001good afternoon everyone um miss tanner can you please call the roll yes the scene [Music] okay um now we're going to go into closed session so miss tanner can you can i get a motion to go into closed session madam chair move that we going to close section of session can i get a second second thank you dr gabriel and miss tuner will you please read the motion to go into executive session move that the members of the school board go into a closed session for the purposes which are set out in subsection a of section 2.2-3711 of the virginia freedom of information act as amended for consultation with legal counsel and briefing by staff members or consultants pertaining to actual or probable litigation where discussion and open session would adversely affect the school board's
002negotiating or litigating posture or consultation with legal counsel regarding specific legal matters requiring the provision of legal advice by council pursuant to sub-sections a seven and eight of the act the subject of this portion of the session concerns briefing and advice regarding the legal issues raised by governor yonkin's new executive order number two and subsequent guidelines and statements issued by the governor the attorney general and other executive branch officials the scene aye samson aye clanton aye gabriel hi jordan hi ralston i'm martin hi all right we're gonna go into the conference room can i get a motion to come out of executive session [Music] madam chair i moved that we um come out of executive closed session thank you mr clinton can i get a second second dr gabriel miss tanner please read the red
003resolution please yes resolution certify an executive meeting of the school board of the city of norfolk in accordance with the provisions of the virginia freedom of information act whereas the school board of the city of norfolk has convened a closed meeting on this date pursuant to an affirmative recorded vote and in accordance with the provisions of the virginia freedom of information act and whereas section 2.2-3712 of the code of virginia requires a certification by the school board of the city of norfolk the such closed business meeting was conducted in conformity with virginia law now therefore it be resolved that the school board of the city of norfolk hereby certifies that to the best of each member's knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements by virginia law were discussed in the executive
004meeting to which the certification resolution applies and only such public business matters as were identified in the motion convening the executive meeting were heard discussed or considered by the school board of the city of norfolk basin aye aye clanton hi gabriel aye jordan ralston aye martin aye okay well you know what i forgot to wish everyone a happy groundhog day yeah whether you follow punxsutawney phil or chesapeake chuck i guess it's all up in the air yeah kung's time phil's determined another six weeks weeks of winter whereas chesapeake chuck says springs around the corner so how many school how many snow days do we have left are we prepared oh about [Laughter] no we have one you know so we can always pivot virtual learning at any point so we're not too concerned right um
005so let's get started first we have our star data review and an echo dr paul go ahead whenever you're ready all right thank you good afternoon madam chair dr martin vice chair mr clanton members of the board and dr birdsong i'm here this afternoon to share the mid-year star data to reflect comments made during the last data presentation this presentation does not have as much data included in the slides however additional data was uploaded with the presentation also this presentation will speak to specific data points focused on the overall star reading and math results there we go as a reminder star is used as a universal screener in our division students in grades two through nine take the math and reading assessments in the fall winter and spring additionally all non-honors english 9 students take
006the reading assessment and students in algebra 1 and geometry also take the math assessment let's start with the reading data maybe miss tanner would you mind thank you as the data show participation rate rose rates rose at each grade level from the fall to the winter testing windows additional data with student counts has been included in the uploaded data file as well ms tanner thank you looking at the overall data by grade level while all grades except for six and seven showed growth in the percentage of students in the at or above level grades two six eight and nine still have more than a third of their students at the urgent intervention level additionally grades six and 7 saw declines in the at or above level and saw increases in the urgent change level while
0079th graders saw strong growth at the at or above level and declines at the urgent change level for demographic data by grade level it's included in the slides that were uploaded for review this slide shows there we go this slide shows trend data from the past three years showing the difference in average scaled scores by grade level from the fall to the winter administration as seen all grade levels except for grade 6 showed stronger growth than last year with grade 8 showing even stronger growth than pre-pandemic times however when reviewing the uploaded data each grade level's average winter scores are still a bit below the average scores from pre-pandemic times some of the reading data points are as follows all division-wide subgroups in grades 2 three and nine showed growth in the at or above
008range all division-wide subgroups in grades three and four show decreases in the urgent intervention range overall there was a three percent growth in the at or above range and a decrease of 1.6 percent in the urgent intervention range in all grade levels except grade 4 black students and students from economically disadvantaged homes have more than a third of the students still in the urgent intervention range in all grade levels students with disabilities and english learners have more than 45 percent of students in the urgent intervention range and all subgroups in the middle school level grades are showing either low growth or a drop in growth some of the next steps being taken to support student needs are continued continuing to staff the middle school tutoring program increasing the implementation of lexia in all english classes
009as well as i lit in the middle school reading support classes there are also there's also a focus on small group instruction with teacher professional development and sessions that were held at the mid-year leadership institute this past monday additionally there continues to be a focused review of data and actions based on that data at each school's data meeting to create a focus on systematic interventions now let's move to the math data with as with reading all grade levels showed increases in participation from the fall to the winter test administrations for the math on average all grade levels have below a third of their students in the urgent intervention range in fact all grade levels showed growth in the at or above range with grades two three four seven and eight showing greater than ten percent
010growth in the at or above range additionally all grade levels showed decreases in the urgent intervention range except for grade 6 where there was a slight growth in that range as with the reading data for demographic grade data by grade additional slides were uploaded for your review this slide shows a trend date over the past three years with the difference of average scale scores from the fall to winter test administrations all grade levels showed improvement from last year with grades three four five seven and eight showing improvements beyond pre-pandemic growth as with reading the average scores for this administration are still below the 1920 win administration however we are closing gaps faster some of the math data points are as follows subgroups in every grade with the exception of grade six showed growth in the
011at or above range with students in grade six in the asian subgroup showing a slight deca decline of 0.8 percent and the english learner subgroup with a slight decline of 0.7 all subgroups in grades 2 3 and 4 had an average growth of 14.1 percent with the lowest growth being in grade 4 students with disabilities still at a 7.2 percent growth all subgroups in grades 3 4 5 and 8 showed declines in the urgent intervention range overall there was an 11.8 percent growth in the at or above range and a decrease of 5.9 percent in the urgent intervention range for math in all grade levels students with disabilities and english learners still have more than a third of the students in the urgent intervention range and students in grade 6 show growth in the urgent
012intervention range here are some of the implications and next steps for math there will be a continued focus on the implementation of edmenham's exact path for each student this has also been integrated into small group discussion and professional development sessions continuing to hire math tutors at the middle school level continued professional development with special education teachers on math aids and programs and to focus on systematic interventions at monthly school level data meetings ms tina overall in response to the data the following are in place professional development for sig teachers on specific uses of lexi and edmund data for student improvement integration of lexia and adventure usage reports compared to student success at school data meetings collaboration with university instructors for in-person tutoring and assistance with small group instruction during the school day in addition to
013our tutors that we've already hired increased professional development with school leaders on effective use of fev online tutoring in classroom sports increased targeted coaching support based on star lexia and edmund data from cni increased funding for professional development for specific schools with use of instructional software focus professional development structures from cni for the reading support blocks at the middle school level the senior coordinator of secondary english is modeling remediation practices and middle school support blocks we're having the focused use of eyelit for reading practices and middle school support blocks classroom libraries of books that represent the student population and that are of interest to the middle school reader curriculum instruction is participating in collaborative planning at the middle school level with a focus on alignment and student engagement and enhancing the curriculum in upcoming units
014with additional resources to support student needs in addition to the slight data slides that were included with the presentation the winter one-page reports have also been uploaded at this time we're ready for any comments or questions you may have miss campson first i'd like to um publicly congratulate dr bert song and dr paul and their team we've seen some very significant increases in here we know that what we do of course we know this if we didn't already know this shows us the value of in-person learning versus virtual but i think i think it's a good start it's a good foundation for us continuing up this way so that when we start next year we were really ready to hit the ground running so i was pleasantly surprised i think i've mentioned to you i
015think i was jumping a little jig i do have a couple questions though i see you're using scale scores instead of grade level proficiency percentages i think it i think the challenge with it is parents understand grade level proficiency they don't have a clue what you're talking about when you say skeletal scores and they don't have any way to know how effective they are i mean there was a time when i knew what the range was at each grade but right now you'd have to give me the chart so i could see where they were on the chart so i would like to have you all consider at least something in some place in here that that gives us grade level proficiency percentages and maybe you're good oh okay because i i i need to
016get closer i guess with my my voice but anyway that was that's a concern i have um is the just using the skill scores is i'm i'm challenged with it because i don't have my chart and parents are going to challenge with it because they don't understand what it is and i know it's it's the best way better than grade level proficiency to to really because of the range of numbers you can really zero in very tightly but i think when you're reporting out it would be helpful so if y'all just think about something like that just i mean use all your skill scores but just give me one one bar graph absolutely okay thank you it doesn't at or above mean proficient on proficiency correct but there for the for the scaled scores there
017are ranges of the scores so if you look at the raw score you can see a range is i think what mrs campson's asking for but and we'll next time we'll we can include that the range of the at or above the down to the urgent intervention yeah that would be helpful thank you i don't need big details i'm trying not to plan the weeds anymore mr jordan i'm trying okay the next questions about that request before we move on yeah doctor i do have a word on it as a follow-up um and so thank you for offering um that feedback and i think i also received from some feedback from dr gabriel as it relates to parents and communication with our parents so that when they hear this information they have a better understanding
018about what we're um what we're talking about so we decided in our next newsletter you know we send out something at the beginning of the year with you know the assessments that that the children are going to have throughout the year but perhaps simplifying something for just specifically for our parents so they're aware of the dates the time so they can help to prepare their children make sure they have a good breakfast and a good night's sleep and all of that and just so that they have a better understanding of how their children are performing so we do plan to put something in our upcoming newsletter was it the upcoming one the upcoming newsletter because i know the parents are getting reports from stars right they are which are really good right that's something they
019need to go out right away all right all right just real quick because i know i need to move on to someone else the focus on sixth grade is where it needs to be it's not like this is a big shock that the sixth grade is the lowest but i think it was even worse for them now because at least in the past there was some transition work going on as they transitioned from elementary to middle which they did not have anything like that now we weren't able to do it and so i so that would be even a worse hit for them but still i'm glad to see a lot of focus there i might i have a question about the the interventionists and the tutors and and i see we we're adding a
020lot of them in math and things what kind of percentage are we getting for being able to staff those positions so at the middle school level we're still low in percentage of staffing right now which is why we did an rfp process and we partnered with university instructors who has who has promised us that they're going to be able to staff us with highly qualified trained tutors and starting with the the math and reading support blocks at the middle school level where we still have those vacancies but then doing you know high high levels of tutors in concentrations areas concentrated areas of need based on the data yeah that's what you have to do you can't it's about equality here it's about what everyone needs right okay and i think my last one was oh
021the software i'm not familiar with i wouldn't mind it doesn't have to be everyone coming but maybe sometime for those that were interested we could come to a just quick little workshop we don't need to be able to operate or anything but i'm not familiar with these new ones i mean star i'm very familiar with but the other ones i wouldn't mind for those who would like to come just something brief to just explain what it is it's a measuring and how it's doing it because we know virtual was not as successful as we might have hoped so when we put them over on into that during the school day i'd like to see if it has enough impact for what it probably cost right and and i'd re-emphasize on the software too it's not
022a replacement this the teachers are actually loving like the exact path it gives them additional lesson plans that are individualized for students you know we've talked for years now about differentiated instruction and individualized plans and this software is actually helping the teachers with that yeah so i'd just like to know a little bit about it i don't take up four times but if we could whoever wanted to go could go at a time you made convenient for us so how about this um if anyone's if everyone just to make sure that we all get access to it if if you think it's useful is there a website that usually has like a video this is what the software does that you can just email to us and then if anyone wants more i don't want
023to do a virtual you don't want to do i want to do that i'm an in-person person i mean i know we had to do what we had to do last year but i think last year really showed us i know when when we had the national thing for school board members and we are we were all registered and i was excited about going but when they made it virtual and i understand why they did i made myself sit there and try and watch some of that stuff and i thought thank goodness that this did not have lauren campson happening during when we went virtual i'm sorry i have to be honest i made myself sit through him because we had paid for it but what i'm suggesting is that if you k if if
024it's available send out a link to the software program to everyone and then people like ms campson can then have the opportunity to do a two by two and of course that sort of thing yeah so that we all have the information up front because we might decide we want to join the two by two or not you know we'll see but just so we're all getting the at least some information okay all right thank you very much thank you great job guys thank you very much okay miss basin and then dr gabriel thank you dr martin um thank you for this high level presentation um and um like miss campson you know it's nice to see some of the growth the progress that's being made um this school year um one thing you know
025in the past we have also seen the school by school reports and that's something that i would like to if we could get just a report on that it doesn't have to be part of a school bar meeting but i would like um i mean not saying that it couldn't be but you know i would like to see the school by school uh star data as well and with that my second question similar to what ms campson just asked but beyond just the tutors um we all know we've had staffing challenges in our schools um you know i think uh you know what i would like to to know more about is how those challenges have impacted instruction in in our schools and what we might be able to do with funds to recruit and
026retain certified highly qualified teachers in those areas because we know that some of our schools that have been more challenged have also higher number the number of teacher vacancies so i would personally like to be able to see that school by school data for that um so i'm sorry school by school data meaning the same star data broke down by school right right and then secondly how it's being funded how the intervention intervention um strategies are being funded is that what you just asked for no no so so we we we know we see every every month you know with the teacher vacancy report shows us school for each school and one of the things i would like the board to consider is you know it's pretty understandable that if there isn't a teacher in
027the classroom we might expect to see you know possibly lower performance you know just that's it's what we've seen in the past it's um so my question to the board is especially as we get ready you know we have federal funds coming in we have our budget discussions you know what what creative solutions and interventions can we consider to staff our schools you know create you know incentive programs for substitutes you know how do we build that pool of resources human resources in the building so that we can ensure that our t our students have certified teachers teaching every day from day one um in their classrooms so that's that's like a bigger conversation around how to attract teachers subs tutors people too right but but i'm encouraging the board to support um you know
