001all right good evening i'm showing seven o'clock and it looks like everyone is here um dr gibson you don't have to have the screen share of the flag do you absolutely ma'am excellent if everyone would please join us for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands with liberty and justice all right the first thing i have this evening is um well welcome to the regularly scheduled meeting of the jefferson county board of education on monday july 12th and i believe we have a presentation dr gibson are you going to be leading that yes ma'am i certainly will thank you um first before i start sharing my screen i would like to thank all of the many people who came out
002to our equity forums over the past week um and participated uh it's a topic of interest for a great many people and we were very blessed to have people from every walk of life from every uh position and including a number of students their parents we had staff we had community members we had grandparents it was um a very robust discussion and i greatly appreciate the people who turned out to um have a discussion not necessarily to impose their point of view on someone else or even to try to convince someone else but simply to hear everyone's uh story so that they understood and we all all grew together so um for that i'm very very grateful and um the information that i'm going to give you tonight i want to let folks know all
003of this is on our website this powerpoint is on our website and an faq that um has questions that came about in the forum answered on there and we will continue to post information to that as we get additional questions so um i simply wanted to share that so right now um i want to start this slideshow um as i said we had the equity forum we had good turnout it was particularly uh positive that we had a large number of students quite frankly who came to talk about their experience and their feelings on the programs and their experience as jefferson county students um the first thing that we started with in the forum and i will hear is um we wanted people to understand the information that we used to base some of our
004decision making on when we look at equity programs and how equitable our outcomes are for students the first thing that we showed them was five years worth of trend data for our english language arts program and uh as we noted there is very little variation on our english language arts program it has been uh fairly successful by any standard we are perennially in the top three top five in the state and the last year for testing we had the highest um english sat scores in the states so our staff does an exemplary job with our ela program and our balanced literacy program which has been very effective so when we look at our math trend data one of the things that we wanted to point out was when we were reviewing data um uh years
005ago we noted that the performance of our students in mathematics did not match the performance of our students in english language arts and we undertook a number of initiatives to begin to make some changes in this data now uh as i hope you can see on your screen the red bars on the far left are designated as does not meet standards uh by the west virginia department of education and the blue bars on the far right for each year are for exceed standards for students performing at the highest level and as you can see over time our teachers have again worked really really hard to uh reduce the percentage of students who do not meet the standard and increase the percentage of students who are exceeding standards and performing at the highest level uh they've
006done that by really focusing on teaching students the ideas behind the math working on higher order thinking keeping math journals really focusing on the thought process behind the math and not just memorizing formulas and it has paid dividends i mean overall as a school district as you can see we've had enormous gains from that now what we then look at is it's one thing to say that we're doing well as a system as you know the federal government requires that states and school systems break the data down by certain subgroups so we go from looking at the overall to looking at the subgroups and saying uh does everybody benefit um equally do they have equal outcomes based on the programs that we have so for english language arts um we do have uh some gaps
007between the performance of our black or african-american students and our white students um those have stayed consistent uh within the framework and and they haven't the the subgroups haven't changed as much um meaning that there's still like a two percentage point variation in those we haven't closed the gap with those but no one has gained or lost ground it's a fairly static program um what we then found is that oh okay it jumped past the slide um okay i apologize let me stop sharing for a moment and make sure that i get it to uh i'm so sorry i don't know why that it's uh that it's um not i apologize for just one moment sorry um these were in a different order earlier okay there we go um from the beginning thank you for
008the demonstration of the real life issues our teachers have faced this past year oh not purposely they are so much better than i you have no idea um or actually many of you have an idea okay so moving from the ela trend data to the maths of group trend data and what um we found with the the math subgroups is that we had considerably more uh variation and considerably more of a gap than with others um one of the things if you look at the data for black or african american early on in this journey nearly 60 percent of those students uh scored at the lowest possible level of does not meet standards and only two percent exceeded standards um so that was of significant concern so as we noted the district as a whole
