NHCS Board of Ed. Interim Meeting | Feb. 15 | Reupload

001the february 15 2022 interim meeting in the board of education is called to order ms bowie will you please call the roll miss adams here mr bullier here miss justice here mr mcmanus miss walker here mr wildeboard president and ms craybill here okay so next on our agenda we have the moment of reflection invocation we have pastor edwin sutton senior pastor of descending church we'll be providing our invocation will everyone please stand let us pray father we thank you for the privilege of formal education we also acknowledge and are thankful for the tasks you have given us to provide substantial education there are so many issues regarding education of the day but god i ask that you will grant us your wisdom as to how we are to handle what comes before us we live

002in a land of a free but true freedom is not the right to do what we want to do true freedom is the right to do what we ought to do would you remind us of that as we make pertinent decisions on today we thank you for our superintendent our board our educators and our parents this we ask in the only name i know to pray that is the name of jesus christ amen please join me in saluting the flag and saying our 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 welcome to the new hanover county school's february interim board meeting thank you for joining us in person and

003in our viewing audience we value and appreciate your interest participation advocacy on behalf of all new hanover county students and staff to this point i trust that we all feel compelled to treat each other with dignity and respect throughout the meeting no matter what our thoughts and feelings are about an issue or about an individual person or group i'm asking all of us to mind our voices and actions so the board can remain focused on completing the its governance work that is necessary for all of our students and staff a reminder to you all that our mass mandate is still in effect inside this building and inside all of new hanover county schools building as a result of the new hanover county schools district-wide mass mandate please keep your mass above your nose and below

004your chin we are committed to keeping a safe and welcoming space for all meeting participants if you are unable or unwilling to wear your mask properly you can watch the meeting live on new hanover county schools tv or later on new hanover county schools youtube channel i also want to remind those people who have signs that your signs are allowed but they do need to be kept below your head so that you don't block anyone behind you okay next we have approval of the agenda do i hear a motion to approve the agenda so moved is there second second any discussion all those in favor say aye aye any opposed okay agenda for tonight is approved next up on their agenda is probably the best part about our meeting is recognitions our chief communications officer

005josh smith will lead us in that effort good evening everyone today is my absolute pleasure to recognize the 13 individuals who have shown deep commitment to student learning and a passion for teaching these select 13 join over 130 000 teachers nationwide who demonstrate the highest standards in the profession and have an enormous impact on the culture of learning of new hanover county school students a huge congratulations to the following for earning their national board certification and with that cares are we ready okay leah long and if you're here come on up christine capen dixie smith lauren gray nia farr robert roth tyler smith lisa layman caitlin demille hannah moon sean casey and not here this evening but also recognizing mary lee and kristen little congratulations [Applause] yes [Applause] [Music] [Applause] come here okay next on

006our agenda is moving to closed session but before i have a motion to do that i'd like to remind folks that you do need to have your masks on while you're in the building i need you to put your masks on please it's a requirement of new hanover county schools [Music] excuse the board previously enforced its mass mandate asking individuals i'm sorry the board has previously enforced its mass mandate and ask individuals who are unable to wear the mask to leave the meeting or if you wear the mask to refuse the meeting to leave the meeting if they refuse to do so in the past uh individuals have been escorted out okay um now i have a can i come over and talk to you for a minute three year old is there a motion

007to go into closed session make a motion to go into closed session thank you is there a second all in favor say aye aye any opposed you clarify the motion oh i'm sorry yes um take that vote back for just one second um we're going into closed session for the reasons posted on the board ms bowie could you move that up just a tad oh so they could read the whole thing okay um to talk about personnel matters and um current litigation i may have another motion to go into closed session thank you um any discussion all in favor uh any opposed okay we're in closed session okay folks we are back in session so next up on our agenda is approval of the minutes do i hear emotions is there a second second um

008a discussion i had two points of to discuss um in the board chairs report it said um that i talked about a complete strategic plan and i it should have said progress towards completion of the strategic plan and then um in the committee reports miss justice had talked about the advisory council for exceptional students and we listed it as the ec committee so i just wanted it to be called what it was um it's the advisory council for exceptional students aces so um do we have to amend the motion okay can we have can i move to approve the minutes as amended thank you is there a second okay um any more discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed okay that one passes or a move the minutes are approved next up is

009dr faust for superintendents report in the two weeks since our last meeting i had the opportunity to substitute teach for several classes across the district along with other central office staff members i know they feel the same as i do about the experience it's always so uplifting to be in the classroom and to see the incredible work our students staff are doing every single day we also recognized our rookie teacher of the year kindergarten teacher melissa daria from forest hills her enthusiasm for teaching is contagious and we're very proud to have her in new hanover county schools this week i met again with our teacher advisory committee and received candid and valuable feedback we've also made significant progress on our annual budget and input from school and division leaders this evening we recognized our newest

010national board certified teachers we have nearly 300 national board certified teachers in our district it's the highest marker for excellence in education and it speaks to the quality of teaching staff in new hanover county schools finally i'd like to highlight that of the 657 teachers with growth measures for the eoc or eog courses 90 met or exceeded growth i'm proud of what team new hanover county schools continues to accomplish and i look forward to sharing additional updates in the next week's video thank you dr faust um next up is the board chairs report last week several board members proudly attended the rookie of the year celebration it was sponsored by the wilmington rotary club as part of their weekly lunch meeting schedule and held at grace united methodist church district and school staffs and community

011leaders all joined together to attend the celebration of these five remarkable young women we are truly grateful to have such a generous education-focused community partner in the wilmington rotary and are incredibly fortunate to have such genuine motivated energetic dedicated the superlative list could go on forever new teachers as well as the mentors and principals and other staff who support them on team nhcs strategic plan update we continue to make progress in finalizing our strategic plan which is the foundation for prioritizing and allocating resources as well as directing new hanover county school staff and board attention over the next four years as our strategic work session at our strategic work session on january 28th we established six overarching goals around academic rigor family engagement equity diversity and inclusion staff opportunities for growth and morale community partnerships

012and safety and wellness the cabinet has met twice since then and in conjunction with their staff department staffs have developed strategies timelines and accountability metrics to accomplish these goals we look forward to reviewing a draft conceptual final product soon and a final product in march so that the district's budget can be created to support it and so that board meeting agendas can be constructed to align with it the board is the board is continuing to evaluate its meeting efficiency and effectiveness as well as its avenues of communication with the public and is making policy and procedural changes to make that happen we are trying to limit individual grievance items at board meetings as these are not what boards of education usually take up in order to focus on our governance work and to leave these

013items to dr faust and an administrative team to address and resolve finally just wanted to let remind you that the board will reconvene tomorrow for a special meeting at 1 30 via zoom to discuss our mass mandate okay so next up on our agenda is consensus items um do i hear a motion to approve move to approve the consensus items is there a second okay okay um any discussion i just have a question the monthly report of contracts is that something we supposed to be getting monthly or is the first time i believe i've seen this does anybody know miss small it just says monthly report and i just don't think i've ever seen it the policy that was approved by the board related to contracts requires that any contracts approved by the superintendent between

014a hundred thousand three hundred thousand come to the board monthly for information okay so that's uh so this report would only come up when that occurs right right so so if there happened to be a month where there wasn't any i think last last month it was the first time you approved it so it was year to date it was a much longer list because it was a new policy but going forward if there's anything approved you'll see it okay thank you i just wanted to clarify okay um did i already do emotion i've just already lost my brain power okay um so any more discussion okay all in favor say aye all right any opposed okay the consensus items all are passed um next into old business we need to um mr boyer would

015you talk us through these four policies please yes uh the first policy was policy 2300 and i'm sorry it's not pulling up for me on my computer for some reason just is um board meetings and we added let me just go ahead yes yes so this was an item brought forward by mr wildebore um at our last meeting we were discussing better ways to interface and communicate with the public and uh you know we had talked about a lottery system i think the board thought a better way forward thanks to mr world of war's suggestion was to add an additional meeting a quarterly meeting where the item would only be called to the audience or a town hall the chair will structure it as she sees fit according to this language but the agenda the

016sole agenda will be to better communicate with our constituents so the actual wording on that on what we what we came up with was board of education shall hold no less than three meetings annually with the sole intent of enhancing listening and dialogue opportunities with the public these meetings shall last approximately but no longer than two hours the public participation meeting format may vary at the discretion of the board chair to include such formats as town halls round table discussions call to the audience etc so that's the only thing that we added um it's item e public participation meetings do i hear a motion to accept that second second okay okay um any discussion i i have some questions sure um the part about uh deciding the format um so you you as chair would

