Davie County Schools - BOE Meeting (6/1/2021)

001it's pretty impressive that was impressive good evening i'd like to call the june 1st i have to repeat that june 1st 2021 meeting of the davie county school board to order it is amazing that we're sitting here at june 1st but i'd like to welcome a crowd uh in our board room i'm excited and it's it's it's a little bit nerve-wracking to have people on top is that of us so just so thankful that you guys are here thankful for a great year a lot of people have worked really really hard to continue the progress that we've made so just super excited i'm glad everyone could be here first item on the agenda is our invocation loving and gracious god we thank you today for all your blessings for the successful outcomes of our school

002events and for all of our staff members we ask that you bless them abundantly and we continue to seek your wisdom guidance courage and strength be with us in our deliberations and help us to be wise in the decisions we make for the good of all of those who have placed their trust and confidence in us give us insight to lead with integrity that our decisions may reflect what is right and good keep us from short-sightedness and pettiness help us to make decisions that are for the good of all and guard us from blind self-interest grant us the humility to always seek your will in all that we do and say amen thank you next if you will stand and join me with for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of

003the united states and to of america for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all next item is uh adopting the agenda uh and i will ask for a motion i have a motion by mr drexler i have a second by mr carroll any discussion all those in favor motion carries 7-0 next i will entertain a motion for approval of the minutes from our regular meeting of may 4th i have a motion by mr drexler i have a second by ms smith in discussion all those in favor motion carries 7-0 uh next important dates we've got a couple um june 3rd at 11 a.m we have central davie academy graduation we have two uh graduates that are scheduled june 4th on friday it's the davie county school's last day

004for students and his early release hard to believe june 5th this saturday at 8 30 a.m the davie county high school graduation at war eagle stadium and uh let's see june 7th board of commissioners meeting and we're back in here july 6th at 4 p.m for our board meeting and then the board of commissioners uh meeting on july 12th uh 6 pm rolling along uh next i'll call mr wallace for the superintendent's report thank you mr chairman good afternoon everyone and you're exactly right it seems kind of odd sitting this close it's hard to imagine i guess we've been conditioned for the past 15 months but it is really exciting to see everyone sitting in in this audience and for those of you that are joining us online we're almost there we're almost to the

005finish line you feel almost like a sprinter or a long distance runner you can now see the disc the end but i want to say thank you students and staff for what you've done we're very encouraged by what you have done this year and being such a difficult year and we'll talk more about that once we do close the year for for another group of young men and women but either way it's it is good to be able to be here and to know that we're real close to the finish line i want to congratulate the davie county early college high school graduating class of 2021 the students and staff ms lynch and had a wonderful honorable authentic graduation ceremony last on the 22nd mark may 22nd at david county high school it was phenomenal

006so again congratulations this coming saturdays already mentioned mr chairman said at 8 30 a.m in warrior stadium another big day we'll have over 360 deserving young men and women that will graduate from david county high school we're looking forward to this event and some people ask me about the weather and that being a building administrator for 10 years a high school building administrator for 10 years i said ask the students and they will tell you what they want to do stay right there and as long as it's not thundering and lightning let's roll the show so i think right now it looks like there's going to be a chance of rain in the afternoon but not that morning but either way we we will make our way through that but it's going to be a

007big day summer school extension learning plan was approved by dpi recently i want to congratulate ms lyon and her curriculum team for their efforts put forward for this it's a big plan that we the dates are june the 21st students will be involved june the 21st through july the 15th uh at this point we're expecting over 730 students now understand we typically do not have that many but this is open for all that want to attend and uh typically this does include to read to achieve folks and and those but at this point we're expecting approximately 730 and that will change with exams and final grades coming this week could that could add some could take a few away so we're positive about that number i will tell you there's districts around us that have

008struggled to find staffing and we have been very very fortunate to be able to staff our classes that we're having we're offering um enrollment update currently we have we are projected for next year our allotment is based upon a projection of 6041 students we currently have 5812 students enrolled so i went back i said oh my goodness should i panic over 200 less but i spent some time on the phone with aaron and miss jemison today and when you look not last year of course that's not a good reference but the year prior to that and the one before that we were right around the 200 mark short at this time and part of that are kindergartners that's the that's probably the the anomaly right now of knowing what's going to happen in our first

009grade in our kindergarten but at this point when you compare years past we are doing very well with the numbers already enrolled so to our staff's point into aaron's point aaron foyle we're not sure if we've done an outstanding job of communicating is there a lot of anticipation or we just have that many more coming and we're not sure yet so that's what causes agenda haynes a lot of concern and about staffing so but we are we do my point is we feel good about where we are and uh we're not any major concerns at this point attendance update again i can't compare it to last year have to go back a year prior to that we were at 95.24 percent in 1819 and the current rate is 93.44 so a little bit down and

010that's in again in large part probably due to summer school we are still working through our concerns about failures or course completions i will taste a couple of positives the typically for high school seniors in the past i believe i'm correct on this first statement i know i'll be correct on the next two you had to have them graduated or complete their coursework by june 30th correct close in a typical year but now the state has originally said july something but now they've bumped it august the 5th so my point is if we have kids that are close to graduating they have time to recover a couple of courses or credits maybe between now and august 5th so some of our communication about graduation may be a little delayed but that is a positive thing

011they're extending the opportunity for them to graduate uh sr2 and sr3 monies the american rescue act whatever you want to call it but it's esther 2 and she iii are two different applications that mr anthony davis and clay harris were primarily responsible for completing the i will tell you that we received uh approval of application of esser 3 approximately a week and a half ago or so okay i'll tell you why he knows that here in just a moment i'll go ahead and tell you now because that's 8 million dollars that's why he knows that we received approval for esser 2 today there was a question that we had to respond to so my point is s or 2 monies again a part of the american rescue act will equate to 3.6 million dollars esther

0123 money equates to 8 million dollars so 11.6 million dollars will come to david county schools and we will tell you how that's going to be broken out clay is going to share that with you specifically now there are some guidelines around that as you can imagine learning laws staffing facilities and those things but we clay is going to share that with you here in just a few minutes but my point to you all is that we've we had completed the application on time it was a pretty tight window and we have been approved by for both we've received that today so again that is a lengthy process and again i commend clay and anthony davis for their efforts and that i would recently i met with the school reopening team that i formed last

013year this was a small we had two reopening teams we had a larger team and we had a smaller team and that team concluded a local physician suzanne wright our director of the david health and human services david then john eller but now david bone our county manager and our lead nurse lori dingler we had a really good meeting we spent time just rehashing this past year looking through some things and what we learned and what we need to do moving forward and how we approach next year and of course we don't have any clear plans from dhhs yet again you as you know i meet with that group superintendents and dpi in in health department dhhs meet usually once a week uh but we don't have any clear protocol about next year but i

014will tell you that the the local physician is affiliated with novant health and we have started talking about messaging and we talked about the value or how important it is to send a clear message unfortunately we are seeing we're not sure about mask yet for next year for students we're not sure but we are already seeing some kindergarteners enroll with mask exemptions which let me say to if you if you recall when we first approached the year last year we did a good job communicating and our physicians said if you really need an exemption a medical exemption you may not be in the condition to be in a school building so we had very few if any medical exemptions i'm not saying there's not something that's worthy of that a point is that message needs

015to be loud and clear about this is what we have to enforce you can imagine a school with 500 kids a school with 1750 kids you can wear you don't have to wear it that will not work so we will follow the protocol from dpi once we get it but again we're working together with this team and we've actually already worked with novant health and the local health department to arrange for a vaccine clinic again by choice obviously the latter part of july and that way their second dose will be available prior to the beginning of school so we already got some dates set but we'll hear more about that as we move forward in that regard too you know pfizer has shared that 16 and older can get the vaccination um and you know

016we held a clinic for 16 and older with parent permission now 18 and up can an 18 year old walk in and get it and um the abc collaborative team i met with again last week and this group that i met with again from physician health department said that they would probably not be the vaccine will probably not be available for anyone under 12 until september october so again if that becomes available we will try to we will work with our providers and we will offer a clinic if parents so choose to have their child vaccinated so again we're just working with them had a good meeting and um as we prepare as we close this year and prepare for next year all right uh it's an honor for me now to kind of switch

017gears and recognize the following students and um wouldn't i don't know years ago i heard chuck swindon on the sermon say you know a man's real character by and of course man or woman is what he's talking about by their response their reactions versus their actions well tonight we have a a presentation unlike what we have done in the past we would hope to be face to face but we want to recognize our kids that have been received the character education award and so i want to say again they're not with us today personally but i want to say thank you and very often how you responded students we gained energy from that so our students have responded or reacted the right way and we're very appreciative of that so what you're going to see

