NHCS Board of Education Regular Board Meeting | May 3, 2022

001it's half chocolate and i see pineapple i love it hello anita can you have him turn me up i don't think you can hear me no you're not very loud so it's the microphone can you all hear me okay all right good evening everyone good evening everyone the may 2022 regular board meeting of ed that the new hanover county board of education is called to order ms bowie will you please call the roll good evening stephanie craybill here stephanie walker stephanie adams here nelson bullier here judy justice he mcmanus here and pete wildeboard okay um so again welcome to the new hanover county board of education's may regular meeting thank you all for joining us in person or in our remote viewing audience we value and appreciate your interest and participation and your advocacy on

002behalf of all the students and staff in new hanover county schools we have a very very full agenda tonight and i certainly apologize for that the budget will be our focus but i had to incorporate a number of other requested topics please do your part to contribute to a successful and a non-stressful meeting by treating each other with dignity and respect throughout the meeting no matter what your thoughts or feelings are about the issue or even a particular person or group who are with us tonight so the board can remain focused on completing the governance work so necessary for our students staff and schools to be successful as we work through our agenda tonight i would like to remind you that not every topic or change that we discuss tonight must be said in policy

003to achieve desired outcome and that consensus agreements are acceptable disruptions to our meetings will not be tolerated just as they are not tolerated at any other local governmental body meeting where there are no listed rules of decorum rather just common sense and calming courtesy and professionalism in action but that said per general statute 143-318-17 people who are disrupting our meetings will be asked to leave if this happens you can view the view the meeting on live stream on new hanover county schools tv or on new hanover county's youtube channel but before we get started uh miss billy could you put the teacher thing back up again real quick i would be remiss if i didn't give a huge shout out to all of the educators on national teacher appreciation day actually to our whole staff

004who deserves to be appreciated this day and every day will the audience please join me in a round of applause for all of our educators [Applause] okay now let's move to the first item on the agenda the approval of the agenda take a motion to approve agenda second is there any discussion or any items that can be um removed from my request none okay all right um all in favor say aye aye any opposed all right dienda is approved next on our agenda this evening is a invocation and a moment of reflection delivered to us by the reverend paula zabkar spiritual leader at the spiritual i'm sorry spiritual soul center um here in wilmington sorry i don't like glasses on no need to apologize yeah thank you for demonstrating the respect that's due at an

005invocation i demon thank you board thank you all i like the approach of looking up the definition of words and an invocation is an opportunity to invoke the holy spirit to invoke god to bring the holy spirit to bring that guidance into this very moment now that's what this is about and it reminds me of the story of elijah in first kings where elijah is actually running for his life jezebel has put out a price on his head for killing hundreds of prophets and elijah is scared and he's running but he rests and he takes a rest underneath a shrub and when he wakes up the next day there's food and water waiting for him so he has enough to keep going and the next day he wakes up outside a cave and more nourishment

006to keep him on his way and the message he gets from inside is this go to the top of the mountain for there you will find god about to pass by so he's like all right so he gets up on the mountain and there's this terrible shaking earthquake but god is not found in the earthquake and there's this terrible wind that whips and whips and whips but god is not found in the wind and after the wind the fire comes burning the fire but god is not found in the fire after the fire a sweet and absolute stillness the voice of god in the stillness and so that is what we are invoking today is to become still because that is where all of us receive the guidance of holy spirit of god of jesus

007of allah of krishna whatever you call the name of god that's where we get the guidance from we don't get it in the weeds we don't get it in the turmoil we get it in the sweet silence of our soul it reminded me too of the book of john chapter 5 verse 30 where jesus says this i cannot do a solitary thing on my own i listen and then i decide and you can trust what i decide because it's not my will but the will of god through me what wisdom that if jesus is giving us that guidance that guidance is here for us that we will not find it through our own will through our own decision about what we think is right or wrong but we will receive that guidance from within the

008stillness of our soul and one more in john 13 verse 34 jesus gives this simple command if you are a practicing christian maybe you observed lent this time of year certainly in the muslim tradition ramadan this focus on god this focus on the holy life and you know what monday thursday is about you know what the word mandy means mandy means command and jesus gave one command in john chapter 13 34 and he said this love one another that's it this is the place this is what we're called to do in this moment as we serve the the students as we serve the staff as we serve as teachers as we serve each other that we should be guided by the still small voice that whispers to us over and over again love one another

009so let's take a deep breath in and close our eyes and come from our mind into our hearts to come into a place of stillness and to listen to listen for the guidance that we can get nowhere else on earth the guidance that comes from the command that we can hear whispered right now to love one another that i myself can do nothing that i rely on the wisdom and the guidance of the god in me we commit to that together during this time we know that when we do that we put the interest of every single student every single teacher every single staff member every single human being right here to the forefront and we rest assured in the power and presence that is god with us in us and through us and so

010it is in this moment and every moment moving forward from now amen amen amen thank you reverend zavkar next the presentation of colors from new hanover high school rotc [Music] while we're getting our performers in place i wanted to make sure that everyone knew this was the air force junior rstc oh [Music] was [Music] mercy [Music] is [Music] and the home [Applause] and if you would all join me in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right thank you very much new hanover i am jackie booth your supervisor of arts education and i am so excited this evening to welcome the murray mastery choir tonight can

011we get another round of applause [Applause] in just a moment i'm going to pass this microphone down and let them introduce each uh themselves to you but i would also just in the spirit of treachery appreciation week like to brag a little bit on miss blackwood down here who is a first year teacher that's right and has just been working wonders at murray myrtle school so let's also give some love and a round of applause for our first second and third year teachers they've had a hard time y'all all right so i'm going to pass this down and they are all going to tell you their name and what grade they're in um my name is rhys and i'm in eighth grade my name is caitlin and i'm in eighth grade my name is maya

012and i'm in eighth grade my name's madison and i'm in eighth grade my name is cassie and i'm in eighth grade my name is isla i am in eighth grade my name is lyla and i am in seventh grade my name is max and i'm in seventh grade my name is jordan i also go by jonah and i in seventh grade my name is sarah and i'm in eighth grade my name is christian and i'm in eighth grade my name is veda and i'm in eighth grade my name is zoe and i'm in eighth grade my name is layla and i'm in the eighth grade my name is harper and i'm in seventh grade my name is ava and i'm in eighth grade my name is violet and i am in eighth grade um my

013name is candice and i'm in eighth grade thank you very much [Applause] as they're leading i'll go ahead and just recognize the new hanover high school air force junior rotc color guard under the direction of lieutenant colonel mark half happy and matt master sergeant jose denijn okay so next on to the the best part of our board meeting is um recognitions and introductions so i'd like to call caress clegg is she or no dr faust you're gonna you go first yeah the um so what we're going to do first tonight is we are going to recognize the students that um their artwork was selected by the superintendent um and each one of the board members got to pick one and if you see the art around the walls right now this is the art that

014was selected last year so those of you are who are in the room congratulations for being selected and your artwork will go from those easels to the wall at the end of our meeting tonight so um welcome and we're gonna we're gonna introduce each one of you and thank you parents and principals and teachers and siblings and other support folks coming to um support these young artists you know the um art is such a great thing so dr faust i will let you go first okay oh when they call your name would you just go stand by your piece of art and and so that way we can kind of put a name in the face with that so my selections were alex tarp from coddington elementary second grade sorry alexis i'm so sorry alexis

015is alexis with us tonight wrightsville beach elementary third grade is lena with us okay nope lana all right next one is sarah daya 8th grade myrtle grove middle school okay thank you miss pitroff for um leading the way she is the um art teacher there principal cindy bliss foreman 11th grade ashley high school is ran with us okay um so next up is um stephanie craybill um the i picked a selection by jackson pascarosa who is a second grader from blair elementary [Applause] principal aaron livengood in his freshman year gay and art teacher kensley rhodes and i just want to tell you that i picked your your picture because it's springtime in flowers and i got note cards made so thank you jackson miss walker um yeah i picked uh jeremiah palmore's um art piece

016fifth grade at snipes academy whose principal's rachel manning um our teacher is cassandra kane and i picked it because it was it was a very beautiful picture i think they call it still life i'm not 100 sure maybe they can tell me that is here you're am i here tonight you represent all right thank you thank you all right my selection was for dylan graf who's an eighth grader at murray middle school uh principal is justin fischetti and the art teacher is laurie patterson um i love this picture because it's the nighttime scene it looks like of times square and it's just absolutely electric and it looks like it was done i think with chalk with pastels and it's just beautiful so is dylan here well amazing piece of work and i'm excited to see

017it hanging in the building before you go i think i saw a young lady did we call her name and she just got here okay never mind we'll get her okay so um yeah for my selection i picked ninth grader jenny enright from ashley high school principal is patrick mccarty and our teacher is helly moritz and i just thought that you know this piece in particular uh was so interesting uh because it blends something old with something new the artist and it's a neat take on a classic so i really appreciated it thank you [Applause] uh and i picked a it's actually a beautiful photograph by lillian hayes she's a 12th grader at laney high school the principal is sharon deschamps and her art photography teacher is andre haley now i picked it it evokes

018a lot of feeling i i have some photographers in my family so i've been very familiar with what involves technique perspective uh the mood that it creates and it's it's a water scene here at the beach i don't even know if it's located here but what it does is it really gives a feeling of this community in our relationship with the ocean and and nature so i really was pleased by it uh is the young lady here [Applause] mr mcmanus um i selected i'm justin is it bolsoy am i saying that is he here is she here okay which is the to me western gentleman with the hat and the guard because i love cowboy movies but uh and the art teacher uh in hoggard is mrs sinclair and sinclair is she here but i

019love her i've enamored with it i'll buy it congratulations last but not least mr wildeboard well the piece i selected was by savannah classing eighth grader at roland grise middle school [Applause] principal charlie broadfoot and our teacher jen capps um it's just such a perfect picture i mean for me especially i just love cows i love animals this is just a beautiful example of a weld just a beautiful art piece it's just a gorgeous piece i can see you know i look out in my front yard and i see ones that look just like this so it was just beautifully done uh you were quite the artist and i just want to congratulate you on on your abilities because you have a lot thank you who was the young lady with the blonde hair that

020came in a little bit late back okay yay um so are we going to take pictures of them standing by their art [Music] can we do that is there anybody mind if we take a minute um um [Music] right [Music] no that's okay we're gonna bring them out in a minute [Music] ladies i've got a bunch of students that are about to attack those book bags [Laughter] i gotta let him come get the bag i think i cleared a path um [Music] um [Music] i just moved the media out of here [Music] oh you're welcome have a good night okay thank you let me sit behind my chair and see if you can get us all in yeah [Music] i might just leave him here because it yeah i think it's gotta be my whole

021house is definitely like thank you yes [Music] we're going to take a break right before programs i'm just trying to help him remember which one i mean it's been a while since we couldn't do it yesterday this is why it's little beach in the morning same time i told my wife [Music] just want to give everyone a chance to give those students another round of applause for their artwork that is not the end of our art recognitions for the evening our art supervisor jackie booth is she still in here with us probably feeding the other students but she does a phenomenal job helping us to celebrate acknowledge and promote the amazing art projects that students are involved in across the district as with the artist we just heard from she helps to collaborate both internally

022with colleagues as well as with our outside partners and organizations such as the azalea festival arts contest to ensure all interested students are able to participate and showcase their talents across their chosen medium tonight we recognize our first second and third place winners from the 202 2022 azalea festival youth art contest first place winners sarah frances butler from new hanover high school [Applause] [Music] jenna ball new hanover high school [Applause] next up ava grace and hayden boyson from porter's neck elementary school and mr slavic if you will come up and get their certificate [Applause] [Music] from noble middle school jasmine hicks moving on to second place we have myra benson from hoggart high school corey keeley from laney high school carmen palettas from bellamy elementary school ashlyn reisley from mason borough elementary school bella hawker

023from new hanover high school and then our third place winners we have patient sands from the career readiness academy at mosley [Applause] and stella kratzer from bradley creek elementary school our next recognition i am pleased to have with us from college park elementary school members of their science olympiad team and we have them right behind us if you guys want to come on up with your very large trophy this team is led by science olympiad coach miss minshaw and principal dr maria madison and they are our first place winners for the district science olympiad we congratulate these pioneers pioneering students and their coach for their dedication and hard work [Applause] swimming [Applause] our final recognition is not here tonight but i still wanted to go ahead and give his recognition this recognition of the evening

024evening is a national honor for one of our students it is a prestigious honor bestowed upon an exemplary young person in recognition of leadership service academic excellence and dedication to living a healthy lifestyle it is my pleasure and i ask that you all give a round of applause for holly shelter middle school 8th grader joaquin dingle the 2022 community boys and girls club youth of the year miss crable board members and dr faust we will be taking this award to mr dingle at holly shelter later this week so we will be sure to send you guys that picture of the young gentleman that concludes our recognitions for the evening okay so now we've all go we're on a little bit of a high here so let's just um move right on into our next presenter

025is um we welcome chris kudray and jessica loper from madam chair thank you um county manager chris coudre sorry i didn't finish my world thank you it's a privilege to to be with y'all tonight the chair extended an invitation to me to come forward and do a little context and level setting on the proceeds that came to the county as part of the sale of new hanover regional medical center whereby we created the new hanover community endowment and then also established a number of escrows but i think the one that is of most interest to the board is the 300 million dollar revenue stabilization fund so my mission here is again just to level set i do have some folks with me that certainly can help out jessica loper and tim buckland both were very

026intimately involved in that entire process and i believe we actually have some commissioners with us who were the decision makers in that process but let me start out by saying what i want to do is offer the context of what both the endowment is intended for but also the escrow to answer any questions that you have about either of those funds and i'm not here to represent myself as an expert on the endowment it is its own organization i'm not here speaking for them but but i was party to the process that helped create the endowment so certainly understand the strategic intent and then it's to really remind not only this board but the community at large about the permanency in both the endowment and the escrow that those funds were created actually through a

027three-party agreement that was approved on october the 5th 2020 and so what is in place really can't be done and i say that because number one novant health which does still exist helped create it new hanover regional medical center that no longer exists in the form that it was known at the time actually the the chair and and me and a few others are still part of the successor corporation but also that the county approved collectively an asset purchase agreement that defined the specifics of that so i'll briefly address the intent of the endowment it was seeded with about 1.25 billion dollars that that's a b not an m but a b 1.25 billion for the for broad purposes that are to be consistent with whatever the then adopted new hanover county strategic plan is

028at the time that it was approved very clearly public education little p little e both primary secondary and post-secondary are things that the board wanted the endowment to look at it wanted it to look at health and social equity it wanted it to look at community development and also at community safety but at no point was the endowment constructed to ever step in the shoes of local government state government or federal government so what the county does what the state does how the federal government supports our community the expectation is those funding obligations or new opportunities are done by those decision makers and the endowment here is here to to be a supplement to that i think the other thing to note about the endowment is that it is intended to outlast all of us

0291.25 billion dollars should last a few years and the endowment is actually limited to four percent of its interest earnings on an annual basis that it can actually return to grants across the community because not only do we want to fund the nonprofit space other public entities we also want to see the endowment grows that 1.25 billion becomes 2 billion or even 3 billion and that folks who are not yet here walking among us are actually the beneficiary of those proceeds in the long in the long run so those are the primary categories of interest in focus but they will change as future county commissions change its strategy what's clearly noted in the apa as i mentioned is that the endowment has to evolve with the county as the county sets those priorities now it

030wanted to take meaning the commission wanted to take the politics i hope it's okay to say that the politics out of the decisions on how to invest the money on an annual basis but also where to actually grant make on an annual basis and so that is why the board created the endowment it has decentralized it has given all of the the grant making authority to the endowment so long as it's consistent with the priorities as i said of the then county commission which at this moment again it is public education but not to step into the shoes of what is the state's responsibility local responsibility or federal responsibility it currently has an interest as i said in health and social equity it has an interest in community development and it has an interest in

031community safety that may well change over the course of time the other area of interest as i understand that you have is on the 300 million dollar revenue stabilization fund that has a very clear charge with it also defined by the asset purchase agreement so the use of those funds by the county commission again there's permanency in that because it was part of the asset purchase agreement and so that cannot really be undone as it was imagined and i think it's important to note that was intentional by the county commission by new hanover regional medical center at the time as well as novant novat wanted to understand how its investment was going to go to benefit the the community so how the 300 million dollar escrow can be used similar to the endowment i should

032say is certainly there is interest in using the interest earnings on an annual basis those are going to be limited returns because we're subject to local government commission oversight on how we can invest those dollars the endowment is not that was one of the benefits of standing it up as an independent entity it can maximize in a smart safe way but it can maximize and and we imagine a time in the near future where 1.25 is going to be generating 40 to 50 million dollars of interest that's not going to be the kinds of returns that we ever imagine not only because of the size of 300 million but the investment opportunities are very very limited and so those interest proceeds can be used by the county commission with a simple majority on an annual

033basis that looks at pay as you go use to use it in place of voter approved debts and it's also intended to minimize taxes in fees in the future out year if the county were ever to consider the principal and again we want 300 million to grow by reinvesting some of that interest if there's ever an interest by the county commission in using any of the 300 million in principle that requires a super majority and so in the case of the county commission four of five commissioners so the the thresholds are very high it was intended to do that nor the escrow nor the endowment though wherever as i mentioned intended to step really into the shoes of what it is that we are currently doing so madam chair that's kind of the large context

034level setting i'm really here to answer your hard questions bring some clarity what to what can and can't be done with with those funds and so i'll pause there madam chair and take any questions that you have mr waterboard thank you for being here this evening um so last time i was you know with some of the county commission we have to discuss teacher assistance and obviously the state pays teacher assistance or and and other classified staff but uh to bring their salaries up there seemed to be quite a lot of support from the county commissioners on that is that something we could use some of that money for so i think it's certainly not something that the endowment could or likely would consider that that is a going cause a responsibility primarily of the

035state i don't know that it's really in keeping with the intention if you think about the four or five things called out in the asset purchase agreement for use of the escrow either it's um to do pay as you go it's to pay voter approved debts that are either generally um approved by the voter or limited obligation bonds it's also to minimize taxes and fees in the future or to address emergencies that were not foreseen which is why the board chose at one point to use some of that escrow to deal with our community violence issue to pay for teacher supplements to to increase the pay of any member of the new hanover county school system that staff or faculty i don't think at all is in keeping with the intent of the asset purchase

036agreement and the fact that it's not called out specifically would likely not make it possible which is why when the board addressed teacher supplements in the current year it used general fund dollars to do that which established we we believe that the best paid teachers in north carolina at an adm rate of three thousand uh three hundred and thirty four dollars per student i hope mr wildebore i answered your your question i think you did yeah so most of what the county's going to do around education is with its general fund okay miss justice all right you just said something very interesting yes ma'am emergency is not seen i'm sorry you said that it could be used for emergencies not seen correct yes absolutely that is in the asset purchase agreement okay uh also let

