04-05-22 Work Session

001is just there is future good afternoon everyone it is 304 pm and welcome to our work session on april 5th we have a full agenda today starting with our facilities team for the 2022 cost model and executive summary update and with us we have our chief operating officer mark strickland and jack mcclear and douglas condon good afternoon everybody good afternoon for the opportunity to be with you today we're going to present an update on two items this afternoon first being the executive summary for this year and the second being the update to the prioritization so we'll start with the executive summary we'll just wait for it to come up and jack is going to help run us through this jack all right good afternoon my name is jack macaleer i'm the director of program controls

002with fdmc i'm going to go over the draft 2022 cip executive summary i've got it broken out into the different sections with new schools existing school and program item summary which may be a little different than the handout that you have a little background on how we arrived at this draft summary that we're presenting today is went through several options over several months with the county as part of our cip committee and county core team process and the first couple of options we presented did not meet the county's financial model for funding our debt we've had to make some reductions and changes and some shifts here there and that's where we landed on this option we're going to show you today the highlights are the changes from year to year the ones in yellow are

003either a shift or a new addition and the ones in green are a reduction of change in funding for that specific item so related to the new school summary i'm going to focus primarily on the changes from previous year to this year we can go into questions afterwards i just have one question because we just have the the cip listing yes are we able to get a copy of this presentation because i'm starting to get to the point where i need readers and it's very small we'll send a copy of this afterwards this is just a little easier to digest in that full summary for presentation purposes i'm not ready for that yet i will squint okay all right so for the new school summary um changes from previous year from last year to this

004year age 15 was delayed four years due to program development also for some to open up some funding capacity for the years that it previously fell we had to shift that out hs3 which is a high school had designed funding in fy24 and construction funding in fy 26 that was reduced from a large program to a small program that was also based off some some funding needs as well as the proposed site is not suited for a large program and the need is not there as well and then also new for this year in the new school category is a placeholder for an elementary school design funds in fy28 one thing to note for the new bond period that's coming up in fy 24 and 25 for the new school totals about 337 million dollars

005which is the 205.9 million and 131 million at the bottom there moving on to the renovation or existing school summary the only change from previous year to this year is we added a new renovation project as a placeholder in fy28 with design funds that's modeled as a middle school currently and also one thing to note with the es renault 123 and the tbd numbers you'll see here that'll be addressed in the present and the prioritization presentation that follows this moving on to the program requirements summary the changes from previous year to last year prim category and program contingency category we had to reduce funding in fy 26 and 27 by approximately 4 million a year for each one of those in order to align with the county's debt model and then also you'll notice that

006land is highlighted in pink the only that is not a net change the funding has not changed from last year the only difference is we did some below the line calculations with cash versus debt related to how we work things out with the county and they shifted that around this year and so that's why we're noting that because in last year's summary it was shown as less than it is here although the total funding for that year has not changed and the last slide is just a summary of what i previously discussed it has the program items as well as the new school and existing school totals up at the top just to recap in one slide any questions at this point yes sir so thank you and i appreciate the work that's done on

007this and um you know we'll probably talk about this in the next presentation as well i think one of the challenges that i feel like we always face is um putting our needs against the county debt model only allows us to right that that seems to be the trump card right um and one of the things that i notice is that and we've talked about this in facilities that we have to plan in one bond cycle to construct usually in the next bond cycle so for example when we look at the new versus renovation which is something that this board has talked about a lot and there's quite a number of us on the board that want to see more renovations because our schools are aging and if we don't take care of it we're

008in trouble and so for example we've got no renovations actually happening as proposed in this 2425 cycle we've got four plans which is good so if i look at the planning balance that looks good for 2425 but then and so we build then in 26 27 but i see no planned no planning for renovation in 2627 which means we go for another two-year block with no renovations we wait to start planning again with only one planned renovation there in 28. and as we're going to talk about in the priority list we we can't just sit around and say um rate four planned renovations where the planning happens in 2425 and then one more next planned renovation the next planned renovation doesn't show up until uh planning in 27 that means between now and 2029 we

009only get to renovate five schools that's not enough now i hear the tension with working with the county how do we and and i know you all don't have all the answers here but but my big question is how do we move this needle because i look at this distribution and i don't see that it's matching the renovation needs that we have in this county so dr martin i would suggest one thing if for consideration if you look at slide one which talks about the the new school summary there are four schools in the design phase during the next bond cycle for 24 and 25. those are tbd's one two um three and four okay and so there is an opportunity for consideration that maybe we say we take one of those slots for new

010construction and move it into the major renovation category to move that needle a little bit more towards the major rounds sure and i pre i appreciate that on to a degree here i'm also looking really at 26 27 because 26 27 the seven year plan the whole purpose for the seven year plan is so that we have this this continuous and we don't have sort of the boom bust cycle sure and and and so i agree that we might want to do that kind of shift even for the current cycle my concern here is not talking so much about the immediate prioritization but it's looking at our goal of this seven-year rolling plan and if i look at this seven-year the goal of the seven year rolling plan i don't see a continuous set of

011design which means we're not going to have a continuous set of renovation does that make sense understood yeah and that of course is balanced as you know in each subsequent years when you have the construction dollars showing up for those new construction right so there's there's that framework that we talk about right and that's the point every year we should have some construction and some design so that we don't have a bond it's all construction and a bond that's all designed and like i say i get it because right now we're being started limited the county comes back and says oh it doesn't fit our cost model yeah but neither do our crumbling schools does the cost model trump the trembling the crumbling schools model that's my frustration and that was sort of why we

012tried to get toward this rolling seven year plan so we didn't have to get into this stuck scenario miss kushner thank you piggyback on dr martin's company in referencing the county debt model and they are our critical partners obviously so i'm really glad that um that you all have been working so closely together but y'all as a core team only work on school construction do you have a sense of what the other competing priorities might be in this coming years from the county perspective is there a wake tech bond coming are there other bonds that i know we've had major library bond where there still do have a funding stream for library construction but are there other competing factors that maybe we as a school board need to think through um to advocate for prioritizing

013our renovations because they are assets of the taxpayer we both at the county level and school board level are charged with with um protecting these assets that passed that we own jointly and that we have to make sure that we're keeping up with renovations of our of our county assets okay discussion i will just say that there are plans for a bond that would be for the school system construction renovation cip there is one planned for wake tech as well and there is one planned for parks bond that has a large portion of it is related to the work at dick's park so there are those three i think are the ones that are being contemplated for the fall ballot and i believe the total is about a billion dollars for the combination okay a

014billion for okay you said dick's park in a parks bond as well as i mean i think the um i would hope that the the figure for the um early college with wake tech seen as a joint you know project with with all three of our organizations and i really truly value working with wake tech i think it is a should be a priority of the county and i think our school system should definitely be a priority um so thank you for putting that context and one thing to note related to because i thought dicks was a city of raleigh project okay got it yeah so one thing to note maybe put this in perspective in terms of you know the not just the seven year plan but next five 10 15 years out in

015terms of how escalation affects what we can do and the number of projects we can do so construction escalation has historically risen at a rate of two to three times the consumer price index that's up through 2015 uh to 2020 it's three times um and since 2020 with co but it's even been higher so if you model that out to 2030 even using a very uh conservative three percent year-over-year escalation the county is going to need to fund 550 million dollars a year for us to do the amount of projects that we're currently doing you model that out to even 2040 it's three quarters of a billion dollars a year to do what we're currently doing now that's way out in the future but that'll be here before we know it and so i think

016it's it's a it's a longer-term discussion in terms of how can the county maybe provide additional funding and alternative funding you might want to look at those options well as you know you have to do less projects every year right i mean but but those numbers scare people as big number one we forget that the county is growing right we're one of the fastest growing places you know and so a billion dollars today is very different than a billion dollars when we had you know only a million people right we're 1.2 million people now right so we have to keep that into consideration but my real problem coming back to what i raised in the first place is what we're building today is not adequate maybe our new construction is close i think we're close

017to adequate our renovations are not adequate and we're getting behind and we're getting behind earth and we did hear that there might be some flexibility with that is that what you were saying meaning that we could look at the possibility of taking a new construction slot and moving it down to the major renault so yes okay miss cash sorry um so you've heard the board talk about renovation over and over and over again um so i want to be sure that you understand it's it's it's a big deal um i have one question and i think i've brought it up a couple times and i i'm not sure i quite understand the capital boulevard site for high school my concern is you know five miles away less than 11 minutes from that site is southeast

018raleigh high school that sets at about 74 and a half maybe 78 to 79 percent full with trailers and southeast raleigh used to be an epitome of school when we built it and i have a concern while we're putting a high school just that far away from southeast raleigh and not focusing on southeast raleigh again and what we can do there and i don't have an answer because i think i've talked about this several times so i i'm not sure what we're putting it at the capital site because it's more than a hundred million dollars i think in this seven-year rolling plan and as a high school i was maybe thinking there was something more we could do at that site k-12 i know we talked about a laboratory school at one time with some

019input from the community but i have i have some concerns about that amount of money going into that high school in this plan as one board member i i will i will also say that that's the that's the most recent discussion the board has had about that site but there have been no decisions made about that site it's why it's also further out it provides greater time to determine because even if it is a high school it would be a small scale high school and i think this the site is actually closer to endless high school which is overcrowded so there are and then there's schools that obviously on the other side of it as well and but there's a need for high school seats in the community whether or not that would be the

020best location for it i think is a further discussion of the board and whether or not a program that's only high school is further discussion of the board it's the placeholder that's been put in the model but it's not the decision that's been made about the school okay so is southeast raleigh high school something we're going to programmatically address or are there some things we can do for southeast raleigh high school that makes it is empty seats take up some of that need for seating in that area for high schools i think the work at southeast is ongoing with regards to their magnet programming um that's where we've laid our focus at the time being um rather than expanding the base at this point in time so that it's ongoing work that we'll have to

021monitor quick um can you remind us where a high school three is located again it's just listed as hs3 we don't have a usually we put it so we i'm sorry i was going to say we believe that that target area is in the morrisville in morrisville any further comments or questions on this all right let's get to the next presentation all right so we will move full renovation and replacement and yes and we'll wait for that to come up while we're waiting for that to come up might it be possible to run some numbers if you don't have them in front of you around the total for renovations and new schools across the seven year plan as opposed to just during the bond period sure a total for new schools across a seven seven-year

022plan is a little over a billion dollars the total for renovations is a little under half a billion okay all right next slide please so uh purpose here this afternoon is to provide you an update uh as you all will recall when we were with you at the march facilities committee meeting we provided a verbal update on what the team had been doing behind the scenes with respect to the prioritization and as you all know much in the same way with the cost model and the executive summary team has been working very hard for the last several weeks and months to to do just that so this afternoon what we're going to be providing you with is an annual update to the rubric scoring we'll be talking about the 2022 top priority schools always important

023to remember that our seven year rolling cip is flexible for a variety of factors and some of those are our enrollment land availability market conditions certainly pandemic related unknowns and then of course we have two options that we're going to be bringing to you this afternoon as recommendations for your consideration next slide please in this slide we take we'd like to take just a moment as we've noted previously and just draw attention to the key collaboration that goes on between our cip team and the county these are several people that have worked very hard for a number of weeks on this particular topic so i think it's important to just draw attention to the fact that there's some very important collaboration going on next slide please so in our march meeting we captured a total

024of three comments and we wanted to to bring those back to you comment number one was a comment that was specifically raised about kerry high school and this in this particular topic the team met internally over a period of a few weeks we discussed the current situation we discussed what the options were for this school as we noted in our march meeting with ul last time we are proceeding with the replacement of the windows and the canopies we felt that that was critical so that that is happening we did consider this school as one of the options for a major high school renovation noting it is not included in the recommendations because as jack noted you know we do have a funding framework from the county that we do need to fall within however we

025understand and we we hear the importance of this so there is certainly a possibility that we might be able to move a slot around and consider kerry high school in one of those two options next slide please comment number two uh was it separate comment but it was was related to the initial comment with respect to kerry high school and that was a comment that there could be potential concern that we did not have a high school reflected amongst our five major renovation slots over the seven year period so again the team met internally we discussed options it was absolutely considered at present it does not fall within the recommendations as it does not fall within the framework of the county debt model but again there is some flexibility that we can discuss and it's

026possible that we can move a slot or two around and discuss the potential of having a major high school renovation next slide please comment number three that we received was specifically with respect to east wake high school again the team met internally discussed the history of work at that campus and also options that would potentially be available to us to address concerns i had the opportunity to meet with scott and some other key community leaders at that campus on march 23rd it was actually thank you for that invitation ms scott it was a really a good morning to be able to meet with key people understand some of the successes that are happening at that school and we don't want to forget that because it's a fantastic administration and there's some really good things happening

027at that school we did talk about some of the challenges that are out there and so as a result of that meeting we went back following that we talked to some key people in maintenance and operations and they are communicating directly with the administration we found approximately seven or eight items on the school's list that we believed could potentially be maintenance and life cycle in nature and we're developing a strategy to try to resolve as many of those as quickly as we can next slide please so in this slide uh what we would like to uh to show you um is just a snapshot uh what's happening with the funding and so in this slide we draw particular attention to the fy 22 major projects this particular category is all new construction and so you'll

028see note that we have a total of six schools you can see where the geographic location for those schools are the respective building capacities and then the construction and substantial completion estimates and dates next slide please in this next slide we talk specifically about projects that again are new but were recently completed or will soon be completed under the prior bond and again you'll see several schools here that show a nice balance and spread around the county again you'll see the geographic location the respective building capacities and then the construction and the substantial completion dates respectively next slide please actually could you back up one slide please in this slide this draws particular attention to the major renovations in our district and these are again our schools that were done prior to the 2022 funding

029so in this particular slide you'll notice a heavy focus in the the apex raleigh and fuquay verena area you'll notice again the capacity numbers the the important dates of note here being when construction commenced and then finally when substantial completion was either achieved or we do have a couple that are slated to be completed very soon next slide please over the next several slides you will see photos of schools that are under construction presently and are soon to be done so this first school is herbert against rhode middle school this is located in fuquay verena and you'll know that this school is to be substantially complete very soon and it will be ready and scheduled to be ready to open for staff and students at the beginning of our next school year next slide please

030apex friendship elementary school located in apex of course this school is again under construction and slated to be complete right around the time the school ends and we'll be ready for staff and students to open at the beginning of our next school year woods creek elementary school woods creek is in progress this is located in holly springs woods creek is a school just so that you're aware that when this is completed will serve as a swing space initially for buckham elementary school balcom elementary school will occupy the space while baucom is renovated when the renovation at baucom is completed approximately a year later they will then go back to their newly renovated school and then woods creek will open for staff and students the following year next slide please westbrook middle school which is located

031in raleigh important to note that this is a two phase project so what you're seeing here with respect to the substantial completion at the end of this month is for phase one phase one includes their new school so at the end of this school year the uh stefan's it will be ready for staff and students to move in for use in our new school year coming up the former school will then be demoed which is phase two and then phase two the piece of phase two the scope of work are the athletic field okay projection for phase two completion would be this time next year so march april of 2023. next slide please fuller elementary school again also located in raleigh this is a renovation going very well slated to be substantially complete in june

032and will be ready to open for staff and students at the beginning of our next school year next slide please in this slide what we'd like to do is take a moment just to a little bit of a history lesson to remind all with respect to the categories in our rubric as you may recall we've got four categories we have our campus building condition health and safety school choice and educational adequacy the respective percentages for each of those categories are noted immediately below the name of each category and are 40 35 15 and 10 percent respectively next slide please so we'd like to take a moment we'd like to share the 22 evaluation approach with you all as we mentioned back in march there were a couple of different things that we did this year

033that we believe helped to refine the process number one maintenance and operations they went out to the market and they hired a third party consultant to come in and to assess the physical condition of our 55 oldest schools in the district fdnc engaged three separate consultants to each evaluate two of our top six schools from last year's list 2021. what came out of this was that a a scoring effort was done per the previous slide we arrived at our scoring for 2022 which you'll note in your in your separate backup provided downloaded and assembly was the top 25 list for this year when we reached the point where we had completed the scoring for this year a small group of individuals from our cip team which included long-range planning real estate services maintenance and operations

034and fdnc they met to start to evaluate some of the additional considerations post scoring like ability to swing on site phasing geographic location of that particular school and any other related considerations next slide please you'll recognize this slide this this shows you uh just as we did last year this is our top six from this year in this slide you'll note from left to right of course the name of each school and then you'll see the scoring in each of the four categories respectively you'll see the cumulative score in the final column and then immediately to the right you will see those six scores graphed respectively and as i noted just a moment ago the complete top 25 list was provided separately in your backup next slide please at this point uh given the work

035product and where we are today the schedule that we have felt that has been the following so we had the opportunity to share this update with leadership on the 28th and the 29th of march we then presented it to our wake county core team that same week on the 31st of march we had great dialogue with our leadership as well as our core team great back and forth questions and answers we of course are here with you all today at the board work session to present this to you formally and solicit your feedback as we continue to look forward the path forward would be taking any feedback that we receive any comment today coming back to you all with this much response as possible next week at our april facilities committee meeting and then finally

036pressing forward to the april 19 board work session which would be two weeks from today any additional comments any additional information that you're requesting either coming out of today or that april facilities committee next week it's important to note that because we do have a bond on this year's ballot the schedule is driven by the requirements in that schedule with the goal being that we come back to you for the formal presentation of the 2022 cip two weeks from today as last year if you all feel comfortable that we are at that point where you're good for a proceeding forward for approval it would go to the board meeting that evening april 19th if there's something that you would like us to continue to look at to refine we would absolutely do that we would

037then be coming back to you two weeks later on the may 3rd work session for any final questions and then it would go on the board agenda that evening for approval important to note because of the schedule with the bond happening on the ballot this year in november that it must be approved by our board you all no later than the first week of may next slide please in this slide what we'd like to take a moment or two to discuss is some of the conversation and process that our team spent over the last three four weeks once we got to the point where we talked about the scoring we talked about the non-scoring related considerations there were several options that were out there and and i think it's important to to capture to know

038that there were several options that were considered by long-range planning real estate services maintenance and operations and fdnc and this was the initial basis for our analysis and discussion for any options that were considered and that will be ultimately presented to you all today we discussed options from a variety of perspectives it's important to know that it's data driven and we'll talk about that in a couple of moments other considerations and key pieces that were included were perceived needs out there in our district swing space and input that has been received from our community lastly most importantly again any recommended options that we're bringing to the table for your consideration and discussion today work within the county debt model they should be data data-driven and ultimately led us to recommend these two options out of

039several that were considered next slide please so in in this particular option this is what we're calling option number one and option number one is data driven by this year's scoring okay and as you'll recall looking at that seven year cip you have a total of five major renovation slots and by virtue of the scoring for this year you'll see lockhart elementary brentwood elementary briar cliff elementary lincoln middle school and either north north garner middle school or zebulun middle school we've provided zebulon middle school as an alternative for consideration given the fact that that's number two on our our scoring this year ligand is the highest ranked middle school okay uh north garner is number two and zebulun is number three amongst the middle schools when we look at our new construction section you'll note

040that brian road and our hs3 which we've already talked a little bit about today are already slotted in on the seven year cip important to note that if you see a tba asterisk that's indicative that that particular location requires that we acquire land okay so in the in the bryan road site in the pool road site we currently have land that you all control that you own okay and these from top to bottom these areas the west carrie morrisville the wendell zebulon the eastern raleigh the northeastern raleigh apex holly springs and the west carrie morrisville areas these are all areas that in discussion whether it's with community or staff or other targets these are the areas that we understand are are in the areas of need next slide please so option two is indicative of

041the scoring for last year it also takes into account trying to address immediate needs for new construction and i think it's important to note that in this particular option lockhart briarcliff and brentwood are still amongst three of the top five major renovation slots okay you're also seeing adams and powell which showed up in last year's scoring in the in the new construction section of course again m12 and h3 are already slotted in and i think it's important to know uh just for clarity that in that m12 section we're noting woods creek middle school the reason that we've shown it as such is that's based on recent presentations that reflect overcrowding in that particular area and based on projected growth the overcrowding is expected to continue as a result m12 was subsequently moved down on the

042list as you'll know to the es tbd number two slot okay this creek is only listed in option two so does that mean it is not part of option one that's the middle school right correct okay next slide please so what we have here over the next couple of slides this is reflective of what jack shared with you a few moments ago with regard to our seven year plan the first slide is is our major renault slide showing of course the focus on the next bond cycle which is fy 24 and 25. next slide please and then this is our new construction slide just as jack presented to you for the next seven years next slide please so uh bringing this to to a wrap-up key components important to note just like last year that