018board and guests is a powerpoint of our character ed students that were selected from each school all right i was trying to delay and carry that out just a little bit any questions about anything i've shared while we're while we're waiting i have two quick questions um is there any money from this s or two and three going toward the pre-k programs i don't think so because they're funded differently and and so i don't think any of the assert funds will be can be slated for preschool just k-12 okay and the second question on the 730 students that's going to summer school are we going to have to run a full transportation route this year they're the routes are not as they are in the normal year but very close to that mr potts yes

019good question yes you're welcome other questions okay we're getting closer and mr chairman that will conclude my report as we roll here and this kind of transitions us over to recognitions anyway and i and then um we will pick up with a second recognition right after this okay [Applause] again this is our character ed selection our winners if you will from each respective school and board and guest the each one of those young men and women will receive a letter and a certificate from me congratulations uh next recognition we have ffa awards i'll call on jesse ledbetter [Music] step up to the mic i'll have a nathan and casey and bailey if they'll come up [Music] let's go right here so you'll face them yeah right here so and like to recognize bailey for her

020prepared public speech last year she placed first in the state it's a seven minute speech on agriculture issues we're really proud of bailey for achievement this year she placed sixth in the state for that same competition but first in her region and we look forward to her winning states again next year so she can go to go to nationals for real then we have casey and nathan they both competed on the floor culture and dairy judging team they placed first place in the region and then our chapter won a national chapter award last year and received two stars as a chapter and this is a this is graded on community effort student achievement and personal growth i guess we'll give them a round of applause yeah [Applause] thanks guys awesome job guys uh next i'll

021call on andrew jemison for the north carolina allstate band i'm short do i need to well uh good afternoon everybody uh if i could have hazel marion join me up here as miss james and mr nelson spoke to you last month about the middle school all-state band we know that allstate band is one of the highest honors that a student can receive in high school in the band program and after auditioning through the district program and we have seven districts in our state hazel was second chair flute in our district and she went on to audition virtually uh with all the other flutes in the different sections of our state and placed second in our state so want to give her at this time our her all-state band medal and say congratulations to her [Applause]

022thank you congratulations we were rolling right along uh next david county high school mock trial team i'll call them mr nicholson and miss caudle i'm going to turn over to miss caldwell in a second i just want to say that um very proud of this group of uh men and women um because it was virtual this year we i was able to see a lot of their competitions this year both the regional state and nationals uh before they competed i talked to my daughter about this would be a good club for her to join next year because she loves to argue but after i saw them argue i really don't want her joining this club anymore so because they did a great job so i'm going to turn up to miss caldwell to talk about

023all the accomplishments they accomplished this year thank you so typically the mock trial team competes in a courtroom and this year just kind of like everything else we moved to a virtual platform and these students handled that beautifully that transition we were able to get over our hurdle of breaking through from regionals to state for the very first time in davie county history and um to walk away from the state tournament a state championship um as the state championship team the first public school in over a decade that has done that in in north carolina and it was an honor to compete at the national level and represent north carolina and davie county so individually i'm going to call these students names out let me get the right or is it just a certificate sorry

024okay one certificate and um i'm going to let somebody toward the middle you guys click there y'all scoot in for the picture okay so this is this is ashley tatum and she is a junior ethan page who is a senior jackson trivet who is a senior in both ethan and jackson are co-captains this year we have emma green as a sophomore owen fender who is a junior kaden koble a sophomore zeb chapman who is a senior and we have two seniors who weren't able to be with us tonight aiden booth and luca yacopy it's caught yes you've got to tell what happened in the regionals you talk about reaction you check a person's character about the reaction yeah so tell them what happened please so we competed in regionals we went up against a school

025that has been um a tough competitor in in the state and we were announced the winner at regionals and we celebrated and we all went home and at about 6 30 that evening i got a phone call from the state director saying that the regional director had announced the wrong school as the winner yeah that's kind of a hard pill to swallow because we were like we did it we finally did it we've made davie county history and they offered us an at-large bid they said we haven't seen all the ballots come in from all the regions yet but we'd like to offer you an at-large bid i wasn't sure how these guys were going to handle that because we we like to work for what we get and agreed yeah and so i said

026i don't know i'm gonna have to talk to my team hardest google meet we've had all year where um we sent out a remind everybody got on and i had we're all celebrating several of them were pulled away from celebratory dinners to have this google meet and we um had to drop that news that we were the runners-up instead of the winners of the region for in salisbury and um gave them the night to sleep on it we all talked again that sunday afternoon at one o'clock and the determination was that we were going to accept the bid by that time i'd already talked to the president of the state mock trial program as well as the state director and she said well we've looked at the ballots that have come in from all of

027the regions and based on your speaker points her team deserves to be there so we felt good about that we felt even better about it when in the finals round at state we beat the team that beat us at regionals so that's our story but i will say this sorry i will say this in the midst of that really bad news you talk about character yeah thank you congratulations guys next i will call on mike asher and dole nicholson for the uh davey county high school men's tennis all-conference conference champion sorry you're good thank you mr junker um school board staff guests mr wallace it's truly an honor to be here today um i guess you know as i was writing down here and i realized what we were getting recognized it was it was

028pretty amazing i've been here multiple times to do this but to have a regular season cpc championship team two players of the year and three coaches of the year i think speaks highly to the to the quality of people students and coaches that we're putting together at the high school so it's very honored it's just a great honor to be here very humbling for me i will say this any of these awards are always very meaningful well deserved but through covid if i were a recipient at this point in time i would probably put an asterisk by it one day all the things that they battled to going back to last summer when we put this thing back together to workouts and the modified schedules and the way things worked out modified seasons we're still

029playing through june 26 but i think if i was a recipient today i would probably feel a little bit more honored if that's the right way to say it so again i'm very humbled to be here at this time i'm going to turn it over to coach nixon and let him talk about his team and his player of the year and then we'll move it from there thank you coach thank you very much for having us today we live on tobacco road and many of you will remember the great basketball coach norm sloan who said this i don't really have to coach i just have to drive the bus and make sure i get them where they're going on time well when you coach the davie county tennis team and you have players like i

030have that's how it works you just have to drive the bus and make sure you get them there on time i am delighted to tell you that all the things we've accomplished on the court and there are many fail in comparison to the things we've accomplished off the court as i watched mr wallace the character education come up two of our guys also got character education awards our team gpa is 3.275 we've been a north carolina scholar athlete team seven years in a row this year we had nine of our guys out of qualify for individual scholar athlete awards and then you said what happens to you when you have to react instead of act so last year when i got the call from coach absher that the season was over we had just beaten

031reagan who's our nemesis and we were 6-0 and on our way to a conference championship and coach after said that's it you're done and i was so mad at no i'm kidding i wasn't but this year my guys came back and they had one goal in mind and that was to beat reagan and win a conference championship well i'm forced to tell the truth the truth is reagan beat us once and we beat them once but they beat us 5-4 we beat them 6-3 i'm not good at math mr wallace but i think that makes us the champs doesn't it you're with that not many of my guys were able to be here tonight but uh three were if you guys just want to stand up where you are this is burke rosenbaum owen fender

032and slade give him a big hand [Applause] that's slade keaton i'm sorry i didn't say slave didn't say slade's last name slate keaton sorry about that in addition uh burke if you want to come up here for just a second you guys can sit back down so um burke is a sophomore finishing his sophomore year in now two a season and a half what would have been two full seasons the number of losses burke has in cpc play is zero when when you're a tennis coach you have to get to five you play nine matches a team that wins five wins as a coach when i show up to play i'm ahead two to nothing because burke's gonna play singles and burke's gonna play doubles so it's very very nice to have him and this

033year burke won the conference and was named cpc player of the year [Applause] one last thing we talk about being davie county through and through i don't know how many of you have had a chance to know somebody who both played on and coached on a cpc championship team in the same sport terry eames as my assistant coach has been for four years she doesn't get paid a dime and she is one of those people played on and coached on a cpc championship team if you give her a big [Applause] hand thanks coach nixon at this time i'll turn it over to coach wyatt to come up and talk about her player of the year in softball this year uh thank you guys for having us here today um a little bit about london london

034is our junior third baseman um she is committed to unc charlotte and stats wise if you follow baseball and softball in the regular season cpc london had a 606 baton average which is pretty stout she had five home runs 16 rbis and then also defensively she had a 941 fielding percentage she led our team on the field she was voted team captain by her peers she's one of those players that you never want to see leave lucky to get her back next year and excited to see what next year holds so she was voted on nominated and then voted on by the other coaches in the conference so london you are the cpc player of the [Applause] year [Applause] thanks morgan so i'll do the three coaches of the year awards and again it's just