009has uh made considerable gains now um those those gains have accrued to all of our subgroups we don't have any subgroups who failed to make gains um our white subgroup and our low ses subgroup um were similar 13 and 14 reductions in failure rates and uh nine percent and eight percent increases in um exceeds standards um our black subgroup actually in terms of overall um failure reduction rates uh they we reduced that by 24 there was a significant reduction in the number of students who moved out of the lowest tier however we did not see the same substantial gains in the exceeds standards we did lower the gap between low scs and black from 22 percentage points to and we lowered the gap between white and black subgroups from 25 to 14 so while that's
010great news we still have double digit gaps in terms of the performance between those uh subgroups um i think also concerning is that at the very highest levels which often are necessary for college admissions for scholarships for a number of engineers steam careers we we have seen the gap widen because low ses and white students have made greater gains and that exceeds high level math category than blacks so that gap is widening so one of the things that we um have heard from individuals is well um does poverty explain those findings when you look at subgroups so we then went and what you see in front of you right now is an enrollment demographic comparison where we basically took students who were black and all non-black students and looked at their low ses status so
011it is correct that a greater percentage of our black students qualify for free and reduced lunch than of our white students i mean our are non-black students so that encompasses every other group so um it also is true if you look at our n numbers that 509 out of our 8 400 plus students are black so it is about 6 percent of our population so a a small number of students but of that number 41.85 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch um whereas only 25 of the 25.4 percent of the non-black students qualify but when you look at the next chart that's a comparison between black students low ses and not low ses and non-black students low ses and non-low ses and what you'll find is um while there is certainly an effect of
012um low cs status on that group it's it's an effect on both groups but it affects white students far less there is a significant portion of that gap that's not accounted for through low ses and in fact in most of our programs our low ses gains are nearly identical to those of our white students um so looking at that data we then got the question of well um is it because they're not getting the material are they not coming to school so we looked at the attendance data and uh this is this year's attendance data but we went back um to 2018 looked at the same data and it is it is very consistent within less than a percentage point um black students attendance rate was 94.56 and for white students it was 95.45 as
013is often the case us low ses was our lowest um attendance group and again 93.22 we we have um and and i'm not sure what our status is this year but there have been years when we have had the best attendance rates uh in the state we our families very much value education and send their kids so looking at all of those things we still have a responsibility to those subgroups of students for outcomes so when we looked at the research and wanted to work on programs and actions that would give us equitable outcomes for those students because it's not just about opportunity everyone has the same chance because a lot of our students come in with very different starting places very different supports at home so um one of the things that we looked
014at was recruiting and retaining staff that are reflective of that uh subgroup population um there's a pretty well-known study uh that johns hopkins did that showed that um black students who had at least one black teacher before the third grade increased um their college goal rate by and decreased their dropout rate by 29 um if they had um two black teachers then uh by third grade it increased their um college um attendance rate by 32 so it was a pretty dramatic effect so we've worked really hard with our hbcus and our hakus to recruit and retain uh black and hispanic teachers culturally linguistic responsive teaching which is just a very um education ease way of saying that kids learn best when and we learn best actually when you take something if you're trying to teach
015them something new take something they already know or something that they're really interested in and tie the new thing to it and when you do that kids learn better so culturally linguistically responsive teaching simply means find out for this subgroup of students whatever they are um what their greatest interests are what they already know tie the new information into something of interest and consequence for them and that's for any group um we the last thing you'll see on there is developing in and implementing instructional programs that target those populations which as as you recognize uh we attempted to do in a math intervention program so this is probably a very uh good place to pause for a moment and uh point out that during a lot of one-to-one conversations with people and all of our
016forums the basic concepts of this program what it is attempting to do and wants folks have a clear idea of how it's implemented um are very supportive so most of the um i think conflict or frustration or fears about this program were based on the way we communicated it and i as the leader of the system have to take responsibility for that and i do um this program at its heart is first of all it is an a supplementary program it doesn't replace any math class that we already have there is not a student in the school system who is going to come out of their regular math class to take this separate math this is an additional program sort of like math 180 which is another supplemental math program that we have however the