043when we talk about our rubric when we talk about the scoring and the percentages building condition and health and safety remain our key drivers because they account for 75 percent of the total scoring as always uh equity very important component and important to note that that's absolutely considered in every decision as i noted earlier we made a couple of changes this year when we talked about going out there and engaging consultants to assist us in the evaluation of these sites always open to continued process improvement and evaluation and that is noted at the beginning of the presentation our seven year rolling cip is in fact flexible and it's in its flexibility is frankly due to the enrollment out there that we have in our district land availability market conditions the unknowns that we face sometimes

044with our pandemic and other considerations so moving forward we would look for information implementation of this into our 2022 cip and as noted always open for other opportunities to refine and continue to make progress in this project this process and as we've noted before the the new snap prim privatization process went live at the end of january and there are some opportunities in that funding to do some things like what we discussed earlier when we talk about work that's still being done at cary high school when we talk about the window replacement the canopy replacement so there are those opportunities out there next slide please and with that happy to take your feedback your comments and your questions before we begin i want to say thank you and i also when it comes to the

045recommendations that are given between options one and two are you looking for directions from board members as to what they prefer or is that just telling us those are different directions that we could go in so we would absolutely want to hear your feedback and we would want your direction okay which option i'm just making sure all right thank you thank you all right board members all right we'll start over here miss cash so i always wonder back on slide 15 because i'm very happy with the fact that we've had a rubric that we start to work with but back on slide 15 prioritization of rubric update i see that school choice is 15 um i know this is where i get a little a little questioning about what we do with our choice programs

046and our schools and i just hope that the conversation between the office of school choice and the facility department is strong i think that in fact i know in my district there might be at least one school that has application to it but literally the building will never get applications to it because of the way the building looks and the land looks and i think we put programs in these schools that we spend dollars on and it's kind of a false security and i think that if we want to kids to apply to that school it's going to have to look better so and i do know that a lot of those schools of choice are not in this renovation project there may be other things we can do to help those facilities support the

047program choice that we're trying to do to fill empty seats in those schools which is what we're all about in wake county so i just bring that concern up i don't have an answer but i know we have at least 20 schools that probably have great programs in them with good applications to fill empty seats but the building will not support people to apply to those thank you ms cash all right let's go thank you and i also appreciate the the work and all of the um the information that you provide with the rubric and um all of the the folks who have um spent time uh offering information for this you know it's it's really hard for me especially having just been to a school like windall elementary and i don't want to say

048that you know only i'm just speaking i represent this part of the county i represent these schools i represent this community so i have to speak um for these people it's my job to amplify their concerns and as as ms cass just said i mean when you look at a school like that from the from the outside and it's dirt and weeds and and screen screens that are very old and i know sometimes we ask the principal did you put in a work order for this okay i mean that's it's a lot to ask it is it is a lot for our our school personnel to balance to write a work order for every screen that is ripped or shredded or just old to to write a work order for every single window that doesn't

049open for every stinky bathroom or the dirt outside i mean that doesn't have grass on it and there's no reason why it shouldn't or a garden that someone started and and those families are no longer there so it's really hard for me to see a school that had been uh five on the on the previous rubric to ranking to to jump down to 11. and i believe in the conversations that i have personally had with municipal leaders and with county commissioners and again these are personal conversations these are not in you know necessarily an official capacity but i believe that the will is there to even be more creative to work to work to provide solutions especially when we have problems or concerns that are we don't have a swing space i mean how long

050should a school be pushed down down down down because they don't have a swing space it's it's really it's it's really hard for me to be able to take this information and to go back to folks who just had a meeting last summer and say no you know never mind this isn't going this isn't going to happen anytime soon i know we're we're dealing with a an impossible equation here but it's it's very very hard for me to to see some of these schools not prioritized and looking at some that are even you know lower on this list where we acknowledge a need and i know that there are other schools popping up in that area that are new buildings that are shiny new buildings that are taking students and it's what's just so heartbreaking

051is when you know that the experience that they'll have inside of that school despite in our schools despite what the building condition may be is one of the most loving and amazing opportunities that a student could have and it's i'm i'm really i'm just struggling with this and i know other board members are as well and again i'm not saying that the east is deserves more um than any other part of the district but i it's it is getting harder and harder for me to go back to this community over the last four years and say not yet thank you miss scott miss waters well thank you for a very well done presentation i just had a couple of questions on the process and looking at the rubric that was used i see the four

052categories that are identified i wonder how far did you drill down into each category in terms of more specific questions that you used to analyze for example with the building conditions what types of questions did you drill down further to analyze the condition of the building and how did you control maybe for human factors as you look at so many schools over time sort of your perspective may change as you look at the first one as opposed to the last one so how did you control for human factors and how far did you drill down into each of these categories to come up with the assessment because it's it's so challenging when you see that that school that's the seventh school that's kind of on the you know brink of needing a renovation and so

053many of the schools need renovations but just wanted to understand a little bit more about the process and how those final selections were made sure thank you for your question so when you look at that rubric you look at the campus building condition and one you know a couple of the factors that and this was part of the reason why we refined the process this year and engaged a third party consultant to actually go to each of our 55 campuses that are the oldest in the district and to actually have boots on the ground and actually be at that campus walk every part and piece of that campus and look at it from a 10-year perspective so when you look at the scoring for this year's rubric it's based on 10 years it's telling us

054so and this is the quandary that we face sometimes we as school will have a piece of major work done to assist with part of perhaps an issue that's going on and so when you do the whole 10-year evaluation that does impact the score because that piece of the school has been improved okay so you could talk about major components like a roof or your hvac system or windows or things that really improve a school that make a difference so if a major project occurred in the course of a given year to one of those top components it will impact the score because there's been an improvement so there is drilling down to really understand what's happening on campus what the major components look like you know the functionability and that's when you get in

055to the health and safety component which is nearly as high a percentage as our building condition they look at those very things the health and the safety of those buildings and trying to understand over that 10-year period what's it looking like today and if you weren't to do anything what would it look like over that period of time down the road ms carr all right thank you so much and i appreciate you going back and also addressing carrie high and i'll just throw it out there because it says on the slide that could be considered in a custom option and i would fully support any custom option just for many reasons but if if folks are interested you can go and see where there were other plans already ready to roll um and then it

056was just not done and so i you know part of my concern i know we've talked about it before one if you if they're playing stuff school then it doesn't happen that creates a lot of issues not only for those who are going to school there living with community working there but i just want to throw that out there but also where we fix some of the problems and then we come back we score them again they could even fall all the way off the top 25 and i just have concerns about that because it's it's recreating a picture and it makes me worry about how again that's really not to me very transparent because it's recreating the picture i understand we're looking at every time but if we're looking at it in a screenshot

057and then we're saying okay we're going to do x y and z and my opinion as one board member then we need to do x y and z and the funding is not there i hear that but down the line it becomes available then if that's something that's already been said it's going to happen that's just how i how i view it and going to what ms scott was talking about i noticed on slide 9 like the major renovations if you look at where they're at overwhelming majority are in raleigh overwhelming and not saying they weren't needed but you know we have other areas of the county and i guess again goes to um you know what we're looking at and ensuring that other areas are not neglected so i mean it kind of goes

058to what she was saying because i and they're smaller as well most of the renovations and i understand that with the dollar amount but the building capacity but that was just something i noticed that backs up exactly what ms scott was saying sorry thank you for comments so yes specific to cary high school and this goes to the topic about considering the possibility of taking something that's designed funded in 24 25 and moving it down as a major renault that would be a potential option okay where staff would want to look at that a little closer and move one of those design dollars and 24 from the new construction section down to the major rental okay and we need to look at the construction dollars that are allotted to that but we believe because we

059would not be doing the entire campus the entire campus doesn't require complete renovation we believe that the dollars that are already allotted for the elementary new construction are close to what we think would likely be needed to complete the construction but you know staff i think would like to take a little bit of time and just make sure that they have that comfort level but we can sit here in today that we feel like we have a good degree of comfort so that's one one option to actually address two areas cary high school potentially and taking that needle as dr martin said maybe moving it a little bit more towards the major renaults okay miss miss kushner thank you and ms carter i appreciate the attention you've given carrie high and your predecessors before you

060have talked about carry high and gotten some renovations there but we looking at east wake so i'm glad that the staff went to east wake high school i think that is arguably the most challenged high school we have and if you layer the school choice that has impacted that school i i mean and i'm and i feel really uncomfortable in some ways having that the board sort of micromanage this because of past experience where board members in a non-transparent way were able to influence the rubrics that we've had in place that we try to place with the professional staff so i i'm acknowledging that discomfort broughton has a cafeteria that cannot fit but a fraction of their students sanderson millbrook wake forest older high schools like kerry high school that have the heritage of their

061history but also have older buildings so i really want the high school discussion to be much it needs to be universal and i think the staff is more able to do that than we are and i feel you because olds has had a plan for a renovation since the 90s and there's been no movement on that school and we have capacity we could expand and i think that's what the raleigh renovations have done is increased capacity in raleigh which is half of our population so i i am glad to see those renovations because they were completely ignored in the 90s and the early 2000s when i first came on this board there were schools in my district that had sewage problems leaking problems style was only fixed recently and they'd had significant structural problems for

062a long time that were put off because of the high growth in the 90s and the early 2000s building schools in western lake in south southern wake in these high growth areas that had extraordinarily huge increases in student enrollment those new constructions had to take precedence in many ways because we had were growing by thousands seven thousand one year six thousand students another year so these renovations in raleigh and i'm sorry i'm getting really getting going but those renovations were put off year after year after year and a small school like olds has been waiting since the 90s so i i feel you i understand your concerns i understand miss cash's and and look at north garner with a five on the in the recent rubric with their building condition score north garner needs some

063love i was glad to see it in option one we need to protect that asset that the taxpayers have expected us to protect so that's a lot of and and i see um and i understand miss scott that wendell has been waiting um but i appreciate the staff doing a deeper dive and um brentwood and lockhart have been waiting a long time briarcliff been waiting a long time as well so i i really would caution us as a board to allow the staff and their expertise to guide us i do think we need to ask questions and make sure that we are providing the community feedback that we hear but also that there are nine districts and we could all point to high need schools and that's the frustration because the the county has their

064um what did they call it their uh bond capacity and we have to work within that and our students deserve these excellent spaces that we've been building the last 10 years where we have shifted from kind of um we have been basing our designs on research that promote teaching and learning i celebrate that that that's been the change since um dr martin and i joined the board 10 years ago that is that is some those are schools our students deserve that are based in research for teaching and learning and i celebrate that and i think that needs to be our overall message as we go forward with this bond is that the school system is building schools children deserve and spaces our educators deserve as working conditions in teaching and learning thank you miss kushner

065miss johnson hustler well i'm actually glad mrs kushner went first um i i echo those sentiments i mean i've sat at the table for eight years and clearly i came to the table saying north corner is a mess you all um and and and it is right and patiently as a board member i am reminded that i sit at this table to represent a district but once elected we represent the entire district and it is absolutely a reminder that every student deserves the best school buildings we can provide but so do our educators and you know i think the last year i've been harping on north garner because we've started to lose educators because the art room floods every year so we haven't had an art teacher so so there are pieces that aren't in

066this rubric that we could all sit at this table and say and i think it's important every board member speaks their piece but ultimately i think i can't agree with ms kushner more right i could add to the rubric to miss cash's point around school choice well i have two middle schools in garner nobody wants to go to north garner because of how it looks that's just the reality every part of our district can share those exact same stories and i think the the hard part for us as board members to articulate to the public is we have staff who dig deep to make the decisions so that it really isn't a personal decision because if i make a personal decision i'm going to tell you to go option one because north garner is on

067the list that is what you would get from all of us because we're human beings and we sit here representing a large constituent and so at the end of the day yes i have a personal opinion um mr strickland's new he's heard from quite a few of us i mean i got a whole list of schools who aren't even on here that i would add if our rubric was even broader right because if we get down to school choice not just for students and families but if we get down to school choice for where educators choose to work all of the because the building is a part of teaching working conditions right and so those are things we haven't even tapped into when we talk about what a rubric should be including and i'm only

068following ms kushner to say that i wanted to add there are things that we aren't even talking about that should be included that would probably put almost the bulk of our old schools regardless if they were billed past 2015 we'd probably have them on the list because they got a leaky faucet they don't have awnings for kids to be protected we could go on all day my whole list mr strickland i'd be talking about a whole list for all the schools but i do think it's important that not not that we just sit here talking from our individual districts but we acknowledge that their pieces that staff can't even tap into or everybody would be on this list and certainly it is our role to weigh in and i will weigh in and i think

069every board member should but i also think at the end of the day it's important that the public who does listen to us do hear us say that we do have staff and consultants to dig into this who we have to trust that they're bringing the right things and our job is to ask the hard questions if we feel like we don't have what we need so to ms kushner's point ultimately what i'd like to my question would be i don't know how we expand this rubric but i do think it's going to be important that we take in to consideration not for this time because all of these things are coming the beautiful thing about being home during cove that people weren't in buildings and now we started to hear a lot more because

070they're back in those buildings right so a classroom who's sat without heat or air for the last three years the teacher's been at home now they're like um uh could you give me some air so those are realities that we can't really talk about and we haven't talked about in a rubric but i do think we have to start thinking long term and articulating big picture of what do working conditions mean because the beauty is we those of us who work for wake county you come to a building that somebody else takes care of so if the paint gets chipped somebody's going to come in and fix the paint that's not true for our school buildings and so we have to talk about those tangible tangible things to the people in the building that we

071don't have on our rubric and i just want to lift that up because that those things are the things that not just parents but our educators talk to us about that we can't fix right i wanna i wanted to pull all the weeds up in the parking lot when my daughter went to um east middlebrook we really tried but then we realized it's actually in the concrete and you couldn't kill it it literally kept growing in the concrete let us use roundup exactly and then we have to explain to parents why you can't use certain things on a school property because it's not safe for schools the list goes on but but i i did just want to echo ms kushner's point that of course i have a personal opinion um and it's important that

072the people of district 2 know that i've been talking about north garner since i set up the seat but every time north garner didn't end up on that list you all provided me with the details to explain why and i think at the end of the day yes i hope north garner is on this list if it's not i'll do the same thing and i'll go back and i'll still the superintendent will still have to tell me that north garner will remain underutilized and here are the reasons why but i do think it's important that i lift that up as a board member who has been driving you all crazy about one particular school since i sat at the board but i also acknowledged that we're a district and there's not going to be a

073district that we represent that doesn't have needs and then there are needs that we haven't even talked about yet so good luck with the hard work and thank you for letting us ask our questions and also challenging your rubric like i it's you know i don't have a lot of magnet schools it's hard for me to see magnet schools ranked higher because of course they have higher choice because people want to go to a horrible building because they can take you know orchestra that they can't take at a comp at a traditional middle school i could be arguing all those things and have and i think those are the hard things that staff you all struggle with because those are not things that can be built into a rubric right school choice magnets are always

074going to rank higher as they should by design and i support that as a board member but i also acknowledge our traditional schools are at a disadvantage with that particular part of our rupert thank you miss johnson hustler dr martin thank you concur with a lot of the sentiments i want to add some specific questions and feedback-wise i mean to your feedback question option one or two i tend to bias toward option one simply because it recognizes that we've got both elementary and middle i'm still very disappointed that we don't have any high school in fact we don't have any high school on the seven year plan not just in the bond issue so i while i understand that we probably are not going to be able to get a high school eve planning or

075anywhere necessarily in for the next two year bond i do have significant concern that we don't have a high school anywhere well other than the new construction or the renovation of bobby murray site but i'm talking about these renovations no high school in seven years of planning that concerns me because i look at the needs and that that just doesn't jive but overall i think your plan one your option one whether there is tweaks to which what the specifics are that that may or may not be an issue but i think option one makes more sense uh than option two uh from that perspective the one question though i do have with option two which sort of gets it the bigger question is trying to understand how powell was on the list such that option

076two it shows up but powell does not even appear on the top 25 list at all this year so could you tell us what why yeah so powell had some some items done in their building which understandably you know they did show up in the top 25 last year and i want to say that the work that was done before this year when we engaged a 30 third-party consultant was good work however i think it's it's important to note that when we engaged this third party consultant they were viewing it from the lens of of an expert that does this every day that goes out there it's not to say that the work that was done previously was not good work but you're talking about someone who is specifically in that evaluation in that field

077and their opinion was that it was not in our top 25 this year based on their evaluation on campus and what they saw going back dr martin i just want to note that your comment understood about not having the high school major renault currently in the seven year plan with the understanding that we could potentially you know staff will go back over the next week we'll look at the possibility of taking one of the design dollars that are in our next bond window moving that down to the major renaults that could be at kerry high school so there is a possibility that we could address your comment with the kerry high school alternative and i appreciate that but i also to ms kushner's point i don't i'm not and and i understand kerry high school

078very well and this has been an issue that's been there for a long time but so has east wake uh so has every other one on this list so i do think we need a comprehensive look rather than just just saying hey it is carrie though the flip side is if we can do a high school runoff for the cost partial renault for the cost of a complete renault of an elementary school that is a compelling reason why it could potentially be on there again because we're we're facing this this debt limit with the county part of my concern though even with the kerry issue is you've talked about the things that you're doing with kerry right now how do we know that though and ms carter kind of brought that up but how do

079we know that those activities would not take kerry off the list for next year valid point and i wouldn't say take it off the list but it could certainly impact the fci score it's which is a major contributor it is right so i think this maybe is my my biggest concern for our discussion here is um you know the rubric has come a long way um you know it it it was way more random as ms kushner noted when we first got on the board so i'm very pleased that we've we've made headway toward this rubric you know we used to even just let this rubric be a linear scale from it used to be 1 to 17 instead of 1 to 25 and we didn't recognize that you know even as the small plot

080that you plotted you know we see the four schools have a high then we have a pretty we have a jump and you show us just two more um and the instability of that was crazy but we still have too much instability in this rubric and so i think we need to go back and look at addressing this because the rubric is so much better than it was don't get me wrong but it's not where we need to be yet uh because we should not have the level of instability on you know as scott noted wendell going from 5 to 11 doesn't make a lot of sense um you know of the 25 let's three three four five six seven eight nine only nine of the 25 were on the list last year now i

081understand that we had a different set of eyes evaluating it that's for the fci but it wasn't a different set of eyes for the health and safety the school of choice or the educational programs so like say i think we've got too much instability i've suggested before i'm going to suggest again that i think part of what we need to do to sort of balance out some of these factors is not look at it just year by year it's a little bit like standardized testing your score on a standardized test if you're a bad test taker hello like me it partly depends on the day that you take the test right what score you're going to get now i don't think our bill buildings quite are it matters what day you take the test but

082it does a little bit when you walk when you walk through um you know how recently has it been seated or is it you know is it dirt all around or how recently has it been painted right that's a little bit the day you take the test so if we would look at even the same rubric over the last three to five years right and take sort of an average what would that look like compared to the single year right and so i think there's two things addressed there one this is a 10-year average fci of what the score is this current one is a 10-year average it is 10. okay yes and so it could be a rolling tin thank you and then two i think what the improvement this year of the 55

083school evaluation by a third party in the somewhat shifts you saw some of the major ones we'll do going forward is we'll be able to lock in lists or we should be locking in the list every year and so it should not change that drastically because you did a small hvac project at this school and it was a million dollars and it drops off the list it should be based on the the list should not be as fluid as it has previously okay based on the improved data and moving forward i think we should lock it in as much as absolutely possible that's that's good to hear i particularly am glad to hear that this is a 10-year rolling average fci that's going to make a big difference in doing so you can plan projects

084holistically not just with looking at life cycle replacements or renovations but look at the program as a whole and use all the funds down the road as holistically more so than has been able to do in the past based on the data we have so we're trying to throw some lifecycle funds at a project that's on a renovation list in year 10 and maintain it until that 10-year versus doing throwing more money at it now and kicking it off the list does that make sense okay no i appreciate that i mean those are the things that again some of us have been talking about for a long time i'm glad to hear that happening and frank frankly in presentations i'd encourage that to be highlighted because that that revision to the to the scoring rubric

085i think really helps and again so we've seen an abrupt change this year hopefully we'll see a little bit more stability uh uh in the coming year um with respect to the stability of the scoring though the one thing i will note which concerns me just a little bit is well the graph you show show shows the first six it's interesting to note that if instead of using a two decimal point significant figure yep sorry here's the data guy coming in again if we only used one significant figure and i'm not sure that our evaluation really is much beyond one significant figure the next five schools so schools five uh through nine have the same value to one significant figure so we're talking about going from 3.92 to 3.86 there is no difference in those

086scores and then if we go a little bit further so yes geeky me did the plots right because i can't just look at a table of data but really so we've got we've got the four then we've got a jump and then we've got a kind of a plateau and a slight gradual slope the next time we get a jump is really out there at school number 22. and that goes from 3.41 to 3.15 so so in many respects of these 25 schools based on the current scoring we have four high needs we have three that probably were not super significant based on this scale and everybody else is right there in contention now we don't have the funds to do that right and this is where to be honest when i look at this