037me state here i did not know you were going to and i'm glad you did because i had requested it but when we did the agenda i didn't wasn't aware this was going to be that you were going to be here uh or i would have brought the documentation i had before of the sale and uh i think it was october 2020. it was october 5th 2020 when the asset purchase agreement was approved that's right at the time the pandemic i guess you could say was the beginning of the pandemic we didn't know what the result would be we didn't know about the inflation situation we didn't know what would be going on with our schools so they did though and i don't have it with me and i wish i did i wish i'd

038known you'd been here no it wasn't um anyway i could have brought it the way the same way i presented it to the board before in that document that was signed by she said novant the county commissioners one of you know chair and also um the new hanover county regional medical center at time which no longer exists uh that they the very first the number one thing it was to be used on was public schools and they gave four or five different situations which is very relevant now you've used one for safety correct ma'am you've used one for safety correct we've used one for sale i mean you have voted in funding out of the was it the million dollars the board will have to revisit it as part of its approved budget but when

039we presented the community building plan to address community violence it does assume some amount of escrow out of the 300 million for that no money out of the community endowment okay so not the endowment himself i'm talking about the 300 million um so considering that many of us think this is an emergency and that the state nor even at this point federal government has helped some but then even with our local funding we've already increased taxes once for the teachers not for the other assisting staff um if you did have a four to five majority it would be possible to use these funds for the concerns of i've heard it from many people where the tas um oh my gosh all our staff i would disagree with that okay why why no if say that

040it wasn't uh oh i'm sorry i didn't know you were there excuse me i'm talking to mr cordano right now so if if according to this document though if the four to five super majority voted for the use of the money outside well any for basically i guess you could say technically for any reason they could do that correct i i would disagree okay when you look at the asset purchase agreement and where you're referencing um public education that's probably more directly aligned in where the endowment can support public education primary secondary post-secondary that's not really at all the intent of the [Music] the 300 million dollar escrow the things that were called out for intended use by the escrow and i would not think that because the economy has raging inflation qualifies as an

041emergency that was unforeseen it is to sunset or pay off voter approved debts or limited obligation bonds it is to use those dollars as opposed to issuing future debts or it is because of unforeseen economic crisis and i don't at all believe and could not with a straight face argue to the board that using it to fund teacher supplements or supplements for other staff qualifies as a use well that is my opinion right correct i could not and would not make that argument okay so but can we go to the next question all right so everybody gets a chance i just want to clarify that's your opinion correct that that is my opinion and and i'm not going to advance that argument to the board so i guess it is in fact fact mr boyer

042did you have your hand up yeah yeah madam chair um mr manager i just want to thank you uh commissioners thank you very much for for coming to speak with us this evening um i don't think anybody disagrees that we've always wanted to solve this issue with regards to pay but you know it is i have a over developed sense of justice and when i came on the board uh the county commission was supporting our board to the tune of 2 900 per student like i said before we had to fight tooth nail the first year to keep every penny of it uh and the manager and this current commission and the last commission uh have really put their money where education is um i think it would be unfair to say they haven't really

043done that and every time we've said we need they have said how much and good luck and they've been our partners and they've worked in good faith with us so when they come before us and tell me yeah that that's just not what we're going to do that's not responsible governance i take it seriously and i certainly respect that position so thank you very much again sure and i'm here madam chair to to outline what you can and can't do not really engage in a debate amongst the board but i've got what's known as exhibit c in front of me that defines what theoretically the endowment should do but also the 300 million dollar and if that's where the interest of the board of education is i think i said this retirement of voter approved

044debts establish pay-as-you-go financing so that we don't issue debt reserve funds to address budget shortfalls in the future things that we don't see and minimize minimization of tax and fees those are the things that the 300 million dollar principal escrow can be used and it would require four-fifths of the board to use any of the 300. the interest earnings that this year will be somewhere on the order of of 2 plus million requires a simple majority vote but we have made a proposal to the board on how some of that limited interest earnings in this year could actually be used thank you did you have a comment ms adams i just had a comment and and following up with a question just for clarification um this was an item that i wanted on the agenda

045because there is information that has been put out into the public that is incorrect by our board members and i said it during the budget meeting and i will say it again it is an embarrassment to this board to not understand what is accessible and what is not accessible to our board of education you have worked with fidelity you have been amazing partners and we appreciate the commitment of the commissioners over the past couple years mr kudray i appreciate that you are here to clarify this you mentioned public education health and social equity community development community safety and you said look at was was the quote look at does not mean committed to or required to commit the money to certainly as it relates to the endowment the the board appointed and delegated all of

046the grant making authorities but it does has to it does have to be within the the framework that you just recited back to me not exclusively but within that framework and it's limited to being able to grant four percent of the rolling average over five years well we're a year into the investment so i can't speak to how much money the the endowment is going to make available later this year but the asset purchase agreement that established the endowment limits them to four percent of the interest earnings over a five-year average and one follow-up question the new hanover county board of education does not have access to this unless it is granted by the county commission it has no access nor does the commission to the endowment proceeds yes it is not entitled to any

047of the 300 million unless it's a four-fifths vote and it would need to be in keeping with the four things that i noted retirement of voter and non-voter approved debts established pay-as-you-go financing for capital assets that could be certainly your capital in a year over year or as we partner with you on replacement schools that certainly is an option reserved for unexpected emergency spending and the specific recitals in the asset purchase agreement at the time were natural disasters and pandemics reserve funds to address budget shortfalls during economic downturns and minimization of tax and fee increases in future thank you for clarifying that is how the principle may be used with four fifths as approved on october 5th 2020. thank you for no other way can it be used it's permanent thank you does anyone have

048any more clear points of clarification for mr coodray okay last one because we're over our time it's quite clear you are very clear um perception of what an emergency situation is is going to vary according to the people that are you know involved and you said also it will take a super super majority for fifth of july commissioners to release any of these funds so thank you very much and you are quite clear all right thank you so much for being here and clarifying that for us um that will certainly help us in our budget deliberation later this evening okay thank you thank you all for the invitation who came out to support mr kudray okay um next that was a sneeze somebody's oh sorry all right so next up on our agenda is um

049the student voice initiative and leading us there let's see who [Music] who got to take the lead on that one well my clicker is not go there we go you all come up to the podium however you want so under the under the um adult ally position um dr casey smith and um shala harper and their student members will provide us with an update on the student voice initiative program so i think we have sarah francis butler will be starting us off yeah i just want to make sure that you guys knew all their names and where yes please so you have sarah francis butler from new hanover high cassidy thompson from hoggard simon bond from laney preston hargrove from c-tec thank you and to naya tune from laney as well and looks like she's

050giving you that visual thank you appreciated thank you [Music] welcome good thank you student voice is recognizing and acting upon the fact that students are the primary stakeholders of our education and should be partners in shaping it on august 17 2021 isaiah singleton presented a speech that highlighted the importance of including students voices within the district's decision making after receiving praise and excitement at this meeting isaiah and myself along with several other students and adult allies began creating a framework that would make students more involved in decisions within the county from september 2021 to january 2022 we met at least once a week to discuss our goals of the student voice project create methods of gaining support develop application materials and brainstorm ways in which authentic student voice structures can be directly applicable to our

051county in january we selected a group of 19 unique individuals from almost all of our high schools to collaborate in the student voice project and create change in the district since then we have met about once a week to discuss topics such as advocacy and solution methods school governance and important student equity terms today we feel confident in our ability to present to you our personal experiences with this student voice project this is this spring we will share briefly about educational equity 101 mapping issues and root causes authentic student voice structures in new hanover county schools gathering peer input about issues and student voice structures local governance and finally our call to action foundational to understanding student voice possibilities is an understanding of educational equity our group discussed what makes our identities unique such as

052gender identity race class disability immigration status language religion location sexual orientation and how the intersection of these identities can create complex challenges for members of marginalized groups in our community these factors contribute to the opportunity gap and are not the fault of the student but the system making success difficult we can't change our identities but we can seek ways to change the system through equity equity is having access to fair and impartial resources equity is creating safe places to share where we can acknowledge and respect others by recognizing that each person is an expert in their own individual experience we then apply what we learned to current issues in our schools where the goal is to create more equitable diverse and inclusive learning environments part of our job as student leaders is understanding not only

053the surface level issues but the underlying causes of the problems that our school district faces for example symptoms for an issue like the common cold include coughing sneezing but the underlying issues behind the symptoms be bad hygiene stress and unhealthy habits in school teachers only see the mere symptoms of the many issues our students face like low performance drive bad behavior or lack of diversity yet they are often unaware of the deeper causes of these issues like poor home environments lack of role models or school support students on the other hand witness these causes among their peers and can provide valuable insight within our district to combat these issues however the ways we are included to provide vary to provide insight vary along the well-documented continuum we learned about student voice continuum and ladder of

054student involvement which you can see on your handout then we identified various student voice structures in nhcs available to us including but not limited to student-led clubs student equity teams safe promise club and student feedback boxes when farther dissecting these structures we analyze what makes them efficient and effective some amiable qualities include true diversity lasting change good leadership multiple solutions and respectful collaboration between peers and adult allies we subsequently mapped out who some of our adult decision-making targets were our decision-making targets for example include our county commissioners without actual change our decision and dialogue mean nothing power is the ability to act next salman is going to talk about how our student voice structures become more effective when we hear from more people when we can accentuate and emphasize the voice of our peers the

055peer input process is a relatively quick and structured way to get our input and insights from peers to catalyze an initiative or solve a problem in the community we learned about different ways to facilitate peer input such as surveying conducting focus groups and student roundabouts roundtables or forums as a group we learned several different factors that would affect the way in which we gather this information from our fellow students and community members we ultimately believe that we should have a diverse population to serve with adequate representation this includes students in general education aig students with special needs support admin teachers and students from various backgrounds and experiences when gathering peer input we plan to utilize tools like the student bill of rights and the student voice continuum which are also printed on your handout our

056april 26 session we had the honor of board chair stephanie crabill joining us to educate us on the ins and outs of the school board we dove deep into the differences between policies regulations and resolutions we were able to ask for terry crabill some of our questions and she gave us a lot of helpful feedback of course there is still much to learn about how the school board is run but we all came back with a better understanding of how our school board works a lot of students don't know much about how decisions are made that affect them so this was a very important session to give us a better understanding that we can now share with our peers as you can see we have learned quite a bit in our short time working this

057spring to reiterate this is a time-bound project ending in june that seeks to map various authentic student voice structures in our school system and ultimately provide a final product that will support the growth and sustainability of authentic student and youth voice structures for our peers and future students as sarah said at the beginning student voice is a is recognizing and acting upon the fact that students are the primary stakeholders of our education and should be partners in shaping it having said this we would like to share our call to action with you all and our community in our final month of the project we will be working on drafting a policy for nhcs to adopt which seeks to grow continue and sustain authentic student voice structures we will present this draft policy at a round

058table on june 1st which we will help to facilitate we would like to invite senior administration officers board members and additional students such as those involved in student equity teams to this roundtable our goal would be to leave the roundtable with a policy that has been truly refined and constructed with multi-generational adult and student stakeholders thank you so much for this opportunity to share about our project this evening thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and if you have any questions for us we'd love to hear them we do i'm sure so first of all i'd just like to say thank you um for coming before us and um it's not always easy to stand up in front of adults you know and like look at us and then have all the other people behind you you

059know looking at you too but um your words were very eloquent and very well put together so um i'd like to open the floor if anybody's got something that they would like to ask miss walker so proud of you guys you did did a great job um and we look forward to this conference i don't know who's available but i definitely will be there and i want to hear more about it um you discussed ending in june but you want it to continue on um so we would love to hear how we can make that happen because you know you want to be able to turn the rings over eventually when you're done and make it a structure that we can you know we can keep on listening to students with because that's important you

060said it you're the largest stakeholder here and without your voice it's a little bit it's it just it adds to the discussion that's very important so thank you for coming mr mcmanus if we come you let us ask us the questions the other night um i think it's really important that we accessible to students when we're making the decisions that as you said you are absolutely first the most important stakeholders so hopefully this will continue in some shape form or fashion i can speak for myself and probably most of the board if not all of it that we want your input we seek your input and we support that input so we're looking forward to going through that and what's the date can you share with the round table june 1st that is when the

061round table will be held here you can send us information about that so you don't have to remember all the details email it to us so i also would like to before you jump and i just wanted to tell you too is that um share with the board is that um they did ask some hard questions that um we um just so you all know what i shared um we um when i picked school safety as the policy that we that we talked about and we had just reviewed that so i showed him my notes on when that i gave um when our policy committee meets you know how you know how we do input um i showed him some procedures that go with the policy so you can see the difference between a policy

062and a procedure um if the and your your i guess your mentor nina you know put it i mean she knows more than we know so um about school board operations awesome but just that you know the policy is the why and the procedure is the how and you guys picked up on that you know like instantly and then we also talked about what a resolution was the series of whereases and then the therefore i declare you know kind of things so um they picked up on that um and they got school board 101 you knew in like 30 minutes so um just wanted to share that with you miss adams well first off thank you that was a fantastic presentation you all did a fantastic job and i love hearing from you and i

063just wanted to click clarification on this quote who i i don't know if it was simon that's it everyone is an expert in their unique experience is that who said that can you say that again because i wrote that down and i want to make sure i quoted it properly because it's beautiful and i love it and i'm totally going to use it see sorry i know i'm putting you on the spot yeah okay um equity is creating safe spaces to share where we acknowledge and respect others by recognizing that each person is an expert in their own individual experience love that thank you that is fantastic and i just want to say um dr casey smith has been a absolute workhorse for this project and and who are you pointing out over here and

064inshallah harper too um to be able to bring this to fruition and this has been in talks for years so kudos to the students that have shown up done the work and kudos to the adult allies that continue to advocate for this because it's an important conversation yeah just briefly uh you know all i care what everybody said i think this community is really proud of you and i know your parents are too as chair of the policy committee when that policy is ready i would like to invite you all to come and present it to the committee rather than having our subject matter experts uh presented i would like to have the people who are living it present it to us because it's something as miss adam said we've been working on for a

065long time and that we couldn't do you're doing it and kudos thank you so much miss justice uh you are all eloquent it's very inspiring um and this is your voice i'm really looking forward to this round table and and this you are the experts we don't need any knowledge-based people up here as far as all of us you're the ones that need to give input so i'm really looking forward to what the policy is i'm just i'm just tell you i know this isn't always easy because i work with a lot of young people and thank you for doing this and thank you for showing up tonight and sharing this with us because we need the experts to be speaking and we need to be doing our policy and our ways towards your future

066right right now actually because that's the way it's going to be and by the way that is how democracy works and so thank you for being so knowledgeable because that's what we need is knowledgeable young people in order to have a great future so thank you mr i'd like to just uh thank you all for being here tonight um obviously it does take a lot to stand up you know it takes a lot for us to stand up there so i can imagine there's a lot for you guys to stand up there but and you are our most important stakeholders all our students are our most important stakeholders so thank you for representing them and uh thank you for everything you did to to you know to prepare for it thank you very much would

067you all tell us your names again and what school you're at and what grade you're in i'm a senior at uh hi i'm janae toon i am a freshman at laney high school wow wow i'm solomon vaughan i'm a sophomore at hogarth i'm preston hart group i'm a freshman at ctec and i'm cassidy thompson i'm a sophomore can you remember all the folks that that like the ones who presented yesterday that aren't here that you might be able to introduce them as well and benji and connie he was also here is a sing senior at ashley and benji goes to school with me at lincoln high school okay thank you yeah so would you all um does anybody feel comfortable talking to us just a minute on what the student voice national organization that is

068sort of mentoring you guys um what they do and how they how they support you all right so when we first started it was kind of isaiah tanaya and i that um we're working with ms smith and miss harper and we like went through a bunch of different powerpoints of different national organizations that we could have the opportunity to partner with and we collectively chose the student voice organization because it aligned most with um the direction in which we were going and so they have um local county um sections of their organization where they place um their employees and we have three girls um that are in college or out of college that work for the student voice organization and are in all of our meetings and help facilitate and give us lessons and teach

069us what they have learned they've they all went through the process and are now working for the student voice organization and they do this in any county that connects with the student voice organization okay anything else that you guys want to add besides what you've done what you've presented so far we're looking forward to hearing more from you um i would just like to say thank you to you guys for supporting us um even though we did say you know students are the primary stakeholders without the adults backing us up and supporting us and actually you know confirming what we say um this couldn't be where it is now so i just want to thank you guys and hope we can continue and stay on this ride with you guys thank you thank you thank

070you [Applause] okay next up on our agenda is the superintendent's report so a couple things that we want to talk about today is part of his introduction um in helping us get to understand our budget and how we make decisions and what comes about when we talk about student achievement and when we're talking about what goes on in the building what you have in front of you is the student achievement group so this is a an evos document and every school gets one of these on a teacher if you teach an eoc and eog you get this and every teep so every teacher in our building has a copy of this these have been coming to us from dpi in by way of sas which is in cary north carolina and so this particular teacher

071is what we would consider a highly effective teacher that teacher is blue and she or he has data in the far left to my to me would be those students who are considered your lower performing she or he's able to grow those students the students that are in the middle or your middle group he or she's able to grow those students and on the enter the high high performing students here she's able to grow them the question is how do i know this so there's another form in the the the teacher or the principal gets that actually list every student in their building and there's a projection that tells the principal where those students are going to be based on the data from the state so evos collects data and it puts students in cohorts

072across the state so it's just not the students who are beside you in your classroom it puts you in a cohort among students across the state that look like you and so then when you're creating your class schedule you can look at your lowest performing students and say this teacher works best with the lowest performing student so i can put students with this and they will get the growth or the student gets middle or high or so on the the form that we have here the next one is our comparison with the top 12 first 12 highest the 12 largest school districts in the state of north carolina and so what we've done is we've pulled out the data and this is something i presented back in 2012 and i want to just bring us

073back to a reflection of it and so the four-year graduation cohort as you can see we um at in um 1819 1819 was the last year that we had um clean data meaning there were no interruptions there wasn't covid there wasn't any interruption so this is clean data and so what you have is in new hanover county schools we were at 87.6 um johnson county of course at that point was leading the way at 93.6 this is out of the top 12 schools and so when i say the top 12 those are the largest so we are the smallest with about 25 000 and it goes all the way up to um about 161 000 students and so if you move over to the right where it says proficiency of end of grade tests for

074new hanover we were at 65 percent proficient so out of all of our students 65 percent of them were proficient so that meant that 35 of our students were not on grade level when they graduated um or when they went through sorry when they went through um so if you'll see uh union county at 73.9 percent uh that was highest and in order to get to that high number we were about 1300 kids away how do we know that because we can go back and look at the data and we know this from the beginning so from inception we know where we're going to fall and so we're able to coach principals on feedback sessions as they're doing their walk throughs they should be giving quality feedback so that individuals can ask the right questions