017program teaches to the same west virginia mathematics standards now i've had some questions about common core west virginia does not utilize common core west virginia uses the west virginia college and career readiness standards and the math that's taught in this intervention program is the same math that is in those standards the difference is that it is taught using different examples um essentially they tie a lot of the math concepts back to um different cultural references most of those cultural references african-american so when i think one of the examples that we gave was the pythagorean theorem and talking about yes pythagoras did um develop this theory in greece but did you know that before then he traveled to egypt and worked with these mathematicians um so i think it was particularly meaningful and effective for students
018who have that interest it also has a lot of real world examples in terms of cryptocurrency in terms of exploring careers for mathematics and uh using different historical figures that children may or may not be familiar with to show what those are so that type of program any student can benefit from and any student is welcome to benefit from um however in our communication and our eagerness to make sure that the subgroup of families knew that this was intended to support their children in a very specific thoughtful way we inadvertently gave the message to other students that they they thought perhaps that it wasn't for them and for that um i apologize so i wanted to give the board some of the suggestions that came out of the forum and i want to put out
019this is the forum participants suggestions it doesn't mean that we'll be able to take or do all of these but um we heard a lot about needing to extend this beyond the summer even had we done the full four weeks it it wouldn't have been long enough to get data on results um we got suggestions about identifying high performing students to act as peer mentors now the suggestion was that those uh be students who identify as a minority however we would never restrict that role if anyone wants to be a peer more mentor more power to you kids learn really well from other kids um we also had a suggestion to train teachers um just to put those tools in their toolbox and they can pull them out whenever they want to or need to
020with any kid they think will benefit um which is intention um and not to replace anything that they're doing now just to give them uh another another um tool in their toolbox um we also got a lot of uh feedback about communication and about clarity and visibility and had some good conversations about the balance we always strike between parents who say we bombard them with information and they want to us to be more mindful and folks who say they want us to tell them everything every time on every channel so we do own that we need to be better stewards of information and and how we get that out to folks so when we looked at uh what we could do to help correct some of our earlier missteps uh one of those is to
021actually to rename the program and not um to in any way disrespect any part of the population but simply because the name itself uh led people to believe that they may not have been welcome if they weren't black or that black students would be required to take it neither of those is accurate um so we're simply simply naming it the culturally responsive math intervention program which is exactly what it is as as boring as that may sound um we are also putting back out to the um community electronically and flyers uh that they'll have an opportunity to join this program we'll have the final two weeks of it during the summer experience we will um we're looking at clubs rotations after school links different ways to incorporate this program and these um techniques into the
022regular school year throughout the year and um we i thought it was a great idea and talked to the staff and they also thought it was a great idea for us to expand the training that we do for teachers to students to interested students so that they could um be stewards of their own learning and really empower them to um take ownership of their learning and support them in moving forward so again i know that was kind of a hopefully really quick um and i think again all of the folks who joined us for the forums i wanted to give the board an update of where we are and thank everybody for their uh support as we continue to work through serving these kids well thank you very much putting it together simply and for
023everybody that participated in it can i make a few comments and questions um so i wanted to thank you for offering the forums because it gave the public a chance to look at the data and the good news is that black students can in our learning math in jefferson county schools we don't want black families to think otherwise because the data shows that that's actually not what's happening when i looked at the 2019 data black students 24 proficient overall and so then i looked more closely at which schools were contributing to that and i found that one particular school is weighing down the numbers for the black achievement so for example if you look at washington high school 30 percent of black students are proficient in math 35 of white students proficient in math black
