Board of Education Regular Board Meeting | April 13

001board of education to order please it's 4 30. thank you all for joining us today whether you are at home or here in the audience we will begin our meeting with an invocation it will be remote it is coming from lead pastor matt morehead a crossway chapel of wilmington so if you all could please stand hi my name is matt morehead and i'm one of the pastors of crossword chapel of wilmington and i just wanted to thank you all for uh the way you serve our county and our area grateful for each one of you and privilege to be able to pray for your meeting today uh god i do want to thank you for each person represented in this in this meeting this leadership team for the board of education i'm thankful for the

002role that they play in serving the students and families and individuals in our county and uh and gotta ask for your your blessing on this time today and their meeting i thank you for the ways in which you have guided and strengthened them during this complicated and difficult season and i pray that you continue to grant wisdom where they lack it your word says that it's good to give thanks to you uh for all the good things you have done the any word also says that when we lack wisdom then we should come to the one who provides uh the wisdom that we just simply do not have on our own the god of abraham isaac and jacob and so we we ask on their behalf that you grant them wisdom or they lack that

003that you grant them unity where they need it where they need vision for the future even if that future is just a couple steps in front of them they should grant them the vision to see what needs to be done and how to lead well how to serve well and i pray to strengthen them for that task but thank you for the teachers for the administrators and for the the board as well and just the the way in which they serve and lead the education system in our county and i ask that you go before them and in this time that you truly superintend their time if there'd be a humility graciousness in the way that they're able to operate with one another that would would help them to effectively serve our county thank you

004for your kindness i thank you you put you put people in positions of leadership and service in order uh to benefit um our city and our county and i pray that their leadership would do just that uh thank you for your kindness to us i'm grateful that you are ultimately the one that we trust in and pray that we do that more and more each moment and each day in jesus name amen amen amen thank you very much pastor morehead ask you please remain standing for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you very much you may be seated next item on the agenda is the

005roll call miss bowie stephanie adams here nelson bullier here judy justice stephanie craybill here hugh mcmanus yes stephanie walker here and peter wilderborg all right thank you very much we have seven board members present there is a quorum next item on the agenda is the approval of the agenda do i hear a motion i move to uh to change it i add something to the agenda all right what would you like to make a motion for ms justice oh yes i move that the discussion that is scheduled behind well in closed session concerning our legal counsel be moved to the uh yes i believe it's the 20th the special session on the 20th to be held in public second the legal discussion that's scheduled for the 20th about our legal counsel in the future that's

006scheduled for the june meeting no it's scheduled now behind closed doors you told me that the conflict of conflict of interest discussion yes miss justice and madam chair the board is not permitted to talk about their choice of legal counsel in closed session anything that is in closed session will just be legal advice from myself well that case i'm still asking for the open session discussion about legal counsel on the special meeting come up on april 20th so is that a motion for tonight for tonight well i was under the understanding from what you said about closed session that we were going to be discussing that behind closed doors uh that was a direct comment from her and one of her emails to me i think you misunderstood what the comment was but um we

007are going to talk about multiple things in closed session this evening but as far as what you're asking for can you make a motion for a future meeting i was mainly trying to make sure we didn't talk about that behind closed doors but did do it and now uh the stagner's saying that's what we should have been doing that wasn't the impression i got from your email the legal discussion about representation per policy is coming at the june meeting um that is not this request this is for not to have it behind closed doors and to add it to the 20th it won't be behind closed doors that legal presentation will be an open discussion presentation from ms stagna well then there's also a confusion and maybe miss dagner can clear it up whether or

008not that's part of your duties being able to postpone an agenda item that was approved by or seconded that you denied me and waiting until june to put it on the agenda i'm following policy so the your policy allows a board to board members to request that something be placed on the agenda that agenda is the the proposed agenda that comes to the meeting at the meeting itself the entire board votes on the agenda and so if the board as a whole wants to make changes at that meeting they can add or remove things from the proposed agenda so can i put this in layman's terms what you're saying is that if it's not added to the us i guess it's the april the 20th special session although i requested it today and it's not

009on the agenda because you want to put it in june that we have to wait until after you once more deny that gender request and then bring it to us in front of the board again during the 20th special meeting on the 20th so your policy does says that two board members may request an item to be added to the agenda we do it doesn't say that it has to be on the next meeting agenda i think that the board chair has discretion to determine what the proposed agenda is but miss justice if you want to make a meeting make a motion at a meeting to add something to the agenda and there's a second and the full board votes to add that to the agenda that can be added but it would take a

010majority to add it to an agenda at a meeting well at this point you said you think are you absolutely sure that she has that discretion it is my opinion she has that discretion this is a discussion about security representation the question is if she wants to make an agenda to have have make a motion to have something added to a future meeting that's not it's not an order at this moment because you've asked for a motion on the proposed agenda for this meeting and we won't be talking about it though behind in closed session the board i am not an employee of the board i am an independent attorney a contractor i'm not an employee employees you have discussion about school system personnel in closed session your outside counsel just like any other contractor

011that you you enter into someone to have to provide services is an open session discussion so what i will be doing in closed session as i always do is give you legal advice we the board cannot talk about what his decision is on legal counsel in closed session and i appreciate that it was the email i received that we would be talking about it today that that confused me and i will continue to follow the procedure but i do want to make it known that was your opinion and we're talking about legal counsel about whether or not she has that discretion and that's one of the reasons we need to have this discussion because a legal counsel is very important to our future uh independent so are you uh pulling out that motion pulling that

012motion well at this point since you said it is not appropriate but there's other avenues i will go ahead and do that okay all right so the um agenda item that we were talking about right now is the approval of the agenda is there a motion madam chair i'd like to uh have two deletions under 12 items b and c middle and high school schedules and remote wednesdays i feel like we covered that very extensively when we reopened the schools at our last board meeting and i just don't feel like another discussion is really warranted okay so there is a motion to amend the agenda to remove section 12 items b and c is there a second uh there okay is there a second i mean i'll second it okay okay go ahead and turn

013all right any discussion about these items yes did you want to go ahead and you're supposed to go first nelson since you're the one that brought the motion you're supposed to go first did you as i said as i made it you know i going back and doing remote wednesdays um after we're already in school our students are supposed to be in school tomorrow discussing schedules i i know several families who opted for that continued uh hybrid model i just don't think it's a good idea at this time and i felt like we discussed it extensively at our last board meeting so i'm not sure there's anything we actually had a vote uh on a motion for remote wednesdays so all right any other comments yes miss justice i felt that the process involved in

014adding that to the last meeting's agenda to last minute and literally nobody else was aware of the aabb edition we thought it was plan a we did not really have time to prepare or even have a very thorough discussion on what we were offered to vote on and if we have that opportunity now whether or not people agree at least the public will see that we did our due diligence and discuss the matter which is extremely important to our staff and some of the comments that were our reasoning behind it need to be fleshed out more as i said the fact that we only found out about it literally that moment the night of the meeting uh didn't give us enough chance and opportunity to really prepare to have comments or a discussion on that

015matter all right any other comments or discussion all right so the motion is to amend the agenda to remove from item 12 items b and c um all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed say nay nay so i think can we go go down so we can get the count please mr wildeboar speak no bye hi all right so the motion fails five to two all right again the uh item on the table is approval of the agenda is there a motion thank you mr bullier is there a second thank you mr wildebore all those in favor say aye all right all those opposed agenda is approved as is all right next item on the agenda is a closed session pursuant to north carolina general statutes 143-318-11a136 and 7 to consider personnel

016matters and to maintain the confidentiality of personnel records under north carolina general statutes 115 c dash 319 and dash 321 to prevent the disclosure of student records rendered confidential under the family educational rights and privacy act 20 usc 1232 g to consult with the board excuse me the board's attorney to preserve attorney-client privilege information including in the case cases captioned john doe the new hanover county board of education ed al new hanover county superior court case number 19-cvs-2745 and whitaker versus new hanover county board of education i see number 19-034762 and to hear reports concerning investigations of alleged criminal misconduct is there a motion move to approve pursuant to the statutes thank you mr bullier is there a second second thank you miss crable all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed we

017are in closed session the approval of the minutes from the special meeting february 10th 2021 the work session on february 16th and the special meeting on march 31st uh do i hear a motion removed thank you mr bullier is there a second video thank you mr mcmanus any discussion uh yes yes ma'am i'm just curious why our minutes are from the month before um we don't have the most recent i'm just curious they've not been approved i'm sorry for are you talking about the march regular the regular right i'm just curious why they don't have i'm just yeah uh miss bowie since miss bowie is the one that updates our minutes can you just speak to why the march regular meeting minutes have not been uploaded yet are you still working on them okay yeah

018all right thank you all right any other discussion okay uh all those in favor to approve the minutes as listed say aye all right all those opposed all right minutes are approved thank you very much our next item on the agenda are recognitions and achievements um dr michelle fiskus unfortunately cannot be here with us this evening but she is our new chief communications officer we look forward to introducing her at a future meeting but in her absence i will do the introduction for the recognitions april is the month of the young child and we're going to recognize all of the district's early childhood education staff and students and in addition we are also going to recognize board vice chair and head start liaison mr nelson bullier for his commitment to early childhood education in nhcs

019we will also highlight an incredible feature of sincere catino 8th grader at myrtle grove middle school thank you i like to play basketball and i like to play different instruments like the cello and the keyboard i like to hang out with my friends and i like to learn about talking about mr fatino is pushing forward each day towards excellence he doesn't let his visual impairment or the current pandemic slow slowing down when bit the tools that i use are my teachers have been very supportive of me and all the people that helped me and stuff recently participated in the braille challenge children around this date which his mom says was an encouraging experience you know sincere does things really good his way but there's another kid who participate that does well but in a different

020way um so just being able to get them in that zone and that atmosphere to you know see the different ways that they are learning sincere also has a knack for inspirational music he plays many instruments but says the cello is his favorite and you know of this song as i'm listening to it and when it comes to his studies his mom says that she's grateful for the wonderful educators who have played a role in his life not just this past year but over [Music] you know i have not had a moment where i've experienced anything where i felt that he was not the best when it came to his education everyone's always advocating for him he's such a lovable kid that when you meet him can't help but want to be a part of

021his life and what he's doing he makes me a better mom every day you know when i wake up and i think you know oh you know it's going to be a rough day i just he just comes in my room and he just lights up my whole world he is such an inspiration really and i just remember as a little boy you know [Music] and that the earlier you start you know the benefits just continue to amplify as you go through the years so i mean i think it's as much a right as you know our constitutions as you have a right to sound basic education i think that needs to expand to include pre-k because it sets you up for that basic education for the rest of your life uh it's it's a

022critical component of success in academics [Music] oh you think if you put it on top i like to say that in pre-k we're in it for the long game so i know a lot of people talk about kindergarten readiness and how important that is and it is important that our kids are primed and ready for kindergarten but what the bulk of the work that we do is a delayed sort of reward and so we're in the business of wiring brains which means that when we get children their brains are only about 60 wired and so by the time they leave us and go to kindergarten their brains are 90 wide so we have a huge amount of time to make all of these beautiful neural connections so we're doing all of this intense brain work

023that just looks like play we don't model our pre-k classes to be mini kindergarten our pre-k classrooms are developmental with a balance of differentiating the needs of our students academics and social emotional when everyone says having children ready for kindergarten readiness it encompasses much more than just the academics it is the whole social emotional piece of a child being ready for school um being used to routines being used to adults being used to just different structures of operating in a school i would say what i like about new hampshire county schools is it's developmentally appropriate and it adapts to the needs of a community i like that we when we see a need of a community we go and meet the needed community if we need more sites we go meet and address those families

024that need support if we have a waiting list the next year there's a needs assessment how can we bring more families in children are our greatest teachers so when we get to work with children we're we're not only teaching them we're healing and teaching ourselves for me personally it's a social justice issue so when we start early with fair access to high quality preschool we set them up for excellence for life i think the path to excellence has to be given the first step and in so many ways that first step down the path is the most important one and i think that's what we do at our pre-k services throughout new hanover county just so proud of the work that we produce every single day throughout the calendar year to make sure that every

025student in new hanover county has a chance to be successful and to be the best i know the pandemic has been especially hard on our youngest learners and i know that every single person who services those kids they've been at their best so i just want to offer my appreciation to our staff to our families and to those three and four-year-olds thank you very much and to all of our pre-k educators happy month of the young child and thank you for all you do our next item on the agenda is call to the audience but before we move into that i would like to just share a few words i want to take a moment to address some of the incidents that have unfolded in our community over the last two weeks first i want

026to offer my sincerest condolences to the boston family david basham was an educator with decades of experience but more importantly he was a father and a husband i can't imagine what his family is going through at this time but i have seen the outpouring of support from our community and i know that they will continue to do so as those close to david boshton try to navigate through this difficult time second when it comes to the allegations against david boston and ron strickland i want to acknowledge many of your feelings of shock and disbelief while i cannot speak to those incidents specifically due to ongoing investigations and employee records policies what i want to address is what new hanover county schools is doing about it and plans to do about it among all of the

027hurt and the tragedy that we have experienced some positive outcomes must emerge everyone within the district is working diligently to eradicate behavior that harms students in fact recently after reading comments on a social media post one of our own board members took immediate action following up with superintendent dr charles faust who wasted no time in putting his team into action i also want to commend dr faust for his willingness to take the necessary steps to critically examine and improve our district under his leadership i am confident that we are seeing and will continue to see two very simple yet essential ideologies put into practice on a daily basis those two things are setting expectations and holding people accountable all of our educators need to know what the expectations are when it comes to reporting anything

028they see or hear as it relates to student safety and then if someone violates those expectations everyone needs to understand they will be held accountable no matter their position in the district we expect everyone to report anything that feels suspicious to allow the new hanover county schools administration to fully investigate there is no excuse to keep information to yourself when it comes to the safety emotional health and well-being of a child furthermore i look forward to new initiatives training and internal communication processes which will help keep our students safe and finally i want to thank everybody already doing those things all too often we focus on the handful who are not following our procedures but so many of you are already doing the right thing and for that i have the utmost appreciation thank you