075to students parents can actually ask is my child's future high performing teacher they can also ask what is projection for my child if you're in eoc eog parents can ask that question we have that information um if you move to the next row this one's about our work our act entry score we're 66.8 percent um our cte work keys we're 72 72.6 proficient we have some work to do we have and i will be honest our our school district our county has funding and you're going to see in the next slide the funding that we have and i do know that we can be at the top this document here is the per-pupil allotment that we have at the end of each school year the state releases as we release this one so it has

076our annual daily membership so that column that says final 8 am that's after everything um and that tells us how many students we have so if you look if you'll just scroll down just a little bit scroll back up so i can see the top of it so at the top you have the school name you have how much we finance per student from the state how much we finance per student at the federal how much we finance per student at the local level given a grand total so with these two these are outliers and so i want to tell you that so we have jc rowe and lake forest so those two there are 23 students there 32 students at the other one and we fund those students at 56 000 per student in

077that building and then 83 per student in that building but if you come down and you can see some of our we go to the first one and so you have um we have freedmen so we'll look at for me that's 248 kids so by the state the state funding allotment we funded at 10 553.92 at the federal level we funded at 2 41.61 and at the local we funded at 4 100 um and 94 cents which makes a grand total of one hundred 17 dollars and forty five cents that's per student so what i'm sharing with you is that the wrap around services are here we have the wraparound services and the dollar amount and so if you go all the way to the bottom you'll see it so they're in um adm order

078so if you go to the very bottom i'm sorry at the last school which would be hoggart so if you scroll back up sorry hoggart um which go down some more lowest hunger has 2074 students we go down to shovels hungary okay 2074 students and so for the state we fund that at five thousand dollars for the federal we funded at forty four hundred sixty one dollars and at the local three thousand dollars which gives them a grand total of eighty six hundred dollars per student so what i'm saying is that the funding is in our buildings we have to improve our academic output we have to there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to every so when we think about wrap-around services those these are wrapped into every individual that's in that building

079how many resources that we have if you scroll down just a little more you'll see that they didn't put the titles but those two titles out to the side the first one is the salary there's 57 percent of that is in salary the next part is in benefits so together that's um 57 plus 22 we're at about 79 are wrapped up into salaries and then in that seven percent is central office so the seven percent of this budget is central office so when we look at it we have everything dedicated to our schools everything in the budget is dedicated that's the priority we have to be able to then turn over and say what is our outlet going to look like so we have put together teams of priority schools so our lowest nine performing

080schools they get first dibs on everything that we need they get in the our lead teachers they get to go into those schools and teach side by side the support whatever is needed to help them the next slide if you will so at the top of this one you will see the grade level proficiency by test so our district in ela that's english language learning third through eighth grade 63.5 percent of our students from third to eighth read on grade level and that was your 1819 that's the data that we use because that was the most clean data we can't use last year's data because it was broken um we can't use the year before that because that was the year that we didn't finish so we have to be able to use queen data

081and go from there so the next one is math at the district level 66.2 percent of our kids are on grade level fifth and eighth grade those are science years 81 english 2 64.7 math 1 42.5 of our kids our own grade level math 349.1 biology 67 which gives us a grand composite is all of that across and that's what the state gives us the 65 what i want you to now focus on is what's wrapped around that yellow box the yellow box are subgroups the subgroups now tell us that in each category where students follow so i want you to look at the all and you'll see where i just read all of those to you but now if we look at our black african-american in ela they're 33 proficient math is 35 percent

082proficient science 56 proficient english 2 31 proficient math 124 percent proficient math 3 23 percent proficient biology 32.5 proficient act scores 29.1 workkeys 38 graduation rate 83.6 percent proficient composite overall 35.5 percent proficient so you're probably thinking well how did they graduate at 83.6 of the students we're able to go in and reduce the credits at 22 and we can get students to graduate at the state level and not at the 27. so that's why that we're able to graduate kids if you go over and you'll see the gap so what i want you to just be able to do is see the gap so if we look at the hispanic group we look at the white group you'll see that the there are gaps so african-americans hispanic there's about 10 percentage points of a

083gap and we're looking specifically at our ela if you look from african american to two or more races it's a 30 gallon if you look at african american to white it's a 44.1 percent gap we have work to do that's what we're seeing we have work to do so then if you look over to the right if you pull those over um this will tell you where our school letter grades are so our letter grades um we have five schools that get a letter grade of an a from the state they're on a 15 point scale so what that means is from 100 to an 85 is an a an 84 to a 70 is a b 69 to 55 is a c 54 to 40 is a d and 39 and below is an

084f that's the school ranking so they're on each web page of the school you'll see their letter grade so 15 15 of our schools are graded at a b these are all graded by this by the state a c uh we have 13 schools we have four schools that are ranked at d and one school that's ranked at f remember i was telling you about the highly effective exceeded growth so exceeded growth tells us that the state will give you the proficiency report or a project from evos it'll do a predictability and it'll tell you that this student should get and i'll just make them a number 205 and if they get higher than a 205 then you have exceeded growth if you get 205 you meet growth if you don't get the 205 and

085you go lower then it does not meet growth so depending on that group of kids and how they grow and there's a there's data that goes that along with that that will tell you that portion um over if you scroll down just a little bit more ap exams i know we talked a lot about ap exams and we had a conversation i think we're gonna have a conversation tonight about um our students and a grade of a 50. i understand the pushback but i want you to see this we have can't see that number from here okay students who take our ap exams 59 of 59 of them pass it so these are your brightest of your right and what i was looking for is how many of our schools have 80 percent or higher

086on ap exams we don't have any so what do we have to do we have to find out what's the alignment and so it's we've got to find out if we have individuals going and what pd we're giving them if we're getting them the pd where sometimes in school districts teachers will test i'm not test sealed they'll grade other school districts ap exams they will go for training there will be someone at the district level who is overseeing and able to help them we have to collaborate so it's not that um we aren't teaching the standard we may not be teaching at the level of rigor that the state that that particular test is giving you so at this point we have um roughly if there are 10 students who are taking it four of

087them are probably not going to pass it even though they get an a in the class so we have to make sure that we are teaching to the level of rigor that the assessment is giving at those ap exams next one that's it okay so what i want to do is just to bring you up to speed and as you are going we need i need you just to flash back one time for the per pupil allotment because when ashley comes up and talks i need for us to understand what we're asking if you're brought to the top of that document our budget is built around all these salaries and what we want to be able to do isn't balancing with what we're doing so we're supporting students seventeen thousand dollars per student but we

088don't have the funds to actually keep this going there's no way we can keep this going with the way that we're going to present so ashley's going to come up later and we spent a whole lot of nights on trying to get a budget that we could work through but we've got to make some hard decisions um about our budget and i don't think we're going to get it all done tonight i'll just be honest with you i don't believe we can get it all done because ashley's going to present some things to you and i'm going to be honest with you we have stripped everything we have taken every piece of esther money um it is like we are naturally i'm going to use your saying we are out in the parking lot picking

089up pennies at this point trying to get our budget to balance and the budget that she's going to present to you i can't put my hand i can't sign my name to it and she can't either but we're going to do it we're going to do it because that was what the ask was but we want you to see after you're asked what that's actually going to do in three years to the school district so those were my um that was a long report but i think that was something that we needed to we want to be transparent that was strange fear oh questions okay do we do it okay um mr mcfannis all questions and it's okay yeah as well i'm saying this from my professional background and my personal professional belief haven't been

090in high school many many many years as many of you know and i understand that we all throw money at schools that's that's the norm we're not doing anything other people don't do but i think there's more here for us to discuss and it's going to come later tonight but you open the door for me so i need to say it now number one i think that we have policies that will add to student success and then as politely as i can i've never supported the 50 because there were zero expectations with the 50. and if i can document if i can take that and say so when you give a student a 50 or a 60 or anything where they have not done the work there have been no expectations to come back to

091write that paper that you missed or rewrite the paper or to retake the test after tutoring no expectations for tutoring so you're going to take that child and go on and on we don't have an attendance policy that's another discussion that'll come up later we have had no attendance policy this year i believe that attendance is paramount to holding students accountable and also doing their work to the best of their ability so hugh could you hold the mr again could you hold this comment no no no as much as i respect dr faust he opened the door by president talk about it later in the year and nobody will be here and i want to say it will be on the news i want to may i finish thank you so what i'm saying is

092when we look at the scope and the sequence of the success of students if a child got a 50 and they really didn't come to school or they're in the pre the pre-ap class and their attendance and their performance is not well and then we send them to the next level when they're going to another teacher the next year and they don't have the basic content because i gave them a 50 and i didn't expect them to be in class and we could build upon that then that teacher is held accountable particularly if they're in a state-tested class and now what hope does that teacher have with those kids who we basically passed with no expectations and so thank you for i had to say it thank you mr mcmahon okay so um next on

093our agenda excuse me just a brief comment because we don't usually do comments to the superintendent well there's always questions or comments um i'm going to go ahead and keep it brief there are many other ways of doing this besides throwing money at kids this is a very sad situation in new hanover county between 2006 and 2010 we concentrated high poverty kids in about five or six schools or maybe nine and the results are very evident uh sadly part of it came along with the racial situation because of the redlining and over the decades in this county this is very brief though there are other ways of doing this besides throwing money at the kids i'm just going to mention them briefly and then be quiet because we can talk we do need to set

094down all of us and talk about this we need to help these schools um i i love the presentation i'm glad all of you are getting a feel now what's going on you know as far as decisions being made but let briefly some things we can be doing that's not just throwing money at kids because this isn't a chair excuse me excuse me well let me just four sentences because this is okay and we're going to be here till 11 30 and you were the one who sent me an email that said our meeting excuse me so please just make your comments for one minute just i don't need anybody talking from the audience this is why we need to do course be asked to leave that's fun can i please finish what i'm saying

095yes right okay it is a cultural problem in this district is caused by the high poverty schools we need there's certain ways you can redistrict but that's very traumatic in itself to social economic integration we can have real magnet schools real magnet schools or we could have targeted social economic redistricting which will probably be the most practical thing but that's not the only ways to deal with this these are the discussions we need that i've wanted since i got on this board in 2018 and we need to have them quick on the agenda next meeting thank report um so i'd like to let everyone know that may is mental health national mental health month never before has this focus been more important than now we are so fortunate to have school-based mental health professionals in

096our schools and multiple in our schools depending on their caseload to address the needs of all of our students additionally we have 150 counselors social workers and school psychologists and approximately 38 mental health therapists so i want to thank them thank you specialized employees within our district and throughout our community and across our state so many people struggle in silence please stay in touch with your friends and your loved ones and with yourself um next miss billy could you bring up the the teacher little thing the teacher poem okay so um next is this is teacher appreciation week as we the whole week is teacher appreci teacher appreciation week today just happens to be um this special day so um this was my favorite kind of poem to do um when i was in school

097so i put teacher and tas and that does not diminish any of the other staff and professionals that we have within our school district but a teacher takes takes a hand opens a mind and sees tomorrow in every child's eyes engages students in new ways to learn awakens imagination and creative expression they are confident cool caring and character building they are the heartbeat and the hope of the educational system they're energetic and they're empathetic they're resourceful resilient and respectful of all students tas teaching children as if they were what they dreamed they could be and assisting and discovering and then making new and assisting in discovery and making new friends so thank you once again to all of our teachers and tas who are in the audience who are listening online and who will listen

098to this later we appreciate you today this week and every day lastly i just wanted to make a note that um the the board is committed to open dialogue with parents and the community and we would just ask that um parents and um take take their issue and take their concern to the lowest level possible um to your teacher and then to your principal and then um to a central office person and then to dr faustin to the board so that everybody who is really the stakeholder in the situation that is concerning you has the opportunity to give input and to help you understand and to find the information that you need um i would just encourage us you know not to not that we don't love our media partners in the back but i

099would encourage you to try and use your internal resources as much as possible prior to going to the media and i would liken that if we are going to the media without trying to address it internally it's it's no different than kids you know posting on social media about threats rather than going to a trusted adult and telling them that things are happening so please just keep that in mind um as as you're having difficulty navigating our system or you're you need answers to questions that you have and finally um there will not be an interim meeting this month on may the 17th because the date falls on primary election day so um i wish good luck to all of our candidates all of our um incumbents who are running and the other candidates who

100are seeking public office okay so um next on our agenda is the call to the audience so we're going to take just a quick five-minute break um before we do that um and then we'll come back so i have um 7 42 so let's come back you know in about three or four minutes okay we're not doing the things [Music] next up on our agenda is the um call to the audience i want to thank you all for signing up to share your comments and concerns with the board as we've stated before we we welcome engagement from our school community and from the community at large there are several items we i'd like to cover before we get started with call to the audience per board policy 2310 the board allows up to an hour

101of public comment for call for the audience please speak on the topic on your call to the audience sign up the public has asked this board to be transparent and our school system would be in our school system to be more transparent and truthful and we respectfully ask that you do the same please refrain from using profanity derogatory language and other slurs in your remarks and in your signs and or you will be asked to sit down and leave individuals may stand by their seats in support of a speaker or stand alongside the podium while the individual speaks but always must be kept clear at all times per fire code regulations no one at any time is allowed to approach the diocese we must respect the rights of individuals who have come here to address

102the board as well as those who have come to listen audience members should refrain from yelling out and or responding to comments made by speakers during call to the audience violators will be given one warning and if the behavior continues they will be asked to leave disruptions by any persons or persons at the public meeting will be subject to action including removal from the meeting per general statute 143-318-17 a person who willfully interrupts disrupts disturbs an official meeting and who upon being directed to leave the meeting by a presiding officer willfully refuses to leave the meeting is guilty of a class two demeanor okay so hopefully we won't have any of that so first up on our agenda or on our call of the audience list tonight is chris sutton mr sutter first off thank

103you mr mcmanus for what you said about the attendance policy something that a lot of teachers keep bringing up is the 50 curriculum and the attendance policy so thank you because it sounds like you have been listening to the teachers a lot um something i wanted to bring up here does anybody know what these papers represent anybody want to take a guess so for weeks now for weeks our board members in the community have waited to see our budget 24 hours ago this stack of papers was dropped on our board members and they're supposed to somehow go through this in 24 hours and be able to state you know where we're supposed to make cuts and everything like this you see this in washington i cannot believe we just did our board members like this

104so many people are running off of fiscal responsibility this is ridiculous especially since we all know this could have been an excel spreadsheet and saved some trees and made it easier to actually go through and find different issues another thing that i want to talk about uh fingerprinting and the dane brit issue we're close to a year into this guys this is ridiculous someone needs to pick up the phone and start working on problems the new hanover county sheriff's department said that they were waiting on the school district the school district said we were waiting on them the sheriff mcmahon now stated that we are waiting on new hanover county schools to just tell him for the memorandum of understanding whether we are going to fingerprint everyone across the board or just the new hires

105we we keep tripping ourselves up and we keep having problems go on for too long it's getting kind of ridiculous another thing the rules of decorum tonight we're going to be discussing that the fact that y'all wrote in there as far as holding signs nothing inflammatory or detrimental to the community engagement process is concerning because inflammatory who's to gauge what is inflammatory like for instance the one gentleman back there that had his rights violated he held up a sign that said masking a child is child abuse well to some that is going to anger them but that's what freedom of speech is supposed to be so i hope that you all do work to change that and make it where it's just vulgar language derogatory language and allow them to do it thank y'all have

106a nice night [Applause] i'd like to start by thanking miss justice miss walker mr wildebore and mr mcmanus for their leadership in ending out-of-school suspensions for our four five six and seven-year-olds except for serious violations [Music] last month's [Applause] last month's vote was historic new hanover county is the first school district in north carolina to end out-of-school suspensions for our youngest learners so now the hard work begins teachers teacher assistants counselors social workers principals and assistant principals will need your time and support to focus on upstream strategies to keep our kids learning in school for some schools that may mean additional staffing in other schools it may mean additional training or planning time and in other schools more mental health services might be needed but for everyone it means being committed to keeping our children

107in school to learn that commitment includes informing staff and parents about the revised policy collecting analyzing and reporting the quarterly suspension data and getting feedback from the children and families impacted by those rare out of school suspensions for guns drugs or violence we look forward to tonight's vote on the revised language of policy 4351 approving it will be a victory for the children and then we can move on to end other harmful policies there's a lot of work to be done and love our children is just getting started thank you [Applause] good evening my name is chelsea cooley i am miss usa 2005 and i'm a mother of two students in new hanover county schools i want to talk to you on the budget tonight and i'm going to reference an email exchange between myself

108and jerrell lewis our title 9 coordinator this email exchange took place on april 2022. i have a copy for each of you if you would like it in that email i asked mr lewis i stopped by your office on april 15th and spoke with john henry your title ix investigator he was very well educated in terms of how things are handled in regards to sexual harassment formal complaints policy code 1726 policy code 1725 and the entire process leading up to julie barnum's role when i asked him about the gender support plan the meeting i had watched and reviewed and the questions i had about what information you're deciding to share and not share with parents he became inept on the subject he all but told me in his words derail handles the transgender stuff i

109just do whatever they tell me to do around here and one question he went from an expert to knowing nothing i would assume that as our title ix investigator it would be his job requirement to know all matters pertaining to title ix and am i wrong and assuming that and if i'm not wrong why does our title knight investigator exclude the transgender gender plan issues from his role especially being that he is on the title ix committee here is his response the title ix investigator role is to investigate reports of sexual and gender-based harassment and discrimination mr henry was not as knowledgeable about supporting lgbtq plus students because that is simply not his responsibility based on the needs of new hanover county schools as an organization my question to you is why are we allocating

110funds and money through a budget to our students to our teachers when our very own title ix coordinator says that it is not a necessity of this county as an organization i implore you to dive into that when you review the budget tonight thank you [Applause] good evening i've been doing a listening tour and what i've heard convinces me that the deep divide between democrat and republican is the most severe over curriculum what's being taught in our schools i hear from democrats that believe nothing unusual is being taught they say crt is a lie that sexualization and the grooming of children not happening and there's no budging them on the other side there are those who say absolutely the curriculum is anti-american anti-family creates a divide among students along color lines it's being taught that

111children as young as kindergarten are being sexually and gender groomed who are we to believe is there any way to bring a resolution to these polar opposites yes and it's very simple taxpayers and parents have the right to look at the curriculum being taught in our school district they have the legal right to do so re-open the curriculum to inspection now when that happens the people who are saying it's being taught they'll either be right or wrong and if they're wrong what have we really lost besides words air however if those who say it's not happening what if they're wrong like we were wrong the last 20 years when parents and students said that children were being abused in our schools teachers coaches and counselors were sexually abusing them no one listened but what if

112they had think of the possibility the damage done to our children by those per choices is incalculable so tonight i ask you loud and clear open up the curriculum to inspection open it up we need immediate curriculum transparency in all subjects all classrooms let parents and taxpayers see the curriculum what's being taught it really is all about the children thank you [Applause] [Music] i want to say thank you to all of you for supporting the end of out of school suspensions for four five six and seven year olds and for writing an excellent policy to correct an existing bad policy you listened you looked at the data you reviewed the data you made a good decision please take this approach to solving other problems that need to be addressed such as use of seclusion rooms

