001so good evening to everyone um i call this december 2nd meeting of the albemarle county school board to order i welcome all of our listeners and all of the people who will be participating in this evening's meeting we will now have a moment of silence shhh thank you because of the pandemic we are required to read this into our minutes for each meeting the minutes of this meeting should reflect that this meeting is being held electronically president of virginia state law and admiral county ordinance because the covet 19 pandemic makes it impracticable and unsafe to assemble a quorum physically in a single location the meeting is being communicated to the public electronically through zoom and stream to live on the albemarle county public schools website and public comment may be offered through the zoom waiting
002room feature in accordance with the school board's protocol or by written submission and now to introduce the members of our board dr kate akov kate akov jack jewett district mr giano el carro johno el carro at large miss katrina carlson katrina carlson rio district miss judy lee judy lee rivanna district mr dave o'brick dave oberg whitehall magisterial district ms ellen osborne ellen osborne scottsville district mr david antrobius yes student rep yep all right thank you for having me and we are also supposed to have uh alternate tonight alexander hilt i don't think that alexander is on yet is he miss johnston i do not see alexander okay he should be attending uh this meeting also we now need a motion to approve our agenda for tonight i move that we approve the agenda second we'll
003by mr alcaro second by ms lee that we approve the agenda any discussion if not ms johnson could you please call the roll ms osborne yes ms carlson yes mr oberg my mute just disappeared yes miss lee yes dr acuff yes mr alcaro yes mr page yes motion carried thank you we need a motion to approve our consent agenda for tonight i move that we approve the consent agenda second move by mr alcaro second by mr oberg did we approve um the consent agenda any discussion on the motion um i don't know if we need to remove this to discuss it uh i apologize for not being up on that but i just wanted to have a little bit of discussion around the kova 19 update being in the consent agenda is that dave should
004we pull should we pull that yes if you wish to discuss it pull it and then we can discuss it after the rest of the agenda's been uh approved okay um i would like to pull item 3.5 from the consent agenda okay 3.5 at 3.6 i have it as 3.5 okay that might be 19 updates okay all right um it's been moved by mr alcaro second by mr oberg that we approve the consent agenda minus item 3.5 on the covet update ms johnson please call the roll mr o'carro yes miss lee yes dr acuff yes ms carlson yes ms osborne yes mr uber yes mr page yes mission carried thank you okay miss um lee you had um some questions or some items thank you page um yeah i just wanted to um raise the
005idea of uh possibly at some point in the future maybe in the near future moving the covet update back out of the consent agenda um since we i i appreciate the hope with which we put it into the consent agenda but i think um it it might be uh you know with omicron coming upon us uh in the new year we might want to put it back out into the school board business okay i think that makes sense we don't know exactly what uh is coming ahead of us and i agree with miss lee's uh proposal to move it out of the consent agenda uh starting after the first of the year i do too okay all right just voice that i'm all right having it in the consent agenda i think it's an appropriate
006place for it because we can look at it we can ask questions of staff if we see fit and our meetings have been pretty packed um schedule wise and i'd like to preserve time for other issues because we can always pull it to discuss things if we have questions and in fact ask questions when we feel like it so i would just put that out there that's a good point too i agree with both of you ms lee would you be in agreement with that idea that we could pull it out on those weeks that we have questions and then otherwise leave it as consent sure and i guess we can um see where we are at the start of the year uh we don't necessarily need to make this months in advance i will
007note that the version that i saw of this one didn't have the um like the strain on the schools uh consider the level impact to a school which i i mean it had been the same we had been in the middle range the whole time um so i don't know if that got updated but i didn't see one so um i guess this is the first time it's been in the casino and i wonder if that's going to be a part of the ones that are in the constant agenda hey good evening everyone uh obviously i'm happy to add that back in that was one where we didn't usually put boxes around things we just kind of talked uh anecdotally about where things were but i would be happy to uh add that back in
008to uh to future uh items um and and you know give our best shot at where we are at those particular levels okay okay great thanks are there any other questions related to the um covet update i just would say to the public so that they know they have access to that material as well if they pull up the agenda they can access that material if they are interested and also judy i didn't mean to squash or point just that we would maybe take a vote on it if we get it back to get it back on sure all right so we are in agreement then that we will leave the covet 19 update on the consent agenda except for those weeks or sessions where we might have a question and at that time it
009could be pulled are we all in agreement with that yes and i'm moved that we approve item 3.5 as part of the consent agenda okay exactly here all right move by ms del carro second by ms stoberg that we um approve item 3.5 as part of the consent agenda ms johnston mr alcaro yes yes miss lee yes dr acuff yes miss carlson yes ms osborne yes mr page yes motion carry thank you we will now have our spotlight on education mr al caro is leading this for us um tonight thank you mr page i i'd also like to say in advance of this that the topic i'm going to talk about uh recently came out with a wonderful youtube video and i invite everybody to track it down tonight i want to help us recognize
010what's come to be a very important holiday tradition at burley middle school one that began in 2013 to help a burly family who had suffered the loss of their home in a fire that year led by one of our guests this evening harold boyd early students collected in a short amount of time 438 pounds of food from then on the quote from a t-shirt warned by students last year we walk with smiles using our feet to get help others eat that was a reference to the way in which this pandemic this campaign was conducted in a pandemic year when students were not in classrooms in conjunction with the need for students to enjoy plenty of fresh air students signed up sponsors who donated 10 cans of food for each mile walked by a student for
011the food drive the goal in 2020 was to collect a ton of food and students wound up collecting pounds of food enough to provide the blue ridge food bank with enough provisions for 2 000 meals an astounding achievement at a time of greater need than usual this year mr boyd set the bar much higher he wants to collect two tons of food four thousand pounds that would increase the number of meals the food bank can give back to the community by 67 percent through the years every early classroom has been involved in this community service project and the school has brought local members and local merchants churches and other schools in our division and in charlottesville city on to their team this year's drive began on november 15th and continues through december 17th on december
01212th a week from this saturday burleigh will open their doors to accept food donations directly from the community in a minute mr boyd will speak for himself but in reflecting on why this program has meant so much to burly students he simply says there's enjoyment in helping others and doing the right thing in thinking about the four values of our strategic plan equity wellness family and community engagement and excellence we all appreciate that these words are important but it's the actions of our staff and students that can change a life mr boyd is now in his 25th year of service to our school division and is a teaching assistant at burley he's joined this evening by adja lee a seventh grade burly bear who is an invaluable participant in this year's food drive mr boyd
013ms lee welcome to our board meeting we're very grateful for your leadership and i'm hoping you can share some thoughts with us on what has made this project such an important part of your community uh school community welcome good evening and thank you for having me thank you for the opportunity to get you to help us raise two tons of food this year that's our goal what i try to do to is instilling the students the need to help the community i try to get everyone we can involved a week ago tonight uh last thursday night we had a benefit basketball game again with beaufort middle school that started our kickoff for the food drive we want to continue that and uh one correction on december 11th uh i gave the wrong date we will
014have uh two of our team uh coaches here from 12 to two to collect food in the bus loop i'm looking at a lot of faces on this on this uh panel and i hope that every one of you all can bring us close to getting our two tons of food at this time i'd like to uh really excited this year because just fyi because i know what the purpose of the school board is we had three middle school sport programs run so far out of the three middle school sports programs we had 28 a.b honor roll students and my pleasure is announcing to say that 16 of them were boys uh and nine were girls and let's don't don't don't like that number though because we had twice uh the teams that the girls
015had but then again uh it's a pleasure to see 16 young men who wanted to make the honor roll and that's what we push responsibility and service to the community i have a group here called the thinking crew that that thinking crew what we try to do is instill students to look out for one another to help themselves to help out home school and community so please give us all the aid that you can in helping us to beat our goal this year right now i'd like to introduce to you miss audrey mr lee is one of those honorable students she's also a two-sport athlete and she carries herself extremely well in this school and i'm proud to introduce her miss leah is all yours um okay hello my name is ajali and i am
016one of our burly athletes that helped contribute to the food drive at school and i just wanted to say that i think the blue ridge food drive donation was a great idea um i think it's good to help other people in need that do not have access to those things and i also think burley does a great job of representing ourselves and donating to charity and other people that need things um i take an art course and we're selling clay ornaments to donate money to the spca also so i just wanted to say that i think we do a really great job of representing ourselves and that um i think everybody should help out in our donation for our food drive thanks roger and guess what audrey we can't miss with the whole school boy
017listening to us so thank you all for the honor for us to talk to you tonight we really appreciate it but we still want to raise two tons of food this year thank you very much and you all have a good evening good safety mr boyd yes sir um i i had a text come in asking if you would repeat the hours for the school for the drive at the school on december 12th it's december 11th uh it's december 11th uh it'll be from the hours of 12 to 2. we'll be in the back bus loop okay so just to just to repeat and verify instead of december 12th people can come to uh burley middle school on what would be friday i began saturday the 11th from 12 to 2. yes as a matter
018of fact uh before prior to me coming on saturday 11th i've already got a commitment from some people uh from my basketball basketball program in flu banner they're going to contribute to so uh please help us out remember think two two tons it's great you know the community involved in men at burley middle school is is truly truly impressive congratulations to you both thank you and i got two words to say go barely thank you very much mr boyd and asha for um your presentation to us tonight and uh that two tons of food sounds really has a good goal so thank you so very very much for spearheading this drive are there any other comments from any other board members for mr boyd or azure are there any specific honor roll there are there
019are there any specific uh foods that would be better to bring non-perishables and and canned goods remember the canned goods carried away and get the store brands because they're cheaper one other question if if one if someone cannot make it on that saturday where where would they leave off the food early it's open in the morning i'm here early in the morning anytime you want to drop some food by before i drive you are welcome thank you drop it in the front office or just bring it we'll get i'll get my young men to come out and get it for you don't have to carry it yourself thank you so much mr boyd thank you very much for and also congratulations on that honor roll um the number of kids on honor roll from the
020boys and girls teams too so thank you for everything that you do over at burley you're quite welcome sir all right our next item is uh announcements and uh dr haas will be making an announcement plus he'll also be conducting some superintendent business oh okay dr haas thank you mr page and i just want to also uh add my thanks and pride uh with mr boyd and aja just outstanding representation for the school system and great work um so i just wanted to thank monticello high school staff the assistant principal patricia dimitri and staff at the school for a great visit today first i just want to give a shout out to the monticello high school's child nutrition staff saw something there i haven't seen at the other schools it may go on but the
021cafeteria staff were actually out in the halls this morning with carts so that students would be sure to get breakfast on their way to class as they were coming in and i saw donna bishop and jan farley and they were doing a great job not just giving food to the students but a great deal of kindness in the morning um i had a chance to visit ms t ms tim's jennifer tim's he saw one class i was doing an outstanding job with those students and then i visited sarah miller and mike wahl's community-based education program or cbip class and they were doing great work as well so thank you very much for having me to visit at monticello high school i want to recognize our principals that are here tonight to hear what's going on
022at the school board level in alamo county schools principals if you want to turn your camera on so the board can see you we're very proud of you for all the great work you do jen sublet from out western albemarle steve saunders from greer megan wood from lakeside cindy wells from mountain view ashby johnson from jack jewett and that crummy from crozet elementary we're so glad you can be here tonight keep up the great work and speaking of great work from principles i did want to quickly share um i know it was on the consent agenda and i'm sure the board reviewed it but i really wanted to just take a second to share our class size report because it reflects the investment that the school board made this summer from our federal recovery funds
023i know i'm just kind of connecting the dots here that prior to the school year the board invested about 2.3 million dollars or 28 full-time equivalent or ftes into the schools as part of your recovery plan in order to reduce class sizes and because that is an evidence-based practice uh to improve student learning and help students recover it also makes the work much more manageable for our teachers uh including social distancing so um i want to highlight the class size report for the impact from your funding decisions and uh our class sizes are the smallest that they've been in years in particular the last five years that are that you see on the report and i just wanted to highlight a few of the tables so you could see with 1b that has the trend
