BOE Meeeting 1/24/2022

001hey bonnie hey everybody let's see if it's me i have to get really used to being like virtual i was all created super ad all right let's do that okay [Music] have we switched to zoom is that what i'm saying yeah correct uh i think mr abella recommended zoom good [Music] um up i believe i see all of our board members here tonight and i also see a number of our guests thank you everyone from the hill group and others joining us tonight we'll get started in just a minute okay dr felder are we ready you ready for me to begin tonight yes cheer doy okay great thank you sure all right good evening everybody tonight is monday january 24th 2022 and i'm calling this meeting to order the orange county schools board of education

002pledges to our families students staff in 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 a moment of silence will be observed before we begin our business public comment will be held after the board adopts tonight's agenda the word um we won't have any uh electronic disruptions tonight as we're virtual so i can skip that part and because we're not meeting in person we're omitting the pledge of allegiance this is our moment of silence as we begin our work this evening i would like to recognize that orange county schools

003was established on land previously settled by the ancestors of the okanichi ban of the suponi nation this board has made a commitment to honor and respect the heritage of indigenous and all members of our ocs community to work to undo decades of racial harm and to build the best of our ability of a community that fosters a sense of belonging for all of our students so that they may thrive and succeed please join me for a moment of silence thank you dr felder i turn things to you for our recognitions this evening okay well good evening everyone um one second here we go okay well thank you and good evening uh chair doyle vice chair stevens the entire board student staff and families this evening we have two very special recognitions first tonight we want

004to honor mr david gaddy math teacher at orange high school as this month's equity warrior i want to also point out that mr gaddy is featured in the district's recently released what does equity mean in orange county schools video before i turn the mic over to mr gaddy to say a few words as he's joining us tonight i'd like to take this opportunity to share portions of statements submitted by one of his colleagues and two of his students the full statements will be linked into tomorrow's edition of board matters so mr brian patton who teaches who co-teaches with mr gaddy had this to say about him mr gaddy is a great instructor that uh that makes it his business to ensure all students feel welcomed and comfortable in his learning environment he often tells students

005their background does not define them and pushes them to be the best they can be he is an all-round advocate for students no matter their race gender or sexual orientation emily mettler one of mr gaddy's students said this about him mr gaddy has shown kindness and compassion like no other teacher i've had before from the very first day of school he went the extra mile to ensure that everyone's voice was heard he allows his students to share their stories with him and he works to satisfy their learning needs he would even practice spanish to better understand and communicate with his minority students there's a certain one feeling that you get every day when you walk into the class and see mr gaddy's t-shirts each one with a message of acceptance and safety printed on them

006he is the one teacher i've ever had that make sure everyone feels comfortable in his class to that extent lastly when reflecting on mr gaddy student stephanie montano said the very first day i stepped into his classroom i was instantly hit with a sense of belonging and welcome mr gaddy made it clear to every student that anyone of any background race gender identity sexual orientation and beyond is more than welcome in his classroom as a student who identifies as mexican-american it is easy to feel unseen at times however mr gaddy always made the effort to make me feel make me and my fellow latinx students feel understood and welcome i never felt as comfortable speaking my first language and about my background as i have in his classroom all he ever strives for his students

007to have is for them to have the same learning opportunities as any other student and for them to leave his classroom as better people please join me in congratulating and appointing mr gaddy on this well deserved award mr gaddy i understand you're with us so i turned the mic and camera over to you um um it's it's one of those things where you're like tapping your leg uh to keep your emotions in check um i just want to thank everyone for the recognition um especially my students and uh my my road dog patton uh for for saying those kind words um in a span of time uh that seems ever changing um it's a motivation and encouragement to be recognized for something that many of us in the school system especially at orange high school

008are fighting for my dad when i'm teaching in the classroom my dad is always looking at me when i sit in the space and he always told me to do the thing that just makes common sense and fighting for equity is the common sense thing to do equity for learning in the classroom finding every tool and resource to make even one student successful fighting for equity for the learning at home because as we have seen that just like learning styles learning environments beyond the school are different for every student equity for uh every student that walks in a hallway because every student deserves to feel safe and loved no matter their race gender ethnicity or orientation and i think we are finally peeling back another layer i was talking to somebody recently of inequity in

009our world and that being one of mental health helping students to advocate for how they are feeling when they need a break creating spaces to escape to at school and designating trusted adults to run to when necessary because especially for mental health we all need to be seen to be heard to be loved and to have a place where we feel safe enough to exist my friend rick uh would tell you that some days this profession that we call teaching is it feels like trench warfare um things are constantly changing for us as teachers and we always have to be ready to pivot and that is true as we exist alongside a student they either resist or they push back or or they choose to embrace and we always have to be ready for whatever

010reaction might be coming and so however for this equity for this fight for equity uh it's a fight on so many fronts and the fight is worth it i mean it's a journey not a destination it's a it's a table that we're invited to and that we can eat from not a table reserved for just teachers and students but for parents and community stakeholders the thing is i'm not perfect at this i still work through my own ways of seeing and doing and looking at the world but i dare to do this work of constantly asking how i can do better that's one of the shirts that i wear is always ask how you can do better because when i do better my students benefit and that's the thing that matters the most and so

011again thank you for this recognition because it reminds me that i still have work to do tomorrow appreciate it so much well thank you mr gaddy we appreciate you so much and all that you do to ensure all students have what they need to succeed you are the epitome of an equity or warrior in orange county schools keep up the great work as shared at the january 10th board meeting the month of january is designated as school board recognition month initiated by the national school boys association in 1995 2022 marks the 27th anniversary of school board recognition month so tonight we want to express our sincere gratitude to the orange county school board of education again by sharing a two-minute video from our students the very people we are all here to serve good evening

012mayor please have everyone to mute thank you thank you [Music] thank you thank you [Music] thank you for my support thank you for your service thank you for helping our community thank you for being considered the teachers thank you for keeping us safe from the virus thank you for trying to find my bounds thanks for tackling the big problems [Music] let's listen to it that was cool i thought that was pretty good dr felder you're muted thank you so what a great tribute to our board again thank you all i would also like to send a special thank you to the music teacher mr patrick mitchell from river park elementary school and to the very very talented student musicians from river park elementary school for this concludes tonight's recognitions thank you dr felder and mr

013gaddy your passion in creating a sense of belonging in your classroom is really a powerful example for all of us and mr mitchell thank you and thanks all your students for us for their delightfully encouraging video um at this time we are ready for our agenda adoption do i have a motion to adopt tonight's agenda so moved okay second i have a motion from ms smiley in a second from this mackenzie uh mr atherton yes thanks i vote yes miss hauser yes and miss mckenzie yes and dr moore yes we are and ms smiley yes and miss stevens yes okay great thank you now is the time for public comments after each speaker has been recognized and unmuted they will have three minutes to speak the board will not have a discussion with any speaker

014no 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 comments should not address any specific confidential student or personnel matter complaints concerning any specific employee or student are not permissible during public comments and speakers must conclude their remarks at the end of their three minutes and i believe we have four speakers tonight um and our first one is miss catherine clewer i don't see her on the attendee list sorry okay she also let me see if she responded she had also emailed um uh and i sent the zoom link to her and do you see her phone number by any chance no phone number okay like there's no participants just dialed in no okay well let's continue um

015with miss uh schmidt and if miss uh cluer joins she can go at the end do you see miss gretchen schmidt she's done okay welcome ishmid your few minutes to begin now okay good evening um the board's mass mandates are being unlawfully imposed uh by this board of education they clearly deprive the students teachers staff and visitors of their natural and god-given right to breathe freely their privilege to live normal lives while in and on ocs property it also deprives and degrades the natural immune system that automatically protects all humans from diseases all because of the mandated medical device mass that does harm to their human bodily functions most egregiously you're doing this to every single individual child under care in the schools there is no law that gives you the authority to inflict this

016heinous demand on anyone you have made it up on your own under the color of law you never had the legal authority or the responsibility to take this action it applies to the entire board all of you as you have all set this policy i'm no lawyer but you appear to be committing and remain in the process of continuing to commit this federal crime title 18 usc section 242 deprivation of rights under the color of law whoever under the color of any law statute ordinance regulation or custom willfully subjects any person any state territory or commonwealth possession or district to the deprivation of any rights privileges or immunities secured or protected by the constitution or laws of the united states shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year or both

017and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use attempted use or threatened use of a dangerous weapon explosives or fires shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years or both and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to kill shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or life or both or may be sentenced to death i demand that you immediately reverse this course by striking any and all medical mandates including not limited to wearing a mask under any circumstances while on ocs property

018this also applies to attendance at your board meetings this comment and letter constitutes knowledge of the jeopardy that all of you are facing you can no longer claim ignorance of the situation that has been created the choice is yours we all know and even from the last board meeting that these practices are in question as to their effectiveness so you're airing on the side of let's let's hurt the children because we already know there's dental impacts there's now proven speech impediments to the children and the list goes on so we're asking you to err on the side since there's no conclusive evidence that these practices actually stop the passing of a cold we also know from the last meeting that the children are in no greater risk to this cold than they are to driving

019to school each and every day so we're asking um for some sense to come into the situation and let's actually do it's healthier for the children thank you mr schmidt next we have miss francis ann cripfield i'm here can you hear me yes welcome your three minutes begin now making the books genderqueer lawn boy and out of darkness available to minors under the age of 16 directly or indirectly is a violation of nc general statutes 14 190.7 and 14 190.15 as analyzed using the defined terms specifically without limitation obscenity as defined in the context of minors is set forth in section 14 191 obscene literature and exhibition section subsection d sexual conduct as defined in subsection c and the terms defined in 141913 definitions for certain offenses concerning minors you will recall that genderqueer features

020a drawing of a child fantasizing about giving oral sex to the child's bearded teacher i have confirmed that cedar ridge followed board policy 3210 when reviewing the books and did not review the books against the applicable state statutes board policy 3210 does not require or even suggest analysis of the books in light of the law set forth in nc14190 at all in addition the review committee interpreted board policy 3210 to require that no written record was to be made of the review process the development of ideas opinions or experiences of sexual conduct of minors and ocs's care are not for ocs or its employees in any way a legitimate example of ocs and its employees carrying out its legitimate function or an employee or agent of such organization acting in that capacity and carrying out

021the legitimate duty of his employment which would be required for a defense to the violation of 141915 this defense was intended by the legislature to cover sex education class content not the development of ideas opinions or experiences of sexual conduct of minors note that there is no defense available for 1419.7 under which the book genderqueer squarely falls even if we apply the rule established in the united states versus one book called ulysses where the case law and the subject matter originates the literary merit argument fails judge hand declared that art for art's sake is not obscene but the use of obscenity in the explicit books and controversy is meant by the authors of all three books own words and interviews as well as the supporters of the books in the media and on information and

022belief even employees of ocs the purpose is to influence the sexual development of minors therefore the erotic passages in the challenge book while submerged in the explicit books do in fact have a material and intentional resultant effect to expose minors even those under the age of 16 to sexual content reasonably determined to be obscene to a minor i am the parent of a queer child and as the former member of the board of directors of the largest lbgtq plus youth organization in the country for almost a decade i see these books furthering the stereotype that queer kids are somehow more sexually mature and not cape and not capable of being victims of sex crime in the same way as straight kids these books are likely to exacerbate the data that shows that queer kids are

023more often the victims of sexual crimes my role at youth pride i saw the devastating effects on queer youth the perpetuating this vicious stereotype found in the explicit causes up to and including death there are many excellent affirming strengthening and centering books available for queer youth that do not undermine their journey the way the books about queer kids the focus on obscenity and sexual content as heavily as the authors of these books have stated that they intended to do do i've included in my written comments suggestions for the board to improve their policies and um to deal with these books thank you mr field our uh fourth speaker is miss knight i do not see her listed in the attendee okay um and miss catherine clewer c-l-o-e-r is she in attendance [Music] i do not

024see her either okay excuse me there's a crystal that may be her let me do you want me to unmute crystal chloro sure hello is this is this crystal core yes and i apologize i was having trouble getting connected to the um zoom link so i'm sorry if it's already time for public comment and you've been waiting for me no no they just had catherine signed up though that your daughter or is she here [Music] same person oh okay go ahead miss cluer your time starts now a sincere thank you to each of you for the time you have committed to devoting to the academic achievement of the children in our schools academic learning is the primary purpose of the public school system and should therefore be the focus of our combined efforts as a

025school board and a community as one of your constituents i would like to request updated information regarding the school report card published by the state each year in order to better ascertain how we are doing and meeting our primary purpose i've not seen that data in the past year we would just like to know how to access it also i wish to clearly state that the use of pornography in our system for the supposed purposes of academic instruction is never ever acceptable allowing such potentially harms the students whose well-being you have been chosen to guard and protect the bloomberg school of health in a study entitled predicting the emergence of sexual violence and adolescence states that porn is turning children and sex offenders 70 percent of high school boys who were frequent viewers reported that

026such made them want to try out what they had seen the average age of the first perpetration of sexual violence by offenders is 15 to 16 years old and is associated with exposure to porn porn results in a lifetime of porn addiction dangerous sexual behavior and harmful brain rewiring especially when viewed by adolescents and teens specifically porn causes the erosion of willpower and shrinkage in the part of the brain involved with decision-making motivation and academic performance for youth this could profoundly alter the trajectory of his or her life why in the world would we risk such exposure potentially beginning in the school library or in the classroom other measured implications of porn use include self-isolation from family and fears as well as increased levels of anxiety depression and suicidal ideation each of these particular implications

027are already problems with the use of today again why in the world would our school system do anything at all to make these huge problems even more likely studies reveal a connection between foreign consumption and harmful sexual behavior including an increased likelihood of committing sexual harassment and rape i ask again why would our school leadership do anything at all to make sexual harassment and rape more likely our school board would never approve of simply making available cigarettes or bottles of vodka in baskets on the library shelves for our children to grab if they wanted to why because we all know that smoking and alcohol consumption are harmful addictive behaviors no one takes their first sip of alcohol ever planning to become an alcoholic pornography addiction works exactly the same way why would we increase the

028risk of the futures of our children being devastated by the result of pornography exposure the library can't be a mindful for children who attend public school yet by highlighting books like genderqueer which even the public library has the good steps to categorizing the adult graphic novel section of the building our libraries have become potentially hazardous a student could be seeking a resource on a number of valid school subjects and through no intent on their own of their own stumble upon this form they're displaying a reckless disregard for the well-being of school children not only in their present stage of life but also in their futures and we shouldn't desire to shape a teen sexual template by deviant fantasies schools should be places where children can thrive and be free from the life-altering consequences resulting from