017be deciding the format not necessarily the discussion itself right just the format the board should be consulting about what we're going to talk about exactly okay yeah do we need to put that in here or is that already just i think that just comes with with the territory like the we would do an agenda to what we're gonna put in there all right that was mike wants okay um any more discussion okay all in favor say aye aye thank you that one passes um approved the policy 2330 yes policy 2330 pertain to our board meeting agenda as you mentioned madam chair in your board chairs reports we're trying to streamline become more efficient i think everybody would agree that an earlier evening for our meetings would be beneficial to us all and to that end

018policy 23 2330 was amended to state that the board chair reserves the right to recess or adjourn any board meeting that lasts longer than four and a half hours and to postpone any remaining items to a subsequent meeting and the recommendation would be to approve the amended policy set a motion i will move that we approve it okay is there a second second um any discussion miss justice i would like to amend that suggestion as opposed to the board chair the chair itself decides whether or not to recess it has to have a majority of the check of the board to determine recess so i want to amend the amendment second that is there any discussion uh so miss justice wants to take out that the board chair reserves the right that the um what

019do you want to say that we have to have a majority vote to do that yes the chair that the board itself determines is there so that's your motion and miss walker made a second um is there any discussion about that i'm sure yes yeah i mean the purpose of the chair is to run the meeting the chair has the same power as every other board member and the purpose of the position is to make sure that the meeting runs in an orderly and efficient manner and i think this goes directly to the role of the chair and this is again why we make sure that we vote you know thoughtfully and with intent every uh january when the chair or every december when the chair vote comes up so uh you know it was

020thought out it was agreed to in policy and i certainly hope the board supports it anymore yes ma'am yeah miss walker well you know i think there's two policies so far we passed that give more power to the board chair and less to the board at large and i feel like you know the board always has a final approval on adjoining a meeting i believe and i think that um four and a half hours i mean that's not very long if you count all the things and the components that we usually have which is sometimes a work session sometimes called audience well we always have that at regular meetings and we also have a closed session that's about three hours gone at least an hour and a half for the rest of the i mean

021we can't be putting time limits on important work if we have to do it so i just feel like you know we should even though we do get weary late at night i just feel like it should be a bored collective decision whether we adjourn okay miss justice right and i would actually like to probably admit further to discuss with miss walker saying after we discuss this we're talking about this motion right now we're talking about who will decide to to close a session and what i'm saying is we were all seven just like mr weller said we were all seven elected up here and that is what the public expects we shouldn't be putting too much power in the hands of one person then it's no longer equal power uh and as miss walker

022pointed out this is increasing and this has been this has been a conflict publicly in the public it's not so hard to have us agree to recess and as opposed to one person that's one way and let's be honest here of manipulating possible information that gets out to people okay all right thank you well are you done i'm sorry no i'm not i'm not done so i think that it's very important that every one of us here have a say the public can see what it is we vote if we decide to close the session and can see the topic we're discussing when it happens that way they can judge whether or not we are doing our job not just having one person make a decision okay so the the reason that this was put

023into oh you want to go first and then i'll just miss i would just like to make a comment to the amendment the sole purpose i mean the major purpose of the board chair is to facilitate the meetings i see nothing wrong with this policy as it is written it is in attempt to streamline what has become very long and arduous meetings for people that have been working since seven o'clock this morning so i have no problem with it i think this is a ridiculous conversation i think that we should be moving forward and not be talking about things that do not relate to schools and students yeah so the the reason that i brought this excuse me it's my turn okay and then you'll be next the reason i brought this forward was because

024um every one of us on this board has made a comment once or twice or 100 times our meetings last too long many of our constituents who come to join us can't even stay till the end because we're sitting here oftentimes at midnight if our meeting starts at um four at five o'clock four and a half hours is 9 30. we do have the option to cut down on some other items in our agenda we we um we can look further at um which i'm going to be talking with you guys you know personally later just to see what your thoughts are is we can do our closed session at a different time that takes away an hour we can also cut down on call of the audience we are one of the we're the

025only county in the state that i can find that allows an hour for call to the audience so there are ways that we can do this better um and so i would just like i think that the board chairs should have we should all agree on the four and a half hours that it's too long and um and that may get us from asking getting way into the weeds and out of our lane um yes miss justice i think mrs walker had her hand at first i saw yours go ahead okay it's very simple we were elected and we knew when we ran that this could go a long time at times we we volunteered to take that on ourselves and for using the excuse that some of us well i was up at six

026i got grandkids i get up i get them on the bus i wait at that spot but i'm still here tonight and i will be here as long as it takes and everybody that ran should have known that we've got some very complex subjects that even maybe the the three of us that were that one in 2018 didn't know about but those that ran one ran in 2020 should have we've got a pandemic we have the situation sadly with the sexual assault the racial discrimination that's obviously a concern and on and on and on so when you ran those were out there and you should have known that things like this would happen better planning would help we've tried to do that but this is not one way by cutting people off okay um we

027are at the end of our five minutes so i don't want to cut us all up miss walker did you have a comment yeah i would i would just say that you know i i know they're a disagreement about um the power of the chair and especially people arguing for that are in favor of that i'm just not in favor of cutting off the rest of the board to have any power to have any input for what we do at these meetings and it's clear where the divide is i feel like there are some members that feel their role is different than others and um you know if it goes that way it's just going to be further further you know power at the top that stifles the rest of our our conversation thank you

028mr billiard yeah just real quickly if you look at a county like wake or mecklenburg union county counties that are much larger than ours they're not even close to four and a half hours so i don't think it's like oh we're doing important work i think we're just jaw-jacking up here and talking too much and frankly we as individuals aren't important nobody talks about what we say they talk about the votes that we take and the decisions that are made on the dais so let's have a little piece of humble pie and admit that maybe we're not that important okay all right mr mcmanus did i see your hand up if not then i'm gonna call for the vote pick up if you got something say it i'm going to count that as a no

029all right so um we need to take a vote on madam chair at any time can not the board extend the meeting and or close a meeting by vote or consensus right now the board does not adjourn until we get to the item called adjourn unless we have another incident where the board chair feels like the meeting is out of control that's really the only two reasons we recess if it's out of control or we get to the end and so i'm just trying to streamline this so that we get the most productive use of our time and our brains and their brains and our community does not have to stay up until 12 o'clock watching and our staff that wants to pay attention and really be involved before we go so i'm going to

030go ahead and call the vote for this this justice you've talked you've talked three times answer his question this is what we're doing right now you we're asking to be able to have the power for us to close it not just one person okay so the amendment on the table um is well the motion on the table is the amendment to take out the board chair and have it say the board reserves the right so is there we already have a first and second so miss billy will you please call the roll on that miss adams no mr bullier no miss justice yes mr mcmanus yes miss walker yes mr wildeboard and miss crayville no okay so that um that motion pass is defeated audience passes so the board the wording in there will be

031the board reserves the right we have to vote on it i know i said we have to take a second i know i'm just getting clarification so now we are voting on the motion that the the board reserves the right to recess or adjourn any board meeting that lasts longer than four and a half hours and to postpone any remaining items to a subsequent meeting so we have a first and a second on that do we need any further discussion on that miss justice well i'm going to go ahead and we should discuss it probably uh i would like that amended to 11 o'clock at night because by you can't think straight i mean honestly after 11 it is very rough but on the other hand if we're doing some really important work and we

032have a lot of work to do these days and at some point hopefully things will normalize it looks like possibly an amount not at some point but 11 o'clock seems like it's late but we can still think clearly in my opinion after that it's probably not practical four and a half hours um it's pretty to me it's almost too short of a time say we came in at five and then left it had to leave at 9 30 because there's a you know a limitation at four and a half hours i think the limitation would probably be more practical this is my opinion and anybody else can speak up at 11. um walker i mean adams i'm sorry i just i have a question of clarification for miss justice did you bring that concern forward

033when this was discussed in the policy meeting we're discussing it now but that time would have been more appropriate at the policy meeting when it was brought forward if you had suggestions that should have been the time to do it and what we should be doing up here is voting on this policy that should have happened 10 minutes ago excuse me okay are there any more comments miss walker i was just saying to miss adam's point they had a full committee that looked at this and looked at ways to streamline this meeting it could have taken place a lot differently you're suggest making suggestions now that they've already made suggestions for like months ago you know with good suggestions and somehow definitely shortened the meeting times you know miss crapo sir so i just want