028the administration when they you know when they come up with what those strategies are you know i'm asking like how can we as a board support those strategies you know that's something i would like to hear more about like what are the strategies that you all are thinking about to attract teachers and retain the ones that we do have so i know we hear a lot about you know the job fairs and the things the ongoing efforts that we have in place but is are there strategies that seem to be working in other school districts you know that we might consider in our district and you know i'm ready you know i feel like we we have funds coming in that i think you know should we be applying more of those funds toward staffing
029our schools and that's kind of what where i'm going with that does this go under um potentially future agenda items i don't see it as a future agenda item i see it as part of the budget discussion right because that's where she's getting at yeah and and i'll have some thoughts on that when i get around to it but i think it's part of the budget discussion yeah right okay and then um the budget discussion and the the use of esser funds you know like which i think is still a an ongoing discussion of how we might be able to use those funds and allocate more of those funds to in this area and then um going back to your first request for school by school report is anyone go ahead ms campson that's something
030we tried to do in the past and it caused and i'm not one to say accountability is accountability and you need to do your job and and get up and get there that's where i am however when you start and they used to do this when the sol test first started coming out for sol is they would rank the schools and we'd go to the retreat and you would be on your rank and i was at ocean view and we were down in the bottom five and so it was very discouraging and so what we worked out uh when i was back here is interim was that that data went to you under the one that did this that only goes to the people that can go in the you know whatever that one's called
031and that way you got to see it but we didn't send it all home to all the parents no and i i'm not i'm asking okay well that's what i would say i'm asking for the board's review i think it's important for us to see the school level um you know the the high level overview that such that you provided here for the district i'd like to see that same report for individuals that she would give it to us and then it could be a report to the board and it doesn't you know it doesn't have to be a presentation but it would be a report to the board my recommendation because i see what you want i think that's very very valuable to see that but i don't think we need to do open
032discussions we if they gave us the data and then we could do two by twos sure or something like that i mean maybe it would just be a report you know a report that we can individually review on our own right right yeah and it only asked for a 2x2 if you wanted it right okay then we're on the same track so how readily available would this report be it's if i can comment before dr paul addresses that so i remember clearly when and and certainly whatever the board wants us to do you know we've always done what's been asked of us um so i just remember distinctly while we were having a meeting at southside stem academy and we were having a discussion around star and during that discussion there were many many comments
033about too much data overwhelming this is too much for the board can you scale it back this is too much we need to stay at the board level and so based on those comments and that feedback you have the presentation that you have before you today so we we keep going back and forth we don't have enough we have too much we have too much we don't have enough we're just trying to to meet the board's needs give you the information and data so that you know how our children are doing and clearly you can see from this star report and other reports that we have provided throughout this year in previous years related to our act our students academic achievement you should know where they are so again we're happy to to do whatever
034the board would like but we are trying our best and i think i said it at the last meeting to give you what what you're asking for and this was another attempt to do that yeah you also said it in december and i i really appreciate those comments and i appreciate this high level presentation that has been provided but i think this the school by school data is important but with the same content that you've provided here so you know we had in that last presentation like i think i might be using the wrong terminology but you know the individual strands and the you know so getting really into the test itself and the different areas of the test but i think this high level information and i support ms campson's request about the you
035know the grade proficiency information just you know generally so that we all are are speaking the same language um i support that but just this this high level information but for each school which i do think is important because you know as we've seen for many years you know there's huge discrepancies between schools and i think as we think about the budget and we think about how we allocate our resources i think it's important to know how um what the magnitude is so that we can appropriately allocate this also goes into our equity but not discussion too but not only not all these detailed things you just need like just the high level school by school a couple of sheets of a couple breasts on it could just be the same for each school okay
036is there anyone um who's opposed to that go ahead dr ross a point about the data and i do would like to say publicly that some of the data was very promising um you know for the district but in light of the situation we've been in so some was very promising but as i started to unpack some of the data particularly in the reading i found that some of the gaps and dips were in very specific grade levels that tie into a lot of research fourth grade i saw dip sixth grade ninth grade with the reading and those are gaps that speak a little more than just instruction but they speak to and as i was looking at some of the interventions um i think we maybe need to consider intervention interventions in terms of
037um professional development and maturation issues and puberty and adolescent development and also increase parental engagement because these are grades that we know their major dips not just in norfolk but everywhere in the fourth grade parent engagement drops significantly sixth grade it drops ninth grade it goes to almost zeros in some places you know parental engagement and i think that's something that's impacting um the dip and gaps that we're seeing and it's beyond instruction it's beyond teachers it's beyond um having a full staff but it's training and specific intentional resources to focus on maturation and parental engagement um activities and uh and motivations and i think that's critical for us to look at because i do think that's what's happening that's not just teachers it's not just schools but it's an intentional focus on looking at
038maturation issues for these grade levels and looking at increase somehow engaging parents more because i think that will take scores up significantly if there was an intentional focus on those two areas along with instruction this instruction is important but sometimes those two areas can override instruction trust me adolescence can override instruction and the faculty and the staff and training and teachers don't understand that that's going on then the instruction part is going to go out the window and i think we know that right i've been that lesson before so we all know that so that part needs to be in some of our intervention and some of our strategies absolutely and if i may one of the other things that we've discussed as well is um in in middle school you're you're you're reading to
039learn you know that transition of reading to learn happens versus the learning to read so one of the programs we're going to start putting in place is partnering with our local universities about reading instruction courses for our middle school english teachers so that we can also have that transference of learning into the classroom because you know most secondary english teachers it's not a you're not a reading teacher at that point and i think right now we're facing that dilemma of needing to be a reading teacher so that's something we're looking to add as well good thank you and and if i may yeah it kind of made me chuckle a little bit what you said and i definitely agree with that it's those transition years when children are moving from elementary school to middle school
040that sixth grade year and then from middle school to high school the ninth grade year it's it's those transition years that are can be very very challenging to students and there's a body of research on that and so we we definitely agree with you with that there was another piece too and also with the instructional pieces and i think lauren campson and i can agree on this it's when the children get to to middle school the middle school principals and teachers all those elementary folk they should have done a better job with getting these kids ready and then the high school principals and teachers are looking at the middle school teachers and principals so those transition years are very very difficult for a variety of reasons but we do need to take a closer look
041at the transitions and what we can do to better support kids as they transition from year to year thank you i'm going to go over to dr gabriel and come back okay i have to chuckle too with your comment dr also because do you know the wellness visits for children around that you know fourth grade sixth grade adolescence they don't want to come to the doctor either so that's when we have to pick up the phone and say hey don't forget you gotta come and see us and they're like oh we need a shot to go into middle school all right let's go ahead and get in the door so you you're absolutely right um i i wanted to piggyback on some of the comments that my colleagues have mentioned too about the credit due
042to dr birdsong and her staff for what we're seeing in this data when we see data like this we do need to take a pause and and celebrate the wins that we have because it's very critical it shows that we have turned the corner and hopefully we're going to continue to accelerate that progress so i i definitely want to say that this is a turn in the positive direction dr birdsong and you you're now two years as superintendent uh one with one as acting so going back to ms campson's you know three-year information that she always you know continues to tell us this is this is the trend that we want to see um and so i just wanted to put a little exclamation point on that and i give credit to my teachers and
043in building principles and so that's going to be my next point um what we see here is the hard work that the teachers are doing and it definitely does not go unrecognized they are working around the clock they are working under very stressful conditions um covering for each other we know the the substitute situation everything that they are doing and so going back to miss bassine's point with regards to budget and what we can do to you know keep our quality teachers here in norfolk public schools i definitely i know that you're working on the the um the teacher funding what was it called the uh residence no no no no we were looking at how we are funding our teachers who have been in the division with x amount of years and there was
044a report that you have had an outside consultant come in to research that correct i'm not the compression scales yeah that was the thing that was prior to yeah administration study so um you know where we are with that so that way the teachers that are within our division are going to be you know appropriately compensated for all of the work and the dedication and the dedication that they have to norfolk public schools i think definitely will play out as we go into the budget season but you're right it's the teachers that are making this happen and i salute each and every one of them um question your thoughts can what do you think about putting the star data on parent view our data on parent view we would have to i don't know if
045yeah i think it would be not possible but i don't see why we couldn't why would we why what is your intention with that so on parent view you know we can go on we can look at our child's grades we can look at progress interim reports and with the star data you can see how they're trending with their math and their reading scores um i logged into that virginia readiness assessment that the children took at the beginning of the school year and with that they give you an entire login website you can go and see what the score is you can compare it to you know how other children should be scoring in that range now granted we only have one you know test but it goes back again to engagement with the parents
046if the parents have access to the star math and reading and they understand what they are seeing as it relates to performance on grade level then it will again give them more knowledge to you know better participate or engage or ask questions you know what can i do better and so it's just another tool to enhance parent engagement so it gives the parents context as to where their child rates among them yes because if if my child is getting a's and b's and then they come and fail that reading sol i'm going to have some questions but if they if you see the data on star reading and you see that they are performing at grade level and you can monitor progress and you're in communication with the teachers it gives you context into you
047know how how the performance is i mean that's just an example but it's something for you to think about does anyone else have any comments on having dr birdsong looking into putting the star data on parent view i think it's a great idea and i think it is a good way to reach out to parents i'm just a little confused because i thought when we were having the conversation about the school by school data going out we were saying we didn't want that to occur i'm not sure i didn't say i didn't want it to occur i'm just asking it's a report request no i didn't say oh you're talking about publicly yeah i didn't say you said that okay i'm just trying to i think parents having as much information as uh as possible
048that helps them to understand how their children performing i'm supportive of it i'm just trying to make sure i'm clear on where the messages that we're sending you know dr bursal mentioned earlier about trying to find this sweet spot with us and individual child score so you're just looking at your child's star math and reading on your parent view account okay you know i think our you know typically if the administration thinks it's a good idea and i'm the opposition to it i think i don't want to put on the spot now students don't get their scores is it what you're saying yeah they they do get their scores yeah they do there's a problem but i think the request is to review to see if we can put it on parent view right are
049all are all i mean i know have a parent view account do all parents have access to parent view without being used to every single thing there's not someone that would be excluded um can you look into it and just get back with us and let us know you can review that to see if we have the okay so when this report goes out it goes to parents their star data yes how does it go is it an email or how is that communicated it's sent home in paper format to the parents okay and and that's because you know it's easier to go home in a wednesday folder yeah parents are likely more you know to look at it than not to say they can't access it online and i don't know but i do
050know i don't know that might be the difference between having an elementary student and middle school um okay is that all for you doctor thank you very much dr martin um go ahead mr jordan thank you uh thank you all for the presentation uh i think what i just wanted to i think i may have made comments about the amount of information that was in the presentations we were at southside stem i was really focused on the presentations that i thought it was so much information being presented in a compact period of time it was hard to digest it all so i'm appreciative of the the reduction that you did for the presentation i'm also appreciative of the supplements that you provided but i didn't want to get the amount of information in the presentation
051confused with what i just thought we should have access to or their parents should have access to but what i want to do is get a better understanding of the the growth so i'm able to follow i think the comparisons of how we're doing with star data performance from the three years that you looked at what i'm not real clear on is uh what should they be you know what what what are the targets so if we i'm looking at one of the uh supplemental documents that you provided i just happen to have star reading fourth grade gap groups in front of me so if i look at all students and we have so many in green so many in blue so many i'll go so many red in the fall those are the actuals
052of where the students fail based upon taking the test correct likewise in the winter what i don't have a good sense for is what is it that we would like to see so to me when i'm looking at growth and comparisons i'm trying to on the one hand not just compare how all students in fourth grade did last year with how all fourth grade students did this year but what should we look at so is our red too big is our green not big enough do we are we anticipating the number that we have in the yellow those are the types of things i'm looking at and then also trying to get an understanding of uh how the cohort works if there is a cohort so if students were in um uh let me go
053back to the chart so let's say you took the you're in second grade you take the winner test i mean the fall test you're in second grade you take the winner test then in third grade you take the third grade test is there some expectation between um what you took in the winter of second grade and what we would expect you to do i mean the fall of you know the winner of second grade to the fall of third grade and so on so i don't i'm trying to get a sense of you know what do our cohorts look like if that's such a thing and then really what are our expectations for what we think makes sense for a peak performing school division and then how do we compare how our students against our
054expectations of a peak performing school division so is there anything that you can speak to in terms of what you've shared with us as to how you feel we are doing against uh our expectations and how we are doing against i don't know if there are national averages or comparison by similarly demographic school divisions something can you just give me a sense of that i i can to some to some extent mr jordan so we don't we don't necessarily have comparisons to other school divisions because we don't have access to their data unless they post their data so there's there's no way to do it however being a national exam these these scores are norm nationally i can say you know i don't have the exact score bans but i will make sure those are
055included in future reports because i do think that goes back to mrs campson's comment as well about wanting to know where those bands really fall and where we should be what i can speak to in this data is is i'm i am very positive about it i think there's been a lot of hard work done and we are we are moving back to where we were however if you look at the actual numbers still as and as stated in the presentation if you look at the the winter data um from 2019 to the winter data from we're still below 2019 so we're not where we need to be yet and we're still working very hard to get there but i tonight i don't have the exact number range but i think that speaks to the