024for elementary school class sizes from up until uh 2122 this year so you can see a pretty dramatic decrease over time and then when you look down to the middle schools you can also see the same trend from at the division level you also see it across every element of every middle school it is the infusion of the staffing but it also is the expertise of the principles like the ones we have here tonight to take that extra ft and make sure they spread it out to bring down class sizes across the board so it takes a lot of work on their part to not only make those staffing decisions but then they've got to advertise and staff their schools which is was a lot of extra work um and then the high schools i'll
025just get to that last part here's the the same trend at the high school level so you can see all the high schools coming down over the years and then the mean class size is coming down as well and then another indicator for the high schools that we always look at is the number of classes across the whole school system in the high schools that are above uh 27 and over the years you would see much higher numbers in all these boxes so for this year to have just four at al marl four at monticello that's just outstanding work uh by the principles to bring down all those class sizes so i just wanted to share that with you so you can see the impact of a big budgetary decision that you made this summer
026to help with the recovery thank you dr haas are there any questions from the board on dr haas's report or comments okay thank you dr haas and also we welcome mr sanders ms sublet ms wood ms wells uh ms johnston and miss crummy to our meeting tonight it's we always really happy to have our principals uh with us so thank you all for being with us tonight our next item on the agenda uh public comment ms carlson thank you i will start off by reading the public comment guidelines the school board invites and actively seeks the public's input in the matters relevant to school board governance and provides for time during its business meetings um to hear from elmoral county residents and community members as authorized by ordinance in the county of albemarle the school
027board is holding its meetings electronically during the october 19 pandemic the school board is nevertheless committed to encouraging public comment for this reason there will be two ways for the public to provide common first as always reading comments may be submitted to the school board clerk prior to the start of the meeting or emailed directly to the school board and will be given to all the school board members for review second as long as the school board holds its meetings electronically members of the public wishing to provide public comment during the meeting may sign up online by 2 pm the day of the meeting before electronic comments starts i'm going to announce the order there are only two speakers today um so it'll be christine uh konig and randy zackerson uh speakers will be given
028three minutes to speak and they'll be notified when they reach the two minute mark the notification is me holding up the finger so you might want to be on the lookout for it or have yourself on a timer speakers during the meeting or those submitting written comments should state their name and address our magisterial district further speakers should limit comments to those matters that are relevant to school board governance are the operations of the school division although the school board will not respond to comments made during the public comment period school board members may address comments at the end of the meeting agenda under other business so there's two speakers we're going to start with miss koenig um let me see if i see her on mr zacherson has not joined yet i'm here i'm
029hi sorry i if i start my video then i start cutting out so i'm just going to keep it on audio great thank you okay um so christine koenig uh whitehall uh i wanted to speak about the new grading policy webinar that occurred a few weeks ago in the policy overall uh acps brought in an expert to present and answer questions from parents about the grading policy changes and acps should not be deciding which questions this expert gets to answer the questions in the chat were only visible to acps and you could see the staff members eyes scanning through and screening questions mr ken o'connor even seemed a bit irked and was clearly expecting more questions than he received at one point he even mentioned that someone had their emoji hand raised and asked if
030they had a question and he was basically ignored after the meeting i was left with several unanswered questions i still wanted to know his thoughts on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation in the early grades as well as how to best transition so we aren't abruptly switching how we grade for children who are used to the old way i've already heard neighbors lamenting about newly demotivated kids who won't do homework because it isn't required and some who now may barely make passing grades because they no longer have that practice unfortunately they just no longer see the value in homework and as long as they do the minimum to pass the class they don't care about the actual amount of knowledge acquired mr o'connor referred to these children as students who game the system and suggested that nothing
031could be done for them as they will always exist that made me wonder if we are creating more students who gain the system with this new policy and if acps is doing anything to prevent and monitor that i hope that acps has reviewed lessons learned and longitudinal data from schools that have implemented these changes and to that point acps should have a transition plan and be soliciting feedback right now from parents and teachers on these grading changes as they take effect i agreed with a lot of what mr o'connor presented however his most controversial point about punishing academic dishonesty and allowing endless retakes wasn't even going to be touched on in the meeting if not before i assume a number of parents asking in the chat the acps staff member even admitted it wasn't going
032to be covered as she reluctantly gave in and asked mr o'connor about it his response was academic dishonesty is a code of conduct issue and not an academic issue so i left the meeting wondering what exactly that meant and with no idea how acps will be handling academic dishonesty it seems like depending how acps handles that there will be many consequences including more teacher time and resources to recreate tests and assignments ultimately i learned a lot in the webinar but i was left with so many questions about how this will actually be implemented and evaluated at acps i'm particularly interested in how feedback will be gathered from parents teachers and students as i think that is essential when making such a big shift in grading philosophy thus i'm speaking tonight to request that this feedback
033and evaluation process be addressed by the school board and shared at a future meeting if we are truly going to make a successful change and prove this new grading philosophy is meeting the intended goals acps needs to be transparent and needs to be actively evaluating this transition thank you for your time thank you for those comments miss coney so the next and last speaker is mr randy zackerson let me check oh i do see um i do see his email on mr zacherson can you hear me now i don't know oh there you are hi hello you have three minutes when you're ready okay uh let me get my name up here right gotta follow the rules okay my name is randy zackerson i have two grandchildren in samuel miller district and as a matter
034of fact i just ran for the samuel miller district school board as a write-in candidate and received 26 percent of the votes after only a short 76 day and nine hour campaign so as i speak to you tonight i speak not only for myself but for the over two thousand voters that apparently did not agree with their current school board representation i met a lot of parents during the campaign we had some great discussions and um i i plan to bring some of those up in in this and future meetings but my first question still is and i put it to you as i have before why do you continue to hide behind these zoom meetings uh at the start uh uh again um there are parents that want to get their views out there
035this is obvious there's at least 2 000 parents that had views that were differing from you and you make it very difficult for them to talk to you and to reach you and and i would implore you to get out and meet the parents in people and in person and listen to their complaints uh i've i've heard uh uh the complain the excuse and it's secure it's purely an excuse uh from graham page that says well the the county supervisors won't let us use uh uh the old lane high school uh room that we always have well you folks own 23 county buildings each of these beautiful buildings has a large auditorium a cafeteria and that could easily be used and if these schools are safe enough for 13 000 plus students to attend uh
036each week i think there's no reason why you people you seven people can't meet at one of these 23 school buildings at any time and quit hiding behind uh the zoom meeting this is very impersonal and and very difficult to communicate and certainly doesn't foster two-way communication so anyway that's my first uh first request and uh you guys got to think about that uh but anyway back to what parents were saying uh in as i was out there listening to them and listening to their concerns which you are not listening to uh there's a big concern uh from the parents about the continued teaching of critical race theory philosophy in the albemarle county schools now i know this board and the current school administration have repeatedly denied that they are teaching critical race theory well
037that's a legal term and that's those are weasel words that you're using but the parents of our county know that the children are being subjected and abused uh by uh the teaching of critical race theory tenants and they are sending me weekly examples and uh go ahead mr zacherson i appreciated hearing your thoughts the three minutes are up we have another meeting um next week or feel free to email us if you'd like okay i'll i'll bring up my two minutes of truth or three minutes of truth now uh next week uh and it's uh i continue to do that uh in the future meetings thank you thank you that concludes public comment and i hand it back to you chair page thank you vice chair carlson uh next item uh the 20 22 23
038school division calendar update by dr mclaughlin all right good evening board members i'm pat mclaughlin chief of strategic planning for the school division and i'm here tonight to present you with the results of the work of the joint albemarle county charlottesville city schools calendar committee in your board packet tonight you have a copy of the drafts 2223 calendar as well as results of a community survey to get feedback on that draft as a reminder we develop our calendar draft through a joint committee formed between albemarle county and charlottesville city schools the committee consists of central staff building administrators teachers and parents we also solicit feedback from our larger community and this year received just under 1700 responses to our calendar survey this year there were a number of considerations that the committee had at the
039top of their mind the first was a continuation of dedicated time for division plc work responding to the largely negative fee uh the second was negative feedback on our early release days uh and also the thought that we wanted to dedicate time for teachers to complete their work during their working hours these considerations align with two goals of our strategic plan learning for all the first is our thriving students goal in which we state that we will ensure that academic time demands place on students allow them adequate time to pursue their personal interests including enrichment activities lifelong learning and career goals the second is our affirming and empowering communities goals that identifies the physical and mental health of our students and staff as one of our top priorities so with that in mind the committee
040created a draft calendar that includes 175 instructional days for students 1050 instructional hours for students at our elementary and middle schools which have our shortest days they eliminated early dismissals with the exception of the very last day of school which tends to be our one popular early dismissal day uh it includes dedicated time for division plc work and includes dedicated time for teacher work days the draft calendar was well received by all of our stakeholders with 62 percent supporting the draft calendar at a level of four or five on a five point uh likert scale survey and 64 percent supporting 175 instructional days at level 4 or 5. support was at similar levels at similar levels when we separate our community members from our staff with 61 of the community supporting both the calendar and
041the shift to 175 instructional days and when we broke this out by staff staff supported the draft at a rate of 175 instructional days was at 71 and we also asked staff to what degree additional planning days would help them in their jobs and 78 percent report responded to that at a level 4 or a level 5 on the 5 point scale so we feel that the committee has developed a calendar for next year that is strongly supported by the community and is in alignment with our strategic plan and the needs of the school division we ask that you receive the calendar for information tonight and we'll bring it back on the consent agenda at your meeting on january 13th and i thank you for your time and be happy to take any questions that
042you may have i have a question um so how many instructional days did we have this year is this similar is this similar to what we did this year after we granted the five additional um days in in terms of clock hours it's probably similar i haven't calculated the clock hours we typically have a 180 instructional day calendar uh the board for this year uh moved that to 182 day calendar when we added in half days so we took away some hours from the calendar that got added back in with additional instructional days um we've since made some some further adjustments to the calendar as you all know uh a couple board meetings ago to put some additional teacher work days uh in there because of the stressors caused by the pandemic so when you
043compare the current calendar that was most recently approved to this calendar you would see a similar number of work days of instructional days on there now so i would like to just i guess register my concern with the fact that prior to the pandemic one of the things that we heard um as a research-backed way to deal with achievement gaps in student achievement was more instructional time really maximizing construct instructional time in fact we were talking about lengthening the day for elementary students and so while i got the need to pull days out this year because of the situation we're in i don't necessarily see the the rationale for just making that an ongoing um thing i would rather if it came to it if we needed to grant additional work days i'd rather work
044that in and pay our teachers accordingly for that time and still maximize instructional time so i wanted to put that out there and in terms of the survey i guess one thing i am curious about is if we presented other options as well which i think maybe we did because i'm thinking if i had to answer a survey like that i mean it's a it's a calendar so i'm going to support it i guess the question would be if i had other options which one would have the most support and from which stakeholders um so that's all i when i think about why we gave those five days this year one of the things that was top of my mind was teacher morale and making sure our teachers um [Music] had some kind of relief
045stress relief um mental relief in the future it's to do that preemptively i just don't know and i don't see it as a recruitment tool i don't see it necessarily helping our teachers in that way so that's all thank you ms carlson are there any other comments from any other board members just a question it's a joint committee with a city in the county i'm assuming that there was agreement yes we have uh we have uh aligned calendars um that went to both boards thank you okay thank you dr mclaughlin so this will be on the consent agenda for our january 13th meeting correct okay all right then thank you the next agenda item is the mountain view capacity update and this will will be led by miss hopton huffman i mean micheladman is this