034to point out that the board has the can recess a meeting at any time the majority of the board wants to recess a meeting and there are lots of different reasons why a board might want to recess or adjourn a meeting if some type of event were to happen and you know the board of education center there's some type of emergency or anything else and i'm a little concerned that if the if the motion or if the amended policy passes to read the board reserves the right to recess or adjourn then the board's going to be limited in its policy as to when it can recess or adjourn a meeting okay so you're saying no time limit i mean right now before this policy was passed there was no time limit on when the board

035could recess or adjourn a meeting it could happen at any point which a majority of the board voted to do so even if you do pass the policy as it reads with as amended uh you can always vote to waive policy um but you would have to you would technically need to vote to waive this policy and then vote to a gen uh vote to recess or adjourn the meeting okay so we we discussed all this at the policy committee meeting and there was no just there was none of this up there so um if if we think that this is not right then um that we're not allowed to do this then i'll just i'll just take it out and we and we will continue to just keep having long meetings and people can

036keep complaining yeah i'm just i mean i think that's fine i just think that this conversation and i thank people for having it because it sort of illustrates the absurdity of this and the need for this policy so yeah that's fine let's just keep going so um do we want to vote on that we do want to officially vote on the motion or do you want to take it you want to withdraw it we can withdraw this policy let's draw the notion yeah we can just speak right then policy 2330 will stay as as is next all right our next policy and i believe it was miss walker who had some concerns here um and miss crabill and mr world boy you guys were in policy so you guys can sort of take this but

037it had to do with crowdfunding on behalf of the school system policy 7360-8225 i didn't have any significant issues with the policy myself so i'll let the people who had concerns speak to it miss walker asked for um specific language to be put in there for crowdfunding and um the the the only the thing we added was if you go down to the bottom um to the end where the yellow highlights are miss walker submitted this wording for the for the committee to consider she wanted number item number three go up just to come down just a little bit so we can see the red right above the yellow thank you review by the school board the board reserves the right to make any final decisions regarding crowdfunding campaigns and retains the right to review

038any appeals any appeal of denials so that is what the only thing that we have have changed so um is there a motion to ex to include this language i'll move to include it i'm fine okay is there a second okay any discussion okay um all in favor um say aye aye any opposed okay that motion i mean that policy is in effect all right so and then so now mr bull you're the next yes policy 1610-7800 professional and staff development if you look we inserted a training that we wanted to make sure our staff had a mental health training program which includes all components and state board of education policy s-h-s-h-l-t-003 and then we cross-reference some policies at the bottom of that but that was the change along with making sure that we put

039superintendent or designee if there are no questions or problems i ask for a motion to adopt the policy is there a second second any discussion all in favor say aye any opposed okay that one also passes okay so next on the agenda we have um new business mr anderson consideration of bids for chiller replacement at anderson gregory and murrayville elementaries thank you madam chair members of the board tonight i recommend award of the contracts to repair to replace chillers as follows anderson elementary school awarded the contract to harrelson mechanical contractors incorporated in the amount of three hundred and fifty nine thousand four hundred and ten dollars gregory elementary school again harrelson mechanical contractors three hundred and seventy thousand six hundred sixty nine dollars in murrayville elementary school harrelson mechanical contractors 356 thousand two hundred and

040seventeen dollars okay um anybody have any questions for mr anderson is there a motion to approve so i moved um is there a second okay mr um boyer mr wildeboard any further discussion okay all in favor say aye any opposed okay you're approved next consideration of forest hills global elementary school student assignment zone modifications yes ma'am thank you tonight we're going to be looking at student as a student attendance zone modifications recommended for forest hills elementary school these are recommended for uh consideration for next year the 2022-23 school year [Music] some of the things we looked at are how capacity calculate how we calculate capacity we looked at the actual size of classroom spaces we looked at the current enrollment and we also looked at potential growth so the current capacity at forest hills is

041475. this is based on a dpi form that we fill out and we submit they tell they we fill in how many kindergarten first grade second grade all the way through fifth grade and including exceptional children classrooms and then it automatically calculates the capacity based on a number of students per classes we'll we can't change that form but we can change locally how we calculate our capacity and i think forest hills is a great example of why we need to do this if you look down at the bottom you'll see that new hanover county schools educational specifications in other words if we were to build a new school today river lights pine valley you've seen the design of those the fourth and fifth grade classrooms are 950 square feet where by comparison forest hills fourth

042and fifth grade classrooms vary from 600 to 750 square feet so i did a a calculation of the per square foot per student and i'm recommending that the capacity at forest hills fourth and fifth grade classrooms be reduced to 18 and that would reduce the total capacity to 400 so there's a reduction in the capacity i will point out this does include the two mobile units that are currently there but it would reduce the capacity from currently 475 to 400. so the next slide takes a look at the current student assignment zone for forest hills and some recommendations to bring enrollment to within the proposed capacity of 400. so in looking at that we looked at planting blocks that have adjoining attendance zones we don't want to create satellites so we're looking at moving students

043that have that are on the adjoining line of another school we also looked at the distance and the recommendations all of these planning blocks are equal or shorter distances from their kernel school to the proposed school and we also looked at some geographic separations in certain cases there were major roads that uh really made sense to recommend these modifications so in summary we're recommending planting blocks 155 and 155 b that are shown on the right hand side moved from forest hills to freeman planting blocks 155 167 and 188 from forest hills to snipes looking at those planning blocks one of the things we want to make sure that you know the first one 151 has nine students this is an example we want to make sure those nine students are all in kindergarten are all

044in one grade we want to make ideally you'd have a nice spread from k through 5 so that the move doesn't over populate the grade at the um that the school they would be reassigned to and each of these planning blocks had a good separation of students a good spread over the k through 5. you can see the breakdown for each planning block what grade they're currently in the total and it affects 82 students so looking at enrollment for forest hills current enrollment is 466 and if we backed out the five planning districts or planning blocks the revised enrollment would be 475. so that would be 25 students under the revised capacity of 400. i did want to point out that we also are adding a mobile unit board has approved funding for that we're

045adding a mobile unit that will be there for the start of the upcoming school year so their capacity would be 420 or it would be 45 students under capacity allowing for some growth um by comparison tom freeman their current enrollment is 254. we add the two planning blocks 155 155b their revised enrollment is 324. current capacity is 377. so they would remain under capacity by 53 students and at snipes current enrollment is 3.85 the planning blocks the three planning blocks that would move from freeman to snipes would revise their enrollment to current capacity is 502 so snipes would remain under capacity at 96 students the staff recommends the following student assignment zone modifications that would go into effect for the 22-22-22-23 school year and i'd ask your approval and be happy to answer answer any

046questions is there anybody that has a question miss justice uh thank you very much thank you um i didn't know that before we redistricted last night and this was one of the concerns was that a lot of students had to move from aldermen to um forest hills or a group of students and so alderman's not being and i understand the location and under capacity but so alderman is not in any way uh considered as being another one of the schools that the students would be leaving uh for stills too you know to go i'm just asking um i didn't look at that one specifically i don't think the aldermen district well it actually does the there was a lot of discussion about that in redistricting and i think where we ended up with oleander drive

047as the dividing line it was a good decision and i didn't want to put any more students at aldermen i'll also tell you um let's see where they are currently so they're actually three students over capacity i was wondering there was no any room to move more students there okay um mr mcmanus oh thank you um so there'll be a net loss of 100 students that will be moved between sniper freeman yes sir and that equates to how many teaching positions would they lose those positions or would they go with the students or how would those positions be allocated well yeah that's they would be you know the students are our teachers are allocated each year by by the formula based on the number of students so that changes each each year but so uh

048a little paper if they would lose four positions correct and there's room with those two schools also to for another teacher yes sir yeah both those schools uh forest hills remains uh 53 students under capacity and snipes was 96. will they will they get their media center back yes sir this um so this capacity is based on k5 plus ec and it does provide um the art room the media center thank you miss walker i would just say yeah thank you very much for the presentation it sounds like it makes sense to me i know forest hills needed some some assistance for a while i know i've heard that they have a kindergarten class in the library and other things that are going on and i think i think i mean looking at this data

049that you're showing us i think it's a good idea to i mean the school schools are under capacity we could use more kids and you know these could use less so mr wilson thank you two quick questions um did we look and have any of these same students been moved before oh uh those students may have been moved uh moved and they moved again i have not looked back at redistricting which you know occurred um two years ago um i didn't look back to see if they had had moved because i'd hate to have they have not been moved these students these planning blocks have not been changed or moved since the last uh elementary redistricting and would we allow the fifth graders to stay if they chose to stay yeah our student assignment policy