029for call to the audience i'm going to just read some basic parameters for this evening per policy 2310 each speaker will receive three minutes to present comments however if more than 10 people sign up to speak each speaker will be limited to two minutes that is not an issue this evening we have less than 10 speakers for each items speaking order at regular board meetings speakers commenting on items on the night's agenda will be heard during the first call to the audience speakers commenting on other topics non-agenda items will be heard during the second call to the audience per the board meeting agenda speakers are welcome to offer comments or criticism directed at substantial ideas actions or procedures of the board and individual board members in the interest of maintaining civility and decorum however speakers

030are encouraged to refrain from personal attacks and insults directed at the board individual board members staff or members of the general public the laws and policies of north carolina provide the issues or concerns involving individual personnel matters are confidential and therefore not appropriate for public comment settings concerns related to personnel issues may be addressed through applicable nhcs personnel the grievance policy or other applicable policies speakers including students may discuss issues and matters of general concern but should refrain from discussing confidential student information concerns related to confidential student matters may be addressed through applicable nhcs personnel the grievance policy or other applicable policies on that note we will start and i will call your name and you may come to the microphone we will start this evening with miss sandy isles i honestly he said i

031honestly believe our district and our district believes that every child deserves a safe environment and we are going to hold all educators educators accountable to ensure that every child is safe i'm here tonight to ask our district to appropriately allocate funds in our 2021-2022 budget to keep our students safe for the past couple months i have approached the board asking you to review and improve your policy 4302r rules for seclusion and restraint i'm asking you to fund our school so that we have more counselors social workers psychologists tas and ec staff so that we can effectively address student needs and skill deficits in order to reduce the use of seclusion and restrain our schools i'm asking you to request additional funding from our county commissioners to permanently fund those support staff positions i'm asking you

032to invest in increased positive behavior support training and resources to protect our students from seclusion and restraint the latest data from the office of civil rights show how our children with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by our seclusion and restraint policies in 2017 there were a total of 195 restraints in new hanover county schools 174 of those restraints involved students with disabilities only 21 involve non-disabled students there were a total of 485 seclusion instances 477 instances involve students with disabilities with a mere nine instances involving our non-disabled students that same year forest hills reported 21 students were repeatedly secluded 242 times in one year that is almost half of the instances in new hanover county schools from just one school all 21 students were a child with a disability 18 of these children were black males

033two were black females and one was a white male we must implement policies that do not subject our disabled students to disproportionate use of seclusion and restraint we must empower staff with all necessary training and resources to meet our children's needs while keeping them safe back to dr faust's quote unfortunately our children are not safe in our schools they're not safe from sexual predators they're not safe from our punitive behavior policies and they are not safe from seclusion and restraint new hanover county schools has been a source of pain trauma and discrimination for thousands of children for decades it needs to stop align your budget to support our students and keep them safe from harm thank you chris sutton um i wanted to start this off a little different today with a moment of silence

034for the victim something i don't think ever has been done here as you all know there's dozens there's absolutely dozens of victims and it's not just one incident we have an issue and it comes down to culture and uh you know we talk about the good old boy club a lot we talk a lot about a lot of issues but at the end of the day we're seeing more and more that the culture around here it was acceptable to sleep with students regardless of how we we worded it it is what it is okay and i wanted to start off with saying that um now i don't want to spend too much time talking about the holiday stadium to be completely honest i believe everyone knows where they stand you have the united states department

035of education that came forward they did an investigative report i believe everybody here has read it and they understand that retaliation was brought up where a certain member i'll not say his name but there's a reason why we're trying to get rid of holiday's name that gentleman he he violated it and it is what it is he was guilty of retaliating against a parent of a victim not only that but we have multiple victims that have came forward okay one of those victims was followed into the bathroom by michael kelvin you know this is the thing he went to rick holiday he wanted help he went to them to try and stop it he didn't receive no help same bathroom reminder that michael kelly was caught with video of him with a child inside of

036a public school facility inside of a restroom one can speculate it's probably going to be the same restroom if that incident wouldn't have went to the air a lot of my friends probably wouldn't have been raped which lead me to hear that's why i'm here i want his name gone now with that i'm not going to spend much more time on that because legitimately i believe everyone knows where they stand uh miss adams thank you for calling me the other night i know you and i do not see eye to eye on some things but you are a charming person legitimately we had an amazing conversation and while i don't believe i have your vote on a lot of the things at the same time you did at least tell me that you are trying

037to do what's best and you feel that you don't need to be portrayed as some monster but understand what just occurred with this policy with policy 2122 where i tried to get you to speak about ms stogner you had the ability to put it on this agenda you had the time to put it on the agenda the only reason is not on the agenda is because you did not want it on there and if i'm wrong please correct me because the raw reality of it is it should have been discussed in front of everyone tonight and it was not but i'm noticing another pattern even like this kate beer collective thing that just came up just like the vote for phase a and face aa and bb these people did not even know that a

038vote was coming up they did not even know that they were voting on face a phase aabb and remote i know that because i've talked to all them on the phone miss crable didn't know mr mcmanus didn't know miss justice didn't know miss walker didn't know mr world war did not know and i believe i spoke to you and asked you and i don't know where you stood on that one we didn't exactly make it there but legitimately there's a problem and i think that we need to take some more time to think about this cape fear collective we haven't even talked about this competitor we're talking about giving someone away all of our valuable metadata that's not a bright idea to do with just a few days to look into it i appreciate y'all's

039time thank you [Applause] it's leslie posey good evening tonight i want to talk about items that are inactive inadequately addressed in the district budget since september 2018 we have had three hurricanes and a pandemic all have had significant impact on the physical and mental health of new hanover students and staff the resulting closures and partial reopenings of schools have resulted in a significant loss of medical and mental health students to students services to students and staff additionally we are already woefully understaffed in providing these services the respective national associations recommend a healthy student population school provide one nurse for every 750 students in schools with high risk populations the recommendation is one to one hundred twenty five the recommendations for school counselors and social workers in healthy schools is one to two hundred and fifty

040and one to two fifty for schools with intense needs i think we can agree that many of our schools fall into the category of high risk especially after the past four years therefore we have a serious need for more nurses counselors and social workers i assume within the budget negotiations you are making plans to use the funds from the american rescue act as well as state and local governments to address these incredible deficits that significantly affect our children and staff finally given the hurricanes pandemic and other events that continue to affect our children i would like to leave you with a quote from one of my favorite authors holocaust survivor ellie wiesel quote what hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander end quote i hope

041you in your positions of leadership will not be the bystanders thank you reverend dante a murphy reverend murphy all right if he comes in we will just add him to the end of the list uh barbara anderson barbara anderson angela keaney april's prevent child abuse awareness and sexual assault month unlike the opening statement of the chair i'd like to pay respect respect to the victims the name that's displayed at the top of the laney stadium is one that should have never been there and is long overdue to be removed there are many things that divide our community in our school system but on this we are united those who cover up sexual assault are not welcome in our schools unfortunately people sometimes tend to only be concerned with those things that impact them directly but

042sexual assault affects us all and is not limited to one group of people we have children who've been victimized in new hanover county schools that fall into every category some are from rich families some live in poverty some are on the north side the south side and midtown they fall into every sexual orientation and gender yes even our boys they represent every single ethnic group and race they're from a variety of different religions as well in fact we have so many victims of sexual assault and rape due to the negligence of our school system that not one group is left out it's the only place that you'll find equity in our county so why then are we not all outraged to the point of ending this the laney stadium carries the name of an individual

043who's blatantly ignored sexual assault complaints impeded abuse investigations blamed and shamed victims and their families retaliated and threatened staff students parents and advocates and purposefully destroyed documentation to support these facts each of these things we've shown through the conviction of michael kelly and his sexual assault and then the sexual assault of a special needs child at bradley creek elementary to name just a few so i have to wonder why our elected officials choose to spend our money on a large litigation team to protect themselves instead of our children and why they spend their time trying to devise strategic ways of twisting policy like the new call to audience changes to silence us instead of helping our students heal from the trauma they experienced and simply going to school we've got so many sexually inappropriate behavior

044cases in our schools that when a new one comes to light like in the recent week no one's even surprised in fact our leadership just pulls out that same old pre-written thoughts and prayer speech where they offer condolences to everyone but the victim life goes on until the next one i cannot even give you an accurate number of how many victims there are new hanover county schools because by the time i walk out of this room tonight the odds that another one will have been brave enough to come forward is very likely there's good and bad in every group sometimes you run across a bad cop teacher social worker pastor but the difference here is that when those people are identified at new hanover county schools we promote protect them and name a stadium after

045them the real danger to our kids are the people in leadership in this room with the power to change things that refuse to do so so if they aren't listening maybe you the people can work together with us to demand better leadership alan sewell good afternoon my name is alan sewell i began my career in a great school system i think back in 1984 laney high school 32 and a half years later i retired enjoyed every minute of it working with the kids and hopefully bettering the northern part of the community i thank you for what you're doing it's not easy a lot of this stuff did not happen on your watch you have been faced with correcting it so follow my timeline here um i will do a timeline to give you a little

046background at the age of 15 a teenager named larry toto came from american samoa to new hanover county he arrived in wilmington and no one knew whether he was white or black they didn't know whether to place him at all black school in wilmington as in williston the williston high school or new hanover high school he ended up at new hanover high school and was a standout football player he went on and played football in college he was a decorated college football player he got into coaching the summer of 1984. this little country boy from foothills of north carolina was hired at laney high school along with larry toto rick holliday had applied for the football job at langley high school he did not get it he was an assistant to larry toto for the

047first year the second year he was demoted by coach toto to jv football as a jv assistant larry toto took a program that i think at the time hadn't won a football game in probably two years to the playoffs upgraded the program if you if you've been around wilmington you know the total name it's very well respected in short rick holiday came back to laney high school i witnessed this as a teacher and a coach he came back as assistant principal and athletic director and fired larry toto one of the most respected men in new hanover county i will ask on behalf of hundreds of students teachers in new hanover county parents that you if you do rename the stadium that it needs to be larry toto stadium and correct the injustice that was done

048to this man [Applause] steve sheffield good evening ladies and gentlemen i know this man he's a fine man i've met some of you and you're all distinguished in your roles i'm going to be real brief i'm going to tell you what elizabeth taylor told her first husband i'm not going to keep you long i knew larry toto would still know him and respect him and this coach and that one over there who taught some of my two my children both my children i was asked by whitey prevet son to take over the role as president fellaini booster club and i know that's not part of the school i did i was warned that it was going to be tough perhaps uh mr young private understood my part of my role as chair of the board

049of directors of good chap administrators here in wilmington we set about changing some things mostly how the money was handled money from football games 50 50 those kinds of things money that was supposed to have been allocated back to the students when we took over we changed the way the money was handled the old receipts from football games on friday nights went to the bank amounted to a thousand to fifteen hundred we collected on a routine basis every friday night between three and five thousand dollars the question i wanted to ask you tonight and the question i asked administration at the time the man this gentleman referred to what happened to the difference i just learned last month my daughter when she was a student at laney high school that principal walked into her biology

050class unannounced to the students and as far as she knew uninvited by the teacher told the students now here's the principle if anybody tells you you have potential you don't have potential i want you to think about that for a moment let it sink in how many dreams were destroyed right there at that moment now i want to ask you a question do we want our children to have that name and or that stigma attached to any building or any facility in new hanover county i think the answer is a resounding note now i have some notes but i'm not even going to look at them because i see a half a minute left i want you all to understand that there are people out here and watch it on camera who love their students

051more than you do unless you have students they hold not only the keys to their future but their hands hold the vote and the purse strings for this county to pay for all of this thank you for your time [Applause] miss adams and all of you uh board members who are here tonight i wish i had prepared remarks but i had planned to trust me i've got to ask you to keep your mask on oh i'm sorry sorry i wish i had prepared remarks but i don't i came here as a parent who feels quite desperate and unsure how to move forward and be an advocate for my child so i'll share briefly the story of my family our journey started with my mary lou who's here with me tonight and her chemistry teacher her

052freshman year at isaac bear high school early college being arrested for sexual crimes against minors try to explain to a 13 year old why will she she will never see her favorite teacher again ever then a year or so more later a teacher at her middle school was arrested for similar crimes both teachers now sit in jail here's where the story compounds for me and where i cannot think of what to do to help our community be better and it's what i want to do every day we continue to hear rumors that there are other teachers that have been protected in similar ways that these same teachers who now sit in jail were also protected one was arrested last week and committed suicide traumatic experience for my family one retired from coaching duties earlier this

053month and was arrested yesterday another traumatic experience for my family and my child was not even a victim i can't say that she was she just sat in those classrooms the volleyball coach retires that is so frustrating my heart is weak on this subject i don't know what to do the only thing i can think to do is to come to you today and ask you to remove the assistant super former super assistant superintendent's name from a building that i'm not a building but a place a public place that victims and families like mine will have to or hope to visit i have a daughter that will be attending congress high school next year i hope we will go to elainey hoggard football game but i won't if his name is on that stadium i

054want to leave you with words of one of the victim's parents every day since i learned that my son and so many others were victims of michael kelly i have wanted to scream i wanted to cry i wanted to break down here i sit sobbing over my computer because i did not protect my son she did everything she could to protect her son but there was someone in a position of power within this school district who did not and i ask you please to remove his name from that stadium richard wilkins you pass okay that um then is the conclusion unless uh reverend dante murphy or barbara anderson that is the completion of the agenda items call to the audience uh the remainder of call to the audience items will be at the end of

055the agenda all right next item on the agenda is are the consensus items first item budget amendments mary hazel small good evening tonight i present um two budget amendments one federal budget amendment number two capital outlay number three um i just wanted to the the federal amendments are just routine amendments that come from from um the state throughout the year um but it did include uh transfer of essa funds where we um change the original plan so that we could do some hvac upgrades to install um improve air quality in school and then for the capital outlay number three um this actually relates to the budget presentation a little bit later related to capital outlay we had an unexpected failure of a chiller at bellamy and so some of the money that we were planning

