glasses muffled voices breathing our own breath for a while longer until the trends become more obvious take it from someone who is in a classroom all day today learning is still taking place and social lives are still being built thank you our next speaker is mel mealy good evening once upon a time not long ago about 50 years or so a magical product was used in a wide range of manufactured goods building supplies paper products automobile parts clothing and packaging this product made virtually everything fireproof but as time went on we found that asbestos caused major health concerns we no longer use asbestos because brave people questioned the science from the 60s and 70s the tobacco industry marketed cigarettes

084as a safer version of their normal cousin these so-called mild smooth and light alternatives contained tiny vents in the filters which were meant to allow fresh air to dilute the tar cigarettes were even marketed for pregnant women to reduce stress through more research and science over the years we learned that not only do cigarettes not reduce stress but they also cause cancer not surprisingly doctors no longer recommend cigarettes to be used because brave people questioned the science in the 1940s a dangerous pesticide was sprayed on but busy crowded streets on children at swimming pools and at the beach ddt was thought to be a miracle cure that could end polio well it couldn't and it was found to cause more harm than good ddt is no longer sprayed on people thank goodness because brave people

085questioned the science thiel sorry but this was our thalidomide was widely used drug in the 1950s and in the early 60s for the treatment of nausea in pregnant women it became apparent later that thalidomide treatments resulted in severe birth defects and miscarriages of thousands pregnant women no longer take it and millions of lives have been saved because brave people questioned the science mercury is not used as a cure and we understand it now as a toxin because brave people questioned the science before hand washing was normalized and recommended to doctors helping with childbirth rates death rates were above 30 percent billions of lives have been saved because a brave doctor questioned the science was put in a sane asylum and was humiliated at some point people questioning the science are ridiculed shunned censored ignored and

086shamed but that's how science works by questioning and finding the research and observing and yes sometimes the science is wrong and has to be changed because of evidence all of the practices listed above and there are many more were at one time believed to be safe and effective these are were only stopped when enough people questioned them and the evidence was honestly and bravely investigated questioning the science is not wrong disrespectful or stupid it is an intelligent mature and moral thing to do when you notice something is amiss it is science itself thank you thank you our next speaker is mr robert castona thank you dr felder madam chairman board members i'm here for two reasons tonight i want to try to convince you or plead for you to do two things one to clear

087up some what i call word games or things that happened in previous meetings where uh the issue of of library books i've got new hearing aids and it's making me crazy and they don't hear right so i'll do the best again with this but it's annoying um there was an issue about books in the library and i understood some of that and it really comes down to what we understand maybe the word game would be curating books for the library and my plea is really simple is that you review those practices and those policies and that those and other books be reviewed based on good principles of curating books for a library the other issue primarily is one that's uh it's dear to me but it it's about leadership and legacy and it's particularly about

088leadership all of you and i've been blessed i guess probably to have had some personal moments or private moments with some of you and i've learned you to be a good heart i learned you to be really committed to what you do and and i have to respect you a lot to be here and spend the time you do in the public eye in these times they're really tough but there's a lot of differences there's a giant elephant in the room tonight it's called moms for liberty i live out on st mary's road i've honestly never had kids in the school district i've been here for about 50 years i've had so many friends i've been in the hillsborough rotary served there have been approached several times to serve on the school board our work

089in the rotary for me especially and some people say well you don't have any kids in the school with your dog in the fight i learned from a couple of folks in the rotary dr william harrison dr randy bridges were personal friends of mine they both were superintendent of schools randy especially was a good buddy and and randy approached me and so did bill at one time to run for the school board well i they said the reason i should run is because i didn't have kids in the school board i'm a businessman i'm a patriot veteran and in fact maybe that's why i should run i'm calling for you to have a town meeting a town meeting or a town hall where you welcome in moms for liberty and all the other people that

090want that want to do something here and we have a dialogue we don't we're not constrained by times and minutes i'm not much of a speaker i made funny notes and i have neuropathy so i can't type like i used to but the bottom line is we need a town hall we all need to come together somewhere in a town meeting and just talk things out you know i think we'll learn things about you that i know will be very helpful i know i will and you may learn some stuff about us and i ask those of you that don't agree 100 with the school board stand up okay mr castona thank you your time is up thank you ma'am i appreciate it [Applause] our next speaker is jackie wieland good evening thank you for

091this opportunity god gave us the rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness people come to the usa from communist and socialist countries they come from medical freedom religious freedom they choose their own careers they make and spend their own money because of virus manipulation the fda might try to impose a yearly covid vaccine say no and don't leave this imposition to the younger generations that this have gone on for two years is ridiculous unvaccinated student information is being released how is this possible in america florida and texas are looking better and better vote in person three to four jabs doesn't sound like vaccine effectiveness if it was a car i would label it a lemon it looks like some of the changes proposed will allow our younger generations life liberty and the pursuit

092of happiness as far as the the masking i'm a teacher i've seen it i was in class from the get-go we were only off for the from march to to june and we were right back in it and i've seen the effect of the masks on children and they move them and they get them wet they're chewing on them and i just think it's it's ridiculous it's and just like parents decide whether they're going to go to this school or that school they should be able to decide whether their child masks or doesn't mask this is america and you have that beautiful flag right there proving that we still live in this beautiful country of freedom thank you so much for all you do thank you our next speaker is ms sarah snipes greeting board

093members of administration i'm speaking tonight on the kova testing measures my student was told by school officials that if they didn't agree to testing they would be deemed ineligible during tryouts and cut so in order to not jeopardize an entire lifetime of playing a loved sport my student is being forced and harassed to participate in the medical testing which is still eau emergency use only please note that you guys are not licensed medical providers and you cannot give medical advice i will hold everyone liable if my student is harmed or has hardship or has any mental or medical trauma it is extremely egregious to single out and only test the unvaccinated students it is harassment when my student came home last week and told me that members on his team had cornered another player and

094were antagonizing him by saying come on man just get the vaccine it's not that bad dude yeah it doesn't hurt and i didn't have any side effects dude if you test positive you could ruin our chances of making the state playoffs the next day that student told my student he decided to get the vaccine saying and i quote yeah i went ahead and got the shot because i don't want anything jeopardizing our chances of winning the state playoffs and also my chances of being looked at by colleges this incident put further stress harassment and mental anxiety and trauma on my student my student has deeply held medical reasons and religious reasons to not take the vaccine in addition he already had coveted why would he need the vaccine natural immunity has now been proven to

095be significantly better and lasts 18 to 24 months but the board administ and administration won't recognize natural immunity why not this is also putting additional academic and safety concerns on my student he is a senior he doesn't report to school until two o'clock the testing is required to occur at 12 o'clock that means he will have to drive 15 or 20 minutes to school be tested drive home to attend his online classes through alamance and then drive back again is anybody going to pay for his gas who's going to help him with that study time that he misses what if he gets in a car wreck on the way to school to be tested who's liable this is ridiculous bored this testing is not needed the pandemic and the cases are going down why are

096we causing this harm and harassment in our community it's not needed they could die more of the flu and driving to get tested than they can for covet it's not necessary please wrap up your comments thanks i urge you to change course to resign or be prepared thank you to the fullest extent of the law if any harm happens to my child or any others thank you miss knights our next speaker is miss bella brown good evening my name is bella i'm a senior student athlete at orange high i'm here to advocate for myself and fellow student athletes who have chosen not to get the jab this is a personal family medical decision between me and my parents most of us are too scared to speak up or we feel like we have no voice

097when it comes to this we are being singled out and being discriminating against it isn't right and all of you know it isn't right how come i have to be tested twice a week and be the one to quarantine if exposed everyone knows and i mean everyone that vaccinated people can contract carry and spread this virus just as easy so what logic says that only unvaccinated people should be tested you also said at a previous board of education meeting that this testing would be private that was a straight-up lie it isn't so private when i have a list of all unvaccinated students in my school who are having to be tested cases are falling death rates are falling hospitalizations are falling and what does orange county decide to do they decide to enforce a test

098that is unnecessary unreliable uninviting unfair absurd ridiculous ludicrous and discriminatory and us students are much more informed than you think we are we know the truth and we know that we are being lied to thank you for your time thank you mr brown our next speaker is miss jennifer wieland thank you board um i just feel for the parents that um have to um make sure that pornography is away from their children or that they their children are taught that they're white if they're white they're they're um you know all of a sudden they they're well they're hated or that they did something wrong by being born white um and also i think that the mask mandates and vaccine mandates are a political thing it's it's it's gone too far and i think that we

099should have our eyes on the prize where did it happen we know it happened in wuhan we know that um that we're playing with fire that people are playing god and we need to stop this research and it's in unc also and we're not safe and everybody's divided over the vaccine and and everything else in masks when we should be figuring out how to stop this for our children and our grandchildren now that this is not safe research they're manipulating viruses and we're not safe and we have to we're we're the ones that look bad if you're not vaccinated or if you don't get your booster and your booster after that two months later another booster um we're the ones that suffer for research that was done in china when it was unlawful to do

100it in the u.s and and i just i don't think we should be harping at each other because kovid divided us already separated us we don't need to be divided over vaccines and masks we need to come together and make sure this doesn't happen again because these doctors are torturing beagles they're they're doing bat research and it's it's like well let's hate our neighbor because they won't get vaccinated no let's figure out what happened and stop it for our children because it's going to happen again if this gain of function research whatever dr fauci wants to call it you know semantics whatever we have to stop this that's what's most important for our children and for us to get through this not this division thank you very much for your time thank you ms wieland

101[Applause] our last speaker of the evening is as mr charles brown good evening i want to start off with saying i'm just a dad i'm not a public speaker so you have to bear with me um but first and foremost i want to thank you guys for your service this is not an easy job i want to thank you from the bottom of my heart because you guys have been able to do things for our kids that us parents have worked really hard and diligently on trying to drive home very important and critical lessons for our kids and i sit around the table with my kid and we talk about tyranny racism discriminative our history is covered with really ugly ugly actions from our government our police departments and what i want to thank you