050does allow for fifth grade privilege miss adams did you have a comment i just had a comment i just wanted like to say you know over the past couple months this board has heard from a lot of staff and tas from forest hills they've come out they've advocated on behalf of their school and i want to thank them for that i want to thank the parents that have reached out to discuss this and i'd like to thank dr faust and his team because they've gone in and provided some real support and mr anderson i think this is a fantastic presentation and appreciate you looking at options and figuring out what's best for our students across the board and providing equity in the three schools mr boyer thank you miss walker thank you both for for

051getting this done i did just want to clarify i always like to do that after my last redistricting uh capacity and fire code are two different things so i just want to make sure people understand that when we're saying we're over capacity we are certainly well within the fire code and you know i was really concerned the last time we moved students anytime we move students to mr wilbur's wilderborough's point so i'm sure dr faust and his team will come up with ways to make sure that as those students do transition they they are supported they know that they're going to a school where they're going to be comfortable and i just wanted to make sure that i always reiterate that because that is our goal so the um the um one question i had

052was when we move um students to another school um will the the support staff be reassigned there because it may put more of a load um like social emotional learning or you know interventionists or anything like that i mean those teachers you that may not be a direct one-to-one transfer we always consider everything okay yes miss walker well i was just thinking um mr wildebore was saying about the zones that you're moving would it be a good idea to check to make sure that those students had just been moved or i guess i'm thinking of the stability of the children that are being moved may be better to look at some of the other blocks i know you've probably studied this so you feel like those are the best blocks well we had study then

053based on the criteria that we used i do think that's the the best planning blocks to move but and i can say that we haven't made any changes since the last elementary school redistricting so it's been it will have been two school years those school years okay okay all right so do i have a motion to um to approve the um redistricting zone modifications mr mcmanus i'm sorry attendant zone sorry thank you second by miss um adams um any more discussion all in favor say aye aye any opposed okay thank you for that one um on to the next consideration of 2021-22 needs-based public schools capital fund grant application yes thank you very much tonight we're recommending approval of the needs-based public school capital fund grant applications as presented these will provide supplemental funding if

054these grants are approved they'll provide supplemental funding for river lights pine valley and mary c williams okay um is there a motion to oh any questions for mr anderson okay is there a motion to accept this application second second okay um any more discussion yes or mr mr mcmanus who wrote this grant uh leanne lawrence she's the director of facility planning and construction way back there is she technically taking the place of a grant we don't have a grant position given the monetary deeds of the county um well she is not taking that position i'm not giving her up but i appreciate you recognizing what a great job she did excellent yes she did okay so um um okay so hearing the got a motion and a second and discussion um um all in favor

055say aye aye any opposed okay great that one passes too thank you thank you eddie and leanne okay so next up um we're on to item 13 title nine student survey uh mr jarrell lewis good evening everyone so tonight i am here presenting information related to the title mountain survey the title ix survey was released to our middle school and high school students in november of 2021 for that we utilize a third party mr christopher kolar who's a data analyst with experience in title ix and k-12 schools so we have him here this evening to talk about the data in that i would add uh one thing that we want i wanted to share with you all is that the definition for these um sexual harassment and gender-based harassment in this survey the title ix

056committee definitely was meticulous in these definitions and we want to make sure that we did not influence our students in any way in their responses to this survey so the teachers in the classroom were not able to provide any clarification the definition that we agreed upon was broadened is based on our policy so of course here in the district we educate the whole person so students experiences of sexual harassment and gender-based harassment on campus off-campus adult student to student all of those are important to us to understand what our students experiences were so i did want to let you all know that beforehand and i'll go ahead and pass it to mr kolar to discuss the data of the channel 9 survey welcome mr kolar thank you for being with us tonight [Music] okay you

057we can't hear you okay okay there we go better yes okay unmuting helps it's only it's only been two years of this so i'm still trying to pick it up i'm christopher kollar i am a former director of research evaluation and assessment for the palo alto school district in palo alto california prior to that i worked for the state of illinois in the higher education system and i'm going to start my slideshow real quick because that's enough of my face okay so i've worked uh one of the things that i've had an opportunity to do is work with school districts that are having issues and findings from the office specific rights that they need to change their practices related to sexual and gender-based harassment i had the opportunity to work directly with the attorneys from

058ocr when i first started doing this work about five years ago and it gave me a sense of what they like to see in terms of things that count as evidence of progress when you are looking at say a resolution agreement and you need to demonstrate that something is changing based upon the work that's being done in the district so mr lewis got in touch with me over a year ago i think when we first started talking about this and uh and i have to say it's pretty exciting um first of all i was very happy to see that the school sites and the principals did a good job of making arrangements in the calendar for the students to have time to do the survey um and second i'm i'm pretty impressed by the students

059responses when you get when you ask 9 000 teenagers to uh talk about and answer questions seriously you can go in a couple of bad directions but i have to say that the group that this uh you know as i looked at the data your students took it seriously um there were only four or five uh submissions that i had to strike because uh you know they were giving superfluous answers but um overall it's pretty good now uh what we had was out of these 13 907 students that were enrolled in the district on the day of uh november when we gave the survey we had 869 submissions so that's 62 participation rate to participate a student really just had to sit in the classroom at a computer or tablet and open up the survey

060now part of this because it's asking questions that may be of sensitive nature to the students we don't compel them to finish the survey if they need to stop and they're given this instruction if they need to stop as they proceed through it and either just sit quietly or talk to somebody uh we encourage them to do that uh you know because their mental health in the moment is more important than um you know the survey response but uh out of those uh 8 600 people who started the survey 92 percent of them completed that's where the number 8046 comes from 8046 are the number of secondary students who completed the seven-page questionnaire and uh submitted it you know in its completeness uh and those are those are really good rates um i was excited

061to see that number because the larger the response rate the more likely and you know statistically valid your results are in approximating what the real reality number is um and what's i think is important is we we saw also uh male and female students and when we're dealing with high school um you know we never hit 50 50. but what's interesting to me is that the students when they were asked to identify their gender uh they were given male female they were also given other options such as transgender genderqueer uh two-spirit and uh and what we did was when we took the data we pulled together the students who are uh parts of what are called non-conforming gender identities uh t-q-q-i-a plus trans queer questioning intersex and asexual plus others um that's about 6.2 percent

062of the students who responded so i don't know if that's a surprise or not you know one of the things that's really exciting the first time you do a survey like this um you know and try to measure climate is that you find out things that you didn't know and what you find out is neither good nor barrett but now you know and so uh we saw that a little over six percent of your students in middle and high school i do not identify as cis female or just male 1 um this is the participation broken down by the number of responses that we had as a proportion of the number of students enrolled at that grade level in november it falls off in high school especially to our 12th grade that's in part because

063students are not necessarily at the high school for the full day any longer um they have other things to do such as job job shadow and such things like that okay and also we had a good participation across the schools um like i said this is something where it was scheduled to the discretion of the site leadership and we had buy-in from all the sites and there is variation in the percentage of students who responded but that is likely due to scheduling differences between how each site handled okay we've got to get to the good stuff and uh this is in the slide deck but as mr lewis pointed out the definitions of sexual harassment and gender harassment are defined not only in federal law but also in your own policies so what we did

064with the students was prior to them so right at the top of the survey before they answered any questions they read the definition of sexual harassment the first question was have you experienced sexual harassment than having just read a definition of it so we didn't embellish it we didn't coax them in a direction but we gave them the flat out textbook definition and then asked them does this sound like something that you've experienced so talking about sexual harassment so uh what you're going to see is that a lot of the results i disaggregate based upon the middle school and the high school responses um i i think that we all know that the middle school experience and the high school experience are not only different experiences but the students are developmentally at different stages and

065their relationship to gender and sex is totally different in middle school versus high school so what you're seeing on this screen is the percentage of students who reported after reading the definition that they had experienced sexual harassment in the past year 22 percent of the middle school students and 27 of the high school students now the reason there are multiple bands is that we asked them how frequently so uh the big blue block is the students who said never the other color bands show an increasing frequency of experiencing sexual harassment uh the worst category being weekly which is the green band at the top also for all the slides i have presented the number of students who are in the count and so if you have any questions i know boards always ask how many

066students was it that's how many students are in the samples that you're seeing graphed out here now uh i'm getting the signal to move a little bit faster so what you'll see in the rest of the slides also is that when we look at the particular level like middle school i break it down by identity the students so when you take a look at this and what it's saying is that 14 of middle school boys said that they had been sexually harassed 26 percent of middle school girls and 29 of the students in middle school who do not identify identify as gender conforming experience sexual harassment in school so you can see that this is this is where you begin to see the breaking out different experiences for different groups people that the non-conforming gender

