School Board Meeting - August 12, 2021

001i move that the albemarle county public school board go into a closed meeting is authorized by the virginia freedom of information act section 2.2 37-11-a of the code of virginia under subsection 1 for the discussion consideration in our interviews of prospective candidates for employment and the assignment appointment promotion performance to motion salaries disciplining a resignation of specific public officers appointees or employees of any public body and subsection 7 for consultation with legal counsel and briefings by staff members or consultants pertaining to actual or probable little litigation where such consultation or briefing in an open meeting would adversely affect the negotiating or litigating posture of the public body second okay it's been moved by ms carlson second by mr alcaro that we going to close session based on all of the sections of virginia code that

002were cited miss uh johnston could you give us a roll call please mrs lee yes mr alcaro yes dr acuff yes miss carlson yes mr oberg yes mr page yes mission carried okay so we'll now move to the um closed session it is now 6 30. and uh mrs carlson do you have a motion coming out of our closed session mr paige miss carlson is not in the meeting yet all right mr alcaro could you make that motion considering i'm not sure when miss carlson will be here graham i can make it okay i move that the board certify by recorded vote that to the best of each board member's knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from the open meeting requirements of the virginia freedom of information act and identified in the motion authorizing

003the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered in the closed meeting second it's been moved by mrs lee and second by miss del caro that certifying that we only discussed items that were in the motion to go into closed session ms johnston could you please call the roll miss osborne yes mr alcaro yes dr acuff it does not look like she's here miss carlson yes mr oberg yes miss lee yes mr page yes motion carried the motion carries i uh called this august 12 august 12th meeting of the albemarle county school board to order and welcome all of our listeners that might be tuned in to the session we will now have a moment of silence and during this moment i would like to also make sure that we especially remember the events that happened

004here in our community on august 11th and 12th and keep those memories sort of held tight to us so moment of silence please thank you and since we are under ordinance by the county we have to read this into our minutes for the meeting the minutes of this meeting should reflect that this meeting this meeting is being held electronically pressing into 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 streamed live on the alemal county public schools website public comment may be offered through the zoom waiting room feature in accordance with the school board's protocol or by written submission i will now introduce the members of

005our board dr acuff has dr acuff joined us yet she's still trying to log on she's she's having difficulty okay all right miss del caro jono el carro at large miss carlson katrina carlson rio district judy lee judy lee rivanna district dave oberg dave oberman whitehall magisterial district ellen osborne ellen osborne scottsville district and i'm graham page samuel miller district and again we welcome our student rep aj johnson h.a we will now entertain a motion to um approve the agenda for this evening's meeting i move do we approve the agenda second all right move by mr alcaro a second by ms lee that we approve the agenda for tonight's meeting ms johnston could you please call the roll mr alcaro yes miss carlson yes mr oberg yes miss lee yes ms osborne yes mr page

006yes all right the motion carries i still is uh dr acuff's still having problems logging on i see her in the waiting room hang on just okay we need a motion to approve the uh the consent agenda remove the motion and move that we approve the consent agenda is there a second a second mr alcaro second by ms leader we approve the consent agenda any discussion on the motion if not ms johnston could you please call the roll dr a cuff yes ms carlson yes mr oberg yes miss lee yes miss osborne yes mr alcaro yes mr page yes mission carried motion cares all right thank you our next item on the agenda is a spotlight on education and we'll be led tonight in that by dr acuff doug dayco thank you chairpage i apologize

007in advance if i freeze i've sent a copy of it to mr el carro so he might if i freeze all the way out then maybe he can pick up the pieces but i think it was on may 7th 2020 nearly 40 school board meetings ago the acronym covered first agenda our staff and our broader community has been a board and for our entire school division the good news is that while there has been some 185 confirmed cases of covid among our student staff and the school school there have been few cases of virus transmission inside our schools today nearly three out of four of our eligible students are fully vaccinated and in the first few weeks of our vaccination clinics last spring nearly 2 000 of our employees received vaccines in little over one

008week we will open our schools to more than thirteen thousand students with the confidence that the mitigation strategies and practices we have implemented relating to cleaning cleaning air quality spacing and masking are under continuous review as well as new policies being considered all are designed to keep our students and staff as safe as possible and to permit in-school learning an important resource for these achievements has been a volunteer advisory panel of medical experts who have unselfishly donated their time and ex keeping our educational community safe for example they review our mitigation plans and strategies for sufficiency they provide real-time evidence-based data and information that allows us to deal with a myriad of challenges they support our vaccination efforts including volunteering at our clinics and communicating with our families they join public meetings like this one

009to discuss covert protection practices they directly support our school nurses on triage decisions and they are nearly always available to deliver ongoing counsel to school administrators and to the members of this board as we continue to navigate the challenges of covid i'd like to publicly recognize this superb team of medical experts which includes doctors jeff vergalas paige perriello and carlos armengal before asking each of our guests to say a few words i know we will be sending letters of appreciation to each of you and to the members of our student health advisory board i want to tell you how grateful we all are for your public service and for the lives you have helped protect against the cobia 19 virus we have a covet update uh shortly on our agenda but we will welcome some

010thoughts from our medical experts on the current challenges we face dr vigalist would you like to go first i would thank you guys very much hopefully everybody can see and hear me without any problem uh dr acuff that was a wonderful introduction and i am you know probably would like the first thing for me to say is to kind of give it give it back to you guys and say that i have had the i guess i would use the word privilege but the unfortunate privilege over the last year and a half of advising multiple uh organizations that deal with kids both in this state and in other states uh and i am not just saying that because i'm on this on this on the school board right now but i can't begin to tell

011you how impressed i am with you guys in the superintendent's office especially uh all the way down to the school nurses uh and a big big thank you to eileen gomez who is a massive asset to this county uh and to the school district and i there's i can't even begin to continue on and on um i absolutely believe that you the reason that some of the success and most of the success that you guys were able to have a lot last year with coveted mitigation is because of the team that dr haas has uh on down and and i'm not i promise you i'm not saying that i've just been i've been dealt with a lot of other organizations that don't nearly have uh the logistics put together um i've had the privilege of

012being able to address this group on a couple of occasions and obviously every time i'm kind of known to saying what what do we know and what do we don't know uh because as we go along in this pandemic i think one of the important things is is that the science changes and it changes as we learn more and more information as it goes on um there's a couple of big key points that i want to remind us about that we learned last year as i kind of set up my colleagues dr perriello as well as dr armengal and one of the biggest things that i think i want everybody to remember that is the statistics that dr acuff put forward in the beginning there were almost 180 cases of covet in the school district

013last year among staff students and uh and other contractors that worked uh that led to over 500 individuals being quarantined for safety i remember though we had virtually no secondary spread last year none all right and more importantly we had definitely no secondary spread from other students to other students there was a lot of fear going into the school year last year that we would see that schools were a big super spreader area or a big area that we see especially like when we see with influenza that would spread disease and the fact of the matter is is that it is the skills and the mitigation strategies that were put in place here in acps that was able to create the abilities for schools to be safe we cannot prevent disease from coming into school

014i wish we could that would put me out of business as a physician very quickly um however what we can do is that we can prevent it from spreading and i think you guys are a testament to that i would like to say that acps is the best in the country uh but thankfully the science would also back up that that was true across all school districts that we were able to see now that you are going to find isolated incidences in various areas across the country that uh struggled uh and found outbreaks but we are seeing time and time again from many well done and well controlled studies that if the proper mitigation strategies are put in place uh that success can be had and i think that's probably the biggest lesson that i