056to budget next year we went ahead because we already had access to it it was in a local sales tax refund to to budget for that repair immediately and um so that budget amendment is submitted for you tonight all right you have heard the recommendation is there a motion moved thank you mr bullier is there a second thank you mr wildebore any discussion all those in favor say aye aye and those opposed all right amendments are approved and disposal of surplus property i believe it's you as well um thank you i request your approval um to dispose of surplus property no longer necessary or desirable for public school purposes to be disposed of and according to public school law um there's a the list of items for you and um upon your approval we would

057plan to have a online auction from may 8 through june 8. all right thank you very much you have heard the recommendation is there a motion move thank you mr bullier is there a second thank you mr wildebore any discussion all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed motion passes up thank you next item on the agenda is the personnel report uh dr coker good evening madam chair board members tonight i present to you the personnel report for the period covering 2 26 through february i'm sorry april 13th and would like to make the recommendation that you accept and approve the recommendations all right and uh you've heard the recommendation is there a motion so moved thank you mr bullier is there a second second sorry miss justice any discussion all right all

058those in favor to accept the personnel list as presented say aye aye any opposed and i believe that two of our personal recommendations are here this evening which we do you have two of our recommendations here this evening i'd like to call up brent hall who is the new principal of winter park elementary school and kim morrissey who will be the new principal of j.c rowe congratulations would you like to say a few words uh just uh thank you to the board dr fowle senior senior staff for this opportunity uh certainly bittersweet to be leaving my eaton family but excited to meet the students staff families at winter park congratulations lucky to have you yes same um you're 14 in new hanover county very excited to be offered this opportunity and i plan to do

059everything in my power to make everyone proud all right thank you so much congratulations on the new positions thank you thank you dr coker all right next item up on the agenda under old business budget recommendations for fiscal year 2021 22 mary hazel small coming right back up there again i think i'll be up here for a little while so thank you again tonight i'm going to be um doing act ii for of the budget recommendations we covered some of these topics last month but we're going to go in a little bit more detail tonight um we'll be reviewing once again our revenue estimates we've had a few changes since last month um the budget initiatives which include um salary schedules and we'll go a little bit we covered those in um at a high

060level last month but we'll go through the specifics tonight and um just a slight change in the capital outlay plan and then we will be bringing all of this back to you for the official approval of the county request at your may meeting should we hold our questions till the end oh yes thank you um this is a fairly extensive presentation um so board members if as we go through if you've got questions just make sure you're notating them so we can let mary hazel get through it all and then we'll do the questions at the end thank you i meant to say thank you ms craig so thank you so for revenue updates um estate projections you know are always difficult because we do our budget process before the state does theirs but we're

061hoping any day now to have the senate budget um be more realistically sometime between now and probably the first of may but as soon as that's released we'll have a much better idea of some of the estimates that affect not only our state but our local budget in terms of our benefit cost retirement match health insurance those kinds of things and what we do know about state is we already have the state the number of projected students from the state for us which is extremely high it's 26 641. um this year's budget was based on 26 000. so they are continuing to recommend that we're growing faster than we're actually growing our our local projections are closer to the 26 000 and so that is what we're using to a lot resources out to schools

062um a little bit later we'll be talking about the county budget they are budgeting closer to 25 500 and so everybody's using a different number but um you know we'll know when school starts so we will we'll be budgeting each of these sources based on those estimates um but with the with the state proposal that's a two and a half percent increase in our state revenue it's certainly subject to change if if the students don't don't um come at that level but um we also have the federal money that would help offset that if that were to be the case so we want to go ahead and get the resources allocated to schools so we're going with the 26 000 number the other thing to mention with state projections is that we're in the fourth

063year of our class size reduction and the way the state did that was they increased every year or sort of funded a fourth of the formula to allocate our enhancement teachers art music and pe separately from teachers and so we'll be fully funded in the new year and that will give us 14 additional state teachers that we'll use we already have the the enhancement teachers hired but we'll use those for classroom teachers to reduce classes so for federal um i talked a little bit about this last month and these were very similar slides to what you saw these are the um are proposals right now for sr2 that is the 25.4 million sort of the second installment of federal relief funds we did find out more recently that our sr3 is still pending but our

064allotment is anticipated to be 57 million 24 000. i mean that will be available through 2024 so we'll have funding um each each of the three relief bills sort of expires um as they were allotted to us and we'll spend them in the order received but we expect to use much of esther 2 next year and for the items that are listed here and we're continuing to work on that budget as we finalize our summer school plan and so that brings us to house bill 82 which was passed and um the state defined for us some of their expectations for what we do with our summer learning program this year and we'll be funding that out of us or two and um i just i know there's a lot on the slide but i just

065wanted to cover for you some of the things that will go into our planning that you maybe hear about or you may get questions on we once we have a more detailed plan we'll bring it back to you um first of all the purpose of of the program of course is to provide in-person instruction on specific subjects as well as offer additional enrichment activities to students in kindergarten through grade to address learning loss and negative impact students have experienced due to covet 19 during the 21 the 2021 school year and so that's you know the reason for this some of the plan requirements that we have to follow based on state law will be the summer program will has to be at least 150 hours or 30 days one of those two requirements has to

066be met transportation mills physical activity has to be part of every day and enrichment activity every day so it's basically like school slightly different focus though the small group instruction for at-risk students and social emotional learning for all students k-3 will focus on reading math and then third grade science grades four through eight reading math and science and high school will be in divorce into core subjects and um the state is also requiring that at a minimum we offer twelve hundred dollar signing bonuses for teachers who worked in summer program who are willing to work in summer programs who have previously received teaching bonuses for results in reading for grades three four five or math in grades four through eight or any teacher who has the national board certification so that there's um i guess

067signing bonuses for those as well as there'll be performance bonuses for third grade um teachers where we're 150 for every student who's able to um become reading proficient by the end of the program so those are some things that we're building into our planning that you may hear about that we just wanted you to be aware of we will continue to not only budget for you know this summer but we'll be making plans for future summers as well because this funding does extend for three years completely switching subjects one of the discussions that we've had through every budget that i have been a part of developing is you know how much is in fund balance and um the county um manager has communicated to us that the county commissioners um or would prefer that we

068reduce our fund balance to 10 million they also have a fund balance that would be available to us in the um in an emergency situation they're committed to knowing that we'd immediately have access you know if we had another hurricane one of the reasons we had our fund bounce a little higher was because of that and we um you have a board policy that establishes a goal it's not a requirement it's a goal of no less than seven percent but you know after florence we had to reduce that quite a bit we went down to two percent and we've been building it back up um if we go to 10 million it would be about 3.7 of our beginning operating budget and for this year not next year it's gonna be a little higher because

069of all that federal money but you know normally um that's our operating expenses and um we plan to in the the final budget that is brought back to you once we have all these this other state and federal finalized we will be appropriating fund balance to get down to that 10 million dollars in next year's budget so any questions about that and that's a lot and common balance is probably not something you think about every day oh i was supposed to leave that's about to say we're going to wait till the end but yeah let's wait till the end yeah but i'm writing it down i know you're ready so remember that one we'll come back i'm going to switch now to talk about the county budget request so this looks a little different than

070some of the projections i had the last last month because we've continued to talk to them and last month i was using our estimated enrollment and now that they have calculated their own you can see the enrollment this first that first section is operating summary where we break out the portion that we receive and the portion that flows through us to charter charter schools and lab school and so the total estimated enrollment for anthem counties 27 422 but our portion would be 25 553 and so you can see the current the revised current year number you remember they gave us an increase mid-year which for the bonuses and so that's kind of our starting point um they did ask that we use that towards teacher supplements in the new year which we plan to do

071and then increase that um by the amount it's sort of a net amount but most of it is an increase for the teacher supplements reduced slightly because it's slightly less students that they're putting us on but the new per pupil that we are proposing and they are proposing is 3423 the adjusted per pupil this year was 3011. so it's quite a big increase um we'll talk about how we're going to spend it in just a moment when we get to teacher supplements but but most of that is for teachers so for us that's a 13.6 percent increase for capital outlay for several years the county had funded us at three three million six hundred ninety six thousand that was reduced by half this year both in our budget and the capital and the county reduced

072their capital as well because we weren't sure what was really going to be happening with the budget um last year in the middle of covid and so we were a little more conservative in the planning but now we expect that that would return to the prior year funding level and we are also requesting that the pre-k grant be doubled we think the county for several years has funded three additional classes for pre-k and we are asking that that be increased to six so they um total projection for for all of this is um 98 million 582 170 with you know just over six well just under six and a half million going to charters okay so now for budget initiatives um the first two we're going to spend a lot of time on the other

073ones i'm going to cover quickly so i'm going to skip over the first two for a minute but you know that that's the salaries and supplements that we'll cover over several slides and expanded program support but just as i mentioned last month for number three we do expect our liability insurance to go up but we don't have those those numbers yet we're still waiting here and of course we're waiting on the employee benefit cost increases um we know about the the k through class size reduction which is great um we also items five through eight is what we already mentioned before that we're going to do with sr2 which is the expansion of mental health support the phase one of our one-to-one initiative that we hope over five years to get to to be one-to-one

074for all staff and students in terms of technology devices and then the summer learning program that we just discussed as well as curriculum upgrade upgrading curriculum for all grades system-wide and um i'm going to move from that to expanded program support so during during this past year several organizational changes have been made and we have you know rearranged things and um some additional positions were added in the areas of construction communications and human resources to sort of stabilize and and move us forward but dr faust is recommending that we add four additional positions in the coming year at the central level to provide increased support one would be a third executive director of schools focusing on enrichment schools supervising principals of those schools second would be a director of curriculum instruction and that's currently handled

075by the second well the budget is handled together by the elementary and secondary um directors sorry i couldn't think about it for a minute but they're going to be focused on supervising principles moving forward i'm asking for a lead science teacher currently there's a shared science and math lead and separating that so that we have full-time math and full-time science and then a director of college and career readiness to enhance student support for college and career readiness so those are the requested positions that will be in the local budget that will be presented to you for approval and now we're going to talk about teacher supplements so this is the most exciting part that we're going to talk about today um currently we our supplement is i didn't even put that on here i think

076it's 20 um 27th in the state but the county would like to increase it to number one so we'd have the highest supplement state and that would be an average of nine thousand um per teacher per year this would be about a 230 average of 237 percent supplement increase not salary increase but supplement increase from the old scale to the new scale the new scales at the top of this slide the old scales at the bottom so you can see the increases there the currently we have a base scale and a targeted scale that only applies to certain schools we are going to consolidate them into one but human resources will be developing an incentive plan for targeted schools beyond those rates but that that plan is not complete yet so that will be part

077of this but it'll come a little bit later the um but these amounts exceed the current targeted rates so that we increase for those as well we also have a hard to fill supplement now where our ec teachers get a hundred extra dollars per month and our speech and speech teachers and psychologists get 200 extra a month we are going to one hard to fill rate which is 200 higher than each of the levels listed but we are expanding that to also include secondary science and math and selected ec cte teachers so it's a much expanded hard to fill for for all the areas where we find difficulty so those will be higher and that is the last two columns showing the monthly and the annual amounts so kind of simple when you put it

078all up there but it's a very busy slide so i just um you will have in your packet you have all the proposed schedules and there it's not a comparison it's just that just the new one so it's a little bit easier to look at but i wanted you to have a reference from the old i think i'm going to frame this one huh i think i'm going to frame this there you go there you go um next would be assistant principles so friends just a explanation of how assistant principles how the state pay scale is set it is 19 percent above the teacher scale or assistant principles and um there's some over the base teacher scale some teachers are paid if they have national boards they if you have national boards and you are

079in a position where you get a master's it's it's pretty much a wash you could actually make a little bit more than than an assistant principal would we don't have anybody in that situation right now but that could happen so our supplement um that we are proposing is to start with the new teacher supplement and add 50 to that so that you would make a little bit more as an assistant principal if that situation occurred um this would take the assistant principals from a rank of 23rd in the state to arrange a third and the the cost of that would be about 316 000 so that is not part of the county's proposal that's part of our proposal to use local funds i mean be county funds but to repurpose existing local um and then

080for the principal supplement we are requesting to to add just fifty dollars to the current um principal supplement just a a minor in increase and i do want to go i haven't even switched slides so i wanted to go back to this principle slide but still up there one of the things that i didn't mention is dr house is recommending if you if you see at the top that's the current assistant principle scale and it's there's just a base and so we have assistant principles that are 10 and a half months and 12 months so you see the monthly amount the 10 and a half month annual and the 12-month annual he's recommending that we we go to a similar format as we have for principals in which assistant principal supplements are very where elementary

081is basically the base middle and early colleges make a little bit more fifty dollars more per month and then traditional high schools fifty dollars more than that so it's it's a variable rate but it starts at fifty dollars above the teachers that was an important thing that i forgot to tell you about so now moving to t to principles not changing the format for principles at all but increasing it by fifty dollars all right this is really busy but i mainly wanted you to focus on the highlighted schedule this is the non-certified which we generally refer to as classified salary schedule and um there are multiple grades these first two grades are listed because i wanted you to see the highlights we're trying to we had a three-year plan so we're now in the second

082year which is really the third year um to to try to increase our minimum wage over time to 15 per hour and this gets us to 15 but we still have some compressed steps because to increase the entire if we if we start with the lowest grade which is 55 and then increase from there it's just cost prohibitive so we it has to be a little bit of compression to do it over time and so but these basically what this means is these employees are getting paid more initially they just won't get a raise raise that they would have had you know every time but they're going to make they'll still make more because they're starting higher and so the only those highlighted steps are the only ones that are compressed all the others would

083continue to have a one it'd be 31 steps for all the grades we are requesting that you consider allowing a two-step experience step because the year that we're in there was no experience done and so that kind of catches them up to be where they would have been on the schedule the average cost would have increased excuse me would be seven percent but there'll be a two percent minimum increase and then um because clearly those were at the bottom that are going up higher they're going to have a higher percentage than those at the top and the um the local calls will be partially offset by the state increases but i can't tell you what that would be until i see the senate budget so we have a lot of estimates here and because of