056fact that we still have work to do but we are closing those gaps and i think that's what's important yeah i just think for for me i think from a school board perspective those are the types of things i think we should be monitoring and giving attention to so if if we're outside of the norm if we're above the norm if we're below the norm um you know if we are seeing that i don't you know again i'm not an educator so it may not make sense but if we were expecting children who finished in the winter or whenever the last time they take the test finish the year at one level and then there's a certain amount of expectation that when they take the fall test at the next year that make you know
057if there's such a thing as scoring at some level and we're showing that we aren't reaching that level then what does that tell us about interventions and supports that maybe we should be doing over the summer so that when students come back in the fall we aren't seeing whatever it is that we may be seeing those are the types of things that i'm uh particularly uh interested in from uh from a board member's perspective okay and i can i can speak to that at the building level that is discussed and the teacher reports they they know the students range from where they scored in the spring to when they score in the fall and they look at those data but we we've not brought those up to the board level um but i i agree
058with the importance of that and please know that we we do at the school data level meetings and the principles with their teachers with their data meetings they they look at exactly what you're talking about thank you mr clanton and then miss basin and then ms campson all right thank you dr martin um and again i echo the sentiments of my colleagues and thanking dr birdsong and the team definitely when we looked at the fall and saw the numbers coming right out of um you know moving students back in person and so forth here and and seeing that there's a substantial amount of growth um however um i do go back to what mr jordan was saying and i was really looking at between the math and the reading um and i see that we
059have interventions that are there um but it's just it's to me it just kind of caught me off because i'm like you know i thought i would have probably saw maybe math lagging behind versus the reading um so it just but there's been a substantial amount particularly when we talk about the resources that miss missing was talking about that we're getting from the federal government we're now getting those dollars in to help close those gaps and that's a major um piece and so for myself and i know that many of my colleagues will also be looking at how we're closing those gaps and you just mentioned it in that respect that we're we're moved up but we're still behind where we're going to be but it's not going to change overnight correct um but if
060we're being intentional about where we're putting those resources um and about a plan and that's where i i commend the fact that i unite didn't just give us data but you told us how you're working it and from a board level perspective that's the only thing i that i can take um that we've got an instructional leader in our superintendent and staff like you that is a part of a team that are working day in and day out to ensure that we're moving this and so when you talk about you know for parents another and there and i appreciate miss um dr um gabriel talking about putting more information out there for parents you know and i was thinking about that when we talk about parent view well yeah you put the data out there
061but i don't know if there's an opportunity to say okay this is where your child is here are some additional resources or these are things that you can be the educational partner at home to help do some read more with your child do you know whatever it may be because i think sometimes it gets really intimidating um for parents who may not be you know an educational you feel like sometimes you know i can't do this or you know this this is too much i don't understand what that is and i think there was a wake-up call when we had to be completely virtual and really seeing what your child goes in and day in and day out so i just commend you i just want to say that i'm going to be as a
062board member watching to see that the interventions that we put in place and when we get to budget time there are superintendents going to bring to us a budget that will be reflective of these new dollars and all the interventions and i truly believe that everything will be placed on the table for us and for us to take a hard look at this as to how we can close those gaps and move achievement for all of our students and as we go through the strategic planning process overall what do we see our division going so i just want to comment on that one a lot of information is already there but i've been circling and looking um but there are still some some areas for improvement and i don't think that we're shying away from
063that this is what we're saying we're being very transparent about what the data is but how do we close those gaps how can everyone support that from in the classroom as well as to some things and i think that um dr allison mentioned that what are some things that parents could be doing at home that we can support and i know that we brought that up in december about some things that we may potentially the administration may bring forth so i thank you thank you i did want to add one other thing about the parent i know you won't recall maybe as easily as i but last year we passed a policy and you know how much i love policy but one of the policies we passed was if a student wasn't scoring at benchmark
064level on assessments that we sent letters home to parents to let them know and to let them know what intervention strategies are there those are in place so students who are scoring below where they should be letters go home to parents based on school board policy um to let them know that we have in-school interventions and and what those are because it also unfortunately gives parents a chance to opt out but we haven't had any opt-out that i've heard of but that information does go home okay thank you go ahead and also if i may that was a great observation between the reading and math because we too were like oh my goodness there's a significant difference between the reading and the math and as we discussed it um amongst the leadership team we talked
065about how when our children came back in person math is hard to to learn when you're not in person you don't have the manipulatives it's you know it's much more challenging concepts and so we knew when we got our children back that they would be able to to grow at a higher level and i think you can see that in the data not to say that reading isn't difficult to uh to learn not over but math is certainly a lot more challenging when it's not taught in person so that's why you see the the significant difference between the two would you like to pick it up faster you can yeah yeah interventions work faster that's right yeah and you missed this thing to get it then and then mr jordan um yeah so i just
066wanted to piggyback too so on the comment that you just made about letters going home to to parents and coupling that with what dr rossen said earlier i think you know long ago we had talked we had done a workshop on parent engagement and i remember um dr constantino saying you know it takes 30 seconds to pick up a phone and make that connection with the parent to you know that's just something to consider because i know having middle and high schoolers that letters home don't always make it into parents hands so and you you know that so nothing you don't know but anyway back to uh the board board work you know i support i support what mr jordan's asking i have the same same thought like what are our top targets what kind
067of growth proficiency are we looking at you know overall for the whole district and then if there are school by school rates with what those are because i do think that after looking at some of the completion rates to get some grade levels there were bigger differences than others especially as you get to the middle school so i think seeing how those matched cohorts you know how how how much growth there actually was i think would be uh important to to look at and i would like to see that also um incorporated into the the reports when you know for the for future uh reference all right um ms campson i think that that mr jordan raised a lot of good points about how we need to know where it is we're looking at and
068how we're moving along and and then mr jordan mentioned what i really want to just say real quick here is what you were talking about the answers are going to be there in the new strategic plan that's why we've needed one for so long that's what that's about here are the goals and this is the way we're tracking on them and this is how we're getting there and so that's why it's so important to have a strategic plan because it answers those kinds of questions you know where should they be what are we expecting what's happening to get us there so that was all i had to say on that thank you and uh mr jordan go ahead well i just wanted to i'm a fan of the strategic plan so thank you for that
069um in the in the school board's accountability plan where it was i guess agreed upon that we were doing star reports three times a year so are the star and in the report it had winter and fall so how many can you just explain again how many times a year the students take the star they take the star in the fall and then the winter and then in the spring so in the um when we look at the the winter and fall that you were showing us for past years where does the spring fit in the event so the reason why we do comparison from fall to winter fall to winter is because it's the same gap from year to year so we there was no spring data in here um from so we in
070the i'm trying to think about the fall presentation um the the fall we fall presentation went fall to fall trying to stay consistent with times of the year where we do it because it wasn't a cohort presentation at that point about as far as how did students do the year before to the fault test it was from one testing point similar to the other testing point in a year so the gaps the changes we looked at this year were from fall to winter from the fall of you know the the september test in 2019 to the december test in 2019 the september test in uh uh 2020 to the december in 2020 the september 21 to the december 2021 to look at consistent gaps of time for student to see consistent growth hopefully yeah i
071was just thinking about what i was saying earlier if there is a spring then at least in my mind if i was trying to understand something from some type of cohort analysis of where students were the last time they took it to where they were the first time they took it the next year then maybe it's that spring to fall comparison that should be made versus the winter to fall i don't i don't know but i was just looking at it i think that's certainly a good suggestion for that fall for another data point for the fall that we can look at thank you okay any more questions for dr paul all right thank you thank you up next we have our legislative matters which is a zoom call so you need to use your
072headsets please pray for no echo hmm pull out your headsets you hear me kathy i can hear you oh good okay is everyone on let's see um okay mr jordan are you on which mr jordan i'm sorry i meant rodney are you on i'm trying to find you yeah ron and kathy are both rodney are you on i can't hear you [Music] oh okay okay okay okay um ron i'm gonna go by first names ron sure can you hear me okay i can all right so um welcome to you and kathy thank you for being here with us um i'm sure you've had a pretty busy few weeks so uh go ahead and start whenever you're ready okay so thank you all and it's good to be with you this evening just a brief a
073little bit of an introduction i'm not sure all of you have met kathy as you remember john retired to be full-time grandma and and other roles that she wanted to to take on um and so we lost her but kathy joined us on in the at the beginning of the year we're very very pleased to have her she is she was the deputy secretary of education under governor northam with her responsibility for k-12 she was the k-12 deputy they have another deputy who does higher ed kathy's background and at public ed is extensive i'll let her tell you a little more she's been in the classroom she's she walks to walk and she's a pretty straight shooter i'm very pleased to have her as a as my new colleague and i'll kick it over and
074she's going to lead the discussion tonight but i'll kick it over to her i'm she's doing play-by-play i'm doing the color thank you well thank you ron and thank you for having us tonight i just appreciate this opportunity and i'm just so grateful to be working on your behalf here in richmond um during another chaotic session and i'm actually still tracking there's a subcommittee going on right now that's got a quandary list of big bills up so tracking that as i'm i'm participating here tonight too so thank you ron for the introduction i'm incredibly grateful to have joined advanta strategies as ron said um i left the north administration at the end of the administration to join advance um and have spent the vast majority of my career in k-12 education policy um and so
075are you good ron yeah i'm good okay um prior to joining the administration i worked at the virginia education association leading their government relations work overseeing all of their legislative political um and a fair number of their organizing priorities as well prior to that i worked with other associations in both state and federal um education policy including working um with associations during the reauthorization of esca and so starting my careers working with special ed students um so education is near and dear to my heart and um the bedrock of all i do is my deep core belief that a strong system of public education is the foundation of our democracy and maintaining that for all of our students is incredibly important to me um and having an opportunity to represent norfolk is is just a
076great one for me and i'm looking forward to it so thank you for having me with that i know you all have had extension extensive conversations um already and so i don't want to take up too much of your time but wanted to catch kind of give you a little overview i'm going to give you a brief update kind of where we are in session um and it's so it's i heard dr birdsong talking about the transition challenges when students go from elementary to middle and middle to high and then frankly from high into whatever is next oftentimes we are seeing transition challenges here in richmond and so always do but i'll give you a brief update there i'll review some of the the bills impacting your legislative priorities my weekly our weekly reports i
077try to highlight those but there are a few both in budget and legislatively that i think are important to highlight in our conversation then i want to talk about the bills for which i kind of hot topic on not directly on your legislative priorities but have become big issues this session they're the ones i sent the email about looking for more information incredibly grateful for all of the information i i received i will talk more about those there and then i'm going to leave you as one of my colleagues here at vanna said with one big thing um that i that that will become your mantra hopefully as we start to pivot here in richmond towards after crossover really focus on budget so that's those are the kind of key topics so obviously we've had
078a transition with governor younkin coming on board i would say it is fair to say the governor's staff is still getting their feet underneath them which is always challenging because you start during session um and and i know many of you have visited richmond during session and you all as elected officials fully understand particularly if you're new how much you are taking in not just from the job you've been elected to do but also the folks you're now working with and we're seeing that we are seeing a little breakdown in the department of education staff being available to lawmakers during committee to answer questions um and that's that's been a challenge for sure we're hoping to see that change a little bit um legislators a lot of times have questions about what's currently in code
079or what you what what might be in regulation and whether or not something exists somewhere else and with in the absence of those answers they have to figure it out for themselves or get the answers from lobbyists in the room and don't get me wrong i'm a lobbyist but not all lobbyists will give you the exact same answer there and so that's been a little bit of a challenge as well and obviously in the house we've seen reversal of leadership here with the majority now um with the republicans and speaker gilbert naming committee chairs we've seen a real pivot there um in in the work that they're doing and the senate is certainly working and they're you know the democrats in the senate have majority the senate was not up for election as you know
080in 2021 maintaining their majority and their hold the line mantra kind of trying not to roll back what they see is great efforts made by the democratic majority of the last two sessions however there are starting they are starting to have conversations about how much they can hold off so they don't become the body of no and so that's a challenge too on how do they adopt good policy in a way that it can get past the house and ultimately be signed by the governor who may not be friendly to all of their policies so it's a good um opportunity for bipartisan work i wish i could tell you there was a lot of bipartisan work we don't see that yet frankly a few bills but not a lot and so um the other place
081where we anticipate some chaos certainly is in budget um the house of house seems and the house appropriation committee the money committee leadership there seems to be waiting and seeing what the senate will pass and fund prior to passing and funding something school one of the school construction recommendations kind of got caught up in that so we will see how the rest proceed um with all of the changes here at the general assembly it is committees are meeting at times that are a little bit unfamiliar to folks like ron and i who have done this work subcommittees as well so we are figuring all that out too so um just a lot of moving parts we are a little over a week i think a little over a week from crossover where all bills things
082run it's got to be coming when all of the bills from one you have to finish work house bills have to be they have to be finished working on those bills the same with the senate then they'll carry them over um literally and figuratively to the other body to pass there and that's when the focus really becomes budget i did want to highlight a few things and i do want to mention there's a lot of big bills that have not come to sub-committee or committee yet so they are coming hot and fast next week is the last week of subcommittee and committee meetings prior to crossover all bills have to go to the floor for three days or three reads depending on how they push them along um and so there's a lot of bills
083that are still in progress some her are being heard tonight literally as we speak some tomorrow morning i'll give you a little more information i did want to kind of give again a brief update on budget because we now have governor younkin's budget priorities i did include some of that in my reports but again the outgoing budget by governor northam included significant spending in k-12 um including about and round number 750 million dollars for salaries half a billion dollars for school construction project projects 350 more four million dollars for no loss funding and then a small portion the number for for benchmarking was 331 million it actually they rolled most of that back in the budget because re-benchmarking came in very low which is what the 354 whole million hold harmless is there to do