102for is being able to do something that i couldn't do i've talked about these things and they fell on deaf ears but my daughter being a senior in orange high it was through you guys that she learned what it looked like what tyranny looks like what discriminated against her because of her personal medical decisions her faith it was this board you guys taught her what i couldn't teach she had to see it through you she plays soccer she's one of these kids that has to be tested she's discriminated against she's also one of these students that is off campus so she has to drive across the county 20 minutes at lunchtime to be tested only because her medical decision solely and we know more importantly you've taught these kids what it looks like and i

103thank you for that because i couldn't do it i was just doing this this dad talking but they seen it through your eyes you heard kids come up here today passionate about this you know what bad times causes good times and there's going to be good times for our kids because of your tyranny it's ridiculous we all know the truth and more importantly i listen to these kids and see their tick tocks they know the truth they know it's the lie thank you mr brown time you're playing politics and leave our kids alone please step away from the podium [Applause] that concludes our public comment and i'd like to remind everyone that um it's important that our guests not disrupt the meeting our time for public comment is over okay i believe we're at the

104point of looking at our consent agenda and we have nine items on our consent agenda this evening um the first one is minutes uh from our february 7th 22nd meeting which does include written public comment submissions um our public our personal our personnel report from tonight the easement request from the town of hillsborough for sewer pump station project um our fiscal year 2022 audit contract second quarter financials service contracts enterprise financials hub report equipment materials and supplies report and i'm going to ask are there any items that board members would like to move to the regular agenda for further discussion will you mentioned yes the hillsborough the easement request yes please okay are there any other items that people are asking to pull from the consent agenda okay um dr felder um would you like

105us to discuss that now or would you like us to move that back at the um when we're looking at and voting on the the cip what do you think makes sense actually i could go either way perhaps maybe when we're discussing the capital investment plan okay the most appropriate time thank you for asking motion to approve the rest of the consent agenda second okay a motion from a smiley and a second from vice chair stevens mr atherton yes um i vote yes miss houser yes miss mckenzie yes dr moore yes ms smiley yes miss stevens yes okay great and now pass it back to you dr felder as we look at our covid19 health and safety updates okay thank you chair doyle so there are some things in orange county schools that will never

106change including keeping students and staff safety and health and schools open five days a week for in-person learning as top priorities shared at the top of the meeting since the onset of the pandemic orange county schools continues to follow the science by consulting and collaborating very closely with the medical and public health professionals who are well-versed in infectious disease as we navigate the evolving pandemic we know who we are we are educators so we are very grateful to these medical and public health experts who have helped guide us over the past two years as shared earlier and not uncommonly uh we consulted with the medical experts last week and again today as a result we are bringing updated recommendations to the board of education tonight so at this time i'd like to invite mr patrick

107auberle deputy superintendent of operations to the podium to lead the discussion mr abele good evening dr felder members of the board we do have a couple of our staff here tonight dwayne foster our director of athletics school health and operations and also sylvia compton our lead school nurse for the district so we as dr felder said we do have a few updated recommendations this evening thank you for that turning up the volume so you should be able to hear me now we have a few updated recommendations this evening that we did want to discuss and just walk through that were mentioned earlier again orange county schools will begin moving to optional indoor masking within 72 hours of the orange county government lifting its indoor masking mandate many folks have forgotten or maybe didn't realize that

108orange county north carolina government has an indoor masking mandate within the county the school's falling as a subset of an organization within the county we are subject to that requirement as well and so that would be first and foremost we would not have the authority to lift our indoor masking mandate without the county first lifting the mandate or making it optional there would be no restrictions for meal times locations or procedures effective march first and we would discontinue all required covet 19 testing for student athletes on march 1st and we'll discuss each of these and give you more information as we move through the presentation the first item we wanted to talk about as we had laid out our plans and recommendations this evening we tried to look at a few key areas as we

109talked about at your last meeting in early february and also in january looking at the cdc the centers for disease control and the community transmission rates as we have throughout the pandemic wanted just to provide this chart straight from the cdc's website about the categories and the calculations that are made for each of the counties and how they're designated as either being high substantial moderate or low community transmission for coven 19. there's the four categories you can see starting out with low increasing intensity through high there are two rates that are calculated over a seven day period the number of new cases per 100 000 persons and the second that is the percentage of positive tests during that seven day window period one of the notes from the cdc is when you have [Music] one

110category such as cases that follows in a different coding from percentages that may be in another category they look at the two and they go with the highest designation so today we looked earlier orange county is in the moderate category when we look at the percent of positive tests the last seven days it falls between that five and seven point nine nine percent however the number of cases per 100 000 individuals is still several hundred so it's it's within the high category so therefore today the cdc still indicates orange county is is high in community transmission and so as we think about recommendations as we think about moving forward we wanted to look to see is one of these indicators better at us watching and monitoring what's happening as we talk about rolling back mitigation

111strategies or are we able to look at other indicators and so we looked at you know when might we start to roll back as a timing knowing that we've been coming to you every 14 days with recommendations this past school year also looking at our student vaccination rates our staff vaccination rates and most importantly looking at the number of cases that have transferred into secondary cases within the school you know throughout the pandemic we've discussed and talked about medical experts have advised you there will be cases there's cases in the community we can expect cases in the schools the key is our mitigation strategies and are we being effective in what we're doing to stop additional spread within the schools and we monitor those secondary cases so again just wanted to refer back to as

112we talk about categories these are the categories that the cdc uses so we looked at one option option one was trying to designate do what we did in the fall start to roll back our strategies starting at the high school level followed by the middle school level and then the elementary level for a couple reasons one the availability of vaccines has been out longer for that age group of students two the number of cases that we were tracking continually to be less than the other categories and three the number of secondary transmissions um same thing is less than the other categories part of that yes is due to the vaccinations but it's also i think older students being able to manage two years into a pandemic and knowing how to properly wear a mask follow

113procedures wash hands etc there are other things they're doing that they're doing well and so looking at this we would we had looked at starting what would that look like if we just started this week february 25th and we started rolling back based on um vaccination status of 70 and then phasing further in march 7th march 14th etc and utilizing the vaccination rates one of the items that's complicated trying to use this scenario is the vaccination status has changed the definition and so individuals that are eligible for a booster if they're eligible for a booster and they haven't had the booster they're not considered fully vaccinated anymore and so we will have a changing of our vaccination rates it doesn't mean we're not doing a great job we've been doing an excellent job in orange

114county managing but if we're solely looking at vaccination rates and the county cdc designation the vaccination rates are going to change we're going to drop because when we factor in boosters the number of individuals with boosters lag severely behind individuals who are fully vaccinated as far as a rate that people are getting them then we look at the number of cases that are happening in orange county with the cdc's designation and i asked the health director as i do periodically thinking about the last week these cases that are causing us to still be in a high community transmission what age group are those individuals and it's individuals that are young adults um in the mid 20s um up it's it's really the large number of cases aren't contributed with um our stakeholders which are children

115and so i do think that's important because we're in a unique place in the state having a major university within the county and so there certainly could be cases that are happening or cases that are getting reported and the question is do we utilize that data as far as holding our schools with mitigation strategies so that was the high school i won't go through each of these in detail because they mirror the same thing just changing of the different dates so middle schools would be the same thing start to roll out march 7th 14th and 21st and then followed by elementary school and note here when we talk about elementary school this evening if we don't specifically say that's k-5 there are very specific rules for pre-k some both state and federal programs and so

116we would be following whatever mandates or masking or requirements that are required for those programs and on this rollout we would have april 7th so it'd be right after spring break when we would look at optional masking based on rates and cases what we have said in all of the examples and it's on another slide is that's how we kind of we reduce option one of removing the mask what might happen or what are we looking for that we might have to put mask on and we looked at two percent of the student population having secondary transmission within the schools as a number for monitoring when we might want to implement required masking for a period of five days we set that number too low there'll be many cases before we're aware we have an

117issue then the concern is we would have lots of students who now have to quarantine because they they are covered positive and that could impact staffing and impact the operations of the schools we set the number too high and it can have the opposite effect where we have coveted that's happening but we're never really putting in strategies quick enough or soon enough and so trying to find the balance between that at what point do we implement putting the mask on without having tuesday put the mask on monday take the mask off wednesday put the mask back on next monday take them back off again and not have the constant bouncing back and forth but we do feel that that would be a starting point for reviewing of because the question has been asked you know

118we're talking about when are we taking the mask off but would there be a time when mass maybe has to be put back on again option two would be not tiering it by level this would be all students in k-12 um starting after march 7th or the day to which orange county transmission for kova 19 is designated as moderate or at least 50 of the students in the school been vaccinated so it changes the vaccination rate a little bit it also sets a target date of march 7th and again this would be if the orange county indoor masking mandates lifted or if there's any other regulations that would give parent options or choices at that point in time but we looked at 50 50 percent and then option three is all students k-12 will begin

119optional indoor masking 72 hours after the date the orange county local inside mass mandate expires that is um a streamlined approach it it creates some notification one of the issues we find is trying to say immediately like tonight we're making decisions tonight folks want all the answers they want the procedures they want the information by 7 a.m tomorrow morning and sometimes that's just very difficult when we make decisions to turn around and implement the very next morning and so we felt like 72 hours once that mass mandate's been lifted would give us time to notify and to make sure that folks are aware and there may be you know we're continuing to offer high filtration mass for parents with optional masking who may want those and just to be able to provide some advanced notice

120the next items that we wanted to make note under masking is masking indoors and outdoors may still be required for students and staff that test positive for covert 19 and mass being required to be worn for an additional period of time once they come back per the strong schools toolkit and the local health department that's aside from any optional or masking that the local school board would have in place that's a rule and requirement through dhhs and the local health department so there would be still could be times when masks are required based on the current requirements number three again we already talked about that that would be our on-ramp for all the categories and then number four for staff members we would make it optional we know right now we have a very high

121staff vaccination rate however for staff members there will be that application of in order to be considered fully vaccinated you will be required to have a booster and so what we would we would designate is staff members would have optional masking when the indoor mask mandates lifted by the county as long as we're not in high community transmission and our vaccination rates of our staff doesn't fall below 90 percent we use a much higher threshold for staff because we want to keep buildings open we want to keep our staff engaged in the work that they do which is so critical and want to make sure that we're able to do that successfully without having staffing shortages or the need to close schools due to staffing issues and i think that was the last one so