087list there's not a single school on this list that doesn't deserve a major renovation and there's a lot of schools not on this list that deserve a major renovation so i want to call again that we got to have a field trip we've got to have a field trip we've got to go with our county commissioners we've got to make this public and we need to visit some of the schools that aren't on the list we need to visit some of the schools that are in the hey we really need a fund but can't that are on this list and we need to see what it looks like because as long as we're stuck with this we've got to fit within the debt model we're not going to address these needs these aren't cosmetic needs

088these are the educational programs these are the health and safety these are systemic and if we the problem's only going to get worse so if we don't start addressing it now while our enrollment is more moderate we're not getting the big five six thousand sweeps in enrollment we should be renovating like crazy right now because we don't have the growth pressure to the same degree that we historically have and may very well again now is when we should be renovating like crazy because if we don't it's going to come back to bite us in the not too distant future so as i look at that that big bulk of schools basically 5 to 22. the next thing that i was curious about is the specific scoring and so while i like our rubric i still

089have some questions to it so if i look at school choice right nobody gets high i'm sorry poe gets a five uh athens there's several that are 4.7 uh athens 4.4 and so on and so forth but i'm going to take you know a school in my district combs elementary 4.7 very competitive school yeah there's a lot of stuff there that if we had a better facility that would sure help choice but then i look at north garter middle school and i see it scored at 3.7 north i know that north garner needs more help right don't get me wrong both schools need help but north garner needs more help with choice than combs does right and i'm not trying to undermine cones exactly right and i just want to highlight it our scoring numbers

090there's something fishy about these scoring numbers because even as a magnet program combs right and and i love combs and it's in my district i've been advocating for combs and will continue to but sorry combs should not have a choice score that's higher than north garner so i think we need to look at these choice scores and and get a better handle on it because even though that the choice the choice was what 10 or 15 that can still right that can still buffer your score i need to make just a quick clarification the school choice is truncated in that column it is choice planning and assignment and so what that means that they're looking at is not just whether or not it's a choice model they're looking at whether or not there is residential

091growth in the area through long-range planning they're looking at whether or not there is crowding in the school as well so we may need to reformat that how we talk about that a little bit because there's more than just this choice aspect that we're talking about so i just need i just need to throw that in no thank you for throwing then and and so to some degree you know that this is one of the things where we're going to need another tutorial miss waters to your point what goes into these numbers um you know we had hoped to have a facility committee meeting where we actually were on site and we could look at some schools and say hey this is how what goes into this score i really think that would be helpful

092for us as board members i think it'd be helpful for the community and to your point uh superintendent moore absolutely choice planning and assignment although i'm going to still take my two examples of combs in north garner middle school and and well well choice has a real seat need no question about that the assignment issues the uh choice issues and frankly even the planning issues i still have question as to how and again i'm just picking on two and i'm picking on one in my district and saying hey i think we got overrated um i i'd like some attention to that the second thing that concerns me from a data analytics perspective is when i when i like say i the the four top then we had this big plateau and so on so i

093independently plotted the building condition score and the health and safety score because from a facility perspective alone those are the kind of the two factors that rightly carry the biggest weight and i discover that three schools washington adams and combs have a facility condition index that's really right up there competitive with the facility needs of the top four there i'm using a 4.5 score as a cut off those other three schools have a lower composite because their health and safety is in pretty good shape then we have will a spring elementary that has a high relatively high competitive health and safety need but its facility condition is lower so i'm a little bit concerned it feels to me like health and safety is kind of a big issue but health and safety when i look

094at some of these schools right if you and maybe i'm sensitive to this because of the chemistry building that i work in at nc state we've done a pretty good job of keeping dabney hall cosmetically looking pretty good but as soon as you start peeling back the layers you realize the electrical is not sufficient the hvac is not sufficient and so on what do i see here if the school keeps itself it's painted well if it's got an active pta that keeps the grounds looking nice and some of the equipment supplied is the health and safety going to appear to be better than it maybe would be based on the building condition so when i see these these big spreads right if they were slightly different i i wouldn't have quite so much concern but

095when i see the kind of this this big spread between the facility condition and the health and safety it raises a question to me so just like i'm really pleased with the 10-year rolling average but i think i'd love i'd like to maybe because i think it helped address this issue if whenever there's a big spread between two factors like the building condition health and safety and i think those two are the primary ones that i'd look at i could maybe be convinced otherwise but i really think those two factors if there's a big spread i think we need to take a second look to see to miss water's point right how much of that is the human factor looking at it right did i walk through the building and oh this looks pretty good

096i don't see evidence of mold and therefore the health and safety is okay but another building that didn't have quite the resources i've got a lot more mold now all of a sudden the health and safety jumps is that the facility is that my eyes because of when i looked at it or whatnot so again we do this all the time with grant scoring when there is a big differential that sort of flag to say hey maybe we need to look at this a second time to try to moderate the differential because like i said particularly that that that next five i see a pretty big spread and i think if we're in better shape we would see the facility building condition index and the health and safety tracking a little bit more consistently and

097so when they're not tracking consistently i think that's getting at some of our variation so i know this is a fairly technical discussion but this is where we had the information presented and i think we need to have that discussion because we've got to get to a better point and again i'm going to end by reiterating that every single one of the schools on this list needs and deserves a renovation so we've got we've got to do a little bit better job ourselves but we've got to do a better job and we've got to get the county to recognize there's a different model that has to happen because this we can't because of debt capacity is hurting our students it's hurting our community it's hurting so much we've got to change it thank you for

098indulging me but this is work i'd love to see us continue to keep working on so great stuff dr martin thank you and i just wanted to add to shine a positive light on some of that many of the things that i think he's referencing or things that are wrong with our schools that we're not able to handle from the maintenance side of things so positive in all of this in the plan is moving forward would be an increase in life cycle money and it goes up i think two million dollars maybe next year but in the outer years it increases substantially and so we would definitely have money or have plans set aside for that money for the many needs that that we know about throughout the district so some of those things and

099we mentioned east wake you know some of those things given a better situation or scenario and funding would not have been an issue maybe they could have been things that we could have taken care of but there's a positive piece in all this in that and this was a plan that was put in place some years ago to increase this life cycle funding so kudos to the county they and and us as well realize that it is a need in the coming years mr strickland if we do more of those life cycle pieces we'll see less need for major renovations as we have now potentially keep in mind life cycle are things that have reached the end of their life right hvac boilers painting things like that so they are are things that that are

100directly a part of how a building operates and if it can operate and function so could some of that also morph into some other things that need to be taken care of you know if your hvac system is operating properly there's less of a chance to have mold and mildew and once you get rid of that then it it stands to reason you could paint the building so i wouldn't say totally but that's something that could be in the realm of possibility something we haven't talked about and i'll just bring this up just just on the surface you know earlier this year we we formalized with facilities our primp process partial renovations so there has been much discussion among staff about how we move forward with those print projects you know we we believe primp

101is is exactly what it says a partial renovation it's not tearing the building down and building something back it is is making things look better making things function better making things operate better so we are having conversations with staff right now that is not to say that you should expect some of this stuff to happen overnight because they're going through the projects as we get them but we are looking at it and it is part of the discussion thank you all very much we appreciate you taking the time and working with the county and bringing this to us we know that there are about you know 200 or so buildings that we're all concerned about and being able to narrow it down is difficult so thank you our next topic is uh learning about the

102gaggle pilot um and marlo gaddis our chief technology officer will be joining us virtually superintendent moore is there anything you want to add no i'll just note the time since we have two two items still thank you all i appreciate the time today good afternoon chairman happy student superintendent moore and board members today i am bringing to you information about our gaggle pilot program also available to help answer questions today if needed our crystal reardon our director of school counseling and allison reed our senior director for digital learning and libraries who are in the board room with you today so let me get my presentation up and ready all right so first of all i want to start by saying that this money our pilot began in 2020 when state funding was made available to

103us through the coronavirus relief fund the state offered this funding in hopes that it would help enhance student safety during remote instruction and then they offered it again in 2021 through sr3 monies which we have applied for so the question is really what is gaggle and that's a question that a lot of our folks are asking so it's basically a digital service that monitors and alerts our wake county staff that are involved if there are concerns related to student or school safety goggle does this through ai and machine learning it flags content that is in either our google or our outlook accounts those are wake county accounts not personal accounts they review them and potentially block harmful content once that happens that flag content is then looked at and reviewed by a safety team by

104that is hired by gaggle they review it and then they send any information to us of any alerts that may be of greater concern to us around student and school safety notifications come to us in email for the for the folks on the response team but in severe situations we also receive a text message or a phone call and that can happen even after hours so why are we trying to use gaggle um obviously now every student has a device for learning and there isn't an increased use of digital resources so having this monitor and it's it's not spyware but it's monitoring will help identify some early warning signs for safety issues including things like self-harm and harm to self harm to others when we started this project back in we pulled an entire team

105together at the district level to determine if this was a pathway we were going to go down you'll see here members of the district team include folks from my department in technology services folks from crystal's area and in student support services we also have our student due process team we have two area superintendents our academic staff our risk management our security as well as nightdale high school who was chosen as the pilot we had their counselors and their principal also involved in the project we began with knightdale high school in april of last year and then have been bringing on an additional uh the hopes was to bring on additional eight schools um both in the areas of our two area superintendents that were part of the pilot were part of the team excuse me

106to be part of the pilot um so you'll see here we have three elementary schools involved three middle schools and three high schools involved um at this current moment all are all are turned on except for lake myra right as we were moving into the project we had a change in administration and we actually have a meeting with the administration at lake meyer tomorrow to begin the conversation there so the big question really is what's being monitored and there's a lot of misnomers and misunderstandings about what's being monitored by gaggle first of all it is only wake county resources resources that we own and that is within google and that's drive google docs google sheets google slides and anything else that might be uploaded into google so that can include links images pdfs word files

107um and anything else that might be added to their google drive then it also monitors our outlook email which is in messages attachments again links to websites and anything shared from their onedrive in a specific outlook email what we don't monitor i need to be very clear about is we don't monitor student text messages we don't monitor social media and we don't monitor personal resources outside of the wake county resources so once google or excuse me once gaggle goes through their alert system they categorize things into three areas for us so the first is a violation usually that's related to profanity or vulgar language it can also be an uh an example especially in the liam in the elementary schools for an example of bad digital citizenship what happens there is usually a student gets

108an email saying hey your choice of that language probably wasn't the best rethink how you're putting things in in your district email they get those periodically this is one of the options we are considering whether or not to keep on or off um and so we're looking at that but those go directly to the students those notifications do then we have the other two areas which are questionable content or possible student situation so questionable content are similar to possible student situations except for questionable content does not have a specific time plan or place so it may be that um you know i'm thinking about hurting myself i'm thinking about doing something but there's no imminent i'm not it doesn't necessarily say i'm going to do it tomorrow or i'm going to do this tonight or

109i'm sorry you won't see me the next day and so from a questionable content our stu our schools reach out to those students who may have some issues that we need to assist them with and support for a possible student situation however we get those as i mentioned earlier we get a text our team does in fact we've gotten one since the board meeting has started we get a text message followed with an email that has the content to be to be looked at and then we we reach out to the student and or the family as as needed in this particular situation our entire process does not include law enforcement unless absolutely necessary um and that might mean if there is a specific threat to the school around school shootings or if we are

110unable to reach a student who has threatened to kill themselves and we have to do a well visit those might be the only reasons we would involve law enforcement in this process so when we think about the rubric i've got a link here to the full rubric so that you can see it because i know um uh chair mahaffey i heard you talking about not being able to see things on the presentation i'll go ahead and tell you i've got my glasses on i still can't see this one so you're going to need that that document for sure but when you're looking at specific things that are going to be monitored you'll see things around drugs and alcohol that can be around the sale or the use of drugs or alcohol harassment so it can

111be racially motivated cyber bullying or other nudity or sexual content again we mentioned profanity and vulgar language suicide self-harm and then of course violence towards others so when we're when the when gaggle looks at these it qualifies them into one of these categories based on um whether or not they are a questionable content possible student situation a violation or if it's just spam that are are is coming in our email or in our google or if it's actually something that was school work sometimes students share in college essays and other things past trauma in their explanations from that point so one of the things we took this extremely slow as you can hear we did it with one school first and we still only have our bringing on eight additional schools um we wanted to

112make sure that this became specifically um part of a process process that was already in place in schools so as that larger team came together gaggle is just one notification of a lot of other ways our our schools are being notified um for instance we have students who come to teachers saying that they are being bullied we have another one student letting a counselor know that their friend has an eating disorder we have a lot of different ways within the school building that these these ways of of notifying our schools that these things are happening um are already in place and so as we did that we tried to use the current processes that were in place so things like a threat assessment if it's something related to school safety our student due process or

113for us the tsd incident response is how we handle when things are in our resources that we need to no longer need to have in there things like pornography and other things that we can sometimes need to get rid of from a perspective of safety also suicide prevention and safe student safety protocols so our counselors are amazing i know i don't have to tell you this but crystal and her and all the school counselors in our buildings doing an amazing job i have a huge appreciation for them even more than i used to but we already have these processes in place and we are just using gaggle as one way to be notified that a student might be at risk or in trauma so you'll see here so that in the midst of when something

114happens we had flowcharts our team built flowcharts for who needs to respond how they need to respond where it needs to be documented and so on and so forth and what gaggle does with the particular resources as they come in so once we began actually before we begin we do training with our school principals they choose a response team they choose in their building who would be part of the people who react when we get these alerts we did request that and require at least one school counselor has to be involved as they're the ones trained in suicide protocols um the the teams range from anywhere from three to ten to twelve people at a school if it's a high school and we trained all of those gaggle works with us and crystal region and

115myself do some training around the workflows we talk about identifying the alert types and we have an incident dashboard where we where we pick up our our our information as well as they let us know when something has been resolved so that we always have a running tab of things that may be unaddressed or needing to be resolved going forward we also in order to protect our principles um created a technology protocol to allow for safe viewing if there is a need to view something brown new to your sexual content in order to share with a parent as we're talking with our parents that does not put them at risk for having child pornography on their on their devices we wanted to make sure they were also safe so we trained them on that and

116then as we're going through this process whether it's with our dashboard or how we respond we are trying to keep up with our principles and our schools to make sure that if something changes or if there's training that needs to be on done on at that very moment we're doing that so quite often either crystal myself or others are working with the schools as they're working to resolve some of these issues so next steps for us as we we monitor over the next couple months is really to solicit product and process feedback from our school response teams we are talking about adjusting some of the pilot parameters as i mentioned specifically with the violations around profanity and vulgar language um whether or not we will do that that will be a a larger conversation we're

117also working with dr mcmillan's team in data research and accountability to develop some feedback protocols to evaluate where we are and that will go to parents and students as well as their response teams because we do want to know um how our parents feel about this and how our students feel about this and whether or not they they um have specific feelings around this so that is our next steps from here but i know you probably have lots of questions so i'm going to stop talking now and i will turn off the presentation so that i can see you and answer any questions that you may have thank you miss gaddis certainly being able to combat things like cyber bullying or being able to contact a student before they take action on a suicidal ideation

118or an act of violence is is critically important so thank you for bringing this to us are there questions from board members ms waters well thank you it's a very great program to see implemented and i appreciate the work that has gone into it just a couple of clarifying questions is this something that students opt in or out of or is it by nature of having a school device and using school resources something that is automatically done at the pilot schools yes ma'am you you actually answered the question for me right there at the end so it is not an opt-in or opt-out at this time it is part of of having wake county resources um and and being able to do that i don't know i i see mr bloomberg um jumping in there

119so if he has a uh comment there he's welcome to do that no you answered the question uh right on and that's the current plan thanks and then just um one more question in terms of education to parents who children may be involved what does that look like in terms of making them aware of how the program works and operates sure so we we send a message home a week prior to this going going live at the schools they're also given my contact information and the school's contact information for for further information ultimately if all goes well they never have to know anything about the product because it's keeping their kids safe and there there's not any major issues i have had lots of great conversations with parents who've had both concerns and praise for

120for something like this and we were happy to have those conversations um through that process i will tell you though as we as we work to resolve through some of these alerts that we get our school staff do reach out if applicable to our parents to make sure they're aware of of any concerns that that may be relevant for parents related specifically to self-harm and and suicide ideation ms scott thank you and another question about the um the context i appreciate that looking at the violations that the action um could be an email to student staff both or neither but wondering particularly with elementary and middle school students i mean ideally with all of our students but particularly with those younger grades i think as we partner with parents um they often want to know

121if their child has violated something you know that if they have done something inappropriate so in those types of situations would um would we also be contacting parents or is there a way to loop them in because i don't monitor my child's school email as often as i should sure so what i can tell you is the way the current process works is after the third violation the principal starts getting notified and at that time most principals do reach out to the to the parents we try to make sure that students have the opportunity to um self-correct and give them that opportunity when it comes to the violations specifically thank you and i do appreciate that we're testing this program and piloting it to see how this can help our students i know there are

122advocates who are very concerned about screen time and access to internet that our students have had even prior of course prior to the one-to-one device and so i think having things in place like this is is our part of our responsibility as making sure that we're taking care of our students so i just wanted to say i appreciate that we're we're trying this and seeing just how effective that can be thank you thank you dr martin and then miss cash thank you miss goddess uh good information and uh i think there's a lot of good things about the way this is structured not only is it the technology tool but you put a team together to evaluate and it's not just a punishing uh it is a it is a uh restorative approach which i

123think is good a couple questions from where i have heard concerns some of it is what records are kept are do we keep histories of sites that have been visited or viewed is it really just is it just evaluating the products that have been sent or received is there any archival of those kinds of things sort of establishing a record yeah great great point so first of all um this does not look at google search at all um so google search no web searches is included in this this is simply google drive and outlook email so there is no google search within this but to your point as as gaggle is going through this process anything that did not require flag is deleted within 30 days anything that is flagged with issues can be kept

124up to and i'm going to say can be because i'm going to give you a qualifier here in just a minute we'll be kept up to a year and then deleted and then by law anything related to nudity is automatically reported to the national center for missing and exploited children if it's related to child pornography and has to be deleted by law uh gaggle has to delete it within 90 days um so just so you're aware of those that's the only archiving that is done related to to anything that is monitored through gaggle thank you that is helpful um uh in in in some respects if i heard correctly it sounds like when when an issue is flagged that sort of like starts a work order is there a closeout likewise documented my question there

125is in in plenty of due process things that we see there are sometimes unfinished business or sometimes we'll see this with the spec ed cases that come to us and you know somebody will say hey you were notified nothing was done it sort of fell off the radar so do we is there a clear documentation on i think i heard it maybe but i just want to clarify that there's a clear documentation that once flagged we have to have a record that something was done maybe it was resolved at just the conversation level maybe it went all the way to the more substantial intervention but but do we have a close out so that we don't get caught down the road you were notified but nothing was done great question dr martin absolutely um that

126was part of the reason why this group really took a good look at what internal processes were already in place so from a gaggle perspective the the owner of the um i'll use the word ticket because you did and that's a technical term i know but the owner of the notification at the school level gets assigned that particular notification and then they're responsible for resolving it in the dashboard and gaggle now that being said we tried to make that very simple to let us know something had been done but in the processes that we currently have in place things like our suicide protocol or student due process there are already places such as ecats and oasis where those those trails follow and those documentation pieces have to go so all of that documentation goes in

127the places where it would normally fall within those processes in the school but they also have to assign and close the ticket um in our gaggle dashboard so that we are assured that a student is not uh to your point not ever addressed in in a particular issue and that's okay i do keep a really close eye on that list so presumably related to that if something is unresolved in a 30 to 90 day time period i'm assuming you or your team or somebody on the team would go back and say hey why wasn't this result yeah so it doesn't go 30 to 90 days um i'm in it pretty pretty regularly and i usually follow up with the schools pretty quickly okay no very good um and the my last point somewhat related to

128that and mr bloomberg may need to respond to this is i'm assuming that this is pretty closely related to some of the mandatory reporting laws that have gone into place to what extent does this become that's the flag that really initiates the mandatory reporting for particularly sexual assault child trafficking etc it can result in a you know if depending on the specificity of the information if we're put on notice of a of a crime um that could involve any one of the mandatory reporting offenses under the law that we would have to report so that that that is uh you know part of this process is as opposed to being reactive you get a complaint and and you then go do a search that could have been for years you know let's look at somebody's

129electronic information that's on the school system's email get a complaint you look at it that's been again a long-standing practice as a part of a routine search and you know that the board policy and the notice is transparent that students don't have a expectation of privacy in the school systems networks and and the the outlook that this is the school system's property and that um if it needs to be searched it will gaggle is a proactive measure in doing that in either one of those situations if if if information is acquired that would create information for a reportable offense the district will have to report so presumably this would the training for gaggle would be a good time to remind people to say here are the kinds of things if you see it this triggers