084and then 273 million dollars for the sales tax losses what that is up against and a lot of good spending a lot of problematic spending too you know for local school divisions and local governments because so much of it requires local effort and in the local share particularly in salary but up against the introduced budget is where we're seeing governor younkin's priorities he has prioritized over two billion dollars in tax refunds to virginians in various ways and again when you when you look at the the spending proposed in governor northam's introduced budget up against what the current governor is proposing clearly there will have to be some changes in the introduced budget where those are we're not certain yet but the governor's big education funding pieces are include 150 million dollars for lab schools which
085is an extension of schools currently available i sent you all an email about that i'm going to talk about that in a little bit but that is a lot that's a lot of money certainly that again when you put it together with that 200 billion dollars kind of backing out of the introduced budget and this additional expense that was not included in the introduced 50 million dollars for school resource officer grants so that we can the governor's day one priority of putting a school resource officer in every school um and um repealing the grocery tax which puts a hole of about a hundred and twelve million dollars annually um i but you can bucket that into that two billion dollars of tax relief but it's about 112 million dollars annually which will likely 112 is
086probably the low the low point frankly um on that we we tend to see those um increase over time partial in year one and then the full is about 112 million in the second year of the budget and that's talking about the grocery tax there are bills that the bills that are in the general assembly that the governor is backing on the grocery tax would the one in the senate for example offers a way to try to backfill the the the school portion the one percent state sales tax that is uh sent back to school divisions but we have some concerns with that and one of the reasons is that currently you you remember that the 1 k-12 is sent back to you all based on school age population uh the bill that's being considered
087by the senate finance committee uh was heard today but uh was carried over because there's a lot of concerns around this issue would redistribute that money based on lci which is you all everyone here knows will make for huge swings uh from what the current distribution amounts are so that's something we're watching really closely on the um on the sales tax bills there is a commitment in both houses to backfill that one percent the the the the questions revol revolve around where it's coming from and the distribution method we're pushing for continuing the current method based on school age population um at this point unless you tell us otherwise but at least it's more pre it's fairly predictable whereas the lcis you know bounces every two years so the other parts that are are not
088nailed down is whether or not they're going to replace the one pers they're whether or not they're going to repeal the one percent local sales tax uh and if so how they're going to backfill that and then there's a half percent um that's dedicated to transportation uh and whether or not they're that's definitely gonna be repealed the question becomes whether or not they go backfill that so that's just a little color here on the on the grocery tax bills and thanks ryan and i will say um what i have i have known ron a long time and it's always good to have um a recovering appropriator with someone who knows the state budget as i know you all know from working with ron upside down backwards and forwards and catches nuance like that that not
089everyone catches um because that's an important piece on the final charge that i'm gonna give you tonight just to tease that out a little bit um so i'm gonna move on to your legislative priorities and where some of those are moving i won't go into long detail on all of them because again including a lot of this in my updates but wanted to talk about accelerating learning really the place where we're seeing work here at the general assembly is in what they're calling the literacy act kerry coiner has house bill 319 with a long long list of co-patrons it reported today out of full committee going to appropriations um senator lucas who chairs the senate education and health committee has the senate companion if that doesn't indicate to you that this thing is on fire
090and gonna pass um it should because we have representation besides the big piece of that it does codify a significant amount of reading instruction which you know that's a little concerning to put how we teach kids in the code of virginia this is definitely setting some precedent however what it does do is improve ratios for reading specialists and requirements for reading specialists this is going to be a really helpful bill if the funding truly follows for all of the staffing that will be needed carrie a delegate coiner does have 10 million a 10 million dollar budget amendment in the budget keeping in mind that governor northam did include funding for reading specialists so she's got a 10 million dollar budget amendment she says that both the governor the secretary of education secretary gadara and sec
091and the governor are fully fully committed to funding the positions um that will be needed of course then from a local government standpoint a local school board standpoint a big piece of this when you if you read the bill and i'll give a little more detail on friday and exactly what it does there was a substitute today um it will put reading plans in place for many many students and so how we staff that um not just too dissimilar i don't want to panic anyone when i say iep because it's not as it's not as extensive of that but having a plan in place that must be staffed and monitored is something that's super you know concerning it's the right thing to do but how do we staff that and get the folks in place
092so i'll give more detail on that in my report but but that's a big piece of what the general assembly seems committed to doing when they talk about learning recovery for those of you don't know me i don't like to use learning loss that learning recovery or learning loss however you want to phrase that the at-risk add-on again the governor the outgoing governor's budget included increases to the at-risk add-on in budget only um the board of education does include an enhanced ad at risk add-on called the equity fund that is included in bills and budget amendments in the house and senate delegate-born house version of both all of the soqs that the board prescribed along with a budget amendment to pay for it 194 million in the first year 70 oh sorry that's the at-risk
093um i don't have the numbers right in front of me i apologize um and then delegate senator mcclellan has the identical bill in the senate to fully fund that um as just for you and i put this in one of my reports i believe the at-risk add-on is funded only in budget in the governor's budget a big number in the first year because of the maintenance of effort required under the american recovery and the coveted recovery act the most recent round arpa requires that a percentage of state funding is maintained compared to schools fiscal year 17 18 and 19 which is why that number is so big there it was kind of a placeholder frankly to ensure that we did not lose any of our federal funding i know you all have a priority around
094school construction most if not all of the recommendations from the school modernization and construction commission have been included through legislation and we are starting to get a sense again all of them require money money the outgoing budget included obviously um literally literally changes to literary literary fund along with some other language and a half billion dollars in school construction grants we are starting to see the sense of the house appropriations committee wanting to see what's going to be in the senate what the senate's going to approve before they make decisions in a really what was clearly to the delegate an unexpected move in house appropriations a bill to allow for a local referendum on a one percent sales tax increase um to go to public schools was killed um that delegate says it was the
095angriest he's been in his 13-year career at the general assembly so it does just indicate the house wanting to see where the senate is going to land first so we will be interesting the bills are still in education or have been referred to appropriate to the money committees in either body so more to come on that the support staff cap again as always lots of conversation about this very very expensive issue that has been around as you know i was i i fought the fight in 29 2009 2010 and we were told it was temporary and here we are um in 2022 still fighting the budget amendment senator barker probably is doing the most detailed work in it on this the budget of the fiscal impact came back really high um 413 million dollars in
096year one 490-ish million dollars in year two i don't think a lot of folks expected that because we have um through soq changes funded some of the positions that were in the cap mainly the school support personnel so i think folks that thought it was going to be um a little bit easier number to bear the um senator barker is working to try to put some ratios around what that might look like i think it will be a challenge and ron certainly chime in i don't see the general assembly going let's just prevailing costs let's just do this when there's not really great data these days on who the support staff what the positions are and how many and how how we're paying for them and they're looking for staffing ratios instead run ahead yep
097yeah i would just add on and that's particularly true in the house of dele in the house appropriations committee where there's going to be we know there's going to be resistance to just lifting the cap uh well in their words willy-nilly without any idea of how many staff there are and they're not being any standard and i suspect in an ideal world we'd create ratios and put them in the soq and fully fund them through the basic aid formula and we we may get there in a couple of years but i uh one of the other reasons that it keeps growing too is the the linear weighted average that makes it surprise that so big is the linear weighted average actually shifts more continues to shift more the cost of these of the support staff
098to the local school division from the state so the numbers that came back obviously were quite were a bit surprising but barker seems to have the bit between his teeth on this and is going to try to push something through again as kathy's alluded to the how if if the senate goes one direction the house is going to go to another and it's all part of a really really high level chess game for one chamber to get leverage over the other on things that are totally unrelated to the budget yes um lots lots of moving parts and no one wanting anyone to know what their moving parts are which is making it really fun um yeah teacher shortage there are a series of bills to address the teacher shortage in different ways i will say
099that one of the items that you all had was a career ladder um delegate van volkenberg who is a teacher in henrico county and represents um actually where he teaches um that he had a bill and that that has been laid on the table it did not move out of the subcommittee um which was unfortunate unfortunate um because we certainly see that as something that is a good opportunity to encourage teachers to stay in the classroom while giving them some opportunity to advance in their career intentionally in their earnings as well um but again we will be tracking all of those aside from salary and budget there's nothing where you're like wow that's exactly what we need to be doing for the teacher shortage i'm not going to pretend that there's some magic bullet bill
100out there it really there really isn't um there really are ticks and tweaks around on licensure extending license licenses for another two years so that folks don't have to worry about all of their their recertification points like those are the kinds of things we're seeing there is an effort to create a teacher a teacher core it's it's based on i talked with delegate reid david reed from loudoun county at length on this about a year ago and his desire to kind of build how they do in the military where you're like where do you need people and let's train them to fill those positions and when he called me i said well here's the problem we need people everywhere like there's no one particular teaching category it's teachers and staff folks that work in schools
101and so that seems to be advancing no surprise to you all that fixing this problem is first of all not something you can do in one year and second of all very expensive and the price tag on the teacher core is expensive so we will see again how that plays plays out and as as usual um it's not going to be free it's as as kathy and i have discussed many times you you net out the the teacher salary increase that's in the budget five percent each year there's not a lot there's a there was a lot more flash than substance in the governor's budget proposals for k-12 but it's going to be a big nut and local match um and it's going to it's and you're going to wind up with a with a
102big i suspect with a big ask in order to provide that same level of salary increase across the your employee groups rather than limiting it just to the soq um staff yeah yeah and i will say there there is a bill in the senate senator hashmi has that looks at um it's aspirational but there's a price tag associated we often see these aspirational bills um delegate clark from from norfolk had a bill he rolled his into some of the others that put funding in place to get teacher salaries to the national average that aspirational goal that's current frankly in code um the law of virginia says that we shall pay virginia or we shall aspire to pay teachers and you know it's always good to put those words in the law at or above the
103national average there are a series of bills to do that with very very expensive budget um requests to do that and to ron's point um you know getting the state funding is one piece of this um and it's easy er for the state to say look look we are funding salaries at the national average when we know that localities are not only picking up their share but also picking 100 of the portion for all of the other positions that are not funded um with any state dollars so we shall see on that um school counselors i know is another priority for you we are seeing we're not seeing anything in this right now around changing any ratios to school counselors the board other than in the soq bills the um the soqs prescribed by the
104board of education put the standard at one school counselor for every 250 students which is the recommendation by the american society of school counselors um in virginia we're one for every 325 this school year um right now frankly the effort is to add some flexibility um there's um some folks it's a heart these are hard positions to fill as well and so giving some flexibility and allowability to hire counseling professionals which is the code they're working on this bill it's going to have a substitute likely in full committee um but trying to figure out how can we give school division some flexibility to hire these professionals into schools and then put them on a path towards licensure as a school counselor um and so you will we'll see how that goes the other bill that
105frankly is concerning there's this sorry oh could you say that again oh that's my watch talking to me who's talking to me sorry um that was my watch um oh my lord um the one place that is concerning and we're seeing again a series of bills like this and i don't know how much you all have seen but there is starting to be a uptick in the number of parents that are concerned about counseling services provided by schools and what they entail um social emotional learning being the main one that we're starting to see across the commonwealth and so there are a series of bills to limit the amount of time a student can spend with a school counselor and also to have parent opt-in or parent permission for any enter any interaction other than
106emergency interaction with school counselors so um those are in the house we'll see how those proceed and i do know that there that there seems to be a broader desire to ensure particularly given the mental health crisis that we know so many of our students are facing to make sure we're putting the appropriate school counseling services in place so there's definitely a little a little rub going on there with those two things going on at the same time i did want to mention the bill that's famously called the tebow bill which allows home school students to participate in vhsl the hsl activities does look prepared for passage in the house we did get in the senate a bhs bill up in the full senate education and health committee and there was bipartisan pushback on that
107bill um and it died in committee with both um senator suiter line who serves on the board of the hsl he's the senate a republican senator from the roanoke area saying he he believes that that that that um the bhsl has the ability to do their make their own rules um and so he um broke with caucus and and a couple of the other democrats that we sometimes see break from their caucus held on this one so i think it sheds a good light they did say that they intend to vote on the all bhsl bills the same way so um we'll see but that does look like we'll be able to get that one down um in senate education and health which is good i know you all have a position on voucher bills
108there are more voucher bills currently under consideration um in the house and senate than i can even count for you um there are different approaches currently virginia has education improvement tax credit scholarships which are a little bit of a backdoor voucher virginia caps those at 25 million dollars a year they have virginia and they have to be reported and so virginia has not gotten close to 25 giving away tax credits at 25 million forever and and not even very close and so there's always an effort to expand the options when the bill was originally presented and put in place um it was for truly low-income students to have access to scholarships to attend private schools or other schools of their choosing it's been ticked away and ticked away there's still probably about 11 million dollars
109before we get to that 25 so we're seeing some efforts there to expand access for those tax credits by putting more students in that's one approach the other is the education savings accounts esa which is a which is a flat out voucher we have seen this effort in virginia before there are more of those bills right now again than i can count for you um we will see um we have i i believe most of them in some version or another will likely pass the house there are strong opponents in the senate but not all of the senate democrats believe they are all bad and so um we will see but without question the esa's the element the education savings accounts are a direct the soq and the local money goes into the savings account
110for this family and so this is truly a real um drawing down of per pupil dollars both local and state um and so there's constitutional issues with them as well so we'll be tracking those for you really carefully those were the main topics that i wanted to talk to you about just related specifically to your legislative priorities and then i wanted to spend a little bit of time talking through the email that i sent out and kind of a series of bills that were a little bit outside of your legislative priorities and wanted to get some clarity from you all before we proceeded on you know getting getting norfolk norfolk's position out there to legislators i appreciate everyone who was able to i know it was a lot of questions and it was a lot
111of email so i apologize and i very grateful to you all for responding i'm also really grateful for those of you who said i want to make sure we don't get ahead of dr birdsong in the administration so thank you dr birdsong as well um for your responses so i wanted to talk about these bills but i need to give you a few updates because since i sent the email some things have changed um with the bill the first category was the charter schools i'm going to put all those aside because none of those have really had their day in committee yet because they're all works in progress i did want to talk that second category of bills that we're seeing that i collectively called parental rights or parental review the first one is on