122i'm going to pause there for questions or comments just about masking and then we'll go into each of the other parts of the presentation so mr eppley if thank you so much for that presentation i just want to go back to the options that were presented and just note that option three given the conversations we had in consul consultation with the abc science collaborative and the orange county health department we are recommending option three um be the option that we uh advance uh tonight so i just wanted to emphasize that again the the slide deck is not representative of that being the uh recommendation but wanted to make that clear again tonight as we didn't have time to update the psy deck i know we have board members with questions but before we get to

123questions could you tell us again so we're saying publicly exactly what option three would be that that you have in mind at this point because we have had conversation today so did you want to yeah we've actually updated sorry you were away earlier with the board we updated that they made the correction so the recommendation as uh listed on the screen is optional masking for all students will be implemented 72 hours after the local bass mandate expires for orange county north carolina masking indoors would be optional for all staff when the indoor mass mandate is lifted for orange county north carolina orange county is not designated as being in high community transmission for cobia and staff vaccination rates are above 90 percent so any of those categories then it would be optional for staff and

124masking indoors would be required for students again when community transmission is high or when the secondary transmission cases exceed two percent of the school population and then again masking would remain required for those additional five days as designated by the department of health and human services or the local health department okay before i pass support other board members i just want to make sure i understand what's on this slide so um for that first line with recommendation optional masking for students 72 hours after the local mass mandate expires and since we're in high or maybe we'll still be in substantial or something that's even considering that whereas for staff it's just it's a stricter guideline is that right that is correct we were once it's lifted um again we were we would lift immediately staff

125vaccination rates are already above 90 percent but we would not want staff to be out of mask in the high community transmission but again that's a local decision if you want students and staff to follow the exact same masking world okay okay great i know ms mckenzie had her hand up and then i think i maybe saw that wielded wouldn't go ahead thank you um i am wondering if there is any indication do we know when orange county plans to lift the mask mandate or when it expires not at this time we we don't know okay thank you did i see your hand well you didn't but uh i do have questions okay um so i'd like to ask the attorney to explain a little bit about how the county plays into it and the

126town because i think it's important to just understand why it's even worded that way um don't know you just have to get closer currently the county has an indoor mask mandate which does include all public buildings and public schools and that is based on the county's emergency management powers under chapter 166a and so that as far as i can tell would control in the school buildings if this the school district can have a more restrictive rule but not less at this time does that answer your question right and this is assuming that the county and the town would do the remove the restrictions at the same time even though it doesn't say that if there was a case that the county removed it but the town didn't we would have an issue we'd have to

127look at the details of what the actual written whatever resolution the town had adopted and and how it applied okay i haven't seen if there is one for hillsboro or if it's easier than just whatever local ordinances or laws are in place i think would cover all of the entities yeah and i had i had one other question for clarity so when we say staff vaccination rates are above 90 is that per location or how is that measured because it sounds like it's a broad district level when this seems like it would be more appropriate at a site level versus the whole district so i'll ask miss hatcher and her if she wants to give an update on vaccination rates or statuses for employees at school sites i'll say two things one is that's a

128local decision whether it's right she doesn't have to give me my site i'm not asking i'm asking for clarity on what we would be approving it doesn't say if it's by sight or we're just saying it has to be the whole district i assume it's by sight right we we were thinking district as a whole at this point and not going with site by sight decisions because of the difficulties with implementing not only with families but within the county and the area is trying to but that's a local decision if you want to start and have different mandates for each of the schools that would be a local decision but our we were talking orange county schools as a whole on these slides and i will say about the staff before staff start emailing me

129here in a few minutes um that was not to be again permanent you know our goal was to get us to spring break and revisit and um especially when math start coming off as optional for students leaving the more restrictive masking in place for staff and then revisit that at a later point in time tonight we were really focusing on our students and the request for optional masking for them thank you for the clarity welcome um sarah and then bonnie i know we don't have a an estimated timeline in terms of the county and the mandate i'm wondering um you know my my bottom line here in how i think we should do this is around community transmission and you know the abc talked about that being a really important factor because of cases coming

130into the school and so i i know the county's looking at hospitalizations are they also looking at the rates of community transmission as they're making that decision so in my uh conversations yes uh but i did hear more about hospitalizations i know that's a huge concern with with unc right now is what i'd heard but yep okay thank you can you say more what you mean sarah about what's what's a concern with unc oh i'd heard maybe i saw this in the in the news announcement about it but the hospitalizations at unc were a big factor for the county in um in the decision to do the mass mandate okay i don't want to speak for them but that's what i'd heard okay um bonnie i have a simple question if we relax the mask

131mandate will we continue to hold vaccination clinics at our schools so um i'll let sylvia if you want to come give an update on before we answer that question if i can give you some data on the last vaccination clinics and actually how many folks have been vaccinated thank you good evening so what we have found is that we have been hosting uh vaccination clinics as well as testing sites throughout the district we had a couple that we had to postpone due to weather but we have not had a good turnout at all we had two weekends two two clinics for testing on a saturday at two locations at um gravley hill middle school in ale standback gravely hill tested three people ale stanback did 23 and that was i apologize that was i think

132the first weekend in february because of whether we had to postpone that two weeks ago we held a vaccination clinic at new hope and we had 12 come out and get vaccinated and that was for five to 11 year olds last week we had a vaccination clinic at effluent cheeks and we had six this week we will be holding vaccine clinic for 12 and above at orange high school this thursday from 5 to 9 p.m so we're trying to see what we what we'll come up with the biggest thing right now that we're noticing it's it's not hard to get vaccinated there are several places that have vaccines due to pharmacies our local health department pediatric offices any doctor's offices the county now has re-established their walk-in vaccine in in hillsboro at the bonnie b

133center every friday and saturday and then chapel hill has several locations so what i think is happening it's nobody's waiting in line anymore and i think those that want to get vaccinated have gotten vaccinated no is the response i just wanted you to understand why we wanted to build the watch to give you that answer just because of the the low turnouts and these folks have a tremendous amount of work to support school health and we want to reshift their focus as we reduce mitigation to the school health other items that they concentrate on it was interesting during dr benjamin's presentation that in some of the mask optional districts they did see a bump in vaccination so regardless of where students get them maybe we will see some of that bump too if and when

134we move to mask optional okay other board member questions or comments um can we have a motion or a question to approve the superintendent's recommendation and forward second motion from will in a second from bonnie by sheriff stevens yes okay i vote yes will yes sarah yes bonnie yes hillary yes dr moore okay thank you so much that motion passes all right next item is uh section two this is our health and safety updates for athletics and extracurricular programs again you saw our recommendation earlier which would be to roll back um testing for unvaccinated athletes and mr foster's here so i'm going to let him give a little bit of information about individuals that are exempted from testing and some of the logistical challenges that we've faced trying to implement thank you mr evilly and

135good evening to everyone uh i'm sure we have to square it away um testing for our student athletes as you can imagine just the pause and trying to get uh things squared away has been a bit of a bear uh working with mako um has been a bit cumbersome as we try to get their team together as well as approvals through orange county schools and like to get testing into schools at the moment as we're aware at the time currently we have student athletes who are unvaccinated would have to test weekly okay we were able to over the last week finalize or our timeline to get mako into our schools to do the actual testing at this point we have our first testing with a.l standback last friday that went well we then moved to

136this week and we have our other high schools both cedar ridge and orange and the other two middle schools lined up for uh testing at this time we've been able to identify through mako our spaces and which that will occur and move from there recently with the change in the shift in our north carolina schools schools toolkit too in line with the cdc as we are now aware that uh boosters increase i'm sorry boosters for 12 year olds and up we've had to then make another shift now to include those as we define fully vaccinated at this time all right so that put again another category of students based off that as well as those who have had covet within the last 90 days these individuals obviously would not will be exempt from testing as

137a result um because of again having coveted in that time period and would test positive and the like so they would be exempt from that 90-day period as well so moving into a space where we're defining these student athletes and getting those individuals who again who are unvaccinated you have that category you have the category we have student athletes who who who are who laptops have tested positive and as well as the category of students who uh who would not be within that realm of testing at all so it's very important that we had to finalize those things as we get those get mako on board and get mako moving towards testing at the moment up next we'll have beginning on wednesday our high schools we'll begin testing there and then on friday we have

138our final testing with ale stand back in that space at the moment so as mr foster said we did have one of our middle schools launched last friday we have the remaining schools scheduled this week we want to make sure based on recommendations or approvals this evening that we would have time to complete all of the schools through that first round as scheduled and then starting with our recommendation being march 1st so i wanted to give a little preference as to why we chose march 1st allowing us to complete the first rounds that are scheduled and for us to be able to communicate the changes and the updates that are for would be forthcoming if that's what the board allows the other thing mr foster mentioned was in the fall certainly the board in the

139fall we were opening schools with the delta surge and there was quite a bit of concerns about again our priority being keeping schools open for in-person learning we know the toolkit has been very clear in high community transmission having a testing program having individuals be fully vaccinated or participate virtually with always having the option in the high community transmission of shutting sports down the board didn't choose to shut sports down what you asked was individuals in order to participate in extracurricular activities which includes athletics or other non-graded non-curriculum athletic programs that have competitions that are off campus competing in much the same way that a student athlete does those are non-compensatory those are not required students volunteer to participate in those programs and the board locally as was reviewed by the attorney the board locally

140can set program requirements or restrictions on those programs much like much like the high school athletic association sets when it comes to academics or other requirements there are school districts around the state i remember years ago that actually um had other types of testing built in whether it was concussion testing or other testing you know there were different requirements for for athletes and so looking at the delta surge certainly there was a clear line to be able to see where if an individual was vaccinated they might not contract as fast or as much or severe on the case of cove not all necessarily that's you know not a hundred percent they're certainly our breakthrough or were cases but with the delta it was more what we were hearing what we were seeing was unvaccinated individuals

141being more susceptible and also with the severity omicron changed that omicron changed the fact of there were many many individuals who were vaccinated and also individuals since then who who have boosted that were still getting the virus and who were able to transmit the virus who were asymptomatic again not within my wheelhouse to talk about why that is or the levels or the viral loads and all that i'll let the medical experts handle all that but when the board made that decision we were faced with trying to keep schools open run these athletic programs and get testing up and running we had a great need based on the virus and the strains that we presented what we didn't have was the capacity to test because we opened up schools in every case required contact tracing