046happening with us she is she's muted okay yeah okay thank you right hello my name is sheila hoopman i'm the capital project manager with building services and i'm leading the design committees for both the mountain view elementary master plan study and classroom addition projects we have combined these two projects to present them to you tonight for information only and at the december 9th board meeting we will ask for approval to proceed with each project separately the committees have been working with jack clark and his group from rrm architects and cooperative strategies for the last six months to complete the master plan study and preliminary design phase for the approved classroom edition project jack will be presenting the following tonight a recommended long-term strategy to address population growth in and around the mountain view elementary boundary
047and a recommendation to proceed with designing the approved addition at mountain view to address short-term overcrowding needs i'd like to introduce jack clark and dan wigan from rrm architects we also have maya kumazawa and cindy wells in the meeting in case the board has any questions jack thank you sheila thank you board members and dr haas we appreciate the opportunity to be here tonight sheila i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen okay so we're here tonight to talk about the capacity update at mountain view i'm going to give you a little overview and start off with the school mountain view has a capacity right now of 624 students the recent school enrollment is 715 that includes 38 pre-k students the projected future enrollment which we'll look at in another chart soon is for almost
048800 students within several years mountain view has been growing since it opened and it will is projected to continue to grow now one item that happened back in october the school system provided an eight classroom mobile unit and that opened in october is not included in the school capacity as sheila just mentioned there are two projects going on in mountain view right now the classroom and cafeteria edition project was funded by the school board and we have started work on that but also back in april of this year we were asked to put together a master planning study for mountain view and for that master planning study we are the point now where we have a recommendation options were considered for the school and we received feedback from the staff in the community that feedback
049included staff meetings in may and in november community presentations also in may and november and then online and paper surveys were conducted back in november and we're going to report on the results of those surveys the cafeteria and classroom addition project construction budget is it was 6.1 million dollars for that the approved project scope was to add six classrooms and a cafeteria addition to mountain view now we've had some planning discussions and feedback with the staff and other members of almar county staff as well as the principal and we've got some discussion items we want to talk about as far as other needs for the facility there's also been some significant cost changes in the construction market since this original budget was put together we will talk about those a little bit too so the
050first part is the master planning study for mountain view this was a division-wide study of school capacity enrollment aiming to develop a master plan for the future development at mountain view there are two parts this master planning study the first part was a subdivision yield analysis that was to study student demographics and housing and develop a yield analysis for all the subdivisions planned in that area the second part was a master planning services facilities study and that would provide a recommended strategy to address population growth in and around mountain view first the subdivision yield analysis a 38 page report has been provided to the school board the cover is over here on the right side of the screen the purpose is to determine the potential growth for planned housing developments and the impact it has
051on the alamar county schools student population that's been provided to you all the second aspect of the master planning study was to develop facilities and consider them so a 15-member study committee discussed and reviewed and evaluated multiple options and then developed a recommendation for future development now this committee met weekly throughout the the spring and then we also as i mentioned we presented to the staff in may and in november getting their feedback also had community meetings in may and november and then the feedback was requested and received this chart shows the enrollment at mountain view the blue line is the enrollment it did see a dip with covid but the trend is continue up as you can see over at the right side we're up to almost 800 students by the 25-26 school year
052as i mentioned earlier the green line is the capacity the building capacity at mountain view is 624 students this bar chart here shows all of the elementary schools in albemarle county and the average elementary school capacity is 478. we looked at this chart along with the thoughts about the benefits of smaller schools and we looked at some data that was produced and provided for us with that the next chart here shows the comments received at the may 14 staff meeting and the main comments related to cafeteria size and the noise need for a new school the need for more admin space and then improve circulation inside the building and the greatest needs cited was for more resource type spaces in mountain view facility options the main focus of the committee was to look at options
053for what to do with mountain view now we had a lot of options that were considered the main options that were considered but were not recommended included these to build a new early childhood which would be a pre-k and k building on the founder's place site move one or more grade levels from mountain view to walton middle school build additions to increase the capacity of red hill elementary school by about 200 students and then redistrict students from mountain view to red hill the fourth item that was considered but not recommended was to build a new 400 to 500 seat pre-k to 2 school in the mountain view attendance zone and the current mountain view becomes a three to five school so the school would be divided up by different grade levels another option not recommended
054was to build additions on to mountain view to increase the capacity to 850 students and then the last one is to build a new 800 to 850 seat school to replace mountain view on an acquired site so those were some of the main options that were considered but not recommended now the recommendation that came out of the committee and we got strong support from the surveys is to have a new elementary school on an acquired site in the mountain view attendance zone so the mountain view would become two schools both of 400 to 450 students so a new elementary school is the recommendation the estimated cost for that new 450 student school would be about 42 million dollars plus land cost the timeline for completion is in the five-year range and if approved to proceed
055in the next few months the new school could potentially be open for the 26 27 school year as i mentioned there was surveys taken both online and paper to rate the support for this recommendation the survey was set up on a scale of one to seven one being no support four being some support and seven being strong support so 128 responses were received the vast majority were in the some support to strong support and well over half were in the six and seven range in fact the latest score here is 5.89 some of the feedback that was received on the staff meeting we have over 60 comments were received this is the member for staff meeting the main thrust was new school quotes up here excited about a new school need for long needed for
056a long-term solution build a new school etc there are other comments received related to the existing facility that we're taking we're taking into account as well now the second aspect of what i'm presenting tonight is the proposed addition project the mountain view so what we have here is an aerial view the areas in the darker orange yellow are proposed areas for a classroom addition that would be at the back left corner of the building and then a cafeteria addition near the front off cafeteria off the cafeteria also shown this plan the lower right is the location of the eight classroom modular temporary trailer unit here's a floor plan of mountain view the area circled in in green is the proposed location of the two-story classroom edition so this is the back left corner of the
057building the plan for that would be in blue we would add three classrooms all with toilets that was one of the comments we received back as a lack of flexibility in some of the classrooms at mountain view because they did not have quotes inside the reddish brown area is a flex room or a resource type space and then of course the yellow are the corridors we would connect through creating a new courtyard connect through to the back two-story classroom wing which would be the back on the right and down to the one story addition that was done 10 or 15 years ago with the other red arrow so this area of addition on the first floor would connect through both both existing corridors creating a new courtyard and increasing the positive circulation inside the building
058we also have a faculty toilet in here which is another comment we received the second floor plan is similar to the first floor plan only but there's only one corner connection that's the red arrow because that's a two-story portion of the building so this is a two-story classroom addition added on to connecting on the second floor to the existing two-story portion there's also a flex size office size flex space that's in the orange area here but most spaces do project up from the first floor so we have three classrooms and a flex room the cafeteria edition is proposed to go on the front of the building connecting to the existing cafeteria this plan in pink is the cafeteria expansion there would also be the yellow area as a new corridor coming out there's an existing
059exit comes out from the building there we would also move the covered walkway from the bus drop off and connect it through so we still have a covered walkway from the bus area into the building we're also going to add two individual toilets with this addition and do some improvements to the existing cafeteria mainly in regards regards to noise level by providing acoustical panels so the cafeteria edition would expand the dining and add two new toilets along with this project there are proposed improvements outside the building additional parking would be added we want to look at the bus loop and parent drop-off improvements and then playground and playfield improvements the area circled in blue would be a playground space geared mostly towards pre-k and k-cl students the area in the orange would be a playground
060space for grades one to two and in yellow would be grades three to five we also want to do some work on the existing play field mainly to do with drainage and do improved drainage at that play field this is a plan showing these proposed improvements the 26 additional parking spaces are shown by a new lot that is ever closer to the main road avon street extended from the existing lot that's the area in gray at the upper left that would add about 25 additional parking spaces now the bus loop improvements and the parent drop-off improvements this item was not part of the initial project request this came out of our discussions with the staff and the principal cindy the bus loop situation parent drop-off situation is very congested at mountain view in fact we've
061got people stacking up out on avon street extended and it's not the it doesn't work well now so what we're proposing to do is to move a parent drop off to the south side of the building or the bottom of the sheet this next plan shows by diagram with the red and blue arrows how we propose to make that change so imagine you're a parent you would turn in you're the red arrows you would turn in and go down at a area that's separated from the bus loop by a raised curb kind of like a sidewalk concrete raised curb you would go down all the way through this area of parking in the at the south end of the project and you would come to a cul-de-sac and turn around and come back up and
062then we would create an area for drop-off right here with a canopy connection from the existing canopy the improvement here is that we are separating the buses and the cars and we are giving lots of stacking space for parents for the morning and the afternoon for the buses that would be the blue line the blue line would follow a very similar arrangement that they have right now where they come in and go up and drop off students in the morning at the canopy but the other thing we will allow this this would allow us to do is when buses get to this decision point here they could turn left and go out to avon or they could go in front of the building straight and then go out the entrance that's a right turn only
063to avon because this area is being used right now for parents but by shifting the parents down to the south part of the site we would be able to further separate buses and cars creating a safer condition and having very little top problem with cars stacking up on avon street this is a diagram and what we're showing here are the improvements proposed for the playgrounds and play field at mountain view as i mentioned earlier in blue is the pre-k and k playground area one and two grades one and two in orange and then yellow grades three to five some of the photographs you see around here are similar types of installations of the items that are being proposed for that this would be a complete rebuild of the playground facilities at mountain view we're not
064looking just a supplement we're looking to replace we feel like the equipment out there is at the end of its useful life here's our construction cost estimate for the addition project the classroom edition is we're projecting to be 4.3 to 5.1 million dollars cafeteria edition 800 thousand to 960 thousand dollars adding 26 parking spaces a quarter million to 300 thousand dollars we're looking at some existing building renovations mainly in the media center 140 170 000 and then the playground outdoor learning and playfield improvements 1.1 to 1.3 million dollars adding these up the cost range is 6.59 and 7.83 million and this is higher than the current approved budget current approved budget is 6.1 i mentioned earlier that we have seen some incredible increases in construction costs this year i'm sure you're all aware of supply
065chain issues and inflation etc now associated with this project as i mentioned earlier the bus loop and parent drop-off improvements were not included in the original construction discussion project discussion we have looked at those and thought that it should have strong consideration so we have we were thinking that we could do an additive alternate that said on bid day and contractors provide a separate price for this and an ad alternate for this would be in the 600 to 750 000 range there's also some work that could be done as far as hvac replacements and upgrades in the existing building the existing classrooms that are there from the original building to replace um those 900 000 to 1.1 million dollars now there is a potential for funding of those through the alvaro county schools maintenance program
066project schedule schematic design september through november we are here in december looking for school board review design development would be the next two months december to january and we would hope to come back to you for design development school board review in february then we would proceed from our for our construction documents and our site plan approval process from february to july bidding in july to august and then construction from august to early fall of next year 2020 i'm sorry two years 2024 2023 so august 2022 to early fall 2023 summary the staff recommendation is to build a new school an estimated cost of 42 million plus land costs it will take approximately five years for project completion it is also recommended to build the six classroom and cafeteria additions at mountain view to alleviate