113the type of analysis dr faust did tonight about looking at the performance of the school system should be used to address all tangible difficult decision-making problems that you are faced thank you i'm sorry donna gargette according to the seclusion and restraint data it is our children that have individual education plans that experience the highest number of seclusion and restraint these are our most vulnerable young and some non-verbal students this data also highlights disproportionate impacts on our minority students we must address this disportionality the data points to the need for more training and more support staff i don't understand the lack of urgency to end seclusion and restraint or this discussion point that it is written in our iep documents an iep can be changed so don't use an iep against the children it is a

114fluid document that parents can request to be updated at any time if we are truly using these methods for emergency situations it doesn't belong in an iep no more than documenting having to call 9-1-1 are you telling me that we are planning for a crisis and not planning to prevent it the iep team should be focused on best practices like including person-centered de-escalation trauma-informed approaches so the argument that an iep would be out of compliance if they remove seclusion rooms is a sorry excuse it should never be part of the plan this board must move to action and empower parents to list the most effective tools on their children's iep and provide the proper interventions to stop traumatizing our most vulnerable students it starts with the positive mindset that it can be done swiftly so

115let's take that first step in ending seclusion and restraint be the voice of our voiceless children thank you thank you miss garrett alicia golden deli good evening first and foremost i'd like to thank mrs justice miss walker mr wildeberg and miss mcmanus mr mcmanus for looking at the data and showing the sense of humanity towards ending out of school suspension for 4 five six and seven year olds and except for serious violations thank you all i appreciate that when i reviewed the proposed revision for the policy 43-51 i was shocked to see serious violations were included manufacturing drugs extortion terrorist threats and even using nuclear weapons how many four five six and seven year olds do you anticipate suspending for those acts yes and exactly how do you use out of school suspension as the

116last resort after a five-year-old has detonated a nuclear weapon think about it next year the policy committee should work with early childhood education staff and revise all the zero tolerance one size fit all policies the the brain of a young child does not think like the brain of an adolescent the language used in the policy 4351 is definitely strong language when applied to four five six and seven-year-olds policy 4351 says decreasing suspension requires close attention to social emotional and behavior needs of all students when you approve the revised language tonight i hope some will have the courage to ask how will you monitor the fidelity and accountability of the implement implementation of the revised policy of the short term suspension thank you all yeah you were just called natasha too it's been a busy few

117weeks for this school board um not only have you made the national news twice once on the glenn beck show on the candice owens show you dr faust have made the local news with garnering over a thousand signatures for your resignation the removal from you from office after blaming the teachers for the poor performance of our students um i'd like to address the gender plan since that was part of the national news right there um what's the deal with trying to keep secrets between our the kids and the parents haven't you dealt 20 years of sexual abuse cases aren't you in the middle of a litigation of settling one and you still want to put a policy in place to advocate promote and encourage secrets from parents from their kids at as early as from

118the k through k through three even please are you kidding me if you're interested in the gender support plan folks here it is all about keeping secrets from the parents make sure you inform yourself according to our lieutenant governor mark robinson's recent report the facts task force processed over 500 submissions from every region of north carolina and what they found over identified six overarching themes fear of retaliation the sexualization of kids critical race theory white shaming biased news media and or lesson plans and shaming of certain political beliefs that's what they're in our schools and he also said that over half our state budgets dedicated for our education but our students are even reading at their grade level what's going on what what are they learning there is my question meanwhile more and more documents

119are being released from pfizer and moderna at the order of the court and since the corrupt cdc fda and nih continue to push this poison on our most innocent and vulnerable allow me to share some interesting facts with you that i'm sure you don't get with your mainstream news coven 19 positivity rate is up 123 percent higher for the fully vaccinated and boosted compared to the unvaccination all-cause mortality has increased 1100 percent garner this athletes have died from this vaccine i need for her to leave [Applause] i think i'll have a seat though if you'd like to have more information could you please escort me out of the building you officers i really would like for her to leave no i'm not doing it next up on our list is loretta stackhouse [Music] um i

120do not need commentary from the office that's twice [Music] taking a break and i followed you see what i did i'm sorry for that interruption you all next up is loretta stackhouse good evening i come tonight to thank the board for voting to change the policy and stop the out of school suspension for four five six and seven-year-old children except for guns violent offenses drugs thank you to the leaders in the group that voted to have the issue added to the agenda thank you to those who had a change of heart and or a change of mind to vote for the policy change let's now look to the change in performance as the children remain in school and learn please continue to consider other policy changes to benefit the students thank you thank you next

121up yolanda hernandez good afternoon thank you to miss tucker excuse me miss justice my glasses um miss walker mr welder bar and mr mcmanus for leading the the way to the um the passing of the policy concerning the oss suspension of four five and six seven-year-olds there i do have a concern about the language in the proposed new policy specifically the the language that concerns terroristic threats and bomb threats and nuclear bombs as well please keep in mind that young children watch a lot of violent television and videos and in their innocence they can use this language in school they may say something like i'm going to bomb the school okay um so the language is very important and i think that that needs to be considered and considering also that there's a discrepancy in

122the way that discipline is doled out okay my concern is that african-american children if they say something like that they are more likely to be punished than other races and racism is a fact of life in the united states there's no need to deny that and just consider that 60 percent of oss that's out of school suspension students are african americans when there's only 18 then they are 18 of the population so and in order to ensure us that uh they are being treated fairly i'm requesting that the oh the out of school suspension data be reported quarterly to include grade race what special services that the students might receive such as ec or esl and the reason for their suspension and as your time is up and also behavioral support leslie posey is leslie

123posey here today okay thank you tell her we hope she feels better dane britt okay the gail major good evening i missed a couple of good meetings the last month or two i think um i'm here today talking about policy policy that about evidence of material that is being taught within new hanover county schools the first thing that will be coming out it's pretty much ready if i don't know we might not give it to you we might just go to the commissioners the documented books some of them we have the research backing from social media and what they say bar codes are included so you can remove them they're still proof of where they were and what the number is isbn numbers are also very good trackers so that's been dispersed through a lot

124of the citizens here so the books are out they say what they say and you'll be real clear on what they all mean i want to talk about policy 3210 parental inspection of an objection to an instructional material we expect the parents to have the rights to do so this is the uh procedure for parental rights this explains the process that parents can follow to inspect and challenge any instructional material books curriculum it covers it all they have the right according to your policy so i would suggest you start a parent committee or we will start one for you and that is an emerge in an urgency way an urgent way and you also know the books were sent the let's see the pride books 103 from the librarian laney that the teach that the

125librarian posted uh that i found that has the complaint ethics 360 now has that federal law federal offense when you see just those books there's hundreds more we haven't got to all of them yet so understand curriculum and books are in that it is your responsibility [Applause] good evening tonight i want to talk about policy 4720 which is surveying students this policy was updated prior to the school year in june of 2021 seemingly intentionally timed knowing that we've given a title ix survey stepping stone survey and panorama surveys in selected elementary schools this policy specifically talks about department of education funded surveys and i know tonight you're going to be asking to weigh that because of the state tobacco survey that's once be given i want to be clear i'm not a fan of serving

126our children and we are talking about student voice and essentially what we have set up as a county to be able to hear student voices we're bypassing parents and let me tell you what i mean by that currently our policy only mentions the department of education funded surveys there's no mentions of surveys to any district level or pilot program surveys in our sel or other curriculums our policy mentions the opportunity to opt out if you wish but does not give a form for parents to fill out and no formal documentation meaning there's not a process furthermore some parents who have instructed their students to not take surveys were told by their teacher it's mandated there's a disconnect and we need to fix that directly this policy should be for all surveys to be changed from

127an opt-out form to be a requiring parental consent i do believe it is i don't believe it's in the best interest of students to bypass parents in the name of inclusion furthermore any curriculum changes that we are implementing should be academically merited based the questions that come to my mind are the following what data is being collected where is it going how is it being shared and how can we access the surveys that are given what are we doing with these results these are the biggest things for me because i'm a process person right now new hanover county has utilized data to buy in teacher development opportunities curriculum changes and other supports connecting the pieces we're subtly bypassing parents asking students what they want to learn and then changing curriculum and teaching instruction uh professional

128development based on their voice we have to fix this i value student voice but not by replacing parents voice so as you look into this i'm asking to make it a formally permission slip in or the bare minimum at least have a documentation out thank you thank you melissa i'm sorry scott wilson good evening my name is scott wilson and i am a parent with two children in new hanover county school system i'm here to talk about my son's experience with seclusion at parsley elementary now mason bear during the 2018-2019 school year at the time my son was in kindergarten with an iep and diagnosis of autism and adhd beginning in november 2018 and last until his removal of the school in march my son was placed in what the school term to calm down

129room for more than a dozen two dozen times for over 1 900 minutes of missed instruction that's an average of over 70 minutes per removal for anyone who's doing the math the space that was used was for nearly all that time in sessions was a closet located in an sta room the space itself did not have a door but instead staff members would hold a gymnastics mat over the opening while my son was inside these incidents were never reported as seclusions but i would argue that they were without seclusions i am bringing this to your attention as you are examining the use of seclusion with our district hopefully with the goal of ending the practice altogether schools without seclusion rooms have found and continue to find ways to seclude children this is evident by what

130happened to my son and the seclusion numbers reported by mason burr this year anytime a child is placed in a small room alone they are being put into seclusion that is true whether the school reports it or not we must do better i'm asking you to hold our school and administration accountable for their actions to provide proper training and ensure our children are attending schools that maintain caring and trusting environments where they can thrive [Music] [Applause] thank you tonight you're going to be voting on policy 7262. which is related to communicable diseases pete wild boar has suggested on several occasions that there should be a group a board of practicing medical professionals advising the school board i wholeheartedly support this crucial addition to the policy there are some board members who say what we've been

131doing has worked so far but has it sweden never shut down their schools because the science never called for it and sweden an entire country never lost one k-12 student to coven meanwhile this board has done irreparable harm to all of the students in our tiny county with policies that were unnecessary unconstitutional and authoritarian and anyone who says we couldn't have known is lying we all watched you ignore the advice of medical professionals here voters will soon choose between board members who make decisions based on science and those who make decisions based on power do we want a board that serves the central office and protects budgets or do we want a board that serves and protects our children there is an unprecedented mental health crisis among children in this county and i believe the

132actions of this board are directly responsible for it i'm melissa mason and you can find me at melissaforeducation.com [Applause] okay um dorian cromartie you know i had a speech prepared for this evening and i'm not even going to give it after what i just witnessed stephanie crabill you are just disgusting you do not have adequate rules of decorum in these meetings you change the rules regarding who's speaking what's going on i want to congratulate this board for hitting national news this week you guys are about to become famous for your inadequacy as a board it is embarrassing to sit here month after month and watch you i want to talk about voting i don't want to hear another republican or democrat come out of anybody's mouth in this room we are all here because we

133love the children if you think we are coming here month after month for any other reason you're not only inadequate you're insane we love the children we want what's best for them and for you to dismiss people who are speaking about the best interests of the children is absolutely unacceptable stephanie you ran as a republican and i voted for you you are the farthest left member on this board that is it's unbelievable you lied to get your seat as a chair you deceived all of the voters who put you in office and you refuse to resign now this board should vote her off of the chair position we have three votes we need one more you guys need to do what is in the best interest of the children and remove her there is a

134reason we cannot have town hall meetings and that's because she will not communicate with people you roll your eyes and you sit here you get through it you watch the clock and we're gone and dr faust you're no better i got a vip invite to your segregated town hall meeting that you did and as an italian i was very honored to be there you blamed your inadequacies on the fact that it was difficult being the first black superintendent if you're uncomfortable with your skin color and can't do your job resign diane your time [Applause] we need to fix this line up y'all shouldn't have made me laugh but i do want to thank the students of student voice i think what they did is awesome they came up with nine uh stupid a student bill

135of rights and they did that in a couple of meetings i thought that was awesome and that's because of decorum those students have decorum and i'm not saying that you guys have terrible decorum but i am saying it's not the best even though everyone here sat through the class that tennis nelson did so what i am saying is we could build could be nicer to each other and work together for the children that's what we're here for for the children attacking someone for their race is very low it's disgusting while i was in the military i had a bunk mate he had a confederate flag in his room he asked me what i thought about it i shrugged my shoulders i said i don't think nothing about it you have your beliefs i have mine

136because on the battlefield or here for the children we understand that we're here for one sole purpose the children it doesn't matter where we come from doesn't matter where we're going but we're here for one reason each other for one purpose that's what we need to understand but attacking someone for the skin color that they have no control over is very low it needs to stop it's 20 22. need to work together for everybody for every voice for every student regardless of learning ability but we definitely need to end seclusion and restraint that's the one parent that came forward there will be others we need to do that asap thank you okay that ends our call to the audience section um next we are up for closed session do i hear a motion to go

137into closed session move for closed session i miss their second we are in closed session the second half of our meeting um and i say that um not tongue-in-cheek we we have a lot to go all right so um where's my list all right so we are um not even off the first page of our agenda um and i wanted to just ask again if anybody is interested in taking off um pursuant to the email that i sent you all this afternoon in response to miss justice's email to all of us um we're slated to go on till about 11 15 11 30 if there's anybody that has um anything that they would like to take off and postpone for um another meeting then i would be willing to entertain a motion right here in

138the middle to do that well yeah we've had to vote on it of course yes that we end our meeting at 10 and take up where we have often a later date that's actually what i suggested is that emotion that's a motion all right so if well first of all we do have to get through the budget and so that's going to be at least an hour so we may not be able to do that so um is there is there a second to that motion to stop it yeah okay well we can do it after the budget let me see here all right we've got three we'll address that at ten o'clock if anybody is um still awake then so we'll do that all right so um i i would just like to make

139a motion to remove judy's got a motion on the table so i didn't hear a second so we will just drop that motion um mr boyer yeah i would just like to make a motion to move item h item g and item wait a minute i don't under what okay what roman numeral uh under new business i was getting there new business yeah i would like to at least lop off ten minutes remove item h and img what letters were you talking about board chair person communication board appointments the outside committees okay give me a second could you could you please say that again because we just walked in here trying to get everything organized and i would like to hear what you were saying under new under new business uh item h board chair

140person communication item g policy 2660 board appointments to outside committees i'll second that okay that that says what do you want to do with it what do you want to do with it i'm sorry what are you motioning to do with it to postpone it to a later meeting it's only 10 minutes okay all right so there's discussion going on the um any other discussion uh where's the penny like the longer we wait the longer we're sitting here so well you asked give people a chance to look at things until they can make good decisions um i okay i would like to amend that emotion well i don't think i need to amend that motion now that i've got a chance to look at this you know at this point maybe if we go ahead

141i would like to amend it to have us leave after the presentation of the budget and then have a separate meeting for the rest do i have a second or for the amendment and so just to be clear um after the budget we still have two and a half hours worth of stuff yeah which is after you said after the budget and that'd take an hour so we're talking about 10 o'clock okay is there a second to the amended motion we will not amend the motion we do have the motion on the table to take off um new business item it's item number seven i'm sorry no it's not it's um 17 no it's no it's not this is crazy new business g h but that's oh i'm just saying it's only 10 minutes i

142don't understand how that's going to help us get out absolutely absolutely absolutely well we haven't voted i'm going to get down here by 10. all right so is there any more discussion on removing those two items okay i am totally confused um at this point we have all established it you we make bad decisions after the later it gets i had brought up about the ten didn't get a second now we're talking about taking out 15 minutes aft out of an hour and a half that's not going to solve the madam chair this is out of order call for the question um will you call the roll um down the line miss billy starting with miss justice the emotion on the table is to remove items um under new business g and h and we

143need a super majority to do that so we need five people um to to do that yeah because we're doing it in the middle okay miss billy will you call the role please sure all right column i'll have to do this okay thank you um miss justice i'll be miss billy will you please call the roll miss justice no mr mcmanus i'm not even sure i understand what you're doing yeah that's crazy we're taking off two agenda items so that we can save a little bit of time let's do we're here at one o'clock instead of 1 30. no get over here miss walker i'm sorry i'm sorry crystal no yes okay yes okay mr wildeboard no yes okay so that doesn't pass so on we go okay um the approval of the minutes uh

144approval of the minutes second okay is there any discussion [Music] all in favor say aye any opposed okay so next we are on to item number for consensus items move to approve consensus items as presented wow all right so is there a second to her motion second okay so now any discussion um folks want to mr baltimore you want to take out which item the meal price increase okay um anything else all right um all in favor excuse me of um so all in favor of accepting the consensus items as presented with the exception of letter c what i please could you talk politely what would you like to talk about thank you uh i had my hand up i also wanted to pull to talk about another item too so go ahead okay thank

145you um i would like to speak about a re eureka eureka math okay so that is item number letter e correct okay so we're pulling out c and e so all in favor of accepting the consensus items with the exception of c and e say i i i any opposed okay that passes um so now um let's talk about um item number of letter number c is that um mr anderson will that be you yes okay answering questions so mr wildeberg just real quickly um yes sir uh other other school systems across the state are doing the same thing we're seeing um labor increases and a 25 to 30 percent increase in food and supplies so what what we are recommending the meal price increases are consistent with what other districts across the state are

146doing and it and it sets that reimbursement rate right between um the k8 and 9-12 uh meal price yeah okay so should we vote on that now oh i'll have my hand up let's go ahead and vote on letter c can we just do one at the time and then we'll do yours next i was going to talk about c oh i'm sorry okay um what i wanted to ask and i guess uh mr anderson um we have been blessed because of the opportunity to have the free well actually the free alliance if you want to call it that all through the district uh since the pandemic situation occurred so that will be ending next year correct yes ma'am that um the waivers the usda waivers were not extended okay they expire the end of

147june we do have all of our summer ignite sites with the exception of one approved through the summer food service program and we're covering that one site in the summer ignite budget so summer ignite all students will eat at no cost but beginning the following school year there are no more waivers and it is the last year of our cep status you'll recall that our cep schools are approved for for a four-year period and uh next year will be the last year oh okay thank you and did you say 20 to 30 percent increase we've seen a 25 to 30 percent increase uh you know in our food and supplies okay thank you yes ma'am okay is there any more discussion on letter c okay is there a motion to accept this um to approve

148this um increase it's removed is there a second okay um any more discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed okay passes seven to zero now we're on to letter e you reek the math um would that be dr payson would be answering questions okay uh miss justice uh yes uh i have heard varying reports about the uh it's a program correct eureka math is a fixed program all across the schools that we pay for correct and all all math teachers are required to stick to that format correct yes it is a curriculum that we are using okay i have heard some concern about the effect effectiveness of it possibly and i would you know at this point i would like to have that pulled and we are going to have a curriculum meeting

149coming up if we could have and that's going to be on public discussion people can come and listen um i uh could we be talking about that during the curriculum meeting can i share a couple of things with you of course if you want to do that but um first one of the things that we wanted to stay with eureka math because as you know our teachers have gotten a lot of new curriculum so one of the things that they asked we actually pulled the teachers and for the most part they liked eureka math they did not like that eureka math had nowhere for them to respond to intervention and data so what eureka math has done is they have actually um created what they're calling eureka math squared which is a revision it's the