084that and because that's that is not proposed i am going to request and that when we get to the main meeting that you approve the supplement schedule because that revenue is assured but the um because the county's already had discussions about it and i think publicly agreed that they were going to approve that but the um until we really know what what our state estimates are i don't think we can finalize these salary schedules so there'll still be a proposal and as soon as we know we'll bring it back to you for free um is there anything else i want to cover on this one the the central office administrator scale also a 30 step schedule step 0 is proposed to be 25 above the state minimum with with 29 1 steps and a bigger

085step between 29 30 to get to the top of the state maximum and the reason that we're trying to do this is to have more equity between director salaries and school administrators because the state has increased quite a bit school administrator salaries over the last several years but not central office administration and so um just to provide more equity between those two pay sched schedules um let's see what else do i want to say about that it's an average increase of and um the categories um the state defines seven categories essay 1 through essay 7 but it's a locally determined definition of each category so like our county decides where director is and where um an assistant director that kind of thing are so that that is what is proposed there and finally the we

086have two hourly pay schedules one is for bus drivers and well let me back up in a minute i don't want to make you dizzy but we're going to go back to the non-certified you can see we do have some hourly employees that are paid on the schedule if you're part-time we pay you hourly if you're full-time it's generally salaried but we also have separate hourly schedules for bus drivers and child nutrition helpers those that that are not um for child attrition those are not that are not in a permanent status and so the reason i wanted to to show both of these schedules to you is for bus drivers the goal was to get to the fifteen dollar minimum wage quicker and so when we went to thirteen they went to fourteen so now

087that we're bringing the classified scale to fourteen we're requesting that they go to fifteen dollar minimum and you'll notice they don't have 30 steps they have 15 steps and they get to the top of the scale in 15 years instead of 30 years the state range for bus drivers is is a smaller range so it starts high but we're starting higher but then we can't pay using state funds above the top of the state range and for child nutrition we would go to a 13 minimum we got to 12 with the last change and increasing sub rates for both of those categories and so for capital i promise not to go through the whole capital outlook proposal again i just want to point out it's a little bit less than it was before because we

088had to go ahead and budget that interlocal sales tax revenue for the bellamy chiller we are recommending that we move an hvac project scheduled for laney to two years out so for the 2223 year in order to we'll still budget all that we have but we felt like it was an emergency we need to go ahead and deal with that children this year so that's the only change but it does affect numbers on all three of these slides so i'll just quickly go through those and we get to our next steps so i'm going to go through this and then be glad to answer any questions that you have but in may 4th you will need to approve the county budget request and i would ask that you go ahead and through the supplement schedules

089in doing so it will allow us to to use those new schedules to help recruit and that will be helpful because there's a lot of hiring to do this summer um also the um all the other local schedules will either be brought back to the the second may meeting or june you know once we know where we are with the state budget and then finally once the county once everything is finalized we will bring to the july meeting the budget resolution for your approval so now happy to answer any questions all right let me open the floor who would like to start shall we start on this end mr wildeboard um back to slide number 10 um expanded program support uh there's no number attached to that so what's that going to cost for all

090those different people i want to make sure i'm on the right side so which slide i believe it was 10 new positions executive directors program support i was in a classroom this week that had 32 students kind of packed into a middle school classroom and you know i'd rather maybe put it towards more teachers than i am struggling it's i can't hear very well because somebody um gets a little bit louder to the microphone expanded programming i can't see the numbers so um right under budget initiatives right there right yeah you have to keep going no sorry go back shut up one more back yep go forward i guess forward forward sorry there you go yep okay now what's your question what is the cost for those four positions or approximate questions what is the

091approximate cost um for an executive director with benefits is probably going to be closer to 120 a director will be somewhat less i didn't i didn't calculate i mean i don't have that with me tonight but most of the time with benefits and benefits are about 30 um of the cost of a salary it's probably going to be a close closer to just over a hundred thousand lead science teacher with benefits probably going to be about 65 000 um and and then number four is also the director before he was also a director oh okay who recommended dove the executive director for enrichment schools was that a dr vause recommendation all of the entire budget i reckon the entire budget okay is there a need for that position yes there's a need for all of

092those positions because well this one specifically i mean is that what the superintendent does say that again isn't that what the superintendent does supervised principles i didn't know why you need the position i was just asking um and could could everybody speak up i don't know why everything's interesting uh not necessarily is there a sound we're all kind of muffled tonight yeah maybe bring this i'm going to need to bring up an interpreter to help me get that relationship so so the question on the table is what is the the need for the executive director of enrichment i'll go down all of them so we have some schools that are our cds some of our lower cs lower d schools and in an effort to give an intensive support for those schools we're breaking those

093schools out and so they will there'll be approximately about nine schools that we the this individual will be working with to ensure that those students get and principals get a different set of professional development different type of structures for them in order for us to move those students and those schools to get to a c that's the goal to increase that director of curriculum right now we don't have anyone that kind of oversees that of course dr smith is um the deputy superintendent kind of falls under here but there's no one that actually is in that middle person that mid level so it falls on lead teachers in order to do that right now for the the lead teacher of science that person is a shared position where they have to do science and math

094so we know that if you we look at our scores we know that science is a need and we need to enhance our science and so that one person is not focused on math giving a little bit of attention to science and doing more of the the math section we're doing that for the director of college and career readiness this is one where we engage our students it operates starting actually at the elementary middle and high and i'd spoken about that in the presentation what i was doing to the county commissioners and that position specifically just helps our students and parents become aware of what is out there for students so they would be helping with the college readiness yes um making sure that we are aligned at the high school so we have to

095backwards plan eighth grade the goal would be to make sure that all seventh graders um get to see a college campus before they get to high school all fourth graders again would be able to visit a high school prepping and planning setting up career access for elementary students career access for middle school students making sure that career access is ready for our high school students again we're talking about fafsa night what does that look like there's an entire different world that we are not touching um and so those are what these positions are are for i was just asking about the first one i know that was a nice explanation i was asking about the first one you were trying to get nine specific schools that you're looking at yeah you want to bring them

096to c schools yeah okay see well the goal is to actually have those c schools i our district is capable of being all a's and b's and to give those supports to the students we're going to our push is to have all students at the elementary level um reading on grade level by third um at third grade and so is that position going to also look at other supports those schools need because it's not just obviously grades a little muffled are there support i was just wondering is it other supports that they're going to give besides just for grades oh yes there's a lot more than just that that absolutely schools need and you'll hear that coming through we have um esser um two and three that you'll hear about um later we've got to

097put that plan together in order to present it to the state presented to you so yes the social emotional portion will be covered through there social workers i think we have that in another slide counselors are additional those are all in other areas but yes this isn't the same budget as our esser budget which is a different one we talked about it earlier but this include i guess under the umbrella your position the workforce the middle school work yes development exposure absolutely madam chair yes mr bullier the expansion of mental health support additional uh social workers and counselors do you have an idea of how many um i didn't bring the list i want to say i'm going to look to julie seven seven or eight of each but i'm i'm guessing and i don't

098want to guess for you i do know the exact number and i will send it to all of you um but they're um i can look it up at the break unless you know on top of your head yeah okay it was in the last presentation we did so as soon as we take a break i can look that up the beauty of this is one so looking at this one the the great part is of course all of it but the supplement for teachers when you look at the um sr2 that's an additional 27 million when you look at the sr3 that's going to be 57 million additional dollars that we're going to get so um and mary hazel and i were talking it's like it's you know it's a great thing it's a

099great problem to have but it's kind of stressful because we've got to get these applications ready by the i think it's may may 7th may 7th so we of course are presenting on this one but we're in tomorrow we're spending all day or a lot of the day and then on monday we're spending to get those applications ready because you know we're talking about an additional 70 plus 78 million don't do math but doing it really quickly right now million dollars that we have for schools so it will look at um sorry for now it will look at our social emotional aspects of our students that is something that we are very much taken into consideration and positions that have been made and when you look at the fact that our current budget um you

100know before some of the mid-year increases was under 300 million um this is this is a significant increase in funding that's going to be available for programs so these budget initiatives were a little bit of our initial planning for esser which is ether too um and also the things that we were planning to do locally so i know it's hard because we're giving it to you in pieces but we're kind of building it in pieces because like i just got the first training on sr3 was monday from the state so it's just coming past and i did just want to briefly mention that 85 million to 98 million from our county that is that is just an incredible show of support for people who have suffered and worked so hard these past months and i

101just want to thank our superintendent for because that takes a lot of trust for somebody to hand you that big an increase and i know dr faust has worked very hard to develop that and i know they appreciate it and we certainly appreciate it sir thank you other questions yes about it you're working your way around so probably it's uh miss craig when do you expect that we're going to have some more info on the summer learning loss programs oh sorry that's um was it h 82 house bill 82 yeah that was um excited about that one but we have got to um reach out to we do teachers and talk with them because at the time it was will you teach are you interested in teaching and now we can give a minimum a

102minimum of a signing bonus that's a minimum that doesn't mean that we so we have extra funds that we can give just assigning bonus in addition to um you know their specifics in there about uh national board certification if you have gotten high growth then we can we can give you more money and then if a student um is gets i think proficient in reading every student so if you have 20 students in a class if every one of them you get an additional 150 per student and so we have to go back and look and we'll market that um because what we don't want to be able to do or don't what we can't do and well we've got to also set the standard of what will it look like who are the kids

103that we will be coming to summer school and again we just got the information but we've got to give it all okay so we're working on it and so the end of the week of the of the may board meeting the end of that week is when all this will be due so it isn't that we can't you know make some adjustments after that but we will have to that plan will be finished by that week so we we um hope to have a lot more information for you at that point um one thing as y'all were talking about that slide i there was a one point that i didn't make that for for teachers who may be interested in in working in the in the summer program may be interested in the the state

104is changing how they will be employed in the summer and so they will be considered temporary contract workers so if they hear that all that means is they're still paid through payroll it just it means that they're not they won't be contributing to the retirement nor nor will we so it won't increase their retirement income which actually means their take-homes a little bit more um and they won't have leave approval so it's just sort of defining in there how we will pay them but that you know they'll still be paid through payroll so it's not like that they're an independent contractor it's just how the state's defining that and i forgot to say that so we'll start marketing to the teachers as soon as we kind of know what our program looks like absolutely absolutely

105moving down the line mr mcmanus did you have a question no okay miss justice oh yes thank you i have a couple questions um the um fund the fund balance um they are talking about reducing it and i've always had an issue with the amount anyway so that's not the issue with me i just wanted to know what the average do you have any idea you probably do knowing how good you are do you have an average of what the normal percentage of a state fund balance is across the state district-wide i don't know i don't have that i mean it is um published from time to time i haven't seen it recently i do know that when it's published before we've generally been on the higher side of what other other folks are able

106to have um but one of the reasons for that is because of where we live and you know it certainly came in handy for for our many hurricanes but um i think the reassurance we have from the county that we can use their fund balance for that and and one of the things we were able to do after florence and i think i've probably shared this in the past is we were able to immediately because we had the money go ahead and start repairs and it kept there from being further damaged and mr anderson can explain this better than i can but the longer the water stands in the building the worse the damage gets and so many of our surrounding counties who had to wait for that state relief money um did not have

107that luxury so you know this was an important thing for us to have that that fund balance so that we could you know we have as close as we could to one month of of reserves we don't really have that even at the 15 million level but um with the county's support and willingness to cover us in an emergency that makes the 10 10 million possible okay at some point could you get that figure to me just out of curiosity if you get a you know if it comes if it comes out how does that sound in some form what the average of its district yes i will research it and try to find it i don't know sometimes some of the um some of the research groups around the state we'll pull that together

108i'll see if i can find okay thank you appreciate that um also let's see um now how now the county really has a significant difference in their projections for enrollments in our schools from you got from the state which is literally got a thousand more i believe it is and we are sort of somewhere in the middle and then the county has an even lower one uh how do they get come by their figures you know i will say this is the most difficult year to do projections right um because there's so many things we don't know and so so with um i'll tell you how everybody did it so the the county has formulas that they've used the county the state has formulas they've used for many years that kind of look back five

109years and look forward and they're looking at growth in our community and you know lots of things that and birth rates and all those things determine um you know what the trajectory is for growth in our region and so that's part of how the county excuse me keep saying that the state projects um the other thing that they do is except they didn't do it decoded but in a normal year if their projections are wrong by more than two percent or 100 students they will pull back funding so we we generally even in a normal year don't a lot to schools everything the state projects for us because if they're high you know they might take some more right they usually are we were less concerned about this year because we have the federal funds

110and we thought it was important to get the teachers hired and get everyone in place and if if we're wrong and we're high we still have the resources that we need anyway okay so that was the reason we were able to be and i've never said this at this microphone less conservative you know because usually we're very conservative in the in our planning in terms of of that but we don't want to overspend but we can't we we won't have that risk with the federal funds so that that gave us a little bit of assurance but the county wants to be closer to actual and so for both us and charters for charters they kept the estimate at their current level um and we are hoping to pull students back both from home school and

111from the charter growth that happened this year and um so you know we it's a guess we have we have heard from our principals have heard from parents that they're coming back and so we feel confident and going higher which is why we went slightly over 26 000 but okay it's it's a guess all right yeah all right all three of them absolutely everybody's trying and i you know it's probably going to be somewhere in the middle and our projections are probably in the middle right ours is in the middle um also now this money the county commissioners are telling us that they're going to be budgeting for us uh that that money is coming from the taxpayers correct certainly yes and um so right now that is a conversation that's going on with between

112us our leadership and their leadership but the reality is is that in order for this to happen the taxpayers are going to have to be on board wouldn't you say well it they they the county commissioner set the tax rate and they um have they have their estimates for revenue and they have already publicly voted that they would fund this fund this supplement increase well i think the supplements are great uh but i am concerned i'm just concerned about what this means as far as them having the the actual funds to do this without hurting other programs and having that in taxes become an issue i think revenue projections have been strong for them can i just can i just ask a favor if you're in the audience can you please um stop the side

113conversations it's difficult to hear some of the conversations going on up here please thank you um and certainly i can pass your questions along to county staff but they feel confident in their okay well i hope that works out i'm also concerned about the classified staff um you know that i've been asking for 15 minimum for a couple years now and there's still certain groups lacking in this um and this is i guess the total amount of money that uh dr faustin county commissioners discussed so would it be up to us or him to just to change this to the point where at least the classified staff would have the minimum 15 an hour living wage i'm just asking no because we were all with the county commissioners a couple of weeks ago he told