067the overcrowding over the next five years these two charts try and show what would have what's going on with mountain view as far as capacity and enrollment the chart on the left is if there is no expansion so a little over 600 line here that is the current building capacity that's the area in pink that runs across the sheet a little over 600. the area in blue is the enrollment and that's current enrollment or projected enrollment and so as we see it's close to 700 and going up towards 800. now the trailers have been added the class 8 classroom trailers that's the area in yellow and so what has happened here is that the capacity for mountain view has increased to the line of the yellow and so the line of yellow is right at
068or just below the enrollment as we get to 2024 2025 25 26. if we'd were to do the expansion what we see here is that the building expansion comes on and all of a sudden what we have is we have a capacity that has been increased and what that allows is the opportunity for flexible spaces in the building what could those flexible spaces be for one of the things that's lacking right now at mountain view are spaces for things like small group instruction resource programs pull out programs enrichment even things like a faculty lunchroom so if the expansion is added what we do is we have a flexible opportunity here to accommodate those programs because the enrollment shown increasing the capacity is just for regular classrooms not showing anything for those enrichment resource type spaces
069next steps you get your next board meeting which is the ninth staff is asking for approval to proceed with building a new school and for the project for the new school to be placed in the cip and we're also looking for approval of the addition project schematic design and at a future date to discuss supplementary funding for the edition project so that's my presentation thank you so much and we're here to answer any questions thank you mr clark and ms hoopman um are there any questions from the board on mr clark's report well we did as a school board rank highly replacement or an additional school in the mountain in the southern feeder pattern um that is certainly not an accomplished deal in our negotiations with the county as of yet um and secondly i
070know that there i mean you answered i think my question at the very end mr clark um that if we are looking at building six new classrooms on a school that would increase its capacity from about 662 to 780 but then we're going to build another school for 450 have two schools in the 450 to 500 range my question was going to be do we need to go ahead and build those six additional classrooms now and wouldn't that should we consider rolling that money over toward the new school you've made the case i think that that many school buildings and this one included don't have a lot of flexible space once you get the students in the room and that we have seen that throughout the county in terms of having our a lot of
071our our uh reading specialists or psycholo a lot of uh specialized staffing in trailers in addition to classrooms so i guess my question yeah i i guess it's a judgment call on whether we go ahead and build six classrooms right now and how confident are we since that is already approved although not with the current price tag um or should we really pull back that four and a half to five or five million dollars toward site acquisition for another school and it's really sort of a question to the universe i guess at this point or to my colleagues on the board and i know in talking with um roslyn at all that that their the recommendation continues to be to build the six schools but i don't know ms hoopman or somebody persuade me there
072you are nish schmidt before you answer miss uh schmidt i would echo those things that's what popped in my head is just i would want to be creative if we're anticipating pushing for a brand new school then we need to revisit what we're trying to do with mountain view um learning itself is changing right now things are happening differently like to it sounds would be great if we just get six extra classroom for additional learning space but if it's not to address capacity it's just because it's already in the budget and we know we need to build a new school with a 45 million our 42 million dollar price tag then that's the tough sell so yeah i would and i would want to be creative then and come with that knowledge when we're designing
073whatever edition we're doing at kale because perhaps then trailers are okay it's just going to be for additional learning spaces maybe it's just the sound proofing in the cafeteria things like that well i would say that um the the the clap the mobile classroom unit um currently the fifth graders are out in that classroom unit and it would be great to get those students into the building um i know that something that was discussed was um that you know what's important for um all the younger kids is that the fifth grades fifth graders model their behaviors and and etc um to the younger kids and that is a missed opportunity right now because they are located pretty far away from the main building so there's a separation of you know those kids in fifth grade
074um i think um feel a separation from the community yeah and just to clarify i'm talking about if we move to building the new school so presumably in the future we won't have the overcrowding we'd be able to move the fifth grade back into the building and have the modular building serve as additional learning spaces for specialty learning and our flexibility is what i was saying i think the um plan for that modular building although we can keep it as long as we would want to keep it because we own it is to remove it once the new school is built so we although we would have additional capacity at mountain view the current mountain view building that additional capacity could be used for things like a community center that's something that cindy had brought
075up or some other suggestions were an expanded preschool in that area or administrative offices or training spaces you know you could use that additional space once the new school is built for a number of programs i would want clarity then around what those are going to be and why we would do it because we have a long list of needs of other places that also need that are at over capacity or near capacity and so just doing it as like uh it'd be nice is just tough for me so i i just agreed with you kate is what i'm saying you said it more more eloquently but i just need more information about that because the building new school is a new thing keeping the old thing and saying let's just do the new thing
076is seems like we should reinvest i mean i do i the current school capacity at mountain view according to the numbers i have is 662. and if our goal is after building another school to have two schools in the 450 to 500 or 550 range you would still have an extra capacity of 100 kids at mountain view and i i guess it's because i mr el carl and i have been working with the capital advisory committee in the past couple of weeks um it well it's not going to be that easy to get funding for all of our needs but once we so we have to be very careful with how we spend the money right you know along those lines if i could uh one thing that's jumping out i i do recognize the
077need for the additional room at uh at mountain view i was out there recently and and got a firsthand look at that um [Music] is that if according what mr clark said that uh the the building would be ready for occupancy in the fall of 2023 and the the new school would be hopefully ready for to go in five years so that's um that would be three years after uh 2023 so we're talking about a time frame of three years of getting the full benefit of the project as as i'm seeing it and and and i'm assuming that even with the new the new um and and ms hootman i mean just to clarify something you had said is did you say that it when the new school is built that the learning cottages would
078go away or when the new classrooms were built the the learning cottages would go away so we're anticipating the learning cottage would stay until the new school is built okay so that would be the six classrooms plus the six or eight that they have uh out in the uh in the cottage so there'd be a lot of room at that point i mean there will be you know some growth potential within the next few years when you add the six classrooms and you keep the eight classrooms and then you would say that when the new school is built three years after that is when it would go because there wouldn't be his need for as much capacity at mountain view okay i just wanted to clarify yep correct can we see if um ms wells
079can tell us a little more about what difference having those classrooms would make that thank you for asking um yeah just thank you for this conversation thank you for thinking about our kids and proceeding thoughtfully with this and i understand where the board is thinking about this of course i'm looking at where our children are right now wanting the most equitable experience for them for our teachers as possible so even with the gift of the eight classroom learning pod that we have we still don't have enough room at mountain view we are we still don't have a place for our teachers to eat lunch and i'm just thinking about um the professionalism of our teachers i'm thinking about our cafeteria it is really very small and it is loud or it takes a long time
080pre-covered to have the opportunity for children to eat lunch so that's something that's really important in this with the learning pod being added there now that's taken up a good chunk of our playground so the playground improvements that we're looking at will actually allow us to use the space at the limited space that we have at mountain view more equitably for our children so that they can continue to play um the classroom editions right now we don't have enough spaces to have music and art so some we still have some music and art traveling around on a cart and so i'm just again going back to those equitable experiences um for children and so just this addition i'm just even looking ahead and i know that's really hard to do looking at now and then
081looking ahead but we're continuing to grow and so just i would ask the board to really like think about this what it would do for mountain view for now for the short term for five years but then what we could do creatively after that to be able to use the space thanks how confident are we on our growth numbers it seems like we have underestimated the growth in that area in the past i would say i'll try because maya's on here too but i'll chime in um enrollment projections are that just that their projections um you're right we have under projected in this area um so and the other variable in all of this is is the impact of covid and trying to predict enrollment um projections after covet is is proving extremely challenging and
082so i would caution that chart that um mr clark shared is enrollment projection and so that's what we were trying to show is that there is no room for error in that projection either if you didn't build the you know if those projections were higher um we are out of space without the addition are there other questions from the board um i don't have a question but i would really encourage both the edition and the new school uh one i think the enrollment projections are have traditionally been under projected in our area and two you know while we have the intention to have a new school by 2026 27 school year i think we all know how those things work out something that's on a five-year plan then turns out to be seven years and
083down the road like that so i i definitely would support both the addition for the term edition the cafeteria the bus and parent drop-off loop and the classrooms so i think we need all of it i would like to just affirm what ms osborne said that although we are looking at a five-year cip and we're going through that process right now there's no certainty that we would have a new elementary school there within that five-year range i mean we're working on mr alcaro and i are working hard to make that case but um [Music] it might be a little bit longer than that so so i could i could live with that i mean i'm i'm i'm also concerned about the fact that our numbers are much higher than we approved in the you know
084last spring so that is of concern but you have to deal with the market you're in i guess okay to sort of try to give a summary of where i think we are now i think with mr clark's um presentation he was saying that on december 9th uh he the um group would like to have two approvals from the board one to proceed with planning for the new elementary school and the second one to approve the schematic design and other um steps along the way for the renovations at mountain view from what i'm hearing are we asking the staff to also include in that approval for the schematic design information about possible other uses of the building once the auditions have been added and maybe other information about how much we really need those additions
085are those things that we'd like to have also included in in that uh report before we approve hearing nothing but i i agree with what you you said graham i think that there are other things uh also that that we would need and mr clark one question i would ask of you is for the uh building of a new school um what because this is something we can be talking about tomorrow um what's the land need for that how many acres do you need we would say you we would call it usable acres yeah sometimes you have a site that has lots of acres but they're not very usable because of topography so we would think of 15 to 25 to start and making sure we had at least 15 usable acres which is about
086the same size as what uh um mountain view has currently i think there are 14 six that would be a little bit bigger than mountain view mountain view has it has a fair amount of land but there's also a fair amount that is not usable okay good thank you i'll chime in graham because i think you're probably speaking to what i had said uh i just so we're clear i am in support of building and advocating to build a new school i think elementary schools that are approaching 800 students don't serve students well um and i did find compelling some of your arguments for why we just need to go ahead with the edition um cip is a little confusing to me in terms of how it works and so honestly it's kind of felt
087like it's not confusing but you don't really get what you ask for to begin with so it's kind of better to ask for everything you can and and see what you get so um with that in mind and certainly there's a reason to have the expansion very good reason i would obviously be in support of the recommendation we'll see what we can get wisconsin so are we saying then that the additional information that we would need would be possible uses of the spaces after the new school is built how much land would be needed um and what else did i have here's enough those would be probably two of the main things that i think we would need in order to approve the mountain view edition i'm not sure we even need ideas with possible
088uses because we're talking after the new school is built we're talking five to seven years out and i don't think we can even imagine what we're going to be wanting to do that far out so i don't really need to know the possible uses of extra space because i'm not sure there will be extra space when it's all said and done yeah the reason i included that in there was because someone mentioned that uh possibly a community center or an expanded pre-k program could be used or housing so that's why i included that yeah and just to be clear ms hootman this the projection is for two schools with 400 to 450 students is that correct or is it different that is correct okay thank you okay one other thing i wanted to put out
089into the public sphere that i think is important and you've got to in some ways is um parity between the schools i think um miss wells kind of talked about that one thing i'd hate to have happen because we're going to be dividing up all the students that are attending mountain view i imagine i don't know but is to send you know half of them to a brand new facility with you know state-of-the-art stuff and leave the other half in a school that hasn't had any touch-ups so for that reason i i do think it's important to continue um with doing at least some improvements there okay thank you and that mike can uh need some of the modernization money that we're also talking about from the um at the cip level because just as