142required exclusion from school required notifications required nurses who were trying to do immunizations and every other issue that we we were addressing aside from getting state programs and vendors and other things up and running and we also were moving into indoor sports within the fall so obviously there was a concern about crowds and individuals and competitions and teams being together within the school environment now we switch to the spring and and we are upon the timing of spring sports and sports being held outdoors we still have what was discussed earlier in the fall we've not revisited that at length but now we have a capacity for testing and that capacity may not now match with the purpose as to why the board was intending to have student athletes or those participating in extracurricular activities tested

143now that we also know that if you have kovu within the last 90 days you really can't do a pcr test because the odds are you're going to show up code positive and as was mentioned you know you may be taking asymptomatic individuals and now all of a sudden putting them into a quarantine requirement so it is complicated it is complicated it is not any intention of this board or administration or anyone else to single out any student any sports team any program it's a fact of where we are as we've tried to mitigate the best we can with the virus that has changed it's changed at least three times from the original strain to a delta strain to omicron and who knows what ba2 is going to be we've also had ever-changing guidance ever-changing

144requirements and staff that are work overworked doing the very best that they can school level at the district level all levels so our recommendation is where we are at this point in time based on the actual number of students who either are not vaccinated or who haven't had covet in the last 90 days it is a tremendous lift to continue to move forward with testing and the reality of it is even if we test the unvaccinated it doesn't mean that an individual who's vaccinated still doesn't have the potential for asymptomatic spread or transmission of the virus the second the second thing is as we try to move forward and implement we we have a program with athletic directors on school campuses who do a great job through the high school at the association with requirements

145with programming training physicals i mean it's very regimented as far as procedures on eligibility when we look at continuing now that we have the capacity with our extracurricular programs there is not a single person on the campus that oversees every activity or program except for the principal each individual coach sponsor or facilitator would need to be part of the processes of working with our team the kobe team at the school location to inform to monitor to check vaccination statuses with the school nurse to find out who is vaccinated and not vaccinated to then schedule and set up the required coveted testing for those and there's a lot of confusion at the school level between what's required as a graded course curricular course because it's a cte class i'm in career technical education high school level

146i'm in a trade and i go off and do things off campus because it's required that i go to the state fair to show my sheep etc it's part of my class versus items that may not be a class you know it could be a science club that builds rockets and um you know it's not required it's not part of curriculum there's a teacher facilitator they meet once a week but they do all go off and compete and by competing and by being off campus and it's non-graded non-curricular it would be required for those individuals the other piece that dwayne mentioned which obviously we're concerned about is we have fall athletes who are now or spring athletes in the fall they did everything we asked either become fully vaccinated or submit to or be part

147of the testing program and submit a registration in order for us to test you those same students now are finding themselves unvaccinated it's hard for them to understand last week i was eligible two weeks ago on the basketball team next week or this week i'm not on the baseball team and the baseball team's operating outside and so just wanted to understand and give the complexities as we implement um what that looks like from the ground level and i apologize because that's probably more information than you were waiting for on the slide thank you so much mr abele before we go to questions um bonnie i just want to thank miss compton mr foster mr abele i know this has been just like a tremendous lift ever changing expectations all year long and i thank you

148so much for all your efforts in putting everything in place with vaccine clinics and testing and keeping our athletes safe so thank you so much for all of your work board members bonnie thank you so much i i just want to clarify because that was a lot of information um i you're suggesting one that we discontinue all required covet testing for student athletes and then second that we also discontinue are you suggesting that we discontinue optional testing for our students no um and let me just jump right to there so i'm going to just kind of scroll down here a little bit sorry so one of the recommendations for the athletic programs is to end testing for unvaccinated athletes and non-graded non-curricular those ones that were required march 1st and continue to offer diagnostic testing

149for any student athlete or students in extracurricular programs that want to test you know let's say they're going to a competition and that competition at the state or regional level requires them to get on an airplane and they're required to have a cove test well we would want to help facilitate that and so we would make it optional you know we would have our testing program allow them our weekly cova testing our diagnostic testing that we have on the campus we're not asking for any recommendations to make those changes tonight we want to continue offering optional testing on the school campus whether it's staff or students thank you for asking that point of clarification buddy go ahead can i ask a follow-up and this is a question for miss compton and that's how many students

150have signed up for optional tests thank you so we have shared information with our families and staff to sign up through mako which is using the company color to process our tests and i know there was some confusion with some families because they didn't understand the difference so we have shared that information out to let them know as of right now in our district i apologize it takes a moment to pop we have 496 participants signed up out of 7 000. thank you i'm sorry out of 7 000 or is this height we just nope out of seven thousand yes ma'am i can break it down by schools but that is the district okay other board member questions will so i i don't have a particular question but more of a statement i i i

151don't feel we should tar test till march first i mean if we're going to stop the program there's so many students that i've talked to beyond who have come in here about the stress of doing it how they feel differently if we're going to stop it we should stop it now not make them go through it and then just say oh by the way you're not going to have to do it later it just seems unnecessary to me to to do that so i just wanted to say it out loud and that will be what i'm intended to say anyway i do have a question sort of in that vein for students who haven't participated but still want to participate in sports when this does go into effect are there windows that athletes or potential

152athletes have already missed for teams that are past now and kind of too late for them to join or would there be accommodations for students who have missed windows sure tryouts have been going on for the last week and a half at all levels seems some and one of the reasons we don't have covet data today because we didn't want it to be skewed based off their tryouts of everyone coming out trying to make a team we wanted to be able to say all right and these are the unvaccinated students that would test once we have our spring roster you know from that standpoint so um i know there are teams that have solidified rosters you know probably at this point and there are some who will continue to do tryouts to solidify that roster

153in the coming days as scrimmages and things begin to pick up okay thank you other questions were you going to say anything mr evilly well there are a couple other pieces in this i'm happy now to stop if you want to take the vote on the athletic testing and then we can come back to the other toolkit changes but we were trying to get all those to the one point but pleasure the board i think were you going to speak to this point bonnie one more clarifying question and i should know this answer but i don't if a student or staff wants a covid test if they're symptomatic or whatever reason if they want a koba test can they go to the nurse's office and get one so there is the possibility to test if

154it's testing because i'm curious and i just want to know we don't have that program but if they register and they're trying to think that they're it's diagnostic and they're trying to find out you know do i have coveted if the symptoms etc sylvia can talk to you about what that looks like so yes thank you i just want to remind everybody that as school nurses we still have other duties within the school we have just officially today have been approved from the state in our health department that we don't have to individual contact trace which means we don't have to specifically seek out those folks that were within close contact to exclude them but we still have to notify a potential group so the work is still there if we're talking about testing and

155anybody can just come to the nurse's office for a test you are now adding another duty we're already talking about doing diagnostic testing what that means is if they come symptomatic to the nurse we will offer them a pcr test and an antigen test just to send somebody that wants to know is not effective time use for the school nurse they should schedule it with the weekly pull testing that we will be offering that's also optional a as a staff member you know i've got this great trip planned next weekend i just want to get a kobe test before i go that is not a school-based option okay is there any more discussion to this point with board members can um can we make a motion on this particular section well so i make a

156motion to accept the recommendations with the effective date of today for athlete testing can i just ask one more question based on that point do you all have any reactions to that shift my only suggestion would be february tomorrow 22nd just because today is we've already tested folks and already sent letters and information out and just would ask if you would um i would gladly amend my motion to that the whole time i just wonder if that will give us enough time uh to just notify everyone that that that's my only uh concern so not everyone watches board meetings it does take we've got to get to the principles there's a lot of chains of communication that we need to to get at i think we could possibly suspend effective tomorrow but we just need

157time to get the messages out um yes and the main thing for us would be stopping the testing tomorrow and then continue to communicate yeah the boards that directive i just would like to ask a point of clarity because i i don't know exactly that i understand your concern will because is it the people who are signed up to test they are unvaccinated and so they're testing for sports reasons but maybe by the end of the week or next week they wouldn't have to is that what our like what is the reason for doing it now versus the suggested date mainly because we're on the 21st and we're going to say we're going to just continue testing kids knowing we're going to stop the program so i'm saying let's stop the program so the kids

158aren't stressed about it and allow kids that normally wouldn't have signed up because of the testing to sign up and all we're doing is suspending it while the communication goes out that's that's the reason for pulling it in from march 1st to now or tomorrow um the motion is to accept the recommendations with the uh the effective date of tomorrow versus march 1st discussion further discussion by stevens yes my concern or my question is dr felder just said that tomorrow would not be ample time to get the messaging out so what is today the 20th monday monday the 21st so would could you live with wednesday i mean because we want to give them a chance to get the messaging out because that's something that uh our parents complain about is that if we don't

159get it out because everybody's not listening to the meeting so i just would like for us to get the messaging out adequately that's all yeah my concern is having them test not not the messaging so if if we can say that we're going i mean we're talking about suspending it not right you know communication so i don't that's my concern is making sure we're stopping the testing versus the communication part that is that is my utmost concern i mean further discussion i mean what if when they came they were alerted that it's no longer going to be a requirement but they could go through with it that day right that's why i said suspend so any other further discussion okay so we have a motion from will we have a second from bonnie hillary um

160i need another minute to think about okay please that's fine do we need another minute for discussion yeah i mean are we confused on any of the points i think we're trying to weigh different aspects sarah i do have i do have another follow-up question um uh i know that like the cdc still does have their recommend that they do still recommend um in high community transmission doing the additional testing and they make distinctions between high risk sports and lower risk sports um and i'm wondering if there are any conditions under which you could imagine us ramping this program back up again so for example if our community transmission heads up in the wrong direction if we see actually a decent amount of transmission in the higher risk sports right those they're designated higher risk

161because of studies about which sports cause more transmission are there are are you all going to keep an eye on those things and come back to us if actually you think testing would be a helpful strategy in a situation like that yes absolutely um a couple couple things because we do have a couple high-risk sports this spring and we do have issues with wearing just now even if we had outdoor masking with mouth guards etc there are still cases that we we monitor and our recommendation was you know continue to follow the toolkit we think that's the easiest for the community and the public to follow the decisions that we're recommending as if as in so long as the health department and the abc science agrees with our methodology and our strategies so we will