114us where we they get to tell us where they want to put their money okay so that's what they said this money has to be all for teachers and that's what they've shared with us it's not really right but the bonus money this year that was given to us mid-year at the time it was given to us it was it was requested that we put it we could keep it for the new year but it would be put towards the supplement increase and then the increase is for the specific supplement increase so so they're the ones that determined that it would not go to the classified staff but to the teachers we're looking through the state and existing local budget to implement the other changes that's interesting okay um and i do believe i i

115just did i wanted to back up mr wilderboy's statement about the uh the need in the schools for staff and i'm glad that we've got these but um and i've always been concerned about the administration almost top heaviness of it in the district and so i'm going to continue that concern and even though these news positions would be very helpful uh to me the the schools are where actually even though they're advising the schools i agree i definitely agree that's why we are putting more specific positions in giving them access to the schools um when we talk about the classrooms we have to look at master schedule in order to see because i guarantee if you have a classroom that has we'll say 25 in it there's probably one that has 15 in it and

116so we have to look at course selection it's just not you walk in a class and say okay that one's overcrowded you have to go and look at how their schedule through the period oh that's so we are um and you have the understand master schedule is my thing i love doing master schedule and shared with principals any day you want me to come help you with your master's schedule i will be there no one is taking me up on that one but we are all about um making sure that our schools are taken care of because that's what we're here for um but we want to make sure that the that we're not over taxing our lead teachers and that they don't have the supports that they need in order to be effective in

117our in our buildings to help teachers and and staff when they're doing their plc's or when principals are in need of how do i i have some teachers that i need some support with how do i help them so it's are our lead teachers is that do they are they also in the classroom or is that an individual position in schools that they have they do a little bit of everything they actually they work there of course out of the office but they work with curriculum so those are the curriculum so they're not who does the curriculum training um they are they're working right now we're doing plcs and they're but i mean are they assigned a classroom no they're not deciding okay thank you i just needed that information okay any other questions i

118did want to um julie brought me the answer to another question the mental health numbers that we have in the preliminary sr2 budget is 15 additional school-based um therapist combination of position types but um and one supervisor in the schools so 16 additional positions and um the last thing i want to point out about you know we i focused that slide on the the additional central administration but we are with the increase in state funding and projected adm we are also increasing school-based positions and i was trying to it's a long presentation but i probably should have brought more of that those position summaries to you and so we will get that information at the to you at the next meeting and i appreciate this i'm sorry maybe for the april 20th meeting we could

119hear some of the the things that might have developed since now does that give you enough time to that's a week no no no okay i was just thinking that the things that you're thinking about that we that you forgot to bring though not to create anything new but okay just just tossing it out there only thing is that we've got to get this um this grant will not grant but these three applications that are actually better dude it's going to be a busy three weeks but we will try to answer your questions and and build a grant so i i mean i would just like to say overall i mean just looking at the list of the budget initiatives this is an impactful budget for so many of our staff and and our students

120um i also want to echo the thank you to dr faust and for you for working so closely with the county commissioners are putting a lot of trust in the school system and that partnership and collaboration shows in what is being allocated in this budget so just thank you for the hours of work that have gone into this and we look forward to the final proposal in may okay thank you very much thank you and and um mr vice chair um the um with the reduction in the fund balance do we have to look at policy 3120 um so that we can um because our policy says we have to have a greater fund balance than seven percent no it does not it is it does not say that it recommends that we have that

121recommends it strongly advises it does not so we don't have to we can just look at that okay okay all right cool yes ma'am i hate to be out of order but i don't want to leave her read her note wrong so in addition to the additional counselors and social workers that we're adding for which i don't have that number but i think it's seven and eight um the county on their side with their additional funding is adding 15 mental health health therapists and one therapy supervisor so it's it's going to be additional county staff in our schools as well as additional okay that's fantastic if they're watching thank you so much to the commissioners sorry to wrap thank you yes mr mcnamara i think we have to applaud the county commission absolutely the competition

122for staff in general and this state is out of sight particularly after the pandemic so that will really give us an advantage yeah tremendous advantages particularly in math and science they don't have them anymore they don't you know but i would not doubt this is happening across the state with every district all right uh next item on the agenda is the renaming of laney high school stadium and um this is an item that miss justice had brought forward so i will send it to you miss justice to begin the discussion okay i move that we remove that we remove uh you see oh sorry about that i moved that the current name of the ea laney stadium be removed and that we begin the 60-day process of renaming uh the stadium i second that all

123right there's the first and the second is there any discussion all right all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed motion passes um yes could we take a break yes yeah let's take um should we do 10 minutes everyone is that good for you so 8 13 we will come back and back for the next item great thank you i could have all board members back to the dice please completely blindly won the azalea festival used our contest were actually um the best foot forward display really i mean i mean they're just talented kids but you couldn't pick their work you couldn't say oh that's a definite yeah stephanie it was just sorry all right uh our next item on the agenda are the policies for second reading uh mr folier you would

124like to take this item for us please yes as always i seek requests from board members but we'll do so again i have not heard anything from any board members there are only five policies on for second reading there will be more on for first reading obviously at our interim meeting but unless somebody would like to discuss a specific policy uh i'm confident in the work of our committee and our staff and i will entertain a motion to adopt these policies as written okay is there a motion you've heard the recommendation thank you mr wildeboar is there a second second thank you miss craybill any discussion all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed policies are passed seven to zero next item on the agenda moving into new business uh audit contract uh

125mary hazel small back up again i recommend the board's approval of um renewal of an our audit contract with cherry beckert um for audit services for the year ending june 30th 2021. the total audit fees fifty seven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars okay thank you very much you have heard the recommendation is there a motion your emotions yeah i'll move all right thank you mr bully is there a second second thank you miss justice any discussion yes um madam chair yes sherry becker they've been with us a very long time when is the last time we put this out for bid i agree and we normally do it every five years we had planned we extended it one year because of the erp that we were going through for our new system and then

126with covid we had to extend that deadline it's just easier for us and we think it's more appropriate that an audit firm that knows our current system helps us make sure that reviews as we transition to a new system internal controls and all those things so this will be the last year and then we will put it out for bid next year okay yeah i definitely like to see it go out because i do agree that the new or the same company can you know give us a better review sometimes but fresh eyes are also a nice thing once in a while so yeah i'd like to see it but yeah i'll i'll um i'll vote for it okay okay can i what um i think maybe it's cause you're so far from the mic

127but i keep having trouble hearing you are you far from the mic no i'm short um no i didn't need it that way these mics are movable or yours not well but they can only do so much i mean you can i don't have go go gadget legs yet but uh i i said i wanted to know about the bidding process on cherry baker and when the last time we put that out for bid was oh okay now i heard that i will add we do we certainly agree and recommend that we we should put it out for competition but all the audit firms the the local government commission keeps a list of eligible audit firms for us to use and certainly they're on the list so any other discussion all right so the recommendation

128the motion is to approve the contract as presented there is a first and a second uh all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed we have approved 7-0 thank you mary hazel small sorry all right next item up on the agenda under new business is the cape fear collective data usage agreement uh with us tonight we have ceo of cape fear collective patrick bryan and director of programs megan lewis is also in the audience they will present some information on the proposed data usage agreement and so patrick thank you so much for being here this evening and uh i will let you take it from there thanks for having me uh slide please so we'll talk today uh who what and why uh we'll start out with the organization so we're a nonprofit

129organization we've been around for about two years our original mandate was to look into a feasibility assessment around a new collective impact initiative here in new hanover county in the broader capital region um we took about 1500 meetings in the first 12 months and really started to pivot away from that aim uh we kind of determined that there's a lot of great work already going on in this community there was no need for us to recreate the wheel so we started to lean into how we could support existing organizations ranging from grassroots organizations to anchor institutions the thing we heard over and over again over a lot of cups of coffee and lunch in the pre-covet era was data data data data everywhere we went folks wanted better data more up-to-date data things that were

130more granular allow them to target their programming more effectively uh and so we started to kind of work through that process uh and since then we've hired a data science team internal in-house that's three data scientists all very highly trained with varying backgrounds raising from the private sector the public sector as well as research and academics we've created a cloud-based platform that's just a fancy word for a database but it's incredibly secure and currently has about a thousand metrics and community indicators in that database so it's an incredibly rich database that has a ton of information from across the country we're scraping publicly available data from all over every source that we can find we're centralizing in a single location to make it more accessible for our partners we then partner with those organizations again

131ranging from anchor institutions to uh you know single executive director small non-profits and we help them make sense of the world that they're working in so they want to understand how can we do our program more effectively i'm working in pre-k but i don't really quite understand how my program's affecting eighth grade math for instance or i'm not quite sure how things like housing affect public health and so what we're doing is connecting the dots and working alongside them using that publicly available data and the mathematicians that we have on staff to look at that what makes us different is that the granularity first so we look a lot of things that census track and census block so we want to understand what is happening in a neighborhood when you look at a lot of

132this data it's at the zip code level it's at the county level it's very hard when you have certain neighborhoods they're in the same zip code but are miles in in proverbial miles and actual miles apart in terms of their lived experience and so by getting down to census tracking census block we can really paint an accurate picture of what's happening in that community across multiple sectors in addition to that we also have the ability to do predictive analytics so generally what you see in the space is descriptive so what is happening today what is happening now predictive analytics allows us to look out at 2030 and try to understand what's going to happen then similar to the student benchmarking you all were talking about in the budget process but we can do that across

133thousands of metrics and again at a census block level that allows us to transition then into prescriptive analytics so uh we want to do uh some type of intervention around third grade reading let's say we can play with the numbers understand how the intervention will affect the trend lines if we did nothing and so it's a really powerful tool for you all to have in your toolbox currently we have 17 executed data use agreements these duas range from anchor institutions all the way down to small nonprofits in some cases those duas are mostly us providing data in a few cases they're then providing us data we're working on private projects with them to help improve their programming next slide please so now to the what uh so it's really critical to understand that what we're

134asking for here is just an administrative framework to transfer data this doesn't entitle us to any data from you we could ask you hey here's a cool data project we want to work on with you you can tell us no all your data is controlled by you and we don't want anything identifiable so all this is is a structure for us to transfer data responsibly and again we're only doing publicly available data so we're really kind of doubling down on the data sharing protocols to ensure that we're really good stewards of your data the other piece to that is that it's not just again an extractive process so again those thousands of metrics that we have already in the cdp we want to provide that to you as well there's going to be instances where

135we might have a partner who does healthcare who's interested in collaborating with you all on some other project around student health this allows us to bring you together and have a safe place to transfer that data through so you can execute the program that you desire next slide please so talk a little bit about the why our biggest thing for our community we're not here to to make recommendations on policy we're not here to make decisions around programming our job is to try to help you all understand a little bit more about the communities your kids are living in there is a large number six or seven active non-profits in this community that really want to put the student and the child at the center of their work if we can help them understand how

136the cross-section of housing or public health or the justice system intersect with actual education outcomes you're going to have an interesting alignment opportunity with all of these other organizations who want to work alongside you and start to understand wow there's a correlation here between safe and healthy housing and how students perform and their absentee rates and suspension rates et cetera et cetera so we're really excited about the opportunity to work alongside you again this is really at your you're in charge this is that url's directive your alls request girls recommendations we're just here to set this in place in the event that a project comes up that we're able to work together on but again you know the nonprofit community is ready to kind of really rally around our children even more so than they

137already have day in and day out this is just going to help them do that so with that i'll pause there and turn it back over but thank you again for the time thank you for that that is that was a brief but packed presentation patrick i appreciate that um are there questions from board members madam chair yes sir patrick i did want to say i'm a big admirer of the work that the collective has been doing you know we all better angels and i feel like the collective gives tools to those angels and allows us to accomplish a lot of great work so i'm really excited about this partnership and deeply grateful that it's been brought forward tonight thank you sir oh yeah i have i have questions i mean i put the question

138because i don't know you i've never met you before i know that the chair said that you guys came in front of the previous board but you know i saw this on the agenda and it was for a five minute discussion but i guess you didn't realize you'd be here doing a presentation tonight miss walker i asked them to come they were not originally on this because this is like a standard almost mou that we've used before so i didn't understand that there was going to be a need for speaking i appreciate it point of order i and the reason is i put it on just a question and i've got over 130 some comments and so it just rose it just made me think of more questions and people were giving me ideas to

139ask i mean i like the idea it looks really really good i guess i just got a little worried because people were coming to me with with questions themselves and i i was getting very mixed responses which which i thought was interesting because because it's a lot of good work that you that you can do with this data and we know in this day and age data is it's a commodity it's like and the more that you get and the more you know you you are the holder of all our data locally i've seen i think i've had people from the hospital tell me that you guys are partnering so that's a lot of data and i guess i was just worried that well when i looked at it originally and i did speak to

140ben before you did your interview and i know he asked you additional questions too about it um and i guess when i saw personal and confidential i know there's there's not going to be anything revealed at all and this is supposed to be public data that's right but is it is it something you can't get it available somewhere else is it the schools are going to get you quicker or is that why you need it and that's a great question and first of all i appreciate the scrutiny right because this is this is important so uh certainly um encourage the questions um so when we talk about uh publicly available data you know things like dpi or school digger the issue is there's often holes and it's incredibly messy and so what we find is

141that it takes us months to unpack and then we're actually really concerned with the validity of the data and so we started to talk internally like well if we're going to publish any type of data from these sources about the school district that we don't feel as valid we should come to the source and say hey we have some concerns about what's publicly being out that was out there and go straight to you all and say this is all publicly available data that you report but if we can clean it a certain way that's a lot more valid for us to do the analysis so that's a one big piece of but the other element to this is that often times the granularity piece comes into question right so when we're looking at say county-wide