090we didn't want to build another high school potentially this is going back a few years and then have three other comprehensive high schools that weren't up to the same standard as the new one i think katrina what you're talking about is exactly the same thing because you don't want to uh have the new school and the other one not up to the same standard okay mr and miss dr akov i hope you have heard some compelling arguments then to present to the cip committee to support all of this right we expect you to come back to us at our next meeting and let us know that we have money available for everything that we have on this list we will give you a pro a progress update we have another meeting tomorrow okay thank you
091are there any other questions or any other comments for either ms hoopman or mr clark no i just appreciate all the work that's gone into it so far and i look forward to seeing the new improved school and i'm sure ms wells is as well right thank you thank you very much thank you so much thank you our next item on the agenda is the crosie elementary school redistricting plan and this will be presented by dr haas thank you very much mr speaker so we're going to be uh presenting my recommendation for redistricting uh based on the advisory committee i received their recommendation on monday night and so i'm going to turn things over to dr mclaughlin to walk us through it thank you pat yeah thank you dr haas and good evening again school
092board members i'm pat mclaughlin chief of strategic planning for the school division and i'm here tonight with maya kumazawa to provide information about the work of the redistricting advisory committee for the expansion of crozet elementary school so in tonight's presentation we'll provide you with background information about the project remind you of the objective and scope that you provided to the committee review the scenarios that were considered by the committee and doc and finally dr house will make his recommendation at the end of the presentation so let's begin i'd like to begin with a bit of history about why the decision was made to add on to crozet elementary as well as review past redistricting that has impacted the school so in 2019 the long-range planning advisory committee recommended that prozay elementary be expanded to accommodate
093capacity conflicts at both crozet elementary and brownsville elementary schools since 2008 you can see that the student population of brownsville has grown significantly and is expected to continue to grow planned new development in the area is high and the population is forecasted to grow even more rapidly than in other parts of our county the recommendation to expand cros a was approved through the capital improvement planning process and as a brief overview the addition will add 17 classrooms and additional support spaces other improvements include hvac systems including the county's first geothermal system renovations to existing portions of the building and site improvements construction is underway and recent updates include the completion of the expanded playground the bus loop and the administration area renovation the kitchen edition is scheduled to be completed in the spring and the
094remaining edition will be completed this summer you have to go back quite a few years to find the most the most recent redistricting plans that have impacted cros a and or brownsville elementary schools the first took place 14 years ago in 2007 when 24 students were moved from crozet to meriwether-lewis elementary school the second took place excuse me the second took place in the fall of 2009 and this was a larger redistricting in response to a significant addition at brownsville in that process about 100 students who live in the areas you can see here were moved to brownsville from crozet and if you recall one of our earlier guiding one of the guiding principles that you gave to the committee was to ensure that at least uh three to five years or five to seven
095years between redistrictings of students when we do these expansion projects you can see that with cross a and brownsville we are well within uh that time frame so knowing that redistricting would need to take place in order to populate the new addition to crozet the board directed staff to form a redistricting advisory committee and they set an objective scope and guiding principles for the committee the stated objective of the study was to address the current and projected overcrowding of brownsville elementary school and the scope of the study was to involve only the current brownsville and crozet elementary school districts the board also approved a set of guiding principles for the committee's work which included uh that attendance areas should serve the district for at least three to five years with a goal of five to
096seven that attendance areas should be largely contiguous that walk areas for each school should be considered transportation routes should be as efficient as possible and try to minimize ride times as much as we can that neighborhoods should be assigned to the same school whenever possible and if feasible greater demographic balance among the impacted schools should be strived for one of the things that the board said should be outside the scope of the committee is whether to allow existing students to remain in the school and that would be considered by the board uh once they make a decision on the redistricting in august we put out a call for volunteers from the cross and brownsville communities to join the advisory committee and i'm happy to say that we have a very engaged community and many more
097applicants than spaces were available on the committee after a view of the applications a committee of 10 community members was formed and included four representatives from crozet elementary rich anderson lauren carter catherine davis and rupesh silwal four representatives from brownsville elementary andrew joyner christine koenig jojo o'loughlin and jennifer roper and gerard smith from our long-range planning advisory committee and scott guggenheimer from our equity and diversity committee the committee was supported by staff members including rene duvall in routing and planning over transportation maya kumazawa our director of budget planning michelle kastner the executive director of elementary education phil giaramida our strategic communications officer lauren hunt our web and social media specialist and stephanie hall our central office office associate these team members deserve a huge thank you for the support uh for the committee's work we
098certainly couldn't have done it without any of them they spent many long hours and long nights uh helping out the committee we knew the transparency of our process was a top priority that was both from the committee members and the support staff and so we allowed the community to follow our work and we and provide feedback to us via a web page which contained all presentation materials and meeting minutes via live streams of all of our committee meetings and via a dedicated email address that received comments uh as well as two open community meetings where we could gather additional feedback the process began back in august and will culminate hopefully with board action in january once we have a once we have a final decision from the board transition activities will begin to take place
099between the two schools and our new boundaries will go into effect at the start of the next school year and as the committee worked toward the final recommendation to dr haas they considered several potential redistricting scenarios which i would like to share with you tonight at the second meeting of the committee four initial scenarios were presented for consideration two of these scenarios were problematic to the committee the first was scenario one this scenario would have moved 100 um 173 current students from brownsville to cross a and included the northern portion of the old trail neighborhood the gray rock neighborhood the waylands grant and bargaiman park neighborhood and neighborhoods along uh route 240 from jarmon's gap road to oak drive the second problematic scenario was scenario number four and that also included the gray rock neighborhood
100uh the waylands park bargain at weyland's grand bargain park neighborhood the northern part of the old trail neighborhood the entirety of route 240 from jarmon's gap to route 250 the area east of cloverlawn shopping center all the way down to the meacham river intersection and the neighborhood of wickham pond the committee with these scenarios received significant feedback from the old trail community that they considered the entirety of old trail as one neighborhood community not several sub-neighborhoods within a larger community with this feedback in mind uh in an alignment with the guiding principles the committee decided splitting the old trail neighborhood into north and south sections was not in alignment with the guiding principle for keeping the neighborhoods intact also in scenario four which you see here the committee noted that leaving the western ridge foothill
101crossing neighborhood which you see here in this light green color in the brownsville district would not align with the guiding principle of keeping attendance areas contiguous in other words it created an island of students who would attend brownsville that would be completely surrounded by students attending crozet elementary so those scenarios were eliminated from consideration by the committee and at their next meeting the committee approved four scenarios to use to gather community input the first scenarios was scenario two which would move 226 students from brownsville to cross a it includes gray rock wayland's grant and bargaman park route 240 from jarmon's gap to oak drive and the western ridge foothill crossing in wickham pond neighborhoods the next scenario was 2.1 which includes all of those neighborhoods that you saw in scenario 2 but expands the neighborhoods
102around route 240 from jarmon's gap all the way down to route 250. that scenario would have moved 253 students from brownsville to crozet the third scenario includes gray rock includes weyland's grant and bargaman park it includes the northern part of 240 from jarmon's gap to oak drive it includes the neighborhoods of western ridge foothill crossing and whitham pond and then also the neighborhoods from east of cloverlawn shopping center down to the meacham's river that had 245 students uh in that move and then the final scenario that was presented to the public was scenario 4.1 and that again included all of those scenarios that you saw in scenario three but expanded from uh the route 240 neighborhoods from jarmon's gap road all the way down to uh the intersection with route 250 and that was the
103largest scenario that was presented uh to the public with 272 students who would be moving from crozet to brownsville so feedback on these scenarios was received by email a community survey and two community meetings and the survey results indicated that scenario 2 had the most community support with 82 percent of respondents indicating satisfaction with that scenario significant comments on the scenario came from the community members who lived in the southern portion of crozet avenue if we just pop back a slide that's this area right in here those community members indicated to the committee that families actually often use walking trails that go behind brownsville elementary school to walk with their children to this school something that would not have appeared to be feasible simply by looking for a map of that of that area and
104seeing a pretty busy road there on route 240 moving down so uh we did get some significant feedback uh about both of those that the smallest of the scenarios was the uh was the one that seemed to receive the most support and so that community feedback along with discussions about growth and future enrollment projections led the community led the committee to make a further adjustment to the scenarios and this would become their final recommendation to the superintendent uh and so the committee unanimously voted to when they developed scenario 2.2 as their final recommendation to dr haas and this scenario includes the gray rock neighborhood the weylands grant embargoment park neighborhood and also the western ridge wickham pond and foothill crossings neighborhood this scenario moves 219 current brownsville students to crozet elementary school next year and
105using the current enrollment numbers that would shift the crosie population to 529 students in the brownsville population to 517. for each of the scenarios that were considered the committee reviewed the demographic impact this would have on the two schools and as you can see here for most demographic categories there is relatively little impact the one exception is where you see the percentage of students in each school who are economically disadvantaged the percentage increases at brownsville from 12.2 percent to 16.53 percent and decreases it cross a from 19.69 percent to 12.1 percent but what this does is bring the schools into closer balance for this category than previously existed significant concern a significant consideration of the committee was future growth in both schools and i'd like to invite maya kumazawa in at this time to discuss
106enrollment projections with the board thank you dr mclaughlin as we alluded to in our discussion with mountain view projecting for future enrollment has been quite tricky during the time of the pandemic when student enrollment has declined significantly so typically when redistricting decisions are made we look at the current enrollment and apply the number of moving students into future years the problem with this methodology is that we that doesn't necessarily account for students coming back to those neighborhoods that are proposed to be redistricted so a more sound way to look at the data is rather than focusing on looking forward we took a step back and looked at what um our enrollment was two years ago before the before the pandemic began so um what these two tables show is that during 2019 to 2020 if
107those new boundaries had been implemented two years ago this is what the enrollment would have been both at brownsville and prose so if we focus on brownsville first the enrollment at brownsville would have been 570 students had the boundaries been moved two years ago when enrollment was at normal levels that would have brought the percentage of capacity to 75 as opposed to the 68 we're looking at in the current year at crozet elementary if the boundaries had been moved two years ago before the pandemic when enrollment levels were normal we would have 620 students at crozet elementary which represents 93 percent of the new capacity at crozet elementary we use this as a a primary data point and looking at enrollment and what the future years might look like if we return to levels that
108we saw before the pandemic but of course this is as dr mclaughlin mentioned this is a high growth area with a lot of concentrated new development in the crosie and brownsville districts so we also looked at the number of potential the number of developing units in the pipeline applied student yield estimates to those developing units and came up with projections of how many students we might see in those areas those are listed at the bottom of the slide i just wanted to note that a main point of discussion among the committee was the development of the old trail neighborhood this student yield potential represents a projected build out of 1 200 units however in discussions with community development we wanted to make it clear that the maximum build out for that neighborhood is 2 200
109units and then of course ranges are shown because in many of the developments it is it is unknown what the housing unit type will be so on the next slide um we did present a a future projection for these two schools again there's a lot of uncertainty we don't know how many students will return as the pandemic goes on or as the pandemic ends and we don't know which neighborhoods those students will return from and we don't know the timing of that but given that if we applied the redistricting to our status quo enrollment projections and assume that students generally come back to the same rates as they were before the pandemic might see how the enrollment is growing at both schools to come close to their capacity levels thank you thanks maya and so
110with with all of that that we've shared with you the committee came back to the guiding principles and they felt that this scenario 2.2 really ticked off the box for everyone uh they felt that the attendance areas will meet the principle of serving the district for at least three to five and likely five to seven years uh the attendance areas are largely contiguous in this scenario uh they did consider the walk areas as we previously mentioned and made some adjustment based on feedback from the community about that uh i want to give always give a shout out to renee duvall in transportation for her her diligent work on the transportation routes and she's assured us that there will be official transportation routes uh in this scenario and neighborhoods are assigned to the same school we