015want kind of everybody to continue to understand is that we know we can control this within schools we have the tools do it you have the team in place to be able to do it uh and you have a huge huge group of volunteer uh you know people that are willing and supporting you every step of the way um finally i want to leave you kind of with a glimpse of what we all know that we're dealing with right now which is this concept of how the delta variant changes changes the facts a little bit um as a quick 30 second aside we are used to variants in viruses variants and viruses is not an uncommon thing i we this is the reason that you have to get a flu shot every year is because

016the virus mutates every year and we're dealing with a new strain uh covid uh the sars kobe 2 virus doesn't mutate quite as fast but there has still been over multiple thousands of variants that have been identified of this virus across the world uh why we hear of certain ones that get called is because it becomes a quote variant of interest and that it grabs hold it seems to be something that does something a little bit different uh and that's where we end up getting the alpha the gamma the delta uh it's kind of a similar concept to how we deal with uh tropical storms and hurricanes to some degree that when it becomes an interesting one it's something that we track a little bit more closely what we've been finding about delta is that

017its little niche is that it has extreme contagiousness uh and that is the thing that we have been dealing with in public health circles is that it seems to be uh drastically more contagious than the other variants that have come before it thankfully we also have a lot of good evidence both taking from states that are you know much worse shape than we are in addition to uh other countries that are about three to four weeks ahead of it that it doesn't seem to be especially in children and young adults causing any more significant illness uh and that's an important patch to kind of remember is that we know as a general rule that is more contagious but we are not seeing significant more illness we are seeing a significant higher number of illness but

018that's because we are seeing more and more children uh and that's uh mainly because of unvaccinated as well as dealing with the fact that um it's spreading a little bit easier right now but i want to understand that this is not a new disease uh it is not something that we are all of a sudden seeing things that we cannot do for it and much more importantly as i'm gonna kind of toss this now to dr perriello is that the mitigation strategies that we have in place work wonderfully for it as they work for any respiratory virus that we really have uh and so that's the kind of key to understand is that in our mindset the delta variant does not change the outcomes that we think that we would be able to have in

019schools uh but it does put a onus on us to continue to stay focused on the strategies that we put in place as a school district so i'm going to leave it now to my uh partner and colleague dr perriello and again i i want to thank you guys for the opportunity to help uh and much more importantly to say that this is uh you know kind of the start of something that will continue to always have your back and always be able to assist in any way that we can thank you all thank you all for having us and just echo dr vergales's um thanks it's really meaningful to us as pediatricians that you all have included us in this process um uh this is you know kind of what we do every day

020and i think elmer county was one of the first school systems to reach out and really start having pediatricians help and and we've been grateful and i think the partnership has been particularly valuable um one of the great things is dr vergales just outlined is that we got to experience last year and learn about what mitigation strategies work um i think that elmer county schools were maybe the first to go ahead and put out their universal masking this year which was incredibly beneficial to have that out there we think it's incredibly important particularly as we go into the delta variant time where we know contagiousness is such a factor and we were able to learn last year that masks really do work to keep our kids safe our staff and teachers safe and keep our

021schools open and i would say as pediatricians that the most important thing to us and we appreciate that you all have had this on the forefront as well is to have kids have as many in-person days of school this year as possible these mitigation strategies are going to allow us to do that so you know masking the ventilation efforts that the school system has gone to um using some distance being outside whenever you can um of course hand washing and some basic hygiene things um as well as vaccination for as many 12 and up folks in the school that we can have all those things together are really going to be incredibly useful we all hope particularly in our high schools where everybody in the high school is able to be vaccinated that we can

022start talking about something different at some point but we are clearly not in that moment um and we are really grateful um for this great set of mitigation strategies going into the into the new year um i think dr armagal is going to talk a little bit about vaccine page knot if you can hear me okay great i'm sorry i'm having some technological difficulties uh my apologies and i don't have a camera which i very much dislike but i just wanted to let everybody know on the board that we're very appreciative uh thank dr aka for her very nice words uh it's very uh appreciated i just wanted to mention that one of the tools that we have in our toolbox this year that we really didn't have until really late last year is the

023vaccination i know everyone who has not had one is concerned about the safety and the fact that it came so fast but this vaccine has been a miracle really it was developed in under a year it was developed with very good science and i don't know of any vaccine that's ever had so many doses given in such a short time i would say over 200 million doses right here in the united states and thus far it's proved to be rather safe um and i just want to underscore to the families out there who've been a little reluctant that they should go ahead and get their vaccine it's really important uh it's the pandemic has become a pandemic of the unvaccinated if you look at the hospital numbers it's clear that 98 to 99 of those

024being admitted to the hospital are unvaccinated the same is true of those who are dying and uh just in the last two weeks or less the number of patients admitted to the uva hospital has doubled and i don't see an end to that i think it's going to get worse before it gets better and the way to prevent that is for as many people as possibly can get their vaccine of course not everyone can get a vaccination the current vaccine is authorized for use in kids 12 and up the one that we use in that age group is the pfizer vaccine which is a two dose vaccine it's given three weeks apart it's available pretty much anywhere that you want to get it including numerous doctors offices the health department numerous mobile clinics uh they'll

025even come out to your home and do it at your home if you have an inability to get around and that can be [Music] arranged through the health department so there there's really uh i think we've tried to remove as many obstacles as possible to getting the vaccine everyone is curious about when the children under 12 will get vaccinated we are as well we're fortunate at our office that we're participating in the study for the pfizer vaccine in that age group we have a little bit of an inside on that and unfortunately on unlike what you've seen in the press here lately we do not expect to see authorization of the vaccine in the kids under 12 until december the the fda has requested a four to six month period of data collection and we

026can tell you that the kids who were enrolled in the study in that age group did not complete their series until uh early to mid july and thus if you count four to six months from there that that takes you into uh early winter i'd like to think it would come faster and sooner and maybe something will happen to uh allow that but realistically i think we're looking at early winter before we're vaccinating the kids under 11. um and so uh uh i think as i said earlier this is one more tool in the toolbox uh the way to prevent spread in the schools is to continue using all the tools in the toolbox uh and that includes all the mitigation strategies that dr perriello has uh mentioned already plus using the vaccination where we

027can i'll return it back to you all thank you doctors vergalas periello and armand gaul we are all in the business of keeping our kids healthy and providing an environment where they can learn in school this year and we thank you very much for your ongoing support and expertise we couldn't do it without you thank you very much i'd like to add my thanks to dr vicalis dr perry hello and dr amen goff on behalf of the alamo county public schools we really appreciate the partnership with you and are there any questions for either of our three pediatricians i i'd like to thank dr perriello for the video that she did uh for all memorial county public schools um people i know who have seen it and i've seen it um you know we're very

028appreciative of it and uh it gave comfort where comfort was being looked for so thank you so much thank you and my colleague dr armigal did it in spanish as well so i think that was that's right i did see that i didn't realize that was him thank you doctor i appreciate it are there any other questions or comments for our pediatricians if not thanks again for all that you've done for us and for also appearing tonight and giving us a report so thank you all so very very much next we have announcements by dr haas or his staff good evening uh mr page and amal county school board we do have three announcements um let's see i think we'll start with the um an update on the new teacher academy and our hiring update