024students are have higher rate of proficiency than hispanic students at washington however if you look at jefferson 41 of white students proficient in math only 8 are proficient in math and that 8 has a heavy weight because we're looking at only we have only 247 black students who took the test and 3 412 white students who took the test so the numbers at washington though it looks like white students are more proficient by four percent four percent more scored proficient that's not even statistically significant because so few black students compared to white so it could be that just two black students didn't meet proficiency and it it gave an average of four percent difference but the numbers at jefferson are so extreme the difference between 8 and 41 um if we just remove jefferson high
025school from this mix the the percentage for black achievement well proficiency and i know that your data and i'll just finish that it would increase at least more than the hispanic students in some cases um at the middle school or at the third grade level black students performed better than hispanics uh one elementary school hispanic students did better than um white students um so my overall it's skewing the numbers so the black students are doing just as well overall or at least proficient level as any other race if not more in some cases when you account for the numbers of students actually taking the test so i i feel like you know um racializing achievement is distracting from the overall true performance of the school system we need to look at the true performance of
026the school system we only have 36 percent of 11th graders who scored in the proficient category on the math test that's 36 overall of all 11th graders and i i just feel that that's not you know that's not acceptable and um we so we really need to increase the overall achievement of all students and i understand that the data was focused more on just that highest level exceeding which that's important too but students are making gains and they are learning across um you know all the schools and i the the black families that i spoke with um some of them felt that you know they're being singled out um it's an implication that they don't do as well as other races and they feel that it's not fair to compare um you know even the
027data that you showed comparing black students to all other races you know and to keep hearing that and keep seeing is is not fair to them because it's actually not the case like i said they're doing just as well as their white counterparts at many schools that's all i was glad to see that we also have a group of students that are hispanic and latino students that that need to have additional instruction as well and basically what we're doing is using multiple learning modalities that are different than the ones we traditionally used and that's not something that happened yesterday that's been going on for years and as as many uh different modalities we can teach teachers to use is a good thing because therefore more students will learn well any other questions or comments all
028right thank you dr gibson yes ma'am next up we have the deputy superintendent for instructional support update and welcome mr banks thank you very much good to see everyone i'm going to give you a little bit of an update it's certainly not an update of the time that i've spent in this position i've been here a week but what i'm going to give you an update on is summer school we are about halfway through the six weeks and i'm going to share some statistics with you about where we are with summer school so that you can see those and hopefully my screen here we go so i'm going to go through this and certainly as you have questions don't hesitate to ask that doesn't mean i'm going to be able to answer them i'm learning
029a little bit about summer school each day as i uh have the opportunity to learn more in this job so through the first three weeks we have a total of 942 students a wait list of 133 of those 942 641 about 70 of them are riding a bus and about 85 uh students of those 942 are taking advantage of the child care along the side you can see the student count by grade level the daily attendance rate which is about 60 percent and if you look at that bar graph just below those numbers you can see the attendance very typical it starts out usually very high in summer school and then it dips throughout the summer depending on what families have going on at home so you'll see that up through today uh attendance is
030at 60 county wide next as you go down um you'll see that the majority not the majority but many of the students that are attending this program are our k-3 students that chart right there in the middle that you'll see kindergarten one two and three it's on the on the left hand side 94 110 103 103. so you'll see that the higher numbers tend to be at the lower grade levels for students attending the program as you move down you also see that the high schools have the highest number of participants and and i believe that that's because a large number of students are taking advantage of credit recovery so that's why those bars that you see here on a student count by home school are higher there for the two high schools as you
031scroll down for elementary we'll see that shepherdstown elementary has the highest number of students from that particular school and then ta lowry so shepherdstown has 108 students and ta lowry has 82. further down we get into transportation a little bit and i mentioned that statistic earlier around 70 percent of the students are taking advantage of busing don't know who's getting a ride to or from it's just that of the students enrolled 70 percent of them taking advantage of the bus transportation and then right below that you'll see the child care graph and a large percentage that green number indicates the number of students who are not taking advantage of child care at the locations finally down at the bottom you'll see the high school program and apex is an online program and then of course