111did we didn't we weren't able to see huge shift in demographic uh impact uh in this scenario but the one area that that there was some more significant impact we think we made it uh more equitable uh at each school and so as i said the uh the committee made this recommendation unanimously to dr haas and i would like to turn it over to him at this time uh for his formal recommendation to the board uh dr mclaughlin did you want to skip ahead to the next steps first okay sure yep um so so just once you received uh dr haas's recommendation uh the next steps would be to hold the public hearing which we would uh hope to have happen at the january 13th board meeting and then we would look for action from
112the board on the uh on the new boundaries on january 27th so uh thank you very much dr mclaughlin and also ms kumazawa dr mclaughlin was chair as you know the redistricting committee and uh having done that myself and having participated on redistricting committees in the past this uh is the smoothest uh process that i can remember uh being part of with that i listened into all of the meetings on the live stream and uh of course attended the first one and the last one and he did an outstanding job also miss kumazawa i think they shared this this leadership role uh as as partners and they really guided the committee through the process [Music] i want to commend the committee members as well and all the staff that that helped out the there was
113excellent teamwork in the service of students and families and i want to thank all of them because i'm sure their their committee members are listening on the live stream tonight to see how things go and i just want to thank you for your time your critical thinking you brought your heart to the work your empathy and your dedication to the process and at this point i will tell the school board that i have received this recommendation on monday night i endorse it and now i'm passing it along to you for uh for your work thank you thank you dr haas uh for that recommendation and uh just to to wrap up again we'll reiterate that the the next steps for the board would be the january 13th um public hearing uh as an item during
114the the business meeting that night uh and then potentially taking action on this on january 27th one reminder that i want to put in front of the board as well is that within the guiding principles uh you instructed the committee not to consider whether or not to allow existing students to remain at their school uh once the rezoning uh redistricting took place that that was going to be a decision made by the board on a study by study basis and so to provide a quick historical perspective as that may be something you want to consider over the next few weeks i wanted to take a look at our last two redistricting processes in 2018 we had a redistricting at woodbrook and the board at that time decided to allow current fourth grade students and their
115siblings to remain at their current school for one year transportation was provided for students who elected to remain prior to that in 2013 we had a redistricting at agner hurt elementary school and the board at that time allowed current fourth grade students and their siblings to remain at their current school for one year uh transportation for that redistricting was not provided for students who elected to remain uh as you are considering this uh we put up a slide that shows the current number of students who would be moving from brownsville to crozet elementary school by grade level the current fourth graders that you see this 36 number here would be the rising fifth grade cohort for the 22 23 school year and as always if there's any additional information that the board would like as
116part of the decision-making process please let me know and i'll do my best to provide that to you as quickly as possible so i would like to uh thank you for your attention to the presentation and for the time tonight and would be happy to take any questions that you may have thank you dr mclaughlin are there any questions from the board members i don't have a question but i wanted to say thank you for the great work and i i concur with that to to to everybody and staff as well as the members of the uh redistrict redistricting committee i i especially appreciate that last slide that you showed dr mclaughlin because uh it shows that the average number of students in grade levels is 36 and i think the range was from 4
117from 31 to 40. so it's not like we're transferring a whole lot of fourth graders and not so many second graders it seems to have just really panned out beautifully i don't know how could have gotten that much better so thank you and thank you to the committee i want to this will likely cause some consternation within the crozet community um i totally appreciate everything that's getting done and i really love crows elementary um i have a bias there because as miss crummy knows my child went there and i love it um but i i do want i do want the committee to be aware uh and and the board to be aware that we're moving back neighborhoods that got moved the last time and so we need to be aware that that's that's tough
118you know to get moved twice um we need to have have a certain confidence going forward that okay we're not going to keep moving this groups uh because i know that you know uh wayland's grant and um gray rock and barnegan park have been moved already now they've got moved to brownsville now they're gonna move back to crozet um and that that's just going to cause some hurt feelings i think uh so i think we just need to be prepared for that on a positive side all the kids who are moving to crows elementary in the fall will get to see the dancing chicken so that's a good thing i swear to you no matter what happens the dancing chicken will be there when you get to cross elementary and i should point out that
119the dancing chicken is uh his own best pr agent right at this moment and uh i would encourage uh board members to be there for the first day of school uh it's a sight to behold okay so those kids who are being moved those students from uh the neighborhoods that mr oberg mentioned i guess one great consolation is to see the dancing chicken in person right are there any other questions or comments from board members looking to see the dancing chicken plus being a beautiful re-done school right right and i did visit crosay and miss crummy uh probably about two weeks ago so i was assured that the work was moving according to schedule and miss crummy really gave was a good guide out there at cross a so thanks are there any other questions
120or comments so from the board we have to keep in mind that there are two dates to look forward to january the 13th for public um comment on this plan and then january 27th to take action and also to remember kids that might be grandfathered in to one of the two schools so um those are things that we have to keep in mind then as we move forward with making this decision any other questions though mr page i just want to add while miss crummy is still here that she has done an absolutely outstanding job of managing the addition renovation to crozet if you have had a chance to visit that project with the exception of the front of the school all sides of that school are being touched by the renovation the noise level
121the um the vibrations the displacement of different parts of the school are all very hard to manage for a school leader and she has handled that very very well this year and i'm i hope she knows just how much we all appreciate that her committee community appreciates that that's a hard time for a principal and she's done a great job with it true true okay thanks dr house ms crummy is awesome i'm totally biased and i accept that but she's awesome true true hearing no more comments on that we will now take a 10 minute break we'll reconvene at 8 33. it's now 8 33 our meeting is a call back into session we will have our next um item on the agenda the human resources resign redesign consultants report led by dr claire cost
122kaiser dr kaiser thank you mr page good evening board members i'm claire kaiser making sure my microphone's on sorry i'm claire kaiser assistant superintendent for organizational development and human resources leadership as you are aware the human resources department currently serves both albemarle county public schools and the elmoral county government when the decision was made to separate the department into two separate entities to better serve the employees of each organization we embarked on a study to learn more about how to best meet the needs of the school division through the human resources lens since june we have been partnering with with mr david woolwin of the paraclete group to learn more about best practices of school division human resources in virginia and beyond through his team's research and interviews with our internal stakeholders and individuals from
123other school divisions he is here tonight to present his findings and make recommendations for our redesign as we move forward as mr woolwind shares the study's findings and recommendations i believe you will notice the alignment with goal 3 of our new strategic plan equitable transformative resources specifically the strategies associated with achieving objective one our moral county public schools will attract develop and retain the highest quality staff here with us tonight we have mr dan reading our albemarle county public schools human resources director who has jumped in feet first with the redesign efforts and our consultant mr david woolwind of the paraclete group at this time i would like to turn it over to mr woolwine good evening everyone i am very thankful for the opportunity to be able to spend some time with you i've
124had the great pleasure of being able to speak with most of you i think as a part of this process and so uh thank you claire for uh for a quick introduction and uh and dan for your help and uh in putting this together as well so without any further ado i will go ahead and start to share my screen and pull up the report here i think this is the right one yes okay can everybody see that okay so uh we again this is a really unique opportunity and it's kind of a once in a lifetime chance to be able to work with folks to be able to help them really craft something that they want to be able to see we've had the good pleasure of being able to speak with as i
125said most of you we will go through that what you're going to see now is kind of a high level summary of the report that we provided and that you have copies of as well but as far as our process was concerned let's see if we can get going here um we started out with uh really talking to the hr departments uh so specifically the folks that were already assigned uh uh into the school system uh as well as those folks that were in hr that were in the shared uh scrolls as well and the purpose of that was really to understand uh what was going well what was not going as well uh what were some recommendations that they had in terms of really moving forward uh some in terms of what they would
126like to be able to see etc we also had the opportunity to be able to talk to albemarle county public school leadership so we had we met with all of cabinet and met with each one of them and got their comments around how has hr served you well in the past what would you like to see in the future uh what are some things that you feel like that they need in order to be able to support that vision that they that they would have uh and we also had the opportunity to talk with senior leaders outside of of cabinet so we'd be able to talk to principals and some other folks that were in in school leadership as well and then we had the opportunity to visit with some other school systems and we
127went across the state and actually went outside the state as well as i'll share in just a minute but we met with folks at york county at james city county we met with got reports from loudoun county uh fairfax county we talked with folks at uh halifax as well as you know several several other henrico uh several other folks that were out there and basically to really understand uh what they were doing and uh in terms of the the the folks that had already separated out in terms of the hr departments so they had uh a separate hr department with the school system as well as with the county or the city as the case may be because we met with false church i also met with boston uh public schools and and really tried
128to understand a little bit more about them and you'll see a reason for that in just a second uh but really trying to understand again uh what were some practices out there that maybe we might want to emulate what is it that we potentially could uh could be edified from and what we found was is that uh there were a lot of school systems particularly in the state of virginia uh that are very similar to what we do um in in that they have for instance their i.t or their human resource information system uh is is typically as i refer to a frankenstein type of approach they will have a great planes timed up with a uh time and attendance and and then bolted on to a payroll system and so there's lots of different
129systems that would come together uh and and many of the systems that were out there had that kind of thing but there were some that were clearly um a little bit above ground in terms of uh the way that they did things in terms of uh going with some larger systems like oracle and that kind of thing too so uh we learned a lot from them we learned a lot from them in terms of leadership development and some of those kinds of things in terms of what they do but again it was really trying to get our arms around what are we doing now and what is it that we really would like to be able to do in the future so here's some some narratives that i got that i could put very quickly
130in front of you from the hr team what we heard leaders say were keys to success is that we really needed to move to a fully integrated hras or human resource information system versus north frankenstein approach they really felt strongly that they wanted to move from more of the transactional to the transformational role and so uh what that means is is that uh and i'll give you an example for recruiting for instance uh you know i have a vacancy i post a vacancy i advertise for a vacancy i fill a vacancy i keep the the manager informed in terms of uh you know the progress of that uh you know there's an on-boarding process etc etc so a plus b plus c plus c it's a very linear process and a lot of hr has
131been involved in more of the transactional approach they wanted to move to more of a transformational and so what that really means is is that you really become more of a partner in helping forge the human resource strategy and so specifically let me give you an example like for instance with retention we have a retention uh with uh you know a certain group of teachers or or a certain uh class of a classified staff or whatever so how do we address that how do we partner together how do we pull the resources together uh from a from an hr perspective in order to be able to solve initiatives that you have uh that really need to be looked at from a more strategic level and they really want to be able to move that but
132they're frequently caught up in that transactional they wanted to be involved in the process and so uh nothing without me nothing about me without me is really kind of the mantra that we've had we wanted to be able to involve people in the process and we have done that uh clearly as we move through it but as we moved in into the coveted world um the hr roles and responsibilities got a little uh blurred because people were having to fill in and wear so many different types of hats so they wanted to get back to more of a of a clearer role and responsibilities going forward and that should be an outcome that we would be looking for and then communicate communicate communicate this is a group of folks that really like to be involved