162continue to monitor we'll continue to report just as if we were talking earlier about watching the number of cases that are happening at the school level in that two percent mark dwayne and sylvia they both compete complete weekly um information for us and so we're monitoring and looking at cases and especially when you know they know whenever i see something come across and it's an athletic team then you know we're we're immediately following back up to find out too because we just know our risk and exposure goes quickly with individuals who are competing or near each other or with each other for an extended period of time i guess um i understand why you want to have the site continue through with what they're setting up i mean that makes sense but it just it

163seems like i wouldn't want someone to have to meet a requirement that's going to end the next day and have them not be told that so if it's like okay this site you know they're still we still want to give them the opportunity to set it up so that it's ready for you know the optional but please know if you're scheduled to get tested today you don't have to go through with it this is this is optional at this point that's that's what i would prefer even if even if someone is showing up and the communication's delayed and they're like oh i wish i hadn't driven over here because of the communication delays but they still have an option to go through with it or go home so i think for that reason i am

164supportive of the motion any other more discussion mom has got a question bonnie just to add to that so the point being that if you don't want to be tested you don't have to be tested right that's so our student it's the concern is our students that don't want to be tested right and so not forcing them to be tested this week isn't okay so if we can continue sarah are you ready to vote um because we will keep monitoring this and ramp things up if we need to although yes okay um so will made the motion sarah voted bonnie yes yes hillary yes brenda yes i vote yes will yes jennifer yes thank you okay thank you i know we've had extended conversation on those first two topics we did want to just um

165mention a couple other items per the toolkit and where there are some individual changes that are being made part of that is the removal for tests to stay test to stay was put in place in order to avoid students having to quarantine following a potential exposure within the school environment there is no required quarantine in that case or situation anymore so therefore the test to stay is not an option for us at this point in time we're not recommending because again it's not it's not a requirement to quarantine contact tracing and exclusion from school following exposure is no longer recommended i mean that went into effect today with the toolkit so we're we will be rolling that out effective tomorrow schools um as far as notifications um in our sylvia to come back up there's

166a couple modifications to notifications and processes when you're asymptomatic when you're positive and group notifications and we've been working with our communications team and so we did want to mention that this evening just so the public and you are aware how notifications will be made going forward thank you so we've had some recommendation from our local health department to go ahead and adopt uh the recommended templates for the group notification and that would be anybody that shared a space with somebody that did test positive and the recommendation was to use the letter that the north carolina north carolina state department of health and human services did post on page 19 for the procedure for response for coven 19 in cases k dash 12 schools that was published and updated february 10th so as of right

167now that's what the nurses are doing they're following up with emails we're trying to establish also a blackboard message response because we do we are aware that not every parent checks the email but where i know that there's also going to be updates to the district dashboard so there'll be two options for them to look up at this point the goal being now to focus on the diagnostic testing um because of many reasons that was listed by strong schools but the fact that the variant does spread so quickly by the time it's identified the five-day isolation period has come and gone and by the time we're notifying folks that have had direct contact their five-day quarantine period has come and gone as well so it's more effective to seek out diagnostic testing of symptomatic students

168and staff any questions on that sarah so just a clarification so so this means if a for example a student in an elementary school classroom test positive the class would receive a notification correct okay and similar in high school if a high school student is in high school it's a little tricky so what we've decided is that we would go through the students schedule because as you can imagine some students might come from one class some might come for two some might have four so we're just going to send a blanket copy email where nobody can see the other recipient and just let them know that you shared a space with someone that did test positive okay thank you so much ms compton and so there's just a couple other items we wanted to mention

169in reference to our recommendations and one of those is when it comes to meal times and effective again march first was the administration recommendation there will be no pandemic or cova 19 restrictions will be in place for schools removal of all guidance on student meal times locations talking etc and lunch and meal procedures will be normalized to pre-pandemic procedures at that point in time okay so we need a vote on this yes because the last vote we had as a board we had restrictions and we placed a time limit for the indoor environment on schools i'll just say i'm not in support of this one with this particular time limit i would be i would vote to make these changes within 72 hours after orange county removes its mass mandates but putting a date on

170this we know how we are still in high community transmission and so the idea of um just everyone going back in the lunchrooms with their masks off at a point when the when the county has the mass mandate in place i'd be much more comfortable either tying this to a rate of community transmission or to the orange county mass mandate so yeah i just want to i'm sorry mr ebele if you already said this but i do believe that um i was told that that you all had conversation around this with dr benjamin earlier today that is correct and he he thought this was a a good go ahead dr phil no no you are spot on he was very supportive of this as was miss stewart director of the orange county health department so

171both the abc science collaborative and the orange county health department are in support of of this motion can you can you explain more about why because the you know the indoor outdoor transmission you know it has been a really big part of our strategy for a really long time yes so again uh ms smiley and i i totally understand where you're coming from uh but as shared in the the previous board meeting i mean this pandemic just continues to evolve and um where we were previously in terms of of the the guidance that we received um has changed and uh the medical professionals are um very supportive of us being able to move into a more normalized lunch period unmasked and kids being able to have lunch in ways that they've had it previously so

172i i can't say more than that i don't know if mr abele has anything else to to add uh but that was the recommendation uh that it is time that we can do this and um and and still keep again our priorities have not changed we start every meeting every discussion you know what our priorities are they are the experts and we trust them to guide us and that was the feedback that we received today so we'll still continue to recommend to schools great days like today the ability to eat outside eat outside extend those learning opportunities outside the building in in reality within the school setting especially elementary schools most meal times lunch times were approximately 30 minutes maybe a little bit longer at the high school level because they had built in some

173other team time or follow-up time with teachers so we're still talking about a limited point in time we're still following the orange county indoor mass mandate the masks are coming off while they're consuming or when they're eating which is allowed under the ordinance which is the other reason why we recommended march 1st so we we make sure we clearly articulate and explain and review the expectations for this but what we wouldn't say is you know has to be 20 at 20 minutes or 22 minutes or 28 minutes it's again letting folks know trying to normalize that experience we've already allowed them to talk with their mask off and eat and it's just re it's just giving them additional time but it's still contained to the meal time it's not any other time in the building

174at this point in time without a mask on yeah and i think to that point we're just at that part of the peak where we are coming down so even as we extended some of those times and talking our cases have actually dropped in the last week from the previous week any other discussion or concerns or questions no move the medical recommendation second okay motion from ms stevens and a second from mr atherton go ahead ms smiley no miss houser yes ms mckenzie yes the stevens yes i vote yes dr moore thank you and will vote yes too oh i'm sorry will that's okay yes and the last item uh we have was with the volunteers we had requests for additional volunteers and volunteers in the schools we know we were limited but again as

175we start to reset and think about expanding opportunities and needing desperately the additional adults within the buildings to provide such valuable services to our students our teachers and our schools wanting to increase the ability of individuals coming in we also know with everything we've talked about we're also looking at a point in time when an indoor mask mandate might be lifted and we want to continue to provide the protection of individuals coming in being covered free symptom free etc and so we are recommending that we do increase and continue to allow volunteers in the schools and we just ask that we follow the same recommendations that are in place as employees which is they're either vaccinated or they go get a coveted test or if they want to test you know they're volunteering they're coming

176every tuesday to read the kids and they want to participate in the mako testing that's happening right on the campus we'd be more than happy to allow them to register and do that but we do feel like we do need to set expectations for individuals who are in the buildings who are going to be having expanded additional time within the school day um and so our recommendation was to mirror um at this point in time for volunteers what we do for employees thank you and you'd like an action on that that's correct okay any discussion before ask for a motion on that move the approval of the recommendation uh i have a motion from ms stevens and i heard a couple voices there was that you mr atherton flip a coin go ahead okay uh

177bonnie are we voting i i just have a question i i'm just a little concerned about once again bifurcating our community will people be wearing masks will volunteers be expected to wear masks when they're in school so again all the requirements that we have in place the volunteers or visitors or individuals within the buildings are required to wear and have if we have a voluntarily optional masking policy then that would apply to individuals that are within the building that it would be an optional policy i think it's going to be difficult if we try to have staff members with one policy a district employee who comes into a building because they're not there every day with another basking requirement the person who delivers the cafeteria food with another policy volunteers that have apologies for us

178in implementation our masking policy should be universal on the campus it becomes a logistical just a nightmare to try to manage all of that at the school level um i'm concerned about parents that want to volunteer that are not vaccinated that's yeah that's what comes to my mind so they could test right they absolutely contest yep oh they oh okay are we voting yes yes bonnie yes hillary yes yes i vote yes will yes sarah yes jennifer thank you all right okay thank you so much for your work and crafting and adjusting these i know it's just been a constant trying to keep up with all the changes that are going on so thank you mr evelyn you're welcome we do it because we love children we love our community and we like the work

179we do oh thank you madam chair i have a question um in the same vein of this uh mainly a follow-up question that we didn't cover earlier and i think it's just important to say out loud you know although we talked about the mask changes and being tied to the county but there still are federal ones that we can't bypass as well can we just get a brief sure and i think that's helpful to clarify that these changes would be subject to any binding federal or state rules and currently there is a federal mandate for wearing masks in federally funded head start classrooms of both children and staff there is also the cdc has mandated that masks be worn on all uh transportation so masks will still be required on buses until that changes so

180one clarity on that so would is that just the yellow buses or would that be activity buses how uh you know if we don't know the answer okay i think the clarity will help because i immediately think about the sports or extracurricular going and i believe it's all buses but i would have to double check all school transportation yellow buses activity buses charter buses any other transportation that's school sponsored so even if they're using commercial transportation they'd be required if it's a school sponsored trip to wear a mask okay thank you very much i think that's very helpful but not like small buses that pick up groups of kids to go to a certain daycare or after school or something that's not related to this not if they're private but any like county city public

181transportation still has that rule as well okay great thank you i believe at this time we're going to um be joined by some guests uh dr cleveland should we move to extend the meeting first yes we can definitely i think with the new policy right it's scheduled to adjourn at 9 30 isn't it three hours yes but i don't remember exactly the status of that policy i know it's been through first read i don't has it gone through second read but yes let's let's let's be very clear go ahead there should i i'll i'll move to extend the meeting to 10 o'clock 10 o'clock okay motion for ms smiley a second from ms stevens i vote yes bonnie sure hillary yes brenda yes yes will yes yes sierra oh and jennifer okay 10 o'clock's the