029poor exposure during the most formative years of life your constituents are calling on you or calling you into account and ask you to please wisely respond by acting immediately to withdraw such dangers from all of our school media centers thanks so much for considering this really important issue thank you miss cloor um mr shofield um is miss snipes um or mr jones is this snipe still not here i do not see her on the left okay thank you so much so that concludes our public comment okay it is time for our um consent agenda we have four items um on consent tonight we have minutes from the january 10th open session on the january 10 personnel report sports plex access for staff and the request to convert a temporary certified nursing assistant position to a

030permanent position for continued support to schools and school nurses are there any items that board members would like to move to the irregular agenda for further discussion and if not can i have a motion to adopt tonight's uh consent agenda so movement okay my motion from ms stevens and a second from miss mckenzie i believe dr moore yes okay miss smiley yes stevens yes mr etherton yes i vote yes miss hauser yes i miss mackenzie yeah great thanks everybody okay um we have our first discussion action item and dr felder am i gonna pass it to you or am i passing it to miss flufco here doyle you are passing it to miss sandra blefko who is the coordinator of family engagement thank you so much thank you for being here tonight miss blefco thank

031you thank you for having me good evening ms doyle members of the board superintendent superintendent dr felder the resolution to protect english language learner students has ensured that our schools have more equitable access to language for our students and families an important of our district and schools communication efforts is providing interpretation and translation services to our families spanish is just one of several languages a native to our students families and community we continue working hard in order to close the gap in communication with our families and this is a shared responsibility among all orange county school staff thank you so much miss bluffko for all that you do for our families ms smiley would you like to um share the resolution with us tonight um yes thank you um and um thank you miss bluffko

032for that introduction um and just everything that you and your team of family liaisons are doing to increase language access and to strengthen partnerships with our english language learner families um and before i read the resolution i also just wanted to quickly thank everyone who partnered on this so um first i want to thank the staff at the community organization isla for reaching out to propose this resolution isla works with a number of ocs families and natalia riva dinera from isla is listening in tonight and i'd like to thank her for her advocacy and her leadership in developing the language of the resolution i'd like to thank dr felder and her team for contributing with different lenses of community uh communications and family engagement curriculum and instruction and equity and especially to our esl facilitator

033miss emily lewis um and the last thing is just at the same time that we were working on this resolution i also happened to attend the student belonging forums where board members could hear straight from students what was helping them feel a sense of belonging at school and what was harming that and there happened to be some students who are english language learners who brought up stories about times that an adult at school had made them as english language learners feel like they didn't belong and unsurprisingly that had also hurt their ability to learn and succeed so hearing from our students really brought this home and i'm just very grateful to those students for their stories and wanted to thank them um and also just um think this is great timing with um the honoring

034of david gadley tonight because um just hearing so many connections there to to his work so just want to thank him and the other teachers working for our students as well um so with that um the resolution to protect english language learner students whereas receiving a sound basic education is a constitutional right and failing to provide it is unconstitutional and has more significant negative impacts for students of color students from economically disadvantaged families students with disabilities and english language learners ell whereas english language learners are among the least likely to be on grade level academically of any subgroup in north carolina according to state testing are the least likely to be on grade level in orange county schools and can be excluded from participating in standard space tests when proper accommodations are not provided whereas

035orange county schools currently has 827 english language learners who speak 34 languages enrolled in orange county schools whereas english language learners can experience high levels of discrimination in school based on race language accent and current country of origin and are more likely to experience mental health struggles whereas english language learners and their families still hesitate to speak their mother tongue in public settings due to how they have been historically discriminated against whereas the sport has recognized the importance of taking intentional steps to ensure access to a sound basic education and is actively working towards meeting the goals set forth in the district's strategic plan whereas the orange county school strategic plan has recognized equity as a central focus of its goals among which are to decrease achievement gaps and increase achievement of all students to

036increase diversity of district staff and to provide an inclusive environment where all students have a sense of belonging whereas this board in board policy 1030 describes its aim to eliminate racial discrimination inequities of opportunity and academic disparities in the district whilst promoting schools as centers for culturally diverse learning where all students are educated to their fullest potential whereas this board is in agreement with and passed a resolution to fully support the approval and implementation of the leandro plan and recognizes that adequate education cannot be provided in an environment that does not reject all forms of discrimination whereas the orange county schools board of education stands ready to address the struggles of english language learners as one of the groups with the greatest needs and challenges to meet their full potential therefore be it resolved that

037this board celebrates the strengths and assets that english language learners families bring to our diverse school communities and supports school efforts to build strong partnerships with the families of english language learners as a core part of our child-centered approach to education be it further resolved that orange county schools will identify strategies that are most effective for serving english language learners and will then incorporate them into the instructional framework for all content areas to include such components as effective instruction and academic social and post-secondary support family and community engagement and professional development be it further resolve that orange county schools will regularly monitor and report on the effectiveness of the strategies being implemented for each component of effective instruction and academic social emotional and post-secondary support family and community engagement and professional development and engage in

038continual improvement be it further resolve that this board will continue to respect support and promote inclusive environments for english language learners within orange county schools facilities and spaces and will continue to work tirelessly to eliminate any form of injustice in our schools including against english language learners it further resolves that this board welcomes open conversations activities cultural events and all expressions of unity that help to address the needs of ell students adopted by the orange county board of education thank you so much sierra and um ms blefco and miss emily lewis and other staff members who worked to um craft this um resolution particularly our community partners and people from from isla would any board member like to comment or have a discussion about this resolution there's generally a support so i will take a

039motion to approve so moved second motion from ms smiley and the second from miss mckenzie uh mr atherton yes i vote yes miss houser yes miss mckenzie yes dr moore yes ms smiley yes miss stevens yes definitely yes thank you so much this has been approved and it reminds me i was thinking of mr gaddy's words that fighting for equity is the common sense thing to do so we all can keep doing better as we try to do that it's good to hear tonight okay now we are ready dr felder to turn it back to you and our um our two information items for this evening thank you chad doyle and as we transition i want to say thank you to the board for uh your support in promoting the rights needs and contributions of

040and for your commitment to our english language learners by way of this resolution okay uh so tonight i'm going to turn things over to ronda rath chief finance officer for the district who will kick off this segment of tonight's board meeting regarding the findings from the classified salary study conducted by the hill group members of which are joining us tonight before i do i just want to say that the sole purpose for the hill group's presentation tonight is to hear about their process and findings regarding the classified salary study uh before turning things over to the hill group uh miss cizrath will outline next steps and actions that will follow the hill group's presentation so at this time i turned things over to mrs wrap good evening everyone thank you for the opportunity to be

041before you this evening to uh talk about this and to have hill group share their findings before we turn it over to them as dr felder stated i would like to take a minute to walk you through and the public through the timeline in regards to what we're envisioning for the next steps associated with this process tonight hill consultants will provide you with the report and the findings and talk with you about their process and how they looked at us against other public school units as well as our competitive market the next step will be that we are having a work group scheduled with the board to spend some time digging in with you surrounding our salary scales and how they align with the state and the supplement and have in-depth discussions to provide clarity

042on february the 7th we will be bringing back before the board our recommendations of responding to the findings that you will hear this evening and we will also be providing the costs associated with that the next step will be then to address again at the budget committee as part of our budget for the next coming school year we will take a deeper dive as we need to into these recommendations and into each of the salary components and how they will be impacting our budget that we will be presenting to the commissioners next slide please from there we will move into the first meeting in march on march the 7th where we will be bringing the superintendent's recommended budget for the 2022-23 school year to the board addressing salary compression will be a major component of

043this budget from there on march the 22nd there will be a pub budget public hearing where the board will discuss the recommended budget and the public will have an opportunity to make comments at that time the board will also be providing staff any direction to incorporate in what will become their 2223 local operating budget on april the 11th the board will adopt its local operating budget that will be submitted to the county commissioners next slide please we also wanted to take a moment to go into a little bit more depth about why this process and this timeline is set out the way it is funding to implement these salary adjustments associated with this study are going to be needed from county commissioners fund balance is used for one-time expenditures and cannot be utilized for recurring

044budget needs like salaries as it cannot sustain them ongoing for multiple years without commissioner approval any salary adjustments would be considered unfunding and require budget reductions in other areas so therefore that is why it is why we incorporate this as part of our budget discussions of what we will be asking our commissioners to fund us for the next school year um so with that unless there's any burning questions i'm going to turn it over to um hill consultants let them share with you their presentation and their findings and then if we could hold questions until they are finished i believe that would be fantastic okay can you rhonda thank you so much for the introduction yes go right ahead you're loud and clear very good very good madam chair members of the board we thank

045you for allowing us to present to you this evening this will be a joint presentation between ricky lopes kathy eisenhower myself all our partners in our firm basically we are all career educators we're cpas and we're on the finance hr side as far as our presentation tonight we have worked in over 80 of the 115 school districts across north carolina doing various and sundry operational type studies finance hr primarily we've done a yellow bus study there in orange county schools we've done risk management studies we've done several different studies in so many districts across the state and one of the main things we've been working on the last several years are salary studies just last week we were in the southeast recent jacksonville north carolina presenting our salary study the 13 districts in arisa uh

046basically the comprising of 13 districts and so forth and the there's been a lot of interest in salary studies over the last few years i'm actually basically covering the first two or three slides of our uh powerpoint presentation now but anyway 13 districts we presented to and part of our methodology in doing our studies is to do interviews of staff we feel it's one of the most important parts of our presentation and methodology and doing that because when we hear from classified staff members we hear many points about the compression that has taken place since 2008 uh in salary schedules and and so forth across the state a lot a lot of your employees were very open and honest in making their presentations to us sharing information we asked questions in a non-threatening environment to

047them to give us information but basically a lot of the classified staff in your district have been overlooked for many years since 2008 primarily the great recession uh steps and have been frozen very little raises have taken place the compression has caused employees that are newly hired to be on high higher salary ranges than those existing employees that you have and that can cause a lot of morale morale issues the other thing is part of our methodology and our study we compare you with private industry uh and try to compare you know the job settings for for the arena that you're in orange county as everyone well knows with chapel hill being included there is a high growth area an area where demand for employees is is greater than the supply of employees that are

048available primarily in the trade areas uh when we start talking about the maintenance area electricians hvac plumbing those that require license are in very high demand across your county as well as in your region the in the area of bus drivers all across the state there's been bus driver shortages due to cdl license and so forth those kind of things that we're going to talk about when we jump into the study itself so at this point i'm going to call on mr lopes to start our presentation based on where we stand and then ms eisenhower and i will be kind of chirping in from time to time to give you our thoughts on on our presentation thank you hank good evening chairperson doyle board members superintendent felder and others that are listening on to the

049presentation and if we could go to slide four we'll start with that one and hank's talked about some of these things but one thing i want you to remember as we go through the presentation whoops i'm sorry i might know i'm maybe off by one there we go i'm sorry um what we have to remember that for the past 13 years your classified employees have received virtually no significant raises they had small one-time uh bonuses and they've had one percent a couple times and they had two and a half this year which was the biggest raise they've had in 13 years so as we go along just remember we're talking about trying to make up for 13 years of of no raises in this time of rise in inflation and of course the economy is

050booming um if we go down to the very last bullet one thing that's not unique to to orange but one thing that that you have to be aware of is how competitive your market is and you live in a high um living area as far as what it takes to live there and to be competitive with wages because the people around you pay high wages whether it be other school systems whether it be other municipalities the private industry so as we go through this presentation uh please just bear that in mind if we go to the next slide please this kind of bears it out it shows you what the average wages are in the different metropolitan areas that are represented here and so you can see that northland as a whole is lower but

051orange county and the surrounding areas have high wages and so that's something that you're competing against to be able to get quality employees for your district next please this is the state salary schedule and i just want to want you to see this for a couple of reasons one your beginning salary is already significantly higher than the first 60 first 13 steps or grades that go up to number 62. you're already paying a 15 an hour living wage the state has not reached that point yet and so one of the issues with the state's salary schedule is that inherently the way it's built it's not going to do anything for your employees and so it has it has the same minimum wage for the first eight or nine steps the same minimum okay so that's

052why a separate scale is needed for the districts uh for those that want to do more than what the state is providing the other thing that you have to remember with these state salary scales is they they provide a minimum and a maximum but they don't provide any type of step within those minimums and maximums and without getting into a whole lot of detail the state has not provided the money for you to give steps within those raise those raises i mean ranges so basically what's happened is the state has pushed the issue of the compression down to the local units the state has not provided the money for you to be able to give the steps that are needed for your classified employees and that's why unfortunately we're in the situation that we're in

053right now basically asking or showing you how you'll need to request additional monies to pay for these steps that have not been provided over the last 13 years next please that's just a continuation of the other slide if you want to go to the next one please these are the folks the positions of the folks that we interviewed and like hank said you know that we can look at job descriptions but i don't think we've done a salary study yet we've talked about 45 or 50 districts with salary studies where we didn't learn from talking to the employees versus reading the job description a lot of times the job descriptions are outdated if one's there at all find out that employees are doing multiple jobs somebody has left the system and they've been asked to

054absorb some of the other duties that we're not there to start with but these are the folks that we talked to in just a sample group of the uh all the employees that are represented in your district next please what were our findings um we would recommend or find that you need a salary schedule with 30 steps to reflect years of experience and right now you're your salary schedules have 42 i believe it's 42 steps either 41 or 42 steps so very rarely are you going to have an employee that works 42 years 30 years is the magic year for retirement purposes and so generally we like to see the salary schedule go up to 30 years i think you have 20 you see the 23 or 26 employees that have more than 30 years

055of experience um and so as you can see uh going above 30 would not serve a purpose because you have such a small number of people that are above the above the 30. if you are able to to fund a salary scale that we're recommending that would correct the situation that your veteran employees have been in for the last 13 years those that moved up to 15 an hour when you incorporated your living wage they received an immediate increase that person that was making 1501 an hour or 15 you know just barely over 15 did not see the results of that and so these veteran employees that have been with you for a while have not seen a significant increase once again in 13 years another finding historically principals that wanted to make a creative