029from dr kaiser or i see waving i saw ms collins came up first so i think she's supposed to go first i apologize ms collins is going to give us a wrap-up on our summer programming thank you dr haas good evening i'm debbie collins deputy superintendent we wanted to share some final information from our summer learning programming that occurred during july our average weekly attendance for our elementary students was 1 360 students was like with our highest numbers in our primary grades k and 1. our weekly average for middle school students was 685 students which is approximately 300 students more than we served at our middle schools in the past years our highest attendance numbers were in the sixth grade for our high schools we had approximately 450 students earn a new credit and 315

030students recover credits from the 2022 school year while i know that numbers tell one story i want to share with you some pictures that show the enthusiasm and gauge learning that occurred over the summer i think jennifer will share a video with you right now [Music] so [Music] i'd just like to echo the last slide that you saw thank you to our teachers staff and partners for a wonderful summer learning opportunity for our students and thank you to the communications department for the pictures in the video this information will be posted on our summer learning webpage thank you thank you ms collins i really appreciate that and i believe our next announcement is from dr kaiser regarding a wrap-up on new teacher academy and a hiring update thank you dr haas and thank you board

031members it is my pleasure to come to you tonight to talk to you about one of the most exciting things that i always look forward to each year and that is when we welcome our new teachers to our new teacher academy beginning on tuesday of this week we welcomed about 180 new teachers to albemarle county public schools in mta during these four days our teachers are introduced to both their schools and the school division these teachers have had the opportunity to learn about the priorities of the school division to include an introduction into the goals of our new strategic plan during the division part of nta the teachers have participated in a number of different activities to help them learn about acps curriculum and related instructional resources that they will be able to use with

032their students they've been introduced to our culturally responsive teaching model and they've learned about technology that they can use to integrate into their lessons two consultants will be have joined or will be joining us for nta mr dan mulligan joined us yesterday and today to provide resources and strategies to engage students in learning and on friday dr sean woodley a motivational speaker will share ways to connect with students in learning i would like to thank mr page for his warm welcome to the new teachers on tuesday and to the lead coaches equity specialists learning technology integrators and professional development staff for the work that they have done to plan and deliver a great introduction into elmoral county schools with that i'm also going to transition to just a very brief uh hiring update uh one

033of the things that we will do is in a future board meeting the human resources team will come and give a much more detailed look at the hiring for this current school year so i as i shared with the new teacher academy information we've hired about 180 new teachers at this point we still have about 18 more to hire prior to the start of the school year and our principals are working hard to fill these positions with highly qualified teachers and i do anticipate that most and i'm hoping all of these positions will be filled as we begin the year with students this is the first year that we have been noticeably touched by the national teacher shortage we are seeing much smaller than typical job pools across all levels and content areas and very

034unusually we've seen drops in applicants for elementary teaching positions as well as english and social studies teachers all of those areas are ones where we typically have very robust job pools hard to fill positions as per usual include special education world language and science teachers i will say though even with the smaller job pools we have been higher able to hire an incredibly talented and diverse group of teachers who we know will provide rich learning experiences for our students we also have hired a number of new employees in our support services departments but like we've seen with the teachers we are also feeling the impact of smaller job pools as we continue to work to fill positions for school nurses and teaching assistants for bus drivers for child nutrition building services and edep edep staff

035hiring and training is ongoing and we are hopeful that our vacancies in these areas will be minimal as we begin the school year as i said this was intended to just be an overview for you and i look forward to sharing more information with you in an upcoming meeting all right thank you very much uh dr kaiser and then we just have one more brief announcement about our transportation department from uh the schmidt thank you good evening so our have an exciting announcement our school bus fleet is going to look a little different next year through a program with the virginia department of environmental quality we have been awarded funding to purchase two electric school buses so that's very exciting i want to share my appreciation to john coles who was instrumental in preparing that

036application and also jim foley who has really led and advocated for this initiative for some time so they will be purchased next year all right thank you very much miss schmidt and i feel like it's really important with uh since we've talked a little bit about our new teachers i just want the board to know that probably the most exciting day for me uh every summer is when all of our teachers all of our veteran teachers join with the new teachers coming back and i'm super excited about that and i believe all of our new teachers should know that they're joining a teaching staff that ranks among the very best in virginia according to the niche rankings based on rigorous analysis of academic and student life data from the us department of education along with

037test scores college data and ratings collected from millions of niche users our teachers in alamo county schools consistently earn the grade of an a so i'm really proud of all of our teachers i am super excited that you are coming back on monday and um new teachers you're joining uh the ranks of outstanding teachers here in el mall county uh thank you very much mr page thank you dr haas miss collins and dr kaiser are there any questions on any of those announcements all right if not we are moving to public comment vice chair carlson i'm going to 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 to hear from

038albemarle county residents and community members as authorized by ordinance of the county of albemarle the school board will hold its meetings electronically during the coven 19 pandemic the school board is still committed to encouraging public comment and so for this reason there will be two ways for the public to provide comment first as always written comments may be submitted to the school board clerk prior to the start of the meeting will be given to all of the school board members for review second actually i should say and also you can email us you can always email us and either email the school board directly the members are as a group and then second or third as long as the school board holds its meeting electronically members of the public wishing to provide public comment during

039the meeting may sign up online by 2 pm the day of the meeting tonight we have 18 speakers and they've all been notified that the speaking time has been reduced from three minutes to two minutes so speakers will be notified when they reach the one minute mark the notification is just me holding up a finger finger so look out for it and then their comments will conclude when they reach two minutes so before electronic public comment commences i will try to announce the three speakers at a time and i believe we'll be letting them into the room as they're getting prepared to speak so if you are following on the live feed there's a little bit of a delay so please be paying attention to if you're getting let into the room and turn off

040your live feed once you're in the meeting so that you're listening to it as it's happening that's caused issues in the past so speakers during the meeting are those submitting grant comments should state their name and address our magisterial district our school further speakers should try to limit comments or should limit comments to those matters that are relevant to school board governance are the operations of the school division lastly 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 with that we'll move over to the sign up sheet and i have the first three speakers as joe rice nikki aithy and mary murzadzewski so joe rice i will see if i see him

041in here i'm here can you hear me i can i'll go ahead and start your time sure hi my name is joe rice and i live in the ravana district i am speaking as a concerned parent a civil servant and a citizen the data i am providing comes directly from the latest cdc bdh and brhd data portals my wife and i have three children in acps schools and we have been virtual schooling since it was made available to us last school year we understand the importance of children being in school for social and mental health development and last spring we were very much looking forward to attending school this fall as vaccinations were increasing and coveted case counts were falling however that was then and this is delta in the last few weeks organizations have

042had to pivot in response to rapidly increasing covet cases in our district as parents we were once again concerned about the prospect of returning to school with the more contagious delta variant taking hold in our community we were pleased that the virtual school option was made available once more in case we changed our minds but like other families we did not want to make a rash decision in response to early rising numbers when acps sent us the email on july 30th giving us seven days to decide the schooling future for our children the rate of cases was 43 per 100 000 persons as of today only 13 days later that rate has more than doubled to 93 cases per 100 000 persons for the entire month of july the total coveted case count for albemarle