067students of non-conforming gender are twice as likely to experience sexual harassment as the cis male students okay and when we take a look at the high school reporting it becomes even more pronounced almost half of the plus students experienced sexual harassment uh in at school uh 35 of the female students experienced sexual harassment well it was 10 for the boys um and so these numbers are the big numbers that you see at the beginning of a project like this um it is kind it's the distributions are in line with what i've seen before but these are definitely troubling numbers and and i was very fortunate in speaking with mr lewis talking about what the district plans are you know for next steps now one of the most important things that we discover in this type

068of survey is when this happens to a student do the systems of support work for them the way that they're supposed to so if they answered if they indicated they'd been sexually harassed they were given a question saying did you report the sexual harassment incident to a trusted adult at school and what you can see on this slide is that about a quarter of the students who experience sexual harassment tell an adult which is them telling us that three quarters of the sexual harassment is occurring off the radar of any kind of official reporting mechanism when you go to high school it's uniformly lower it's about 15 percent and this is not surprising to me but it's it's not very good it's telling you that the students are not very comfortable coming forward and raising

069this is an issue now the students who did report to an adult we asked them how comfortable were you with the response and this slide shows a breakdown of the degree of comfort that they experienced having reported sexual harassment to an adult um i think that the numbers here are are good um the degree to which that's ever a comfortable conversation is probably uh you know very low but what this is telling me is that the staff who were contacted handled in the way that the student felt like it was a good exchange or experience now what's really important um and i probably said that five times now but uh when a student says that they've been sexually harassed and did not report it then they get branched into a question that says well why

070didn't you report the behavior and the choices here are based upon uh iterations of uh survey options uh that have gone through multiple schools and districts multiple times and uh so we distilled it down to a lot of things that they used to write just in a blank um the biggest thing in middle school is that they didn't need help now they either didn't need help because it wasn't they didn't consider it serious or they've gotten they have the tools and the techniques to navigate themselves in that sort of situation but i think what's really important is to take a look a little bit further down the list didn't want attention or publicity didn't want to make things worse or be retaliated against um and you know there's a very strong some of the kids

071wrote in the margins i don't want to be a narc and so you know part of this is the uh social pressure to not call people out who are doing wrong things and reporting them but also you know there's a second cultural dimension to it it's just normal behavior or uh it was all good fun playful uh what that tells me is that there's a big chunk of your students who are being sexually harassed having just read the definition and um uh and then but then they declare that they didn't report it because it was just all in good fun um so hopefully this will lead to a lot of really conversations with your student support staff uh this is the same set of questions broken down for the high school students again uh one

072of the biggest fears at all levels was that they wouldn't be anonymous that the complaint would be somehow carried out the public eye either the student would know who it is that reported the incident or that it would the teacher would talk about it or the staff member would talk about it and it would not be isolated to the people who they wanted to know now also in the slide deck you're going to see gender-based harassment i'm going to flip through this pretty quickly because i'm getting indications that uh my time i used a great deal of it and i am very familiar with four and a half hour long board meetings so i i don't want to contribute to that um but a couple highlights first middle school uh harassment based on gender identity

073of the tqqia plus students have been harassed over their gender identity and in high school 60 of the students who identify as tqia plus had experienced gender-based harassment and that almost you know it shouldn't take away from the fact that it's also almost 40 of your female students um this looks like a really significant cultural issue that you'll be undertaking on this path and just like with the sexual harassment what we're seeing here are the reporting rates we're seeing that the students are not really very likely to come forward and that it diminishes as they go into high school again the level of comforts looked pretty much the same and the reasons for not reporting the gender-based harassment were similar and i'm not going to read you the slide but it's the same it really

074falls into the questions of confidentiality anonymity and a fear of retaliation so uh having uh spoken a great deal with mr lewis and had a chance to talk to a couple of board members i've got some opportunities i wanted to identify first of all um when people say that they're not satisfied with process or they don't think it works there's a reason for that they have some sort of an expectation and what we found is that people's expectations of what happens when you file a title ix complaint has very little to do with what the actual experience of making the complaint is and so first of all being upfront and transparent about what the process is going to involve important to build students confidence in staff they are very much afraid that they will be

075labeled as a narc or that the person who was bullying them will continue or even bully them more so it's not really cut and dried whether or not to report because they view the speed stakeholders in the future you know state that occurs um utilizing the staffing student program is the counter normalization of harmful attitudes and behaviors so you know all in good fun i think people need to start learning how to say it's not all in good fun i'm not having fun they said that they had been sexually harassed based upon that definition that board definition that we use and therefore it that does not it's incongruent with being all in good fun and so i think people need to start questioning those initial knee-jerk reactions that they have um i think that it's

076important like tonight to ensure community discussion of the results but particularly to include student voice via clubs and organizations what i have found was that one of the best audiences that i ever had were student councils or other student groups who were really felt invested in the results and invested in the actions that were going to be taken in response to the participation of the students also review the student support and services this is to some degree uh almost an operational question is to make sure that the counselors or the people who they would be calling in on are not uh that there's some privacy related to actually go into making the uh the report and uh and finally i think it's important for staff to know procedures uh for how to help students when

077they report this kind of occurrence happening um i it's it's a common knowledge that sexual harassment and gender-based harassment act as a multiplier for the odds of students committing suicide and it's really something that needs to be taken seriously by the staff when they see it the you know you don't want students saying well it happened in front of the teacher uh and they didn't say anything or do anything um and so that's uh you know for me a very important part is to make sure that every student is taken seriously um i've reached the end of what i was going to say i hope i'm within time and i will turn the control back over to mr lewis thank you mr color uh so with that information uh mr colar provided us with a

078number of opportunities for for you know growth and supporting our students i'm glad to say that a lot of these items these trends and patterns are not unexpected uh new hanover county schools has definitely been doing things to try to combat some of these issues proactively uh for example upping our policies establishing routine training for staff and students and for students particularly through student programming new personnel in central office to be able to support principals and staff at the school levels in addition to establishing reporting systems such as say something app and ethics 360 in addition to all the work that student support is doing under under the leadership of mr barnum so um definitely still have work to do but i don't think that our district is particularly surprising some of these trends so

079i'll open the floor at this point to any questions from board members for myself or mr calhoun well thank you mr lewis mr cole our very enlightening information and we will be reviewing this um at our our next title nine committee meeting too with with those committee members because they were instrumental in um helping get the survey put together the wording and um the different options for choices does anybody have any questions uh mr mcmanus mrs i don't know the answer this at all so at what point or at the inception of the would a child goes to visit assuming it was a counselor um are parents involved parents are involved at the very beginning definitely that's going to be a big aspect particularly with these types of reports sexual harassment gender-based dressing very beginning

080any other questions miss justice oh and i don't know if you can answer this mr lewis uh but what is there any plans for um educating students one of the things that i mean there's many things about this that bother me uh when i taught in the 90s that what the the the lgbt community was a was a concern of mine then because the students that were attempting suicide and were dropping out or substance abuse that was the main connection and the other students were very difficult on them uh and i can see the harassment is continuing also i noticed 40 percent and i'm i'm talking about i mean there's several things here but i see 40 percent of the female students feel harassed is there any plans for education for our student body because

081this really makes a huge impact on these children being able to attend school comfortably and learn yes ma'am so a student program is a big piece that we've that has been developed through the title ix committee's work for example this this survey was for middle school and high school students the middle school students have already been receiving student programming related to these topics through the shipping boundaries program uh we recently launched in january 2021 the bringing in the bystander program for our high school students in ninth grade in addition to that we have more student programming coming out for our k-35 through a program entitled safer smarter kids so we do recognize the need for student programming to combat these issues we can always utilize more but we do have some and will continue to

082review the effectiveness and any modification that we can implement and yeah and um miss farnham and several members of her staff are on the title ix committee and are regular inputters um for that we have excellent community partners that we work with that we use to do training additional trainings and get additional input so yeah the um it's not just a jarrell lewis program it is a compilation of many divisions and um folks doing that correct mr willabour i just had a quick question um and and i should remember but i don't um was this an opt-in opt-out everybody had to take it this this whole question here i understand that they could stop once they started right but i'm sorry i did finish your question so this was this was an opt-out survey okay

083uh meaning that we assumed that persons participated unless their parents specifically told us that they did not want to participate but in light of that we understand that this is a sensitive topic so students were provided with directions prior to the survey um being implemented and they were able to if they felt uncomfortable for whatever reason they were allowed to stop during the middle participating so the student could start start it and stop that they felt any type of anxiety or uncomfortableness if i could follow up so we did send something home to the parents to let them know this was coming and we did we sent something home we even had what we apparent night to be able to and i think we had a pretty good participation where myself and central office staff