130this kind of action particularly that kind of reporting right and the hope with with gaggle and um is is that you're catching things early enough in the process that there's not a crime um it could be a threat and then that you know a specific threat to a specific person so it could be but but the hope is is that it's not a crime it's it's preventing things early enough in the process so it never gets there um but yes if we get if we receive specific information of a crime that's got to be reported then we'll have to be reported well if i'm understanding though the some of the reporting requirements were even to precede crime or was it just if it's a crime monika i know you were part of writing that yeah

131i mean you're asking the right the right questions and preventative measures are appropriate i mean that if it's a threat you know that like a specific threat that's a crime unto itself but but the reporting requirements are triggered by notice of a crime okay thanks all right thank you miss cash miss carter and miss kushner yeah a quick question um first of all it's a good thing it'll be hard to convince me that it's not a good thing so my question is specifically since this is my one button that people push is the cyber bullying i still don't see how this is tell me exactly miss gaddis how this helps cyber bullying sure ms cash so the misnomer i will tell you is that often people think our kids aren't using our email system because

132it's for old people um they also think that google's not being used for the same thing what i will tell you is one of the things we've learned through this pilot that we learned very quickly was that when students lose their phone at home they use our resources and they use them a lot and so we do see a lot of in fact i will tell you that we got three notices today from three students who were being bullied who um sent notice to staff members and and we were we were notified through through this so a lot of times those conversations are between students um where somebody is being bullied or or there may be a some type of cyber harassment or cyber bully um if it's being done in email or google of

133our resources then it's catching that in there and we're able to address it as we as we learn of it so to follow up question if the sender is sending it from home before they come to school but the receiver is receiving it once they get to school which is how our cyber bullying happens often they've gotten smart enough to send it from home and then it's opened up in our schools so it doesn't necessarily break our policy do does the syndrome get picked up or [Music] if they send it from home on their email it gets picked up by us as the person sending it marlo we will get it if they're using and i'm assuming you're meaning a personal account at home correct just to make sure i understand well i'm not sure

134what i mean on that okay that's okay that's okay so what i will tell you is email um because gaggle is in the middle of our email flow what i will tell you is if it hits there as being an issue of bullying or harassment it does not get delivered to this to the recipient um and then we're able to address it from that perspective so email's a little bit different than google in that gaggle is in the midst of our work in middle of our mail flow and if something happens it actually um quarantines that message so that the recipient does not receive it but we get the notification instead if i could just extend that a little bit this the documents and emails that we were talking about are only when students are

135using wcpss google drive or wcpss email that platform wherever they are wherever they're using wcpss google drive from or wherever they're using wcpss email from if it goes through those platforms their wcpss accounts then then we can flag it and catch it but if they're using their personal email if they're using web-based platforms like tick-tock or instagram or those kinds of things and we don't see that that's not part of this yeah what a consent what if it's sent from a private or web-based ev platform to a wake county email does it catch it then it will it's coming into our platform i'm sorry i'm just i think miss cash is on to i mean i think we we need parent you know and so we we're not monitoring private emails we really need parent

136support and monitoring you know the text the social media the private platforms that our students use because we are monitoring at these schools the wake county platforms that we have legal control over or access to and now i appreciate you raising this because miss cash has raised this issue with us and it um has really hit close to home with many of us so i appreciate the clarity and and that we need partnerships with our community yeah and let me clarify thank you superintendent moore you perfectly explained that our google and our outlook are both cloud resources the cloud environments which means it doesn't matter if you're using your personal cell phone to access it or your personal at home network or you're in india or you're in asia it doesn't matter if it comes

137through our cloud google or our cloud outlook we will see it our gaggle will see it and notify us if it's a concern but we're not looking we're not reading every message that comes in i want to be very clear about that nobody's got time for that but we do use gaggle in order to help us find anything that may be of concern so that we can get those early warning signs i would i would just add that you know in a perfect world as the board and staff reviews this and marlon i've had this conversation it's in a pilot phase right now but reviews it for the future and for it potentially being more widespread like i say in a perfect world the district critical staff would have all of the important information about

138safety issues that impact students and be able to intervene and take appropriate measures to prevent that but this becomes again in that perfect world lots of resources and so that as you look at this the key is going to be when this information comes in staff then has notice of a potential issue and needs to be in a position to be staffed to respond to it what you don't want is to have the notice but not have the staffing to be able to respond effectively and so those would be some i think balancing points for the district as you review this and we don't have any policies that stop us from supporting this you do not so we have miss carter and then miss kushner and it is 506 and we have one more presentation

139after this i'll be quick and i just wanted to thank you for slide two the background on it being a state-funded pilot because i believe that was important to share and then the second thing i have i i can be followed up with this later because it's not per se with the gaggle but it's more i'm looking at uh mr coe he might be the one to answer this but it's on the safety wall visits let's say this happens at 2am and i would just like clarification to ensure it's not just police that are involved especially when it comes to suicidal actively suicidal because i've had a lot of folks concerned about folks being handcuffed and i'm just trying to i just want to just throw that out there i don't need an answer right

140now but if i could have that in a follow-up information and a follow-up email or conversation on how that would look i'd appreciate it we will thank you thank you and my only question was we we're starting with these eight or nine schools and what are the plans for if we have the capacity to to add additional schools and that the timing of it i think that's really going to be dependent on funding also it is through the facilitation of the sr dollars that have been passed down for this purpose from the state that we're able to facilitate this so and i appreciate that we're doing it as a pilot and to miss carter's point so that we're responding in the proper way so i appreciate that we're doing this but that it's also at

141a pilot level so thank you miss johnson hustler thank you dr martin you asked all of my and questions last one miss carter did up i certainly would say it should be a pilot because for me this hasn't this is not the space where parents understand what we're doing and i think the articulation to parents is paramount especially what the follow-up looks like to ms carter's point so not a conversation for here but i miss reardon's shaking her head because she knows i'm always like how do we make sure parents understand this not just understanding what happens but also for me it's the safety of their children and what this means because we're talking about cases that have to be reported that that mandatory reporters are required and i just i never want parents to

142be surprised by what we're legally bound to do just because we say we're legally bound to do it yes and um the only question i had was in that questionable contact piece it says the action as an email is sent to emergency contact i'm assuming that is a parent of the student how do we ask them to follow up with the school so that we know that something's going on if it's harassment or bullying at some level or um how are we how do we stay engaged or how do we ask parents to engage with the school so that we can start great clarification it is not the parent it is the response team at the school level okay so the school is actually the emergency contact at the school um and they follow up

143and if if it needs to be followed up with parents or others that is managed at the school level okay and you had previously talked about how you reach out and engage with parents so i appreciate that absolute priority on that anything else from folks well i will just note to ms carter's point you had in one of your slides that law enforcement will be caught you haven't it's a law enforcement will be contacted i don't remember what your exact language was because i don't have that pulled up right now but it was if necessary but it was not a first clearly not a first responder it needs to be solved internally first so i think that's the intent and that's where i was really pleased with the restorative aspect of this but there are

144times where we mandatorily have to contact law enforcement but they should not be the first one to be contacted all right thank you thank you miss gaddis we appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today and we hope you are back in action soon we're moving on to our student engagement team grant with dr co we're mr coe not yet doctor and dr pettiford we talked heard a little bit about this during our joint meeting and so now we're going to hear from the school side on what our folks are engaged in at the school level so welcome good afternoon chair mahaffey superintendent more members of the board we're bringing to you as ms mahaffey noted that an update about our student engagement team grant and this is a collaborative effort between alliance

145health wake county cooperative extension and wake county public school system and co-presenting with me today is dr marius pettiford next to me senior director of counseling and student services and we're joined by our community partners behind us catherine lilly our school-based crisis team supervisor from alliance health and catherine williams cooperative extension director and we're we're again going to share with you a high level overview of the 2.3 million dollar ish student engagement team grant and for today's presentation we wanted to provide you with our rationale for the student engagement team grant provide an overview of the student engagement team grant as a program and share our next steps and respond to questions and receive your feedback as a board for this work and though you've seen this slide many times we felt it's important to

146provide a friendly reminder about our framework about behavioral health how it incorporates the lens of social emotional learning behavior and mental health and this is our work and our work with this grant will use this lens of behavioral health and in our work during the covet 19 pandemic our efforts in meeting the food security needs for our students and families moved us to see how much food security is a window into additional needs some of our students and families may have that we need to work as a community to meet and in case i didn't say it enough it was the work of our cns team transportation team and our community partners to meet the food security needs that opened up our lens to the additional needs that prompted our organizations to come together in

147the student engagement team pilot and we know that individuals who are not getting their basic needs met have barriers to school and life success and one of the frameworks we've used during the pandemic as a district is maslow's hierarchy and using this framework as a way to guide our student engagement team pilot work we wanted to share with you the categories and some of the pieces of data that that will supplement what we are looking at to support our students and families and just as a note this the categories here mirror the work that we've done since the pandemic with our behavioral health needs assessment so there's an intertwining of two two pieces of work that we're doing as a district and so under physiological we have food security as a metric and under safety

148we have housing transition cps referrals suicide and threat assessments and self-injury reports and under love and belonging we have chronic absenteeism wcps student survey results teacher working conditions survey and wcpss teacher survey and under esteem needs we have major minor behavior incidents suspensions behavior intervention plans and functional behavior assessments as ways we can measure these four categories and the framing of the behavioral health needs assessment provides us a way to monitor how we are doing to support the behavioral health of our students and families in our work through this student engagement team pilot and so with the framing of maslow's hierarchy we wanted to provide you a quick timeline of how this work evolved and so prior to the pandemic wcpss and wake county supported food security efforts through our pantries universal breakfast and our

149summer food service program and these are all still in place however when the pandemic required us to close schools temporarily starting march of 2020 wcpss and wake county cooperative extension staff worked together to support the food and nutrition needs we were seeing in the county and this work evolved into supporting basic needs for our families in addition to our food needs and then as we returned to in person there was a reduction to the food pickup and drop-off sites and though many continued through the efforts of our cns and transportation teams along with our community partners but this change in context refocused our efforts on the basic needs of our students and families and with alliance health coming on board with our work we evolved this work to become the student engagement team pilot that

150is an intentional and holistic student and family engagement model built on a tiered and family-centered system of care to support structure that recognizes the role of the school community and family in a young person's engagement in school so with that i'll pass it now to dr pettiford who will share with you more details related to our student engagement team grant good evening we could go to the next slide okay great so the student engagement teams were will actually strengthen our system of care model by bringing together different promising models you know we've got the behavioral health component the human capital development family engagement and also academic supports and re-engagement this model is actually set up so that we have student engagement teams at four schools that will pilot the program staff will work with wcpss

151staff also alliance and cooperative extension as our community partners and we're going to engage or re-engage 25 students at each school and their families to connect them to supports in the community part of that came out of the learning that we had from the pandemic about the initial concern being some food security issues but then finding out there were other things that families were dealing with like the potential loss of home or families losing employment so these this model is set up so that we can provide wrap-around services we could go to the next slide so i want to outline a little bit for you what each agency is going to be providing so with alliance this is going to be our mental health connection and you'll see that families will be supported by two

152positions that they will have and it's going to support our behavioral health system and address barriers to mental health services we also are looking at community resources from a social determinants of health focus child and family team meetings and care reviews are going to be an integral part of this system so there's there will be some training around that also the crisis support as needed in addition alliance will provide the training for the system of care and also for the child and family team meetings and the child and family team meeting is really a model that's driven driven by the parent so it's a little different from some other models that we have been accustomed to they determine as a parent who's going to be a part of the meeting who who are the key

153stakeholders to be at that meeting and the family is an integral part in designing what the outcomes are going to be for that for their own child next slide another component of this is the work with cooperative extension and they will provide four life coaches and these will be individuals that will coach the families in how to address these particular resources but also with the lens of getting people to a place of empowerment we want families to get to a place where they don't need the services anymore and so that's going to be the job of the life coach to work walk alongside the family and help them address the barriers that are in place and then to be able to get them in a position where they don't need those services and our component

154of it in addition to what the schools are already doing to support families we will provide a program manager for the program and a data analyst who will help us with reviewing the data from this pilot to see how effective it is and what other areas we might need to address the program manager we wanted to put in place to make sure that there was a liaison between the school and the family that would walk alongside with the principal and the student services teams at those schools and not putting extra burden on our staff that already are dealing with a lot next slide and so our next steps in our work and i'm getting like you miss my half and my glasses aren't working so i'm going to depend on my notes here so we've

155got we've already done the process of onboarding with our area soups and and also engaging our four principles right now we're waiting for the finalization of the mou once we have the finalization of the mou then we're able to draw down the funds that we need to be able to post in higher positions and then we will start with our staff training and planning and we have a projected date of july 1 to get started we know all of this is ambitious but we we've got a solid team that's been meeting since the fall we we feel like you know once all those pieces come into place we can actually move forward and get something going so we are still targeting the july 1st timeline but we also are flexible enough that if we need

156to push it out we we can do that so thank you dr pettiford so we'll pause here now for any questions and dialogue and just as a reminder if you have any questions for both uh catherine's behind us uh they're here to answer any questions as well and so we'll see what what feedback you have for us all right we'll start with the side of the table i guess miss carter i just want to thank you for bringing this to us and um i'm very pleased to see this beginning and i think it's very important and could really especially during these times and i just feel like just thank you i want to start there the other thing do we know when we'll when we'll be made aware of the four schools and how soon

157that will be determined do we know that now oh okay well there you go all right thank you there we go so um it's advanced elementary walnut creek elementary durant road middle school and north garner elementary school north garnett middle school sorry miss cash um just so this is a grant right um so we're we from the wake county school system side we would be is it just one position or one per school so we're getting two positions from the wake county side to cover that's going to be the program manager and the data analyst position so and we're impacting approximately 100 students so we'll have two positions from wake county schools that impact 100 students along with their student services team and then also the four life coaches from cooperative extension and the two

158positions from alliance so it's a total of eight people in the grant okay so one four of them there will be one at each of the four schools is that correct and then two at central services and two through cooperative extension that will help manage the program miss moore just it would be two at alliance and then and then two from two for wcps and four four at each school from wake county cooperative extension thank you so what i want to measure is you know these so eight positions to impact approximately a hundred students 25 per school i went there too okay so isn't it 25 families per school i mean yes it's a student but but aren't we talking about families not just students we're talking about wraparound services but it's still 100 wake

159county public school kids i understand that but it's families which is bigger than individual kids in particular if you're going cost analysis we've got to think about it let me let katherine er either that or because she seems like she's dying to say something over there come on up to the table sorry no i um i just wanted to thank you all so much i i know i got this question when i had the opportunity to talk with all of you all and my response was more like 800 students and the reason for that is that while we only have resources for the full coaching model for a hundred students approximately 25 at each school we do expect to have measurable impact on more like 200 students at each school and the reason is that

160the model also will allow us to do more than just the coaching so we hope to be able to bring and leverage other resources to support that schools team as we've discussed and we also believe that we can engage many more young people and provide additional resources and partnerships to support the school's goals for them so we are going to try to measure that as well miss cash and not just be just the 25 that get the full family coaching engagement and that's what we told our county commissioners as well and if i may also add something that we find sometimes is that when we're to dr martin's point that when we're working with a family that might specifically be at one school there might be siblings that are also at other schools or their

161younger younger siblings that are not yet in our school system so those are those are people we will support through this initiative that's not just about one student but it is about the entire family that would also increase our impact in terms of numbers of people we are impacting through this grant so i would like to follow up i definitely think if no matter how many people we involve in this that there should be a real collection of impact by dollar whether it be the wraparound with the families or whether it be just our students i think we need to know the number of people that we impact with these dollars if in fact we wanted to move forward to do further work with it and to your point i just want to say ms

162cash that that was really the reason why we wanted the data analysts because we needed somebody who was going to be able to follow all of the data and also the work of our student services teams that are already in place to be able to quantify all of that because what we anticipate is that we will learn some things out of this pilot that we might want to continue whether it is with our own staff or with additional support from the community or other grant dollars or something like that and just as a reminder this isn't just a one-year pilot but this is going through the 24-25 school year so we're hoping to see a little bit more of longitudinal data about what the impact will look like miss scott thank you so much for

163bringing this program and thank you to to everyone who's been working to to provide this i didn't really speak at the county commissioner uh meeting but i am as as my colleagues who've been working many years and and serving making sure that our families are served i greatly appreciate this i've seen the need firsthand as well and i'm so thankful for this i remark somewhat regularly that while of course we we do sometimes fall short of meeting the needs and reaching all of the folks who need assistance wake county is an incredible place in the way that we try so hard to take care of our residents and to take care of each other and and we don't i do you don't see that um everywhere unfortunately so i just i wanted to extend my

164gratitude and also i'm thankful to see the the data analyst analyst as part of this um i look forward to seeing how you know what is being measured and how that's being uh collected to provide that sort of accountability that our stakeholders are looking for even though this is grant funded if this continues to move forward as i think ms cash was raising some of the concerns about the investment from the the school system as well that will directly impact taxpayers we want to make sure that we have the information to show the effectiveness of the program and then of course be able to tweak it as needed um here and there but i just wanted to say that as fast as i could thank you thank you both very much appreciate this work and

165and the team that has come together to make this happen that concludes our work session we'll take a short break and come back for our regular meeting thank you there's a power thing that needs to go into apparently you observe as the board of education conducts its official business i want to take a moment to highlight board policy 2310 which states persons who willfully interrupt disrupt or cause disturbances at an official meeting may be directed to leave by the presiding officer members of the audience should show respect for any speaker by refraining from loud comments or other disruptions disruptions by any person or persons of a public meeting will be subject to action in accordance with general statute 143-318 we have a quorum and we will now please join in reciting the pledge of allegiance

166of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you all very much before we begin today we had an unexpected loss in our wake county community specifically our millbrook high school community and that is the unexpected loss of principal dana king who passed over the weekend if you will all join me in a moment of silence um thank you all very much and we'll begin with superintendent moore's comments so many of us remain shocked and deeply saddened by the sudden passing of our longtime colleague and friend dana king with her sense of humor and fierce advocacy for her colleagues and students dana has made a lasting impact on thousands of people since she joined our district as an

167english teacher at sanderson high school in 1986. she served at principal at east millbrook for four years before beginning her tenure at millbrook in 2003. her students and staff just last week paid a heartfelt tribute to her as she prepared to retire later this month dana had the unique ability to make a large magnet high school feel small and personal she cared for one student at a time often pulling students into her office who needed a listening ear then helping them formulate a plan for success she also had ability to put a smile on anyone's face regardless of the circumstances she was well known for bringing levity and in turn some perspective to the most challenging of situations our hearts are with the millbrook community and with dana's family her husband rick her daughters katie

168and jenny and her three grandchildren as they grieve this tragic loss know that her memory and legacy will live on in all the lives she touched during her 42 years as an educator congratulations are in order to the six school athletic directors and one athletic trainer who received awards yesterday from the north carolina athletic directors association colin fegley the athletic director at green level high was named the state's athletic director of the year he has served as an athletic director in our district for eight years starting at green hope high before being named green level's first athletic director when the school opened in 2019. eric hall the head athletic trainer at carey high was named the state athletic trainer of the year mr hall graduated from cary high in 1993 and returned to his alma

169mater in 2006 after six years at the has to head trainer at southeast raleigh high jeff dunbar athletic trainer at garner high and mike joyner the recently retired athletic director at wake forest high each received a brave heart award for continuing to perform their duties amid personal hardship mr dunbar continued to serve the garner community while spending countless hours with his family in the hospital as his son battled an illness and mr joyner rarely missed work even as he underwent chemotherapy treatments for non-hodgkin's lymphoma finally crystal massenburg of south garner high travis cease of athens drive high and jason adams of pine hollow middle each were recognized as athletic directors of excellence for significant contributions in the field of athletics within their state region and nation it is well documented that the benefits of student

170athletic participation extend well beyond the playing field these awards are a reminder that the state of athletics in wake county is strong thanks in large part to dedicated leadership next i would like to congratulate apex friendship principal matt white for receiving the ralph kimmel award last week from the north carolina principals and assistant principals association the award is given annually to a retired educator who has made a lasting contribution to the profession and the association while mr white has not yet retired he has announced his retirement and plans to stop step down at the end of the school year mr white has 39 years as an educator 23 of those in wake county he served as principal of east cary middle salem middle and apex high before becoming apex friendship's first principal when that school

171opened in 2015. he was named wcpss principal of the year in 2008. and mr white's leadership and dedication extends beyond his principal duties he has served as president of the state principal and assistant principals association in 2014-15 and continues to serve on that organization's board thank you mr white for your many years of effective leadership in our district across the state and congratulations on this well-deserved recognition finally this is assistant principal appreciation week and i want to join our students parents and staff members in expressing my gratitude for the countless ways assistant principals keep our schools running smoothly as a former assistant principal i know that it is a challenge to juggle the many responsibilities that come with the job assistant principals have a hand in nearly every aspect of campus operations whether it's facilitating