035a very what's such great representation for our school and i will say just a blanket statement these three people as good of coaches and and teachers and as as shane is in our community um they're great people uh and and again i think that that goes a long way and and i think um we all would agree that as much as we want to win championships uh you know when we have leaders who are developing these young men and women that's the ultimate the end result so i would just say that about all three of them so at this time i'd like to call up lindsay adams come on up lindsay lindsey was selected by her peers in the cpc as the women's basketball coach of the year and um you know when i let

036mr wallace and mr nicholson and anthony davis know this they all three had some really good things to say but some things that stuck out one amazing accomplishment for a first year teacher a first year coach and again as i spoke to earlier just having the things we had to go through with coven she brings an energy and enthusiasm to our program that is really fun and exciting to see so hopefully we're here to keep her here for a long time and so our coach of the year and women's basketball was lindsey adams let's give her a nice round of applause congratulations coach white if you'd come on back up so morgan was selected by again by our peers as the cpc softball coach of the year i won't i won't tell you her record

037last year when covet hit but i will say this we were at the school one evening doing some things we were morgan was actually helping me talk through some things for seniors and we were just talking and and at that point in time we were hoping that there might still be some season and uh one one reason why was she had a bunch of young girls and just playing was going to help them unfortunately as shane said that didn't happen last year but what a turnaround they finished second place uh made it to the state playoffs which was extremely hard this year because the fields were reduced tremendously and won a first round game and we're very competitive in the second round a couple weekends ago we hosted the 1a 4a state softball championships at

038our school it was a great weekend a lot of work but morgan and her staff were just amazing during that time period and it took a lot of prep going up to it so very fortunate again to have morgan a part of us but congratulations to morgan white as the coach of the year all right coach nixon come on back up again uh won the regular season championship this year uh but that wasn't his first that was his second uh he's won the cpc tournament championship two times had five regional qualifiers this year which was uh extremely impressive but he has done just a tremendous job with our tennis program he's been on my staff for eight years now men's basketball so he's had a big impact with a lot of a lot of kids

039in our at our school and in our community uh and again we're just extremely excited for coach nixon and hopefully we're able to keep him for a while too so shane nixon cpc men's tennis coach of the year [Applause] thank you we would love to have you guys sit for the rest of this but you are welcome to leave if you happen to have something better to do congratulations you guys there you go we're gonna have to up our game it's less less pressure now yes right next we have a consent agenda and we have many many things on the consent agenda so i will entertain a motion and they'll ask for questions but i'll entertain a motion anyone motion to approve on the consent agenda i have a motion by miss webb and second

040obama smith any questions discussion scene none all those in favor motion carries seven zero thank you uh next uh with school board mental health policy plan i'll call on miss custer and miss haines and caserec i apologize good evening chairman junker mr wallace board members and guests um it's my pleasure to be here with you this afternoon i'll introduce my wonderful crew jen casseric as our district mtss coordinator andrea collins is our lead school social worker and of course jen dehayne's my partner in crime oftentimes as mr wallace will call us and then you add the triple j and he really is in trouble so i want to share with you this evening a little bit about the requirements for the school-based mental health policy so as you look at this timeline you will see

041that starting back in november of 2019 session law 2019-245 was passed and that included training on sex abuse trafficking and mandatory reporting so at that time miss haines and i started working with the dragonfly house and some other options for us to look at to complete this requirement and we started that this year and it is every two year rotation so we share with that with you because of where it has led as we've gone through several different phases the next step as you see was in june where the general assembly passed session law 2020-7 and what that looks at is the requirement for all school districts to adopt a school-based mental health policy so that required public school units to adopt a plan and part of those requirements were the mental health training program

042as well as the suicide risk protocols after that you can see we've moved on to november where the state board met and they adopted the the next policy there which is the school-based mental health initiative that we're here to talk to you about this evening and then from february to may i had a wonderful team that we started pulling things together and met as a group to look at our strengths and needs and to build forward with what we had in place and the other requirements of this plan so part of that collaborative team you'll see a multi-disciplinary group here that we met with starting back in february lead counselors lead social workers lead nurses our mtss coordinators school psychologists just a large variety of folks we did have two of our assistant principals to

043join with us behavior specialists we import in our sro officers so we had a big group at times that was meeting and one of the very first meetings as we began we began by looking at our strengths and our needs and so as we put our strengths together we realized what we knew was we are in a good place in our district with a lot of things that we already have in place to support the mental health needs and i have to throw out a huge thanks also to sarah saint out of jill wilson's office who was a key player in keeping us in line with the policy starting back in february she led myself and several other student services director in some virtual meets looking at the policy reviewing those requirements as well so

044i want to say a big thank you to sarah for that but we're going to keep moving forward we're going to share with you just some highlights of the components of the plan and looking at that at the end of this the board does have to vote to approve our plan so we'll keep moving forward the plan is broken up um into these different components and we had to go and identify what we already have in place and then write what we would like to do moving forward this is a five-year plan so really addressing year by year what we're going to do to strengthen what we already have in place to address our social emotional learning and the mental wellness support as well for students and staff [Music] so the first part of the

045plan just looks at how we're going to identify those strengths and needs what we already have in place and where we need to continue to move forward looking at this we're going to just continue to use the assessments that we already have in place so we have the fam s which is used really with mtss and that does have behavior and social emotional components looking at all different levels of support this has been rolled out has been something we've been very consistent on at the school and at the district level this past year we did work to align that to nc star so now schools can really tie that into their school improvement plan planning with a easy to use crosswalk tool and really just want to move forward and establish a routine review so

046not just do it at the end of the year we really want to make sure that we're reviewing this plan and the this assessment multiple times a year at both levels the shape that is a very in-depth assessment as well that we already have completed in the past we just want to make sure we have a good team moving forward that's very consistent so establishing that team and then again looking at conducting a routine review the ecats early warning system this is a state technology it's a data tool that's rolling out fully this upcoming school year so we'll be training staff on how to use that and then there'll be quarterly data memos that will be going out to all schools to show where their behavior and seo needs are at what levels of supports

047they have in place and how effective our different interventions are being and the last thing we really want to make sure is that we have routine student services meeting bringing all those folks together at the school but also the district level so we have the right people having these conversations and continually looking at what the data has and moving forward and adjusting as the school year goes by especially next year we do know that will be something a lot of students are going to need is just that support as they transition back into in-person learning more days per week so just having those routine reviews is really going to be helpful for all staff so when we reviewed the current things that we have in place we came up with a few things to go

048over with you these are our current social emotional learning and mental health initiatives so right now we are working through compassionate and resilient schools crs for short and we got a little off um off the path i guess with covid but we hope to have all schools trauma informed and using compassion resilient school strategies for the year 2025 or by the year 2025. so that's our goal we had to just bump it a little bit further and that will include continuing the training that we're doing now with the schools that are currently involved reinforcing those practices conducting other booster classes and needs assessment for individual schools as we move forward we are also in the process of re-establishing or refining the strengths and needs of each school um with our universal screenings that we do

049so we're working on that we're hoping to build that standard treatment protocol for each school um and monitoring the support that we need the other thing that we're moving on to is we're going to strengthen and expand the school-based services with our current partners that would be our school-based mental health support right now we have school-based mental health support from the dragonfly house from cantegra and from insight human services we have that available at the high school north davey middle school and several elementary schools moxville elementary coulomby pinebrook and i believe south davie and central davie academy so we're working on adding a few more therapists from that to expand it to other schools and we are continuing the implementation of safe and secure initiative to provide a safe and inclusive learning environment for every

050student and we're trying to look for connections with these initiatives so that we all kind of blend them together and it's more streamlined for every school next is infrastructure how to move it forward sorry we didn't practice that part so i am going to start with this slide and then agenda is going to review a lot of this in the next slide um so we are adopting and implementing the training program and that is going to be for all staff and it is going to be partly in person and partly virtual or online because that hybrid model works best for staff we determined so we're going to do that we are going to revise and continue to use our suicide risk referral protocol we basically have this in place it we called it our or

051call it our red notebook and every school has one we know where it is we know what's in it but we want to make sure that everyone is using the same information from it we're handling things exactly the same so it too is also about streamlining and making more consistent with every school so we're gonna work on revising that and just updating it making sure everyone is on the same page with that we're also going to establish and implement a threat assessment team we have started this and have started researching threat assessment policies in other districts and so we're hopeful that we can find one that's sort of already in existence that we won't have to recreate the wheel we'll just kind of make it work for us we do have some individual teams started

052at schools already so it's a lot of these things are already in process it's just a matter of making them more consistent across the board and we are going to continue to improve our specialized instructional school personnel we have a new term sisps now which is hard to get used to but we're going to work on that our ratios for that and that's basically just our are people like school social workers behavior specialists nurses counselors so we're going to try to improve that as well and engaging relevant stakeholders across agencies faith-based organizations community partners to strengthen that their understanding of preventative services and awareness we have a really good start on this with a variety of community partners that we work with so i will turn it over to jenda who will talk a little