056education a lot of them want to move up through central services onto the superintendency so to do that they have to get experience in central services well for them to come to central services requires a at least a an equal salary if not a small increase to come to central services so what we'd like to see is a scale that ties the principal salaries into central services so that a principal can see if that particular position is worth their uh it's worth them coming into this essential services and their progression um you we will have a schedule at the end of this a recommended schedule that kind of incorporates that consistent policies are needed for placing employees on the salary schedule so we see this everywhere we go what experience do our employees give a

057credit for is it one for one do they get credit for outside school system experience what if they come from a neighboring school district do they get one for one do we start them off at zero whatever policy is in place or procedure it needs to be in writing it needs to be consistently applied and salary schedules should be available once they're approved on the district website and it should be easy to understand you'll see when we get to the end our schedule is very easy to comprehend an employee could easily find where they would fit with just knowing a couple pieces of information okay next please buy the numbers these are the size of the uh different information about the cohorts that we compared you to and you'll see they're all in your your

058geographic area because of once again because of the the market you know if we could just as for an example if we compared you to um a side a district that had 7 000 students in the southeast region where i'm from it wouldn't be very comparable because the salaries are are not as high in the marketplace and it's a different um you wouldn't have the employee making the kind of money in the marketplace down here that they make up in your part of the state up in the triangle area let's look at the next one the estimated median family income there's a lot of different sources of information that come from the u.s census bureau and this is one of them the department of commerce provides a database where they take selected data from the

059us census bureau for all 100 counties and if you go and go into that website you'll see there's a four-page report on every district well there's also different sources of income there's family income there's household income there's per capita income with the median family income it requires to have at least two or more people uh related by blood in the same household so you're looking at a husband wife or husband wife or two kids or whatever and so the family income is going to be higher than a head of household income if i'm a single person living in an apartment and i just got out of school and i'm making thirty thousand dollars a year that's a head of household if i've got two people making thirty thousand dollars a year husband and wife that's

060gonna be sixty thousand on the family income so family income is going to be a higher number than head of household so that's just for clarification when you're looking at the numbers but the point we're trying to get across here is this the family income in orange county and once again it includes you know the chapel hill area um is high in comparison to your neighboring districts but also in comparison to the state even though we don't have the state average on there you are in an area that requires a high wage so to speak to get by let's look at the next um thing there total local spending per pupil um if you actually go to the to the forum website it includes city systems with the county so we took that out and

061so once we took the city funding out for the city school system orange county was still at four thousand one hundred thirteen dollars per student of local funding which once again compares favorably with those that are in the in the area but look at the state average there's only seventeen hundred dollars per student so from a money standpoint orange county does have uh resources that other districts do not have across the state next please ability to pay that's also in the public school forum publication and it shows that there's two numbers in that first um graph one is what's the ability of the of the county to pay for schools and so the lower the number the higher the ability so in this case you can see that four of you are right there neck

062and neck orange chatham durham and weight are virtually the same as far as the ability to pay but from an effort standpoint orange is doing better than those that surround you now if you go once again it included the city numbers and so we went and took the city information out we take the city information out uh the orange relative effort goes to 24th which is still very competitive but the four number up at the top included the city supplemental tax which obviously does not affect the orange county school system so we did take that out we go to the next slide so now let's look at actual salaries for one of your positions which is principles and obviously in an education that's one area where we know good principles attract uh good educators and

063so what does it take it's not always we as a matter of fact we talked to some of your principals and they money was not obviously the biggest issue for them otherwise they could have already left and gone to some of these other systems but for some folks um they can just make a 15 10 10 or 15 minute drive and get significantly more local money in their in their salary so you can see that this is an average for last year but the average uh principal supplement in orange was 19 000. so uh alamance and chatham are below you but if you look at chapel hill durham and wake they're significantly above you so if you wanted to be competitive with those districts um it would require an increase and we're going to go

064over that increase in just a second and while we're talking about principles this the principal salary schedule has changed a couple times in the last few years with the state they don't recognize experience on this principle state principle scale anymore all they recognize the size of school and they don't even recognize the type of school and i know there's folks that can look at this both ways but a thousand student high school makes the same thing as a thousand student elementary school based on that on the state's principal scale and so some of those differences that we may think need to be taken into consideration is where your local supplement comes into play and so in just a minute we'll look at a salary supplement for the local uh principals and other employees obviously are

065local salary changes so uh i just want to give you a little synopsis of the principal's information and in the big report you'll see more detail i should have told you this to start with we're trying to summarize this just for sake of time and for brevity of course we'll answer any questions you have but we're trying to summarize the report for you in a few slides next please observations if we look at your salary schedule the schedule is very competitive the problem is not that the schedule is being able to implement the schedule so what happens is your minimum salaries are very competitive but once you get to the midpoint of the maximum because your step you have 13 steps that are frozen your employees are not getting to the midpoint and maximum when

066they should once again remember you have to get 42 years to get to the maximum okay and so your midpoint is going to be somewhere in the mid-20s so once again the scale looks good if all we did was look at a piece of paper and said what's your salary scale look like we said y'all are doing good what do you need us for but when you look at the actual salaries compared to the salary that's where you're seeing the problem uh employees don't understand how their salaries are set or how how employees get pay raises sometimes they'll see somebody within the district or within their own department get a raise and they wonder how that particular person got a raise that's going to happen no matter which district we go to but we do

067want to make make it easy for employees to understand how understand why they're making what they make and hopefully when we get finished uh we'll be able to show that we already talked about the next bullet about the lower paid employees moved up to the living wage but it resulted in grade compression there's two types of compression we've been talking about the 13 step compression grade compression is when you move up in a position from a from a pay standpoint and you don't get a increase by going to that next grade that's that's a great compression well to be able to afford to pay people at fifteen dollars an hour to maintain that spread all the way up through your salary scale you'd have to decompress your your grades also to help those employees that

068are in other positions that are above the um the lower uh classified positions right now the school system uses three different levels three different uh terms of employment for three different um pay scales our recommendations will be one pay scale if you're a custodian for 10 months and i'm a custodian for 12 months the monthly salary should be the same the only difference is that the person working 12 would get two more months of pay so we would have simplified that by just having one salary schedule for type of employment as opposed to multiple salary scales we see the title of specialist and coordinator all throughout the state and not that there's anything inherently wrong with it it's just that it can be used for any number of positions and so it's hard to determine

069what a specialist or coordinator is compared to another specialist coordinator sometimes it's used as justification to give folks pay raises just change the title that sounds better you know then technician or clerk or whatever so sometimes you'll see specialist and coordinator we like to see other titles use them that more closely identify what the position is and we just talked a minute ago about the principal supplements uh once again if you want your principal supplements to be competitive um you you've got three in your in your cohort or three in your region that pay significantly more in principal supplements next please recommendations um we're recommending a 30 step scale and we're recommending a one and a half percent increase between steps and three percent between grades and it may not be three percent all the

070way across uh the steps are pretty consistent but the grades may not be as you go all the way towards the end but once again uh we tried looking at even higher numbers we didn't think it would be um um reasonable to be able to afford more than the one and a half percent now that and even the one and a half percent can be modified this is just um based on the what we put together if you decide you wanted to be two or two and a half it can be if you want to be one you know for an affordability standpoint that can happen also one thing you need to remember each year because you're dependent on the state for most of the funding for the increase from year to year the scale

071is going to have to be adjusted each year to reflect that for example let's say the state gives a three percent raise next year and our ski and you recommend this scale and it only has a one and a half step increase you would need to adjust the scale to reflect the three percent so that one and a half percent of it is a step and one and a half percent of its cost to living so but there'd be a three percent increase instead of one and a half but what if it goes the other way what if it's a one percent increase is the district going to have enough money to pick up the other half percent if not you've got to adjust your scale the other way so this is a breathing movement

072document once again because the way schools are funded in north carolina you're what you have to wait to see what the state's going to do unless you're fortunate enough to have enough money to pay for a raise for all your classified employees out of local money every year and i doubt if you're able to afford that i don't know of any districts that are that you could pay pay a raise for every classified employee with just local money employees should be placed on salary scales based on years of experience right now in your data file every employee has a longevity years of experience we recommend using july 1 of uh in this case of 2022 as your longevity years of experience and place the people on that um schedule accordingly and then from that point

073on whatever your experience policy is you would incorporate that so if you hired somebody that had 10 years of experience that would come in they would get experience on the scale but we have to remember your existing employees for the most part are going to get a 13 step increase because we're incorporating it from 42 down to 30 steps and so for the most part the existing folks are going to get credit for this experience they've had retroactively whereas a new employee would get it you know as they come in uh the next bullet kind of reflects what i just uh what i've already said you're going to have to revise the schedule each year to either increase or decrease what that step increase is going to be based on what the state does and

074your local funding to be able to continue paying for the increases from this point forward one thing on that state salary schedule that i didn't mention the way the state does those salary schedules it perpetuates compression because every year they change the minimum by whatever raise the state gives so let's just use a quick example if a person makes three thousand dollars a month right now and they just started and they're zero at the zero level uh next year they're going to go to the year one and let's say the state gets a two percent raise they're going to go to 3060. well the state changes the minimum to 3060 on their scale so right away you've you've built a step of compression because the person that's just beginning is going to get the same

075thing as a person that's been here a year so there's some things the state does that we don't necessarily agree with um as far as the a lot of things to be honest as far as the salaries are concerned but that's one of them the way they do those minimums and maximums perpetuates the compression let me say too really if i can give you just a minute of a break and i was reviewing my notes this morning from some of our interviews we had last fall with your classified staff and there's a lot of frustration because they don't really understand that the difference between uh the state giving raises in prior years to state employees and why school district employees were not included in those raises uh you know they don't understand obviously the the

076role of the general assembly and and appropriating the funds for uh the state races that have been so scarce over the last several years and you know in many prior years when recruitment and retention efforts came about for school districts those of us have been around for many many years can remember at a time when school districts were the place to work and schools could could recruit from cities and counties the employees that they had and now what we've seen over across the state and in many places is the exact opposite where cities and counties are now hiring our classified workers away from school districts a lot of frustration from that perspective thank you hank um we talked about uh deleting the three different designations for the salary levels and just having one that once

077again simplifies it for the employees the last bullet is also a flexible recommendation um we recommend one-for-one experience for similar work out in the marketplace with a cap of 10 years but for your hard to find areas we would recommend that you get even more than that if that's what it takes to get employees in certain areas but you need to identify what those areas are it doesn't need to be an arbitrary thing where i like ricky i'm going to give him 15 years i don't like hank i'm only going to give him 10. it needs to be positions that the district agrees are hard to find areas if you want to give more than the 10 years but once again these are our recommendations it's not meant to be written in stone these are

078things that the district can work with and adjust as necessary next please um if an employee comes from another school district our practice has been to give them exact years of experience if somebody comes in as a teacher assistant from a neighboring county with 19 years of experience then we recommend they'd be it'll be at 19 years because it's been a like position with those 10 years of experience as opposed to the marketplace where they may have been in a um in a position that may not quite fit the position they're going to be in in this case it would be a like position um we like to see um different levels for folks that in the trade areas that take the initiative to go back and get licenses it helps them from a pay

079standpoint but it helps the district from a money standpoint because if you don't have the licensed folks in place you've got to pay a contractor to come in and sign off on some of your projects if you have the right people hired in place they can go ahead and sign off on that and it saves you significant dollars but it also gives a person a reason to want to stay because they don't know they can move up so you'll see your recommendation for three levels of positions within those trade areas to give them an incentive to to move their way up um the next bullet basically just summarizes all the classified positions that are in need of adjustment and you've seen this i think if hove had taught us one thing the pandemic is how

080much school systems rely on the classified employees they've kind of been taken for granted in the past but i think all of us now realize that what they're needed they're also needed to run the school system you know they're not in the classroom they are needed to help on an instructional day we talked about eliminating specialist and coordinator titles we talked about increasing the supplement for principles and also tying the central office administrator schedule into the principal scale next please okay so if you don't mind if you've got your big report in front of you if you have access to it what i'd like to do is look at the salary schedules that we're recommending for just a few minutes and then um we can take some questions but i think it's on page 39

081see the 38 or 39 i don't know if i'm off by one with y'all or not let me see and this won't be on a slide so i apologize um is there so many pages to the um it's page 39. okay page 39 please this is what the scale would look like and there's about three or four pages that look the same the only difference across the top is you have you have different grades but if you'll give me just a minute i'll explain and then we'll go back a page to uh show up how the position would fit on here 26 if you look at the very first number on the left hand column under 55 grade 55 it shows twenty six hundred dollars that's equivalent to fifteen dollars an hour okay so effective

082july one of course you already had a living wage in place but effective july 1 across the state school systems have to pay 15 an hour as a minimum wage so that's what we're building off of okay well right now on your schedule 55 and you'll get more details from ronda as you go in the next couple weeks as you go through your work group and so forth but you'll see that you've got quite a few employees that are making the 15 an hour and right now your 15 an hour includes the seven percent supplement so that's another decision that you as a system will have to make does the fifteen dollars an hour do you want the inclusive or exclusive of the local supplement our scale the state's going to be looking at that

083person making 15 an hour then it can be done either way so any of the scale is going to show 15 dollars so that's why you see 2 600 up there i think you'll see 24 something maybe or on your actual internal scale and then when you add the supplement to it it gets up to twenty six hundred but uh for our purposes we started off with the twenty six hundred then if you add one and a half percent to that for the first year or the first step it goes to twenty six thirty nine well you pay your employees twice a month so we went ahead and showed a second column that would show the employees how much they would make each pay period so all it is is just the first column divided

084by two and so if you were to go through the next three pages i think you would see the same logic you would just see different numbers because as you go up from left to right the grades are going to increase if we can go back a page actually um two pages this is our um i just i call it hierarchy for lack of better term and how employees would be placed from lowest grade to highest grade and once again this is flexible as a district uh you may see we obviously didn't get to talk to everybody we're basing it on titles there may be a title of a position here that has more responsibility than what the title indicates and you think that position should be classified higher but the custodian and the school

085food service worker would start off at that schedule we were just looking at grade 55. if they've got 15 years experience then we go to step you know 15. so uh but you go all the way down if you'll go through that full two pages it ranges all the way from a custodian to the highest graded position we had was your network analyst and so it's not unusual to see a district take the recommendation and tweak it but i think for the most part you'll probably keep most of the recommendation that we have in there at least from a hierarchical standpoint you may change the um salaries a little bit but for the most part uh the grades should be um pretty much in the order of um that you normally would see for these