112the state board requiring the state board of education to create policies on sexually explicit material that would require school boards to adopt those policies and require parental review notification and review alternative assignments and the the summary of those bills is really is is a little bit different i shouldn't say really different from what the bills actually do i once upon a time had someone say to me when i asked a question about a bill early in my career did you read the summary or the bill and i had read the summaries like always read the bill um but the bill would require um identification of of the instance of sexual explicitness in that content so you couldn't just say this class the following books will be read and there may be sexually explicit content you
113actually would have to id which where they are and what it is in each content area keeping in mind this isn't just books this is all instructional materials um that the senate version of the bill is coming to full committee tomorrow with a recommendation to not report it so um it went to a subcommittee and on a two-to-one vote because we had some missing folks in that subcommittee um the recommendation is to not report um so so that's an interesting kind of piece on this so we may we're certainly previewing where the senate is going to be ron did you have something down yeah i just wanted to say this is this this is the part in in our conversation here where we really do need a little con we've gotten you all feedback and
114but we also want to have a little conversation here so as kathy's role rolling along uh if you if you if your fan with the approach that that she's suggesting we take and then we'll take a scent it will take silence as a scent but if you you want to talk about it you know break in and let's have a little discussion and i will say the house identical version of that bill was is up in the subcommittee that's meeting right now so the house is just starting to look at these bills and i do know that dr birdsong you had sent along um again interesting to say there's no state requirement on posting or or putting on a syllabus or wherever you put this like particularly on our aap courses this students in these
115courses may be exposed to mature content i know in talking to school boards association all school divisions do that there is no state mandate or policy for that these are locally adopted and i know dr berkshire i don't know if you wanted to chime in on the the newport um public schools policy or kind of practice but i appreciate you sending that along and and i think this is a good time if anyone has questions or thoughts to to share so that we can make sure we're informing your position appropriately okay dr birdsman yes i thought it was directed at the board okay what is it that you need me to do at this time well you said um so the the bill around sexually explicit material uh you had sent along norfolk's um kind
116of operational procedures around what you all do and so just want a conversation because legislators have recognized and i will tell you i had a conversation today with senator lewis who is on the senate education and health committee and he will consider this bill tomorrow his question to me was is there a state policy because he is concerned that there's not a state policy he does not like the idea of the state defining sexually explicit which is what this bill would require but wanted to kind of get your thoughts and then anyone else's thoughts on this as well yeah that that was one of the primary concerns that the administration had that who who would be defining sexually explicit would that be left up to the locality who's going to be defining that because what
117one teacher may be may perceive as sexually explicit another may not so it's just kind of vague what does that mean so that was a very concerning and typically for our teachers here of course if that became law we would certainly do what we needed to do but it's it's not in alignment with what we currently do the teachers of course as they're teaching they they stay in touch with their parents and certainly if parents have a concern about what their children are reading we have a process for them to to vet you know materials and so i i really don't we don't understand the the significance of moving forward with this kathy i just want to say um you know this goes this is a this is an old debate like what is pornography
118what is it you know you know when you see it i really don't think that the school is defining you know our administration should be defining this so um i i don't know that we'll be cutting any new ground here because you know nobody has been able to clearly define it yeah the legislation does have the board of education defining it okay um which they have attempted to do before and made the decision not to yeah okay for the reasons you cited i'll know it when i see it and and you may know it when you're seeing it one way and i may know it when i see it another way and it's it's a swamp yeah and the other piece and this is not a super duper great example because it's a violence example
119over sexually explicit because i'm not going to define sexually explicit either but i gave this example um to a couple of members of the senate i i took a leadership course and they used the movie glory um which um matthew broderick movie about this 54th regiment um during the civil war and they used clip clips of the movie to just to show leadership styles um and none of the violent part of the movies but if this was you that this would be an instance where even if you use that movie for something unrelated to the violence or the sexually explicit content you would need to potentially say that because if a kid comes home and says we watch glory today you know or whatever it is i mean those are the kinds of things too
120that certainly as a former educator i know can happen so dr martin you mister welcome go ahead wait okay i can hear you now okay to those who can hear me um my my recommendation is that um we oppose efforts to take uh control from the local school board and local school division setting these um terms and expectations as dr verson mentioned local school divisions already handling it i think it's better for it to be handled at the local school division um different communities may see things differently but if the parents or members of the public have concerns we are the their first line and if they want to come and voice their concerns or be engaged in whatever policies we may set i think it's best done at the local level and not a
121blanket determination made by the state board does anyone disagree with that statement no okay thank you there you go well that's i appreciate that yeah that's really really helpful and so we will we'll see tomorrow um like i said it will be in the full senate education and health committee tomorrow i will send an email along to jessie who is in senator lewis's office to let her know that we had this conversation he knew we were meeting tonight but if any of you wanted to send a message along to senator lewis as well it would certainly be appreciated um he said it district six so it's senate or it's district 06 at senate.virginia.gov and just to let him know of the opposition and any concern you have um he was very interested in knowing where
122you all landed on this and um so i appreciate it the other piece of this there are two bills that actually lay this a little farther we are starting to see some evidence that um there are a lot of places where school boards are seen i hope i don't get fired for this where school boards are seen as the wall between parents and their kids and what's happening in school not in norfolk um but that's certainly a little bit of what we're seeing in the general assembly this year and the new thing we're hearing is principles principles principles and trust your principles like that trust your principles are words we are hearing out of this administration and the secretary of education we want families to trust their parents and their we want schools to trust
123their parents and principals and so the next two bills actually put the responsibility on principles to ensure that no divisive content is in their buildings even if that content was given to them by a school board employee so if i know but we're asking um i was watching dr bird's songs shaking your head um this i just need this is that these are the kinds of bills and i think obviously it puts principles in a really concerning place but also um it's just bills that i wanted to make sure you all were aware of i will tell you that one of the bills is patroned by the co-chair of the house education committee a former principal um a long time ago principal he every time he says when i was a principal i'm like yeah
124that was the 80s lots changed um but those that this is a bill that obviously is to what they see as parents first line is the principal um so obviously i i appreciated your answers that you sent along and dr birdsong your i you know the principles will will follow the directions of the law and do whatever we need to do but just again um wanted to get your thoughts on this one um i i don't want to give what i think is the intention of this film my guess is each of you can probably put those pieces together yourself but this to me puts principals and school board employees in a really tough spot so thoughts on this one well i mean i'll say whenever i read the executive orders and some of the
125legislation the the way the tone is really pitting parents against schools and schools against you know police department things like that and so um that was disturbing but again we don't i don't believe we'd be supporting any bills that are going to micromanage what's going on in our classroom we have trained professionals doing their jobs teaching our children and [Music] i know we haven't clearly discussed this but i i just think this falls in line with what we've been saying about other bills is that um we we need to leave the teaching and the discretion to the experts gabriel do you have something to add just that i would oppose um any bills that would be supportive of this effort in alignment with what dr birdsong said they want to help our principals then they
126will fund teachers so they can staff their buildings yeah i would i would just add to that that um i think there may be some confusion in that some may see principals as heads of school for those that are used to being in the private school environment i think our principals are already overwhelmed enough and trying to uh put this additional burden on the principle i think is ridiculous and so i think not only should we be in opposition to the bill but trying to uh also be somewhat um clear that um putting additional burdens and responsibilities on individual principles is going to cause even more chaos that's why we have school boards that's why we have superintendents and so um not only being in opposition but i think in any way that we can
127be offer some clarity around what may seem like a well-intentioned effort it can really be a source of chaos and confusion um i think we should try to make sure that we're communicating that as well and i appreciate that um very much mr jordan good to see you too by the way um all of you but um and again feel free to reach out to your delegation and let them know again i have shared your legislative priorities i will circle back with all of their offices after our conversation tonight to give them some additional updates um the democrat and again your delegation of democrats in the house seem to be ready to fight these kinds of legislation i will reinforce your position i do think there's an opportunity particularly with the new members delegate anderson
128being one who has a piece of norfolk city to help them understand and it may be some confusion around head of school i think that that might be a really important case to bring to them and um you know it's worth reaching out i will tell you that in my years of doing um education efforts advocacy efforts um elected officials at the general assembly respect your opinions tremendously as elected officials and so um anything you can do to support that but again we'll definitely follow back up with the folks who have asked the question to make sure that they know where what the position of norfolk city public schools is on these bills keep going okay thanks um the next one are in the discipline sorry thanks for discipline i won't talk faster though i
129promise ron uh because sometimes that happens the mandatory reporting bills um all of the house bills rolled into one bill house bill four the senate bills will all likely roll into senate bill two and they will likely match each other when the time comes the senate bill has not come up yet ultimately there was a substitute to these bills um that rolled back the two years ago two years ago a year ago i think it was two the mandatory reporting by principles to law enforcement for for those things that may um that are not felonies like felonies you have to report it gave discretion there was no discretion for principles we saw over reporting across the commonwealth and frankly the country of special special ed students and students of color particularly black boys and men
130in schools and so there was an effort to put the discretion back in the localities and give that discretion to the school principals i always like to remind folks at this point in time in our discussion and i know you all know this is that when a school resource officer is informed that is reporting to law enforcement they are law enforcement i know you all know that but i like to say that to anyone i can in hopes that one day everyone will know that um so those uh i will say that the effort to put put some puts there's there was definitely a sense that they went too far um and so they rolled they rolled back all reporting they did and everything yes and that's not what happened but um but regardless where
131they have landed frankly is not so bad um it adds some requirements around reporting and mainly out of how all lines point back to loudon but out of the cases we heard in loudoun particularly there was a lot of concern around sexual assault and that was frankly the big debate by the now speaker on the floor during this bill when it went through two years ago and so the bill that has is is on the floor of the house right now is a scaled back version of the original bill it is not as concerning and troubling as the original bill in fact even the legal aid justice center here in virginia while they still oppose this action set exact words to me was this could have been a lot worse and so um i think
132it puts some safety some guard rails up that makes those folks who think they went too far feel better but not taking it as far as putting mandatory reporting back on the books as fully as it was the senate bill has not gotten its day in committee yet but the house as i said the house bill is on the floor ultimately the language that is being passed by the house is language that delegate mullen democrat out of williamsburg area had in place we ultimately made his bill look like senator mcclellan's bill so that should give you some kind of relief that this bill is not as concerning as it's in its original form the place where there is some concern and i want to have some more conversation about this is in disorderly conduct um
133two years ago we were also able to remove or we removed i shouldn't say we were able i did i worked on that i had to remind myself new job there was an effort to remove and it was removed disorderly conduct in schools from the criminal code and that's where it exists existed and all of those hearings were in the courts committee in the house because they take care of that section of the law the criminal code um it put it back on the discretion again depending if it was a felony or a misdemeanor i don't think there's felonious disorderly conduct um report not not required reporting again this overwhelmingly impacts special ed students and students of color um this year there was an effort to put that language back in the criminal code and
134interestingly the bill did not go to courts it went to education even though it's in a criminal section of code the bill originally was not there was no motion to move it forward and then that weekend is my understanding there were some conversations on with leadership to put the bill forward and so um even and i will tell you we have a couple of really um republicans who just really stand up for kids with autism in particular who who this is going to sound but they held their noses and voted in favor of disorderly conduct the other night because they knew that the leadership wants this bill to get to the floor of the house and so the bill that in good news there's not a senate version of this bill so we've only got
135a house version that should tell you some things but the bill to put disorderly conduct on school property back in the criminal code is headed to the floor the only change was they are waiving kindergarten through eighth grade so if you are above eighth grade that that was kind of the like the negotiation i think that happened over the weekend if you are an eighth grader or above you would be in a disorderly conduct you through the criminal code could be charged um so that will be on the floor of the house and i think um i can't remember dr martin because you were not that talked about this idea of pair schools against police and police again there's definitely an effort we see that through the school resource officers we see it through some
136of the other bills as well um we see it through some of the action with bills like this to uh and the proponents of these bills say to improve safety in our schools um and so that's where we are in those bills and yeah yeah i'm gonna be quiet now okay i just so whenever i um so my here's my question um do other local school districts um fund the sro program does it come out of the school's budget it's all over the board it's all over the world okay because it doesn't nothing and so when i read that when i read that it was you know a little interesting that that we're i think we talked about this at some point but that this it's to incentivize the schools to participate in an sro
137program by funding the schools that's the incentive but that's not an incentive for norfolk because we don't pay for our sro program the city does they're all over the important in some places the city pays for it in some places the school board pays for it under a contract to the city okay yeah i was just wondering how common our agree our mou is our situation but thank you we can survey that if you'd like but it's okay i just just know that there's a variety yeah and and it's interesting too because and and again this is a place for school board members who look at these levels of budget all the time and understand the nuances of this is that sros can't be school board employees they're they're employees of whatever law enforcement agency
138you have your agreement with um and so that's a piece of it too is making how how the funding stream will happen and what your agreement looks like what your mou looks like drives that funding um and so it's very complicated and it's i would and i need to do a little more digging because again the governor put 50 million dollars in his budget to fund school resource officers to have one in every school but those agreements are all really really different um so that's a really good point i appreciate you bringing that up and ron i i just want to be clear now that we have a better understanding of some of these bills um the administration definitely would not be in support of anything any bill that would increase the the school-to-prison pipeline
139and as you have described the bill related to the reporting piece um so we we definitely wouldn't want to support anything like that i just wanted to be clear i appreciate that appreciate it yeah we're glad you're weighing in yes very much we've been consistent with that over the years um so is there anything else yes i promise the last charter schools um charter schools where we believe we are probably headed with charter schools is that the charter school bills there were three options that are really floating i sent them to all of you you know one is a regional approach that um again there's some question around constitutionality there because you all know this the constitution of virginia gives the authority to operate the schools to you as school board members um there is