053bit more about the training okay so from these building blocks i'm going to spend a little bit of time talking with you about the training the mandatory training for our instructional staff when i say instructional staff we're really talking about teachers administrators potentially teacher assistants we can determine as a district how far that goes but this mandatory training um is as you'll see on the notes here six hours of mandatory training for students who work with staff who work with students in k-12 okay so it doesn't actually include pre-k again but again that's that's up to us as far as including preschool originally what you'll see in the legislation is that this training is required in the first six months of employment so that's an important piece not only now but moving forward what you'll

054see in the policies that mr wallace is going to present a little bit later in the meeting we actually have the whole first school the whole first year so the 2021-22 school year to get staff trained next year so they give us a little more leniency in that first year after next year or after the first year of employment staff will have two hours of follow-up training each year you'll see the topics that are listed there over on the right-hand side i'm going to refer back to what ms custer said as well as andrea collins who was also on the on the committee or the team working on kind of an approach to training as we considered how do we approach training what's the best method six hours is a lot when our teacher work

055days are extremely limited you'll hear that when you when you talk with staff six hours is a lot of time but these are obviously important topics we want to give them the time that they that they deserve but what we did learn from previously with senate bill 199 is that our staff really appre appreciated a hybrid model so they liked having part of it flipped outside the classroom so to speak let me do some learning on my own let me do part of this online and then let me do part of this face-to-face with my staff or with the team which with a smaller group particularly when there can be topics that can trigger folks emotionally trigger folks and so we like this idea of a of a blended approach so that part of this

056will be outside will be online it won't all have to be sit and get at the same time with everybody but part of it will be still face to face this will also allow us to work with some of our community partners so work with a dragonfly house work with insight work with some of these folks who really have expertise in these fields and so that's an important piece not only as far as working with our community partners but tailoring the training so that it really fits davie county schools and and fits even by grade span and by school as far as what the needs are you'll see the topics listed over here on the right so suicide prevention substance abuse dating violence sexual abuse and prevention sex trafficking sex trafficking and prevention and in

057the youth mental health we will also be incorporating as many of these topics as possible for the staff approach as well so thinking about how these topics are relevant for staff so not only youth mental health but also employee mental health so we will incorporate that as much as we can as we go through so when you look at the approach bullets that are there at the bottom you'll see that we are going to be using canvas and we'll use that for the online portion for the modules that people do independently they can do them small group but they won't they won't necessarily have to be face to face canvas as you will remember is something that we incorporated this year that our curriculum team brought to us as our learning management system as we

058move to a one-to-one initiative so canvas there are several advantages in using canvas first and foremost we are going to be getting some materials some modules from the state to cover some of these topics so that we don't have to develop everything from scratch and so we will use some of those components but again we will tailor those to davie county schools we can also use canvas as a way of record keeping so because this is mandatory training it's really important that we can keep up with who has completed the training particularly when you have folks who may be hired later in the year or at a later time so that will be important for that part and again it will give us give our staff some flexibility in how to how to complete the

059part that's not face to face finally using canvas will allow us to basically come up with two canvas courses one for folks who will be able to do this with their staff during the first year and one for folks who were hired after this point so that they can move through this training in a more independent self-paced manner is there anything i forgot from all of that that was a lot okay that is one of the main components of the whole policy in the plan i will say that as you all looked at the plan hopefully in the last week or so you will see that our our training plan is still a work in progress so we have started mapping that out but we really just got access to the state canvas course and

060so once we can kind of get school wrapped up there's a team of us that will begin going through the canvas course and determining what we feel like is good and what fits davie county and what we might want to tailor and adjust for davie county and so that that process of really mapping out and ironing out that training will happen over the course of this summer so that we're ready to implement in august so you'll see even if there was a link in the plan that is literally a work in progress as we go through okay i have no questions there and we can come back to that oh hang on we'll pause these are mandatory hours by the state what what what is the accountability back to them that all of our staff

061has accomplished this we have to we will have to actually report to you all and we'll have to report to the state in september of each year so that's where the accountability piece comes in ms collins mentioned under the infrastructure section about sip sisp uh when i saw that earlier looking over this a few days ago i wondered what kind of persons are you going to be looking for and what or maybe what kind of uh positions is this going to open up for us one of the positions through the esser funding is that i did request for us to sorry one of the other positions that i did ask for within our essar funds is to hire another school social worker and that will hopefully allow us especially as we're digging into this plan

062that will help us to balance out that support possibly one social worker per two schools so that'll allow us to really focus on this plan and the mental health support that we need to be providing with more consistency because right now you know our school social worker position i think often times in my two years of being a part of that amazing team is we forget there's a lot more to a school social worker than attendance yes that's important but the home visits the home connections the support that they can provide from the mental health side they can provide a little different level of counseling support for students and families and staff members i can't tell you how many times i've been in andrea's office and there's a staff member with her so that is

063one of the areas that we are looking at to add on that support using the esther funds to get us going with this process as well and so uh i envisioned that this is going to be something down the road that the federal government's not going to be paying for but we'll be able to continue we hope we're able to find a way to maintain that support and really see the benefits from it as well yes thank you that's our hope yes good question i have a question if i may you obviously all have worked very hard to develop this plan and to identify the appropriate trainings but picking up on what mr drexler said what parameters will be used to measure the plan's success and then i have one question after that sure so

064um we haven't quite got there yet but at the end of the presentation one of the things you're going to see is i generally prior to covid had started the process of meeting with our leads lead school counselors and our lead social workers and lead nurse and we met probably every two months as a group when we just talked about where we're at with things some things that were happening and those kinds of supports updates on curriculum that the counselors were using well my intention is going to be to be very deliberate to make this plan fluid that it becomes a natural part of our agenda topics where are we with things because then they go back and meet with their groups of other counselors other social workers to be deliberate also this will be

065more of a part also within our administrative meetings as a part of my agenda and reviewing things so again it's not just a plan to say here it is we're done with it we really want to be very deliberate about this because the social emotional needs of staff and students is what we're really worried about coming back in the fall and how we're going to be able to address those things effectively so again that's sort of how we'll be looking at that the other question i had thank you you had talked about engaging relevant stakeholders so my question is i didn't see any planned interactions with parents so that will be one of the things that we'll start to look at and focus on so we did talk about within some of our small groups

066that met before while we were planning this and at all of our schools of course there's curriculum nights family nights title one nights and things like that so we hope that we're able to their counselor support they'll embed some natural component as well to engage the parents and make them more aware of those types of things that we do have in those supports through cantegra we're able to reach a little bit more of the family support with their abilities and what they they are able to provide so they also help to make those parent connections as well as insight for those families and those students who need that extra support as well right so that will will hopefully build within the plan the ways to embed those things more naturally yes i have to say

067and i as i continue i hope that you are starting to hear and see that this plan is something that pulls pieces from lots of different areas whether it's coming from student services whether it's compassionate resilience schools that we already had built into our strategic plan partnerships and outside counseling therapy that we have in place i also think about this related to our safety directors and information that comes down from the state as far as threat assessments this this really is an overwhelming plan and so even trying to get it into a format that you guys could look at and then there's links in all different directions but this is pushing us in a positive way we're going to say in a positive way to put all the puzzle pieces together there's so many of

068these things that dovetail and they do fit together but a lot of times they can be siloed in different departments or in different areas and this is really pushing us to pull all of that together and so the next slide my last slide to talk about really i looked to jennifer lyon because she was part of this committee or led this committee how do we build all of this social emotional and mental health into the academic objectives because it all has to be connected we don't want anything to be another thing added to a teacher's plate when their plates are already full and so trying to make sure that these are married and that they make sense and that there's connection and that there's alignment and so when you look at the steps as far

069as alignment with the with the academic objectives the first step is for our curriculum and instruction staff to really identify coach and support the staff and in utilizing engaging um strategies engagement and teaching strategies so identifying those best practices and then the second piece of that is really looking at the alignment with the social emotional learning standards and the academic areas to see where they intersect and where they align and then that leads us to the training on the sel alignment and those learning targets and then the fourth step is really tying back to the instructional framework and i know you've heard us talk about instructional framework for the last couple years but they're going to be revisiting the instructional framework again and really refocusing on that as we move into next year if you

070remember back to the instructional framework in the center is the is student learning because that's that's really why we're here but wrapped all the way around that center point is the culture piece and so that culture component wraps and supports everything at everything else and ultimately supports that student learning that is directly tied to if you look at our teacher evaluation instrument it's directly tied to standard two so again we're connecting all of these different pieces um and so we're going to be looking at our curriculum team is going to be looking at this culture component and standard two and then how again to make sure that those connections are clear and then that fifth step is again figuring out as as mr carroll was talking about how do we measure what we're doing how