084relevant staff and community partners came together to you know preview what the survey was about so that parents didn't have to worry too much about what was going to be said with their students so we definitely did that and moving forward if we do release another survey we do the same thing as well and we also utilized our communications department to get that message out to all parents that a letter was coming home and then we used the communications department to help us talk to reiterate that the meeting was taking place so there was written forms there was talking about it the principals talked about it at the schools so we we use multiple avenues of communication to make sure so um parents had pla and we had copies of the survey at school so

085parents had plenty of opportunities to opt their child out mr bullier thank you madam chair you know um i think i've had several great moments on the board certainly hiring our superintendent mr lewis hiring you are two of my finest into that i'd really like the board to grant a wish at some point maybe over the summer um you know we'd talk about just a minute ago being humble this is why we're here this is it it's not about who ends meetings how when what it's about this and we've talked so many times as a board about maybe having a student voice um god i'd really like to figure out a way to come to our september meeting with a plan to really do it because it's so easy to get distracted with the other

086stuff this is why we're here this is what matters and i really feel like that perspective would be just a wonderful thing for our board so thank you so much mr voice and thank you sir i really appreciate you uh helping us with this survey okay thank you appreciate your time have a good evening thank you thank you and your only your pay will only be docked for a couple minutes over mr kolar okay um next on our agenda is um behavior leadership foundations update the um by ms farnham and and staff helpers good evening i have my great partner in crime here susan cole and we want to walk you through some updates to our behavior leadership foundations and then also give you some information on student data so first i want to thank

087you for your continued interest in this work school-wide social-emotional learning of course is a systemic approach to integrating our academic social and emotional learning across all school contexts so we're here to share with you how some of our schools are responding to these efforts it has to be clicked it will work when it's on [Music] hi i'm susan cole i want to thank you all for this opportunity to speak with you about this amazing work that we're doing in the district starting with our overall vision for today and into the future for bringing social emotional learning um into our school community and truly as a district we are investing in the comprehensive personal growth of all staff and by all staff i mean our teachers our child nutrition workers our bus drivers and all the

088way down to our itty bitty pre-k students so all members of our community really focusing on those five developmental social emotional competencies of self-awareness self-management social awareness responsible decision-making and so our vision over the next three years you'll see we started last year very much prompted by the pandemic this was a we need to address a great need right now and we focused primarily on student competencies and comprehensive wellness you'll see if we've as we've moved into year two we're extending that focus so continuing to focus on students but extending that to our adults and like i said we're talking all adults including families and our community partners and then in year three as we move forward you'll see we're going to focus on using both informal and formal data sources to drive our decision

089making for continuous improvement this isn't a one and done activity this is an ongoing year after year process of continuing to develop and learn all right so what we want to talk to you a little bit more about would be the indicators of schoolwide social emotional learning so i hate to read these to you but i just really want to make sure that there's a shout out to each one of these with regard to the classroom we want to make sure we're seeing explicit social and emotional learning instruction having consistent opportunities for our students to cultivate practice and reflect on these competencies we also want to see that sel so social emotional learning seo so i'll save a little bit of time there for you seo being integrated into our academic instruction we we know

090that youth voice and engagement is a critical part of this and then making sure that our classrooms and school environments are supportive and responsive to our student needs in this we're not forgetting that we are going to focus on adult sel as well and including in that supportive discipline discipline processes so discipline policies and practices that are instructive restorative developmentally appropriate and equitably applied all of this has to be blended into a continuum of integrated supports with authentic family partnerships aligned community partnerships where we have interagency groups working alongside as opposed to working on the same efforts and maybe not in a connected way and always the systems for continuous improvement where we are monitoring our data we're monitoring the impact so we can determine if it really worked or not this is not checking

091a box so we can move on this is really analyzing the amount of impact so as we have spoken or have you as you've gotten have the opportunity to hear from both ms varnam and wrightsboro elementary about their participation in the behavior leaderships foundation plc i wanted to give you an idea of what that what they focused on primarily and again you might hear me say repeatedly that we're really focusing and supporting on supporting the learning and development of all members of the school community and we're really going beyond just improved classroom behavior and a decrease in exclusionary discipline practices we're really looking at creating those environments that are most conducive to teaching and learning where teachers feel safe and part of a community that supports them and students feel safe in a community that

092supports them taking risk with learning and so we can talk about what seo looks like conceptually but i wanted to offer you some evidence of what you might see right now in these schools so following our first session you'll see that we focused on building safe welcoming and inclusive school communities and we will address that throughout but through this we worked to diligently excuse me diligently to rewrite or revise our vision and mission statements to make sure they were inclusive of not just a teacher's mission but also the collective mission so you would we'll also see in those schools clear guidelines for student success in different settings and they're posted and they're explicitly taught so when we create these predictable routines we allow for the teaching and learning to happen moving on as we focus

093in our next session on positive behavior intervention and support what this looks like is school-wide behavior plans that take an instructional approach to teaching those guidelines for academic and behavioral success and re-teaching as needed so really taking that instructional approach to behavior we can do all of those things and like really now lay a really nice foundation and we still may have students who make mistakes because they're learning so when that happens we need to equip teachers with the tools and strategies to address and to take an instructional approach to that misbehavior so through that our schools developed a three-level system for responding to behavior so a toolbox for teachers and a corrections menu for taking that instructional approach and often looking on a looking towards approaches that restore relationships moving on we took a

094direct focus on social emotional learning this would be through that direct instruction of of seo but also embedding it in our content areas as well as focusing on adult wellness initiatives and finally we combined our last two sessions to include a focus on relationships and our systems for continuous improvement and what you will see as a result of that focus on relationships as more family involvement activities and an increase in two-way communication models not just sending a newsletter out to a teacher i mean to a family i'm giving them a direct way of responding to that and contacting me for additional support in terms of systems for continuous improvement we are scheduling data review sessions more frequently so these may occur bi-monthly monthly quarterly where we're digging down at that informal and formal data sources

095to make in you know real-time decisions and sort of change course as necessary oh so i'm sorry i provided some pictures that are just represented representation of what you might see in a building so you can see we have students working together collectively to problem solve so you have to learn how to manage your emotions and disagree and collaborate towards a common goal you will see in the middle picture an approach to capture student voice and and having them look for those successful behaviors in their peers and give shout outs to them and this might be my favorite at aldermen in an attempt to really bring their school community together with everybody supporting the expectations their child nutrition staff and custodial staff and elective or specialist teachers will give awards to classes that display those

096desired or those expectations for success and so you can see like they will get a golden spatula golden sneakers to indicate that they have been successful in those environments and this last slide with with pictures gives you a couple of examples of those guidelines for success and the way that schools have chosen to market them with students so you will see that there often involve acronyms that make it you know in education we do love an acronym so we we start teaching kids that at a very young age but it could be owls or it could be storm but it gives them maybe it's connected to a mascot but you can see some examples there and you'll see these as you walk around the building posted in common areas and classrooms so um of course

097with this work our student suspension data or data just from one source is not going to determine the overall success and the overall impact of this type of professional learning community however this is one piece of data that we want to talk about so again our k5 quarter 2 data our 2021 2022 this school year data is collected in our online system that's called educator handbook and it's a live dashboard the data is all entered at the school level but we have full dashboard access to be able to analyze and view and drill all the way down to the student level our 1718 and our 1920 keep in mind we're not using 1819 because it wasn't a typical school year we're going back to typical school years that did not have florence or covet so

098in the 1718 in the 1920 our data was reported in powerschool and now our educator handbook tool has has many more components so we've advanced and we have used in the annual discipline report iss whether it's a full day or partial oss so iss in school suspension oss out of school suspension and then also capturing instructional and restorative responses especially now through educator handbook so this is information you've seen before but as a refresher um so that when we look at this year you can see that so the schools that are highlighted in orange this is our 2017 and 2019 in school suspension by the numbers schools in orange were a part of our behavior leadership foundations cohort one our schools in yellow are our two exemplary schools um snipes in college park so you

099can see total in-school suspension and we're looking only quarter two we're making an absolute comparison here on the time frame in 1718 128 uses in 1920 75 uses and so far in 2122 our k5 iss assignment second quarter were 104. now i want to bring your attention again schools in orange are cohort 1 schools schools in yellow are exemplary schools i'm sure i don't have to bring your attention to the snipes number for 63. so in in you know reviewing this data we also have been in a lot of collaboration with the schools but one thing i want to explain about what snipes is doing as a part of their in-school suspension is that it number one it reduces out-of-school suspensions but it's not a placeholder or just a placement it is an instructional and