032you know what live instruction is so you'll see that a higher number of students are taking advantage of the online program as opposed to the live instruction with 11 enrichment only so i just wanted to give you that update again this represents half of the time that students are going to be in summer school a total of six weeks the program is six weeks long and we have been been in the program for exactly three weeks so again like i said before i'd be glad to answer any questions and more than likely i won't know the answer but i'd be glad to check check into it and get back to you are there any questions about summer school i have a question yeah why is there a wait list is it a wait list for
033students to get into summer school i mean i thought we had so much funding available the there's act and i don't understand the waitlist part what is that for you now um dave i can i can help you here uh certainly we do have a lot of funding what we do not have is a sufficient number of staff to be able to deliver for all of those students who signed up so we had folks who came on either they registered after the deadline or they were in a program that was full and um unwilling to go to another place or we simply didn't have room so um i will certainly note that with almost 950 students the previous largest summer school program that we've had has been no more than between 150 and 200 students
034and at the end of a pandemic year for alex white our somo team instruction to put together this robust summer program and get enough staffing for it was um quite a heroic effort so while i certainly would love to see every single child who wants a full-time summer camp and transportation and food we simply could not garner enough teaching staff who at the end of a pandemic year were ready to turn around and teach for another six weeks well how long are they on the wait list and if these students that the attendance is so bad 60 um is there a time when those students are said you know told you either come to come to the program or we'll give you a spot to somebody else does that happen i can certainly get that
035data from dr eversol and mr white about how many students have uh failed to show and been removed thank you i think that's awesome that you're offering child care that targets a group of students that we could not serve if we didn't provide that opportunity i'd also like to add that it's been difficult finding bus drivers custodian secretaries not just teachers it's been across the board and you need those folks absolutely in place to make sure the summer school runs as it should with a huge thank you to all the folks who stepped in and subbed when we when we needed them to serve as many students as we could kudos to them the other thing i wanted to mention if there aren't any other questions and and i just happened to come across this
036today so um it's on the website and it's a really cool story there's a a young lady from wildwood middle school her name is grace ott and she took first place in the state prepared public speaking contest she was outlining the differences differences between animal rights and animal welfare and it's just a great story that's on the on the jefferson county schools website and and uh all the things that she went through starting back in february her teacher miss finnell her ela teacher and her ffa advisor miss poole helped her uh get ready for that but that's that's quite quite an accomplishment and i just want to say uh congratulations to her uh if i had more time i'd bring her here and and have her talk to you guys tonight but uh we just
037found out about that i just found out about this this morning so congratulations to to grace uh a student at uh wildwood middle school an ffa member mr banks i i just have one more question um i it was hard for me to keep up with your your your powerpoint your presentation could you send that absolutely thank you all right thank you very much we appreciate the update um next we have approval of minutes and before we move on to that i just want to confirm dr gibson that you are taking minutes for this evening since miss murder is absent is that correct yes ma'am um absolutely i'm i'm taking minutes for her which um i i also want to put out since i since i am taking the minutes i know that there was
038a discussion uh at the previous board minute meeting regarding uh minutes so i just want to be clear that the minutes are a record of the action taking and are not a transcript nor will there be a transcript of the meeting for those individuals who want to go back and see any of the discussion that led to any of the votes or any of the positions taken by folks they can review the video which we post uh typically within 24 hours of the meeting i know that one of our board members stated that they wanted the minutes to function as a transcript because a video could be spliced or pulled and i actually want to point out and thank mr jason johnson who is the man who does the videos for us who is a
039five-year employee and actually certified in cyber security and an exemplary employee and i thank him for his integrity in this process and have full faith that he will continue to do the same job and ensure that anyone who wants to access the information has access to it so thank you thank you and i will not put you on the spot and ask you if you are taking the minutes and shorthand the way ms marner does now that's like a foreign language i i don't know how to do that exactly all right so is there a motion to approve the minute the regular minutes from the board meeting held june 28 thank you mr cable is there a second i'd like to make a motion to amend the minutes do i need to wait for the