086these types of positions any questions on that okay let's go to um the principal salary scale which would be on page cheap 44. if you go and look at the detail on in the report i mentioned that there were three districts that pay significantly higher uh principal supplement and so what we tried to do was take some of what they're doing and put that into what you could possibly do in orange county and so if we look at the principle let's look at the very first um section there the principal for an elementary school um the uh with 200 to 400 students right now to get a thousand dollars per month what we're recommending is that they get a 17.5 percent uh percentage of their base salary because that base is going to change every

087well i shouldn't say change every year there's a if the state gives raises the base salary for the principal will change and so that percentage of the local supplement would also change with it the second the last column is the one i want to spend some time on one of the districts that you compete against pays a longevity factor based on experience to its principles okay they pay more than what we're recommending here not that we don't think they deserve it we're just trying to make it somewhat more affordable but you can raise our recommendation with seventy dollars per month for after five years of administrative experience and so um a person that's been in the principalship for 10 15 years would obviously get additional money on top of the 17.5 percent what that prevents

088is that brand new principal for making the same thing as that principle that's got 15 years experience okay so it does give credit for experience in an administrative position so once again the 75 dollars is flexible the five years is flexible you can start it from year one but this is just a recommendation that you can work off of and come up with your own if that's not what as much as you want to do if it's more than what you want to do but that's the reason why a couple of your neighboring districts are paying more it's because they have built in a longevity factor into the principal salary schedule one a couple minor changes um well let's go ahead and talk about middle school if you go down two more categories two more

089columns middle school we put at 25 of the base salary and comprehensive high schools we put it um i think we recognize the the amount of time that's required at a club activities after school activities and so forth at a at a high school the last column is the one that's a little bit different you you have a um i call it a specialty high school but i'm sure you use different terms there but this is a high school but it's not a comprehensive high school and so we recommend that that be paid at the middle school percentage not at the comprehensive high school percentage and if for some reason that salary is less than what the current person's making of course we would recommend you grandfather that person in but we didn't look at

090that you know go that far with it to see what that would entail okay let's go to um page 45 i mentioned earlier that we like to tie the central services salary schedule into the principal salary schedule so what we did was took your certain administrative titles and put them into the same position as as a principles at certain levels so you'll see the certified coordinators at the elementary level assistant director is that a i think that uh the bigger of the two elementary levels the uh and so forth down the line but you can see there's a hierarchy there or a correlation between them and the principal scale so that a principal can move up to central services and not take a cut and pay and in some cases they would obviously get an

091increase because if you had an elementary principle that you want to bring into the central services as an executive director obviously their supplement is going to go higher than what they're currently getting and they would have an increase and it'd be an incentive for them to come to central services now the way we did these scales um you could if you just want to keep principal salaries and central services supplements the same you could just do the local base differential the part that that's going to be a little bit different or cost a little bit more money is that second or is the last column the local longevity edition but once again that's to be competitive with your neighboring districts as it comes to uh comes into play with principles and so that's pretty much

092um i think that's it yep that's a quick overview of the presentation you'll see a lot of data in the big report you'll see the um the um salaries for the different classifications that we looked at but the recommendations observations and findings are is the bottom line of all that we looked at and so um at this point i'll turn it back to um dr felder or ronda or the chairman doyle whoever needs to take over at this point but uh see if you have any questions thank you so much um mr hurd and ms eisenhower mr lopes this is incredibly um just incredible information for us to have miss wrath are you feeling i know we have a whole timeline of how we're going to process this as a board are there questions that

093we're planning on fielding tonight or i know board members submitted questions are those for us to use in later sessions so the questions that the board has submitted are a little bit more granular in regards to um where we'll be looking at cost and how our staff actually align in certain categories but we do want to allow the board if there's any questions surrounding how hill consultants perform this study or if there's any other questions for clarity surrounding that now would be the time to ask those okay do any board members have questions in that vain and i may or may not be able to see you all the same time it looks like will does you want to go first well yes uh thank you um so i i did submit questions that are

094are much more detailed uh as rhonda mentioned but one of the questions i had is um as you were looking across the different um you know categories and people and you know one of the things that really stuck out to me is we have a minimum a midpoint and a maximum and i'll just i'll pick i'll just pick one for example so let's just say data managers or bookkeepers because they're in the same kind of category um it's not obvious when you look at this you know or other districts for example alamance chapel hill durham are their majority of their staff following in the maximum at you know as they progress you know they've got longer people on those jobs and they're at the top of the scale or they all at the bottom of

095the scale you know a lot of this data was hard for me to consume without the context of saying okay i see what they're paying and what we're paying but is our problem not that our scale is wrong but our people are are all at the minimum and they should be at the maximum and the maximum should be more right does that make sense yes you summarized it just right that's the problem the problem is not the scale it's the placement on the scale because of the freeze and so what's going to happen is the maximums will probably change for for those categories of employees but the main thing will be even somebody who's not at the maximum somebody has 10 12 years of experience will move up 10 or 12 steps because they have

096they've been frozen and we we don't know you're correct we don't know the what people are making in other districts we've worked with some districts that were able to give increases um after the recession they kind of decompress their scales we've had others that have as many as 50 steps and so there's i would say more districts are in your situation with the compressed scales the difference is you had already gone to the minimum of fifteen dollars an hour and uh no none of the other districts that we worked with have done that so you've you've taken care of part of the problem but not the compression issue but you've yes you are correct the maximums will probably change and your employees will move up the scale um without us knowing how much that they're

097making actually making in some of those other districts and just one other question around that um some of the numbers i look like looked at does it appear to have all compensation in it it seemed like it was just the state numbers is that true um it should be all of it unless the the your local scale that you've developed does not have the local supplement in it uh but but the other salaried information should uh where we actually compared salaries uh it probably is their base salary but rhonda may have to answer that one i'm not sure i don't think ronnie it should be it should be base salary it will not include supplement because not every district can offer supplement and the local supplement is what varies from district to district so it

098will include just the base salary okay okay and then last question on this and i'll i'll jump back and let any other board member ask questions so for example um you know our uh social workers and master pay for example those pay scales that are that are shown are just standard pay scale we're not calculating in people that may be in the master's uh pay or not correct well we didn't the social worker would be a certified employee and so the state determines their salary so the only other increase they get is what you pay them their their supplements quite a bit higher than the than the classified but yes the state gives a certified salary you cannot use more any more state dollars than what they will allow for that and then the difference

099is what you pay as a um as a supplement okay i'll relinquish to let other board members ask okay thanks phil sarah one thing i wanted to say out loud that came up in the budget uh committee meeting just for anybody listening out there is the dollar cost of this is going to be millions of dollars and it's a lot of money to find like i think we've sort of alluded to that but i think it's just in terms of and and why we need to incorporate it in the budget conversations with the commissioners but i think that's um i i thought i just wanted to say that out loud for for any staff members who might be listening about um the scale of of the money that we need to find um even if

100we're not getting into specifics um the you know i it's i guess it's sort of a follow-up to will's question which i had also wondered out about specifically about the principal um comparisons to other districts and i had wondered how much of those average differences might be years of experience or um something like that do you have any sense although knowing that like years of experience are only really sort of solved in a local supplement maybe that isn't a factor but is it like size of schools or yours do all those things come into play too or is it more straightforward only locally the only thing that comes into play from a state standpoint is the adm and so whatever factors you want to include when you're doing your supplement you can do um normally

101you'll see a difference in the grade level supplement and so the experience factor not a lot of districts use that and so that that's why the your surrounding districts are so high there there's only probably a handful of districts that take that into consideration and so when you look at the state averages for principal supplements you're doing very well but if your goal is to compete with your neighbor with your neighbors it would need to be even higher and that's where the experience factor would come in right now it's not a factor it's just a you know a flat dollar amount and so if you did want to get closer that's where the experience would come in but i would say 90 95 percent of the districts do not even consider experience in their um

102local supplement well i really like that piece of it for for what it's worth i know we'll get into the details but i really think we should be incentivizing principles to stay in the principalship so i think what a lot of districts have done once we made our reports to the to the boards and the board has time to really kind of look at the what we're what we're presenting and our observations and recommendations is to come up with a amount of money as you mentioned it could be millions of dollars and will be to alleviate you know 13 years worth of frozen salaries the inequities there but to come up with a plan and present to the county commissioners and we've had some districts to get a dedicated pool of funds to alleviate some

103of the inequities over time and and you didn't get in this mess for lack of a better term as far as the frozen salaries are concerned uh overnight and you won't get out overnight either as you're pointing out so coming up with some priorities and a lot of times the classified employees when they hear that there is in fact a plan and a multi-year arrangement it kind of calms the waters for lack of a better term as far as folks knowing that hey you know the board does realize that we have some inequities here and it's going to be addressed over time but uh you know that we we sensed a lot of frustration and in your classified staff you know the the the amount of inequities that have occurred over years with new hires

104coming in and we that's not uncommon i mean again we've done over 60 of these over 60 of the 115 leas just within north carolina we've done these same surveys and studies and we've actually performed them in other states also in fact just recently we were contacted by two school districts that found out we were doing these studies from south carolina wanting us to come down which you know we're very limited in our capacity being able to do the type of work that we do so uh again a multi-year approach is the way to go about addressing this and you have to keep in mind what ronda said at the outset you know budgeting recurring expenses out of a fund balance is not an option it's got to be a recurring source of money now

105and and one of the things we found out is in a lot of the studies that we've done is when in talking to cities and counties that they they have been doing this over the last several years they basically looked at the frozen steps that they had and a lot of them basically have to have already put in plan in place a plan to alleviate those and a lot of cities and counties have not been frozen over the years they've not they don't have quite the compression that we have in school districts just to throw in a little side note i think one thing that would be helpful i know sometimes often times county commissioners and school system boards don't see eye to eye but i think one thing that you all could all agree

106on is that the state has pushed this issue down to the local level you know somehow it was an agenda item a a high legislative priority at the state level if the county commissioner association and the school board association would put the compression issue get away from the 13 or 15 dollar uh everybody being excited about that once again that just helped a certain number of employees but i think both parties could agree that the compression issue is a bigger issue that needs to be addressed and uh if both bodies that could agree on that it might might carry some weight yeah thank you madam chair i have a a question okay vice chair stevens oh i'm sorry oh was bonnie before me go ahead brenda oh okay all right all right so um we'd

107like to to uh look at chatham and alamance a lot you know when we're comparing and i just noticed that in this grid there's a lot of n a's in the chatham boxes help me understand why that is some districts are more forthcoming on providing information than others and so we weren't able to get the information um that we needed uh from them as easily as we were from others and so in some cases uh we were able to get information from other databases but not from them to uh directly well that doesn't seem correct ani so um thank you um first i i wanted to thank you for for highlighting the um the salary issues on our school administrative positions the bookkeepers the data managers the secretaries um it's been a high priority for

108us so i really really appreciate you highlighting that and the trades is also really interesting for us to look at um i had a couple questions one is it's you don't have to answer it and i don't need the technical answer but i'm just i was surprised when you said the salaries um in the scale did i hear you say that it did not include the supplement and the salaries that we compared did not include the supplement is that did i hear that you heard correctly supplement is not included because that is varies from district to district and there are districts in the state who are not able to offer a local supplement so what so when we pay people though one of the the when i think of the lever that we have as

109a board and as a district it's the supplement however we're going to make these numbers work it's by manipulating the supplement because the state salaries are set by the state correct that's correct and so one of the decisions that you'll have to make as a system is whether you want that seven percent to be part of the fifteen dollars an hour beginning point or do you want to add that to the fifteen dollar beginning point okay in other words technically you can you would be okay keep it at fifteen dollars an hour and saying that seven percent of that is a supplement and the fourteen dollars and something is the salary for a total salary of 15 because you pay it monthly or are you going to save 15 an hour and then add seven

110percent on top of it so you do have some flexibility there but from our standpoint we just put in the twenty six hundred dollars at fifteen dollars an hour as the beginning point got it for for us i think it when we compare ourselves to other districts the supplement is going to make a difference so it's gonna underestimate us in some cases overestimate us another so it makes it um second question is is this um 42 years which we use today in the 30 years and the 13 steps is the state correct and and are 30 steps and 42 steps is that just for the supplement or is that for the total salary because i think we're going to have to like like but buy rhonda lots of presents to figure this out that's the

111total number of steps which you which equates to usually to years of experience and so the 40 the base salary is based on the 42 years or whatever their monthly salary is that's what you base the 7 supplement on but the 42 years you are correct as the is um the years of experience that an employee would need to get to the top of the scale so so your suggestion we go from 42 to 30 and we have to convert that to what that means in terms of base plus supplement yes that's correct so one one last question this is really an impression you've done this extensive review for us if um you point out that our per pupil allocation is higher than substantially higher than all our peer counties yet some are paying people

112more than we are and i was wondering why if you had any impressions about why aren't where's it going where's the money going if it's not going to salaries is there just something kind of weird there i hate to speculate because we didn't really look at your your budget or your actual expenditures or whatever and so um i'd hate to guess because i'd probably probably be wrong but um it was uh usually you know our biggest expense in any system whether you're spending um more or less money is obviously people and so that it would just have to be where's the you know uh which there could be certain categories of employees that you have a higher number of people than others i don't know but yeah without looking at it in detail i'd hate

113to guess what what the reason is i would wonder if i could interject here if um a component could be where um we may vary by having more num more people that are paid off of our local budget than some of our surrounding districts i.e we may have um we we just have more positions i i can't think of an example to use that i don't want to spike fear or panic in anyone i just wanted to use an example of you know how we may have a certain position let's say that we have one in every elementary school the districts that we were compared against do not or possibly do not have that and so that would be a difference in where our we have more money and since going to more salaries so

114we can't i guess we have the same pot that we're spreading over more people where other districts could have the same pot they're spreading it over less people so they're able to give more competitive salaries if that makes sense yeah almost like a t it's like a teacher to student ratio but it could be other staff to student ratio yes yeah thank you thank you other board members with questions and bonnie might still have a question too no i think that i think that's that's it well this is wonderful sarah yeah thanks i'm just trying to understand um the the idea of um the schedules and then the idea of the local supplement i really liked the suggestion that we put our schedules on the website where they're easy to understand you know that kind