142data it's not as actionable at the neighborhood level and so by working with you directly we're getting the same data that you're reporting out anyway we're just getting it at a little bit tighter level and that allows us to then provide it back to you with a lot more analysis and a lot better insights so that's kind of the reason we've done this before other organizations where if we had put in a foia request what we would have gotten back wouldn't have been um anything we could analyze but by working alongside them we transfer that data appropriately we can provide a lot better insight back to that organization you'll make this doubt available to anybody that asks for it for free because i know y'all are a non-profit right so yeah so we will so

143if it's a partner and we're going point-to-point with you we won't make any of your data accessible at all um so this would be a project-based you know process and partnership um you know there could be a world where you know we started working on analysis and you all said hey we would like to put this data out there can you help us do the visualizations for that but we certainly wouldn't put any data out there the only data we do put out there is either stuff we have permission to do or it's stuff we've pulled from census or some other publicly available source i was just i guess i was just worried because i was looking at your website too and it talked about investments and i guess international investment what does that mean

144the investment philosophy is that is there a higher goal for this data that you're collecting no so the two problems we were out in the community one was data the other was capital and this was kind of in you know two years ago you know you really had two foundations here and so one of the things that we started to work on and some of the work i had done globally was around social impact investing and so there is and you're seeing this really take off across the united states where you have things like impact notes caliber capital various non-profit investment arms who are doing things like affordable housing um they're doing workforce development and different ways to equitable student financing small business investments and so that's really what we're doing we've kind of taken

145right now all that funding is controlled at a national level we're trying to bring it down in non-profit method to a local level so we can distribute that funding so we've done things like uh issue an impact note and then we went out and protected uh 23 units of naturally occurring affordable housing we're reducing rents we're putting solar on we're doing rehab on all those houses so the the data um you know in terms of like crossover we use publicly available housing data to help us figure out what neighborhoods need protection uh in terms of gentrification or we're seeing huge price spikes how can we get in there but from a school aspect we would never use that data in terms of those investments so there's a hard firewall between the two we don't interact

146in school or education type programming and besides that we have to ask your permission to use it for anything else anyone right and it's going to be protected i mean you say it's public data of course but i mean i guess they're the claws in there about being confidential and protected data yeah is that is that the way you have to scrub and scrub it like you were just saying it's a good question so we treat the public data that you provide us in this kind of one-on-one relationship like it's like it's confidential data um unless you give us permission to put it into our community data platform or put it out publicly we will never do that so for us you put your trust in us in terms of providing us that public data

147we're gonna lock it down which is why the agreement is so robust for public data we just really believe that this is important and and for us to even do this work we have to be a trusted element in terms of how we handle data usage and so that's why it is the way it is is there any way that you could come periodically and tell us what you're working on or i know because i'd love to because we would love to know how it's going to impact our schools because that's really i mean that's really where where where we want the data for i'd be honored too i'd be happy to come and theoretically uh work through all of that as well as some really interesting uh data in public health and housing that

148i'd love to share with you as well yeah um yeah i guess i guess can we set that up and maybe you can get with the chair and maybe set up a periodic like you know presentation of things you're doing last question i apologize is there money involved like because if you if you ask for data from from the district it's going to take them time to get it i mean it's man hours i mean is it is it too hard to get or is it it's a mutually uh you know it's a mutual partnership so there's no money changing hands if you were to say listen like this data is too hard for us to pull we certainly understand you guys are working on a shoestring at times in terms of your analysts so

149we would understand that and and kind of say okay well let's put this on on the agenda maybe for a year from now or six months from now we can plan for that resource allocation i know someone else had a question um i definitely believe in doing these good deeds and it's definitely across the country in many ways it's been a benefit to many different organizations this kind of uh setup but what my concern is is that it is an extensive agreement and what you just said is that everything is public data so why in the uh dui i believe that's what it's called ua sorry about that why in the dua is it necessary to put in the statement about the personal and confidential information being shared if it's public then that shouldn't be

150in there so why is it in there so we include that because we're not going to let's say dpi and scraping data from some open source right we're coming to you and saying these are the things that you already make publicly available will you direct transfer them to us in a lot of cases we might be saying hey should we be doing this more often right a lot of times the public data you get is like two years old and so it's not very actionable and so we we're having a relationship where we're transferring data in that way we want to make sure that we're treating that data like it's confidential regardless of it because it's coming from your organization to ours but it it comes across and i'm not the legal expert uh mr

151stagner is but it sounds like that you then have the right to receive personal data from us instead of contract we don't have any we don't right you have all the control in terms of what you send us so that's the first safeguard and we would never ask for any type of confidential or personally identifiable data but it's in the contract that you can we're taking well we're taking safeguards in order to ensure that any data transfer back and forth between us is treated as if it is confidential so we're taking our public data uh what would normally be a process there and we're just trying to amplify the protection around it to ensure that your data stays safeguarded can the wording on that seems like it could be interpreted different ways legally it's and

152and i'm just concerned because it's even in there because it is public data could you weigh in on that please yes if um board members would look at page three of the dua under three there's a bold statement that says not withstanding anything to the contrary in this agreement cfc shall not receive any personally identifiable information and will not perform any analysis using data that results in derivation of any personally identifiable information so that means that the cfc will not be receiving anything that could identify a particular student and it cannot use the data that is received the de-identified data in combination with other sources to try to identify a student okay and that's what i want needed thank you for that clarification okay mr mcmahon okay who's your contact person here i usually go

153to doctor pals okay any other questions did you have complete in section two up here on page two that it does say you know the protected data means information maintained or transmit transmitted in any form or medium that directly relates to a student or identifies the individual with respect to which there is reasonable basis to believe the information could be used so is it is it that or is it not that i mean i'm sorry can you clarify your question sir uh again uh just the protected data on the second section it talks about uh identify as an individual i see like i said we you would we wouldn't get any data like that from us yes there's all we're doing here like part of this as well as um mistakes happen right so if

154we all of a sudden receive data transfer that we did not want that had some type of identifiable piece of information in it at that time that's a lot of the reason why we have some of the confidential and the private i'm sorry the protected data sections in here um and so again we're not requesting it under the agreement we can't request it but we still include the legal framework to ensure that we're protecting all data whether or not it's confidential or public well thank you all right you have heard the information and we have had some discussion is uh the recommendation is um to accept the dua is there a motion moved thank you mr bullier is there a second any additional discussion i just wondered one last question it says for five years

155does it have to be so long and why so long could it not be year to year is it i mean that would be a good idea i think it also says you can we can stop it within 30 days yeah you can terminate i like the review periodically i mean i don't know that's one it means the reason why you do five yeah so we we give you termination rights so you can terminate the contract at any time and the other reason is we find that you usually can't see movement and metrics for several years and so what we're asking for is a long-term relationship to work through this process and start to build the data infrastructure that'll start to show you movement on data metrics based on your interventions and this information is

156going to help our non-profits locally too right because i feel like i don't want to leave them behind there's so many that are trying to do good work out there absolutely and that's what your goal is right to connect them all the information for them so they we just don't want them to be left behind yeah and that's a great question so right now the community data platform is completely locked down so all that public data like let's say census data it's really hard to access and so what we do starting next month we'll have data sets online for anyone to be able to go grab and these are all public nothing from this district would be on there but it's more like demographic data what does the poverty rate look like in our community

157and so our goals really break down various access to you know all organizations big and small to get their hands on this data and we can also help them with visualizations and then also how to help them define metrics for the program and it would never be skewed in any way it's just straight data and straight reporting right because i know data can be manipulated sometimes not that you would i'm not saying that you were absolutely i totally understand what you're saying yeah we're just here to kind of break those barriers down and present the data but at the same time we're super open to to you know having those meetings and having those sit downs and say hey i have some issues with the way this data is flushed out we love that conversation

158we love doing that so happy to have them all right we have a first and a second all those in favor of accepting the data usage agreement say aye aye all those opposed if captioning not on the available is the superintendent's report dr faust what a great turnout this past month at our vaccine clinics site where numerous employees received their second dose of cobit 19 vaccine sites were set up across the county and i actually had the chance to to visit the health department clinic and spoke with staff members ahead of the vaccine it was really an incredible sight to see so many of our educators receiving their vaccine and you know in addition to help stop the spread of cope at 19. new hanover county schools student support and collaboration with our early childhood

159education department communications division and bilingual family liaison enrolled dozens of new families for the 21-22 school year during the pre-k in kindergarten enrollment yesterday plan a was rolled out at our middle schools and high schools all students are now offered in-person learning five days a week i recently visited several of our schools and was impressed with teachers continuing to use innovative teaching models and keeping our students safely keeping them safe and engaging them while doing so april is the month of the young child we are focusing on early childhood education throughout the month the district will spotlight the great work that is being done by the new hanover county schools early childhood department and the importance of the young children having the opportunity to access early childhood education the new hanover county schools communications division

160is releasing weekly videos to highlight our early childhood educators these educators go above and beyond daily and we are grateful for the work that they do here in new hanover county schools for next month our communications team will be working to highlight even more of our teachers here in the district as the school comes as the school year comes to a close the pr team will begin our graduation coverage and will be highlighting seniors with spotlight videos features and podcasts thank you all right thank you very much next item is board chairpersons report i have done this evening so we will move right on to items brought forward by board members the first item is high school proms and um this was an item brought forth by miss justice i'm going to give it to

161dr faust to start um just to give the background on the prom discussion of how the decision was made and then handled the discussion hand it off i mean to miss justice or miss barnum excuse me good evening we have been provided an update from the lighting our way document which is the companion guidance to the strong schools toolkit i could not go a meeting and not mention the toolkit it's been updated to include guidance about events like graduation and prom and so specifically with regard to prom the guidance states that the north carolina department of health and human services does not recommend traditional proms a traditional prom is a high risk activity where predominantly unvaccinated population would be in close proximity for an extended period of time the north carolina department of health and

162human services encourages alternate approaches instead of a traditional prom and having those planned in coordination with our local and state health and education leaders the document contains general guidance about encouraging and monitoring for six feet of physical distancing between groups having small cohort groups and avoiding mixing of households entry point symptom screening can be considered it's not required but the guidance also suggests utilizing rapid testing for pre-event screening which would be through contract entities so i want to highlight a couple of pieces it references the most recent executive order that's in place which is executive order 204 which does raise the capacity limits for indoor and outdoor gatherings but continues to require that everyone must wear a face covering and stay seated so that that is true also for private reception halls ballrooms um etc

163only seated events are allowed and so while we know that a seated dinner a graduation an awards ceremony is an option current restrictions do not allow for dance floors so um to put this together um encouraging alternate approaches instead of a traditional prime when possible holding the events outdoors but keeping in mind that six feet between groups at all times small cohort groups and mixing of households is not advised okay so miss justice okay well i guess i would move that individual schools in the district can hold problems under the guidelines of the cdc and the toolkit and that's that's what i move okay is there a second all right thank you mr mcmanus any other discussion uh let me just go ahead and start since i brought it up um my concern and that's

164a big one is that there's many problems going on all over the district right now different groups that put them together there's absolutely no safety guidelines that they are necessarily have to adhere to outside of what possibly you know the 50 the capacity or supervision or a lot of other factors that could lead to an increase in our students possibly contracting coverage and spreading it and i know i've worked on media prom in the past it would never be i mean at this point this year could never be a traditional one even just the idea of planning it at this later date but some kind of activity similar to that to give the students some kind of memories and have the experience under these guidelines would at least be an alternative to allowing you know

165these these private groups to me are are going to have many super spreaders uh just when we're actually doing well and so that's my suggestion if it's individual high schools i guess there's also smaller specialty schools if they would like to do that let them make that decision and if they want to put it together in this late date in that kind of strange format but it would be some kind of experience for this for the students and that's why i brought it up i'm believe it or not i'm actually concerned about health uh i want them to have some kind of safeties in place if they're going to be getting together because they desire to have some some form of problem at least try to keep it in some kind of environment that we

166can offer and allow our kids to be safe thank you madam chairman uh yes mr bullier first and then mr bill deboer oh go ahead um dr foster i was just curious and miss varna maybe you can answer this better if we had an outbreak at a prom if we could tie that back to a prom that wouldn't just affect i don't believe the juniors and seniors that could potentially shut down an entire nine through uh high school wasn't wouldn't that be correct perhaps possibly yes yeah i mean i i'm really focused on finding out a way to do some sort of more traditional graduation um i mean i just i just can't support that right now mr miller i was gonna say my wife tells me all the time that i always look at

167the worst case scenarios so a lot of those same things but you know these children are gonna have one opportunity to have a prom or something like that and you know my daughter right now is a senior and so many things are being taken away from her not not at a high school level the college level but so many things are being taken away from her that she'll never be able to recap so you know i think that trying to find some way to be able to give them those memories is really important i just want to say we're putting them all together anyway i mean they'll be masked up i don't understand like you advocated for them to be all together in school so i mean there's no work well excuse me but you're

168against this and it's the same thing so i don't understand i mean like to miss justice's point let me finish please is that people are going to be holding them outside with no mess or anything so i mean why not give the opportunity to do it safely if some parents would prefer that it would be a danceless problem so i'm just asking right a danceless problem with family members because you can't mix households um dr fess let me ask you what is the impact that this would do to high schools at this point well i don't know did anyone survey the teachers because we have to have chaperones or surveys that's true what is the impact to the schools it's the teachers because we have to have chaperones we have to have someone to do

169the teachers do the prom well that can be part of the planning if the school decides to do it and ask they don't get enough volunteers and they can't do it i mean it would be voluntary but it would be up you know to the individual schools to see whether they could do it or not that would be my suggestion anyone surveyed the principles pardon did anyone survey the principles that's always my question yes i'm doing exactly what's done to me you picked up on it i i you know planning for prom takes months and i i think i mean we're sitting here at april 13th and typically problems are occurring this month and early early next month and with everything else that our schools are working through right now is that something we truly

170want to put on our administration and teachers to pull together i guess is my is my question and i do feel that there is a safety issue um obviously i can support the public principles of the teachers because we've got them stopping work but i think they need a chance to at least be involved i mean this would be this would obviously be very modified and take a lot less work because i mean truly you're right i can't remember planning for for promise from oh my goodness the summer before it's a big undertaking normally i just think that when you modify something you probably create a little more work not less well that's why i said and then if they don't have enough volunteers that they can't do it but at least give them the