150same thing as eureka math but instead of the teachers having to do this um set lesson for 180 um well i think it's 183 days but we don't we don't have that many they've cut back so the teachers have now time to put in places where they can respond to the data and have some more leeway so we polled all of our elementary teachers and 625 teachers out of the 625 we had 388 respond and 87 said they wanted to do eureka math squared the reason why i would be concerned to hold it to may 25th i think our meeting is last year and you guys have to help me we were behind the big districts most of the districts a lot of the districts across our state are doing this curriculum so we got

151behind the big districts so our teachers were not they didn't have the resources and the equipment that they needed so they were making copies and doing things like that so we wanted to get ahead of guilford i think is charlotte we wanted to get ahead of those districts so our teachers would have the resources they need on hand so we did that and we also added additional manipulatives because that was something the teachers asked for so we can do that but we feel very comfortable that this is what our teachers want and the adjustments they said they like but that is our concern that would be my concern i literally have someone in ashley's office on standby if this is approved tonight to get the order in because if not our teachers are not going

152to have it and then we have our year-round schools and our um um restart we're already concerned that we might not have it in time for them but that would be my concern ma'am okay so and basically it sounds like you half the teachers and overall math teachers responded to the survey correct yes 300 and i pulled the data up 389 we have elementary classroom teachers and 87 said they wanted to go with eureka math squares and the 17 i think or the 13 percent that did not um said no it was about pd because if you recall we had letters training last year so they did not receive pd we have embedded pd for eureka math this year where we're actually going to start the pd right after school we also have them coming

153over the summer and they're doing some and then we have coaches that will from eureka math that will be coming and walking the buildings with our coaches and training them on how to support their teachers so it's all about making sure our teachers feel comfortable with this so that's what we've considered okay thank you for that explanation because as i said that sounds about the reasons that were these all the things you said that some teachers are feeling uncomfortable yes ma'am move to adopt second okay any more discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed okay that would pass the seven to zero all right now into old business um the grandfather of them all um old business letter a the 2022 2023 budget music so tonight i'm going to go through the budget

154information that we've been reviewing i'm going to go through what we're seeing with our state revenue and what the parameters that we're going to use to build the budget for next year so i just want to make sure everyone understands i'm not asking for approval of the budget tonight i'm just asking for approval of the county request and then and along with the parameters that i'm sharing for the budget that we will go back and we will build based on these parameters and then we'll bring back a budget to you for approval later once we have everything built i just wanted to make sure that was clear and we were all on the same page with that so as we get started we'll start off with some revenue updates so starting with state projections um

155as i'm sure you're aware our student numbers have been going down the past um three to four years and of course our revenue as we've talked about previously in board work sessions is based on our student enrollment so as you can see here we have state projections for this coming up year fiscal year 23 25 and that's going to be a reduction of 3.2 percent compared to our current state funding of the 26 064 you see there on the screen and in the past the state has held us harmless over the past two years to whatever they projected for us so even though our enrollment came in lower on like second month or mid-year they they didn't reduce our funding based on the decrease in student enrollment the language for the state two-year budget that

156was approved earlier this year does not have that held harmless included so we will feel the full impact of that decrease in student enrollment this coming up year so as in preparation for that when we were allotting teachers dr barnes actually allotted 32 teachers less than we had this year in anticipation of those state revenues going down and so we're already starting to prepare for that with the allocations and here is an analysis of enrollment for you that i thought could be helpful and as you can see here the green is showing the actual funding that we're receiving from dpi for these years and then the blue is our actual enrollment so as you can see here for the those first for um fiscal year 19 through 21 our funding from dpi was fairly constant

157even though our student enrollment was not as high as what dpi was projecting for us but they held us to those same level of funding and then last year they even projected us to have additional growth on what they had said the previous year which did not happen but they didn't take that funding from us but this year as you can see here they are reducing our projected enrollment which is what our funding is based on down to that 25 777 and so we we're preparing for that um and that's about 300 and i think that's about 330 students less than the funding we received on last year so as we're planning for the state of that 3.2 percent reduction in funding we're also looking at our federal so federal funds we at this point

158have not received any planning allotments from the federal government um but we all we know just like with state and we had talked about in our previous work sessions majority of our funding is based on student enrollment and so we since we are anticipating that 3.2 percent decrease in enrollment we're going to go ahead and start planning our federal and state budgets accordingly so as we're building those budgets we're automatically assuming a 3.2 percent decrease compared to current year we're also with both those budgets we're going to go ahead and take into account the salary adjustments that we're doing for local we'll take those same changes into account when we're building state and federal budgets as well i also wanted to point out and we've talked about our esser plan here previously um we are

159projecting to have about 57 million dollars as of july 1 left in esser funding and in our previous plan that was brought to the board in january we talked about how we were going to spend those funds and i'm going to go through just a summary level of that again tonight just as refresher and then also changes that we're recommending to make related to that plan the next revenue source i wanted to talk about was fund balance and as you can see here our unassigned fund balance as of june 30th 2020 22 i'm sorry that we're estimating is about 16.8 million dollars and as you recall from last year's during last year's buzz budget process the county commissioners were recommending a reduction down to 10 million because they were gonna use their fund balance to

160help us if we get into some type of emergency situation where we need an emergency reserve and so we're keeping that in mind as we're building this budget and working towards that recommendation set by the county commissioners we're projecting in this information i'm sharing tonight thumb balance appropriation in fiscal year 23 of that 4.4 million you see and then in fiscal year 24 that 1.5 million and so when i say appropriation i mean we're we're setting that money aside to use is all i mean when i say appropriation um and it so once we get down to the 10 million and so we're projecting if we go forth with the plan and student numbers remain constant we're assuming that for the next three years and we'll make some other assumptions i'll talk about a little

161bit further along but assuming all these things happen the way we're hoping or we're projecting and at the end of fiscal year 25 we would be down to that 10 million dollar thumb balance number and that would give us a little over one months of local current expense operating budget and before we move on i wanted to share you may also be aware of this but the fun when you think about fund balance um how that's created is when you have more revenue than you have expenses and so that creates this savings and it's important to remember that this savings is it would be one-time revenue whenever you're using this and so you could consider this like a savings account you're putting money into this account and then as you use it you know you

162you're using that up there's no money coming back in like a paycheck to replenish the money that you're using and so that's why when we talk about fund balance you always hear people say you're going to use that for one one-time expenses you're going to use that for things like natural disasters so for example when hurricane florence came that damage was i think it was about 13 million dollars damage related to that hurricane where we had fund balance that we could go to to pay for those expenses instead of waiting for fema or someone to provide that funding to us you also would use fund balance for unexpected things changes in your student enrollment would be an example is maybe you've projected high and you've allocated positions higher than what you ended up getting funding

163for state takes money back later having this reserve to be able to go to when you need it that's normally the purpose of fund balance another example is for cash flow purposes normally state and federal funding well i'll say i'll focus on federal federal is more likely to not come in and come in until maybe october or november of the fiscal year and so you're using your local money until that funding is available available for cash flow purposes and we're going to go in to more detail and i apologize for that enrollment being broken off that way um but i wanted to give you just that as a glance as we're going through the requests that we're working towards for the county so in this enrollment i mean i'm sorry in this request it looks

164a little different than what you're used to because i'm actually including a three year it's a three year request so i'm showing what our request is next year in 24 and in 25 and projecting out in 2025 um we would be asking can you share why we're doing three years versus the one year that they would see yes so um the reason we're doing a three year versus a one year is because we want to take advantage of the sr funding that's currently available so that we're we're really leveraging we're gonna and you'll see as we go through i'll go into a lot more detail but we're going to be using fund balance over two years we're going to be using s or over two years to slowly implement the salary study plan and so

165we're taking all three of those things into account as we're building the budget and then when we get to that fiscal year 2025 we'll kind of be back on track at that point we wouldn't be using fund balance anymore the esr funds will have ended and then hopefully the county is picking up the request over those three years and at that point it would be reoccurring funds from the county versus the other two years we're using one-time money that isn't sustainable thank you yep and at the bottom of included in this request the capital outlay request so i've summarized that there we had and i'll have a detail sheet for the capital again at the end but that's coming from the paperwork we talked about in the last work session and we've pulled out the

166safety and security phase three so that was a million dollar project that originally we had included in the 3.6 but i believe the county had asked for us to show that separately because it was security safety and security so i pulled that out we also normally provide in a request for the annual pre-k grant that we receive from the county so that's why i've pulled that out separately along with they've asked us to submit a request for a pre-k expansion of six classrooms so we've included here the reoccurring cost of the six classrooms along with a one-time startup cost for those classrooms and that does include some renovations to those classes and then the last item there is the contract for land maintenance that the county had been managing on our behalf and they're giving

167that contract back over to us and so we've included the cost here along with a supervisor to help manage those so as you can see about midway through you see the increases i have the total appropriation for the operating um had the 91 million and then um the 3 million 10 million and 3.7 million to get the 108 million and so you see the increases of 3.3 percent 10.7 and 3.6 and then i have the total request at the bottom which includes the capital outlay and those expansion items that the county had asked us to include in our request so now i wanted to talk a little about budget development and the things that we were taking into account when we were developing the budget and so we've already talked about the institut the student

168enrollment next i would like to share information about the operating cost and as we were going as we go through the operating costs and i have a separate slide and we'll get into a little bit more detail but um in our last board work session we talked about department program request and what those increases were and we talked about mandatory and continuation items as far as just to keep our level of service the same um and it amounted to about 1.1 million dollars of additional requests and so as you know as we're working on our budget we start with our current budget and then we take these changes into account and we adjust our budget for the changes to get to the budget that will bring back to you for approval at a later date

169and so as we were going through and you saw those items listed and dr faust said at the end of our last board work session that we were going to get together and we were going to be going through the budget and so the past two weeks that's what we've been doing we've been going through the budget we've been trying to identify things that um items that we could reduce funding that we saw maybe we didn't need it looks like we're not going to use this year so we're not so we would assume we wouldn't need that for next year along with in the increases we were also looking at decreases and so as we went through when we did that process um we came to i think it was about 1.5 million dollars that

170we thought we could reduce and repurpose of local money and we'll go through a slide that we'll talk a little bit more about that we also as we were developing or thinking about our plan our priorities for the budget we were thinking about the salary study because we heard from the board that that's important we need to build that into the budget we were taking into account the mandatory salary and benefit increases that was coming from the state along with thinking about esser and that 57 million dollars that we have left there could we repurpose some of that could there be a different use for that to change the plan what would be allowable there and so these are all the things that we were thinking about over the past two weeks to try to

171work on this budget to present to you tonight so as i had talked about a few minutes ago the operating cost increases so this is where we went through and you you saw these items at the last board work session where we had increases for utilities because you know gas prices are going up and that's going to affect our utility rates there were increases to contracts and software and of course our insurance those costs are going up and so that was about 1.1 million dollars that we needed to find a way to fund that and so we went through like dr faust said we've scrubbed these budgets and we were able to identify areas where we could reduce and so we were looking at so the areas that we reduced and these are the high

172dollar areas we're related to supplies and food looking at pd computer equipment contracted repairs computer supplies and repair projects and so this is these were the big areas where we found where we could identify some savings as we're building our budget for next year we also identified that we have a vacancy in a chief officer position that i have listed here and you know trying to determine you know savings since this was vacant we've added this to the list that helps us reprioritize our funding and through doing this and we were able to identify like i said it was about one 1.5 1.6 million dollars and so after we covered our reoccurring and mandatory um items we had about 562 000 left that we applied towards the salary study ugh so um as we had

173talked about the last board work session and when we're developing our budget we were looking at the salary study for the 16 minimum pay the 2 increase per step and that was going to be for our bus drivers and then our classified staff grades 55 through 78 and we had talked about splitting this instead of trying to do this over a three year period we were splitting this over a two-year period and so this is the um and i have at your desk as well because i know this is hard to see um a copy of the salary schedules and so the salary schedule at your desk i have several so one of the salary studies at your desk says proposed salary schedules and that schedule is the actual schedules that were included in the

174hill consultant document that was shared i think it was last week or the week before and so these these are the schedules that we were using as we were building the budget and so we since we're phasing this in over a two-year period i wasn't able to use this entire schedule because we were breaking up the grades and so there's another document in addition to the one that came from the hill consultant group the revised schedule and it looks similar to this across the top it's got year one on that first page and so this is where i took the heel groups salary schedule for grades 55 through 65 and i was able to use the heel groups schedule there but for the other grades since we weren't making those changes yet i use the

175current schedule but i had to adjust it 2.5 because that's a state mandated raise that we talked about at the last board work session so even um so we're having to take several things into account here we're having to account for employees that are impacted by the salary study we're using the heel group the schedules done by the heel group if our employees were not impacted by the salary study then we need to make sure that those employees get the higher of a 15 minimum pay per hour or 2.5 percent increase and so those are the things that we're looking at as we're building the budgets i also have at your table two more sheets they both say revise schedule at the top one has two columns and the other has just one so the

176document that has i'm sorry three columns the document that has three columns is for the bus drivers and it also has a column for the bus aids because they're not included in our grade 55 through 78 schedules they have their own schedule and so you'll see here that the bus drivers are going to be at the sixteen dollar minimum and we're doing the two percent step for them the bus aides are going to be at the 15 minimum and we're doing a one percent step for them which is more similar to our other scales um so like our central office admin scales it's got a one percent step the child nutrition helpers are also going to be starting at 15 minimum with 1 steps and both the bus driver scales and the child nutrition skills

177max out at step 15 so even though it goes all the way to 30 you'll see 16 actually yeah 16 through 30 is the same hourly rate okay i do want to share with the board as i was reviewing the salary schedules i did see some interesting facts that i believe i need to bring to your attention when when i was going through reviewing the scales i did notice some things when comparing beginning teacher pay to these salary scales i wanted to point out so i'll just give you a couple of examples of things i saw so if we think about a beginning teacher their monthly pay and if i include their set their salary their monthly salary plus their supplement that they're going to receive every month that that brings them to a monthly

178pay of about four thousand two hundred ninety two dollars if you look at this scale and you look at grades 57 step 21 that's where a teacher assistant would be and at that point on that scale that teacher assistant would actually be making about 82 more than a beginning teacher so i just want to make sure that we're aware of that as we're having conversations about the scales i also wanted to bring to your attention just another example once again look at thinking about a beginning teacher a clerical person on a grade 65 which is like a school treasure they're going to be also when they're on step 13 so 13 years of experience they as well would be making about 82 dollars more than a beginning teacher so when we're thinking about this and

179um the next thing as i was reviewing and going through the schedules when we split and we we are implementing over a two year period there is going to be there are going to be situations where you might have someone who leads or coordinates other people making less than the people that they're leading or coordinating and so for example if you think about a plumber or a carpenter they're going to be on grade and the foreman or leads that are directing them are going to be grade 67 so it's just about how we broke up and i think no matter where you break the scale in half when you're implementing across different years you're going to run into that from time to time and so i just want to make sure that we're aware of

180that as well as we're moving forward and so it does depend on what step they're on and what step the leader coordinator or foreman zone how often that would happen so with this scale as you as you see so this would be year one these individuals would go over to the new scale as we've already talked about they would be at a 16 minimum wage it would be two percent steps in between for their years of experience and the average increase is going to be about 40 percent the minimum is going to be 15 and then these are the two schedules that we had talked about with bus drivers and with child nutrition so with bus drivers as i had said we're gonna for the drivers they're gonna be at the 16 minimum wage two

181percent steps and your age is going to be 15 minimum wage with one percent steps and um they're going to top out at year 15 and child nutrition work helpers will be the same way they're going to be at 15 minimum 1 steps and top out at 15 years this is the um non-certified or classified scale where we the this group will actually be on the new scales um in the second year so as i had stated before this scale will just go up to 2.5 for that raise and they're going to continue to have the one percent steps um in between and that's going to be your grade 66 through it's actually sorry about it 66 through 78 not 67 there and just for informational purposes there's we don't have any employees currently on

182grade 66 so i didn't show that grade here so then in phase two of implementing the salaries the salary study this is where we're going to bring that second group to the new um salary schedule and so that once again is going to be your grades 66 through 78 and at that point they would actually um have the two percent steps in between and that's going to get be an average of about 33 percent increase with a minimum of 13 percent i didn't bring copies i'm not showing the salary scales for our central office and for teachers and principals but all of those groups are going to be the 2.5 percent increase unless state legislators when they're going through their budget process are to make a change so assuming everything stays the same as it

183was in the two-year budget that was passed earlier this year they would all get the 2.5 increase before we move on i also thought it would be beneficial for me to share information about you know we've talked about dollar allotments um in previous presentations versus position allotments and so another thing to keep in mind as we are paying our employees more which is a good thing right the other thing we have to keep in mind though is our dollars don't go as far and i know we know that but sometimes i think it's worth having a little bit more of a conversation on that so just as an example we have a state program and that and the state gives us in that program 570 000 and this year i was able to pay less

184so i had an example here some employees at a grade 67 and let's just assume they're all on the same step just to make life easier i was able to afford 14.5 positions but going to the new salary scales because these these individuals are getting raises of 33 and 40 percent now i'm only able to fund 11 positions with that same amount of money so that's just something to think about as we're talking about budget so now let's go into our essar plan so as we were going through and i'll use dr fafsa's word scrubbing the budget and we were identifying these different funding sources that we could use we started looking at esser and so this is going to be really familiar to you i'm just listing the things that were in that plan

185positions i don't have dollars there but if it's not a position i try to put dollars there just for it i thought that would be helpful and so if you see items in red what that means is we've identified identified that funding um for use to help fund the salary study and so when i say help fund the salary study what i'm saying is we're going to not do this thing in red or we're going to reduce what we're doing um on that line so that we free up the s or money so we can move local positions into esther which frees up local money to fund the salary study so what she's saying is that um we can't give a raise out of essen so federal law won't let us give raises so originally

186we never put positions in esser because we knew that that would trail off and that wasn't reoccurring so we tried to keep as many positions out of that so what we're doing basically is opposite of what we said so that we can give the raise we are taking all these individuals and dumping them over into esther so it'll free up all of the state funding and then we can make it work so but it's only one time money so that money does run out in esther so then we've got to find the spot for these people right and so we'll so that what you see in the blue are things that are already in the plan and what you see in red is um an adjustment to the plan sorry i'm headed sorry you're okay

187no no i said i was ahead of you oh i'm not sorry that's good i appreciate your help i appreciate your help so as you can see on this screen we're going to continue to fund 32 instructional coaches with esser three ec curriculum specialists one speech language pathologist two occupational therapists i'm not gonna read every screening like this to you but just so what she meant sorry so i can't break the place so these positions were given to schools through esser and the goal was through attrition to pull them out of if the school wanted to then buy the curriculum instructional coaches so we gave all middle school and i want to say high school um these positions um last year and so we wanted to make sure that they could because we're recapturing learning