172transportation looking at other student services supporting classroom instruction other duties as assigned often that work happens behind the scenes so it is fitting to take this time to let our assistant principals know how invaluable they are to the success of our students i hope that we will all take the time to thank an ap this week that concludes my comments thank you superintendent moore on may 25th members of the apex high school community past and present gathered together along with the sisters and cousins of kevin e todd to commemorate him and name the field in his honor coach todd had many people who came to see him to see this honor bestowed for him in his honor past principals assistant principals no matter how short their time at apex high was past athletic directors coaches

173from other schools and one of his first players who was on his team when he coached at northgarter middle school in addition to naming of the field there's also a rock with a beautiful plaque inside to memorialize coach todd and what he meant to the community i'd like to congratulate the spice girls of apex high school for winning the north carolina junior chef competition always fun to see what our cte kids can do and speaking of that student hands-on experience day or shed and i know dr martin will talk on this as well puts our students in with business members of the business community for construction holly springs high school and heritage high school were named some of the winners we had carrie high leesville high and other schools participating alumni had come back to

174help coach teams and the most incredible thing was the job board where 12 students at that by the end of the three days walked off of that site with a job for when they graduate high school and that concludes my comments vice chair hagerty is away at a conference so we will start with miss kushner thank you chair mahaffey and it certainly has been last week was so inspiring to to be with ms king and her family and her community and i'm sorry miss cash for the loss of your dear friend and for to all of us to our principal community for the loss of their colleague it was a day of celebration and it should have continued for so long so my heart just goes out to everyone in the king family and then

175wednesday i was with mr hegarty and superintendent moore at green hope high school where we had another emotional day of re-weaving our community it was such a magnificent day honoring captain brian smith and mr eric hall who at a cheer conference in february saved the life of a man who had collapsed robert gresham senior was visiting from charlotte and was watching his granddaughter in a cheer tournament and collapsed and his son gave the emotional description of these two men captain brian smith and our carrie high athletic director of athletic trainer um eric hall coming to his aid and i appreciate the green hope community and the kerry high community coming forward to celebrate those two men and it felt like a moment of truly um re-weaving our communities together after this such long time of

176being broken apart we needed i needed that i will see for myself i needed that moment to to feel things were coming together and we and the need for us coming together in school communities and miss king's celebration was that too and um so we we need our school communities to be elevated for what they are ms carter has spoken about this with her loss this last year we've had so much loss that we need to take on i told miss cash we need to take on ms king's legacy and and live that her legacy every day remembering her that's what we need to do so i'll charge us all with that um ms carter also has inspired me about musicals i was at martin for shrek jr which was great fun to watch all

177these kids um in their green paint and wonderful story tell costumes it was so i encourage everyone to check out a musical i think enloe's doing pippin and bro and broughton is doing chicago so lots of great talent in wake county schools also thanks to the office of equity affairs for hosting the young women's summit this last weekend some wonderful conversations ms johnson hostler and i had with these brilliant young women who are ready to take on the world and also to dr rangel for the being part of the hispanic professional education summit which brought together students from not only wake county from across the state to encourage excellence in education we also celebrate our national board certified teachers what a wonderful event because we have we lead the nation in this gold standard of

178teaching we have the best teachers in the entire country and wake county i appreciate the staff and schools supporting those wonderful teachers as they spread their brilliance and and work hard during a pandemic to renew or get board certified and also carroll middle schools welcomed their new principal mr zarzeki with a true leadership night where students were doing student-led conferences and leading their families and their parents through the school and again it was a celebration of being back in that school community so it was it's been a wonderful emotional two weeks thank you mr mahaffey thank you miss kushner dr martin thank you uh echo a lot of those congratulations um i too want to start with remembering dana king i don't remember exactly when i first met her but she was one of the

179first principals i met who was not a principal at one of my children's schools we were i believe it was working on some equity committees that i was working on before i became a board member and that was dana uh and i have a heart i'm not i'm not likely to call her principal king or miss king because she was she she was that person and she cared about every every child not just every child of her school but of this district she firmly believed in the magnet program and wanted to see that succeed she touched thousands of lives i'm very sorry that i was not able to go to a retirement reception and now she's not with us but may her legacy live on as mrs kushner noted that's a charge to all of

180us as you noted mr chairman hafey yeah two weeks ago i was in uh a more normal element for me uh well i was leaving my normal element and going to the the our joint meeting with the commissioners we had a good meeting with our commissioners great to continue those partnerships but i spent the day with the with folks at the shed competition uh just huge congratulations to kevin kevin kimberly the cte the construction teacher at cary high school who had this idea i don't remember how many years ago of of initiating this competition where students would would you know build sheds the sheds get auctioned off it's competition you start with a pile of lumber and at the end of the competition there are sheds that can be sold and they're really high quality

181work i've interacted with it as as long as i can real super hats off to the holly springs team who uh well one of their two teams they had they initiated two teams but they had the first as far as i know it's the first all-women's team and had a great chance to talk with some of the young women and one in particular stuck out because she was interested in in going on toward a medical career likely into surgery and of course you all know that i'm gonna champion that like crazy because the skills you learn building with your hands are so related to science and frankly to medicine we are constructions and and to see the combination of that kind of cte hands-on experience with very high level academic performance was fantastic and particular

182hats off to the all women's team when i participate i always ask mr kimberly to you know put me where needed and i got to work with a group who frankly had very little experience coming into the competition um and uh you know it helped keep that that that gang uh you know in the running uh day one and it was really fascinating and just such a reminder of the importance of this kind of hands-on learning because here were kids who at the beginning of the day were still awkward with the tools with measurements with how you lay stuff out and i'll tell you what by the end of the day in just one day the level of improvement was so obvious it you know it is it is so different to see active hands-on

183learning than just sitting there talking about in the classroom so hats off to everybody involved in that process it's such a great thing we now have a couple other competitions going on the next one coming up is going to be with the electrical wiring so again a number of these things are are happening we've had them in the past for architectural design so the the business community gets to actually see the product of our cte kids and many of them get jobs so keep it up great work i do have a bac meeting for district 5 coming up this thursday evening 6 30 at dillard drive middle school we'll be doing some of the work getting community input on the strategic plan i want to give us the brief uh update on where we are

184in terms of uh covet data the data reporting in the school system has changed so it's a little bit difficult to sort of give numbers that are meaningfully compare comparative but our wake county numbers are currently at 52 cases in a week per 100 000 population that is up from the low of about two weeks ago when we were down we got down to the low of about 42 cases per hundred thousand population so the cases are slightly rising again uh it's not clear whether this is the really uptick before ba2 or whether this is a bump uh on the way down but karen needs to be taken those numbers are based on comparing our wake county schools numbers with the county numbers i would have to estimate the numbers are probably the formal reported

185numbers are probably 30 to 50 percent low based on uh the amount of home testing that is done from the statewide data if we look at the disaggregated numbers for the first time in quite a long time really almost in a year the school age population is now dipping below the rest of the county population the five to nine year olds are at 40 cases per hundred thousand these are weekly cases the 10 to 14 year olds are 29 400 000 population the 15 to 17 year olds are about 40 cases per hundred thousand and those are also however on the verge of turning up right now the highest cases the highest infection rate in wake county are the 24 to 49 year olds which are up eight percent from last week that's with reported

186cases that number is actually going to be will be significantly higher because the each week's reporting uh is a little bit low so the 24 to 49 year olds are up to 62 cases per 100 000 population so things are trending unfortunately not in the right direction right now finally in the last week or two we've been hearing a lot of new talk about the state's consideration of a new way to pay teachers and educators in general and sadly with that conversation the old trope gets marched out of this myth that educators are afraid of change uh you know the folks from best nc you know excited in the paper educators are just afraid of change and i'll tell you what to march that trope out again now is embarrassing teachers and educators in the

187last couple of years have changed like crazy met needs throughout a pandemic in ways that nobody thought possible before uh none of us knew what to do before um and as uh it was some committee meeting somebody noted and i lived that experience as well you know we some of us in education hear people talking about you know all the binging on netflix or whatever during the pandemic i can tell you every not not a single educator was sitting there binging on on anything because our work went up yeah working hybrid working remote the new forms of instruction you know what we dealt with change did we solve every problem no did we keep it from being a whole lot worse you bet educators are not afraid of change when they talk about the afraid

188of change in this new uh education or funding profile for educators they again are marching out the tropes of how testing and assessment and accountability metrics are what we need and we need to pay people based on these accountability accountability metrics well let me tell you folks if standardized testing and accounting accountability metrics would magically improve teaching we would have world-class education everywhere in this country but you know what ever since no child left behind we discovered that standardized testing and those kind of spreadsheet accountability measures well they may have some place they really do not tell us about quality education and they're not going to just reform things so i think i know who is actually afraid of change i think it's those policy makers and many of these alleged business reformers are afraid

189of change change that will actually work is to trust and pay educators as the professionals that they are you know what it worked in finland finland had some of the same challenges that we have and they looked at the situation and said what do we need to do they said we need we need to actually treat our educators like professionals pay them like professionals and you know what happened finland went and became the top uh in the world in terms of education so whenever you hear this trope of educators are afraid of change hogwash the folks are ferry to change are those who are trying to keep this crazy mythology going on that somehow we can do it cheaper somehow we can do it with standardized testings somehow teachers are afraid of being accountable hogwash

190let's lose our fear to recognize treat and pay educators as the professionals that they are thank you miss scott thank you i want to start by echoing the sentiments of my colleagues and and just express my my prayers to everyone who knew and loved dana king just a such a tragic loss but my goodness her legacy is just an infinite wake of um a positive uh of the ways to use your voice your strength and your knowledge and education i just think of the the number of people she served and i was actually speaking with someone and and talked about uh something that dana king had uh had had done i mean just a few weeks ago i said you know dana king did and so she just she has that she will always and

191forever um her legacy will will absolutely live on um as as ms kushner and dr martin and chairman mchale pointed out it's been a very busy time but full of hold of a lot of joy so so in these moments of loss there certainly has been so much to celebrate as well i appreciated the opportunity to go to east wake high school where they had a presentation about their the the many challenges at their school but the many positive things of their school and i was thankful that douglas condon as well from our maintenance and operations was able to attend um it was also a really great opportunity because they had both a teacher panel and a student panel and while as board members we have lots of opportunities to meet teachers and see them

192in various capacities it isn't that often at least for me that i've had like a panel like a question and answer type opportunity with teachers um or students especially and those are the voices that we we really need to hear from we we hear from parents and and that's absolutely important but i think it's also the opportunities to have to talk to people who are inside those buildings every day is a positive one and i i hope i've mentioned this before i'm going to put a plug for that again but maybe we can find a way to incorporate a student voice into our board advisory councils or have some sort of input that we can hear from on a regular basis the window elementary science fair returned they actually had not had their science fair

193for a few years even prior to covid so it was great to see that come back and to see the students the projects amazing projects we have such talented kiddos and talented teachers and dedicated parents who helped put on this great great event so it was that i appreciate and thank them again for the opportunity to judge the the projects and congratulate those winners and speaking of things that had not happened for a while as you probably are all aware we had uh mpa so the musical performance assessment for groups are our choirs orchestras and bands have been participating in these where they are if you're not familiar if you were in band a thousand years ago like i was it's contest so um they go and perform um in front of judges who provide

194feedback and then give them ratings and i wanted to just extend to our music directors who maybe you didn't get to go back this year because your numbers did drop or it is hard to do that again to return to participating in these types of events because it is not an easy task to plan to to prepare your students and especially if you've lost instrumentation i was thinking about our future farmers our all of our these sort of co-curricular groups that go out and participate in different activities and it's been difficult to get that going again but what i want to say to those teachers and leaders is that maybe mpa didn't happen this year but the experience that your students have in your classroom each and every day is what they'll take with them

195and that's what you have been doing and that has never been lost with your students whether they are in school or not the connections they make in your classroom virtual classroom but especially in person is something that they take with them so hang in there and you'll get back to those contests very soon because i think children are just going to keep they're going to keep wanting to participate in these types of activities that truly as mr kushner said bring us together thank you miss waters thank you chair mahaffey i also would like to join in offering prayers and support to the king family the millbrook community and all those who loved and knew her as a millbrook graduate and having gone back later in life to millbrook the loss is very personal i think

196to everyone here so lots of prayers in the three weeks since i have been on the board it has been quite a journey and i'm very grateful having been a student an employee a parent in the district and now a board member it is really amazing to see all the behind the scenes work that goes into keeping the district operating and our students receiving the great education that they do so thank you to all of my colleagues and all the staff who have done such a great job with the onboarding and explaining and answering many questions that i've had so that's been wonderful and in my first 24 hours on the board i had the wonderful opportunity thanks to miss johnson hossler to visit my first school which was mary phillips a school that i

197was only familiar with in name and so actually going there was what a beautiful experience and i think this is a school that is very unsung the energy there was so positive and so encouraging and they were hosting a lunch and learn through the north carolina transit workers association exposing the students to different career options and the students were so engaged as wonderful questions and just were so attentive i was thinking i wish i had been at that point at that age in my own life but to see them was wonderful so mary phillips is just an amazing school and if you've not experienced the environment there it is it's a very special place and also over miss kushner i had a chance to step over into carol where i have a student and so

198the student-led conferences were really amazing and the special thing about carol and every school is very special that the special thing about carol for me is just how positive the environment is i think they've used every inch every wall every staircase to be a place for encouragement and affirmation so that our students feel good about themselves and feel good about being in the environment so it was a great opportunity to meet teachers and to be able to thank them in person for all the work that they've done and being back in the building was really great to connect with my sixth grader and to see his world and actually be there so very glad to have our new principal at carroll and then had a meeting at the southeast raleigh ymca which as you know

199is connected to southeast raleigh elementary and so i was like i can't be this close and not actually go to the school and so our meeting host made opportunity for me to go over and as we celebrate all the workers in our district i would like to say our frontline staff are receptionists they do a great job so miss data who is over at southeast who sits in a very open glaston space wonderful smile and so welcoming so i really enjoyed going over and meeting miss spinner in an impromptu meeting they were so kind and so sweden so i didn't get a chance to tour the school but to see all the young learners walking around was really really special to me and on sunday went to inlo and wow inlo is doing amazing things

200it was really just the perfect blending of so many families so many students with so many interests i met football players i met students in band i met students in the performing arts and so many students coming in as in incoming freshmen it was just lovely to be able to see a school that represents our community and has a place for everyone and so principal jordan does a great job and the students really had such a strong impact on me at that event because they really took charge and were very able to answer questions and guide me along even one of their lead marshals she pulled me over and said come on you're going on this tour with me and so i appreciated that confidence again seeing how our students are demonstrating those leadership skills

201and being able to be the voice of our future is really great and then also joining in some of the work with the community equity leadership team so it's been a great three weeks and i'm looking forward to lots more to come so thank you miss carter thank you and i too shared condolences about dana king to all those who knew her anyone that was touched by her maybe she didn't even realize it and i just want to send the condolences to everyone there and yesterday was a school librarian day so i did want to mention that and i thank all of our librarians because this month is also school library month which is a very important part of our schools but also our the other side the public libraries outside of our schools very

202important in our communities another awareness month that is that touches me personally a lot is parkinson's disease awareness month and i just want to take a moment please indulge me a little bit because i do know that you know folks who work for our school system or families who have students in our system have been touched in some shape or fashion whether you yourself have parkinson's disease or you have a family member or friends friend and my dad had parkinson's and my mother has parkinson's disease and i just want to say to anyone who's listening there is lots of hope there's lots of resources out there it is a very challenging disease but there are lots of resources in our community i know our family the unc parkinson center for excellence was very helpful to

203us but the parkinson's foundation provides free support and lots and lots of information so just reach out and do not give up that's what i'll walk away with that for but switching gears a little bit i want to thank all the aps i know that's been touched on already but just knowing how much of an impact they can have not only our students our families but staff because i know when i worked in a school system aps were often there and the ones needed not only in great times of celebration but also when we needed support perhaps so i just wanted to thank all of them for all they do i did have the opportunity to attend another united art artist in schools event and this one was at adams elementary the number drummer number

204drummer i think i'm saying that right i'll probably messing my mmb's but uh it was just fantastic the way he merged math and how it connects to music and how you know guys you don't need to have an instrument in your home you can still be playing music bringing in multiplication fractions and seeing the students just really going at it with drumsticks and my personal favorites cowbells and the trash cans trashcan lids and it was just a great event and just very important to continue all of those and there's so many i have another one coming up i think later this month i think it's roger day which i remember for quite some time i can i think have some of his songs still memorized for my children when he was around so i also

205enjoyed the shot of it as well the day i went it was raining and i was like of course but it was actually really helped in their work experience because when you're working outside the job goes on unless of course there's tornado or thunder you know lightning but i mean if it's raining they have to continue those students were continuing they were walking through that mud they were hauling the shingles up they were you know and it was um a great event um got to talk to the ocean i called him the osha guy because he kind of got upset because i had the navy junior rotc on and he was not a navy man but we worked that out but it was just great to see how he told me a lot of history

206and how long he's been involved and just a huge amount of community support and the jobs were wonderful because i just think you know every student has a little bit different path and anything we can do to encourage those different paths and help them on whatever their journey is is a wonderful thing and congratulations to about the new and renewed nationally board certified teachers that too was a great event especially considering everything else that's been going on to be able to work through that process finish that and uh congratulations congratulations to all those teachers and um right after that event i was lucky enough to attend my first lacrosse game never been to one of those i did that because there was one going on i was kind of shocked because it had been the

207weather and a lot of things postponed but the women's lacrosse at carrie high was still going on so i was able to catch that and of course a musical i you know i loved the musicals and i went friday uh which was appropriate because it was freaky friday at green hope um high school and it was just uh another magnificent event um i just the cast the crew the orchestra pit the director team and i have to say it was not only the singing and the music but there were some serious jump rope skills i'll just leave it there that occurred and it but it was just again i i love it i have another one i think it's east carey middle school is coming up later this month and it's shrek jr i believe

208as well but looking forward to that and last week was the district nine back meeting and i want to thank miss gaddis for always helping because we are doing virtual the rest of the school year and she helped with all of that and mr hofstedler and his team for helping ensure the materials the presentation was translated and having an interpreter on the call i really appreciate all of that help and mr needer and dr murtillo who are over there i want to thank you all for coming they did a great presentation on all of our staff challenges our vacancies the different steps that have been taken with compensation bonuses and also the wide variety of recruiting processes that are going on and ongoing and even we're able to celebrate some early i think i'm going

209to say this right early contracts is that how okay thank you dr patel that have been signed so it was great to hear and the next back meeting for district 9 is on april 27th at 6 00 pm and again will be virtual and this will be the strategic plan input so i encourage folks to sign up and please come because we really want to hear as many from as many folks as possible and many voices so thank you miss cash um so yes so dana king was probably one of my closest friends so i probably emotionally won't say a lot tonight but i can say that i think i think most millbrook will say that about dana king being a really close friend because milper high school is a community and you know as

210well as anybody um i did walks around millbrook yesterday and we coaches and i spent a lot of time around the gymnasium in the hallways i stood in front of her room for a while and um i don't think i've seen a room without a light in it before but we did talk about the trouble we would get into we did talk about cathy moore and how fun it was to break the rules but she would always say to me i'll tell cassie she'll be fine um and should i tell her before we do it or after and i'd say i'd leave that up to you dana because you know cassie better than anybody uh and kathy knew her well i don't think we would always tell our area superintendents what we were doing because

211it was easier just to let that go but i remember i remember the first time i met dana king it was when her she was made the east millbrook principal and i was still i was on the board of education in the 90s and somebody called me and it was getting dark out and i said east millbrook is burning down and i said okay so i went over there and dana king was there and it was kind of dark and her building was burning down she hadn't been a principal very long and here comes this lady out of the flames kind of walking out towards me and i said she must be a superhero and that's the first time i met dana king and well she is a superhero so i'm going to think more

212about the things that that i can talk about later i am so happy that we had a retirement thing on the earlier this week ms moore you did a beautiful job of telling all the things that you two had done together for years and years and years and the area superintendents that had her told a little bit of her life a little bit at a time and covered all the things that she had done in her career it was a story well told her staff was there her two daughters and their families and little grandkids running around and her husband rick all looking forward to the next chapter of their life and she was too she was excited she you know all of our principals have been through a lot in the last couple years

213and they have persevered and been exhausted but always smiling so um i don't think that you'll anybody will drive down by millbrook high school ever and not see dana king standing somewhere as they remembered her on the property and there's a beautiful tribute that was given to her that day made by the the shop people that will stand out in front that just shows how what a light she is in the community and even though i know her light wasn't on in her office that day that i looked at it i just know that her light goes on forever but i'll share more as i think more about it and emotionally more prepared but thank you miss johnson hustler thank you i felt horrible all last week because i had um lost in my family