071do we measure the implementation of that sel and jen if there's anything i've left all of that please jump in all right at this point i'm going to turn it back over to jennifer castrick and i also add with the question about you know instructional support staff ms castrick has has kind of shifted roles for us and is now serving as our mtss coordinator so that is a key role in in the academic piece well not only academic the academic behavior it's actually part of all of it social emotional and so her role is key in this implementation as well so adding to the academic piece we really want to look at our instruction curriculum and environment and making sure we are embedding that social emotional learning and mental health supports within all of that

072um so the first is really just looking at how we're going to establish those intentional practices how are we going to embed social emotional learning and mental health supports within the school day is there times during the day that we can talk about some of this is there something in the morning announcement that can help students learn different words to express their needs different ways to express their feelings embedding that in as well as different supports and practices within that we want to look at strengthening our curriculum we already use different social emotional learning curriculums a lot with those our counselors we just want to make sure we look at those that it meets the standards that are out there for the social emotional learning and then just continue to improve on those as well

073as embedding them into other parts of the day and linking them to that academics within the educational environment we just really want to look at if our schedules are meeting the needs for our students and allowing them to have that time for breaks as needed limited transitions because those can be really difficult for students and allowing time for staff to have that collaboration as well not just with each other within the grade level but with those other personnel those student services personnel so they can have that time to work through anything that comes up any concerns and then with our instruction we just want to really look at our different resources that we use just make sure that there is some inclusivity there and that everything is linking again to the standards and really training

074staff on how they can take their academic but add that into an sel standard as well so you're sort of putting everything together so if you're teaching reading is there a way that you can bring in a story that also works on some sel social emotional or mental health theme as well linking all of the pieces really [Music] together and then we also want to look at our data evaluation so within our multi-tiered system of support mtss it looks at academics behavior social emotional learning and attendance so incorporates all of that i mean a big piece is making sure we have a universal screener we have something there that we can really look at and figure out what students are at risk for needing social emotional support and mental health support this year we did

075roll out a social emotional screener at the schools on the student risk screening scale we did that twice a year beginning and end of year so we want to continue to have that it's really been an eye-opener at a lot of schools to really see what students are flagging as having some of these social emotional needs that we might not have realized because they're very internal behaviors so looking at that and that tells us what supports we need to put in that a teacher place or is it also a self-report uh this one is uh from teachers so the teacher report some of the schools do use into a student-led model though too that really gives you some great feedback yeah the older so that's more typical in the high school and middle school level

076is adding in a student report along with other screeners getting input from the parents as well on what could be those needs and keeping that line of communication open with them yes and then we really just want to from there really just make sure we build some consistent language making sure we're discussing um the same amount of information the same teams and then having really consistent policies and procedures for entering data and monitoring that data how often we want to look at this data what does this data say and then what are we going to do with that data [Music] so taking all that information from the data moves us right into what we're going to do how are we going to intervene when we do see students are at risk so within again that

077mtss support that we already have in place our structure we already have those interventions we already have a behavior social emotional mental health and attendance matrix that includes interventions that staff can pull from but we just want to make sure that we really just re-establish that at the schools and then we're going to be looking to create a standard treatment protocol so we know exactly if they score this on our screen or if they show up this with our behavior we want to put in this intervention that we know works and with our early warning system that we'll be able to roll it out that will make the process a lot easier and then provide a lot more reports and information back to personnel so they can make sure they're putting in interventions and supports

078that are working and that we're constantly changing things if things aren't working so what can we do to establish something new and continue to move forward with all of that growth and then andrew is going to go over the last two sections [Music] so with our annual review of crisis intervention and discipline policies practice and personnel we just want to make sure that we are reviewing them consistently that we're being deliberate in those reviews making sure that our discipline policies are fair um equal we're trying to give kids time in instead of time out looking at our suspensions that kind of thing so we just want to make sure that those are consistent across the board for the the public school unit to be included in our local community emergency preparedness we already have people

079participating in that i believe officer jones our sro and lori dingler our lead school nurse already participate in those emergency preparedness meetings oh i'm doing this one too for treatment referral and re-entry so we are going to review and revise the protocol for students re-entering school following the acute or residential mental health evaluation so that's one of the things that is in what i referred to earlier as our red notebook we have those things in place like the the forms that we want to send home with the kids that we do send home with the kids um those forms don't always come back when they leave a hospital treatment place let's say um the parents aren't always willing to share information so we really want to figure out how we can communicate with families and

080hospitals in a helpful way so that we have needed information not because we're being nosy or trying to get into their business but we want to know how to support their child when they come back home and come back to school from a placement so we are going to be very diligent about figuring that out and that might mean meeting with different hospital staff carrying on meetings working through problems letting them know what we're facing how they can help so we're going to really work to better have a better transition plan because like i said we have the form but if we don't get the form it's not very helpful so we just need to really work on how we're going to do that and currently with our school-based mental health services the counselors that

081have these providers at their schools make those referrals that works really well because they're familiar with these students so we're just going to make sure that we have that process in place that it looks the same at each school for how students are referred if parents want their children to be seen by our school-based mental health are they able to make referrals probably they can but we just need to make sure it goes through the counselor so that we're all on the same page with that and as this expands to other schools we're going to have to make sure we're very consistent with that we've been very fortunate to have some some really good therapists from cantegra this was our first year with two therapists from there and it's worked out really well we've had

082some real success with that so we're just gonna keep working toward making that um very consistent um and that includes i mentioned kentucky but that includes with the dragonfly house and in sight as well because those do look a little bit different so we want to streamline that a little bit more so if you think about it with what we've mentioned between contegra insight and the support from the grant through dragonfly house we do have an outside provider supporting at least every school in our district in some way now some may only have one piece of that but all of them do have that support and we're looking currently to build on that as andre and i met with cantegra about a month ago and they are looking for um we're looking to add possibly

083two more supports from contegra and then andre and i balance those needs across the district so and i will have one more thing so with the dragonfly house we are so fortunate to have them as one of our partners especially for mental health providers because we ran into a few situations this year where we needed school-based mental health at a school that didn't have a provider and so brandy has been amazing to work with our school counselors to figure out a plan whether that's a virtual session or them providing transportation for a kid to their office they've they've worked through it and so they will continue to support us in that way so as we look at following up as uh mr carroll asked while ago about in the pl removing moving through and looking

084and um reviewing the plan we i will minimally pull that team back together at least once a year to look overall at the plan but again we're going to be very deliberate with it moving forward and then in august of 2025 we will be bringing that back to you to support and look at what that next plan will be or another group of individuals because all of us may not still be here um so i any questions i think they should have a test on all the acronyms in the plans so as we were working on this plan it was so funny we were all sitting there you know we rattle these things off all the time and the wonderful jen castrick said i will create a glossary so thank you to her for putting

085that link in there because educator jargon is not very fun sometimes so hopefully that was helpful within that plan and they threw in a few new ones yes we were like when i started on the plan and they had sisps i was like okay what's that one so so you connect things to different things so so this is our plan moving forward yes um i was writing some notes while you were going through this first thing i'll say is is two parts that what you have presented seems to me two examples or an example of two things one things just don't happen in the school world in the education business they just don't happen so thank you very much for the the thinking and the planning and the stuff that happened way back when to

086get you to this point and and i i applaud you there's there's i can tell there's a lot of work that's going into and it seems like there's going to be some more yet the next example this is an example of um education is way more of a responsibility than just abc's anymore and we're really going to have to be and that's one of the things we have all talked a lot about when we're going through and starting this training and our kickoff at the beginning of the next year in our different departments that's going to have to be first in primary and a lot of schools have already started talking about what the first week or two of school is really going to look like and they're making a plan to start embedding some

087of these things more naturally at the beginning to lay that foundation and then we'll build upon it throughout the year because you're right mr drexler is going to be very different especially as we're looking at some 800 students who have been all virtual this year and the transition from a day b day back to five days a week there's going to be a lot of different supports that are going to be needed thank you thank you okay so just thank you for your time and we present this plan to you to ask for approval as we move forward with the next steps with this policy and supporting davie county schools echo what mr drexler says it's just it's overwhelming it really is uh so thank you i'll entertain a motion to approve i move that

088we accept the proposal as presented by the student services staff i have a motion by mr potts second have a second my mr drexler any further discussion all those in favor motion carry 7-0 thank you so much for all your work uh next public address to the board look hello i i've got clinton's all right uh ladies and gentlemen you have someone ready to address you this afternoon uh miss joanne landry who has given us her address is here to address you so miss linda if you come on up to the microphone and uh you have uh do we have our timer or is it still all right please please try to limit your you must limit your comments to five minutes and don't make me gamble you down it's so rude i'd love you