100restorative model so it's called choices um and it's really um aligning back to helping students understand that they made choices with their behavior and they can make different choices too so it gives one-on-one academic and behavior support from the school counselors this is right from this manning principle the counselors make sure that they are working with every student that is assigned to choices um and then it also we also make sure that students that have ieps are also getting all of their special education services and then also if they are students who receive school-based mental health services then that school-based mental health provider is tapping into there and working with them as well so i'm going to move on to the 17 and 19 out-of-school suspension again this is information you've seen before but um

101this is quarter two so in 1718 we saw 274 out of school suspensions k-5 and 215 in 1920. and you can see the spread across schools again orange were our cohort one yellow are exemplary for total k5 out of schools assignments second quarter we're down to 55. so again i'm going to switch back in 1718 we were at 274. in 1920 we were at 215 and this in this quarter of this year we're at 55. not this court last quarter so again you can see across the spread um there we've looked at the the 55 and it's it's really um a broad mix of gray levels of schools we see very few repeats or very few recidivism but wanted to make sure that we highlight this reduction here so to give you a quick picture

102of three year comparison quarter two you can see 17 18 19 20 21 22 iss kind of fluctuating right but um the trend for out-of-school suspension is certainly reduced so what's next and i'm gonna let susan join me in this one if she if she would like um we know that um we're we're still on this journey to create these safe welcoming inclusive learning environments for our students and staff we are excited to launch a cohort too you heard it here we're looking more at secondary schools now and then providing one-on-one support to elementary schools that didn't get to participate in cohort one because we um we invited schools to participate in cohort one and some said well you didn't invite me and i wanted to join so we have a list of those so

103we'll be working with those um individually and then continuing review of this data because this is this is about evidence-based programming and responding to the needs of our students and the needs of our staff also aligning this to individual school improvement efforts we can have a district-wide approach to something but it lives and breathes through the school improvement team and the school improvement planning do you have anything you want to add okay all right so we are um we will take any questions that you have okay thank you for that um presentation it was very informative um mr mcmanus um thank you for the presentation and i like the idea you and i've talked about this that they're not suspending they're keeping them in school my question is why do we still call it in-school

104suspension since one of the biggest argumentative arenas is the school to prison as identified as suspended in or out why don't we call it refocus redirect it has nothing to do with suspension and what they're doing in snipes is absolutely wonderful is they're making it an academic where they get their classes and mental health as i understand and also counselors why do we have to call it in-school suspension so most schools do not call it in-school suspension with their students so we have to call it in school suspension because the state calls it in school suspension and requires us to report it so we're calling it what it's called in state reporting kids don't know it as this so kids know it as choices or turn around or i think that we've had so many

105different names that we that we've seen choices is definitely popular at this point mr goulier yeah thank you madam chair so i think we spoke nine months ago where he said we wanted to reduce these numbers fifty percent year over year and just based on the cohort it looks like we might very well have the formula necessary to do that in that three year timeline um so that's very exciting but i did want to ask you a question about the 55 and i'm sure you know this because you're probably as exhausted as everybody else but behavior this year has been a huge issue in our school system and i'm wondering if i'm wondering what those 55 are i mean you know because we're always talking about making sure suspensions are only occurring for violent offenses

106and i know we can't get into specifics on each case but by and large can you give me sort of an overview of what those 55 look like do you want to you want to take a susan studies this spreadsheet i look at data all the time so primarily with these kids you're right we have had a there is a difference between the behavior we're seeing this year than prior behave in prior years this year what we're seeing a lot of is fighting and physical aggression so really behaviors that result from an inability to either manage a negative social interaction which goes back to an inability to manage their response so we're working with both students in managing that response and teachers and helping them coach students to manage those responses so we're definitely seeing

107those those behaviors that warrant suspension our safety in terms of physical aggression and fighting and they're around both kind of the social interaction social awareness and and emotion management well thank you i know you guys are working hard and it's it's nice to see this progress so thank you mr wilderborn first off i want to thank you both for your hard work in this area it's awesome i also want to highlight the choices i get that's outstanding you know supporting the students not just putting them in a room and make them do their homework is there a way to break this down because we do have a lot of folks that are pushing through okay too we would look at k2 data versus you that can be done that was not requested as a part

108of this but i can tell you that it's a it's a rather um 50 50 split between k2 and 35 on total numbers miss justice yeah i found this interesting for a couple reasons first of all thank you for doing what you're doing um and i know you guys probably think of me saying i've been doing this too for a very long time in a different role now but positive behavior intervention supports have been around for 20 years and i know we've had them in this district and i know we've had people pushing them they come they go they're not spread around evilly and even this now this is a beginning and i hope that it continues to broadly spread the whole way but we have had access to this and it has not consistently

109stayed the way it should have been because i've talked to previous employees have been very disappointed they've left the district and one of you know one of their concerns was that it wasn't being implemented across the board properly i'm just bringing that up because we're a different world now and i'd like to see it keep going that way also like someone said i would like to see the data on the k through uh pre-k through second grade because even though you weren't asked i think we've asked in every different way possible so if you could please at some point have that presented to us and another thing too i'm looking at this three-year comparison of the totals um if there's also some way you can break down because we're now in the beginning or the

110middle of february we've got the rest of the year to go you've got the whole years here on the 2017 and 18 and 20 19 and 20. if you could even more appropriate to have had to break down on what they were in february as opposed to the whole year there's some way to provide that i'd appreciate it okay it is quarter two data for each school year yeah it's only quarter two okay so so this right here for each one thank you very much yes it's all the same time frame thank you very much it's good thanks walker hey guys thank you so much the um there's a lot of positive things going on here and i'm all for that um do you guys feel at any point whether it be good to integrate

111maybe data on seclusion as well do you feel like that's a behavioral component of this or you feel like that's a separate discussion it it that's a really complicated um that would be a complicated answer to that i think there is going to be some connection because there's going to be some connection to how students are supported um when they are in um in those types of situations when they're exhibiting those types of behaviors and that actually susan's also partnered with me on that kind of work um with our internal auditing and really looking for patterns of use patterns of students patterns of behavior that kind of thing so i don't know that we're prepared to give you anything other than yes i think it's connected i don't think it's an absolute correlation though but

112as a school psychologist i'd love for susan to weigh in too yeah so i would like to say that um that when we create an environment that is sensitive like trauma sensitive to the needs of our students and the unique needs of our students right now we are able to put prevention preventative steps in place to keep us from getting to the point where students are unsafe and they're in danger of hurting themselves or somebody else and then that is when we we have to look to seclusion so i think as we create these environments that are more supportive to the diverse needs of our students we're going to see decreases in those numbers as well but stay tuned stay tuned yeah okay and i want to add to that just briefly that we have

113found some new research on types of assessments that can be completed by school teams but again that's more it goes back to that team approach and it's not a diagnostic approach it's a team assessment approach and so we've got plans for implementation on that and we'll bring more okay thank you okay thank you very much appreciate it great presentation um next up on our agenda um are is insurance requirements and i think we have do we have julie moore here can um could we take a break please um five minutes please we are so close sorry oh my god hold on we still have you we have a quorum okay we have a quorum we'll go ahead and start it um miss small go ahead please thank you um did you run away you want

114me to go ahead no we're gonna go okay we have a quorum so um the board had requested um that i share information um related to um response from liberty mutual that we got last may i believe it was regarding allowability of event for coverage purposes and so that information you know is shared um on the attachment i just wanted to mention the additional requirements um related to risk transfer and logistical recommendations to reduce risk but the actual insurance requirements are the same as that we require for every other company we have in october of 2020 we had changed and standardized all of our contract requirements and insurance um with guidance from therington smith and our insurance company so um the insurance requirements are the same for everyone that's on our campus doing any type

115of work but the um there were some specific specific recommendations to allow this type of event to reduce risk um and so i'm happy to answer any questions you have i wasn't sure exactly what the board wanted in terms of this agenda item um miss justice and miss walker brought it to our attention so perhaps they can jump in on questions uh well this is what we've been told we were sent this information legal i mean earlier anyway what i would like to understand is you know mr brett who i have not talked to personally and i've never seen his show but i've heard all kinds of wonderful things about it uh of course it's really good he's you know anti-bullying positive experience for the kids mr brent according to what people that know him