214and missed her tribute um so needless to say um i was at family funeral and missed my happy call to tell me um i think many of you know my my daughter goes to millbrook and what you may not know is millbrook was our first family when we moved here in uh the end of 1999 my husband's first school was millbrook so his first boss in wake county was dana king and i mean i you explained it well it's a community um and even once my husband left bill brooke and my daughter was still at millbrook i have to tell the story miss cash is like a lifelong wildcat just wanting i don't know miss king is the chief wildcat this is the lifelong wildcat and so she um so cash was always at events

215at millbrook during our tenure and my husband has been gone from over for a while as a coach and um he still had keys to mill brook still does we have this conversation as a part of our family processing what it means to lose someone that is the first person he worked for in this district and my daughter's current principal so i mean she's was a part of our family and that's also how she treated us and treated me prior to becoming a board member and i think you all have gathered she also had a sense of humor so she was like well you're a school board member now but you're still bobby's wife and i was like true and we also acknowledge that ms cash is her consummate board member forever but i have

216to tell you at the last homecoming before covet with my best friend ms cash's granddaughter we were all decked out in our mealwork gear and ms king comes across the loudspeaker to give her announcement and she says and mr hosler still has keys this is still your home we welcome you back any day and i i was floored i was like what a homecoming football game she just she was like yes i am offering mr hosler his job back and i i just think it's important that i mean it's funny and it's a thing that i remember because it's important to note that she lives such a long legacy but talk about a rule breaker like she offered a job over an intercom like so so so that won't forever be funny to our family

217and my daughter was super embarrassed because we have a last name like hustler so of course people like is that your dad and that went on for a couple of weeks like your dad got offered a job by the principal so so i think it's important that you know that not only did she have a sense of humor but truly i don't think that there is anybody who's touched the soil at millbrook who won't remember her legacy her humor even after she was struggling to walk she came to that football game i felt sorry for the football players like she sat on the bleachers with the football players during football season this this past season and like there's a number of things that we could all say but there are people in your life that

218you just know that they know and she's one of those people who truly loved what she did and would do it at any cost and i think that speaks volumes to even when she broke the rules i think everybody in central services knew it was because at the end of the day her first priority was her community her school community and there is i don't think as a non-educator i think that that's what educators would want to know is that the legacy that they left is that they would do anything not just for her students i was married to one of her employees like for her employees i should also state when he became came to work for her i did not have a child and she he did not have a lot of time

219and she made sure those educators allowed him to have parental leave with me like she as the principal orchestrated what that could look like so i could go on all day but to your point her light still shines bright and the legacy will live on and all of us who ever ever communicated with her will have so many danny king stories i called her by her whole name which she also thought was funny i'm not sure why i just called her it seemed weird to call her dana after i became a school board member so i just call her a whole name but indeed the stories will live a long long and so are her legacy and i can't tell you the outpouring of love on social media from every student who ever attended bill

220brook so miss cash i know that a piece of you is aching far deeper than we can understand because you were also personal friends but thank you for giving a little piece of her to me as we shared her as as co-board members while my daughter is at mobrook so thank you all for for those of you who indulging us because life is short and i realized that in the last seven days with the unexpected death of my family like you wouldn't believe and the things that overwhelm you and i always tell board members and this is no secret my faith and my religion grounds me and it's the thing that allows me to endure no matter how much insanity is around me and so i just trust and rest in that she lived the

221life fully that she wanted to lead and we can rest assured that she lived every moment of every day and not everybody can say that and for those of you who are listening who didn't know her if you take one thing from me that's what i would say is love and live fully and give to the things that you adore especially for our educators i know this is exhausting and i yet you still live fully and passionately and so just let that be a reminder that that's the legacy that we all want to live and lead and that people will say after we're gone well said so it's a little bit of sadness at this board meeting today and shock and as we move forward with the the business of the school district we do

222have to approve our meeting agenda there is an amendment to remove item six which is recognition recognition of the north carolina tech director of the year she is unable to be with us today she's not feeling well so i'll move approval of the agenda with that addendum madam chair second thank you we have a motion in a second any discussion hearing none all in favor sign of i any opposed nay all right moving on to our first information item which is the presentation of the superintendent's proposed budget for the 2022-2023 academic year superintendent moore good evening chair lindsay and board members as i prepare this budget proposal for it is clear we have moved into a new phase of our cobit 19 pandemic response while we are optimistic that the worst has passed we are

223also grappling with the effects of an event that could linger for months or years these challenges include staffing shortages academic recovery mental health issues and more with the generous help of county commissioners and increased federal funding we've made progress in addressing some of these needs but we have a long way to go if we are to put every child on a path towards academic success within our new reality in 2223 that has to start with shoring up our workforce in years past i have highlighted one of the six core beliefs found in our strategic plan to help frame my annual budget message this year it seems all together appropriate to cite our third core belief well supported highly effective and dedicated principals teachers and staff are essential to success for all students the national labor

224shortage has made it painfully clear that every single member of our organization is essential to success for all students that's true regardless of their role to cover gaps during the past year for example we've asked bus drivers to drive triple and sometimes quadruple routes to get students to and from school each day hundreds of central services staff report to schools each week to assist cafeteria workers custodial staff teachers and instructional needs instructional assistants with needs and vacancies in the schools i'm grateful to our employees for stepping up to face these challenges i'm also grateful to this board for taking appropriate steps to increase compensation within our financial means to further these efforts the bulk of this year's additional funding request is tied to raising employee compensation more specifically i am proposing that 35.2 million dollars

225be spent to increase employee compensation as part of a total request of 56 million 16 thousand three hundred and forty dollars in additional support from the county commissioners for the 22-23 school year in addition to the 35.2 million increase for compensation i'm obliged to include an additional 8.3 million for legislative requirements such as costs that are incurred due to charter school expansion and increased local costs for employee hospitalization and retirement benefits i'm also requesting an additional 6.4 million to support the opening of four new schools in 2223 apex friendship elementary barton pond elementary herbert aikens road middle and the wake college of information and by the work wake early college of information and biotechnologies as town leaders and parents can attest these schools are necessary to address areas of growth in our county where the

226demand for seats has outpaced supply the money requested here would cover the operational costs of these schools such as staffing supplies maintenance that are not included in the construction programs approved by voters the additional increases in this proposed budget are largely tied to six million dollars in long deferred operational expenses and overall rising costs some costs are so significant that it is only prudent to fund them over multiple budget cycles you will find a summary of some of those priorities in the pages that immediately follow this letter in the budget book i'm grateful to this board and to our commissioners for their strong support in the past which has allowed us to continue to have success in the face of unprecedented challenges for example results for high school end of course tests have close to

227rebounded close to their pre-pandemic levels our four-year graduation rate has remained over 90 percent we have led the nation in the number of educators earning national board certification in our classrooms for 16 consecutive years magnet schools of america earlier this year named 45 of 54 wake county magnet schools as either schools of excellence or schools of distinction numerous teachers principals and staff members were honored with regional state and national awards including elena ashburn of broughton high school who became the first wake county principal to be named the north carolina principal of the year in closing i want to acknowledge a group of extension essential personnel that i have not yet mentioned are parents while this budget necessarily focuses on supporting our employees and how they support our students i would be remiss if i did

228not acknowledge the most important partners in education which are our families and parents for our parents this pandemic has been particularly difficult but the connection between parents and their teachers has often grown stronger in this struggle it is beyond doubt that such commitment and partnerships keep our school system and our community strong and it is the strength of those families and our ability to serve them that allows us to move forward together thank you for this time i will now ask david needer our chief business officer to provide highlights of the budget request thank you superintendent moore good evening chairman happy members of the board and superintendent i will now get into some more details of the budget if i could ask that the powerpoint slide that be put up thank you julie and if

229you could go ahead and proceed to the next slide tonight we're presenting to you the superintendent's proposed 2223 operating budget before we get into the actual budget though i want to share some background on the landscape and context that the budget was developed within shared a little bit of this with you at your joint boards meeting a couple weeks ago but i would like to review that again tonight we'll then review the funding priority areas and the actual budget with you and then lay out a path of next steps after tonight tonight's presentation is for information only as we go through the presentation you'll see that the focus is on local funding for the most part and the reason it is the only real opportunity that a board of education in north carolina has to

230request funding is with the local government or the county in north carolina the state legislature makes all the decisions about public school funding and in every state in the country the federal government makes decisions about federal funding next slide please our actual budget development process began later than any i can remember my 15 or so years here largely due to the late final budget coming from the state late calendar year 21-22 perhaps the good news out of that was it forced us through a lot of work very quickly 2022-23 is the second year of the state biennial budget and it does include two and a half percent average increases for teachers school administrators and support staff already in law for that second year as we look forward though the legislature will come in i believe

231in may for their short session one of the uncertainties out there is will they change make any changes to that second year of the biennial budget we'll have to wait and see and we'll also have to wait and see if any of the economic uncertainty that may be on the horizon due to world events may impact the state as well as local government and federal government i'll speak more of that in a minute next slide please so one might ask why is the economic outlook a part of this presentation why does it matter to us well unlike most other states in north carolina boards of education have no taxing authority and they're fiscally dependent on other governing bodies i think we're one of only a handful of states where boards of education do not have

232that authority and they're fully fiscally dependent so we are as i said depending on federal state and local governing bodies for their funding policies and decisions and those policies and decisions are in turn can be in turn influenced by the state of the economy next slide please here's a chart we shared with you a year ago it shows the federal local excuse me federal state and local unemployment rates just as some general background high unemployment rates as a general rule are not good for the economy low unemployment rates usually are you can see on the left side of the chart the spike up at the beginning of the pandemic in unemployment you can see the rapid decline and now with quarter one of 2022 at the far right you can see they're down to or

233below pre-pandemic levels just for your reference blue is the national line red is north carolina in green is wake county so you can see that as far as unemployment the state is doing much better than the nation and as far as wake county we're doing even better than the state next slide please this next slide is something you've seen in prior years as well it's an index of north carolina economic indicators maintained by dr michael walden at nc state university the higher the number the better and as you look at this chart the downtick you see on the left side of the graph was the great recession and you see a long recovery to get back to the great prior the great recession levels and then the downtick you see towards the right side of

234the slide was the pandemic and you see the rapid recovery of it i want to point out three things though that dr walton points out about the north carolina economy because based on this economic leading economic indicators it looks very strong and positive he speaks to [Music] the actual state of the pandemic becoming endemic if that were to change we all hope it doesn't that could have economic implications the second thing he points out is the conflict in ukraine and if the united states does get more fully or directly involved the likely impact that will have and likely lead to a recession in the country and finally he points out how the federal reserve will manage through the rising cost of living and inflation rates through their rate increases and that has implications for slowing

235the economy down too much and going into recession next slide just a couple more slides in the economy and then we'll jump into the budget a year ago when we presented the proposed budget we shared some information from with you from the north carolina legislature's fiscal research division when we shared that a year ago the division had just done a study in february of 2021 and then just a few months later in june of 2021 they made revisions to their revenue projections and that's the most recent study that we're aware of but if you look at the chart you'll see now that projected revenues for the current fiscal year between february and june grew by an additional 2.4 billion dollars up to billion dollars and that projected revenues for next year grew by an additional

2362.2 billion so overall if you look at state revenues the actual revenues for 2019-20 of 23.9 billion and projections for next year of 30 billion that's about a 28 increase in a very short period of time in state revenues take away from this slide the state's looking pretty good next slide please the last slide i want to talk to you about um on the economy and looking at things has to do with the wake county economy and i'm not going to go into details here but on the 28th of march the board of commissioners held a retreat where they looked at a number of things around all things budget and the economy there is a hot link in the presentation so if you want to go to the presentation in our assembly system online you

237can directly access the presentation materials in the agenda for the meeting included in the presentations though were projections for wake county revenues into next year and beyond and related economic information again i'm not going to go into details but overall is a very very positive outlook if you haven't been able to look at the presentation yet i would encourage you to there's a lot of really good information in there take away from this slide the economic outlook for the county is really strong for now next slide please now i want to switch gears and talk about some potential risks budget planning whether you have authority or don't have taxing authority is always just that it's projecting it's based on assumptions and in this case assumptions about decisions that other governing bodies will make that we

238don't control and perhaps at best have some influence over and so what's in our proposed budget are those assumptions what the governing bodies ultimately do are their final decisions and there can be gaps between those two and those gaps can create issues for budget adjustments so that's one risk second risk and i believe i spoke to this at your joints board meeting i want to mention it again the child nutrition federal reimbursement program that the federal government put into place over the last couple years during the pandemic that reimburses school districts across the country for all student meals is set to sunset on june 30th we have no indication that they will extend it beyond that that said we have concern we're doing analysis right now on what the revenue picture will look like one

239of the challenges is no one has had to sign up for free or reduced lunches go through the application process over the last two years there is a process for that and if the parents of the students that might qualify for that don't go through that process they're not eligible so we have some concerns there we may be coming back to you in may with a recommendation for meal price increases we've only done that a couple times in the last years but even if we do that and even if the board were to approve that it is possible that increased meal prices would still not cover our costs consider our cost for meals i'm going to oversimplify our two-fold food costs and labor costs we all know what food costs are doing and we all

240know what we're intentionally trying to do with our labor costs these are support staff paid some of the least in the district so stay tuned we may need to look at use of other local funding to supplement the cns operation in this coming year and finally i'll just point out that when the legislature returns in the short session they could make decisions to change either employer benefit contribution rates for health insurance or retirement or compensation changes which increase our need for local funding and when it comes to those two categories depending on the change it could be a large increase and so we don't have funding in there for that in the budget for that but that's why we list it as a potential risk next slide please jumping into the budget i want to

241go through how the operating budget is spent almost 90 percent 89 percent of every operating budget dollars go straight to the schools and i would posit that that next orange box of four percent we have to account for it separately based on what the epi tells us to do but i would posit that really goes directly to the schools as well because included in facilities and operations are the maintenance costs of the buildings the utility costs for the buildings the child nutrition operation the yellow bus operation the special needs transportation operation and so on so i would pause it it's more like ish that's going straight to the schools you do see a charter school pass through of but i'm going to speak to that in a second and then the other central office areas

242board of ed superintendents office communications academic advancement administrative services and technology services providing that backbone of support to our 193 but soon to become 197 schools i do want to point out that when you look at the local pass-through of just local funding and not the total operating budget eight percent of our local funding goes to charter schools that's by law so when we request additional funding from the county it's not all for the wake county public school system approximately eight percent of it is just to pass through the charter schools next slide please just a couple things i want to show you on this slide first normally federal funding represents about eight percent of our overall operating budget but you'll see here on this pod chart for next year it's up to 15 percent

243the reason for that is the large influx of pandemic relief funds mostly federal and so this pie chart will look like this for next year and likely the following year but then we face the fiscal cliff and it will likely go back to more of the normal ratios and i'm going to speak to the fiscal cliff more at the end of the presentation second thing i want to point out too on this slide if you look at the left chart about three lines down from balance appropriation this proposed budget invests almost 25 million dollars of fund balance into the budget and again i'll speak more about that in a future slide next slide please so the prior slide showed a total projected operating budget of just over two billion dollars big number let me put

244context into that number by looking at funding in terms of per pupil the current year budget provides per pupil funding for wake county of 9797 dollars that has wake county ranking at 98th in the state out of 158 districts the lower the ranking the more funding we're 98 out of 115. you'll also see on the slide funding amounts from out of state peer districts again i'll note that is from the 2018-19 year that's the most recent year this national data is available but again i would posit it still reasonably fresh to show the distinction between how schools in our state are funded versus perhaps some other peer schools in in different states nonetheless it tells a story and the last comment i'll make about this slide in the past it's frequently been brought up well

245some of these other out-of-state districts have a much higher cost of living and that has been past tense been the case now so much less so didn't do a formal study but just looking at the cost of housing alone in the triangle area and how rapidly is growing i dare say and we'll do some research but i dare say it's going to show the cost of living is playing less pain being less and less a factor here and again there's a start difference in some of these districts being able to invest up to 50 percent more per student in that student next slide please i want to now move into some of the funding priority areas again at your joint boards meeting in march we shared significant detail about the use of pandemic relief funding

246in response to interrupted learning so tonight i will simply note that this will continue to be a focus for the 22 23 and 23 24 years next slide please and you've heard already from superintendent moore the other top funding priorities within the superintendent budget again with a heavy emphasis on staff compensation next slide please public education is a human resource intensive business eighty percent of our total operating budget goes to pay salaries and benefits to our staff state funding for compensation and legislation to maintain competitive rates was not where it needed to be pre-great recession and state legislation and funding to maintain competitive compensation rates has not moved forward to where it needs to be post-grade recession ironically this same post-great recession economy has arguably been the longest and strongest period of economic recovery and

247growth that any of us in this room have witnessed the lagging of salaries impacts all categories of staff but some more than others and the changes to the employment marketplace that have evolved through the pandemic have had only added fuel to the recruiting fire and retention fire take away from this slide staff compensation is the fundamental focus for the proposed budget for next year next slide please got on this slide categories of staff that were having the hardest time recruiting and retaining and with the highest vacancy rates these vacancy rates were from earlier in march so they may have fluctuated a little bit bus drivers 22 percent almost one out of every four bus driving positions vacant you heard superintendent moore speak to the extra duty they're doing but that's not filling in all the

248blanks and i'll speak to that in a minute child nutrition workers 17 vacancy rate skilled craftsmen in maintenance and operations 25 vacancy rate there's a little blessing in that one and that we can contract some of those services out we can't contract a yellow bus driver from another company but that said we're also competing with the red-hot construction industry so their chance their limits there too special education teachers seven and a half percent and while that number is much lower than the other vacancy rates it's still significantly higher than the i think it's about two or two and a half percent vacancy rate for regular education teachers instructional assistants regular education 9 vacancy rate special education 16 vacancy rate and central services administrator professionals 10 vacancy rates these vacancies are directly impacting our capacity to

249conduct a core business i'll give you one example the lack of bus drivers i've heard stories of the last couple weeks consistently bus drive well buses when they get to the school late whatever student was on that bus is getting the class late they're losing instructional time that's going to impact them in addition when a school comes to pick up in the afternoon and arrives 45 minutes or an hour late the student may be impacted by not being able to participate in some other regular or extracurricular activity or something to do with in the home but it's also impacting our school-based staff including our teachers who are required to stay there with those students and supervise them when they may otherwise be beginning their planning for the next day just one example next slide please

250so this board did approve in december to move our minimum hourly rate for support staff effective january 1 to 15 dollars an hour that was big our graded support staff position saw increases averaging from 43 percent to just over 5 percent with the lowest grades who had the lowest hourly rate seeing the biggest percentage increases next slide please as you already heard from superintendent moore the proposed budget request over 35 million dollars to apply against staff compensation that represents 63 percent of the total 56 million of additional county appropriation that is included within the proposed budget and included within the proposal is shifting the minimum hourly rate for support staff to 16 an hour effective july 1 and addressing compression by maintaining step differentials and grade differentials i will note and you'll recall that in

251the state's second year by any um budget their plan was to move support staff of school systems to 15 an hour minimum whether that stays or not we'll find out in the short session but regardless in the penalty of this we're requesting local funding to be able to move to 16 an hour minimum next slide please also included within that 35.2 million is funding required to increase our locally funded supplements for teachers instructional support and school administrators by two and a half percent which then aligns with what's in the current state legislation as far as average increases for those individuals so their entire compensation would go up by that percent next slide please this slide walks us through a bit of history on the focus of the non-certified support staff compensation take a minute and

252run through it just so you can see where we've been and where we hope to head but in 2019-20 we were able to receive through the generosity of the county commissioners just over just under 8 million 7.7 million dollars of additional funding that funding was used primarily to bring our bus drivers up to 15 an hour effective january 1 2020 right as the pandemic was about to hit you'll see in the following year another 1.6 million dollars that was funding requested from the county so we could fund those bus drivers at 15 an hour for an entire year and not just for six months in 2122 you'll see the over 23 million dollar funding that was approved that went through all the improvements that were brought to you in december that you did approve the

253biggest one being going to that 15 an hour minimum and addressing compression throughout the grades in the bands you'll also see on here the 21.7 million that's included within the 30 um 5 million that will be required to go to the 16. there are other things in that 35 million as well as just the 16 an hour minimum and then finally we've got two estimates out there for 23 24 and 24 25 and those are estimates for in those years going to 17 an hour minimum and then in the last year 18 an hour minimum i do want to stress those are estimates we didn't run the numbers like we would have for this year's budget where accuracy is important but we wanted to give some sense of a ballpark of what would be required