043county was 127 averaging four cases a day we are only 12 days into august and we have easily eclipsed that total standing at 168 cases and averaging 14 cases a day a 250 increase this morning government county registered its largest single day covet case count since april 21st in light of recent reports that one acps does not track staff vaccinations and has yet to mandate vaccinations for its employees who are interacting with our unvaccinated and highly vulnerable children and two that the state requires all students that wish to physically attend schools to do so in pre-pandemic form full-time five days a week we hope that you consider having the virtual school option open and available without limitation throughout this delta crisis and until a vaccination is available to our vulnerable public under 12. thank you

044thank you for those comments mr rice the next speaker will be nikki hi i'm nikki athy from the samuel miller district good evening oh let me turn my video i offer four requests for your consideration i ask the board to reject the transgender policy as written it is not written in policy language policy should clearly convey responsibilities and responsible parties as well as boundaries for each currently by not conforming to any policy standards it cannot offer protections to any party not to students not to teachers not to staff and certainly not to parents policy quality is not a trivial nitpick as a corporate board ensuring proper and enforceable policy is one of your primary duties you must reject this policy as it will open incredible liability and confusion in acps and in families i asked

045the board to completely rewrite the policy including only what is covered not covered in other policies and that which is required by law and to hold open working sessions with the community in its development i asked the board to evaluate in detail how the administration is handling community input the scope and scale of changes put forward this summer are staggering and acps has paid little more than lip service to true community engagement we share so many of the same goals that i am confident that there is a middle ground on many issues finally i asked the board to reject the renewal of the virginia school board association contract acps has outsourced almost all of its policy writing to an outside organization which leaves us over 320 policies that are almost exact duplicates of what are

046found in other counties given vsba policies are almost always always on the consent agenda with virtually no discussion the sba has a powerful voice in this locality albemarle county and the city of alexandria for example have different policy needs if their policies are almost identical because of vsba thank you so much for those comments miss ap the next speaker let me stop the timer um will be maria murzujuski marie excuse me you can see her connecting to audio i believe give her a second the three speakers after marie will be bill love david stoddart and donald webb okay so miss murjajuski if you can hear me we're gonna move to the next speaker and if you get connected to the audio during that time um i'll loop you back in so i see bill lug

047connecting to audio now can we just say that when i ran for school board i didn't envision this being part of part of my role the technical side okay the love is on so mr love if you're ready to provide comments i can go ahead and start your time all right thank you um my name is bill love i live at 2659 hydraulic road and i'm here tonight to speak in support of changing the name of jack jewett middle school i lived just down the street from the school actually actually within walking distance and i was a member of the naming committee that looked at this issue we were told as a committee we had two criteria to apply to any individual that the school was named after the first criteria was did the person

048make contributions to the community or contributions of state national or worldwide significance clearly jewish met that uh requirement that criteria his ride in in 1781 at age 26 by the way saved jefferson and the legislature from being captured or worse by british troops he also served in the virginia militia for five years and rose the rank of captain it's a different story with the second criteria did the person's personal and professional conduct exemplify the division's current values we know that the year after his ride in 1782 jewett moved to the western part of the state he lived out there for 10 years until 1792 and that area became part of kentucky and he lived there for another 30 years so in the 40 years after he left here we know that for most of his

049for that period he was a slave owner a census data show that at one point toward the end of his life he owned as many as 25 slaves he farmed and he used enslaved labor to work in the fields he owned a distillery which was managed by slaves and the slaves built a new home for him in kentucky in 1797. so the committee looked at all of these factors decided there was clearly no way to reconcile the ownership and enslavement of human beings with the current division's current value so we recommended a different name and i'm looking forward to hearing dr haas's recommendations tonight thank you thank you so much for those comments mr love so i'm going to check back with marie see if she can hear us hi can you hear me yes

050i'm sorry we're traveling and i'm going to rest stop i apologize that's all right sorry about that forgive me um are you all ready can i speak yep go ahead and start here great thank you okay um thank you for taking the time guys to listen to my concerns would you each please consider them before voting on this new policy um the members were promised um of your community that if we emailed you guys with very specific questions about the transgender policy that answers would be posted and that has yet to happen okay so here's the questions i'd love answers to number one how do you plan on making those children who are not transgender some may call cisgender feel comfortable who do not want to go into the bathroom with another student of the

051opposite biological sex as it stands there seem to be two options that acps policy gives okay number one have kids that are not transgender continuing to go into the bathroom feeling incredibly uncomfortable mr alcaro mr oberg and mr page i'm not sure if mr haas is here or not still but i wanted to ask you specifically would you honestly feel comfortable sorry excuse me if you were in the middle of using the urinal when a biological female walked in how can we possibly ask children to do that the other option that i can foresee happening is have these students like my own child that would not feel comfortable feel singled out and made to go into a separate bathroom and wait for the likely subsequent bullying that will result and i'm not saying this to

052be fresh it will happen this part i can almost certainly say is going to happen these students will likely be labeled transphobic misogynistic sexist my own child receives such bullying calling him those exact same words by another student what could cause such a student to cause them those ask him call him those things well it was very simple he said that when he was asked in class by another student in an open discussion by his history teacher another student asked him what do you think what do you believe about transgender students he said i believe god made two genders male and female okay even his very liberal teacher that he really loves and we all respected mr west went on and on and on to tell the students that he had to stop the conversation

053but that if they disagreed with another student that he honestly hoped they would speak in the way that peter did guys if that doesn't speak volumes somebody on the opposite spectrum whether it's liberal conservative telling somebody else how you spoke even though we feel differently was so respectful i mean yes sorry your time is up it got reduced to two minutes i don't know if you got notice of that oh sorry okay shucks okay um feel free to send or email us what you have left it looks like you have prepared yeah sorry yeah thank you yeah so the next speaker will be david stoddard donald uh followed by donald webb and then randy zacherson so let me see if mr stoddard is on i believe he's connecting to audio right now mr start stoddard

054are you on i would wager that he is the per yep okay are you there i am here now thank you very much appreciate your time do i begin right now you can go ahead and start great thank you uh my name is david stoddard i live in the scottsville district my wife teaches at mountain view and i've had two children go through the albemarle county public schools and graduate from monticello high school i'm an episcopal priest and director of church of our savior i'm here to state my strong support for the proposed transgender policy and for all efforts to care for transgender and non-binary students in our schools in my faith tradition in our baptismal covenant we promise to respect the dignity of every human being every human being it is a fact that

055transgender and non-binary students attend our schools and they deserve to be accepted and respected as they are just like everyone else i know from talking to the gender expansive people in my own parish how vulnerable they are to being hurt and mistreated by people who scorn or despise them and we see that reflected in the grim statistics that show how often these people are the victims of violence such hatred and intolerance has no place in our schools our schools should be safe places for every single student places where they are respected for who they are and where they can learn and grow i understand that this involves some changes in our school policies for some it demands a real change in outlook but dealing with everything from pronouns to bathrooms is essential if we're going

056to create a safe and caring environment for everyone and where there is resistance to that we need to meet it with love and education so that we can overcome any intolerance that is rooted in ignorance and a refusal to accept the human reality of gender expansive people my heart hurts for all those kids who have been bullied for being who they are for all those kids who feel isolated misunderstood and afraid but i am grateful for all those working to make our schools more caring and inclusive and i urge the school board to do the right thing and support policies that will make it possible for all our children to learn and thrive in schools that are nurturing and safe thank you thank you for those comments mr stoddard the next speaker will be donald