140another approach that allows the board of education at the state to approve an application and even if you say no they can approve it and you get a charter school and you have to figure out how to fund that too staff at all of those good things it seemed again there's some constitutional issues there as well i will say that there the the delegation from far southwest virginia in the house and senate tend to be anti-charter school because they recognize it's a draw off of their local school division budgets that they can't afford and they can't make up as local governments the one that seems to be getting some traction and and has a fever as we like to say sometimes here at the general assembly is this lab school change lab schools have been
141around since 2010 and they were designed as partnerships between higher ed institutions that had teacher prep programs and they were teacher prep programs they were designed for those those higher ed institutions with teacher prep programs to have these laboratory schools where they could test different strategies for teaching and learning so this was not just about we're going to give this new approach to we want to put a you know some we want to teach a cl like a whole school on engineering no this was about how do we innovate at this lab school and test not only what we're how we're teaching kids but how we're training teachers that was the intention it was never funded at more than 600 000 a year and almost i think there were a couple of them at one
142point in time but ultimately higher education institutions are not fully prepared to run schools and especially not for six hundred thousand dollars a year in total state funding there's no local chair going there's no soq funding going so what the governor is proposing is a hundred and fifty million dollars to fund an extension of these laboratory schools expansion so not just teacher prep programs any institution of higher education public or private could could open a laboratory school and draw the grant funding down there is a lab school grant program right now there is absolutely nothing in the legislation that talks about state or local share of that student it is 100 percent funded by the state and run by the institutions of higher education um that bill seems to be getting some traction in the
143house and senate mainly because we don't think it by violates the constitution we'll start with that um but that seems to be where things are are leaning i know a lot of you gave feedback that regardless even when you don't have your there's no requirement to send the state and local share to that school you will lose there's going to be enrollment loss and when you base your school funding on a per pupil basis that's an impact but tomorrow we anticipate the senate version coming up the house version went by for the day because they recognized it wasn't going to work the way they had it drawn they're working on the bill so that's the one that seems to be moving along although i wouldn't be surprised if the house versions of the unconstitutional ones
144pass and and as kathy noted uh while the the lab schools are getting attention we're also watching it for any stealth movement on the charter school on true charter school legislation just dr martin mr clinton go ahead all right thank you on the the laboratory schools piece um it's it's interesting um but as i've kind of read and watched and and i appreciate you guys and i say to my colleagues too every friday three o'clock i'm i'm watching and um you guys are giving some great updates um from the sba they're giving us updates on what's happening um but i mean i could definitely support the original true content of a laboratory school i mean when we talk about we have teacher shortages all over i mean if we could definitely connect and to to
145test out new strategies but also to get to early preparation grow your own as far as teachers i could support that the only piece of that though is that there needs to be dual communication if a higher institution of higher education is looking to do this i think that it still needs to come back to the local school board um that this is something that we are doing in partnership um just like we have some regional programs but each one of the school boards have to vote on it and say if we're going to enter into one of those contracts to do so forth so i just kind of go back my opinion is is that i'm this particular area because it's already on the books but if we can get it back to education
146and only institutions of higher education who have educational programs and not for this private business thing because to me that was just another way of trying to bring in charters to another um to another avenue so that's kind of where my opinion is on it yeah i will say um senator pillion has the bill in the senate he represents far southwest virginia and he is the bes his subs his bill has stricken private business he is working with the school boards association and some of the education advocates and lobbyists who are up there to try to build out some agreements if we're going to do this with local school boards um so yes um that is definitely something that i know the school boards association is having conversation i won't i won't pretend that delegate
147davis who chairs house education in the house he has the bill he's not as eager right now i do know that dr spence from from virginia beach talked with him today not sure how that went but you know i i think at least private business may be stricken from the house bill i'm not certain but that's certainly something that we're flagging uh miss spacing and then mr jordan thank you thank you dr martin um so uh you might have seen some of my comments related to the the lab schools that i had shared of course i don't want to see funds diverted from our public schools to fund charter schools but i think there are some interesting components potentially with this um but before i share you know i guess i would like to learn
148more about this if i'm not mistaken there were there was a previous bill similar to this and had there were there any lab schools um before that were done and is there any data to show whether they improve performance um what opportunities were created as a result of these lab schools and what outcomes uh came out of it i think that gets to what kathy's stated originally is the the emphasis when you read the code sections on the lab schools when they were first set up in 2010 the emphasis wasn't on improving student performance because you know all the conversation now is about charter schools medium to improve performance the lab school and the statute as originally set was intended to focus on in improving teacher performance by looking at innovative ways of delivering content
149and things like that that was the primary focus for them okay and i will say there were a couple i know william and mary had one jmu recently submitted an application like within the last two years but but they realized there wasn't really any funding to do with it because again six hundred thousand dollars which was reduced um a couple of budgets ago to just fifty thousand dollars because no one was taking the money um the most recent i'm going to do air quotes on this lab school was between virginia state university and just one elementary school in chesterfield county but ultimately the what we found by the governor's office because we eliminated the governor's the most recent introduced budget so governor northam's introduced budget eliminated the funding because what we found was students teacher
150prep preparatory students from virginia state were reading going over to read with students in the third grade at etric and that was not the intention of the lab schools so there has there's no long-term kind of study here in virginia there are certainly lab schools in other states um that's some of the research that i did when i dug into it that are interesting but they're they're far more expensive than 150 million dollars um as well st those states spend more than that right okay thank you mr jordan go ahead yeah i think i have a clarifying question so the lab schools that you are referring to that became available in 2010 how does that different from the lab schools that existed for 40 50 years hampton had a lab school thinking of state hit
151header lab school there are other lab schools what's the difference between what you're defining as 2010 versus the lab school that operated on hampton's campus for for decades you got me stumped there yeah i'm not that old okay so so but i will but i have heard like it's like a unicorn like i have heard of such things someone else has recently like in the last like 48 hours has mentioned something so let me do some digging work you know something well so i think that the governor made a visit to my alma mater hampton and heard about lab schools that used to exist there that i think could not be sustained due to funding they were opportunities for students to come on campuses i recall it when i was there and that education majors
152had the opportunity to basically get hands-on experience while also working with uh working with students so your last comment about 150 million dollars i don't think that's anywhere near enough to sustain such i'm not i don't see any impact statement on the bill that suggests what the capacity is required um at universities in order to sustain the lab schools so as you know many of our universities are uh challenged just by having facilities just like we are in in public school so i have some concerns about that and then the bill also seems to target as is defined as underserved communities so i guess that's the the way that people can continue to try to target uh students of color and low-income students in this backdoor charter school debate and i'm not in charter school
153per se but i am anti this effort of trying to target districts and cities like norfolk with programs that they haven't done any real research on and then define it as being innovative because it's serving underserved children or children of color so uh a lot of these bills including the charter bills and i've had this conversation with delegate davis uh personally um are on the books and if if norfolk public schools wants to go and have a collaborative relationship with old dominion or norfolk state or virginia western or anyone else we want it to the capacity exists to do that today we don't need new bills to uh to make that occur and if the governor and the general assembly wants to provide incentive funds to support that you know bring that on but i
154think this is just another uh backdoor bill that's going to end up with a lack of sustainability and infrastructure both on the university side and on the public school systems side and that children are being certain children are being used as pawns in this in this in this effort so if we want to do collaboration um i know this board and i know dr bird song for years has been open to collaborative partnerships with higher ed and as mr clinton said i think we've had a track record of being able to do that but to try to codify this and push this through without a clear understanding of infrastructure needs and support needs and who attends and who doesn't get to attend i think there's a lot more work that needs to be done and
155maybe this is something that the patron should send to [Music] legislative services somebody jaylark or someone to do some research and then come back with a much more better form piece of legislation if this is something that they really want to push that's my personal opinion mr ross dr aston go ahead thank you chair i would like to first say i agree with some of my colleagues sentiments on the lab school concept except i do see it slightly i see a lot of tricky language because how i envision the lab school concept is more professional development kind of school particularly if the language is saying we want to enhance teachers then it's essentially professional development that's what we call enhancing teachers it's professional development but when i hear the language says that it can go
156to any college or university whether they have teacher ed or not then to me it's going another direction because if we're trying to do professional development for teachers and it can go to a school who does not have teacher ed um i'm not sure how they're able to do that in the real sense of a professional development school for institutions that we don't have teacher education we don't teach teachers we don't prepare teachers but we do want to lab school it's it's getting kind of tricky and almost a backdoor concept so that's the thing that kind of um is the language is a little confusing with the intent when you're talking about professional school and we're saying how about schools who don't have teach education programs there's somehow a conflict to me thank you miss
157vasene do you have your hand up again on the screen you dude yeah okay that's okay i was just checking i didn't want to ignore you okay in discussing this with one of my colleagues who worked does lobbying for higher education he indicated that the college presidents made it clear to the governor when they were summoned last week that they have no desire to run these schools that they want a partnership a formalized partnership with local school divisions that want to do it uh and i think there's a there's certainly and that tells me there's a and they also believe that it should be focused in the schools that with teacher preparation programs um so that tells me they they they share the college presidents certainly share a lot of the same concerns you you
158all do and if there's something's going to be set up they want it to be set up so it's actually going to work and acknowledging fully that running schools are hard yeah i don't know a big admission by college presidents yeah i know it's interesting because it seems like there's a lot of people right now that feel like they can do it better than the professionals um but yeah well did you yeah i just i was gonna leave you all unless someone has with the one big thing um for you all if you're like what do i need to do um one obviously any member of the delegation senator lewis sees bills ah because he's on the full committee he'll see bills earlier than others oftentimes but the one big thing this session is the
159message to legislators around make us whole um you know we heard you heard ron talk about the tax the sales tax and the grocery tax you have heard about the priorities of governor younkin while not you know he's not talking about eliminating anything that governor northam proposed not that what gov everything governor northam proposed was perfect um but he's got priorities including that two billion dollars in tax tax rebates or refunds um so make us whole um you know show your math show your work on what that looks like for norfolk because when we talk about all of the issues of our students particularly coming out of the pandemic this is and school infrastructure and construction and modernization in norfolk is you know among the most in need school divisions for many of those pieces
160of this puzzle that's that's what i would give you all as your marching orders if you're looking for like you feel compelled to really get in touch and i will reinforce again elected official to elected official you all have much pull and um your opinions are very respected by the elected officials here in richmond and that's the marching order i would leave you with other than always being available for questions or comments or if you ever want to head over to up to richmond let us know we'll get you we'll get you connected and we've done as you know i'm chair we've done that before and we've had we've all had a pretty good time doing that when you all come up and and with that uh as far as it's a wrap for us
161um we certainly didn't want to take up this much of your time but also want to do and that's not a reflection on you okay yeah i talk too much i know that no no there's just so much stuff if we'd have been back in early november i think all of us expected the big subject in education this year would be how much money we're get we can we're gonna deal with um how much new money we're gonna deal with and uh since then it's just um exploded in terms of other issues and so education has become one of the dominant topics this year in in areas that we didn't fully expect so there's a lot going on and i will also just appreciate school boards across the commonwealth but you all in particular and
162dr birdsong um superintendents and principals and teachers and school staff everywhere and for everything you're doing just thank you so much cannot say it enough um you are truly the front lines and the loudest voices for these students who need it so much so very much appreciate everything you do thank you rodney did you have something to add yeah well i just had a process question before they leave so i know we got the email and i've heard from the discussion today that some individ some um school board members and individual responses dr birdsong has sent some responses and i think that our responses need to be representative of norfolk and so we shouldn't have an administration position in a rodney jordan position and a dr martin position we should have a normal position so
163just moving forward whatever process that we're going to use i think we need to be clear on that and generally speaking i think when it comes to these issues of expertise around curriculum and impact on the operation of the school division that dr bursson and her team our best to respond to those and she can share those with us so that we can support support that but i just feel a little unease because i know they have received responses i didn't send one because i felt like we would discuss it as a as a board but i think we need to be clear on how we respond to requests that come from advantage or what's the norfolk position yeah that's exactly what i was just gonna bring up so thank you for for getting ahead
164of me on that um and i wanted to ask uh ron and kathy is there a model that um other schools are um other school systems are doing that you think is the most uh effective because you know we tend to kind of you come to us and then we have we need this quick turnaround and we've been falling short of that and so do you have anything any tips to share to us and what works well a couple of things one is um we asked the questions for you all not to articulate your position but but to get a sense of where you all were so we could frame the discussion we've had tonight and it helped us uh immensely the feedback we got so that we were a lot more focused tonight in
165our discussion on those issues um other school divisions tend to quite honestly vest most of the um responses on things like this in the superintendent virginia beach it's aaron spence and um in in chesapeake it was jim roberts and that's jared cotton everything came through the superintendent's office um in in richmond when we represented them it was the school board louden county we've represented them it was the the school board had a separate very very active legislative committee met monthly publicly took testimony but it's also an 11 member school board um and uh but but the superintendent had someone the chief of staff of the super in the superintendent's office staffed that committee too so it the the models all vary and um but it can be fairly work intensive and you've got to have
166staff who can who can a lot a lot of time to it inside uh if you want to take a more active role and that's and i know you guys have been stretched pretty thin for a while uh and that may be the big challenge we do have our legislative committee members mr jordan and mr clanton that i think could support dr byrdsong in the responses if she if she needed that so to be clear we we have provided responses right okay so but i'm saying if there was a question on where the board stands we do have the legislative committee that you could bounce things off of does that make is that more clear go ahead mister yeah my opinion is i think the board established its priorities we went through that process and