254to continue this progress next slide please so the superintendent's proposed budget does continue to move us forward that said even if the proposed budget does come to fruition much work in this area will remain next slide please the next budget priority in the current year's budget is also part of the multi-year initiative established pre-planned on it and for this coming year's budget it seeks 960 thousand dollars in local funding to provide additional instructional technology support services in the schools next slide please our utilization of instructional technology continues to expand the onset of the pandemic and going all virtual put that on steroids by effectively putting us into a student device one-to-one ratio pushing us onto even more digital content platforms providing additional student teacher resource applications engaging additional virtual teaching platforms and also acquiring additional

255classroom technology all these things require support however because they've got to be working effectively and staff and students have to understand how to utilize them in order to leverage it next slide please this is a multi-year initiative as well and i'd just like to walk you through where we come and where we'd like to go we did invest in 2019 20 and 20 20 21 about 600 000 in this initiative in each of those two years and then for the current year we invested 869 000 but you'll see that's in a different column it's in the federal column we invested for the current year using pandemic relief funds our proposed budget for this coming year that's being presented tonight requests 960 000 of local funding to continue this endeavor i do want to point out

256that those resources that are funded by pandemic relief funds will need to be addressed at with the fiscal cliff because the funding that they're currently on will go away at the end of 20 well into the 24-25 school year and so we will manage that through the fiscal cliff next slide please next priority area i would like to go over with you again it was a multi-year initiative established pre-pandemic an area of critical need related behavioral health supports counselors school psychologists and social workers ratios of students to staff have not aligned with our student needs or national standards and while we have made progress in the prior year endeavor to target national standards the pandemic has exacerbated the need for these supports this year's proposed budget requests nine hundred thousand dollars of pandemic relief funds

257and if i could ask you to go to the next slide thank you julie i want to go through the history in 1920 you can see there was 1.7 million dollars of state funding invested just under a million dollars of local funding the following year 2.3 million dollars of federal funding and for the current year 8 million dollars of federal funding again just as i spoke to the instructional technology support positions the eight million dollars invested for the current year is using pandemic relief funds that will become part of the fiscal cliff because we fully intend to maintain these positions post pandemic and post pandemic relief funds so again i'm going to talk a little bit more about the cliff towards the end of the presentation next slide please final priority area i'd like to

258go over with you has to do with our maintenance and operations area these are the folks that make sure all of our schools are maintained in proper working order and as i heard during your discussion during the board work session on a couple of the facility items the fact that as these facilities get older and they're not renovated their needs for maintenance become more frequent and more complex i'll leave it at that so we started a few years ago targeting getting our maintenance and operations funding formulas to a national average of funding per square foot during the great recession as we made a lot of budget cuts and we try to mitigate the impact directly on the classroom maintenance and operations was one of many areas that received significant reductions so the proposed budget does

259request five million dollars of local additional local funding for this initiative and i will note and you'll see on the next slide we are also proposing removing two million dollars of maintenance and operations funding from the pandemic relief funds to begin mitigating that fiscal cliff so that said it really would be a net increase in funding for the maintenance and operations for next year 3 million next slide please so on this slide again you'll see the history in the first year of the initiative 2019-20 we were able to invest an additional 25 two and a half million dollars excuse me in the following year just one million i'll remind everyone that following year was the onset of the pandemic we had no idea what the economic implications were we went in that year with a

260very austere budget and went very late on these multi-year initiatives and then if you look at the current year you'll see we have placed 13 and a half million dollars of funding for maintenance and operations additional funding on the pandemic relief funds the current year for next year's proposal we're requesting five million dollars and then you can see the next three years 5.6 million dollars and that would take us to the national standard for funding per square foot we're currently at 87 percent of that standard next slide please want to switch gears you heard me state this already but beyond the additional 15 56 million dollars that's being requested from the county the superintendent's proposed budget also invests 25 million dollars of fund balance and if this level of investment is approved and remains board

261policy 8101 will need to be waived as this amount represents slightly over 50 percent of the june 30 20 201 unassigned fund balance next slide please you've already heard from superintendent moore that we're opening four new schools next year two elementary apex friendship and barton pond the middle herbert aikens and the early college of information and biotechnology they all will have operating costs that are not covered by the state utility costs maintenance costs perhaps less so when they're brand new and they also receive local funding for students that are not associated with their fixed amounts whether you have 50 students in the building or 500 students in the building so that represents the 6.4 million dollar request next slide please the last category i will go over is a 4.9 million dollar request for newer

262expanding programs including a change to the high school assistant principal formula a change in retitling high school clerical assistance and upgrading them to receptionists expansion of magnet school programming both athletics and performing arts school allotment expansion aig expansion some central support positions i'm not going to get into the detail on this tonight given the time but details on each of these and actually every other one of these funding initiatives is included and these newer expanding ones begin on page 154 of your budget document next slide please so the budget document is now posted at our website pdf format available to look at or even download as the board works through the process of going from the superintendent's budget to the board's proposed budget to the board's adopted budget each of those will be posted on

263our website next slide um this is a very brief orientation to the budget document i'm not going to go through it it's very similar to how it's been organized in the past i believe we now have one board member miss waters that has not been through this process i'll be glad to work with you and staff sort of walk you through it so we'll work something out if you would like that next slide please all right i've been saying i'm going to talk about the fiscal cliff well here we go we've got approximately 30 million dollars invested in the pandemic relief funds in what i would call recurring expenditures that we desire to continue after the pandemic relief funds are no longer available the primary areas are behavioral health supports the instructional support technicians and

264the maintenance and operations funding as we developed this year's proposed budget there were competing needs for addressing the fiscal cliff now versus dealing with our number one priority staff compensation so you saw the limited attempt of two million dollar reduction of 0.2 million off of that 30ish million dollars we believe we're going to find another 8 12 million dollars relatively easily which won't have direct impact but i think it's likely we think it's likely that as we prepare a budget a year from now proposed budget we're likely going to also have competing needs so we've had some initial conversations and they will continue because we've got three budget cycles to address the fiscal cliff 22 23 23 24 and 24 25 and we may be regrouping and rather than looking at asking for additional local

265funding to backfill the funding cliff looking at our existing operating budget and looking at how we can repurpose funds within that existing operating budget so we can continue doing these initiatives that we have begun using the pandemic relief funding stay tuned more to come next slide so um as you go through the budget document we'd ask you to send any questions to our senior director of budget she's sitting way over there terry kimsey through her email and at your next finance committee meeting and board work session depending on how it works out either finance committee or finance committee and board work session the board will have a budget work session where you will have the opportunity to discuss the budget and i'll cover that in a minute but we'll also review those questions board member

266questions and staff responses with you at the finance committee meeting and we'll also post those questions and responses on our website along with the budget documents again for complete transparency and so the public can see as well at your board meeting on the 19th you'll hold the public hearing on the budget and then based upon what direction the board directs the superintendent and staff to make adjustments or changes to the budget or perhaps sends us back to the drawing board on certain things we may require an additional board work session our target currently is to have you approve your proposed budget on may 3rd again that may need to adjust based on the need to add work sessions and we need to get the board's proposed budget to the county commissioners before may 15 to

267meet statutory requirements next slide and it's the last slide i promise at your work session again we will present the questions board member questions and responses but the primary focus of that is for the board to discuss the budget see if they aren't consensus about it see if they do want to redirect the superintendent and staff to go in some different directions and then we go from there and that concludes my presentation which again tonight is for information only and i thank you for your time thank you mr nader we look forward to getting our questions to mrs kimsey and seeing you again on the 19th for our work session thank you and what's the deadline for getting those questions mrs kimsey we'll put an email out we'll we'll take a look thank you yes

268and we'll push the email on thank you thank you miss kushner next up we have our superintendent updates superintendent moore i'll just be providing some updates on the information that the board engaged on during our work session today the first two items of the work session were an update on the 2022 cip cost model update and the existing school renovation and replacement rubrics as we get ready to move forward with requesting from the county commissioners the funds that will be necessary to continue our seven-year plan for the building of new schools and renovation of existing schools which will likely require that our county commissioners look at putting a bond on the ballot in november the next item that we went over was the gaggle pilot that is being implemented in school districts across north carolina

269including wake county using state designated federal funds for internet security we went over the pilot schools that are currently engaged in that work um the messaging that has gone out examples of the types of things that are being done and clarification that these are only wake county platforms that are part of the gaggle pilot things like you know regular social media twitter tick tock individual student email those are not they're not part of this program the last item that we engaged in during the work session was an overview of the student engagement team set grant this is a collaboration between wake county cooperative extension alliance health and the wake county public school system it is a multi-year grant that will provide support to four specific schools that will have the opportunity through some additional resources

270staffing and other connections to our community partners wrap around services for students who have high needs this was really born out of the work really during the pandemic where we did so much around food security with our partners in the community to support our students and recognize through our work and with our social workers and our county health partners that the needs extended beyond food security for many of our families so this will provide an opportunity to provide support to those students and those were the updates from the work session thank you thank you superintendent moore we now move on to public comment public comment is accepted in video written and in person formats members of the public are welcome to offer comments or criticism directed of substantive ideas actions or procedures of the board

271and individual board members in the interest of maintaining civility in decorum however speakers are encouraged to refrain from personal attacks and insults directed at the board individual board members staff or members of the general public the laws and policies of north carolina provide that issues or concerns involving individual individual personnel matters are confidential and therefore not appropriate for public comment settings concerns related to personnel issues may be addressed through applicable wcpss policies the grievance policy or other applicable policies speakers including students may discuss issues and matters of general concern but should refrain from discussing confidential student information concerns related to confidential student matters may be addressed through applicable wcpss personnel the grievance policy or other applicable policies the following citizens have submitted comments as part of the public comment portion for this evening's agenda these

272comments are linked on the same online agenda that we are using for tonight's meeting that agenda as well as guidelines for those wishing to submit comments for future meetings can be found at the school district's website wcpss.net under the tab labeled school board we have 30 written comments and two video comments from members of the public the topics of which comments are attached to the agenda are as follows six on books seven on class rank two on prom 5 for thank you and 10 miscellaneous comments including maintenance curriculum special accommodations masks germ theory drugs drug searches background checks transgender and crt alc student achievement ocs and lgbtq books for those of you that are here to speak in person during public comment you may speak for up to three minutes a yellow light will illuminate

273at the podium when there are 30 seconds remaining in your time and a red light will signal your time is up please remain at the podium during your speaking time any materials you wish to share with the board should be handed to the board attorney either before or after your comments and our attorney is located right over there thank you first up is janet peterson hi my name is janet peterson i have a combined 36 years in teaching and working with young children 25 years teaching in wake county public schools teaching kindergarten through second grade i am since retired my team and i have read and reviewed books that are found in wake county public school libraries that belong in the adult book section and bookstores you're about you are allowing the sexualization of children

274and teens i'm about to read to you passages from some of those books that and i'm asking if there are any young people in here under 18 to please leave the room let me read you first some excerpts from the north carolina statute on obscene literature and exhibitions sexual conduct is defined as vaginal anal or oral intercourse whether actual or simulated normal or perverted masturbation excretory functions or lewd exhibition an act or condition that depicts torture physical restraint or being fettered or bound all of these items are found in the books that are in wake county public schools i have a few back here and there are many let me begin by reading to you from the v word book uh since i felt a particular longing for intimacy and sex that grew each year

275i kept to my romance novel novels finding new scenes i learned how to touch myself with my own hands how to draw circles with my fingers where my body liked it best when chat rooms first came into vogue i discovered cyber sex i would ask faceless men to imagine what they wanted to do to me blocking the ones who wanted to be rough clicking away from the ones that wanted to receive oral sex i chatted with the ones who wanted to enter me with their tongues and it goes on this book is full of it and it's in several high schools here in wake county i uh let's see i tried stroking her stomach thighs nipples hip following the path of my hands with soft kisses it was all lovely but it felt like nothing

276was really happening flustered i pushed to get on my back maya boldly took a blunt a plunge and kissed her way down my body until she was on my kissing and licking that's in wake county public schools let me read to you from a poem from uh from the book identical and i'll just read a section the poem is entitled true to his word he ra it starts with ty wants ty's voice is almost a snarl he wraps his rope around my hands he ties it tightly i shake my head but he but uh excuse me i shake my head don't but he does should i scream would anyone hear would anyone care that's about bondage i have another about incest and that's right here like i said in our books and i'm really sad

277um you've allowed the selection of such books into our libraries media specialists librarians principals review teams all have signed off on these books i tell you you must protect the innocence of our children and teams our next speaker is jim walsh [Applause] good evening parents and board members i would like to read the statute but it's already been read and i think you can maintain what was said a little bit and the school board has direct policies that override that law and those policies were given grant to the school board by statute of the legislator and the policies are that if material comes before the school board that is question it goes to the principal review committee and then another review committee and then another review committee and then comes to the board well we

278have a book longboy on november 6 of 21 it was brought to the attention of kerry high school principal on november 22nd a response came back saying this book's appropriate on january 12th the central institutional instructional materials advisory committee recommended that the books stay and then it went to the board appeal here on march 10th the board decided two to one that this was appropriate material now i'm going to repeat what janet said if there's any children listening i personally do not want them to hear this lawn boy can be found in the following high schools apex carey fouque green level panther creek sanderson south gardner in willow springs page 19. but there's one thing i'd never tell nick in a million years not that it really matters in fourth grade at church youth group

279meeting out in the bushes behind the parsonage i touched dick global's dick and he touched mine in fact there are even some mouths involved at age 25 placing her knee between my legs she wrestled off the sweater and unbuttoned her blouse and pulled off her panties and she climbed on top of me before i even had a chance to savor the moment i'm not saying i was grateful to this day i remained grateful to gina and whatever when or combination of alcohol and restless prompted her to unbutton my jeans and straddle me in the passenger seat page 91 you get the gist now i challenge our committee and our parents to accept this as acceptable practice in our school system this is not parents you need to get active in what the board is doing

280i would also say the parents are getting active oh they're homeschooling the only thing that needs to follow now is the cash to follow the student thank you our next speaker is tucker willenborg parker willenborg on behalf of the students of wake county i asked the board do you care about us will you take action to prevent a needless and harmful cause of suffering class rank instead of stepping up to support us amid the devastation this pandemic has unleashed on our lives this board is actively choosing to ignore us as the class of 2023 moves towards college application season i ask this board to finally act on class rank as a student at green level one of the highest performing high schools in this district i see the harms of class rank first hand it

281isn't pretty especially with the pc19 pandemic grading policy the competition is ugly numerous colleges state the class rank is an important or even highly important factor for admissions and scholarships some colleges even have class rank requirements requiring students to be in the top 10 for scholarships at green level however a top 10 ranking is a nearly hopeless endeavor an endeavor that harms every student green level has national merit finalists outside the top 10 percent green level has state straight a students outside the top 25 percent green level has students poised to graduate with this board's magna laude high honors designation ranked outside the top 25 ranked outside or ranked in the bottom 25 percent of their class students at my school employ harmful strategies to maintain the ranks some take multiple online courses at wake

282tech after school or over the summer triggering additional stress and harming extracurricular activities students utilize pc19 to drop lower weighted courses often with high a grades to boost their test ranks subjecting them to unsightly past marks on their transcripts and as well as allegations of cheating from their peers whose ranks are lowered as a result nearly all of the top-ranked students at my school pick their courses explicitly for class rank choosing courses like microsoft word honors over much more valuable career preparatory courses like python programming you are harming our futures and livelihoods because of class rank this is the very definition of unhealthy competition none of us benefit all of us are harmed if this board instead calculated class rank using the latin honors methodology that was approved in 2016 we would have clear achievements

283targets and none of the tremendous uncertainty from which we currently suffer this proposal was fair it complies with state law it complies with state board policy it is in your hands to implement the current policy of printing inaccurate and harmful exact class ranks deals a tremendous amount of harm it impairs our chances of admissions scholarships and aesthetic recruitment it punishes us for choosing courses for our future goals it creates a painfully competitive high school culture and worst of all it isn't even fair therefore on behalf of students of green level high school and of wake county as a whole i request the sport update its policies on class rank policies that this board can and should change today thank you our next speaker is susan book hello first and foremost happy autism awareness acceptance and

284in my house appreciation month we should be celebrating our autistic students as well as our autistic staff and teachers and those who work in our wonderful buildings we should also be mindful that these students go out into the real world and my hope is that wake county schools can be an incredible place for them to find jobs just like everywhere else please make sure that your policies have inclusivity that not only affects students but also the work life that might happen here now no one should feel shame for who they are or who they love i'm not really good at this i'd rather speak policy any day but today i'm here to stand with wake students who identify as lgbtq with their parents and with their community i'm here to stand with black and brown

285students parents and community i stand to promote a safe place for them to live and learn a place where their lives are reflected positively in the books in our libraries where history is celebrated debated but most of all taught honestly with primary and secondary sources available in their own schools this is the very least we could do please board i ask you to continue to lift up those who others might put down continue and invest in equity we obviously need the office of equity now more than love one another thank you our next speaker is carrie bly hello again this is our anniversary we started asking you for viable math learning resources for our kids april 2nd 2019 three years ago today is our second history speech to you last time we discussed how you

286vetted mvp and opened up math curriculums through imet eqip and ed reports and while it sounds extensive and impressive we thought you might want to understand that they're all rooted in the exact same metric and foundational text today we want to run the history of the only other data source you say you used to pick our kids curriculum and that's where 2016 tntp audit the first time we ever heard that was in the june 18 2019 board meeting it was justification for why the board dismissed our formal complaints and you presented this tnt report as one of the major catalysts behind adopting new middle and high school curriculums i asked for a copy of that report and it took you two and a half months to find it and i'm going to repeat that it

287took you two and a half months to find a report that you paid 170 881 dollars for that you called a driving force behind your math curriculum adoptions and that was our first red flag initially what mother bothered me most was the timeline you hired them in march 15th you did seven days of curriculum audits in april and may and then 27 days after you were done north carolina adopted new high school math standards june 2nd of 2016. that's when you told us that nc stopped operating under common core you knew that we were going to get new standards yet you initiated sent out an rfp selected and accepted tnt's proposal the only proposal that mentions common core standard alignment 46 times in their 13-page proposal to you that's a very good example of what

288we mean by a lack of transparency and a lack of communication now in dr martin's speech on june 18th he sort of asked a question after noting the dire state of math education he said that the low proficiency data nor the wake county audit did not result in public or parental outcry and it sounded like you were trying to admonish us well i have an answer for you we did not outcry because you did not release this report never wake county conducted a common core curriculum quality review changed the name of it then once you got the results in may you sat on them for six months until you reduced the 75 page report to 12 slides that you discussed six months later in november and a student achievement committee behind closed doors not on

289camera in the middle of a weekday no you did not hear us cry out you didn't hear us cry out until we saw our kids crying at the kitchen table because they got a 13 on a test again when we watched them hunched over their computers for hours trying to google basic math concepts to figure out how to do their homework thank you miss fly rachel blackwood speaker first of all thank you i'd like to thank each of you for serving over the last two years i know it hasn't been easy i know it hasn't always made you very popular but i do know and i was able to see that your heart was with the needs of the children and that is something that i appreciate as a parent and i'd like to appeal

290to the heart of the board yet again today recently there were discussions about moving some of the students from abbots creek elementary school to durant road elementary school to my school my children's school and those that proposal was fought by the community by abbott's creek parents and even the media but something was left out of that conversation the needed renovations at durant road elementary school was left out of that conversation you see abbots creek elementary is just across the street from us it serves a high socioeconomic status base it's a brand new beautiful facility everything's in working order the students don't have to worry about if their bathroom is going to work or if they're going to a dilapidated trailer in a sharp contrast the students at brandt road elementary school have a very run

291down school it's 30 years old we're not even on the renovation list we serve a very low socioeconomic status group of children many of our children are food insecure some of them are homeless they come to live and they live in deplorable conditions and then they come to a school that's been run down and quite frankly has not been maintained the way it should by the county and i know that that money is an issue but i also know that while my neighbors across the street abbots creek elementary school from the upscale neighborhoods get a brand new school with everything in working order our students deserve the same regardless of socioeconomic status they deserve they deserve the same and so i'd like to plead with you to put us on the renovation list to give

292us a chance to make our school look as beautiful on the outside as it is on the inside thank you our next speaker is lindsay tobin thank you as we are beginning to see the ramifications that the pandemic has had on our children there is significant learning loss as well as anxiety and depression and while most are acknowledging this instead of working hard to correct this we are lowering standards now this goes from babies developments all the way up to high school graduations and i believe we need to get back to the basics with our children's education we live in the greatest country in the world and our students need to have the best education in the world the focus needs to be on math science technology etc during covid one of the board members

293stated that there was much more suffering in the world than what was happening with our children and that is on full display right now every day but the only way that we ensure that that type of suffering does not come to us in future generations is to ensure that we are building strong future leaders our children cannot compete and will not have the proper tools to be great thinkers and innovators if we deny them a robust education in favor of personal causes we can teach about our government without bringing political ideology or rhetoric in we can teach about self-acceptance and love in the acceptance of others differences without sexualizing our children i personally know a mother whose first grader's class was asked to vote in 2020 for either biden or trump i know a family