057webb and we'll check and see if he's on he's not in the waiting room okay i'll mark him and try again at the end so he'll be followed by randy zacherson let me mark him on my sheet real quick i see someone connecting to audio but i can't see what their name is so that's randy zackerson is it i'll give him a second to connect the three speakers who will come after that are going to be daniel um mays nicholas nacie and michelle cox with her son i don't know if she gave the name of her son lucas mulder mullenberg so mr zacherson is still connecting so we'll just see who connects first daniel or randy mr zacherson i see you're connected to audio it's your turn if you are ready to go okay mr

058zacherson i'm gonna skip you but we'll come back to you right after the next person because i also see daniel mazon and i believe he's connected to audio so mr mays if you're ready to go you can start your comments anyone who wants to speak who's on he's one of the public speakers please feel free to start okay now we have nicholas nacey joining me mr nacy if you're ready to speak you can go ahead and do your comment guys i swear i'm trying here for those listening on live stream i'm just going to say this one more time i think what happens is there's a delay when you're watching the live stream versus what's going on and you kind of have to have the audio of this on versus the live stream i think

059might be what's causing a little bit of the lag so mr zacherson mr mays our mr nacy all three of you guys are in the zoom and it says you're all connected to audio and if any of you all are ready to go now would be the time okay now i get it okay it has to do with that there's a window over the button so okay sorry about that it is all right okay thank you i uh i i thought i had the other one shut up but um okay so again this is a bizarre way to do this again appreciate the opportunity to talk uh it's uh uh it's very difficult to communicate with the board and i don't know if that's by intent or just the way it is uh uh it

060seems like uh the board has done a lot just to avoid listening to the parents that may not be the way that you see it but it certainly is a perception out here that by continuing to hold zoom meetings rather than in-person meetings by not publishing minutes uh on your website as i think is required by law parents don't know what's going on you're passing a number of very controversial bills or i mean policies and uh there's a lot of county citizens and parents that are are quite upset i don't know if you sense that or not you have to almost be uh pretty um pretty pretty naive if you don't know that there's a lot of angst out here among the citizens and and the parents there are other counties that have looked at

061the the same transgender policy there's nine counties that have actually rejected it uh russell county has put together a a very comprehensive review of it and find finds out that uh these uh these transgender policies uh basically violate the first amendment 14th amendment uh virginia constitution a number of of things and the way you're rushing in without parent feedback uh it just uh kind of uh feeds the fact that you don't care about what the parents are saying uh why don't you slow down have some actual real meetings with the parents and the citizens uh let them talk uh and let them express their concerns uh i i mean i feel blessed i won the i won the the free speech uh lottery today and i get to talk for two minutes but you know

062what no mr zackerson your two minutes is up i rest my case uh you don't want to listen to us thank you i thank you so much for providing your comments so that we could listen to them the next speaker is going to be daniel mays there you are hey there uh i agree with zach except i will say the zoom meeting is saving me on gas money so i appreciate that uh so my name is daniel mays i'm a resident of the white hall district i'm speaking today to voice my opposition to the anti-racism policy masked mandates and the transgender policy the anti-racial racism policy is blatantly racist it's un-american and it creates a systemic it creates systemic criticism rather than fighting it for example if a black student correctly defies a teacher in

063saying he does not believe he is oppressed and he is the master of his destiny it seems a teacher would under acps's anti-racism policy and curriculum tell them otherwise would it mirror teachings with staff around the courageous conversations about race book study will our children be taught that they are either oppressors or oppressed i'm a guest i'm against masked mandates simply because it should be up to the individual to decide if he wants to wear a mask or not regarding the transgender policy among other things i strongly oppose the school system deciding they can withhold information from parents really pretty important to me that that not happen what will the school system decide to withhold from parents next i'm also against biological males especially males with clear physical advantages competing against biological females in female

064sports it's unfair since it could prevent biological females a chance to compete anyone who's played sports understands this what should parents expect in terms of future curriculum changes at the elementary level if those changes are in the future plans how will parents be made aware and given a voice i once again encourage the scoreboard school board to consider everyone's viewpoint because y'all means all thank you so much for those comments daniel welcome the next speaker is going to be nicholas nacey who i see on and i see his video hi mr nacy hi my name is nick nacey i live in the white hall district i would like to voice my support for the acps policy on the treatment of transgender and gender expansive students and i believe that the policy should be approved by

065the board tonight none of the aspects of the acps transgender policy should be controversial there's extensive research about the biological origins of gender identity and the difficulties that transgender students face in our society policies on such a nuanced topic as transgender youth need to come from taking into consideration the best available research and practices from the fields of education biology psychology and medicine i'd like to thank those who worked on the policy for making decisions based on the research in accordance with the law in the state of virginia and with the best interest of all acps students in mind i think it's unfortunate that some in our state instead think policies should be based on sources such as conspiracy theories blog posts biblical verses taken out of context something said on social media extremist television

066pundits or outdated research from the 1970s it's a sad commentary of our time that grown adults in our community cannot tell what information is reliable and what is not my sincere hope for acps is that you can help teach our children to do better than this some parents have expressed concern about the aspect of the policy regarding parental notification of a child's gender identity at school where i think what's troubling isn't the wording of the policy but rather that such wording is needed in the policy it should be heartbreaking to all of us that lgbtq children might feel that they can't come out to their own parents because they fear physical violence psychological abuse or being kicked out of their home we as parents should all embrace our children for who they actually are the

067issues surrounding transgender tillburn may seem new and different to some people i understand that but i implore those of you who may be listening to explore your own feelings at a deeper level try to learn more about the issue from respected sources and not from misinformation campaigns thank you school board thank you for those comments mr nacy the next speaker will be michelle cox along oops you finished early um the next speaker will be michelle cox along with her son followed by paul henkel and then lisa klein ms cox if you're ready thank you my son is not able to be here my name is michelle cox and i live in the scottsville district and i have two children in the acps i have taken great care to read the proposed transgender policy and updates

068a number of times and submitted my concerns in writing but with this latest update i still have remaining questions and it seems to me that because it's such a difficult topic that you as a board are trying to rush through and get it approved as quickly as possible this is not what we elected you to do we put our trust in you to uphold the opening statement of the transgender policy which states it is the policy of acps to maintain a safe and supportive school environment for all children free from harassment intimidation bullying and free from discrimination so i'd really like you to answer my question why are you rushing so much to complete this you ask parents to complete surveys on after school programs lunch choices and whether or not we want virtual school

069but not once i've sent out a survey to any parents asking what we think of this new policy why not gather more data this is going to be literally life changing for the majority of acps students for the benefit of very very few and i think that when you single out one group for special treatment individualization you are by definition discriminating i think it will be discrimination against my ninth grade student when you asked him to be put in a locker room restroom or overnight accommodation with the biologically opposite sex you will not be protecting his feelings of discomfort and intimidation in that situation in fact we who elected you to protect and support him will be producing harm with this policy as it's written i challenge you to consider what it means in your