167that generally speaking the administration is best prepared and equipped to handle it one of the reasons why we moved to having a consultant at one time the lobbyist so to speak was an employee of north public schools and they worked with the superintendent they gave reports to the board as we were dealing with staffing challenges we went to to this model but i think generally speaking that the the superintendent administration ought to would be in the best position to be able to tell advantage strategies uh the impact on the school division and if there are any questions or concerns about something being outside of the board's priorities then i think the superintendent can refer that to the that's very well put that is what i was getting at thank you mr clinton um i don't
168disagree with that i mean when you kind of think about it over the last couple of years it's you know we didn't we weren't calling the board back for meeting or discussion um things are very fluid um and you all need you know immediate things so i agree and concur with my colleague there that we set up a legislative priorities our superintendent gave very detailed um because she met with her team to provide information um there and actually my responses were in response back to my superintendent um because a lot of this stuff got down into the um to some of the organizational and operational things of how things happen so i would i support um having the superintendent um be that point of contact there i mean anyone else that she desires and her
169um team to respond back um and just keeping the board in in the loop as to you know what's happening there but that we take our official aim there because we come up the legislative party these are the priorities but as you see bills and things that this is probably one of the session where you have more chess going on um and waiting the speaker's holding bills right now but we know they're out there they've been pre-filed but i think that you all are there on the ground this is what we hire you to do and you're doing an outstanding job um and that our superintendent so i agree so uh madam chair and dr birdsong um how about doc we get offline uh in the next couple of days and sit down with you
170dr birdsong and and work out the the best way to do this it works for you is that fair that that sounds good when i was on the administration i was your legislative liaison and i'm going to assign and i have assigned one of my staff members to do this okay and and please know that we are working as hard and as fast as we can and so sometimes it may be difficult if you send us something at nine o'clock at night we may not have answers for you at eight o'clock in the morning because we're trying to get school staff we're out and about we're not sitting at our in our offices at our desk just waiting for questions to come from you not in an ugly way but we're very very busy and
171so please be understanding if if you don't get things um back as as soon as you would like please know that we are working towards getting things back to you as soon as possible absolutely and and you know that you know how this works from goodness before so yeah so we'll give you a call in a day or so and sit down and work out all the details that sounds good thank you thank you well i appreciate all the time you all took i look forward to continuing to work with you and um appreciate it and please get some rest you too all right well thank you so much for supporting us okay thank you all have a good night thank you bye [Music] oh um next on our governance training update so i just
172wanted to be consistent and um so as of right now um the procurement office is um it's going to require four bids so mr how did you have anything to add to that no i think i sent the board something earlier today i don't know if you've all had a chance to read that the main purpose was to outline the laws governing the next step in this process i did volunteer to work with your purchasing agent carol robinson uh some in helping to bring this forward as expeditiously as possible but i also wanted to say that that's purely uh that's i'm volunteering to do that out of the goodness of my heart because god knows i had lots of other things to do and i i you know certainly if there was any desire for
173me to at this point bow out of the process and just wait that would be fine and i could just uh when the time comes i can leave it to the board the superintendent miss robinson to carry forward with the procurement process and then if if the board then wants me to do the contract i can just be presented with the with the procurement records and the final vendor that's chosen and then i will draft the contract based on that and with discussions with the vendor and ultimately present something you know as a draft to the board without involving myself at all in any of the procurement procedures as such where's our trash cans are you looking for feedback so i'm concerned i haven't seen um responses back to attorney cloud's questions around what is
174it that we're looking for i i haven't received anything you have i have not okay so when this when this first came up some weeks ago i my recommendation at that time was that the board has to be clear so um what is it that we are seeking and what are our expectations typically what what has occurred or what at least in my experience and exposure um you know having good governance uh good for superintendent relationships is in the board's interests and is in the superintendent's interest so largely the superintendent has helped to lead that effort in trying to work with the board towards that goal if indeed that's that's required i'm not quite sure what's where we are and what we're doing but i think it's important that the board be clear on what
175our expectations are so that we can help inform the board and superintendent together what our expectations are so that we can then support any any procurement process in the in the absence of that i think we are we're wasting our time and administration time and staff time going back and forth trying to figure out how to accomplish something that we've not defined that we want it so whatever we do to me if we're going to be successful the board as a whole with the superintendent has to be clear on what our expectations are with governance training and over what period of time and with what resources and then allowed the superintendent to work with her purchasing folks with the support of attorney cloud is needed to then secure what we're asking for but if we
176aren't clear as a governance team what it is that we're trying to achieve then we won't get it and for us to be um you know almost choosing a vendor and then going through a process to get to the vendor that we choose that's that's not what we did with the council that's not what we did with vsba and it was because of um our membership in those organizations that allowed us to do certain things that this is very different and so i think we need to be need to be clear on that or even if we think governor's training is important before we spend more staff time and attorney's class time and resources going down a path where we've not in my opinion had that conversation and agreement as a board as to what
177do we think worked what do we think didn't work what is it that we're trying to achieve so that anybody who's trying to propose something to us has some framework upon which to to respond well as far as the scope of work that we i didn't if things have changed from the course that we were on before as far as finalizing our goals and guard rails um reevaluating our agenda you know our you know making sure that we're um changing our you know making sure that we're doing a better job of focusing on academic outcomes um in our in our meetings if that has changed then i am not aware of it so what i've been doing i've been we voted on a scope of work previously and um i think that i'm under this
178maybe i'm assuming but based on the discussions we've had i felt i thought that that is something that we wanted to continue to do am i am i have i am off the mark there my i guess my my response back to that is is that what the what the council of great cities schools crafted in terms of a work plan based upon their experiences their work on um student outcome focused governance can be very different than what somebody else may do and so i'm not sure it's just taking somebody else's work plan and then just turning that into uh an rfp is is fair to the vendor or i don't even know if you know if we can just do that so if it is the will of the board to maintain that student
179outcome-focused governance approach then let's just be clear on that but but then we also have to make sure we're we are clear on the experience and capacity for any vendor than to be able to deliver on it i don't think it's just that simple as because we did something with goals and guardrails that anybody can just come and do goals and guardrails i agree with you on that is there anyone here who is does not want to pursue [Music] student outcomes focused governance okay um mr clanton and then miss basin thank you dr martin um i was trying to listen intently um so the scope of work for which we had with the council great city schools um if the goals are in there i'm not talking about me personally it's not about taking somebody's
180work but i think student-focused outcomes and the goals that we need to do you know the basic things i mean that we've got to do for governance training i mean the basic thing of even going back and just doing and reviewing our board norms and protocols that have not happened which was but i don't even recall there being multiple individuals that we even reviewed for governance training last time that came before this board we're in a process now that's requiring us and we're going through it to take what the goals are that this board generally had a discussion the only person who wasn't there for that conversation was dr rowson he's here now but i don't think there's anybody on this table i hope not around this table who doesn't feel that we need to
181move forward with this process that we have a strategic plan that requires this board to have some clear goals and to set up what those things are and so being able to move forward with that um we may have to not go through some normal processes of things and we may have to go back and look um and i'm talking about within law i'm not talking about skimming through stuff but time is not on our side here um unfortunately we've gone through and the board be perfectly honest has had that discussion about what was working what wasn't working that's why we're not with that we separated ties because the board had the discussion and we're seeing that we're moving forward we've got a new member here i think that we have done that we've had
182the discussion with our superintendent and we've seen it in an option that could come before us i i agree with dr martin in the respect of looking at the scope of work for which this board has already spoken about which clearly outlines goals taking those goals and not taking somebody else's work because we had to provide them those goals for which we wanted them to do the work i don't think that anything has changed i know they haven't changed for me i'm not going to speak for all my colleagues here um but if we're going to take that and that becomes a substance and if there's anything additional that we as board members want to add to that about what we're looking for in a facilitator and how they want to do the work i
183believe that continues to move the process forward and i will support that effort however any effort to delay to not move forward i will not support that i will support the respective you know mr cloud i appreciate the fact that you're working you're you're going above your scope to help us to get to that particular point because it's important that this board clearly identify its goals we lay the foundation which is required for us annually when we we when we organize how we're going to operate and we've been operating on on some older rules that are there but to be fair to our superintendent we used i've heard a lot about our superintendent let's be fair to our superintendent let's do what we are supposed to do as a board and clearly identify what those
184goals are so that she clearly has those those goals aren't just for the division but they're also what we're supposed to evaluate her on and give her fairness and i don't think that we've done that and this is an opportunity for us to do that so i don't support anything that will delay the process i will support efforts that we've already put in place that would allow us to look at the scope of work for which we've already had a discussion as a board about and what those goals are and to clearly place those out there that this is what the goals are for the board and allow any board members who have additional contacts to place to that to be able to do that but come back and see what the four rfps are
185and then we can make a decision based on that but to sit back and say we we haven't done certain things i i i don't agree with that thank you thank you um miss spacing and then mr jordan i'll i'll allow mr jordan to follow up if that okay if you're following up to yeah i i'm there there's dr bart i think my colleague raises a lot of important points um the delay to the extent that there's been a delay with successful governor's training with our team is a board self it's a board self-imposed delay the point that i'm trying to make is is even as we are having these discussions around the goals the strategic plan the norms and protocols so the work that we were doing with the the vsba model started with
186the annual review of norms and protocols the council of great city schools model looked at that but it was a it was different differently defined and differently described within the the work plan which we never which we never got to so in the conversations that we may have had i think most of us i think we may be referring to some of the closed session conversations that we've had but i'm not talking about that i'm just simply saying that um this this way that is being described as delay it's not about delay it's about the board doing good governance and working together as a whole and being clear because sometimes we say we have goals we pull up the accountability plan we say we have goals we have priorities then other times we say we
187don't have goals in priority so that is the an indication of um in my opinion why we need good governance training so we can be clear on exactly what we are doing i'm just simply saying that governance training whoever it is is sometimes rough and tough and sometimes things get sad people's feelings get hurt whatever we have to be prepared for that i don't care who it is but in this particular instance what came forward was that a particular vendor could do something and then we had a presentation from that vendor and i just think that it requires more of the board around work that we have to do and we can do it at whatever speed that one would like to do it but i don't agree that there's clarity around what those are
188and as my colleague mentioned it's often acknowledged that each time you have a new board member you have a new team and so that's just where we are and so i think it's important that we are clear as a governance team the board and the superintendent together on what we are trying to achieve so that we can support the speed with which we would like to continue the the work and dr martin reminding my colleagues about good governance and the respect is the right of the majority to govern and the right of the minority to be heard and that no minority of the board should hold back the board from carrying out its work that in many cases we have unfortunately those who have not been in the majority have made lines on the sandy
189to hold back but we want to talk about good governance let's do that i again employ to my colleagues that the right and majority of the board had the conversation where we are so that we can continue to move forward we have work that has to be done clearly before the end of this division and i know that our superintendent is looking at we've said it you mr jordan said it yourself earlier you support strategic plans well there's a big part of that that's relying on this board to move and to take action and so again i i encourage that the process that we have now may not be the best but i believe that it's the best that we have in front of us and that we can move and we can live with
190well being paramount in our governance training is um is our team development and you know coming together as a good governance team and that's going to be a really big part of it from from the beginning so we'll continue to work on that um anything else go ahead yeah so if we could um come back so um i think i think uh mr cloud asks you know some really good questions in in his uh correspondence with us about what how we might go forward our next steps and i think they're valid and speak to some of the um uh concerns that mr jordan is raising and that i share as well um you know because this is would be our third potential trainers and i think it's important that even though the the work plan
191may be the same and that we agree that we want to continue with the student outcomes focused governance the process is where i think we all need to be on the same page because that is where i think we've had concerns raised with vsba concerns raised with the council of great city schools and so i think we need to all be on the same page so that we can inform the the proposal um and so that when we do make a decision we are all very clear about what we want and uh can make a more informed decision so that's that i think i think those were valid questions that were raised that i'm not sure that we've i was i was depending on the vendors to tell us what their process is to meet
192the outcomes that we're looking for which what we're you know with our goals and guardrails with um you know time used with uh enormous protocols you know so so i don't know that we dictate their process because they think what i'm anticipating is that the vendors will come with their own style like every other vendor has and we'll we'll vet that right well and if i may use this as an example which you know which i i think came up with with vsba and council of great city schools you know if we are looking for flexibility while we all recognize the importance of having full participation from all board members are we looking for a vendor that is flexible with participation you know those are things that i think we need to be able to
193say and i'm just using that as an example because that that was a point that did come up you know with with both um trainers yeah and um i think just like with the the last go round we'll have to be very upfront about where we are you know collectively obviously we all want to have be participating a hundred percent but there are some exceptions how about how much are they willing to work with us based on exceptions right so i just i really think that i was just anticipating that that type of question again to come out and in their in interviewing them and again through the vetting process because i mean what would how would we write that out as necessarily i'm just i was just that was the first consistent thing that
194has come up their percentage of you know absent you know allowable absences from each i mean i don't want to remember yeah it's kind of prescriptive having spent you know and i know we we're all we have spent so much time and energy doing the work than to have these things keep coming up um which you know i think we just have to play it all on the table and be on the same page um before we go with another trainer and that's my you know perspective on it so i'm trying to understand um so you're are you saying don't go through the procurement process and give oh i'm i'm not saying that but i'm i'm going to have a discussion before we interview people about what we're looking for what we are what are
195we looking for in this training can we just assess where the board is on this particular item before we drag this out into another discussion and what i'm just saying it we currently we're asking for commitment to governance training i mean no we have a commitment to governance training i think that that's clear i think now it's really the process is on the floor about whether or not we continue to go with the four um which i mean like has to go through procurement to get the four to come back and to look at those and i just think we just need to go around the table if that's the way we want to go or do we want to go somewhere else rather than going back and forth about our various different philosophical opinions