182limit 10 o'clock but we have some we might have to extend it again and we go home and do it virtually so so equity as you all know is ensuring all students have what they need to succeed and thrive as outlined in policy 1030 equity in education and it is at the core the very heart of everything we do in the district so in the winter of 2021 the district commissioned an equity assessment with the millennium learning concept in order to examine the district's overall academic program policies and practices through the lens of equity so tonight we have dr roger cleveland dr greg ross and mr rodney jackson joining us virtually to share the methodology used to conduct the assessment as well as their findings and recommendations please note that phase two of the audit

183will focus on a comprehensive equity analysis of the financial and budgetary practices in the district so at this time uh welcome uh to uh dr cleveland dr ross and mr jackson trash thank you so much for joining us uh good evening everyone uh can you hear me okay yes we can okay thank you all for this opportunity just to share um the results of the uh the assessment i will take consideration uh that you all have been there a little over uh three and a half hours so i'll try to get through this and make sure we address your questions i'll let uh dr ross and uh mr jackson just introduce themselves real quickly my name is rodney jackson i'm the executive director of finance fair county public schools i'm the immediate past president of

184casville kentucky associate school business officials and i served on the executive board of kentucky associated school administrators and southern southeastern excuse me associated school business officials i've been working with dr cleveland now for over six years providing consultation related to financial equity and hello i'm greg ross i am a principal in fayette county public schools i also run ace educational services and i've been working with dr cleveland for about i guess about six months to a year you um am i driving or someone else is uh running to powerpoint someone else is uh driving the powerpoint you just say wanna change the slide and we'll do it okay uh you can go to the first slide thank you and i think you all know this uh uh how we define a equity uh assessment so

185you can go to the next slide and so the process process was we uh we did what's called a first we have a conversation a discovery conversation which we did that with uh the superintendent and the chief equity officer and other folks in central office about the process what would look like and we also had a conversation with uh you all as the board and so after that the first thing we did was to have a desk got it that's basically going through a lot of the district and school documents to kind of give us a snapshot of where you all are and that helps also kind of uh structure and capture the uh the questions interview questions and survey questions and so uh once we did that we visit you all school district uh

186for a couple of days and we visited the central office and we spent time in the schools doing interviews classroom observations things of that nature we interviewed staff at central office certified staff at the schools and students middle school and high school students and we also conducted a equity culture online survey and you can see below the uh the bottom part of the screen with how many people were interviewed how many people conducted the survey and how many were um at the central office and that nature collected that data so it was a uh a process around triangulation so we're pulling data from the desk at it pulling data from focus group interviews qualitative and then quantitative data through the surveys if you look at the the numbers below the um the only i thought

187we had a good number of students uh like to have probably more uh teachers we had teachers respond to the survey but overall we got a good uh a good snapshot and a good response overall for all the staff and folks interviewed and so that was kind of the process of collecting the data next slide please and so here are some of the strengths you all have that one of the things that we work with a lot of districts uh around the country and one of the things we really try to get districts to do is create what i call it equity infrastructure and you all have that you have a you know equity uh resolution you have equity policy your equity plan you have a cheap equity officer and an office and those are

188things that very few districts actually have uh in 2022 uh even probably in the state of north carolina there's probably only a handful of districts to have an equity plan equity policy equity resolution and a chief equity officer and those are usually your larger urban districts like near you all like raleigh and wake county and charlotte mecklenburg but even around the country there's not a lot of districts that have that so that's one of the biggest standouts and one of the highlights and commendations about orange county is that you all have that equity infrastructure yeah you see all the other commendations and these are the things that you already know but we usually want to at least highlight those things show that uh you have a lot of good things in place next slide please

189um we heard a lot of school-level staff we interviewed them that they really um honored and respected the leadership of their buildings we heard that quite a bit uh which is always a good thing you have an equity initiative which we kind of talked about also and leading to the lens of equity uh next slide please and so if you look um at the bottom of this you know we had three major recommendations i really want to spend most of my time on the the first recommendation and and because if we don't do the the commitment and systemic piece around equity it's gonna be really hard to do the other two uh and so uh i really wanted to talk about that next slide please and so systemic focus on equity and capacity so you

190all have an infrastructure right you have equity infrastructure we've got a plan we got a resolution we have a policy we have chief equity officer but during our visit there and reviewing documents and things like that we have the infrastructure there but it was hard to determine there really was a systemic or not especially at the school level so we have these things in place it's almost like you have a house built without a structure there uh the footer the foundation but all the wiring is not in the house in other words it's not systemic and that was one of the uh the biggest findings and recommendations that we're looking at is that uh all this is not systemic and we haven't built uh equity capacity at the district level and at the school level

191and a couple other things we want to share with that is that um you know the schools are just a microcosm of the district right and so it's critical that everything all this work that you all are doing which is really good work around equity needs to be embedded and interwoven throughout central office and when this embedded and interwoven through central office then it will get to the schools and so those are some of the things that we saw uh that was really important that how we make sure this is systemic and that we have uh capacity to make this happen one of the things that uh i i liken this with is that i work at a university and every year beginning of the school year our president comes on a convocation that says

192that everyone who works at this university it's their responsibility for recruitment and it's their responsibility for retention regardless where you work but we also still have an enrollment and retention office but he still says it's everyone's responsibility same thing with equity you can have a chief equity officer but it's everyone's responsibility to assure equity at the central office level at the school level i hope that makes sense and so even with the equity infrastructure you still need alignment with the strategic plan the structural framework all those things need to uh be connected or you'll have what we call islands of excellence next slide please and one of the finest organizational culture and and accountability that's the other piece is that even if you have an equity plan and i know i went through the equity

193plan uh a couple of times and it's a good look it's a good plan you know you all have um the equity framework which is really great but if you look at i'm looking at now if you look at equity framework it has collective responsibility educational experience equity embedded leadership and equity guided decision making in other words everything needs to be conducted and developed through the lens of equity how you make decisions about resources and things of that personnel um is really important so everybody's responsibility if not if it appears that it's just the the chief equity officer's responsibility to ensure equity or if it's just the superintendent's responsibility uh to address equity then it would not get into the school some schools would do it and some will not and that's kind of things

194that we heard some people are like really taking it serious and some people like uh maybe so the communication about um the level of commitment accountability is really important i'm gonna stop right here let greg china a little bit because you want to talk about the equity piece around the instructional framework well as we talk about the instructional framework you know i think a lot of it also creates the opportunity for professional growth especially through our your leadership lens uh being able to transfer that message that comes from um your equity leadership and distribute it uh through the mindset of um responsive uh culturally responsive teaching and learning uh looking at it from hiring practices looking at it from the aspect of uh cultural awareness in your instructional libraries and have that aspect consistent throughout

195the district i think that's a very important piece and also you know i think we have to be very careful to remember that equal and equitable are not the same thing and those assurances through from school to school you may have a school that instructionally or even from a personnel standpoint have more needs than another school then you have to look at it from that lens that that school needs a more magnified focused intentional drive towards a equitable efficiency uh in reference to a different school assuring that each per each school has the same thing is not assuring equity also i think from an instructional standpoint and this goes back to what dr cleveland was saying about the house and ensuring that everyone has access i think it's so important matter of fact it's imperative

196that the load is not dropped on one person you know it seems like um in a lot of the conversations that uh there was a uh lit as a as a school principal let me look let me share it this way i have a writing teacher in my building my writing teacher she pushes in the classrooms but the but the responsibility is that when that writing teacher pushes in the classroom teacher is right there beside that writing teacher modeling those practices uh doing a workshop model type of intentional focus with each student going by and ensuring that the work is done i think it has to be that same type of priority with this with this uh with this model you you all may have a you know a district person there but there has

197to be someone to assure that uh it's not falling on one person but it is a uh train the trainer aspect or even a shared ownership where that information is shared professional learning is taking place uh to assure that each teacher has access each instructional para has access each person providing interventions has access so i think when those things uh you know you make sure that every aspect of that vehicle is running well um uh you you have assurance that you'll reach your destination but if a tire is flat uh or if uh uh you know the car doesn't have oil it's not gonna get where it's going but when everything is running well everyone has the same information and uh receiving that professional development uh it'll it'll make sure that that vehicle gets to

198its destination thank you greg and the other piece behind that is that it has to be systemic so people will not think that equity uh is an add-on this is something else i have to do and thinking about every uh initiative uh resources spent that is through an equity lens for instance let's say that um you all have literacy specialists at all the elementary schools uh there may be an elementary school that may need two equity uh literacy specialists versus the other schools how do you all make that decision about resources or if you have the state pays a certain amount for all teachers if you decide to add three more teachers to the school how's that decision made for equitable resources where it's based on need of the schools and uh mr jackson has

199we submitted a uh equity uh finance and budget uh plan uh for you all to kind of look at some things that you all need to consider but i i do want to stop right here for a second because i think that the uh if you can go back one slide please i think this is the the greatest focus of you know there's a lot in the report i know you already report but i still think this is like the most uh important piece there is that we have a systemic focus and that everyone if we ask title one how do you all addressing equity in your office curriculum how are you addressing equity in your office special education how this is a central office each office should have a a uh a focus and

200a process how they're addressing equity and the chief equity officer should be a facilitator of all that work right and so a subject matter expert so they can provide assistance for all those offices but those different offices operationalize that work uh that equity work the chief equity officer is the one the person who supports that work that way when you go in the district they won't think it's the chief equity officer the only one that's talking about equity uh and so when we asked certified teachers about equity and things like that uh some are like yeah the district's on it and some are like well we don't know and so you all have the infrastructure there i mean like i said you're probably a one or two percenters uh around the country who has that

201equity infrastructure it just needs to be infused systemically where everybody understands that this is the work right this is the work it's not something else everything's done to the lens of equity and it has to start in central office and get into the schools i'm gonna stop right there um because i said a lot because y'all may have some questions about i know the finance and budget part was also a big piece and we did uh share that with you all just but just based in general that you know looking at the report uh did you all have questions comments but i i do think the the first recommendation is the most critical recommendation because we have to do that first make it systemic and build capacity uh before you do those other things uh