116said has said he has fulfilled all these requirements now you're saying he has not contacted julie moore has she reached out to him um well basically the way this works for any contract of the school so we we sent the information out to principals is what was required and then it was um i believe it was also shared with mr britt by the schools i'm not that was interested in having this i'm not not positive but um if they wanted to contract with with any vendor they had to do the insurance but specifically this vendor we asked for this additional information or change in the way the event would be held to make sure that we would be covered by our insurance for for risk purposes so we also want our vendors to be insured

117but we need to make sure events are insured for the safety of students so um i'm not sure i'm understanding your question but a principal would have to to want the event to be held and then you know negotiate these terms not negotiate but get all this paperwork from mr britt and then um at that point they could move forward but they i'm not i don't know of a principal that has um recommended to move forward with the contract so that doesn't mean there isn't one but they have not contacted me well russell he's not he's a volunteer it's a voluntary he's not a vendor per se he's not making a profit off this is a non-profit um and at this point what you're saying is you need to have a principal reach out uh

118to us or to somebody in order for him to perform is that what you're saying well i mean generally that this type of activity would not be held to school without a principal wanting the activity to be held scheduling event whether it was voluntary or it was paid but we do have requirements that could you hang on one minute yes um ma'am you're blinding me thank you where why um i know but thank you the and not how do i say this the um if a principal wants to have an event on their campus um anyone that's going to be on campus whether it's you know um whether there's a fee involved or not would have to have the proper insurance if they're going to be doing something on our campus like that um this

119there had been an event and i think in several years in the past at a particular school another school was interested in it and that is how all this came up we had not we weren't aware of this event in the past but there was there was some video there was some things that were dangerous what appeared to be dangerous in terms of you know um i don't i didn't see the video myself i wasn't involved in it but the um as i understood it there was like motorcycle jumps and different things like that that were a concern to the safety of students and and staff and so we shared that information with our insurance company to make sure that that type of event would be allowable and they gave us these recommendations for additional

120considerations before allowing the event to be on campus okay let's do let's do suppose suppose mr and he apparently from what people have told me he has fulfilled all these requirements and i'm not sure because i haven't spoke to him but let's suppose he were to approach a school and say i have done this and now i'm volunteering for the kids for services so apparently if he were to do that there would be no problem if he fulfilled all these requirements all these were required and the principal was interested in the service you know you know lots of vendors approach schools to to to have events on their campus but that doesn't mean you know every school wants to have have the event can i interject because i i mean i tried to do this

121walker yeah i'm just recognizing you just you know what you already did you said miss justice and miss walker brought this forward so i was just interjecting thank you though um as far as the the research i've done um it seems to be some discrepancies and this is not found to you mary hazel of course um but the the the first discrepancy was the fact they were youtube videos online and then they were taken they were asked to be removed and they weren't and so then they just started a um a cycle of basically refusing him to be able to do shows and so even after risk management was contacted and he got the list which he says he abided by a principal did contact him to do a show and that they were refused

122he was refused to do motorbikes and then um even though he had come up with all the required you know things that risk management had asked of him um so i'm not sure where the disconnect is maybe this a communication problem with him i personally like to just get it worked out because i feel like he his message the fact he's been in the district for over for about 10 years now the fact that he's doing shows in other places i think the the students would be would be served well with enrichment for the shows he does and his message of anti-bullying etc and that if the process is is he's following them then we can work out getting him back in our district to do shows if he follows the rules and if all

123he's got to do is contact us more i think that i think next time i hope that we can put it on the agenda again for an action item to see if we can get this sorted out contract-wise um because i mean obviously if he's following the rules and he's doing what he's asked of him then we would have no reason to not let him and like i said it was i know that one school actually the school that had it previously had reached out but i i wasn't aware um when they reached out to us before that all this had been completed i don't think that was communicated to our office okay so um if that is the case you know we can certainly review um what was submitted but i haven't seen it

124so we certainly could follow up with that school if they if there is interest by the school again we would never want to force the school to have an activity but if they were interested and all of these requirements were met then then there would be no reason to to not allow it if that's what the school wanted to do okay yeah all right okay are you done we're at our five minutes so this will be the last one do we want to continue the discussion we are at our five minutes um just will the board are we going to continue the conversation for just 30 seconds i'm going to speak in new jersey terms i'll be real quick um so again so basically if this is all fulfilled a principal needs to just contact

125or is interested because i know he's currently doing it in pender county and i'm sure they have insurance there too so so they would need to have a contract with him the standard of all of our contracts um just and and where he would um show his ins proof of insurance and agree to the other terms you know of a contract and then also you know meet these additional guidelines that are recommendations and then um they would be able to proceed okay thank you okay thank you thank you okay thank you mayor hazel i mean smiles um next up on our agenda is facilities use animals i think uh mr schade was gonna lead us in that discussion yes i've been asked to provide some information about facility animals in schools i first want to

126note there's a distinction between service animals and facility animals i think that's driven some confusion service animals are our service dogs are animals that are assigned to individual students to meet that student's needs and i want to be clear that service animals absolutely are allowed and are in place throughout the district facility animals are something different facility animals accompany a handler oftentimes affiliated with a non-profit or a provider that's entered into an agreement with the district to provide this service and the facility animal will then come to a particular site particular school and be a resource to anyone there to to any student or staff member there so they're not providing individual supports to a particular student based on that student's needs instead it's just there for anybody who wants to interact with that animal

127it's under my understanding that there were some sites in the past that did have facility animals but there were concerns from the district's insurance carrier about some requirements that needed to be put in place as well as concerns about staff members or teachers in particular serving as the handler for the dog and that in turn raising concerns about proper supervision of students if the staff person was also assigned to be the handler of of the dog so the program was put on put on pause however i can't share that administration is currently working to negotiate an mou with pause for people that would include all of the requirements of the district and the insurance carrier the district's actively working on on developing that and then once it's in place the program can proceed okay um

128mr bullier yeah thank you very much i do want to say that i love the program i think it has provided immense benefit in the past and i'm thrilled to hear that it's it's being worked on because there really is something there um and i've seen it work and i appreciate it so thank you um miss walker thank you yeah i appreciate you clarifying that do you know of a timeline for that for i mean and the distinction is therapy dogs so as opposed to facility dogs right you mentioned that there's a handler with a facility dog that we had successfully in the district for like five years at pine valley who you brought the concern about the handler being also the teacher excuse me i had not heard that there was a problem with

129the handler being the teacher as well who brought that forward do you know i mean was it a student a parent i'm not sure i was not working with the district at the time that uh concern was raised i don't believe so i just say like it's a well-respected company we know that it's the the teacher was a very prominent teacher at pine valley he had the dog in there for almost five years with no issue and they're they're very beneficial i mean i think especially in this day and time where we have a lot of mental health issues and i think everybody knows how comforting animals are especially dogs that are trained well also i guess you say you don't have a timeline i think there was also concern about a policy we didn't

130have a policy for facility animals is that true there is a policy that does allow a facility and will be put in place at the discretion of the building supervisor with the approval of superintendent or designee okay so we don't need to make any policy changes miss justice thank you thank you thank you thank you a lot of confusion around this issue has been going on for months months and months animals are so therapeutic for children they're just such a basic part of our existence and in the world we live in today and what the kids are going through it's nothing but a plus i'm so glad to hear that this is happening i'm sorry that it even was interrupted and caused all the confusion and so i'm looking forward to the future and i

131hope that in the future we are able to discuss things like this or somebody is not us we're not i want to micromanage this district before it gets to the point where dogs the dog the dog was removed a lot of children's little hearts i love children i'm not being making fun of them because they have smaller hearts than us but they were hurt well kids were hurt and a lot of a lot of people in the community were shocked and i hope not that this kind of situation doesn't occur again that we're mr we're right at the five-minute mark so okay another jersey comment on tonight i think it's outstanding that we're going to look at this and get it back in place so i concur with everyone what everyone else has said i

132think and i just want to be clear that mr scheid is not in charge of this um he is our legal counsel and he was just here to define some definitions so that comes from our staff um on that so we won't be following up with mr shive on this thank you thank you for your time okay um on to the next is does anybody have a committee report i didn't hear any nobody told me they wanted to have one okay any correspondence okay announcements let's go ahead and read those the title ix committee will meet on monday february 21st at 3 p.m at the board of education center the audience seating capacity will be 170 people the march regular board meeting will be held on tuesday march the 1st 2022 beginning at 5 pm

133at the board of education center and like i said at the beginning of the meeting we have um the board will convene tomorrow for a special meeting at 1 30 pm via zoom to discuss our mask mandate um hearing no objections to adjourn this meeting is adjourned good that's a record [Music] you