188law so that's what that's for and then at the end of esser the schools were supposed to pull that over into their budget so here you see the the only red item on this slide is we're taking the curriculum resources we originally had planned and so once again when i'm showing these slides i'm not showing from the very beginning of esser i'm just showing as of july 1 what we're expecting to have left and how we had planned to spend it over the next two years i just don't want it to get confusing if i'm saying something different than what you had seen in january so the curriculum resources we have here we would actually reduce this down and use one point the 1.2 million dollars here to help fund the salary study under the

189addressing learning loss here we would actually um take the funding for the teacher assistant scholarship program that had been set aside to fund the salary study we'd also use the summer learning um to so we'll we would still of course have summer learning this summer but then the following summer we would use that 2 million towards a salary study we would take 1.6 million dollars set aside for after school programs and then we and and so through all this movement is free enough the esser money correct and so we're going to move 117 positions from either state or local to esser to use up the extra money esther money and then free up the other money to use towards a salary study salary when you say salary so you mean the salary study what they

190brought to us yes i'm sorry i'm sorry the um yeah to to implement the salary scales that came from the salary study thank you yes yep thank you preparedness madam chair just to clarify this this is what is required for the two-year plan yeah so this is what we've had to do to be able to have a balanced budget and incorporate to implement these salary scales thank you and we would continue to have our 10 social workers and 10 school counselors no changes there no changes to um preparedness and response no changes to mental health services make sure you're paying attention so that's 23 and 24 yes 23 and 24 yep yeah this is our esser plan for 23 and 24. at the end of fiscal year 24 s or money will go away okay

191and we lose these positions unless we find yes ma'am the technology plan to the initiative for the one-to-one no changes here the facility repairs improvements and supplies area of the esser plan we would use all of these these funds towards the new salary schedules and we had to pause laney's laney had he was rooting for it but the um hvac project laney's gym there are um their band room is without uh air conditioning we've got temporary ac in there and we were waiting for the esser funds to release that contract um so we're uh now we're seeking another funding source and then under the other support there's no changes here is that we did have money set aside for st stabilization reserve so this was money we had set aside in esser to help us

192because we knew the student enrollment numbers were going down and we knew there was going to be a held harmless coming related to that and of course we don't want to have to have a reduction in force we want to be able to keep paying for those positions until we have turnover and then absorb it through the turnover and so we had this money set aside to help us in those areas and it was about 25 certified positions about what the money amounted to but we're having to use that money now to help pay for this the salary scale so here is a summary so we've gone through all the details so on this slide i've tried to summarize for you um the changes we've made and i've i've tried to provide that by gear

193and so in in year one and um i know this takes a little time but i think if we just talk through the years it might be easier um to understand even though it might be a little repetitive yes ma'am it's kind of clever because we were just asking you've got 23 and 24 do you mean 23 to 24 and 24 to 25 or do you mean 22-23 fiscal year 23-24 fiscal year and 24-25 fiscal year so it's next year and then the following two years okay so it's a i'm giving you a three-year budget projection so in the first year we're going to cover our state our mandatory salary increases and benefits and so remember that was a 2.5 increase that the state was requiring and i'm going to find my cheat sheet um

194five point let me find that so i can say that wrong um the retirement rate increase was 5.7 and the health insurance increase was 5.4 so that's accounted for in that 3.3 million dollar number and then to fund phase one of the salary study was the 12.2 million dollars you see here and then you see under the revenue section 562 thousand dollars this was when we went through and scrubbed the budget and we were able to identify funding to repurpose within our current local budget that and i said we were going to apply that towards the salary schedules that's the 562 000 you see there and then we are using 4.4 million dollars of our fund balance and we are repurposing eight million dollars of esser so when we went through the esr plan the

195items martin in red that's what you're seeing on that repurpose esser funds and so even with those reductions and repurposing those funds we're still going to have a county request of 2.5 million dollars and then in year two i went i had to go ahead and account for salary and benefit increases for those next two years as well and so of course i don't have state numbers on that yet so i had to look at the last five years and come up with some type of estimate of what i think those raises and benefit increases would be and so um based on the last five years i think the raise is probably gonna be trying to be conservative i did two percent um and then the benefit increases of three percent um and so i

196did three percent for retirement increase and for hospitalization increases so taking that into account that's where the 1.6 million dollars came from and then you remember when you use one-time money that money goes away so that's why you see prior year salaries funded with one-time revenue so we have to pick those expenses up from the prior year we have to pick them up again because we use one-time revenue so that's why you see the 12.5 million and then to implement the second phase of the salary scales that's where we get the 3.8 million dollars then we're also going to use 1.5 million dollars of fund balance and you'll see to the far right that six million dollars so that was our target to use six million dollars of fund balance that gets us down to

197the 10 million dollars that the county commission had recommended and then we're repurposing another 7.1 million dollars of esser and then in the third year you see esther goes away and in that year we will be cutting 265.8 positions we will have projected salary increases of 1.7 million we would still need to fund the one-time salaries paid in the previous years which is the 8.6 million because we still hadn't received enough county appropriation money yet to fund all the previous salaries paid with one-time money and then we have the so the local reductions so in addition to cutting the esr funded positions we would also cut another 82.8 positions and that's how i came up with the 6.8 million dollars and so then the second year the county request would be the 9.4 million the

198third year would be 3.4 million and so that gets us to the end of that third year the increase to our county request over that time would be the 14.4 million which was approximately the cost to fund the salary schedules and then of course the the increases for raises over those next two years madam chair yes is that the um i have more there's more so i'm almost done so then we have capital outlay requests so this was the same information that i shared at the last um board work session um and so this would once again as i stated in the beginning this would be part of the county request um it was the bottom section of that request and um if you would like we i do have information about if we would

199have spread it over three years what that would have looked like but i don't know if you you may want to talk before we go into that um miss adams um so just my first question this was a lot um with the elimination of some of the computer equipment with the space um this two-year plan does that affect the one one to one it does not okay that's the first the first thing so my the people the equipment i mean the equipment so i will say this one of the things i ran on what feels like a million years ago was equity and i came in and i spoke to the previous admit um previous leadership in the district and my goal was that by the time i got out of this office which is

200quickly coming that i really wanted to work towards having an office of equity because we knew there were inequities within our district and we needed people that were focused on it looking at it making sure that all of our students were being met where they needed to be this cannot go away so that's the first thing to me to see eliminating of a dei position cannot go away so that's my first piece of this the second piece i want to thank you for all the work that went into this because i know you've been working tirelessly for months already on the budget and for us to throw this at you to take it back to two years ashley i appreciate you so much dr appreciate you so much i know this was a huge ask

201i have talked to county commissioners a one year let's just ask for it let's give everybody what we want no matter how much we want to do it that's a non-starter that conversation is not going to happen the two-year of all of these things that were just presented that is probably not going to happen either based on some of the conversations that i've had what i would like to say is it possible talking about this 57 million dollars in esser if we go back to the original three-year implementation plan for the classified employees is it doable to utilize s or funds to provide bonuses to all classified employees july 1 and this is why i am not a gambling person we have no idea who is going to be in office in three years when

202these funds run out so to just hope and pray we're gonna have a county commission that says sure we'll give you that money that esther is no longer funding that's not a guarantee and so i don't want to lose 266 positions to be able to fund raises which everyone is going to get as of today if we pass the budget as it was presented everyone would be getting their raises is it in the time frame that we want no but we have a reality to work with and that is an infinite number of dollars so is it possible dr faust ashley sutton is it possible to award esser bonuses for classified employees in light of not being able to go all in on one year or two years that's my question okay so i just

203want to repeat and make sure i understand and so i'm just going to flip to this real quick just to make sure i understand so a three-year pla so are you talking about implementing a three-year plan the original budget that you brought forward of a three-year step plan for classified raises so that is this yes and so um um not to put you on the spot so you still end up at the same place and i just want to make sure we all understand that so whether you do a two year a one year or a three year plan at the end you're still asking the county commissioners for 15.4 million dollars i just want to make sure we all understand that to be able to move forward with the salaries so are supplements allowable

204in esser yes um so we could do that um we we would have to make adjustments here and we would have to um determine so i'm assuming if we do supplements and we spread it out that the county request would be higher because you're using more money to do the supplements right not no no going back to your original i'm saying esther for a bonus not not for salary for a bonus did i say supplement i'm sorry um well bonus i'm sorry i misspoke bonus so if you but let's so um we so i if we do a bonus then we would reduce something in year one to fund the bonus or we would increase the county request to do the bonus so there would have to be more money but yes we can do

205that but the county request would go up the other side to that is if we are doing sixteen dollars the two step versus sixteen dollars versus with the ones one percent yes so that's the other thing so if we went with a different um salary schedule then that would cost less money which would free up money to do a bonus so i guess what i'm saying is with doing the current salary schedules with the 16 dollar minimum and a two percent it's going to cost this um no matter which way you go and so if you want to add bonuses to it it would be additional money but if you went to a cheaper salary scale so if you did um like a 17 with a one percent step instead of a two percent then

206that cost savings between the two percent and the one percent step you could use that to fund a bonus like i would would i would do less i would repurpose less for salaries right and i would use that for bonus instead so we could definitely work that i don't have that tonight but i could work that up miss justice all right just about 10 o'clock and this is very complicated i know i'm not the only one up here that understands that you've given us a lot of material on overheads and a couple of handouts i would like to have the body of it and take it home and study it sure if we're going to make good decisions we need to do it properly and not rush through things i mean i just heard what

207you said but those are some ways and some questions one question i'm sure we all got questions especially if we've got more time to think about it and look at the information we've got tons of information and we need more time if we're going to do it right and he already said the vote would come at another date anyway normally we have two meetings a month our interim totally disappeared because of the primary but we can do that another day this we've got three more weeks in this month do you have questions well no i'm just you well what i'm saying is i'm going to make a motion i'm going to make a motion can we let everybody else talk before emotions hold your motion okay but i'm just saying this is a lot of

208information it's very complicated you agree right i do okay until we have everybody to talk okay hold your thoughts [Music] to say something yeah thank you again for all this work um madam chair um i would actually uh miss something thank you i would actually like to see uh something similar maybe at the end of the week and we have to move quickly but something with a 17 dollar minimum wage in the one percent with the idea of using the savings to do some bonuses i can't believe we can talk about we agree miss justice but i don't believe hell hath i agree um do we need to meet again all of a sudden i just want to thank you for this my uh where my brain is a lot i'm trying to figure all

209this out but um you know i just go back to you know our most important obviously our students are most important but behind them our educators are right behind them so i mean if we have to go you know and find borrow and do whatever we got to do i think our county commissioners have been extremely nice to us i mean and i don't want to over burden them but on the other hand i think that they would agree that the educators are hugely important across the board you know we sit there and lament that we can't get bus drivers and then we you know so i think it is really important that we that we do the right thing by them also so uh i'm just going to stay on that at that point

210but i do want to thank everyone dr faust ashley for all your hard work in preparing this thank you miss walker so i had the same question about the cdi position i we just had discussions about how they were looking for hiring and now i see on the screen is that what you recommend or is that what dr faust recommends to eliminate that position or that's what we have to recommend in order to get to what the board we have to recommend that online i know what ms adams was saying about how she was wanting to accomplish this before she left and i understood that i've been working with the edi committee for a while and we have we had somebody facilitating that uh if anybody's paid attention to that meeting last night and if

211they haven't they should there was a really hard discussion that we had at the end of it that talked about our intention and um i thought we had got to a point where we were there we do this and it kind of says the district doesn't care about what what the work that we've been doing and i don't i mean that's not the only thing there's a lot of other questions thank you so much for presenting ashley i mean we have a lot more to talk about um but we have to be intentional and i feel like to a lot of people that do this work and volunteer to do it and really feel it's important it just looks like the district doesn't doesn't care about it and i i mean that's not just coming

212from me that's coming from the people that i spoke to yesterday um so i would like to see that added back in somehow maybe we can talk about that the next time about like what it's going to take to fund it and where we can look to get that funding and if we have to shift things around i just think it's important so so if i can we went we only cut positions where there was no one in it so if you want to find another position that means we've got to find a position with the person in it somebody just retired out of that position but that's a vacant position that's considered a vacant position so what i'm saying is that this has been the hardest budget because we're not used to having a

21312 million dollar ask and we had to find it i get that so when we had to go find 12 billion we had to look and i get it everything is important to everyone but we don't have enough money to fund everything no no i just want to push back because the office was created i mean just because someone transitioned out of it doesn't mean it just poof disappears i just feel like that's not that i mean i don't think that's an adequate way to put it because i mean just because she's technically there so i don't know if y'all are actually um got applicants for it or not i'm sure is that true the position was open so yes they're very absolutely right we've let's we listed for the position but we have had

214to pause because we have a budget and i get it i promise you i get it this i mean i don't think but i don't think the board gets what they're asking us to do so if we put that back in there so we can put the five hundred thousand dollars back in there we started buying five dollars somewhere no because the only reason i'm pushing back on this because i was told the email y'all were i've seen the listing for it five years ago there yes y'all are doing uh what all we did was post the position i just want to be clear the people that are listening especially people that do this has been doing this work for a few years that it's not the board it has to be the board we

215have to find the money to fund the board we can't when we ask so our ass was 2.5 million when we were at this workstation what the board asked us to do was to do this in two years and i told the board that we would come back and we would scrub the budget to find the money the county commissioners were not going to fund us at 122 million dollars so we had to take all that 57 million dollars of esser we reappropriated that money in every position that we could find money we had to take that it was it's not that we don't want the position it's that we can't afford it um i just feel like that's what budgets are for registered to look at you you know look at the plan i

216mean this is like three years we're looking at 22 23 24 yeah i mean it's a pretty far out you know way to look at it right and i know the administrators want us to use the extra funds we have i get all that i get they they want to know that we are digging deep defined money you know but i was also had conversations too about our intentions you know i went to the county address that's the one thing they talked about that they were very very adamant about is doing this work and i just feel like you know if the district is going to want to be intentional on it we have to keep make it a priority that's what i'm saying well i agree with you but if we look back at

217the board's priority the equity department was not the priority but i mean it was a position that was the priority changed we're not done yet the the priority was our employees then we had um i think academics was number three what was number two i asked you to have that on top of your head right so we followed what the priority was of the board that's why we were able to say hey this has to go because this wasn't a priority for the board when building a budget and the reason why we had to do three years is because we couldn't fund it in one and so we're asking for grace from the county commissioners because typically you would not have um in previous years you've not had a salary study where it was implemented

218over three years that's why we had two or two years that's why we had to build a budget for two years and ask for it typically it would say one year would build a one-year budget so i get it everyone wants this but we can't have it that's basically you're saying we're not learning technology for elementary kids we're using esther funds i don't know i just feel like in a budget you make budget priorities and that's what i'm you know we do have an important position we do stephanie okay can we move on nelson has a question i just want to clarify this is not dr faust's budget recommendation he passed we had our budget recommendation and the board's directive to the superintendent was go back and find money for bonuses so i'm pretty sure

219and raise it i'm sorry it raises go back and find the money for the raises and that's what was trying to be done this is not the budget that the superintendent is recommending he's telling he's showing us what we asked for and i'm saying what we asked for is not possible i don't believe i don't think it's responsible and i would like to go back to that original proposal at seventeen percent or seventeen dollars an hour and a one percent increase can i clarify is that over three years oh yeah three yes miss justice and i don't think it was 17 i think we we asked for the 16-2 you guys gave us the 16-2 and then we out over three and then we asked for um 16-2 over two right but i wanted to

220look at the possibility of lesser bonuses okay all right so miss justice i would like to motion that we in the meeting tonight take up where we left off after we're more rested and we can be more cohesive in our questioning too because some of this is going all over the place uh because i think it's the time of night and the amount of information we've been given i guess we're supposed to discuss it i move that we uh end the meeting now and reconvene at a later date within the next week or so is there a second what do you want to say only okay hearing none um we them not a second then we will move on and continue with the budget discussion so what do we want to direct dr faust and

221his team yes i don't know how to say bless you thank you for everything you've done the numbers are and this information is heavy um i can't imagine doing that for a living so let me see if i've got this correct we're trying we're on a trip and we've we know we got two years worth because we're going to do fund balance we're going to use fund balance we're going to tap the extra funds we've totally reallocated so we basically reached into every pocket and checked all our dirty clothes gone around the block picked up do two years hoping we can get the county commissioners to come back and support us on the third year if the state does not increase and there's no guarantee and this this is assuming that our enrollment will stay

222consistent you know what the word means sometimes so my question is we're kind of and i understand it i'm getting it we're kind of charged with due diligence to use our mileage and our gas to the best of our ability for two years and then maybe somebody will come in and step in and help us but that's two years away starting next year um i'm on the edi committee as well as vice chair and i understand i i totally get it i do but maybe somehow we can get and i know this is not going to make me popular but some very capable people who are already in the employment of new hanover county that we could somehow keep this going i think it's very important that we keep this as something that's important what's

223this edi okay and i realized we can't hire someone i lost a lot of money and that i i mean i get it but it's some way we could keep that alive so that doesn't go stale we don't need that um this is this tough decision i don't care if it's tomorrow it's going to be tough even with the night so when i talk about equity is important to me in my role but their ta scholarship program is going to get cut i hate that the path that was just created for tas to have an opportunity to become teachers in the classroom i hate that the fact that some are learning that's fewer children we're going to be able to support that need that additional support over the summer summer months so there's things in

224here that are important to a lot of people that we are going to have to give up by trying to ram this down the throat of the county i don't think it is fiscally irresponsible and i can tell you i'll be damned if i'm part of a riff of over 200 employees if i am responsible for a budget vote that causes us to have to lose over 200 employees in a couple years i'm not going to do it i can't support it and of course i will say you know the if if we move forward our plan is that you approve this the next day as we're having senior staff meetings we're going to start looking at our local formulas we're going to start looking at extra positions different programs we have in place like

225dr faust had mentioned the funding by school all those programs and so it's not like we would sit back and wait we would go ahead and start the work and as we had turnover that would give us two years but to your point when we get to that last year if we haven't had enough turnover to get to our target numbers um then yes that's where we would be and you know let's face it you're not going to cut that much out of a budget and you and have anywhere close to the same level of service you got now i mean that's just do you have um oh i'm sorry the um do you have on you what our budget was that you presented to us last at our budget work session so at the

226last work session i did not present a budget so at the last work session i went through um our plan for building a budget and then i ca i was asking for direction if we were going to implement a salary schedule because i needed that information to do without what i presented tonight and you you presented tonight based on what we asked you to do not over three years but to try and do it over two is that right yes that's right okay so you would have to go back to the drawing board a little bit and to um with what you presented us on yeah so i had gotten to a certain point with both those plans but i kind of stopped until i had direction and then i moved forward with the one