171opportunity to have the discussion so the motion is to allow schools to make their own the high school to make their own determination about well that's what i said and according to following the health department rules because that's very important otherwise no okay miss miss dagner is there any do you have anything you're looking at me i just didn't know if there was something that needed weighing on i don't i don't have anything to add okay i'm happy to answer any questions but i don't have anything to add are there any legal implications i i think that the language that miss farnham read was that they were discouraged that the north carolina department of health and human services discouraged proms i i don't have that exact language but certainly i would advise the board to

172follow the health and safety guidance from the state and local health authorities i'm just having a hard time comprehending how it took us seven months to get our kids back in school and then just when we think that we're we're coming over the hurdle we want to have gatherings like this when we're not even allowed and i mean we had to julie had to jump through some hoops to get us 50 people in the room tonight and um we're adults who wear masks and you know we had a visitor here earlier that didn't want to wear his mask so how are we going to keep kids away from each other with their masks on so i don't have a family let's say so i'm going to the prom by myself you know and there are

173so many kids i'm just thinking of all the equity issues about the families that can't they don't have a little group to come to the prom and some of our teachers don't even want to be in school right now how are they going to come and chaperone so i mean i am a party person and i am a celebrating person and i loved prom you know and and i know these kids do too but i would feel more comfortable with parents doing their own private events so that the school system is not in charge of that because we like we said we have we got to get through you know ap exams we got to get through exams we got it we got to get through graduation i'd rather see a kid walk across the

174stage in his in in his or her stadium than risk it with planning and spending all the money and collecting all the money you know for a prom so that's and i know everybody's going to say i'm a debbie downer but you know you i'm not you know when it comes to celebrating i just am trying to weigh where we are and what we're up against i mean everybody keeps talking about the different variants and we've had that discussion on this board so many times about you know the what ifs what ifs what ifs and i just i'm having a hard time thinking that we're going to let our guard down right now well i don't think we're letting our guard down if we follow the recommendations so then that's why i suggested this because

175i i just said against it well there was a time when we were putting kids you know under six feet going back to school outweighs the benefit of a prom as important as prom is did we stop sports did they still do did they go on i'm just wondering sports went on and they had very limited people in the stadium and you know julie and her team had to go through a lot of hoops to get more parents in the stadium just to watch their kid you know and that was like sitting in little clusters so and a lot of students didn't even get to go to watch their sports games because parents took up all the seats and you know and they should just some something else to consider to thinking about what we're

176putting on our schools and our principles if a school decides that it's not going to work for them and they have to now make that choice that makes them the villain and i don't think that's fair to do to our schools if they say we don't want to do this yeah like ashley gets one but hannah doesn't you know i think it's putting in a precarious situation and it's it's creating a in an equitable situation that we are forcing on on them so um i i think we've had pretty robust discussion around this we have a motion we have a second um so let's just go ahead and we will take a vote um all those in favor of allowing schools to determine their prom plan is that determining right as long as they're following

177the toolkit recommendations following the toolkit recommendations say aye aye all those opposed say no so let's let's go through and let's just poll uh mr wildebore aye ms walker aye mr mccoy no i'm a no no no mr mcmanus i'm sorry yes yes and miss justice yes motion passes four to three all right next item on the agenda are the middle and high school schedules uh miss justice this was brought forth by you um yes and um we had a little discussion on this earlier but my my motion i move that we eliminate the option of having an aabb schedule in our current high schools and middle schools and just remain with the plan a and the plan c schedules as is that's the mission okay is there a second second all right any discussion

178do we know how many students actually are taking advantage of aabb versus and if we talk to the teachers and see because i've heard from several teachers that it is an extra layer of work on teachers that are already trying to do remote and in person we just started yesterday so we don't have any data that would be because it just actually started right well should i go ahead and give them my arguments as i made the motion i'll go ahead and explain my reasoning since i made the motion okay and i i believe that was exactly what uh mr wilderboy pointed out is i've heard from numerous teachers and especially in the middle school area that this could lead to a lot of inconsistency and problems extra work uh the high school students if

179i remember right from what dr faust was explaining why that happened during our last meeting unexpectedly that he suggested that too it was because certain uh high school students had already gone ahead and started working during the pandemic for a lot of them for were financial real reasons they had to but it sounded like and i know from the area the numbers probably in the hundreds i would assume and i probably that's you know how assuming is so i'm not exact about it if you've got a couple hundred students in the high school level that need to have that aabb schedule in order to continue to work then work with them individually don't make all the high schools in the middle schools and their teachers possibly go through extra confusion because of a handful of

180kids that you can work with within the schools to probably solve these problems that's one of the things we've been doing since the beginning of the pandemic is looking at a lot of individual cases and working with them and i would rather i know that the the morale from the teachers after this was decided on was underground they and i've heard from it repeatedly and especially in the middle schools where they have where the kids are more likely to to come on a regular basis the high schools of from not understand i think their attendance levels are down just down but the middle schools so it is less stressful but it's still stressful for the teachers but the middle schools are just overwhelmed with this new part of their daily lives on top of everything

181else that they have done amazing work with since last last spring so that's what my concern was and why i brought this forward we're in plan a and plan c for sure at this point but the aabb schedule just adds more confusion and work to too many teachers that are already over stressed all right anyone else yeah i wanted to direct mom my question to um mr anderson and um miss smith about um dr smith about what is this now going to do to our bus schedules to our feeding schedules to our classroom courses i mean i mean just there's a lot of other logistics besides just stopping so could you just give us a little update on that in terms of child nutrition i would encourage you not to do anything that would reduce

182the number of kids and the options they have for coming to school once we went back to plan a we fully staffed our child nutrition staff and more kids that are in school the more kids that are taking advantage of the lunch and breakfast that we provide the better you know we may have to make some adjustments but i think they would be minor in transportation um yeah i just think that you know the the the other thing is uh i think testing i mean i think really we're talking about maybe five weeks it would uh it would probably take us a little while to make this change so if we at least a week to take a look at it i don't know about classes dr smith's not here but yeah this is the

183first we've heard of it so i'm not sure i'm prepared to completely answer the question well we could continue as functioning as we are until we put that in place though correct so kids yeah kid's still in school so you know if it was about five weeks till testing starts and then if we uh we it took the rest of this week and next week to make a decision we're down to i think it's unfair to keep changing on our staff we made a decision they plan for the decision they've worked to make it prepared and occur and it has started and we're in the final stretch of the school year and making a change like this now i just think i i just think we're putting people through the ringer families and staff and

184students by continuously going back and changing planning on them well and i agree and i think we have done things that have been difficult because of the changing plans and they haven't necessarily came for me that's for sure but i this is driven this comes from teachers i'm telling you that right now they're the ones that are concerned about the aabb schedule i think if they could have the situation go now for a week and then implement the a and c that would that that's that's their record yeah with all due respect teachers were worried about plan b teachers were worried about plan a and what occurred every time is we've made it work and and we've figured it out and so i understand that there may be discomfort but we're on day two and

185and so it's so there's such limited time left in this year why make them change again a week from now because they requested it i haven't seen an email i get a lot of people that talk to me a lot about staff members especially middle school teachers i said they're the ones that are having the greatest time or trouble with this i personally wish we had this discussion when it came up the first time but we weren't afforded the opportunity to to know all three were being offered and to begin with so this is on us here agenda now because we wanted to talk about it before but now we we really didn't force to be able to talk about it because we never had the chance to do it the motion was made and

186if you disagree with it you can i did disagree with it but you could have at least we could have been including one this is the thing about things being put on the agenda we don't get a chance to discuss beforehand and this is on the agenda we could have had numbers i mean i know p asked how many people are taking advantage of this but we don't even have those numbers right now so um well we only started yesterday no but you would know who was coming back or no no would you not no it just started yesterday so this wasn't well planned did you not ask them before they were coming back who was coming for a b abbc we gave that to you yeah we got a problem we gave that to

187you you gave you gave a survey of half the students i mean i just i would figure people would be reaching out to let you know exactly what they were going to do but you just left it up to the anybody who wanted to come back for whatever plan is that how that went down i don't understand what you're saying to me you didn't know who was going to come back for what not every i'm sorry not everyone responded but there's we were supposed to i didn't we weren't supposed to send out another survey after we sent out the other yesterday was the first day with that one so it was like at that point who showed up we gave them the option so it's like who showed up just almost like when we gave

188them the option to teachers and family to be vaccinated it was who showed up it wasn't that we had definitive numbers this is yeah i don't i'm not sure which i mean i think we should have known who they should have said who's coming back i mean teacher it's just fair to them to know who's going to be coming back so they can plan properly i agree that'd be great to know well they should have been required to answer is what i'm saying beforehand i can't force families to answer and you know have to track them down sometimes and it sometimes doesn't happen until they get into school i mean i see that at my son's plan well only half of them did that survey to begin with so that was not even necessarily representative

189when we first made the decision one was brought to us that evening without any prior knowledge all right so we have a first and a second we have had discussion um all those in favor of altering the middle and high school schedules to plan a and plan c eliminating plan a a b b say aye aye all those opposed to say nay nay hey so let's go go through and pull just to make sure uh mr wildebore nay yes miss walker isn't a yes a mr blow is no miss craybill no no mr mcmanus miss justice yes yes okay motion fails five to two next item on the agenda is remote wednesdays uh miss justice well this is this this fits right into the previous discussion um the teachers have had since last spring in

190an amazing work work ethic and stepped up but at this point they are exhausted and we've got five weeks left now i brought this up during our last when we had a discussion about adding changing the schedule and i really do still think it would be valuable especially since the kids too are suffering because a lot of them and we know this are very behind a remote wednesdays would be invaluable for helping catch up with assignments doing extra tutoring online and help it's just to me seems extremely practical for the middle and high school at this point because the elementary it was beyond talking about that at this point but the middle and the high school could really benefit the staff and the students could benefit by having a remote wednesdays i think our surrounding

191counties are doing it also i know they're doing it across the state it's it's just it seems very practical in order to at least give them an opportunity to do better work in in teaching and for the students to do better work as students by having that day offered to our staff and our schools so your motion is to add a remote wednesday for the remainder of the year right it's been a long evening i should have just said that first yes my motion is to have the remote wednesdays and then that was part of the discussion i set up for middle and yeah yeah all right is there a second yes second all right any discussion all right all those in favor of adding remote wednesdays uh through the end of the year for

192middle and high school say aye all those opposed say nay okay uh if we can just go through and i'm sorry hey miss walker yes mr billing no nay for my for me all right mr venice yes okay motion fails five to two all right next item on the agenda uh we are moving into committee reports and the only committee report we have scheduled for this evening is the ad hoc committee and their recommendations miss justice all right um about i think this has been about three months three to two months ago we started meeting uh because it was very that was two months ago it was very evident that the way we were con our meetings were being conducted was exhausting overly long and at some point uh probably after now about 9 30

193or 10 we really couldn't be making good decisions due to the length of our meetings and the type of things we had to tackle we need we needed to do it in a more effective way we've heard from other people of one of our trainers mr benton i believe it was came in and told us about what they were doing in wake county during one of our training sessions and it sounded great and i started researching it we we decided uh during a meeting right after probably the first several meetings of the first meeting that it was not working the way it had been previously and that we needed to change the meeting days the amount of days or whatever we decided on as a and to create a committee to look at all the

194different options in order to make the meetings more efficient and more effective for our district and so we met probably three times and it was very focused and i think we came up with a good result looking at other school districts and how they operate across the state and most of this is based on i guess you could say putting together the ones that had these different ways of offering their meetings all of them had two meetings a month and that was one thing that we did that is predominant across the state for the large districts two meetings a month and if you look at the document that i supplied was the final outcome of the ad hoc committee suggestion and i'm bringing it now to you to approve uh this is different from our

195agenda excuse me then our policy but that's we knew that was going to happen so we had gone ahead and just recently passed a policy for agendas because we had to keep moving along with what we were doing but this is this would be a new if we approve this this would be a new um format in a couple different ways that we would have to go through the policy committee to create a policy on this and approve but this is the first step in that and there's also another component that i have not yet brought up and that has to do with the day of the week that we were talking about meeting differently than we are now because it conflicts with some governmental bodies i would like to go ahead and wait on

196that because that's the two separate issues i think so right now just focusing on the change and the type of meeting schedules we would have and if you want to look through this i'll go ahead and go over briefly the recommendations for the meeting schedule agenda are are the following having two meetings a month as i said which weekdays of the month to be determined as a separate agenda item we will come in at four have a work session from four to five these are less formal opportunities for the school board to discuss issues receive reports and provide guidance to the superintendent and staff for example i will use what happened tonight the presentation the budget presentation the presentation about the dua things like that can be presented outside the evening meetings part and earlier

197in the day instead so a lot of people that would come in that wanted to see i guess you could say the meat of what we're doing uh could have you know don't want to attend the work session that's fine they could do both or they can watch it on you know we have it on video also so there's multiple ways of people to get getting the information it's all public but it's also more effective so we won't be here until midnight or 11 o'clock at night uh so you'd have the work session first from four to five then we'd have once more our closed section session and uh it's better to do that earlier as we all know because there's things that we have to discuss in a closed session pertaining to things like

198personnel and in situations like that so when we come out and present it to the public we'll just be voting on it and not discussing it because that's privileged information so we'd have the work session from four to five and say that we didn't have to i mean the closed session from five to six say we didn't have that much to go over then we could just end that short maybe have a lunch or something a break and then come back at six six would be the more more formalized session uh starting at six o'clock and here's a sample of the agenda for the former live session um that would be let me see i've got the two okay for the work session see there's two different sections about the agenda process for the work

199session would be a call to order a roll call and then the head start report could be presented during that time also we've talked about that before information like we just said budget new programs facilities committee reports can be offered like i'm doing right now and then any correspondence and part of this is because we have our senior staff that's worked all day and this would be the time most of time they'll be doing their presentations sort of like flowing in from their work day into here and that would be a lot more effective for them also so that would be going on during the work session then we'd have the closed session um and then breaking out the closed section at six uh we'd have the regular this is pretty much similar to the