133and they like to be understand what's happening and be able to participate in that process interestingly enough the board and senior leadership had similar type of comments and so specifically they saw also a need for a robust hris report but with high quality data at your fingertips so to be able to look at analytics and be able to predict uh in in in advance maybe some things that we might have to deal with in the future going forward or not have to work so hard in trying to describe uh you know the the problems that we have or the opportunities that we have today from an hr perspective uh we also they also felt like that they would like for hr to be both transactional as well as transformational both of them at the same
134time because the you know the trains still have to run on the tracks we still have to get people paid we still have to get uh you know processes done and that kind of thing but we really would appreciate somebody to be able to help be by our side in some of these more strategic initiatives and what role would they play be more of coaches be more of experts in knowing best practices around diversity work environment and bringing in and retaining talent and so it's it's really about being by their side in order to be able to help them uh from a perspective of leadership to be able to move forward and then finally we realized from a from a board perspective and senior leadership that we really needed to equip and grow and develop
135our hr team to mirror some of these things that we're looking to be able to do both in a transformational perspective so having said that let me see the recommendations are really about 11 or 12 specifically the first one there is to review and update policies where commonality plays a key role so we want to make sure that as we move into two separate entities we want to make sure that we understand what those are and to be able to review and update policies in order to be able to mirror that um second is that we would like to be able to submit an rfp for a separate uh comprehensive hras system we have already uh gone out with a request for information so we have an idea about who are some vendors that potentially
136could meet the needs that we have described and potentially their capabilities to be able to do that and so now we will go in a more formal outfit or a formal proposal to actually get quotations and that kind of thing and hope to be able to have that in the next uh the first part of the year and then we want to move to a employee services or human resources redesign which i'll describe here in the next couple of bullets that you will see uh and so specifically uh what that design looks like is to create a new organizational structure uh uh you will see this in just a second there will not be an organization chart uh because we are still uh you know trying to vet that out but really what should the
137organization look like in terms of a structure and how should we prioritize our resources and our hr resources in order to be able to affect the outcomes that you're looking for in a strategic plan and to be able to enable those and so yeah i think you will see that that will we have a design that will really help with that and then i will look at uh what we call an employee service center um which really is a these next two bullets here uh recommendations uh in terms of providing um a customer relationship management software as well as for supporting technology so this is another technology issue that we'll need to have really to be able to support the last bullet that you see on this slide which is really an hr shared services
138model using a three-legged stool and i'm gonna i want to explain that in just a second as i go into that see if i have that as the next slide yes so this is a commonly held uh best practice in terms of of of service delivery and hr uh this is something that's been around for about 20 years now it's called the three-legged stool but basically it really involves up to three pieces here uh one is uh a a group of our hr ex people will be divided up and will be performing in hr expert type of roles and so specifically what this means is is that there will be a group of folks such as the compensation people or the benefits people or potentially even training and development that have a very unique knowledge
139skill set that we need to have going forward we need to have people that know about benefit plans we need to know have people that know about how to do comp studies and that kind of stuff and so there will be a group a small group of hr experts that will be process facing they will be ones that will be really involved in engaging on process and around uh policy and procedure and some of that kind of stuff that really affects that and so there will be a group of people that are hr experts or process facing the second group is going to be something that's unique and this is something that a lot of people in virginia have not seen yet but the city of boston has been implementing this and it's called an
140hr service center and so this is really something that really helps enable the quant or the the more transactional work so it is a group of folks probably four or five people that will get together that will create a an online employee self-service module that can ask frequently asked questions such as for instance how do i apply for finland it will walk you through that and that process and actually have forms embedded in there that you can actually complete those forms and then turn them in and and when you hit click it goes on to your supervisor for approval or cetera cetera same thing with uh with the vacation or those kinds of things or questions that they may have around pay or when when do i get paid next these are all what we
141call uh you know employee self-service type of questions that can be answered electronically that you don't have to engage uh human resources people um in your own face to face however if they do have questions you need to have a group of people uh that are employee facing that also will answer those questions and so there's a call center that they could call in and they can get those questions answered if those are beyond the things that they that they talked about in terms of they weren't able to get their answers as far as the uh frequently asked questions are concerned but then you go back and you have the last one which is leader facing okay and the leader facing ones are typically right now you think of your hr journalists but the hr
142journalists right now have a have a a lot on their plates they do everything from compensation to recruitment to onboarding to coaching to whatever with particular client groups what we're looking at to do here is that there will be a group of folks because we will have the transaction done a lot with this middle stool leg these will be leader facing people that will be assigned to secondary or be assigned to elementary that will help them with their particular issues like uh retention in that particular group or it could be we have we're having a real engagement issue that we need to be able to vet out in terms of doing some employee forums and that kind of thing or it could potentially be employee relations in terms of issues or investigations leader facing groups
143will be the last group that will be in in hr and their purpose is to be the service partners they are there to serve the leaders uh in some of those more strategic outcomes that we're looking for so process facing employee facing and leader facing are going to be the three legs that would be moving forward with so having said that uh that was kind of the structure we're looking at about 24 we're looking at 25 ftes that will be included in this uh they utilize the employee services team to design the roles and responsibilities assigned in redesign so once we have gotten to a point where we've gotten people faces in places which we're really in the process of really nailing that down now those people will start into the process of defining what
144those roles and responsibilities will look like and how we will integrate together and making sure that that model works between those three-legged stools moving over to the right-hand side they will also be responsible for designing and implementing best practice processes in the areas of recruitment compensation retention and diversity inclusion one of the things that we heard uh is that you know we we have a level of recruitment right now but we really need to need to take that up a notch or two and so who are the some folks that are doing that really well and how can we adopt some of those practices into our own practices and include that in the hres systems that we're talking about that would be an example retention and diversity inclusion would also be included in that and
145then finally uh we will be populating the new design with employee services uh team members based on interest and experience and dan redding has already been deep into this he's had conversations with each one of the different hr folks and they they're they're starting to narrow the gap now in terms of who are some faces and how would they actually mirror up to some places uh in in the new model that we have and of course ongoing communication with the stakeholders is going to be key so i mentioned about roles and responsibilities this is kind of how it's a busy slide but this is the kind of thing that the hr folks really want to be able to see so what is different about what we're doing with this is that you'll see a very
146keen focus on the first two talent acquisition and talent retention uh this model that we're pushing more towards and you'll see in an organization structure in just a second is really trying to vet out and capture and retain that talent that we that we need in order to be able to bring the best in class into the classrooms there will be a diversity and inclusion focus and you can see the roles and responsibilities there they will be be the champion around diversity and inclusion they will create a more inclusive and culturally aware community within the school system recruit and develop and talented diverse staff for all positions and then develop a dni plan or diversity inclusion plan for all of the the public county school system and again this would be a strategy that they
147move forward with pop and been you can see those are those are the folks that typically do the things that they have there and and we would absolutely need to have that going forward in the new learning and organization health there will be you know the certification licensure and the teacher and classified staff development but we want to do a lot better job in terms of leader development succession planning career development team member development what you know when you will start to get into some of these engagement surveys is that the more that you have these type of things in you really see people see that you're interested in my career and my development and they it really helps a whole lot in terms of retention it is a big big factor in terms of
148developing people and they really uh really appreciate that so team member mentoring and virtual learning those were all the things in there the next line over you see the hrs technology so we'll need to have hr data needs we'll create a routine and ad hoc reports we'll have metrics and dashboards in order to be able to visually have this data appealing so that you can understand it quickly and be able to do things with it they will accomplish the audits and those kinds of things so you can see we're trying to really spell out how these these folks will be engaged uh the the service partners are going to be really client group oriented but you'll see they have employee relations and investigations third bullet down uh they'll be the conduit for client group needs
149so the client groups will be in interacting through the h to the hr people through these uh through these service partners uh spearhead strategy implementation policy and review et cetera et cetera and then you see the last piece over there which is the hr service center so these are the things that will be roles and responsibilities they will be vetted out in more detail and we have goals already that have been drafted up in terms of what each group would be working on but it's really trying to help operationalize this in a little bit more level so having said that this is a structure and again it's not an org chart but what i would invite your attention to is that you have claire the assistant superintendent of employee services and development and then you
150have uh dan who's going to be on the right-hand side the executive level our director of employee services and support and then you have the director of talent you see that the hr folks are really honed in on either they're on the talent side or they're on the employee support side and we really feel strongly about that because it sends a good solid signal that we're really focusing on developing and attaining our talent but also in really supporting employees whether it be in the wellness or benefits or safety and compliance or with this service center and that kind of thing on the right hand side you see professional development there'll be teacher professional development there'll be staff support staff professional learning professional development and technology and leadership development as well as in certification and licensure
151so we're really trying to bring a more comprehensive 1hr approach and you'll see that in this structure the organization chart will be more detailed from this from here and we'll be doing that as we move forward the proposed timeline is uh first and foremost you see that we have uh the review and adopt and so we're in the process now we've uh math dr haas and others have seen this uh senior leadership has seen this we uh made a covenant with you all to be able to bring this back and inform you about the some of the things that we're working on and how we were planning on doing this uh we're in the process now of budgeting the rfi material uh request proposal for the hras in the 2022 budget we are also looking
152at the employee services design and team design as well as the parameters and so we will be vetting that out as we start putting these faces with places and then the hras and the hr services hr services teams will start to do their work to operationalize things a little bit in the january to march time frame hris will be looked at in terms of the rfp and bringing that home and hopefully be able to make some decisions about what that looks like and then finally the hris is fielded and the and the uh the model is piloted in april to july but it's really test drove uh and goes live in the august to december time frame so that's a very quick summary claire i know you and dan have been champions around this i
153don't know if you want to add some things and see how it takes some questions or whatever i just want to thank you uh dave for the work that you've done on this and uh you know i i'm very excited about taking this and we're working really hard to begin operationalizing it and i know that we're kind of in the the messy stage right now and i'm really looking forward to see what this looks like when it rolls out um there's so much of it that i'm really excited about and really excited about the potential so thank you for your work and uh we look forward to to see what's next with this can i answer any questions okay well thank you mr blowmind thank you very much thank you very much for your presentation
154appreciate your time all right well maybe one thing uh claire i guess uh we'll be we'll be receiving updates on this right so when will that probably be occurring absolutely um what we can do is on a you know every couple of months as part of a business meeting we can just share a kind of a quick update as part of the uh superintendent's um business piece at the very beginning or we can come back as we get closer to total implementation and give you an update um more specifically around our organizational chart and our people and maybe even uh reintroduce the hr team in their in their new roles okay all right thank you one question i did have some questions just about the budgetary side of things because 25 fte is shocking but
155i'm assuming some of that we're already spending on hr and we'll be offset actually actually it is um currently we have 19 in hr but we also have six temporary employees so it actually brings us temporary employees into the the fold okay and then my question would be that i know um the va vea has done kind of some communications with the school board around being upset about the process of re i don't know there was information out there i don't know if you all saw the emails as well where they were saying um they just weren't happy with the switch and i kind of was curious what y'all have done around that or if you've been in communication with teachers and or how we're kind of getting the information out to the public are