115of thing um do districts ever just sort of wrap the supplement into the schedule you know there's sort of assumptions there and they they don't say like and we give this extra supplement but the the actual dollars that people are earning fundamentally i mean it's all a supplement over what the state's paying that's all over the board uh some districts pay supplements twice a year others included in the salary we've seen it in many different ways depending on the district and you all don't have an opinion about which one of those is more effective for well it really depends on a lot of times what the classified employees in the feedback sessions what they prefer of course a lot of times you you find divisions in the bus drivers for example they want theirs every

116month you know whereas you know others trades folks may want like a supplement in november and one in may or june i think durham next door pays theirs in may and june i mean uh november and in may so anyway it just depends on what the district what the policies are and what it looks like a lot of options thank you yes years ago orange county schools did pay the supplement twice a year um no actually they paid it once a year let me take that back they paid it once a year um in november right before thanksgiving whenever we implemented the semi-monthly payroll schedule it was determined at that time that it was more beneficial for the employee to receive that supplement each month and so at that time policy was changed where supplement

117was then given monthly versus only one time a year well this is incredibly informative and i'm starting to think we're at the end of board member questions but i think i see will will has another one yeah i just have one more so as we think about this how does this affect the overall benefits like what we have to contribute into the state as we do these adjustments we would have to adjust for benefits as well correct but that is correct mr atherton because our um benefits are a percentage of the salary so the retirement as well as the employer portion of the fica is a percentage of base salary so that will be a component of the cost and right now retirement the portion that orange county schools pays is 24.10 percent and fica

118is 7.65 all right thank you thank you again for this presentation to everyone from the hill group dr felder do you have any comments that you want to make most certainly do thank you uh chair doyle i want to personally thank the board for approving uh miss wrath for shepherding and the hill group consultants for conducting this long overdue salary study of classified staff who are valued and needed to successfully operate this school district to be clear like our certified staff i know they would agree with this our classified staff are essential to the successful operation of our district we cannot i repeat absolutely cannot successfully operate the school district without them lastly uh while uh as noted by the hill group uh we didn't get into this situation overnight and will not get out

119of it overnight i am thankful and encouraged that this salary study will be leveraged to alleviate inequities and enhance the district's salary structure for our classified staff so thank you all thank you thank you also thank you for having us thank you again and thank you miss raf for the collaboration and showing us how that timeline is going to work i think that is really helpful um we have another information item dr felder um would you like me to welcome mr abele and mr mincy or do you have anything you'd like to say before we start on the easement request no um you're welcome to uh welcome mr abele as he will be joined by miss marie strand wits uh utilities director with the town of hillsborough so take it away alrighty so we've got

120a few uh background slides here we appreciate the board's comments uh when we brought this um back in december to seek additional clarification and information on this project and i want to thank marie for being here this evening and providing background and supplemental information and you'll be able to see some of that this evening there's uh for the public or anyone that's listening or watching there's more details certainly in the abstract and materials that are listed online that we'll be able to cover or be able to show on the screen um this evening so you can go to the next slide uh just to give a little bit about this uh the background of this project the town of hillsboro was looking to relocate a 70s air pumping station out of the floodway the new

121pump station would be an underground um system and marie will talk a little bit more about that identified on this critical infrastructure that not only would serve the town but serves the school and since we do have accessibility to existing uh sewer systems and are close to the wastewater treatment plant um the town looked at the property at river park elementary school and the school district although we own approximately 20 acres of the area at the school not all of that is usable what we would consider school operations on a daily basis because it is and does slope down into the floodway it stays quite wet and there's little use of actually having school-aged children back towards the river on a daily basis and so we do have some trails and there are some areas

122that is used by the school but this would be located out of that general area that we would consider what we use on a daily basis and what we what we maintain back into the natural uh areas and then um you know as we discussed uh last month um these projects typically happen behind the scenes but the board felt it was important that we have full transparency on the project not only um making sure that we were able to answer and bring back additional clarifications and questions on the project we give an opportunity for the school and the stakeholders at the school with the parents at an opportunity to provide feedback we did through the principal send information out to the parents about this project last week and at the end of last week and

123that survey is still open at this time with project information the background information that the board has and then also a survey for any additional comments or feedback on the project and an opportunity to visit the site as well to date i checked just prior to the board meeting this evening we did not have any comments to that survey at this time next slide again there is a special access area that would be utilized for the the pump station once it's in place and the weekly maintenance or ongoing maintenance of this that the town would have access through and it would not be through the school property and we've got a map that illustrates how the access would go do not have or anticipate or have any um concerns that with this project impacting the

124the school um hours or operations there's there's not going to be any noise from it again it would help us with the private sewer line that we currently maintain at the rear of the school because right now we're maintaining it all the way down the line once the pump station if it were approved and it were installed we would just be maintaining from the school to the pump station and again there's no cost to this project to the school district the town has applied for grants for this through fema next slide and uh here's an overview of the project and marie i'll turn it over to you if you want to give a little more information about what's on the screen so thank you for joining yeah thank you for having me good evening everyone

125so the map explains where the existing sewer line is it's the green line and the t the school's sewer is in the red area that i outlined we are proposing to put a new pumping station in the blue outlined area which is the corner of the school parcel if anyone has been back there it is down a significant slope in a wooded area and so we feel like it's out of the way but that area is right outside the edge of the floodplain the town is applied for some fema grant funding to relocate the station out of the floodplain so we really didn't have any other options without significant reworking of the existing sewers which are shown in green at the bottom that go towards the existing river pumping station i think uh the fact

126sheet that you have explains generally what we're looking to do i'm happy to answer more specific questions but we're at the preliminary phases of this project so we wanted to get that in front of you for consideration as we move forward the timeline is probably more stretched out than i put in the fact sheet we will not find out if we've received the funding until summer if we receive the funding then we have to go through design we have to do some studies of the area obviously we would need to determine exactly how much space we would need survey the area talk to you about uh the terms of the the purchase which i think is the suggested method so and then get to permitting and construction so we are looking at this project actually

127breaking ground i would guess probably not for another year and a half um we have to spend any grant funds received by the end of 2025 so that is our current time frame for the project and so the board has a couple options when it when it comes to this project one is to just grant um an easement of the parcel of land uh still retain ownership and allow the town to construct the pump station on the property the second which is what um the administration would would recommend which would be um the board declared that area surplus and we would go through the process of uh moving the property off of our usable space and declaring its surplus offering it to the town and we would have a market value for that the town

128would we would go through the survey process and then we also would be required to offer the parcel to the board of county commissioners um because that's a general statute requirement for property real property that we would be disposing of part of the reason you know i recommended that we do a land transfer of this is because of the location one um based on uh just the area that was described and it just being out of the flood plain and not in uh usable space that we would build on or utilize there's already existing sewer line that runs through that area already the second thing is so that the town retains responsibility for the pump station and any uh ongoing or long-term maintenance for the pump station or any issues that would result of the

129pump station operation um on that parcel of land and if we can go to the next slide i think we've just got a couple graphics here so this is the uh information sheet it's a couple pages long we thank uh marie for that and there are direct links to that within the presentation and online as well that has information on the project and if you go to the last slide just shows the um just shows that i think we probably eliminate it but it just shows that along the access point of how the access would be if you can back up one more slide for me so if you look at the south of the map that you're seeing here coming from the left hand side up to the blue shaped area that is an

130existing sewer line that comes from cameron street and that is how the town would access this to the rear of the property from the river along that sewer line so i know that was one of the critical questions was if this was constructed how would they access it and how would they be getting to the property it's it's completely alone that existing sewer easement and not through the direct front of the school or through the school property and so um with that i'll just turn it over to the board if you have any questions or need clarification again marie thank you for being here thank you ms strandwitz and thank you mr abele do we have any board members with questions i can't actually see you yet so looks like mr atherton does go ahead

131go ahead thank you um so just a couple of questions one is how would the power and anything needed to run the station be run i i'm hoping that you're not going to tell me it's going to go straight through the school through the woods to the back would it come through the back as well as part of this we have not gotten as far as to evaluate the path for utilities i don't know where the poles are but we do have we do have power obviously at our treatment plant which is right across the river and we have it over to the existing river pumping station which is further south so there may be a way to reach it from there and i know there's power along burnside drive okay uh the the second

132question i had was um what's the approximate total size needed for this the space the footprint yeah the footprint thank you the footprint so the fact sheet that i gave you shows you our current elizabeth brady pumping station that is going to be a similar size that is about a little over an acre now we need to add the access drive right up to the corner of the property and probably beside the station so i'm thinking permanently it would be no more than an acre and a half max but we're shooting for a minimal footprint and then there would be some temporary construction easement requested just during the construction phase which would be restored back to natural state or better okay thank you um bonnie go ahead you're muted donnie um thank you for coming

133thank you for this presentation i have first of all the most obvious question that you have to ask when you're dealing with a wastewater treatment and that's odors will there be odors from the lines or venting or will everything be underground everything will be underground except for manholes there'll be hatches on the uh wet well that has the pumps in them they'll be manholes leading up to the site i'm trying to think if there's anything else above ground really no there shouldn't be anything above ground it should be an entirely closed system except for when you open the hatch to the wet well the uh site sits several feet below the school grounds and i think we actually looked a little bit at the prevailing winds and i believe they go to the east northeast

134but that's something that will be evaluated during design and we have some of our stations right now have odor control uh which is like a chemical feed but we rarely use them because we really don't receive odor complaints we don't even receive odor complaints from the wastewater plant that sits you know right across the river south of the of the school i was i was thinking about the odors like if you walk along the river walk there's those vents along the riverwalk and sometimes owners come out of there that's kind of what what that is true um the river walk the reason those manholes are sitting hot so high above ground and have vents is because they are in the flood plain uh the ones that would be on the school site would not be

135that high so that would mitigate the oath so there'll be less odors because they're buried is that yes okay and um just on the and it's not a question to answer but i just want to throw a thought out um and that's you know we are we have many off out of town campuses that are paying out of town sewer rates to hillsboro and wondering if that's something we could look at if if we do this deal if that's possibly a negotiating point to bring those on an in-town rate so just i would love to hear everyone's thoughts on that as we move through the process thank you certainly consider all all suggestions thank you and thanks bonnie other board members questions motion to approve madam chair well i think we're actually just receiving this

136information oh i thought we're voting tonight okay yeah nope um will has another question yeah yeah i think the the form is open until the 28th for parents to submit any feedback but the only other question i had is are are there other sites being considered besides this or is this the one you'll believe is the the site that makes the most sense i i've heard anecdotally there's two other sites besides this there was a conceptual plan evaluated the other uh two sites the first one was at the corner of burnside and cameron and those lots that corner has been sitting vacant for many years and right when we received our report back that used that location as a potential site the owner decided to sell it and there's a house being built on that

137parcel right now so what are the odds the other site was we were trying to get the sewer across the river to our elizabeth brady pumping station which is on elizabeth brady road near the um the speedway entrance and that would require piping almost 60 feet deep and that just was not a feasible option by the time we took it there okay i just wanted to also just thank our staff and the town staff for putting together the faqs and giving us some time to look at it so i just wanted to mention that as well thank you thank you everybody for your presentation and i agree it's really helpful that this came back as an information item so we could spend some more time looking at different aspects of this i think we're ready

138dr felder to move on to our discussion and action indeed we are chair doyle and so i just want to say thank you so much to ms uh strandwoods for joining us tonight into mr avilee who won't be going too far as uh he will be facilitating this next agenda item on the discussion of transportation and the lottery process at hillsborough elementary school which the board will be asked to take action on so uh mr abele will be joined by the school's principal uh mrs christine kreider and so at this time um mr abele and mrs kreider take it away all right thank you all very much so we're uh wanted to bring back information to you this evening um obviously the board has you know heard uh and we discussed previously in reference to

139hillsborough elementary school being a choice program and how are we promoting um not only the school but keeping the school success uh continuing but also bringing back a plan that would help create a diversity at the school that mirrors on that of the school district and so there are several components to that we're glad to have miss uh christine kreider here who's the principal um and she has been working with our team and katherine mao our student assignment specialists and technology coordinators here this evening as well and so the three of us are going to walk through what we believe are the critical components to success in reaching the board's goal for the 2022-2023 school year and so miss crider will turn it over to you to give us the background on hillsboro elementary school

140and the efforts that are being made next slide please well thank you so much well good evening everyone um first i just want to say hillsborough elementary school we are just a fun caring inclusive learning environment where families are valued and staff are valued and belong to our dolphin pod as a community we embrace diversity of all types kind of as as mr gaddy eloquently described earlier we believe strongly in the benefits of our year-round calendar and we want to share those benefits with all members of our community which is really the purpose of tonight's discussion we take the fact that 100 of our families make the choice to come to hes we take the responsibility very seriously and very dear to our hearts you know serving the community for 26 years we have a

141wonderful school where we work to make sure all families and staff belong and are valued and we recognize that some groups in our greater orange community are not as well representative at hes as others and we know our school only gets stronger when there are more voices and perspectives the school-based equity team and our positive culture climate teams they lead the work for teachers to engage students in great appropriate brave not perfect conversations i know some of you have tweeted out and retweeted some of those that we have posted and we do that through morning meeting dialogue and we have a common understanding of vocabulary around topics of belonging respect diversity inclusivity just to name a few as one of our systematic ways that our community works to build student capacity to live this vision

142and these values that you see on the slide as an administration we provide authentic spaces for staff based on mutual respect and trust and how do you build trust you build relationships and teachers can bring concerns and we engage in that authentic dialogue teachers have posted on social media about them feeling valued in our in our community and we do this for teachers to set an example and teachers do this for students we've made many efforts to recruit and retain a diverse student and staff population and we want to we want to share with the board and the community some of those efforts next slide please so our hillsborough website we have a special page dedicated just for prospective families including all the application information as well as our information brochures in both english and

143spanish that we've created for distribution as well as posting we've held multiple bilingual in-person and virtual school tours starting in october through january we have our recruitment efforts and brochures shared with staff and families to share and promote in person and on social media and our families do a wonderful job with word of mouth sharing and they are some of the best recruiters that we have i can't tell you how many of prospective families share that they came to want to learn about hillsborough because a neighbor has said something and has just really promoted promoted the school we've collaborated with our family liaisons to translate and promote in the community our school-based equity team makes systematic efforts to reach daycares churches other organizations and and other organizations in the community and of course the use