202thoughts comments questions dr cleveland i just would like to say thank you so much for um wait we can i can barely hear you for some reason doesn't sound like your mic's on can you hear me on this one yes listen okay i just want to say thank you so much for your work and i really appreciated the report and i from my own vantage point agree with the overall findings that we have a lot of the structure which is a really big deal and it took a lot of work and teamwork and advocacy to to get that structure in place and now we're really at that stage where it has to be infused throughout our district and i appreciated all the um the interview notes that you had from teachers and students i i

203just thought that was really helpful um so i just wanted to to start off some some discussion with that board members who have questions and comments will so i i'd like to say bless you so one of the things uh that really stood out to me in the report as you read through it especially as you went through and looked at the strengths and area how much communication came up that it just you know i know in the findings at a higher level that was brought up and then as you look through it's clear that there is some frustrations around our communication and how we do it so i really appreciated you know seeing the the difficult discussions on us reflecting on how we're doing that and is it effective and what people are hearing

204and how they feel included so i just wanted to say that from an observation of me going through this thanks will oh great that's working bonnie yeah thank you for this work i um first of all i don't know if i'm before i jump ahead um in the report and i'm hearing it a little bit here um i haven't heard your comments about the equity teams in our schools because that seems to be part of the support infrastructure but also and the thing that's throwing that throws me is words like culturally relevant pedagogy social emotional learning and consistent discipline these are things that you talked about in the report we've been talking about it since i've been on the board what does it take to really make that happen what does that look like what

205does it take to where's it's kind of a where's the beef how do we get the content to run through here well one i think we have to have a common language first of all they're all saying the same thing right and we also have to have common messaging it has to come from all the leadership from the central office saying the same thing and also it has to be i looked at the equity plan it talks about the level implementation but it doesn't talk about the impact right and so um that piece and the other piece is uh bonnie was you know i always say what's respect is what's inspected the accountability piece and so i don't think you should you should ask any teacher to do something new where they have not been

206trained provide the resources once they've been trained to provide resources there should be a level expectation that you implement this and then the support there but the if we've you know done that part to some degree then it has to be people have to be held accountable put it this way there's there's some things that you are doing uh there may not be time directly to teach you to learn it but it's the things that you all doing in the district you do extremely well and the reason why that is is because everybody's held accountable for it and it's part of the culture now that you know if you don't do this somebody either board member or superintendent somebody's gonna say why isn't this getting done the question becomes if sel and culture responsive teach

207and things like that if it's a one-off right you had the training and then nothing else happens well that's why it's not getting embedded systemically and then that's not why that's why it's not having impact on student achievement because once you have the training someone has to be in the classroom to see if it's been actually implemented and used for the students and then also be measured for implementation and impact all right it has because it has to be part of our dna and if it's not part of our school district dna then some some schools are gonna do it well and some are not because it's not systemic so it has to be the training has to be provided there has been follow-up ongoing and then it has to reach the classroom then somebody

208has to go in and see if that's actually been done and i get uh we know this for sure all the things you just mentioned are taking place in your schools this is not taking place consistently we have islands of excellence that's what that's what you're seeing right now eisendraches but it has to be an expectation and i would say the schools that are doing it and doing it well is because they're held accountable but they're also support at the same time uh greg you want that's a good question greg you want to talk about any more about that you're doing it right now and so if you want to share your thoughts uh thank you dr cleveland i i think you hit the nail on the head in reference to being held accountable but

209i also think you know people think that you are receiving professional development on social emotional learning or you receive a professional development on culture responsive teaching and learning at the beginning of the year and then checking in ensure that it happens and it's all good and that's not the case i mean it's a continual growth process it's not necessarily always a check-in sometimes it's a a chance for feedback and and a chance for them to kind of uh recalibrate and you know remove some of the [Music] biases that they may have you know came in with and recalibrate the thinking a little bit um i also think it's very powerful if you have a social emotional learning curriculum um i think that's a very powerful piece and i know that that is can get extremely

210expensive and you know elaborate but it's nice when dr cleveland was saying having that consistency throughout the district uh that really helps uh to have that you know because usually if you have a curriculum then it'll come with a scope and sequence it comes with professional learning it comes with all those pieces that you need to assure that those things happen wonderful and i know we are in the process of evaluating evaluating um sel curricula that's exactly right we are that's great at this time we have 10 minutes unless we um move to extend and is there is there more you want to talk about beyond i know this is kind of like the take home and i know that we have a phase two that's going to focus on finance so where are we

211in your presentation dr cleveland i want to make sure we leave enough time i i do uh uh rodney jackson uh mr jackson he did uh put a a few uh one or two recommendations in the presentation but we also uh submitted to you all i'm not sure if you all received it yet but a very thorough financial and budget uh plan through the lens of equity and and so i would like him to talk to you about that a little bit because i think it's important that when you all make decisions about resources at the school level it can be equal it has to be equitable and when it's when it's equal that's when you start seeing the different opportunity gaps but when it's equitable you'll see those gaps start closing and so ronnie

212you can just talk about uh some of your work um around uh the finance and equity piece uh real quickly and i think the board may have some questions for you also everything is interwoven together um related to expenses of the school district using most school districts salaries and fringe is about 85 90 of the um budget so it's equity related to that the hiring retention and so forth um the question always becomes does the budget drive instruction or does instruction drive the budget you don't want to be making decisions based on how much money you have you want to make a decision based on instruction that you're trying to achieve and if it's equitable that you have not just smart goals but smarter goals which includes the e being equitable and our resources to

213make the equity happen and then you can have data driven funding allocations um then you can do analysis related academic return on investment when you know where everything is at if you're hitting low-income students um different social economic racial and so forth and then the communication of how you communicate that out that everybody understands that the focus is from the district level down to the school level as you build the budget and have everybody involved with their classified staff certified staff central office leadership bus drivers custodians everybody's involved in the whole process so it becomes very transparent everybody understands why the money is being spent and why you again is equitably spent not just equally spent and i'm not sure did you all receive the uh it's pretty extensive the uh the plan that we

214sent you all on your financing budget i'm not sure if you received it or not yet yes sir the table yes yes sir yes questions and comments from board members in regards to the finance plan sarah i'm curious if there is um when you said there's a there's a part two is there another part that's coming after this or or was it part two of this presentation i just wasn't understanding so my understanding and correct me if i'm wrong uh dr cleveland is that the millennial learning concept will um conduct an audit around our finances and budget through an equity lens yeah we that's what he did that's why we submitted that part that was i think superintendent when we spoke earlier when i spoke to the leadership that wasn't totally completed yet uh you're

215on you and i we all met and i think maybe january it wasn't totally complete it was completed now and that's why we had submitted the plan so i think when uh you all met we wasn't totally finished but i i don't know who will have it completed or not today but it is completed that's what probably what we could do is have the board give the board time to look through um the finance and budget equity plan because that was uh all the information we had access to we went through that and created this plan and made recommend strong recommendations about the equity and budget piece i mean the finance and budget piece around equity so maybe they made to maybe take a deeper look at that and secretary you may not have a

216chance to look at it also in detail and maybe look at that and then uh if you all have questions we can uh address those at another time thank you for that clarity thank you so much sarah yeah just to follow up there i would appreciate the chance to go deeper on the equitable resource allocation piece in budget i know that spring is proposing next year's budget but i really want to get deeper into that and understand that a bit more if we're able to whenever we're able to fit it on the agenda okay i agree with that and will's nodding his head too yeah i like you said our next agenda is the budget but after we go through that we do have the opportunity to reset and start going through it so it

217would make it would make sense after the proposal are we proposing that we try and build some of the equity principles into this year's budget is that the goal or is it too late i mean this year's budget's coming thursday right to do the work i think we have to do the work to go through how we would approach this but the superintendent's budgets required for us to submit to the county we may be able to this is will just speaking off the cuff is i think we might be able to adjust if we once we go through the report and see things that we could do but i i don't think it's realistic in the short term that we would make huge changes in the short period of time that we have to submit

218this to the orange county commissioners that's just my thought dr felder you may have a different view i definitely would like to review the report i will say we have made some decisions through an equity lens with regards to resource distribution so but we have a lot more work to do so i think where we can we should not only with regard to the budget that will be proposed but as we continue to um allocate resources uh throughout this the rest of this school year and in the future yep and i also noticed in that finance piece the recommendation of who to have in the budget committee which might be something we want to look at in advance of next year we have a new equity task force convening and you know maybe it makes

219sense to have some other community members join participate with our budget committee at times so that is kind of look it seems like it's looking ahead at this point so thank you so much and it looks like we are going to want to follow up on budget and finance and as we are at the end of the time for our meeting i would like a motion to extend we do need to um i want to leave a few more minutes to wrapping up questions i don't want to kind of cut off our guests at all but i need a motion to extend the meeting because we also need a vote on the capital capital investment plan we do an additional 15 20 minutes do we have to do this can we do this virtually tomorrow

220we do can we just stay here well tomorrow we also have i can't do it tomorrow all right we the county commissioner meeting tomorrow too oh tomorrow night yes ma'am tomorrow crow well yeah that's tomorrow i have another meeting from three to five okay is 15 minutes enough to present capital improvement mr probably would 15 minutes be sufficient for the uh capital improvement plan okay okay i'm assuming we've all reviewed all the materials and everything so okay um so i motioned to uh extend the meeting by 15 minutes okay from sarah second from will bonnie hillary yes brenda yes i vote yes will yes sarah jennifer why does she care oh yeah okay all right so we're going to continue till 10 15 and i thank you so much for joining us tonight um dr

221cleveland um dr ross mr jackson closing comments dr felder before just thank you so much and looking forward to touching base again uh one other thing uh board chair and superintendent uh when it comes to uh common language and common messaging and capacity if the opportunity presents itself i will uh dr ralston i would love to come to uh provide a professional development of the board and the senior leadership at the district for no additional cost so we can take it off paper and actually do a professional development for you all if you see it sometime in the next couple months that you're all available we'll come to uh north carolina and do that training for you all wonderful i would love that thank you thank you so much all right we appreciate you all