040discussion or yes ma'am okay american thank you mr yeah i'd like to make a motion to amend the minutes so that they reflect that i did call a point point of order um for the last session um i said that i made that we shouldn't go into executive session because it's a violation of the open meetings act so and point of orders are to be listed in the minutes and that's not listed it only says that i voted no but it doesn't say that i did call a point of order because we're not listing on the agenda what we're going into executive for and um again that's according to the open meetings act we are required to do so at least mention personnel or legal or something but we don't list anything and certainly if
041the board so chooses to um designate that as a point of order and demand that is a choice of the board um however we do have a legal training session scheduled for the board at which it will be clear that the current methodology for executive sessions is legal and valid despite what individual board members may believe to the contrary so we i will be looking forward to that training are you suggesting that when a board member makes a point of order that it's not supposed to be listed in the minutes no ma'am it i said that it is it is a vote of the board to determine what action they're going to take i i do not function as a board member that's the state code it's supposed to be listed when a board member
042makes a point of order or emotion you have to list that i i don't know what you know i i've gotten my information from many legal sources and so you know we'll see what the um the board's lawyer has to say but i mean this is public knowledge verifiable i can send it to you which came to me from this state right now what's before the board is a motion to amend and that's the decision of the board for a point of order i have no recommendation one way or the other you're welcome to act as you see fit your elected board members okay is there anyone interested in seconding um dr joy's motion to amend the minutes all right not hearing a second we have a motion on the floor to approve the minutes
043from the meeting held june 28 2021 all in favor say aye ms ogden i'm sorry you're on mute i couldn't hear you thank you opposed no all right thank you moving on to citizens comments and dr gibson i apologize i do not have the list of the citizens who signed up if you wouldn't mind uh not at all mr johnson has those and he will be moving them over individually uh the first person that we have signed up is mr paul clark um and uh i will um denote for uh all of the participants i will presume that you do not have in front of you the rules for public comment um which uh mr johnson usually posts up um so simply to let folks know will you be doing the uh timing i would
044be more than happy to do the timing thank you ma'am so thank you so much mr johnson uh always want to come to the rescue in a moment of need so uh for those who are coming in for public comment uh please note that uh everyone who is on public comment submitted their request in advance we asked again 10 minutes before the start of the meeting um speakers are limited to three minutes speakers are prohibited from making negative or derogatory comments using a name or position by which an individual can be identified comments may not be threatening profane vulgar or abusive or the speaker will be required to cease his or her comments um anyone who deviates will be called out of order by the chair and required to cease uh it is not a
045question and answer period uh individuals can come and express their views on any subject matter they direct those to the jefferson county board of education the board will not respond to those comments the purpose of a public comment forum is for them to hear all matters of interest to the public so with all of those caveats thus said our first speaker for the night is mr paul clark and he will be followed by miss karen buck okay so uh mr johnson has uh searched the queue of attendees and there is no um mr paul clark listed as we noted to everyone who contacted us to sign up your screen name uh must match uh your sign in um mr johnson i believe that the uh individual whose name is user has their hand raised i
046think perhaps that that individual may be mr clark um and you can uh contact him in the chat to verify that um and if you could uh move miss uh karen buck over then she can complete her public comment while you are verifying um if that is mr clark okay so similarly um say that you do not see miss buck um miss buck was able to join us for our forums which i was deeply appreciative of um if she is out there then please raise your hand and we will um uh locate you uh next up we have miss barbara fuller i believe that jeffrey fuller is a miss barbara fuller so i'm going to promote uh her as a panelist while we work to confirm mr clark and miss buck um let's see so
047okay we do not have a miss fuller in the chat any longer or on our screen not sure where folks are going um so um jeffrey fuller is this miss barbara fuller i've turned on your microphone so that you can speak i've also moved to promote you as a panelist which you are not accepting so i can't move you over against your will he's showing as a panelist but he's showing us muted right so um if this is miss barbara fuller i need you to unmute and complete your public comment okay okay um so the last individual that we have is miss uh jessica bridges and it appears that miss bridges is not uh here so all of the folks who signed up for public comment uh received a uh notice that they were in