294whose second grader was given the gender unicorn handout my kindergartener knows nothing about these topics nor should he he is young and innocent why are we so insistent on making our children go grow up faster than they should years ago many people were offended by religion being taught in public schools religion is a very per very personal to someone's identity and people can be uncomfortable with others outside of their family teaching this to their children do we not see politics and sexuality as very personal issues why would it be okay for them to be taught in public schools it seems that we are putting our personal fears and burdens of this world on our children's shoulders when our children's children look into the world they don't see politics they don't see hate they don't care

295what your skin color is or who you partner at home is and instead of taking this away from them we should learn from them thank you our next speaker [Applause] our next speaker is gil pagan good evening school board members i wanted to bring to your attention a few books of many that are in the wake county public school library system one book and these books are pornographic in nature one book is called george and this book is about transsexualism and it also has references to incest this book called blankets is a graphic novel by greg thompson has pornographic pictures inside of a boy and a girl having sex and there's also masturbation in this book and the third book is lawn boy which i'm sure you're familiar with lawn boy is a book that

296has a story in it about two mexican-american boys that are 10 years old that go behind a church and engage in oral sex and that book is in the wake county public school library system and i'm going to read to you a piece of that book a page from page 91. what's normal then nick tell me that your porn habit the way you talk about women oh like you don't watch porn actually no you're a liar what if i told you i touch another guy's dick i said nick waved me off and turned his attention back to his beer what if i told you i sucked it will you please just shut up already i'm dead serious nick well i'd say you were a i put doug gobbles dick in my mouth the real estate

297guy yeah that guy nick looked around frantically what the are you talking about these are the books that are in the public school library system and by the way this book in particular was voted on by this board to remain in the library i don't understand why you would do that how dare you ignore parents phone calls concerns like this to pull these books out ignoring their emails how dare you take away the rights of parents to shield their kids from this type of stuff pornographic books in our public school library how dare you decide to put these books in these libraries at the hands of these children parents are upset they are angry hispanic parents are upset and angry because these books are in the public school system we demand you take these books

298out now from these libraries and put them away where they should not be seen or touched again thank you our next speaker is [Applause] steve bergstrom our next speaker is amanda lund growing up i had the opportunity to attend three different public schools in grade school the second was in west tennessee the powers that be tried to shield students from particular subjects one of these subjects at that time was darwinism teachers weren't allowed to teach it students were not allowed to talk about it the message i received as a young child was that darwinism was the devil's work and that it was not suitable to be taught in public schools i am not sure exactly how i picked that up it really could have been the result of parents and the public having meetings such

299as this but fast forward to ninth grade i had moved to western new york i was in science class and a teacher publicly taught about darwin's theories my jaw dropped my eyes bulged here i was witnessing a teacher teaching a subject that had not been previously allowed to be taught to me and the students were doing just fine they took it in like they take in every other piece of information that they receive in their school existence the teacher didn't teach it in a way that forced it as truth it was taught as a theory an educated guess that hadn't yet been able to be proven false by scientific evidence students were simply given a new piece of information they could use in their data bank to think critically about then in my freshman year

300of college my roommate self-identified as jewish again my jaw dropped my eyes bulged i'm not sure if i spoke out loud or if it was just in my head but what i thought was oh my gosh your family survived your people survived that's amazing that they survived the holocaust why did i think that due to a lack of diversity due to a lack of inclusive curriculum the only time i ever encountered the concept that a jewish person existed was in that very short segment that we taught about the holocaust diversity matters inclusive curriculum matters they foster new perspectives open-mindedness opportunities for critical thinking and empathy while reading writing and arithmetic are important these life skills also have so much value and our students deserve an opportunity to hear them and formulate their own opinions thank

301you our next speaker is lisa vicer hello i am here to talk to to you about class frank as you've already heard some speakers already address we recognize that that class rank is often very detrimental to our students well-being i want you to know that this is an issue that's not just relevant to wake county students and parents and administrators my i'm a parent in the chapel hill carrboro city school district we also care very passionately about this issue of class rank and how it can be very harmful to our students in fact our district over the past decade has tried several times to challenge the state rule that insists on class rank they haven't been successful in the past but there is some hope some opportunity now that there could be a different interpretation

302of this state mandate that would allow some flexibility with class rank and there is definitely some momentum in several districts in the state and so i encourage the board to be open-minded to what some of the opportunities might be i've got a real quick personal anecdote in terms of the damage to mental health to the sense of extreme competitiveness that students high school students feel because of class rank my daughter is a freshman at unc chapel hill right now she graduated from carrboro high school last year she very much decided she would play the class ranked game and it absolutely is a game and from the time she was in middle school she was on a mission to have a high class rank we actually discouraged her from pursuing that mission because it didn't seem

303to be a very very valid use of life energy but she wanted to do it and she did it and graduated toward the top of her class and was happy with that now as a college freshman she has so much regret looking back on that incredibly stressful negative competitive experience that she had in high school and now she's the biggest advocate for anything we can do to change that environment the other issue i was going to mention is that professionally i have worked in the area of college admissions over the last 20 years or so and so i have the perspective and opinion that the colleges do not want to see class rank if it's there when an applicant applies to a university you have to look at it you have to consider it you

304actually have to report it and your statistics as a university are measured by the rank of your students but if it's not there you have more flexibility to kind of make the right decisions and holistically evaluate candidates so i've got a someone i know who's dean of admissions at a highly selective institution and she had one point of advice to me if you can do anything in north carolina in your district it's to get rid of class rank it is killing your students when they apply to our institution because they have class rank attached to them so thank you for your time and i look forward to hopefully having additional conversations about options in the state for changes to class rank thank you our next speaker is robin livingston so i've had three students in

305the wake county public school system two have graduated and my youngest is in eighth grade my kids have had some amazing experience in this school system i grew up in a small very rural town where schools were wonderful but had limited resources through wake county's public school system my kids have traveled to europe washington dc my daughter trained and performed with a world-class musician through her band program she also marched with her marching band at disney and my kids have had access to a much higher level of course than were available to me in order to continue that level of education we need to make sure our school system continues to provide as many educational resources as possible this is national library week in honor of that i would like to encourage you to make

306library book funding a priority libraries don't need fewer books we need more the wcpss website is available in eight different languages we have kids from all over the world in our school system these kids have different backgrounds experiences religions languages etc in north carolina a school librarian is required to have a teaching license and a master's degree these people are trained to provide resources that are age-appropriate for a wide audience some of these resources are not always going to be pretty in fact some books are very disturbing but not everything we learn about the world is going to be pretty the good news is the american voting public agrees in a recent poll commissioned by the american library association 71 percent of voters oppose efforts to have books removed from their local libraries this is

307bipartisan with 75 percent democrats 70 percent republican and 58 independents opposing such bans ninety percent of voters and ninety two percent of parents have a favorable opinion of the librarians who work in local public libraries and in school libraries most voters are confident in local public libraries to make good decisions about their collections and think libraries do a good job representing a variety of viewpoints the biggest takeaway for me from the poll information was that 74 percent of parents are confident in public school libraries decisions about their collections that means parents who are fighting to ban books are on the wrong side of the issue some of these parents come speak before the board claiming to speak for the parents of wake county but they do not speak for me thank you our next speaker

308is michelle manley hello i thank you for the opportunity to speak um i had the the blessing of being able to be at your last meeting with the um both the county commissioners and you guys when you were a joint session and so i appreciate everything that was shared about the budget i i'm really concerned for this reason i don't know if you guys remember i have five children um three of them are out of of um k through 12 now but two are still in and i'm really concerned about the quality of education and i feel like that really should be the primary focus of a school board of wake county being the 14th largest school district in all of the country we have an opportunity to really make a difference not only here

309in north carolina but throughout this this this nation and this is my concern a few weeks ago there was a there was an article in the charlotte observer that said that 18 50 of 18 to 40 year olds in north carolina will not be able to accept the new jobs that are coming to north carolina and you know in 2008 north carolina probably did better than any other state in getting through the recession and we're about to head into a deep recession again and what we should be wanting we should be preparing our children by the time they're 18 years old and they get out of high school they should be able to be critically thinking and able to take whatever jobs are available to them if they want to go on to a further

310education absolutely they should be prepared to do that but i think they should be ready for adulting at this point and what i would like to see i'd like to see curriculum textbooks come back i think we would have we would have avoided a lot in this pandemic if we were not completely relying on education through the laptop and i think what you said mr mr martin was absolutely incredible when you said hands-on learning works and especially for children that are in elementary aged education they like the experience they like being able to talk and to touch and to see and to feel they like specials we need to get books back into our schools that are textbooks so the parents know what the parent the children are being taught so if there is a

311learning loss if there is something that they missed chapters three inch two two and three and four chapters back they are able to then pick up on that i found a lot of talk about learning delays or whatever you're going to call it learning loss over over the last two years with covet but i will tell you we have gone in the last 15 years from being 18 i'm sorry being 12th in the nation here in wake county or here in north carolina to being 38th in the nation that is not okay we are a state that has opportunities from the coasts all the way to the mountain you can be anything that you want to be here in north carolina and i would encourage you we need to focus on educational excellence we need

312to focus on the foundations from k through third grade we should be focusing on reading writing and math and we need to get all of this political ideology all the sexual ideology everything else that is not focused on reading writing and math because if you can read if you can write if you can do basic math you can learn anything and our children deserve that in 10 short years every child that is in second grade will be graduated will be an adult and will be entering into the workforce we need them to be prepared to be the next leaders and to keep north carolina great thank you our next speaker is ruth wilmer ruth willenberg the current class rank system was created in the past 1995 and no longer works today so much has changed

313and given how much more complex and rich the academic offerings are for our students we have an opportunity quite frankly an obligation to change the system to more accurately and fairly recognize student accomplishments for wake county class ranks a 90 equals a 100. this creates a huge pool 100 150 200 kids all with unweighted 4.0 gpas instead of rewarding the accomplishments of straight a's wake county is punishing these students with a so-called exact class rank based on course weightings in class performance isn't even considered head-to-head wins perfect 100s make no difference microsoft word honors wins over biomedical technology in fact a 90 in microsoft word honors wins over a 100 in biomedical technology worse yet the kids who received ap computer science are ranked ahead of the kids who signed up but didn't get in

314and the kids who chose pass pc 19 over numeric grades in their academic courses are ranked ahead class rank in wake county doesn't measure academic performance given the problems with course scheduling especially with split schools during the pandemic class rank is not even an accurate reflection of desired course rigor it's broken wake county is actively certifying inaccurate data and harming students on behalf of over 200 parents and students we are asking wake county to immediately eliminate the class rank from transcripts and replace it with latin honors class rank this can be done now without any state level policy changes there is no state law to send class rank to out of state or private universities there is no state policy that class rank has to be an exact numeric rank or that weighted gpa needs

315to be four decimal points in precision nowhere all the policy says is that class rank is calculated based on weighted gpa latin honors are calculated based on weighted gpa a latin honors class rank based on weighted gpa does not violate any state law or state policy wake county can address the class rank problem by switching to latin honors thank you thank you our next speaker is jacob arthur good evening my name is jacob arthur and i have four children three of whom are in wake county public schools with a fourth waiting in the wings i'm also a candidate for the district 7 seat on the board and i regret mr haggerty is not here i would have liked to have earned his vote i would like to use my time to address a great harm

316i see being done to our students through much of the curriculum coming out of the office of equity affairs and the inappropriate materials that are available in our school libraries it is no secret to parents that any student with a smartphone can access inappropriate material however there is no excuse for it being made available in our schools even in the name of affirming our students while your intent may be to make students feel valuable and worthy of recognition what you're actually doing is far worse by promoting these materials in our schools in the name of affirmation you are in fact teaching our students that their value as people is found in their sexuality or gender our children have value and are worthy of recognition and love by the fact that they are human beings and

317they are our children nothing more nothing less likewise much of the curriculum from the office of equity affairs is teaching our children to begin relationships with each other from a starting point of what makes us different rather than what unites us as human beings for example my seventh graders class is reading ghost boys to supplement their unit on frederick douglass in reviewing this book the school library journal is quoted as saying it quote provides an important window for readers who are just beginning to explore the ideas of privilege and implicit bias in other words critical race theory my wife and i are graduates of the wake county public school system i can tell you from my experience that the pushing of ideological materials is not making things better and it's not improving academics yesterday was

318the anniversary of the assassination of martin luther king jr a man who implored us to judge each other by the content of our character unfortunately the more this board pushes diversity equity and inclusion the less diverse equal and inclusive we seem to become it is time to spend our dollars on actual academics and not social agendas as your social agenda has advanced the data show proficiency in reading and math continues to decline over the past decade it is time to let parents parent it is time to let teachers teach again i'm jacob arthur and i'm running for school board you can find information at jacobartherweightschools.com thank you our next speaker is amandabean well i came here to speak about several things and you know a lot of these things that have been said today they've

319been said already y'all have heard these books being read before and um actually on january 18th you were served with paperwork and part of the paperwork had statements with some of the very literature that was read from this podium in it saying how it was inappropriate also my son has accessed that he's eight on his wake county public school system laptop immediately pulled up genderqueer immediately was able to see all the photos both this board the kerry police department apparently is in the pocket of y'all also michael glover at liberty mutual amy bolton at liberty mutual all feel that this is appropriate it's appropriate for an eight-year-old to pull up those images it's appropriate for these surveys the survey that came out so you have gaggle right you want to uh follow what the students

320are reading you know what they're reading we've shown you what they're reading they're reading things they should not read but you you can gaggle them right but you you won't stop uh genderqueer from coming up on an eight-year-old's laptop so uh i find that odd but then you know this is a corrupt board so then i i realize that that's just how it is and things need to change in 217 days another thing that i found interesting is something that ncae passed on to the teachers for black history month and they give kid language for um suggestions for you know inclusiveness and i'm all about inclusiveness we should include everyone that's fine but there's a difference between inclusion and indoctrination so to say everybody has the right to choose their own gender by listening to

321their own heart and mind everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or something else and no one gets to choose for them my teacher my son's teacher has told him something similar the whole entire class that's not her job i've said i heard before and said it's not your job right first time i was here i was very upset about that and uh it's the same thing the teacher is not the teacher's job i don't understand how we've got to this place where the teacher you know feels that it's okay to teach these you know ingrained beliefs in school it's one thing to include it's another to indoctrinate additionally there is queer affirming which is working towards a queer affirming network where heteronormative thinking no longer

322exists so the ncae is basically saying that the goal is so that kids do not look and think the mom and the dad that's normal that's not normal they don't want that to be normal why i mean does anybody know y'all don't our next speaker is peter bly pete bly good to see y'all i'm gonna pick up where kerry left off so now once we get over the timeline of the tntp curriculum audit and get over the fact that the report was never released to the public let's look at the report and its merits because that's really the most shocking part dmtp might sound familiar to you that's the group that would go on to write the opportunity myth education article in 2018. if you haven't read it you don't really need to you can

323just look at the tnt report that i just uh handed the nice gentleman over here it looks like it looks exactly the same so basically y'all were part of the propaganda practice that they were going through right then do you remember kerry's last board speech history number one when she told you that the curriculum evaluation tools of imet equip and ed reports were all based on the same checklist well right off the bat you need to read the fine print print in the assessment process of the tntp report because they also used the imet and eqip common core standards checklist so technically this will be the fourth curriculum evaluation using the exact same metrics what i just handed was a full copy of the 75-page report the 46-page proposal summary the 14-page tntp proposal summary

324and the tntp contract and 13-page initial proposal read the proposal first you know the one that mentions the common core state standards 46 times read it first then read the rest in succession because after we did that we immediately went back and re-read the tntp proposal and the first thing that came to our mind was why why did we even hire them in their proposal they clearly spell out that they will find wrong with our math and english curriculums just because you call them independent does not mean that they didn't have opinions and it feels like they had a pretty strong opinion and were very deliberate in the pop they were trying to prove you knew you couldn't purchase math curriculum since the year 2004. did you really need to pay an independent company 173

325881 dollars to tell you that you needed a middle and high school math curriculum in the year 2016. when it's said out loud does that make sense to you because it doesn't to us you then turned around and used this tntp report to justify hiring another independent company garter inc so they could put together a curriculum roadmap to aid in the purchase of purchasing of new english and math curriculums and you paid them 273 000 so keeping up at home that is now half a million dollars almost half a million dollars spent in 2016 just deciding if you need math and english curriculums and how to find new math and english curriculums after all that money and time and expertise you ended up putting math workbooks in front of our kids that have zero math

326learning content in them anyway thank you very much thank you our next speaker is daniel grant king good evening chair mahaffey superintendent warren boy members i am mr grant king and currently i'm an educator with wake county also i serve as the chair with the state board of education subcommittee on our advocacy with our educators and our instructional assistants this month can you all hear me this month of course is autism awareness month and as a special educator in the classroom with our exceptional children i want to take a moment to emphasize when autism awareness month was first began according to history autism awareness month is a long month observed focused on raising awareness about the autism spectrum disorders and what it means to be artistic regardless of academics regardless of people and the difficulties

327and the discrimination that autistic people have faced in society of course my committee and i went over a lot of the advocacy issues regarding all kids and students with disabilities but we chose this month in particular to focus on autism awareness month and we also made a decoration in accordance with the 1972 artistic society established the national artistic children's week as a part of efforts to educate the community school districts and many others about how to support and not only have to support but far as instruction in the classroom setting also it gives me great honor and privilege as chair of the advocacy committee that i currently serve we made a declaration making it very clear to the state as a whole educators and support staff along with myself and many others making it clear

328and setting the tone that we will continue to advocate for those who have experienced discrimination and bias regardless of gender and regardless of the color of their skin also we have had the privilege of meeting once again this month in preparation for our teacher appreciation week of course it is in may and of course with the advocacy work that we do we decided to recognize one of our very own one of my colleagues at south ghana high school none other than miss yolanda j thomas limas we will be recognizing her on thursday may 5th at 1 pm and of course miss johnson hustler has been invited to attend that occasion so it gives me with great hope and reminding us that regardless of outcome everyone could still achieve thank you very much thank you mr

329grant king that concludes our public comments section for the evening madam chair moved approval of the consent items as listed okay we have a motion and a second on our consent items is there any discussion all in favor of improving our consent agenda please signify by a sign of i any opposed nay the motion passes we move on to our action item which comes from our chief of schools and it is the instructional calendars for early college and that is glenn carosa with support from tamani anderson powell and paul domenico and paula i'm sorry paul good evening chair mahaffey members of the board superintendent moore this evening staff is seeking your approval for the 2022 2023 instructional calendars for early college high schools i'm joined this evening by mr money anderson powell and mr paul

330domenico from our magnet office if you remember back to march 15th during the board work session we shared with you the calendars that are uploaded to assembly this evening those are the draft calendars for early college high schools i'd like to just share with you that all of these calendars adhere to general statute 115 c 84.2 regarding school calendars new the new early college that's opening in 2022-23 wake early college of information and biotechnologies has been conditionally approved by the state board of ed we're seeking final approval by the general assembly still they've assured us that they will address this issue during the early portion of their session however if necessary staff will bring this item back to you for additional discussion at a later date staff has begun the process to reach out to

331parents who were assigned to the early college for information biotechnologies and should we need to reach out to them again we will bring them in for further information as necessary with that we are seeking approval for the early college calendars for 22-23 motion to prove okay we have a motion from dr martin a second from miss carter is there any discussion mr crowza do you have a date as to when we expect to hear back from the general assembly or when we will inform parents so let me just pipe in real quick so it's a two-step process dpi recommends to the general assembly which early colleges the legislature a few years ago indicated that they would not fund more than three a year dpi has recommended three including hours in our work with the folks

332at the school board association superintendent association and other places it's our understanding that this will be an early part of the agenda when the legislature returns in may because technically you're not in early college until the funding is approved and so we're adopting a calendar that goes along with wake tech but should something happen with the general assembly we may need to come back and discuss that again and that is what we want to make sure that our parents understand that it's a conditional approval thank you for that clarification any further questions or comments might we just note yet another thing where the school system should be able to decide what is good for the school systems and this reliance on the general assembly is not good for education hearing nothing else all those in

333favor of adopting these calendars signify by sign of eye aye any opposed nay all right thank you very much thank you have a good evening and i'll see you now we're going to be moving into closed session and i'm happy to sit in for mr haggerty and i move we go into closed session to consider confidential personnel information protected under gs one four three three eighteen dot eleven a one a three and a6 to consult with the board of education attorney and preserve the attorney client privilege as provided in gs143-318-11a3 and to consult with the board of education attorney and preserve the attorney-client privilege as provided in gs143 318.11 a3 which i just said due to current litigation jb by and through his parent or guardian hb 21edc 0445 office of administrative hearings all right

334we have a motion in a second all those in favor signify by sign of eye any opposed nay we are now in closed session thank you