144of social media promote promotion thank you again for those of you who are retweeting out what we are posting on social media we've also purchased some flags to install on the property to get the attention of folks in the area and excited that we've formed some partnerships with community organizations i know our my assistant principal and social worker this week are meeting again with the family success alliance and sharing information about hillsborough in the community i know orange county schools advertised via parent academy sessions and on social media and on their website as well as additional outreach by orange county schools um and the other piece of this and the most of this is about you know prospective families but we also need to talk about you know our strong relationship building and treating staff

145well because they're the ones that have really helped us do a lot of our recruiting for additional positions and i do want to note that over the past few years over 50 of our new hires were all staff of color and i think that's that's notable um as we look at our recruitment and marketing efforts next slide please so again we know that some groups in our greater orange community are not as well represented at hillsborough elementary during school tours and when speaking with prospective families were often asked many questions about curriculum and the school in general but sometimes it's about diversity that exists at the school as they just want to know more right um additionally we receive many inquiries about transportation and programming during intersession we have a great dolphin camp and we

146want to make sure that that continues and is offered and also having middle school year-round options just for example last week we registered a new family from from out of state and the mother the first day completing registration asked about what the ka options were you know to have for a year rounds middle school in working with families we often need to provide assistance in understanding the process and the application sometimes the language in the application online is a little daunting for some folks and so we provide a lot of one-on-one assistance where we can and outreach needs to continue in helping families understand that while kindergarten registration begins in february if you would like the option to attend one of our choice programs that application starts in january we always get calls in february

147and march from families that want to attend hcs but have missed that application window so just as a reminder to the greater community anybody listening those that are interested all those choice programs that application window is in january and will close on january 31st it's also important to note that we have low student turnover which is wonderful and we have low staff turnover which is again a great indicator for a great school so therefore it's really critically important that in order to increase the diversity of our demographics we've got to increase the diversity of our applicant pool in order to make an impact on overall student demographics and we would really welcome support and recruitment efforts especially in groups that are not as highly represented so now i'm going to turn it over to nystrabali

148to talk about strategies in student assignment next one thank you thank you so the three priorities um you'll hear more about this evening one is the targeted outreach how we utilize and look at student assignment when it comes to segments and where our students live as a group as a whole and how we can use utilize that when we make priority decisions uh transportation we've talked about that previously and you you saw the earlier slide transportation is a barrier this board has made a focus that we address the transportation barrier and we are working through the process although we are working on the nuances of exactly what that looks like it's hard to have a transportation plan before we know the families and where they live and the locations wanting transportation but we're doing everything

149we can to eliminate and address that barrier and then the third is our application priorities which we'll spend some time talking about uh this evening as well but wanted to just really focus in on the three areas that we feel will be successful in reaching the goal of increasing the diversity at the school next slide so i just want to point out that we do have guiding regulations and policies policy 4125 we do have a lottery process that is open to all the families um and all the individuals applying to the district and we do see within our lotteries in district families before we seed out of district families but we we have those our board goals alleviate alleviating overcrowding and efficient use of our schools balancing of school populations giving a preference to siblings

150trying to keep families together especially fosters or other family situations keeping the families together in the school assignments and then providing an opportunity for all applicants to have at least some chance for a seat within the programs that we offer next slide and our specific board policies are listed here and i would say although we didn't list it we're also guided by u.s department of education and federal regulations when it comes to school assignment and school assignment regulations as well and so all of our assignment priorities and policies um we've worked through the the firm with the board attorney um over the past several years and ensuring to make sure that as we uh make changes or updates to our policies that we're not only within state but we're meeting federal guidelines as well next

151slide a few uh information items here about admission to hillsborough's ms kreider said we do not have an assigned school zone for hillsborough elementary school so if you move into the district no matter where you move into as an elementary student you have an opportunity and can apply to go to hillsborough elementary school there's not a set school zone or a school boundary based on where your dome is out or where you've purchased a home or where you're living that automatically gets you assigned to hillsborough elementary school which is strictly through the lottery process and all of our applications for our choice schools um as ms kreider said the deadline is january 31st it is earlier than the um as she mentioned the kindergarten registration and part of the reason it's earlier is several years

152ago we had all of our applications at the same time closing and there was a feedback from the community and the public that because the choice programs are so limited in the number of students that could attend those to do those applications first and then parents would be notified if they were accepted or not into the program then the regular discretionary application window opens for transfers coming up in february and so if i don't get an opportunity to get into hillsboro because there's limited spaces then i still have an opportunity to request transfer to one of our other schools that may be open or have limited capacity and so that's why this process starts in in january but i wanted to provide a little bit of rationale as to why we're so early with the

153choice programs it's so those families get notified early on and they still have an opportunity to request a discretionary transfer if they don't uh get into the choice programs again there's no school attendance zone and and we will run the lottery processes planning on those around february 16th and those are done not only with district staff but staff from miss kreider's school are all part of the lottery processes and those are done electronically as of january 20th there are 92 applicants we have 72 available seats in kindergarten and we are limited based on class size numbers that are set by the general assembly with the state for state class size for individual class size and space at the school and so we're limited to 72 seats and that equates to four kindergarten classrooms with 16

154students in each class as a base enrollment for the school 28 of the applicants are siblings of returning students three are children of employees at the school and then there are a small number of seats um after the first three priorities are indicating we'll talk more about the priorities but returning students automatically get an option to come back to the school their siblings get an opportunity to come into school and then the children of employees that work at the school so those are our first three priority level sets what we're talking about here so those first three and then um after that there's a approximately 40 seats that would be available and that's really what we're talking about is the priorities of of what um the rankings would be to for the next levels of

155students who would get eligibility for those seats um and again you know you discussed and asked us to bring back information and the goal here was to widening that pool of applicants to hillsborough elementary school and to have a kindergarten class that more closely reflects the demographics of the district next slide i want to talk just a minute about the transportation and you've heard us mention probably previously that there's this 1.5 mile zone for transportation with hillsboro elementary school the map on the right is a nice concentric circle it shows you what a you know put a pin on the map at 1.5 miles around and this would be a zone for which bus transportation would be provided a couple things we do not have designated walk zones within the town we know um for

156safe routes the schools that is an area to be addressed and we've we've looked at those plans and how we provide so we do provide transportation services within the city zones to to the schools but the actual map on the left is actually how it works out with the transportation and transportation routing so even within what was previously indicated as a limited area to provide transportation it's it hasn't worked out feasibly to where we would expect individuals to be able to have routes and services and so we recognized even with limited transportation um it hasn't been providing the service to to the school and so um we are not setting a limit we have not set a zone what we brought before the board was a plan that would indicate we would look for feasibility

157for any student regardless of where they live to try to establish routes and to have the availability of them to be transported to hillsborough elementary school and not this 1.5 mile radius just around the school next slide and so i'll turn it over to katherine now she's going to walk through the priorities and some of the analysis that was done as we looked at how do we expand our priorities and tweak the priorities for next year thank you everyone i am really excited to present to you some of the different options that we came up with to diversify the applicant pool this is so exciting and usually people run screaming away from me when i talk about this so i'm really eager to get into the nitty-gritty um as you know there are very limited

158factors that we can use to legally assign students to schools and we are definitely not permitted to use participation in the free and reduced price lunch program so we needed to get together and come up with some different categories that would help expand the number of students that we could provide weight to next slide please the first area that we explored was academic achievement by planning segment the district is divided into about 200 little planning segments and it's used mostly for reassignment however every address in the district is assigned to a planning segment we tied these planning segments to academic achievement looking at the third grade eog scores for for reading is a major indicator of student achievement we looked at the year 2019 which was the year the last round of testing before coven

159we were able to calculate the average achievement for each planning segment and we identified about 80 planning segments where the average achievement was below 2.5 during 2019 that represented about 190 students it's of course different each year but by targeting those students with a laser focus and making sure those that are most in need of a year-round program have a higher weight um we think that we'd be able to help achieve this goal next slide please another way to look at it was to include title 1 school zones or students who reside in title 1 school zones to give them added priority however there were a couple issues with this first of all a school zone is much bigger than a planning segment and if you looked at the four schools that are title 1

160we would be giving preference to 66.5 percent of our students and that's just not what we felt you were asking us to do so this is not a method that we're recommending however it it is interesting to look at next seg please the third thing we looked at was overcrowded schools looking at the projections for this the students who are expected to be enrolled there next year normally this is a great way to ease overcrowding and make sure that we don't have any particular school that's bursting at the seams this year we don't have any schools that are over that 1.06 percent that the sappho agreement requires for consideration of a new school however we decided or determined that evelyn cheeks and river park will be very close to our over capacity and so those

161are two options that we can use this is going to represent 43.9 of our students so it's a much smaller number than the title one students and so it's a priority that we thought would be useful next slide please we've talked about the bus transportation and so now i'm going to tell you about the different priorities and the order in which we will apply them to the applicant pool next slide please so our first priority is returning students and that has been the case for years students who are already at the school will have a chance to return for the upcoming school year only we're recommending that students who were at hillsboro but had to attend the online academy and want to come back be given the same priority as the rest of the returning

162students and this is just going to be for one year only the next priority is the students who are new with a returning sibling so these are those k siblings that patrick was talking about we have as our third weighted priority children of a hillsborough elementary employee next we recommended bumping up the planning segments with achievement at or below 2.5 we figure that we can help diversify that pool by offering higher weight to that then the next priority which is students are domiciled in a planning segment just assigned to an over capacity school the next pool that we would have is students who are domiciled in the district but don't meet any of those other categories and then finally out of district students who are accepted for discretionary admission with the payment of tuition and

163i will just add to that that's after the wait list and after the students in district have been exhausted um and there's just no other students that have applied or waiting to get into the school than the district has offered and allowed out of district families to apply with the payment of tuition yeah that traditionally is for the older students maybe there will be a seat available in a fourth or fifth grade situation but rarely in kindergarten okay next slide please in the future we are eager to explore using poverty level segment indicators to assign students to schools for reassignment and for for hillsboro this is a really exciting new idea that has been described in the report linked below the last bullet in a report from the department of education and the u.s census

164bureau and it takes very very specific laser-focused poverty banding and applies it geographically to help us determine exactly the segments that are most in need of some special waiting what's also exciting about it is that we can then use information from the census and from davis demographics to do some forecasting and to do some future planning it is a really cool option that i can't wait to learn more about and it's something that we just are not ready to apply this year yeah and so there's other options as well as catherine mentioned um you know even if we don't apply it with the waiting process we'll have the information because it's very useful as we go through the reassignment process as you heard earlier i think the number from orange county the household medium family

165income in the county was 104 000 or so which included chapel hill well what this allows us to do is to be able to narrow that down where do we have individual planning segments where the poverty level is much lower than that medium inc income and be able to find those exact zones and then be able to do targeted outreach or to utilize that as we're doing the reassignment processes so that we're diversifying our schools in the planning process next slide and so um you know bringing us to to the recommendations as catherine said um you know the first uh three items on the list have been uh typically and historically uh what the school district has utilized for the assignment priorities for the lottery at hillsborough elementary school we're recommending the addition of number

166four which is a 2.5 academic planning segment that those individuals who apply from those segments be seated at the fourth level and then at the fifth level would be the over capacity schools we're using 98 percent obviously a hundred percent is is at capacity when we talk about open limited or closed capacity schools we're really um closing schools prior to getting the hundred percent and so we recommended the 98 percentile here but the board certainly could say you know that's a hundred percent where the board could say that's you know we want to back that down to 95 percent um over overcrowding um and how much space we leave for families that move into the district but there is a a concern especially with k3 class sizes when we have students that move in being

167able to seat students who live in a particular school zone if you're over capacity at that grade level for the individual class size or the district you know we would be required to correct that whether that's add a teacher at a mobile unit etc and so this is another opportunity for us to reduce some of the crowding at the schools without the additional cost of additional teachers or mobile units etc in order to ease some of the crowding that may be anticipated number six is again the students any other students in district that apply and then seven is any students that are out of district and i think also attached to your report was the historical wait list and so um these are the recommendations that is the um item that is for the vote

168this evening um that we've recommended but before we get to that i know we haven't given you an opportunity to ask questions and clarify so i'll just pause there thank you so much mr abella and miss mao and mrs frider um this has been really helpful i appreciate these new approaches that we're implementing and considering for um improving our equity lens board members with questions sarah and then bonnie yes and i'm also excited miss mal for the things you spoke about in future um in in looking at poverty bans and uh planning segments so look forward to hearing more about that um i really um appreciate the um thoroughness of trying to consider all the different options here um and i really like the idea of the priority order that you're proposing um my only

169question is around those over capacity schools and what the potential impact there is i imagine it it's really hard to project how many students might take up seats in that category above but i mean in terms of how many of the kindergartners maybe have come from those over capacity schools in the past like are we talking do you have any sense of what the size of the impact might be because i do know you know i mean river park and uh new hope although i know was lower this year i mean they both have mobile units already you know so are we talking about potentially having to add mobile units do you have any sense of that so a couple of things one historically there there were practices and lottery processes that were different prior

170to us having the policies and regulations that are in place now and so trying to compare kindergarten enrollments from different zones several years ago may be difficult we can say and certainly can go back and look at the breakdown of the students and at what schools those students came from but we do know um the percentages have changed based on the number of students applying from from different zones and we we looked at previously when i was in the district actually setting caps to say you know no more than five percent or 10 percent of a student population can come out of a school with at one time um because you know at the same time we're trying to attract students to hillsboro we don't want to um cause you know a massive amount of

171students to shift or to move at one time that hasn't been the case yet under these new policies on the last several years but we can certainly i guess we would need to dive back through the data from you know three three years or so ago and look at the breakdown of the students and where they came from or which not they really came from because some of them are kindergarten students so they really haven't come from anywhere yet so but where they would have gone so yeah and i know and you're looking for action from us tonight so i know that that i i guess um it would be helpful to know mr oblate like you're comfortable making these recommendations if if we're gonna have to like mobile units cost a significant amount of

172money so if yeah we're going to talk with our capital improvement plans and the mobile units are going to be in our future um and i'll say it tonight just for the fact of the amount of uh facility construction that we're going to be trying to accomplish over the next couple years and trying to do that while schools are in session we will need to utilize mobile units or a reassignment plan or as catherine worked with me in another district spot reassignments or other ways to ease crowding on a school campus this is certainly one way to do it is through the choice program but at the at the level that it's at as we said from 72 slots down to 40 slots by the time we get to the fifth band i'm not sure

