001[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Welcome to Montgomery County Public School System board meeting is now beginning. Today is April 15, 2025. The time is now um 2:00. This meeting is now being called to order. There is a quorum established at this time. Is there a motion to approve the agenda? Madame President, I move that we approve the agenda. Is there a second? I second it. Has been moved and second. All those in favor of the agenda approval do so by showing of hands. It is unanimous. At this time, the board will go into executive session. But before we do, I'll read our executive session statement. The board will go into executive session to discuss good name and character. We should be in executive session approximately 15 minutes. During the executive session, no votes
002will be taken. Is there a motion to go into executive session? Madame President, I move that we go into executive session. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor do so by showing of hand. It is I just did it was for uh good name and character. That was the first thing. Oh, for the motion. Gotcha. I move, madame president, I move that we go into executive session to discuss good name and character. All right, it has been moved and second. All those in favor do so by showing man. All right, thank you. It's unanimous. All right, into executive session. This is her forte. This is her field. This is her love. And she has just um rocked it. And we we could not be more proud of the stores and kind of job
003she's doing. Thank you. I'm the interim superintendent, Miss Wilson, and I am here because your teacher, Mrs. Norris is our teacher of the year. So out of all of our teachers in Montgomery, we have chosen your teacher, Mrs. Lewis, to represent all of our teacher as the teacher of the year. So we are so excited. I'm so excited. Thank you so much. Thank you. This is so cool. I really appreciate this. I feel this is amazing. Thank you so much. You're welcome. And we did that because of all of your innovation. When we look for teachers of the year, we look for teachers that create innovative experiences for our students, not only in the classroom, but are also examples for other teachers and leaders. And so you are that this year. But I really appreciate
004this. I love this job. I love what I do. I love these kids are amazing. Um I have high expectations for them and I think they know that. But at the end of the day, they're some of my favorite kids and they are they do incredible things. cuz they make this job amazing. She was my third grade teacher actually and she's been one of my favorite teachers ever. She's always so fun. Her like she's always she's never sad. She's always like happy and smiling and she does such fun stuff with us. She's just the best. We love you very very much, Miss Norris. Congratulations. [Music] The person at the end of the line actually [Music] um good afternoon. We're just so excited to host um Dr. Mackey and his team. Um I've had a chance
005to connect with Mr. Wles who is the director of department of agriculture and um it's just really good for us to be able to partner with Sweet Grown Alabama. um our students uh thrive off of healthy living habits and so we want to make sure that we stay um engaged with Sweet Grow in Alabama to ensure that our students have healthy eating habits. National School Lunch Week started with John F. Kennedy in the 1960s and it was brought about to bring awareness to everything that the child nutrition program does nationwide. We serve over 30 million students and we just wanted to bring our initiative form to school um kick it off and start off with doing that in our district for this week. Um it started with a phone call from the department of agriculture.
006They wanted to increase farm to school activities in our district and they selected us to do a test run and hopefully do it in the future. And today, you know, we're we're we're featuring uh Alabama grown products throughout Montgomery County at the Montgomery County School. So, there's over 18,000 lbs of food today that will be served in the cafeterias in Montgomery County that came directly from Alabama farmers. You know, one of the most important things we can do is help make sure our students are healthy. And uh being healthy means eating healthy. We want students to know where their food comes from. We're fortunate that in Alabama, agriculture is actually our number one industry. Uh brings in more money to our to our state's coffers than anything else. And so students need to understand that
007this food uh comes from Alabama. Certainly we we have food that's shipped in also, but it's all grown by farmers here in the United States. And um with the cafeteria, our students come together and they eat at the table. Parents are so busy now. And to have students experience family in the cafeteria, but not only experience family, but to have farm to school products. Oh, the perfect school lunch. Um, well, you know, you definitely in in every meal, you got to have a like good good staple, so a good meat. So, I'mma definitely go with some chicken, some grilled chicken, some like seared or sauteed chicken, probably with mashed potatoes, some bell peppers, um, some fresh fruit, and not milk, but probably juice or water, but milk works, too, cuz you need milk. When I
008was at middle, I gave eighth graders to ACT because kids were just coming to school. But I need you to do more than just come to school since they taking algebra one with me and that's a large portion of the test. So I started giving it to the students then because it was all about exposure and most kids are just afraid. go. I wanted to give kids a fighting chance, start exposing them early. So then and then they also I want you to think about there's more to life than just coming just going to school, but what you plan on doing with your life, how you've been thinking about that. So that that was important to me and that's what this program is kind of doing. What we've been going over a lot in my
009class is the ACT. So, um, we've been doing a lot of ACT problems and we're hoping to get our ACT scores up for the students who are participating in the class that I've been teaching in right now. I just took a little test um, in math and basically I learned that I need to like manage my time a little better because I tend to like ponder over questions too long and I know the answer, but I kind of like second guess myself. So now I'm going to know next time when I do that like just focus on the questions and like manage my time wisely. My hopes are to become an artist and either go to a art school or just um an HB.CU. That would be really good. Um to get in there with
010almost a full scholarship if I can. Um that's my biggest goal. So I don't have to pay for college. I want to go for free. So I hope this program will help me with that. I have been attacking English, reading, and writing. So, I've been bouncing around from each content area. Um, but as far as some of the skills that I've been incorporating is time management as well. Unfortunately, for each area, it's a different time um guideline. There are different parameters, but I've been getting students familiar with those, giving them test taking skills, um, showing them, well, getting them familiar with the content. like for reading for an example, if they know their strongest passage, why not go and attack that passage first? So, just getting them familiar so when they see it on ACT
011test day, it won't be foreign. Um, since I'm going in engineering, I do want to try and study the uh the sciences and mathematics a little harder so I can get um those scores up for engineering schools I want to apply to. main things I really wanted to benefit from this camp and one of the main things I signed up for it was because I just want to improve my ACT score in order to because the higher my ACT score is like I can you know broaden my horizon and expand my opportunities and stuff like that. So our goal is to give them early exposure. So we're doing calculator practice. We getting them familiar with the formulas and we're also going over actual ACT problems. So giving them that early exposure so they're prepared by
012the time they take the test in the 11th grade. Showing them how to use process of elimination. We're showing them how to plug in the answer choices to get the answers if they're unable to solve the problems. We are showing them how to um work backwards, how to draw pictures to figure out the math problems. So we're going over several different strategies to help them increase their scores. And we also going to every kid that's in this program will be able to take the ACT. they're going to pay for them to take the ACT. So, that'll give them some exposure. and the more even the middle school kids cuz 40% of the ACT is material you get before you get to high [Music] pull us up. We will now convene a special call board meeting.
013No votes were taken during executive session. This meeting is now being I'm sorry. The meeting is now adjourned. Our next meeting will be May 13, 2025 at 5:00 p.m. in the regular board meeting training room 1. The meeting is adjourned. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]