227that we selected so if we go back to the other plan then i mean i have i'm not starting from the very beginning i'm starting it wherever we left off and then i would build on from that point okay so for our next oh miss walker um well i know there's a lot of um kind of people up here talking about freaking out the county commissioners i think the thing that i heard was they want to make sure we're using all the funds we have before they decide the thing is i was um the point i made the other week was that we can't control inflation we can't there's a lot of stuff we cannot control as well we don't we're not a revenue creating entity and so i feel like if they think if

228they know we're doing our best i don't think that means that they're necessarily going to just say no are you trying no no that's true no i mean that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to say no because um i just think from what i heard from one of them especially was that we just want to make sure they got they're using all the funds that they have available to them because they understand they've given raises to their own employees they understand that the cost of living has gone up here inflation is high then we can't control that and if we want to keep our staff and keep them you know employed and keep our students you know learning properly then we need to be able to help them live and pay bills mr wildeboard well

229just i want to go back to something you said before and make sure i understood it so basically at the end of three years either way it's going to be we're going to have an ask of 15 million whether it's over two years or three years correct yep so the different plans it just spreads it differently so this the plan i have up on the screen in the first year we're asking for 2 million and the second year 2.2 million and then the third year so in essence if you spread it over three years you're pushing the big county request to that third year so that gives them time to plan for it but i will also say it would you know i'm k i would be carrying a three-year budget request to the county

230and i would be asking the county to approve funding for three years and not one year because we like someone else someone had already said this but we to be fiscally responsible we need them to say in three years this is where we're going to be with or else we can't implement we wouldn't want to implement a salary schedule that we don't know in three years if we can fund it because then are you going to do a pay cut so that anyways i just felt like i needed to say that and just to you know i was actually one of those principals that actually went out in 2000 i believe is nine and handed out sheets to people so i know i don't want to do that i don't want to cut anybody without

231a doubt but on the other hand i also don't want to tell somebody that you know as we've heard time and time again that you know i can go to dominoes and make you know three or four dollars more than i am right now so we got to do something for our classified staff and i mean we can't just put our blinders on and say with all due respect to my colleagues up here i don't think that that's responsible either to say that well we're just going to keep paying you at the minimum the state's going to you know give you and hopefully you'll stay with us and hopefully you know there's there's enough we got to keep the best of the best in the classroom so um so i think a couple things just

232to help you understand where we are with our local because this is what we're approved the budget is a local budget we have about 667 positions in our local budget 667 that's not normal that's not normal that's not how you build a budget but over time because we just kept adding and adding and adding typically and that's what i think about 35 typically you'll have about 15 out of your local so we're so dependent on our local that we can't move and so that's why i was adamant about showing you the wraparound services the state didn't fund those so we were picking up all those other expert services through local and so when i was saying that we're running out and when ours we were we were buying things like our students we're continuing to

233come our student population is coming down but we're still adding and so they're all coming out of our local fund and that's what's happened to us we've gotten ourselves into a spot where we've jammed ourselves up that's basically all this we've jammed ourselves up minus so we and i'm not saying do this let's say if you didn't have the ask of the salary study you'd be able to continue everything that you asked what's happened is again when you have positions and you ask local and local and they don't have to fund you that's the thing they don't have to fund you at that level we got ahead of ourselves and that's what happened we continue so in some of our schools all of our elementary middle and i think our highs share an academically gifted

234teacher some of our schools don't have a program but they still have a teacher all of our schools have um social workers i'm all for social workers but in most districts some still share those positions so it's like you're at this school two days you're at the school 2.5 days we've been we've got the luxury of doing that and that's okay but we have to understand what that luxury means because it comes at a cost so when you solve seventeen thousand dollars per kid that's what that cost means so when you then go in and you multiply seventeen thousand dollars times three hundred that's where your budget is that's where your money is so it's not that we can't afford a pay increase we can't afford it with all the people that we have and

235i get it when individuals are saying they can go elsewhere and make the twenty four dollars if we didn't offer insurance we could pay you that what gets us is when actually was showing you it's like two million dollars for that other that salary the state salary increase and i'll say this god forbid there is a raise in year three we will be actually taking collection to come into the board meeting i mean we won't have the funds because they don't always fund that at that high number so the state only funds their positions that they give us those 666 positions we have to fund those locally and so the state is not giving you a raise for the 666 or the feds so we have people who are in federal and so remember when

236we increase the federal supply that's a lot of special ed their services have to go down because we have to pay the people so let's say if it's 11 million dollars that we get for them i'm making that number up whatever we have to take out a salary we have to pay so the things that we could do or we used to do we can't do because we've got to pay them it's a it's a luxury again i say it's a luxury to have these things but we just understand what we why it's so hard for us to put together a budget and then to say we co-signed it because neither of us co-signed this budget because again we're banking it on a yes for year two a yes for year three and that the

237money will come in and that the students will come that's the that's the the gist that's the the trans parent um they know that we'll have to cut more they're looking like please don't there was you know they're trying to barter um but we we have to in order to make it we have to because we can't wait till year 3 and do a cut for 265 employees you can't keep 667 employees in your local we've got to find a way to get those employees back over to the states of the state and pay for those employees both will play their insurance and their insurance yes all of that is not available okay so um what do we need to do do we need to make a recommendation to you um to look at the

238numbers again based on something or do we need to like what do we need i know we need to have another meaning that's an obvious um what do we need to ask you to do so that we are prepared for another meeting can we do a 16.1 step increase i'm sorry a 16 and a one percent step increase so we can bring that back in over three over three we can also look at that i mean 17 will be more but we can look at the 17 but i think we look at a 16 with the one percent because remember when you're doing the our budget is going this way on that the paid salary if you were to go to someone will go to that page you could go back going that way we're

239going both and so we're paying to the left and up and down going if you want to increase going across your grades both ways and so that's where we're having to pay so much and you do two percent two percent two percent then miss justice you had your hand up i'm hearing a lot of information a lot of it's good information very valid and a lot of there's questions to be asked too we voted on 16 with a 2 percent and i do believe that the county commissioners absolutely wants best with far schools we are in crisis that's why we are losing staff because they can go make nineteen twenty dollars an hour a dominoes this is what we were going to do in order to reassure them that they came first and that they

240would be able to survive in this economy in our county there is one position here that i'm hearing that's under dispute and that is something that we have been talking about as part of the strategic plan it might not be the priority but it was something we voted on i think the whole community has been demanding it and it's needed i would say my ask for you and dr faust is to go back again and find you're saying 500 000 for one position over three years is what you're concerned that included 500. to get to that 500 we had to do that position and there were some other things in there okay so but that's the main position that you talk about the equity officer correct that side actually yes and then by the way

241what the goal is is for us to decide what we all want her to do not what just one of us wants well we're all asking you asked to ask no i know you can't but we need to decide together as a group this is what this is so out of the operating cost so the expenditures so the rate increase for utilities contracts software insurance was 1.1 million dollars so then we looked at the budget so we looked at supplies that were in there we looked at food professional development computer equipment and we were slice and budget and then out of that we were able to save 562 389 out of that 1.1 million and whatever whatever those came up to that all of that came up to the savings was five hundred thousand dollars

242well what's that got to do with the equity officer you made a statement about that i would like to see that next time that was put in there to get to reduce we have to we had to reduce the cost oh so you put that one position in amongst those other things and how much would it have cost if it stayed in so it's that position and i think there are coordinators that go along with it so that office it was i think there were two coordinators those were included i think it was two coordinators and a half um office clerical type person um was included in building i think that i don't know if it was a department but structurally you can move people around but we didn't those were not in the i'm

243sorry i just want to make sure those other items were not in the current budget those were requests through the budget process this position was the only thing that was in the current budget that's all i was asking about was the position and that's all i was asking the next time we speak what that position looks like yeah that's all that's right so mr wilderboy had to stand up just a quick well just a statement more than the question um you know i've been in a lot of counties been three counties and a lot of counties have as dr fowle said we have you know we're very you know very fortunate in this county we have a person who does this person does that you know we separated science and math you know at the

244lead teacher position i mean the last county i was in was a poor county and they had you know one person had four or five hats you know and it may be something we have to look at for the short term is a situation that you know you don't have a person that just does this they do this this this and that you know it's great to have you know different people in charge of every little piece but i mean we may need to look at you know consolidating some of those those roles at least in the short term right right we do you can move people around and struggle that's that was the dialogue he just i agree with him we need to do this because every i'm going to get yelled at in

245about three seconds on following our own rules so we're going to follow our own rules um i just i just i'm going to push back on that statement last night there was a comment made in the edi meeting by one of our teachers that said we need to stop doing things for free and he's right all right we ask so much of our educators every day and so that goes against everything we're talking about we're saying we want to pay them more but if we can't do it let's give them more responsibilities that doesn't make any sense to me so i just feel like we need to move things around i think that the people the positions that are in the budget all serve a purpose and i think that we need to be trying

246to take things off i mean the 667 local that's tough but you know what this community that's what we're demanding we want the mental health support for our kids we want the wraparound services that we're providing and we're trying to make that happen um and so it's not an easy this is not an easy discussion um i think that you're right there's a lot of questions and you know we want to have it all we can't have it all we've got to figure out what are the priorities and with all due respect to my colleagues madam chair i'll just i'll just be very brief i think we really do need to sort of wrap this up because we're not going to be able to solve the budget as a group of seven of you know

247overnight um but i do want to say um for the record the county commissioners publicly said no there's there's no maybe there's no the county commissioners publicly said no yes yes they did they publicly said that that was not acceptable when they weren't going to do it so i just want to make that very clear it's not good okay so here's where we are um we know we have to have a second meeting to review something so we just need to decide as a group what we want um dr faust and ashley and team to work on to come back at that meeting so that we can vote on something because we have to give him something soon to take to the county commissioners so um what do we want i'm hearing that dr faust

248said he would like for us to consider a 16 an hour with one percent over three years or a 17 17 hour with one percent over three years um and then i'm hearing that we want to keep equity in there um so is is is there anything else that we want to add and they'll have them try and look up numbers for us with both of those what are the esser bonus options okay so does that um does that sound like we've got everything that we want them to look at and bring back to us i know i see it i i just had a question that's not related to exactly this but like can we get something we can look at because yeah he sent us an email no i understand he did tonight

249can i finish what i'm saying that right there whatever that is is not what i asked for and i would like to be able to look at the whole thing if i'm going to vote on a budget i want to see it and i don't mean every little tiny detail you know i know mary hazel had given us copies of budgets they were you know they were probably this thick and they were bound i mean you wouldn't present that to the county commission so no so what i kept saying so in the email when you asked you said the budget i said i'm what you have is what i ask for mary hazel would give you this this is what you would vote on the fur you would see this the first time then she

250would come back and she would give you this again this is what we use to give you but when you kept asking for i need the complete budget and that's why i was pushing back into him well i mean that's why i gave you the whole budget but then miss justice followed up with she needs the budget in order to um like that that is but that's the complete budget and that's why i kept telling you that's not that's what we well let me finish the what i sent you on friday to everyone was the ask that's the word that's what we work from when you said or when the the the email came through that we need the budget we need the budget that's when we were like we've given you all that we

251have that's what we're working from all of those requests trying to find it because what happens is and i'm not sure everyone understands the 403 million dollars that's already voted on what we're voting on is the new budget those new items that's what ashley was giving you there that's what mary hazel would give you there the new budgeted items they would present them to you in this fashion and then we would come back and we would do it again i have that i have the emails from i can show you the emails from last year i'm not just doing i got last year and i'll show you it'll be this unless we're we're misunderstanding what we're talking about hold on what we're talking about i think maybe we're talking around each other because that is

252not what i asked for and i can you hold on i said i think he was waving over here i i'll show you what i was thinking i was gonna get and perhaps that will help us bridge whatever kind of miscommunication we're having can i clarify i think i know what you're talking about that budget that bound budget we get that's after it's done that was always the copy that we receive after the fact what is being presented to the commission are you going to hand them no a book or no no what will happen is after you vote on a budget then we take the same thing that we give you so let's say this powerpoint we would do that powerpoint presentation for them and then they would vote on that then once everything

253is said and done and we have um the year end there's going to be a really nice bound budget that we put it looks like this and this is the so these are on our website along with our financial statements and so this is the product after we finish the budget development we're still developing the budget now i understand that it's just i feel like there's things that we could talk about that we haven't had a chance to talk about that are in the budget you know oh sorry miss justice well in the past as i said we had two to three meetings two hours at least long previous to having this kind of discussion in front of the whole board where we did that and what mary hazel gave us was last year's budget

254and we were able to look at it and see what was going on so while we developed which was about it was about three bond years worth but it was you know not this but it was a lot more detailed than what we have gotten this year so that's not against you are you doing a great job but it seems like we need more we needed more information we got a lot tonight and that's what i was asking for because we it just wasn't the same amount i got the first couple years i was on the board for mary hazel that really explained more that was going on before we did the final budget so we could see where everything had been in the past but that's neither here nor there because we could debate

255this all night around and go around circles back to where we were before what do we want together as a group to ask ashley and dr faustin team to put together for us to review so that we can send it to the commissioners i'm hearing we need to decide between sixteen dollars an hour with one percent or seventeen dollars with one percent over three years and include esser funds for bonuses is there any and then and to keep the edi um office and um and associated things with it is there anything else that we're asking for well and i'd just like to clarify what i said before since i was questioned on it what what i said very clearly was that a lot of counties don't have somebody in every single office sometimes there's shared

256responsibility i wasn't talking about educators in the classroom as being asked to do something for free we're talking about very highly paid people at central office that are being asked to do more than one job that's what i was saying so i just want to clarify what i said okay thank you all right so can are we in agreement with those one two um we have to decide between 16 or 17 or do if we want them to do two that's a lot of work um with edi and ester bonuses is there anything else we want them to look at so that we can evaluate okay i would like to see it stay at 16.2 as we agreed on that's what this salary schedule said that's what we thought was great at the time i

257hate to say that we're going to go back and do that and change it now but and there's only one contention that i'm hearing the 16.2 is working the only thing i'm hearing up here that's the contention has to do with the edi situation and i think we need to use the same kind of creativity that you're using for everything else to figure out a way to have that position funded uh without damaging what you've already done with the 16.2 all right so now we have three different um funding strategies for our um classified people so which one do we want to do um do we have to you want to vote individually or you want a show of hands not voting tonight right no we we have to vote to tell them what well

258if she why don't they do it all yeah we can't tell her to go and do you know five iterations of the of the budget the only thing we're doing is the edi right she's only she's already done the six we can bring back sixteen dollars and one percent over three years seventy dollars one percent over three years and esther bone is options right and we can give you all of that that's it and i don't i mean you just need to tell us that and we can do that and all right so can you tell us do that do you want all three of them or do you want one of those guys what do you want i'm telling you we can do that okay all three of us so moved well wait one

259second okay all right so and then you'll include edi and the answer buttons if possible we will do it okay all right all right so um do i hear a motion to accept this approach for our next meeting mr mcmanus first is there a second okay is there any more discussion yes i would also like to use the 16.2 and have in the uh edi position in some way form that you find that you it can be funny that's part of the motion already why wasn't she you said 16.1 then you said 16 point i mean 17.1 okay she said 16.2 as we have and bring back the position that one's different yeah right so this is um 17. i'm turning 17. so so we would do 16 a 2 step a 16 at one

260percent step and a 17 at one percent thank you and the edi in all of them and then yeah the bonus and the editing that's what the motion is that's what the second is um let's go ahead and vote on that do you want to do show of hands or do you want to do role play all right okay i'm all in favor say aye aye any opposed okay so that passes seven seven seventeen seven to zero so all right so you're clear on what we've asked you to do okay and i just want just for informational purposes so the county is expecting something from us tomorrow so i will call and ask for an extension on that they're going to have i think it's a work session where they're going to talk about our

261budgets and the other budgets requests have been submitted that's scheduled for may 16th so i know they're going to need our stuff before then and then i think it is june the 6th is when we would go and actually give our presentation but they want to talk about it before we give our presentations i just want you to know those deadlines on friday will that be enough time for you guys to do what you need to do we will do the best we can okay so everyone please check your calendars right now for um friday friday morning may 6 hotel what time um i'm saying in the a.m or you want us to do p.m so you guys have more time p.m would be good for us with chill friday pm is really kind of

262sucks excuse me um is not probably the best opportunity but if that's what works best for us all then we will um yeah pleasure of the board what's what's best for you guys i'm not available in the afternoon on friday morning okay so how much time will we need like two hours well how miss sutton how much time will we need um i would say two hours just so we can have all the conversations and not feel rushed and whatever the document is and i apologize if i know if you can show me or even tell me what the document is you're looking for with the budget we can try to get that to you as quickly as possible i just and i even called mary hayes and i'm not sure what the document looks

263like i just sent over an email that what she sent us on march 14th 2021 and so i sent it to you oh yeah it just came all right okay so let's say 10 to 12 10 to 12. that's good uh miss adams can you make 10 to 12 waffle house madam chair um i can help you uh i knew that won't work i'm gonna tell you right now ten to ten to twelve and we have to get it done in two hours i i i okay semester so i really wanna make sure we stick to that so let's um all right so it's friday may the 6th 10 to 12. um good let's write that in okay so you know what we're asking for and we know when we're supposed to be here to

264hear that okay all right so thank you thank you thank you okay all right so we will um yes we're good you you are dismissed thank you ashley and we we do have someone from sherry here to talk about so next on our agenda stay up there um special event insurance um go ahead and do that yep we have zach wright here and he's going to help us out so he's been helping us with the special event insurance and so i'm going to let him speak to that a little bit he's here to help me answer questions interesting and just go through the process of getting that special via insurance thank you so much for hanging out with us this evening i hope you got a burrito and some fruit okay well i'm glad to

265do it you folks are working hard thank you for being with us i'll try to be brief and then if there are any questions uh certainly please ask those uh we're here to talk about a special events policy for a motorcycle exhibition your current carrier decided in march that that was too much risk for them to bear so we're in the specialty market looking for policies to provide that coverage on behalf of the board of education at this point we've had 16 declinations we're waiting to hear from six more insurance companies but we do have one that sent over applications today that are in the hands of risk management and ashley as well that upon completion we should we hope to have a company that will offer coverage for the event thank you do you

266have um any idea what that cost might look like i do not i think we're in three buckets we're going to be in the highly unlikely that it's available and affordable i think we're going to be in the following two buckets if it's available it's going to be hard to pay for or it may not be available at all just trying to be very realistic with you folks but you're trying and we appreciate it mr mcmanus we're trying thank you sir miss walker i just had a question um i think because we've been trying to talk about this for a very long time and um i think the initially the gentleman got a list of um requests that he needed to meet in order for them to consider or or cover it um and he

267did that and he followed a lot of roles and he bought more things and he got more coverage but i think the the question is he's not profit company so i think he comes and he does work for free he doesn't charge for anything like that and it's being he's being treated as a vendor and i don't know what the difference is for that like why you might not know that i'm sorry if you don't but um my best answer to that question ma'am is that the event that's being proposed is of a higher risk than you normally see at a public school system so that has insurance companies who are conservative by nature you know more hesitant to offer terms and in the meantime have asked for additional items to ensure the safety of