173how many slots will actually be available for overcrowding we did feel the academic performance and the academic performance indicators based on what we know long term for students in their academic achievement level outweigh the overcrowding cons priority level at this time knowing that we have other tools to ease overcrowding thank you you're welcome ani what's next yeah so i have a just a couple questions um and very interesting information i'd love to talk more about the the reassignment numbers and how that works i was told that that expedition actually has had really good success using the poverty level indicators in their lottery so for whatever that's worth um first of all you've presented some numbers to us um that say 92 people have applied um we have 70 72 seats um 30 of them are

174going to be filled by um returning students or families or or students have employees so we have 40 seats left and 60 applicants so the first question is of the applicants that we have do we know how many fall into the criteria that we're proposing and then secondly are we proposing to open up the application deadline ends this week right or in a week are we proposing to open it up or how are we how are we going to get these people to apply or have they so to your first question no we have not and we we typically don't dive into looking at the data and looking at the applicants prior to making decisions it just keeps us neutral and unbiased to the processes um as we're making especially as we're making recommendations um

175this evening so we have not um at least we have you know i know catherine i have not looked at the data and broken down the data of the applicants in the applicant poll as far as the deadline um you know that is a um has been with policy um the administration sets the deadlines and sets the application time period if the board feels that the there needs to be an additional time to the application period um i certainly we've done it in the past for other extenuating circumstances would be comfortable if the if the board recommends a another week or another 10 days if you want to extend the application period but again we're not we're not seeing a major um concern right now or hearing feedback that the application window's closing i know

176there is additional outreach that the district's doing as well to remind families that the application deadline is approaching and that the applications are due prior to january 31st and it has been consistent with that application deadline probably for five years now so it's it is a deadline that has been published um previously as well okay well it begs the question about we have a process we have applicants are we going to meet the go how do we meet our objectives so that that question is out there um it's kind of a side step on on space hillsboro has been a really and and miss carter thank you so much for creating a great school for us and um such a desirable place for us so so um and i was thrilled that you you touched

177on all the questions about staff diversities not just transportation staff diversity it's the intersession programs and the middle school year round that are the things that parents that i hear parents are asking for there is some additional space in the building i think it's the space that kidscope had and i wondered if we're considering expanding the space in the school either for expanding the enrollment or possibly beginning to add a middle school option so is that something that we could do to expand the capacity you know and and there becomes this overarch and my third question before is this overarching question about year round um have we made the case is there a case that we need to make better that year-round is a is a as a program that serves certain students in certain

178ways because it's you know i i'm a big fan of it you know but i think there's and of course if you ask any ats parent they'll tell you it's there's nothing like it but and and there's arguments but i wonder if we've made the case if we've done the research if this is a choice program that we want to expand in that space and possibly into other schools so those are my other questions i can um i'll dive into the facility question because i think i can best answer that one there has been no discussion that i recall or have been part of as far as expanding grade levels or additional students on the hillsborough campus with middle school i think that would be very difficult with the programming the space profiles and the

179core facilities media center gymnasium you talk about specials and wheel classes in middle school level the cafeteria um the the parking i i just i'm not seeing where even in the limited space in the learning center that we would have to be able to expand core facilities that are needed for the middle school level and that's not even included the conversation about athletics or any other type of programming that might be needed what i do recall several years ago was a discussion of would it make sense to make one of our other middle schools a year-round middle school and so um making it a year-round on a current middle or traditional school campus and converting that but i've not been part of any discussion i've heard that would um expand hillsborough elementary school and i

180don't think with our current funding and what we're looking at for renovations we would we would be able to convert that school to a to a middle school campuses as well and if i could uh just comment on the research well certainly we uh can uh revisit research uh take a deep dive into the research my recollections with regards to like districts that are uh district-wide uh year-round that the results are mixed and um and so again we can revisit but um based on my recollections the results are mixed and so why that is i don't know would have to revisit the research okay and what about expanding the space using the unutilized space for expanding this the campus enrollment is that a possibility we right i think there's a bit i'll just leave it

181i think you have the question you have to answer tonight it's just something i wonder if we should be looking at okay i see will's hand up thank you um as well just wanted to thank mr spreider for her time tonight and pointing out all of the different areas that they've been working on and the changes that the school's been making and staff for bringing in the recommendations one question i had is for us to be very transparent about this process uh how would someone look up if they fall into the historic academic achievement at or below 2.5 where would they go to find that out yeah so what we would do is if this is approved by the board we would have those published and there's um there's ways that we can look up

182your segment and be able to to utilize and show i think we tried to condense it down to a a map that was actually but we just couldn't get it shown here and so katherine may have some other ideas of how we would would be able to show that but we um we can certainly you know highlight those yeah i just want to concern oh go ahead sorry one concern was that some of the planning segments in your district are very small and we run the risk of identifying someone looking at that map and saying oh that's catherine who got the one so we want to be careful about that as well so because we haven't gone through the reassignment process those segments have not been balanced and have not been updated in many years

183so that's part of our processes as we work through the reassignment planning but certainly like all the maps that we had katherine and i down south i mean when you look at a school zone you can see the planning segment you can see the numbers i mean you know that the school published maps of the school zones the segments are the segments are indicated there are so many segments in this in this district that again they're much smaller and in a previous more southern area patrick and where patrick and i were together it represented originally one busload that would go from one place to another that's not how things were set up here and you know this is a much more enlightened approach here however they're so very small that i really think you know

184you could unless we did some masking it would be very obvious who scored what yeah i i just hope we can be transparent on it i i hear what you're saying just some way to for people to know where they are as they're considering this uh the the only other comment that i was gonna make is i i am very supportive of a uh middle school year round and what options there are i mean i'm not saying go convert a school but i definitely would like to hear ideas around what we can do or increase the capacity as well thank you okay hillary and then sarah and then bonnie you um i just wanted to thank staff for these recommendations i really appreciate you spending so much effort bringing these forward so we can have

185these conversations um i think it's really important that we look at making all of our programs accessible to all of the students in our district i know we have so many caring staff members and our your own program is a great program and i just hope this board will be careful and slow roll the middle school situation i think that it is difficult to justify expanding a program that's 85 white for me personally so i hope that if we can crack the code of making it a diverse place where everyone has access to it if we absolutely look at expanding it if the need is there but if we're serving 85 white families and 85 you know high socioeconomic families i'm not sure that i can personally support it so just going to put that

186out there thanks hilary sarah and then bonnie um i just wanted to go back to a couple of the other um pieces that were mentioned in in all that um is leading to the school not being as representative of the district um the one thing i was wondering about the i was fascinated by the application window being so much earlier than when somebody would normally register their kid for kindergarten fun fact i almost missed registering my oldest for kindergarten i called up the school the week of and was like what's going on they were like registration is this week so you know i think just think information not everybody has access to information um i was wondering um you know the the purpose for changing the timeline was that families might then want to request

187other transfers and i was curious how often that actually happens and you know does that actually play out the reason that we bumped the application even earlier and is there any world where we could place this application at the same timeline as people are applying to kindergarten the the hillsborough kindergarten specific piece is their way to place it closer to so one of the things is this process does take time because we we have an application window we also have to confer with all the individuals who are at the school if they're coming back or not because for every student whose family says they're not coming back next year that's another slot in the lottery process that we then can see another student and then once someone's notified that they're in the their applications been

188accepted we have to give them a seat we have to give them an opportunity to accept the seat and then go on to the next person on the list and so the letters the notification the processes takes about 90 days from once that lotteries ran to be completed and then with our general transfers as well then we get into any um you know feedback or processes where individuals request a hearing or they request on a review and so it it takes us time to work through i think um that would be a concern with waiting the other um the other day applying to other schools it's not just within district what we heard was folks apply to charter schools and they apply to other locations and we want to not defer them to charter schools

189because they haven't heard back from us and whether or not they were accepted into one of um our choice programs or were accepted into another school on transfer and so the other premise was they all are running their lotteries in december january early january mid-january and so we are also trying to get our families notified early on i i so that's just part of the the you know the reason it it's happening so soon i do think what is permissible and something we certainly could look at is we have this first round we go through with people who are here people have been notified people who understand who live here the processes but then as those families register for kindergarten either adding them to the wait list if they're interested or running a lottery or

190you know we could we could look at and i you know we have to talk to staff and christine you know is there a possibility that we we you know if they're interested we get their information at that time so that they could at least get on a wait list if there was slots that open up or people move at the end of the year folks decide they're not coming back catherine well i'm new but i and it's it's too late for this year but i do believe that there are things we can do with our existing software and other programs where people can rank their choices right now people are only allowed to apply for one thing so if we allow them to say oh hillsboro is my first choice and then central is

191my second choice that would help and i definitely agree with patrick about the ability for people who enroll later in the year to just be added to a wait list and there are lots of things that we can discuss but for the future and one thing i just want to make sure um demographics are correct i think miss mckenzie you referenced us um being an 85 percent white school um we're not 85 percent we're at 77 um so i just want to make sure that that um statistic is just is corrected okay that's that's great thanks for correcting that do you mind um telling me how many classroom teachers of color you guys have right now did you our whole staff i just met classroom teachers sure so we have both asian hispanic black multi-racial

192and white teachers all present you know at hillsborough elementary and that's that's all staff raven thank you um okay did i lose see i see your hand up well but i feel like was bonnie supposed to go and then well and then brenda i i just had i just i wanted to mention that orange county has is piloting a point-to-point transportation system and i wonder if they might if we decide to open up this transportation system if they might work with us and maybe we can leverage that or and i realize there's some restrictions when you're moving school kids around although i went to school on a public school on a public transportation bus but but i think it's worth a conversation with the county to see if we might be able to if they

193might be willing to work with us to get it happening quicker so just a thought and i didn't know you have to answer it for us do you want us to give you an extra week and maybe it's a question for miss kreider i know catherine do you want us to give you an extra couple weeks to allow more applicants to come in under the new rules or do you want what would you prefer we just let it go as scheduled you want more time i mean historically the numbers that we have right now in the lottery are um higher than we've had at this time in the past um you know i don't know where they fall in those demographic you know in the different um zones uh but we've kind of been clear

194about the lottery window being january you know the month of january um you know so i thought that would be that would be up to you whether or not you want to expand it for another week or so is mao did you want to respond to that or well i again i knew so i i don't feel like i should comment to in-depth but and you did vote on the open and closed schools and the different deadlines in december and maybe this is the year to stick with it and then start investigating other options in the in future years but i will do whatever patrick and the board recommend yeah no i was just going to chime in thank you all so much uh and i agree with uh and actually was going to say

195something similar to what uh miss mal just uh mentioned and i would also think if we did extend we would have to extend for all uh choice schools not just for hillsboro elementary okay thank you dr felder um will and then brenda i think yes so uh i just wanted to follow up on the middle school discussion because uh that is listed as one of the barriers and i have talked to many people in our community that won't consider it because they don't want their kids on middle school or i don't want my kid on a different middle school so i just want to be very clear that if we're looking at moving barriers this is the first step next step is you know getting more off the list because if people aren't applying regardless

196of what our lottery is it's not going to change so we're going to have to i think look at these other options to figure out how do we ensure we remove as many barriers for families as possible thank you okay brenda yes speak yes thank you uh i'd like to say to the principal and patrick and everybody who's been working on this i appreciate it because you know we've been talking about the lack of diversity at this school for over a decade and it's been talk uh but with all of uh the parameters that you are putting in place i believe that we're actually gonna move forward to do something about it we've just been talking forever and uh to the principal one first good step i see here is that i thank you for

197picturing our actual students um lately i've been seeing a lot of stock photos on our slides and uh when our community can see their their kids uh they feel included and they feel good about it so to the principal thank you for for that i really appreciate that um it makes a difference and i certainly hope that um we will do all of the things that you said in the recommendations so that we can get have a more diverse uh student population uh i do want to follow up on one question you listed a plethora of diverse teachers so say you got 50 teachers and out of all the 50 how many of those are the diverse ones like 10 20 half of them what so so we do have um you know if you

198want to break it down by like teachers and off the top of my head i just i don't know all of our the specific numbers of teachers versus tas versus staff versus you know a lot of our groups um you know but um but but we have over the past you know a few years that's um that's been a goal of ours is to increase the number of minority um and diverse staff that we have at hillsborough elementary and um and it's a slow process and because we don't have a lot of turnover right and so um so when we do you know um it's important to us you know even you know in positions like social working and you know in the student support areas you know so we're we're always seeking out to

199have you know that diverse population as we can and fill those positions excuse me you mentioned teacher assistance i specifically was referring to teachers and i'll tell you why i was in i went to a classroom a couple of days ago and a little girl ran up to me and said ah i am so happy to see you in this classroom well it was a little black girl who said that to me and i know exactly what she meant because she said are you our teacher today and i said yes i'm your teacher so the teacher makes it it's good to have a diverse everybody else but the teacher really makes a big big difference i just wanted to throw that out there and thank you and thank you again i i really mean it

200about those pictures it means a lot they're not stock pictures and you because you can tell the stock photos your kids look like they were having a good old time brenda the answer to that question is two classroom teachers at hes and the reason that that matters is because they're the ones that take the heat for hard conversations that are happening in that school and that's how you change the culture so i just think it's really important to name it and i'll just leave it at that oh okay well i i know it's important because i was shocked when the little girl came up and hugged me because she thought i was her teacher but i was just a teacher for three days not forever yeah i mean it's a long slow process to shift

201to shift staff and i know when that's happened in some other some of our other elementary schools i've just been really pleased and it's slow progress and i just hope we can continue to do things like because this came up in our student forums too when teachers when kids feel like they don't see staff and teachers who represent them what can we do to push that in more and and i agree that other other staff as well but do we need to bring in diverse speakers do we need to bring in diverse authors you know there's so many things um we might really need to work um to do to create that environment where students are seeing the person the leader you know the leader in charge um look like them so we couldn't we

202couldn't disagree with you more those and actually it's three three teachers of color um but um and that's that's why the work of our equity team and that positive climate team of leading those brave not perfect conversations is so important right because we need to be having those that dialogue and that vocabulary about diversity and inclusivity you know the and belonging what does that mean right um and that's that's the work um that all of our teachers are championing um and having those difficult conversations and that that's important yeah so i thank you for being here miss kreider because they are hard conversations and so thank you for fielding these questions tonight and thank you to all the staff who are working on making some shifts here any um closing comments from board members before