070policy that all students will be protected from discrimination please protect students that want to be treated as they are biologically assigned by their dna and by their creator all means all protect all the students thank you for your time and consideration thank you for those comments miss cox might i say they were right on the two-minute part marked perfectly time the next speaker will be paul henkel followed by lisa klein i see paul connecting to the audio and lisa as well the speaker after that is going to be matthew mirzajewski so if he's on vacation in that gas station we should probably get him in so he can start getting connected um so mr henkel if you can hear me i think you're connected now you can go you're muted can you hear me now

071yes okay great uh i would like to echo the comments made by miss cox the previous speaker i also want to say that these meetings really should be in person you're not giving enough people enough opportunity to participate or to hear these meetings doing them on zoom or live stream is not acceptable and i want to i live in samuel miller and i want to voice my opposition to transgender uh crt and mass policies that delmar county wants to impose on our children elmore county public schools is teaching marxism beginning in kindergarten i know these things are true because my children have told me about their classes i have read the authors whose materials are being used in our classrooms as curriculum an example which most parents will be able to recognize is on the

072first day of school elementary students school supplies are taken and placed in a collective for community use re-examining re-evaluating reimagining are all marked as catch phrases that hide malicious malignant intent our students are taught to reject capitalism as oppressive despite capitalism being the most free economic system known to man now passes is history of philosophy is misguided in malicious opinion not as honest evaluation of the facts systemic racism oppression and inequality in the united states has always been the hallmark of the democrat party and its acolytes and subgroups and that is also the teachers union political party of choice students are taught to value change as a rejection of past injustices rather than to retain the good and remove the bad through reform individualism is devalued everyone is divided and assigned into groups real or

073imagined in order to set us against each other and make us easier to control there are only two genders despite someone's self-identification as a member of a previously unknown gender group equity is not the same as equality equity means favoritism and engineered outcomes not based on merit the hate-filled marxist anti-american agenda being taught to our children is mentally unhealthy this board is creating a hostile learning environment mr henkel you should not accept the lame attempt to have guilt and shame laid upon us mr hanklin is self-righteous individuals sit on this board okay mr hank we're gonna have to go ahead and cut you off i like that you're giving your comments but please respect the time everyone's got comments to make so next up will be miss klein followed by matthew murgis kiewski who's hopefully

074gotten connected and then miss mariano so miss klein whenever you're ready thank you my name is lisa klein and i am the parent of two children who attend murray elementary school i am an advocate for the rights of trans kids and have spoken to many doctors and therapists in this field i have also been blessed with knowing trans and non-binary people in my personal life i'm speaking from a place of knowledge as well as vast personal experience when i say i fully support the adoption of this policy tonight having listened to a variety of tax of attacks on trans kids this year an appropriate quote that comes to mind is i'll respect your opinion as long as your opinion doesn't disrespect someone else's existence trans kids exist and deserve to have the same rights to

075feel safe and included as every other child solidifying trans students rights does not take away the rights of any other student feeling safe and seen by others means everything to these kids and young adults it eases anxiety which in turn frees up critical brain space needed for learning in cases where these students have no affirming support from home having just one person or place that positively affirms their identity can reduce the risk of suicide by at least 25 percent trans kids know who they are they are not confused or experimenting in fact studies show that most trans kids know who they are by the age of seven and most between ages four and six last week a very wise beautiful trans girl said to me when i feel loved and accepted there is a light

076in my heart and i feel free it would mean everything to these trans and non-binary students to walk into school each day knowing there is a written policy in place that protects them and essentially says you belong you belong in this world just the way you are i feel this policy is especially important for the trans kids who have never felt that light in their heart they deserve to feel free to if only in one place at school and that is why i urge the board to approve this policy thank you so much for the excuse me sorry i'm tongue-tied thank you so much for those comments miss klein thank you the next speaker will be matthew murchinsky everybody can you hear me i can hear you all right great thank you again for having

077me um a little more scripted in the past try something new go a little unscripted and uh talk heart to heart with you guys i sort of agreed with um mr zacherson's comments and share a lot of the same sentiments uh dr haas i read your you know equity mission statement revision working together with families is is a very few word sentence but uh that's right in there that's i think really important and just here to express that i feel like that's not been the case i mean you know i've asked personally i know some uh friends of mine have asked personally for more dialogue some dialogues happen one-on-one appreciate that but it all of this dialogue just feels like the illusion of care you know i i don't get a sense from the superintendent

078office from the board that there isn't actual care to hear all the sides i mean i think roughly half the people who have spoken have had some form of opposition or called a slow call to take more in understand there's no two-way dialogue and i get covet all this other stuff but there's got to be opportunities we could hold a zoom meeting with with 15 people right it doesn't have to be the whole community from different sides on the issues and you could hear those inputs that's one solution you know take a challenge you know this is what people do in the business world they take a challenge they wrestle it together with different viewpoints that's why we want diversity of thought that's why we want diversity of backgrounds and cultures so that we can

079hear differences and opinions understand each other and come to solutions there's been no real care to hear there's been no real care to listen um it's all lip service and i'm kind of getting sick of it to be honest and in the business world if if you surveyed employees and they had some feedback that was negative and it felt about half the people you know we had over 400 people asked on a survey that you know i signed uh myself you know people would quit if you were working for a company and your leader said i don't underst you know i don't really care to understand your viewpoint we're just going to move ahead anyway people would quit they would resign or those leaders should be fired so that's where we are those are the

080two options i feel like we have left and my call would be just engage in dialogue small groups come up with solutions thank you um thank you for providing those comments so the next speaker will be miss mariano it's not in the meeting okay so i'll mark her so i can come back just give me a second to do it and then the last four speakers after that will be michael salzberg phillips hamilton phillip andrew hamilton lisa meadors and julie govan [Music] so i see miss salsberg in the room hi yes hi thank you yep go ahead and start yes i'm nikki salsberg i'm in the white hall district and i'm speaking out today because i want the voices of support for our transgender and gender expansive students to outweigh any messages they may hear

081or experience today to the contrary you matter and we embrace you as you are thanks to research from the trevor project we know that lgbtq youth seriously contemplate suicide at almost three times the rate of heterosexual youth and almost five times as likely to have attempted suicide but we also know that policies like the one being voted on tonight can make a significant positive impact in just one example transgender and gender non-binary youth who reported having pronouns respected by all or most people in their lives attempted suicide at half the rate of those who did not have their pronouns respected virginia's policy will provide guidance and protection for students who are often bullied marginalized and harassed it is important that the school board adopt the proposed policy and send the message to our youth that

082they are all worthy of protecting thank you thank you so much for those comments ms salzburg the next speaker will be philip andrew hamilton well i do not see him do not see okay put a little mark next to his name lisa meadors yep i see hello hi are you ready for me yes all right i'm lisa meadors i have a rising 9th grader and 12th grader i've been a baker butler and sutherland pto president i've been on the parent council and i want to express my support for everything that the board is doing i think that the policy for mask even before governor northam said that we need to have them by law in all schools is amazing i think that you have listened to teachers last year at this time you listen to

083their concern this year at this time you're listening to all the people and i think that is amazing the transgender policy my daughter has several friends who are transgender and who are so relieved to finally be able to be their true selves freely with support and i also think that trust is huge and i trust that this board supports our kids i trust that the administration supports our kids we had pediatricians speaking dr armangal actually treated my babies when they were young i support and trust these decisions we were all on the same team and the united states in its relay you train differently but you all pass the baton and you're going for the same goal to educate our students to keep our students safe and i completely trust that that is what this