048public comment and to either give me their screen name or to have their name as their screen name and we would be happy to move them um and at this point none of those individuals outside of user has um either arrived so um dr gibson excuse me uh didn't we have a stephen mcdonald as well uh yes sir he indicated that he would be attending um and he wasn't sure if he wanted to speak i told him that we would i would put him on and if he chose to come that i would place this cue so um hi can you hear me oh hello is this mr clark yes it is uh wonderful i'm glad we were able to finally thank you sir yeah i think you're having a problem with the other uh
049folks too i think you're muting them or whatever but i just now got the pop-up that says uh you know that you gave me permission to join the meeting so um anyway um so what have you got three minutes or whatever i'll go ahead and start the timer okay so one of my biggest uh things that i'm noticing here apologize i've got this phone on because i tried to call in um you guys are getting wrapped around the whole black versus white thing and it's just a continuous theme not only the presentation but you know a lot of the discussion here and i i really wish you wouldn't do that i think that donna joy was on the same was on the sort of the right path when she was talking about the racialization which
050is a word that's new to me but i find it pretty uh descriptive of what's going on you guys all kids are the same okay i i know everybody comes from different backgrounds you know i did too i'm all over the place i was poor i was rich i was poor it doesn't matter the teachers matter the curriculum matters that's what you should focus on and the other part of this is from what i've heard i don't know how much money you guys are getting whether it's in the federal government or or what but there's a lot better ways to use that money you mentioned that that that gentleman mr banks came on and he had you had issues even making the summer program work because of lack of folks um you know let's hire
051some better people if you're gonna use that money use it for what it's worth i wouldn't accept it but because there's a lot like a lot of government programs you've got uh stuff like critical race theory tied to it you've got all this other crap coming down that has no bearing on math reading writing english all of the normal things that every kid should be exposed to black white asian hispanic you've got a whole bucket list of races on there it's ridiculous a teacher should be able to teach to any human being no matter what color and it's getting ridiculous and i don't know if you guys are forced to do that because the department of education or the state or whatever but it's got to stop you're having this problem over in loudoun county
052it's creeping right over the mountain well it's all over the country is this this cultural freak show revolution that's going on and it's affecting everybody learning our history our culture our heritage our way of life our entire society and we're all supposed to be the same under god there's no black white this or that and if there is then people ought to stamp on it and that's your responsibility as board members even in your little world of jefferson county and i would highly encourage you to get rid of these little dopey programs put the money around the teachers get good talent in here that's where it's going to pay off that's all i have to say thanks were there any other public comment speakers available right next up we have the consent agenda are there
053any changes to the posted consent agenda yes ma'am there are two changes to that agenda one of those items was changed from a um a higher to a transfer and another one was a withdrawal of a resignation um and both of those changes are redlined on there um i i also want to address a point that was brought up during our previous board meeting since we're at the hr consent agenda portion of this we had a board member who publicly made an accusation that our human resources department was violating the law through a hiring process and that statement was untrue both in fact and in law and all of our hr policies and the particular action that that she spoke of uh are compliant with 18a and i appreciate the fact that we all have
054strong feelings about matters but i think we need to take care in ensuring that we have accurate information and that we are respectful of the employees who do their jobs and work very hard and are following the law and need to be given the due respect and due diligence for that so thank you is there a motion to approve the consent agenda with the um amendment to number one from a point to change transfer and the amendment to number 13 deleting the resignation thank you mr osborne is there a second okay thank you mr cable any discussion yeah um i want to make a motion to pull number 29 from the agenda um that position was never approved by the board um it's also a violation of state code you're referring to um the dnsu
055to the attendance coordinator yeah number 29 we didn't approve that um and it also uh you can't go from attendance to a director to attendance that's something in the state code okay is there anyone interested in amending the motion yeah i just did i'm looking for a second oh i don't think you need it for the consent agenda that's what i've been told so i mean i know that's what you've been practicing but um apparently if a board member asked to pull something since it's the consent agenda if you don't agree to it we have to go through each item individually that's my understanding okay so right now we have a motion to approve the consent agenda including the attendance coordinator which i believe is required by state to have an attendance coordinator it is