203we um i asked for a motion um in regards to the the priorities advised by dr felder and her team no i move that we accept uh the recommendation by the team they've done a terrific job second okay i have a uh motion from by tear stevens and i couldn't tell who the second was from this is me hillary miss mckenzie thank you so much okay mr atherton yes hey i vote yes um ms houser yes miss mckenzie yes dr moore yes smiley yes and vice chair stevens yes okay great thank you so much all right we have one action item left and if we choose not to spend an hour on it we could be done before 10. oh wow yeah and um because this item was slated for 30 minutes and we took

204an hour that's that's okay it says it works it was worth it it was worth it yes ma'am okay so um dr felder um are we inviting uh ms hatcher and mr abella to lead this it's time for us we are happy to uh but first i would like to thank again uh mrs kreider and miss mal for uh uh joining mr aberle in this presentation and to the board for your support of the um uh priorities tonight to increase diversity at hillsborough elementary so thank you okay so mr abele and miss hatcher i think miss hatcher is going to lead off here and then i'll pick up okie dokie okay good evening doctor i'm sorry good evening board chair board members dr felder and thank you mr oblay i want to lead the discussion

205this evening and start with the two um board policies for first read and that board those two policies are twenty three hundred and twenty three ten we discussed these two policies um in our december seventeen pilot board policy uh meeting uh boy i'm sorry board committee meeting um no that is incorrect that board policy meeting it is late not to apologize um so the first the first um policy we're going to look at um and note some changes you all did receive um in assembly on thursday the strike the um the updates to the policy in way of strikeouts uh mark outs so the first policy we're going to look at is 2300 and that policy is board meetings we did make a recommendation to add to this this section um the wording after june

2061 to add the following wording that the superintendent should keep on file the schedule of regular meetings with the time and the place ensure ensure schedule is posted publicly the schedule will be revised only in accordance with legal requirements for notice so that was the first recommended change um the second recommended change will fall under meeting calendar we're going to remove the items um regular meeting and work session um want to know for a regular meeting the update will be that the meeting will generally generally be held on the second and fourth monday of each month except as modified in the official meeting calendar adopted by the board um any items that you also will receive in here that um let's see here also too i just want to make sure i'm getting my notes

207here correctly um we're gonna remove the regular meeting there uh then also to under um let me see here we're gonna add the wording that talks about um the open session proportion of the meeting will not last longer than three hours except by majority of the vote i'm sorry majority vote of the board any items on the agenda at the end of the meeting um should um maybe we will we remove the wording 10 pay 10 pm and maybe carried over to our next meeting so those are our recommendations for first read on this policy and i do know that eva is on should be on the call as well she did help with these uh revisions per our meeting so if there are any questions um i'm prepared to answer those now does anyone

208have questions um from miss hatcher or for ms dupison i i just have one are we going to go policy by policy to each one i'm not i'm not sure what mr abele is going to do but i'm just going to and i don't have to do it in this format but i was just indicating what was strike what was what the changes were if i don't need to i don't have to and i'm not sure what mr oblay's going how he's going to present his and the next one i have there are very very few changes on the next one i do have yeah okay other questions i see bonnie as your hand up i can't see everyone else right now though i do have a comment on policy 2310 um and that's um

209b2 since we're no longer distinguishing business meetings and work sessions that section b1 suffices and i think we can strike section b2 i think it's superfluous it's redundant actually miss duberson can you comment on that please yes that's fine that i don't object if if the board so um you know generally we would pass them through first reading to second reading so if the board agrees with that someone just included in your motion to make that revision to 2310 um and i will note as far as the process tonight most of the updates or many of the updates are just periodic updates from the school board association that probably don't require review and detail these particular ones were um generated from the board rather than from those outside recommendations yeah i think that's why we

210address them in more detail thank you eva um question questions other than uh let's see will's hand us up yeah so i'm i'm guessing we're just going to comment on the ones we have comments on versus yeah let's just comment on these first two okay that's fine so on 2310 the only concern i have is i i do see that public comment will be limited to one hour my only concern is if we have five agenda items and some group comes in and signs up the first 20 people the other people that want to comment on other items that are on the agenda will never hear so i i'm not sure the answer to that but i am concerned that the one hour limit is going to cause us to not hear from people that

211just come in to speak on other agenda items so uh i i guess i'm going to ask eva do you know how other districts handle this or is there a one-hour limit is common some have shorter um i think you know we're doing away with the requirement that you sign up for certain agenda item so i guess what you're saying is the first 20 people might all have the same perspective and i guess that's that's true anytime but and the board can vote in a certain meeting if there's a lot going on the board could vote to wave this and extend the deadline um you don't have to have a limit i do i find that it can be helpful and generally the way we handle it and the way you have been handling it

212is just to limit the number of people who will sign up so the other question i had even around that is and it makes sense because we won't be able to do business if we haven't unlimited right the second question i have around it is it says it's limited to one hour per meeting is that total people talk time or is that typically hey we started the you know public comment at six o'clock and now it's seven and it was five people because you know finding the person and telling them they can go you know i'm just curious and practicality that's up to the board the way you have typically handled it is just is because otherwise the time keeping can become the math is hard if you're actually like timing well this person had

213three minutes but they only talked two minutes and 42 seconds is to say each person has three minutes so 20 people equals 60 minutes okay all right that's all the questions i had for that one thank you okay bonnie i i think i can yeah i can't see you yet but is there anyone else other than lonnie who wants to speak to these two policies okay go ahead bonnie i just want to build on on will's point because the whole reason i think the board render you were on the board at the time but the whole reason the board split these work sessions and business meetings was because the public was coming in and taking up all the time on topics that were not germane to the agenda and they just wanted to be you

214know they just would take up a lot of time and so that's why something like a half hour for topics that are not on the agenda um and a half hour and then i think if it's on the agenda the public gets as long as they want to talk about it but i'm with will i'm worried about groups coming in and um [Music] co-opting the agenda for their purposes um the one thing i'll say about that is it has been our experience that if you limit it if you tell people they have to be related to an agenda item they will say it is and they will just pick one and it will be well into their comment before you can really determine if that's true or not and so i i think the experience

215of the chair was that that was kind of impossible to math 180 right so it lately has not worked as well as perhaps it worked when initially adopted yeah i i'm used to a structure the county commissioners use a structure where you sign up on an item that's not on the agenda and then you sign up to speak on the agenda item if you want and then it's and those comments are only allowed when the agenda item is you know they're they're allowed you know essentially steph makes the presentation um and then public comment and then the board deliberates which has the added value of placing public comments in the context of the of the topic as opposed to people just speaking at you know in a random order um the policy committee wasn't so

216favorable to that i think there was a concern about parents but um from a meeting perspective it really runs well if you have a lot of people if we have a lot of people it means that we we're doing some things probably not exactly working well but anyway i just i i'm willing to go lots of ways i do think we should that's all okay any other discussion or can i have a motion on these two policies or one of them so moved for the first two policies twenty three hundred and twenty three ten but oh okay i i understand from eva that we should make a um an adjustment in the motion so with the deletion of 2310 b2 yes exactly okay i have a motion from miss stevens and the second from mr

217atherton um this houser yes uh ms mckenzie yes demore yes ms smiley yes ms stevens yes mr atherton yes and i vote yes great first three of those two policies have passed um i'll pass back to you ms hatcher or unless you're passing to mr abella for i am passing i am excuse me i am passing to mr abele and thank you for the approval first reading of these two policies thank you so much for your work ms hatcher all right good evening again so there are nine policies uh listed here um i have given you a guiding memo as part of your packet that outlines each of the policies i shared this with the policy committee and there were a couple recommendations that have been incorporated with the feedback from the december 17th policy

218meeting within each of the items it includes any north carolina school boards association required changes to the policy any school boards association recommended changes to the policy because we do use their policy templates and then any administrative recommendations so you can see the justifications for any changes uh being recommended the first policy 1500 is just the technical policy it will not cut our technical change it will not come back before you it's just aligning that policy with the school boards association policy manual i've just included it so we have a record of where policy 1500 went to and why it was changed but because it's a technical correction just alignment to policy i don't believe you need a vote to do that um and i'll defer to the yeah okay um and so just the

219next would you like me to go through each one i know you have the background in the information i don't want to waste your time since you have the information before you so i'll just pause then if you've got questions yeah any questions will i have one for policy 1510 uh section c uh where it says uh it starts with all exterior doors must remain locked unless being monitored by employee in order to ensure no unauthorized individuals are entering the building employees shall immediately report the loss of an id badge or key to their immediate supervisor i would like to see us add in that employee shall immediately report any doors or windows that do not lock or close i mean you can lose your key or badge but if the door doesn't lock or

220close then it won't matter so it seems like in the spirit of what this is saying we should also include that as well okay um sarah had her hand up and then bonnie i was just gonna say i didn't feel the need to go through each one and thank mr abele for the memo summarizing the changes that was helpful agreed okay johnny do you still have a question or comment yeah i i just have a couple of simple questions on the 9000 series um first on 9010 should the town of hillsborough and the city of melbourne also be listed since they have zoning jurisdiction in the district and it's just a question on 9 30 i have a question about accommodating design build and performance contracts because sometimes if i depending on how i read

221the policies it implies that architects and engineers are separate from the contract obviously we always want licensed professionals doing the work but they may be part of a construction team especially if it's a large project so in section a i wondered if we should add something that that specifies that's the services the a e services may be part of the of the contract and then in c2 it it suggests that if a change is over three hundred thousand dollars that we kick it over to the architects as an engineers as though they're a separate organization and i guess there's a question about in are we looking for in an independent organization or an expert and so i wonder if those 300 000 changes should be kicked back to the superintendent instead again i just don't

222you know if it's a big change i i don't want we might want someone independent from the so so start again architects and engineers may be part of the con construction contract and then separately if there's a big overrun on the project i don't want the people who have the overrun to be approving the change so i want to or when you say 300 do you mean 30 000 300 000 was uh says if it's over 300 000 it has to get kicked back to the architect in engineering and if they're part of the contract that doesn't make sense maybe it does i don't know i'm sorry are you in 91 10 no i'm in i'm sorry i went to 90 30. 90 10 was just on the the hillsborough city in melbourne the rest

223was 90 30. the school construction and again i wanted to be clear that some of our contracts the architects and engineers may be part of the construction contract so as i'm looking through that that was currently in policy and there is some general statute language around projects that are greater in excess of 300 000 and the requirements for that i think what we've done in the policy on change orders and contract we've actually we've actually lowered that in policy above that in c for change orders we require and have reduced it from a hundred thousand dollars to fifty thousand dollars so that requirement i believe is a is a general statute requirement that they they submit those on those formal projects but we require documentation and approval um for anything any change order but any

224change orders um over fifty thousand dollars require additional approval yeah i understand i was i was talking about point two additional requirements for contracts in excess of three hundred thousand and it's saying that the contractor shall submit a proposed change to the project architect or engineer for review and my only question is how does that work if the project architecture engineer is part of the contractor so i just wonder if they should just submit the change in writing to the superintendent uh for action you know and leave it there so this is a this does come from a legal distinction that under under chapter 133 that what the purpose of the the statute is to ensure that public buildings don't take big projects consulting an architect right and um so that's what we have under

225i understand actually well let me finish and so under section b it says you know if you have any project over x amount even if it's not a new building but just a renovation you have to consult an architect so then the point of the the change order is just to point out that even if your project's already been to an architect if you and if the contractor now says we need to amend you know and and it's going to be this large cost increase you have to go back to the architect and have them review that um so regardless of whether you know so i wouldn't take that requirement out i think that that is necessary legally speaking as to if that if they're employed by the same firm i'm not sure i have

226enough frame of reference to give an opinion on whether we would also hire an independent architect i think it would depend but i wouldn't want to take out the requirement that it go through the project's architect i i agree with that i just um trying to um [Music] be accommodating to con projects that are design build contracts or performance contracts that where the architect is part of the construction team you know so if we want independence this doesn't do it but if we don't that doesn't matter to us then this works fine well i'm not saying it doesn't matter i'm saying it's hard to make a blanket statement that you do it every time or no time yeah so let me make it really easy on point two i was just saying thinking that we

227could just um do the proposed change in writing period for you know and because i don't know exactly how that would work if there are architects and engineers would because i think it's a 300 000 change um and so if they're the architect and engineer if they're part if that's part of the contract team do we have i don't i think we want to have some discretion on how we review that but it might not be them that's what i you know what i mean it might be different you know we we may choose to i mean it really depends if we're talking about a 15 million dollar contract or a million dollar contract so you know it's hard to to really look at this i just don't want to imply that the fox can

228guard the hen house that if we're if the architect and the engineers are are part of the contract team they might not be the final authority on reviewing large changes that's that's my bottom line and i i don't disagree with that i guess i don't think the current i would not strike to the project architect or engineer for review if you in a certain situation also want an independent review of course you could do that but i i don't think it's either or okay so if their the contract is include the contract includes the architects then they the contractor submits it to themselves and then we and then we're covered because we have to approve it but it's over 50 000. so right that's kind of what you're saying and that that that works that

229works because we review it anyway yeah any change order of that size would come back to the board okay all right thank you thank you okay are we ready to either proceed mr abella or do you want us do do you want to answer questions on all of them and then maybe there's gonna be a motion to it yeah before i lose track of the questions let me back up to 90 10 for hillsboro and mebane was not mentioned because they do not have specific school construction standards although within the zoning we would follow whatever the local requirements they're not specific that the town of hillsboro um in mebane the we do follow the orange county school construction standards in the north carolina department of public instruction but right now there's no other specific school

230construction standards that i'm aware of that have been presented from either of those entities okay thank you any other questions from board members i'll move the i'll i'll move ahead i'm sorry you're gonna make a motion bonnie to you no will will i think has a question were you raising your hand i i was gonna make a motion second remember so i just take the emotion with uh the amendment uh 1510 and approval the rest of the um first readings great i have a motion for mr atherton and a second from vice chair stevens uh miss bowser yes is mckenzie yes dr moore this is smiley yes miss stevens yes mr atherton yes and i'm yes that is great they have fast first reading with that um amendment there and dr felder is there anything

231else you would like us to discuss tonight or should we entertain a motion to adjourn chair move to adjourn second okay motion from stevens and a second from miss mckenzie dr moore yes smiley yes stevens yes mr atherton yes i vote yes miss houser yes and ms mckenzie yes we are adjourned thank you everybody for your time attention this evening have a great night yes love it you