268students do we know if he was covered before because what i was told was he was in the district before for about almost 10 years and he was doing shows fine and i know when mary hazel was up here the last time if a principal requested and he met the requirements that it was okay to do the show and i think after that is when he was trying to do shows and then they said he couldn't so i guess i'm just confused at the process so let me try to answer a couple of those questions so my understanding is and i wasn't here when the shows were happening before but my understanding is earlier this year is when we it came to our attention that the events were happening i don't think we knew the

269events were happening and so we didn't know so we didn't follow up on the insurance because i don't think it was going through central and i could be wrong because this was before i was here but once we identified what was what the events were that it wasn't just a speaking role that the stunts were happening we reached out to i'm sure to see to make sure our liability coverage would cover whatever was going on and that's kind of what started the process and then i think we thought we had gotten to a point where we were in a good place we had the insurance from him but then we found out he didn't have workers comp for the other volunteers that were helping him so that was the next roadblock and then to go

270back to your i think your first question we um asking for the insurance isn't necessarily about him being a vendor it's about just making sure we have that coverage if something were to happen on our campus that's what that was about i'm sorry we've gotten used to everybody wants to speak once before so i just want to double check because i know when i was principal of school all sudden they said well you know you got to have this extra insurance for bouncy houses oh you couldn't have bouncy houses you couldn't have bouncy houses then two years later also you can have bouncy houses again but are we talking about the school system or because in that situation the pta actually purchased it was 250 is all it was 250 worth of it was like

2715 million worth of insurance for 250 for bouncy house i understand motorcycles are different but we're not having kids on motorcycles so i don't know if it would be a whole bunch of difference but you know it may not be 250 but if the pta stepped in and said you know at whatever school we're going to cover the insurance you know can can they do that on is that is that a possibility that is a possibility you would want to have the school board or risk management to review the pto policies and see what exclusions may be in place but currently under your liability policy on bouncy houses you do not have coverage but i guarantee you on field day they're out there oh they sure are yeah so once this became news to the

272insurance carrier that's when the trouble started what we don't know we don't know uh mr boyer and then miss justice thank you madam chair and i'm a cranky yankee at 10 45 so i'm just kind of i'm a little miffed at what this board is considering so i'd just like you to think about it for a minute um you're considering purchasing an insurance policy for one individual who does a show and my question to the board would be what happens when a really great magician comes in and says look i can't afford the insurance you're asking me to have or when a really great charity comes in and says look i've got this great idea that i'm going to put forward to you but you just have to buy this insurance package mr britt has

273never contacted me mr brit has never contacted a board member's email he's never contacted us so i don't know where this is coming from but i'm really uncomfortable doing a favor for one individual and you know we just talked about our budget and we're thinking about spending money so somebody so kids can enjoy a really great job it's a great show he can go to a park and do it he can advertise it differently this is not fiscally responsible in my opinion miss justice have you looked into the show at all i've seen it many times miss justice it's a very good role model he does a lot of positive messages to our students and and you know you were just here this year this has been going on since the first of last year

274and he did he confirmed to all of these different requirements he took out extra insurance himself this has been going on gosh knows almost two years now and it and it's very sad it's very sad that it seems like it's almost become personal with some people because it is something that should be used as a positive experience for our kids and it has been in the past in fact i've been for years he's doing performances in pender county right now with no problem and so we should do everything we can possibly do to have a local gentleman who has been volunteering his time freely to do a positive message with our kids i don't even know the man i just know of him because people said such wonderful things about him so this is not

275anything individual or personal it's about doing something good for our kids in our schools having a local person be a positive role model or doing this in his performances now i know there's some people that were upset for some reason because of his business that has nothing to do with what he's do like you don't know what's going on um i'm not and i think we need to ask um our guest questions that are relevant to his work not our opinions so um miss walker well can i finish what's good so um as far as the cost goes would this apply to other events that we might have of a similar nature if we do take this kind of insurance out if i'm understanding your question correctly if it were being applied for here or

276in pender county the cost should be relatively the same based on the number of events oh i mean if it wasn't just tim but another type of event a show that might you know have some kind of case yeah it is the underwriters will um underwrite i hate to use the same word twice but we'll look at each vendor separately in this case and price based on the inherent risk of what's being done so if we had a magician in the middle of the high school gymnasium it may be five hundred dollars this i don't want to put a dollar figure on it but it will be much higher than that thank you miss walker one question i have and i have a comment so the question is um i think we basically learned here

277tonight that and i would i don't know what records that you guys keep as far as he is concerned so this person has been doing this for about a decade now or in within the last decade and you're saying he's never been covered is that what you're saying what i'm saying is liberty mutual did not realize the event that was going on so at the time the board of ed would have had coverage in that event now that they are aware of what's going on they have excluded coverage from your policy so we have two choices if it goes forward you would have to go the board of education without insurance and or possibly explore governmental immunity which i would defer to your board attorney to discuss that it's been happening and we didn't i

278guess didn't know and it wasn't covered and so all of a sudden someone noticed that and they reported it and basically now there's no coverage but i want to say this i'm speaking to the larger point that miss justice spoke about as far as the community is concerned that is really when i when i learned about this initially the the board was getting hammered over it we were getting blamed for making a decision that we didn't make and so this this has been going on for a while it's not based on you know um be doing a personal favor for somebody that's really how we treat it's really how we treat people in the community that are been here for a long time and there were a lot of stories that came out of it

279that really kind of made me question what was going on you know i it was over uh the fact that it was uploaded onto a gun i don't know facebook page for business he owns and then it just made it seem like it was a personal thing with this person and we were all getting blamed for that and i you know i didn't understand it i've been trying to get information for almost a year now so we're here not because of favor we're here because it's just how we treat people in the community and we have to make sure we communicate that way okay i'm going to jump in first because i haven't had a chance to talk i wanted to just um make a say and this is this is not directed at you

280this is directed um at our board um for pondering so a couple things i'm going to go into the mom mode when um just because pender county's doing it um does that mean that we have to why are we going to jump off the bridge if um our friends are jumping off the bridge so um they have a different legal system they have a different insurance than we do so i don't think that we that is irrelevant me personally don't think that's relevant this has been going on for 10 years well folks i'm here to tell you and i hate to say it out loud we have had a lot of things going on in our district for the past 10 years that we did nothing to address um we probably weren't insured you know

281for those kind of things either and i can say it out loud everybody knows what's been going on for 10 years um you know in our district so i don't think that's a good analogy for us to say that it's been going on for 10 years so therefore we should continue um and then the board's getting clack we get flack for everything we do we get flagged for walking across the room um old boards did this to us and unfortunately we are the new board and we are stuck with a whole lot of crap so that those are just my thoughts on us deliberating not directed at you so um thank you for attending one of the things i understood and i i'm just going to add to that i would like to turn this

282conversation to thank our leadership and our administration that are taking accountability everyone up here has said we need to be accountable to the things going on in our district and i agree with ms craybill i think there were things going on in our district that we were unaware of that were not being necessarily handled well and this may be one of those situations so i think that what we're doing yes i think we're cleaning up some mess and i don't know dame britt i've never seen his show i don't know anything about him what i know is that now i do not want to think about having to pay for insurance for one person because it opens the door for everybody else that wants to come in to do something and then are we going

283to put money towards everybody and then b we just talked about a budget where we're already facing a lot of deficit and i just i don't understand i i appreciate you are keeping us compliant you are keeping us legal you are keeping us insured and i appreciate that the district is taking such a strong arm strong hand to make sure that we are doing right by our students and keeping our kids safe so i just want to say thank you and thank you for being so we don't have on here um it's just says for board consideration um is there some action that anyone is expecting from this meeting yes well i if you remember this whole conversation started when i brought it forth because i said can't we just i asked dr faust i

284believe it was can we just find the the cost of what it is uh with all the respect for everybody that's going on and on new hanover county had it before pender county to my understanding my wife talks about it many many years ago that it happened maybe it was wrong but it started as far as i know he's the guy's in new hanover county he's done it in new hanover county and all i ask was can we find out how much it is i didn't i said and i was told well everybody's so tied up in budget including our risk management people that we have no time to do that well i mean it's obviously we're investigating that so that's all i think the to answer your question i think we'd like to know

285how much it is so that maybe our ptas like in my past in pender in other places that you know they say hey let's let's do this event we'll pay for the insurance that's all i ask thank you we also have um from the risk management point of view and correct me if i'm wrong ashley it really kind of doesn't matter who's paying for the insurance if we don't feel like the event is worth the risk to us then it doesn't really matter because in from the pta perspective we have to get insurance and we have to put as a co-insurer the new hanover county board of education so we're sucked in to pta insurance whether we like it or not um that's like through aim insurance and and those kind of things that the

286ptas do for their special events so just because the pta does it doesn't mean that the liability does not want to be accepted you buy our school system right but i'm going by the cost okay so the cost we don't know yet but we've had 16 people tell us no so the cost is irrelevant and then we have one group that may be a yes and so maybe you can just forward that information to ms sutton and she could just relay that to us absolutely will ma'am and it should be i would say by end of next week at the latest well thank you for doing a legwork because you know 16 people is that's still a lot it still takes time it takes you that's you know 30 minutes if you're getting yourself a

287minute and a half you need to read each one but i do want to share we do we received the application and the top part we filled out is related to new hampshire county schools and then we will have to give him the application to complete because the second part of the application we we wouldn't know the answers to so he's really completing it for the event and then once we get that back we would send that back into the insurance company who would then look at that and determine first if they want to cover it and then what the cost would be and so for each event whoever's doing the event would have to fill out this paperwork so i just want to make sure we're clear on that so if it comes back

288again a different event that wasn't listed on this application it would require another application is that correct if if we had a schedule of events if we knew there were going to be 12 shows and they were all going to be the same show one application would suffice so if we left off the date of an event correct if we just did an application for may 15 and there were no more shows this year and then another one came up in september we would have to reapply but if we knew at the end of this week that we had may 15 august 28th september 15th we could do it all at one time if we knew we had the foresight to know the dates all right well thank you for your time on that so

289um we will look forward to hearing back from our last man standing to give us some information thank you madam chair thank you board thank you um safe drive home all right so um the someone has asked for a bathroom break um we only all right we have a lot more to cover so let's take the bathroom break and then let's come back and revisit where we are well okay just take a bathroom break and review it like a two minute or because it the time is 10.59 hey what if we did [Music] this question and then these amendments by the way we have employees that got to work at eight this morning hey folks welcome back so it is now um 1107. we have roughly um an hour and a half of business if

290we stick to our time limits which we have not been able to stick to any of our time limits because everybody goes uh judy i see your hand and i'll follow me please um so we have my suggestion i want to toss this out here again is that can we please finish old business and then we will adjourn but before we adjourn this is just me talking out loud um before we adjourn we will look at our calendars and try and set a date to finish all of this or we can have miss bowie send us out a google sheet and we can pick some dates um we do know that from here friday 10 to 12 we've already committed to to finish the budget um i think i saw an email that you've already

291noticed the meeting so we we are in you know we are in for 10 to 12. so um i would like to um make that motion right now that we finish up old business get a date um just finish up old business and then adjourn and pick another date to finish our stuff i'll second that okay okay all right so we've got like five seconds um is there any discussion great idea yes okay um all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed okay so that's gonna pass so we are gonna power through um the policies for a second reading the rules of decorum and the mask vote um and i'll explain that when we get there and then we will adjourn so policies for a second reading mr boyer would you please leave that

292discussion for us thank you madam chair before i begin policy 7262 is going to be pulled out and moved on to that next meetings agenda we're going to separate that i know some board members would like to discuss that a little bit more in depth but we're not going to do that tonight so um this is it ladies and gentlemen the five of you who are still here this is the end of seven two six two will be on for the next yes okay and so this is it this is the end of the north carolina school boards association's policy update routine updates will come to us but no that one we have one more left that is down here in um in new business for um policy 78.05 which means what i'm saying is

293the bulk policies are finished the north carolina school board association's policy update i moved that we approve the policies with the exception of 7262. thank you okay i'm sorry so we're removing policy 72-62 yes until next month okay and then we are voting on all of the rest correct okay um is there there was the first and a second um all in favor say aye aye any opposed great okay rules of decorum um miss walker well you seem to incorporate a lot of those in your discussion early on which is good i think uh you covered a lot of things that were in there um i reached out to everybody not everybody got back to me some people said they didn't think it was necessary or they felt like perhaps there'd just be more things

294that were added and had and added i disagreed only because i feel like meetings have gotten really out of control i i feel like we at some point have to obviously put our foot down and i think tonight we did do some of that and i feel like we got to keep keep that up um i don't know what the what the process is for this whether you wanted to send us to policy or you want to just approve these now or what did you want to do i moved to adopt it [Music] okay okay we got a mo um got a motion is there a second okay so now we're open for discussion um my thoughts for me and colin you can jump in um do you want to make a comment first or

295my comments so 99 of it or 95 percent of it i guess is um totally fine and i i think that having some of these things set out will be very helpful there are a few little kind of around the edges that i would want to massage a little bit just to make sure we don't run into any first amendment problems um but we can do it through policy committee or i'll rescind my motion thank you yeah so um here here are my thoughts on this is when i got these these this document it was thoroughly done um and i sent it to all you guys to look at too all the things that are in this document are things i'm saying at every meeting um the only thing you added which i i thought

296was great was the um please silence all cell phones during the meeting i don't ever say that um i can easily do that um so i i'm what i'm looking at when i did research for other school boards they basically are all saying the same thing um our local um city council doesn't have rules of decorum these the county commissioners don't have rules of decorum people know what is right and what is wrong and the more things that we write down i believe that um folks will come with their toes right up to the line and hang their pinky toe over the edge to get me to throw or me or any subsequent um board chair to throw them out of the meeting and that is not our goal our goal is to keep everybody

297in here getting to say what they want um i don't know about you guys but you know i listen to a lot of bad stuff about me we learned we heard a lot of bad stuff about dr faust we heard a lot of stuff about miss adams you know when she was board chair we've heard people attacking each one of us and um the so if we're gonna have to put up here obscene offensive inflammatory personal we heard a lot of personal stuff about ourselves and every one of us has been has had a personal thing about them including our excellent staff over here including some people just from the public i personally don't think we need to add this into policy because once once somebody goes over the edge on policy we got to

298do something right there right then and there is no discretion so and i do have a problem with loss of call to the audience privileges i don't know that we can do that removal from board meetings obviously we just did that tonight being banned from new hanover county premises um so um are we gonna really ban somebody we're answering something okay yeah no i'm i'm just i'm at things and then you can you can roll so i'm just giving my opinion on i don't think that um the only thing you didn't have in here too that i had was um no one in the aisles for fire um we're not supposed to be that's important we can't be in the aisle so go ahead and force them sometimes i um this is the thing like

299i've been sat on this war for almost a year and a half now and it is out of control there is no other body that elected body that has to deal with this and i feel like we have not we have not paid attention to it enough we have not addressed it we have allowed things to happen that we should never have let happen and i think at some point we have to put our foot down there like like the beginning says we are a governing body we are elected governing body we hold official meetings and what has happened over this past year has been it's just out of control and it's got to stop and at some point if we do if we don't so my thought in behind doing this and you know

300you said a lot of it at the beginning of the meeting is it's got to be a condition of of speaking or coming into this building that you agree to that because if you don't you know what to expect when you sign up you agree to it and therefore you are liable for it if you come in here and you violate them and that is why i throw everybody out you don't worry everybody out you didn't throw everybody out tonight you threw somebody that that violated that was clearly violated a state statute which you asked and you asked and they didn't and then you followed through and i think if you're consistent with that we can stop a lot of this from happening i mean unless you want to keep letting it happen i don't

301want to sit here and do this for another two years i just honestly don't sorry mr um mr will never yes ma'am thank you thank you madam chair you know we had we had one meeting where there was a big discussion on can you yield time can you not yield time so i think written here that you cannot yield time it makes it very easy for everybody and you know sometimes you you know there may be a situation you're not here so the vice chair has got to take over and at that point it's not like well okay is her or her rules different than your rules i mean it just makes it very clear and especially i like the idea that when people sign up they see these rules so they can't see that's

302also i didn't know well yeah you did because you signed you signed up underneath this or where the sign up is here it's clearly listed so everybody sees you know like i say we don't want to do anything against first amendment rights but short of that i mean i think it's good to have written rules so everybody knows what to expect when they walk in the door all right so is it fair to say or is it a fair thing for us to do is to um give mr shive a chance to look this over and make sure that our wording is right if they're not we're not duplicating we look at the things some of the things we're already doing incorporate all of that and then we can um vote on that at our

303upcoming meeting okay upcoming the next one no the next one the one to finish this meeting okay the one that's coming up like soon to finish the meeting is that is that agreeable well it's going to policy then right after mr after mr shah looks aside if after mr looks at it do we want this as a policy or do we want it as a board standard operating procedure we don't have any of those um but we can make it a standard operating procedure for us why don't we why are we changing i thought we were going to do it with the go to the policy meeting and then vote on it i'm not sure what the standard operating procedure is it's not written down this to be a policy yes or do we want

304it to be now we'll ask everyone um mr mcmanus that was decided ask colin which one would you recommend well can so some of this stuff is already included a little bit in policy 2310 public participation at board meetings and some other districts have a little more in their in those policies they set out some more of the rules so we could fold this in there and then in addition to having it in that policy it could be a standalone document that the board you know would would have approved um that could be posted and handed out and um you know for speakers to see so you could both be in policy you know some of these rules could be in policy and then also the standalone document could be out there for members of

305the public okay so why don't we do this colin will look at it for us and then at our board at our next meeting we'll decide how we want to do that and then we will put if it's policy we go to the policy committee you know have that in there i'm still going to keep saying these things until we get something in writing you know until we get whatever document we want so is that okay to let colin look at it we bring it back at the meeting that is a continuation of this meeting is that okay with you clarification on that we will have already passed this item on the agenda so will we have to add it because if we're doing a continuation of this agenda then let's table this we will

306table it so that we can um right okay we'll we will table this item so that we just fold it right in um but we're not tabling um 7262. correct correct okay all right that was easy all right so now the the next thing up on our agenda that um is i know this sounds kind of um out of place but we um still are required to vote for masks according to state statute and if we look at is that up on the board crystal do you have thank you so um we still according to senate bill 654 section x um we still have to vote on this at least once per month we have forgotten to do that over the past two months so do i hear a motion to keep our policy or

307let me hear do you miss somebody make a motion i'd like to make a motion i'd like to make a motion to keep our policy as it is max mask optional okay second okay um any discussion all in favor say oh wait can i say something any pose no okay we're just we're voting on the mask well i just wanted to remark that i think that we're all very happy the way things have gone as far as you know yeah that's all it's great thank you all right so with that um meeting is adjourned [Music] that i'm allowed to invite everybody for breakfast at his house you