089just to end on time it would be delightful i might even end sooner can i make a motion to remove the masks and other the kids are gone because i don't know if that can happen no i think we don't respond by the way to public comment we just listen okay oh okay so there's no not going to be any answers okay great okay my first comment that i wanted to ask was i want it was mostly questions i wanted to know that since the critical race theory has passed in the house and is going to be in the senate if there is going to be any kind of critical race theory is there any discussion of that in davie county is that going to be on the curriculum agenda and if it is i'd

090like to say that i'd like to question whether or not you've surveyed any of the parents are you intending on surveying any of the parents uh to see if that is something that they would want because my vote is no don't have it don't do it i think it's racism at its core and we'll go from there second thing i wanted to know was whether or not you have um i think it was addressed earlier taking any money from the covert relief uh money and if there were any stipulations to having received that money and if so what are they so since you can't answer that question i'd like to know if i can find out what those stipulations are with regards to receiving that money i want to know if there's any kind of

091tie in to your receipt of that money and vaccinations and whether or not that's going to be mandated within the county or any of the schools for that for that matter um i'd also like to know i wanted to know whether or not any of the schools in davie county had been retrofitted to receivers or towers with regards to the 5g network okay so these are all connected i don't know if you do your homework i don't know if you follow any of the information that's being put out there with regards to that kind of stuff you can call me tinfoil hat you can call me conspiracy theorists but i do a lot of research and i do a lot of outside information other than the mainstream media there is 5g that is concerning there

092is vaccination information that is concerning especially with the children so if you're not aware of what these shots are doing to people being that they are still experimental and there's a lot of new information that is coming out regularly with regards to the mrna the uh inflammation that could be caused of it the results in the lab with regards to mrna and sars viruses once it was back once the animals were shot all the animals in the testing died once they came into contact with the mrna or the sars type of virus so this is what is in the vaccines and i know that you are offering it to children based upon whether or not their parents approve of that but i think that it's important that as the board you do your research when

093offering it to children and even offering it in the davie county school systems the hospitals are offering their vaccinations and i don't know if really you guys want to be associated with that so i mean if unless there's people who do not have medical and they look to the school board for that purpose okay that's a consideration i don't know since you guys can't answer any questions um i know i have spoken about um with mr wallace about some of the uh race type baiting division type baiting uh curriculum okay i don't have to worry about the curriculum anymore in the high school because i have a senior who will be graduating but that doesn't mean that i'm not going to be informed and aware and meeting you guys at the board for the other

094students that are coming up okay i just wanted to address that there has been a lot of political agenda indoctrination going on at davey in davie county i have faced it from the time my kids were in pre-school actually in grade school middle school and in high school i know that the mr robinson has took uh has a task force that he is he's asking for parents to report indoctrination so i'm going to do that right here and now okay i understand that there are political agendas that are being pushed throughout the educational system by way of individual teachers and i know that that is not something that you condone but we need to have some kind of accountability for those that do it we do have conservatives in this county i don't like my

095children being labeled as conservative and looked at by teachers for whatever they decide to wear to school that says i'm a conservative or one way or the other okay i have had teachers make comments that i like you but i don't like your shirt okay that's not called for i want that stopped i also want to stop the political agenda that is being indoctrinating our kids as to certain things that lead a certain party way i would like to have that stopped so as the board i'm asking you if you would please put a policy out and stick to the policy and please let the teachers or the students and the parents know what this policy is so that when my child comes home and tells me that this is what they're pushing and it's

096anti-conservative it's political it has no business being in the classrooms of art or math or anything else other than maybe political science if you want to discuss it there that then i know what steps i can take as a parent to be able to contact the board now that my students are no longer going to be in the school system here in davie county i want that for all the other parents and i'd like that made available to all the other parents not everybody goes on the davie county board website for their school so we get those phone calls every night multiple times sometimes i'd like it to be put out in an announcement that there is a policy in where the parents can go to get that policy so please consider uh i can't

097ask you to answer if you have a if you will put out a policy that and what you intend to do to the teachers who violate that policy but i would like something to be maybe you can email me call me send it to me i don't know how you're going to be able to do that but i'd like to know that that's being done that's all i have thank you thank you very much all right next we've got uh committee staff reports and mr wallace for spring policy updates after working your way through that multi-layered plan i thought i would unpack the 44 different policies that we expect you to have read and approve tonight would you read over them now he's going to read them all out loud with all due respect mr

098chairman though is that's okay rhetorical staff i would board i would entertain any questions i said we've been busy i know you've been busy and they got a little taste of that tonight and thank you for the comments and paul you made some really good points there that was you're right and it's just not showing up and just opening a book anymore so um asked where are there any questions yes sir are there any questions about policies yes sir voted on next meeting that's correct these are just presented to you now these are and these are from the north carolina school board association as you routinely get the spring update but if there are i'm sorry you're right i'm a month ahead of us so if there are questions you're welcome to call me at

099any time and uh but these will be presented to you at the july meeting for a vote okay so my question about that is do you anticipate any anything new or different outside of revisions to accommodate changes in statutes very often there's some wording and or documentation that causes the policy to be changed on a local level do you anticipate anything outside of that kind of change i don't think so not that i'm aware of [Music] um and some of the policies some of those things that we we don't just adopt every word we do your department your leads i hand those out they read through them that's relevant to their department and then if there are any questions we run them by jill and she kind of gives us some guidance because there are

100some some are required and we just have to be careful with those but there are some that recommendation recommended strongly recommended but they we have the ability or the opportunity to make sure those fit our culture and what we expect here in this county yes good question did i hope i answered your question okay all right uh next we'll move on to the uh esther esper funds uh with mr harris we'll talk a little bit about s2 messages 11.6 million dollars and we really divided them into four key big categories you take a look at that learning laws facilities technology and there's a piece of transportation inside of that so learning laws learning loss in the requirement says we have to spend at least 20 percent of our money on learning costs you take a

101look at where we are we're sitting about 58 right now so the vast majority of our money is directed towards running off whether that's subscription technology um teacher salaries i'm counseling through betting there um when there's some other support around social emotional just kind of keeping up learning the summer school programs and some are schools you've got teachers you've got both college different students you've got psych coordinators that's all on the side of that as well so let's speak for sure the money is inside of that facilities is really inviting we have repairs in our [Music] and i failed to mention that to you but i'm going to talk to you about it in closed session so but yes we will have a called meeting next monday and i'll i'll unpack that a few moment

102in just a minute so we'll we'll talk through that but there's really two pieces inside of that both of them roll out in in the policy and what we could do with the money um and that's about 24 of our dollars um technologies devices and reporting um when we came back and took a look at it uh what what we needed um ms spoil came back and said you know inside power school to help with some of the students there's some additional reporting we can take a look at so there's a piece that's layered inside of that and then our device is to support one to one so we need to continue working through that um whether it's in our general ed or ec adopted adaptive equipment that type of thing so as we work

103through that and then the last piece is around transportation and in transportation it's really around um the ability to identify uh contact tracing on our buses that type of thing help with safety from that standpoint so that's really where the money gets where we'll be using the money really four criteria i touched on the first part of 20 percent of it's got to be directed towards learning loss as i said we're at 58 percent from that standpoint we're required to have a reopening plan and get feedback from our um stakeholders and grad their stakeholders whether that's parents teachers um just community that type of thing so we work through we're working through that list whether it's through mr wallace's conversation with his opening team um his parent group that he's got he's collecting information from

104that standpoint as well as we collected from our principals administrators and just feedback as a whole that comes back to us from that standpoint expenses they say expenses have got to be three things they've got to be allowable reasonable and necessary um and so we've been through that process to make sure that everything we're looking at is allowable we've sent the applications we did a pretty pretty in-depth write-up of what we wanted to do and make sure that our federal contacts were were aligned with where we were going and what we were doing they all came back and said yes we're aligned with that and the last one the last piece of guidance that they gave us was it's got to reduce prevent or is in response to covet and all of our items are

105in that fall in those four guidelines take a look at it so there'll be more to come as we work through this but i just want to kind of give you a 10 000 feet so to speak kind of where we are and what we're doing so you understand the money that's coming in we've got a plan for where we're going to go with it and it's it's in allowable areas um and it's directly related to what we need to do mostly to cover our learning laws because we know they'll be a big part of that any questions for me i'd like to make a couple points as well you're hearing the terminology learning loss we're using that because that's in this that's part of this application process i have made it real clear and