222time and the work that you all do thank you thank you thank you good night mr abele and we also have the item that got moved from consent that's true easement okay matrix of the mindset that that can wait okay this is the one thing we have to get to i'm not sure that's on we can't hear you justin i'm back you're back so thank you i have nick mincy our director of facilities who was also our director of facilities and capital projects um helping us this evening we wanted to walk through our cip plan and just for the public it's a 10-year plan a funding plan starting with fiscal year 23 which starts july 1st for 10 years only one year of the plan is actually funded at a time by the board of

223county commissioners we do a 10-year plan a capital investment plan but just the one-year funding comes at a time so i'm going to focus on the funding for next year the pots of money we have for capital projects embedded within the materials is an update from the 2016 bond projects and information on the supplemental deferred supplemental deferred as mentioned in the cip so i'm going to mention it here in my limited time but the additional information about previous bond projects funded i'm not going to mention just for the sake of time so when we look at our capital projects for this upcoming year one thing we tried to note in your modules this time was the rationale and the reasoning is why and the differences between each of the different pots of money we have

224from capital for the county we have what's called pay as you go that's our local debt financed and the money that we receive from the county for capital projects are identified within the plan and this does have an escalation of two percent that's built in each year so you can see the line item the amount that we get this year most likely it will go up automatically by two percent next year there are some years there's adjustments made to it but we when we calculate and escalate our costs across the funding years we're escalating two percent you can see our additional pay go which we refer to as the lottery funds it comes directly from the state that is based on adm it passes through the county board of commissioners to the orange county schools

225and that funding is pretty consistent based on our adm then we have what's article 46 which is sales tax we have earmarked that in the district for our technology because technology is changing and technology is a consumable and it also depreciates very quickly we don't want to do leases and other types of capital items that are depreciating from debt services so we use most of our money we received or almost all of our money we received earmarked for technology and so our laptop leases that the board approved that's all the money that's where that comes from for any refreshes or infrastructure etc and then the last one is our supplemental deferred maintenance district received just over 12 million dollars three years ago this is the third year of that funding cycle and so we do

226reflect that in the plan so you can see next year we're going to receive approximately 7.3 million dollars for capital and then that's going to go down by 4.3 million dollars the next year because we will no longer have that supplemental deferred and so um we've identified some of the major projects within the cip budget these will start or have started upcoming for fiscal year 23. just a big note is some of these projects are multi-year and one of the major difficulties we've run into is trying to get projects completed over the summer months we know our buildings not all of them will be closing and we will continue to make these upgrades on our campuses including the use of mobile units as well and so we've identified major projects for each of the schools

227and that's in your materials and then the partnership academy discussion will defer that for a different night that's not part of our current cip plan i know you have additional attachments both the full cip plan of the projects and funding for 10 years we do ask your approval of that plan so that we can transmit to the county and so they're able to present and get their packets together for the board of county commissioners again the funding is set by the county we look at our facility plans our facility assessments life safety systems major building improvements life cycles of when items need to be completed or replaced we prioritize with hvac systems and building occupants for learning environments you know upgrades and furnishings and finishings roof structures building envelopes so there's a whole host of

228projects that have life cycles to them and that need repairs in our buildings and that's what we prioritize to get those projects completed nick's here if you have any questions i'll stop there you have the materials thank you so much uh will and then sarah i just wanted to first request that in our next agenda that partnership is the top of the list we have kicked this down the road since i've been on the board and we need to get those kids in an area where they have a safe place to play and outside and indoor i know that this is not a statement of you this is just a statement of me feeling like we we owe them the focus um the only other question i had was on on this plan um is

229there any where does the oc action grant fit into this is it included i mean i know we submitted that separately do we know what we got does anything come off to support that or it's just in addition it's both it's in addition it's not in the plan because it's funded and so what we put in the plan are items we're requesting funding for for future years with year one we do have 120 000 maybe a little bit more for solar we're still working on that project and getting that completed before we would um have additional projects that we would be requesting and completing okay thank you you're welcome i just had a quick clarity question i was um glad to see all the hvac upgrades that are going to be happening um and i

230saw on the slides central and hes hvac projects mentioned but then i didn't see it in the cip so is that coming from this year's dollars or bond funds so it's already been funded okay great thanks yeah the chiller replacements actually i'm not sure what side he's on right now but i think we just finished the chillers at hillsborough elementary school uh chillers are in place and they just need to be permanently plumbed and wired but they should be up and running in the next few weeks thank you mr mincy bonnie so so a similar note first of all there's a narrative and plan and the narrative said that talked about mobile units for effluent and grady brown but i didn't see it in the plans and also um i think there's more work coming

231for stand back and hes and maybe its next year but why wouldn't we show that the details or estimates are there but why wouldn't that be in this plan so one is um construction costs for those large major projects should include any temporary mobile units needed so when we bring back the bids and the estimates and the costs for those mechanical systems those will reflect which are bond funded those will reflect the cost of the temporary mobile units that was something that was not in the geothermal project at orange high school and it should have been in our opinion it just makes the project easier if we have all the cost incorporated so the mobile unit cost will be within those projects as we bring them forward so the mobile units are to do the

232hvac project they're not to add capacity it could be both once we have the mobile units and they are utilized on the campus beyond the capacity or the beyond the need for renovation and construction the board would always have the opportunity to use those for capacity which is a larger discussion than just the cip plan but certainly we're preparing for the future of the district should we need those in another capacity around considering the amount of growth that we're having coming from the west and then a.l stand back which isn't on the list and i think there's more work at hes is that coming next year not this year but next year and is that do we have the money for that so what we have committed to is the bond dollars will be extended

233to ensure the six schools that had mechanical hvac projects are completed the roof projects have already been completed and extensively amounted al standback that's primarily what they were getting was roofs and i know you can't see that but that was that was completed previously so it's not it's not reflected now because that work has been done but what we what we've tried to do is to make sure that we're addressing everything that was identified with the exception of the transportation facility within the bond funding and then using that supplemental deferred maintenance to 12.3 million to ensure all those mechanical projects are completed and any additional upgrades that go with that including mobile units electrical upgrades some of the issues we've ran into already with cost escalation due to the pandemic so is that all getting

234done this year or this year and next year it's multi-year so right now we do have effluent cheeks and ready to bid central will be rebid those two will be packaged together because we're still looking at a few months before als mechanical system is designed and ready to bid we don't want to hold up central and effluent any longer so we've authorized those two to move forward and then while we're completing al standback nick is working with dpi on new hope elementary school because we've already started replacements of units there and then we need to complete effluent cheeks finish up hillsborough and grady brown so those would be coming with the al standback projects at some point okay but those are i guess i'm just trying to understand what's covered and what's not here so

235non-funded projects is what we're asking would be asking the county to fund in our upcoming plan our projects that are not previously funded the things we just talked about with the bond or the previous supplemental deferred already funded so als hvac is funded it's funded but again at this point in time we don't have the final bids in and so we have reserves with the 12 million additional supplemental deferred to help us make sure those projects get completed okay so they're funded we just need to update one absolutely and and to the public and to you all of these projects when they're bid we bring back to the board you have to approve each of these projects and the cost before we move forward it would be nice for the public and especially our schools

236for them to see a timeline on when their projects are coming because they've waited a long time for them yes we have we have a 50-year need and the the schools and trying to accomplish this would be nice to give them a simple timeline we are at we are right at our 10 10 15 time are there any um final questions before we uh take a motion yes well i'm sorry go ahead i was just going to ask if we were going to talk about what got pulled off of the consent agenda yeah let me see what i was going to say but she said questions before motion yeah i think dr feather do you want to speak to the easements item should should we just motion to approve the cip first so i moved

237to approve the cip exactly motion from sierra second from brenda i vote yes will yes sarah yes bonnie hillary brenda yes jennifer great thank you so much thank you both all right dr felder so i could go quick uh you it's fine by me if okay if that's the pledge of the board yeah i don't need a presentation the only reason i pulled it was in our prior conversations with the town we had requested the potential of compensation in the forms of in-town rates versus out-of-town rates or the sewer easement them taking over it at cameron park or i just didn't want to just approve this without including that as part of the conversation going forward so if if i can clarify are you just asking for permission to allow them to do the survey

238at this point that's correct we just need to do the survey so we can put it so i do think that wasn't so clear but i think that needs to happen before a price can be negotiated essentially okay that's that's that's good the only thing that really got me nervous of we're going further is uh it said request the land survey to do the disposition of the school pump station so it it felt like we were going past that but if that's just the survey i'm fine with that we can include it in the motion and that way it'll be clear that the there could be a motion to authorize staff to proceed with this survey and other background um work that would be necessary to negotiate a sale so moved second motion from will

239in a second from sarah bonnie yep hillary yes brenda yes i vote yes will yes sarah jennifer it's 10 15. i'm i'm wondering if the um the summer scholars presentation is going to be communicated in another way is that what i'm thinking dr felder yes we can communicate by way of well we did provide an update in the board weekly update you do have access to the abstract uh we continue to refine the plans there's a large team 39 who are working on this but uh in the meantime if you have any other questions feel free to uh reach out we're happy to address your questions but we do have dates and time frames etc yeah i think i think we really we want to make sure dates get out to families as soon as

240is there a way that that might happen this week or dr dawson can you speak to that okay quickly click a quick quiz as she's coming up i'll just say that summer school summer scholars is a topic on student achievement meeting on wednesday in case anyone has any questions wants to talk about it okay yes okay wonderful great yes and after that if we um could we would like to post the dates and the times after that meeting where we'll have a little bit more opportunity to discuss so ms doyle if you're okay with it being posted um by thursday morning yeah i'm at the latest so that would be i think that sounds great and it was just gonna be an information item tonight as well so thank you dr dawson thank you yeah

241the only concern i had was besides the date was families knowing if they were selected because it's invitation only and people are planning what they're doing for the summer and how they're handling it and i know it's invitation only but that's what i was concerned with is how do we connect the parent yes you're going to be part of this so the planning goes as anyway that was my concern i'll just leave it there yep and we'll provide more and we'll discuss further um in the student achievement committee meeting okay does that sound good to you too sierra lead that meeting okay great excellent thank you i will take a motion move to adjourn okay we have a motion from vice chair stevens a second from ms mckenzie miss houser dr moore yeah she's going

242to bed he's smiling yes mr appleton yes i vote yes mrs evans mackenzie we are adjourned everyone have a safe drive home thank you everyone for a smooth meeting