084board is doing judy lee is an amazing representative as the urbana district which i am in and i really want to say to teachers administrators teaching assistants cafeteria workers thank you i really believe that you understand how important it is to all parents and everyone that our students to be educated our students be safe and for those parents who are for the first time experiencing an uncomfortable feeling think about it why are you uncomfortable is it because you have never had to think about anything because you are privileged probably and think about all the people who have been suffering who finally get a voice and who can finally feel thank you sorry thank you so much for your comments so the next speaker last speaker before i cycle through the names is going to be

085julie govin can you guys hear me and see me i can we can okay so my name is julie govan i'm in the samuel miller district i have four kids in albemarle county schools i'm speaking tonight and you might think that i don't have a horse in this race um because i don't have a student i'm advocating for who is transgender or gender expansive but i'm here precisely for that reason i was recently standing in front of albemarle high school reading the sign memorializing the album role 26 the students who desegregated albemarle schools after massive resistance and the obvious thing i thought about was the courage and the determination of those students but then i also thought about another set of people and i thought about the students and parents who were fearful of that

086change they had been raised with teachings that gave them reasons to fear they thought their church leaders even in some cases conveyed to them that fully inclusive schools were dangerous and bad and encountered their religion they learned eventually that there was nothing to fear and many later expressed regret so i'm speaking because this is our chance to not have the same regret to not make their mistakes to not let fear dictate policy these students these transgender and gender expansive students they are part of our community and they have been for years they're already using bathrooms in our schools they're the children our children went to preschool with and played soccer with and splashed in the pool with this policy will change almost nothing for kids who are not trans but it will make all the

087difference in the world for our children's peers who are trans who are gender expansive to know they are seen heard and accepted by their school i have heard commenters ask us not to rush to act this doesn't seem like a rush because it's taking years for schools to step towards supporting and affirming transgender and gender expansive students child-centric policies are important and i came here tonight to thank albemarle county for their work in understanding how important this is and understanding the needs of these students thank you thank you for those comments miss govind and also perfectly timed at 10 minutes so i'm going to cycle through we have three names that i marked i have um this will be your chance to speak if you're in the room i notice there is one person in

088the room that just has it say iphone so i'm not sure who that is um so first off donald webb do we have donald webb okay hi can you hear me is that philip andrew hamilton talking that is correct okay you're on the list so if you're ready you can go ahead and speak okay all right in 10 seconds you got two minutes two minutes okay all right well good evening everyone um my name is phil hamilton i'm a candidate for the virginia house of delegates here in the 57th district which is in charlottesville in part of baltimore county and a few different things i'd like to talk about um i'm actually standing outside of the building because it's over zoom and i was hoping it would be in person but you know i think

089it's just very unfortunate that we have not been having uh in-person meetings it's important for members of the community to be able to beat the school board members to see them in person um you know of course we require social business and mass and other things like that um for folks to feel safe but i think it's just very unfortunate that we're still having these online oat meeting meetings going on and i encourage the board to have in-person meetings in the future so that we could have these frank discussions that need to be had now uh as you all know the governor uh northam he has uh instituted another uh emergency and he is declaring that all students you know ages two and up have to wear a mass now what happened to freedom of

090choice uh students went to school earlier this week with the choice to wear a mask or to not wear a mask and i think we need to respect that choice and it was very unfortunate the governor the overrun so many different uh school boards in different counties that was giving students choice and there's been hundreds of students protesting this week against that decision so i asked this board to keep in mind that we need to maintain the students freedom of choice and that we should make it optional for students to wear a mask and another issue and i understand it's not being covered tonight what is critical race theory you know we saw in loudoun county mr hamilton i'm sorry to cut you off but before you start the next comic topic you're actually past

091the two-minute mark so um your time is done thank you so much for providing comments we enjoyed um getting to listen to you okay thank you yeah the last name to check for is miss mariano no not here okay so with that that concludes public comment for tonight um thank you for everyone who logged on and and provided their comments we always appreciate hearing them please feel free to share anything also via the email or by sending in reading comments and with that i pass it back to chair page thank you vice chair carlson and you really did an admirable job of taking care of this as you have throughout this crisis so thank you so much and again that's really necessary because um we aren't having our meetings in public because the board of

092supervisors are still well there is still an ordinance that declares like a state of emergency here in the county so until the board of supervisors makes a movement you will still have your job right and i know you'll be able to handle it as well as you did tonight all right our next item on the agenda is the covet update by dr mclaughlin and ms gomez all right good evening board members i'm pat mclaughlin chief of strategic planning for the school division and i'm here tonight to provide a covet 19 status update and also to provide you with the latest information on our mitigation plan as we prepare to begin the school year in just a couple of weeks also with me tonight is eileen gomez our school nurse coordinator who can provide some insights

093into any questions you may have so let's get started tonight's update will look a bit different from the updates you have been receiving over the course of the pandemic as we are aligning our update to the most recent guidance provided to us from the virginia department of health as all public schools in virginia are now required to open five days a week for in-person instruction the guidance is no longer geared toward the conditions under which schools should be open for students the newly updated guidance instead provides five steps for school divisions to consider as operational decisions are made for and during the 2021-2022 school year the first of these steps is to evaluate the level of community disease transmission at the local level so the level of community transmission is determined using two measures the

094first is the total number of new cases per 100 000 people in the past seven days the most recent data we have is from tuesday august 10th and at that time our current seven day total per 100 000 people was 92.38 putting us at the substantial transmission category the second measure is the percent of naat tests that are positive during the past seven days and our latest percent positivity is 4.4 which puts us in the low transmission category uh for the vdh when the two indicators are at different levels the vdh recommends that you use the indicator with the higher level with the higher value as your community transmission level so our current transmission level is at the substantial level the second step to understand the second step they recommend is understand the community level

095of vaccination coverage i'm happy to say that our levels of community vaccination among eligible school-level school-age students is one of the higher we've seen in the state in albemarle county 78.2 of 12 to 15 year olds and 83.2 of 16 to 7 year olds uh have had at least received at least one dose of the cobit 19 vaccine our fully vaccinated numbers for our 12 to 15 and our 16 to 17 year old age groups are 68.5 and 75.8 respectively step number three in the operational decision making is to consider the level of impact that the virus is having in our schools so you may recall this matrix from previous covet updates it asks us to look at levels of transmission in our schools how the virus is impacting student absenteeism and our staff's capacity

096to attend school this level of impact can only be determined when schools are open and operational and since we're currently closed for summer break we can't determine a level of impact on our schools at this time so this information we will be provided in future updates to the board once our students return later in the month step number four is to understand the capacity and needs of our community in our school and for this step the vdh advises that schools should prioritize providing safety optimized in-person learning environments schools will need to assess the feasibility of certain prevention strategies to help decide what combination of strategies is best with that advice in mind our teams are continually examining our capacity our needs in our layered mitigation strategies which leads us to the final step in the

097process which is to determine and implement a layered approach with multiple prevention strategies the vdh recommends that all schools and school divisions work with their local public health departments to assist in determining that layered prevent the layered prevention strategies that are needed we have done this since the start of the pandemic through our continued partnership with the blue ridge health district and with the local metal medical professionals some of which you heard from earlier this evening there are nine key prevention strategies that the vdh has outlined and they include promoting vaccination consistent and correct use of masks physical distancing screening testing ventilation hand washing and respiratory etiquette cleaning and maintaining healthy facilities staying home when sick and getting tested and contact tracing in combination with isolation and quarantine we have had and will continue to