106we'll continue to make it clear with our staff we're not going to beat kids over the head with learning loss you lost so much we're not going to do that so you're not going to hear that language out too often we did use it tonight again because that's what it says i don't want kids to think that they've lost so much that can never recover and those types of things second point i want to make clear clay emphasized that we're spending 58 of this money where we only are required to spend 20. some districts are choosing and mr potts you brought up a good question about sustaining some positions we have we have made it real clear that certain positions for two or three years depends on the sunset date for this money we plan

107for those positions to build capacity to extend the services and the skill sets that we need so we are choosing to use some of this money for people the people who put people in place for two to three years if we stay exactly as we are now we will not be able to sustain this after three years we know that but we are very upfront with our staff coming in taking those positions yes any other questions for now thank you still weird to have everybody so close next hunger fighters jimmy welch and lori smith evening y'all first of all i wanted to thank everybody in this room that's been involved with hunger fighters it's a it's a program that is providing nutritional assistance to students outside of school and a lot of you have had

108your hands on it mr wallace was with me when we found it back in 2011 and it's been a great growing program and it continues to grow right now lori came in four years ago and really created a lot of good energy and helped to build it and expand it currently we're serving about 75 families a week and we are on a budget of about 12 10 to 12 a year we put into the program and provide food with um i think lori had a quick video and wanted to talk a little bit also and free to open any questions get that going so this just provides a little bit of the coveted relief what we did last year so march 13th or 15th when we shut schools down jeff loss asked me hey can

109hunger fighters help reach out to all the schools we currently just provide food assistance to the high school students but during covid we were asked to be like the hub of food distribution throughout the entire county so we were providing food to every school in the county we went from feeding about 50 students a week to almost 400 students a week we would get the food from either second harvest food bank or a local grocery store use the box truck bring it back to the high school have the ta sort it by schools and then the counselors or someone would come pick it up from the high school and take it back to their schools to distribute so this is just a little short video a little bit of what we did the past couple

110years [Music] so [Music] do [Music] so [Music] something you might have noticed in there there's a lot of chick-fil-a sandwiches something we uh we partner actually with chick-fil-a and clemens and david moore was a great partner with us we reached out to him and during the pandemic we gave out over 3 350 free chick-fil-a sandwich meals to davie county students we we reached out to the counselors and we provided food as a drive-in drive-through pickup we provided free sandwich chips and water and we reached out to the counselors they reached out to the families who need it we had one parent say they showed up a hour an hour ahead of time because their kids had never had chick-fil-a before so it was just really sweet and it was something we really enjoyed doing just

111to to provide that to our students and we went to every single school a few schools i went to twice but that was just a really a neat thing just want to mention a couple numbers during last year we had over 115 individual donations we received from davie county community members ranging from ten dollars to a thousand dollars um we had nine local churches donate to the program like i said we gave out over 3 350 free chick-fil-a sandwich meals um currently we are serving as jimmy said about 70 to 75 students per week at the high school as we went back to school in the fall a lot of local churches were still not meeting in person so they didn't have their volunteers and the financial money to be able to pack their food

112bags that they a lot of local churches help out individual schools so we are currently helping or this past school year we helped moxville elementary we provided 120 students with a food bag every week so 120 at marksville elementary every week also 60 students at william r davey twice a week or two times a month just a couple sponsors i just want to recognize real quick obviously chick-fil-a and clemens the davie community foundation east daviess civic club hillsdale church smith and davis foundation rescue house church bermuda run garden club and bermuda run cares group the davey foundation pearls group and pit stops for hope those are some key partners for us this past year as we were serving students through the pandemic so like um laurie was saying we we work off the donations nine

113years ago we became a 501 c 3 company our not company non-profit agency and then i think mr wallace asked me to do this because i called him the other day in fact and i'd asked him about we just received a 54 000 grant from larson doors here in moxville and i asked him if i could build a driveway from one of the roads at the high school back to a door at the high school and get permission with him and mr uh spillman and with that fifty four thousand dollars we wanted to build a driveway get a truck and a couple other things that were capital outlay money that couldn't go towards just strictly the food but to building the program to be able to reach more so hopefully with that grant we'll get

114a couple things going in place and continue to grow the program and help the outreach as it goes throughout the county thank you guys and i'm hoping like i said any questions we're willing to take i don't have i want to make a few comments what do you say my goodness people you said it it doesn't just happen and i vividly remember you we all have landmarks in our points of education and i want to thank lori i mean if you want to see somebody's heart right there was and you all know that and that's food and peep they in our children's mouths period i vividly remember the conversation me and that gentleman right there had standing in the breezeway at the old high school i will tell you i don't know if i've ever

115shared this but i had one person we started we thought about this and i had a staff member come to me and say i'm scared we can't sustain this and i would never share who that is it's okay intent was good i got it this one stood there with me and said i have i feel this calling on my heart that i need to do this now i want you to look where we are coach that's that's putting legs on love that i say a whole lot and i appreciate that you do a lot you do a lot in all of our places our kids in the classroom on the fields and then to do this that is phenomenal and i want you to know that i really appreciate that laura you you that's probably

116an understatement you added energy can you say walked in with a lit you were nice there but that but no it it matters a lot and to hear a story about one of our kids never having a chick-fil-a sandwich means a lot thank you absolutely thank you guys here you go coach welch and laura you got a 100 donation here tonight so from miss or miss jill wilson so you absolutely thank you jill so much for an anonymous yeah it doesn't mean you have to announce god thank you sir awesome next davie county virtual school overview miss paul and miss fuser good evening chairman junker board members mr wallace guest i'm excited to be here tonight to give you guys some updates on the dc virtual school for the 21-22 school year so i joined

117in right during the application process so applications were put out on our website communicated through parents through the school messenger and we accepted applications throughout the whole month of march and i've got some numbers for you we received a little over 200 total applications for grades four through twelve and you're going to see throughout the presentation it's about evenly split the entire time so for grades four through eight 111 and grades 9 through 12 113 applied we do currently offer a wait list application to any new families to davie county we didn't want them to lose out on that opportunity in order to be consistent we looked at how did we accept students into our stem program into the early college and we wanted to follow a consistent procedure so we reviewed all of the

118applications we reviewed their current and historical student data really focusing on their current attendance and grades and how they were performing if more information was needed we reached out to their current teachers to get some survey data as well as scheduled an interview with the parent and student so out of those numbers we accepted 85 and 48 and 81 into 912 with follow-up interviews of 11 and 12. and then we put this back on the parents because they know their families they know what's best for their children they knew uh what what how their children will learn best and so we sent out decision letters and contracts over spring break on april 7th i traveled over here and me and mr marshall worked on those and contracts were asked for parents to send those back

119they could email them they could drop them off they can mail them back by april 18th because of the short turnaround and it was over spring break we really didn't want to miss out on anybody so between the after the week of april 17th april 20th we reached out to anyone we hadn't heard from called them several times emailed several times just making sure that something didn't happen and we have landed on our final numbers so we have currently 56 enrolled in grades 4 through 8 and 57 in grades 9 through 12. so again even throughout the whole process i have been on board officially for 10 days today was day 10 and so we've been busy establishing communication with parents weekly i've sent an email one week with a video message i hope to

120do that again this week as well as last week an email just asking parents for see if anybody wants to be to serve as a parent advisor to me this year and to the teachers i got five or six volunteers and i'm meeting with them next week in order to just kind of show them where me and the teachers have thoughts for schedules have thoughts for expectations just to get them in an orientation open house for the fall we really want to make sure that what we're thinking in this early planning stages is what they're thinking we don't want to get too far into planning and realize that we're not all on the same page we've hired our staff at the grades four through eight students i'm loving these emails so email students ask them

121for student leadership team they're giving me all sorts of interesting ideas for mascots as we form our identity and culture and i asked them all why that mascot and they always have a great answer we are creating expectations and procedures and i've also started to work with the other schools to meet with their principals the middle schools and i met last week and just to make sure that we're maintaining consistency in programs we want to make sure from the get go especially for myself doing this position like if something it always happens at 8th grade in every davie county school i want to know that i don't want to like learn that by chance so that is where we're currently at and it's short but do you have any questions for me i'm not sure

122if you can answer this but i was just wondering where we landed versus what the expectations were there any expectations none i don't know that there were any expectations we were just hoping to print it wouldn't be 972. that was my only expectation like it was this year i want to commend both erin and valerie and and you've you heard valerie say she's been here 10 days and she hit the ground running and the first one of the first parents she didn't give him the answer they she wanted they asked for a meeting with me well i didn't meet with them i went we went right back to the principal and then she did a fab now she's been a principal before so she can handle it so good job i mean both of you

123i commend you both because you are starting from gret up and i really appreciate the effort the holistic approach she's taken to what she's doing and that that means a lot and again it shows her experience and her and her abilities too and of course aaron's been right there by her side so thank you both for that thank you for coming on board thank you i appreciate what you're doing thank you you remember you've heard it a thousand times we've got to be attractive right there's one of the reasons you got to be attracted to people like that we have to continue good stuff thank you guys thank you uh next art smart 2021 miss roberts good evening chairman junker board members and mr wallace i bet y'all are hungry so i won't take up