056required by the state to have an attendance person they are their title at the state level is director locally you don't have to utilize that title um and certainly our attorney laura sutton is able to speak on that matter um the the rules that uh dr joy is referring to uh under robert's rules of order actually apply to what are called small boards um meaning if there were boards that were smaller than this functioning board which this board does not use the specialized small board rules so it's inaccurate that if a board member wants to pull something it has to be done and then you have to go through item by item so well either way we never approve this item and um this position and also it does say in state code it's to
057be the director because that's a pay difference we don't have a um a job description you know we the board has not seen a job description for coordinator it's not approved it so we are not supposed to be you know hiring people until this position is approved so it appears that we may need to do a training on uh human resources law and protocol and i am happy to arrange for the staff to do that yeah you can do that but we still need to pull that gender right now we have a motion to approve the consent agenda with the two amendments that were made by dr gibson and we have a motion and we have a second all in favor of approving the consent agenda say aye aye [Music] all right thank you opposed
058we oppose thank you all right we have no unfinished business this evening and for new business we have request action on the naming of the jefferson high school softball field yes ma'am uh we will be moving over mr bill stewart to do that presentation and i know that several members of the naming committee are uh here along with most joyce white operations that field naming falls under so i'll turn it over to miss white good evening members of the board dr gibson this evening um i would like to request that we that the board take action on the naming of the jefferson high school softball field um the official name that's proposed is the lawrence and debbie vickers field and prior to your vote i do have mr bill stewart who would just like to
059say a few words and give you a little brief background about the vicars and the naming of the field thank you for inviting me to the school board meeting and it's also it's always very very exciting for an administrator an athletic administrator to honor volunteers and one of the highest honors that you can bestow on a volunteer is naming something after them lawrenson debbie vickers basically built the salt ball field maintained the softball field and also had worked uh participated in work with the concession area when i started researching uh softball field uh history and those types of things everyone mentioned the vickers and in 2013 and the packet of information that you received there was a letter to susan wall who was the superintendent at that time requesting the name of the field to
060be after the vickers with research supported by joyce white we did not find that that letter ever made it to school board agendas or approval when i brought this back up this letter was very interesting to find and um we also had letters of support from former athletic directors john brown jay kirby and the current head baseball coach john lowery senior we also received faculty senate approval so we went through all the steps and the request here is to name the field lawrence and debbie vickers iii field thank you thank you mr stewart all right so from what i understand you're requesting action on the board's part tonight for the renaming of the field or the naming of the field is that correct yes that is correct all right so is there a motion to
061approve the naming of the jefferson high school softball field the lawrence and debbie vickers the third field thank you mr osborne thank you miss ogden any discussion all in favor of naming the jefferson high school softball field the lawrence and debbie vickers the third field say aye aye opposed thank you thank you all right thank you for joining us this evening i would also note that there are several members of the vickers family who are on here as attendees and watching this broadcast including people who put an enormous amount of time and effort into making this happen and making uh jay high softball successful including some great coaches um that's a family business over there and i would just like to say thank you so much to vickers group the whole clan out there really
062well done thank you for doing so much for our kids it's it's appreciated it's seen and appreciated all right yes thank you to them absolutely next up we have um superintendent's comments madam superintendent do you have any comments for us this evening uh no ma'am i do not thank you all right and then this evening i believe we have an executive session is that correct yes ma'am we have an executive session for legal advisement and for personnel okay so um pursuant to west virginia codes 6-9-8-4 is there a motion to enter executive session to discuss pending litigation against jefferson utilities with the board's council which is protected by attorney-client privilege as well as personnel okay thank you mr cable is there a second thank you mr osborne that i want to call a point of
063order um as the public wasn't given any indication about this executive session in the agenda um it's supposed to be listed in the agenda i mean you've said it now but um technically it's supposed to be provided to the public once again we're currently following the guidelines that we have been given and we are rechecking those guidelines and that's all i have at this point so um there's a motion to go in executive session all in favor say aye opposed okay um 807 we're gonna go into executive session and dr gibson do we anticipate action this evening uh possibly on the personnel action ma'am okay so we will go into our executive session zoom and then we will come back to this when we're done correct yes ma'am all right thank you you