196about this what other process is there am i what other process would there be for selecting a vendor for governance training i've i laid out the the processes in my email you've got three choices depending on how much money the contract will be capped at right if it's going to be and i assume it's not two hundred thousand or more you have to file a full procurement procedure it's less than 200 i think the uh council contract was something like 70 000 then small purchase procedures are available and i i set them out the core requirement right now is that there has to be something in detail directing your purchasing agent that she can use to either through small purchase procedures contact at least four contractors and discuss with them what it is you want
197so that they can then provide a response it's essentially a request for quotes the technical name and they would provide a quote saying you know pursuant to what you've indicated you want we're willing to do it for this and you know would be more detailed than that the other alternative a more detailed process would be to just go ahead and follow the usual procurement process which would be and i can give you an example to see of one of those but it would be a much more detailed statement of the work you're looking for it would have to be published for several days and there would be a period in which that is open where any vendor can provide you with a quote i think that the shortest period is three days so it doesn't
198take a long time and then after that you would have uh either whichever process you followed you would potentially have multiple vendors that you would then have to choose from based on the usual principles by which contractors are chosen under the virginia procurement act it was not necessarily the lowest bidder but you know they have to be responsive and responsible and the price has is part of the consideration it's kind of one thing that we could do i'm sorry isn't that the exact same procedure we followed when we were doing the superintendent search and we were looking for the vendor to guide us through that well pretty much yes in the sense that superintendents well if you're talking about supernatural search hiring consultant to help you right and that's that's basically i don't think the
199process called the how much that the price was on that but if it was more than two hundred thousand it wasn't not even close not even on the ballpark full procurement yeah but we did we went through carol yeah yeah and and and you should go through carol because uh definitely other than me she may be the yeah the only other person that has a lot of knowledge of what the procurement act requires she's already involved so i mean she's she's the one that's working with us and i'm this is purely an offer if it would help the board in terms of just having something concrete before you in writing that you can begin to think about i'll be happy to work with carol and this is kind of what i was indicating or trying
200to indicate in my email to come up with some initial draft that can then be shared with the board just for uh for discussion you you all will probably have individual issues with it some of you may not like the whole thing but it will give you a kind of example based on you know i'll look at your contract with the the council of great city schools what has already been provided you all and i've shared all this with carol from the valburn group and as well as some of the you know carol doing her research looking for the sorts of things school boards in virginia have asked with regard to governance training and try to come up with come up with something in writing that you all can begin to look at and make
201a decision on revising it as necessary me with which will give us something that then carol can either use to follow limited small purchase type procedures or to develop a full scale request for quotes of the kind that's used when you can't follow small purchasing procedures okay all right we really need to come down to what we want to do here when we were training with the vsba i don't necessarily recall putting out um uh and and dr houston and dr robinson may have been the ones to kind of work with the then superintendent at that time to to put out an rfp for vsba um i don't know what the process was for panasonic and i definitely don't recall this doing that for council of great city schools but if legally we need to
202make sure that we are dotting our eyes and crossing our tees if this is the process that we should do then let's do it and then if if there is something a scope of work that is already in existence use that use that we want outcome student outcomes based we want team building that's what we want and go with that mr cloud if that is helpful but we really need to move because there are so many other dependent factors that are uh waiting for this action to take place and i'm not trying to rush something not thinking thoughtfully about it we have thought thoughtfully about this for a really long time the elephant in the room is trust that's what the elephant is we have to move beyond that our kids are waiting for us
203and we have to demonstrate leadership so there's a scope that exists if anybody wants to add to that add it put it out there we'll get those four rfps and we will move on i agree yes we already have a scope um that we have already so i support what dr gabriel has mentioned that's what i was saying earlier that's what i was trying to do if the scope of work has changed then i don't i'm not aware of it well i just have a couple comments on that uh i had nothing to do with the vsba contracts i didn't draft them and i wasn't involved in procurement i had nothing to do with the procurement of the council contract i wasn't involved in that it was procured negotiated and a final potential final draft
204of a contract was presented to me for my review and i had a couple of comments for changes so i i and i'm not familiar with the records behind either of those uh which is partially why you know some of these questions have come up but as i i said i'm happy to draft something discussing with carol and based on what i i do know of what the board has indicated before they want and what i saw with regard to the council which was the final essentially the final draft of the contract which i believe was drafted by the council or their attorneys i don't know who drafted it so my suggestion would be i can try to get that done say in the next week import it to you all what we could do
205is schedule a discussion in the closed session of the of the work session i think this would qualify for closed session discussing some of these things both in terms of legal issues involved in the need for advice of counsel but also because arguably too much discussion in open session could affect the bargaining position of of the board as it goes forward to choose a vendor and and form a contract so if if if that's agreeable to the board i'll undertake doing that with say the goal of getting you something by like next thursday with the idea that then it would be the following wednesday i think is the next uh is the board business does anyone oppose okay thank you all right thank you i think i have some unreadiness um but i'm in support
206of moving forward i just think that um there's still some clarity around things that we're going to have to do and i think the sooner we can find a way to do that the the better um whenever it was two weeks ago when we brought up this conversation we assumed or some assumed we could just um take an existing contract and just add on to it and so which we couldn't do and so um part of what um i don't think the elephant in the room on this issue for me is not trust what the issue is for me is making sure that in the principle of doing governance training that if eight people can't agree on something as simple as what is it that we are expecting and trying to achieve then that is
207an indicator of where we are from the beginning and so all i was asking for was that we be clear even if it takes five minutes to just say yes these are the things that we're trying to achieve as a governance team as a whole that would be a clear indication of where the governor's team is and would ensure from the very onset that all eight of us are on board together and so that's the root of my principle in terms of governance it is the board and the superintendent together and simply just saying that you know the majority of this and the minority that is is wasn't even where i where i was going where i'm going is is that the whole purpose is for it to be a team this is an opportunity
208for us to do it as a team and if it takes five minutes in order for us to review what we have to affirm that especially with a new member involved we should do it we we are going to do that and um and so unless are you suggesting another process other than what was just proposed well you know i just the only concern that i had and i shared this with the attorney cloud personally is it just made me uncomf i think that we always talk about in training we have one employee our employee is the superintendent superintendent has you know her employees and in our goals and expectations and we've set some things around supporting the superintendent in leading and i think that we have to be careful because we're going to go
209down the path where the board is going to start picking and choosing when we intervene into the procurement process and become the reviewers i just think we just need to be cautious about that so okay i mean we do want to interview people to make sure that they're meeting our needs we have established what our scope of work what we what we'd like to achieve and i have mentioned to dr rossen several times that i think that for many reasons this is a good time for him to be coming on on the board because you know because we have taken a break and we are reevaluating some of the things we are doing moving forward um and of course we want to work in collaboration with our um our procurement process our our superintendent so
210i don't see any of that going away um but thank you for clarity you're saying you see the eight of us are going to be interviewing applicants is that what you mean well we're going to get a proposal from on who was recommending yeah the recommendation on who who applied we'll review that we'll score that collectively what you're saying yes yes why wouldn't we do that i'm sorry i'm not thinking i'm i'm thinking i'm not thinking we need to be doing that communicate it for everybody's not always clear so i'm just trying to pull out what what you're recommending so i'm clear yes and i was just going to add interviewing people under their circumstances there's a specific fully exception i understand i just think it's important that all of us understand i want to
211be a team okay so next on our agenda we have future agenda item suggestions ms campson would you like to go first you're very anxious over there with your hands my adhd it was hard not to okay i'd like to see a more in-depth and more often updates on what's happening with the facilities as you know in the first cent in the first decade of the century we built five new schools in the second decade which we just finished we built five new schools and and we're not going to even be close to that if we don't get moving on it and so i want to see is rick here i want to see that man tell me where we are have we selected the schools what's happening with it extra money's coming in and
212i want to build we may not build five schools because we've got to build a high school but we'll want to get building so we did receive a presentation two months ago i need lots of presentations because i don't feel anything i don't feel it's moving fast enough yes and so we will be also talking about a decade we will be we'll we'll be meeting with our um art with uh cooperative strategies um on friday and they're going to lead us through a hands-on you're going to have a plan for me to see yes you've seen a plan give them a call but but also i would say refer back to the to the presentation from i think it was no no no in november it's been a while we've had another one we had
213it we had it we had one recently yeah very much not recent okay anyway that's all i just want to make sure that gets on the internet that's an easy one thank you miss vasene go ahead um thanks so i've uh over the last couple few months i've sent some agenda items that i would like to see make it to the agenda related to student outcomes one that i want to hone in on is one of the requests was around an update on alternative education and also which would include a report on short-term suspensions you know what's in our accountability plan around short-term short-term suspensions long-term suspensions what type of incidents i would like to add to that with number of contacts with law enforcement and number of referrals to the juvenile justice system added
214to that i do think it's been a long time since we've had a discipline overview and given you know what what we've been hearing happening in some of our school buildings and also just what we know nationally is occurring with behaviors with their students dealing with also with the traumas that they've dealt with especially over the last two years i think you know really getting a good understanding of how our students are doing is is critically important to me um so that coupled with really having focused attention on student outcomes um you know if you ask me i feel like we've had a lot of conversations about facilities over the past year which are you know have been necessary but i think we also need to focus attention on other areas um the other piece
215is also following up on our specialty specialty programs we've talked about creating equity and opportunity there how are we doing what changes have we made since the last update that we've received you know where are we today and so um that's just two you know two requests i'll highlight but you can refer back to that at some point what i was hoping in our retreat is that we would also get a better understanding of how items are being placed on the agenda and how we might be able to have a more i guess collaborative approach to that um and a better understanding of how that's happening um which i know i can say it very simply we have the accountability plan that we're still following since we we're still operating under that and there's the
216timeline in there that has when we're reporting when dr birdsong and our administration are reporting out certain items so we we definitely reference that and then we have the larger calendar that's been used year after year on reporting and monthly recognitions and things like that and i did review that and that just essentially has dates on it not topics of discussion so i think based off of the the larger one which we went over we we actually went over the larger calendar and it should be posted if if you can send that to me then perhaps it's not where i think it is um but i don't recall one and i know that of course that was anything that comes that was you know i know that was on the on the in the work
217plan so um you know like an understanding of that anyone else go ahead i don't i don't have anything to add to this i think there's an existing list of requests that have um come forward uh like ms massena more interested in earning understanding what the process is in the calendar so we know what to expect um you know we were there were some we were at one point working on um issues around um school names and i'm sorry around white school school names names okay um and uh so i just wanted to get it you know understanding when is that coming back is it dead what are we doing so there are things that get discussed here uh task forces get started we should have some report that comes back you know to me
218it's more about the the process piece i think that um some feedback you know if you do get a request from a board member for an item just letting us know if it's going to be placed if there's not going to be place when it's going to be placed i haven't in a queue so i don't always know exactly when it's going to be placed but i have it you know waiting and i will you know we'll have this discussion i'll say what about this is this ready you know and we'll have that i mean this isn't a new process this is um pretty much i mean i don't it's just like anything it's uh whenever we can get it on the agenda when the time is right or if it's mandated through agreements we've
219already made then i understand that i'm just saying just being able to communicate back so like we were talking about the calendar the reason we did the big calendar is to be so that everybody would know certain things when they were coming this is not what we just need that calendar and no and another example for me is like so it's described at the retreat that we're doing something with cooperative strategies i guess that's the only thing that we're doing now i don't know how to prepare for that so is it yeah we don't actually have anything posted yet for that but can can somebody describe what we're doing dr birdsong can you talk about your communications with cooperative strategies please yes we will continue the conversation that we've been having with cooperative strategies for
220the last couple of years tomorrow friday you will have an update again with recommendations around the board's priorities which include decreasing the concentration of poverty within some of our schools and looking at new boundaries they will be bringing forth those recommendations for hopefully the board to consider so we can take action there are lots of things that we will be making recommendations on and we will need the board support especially as it relates to having some public hearings and things of that nature because if we are expected to take some facilities offline and to adhere to some of these recommendations the administration has a lot of work to do and we're running out of time so all of that information again a continuation of the conversations we've been having for the past couple of years
221that's what we plan to do on friday and just so you know just going back to for example what you're saying about naming schools so that is on the list still you know that but if you if you look at it from from the agenda planning do we talk about naming schools that may or may not exist you know so i mean i don't want to i don't want to but if we're going to i think that this discussion about possibly consolidating schools changing changes changing um districting lines we need to put this is what i'm thinking we need to put that ahead of naming a school i don't i don't disagree with that yeah oftentimes we will be in a meeting and we'll say we direct the superintendent to do x by certain date
222and then we don't do it so and that's not a superintendent that's on us as a board so i'm saying that if we originally said we're going to do something and then it's the recommendation of the board leadership with the superintendent that we delay it then just communicate it back to us so we know otherwise that's not the only reason though i mean we had staffing changes and we all know that the person who is in charge of that that was charged with um that making recommendations on the naming is no longer here if i may um so the administration came forth with a recommendation in the timeline we presented that to the board the board had a discussion about what they wanted committees to look like and so that's where the conversation halted it
223was not based on what the administration did or not do or a turnover in a person in a position it's thought right here at the board in terms of our next steps i thought there was another discussion that's going to be had okay yeah which is which is my point so will is there anything going to be provided for friday or is there anything the reports everything will be posted tonight okay because i know it wasn't posted when i looked it will be posted tonight for five days retreat thank you okay anyone else right with that um meeting adjourned thank you all for a great discussion thank you