124too much of your time um but on behalf of all of our blossoming artists in davie county we have some really good news for you the arts are alive and well in davie county and not only that but have evolved into a global model in the event which we hope will never be in a pandemic again but we have risen to the occasion and shown that we made the best of it and i think that you will be very pleased with what you see that we share with you this evening so i'm gonna head to and so early in the year we were sitting as a team art educators and um john marshall and we were thinking about our annual art smart festival and believe it or not this is our 10th annual art smart

125festival and we knew that it would be different we were just you know thinking through how this was going to work and john is brilliant and thanks to him we moved in the direction of gathering our resources and our intention to have a virtual festival this year and thanks to will mars who's at the high school we have accomplished the goal and the children are able to share a resource and a festival that people all over the world are able to come and see and that they can have in their portfolios as well and that family can check out later in the summer it's very user-friendly so when we go to our main page our davie county schools page and we click on this area here it's going to bring us to the link and

126it's very easy to navigate on our our desktops our our um notebooks um the phone the file is very large because we've been very busy so i'd encourage everyone to access it on one of your tablets but when you click on this link it'll bring you to the interactive pdf and we are extremely thankful for our partnership with ashley furniture it has grown into a warm relationship and they have consistently stepped in to help again this year donating ten thousand dollars as well as several scholarships to our students the ten thousand dollars that they have given us um will be allocated in the year ahead once we really have a better understanding of what our year is going to look like we as educators will put forward our our interests and they are always supportive

127of the needs that we have to help our children succeed when you dive into this beautiful image that will mars created and john you will find lots of things going on and every year this has been at the high school last the year before we had at the new high school which was phenomenal but you can see here lots of things happening and so when you zoom in you'll find some of the areas that you want to explore so we're going to dive in quickly into the information about the generous donation with our partnership with ashley furniture and i wanted to share some information from several of the students that were fortunate to receive a scholarship from ashley furniture from three of the disciplines that we teach sadie essek she received a dance scholarship and

128she was noting that her experience in davie county schools and dance has exposed her to multiple cultures it's improved her dance abilities and it's allowed her to participate in various service projects she had the opportunity to perform at local nursing a nursing home as a way to bring joy and entertainment to its residents and she was a member of a group selected to just to demonstrate the importance of the arts in schools at our state to our state government representatives another amazing student that received a scholarship this year was andrea mcbride she received a visual arts scholarship her intention is to continue pursuing her graphic design education and she emphasized that she wanted to have a lucrative income so that she can be comfortable and so that she can also give back to her family

129that has been so helpful to help her get where she is today and the third artist that received a scholarship from ashley furniture is katie dyson she received a band scholarship and the information that she shared in in her writing notes that she's played lots of instruments she's played the piano in third grade in sixth grade she picked up the clarinet she's learned the alto sax the mandolin the ukulele and when she was a freshman she said i was involved in either lessons an extracurricular ensemble marching band rehearsal every day after school my sophomore year she says i decided to put in all the effort i had to be a better musician i made it into the all-district band and something that i've done every year since her plan is to major in biology on

130the path to become a geneticist and she noted that music and the instruments that she's played have always been with her through the rough times and that she plans to keep doing this as long as she can another important award that we gave out this year goes to a very special family in many ways to our community our humanitarian award this year goes to bill and nancy with witcher mr and mrs witcher are both retired north carolina music educators and are the parents of miss aaron pinley which is one of my colleagues and she's amazing an elementary music teacher at kulamy and pinebrook and their grandchildren bryson and garrett are alumni of the davie county band programs when they study with mr mccrary and mr jiminson mr witcher has served as a guest conductor of

131the davey high wind ensemble and offered his services as a band clinician a trumpet specialist on multiple occasions to help the band programs prepare for concerts state music performances assessments and festivals they have also given donations they've sent they've called emails to check on everyone to make sure that we are on the right path and have the support that we need so we're extremely thankful for this amazing family in many ways another special highlight that i think our virtual school will be very pleased to see um is the presence of our nation or north carolina poet laureate miss jackie shelton-green and she completed an artist in residency this april with davie county schools virtual she worked with fourth through eighth graders and she is still currently the north carolina poet laureate governor cooper he recommended

132again her continued efforts to be the north carolina poet laureate and i encourage you all especially just throughout this year that we've had to read some of these writings from students they wrote letters to kovid they've written letters um you know in terms of it the um one of these was let me see i am a tennis racket or um i am a blanket just really fascinating writings their favorite things from their points of view and so students had an opportunity to really express themselves creatively and ex and received very high level interaction with an educator that has been the north carolina poet laureate for many years and is still the north carolina poet laureate for for our state so let's just take a minute and just look over what else is happening in this

133this masterpiece over in this area when you dive in you'll see lots of virtual visual arts galleries on our main stages you'll find podcasts from middle school students superhero creations our dance concert from winter 20 20 20. covet follies davie county high school hear us roar we have our band performances over in this area and when you dive into the elementary music departments i think i'll need to zoom in really quickly let's see i wanted to show you something incredibly impressive um within our music departments and as you know going into this year we were really uh concerned about how we were going to continue to keep the same caliber of education musically because of some of the restrictions well we we definitely did not let that limit us at all there is an extreme

134amount of integration core integration going on in music classrooms the students thanks to you all and your support they were creating um their own band lab recordings virtual chrome music labs there they were using hand instruments they were going reading along using instruments um so there's just a lot of resource in here and one of the beautiful things about this festival is that people anyone in our community globally can come in and see the caliber of art education that's going on on in our schools and how the students are interacting with with us as teachers and with each other but especially during this unique time i'm so proud of our students and they have done exceptional work even in this situation so the last few things that we wanted to show you in our virtual

135festival are some of our visual works so when we dive in these are some of the artworks i'm going to brag for a quick second these are some of the artists that i have the privilege of working with this year um and you can see that in this festival we have a section as well as on some of these pages where you're able to see the students actually in the process and some of the behind the scenes which i think is a big benefit of this resource that we've created because there's a lot that happens behind the scenes as well and so you can see they're so proud of their work and some of this work is up right now in our school on our end of the year exhibit and as you look down

136in this bottom corner down here when you have a chance to look over in our our spelling bee logo competition um we were asked thankfully this year to participate in our spelling bee and the student the visual artists in our um at south davey were able to create we're able to create the um spelling bee logos for our bee this year that projected onto the virtual experience for guests as well so those are really fun to see you can see them down in there when you dive in so we're really proud of them to do that as well we study different logos around the country and the world and they really stepped up to the plate for that the is not only in a place where the festival is not only a place where we

137can see what the kids are doing in our classrooms but it's also a great resource for them to continue their education some of these areas are make takes virtual museum tours we have uh famous musical performances the children able to see the beatles in 1965 or miles davis and elvis performance in 1968 some tony award footage from the king and i the lion king and hamilton are down in our make and take area and also google arts and cultural cultural interactive sites and areas where they can have some science and math and history integration so right down in the heart of the the festival or areas where the children could dive in and create music on their their devices they can create masterpieces on their devices and so all of that is very helpful and

138fun for them and any of the other guests that want to visit are children around the world that want to visit our festival the holiday land is where i wanted to end i thought this was a beautiful example of what is possible and this really touched our hearts when we were able to see this anything's possible and i will say that we get so emotional because we were thinking about the impact that this would have on our children and how we wanted to make sure that this year they felt like they could continue to thrive as artists and so these are all students that are performing in their home together and it's amazing so i just wanted to end with this because it's just beautiful [Music] my [Music] so our children are davie county strong

139they're not giving up and we're going to move into this year ahead just stronger than ever i wanted to just give a special shout out to one of our colleagues that did something quite remarkable this year out of the circumstance justin mccrary one of our teammates had a composer and band director from salisbury chris ferguson write a compose a piece specifically for sal davey in commemoration of our 40th anniversary and the children performed that special piece that was written just for for um south davie middle school so there's just i could go on and on but we're really proud and thank you so much for your support without you we couldn't do it so thank you thank you so much and thank you for your passion as always it's contagious uh that concludes our regular

140meeting uh next i'll call for a motion to go into closed session let me read this to preserve the attorney client privilege pursuant to the north carolina general statutes listed on our agenda to discuss personnel matters protected by state law and to discuss student matters made confidential by general statutes and ferpa i have a motion by mr carroll i have a second moment smith all those in favor motion carries 7-0 we are now in closed session thank you guys so much yeah we're meeting in here yep you can go to the restroom but we're meeting in here you