156you referring to the payroll clarity project uh i did get the communications around that and then being upset about that but i also saw one that was specific to the hr switch being i'll i'll find it matt and i'll send it to you but i saw one that was specific around us reorganizing our hr department and how that was going to have some kind of negative impact and i didn't know if you all had heard that so it sounds like you had it and i will pass it along and just uh just as a point of reference we meet with the aea leadership every two weeks uh to hear what their concerns are and that has not been brought up during those meetings great that's my primary question is just if we're communicating that we're
157doing this with them because i had seen that yeah in fact i would say they've we've brought it up with them and talked to them about the process to get their you know feedback in those conversations and it's been pretty well received by the leadership so i would be interested to see that okay that's all thank you okay thank you wisconsin um do we have any other business by the superintendent or by the school school board i have one issue mr chair that i'd just like to to bring up and i don't know where to bring it up or how to bring it up so i'm just going to throw it out there um i know that the wiz drama department really got kind of hosed uh from the pandemic because they had spent a
158tremendous amount of their budget to get the license to do the addams family and i think the drama departments do that they have to like get the license to do them and then they use the production to get their money back and we shut down the we shut down the schools the day of their opening performance and so they had invested all the money that they had in their their account and never got to recoup it and so that money's gone they're in a financial straight i am guessing there are other organizations in the school system extracurriculars or stuff like that that might be in the same spot given that we have gotten money from the from the state from the federal government to address losses like that i doubt it would be a whole
159lot of money due to it but i would like to i'd like the board to consider doing that to if there are organizations that were you know put in that kind of position because of the shutdown if we could restore them to where they they would have been it i think that would be an appropriate thing to do okay thanks mr oberg um dr haas could staff sort of work on that to find out how many organizations or groups like the drama club edwas that might be affected by that absolutely i would say that's probably already been addressed and with the funding that we provided to the schools however if if we can do a little research on that and there are groups that have not already shared their concerns with the principal of the
160school uh to get support then we'll we'll make sure that happens okay all right thank you does that sort of address your concern mr ober thank you any other business by either superintendent or school board members mr page i did have a communication from a board member asking me if i would just say a few words about the grading policy that uh there were some some points made during public comment about that so okay um first of all i do want to thank uh thank when we when we receive public comment that's a form of feedback on what hap what's happening in the school system and the changes that we're making um i uh of course anticipate uh that there's going to be issues there's going to be concerns that families have about changes especially
161something as fundamental as changing the way we do grading it is a it's a long-standing practice and it's uh it's a practice where we found that we had a great deal of inconsistency and also practices that are counter to the outcomes that we'd like to see for our for our students having said that whenever you change something as fundamental as grading there's there's going to be concerns about it i did attend the the meeting the family event that ken o'connor presented and i know some board members did as well we had a great deal of positive feedback about it i thought that dr o'connor did a great job explaining all the the nuances of grading and how student learning and motivation are impacted by the the practices that we have in place currently and so
162um also in terms of facilitating the meeting there were a lot of questions that went into the chat and the goal of the facilitator was to be able to group them and ask the questions so that ken could respond to as many as possible given the time constraints that they had so if anyone felt disrespected or not heard i apologize for that that's certainly not the intent of how the meeting was conducted and we did say you know if you have questions please let us know because uh we are building a web page that will contain information including an faq uh about the changes um and in terms of how how we would evaluate the changes there's a there are several ways that we will be evaluating these changes and they all align with our
163strategic plan and i always want to point our school board our staff everyone back to the strategic plan that the board recently approved um one way that we will evaluate our success with these changes and i'll i'll just you know since we since we're ahead on the agenda i hope you don't mind if i just take a few minutes to do this um let's see one way that we we look at our you know we haven't we haven't typically done this but it will be a shift for alma county schools is to actually focus on student achievement that has not been a practice of albemarle county schools for many years and this first objective this first goal in our strategic plan is around thriving students and you can see the strategies that we have in
164place and this is where the grading policy comes into play the guaranteed and viable curriculum ensuring that our that our teachers are teaching the virginia standards of learning and then assessing student progress based on those standards and these are success measures the first one is that our achievement gaps will be closed and we will have standards of learning test results that are better than state averages currently our our history sol scores rank 61st in virginia and when you look at our 1819 results that's prior to the pandemic our math scores are 71st in virginia our reading scores are 50th our science are 71. our writing is 20th and i would submit that writing is in particular in amal county schools is a very feedback intensive activity there's been a lot of work around not just
165putting grades on papers but providing students feedback on their work so that they can improve next time so that that would be more of a success story around changing practices the second thing would be we would reduce our achievement gaps not just have overall improvements in those scores but reduce the achievement gaps for traditionally marginalized students one of the things we see and these aren't anecdotes these are just running through the data you can see that students for example will take math all the way up through algebra 2 to earn an advanced studies diploma you need to take two math courses at the high school level and pass two sol tests the third class would be algebra 2 that has an sol test when i go through reports i will see many many students across
166the demographic groups that will go into algebra 2 earn an a or a b but don't pass the sol test which tells me that they're not getting feedback on the the standards as they make their way through the class a student that doesn't pass an sol test for a class really shouldn't pass the class because they haven't mastered the standards so that they could do well on the test but we do see that and so there are achievement gaps in terms of the results on the sol test and there are also achievement gaps between the grades that we report for these students and the scores that they receive on the standardized tests we should we will also know we're successful when we have consistent grading practices this is part of the board policy is to
167look at our grading practices we we conducted a survey in 2018 where we asked all of our secondary teachers all of our teachers that have signed grades to complete this survey it was required so we we know the data that we have um we see things like uh in 2018 we asked i reduced grades for cheating and that's one that was brought up earlier tonight about half of respondents said they always almost always 8.7 frequently 17.5 sometimes 21 never so you see across the board just vast inconsistencies among our teachers so really then for students would be a luck of the draw as to what kind of grade they might earn in the class by doing the same work as their peer a couple of doors down so what i one way i'll know if
168the great if our changes have been successful is when i look at this and i see i give bonus points for extra credit that should say never 100 because that doesn't show student learning that's that's a change that we've made and that should just be never it should be consistent 100 we should be consistent on all of these aspects of grading that will tell me that we've been successful and i think we can be the other piece that was recently shared with the board that i feel like we can probably share just so you can take a look at it is our panorama survey results that we recently conducted the panorama survey which is a social emotional learning survey and these are current students these are our current high school students we one of the
169questions on the panorama survey or one of the groupings is around rigorous expectations and i would submit that many people would say that in alamo county schools we have rigor i think that's a reputation that we have our students are telling us something different and when you see the responses to these items they are directly related to the kinds of feedback and grades that students receive and you can see among the national database of all the uh school districts that participate in the panorama we're not we didn't do very well with that but here are the questions here are the items how often do your teachers make you explain your answers 59 of our high school students responded favorably to that when you feel like giving up on a difficult task how likely is it
170that your teachers will make you keep trying how much do your teachers encourage you to do your best 67 how often do your teachers take time to make sure you understand the material 58 that's that's the aspect of grading overall how high are your teachers expectations for you 53 now i want to be clear and i say this every time i talk about our grading this is not the fault of teachers this is not this is not each individual teacher not doing a good job or not working hard enough this is because we have never had a systemic approach to how we expect students to receive feedback on their work like most school systems one of the things that ken o'connor says at the beginning of his talks is that this what we're doing right
171now this reform is being tackled across school divisions across the united states because it is universally recognized that current grading practices that most school divisions or virtually all public school divisions have in place are not they're not based on standards and they don't and they really don't foster learning like we would like to achieve and the another piece that was brought up was around cheating and how we deal with it so i felt like i could answer that for the board too and i'm almost done but like i said we got a little ahead and i figured this was good to just share um we do have a student behavior manual uh that outlines different uh i guess you might call them offenses and how they are and this this all comes from uh the
172virginia uh department of juvenile justice they they outline code around student offenses and how you deal with them as a school system we also have latitude around many many of these types of offenses some of them the state says what you have to do but this one for example would be considered a behavior that impedes the academic progress of the student or other students so for example scholastic dishonesty cheating or plagiarism in amal county schools we consider this we have levels of offenses and then we outline how they would be dealt with appropriately by school staff so we say this is level one what that means is if you go up to level one here the way it should be dealt with is by reteaching modeling desired behavior restitution which i think is probably the
173best one when someone's dishonest or they haven't done their work the best thing to do is to allow them to restore themselves loss of school privileges and a student or teacher conference so i feel like those are appropriate consequences for cheating if you give a student a zero for cheating on an assignment you are essentially saying that now you do not have to do anything at this point and you and you may not do anything to restore yourself or to actually learn what you were supposed to learn um and also assigning them to zero and also punishing them in some way i feel like is double jeopardy and um that's not fair it's not not the right way to treat uh a child and uh [Music] i think i have almost covered everything the last
174thing is that this is a board policy um in may of 2020 the school board provided a policy or approved our policy on grading all of the things that we are working on changing are outlined in the policy very specifically what you expect from us to do as your staff so that we can promote a school climate of engagement and have students really learn what they're expected to learn based on the feedback they receive from teachers and we intend i intend to follow this policy and be able to put a check mark next to each one of these so that i know there's accountability for me and my staff to follow through on the kind of environment that you expect for our students which ultimately will lead to equity more equitable outcomes for our students
175because when you have inconsistency and you have practices that don't facilitate feedback for student learning the students who are again traditionally marginalized are the ones who are are the losers in the system the students who come with advocacy and a background of greater cultivation perhaps they win in a system where there is um inaccuracy inconsistency and unfair practices we want to close those gaps make it fair for everyone so i know that was a long answer however i feel like it i have not talked in public about these issues i've had conversations with board members i've had conversations with staff and i feel like you deserve a public explanation and accountability for me for the work that we're doing thank you for your patience thank you for those explanations dr haas yeah thank you doctors
176and you did say that if any of our listeners do have questions the website that's being developed should help and also they can be submitted to staff right yes sir and uh we are also working on a handbook i want to get a group of teachers working on a handbook that provides not just the rules but how to implement the rules for for changes so a lot of success stories out there our grades i've monitoring our student grades i would expect coming back from the pandemic they would be a bit lower across the board in the first quarter they were not significantly i'd say there's about a three percent shift of three percent fewer a's three percent fewer b's they all just kind of shifted over to the right but as minor it's not as
177much as i would have expected and if if i saw alarming uh drastic changes in our grades then i would be really concerned about the change in the policy i'm hopeful that what those grades mean has changed that if a student is earning a b right now or an a or c then it's based on their competency and not uh whether they um have received extra credit or have been getting padded grades for doing homework that doesn't really reflect uh what they've learned but i if believe me if i saw after the first quarter grades that there were significant changes we would take a hard look at this but i'm watching it okay thank you are there any other comments or questions related to that from other board members all right thank you doctors do
178we have any other business from uh school board members any other business if not our december 2nd meeting is adjourned thank you all for attending and thank all of our participants bye everybody