200other agenda except the things that for the work session have been pulled out you have the call to order invocation pledge of allegiance national anthem and posting of the guards um this has been a very odd year we're doing things a little differently than we had in the past couple years approval of the minutes recognition of achievement call to the audience consent and here's another thing to call to the audience there's been some concerns about it being split up because of our long meetings right now that's basically almost the only way sometimes we can get this done properly now we've got two times a month where we can do this and we we would not have to worry about that concern so that people have the opportunities to speak and we'd be earlier in the

201day and it wouldn't be such a strain for us to have the meeting go with when we have all them that people many people signed up that have two separate opportunities um you got consent items that old business which would be action items most likely some news business isn't so i left action off a superintendent's report board chairperson's report board members report then announcements and adjournment and that would be a lot less burdensome than what we'd say gone through tonight also the concern is that people want to come in and participate as a public most of them work until five or so getting here 5 30 can be a crunch time and the main time people want to be here say if they got kids that are doing part of the recognition the parents want

202to attend which we could do that a lot in in a year that doesn't have coke we will be doing that more often and that will give the parents an opportunity to be here at six and more other people that are interested in whatever it is that we're working on to be here after they get off work so it would increase public participation in my opinion that's why moving to time to six also i've talked to a couple board members originally we were talking about doing 3 30 to 5 30 and starting like that regular time but it was like 3 30 but for some reason four isn't as bad i don't know why but that's the perception so um that's an explanation does anybody have any questions of what the committee yeah miss justice

203thank you for your hard work on this first off uh but what can you define exactly what the board member's report is for me please that's something that wasn't on our other agenda but i've seen other districts do that okay and somebody was what is it it's literally like she like uh chair and said that she doesn't have anything tonight well you could you know most of us may not but there might be something of interest that we might want to share with the other board members does that help like yeah miss justice uh first of all i don't we never discuss board members report as a committee um i know i didn't put it in my my piece i don't we we have correspondence and that's where board members that's where i've typically given

204updates or things like that i don't i don't like board members report i don't know what that is well i mean that's why we're discussing it now this was this voted on and recommended by the committee i guess um the one that that was and he did he picked up on the one thing that we did not look at and i found that i didn't find it that was in several different and you know that's why we're discussing it right now but we did vote on having it come to here come to here come here i was taking notes at the time so i didn't have it out there but we all agreed on our discussion that it was that that was a good format to follow right other questions or discussion um got a

205question so if if there's any one part of this that we don't like we vote no or are we going to dissect it well i don't sport of order medicare i do not believe that and mrs stegner can correct me i do not believe that that agenda format really requires any deviation from our current policy the only thing the only action item i think would be the um and we we've already said we're not going to do two separate meetings a month in policy it will just be practice and um i i think that one thing would be the changing of the days but i don't believe i believe that this would format fun i don't believe we'd have to change our policy to adapt this oh well see that i don't i don't i

206did not know i'm not the policy expert i said i was assuming that after we adapt this we don't know it's fine with me i believe we can just put it into practice well um i i can't i'm sorry if you can so please currently your meetings start at 5 30 so this would require a change to your regular meeting schedule to start at four o'clock and that would be this you would so for notice purposes for open meetings law you set a regular meeting schedule and then you don't have to send a notice for every single regular meeting if you're changing your regular meeting schedule you would need to set to change that so that the public has notice of the new change this is different from your current agenda policy and i know

207the board just just updated that and so my recommendation would be if the board wishes to change its agenda format again that this go to the policy committee to be incorporated for example this does not have to call to the audience i i'm trying to remember if that was something that was updated in the policy committee um but aren't we only required by statute to have you're only required by statute to have it one time a month so this would be um again so we can add more if we on a second meeting if we wanted to you can certainly have one yes yes alright so i am not in favor of moving us any earlier than what we're doing right now because um some of us have jobs that we have to be at

208that we can't i can't get away from on a regular basis the um and i'm just worried that all this is doing is moving the clock we're just going to start earlier but we're still going to last five hours um i am i'm going to use this meeting as an example is um we started at 6 30 and we had a smaller agenda because we already knew we were going to move some things to the second but if we didn't have a heavy packed load then we wouldn't have had to had two meetings so um i i am i am not in favor of starting any earlier and um i am not in favor of moving different things around like a work session is not where we have committee reports um it is i don't

209think personally um and i think a lot of people in the public in the community might be interested in some of these things that are up in the information so i'm not a big fan of of this change and i'm definitely not a fan of changing the day of the week so that's a separate motion but just wanted to get it all in at one time is it possible instead of moving to approve or move this to the next next stage tonight that we could provide feedback um for an updated version yeah no problem though uh and i don't either but i i just wanted to uh answer uh miss crabill's couple of her concerns for one thing we started at 4 30 today not 6 30. we had a work session even though it

210was a closed session that's the kind of thing we would be doing on a regular basis right and that's that wasn't good for me that's what i'm just saying is at that my personal opinion starting and we had a two hour work closed session which we don't normally have we would start at 5 30 for that part and 6 30 for the meeting for the the open session meeting well so you're saying you're individually it's a problem for you but then if we did this on a regular basis we would be ending earlier on a regular basis and that would be that that's been a concern for other people so you can't make everybody happy and that's the reason that we had this committee and i'm just trying to come to some way to have

211it done so that it works functionally and other districts do have their committee meetings and all these different uh information sessions during the earlier part of their works during their work session part and you can the public can come in and watch they can watch it on video so that answers the questions you had concerns about okay yeah i i do understand stephanie's concerns and i think if we can't get our work done in eight hours in a month in a public meeting and two an interim in the public meeting we have to do some self-evaluation i mean lengthy lengthy debates that just spin around in circles we have to do some self-evaluation as a board i i know ms crabill mentioned it and i absolutely support and i know mr mcmanus might just jump

212out of his seat we should not be having public meetings that last longer than four hours if they do everything else gets moved to the interim meeting and that's that well we don't play well together after about four hours because we need you i know that that seems like you're your play limit it's about four hours and it's mine as well so we're going to get there tonight you know hopefully absolutely three hours and one of the things do since wake county was the one that was pointed out to us originally i checked with what they usually are out by eight or eight thirty so if they started if they start at four and they're out at eight then that's four hours all right miss justice there's a lot of items on here that i

213really like that you guys are proposing but i do think that there is some feedback that okay yeah and that's what we need to look at we can we can should we send them to you as the chair just our thoughts on on what was presented absolutely please do move it to the interim meeting sure and the follow-up discussion does that work can i get one one thing i think that you know i and i do definitely agree that the work session is is i think that's a big valuable uh point uh part i can't speak see it's late at night uh but like pender county they use it and they get a lot of their their meat and potatoes done there um and it is an open meeting where anybody can come in so

214it's not anything closed but i think you know that that piece for sure is very very valuable uh mr mcmanus you had a comment also i agree with mr moore okay all right so no need for action tonight did you want to i'm sorry i'm true didn't you make motion well i can just throw the emotion and we can uh by the way i'm sure crystal's uh miss bowie's taking good notes and if you could send that we can we can reconvene as an ad hoc committee and we can you know we can go through these these concerns that we have because i want everybody happy with this this is we all do and i want us to be more effective so if on the board could send you went how when would you like

215sure please do okay please within the next 48 hours yeah because uh what is today the 13th and the uh the interim meeting the interim meeting is going to be on the 20th so i'd have to make sure everybody can meet as a ad hoc committee yeah because we have to get all of our schedules together sure thank you thank you all right next item on the agenda back to my other screen here is correspondence does anyone have any correspondence they would like to share no all right moving along to the call to the audience non-agenda items uh first up and thank you all for for staying for the new process first up is gail major ale major i'm gonna try not to to mess this name up jonathan he left okay uh lindy ford

216she left amanda white good evening board i do want to remind you that you did have a parent last week who had to leave um because you took too long and she had a family to get to and she lives right over there um these call to the audience i guess it's a good thing that we can just come in you know what nine o'clock at night my sister's birthday is today so i'm glad that you had a second opportunity to do the call of the audience because um we're i think sick and tired of having to wait an hour and a half two hours to speak to you because you don't really respond appropriately to our emails now i'm here to talk to you all about the sros who are policing the hallways of

217our schools i personally saw two sros tackle a girl not involved in a fight who was trying to break up the fight while one of the administrators allowed for a student to wail on another student during a conflict that they knew two weeks about now the reason why i'm speaking about this because i was a witness to it earlier that week there was another student who was handcuffed in which sros were called to the the room for her reason unknown but because she did not cooperate they decided to handcuff her later that week for three days later uh four girls were handcuffed two in the fight one girl that tried to break up the fight who got pinned down to the ground and another girl who was very concerned about her friend who had gotten

218pinned to the ground by two sros this is a very traumatic experience not for somebody just watching this happen but for the girls who are having to go through this it is extremely hard for anybody to keep their cool when somebody puts their hands on and the cuffs this should not be happening in our schools now there is a contract i believe that is going to be renewed between the wilmington police department along with the sheriff's office and in the previous contract signed by dr tim markley in 2019 it there is a statement in there that students are only to be handcuffed as a last resort and outside of the student view i saw a girl along with seven other students or she was not involved in the fight and because she had elevated to

219a level that they felt that they needed to put their hands on her and handcuff her she was sitting on the ground for five minutes in handcuffs i don't think that that is something that y'all really want to be happening in our schools keep in mind these are all black female students this is an issue that was brought to me by a teacher who was sick and tired of seeing this and also by other teachers who think that we can do a better job so i will be emailing you about things that we will be asking for you all to do to help us avoid these situations thank you aaron r kogan aaron cogan peter rawich tonight i'll speak to you again about your policy on school suspensions last month the board approved policy 4300

220with this new sentence school administrators will utilize positive behavior support alternatives to suspensions and only use out-of-school suspensions as a last resort it seems that not all of the administrators got the memo since you approved the policy there have been at least three incidents where it appears that students were suspended as a first resort this is unacceptable i've already sent you and dr faust details about those incidents it's also my understanding that they have been reported to the ethics 360 site or i hope they'll be investigated there's a video clip of an incident at one school it shows two students tussling outside of the building two administrators can be seen trying to separate the students and then the two school resource officers arrive the sros can be seen aggressively pushing a third student against a

221wall a student who is trying to help separate the fighting students in the end those three students plus a fourth student were handcuffed and suspended for three days there were no weapons involved no serious injuries and no flight risks so why did the sros handcuff those students as criminals for a minor violation it's shameful i'm wearing toy handcuffs and yes they're uncomfortable and unwarranted i can only imagine the humiliation and the trauma that those students experienced that morning now i understand the sros are not your employees but these are our students in our schools the actions of the sros occur under your watch even when students break a rule they must be treated with dignity and respect administrators must know positive behavior support alternatives are the first interventions an out-of-school suspension is the last resort

222thank you veronica mclaren brown good evening i'm going to take a second but because that brought me to tears the board of education begins its meetings by asking asking the audience to join them in reciting the pledge of allegiance the last three words of that pledge are justice for all has the new hanover county school system fulfill its pledge for justice for all students no it has not you just heard two examples a school system that allows a culture to exist that provides a safe harbor for employees as sexually abused students is saturated with injustices a school system that allows a culture to exist that provides a safe harbor for employees that weaponize suspensions against students is saturated with injustices you know the harmful effects of suspensions on students you are aware of the school-to-prison

223pipeline nexus it is an injustice for you to know the harmful effect of suspensions and simply add the phrase last resort to policy which will result in little or no change in school culture when you realized you really realized the cultural and generational nature of the sexual abuse issues in our school system did you act swiftly and decisively to protect our students from being sexually abused yes you did when you realized it now it is time for you to act swiftly and decisively to end the oppressive and harmful practice of out of school suspensions because it is two it too is a form of student abuse revised policy 4300 give dr foss the mandate and resources that he needs to end out of school suspensions stop throwing children out of school who still believe in

224santa claus the easter bunny and the tooth fairy in out of school suspensions for pre-k to second grade do it now demonstrate that you understand that out of school suspensions are like a knee on the necks of our children suffocating them killing their hopes and dreams thank you beverly setz um dr faust these are basically directed to you um you joined new hanover county school system in september of 20. in on on mar on february 25th 21 a contract was entered into with soviet solutions um and it was finalized at that point and the board members were not a part of this evidently we were not a part of this consideration because nobody signed it and the board does not have to re refer to it or sign it until it's over three three hundred

225thousand dollars this contract uh was through investigating with sole sourced sole source contract which means there was no rfp put out because it fell below the threshold the financial threshold um the taxpayers have paid seventeen thousand dollars for what the critical soffit solutions uh promotes critical race theory and i don't know if any of you or any of you parents are aware of critical race theory but it's where the white students are considered racist and the the curriculum is based on that and the students are immersed in this thinking and i found in the in the budget listening to the budget presentation that you've added a 100 000 position for the director of curriculum and i'm assuming that director of curriculum position will be put in place to further enforce critical race theory immersing our

226students in that racist or not racist in that socialist and marxist theory and it truly is because of uh instead of advancement based on uh individual merit crt recommends an exclusive focus on race for educational advancement and can you tell me if the parents were advised of any of this before before the finance and budget committee entered into the contract and dr faust when you were in texas and kansas did you introduce soffit solutions to either their curriculums club of the audience doesn't allow us to speak back miss that's i'm sorry okay i will i'll send you an email i'd be interested to know um but if your parents are not aware of it please look it up critical race there your students are being force-fed this socialist agenda thank you [Applause] our last speaker

227is dorian cromartie dorian camardi okay that concludes our non-agenda call to the audience next item on the agenda are announcements and the subject for this is the workers compensation settlement agreement the case of whitaker versus new hanover county board of education i see number 19-034762 has been settled on behalf of the board for payment in the amount of fifty thousand dollars a copy of the settlement agreement will be maintained in the board's records last item on the agenda adjournment is there a motion moved thank you mr bully i'm sorry did i miss something no i was going to say didn't you want to announce any meetings that are coming up prior to the 20th like title 9 committee on the on monday i don't it's not on here tonight okay sorry um sorry okay um

228we have a first uh is there a second i'm sorry thank you mr wildebore any discussion all those in favor say aye all those opposed motion passes we are adjourned you