098have all of these strategies in place with the exception of screening testing which we have been advised by our partners would have a limited benefit to containing the spread of the virus we're following all the recommendations put forth by the bdh to make our school environments as safe as possible for our students and staff and tonight i'd like to share with the board more detailed information about what those mitigation strategies will look like in our schools this portion of the presentation will be shared with our principals to share with both their staff and the school communities to make everyone aware of our plans as we begin school in just a short period of time so the mitigation strategies that you'll hear about tonight and that we have put in place are based on guidance from

099the national state and local level and as we said earlier we continue to partner with the blue ridge health district and local medical professionals on a regular basis to stay informed of any changing guidance based on the levels of community transmission daily covert 19 screenings are a first step in the process each school day parents are responsible for completing an at-home health screening of their child for coveted 19 symptoms prior to allowing them to board a school bus or to enter a school building if they answer yes to any of the screening questions they must keep their child home and notify the school employees are also required to perform a self-assessment for symptoms of copic 19 before reporting to work if any employees answer yes to any screening questions they must stay home and notify

100their supervisor and finally visitors are required to undergo a health screening for covert 19 symptoms upon building an entry if they answer yes to any screening questions they will not be granted access to that facility we'll continue to require masks to be worn by all students employees and visitors when inside our school building or on our school buses regardless of anyone's vaccination status in our buildings we'll maintain at least three feet of physical distancing between students and greater distancing at least six feet will be maintained when students are participating in moderate to vigorous physical activity singing or playing a musical instrument while outdoors distance will be increased as much as an activity in space allowed and as often as possible will maintain a distance of at least six feet between adults and students students are

101required to wash or sanitize their hands frequently during the day minimally this includes each time they board a bus enter a room and go outside for recess and before they eat all building entry points classrooms cafeterias and buses have had sanitizer dispensers have hand sanitizer dispensers to promote and support this requirement throughout the day custodial staff disinfect high-touch surfaces at night custodians clean and disinfect classrooms and other spaces that were used during the day disinfecting wipes are available in all occupied classrooms for use by students and employees to sanitize high touch surfaces periodically throughout the day albemarle county has made investments in improvements to the ventilation systems in our school facilities wherever possible we've installed upgraded air filters and adjusted our mechanical systems to increase air flow from the outside every day in an effort

102to improve indoor air air quality we perform a building air flush both before and after occupancy also we have placed air purifiers with high efficiency particulate or hepa filters in all classrooms clinics and school buses each school day breakfast and lunch are going to be available to all students free of charge regardless of income level breakfast is available upon arrival and students eat the meal in their classroom lunch is served primarily in the cafeteria though larger schools may set up additional serving lines in an alternate location depending on the school and grade level students may eat lunch in the cafeteria a classroom another designated area of the building or outside we encourage eating outdoors when the weather permits and if adequate supervision is available whether indoors or outdoors we maximize physical distancing to the extent

103possible maintaining a minimum of three feet between students once students are seated and ready to eat they are permitted to remove their masks and for contact tracing purposes elementary students sit with the same group of peers at least one week at a time and middle and high school students use a system to track where and with whom students are eating our school buses are going to be operating at normal capacity this year we've installed hepa filters in all of our buses they're located near the ceiling a few rows behind the drive and they remove dust pollen and virus particles from the air we turn on the filters whenever the windows are closed so on buses without air conditioning open windows during warm we open windows during warm weather and turn off the hepa filter during

104cold weather we close windows and turn on the hepa filter on buses with air conditioning we keep windows closed and run the hepa filter at all times all riders must sanitize their hands each time they board and exit the bus and each bus has an adequate supply of sanitizer directly behind the driver's seat the bus driver and all riders must wear a face mask and each bus has a supply of mask in case a student forgets theirs we assign seats to all riders and this is also helpful for contact tracing and limits the number of exposures if we do have a positive case all visitors to our facilities are required to undergo a health screening for covert 19 systems upon entry uh they must sign in through the visitor management system in the school's main

105office and receive a volunteer visitor's badge they are not allowed in classrooms during the school day they must wear a mask and keep at least six feet of distance between themselves and students and during the school day visitors are limited to those who are volunteering attending a meeting or visiting for another purpose approved by the principal a few final safety measures that we'd like to share with the board include the establishment of a central committee to review field trips and extracurricular activities in advance we have turned off our water fountains but left on the bottle fillers that are attached to those water fountains so students can refill their own bottles outdoor tents are in the process of being installed at each school to promote more outdoor activities we limit the sharing of materials and equipment

106and students will have individual classroom supplies this year and if all those mitigation strategies such as physical distancing are in place we will not have to place any additional restrictions on assemblies large gatherings or community use of our facilities so we wanted to also talk about what happens if we do have illnesses within our school so any student or employee who develops covert 19 like symptoms at school or work will be excluded from school or work and referred to a healthcare provider to see if covid19 testing is warranted if a student becomes ill at school will notify their parent or guardian who will need to pick them up promptly usually within 60 minutes of the call the student will wait in a designated clinic space until that time and before a symptomatic student may return

107to school the return to school plan must be completed by a health care provider if we do have a confirmed case of covet at our at one of our schools uh we'll exclude the person until that return to school work criteria has been met we'll follow established disinfection and ventilation protocols we'll work with the health department's contact tracing team to identify close contacts and we'll ask close contacts to quarantine and monitor for symptoms for 14 days from the last day of exposure one important note is that fully vaccinated individuals do not need to follow quarantine procedures after a known exposure provided they do not develop symptoms if a fully vaccinated person does develop symptoms they should seek medical evaluation to see if testing is warranted in general people who are considered fully vaccinated two weeks

108after their second dose in a two dose series uh such as pfizer or moderna or two weeks after a single dose vaccine such as johnson and johnson and finally the superintendent of school is in consultation with local health officials will decide to close a school facility based on uh factors that are include or not limited to the extent of an identified outbreak at one of our facilities the coveted 19 conditions in the community absenteeism rates among staff and students and local and or state ordinances and orders if needed individual schools will temporarily transition to fully virtual instruction for a length of time determined in coordination with the local health department such a decision would be based on the number of cases in the school and evidence of transmission in that particular school we are currently

109developing a plan for how this transition would occur should have become necessary so i'd like to thank the board for uh their time tonight on this extended covet update uh and mitigation plan um and eileen and i would be happy to field any questions that you may have about anything that you've heard are there questions from the board um oh go ahead aj oh i'm sorry uh i just wanted to ask um how many like students would be seated per seat because i kept hearing about one person per seat on the buses but i don't know like if that's true or not so our buses are back to full capacity which is which is more than one student per seat i think full capacity is two students per seat at the secondary level and up

110to three percent at the elementary level but i would likely defer to ms schmidt to uh to correct me if i'm making a mistake there dr mclaughlin this is kate um just in terms of the logistics of having to switch to all virtual which i hope you don't have to do at any school i know last year we had to pass out additional computers for the lower grades we had hot spots and those types of items i imagine your readiness plan will be how to rapidly deploy those resources that is correct and we've got teams working on uh on a plan for that should it become necessary as as you said we are keeping our fingers crossed that the mitigation strategies that we have in place will prevent us from having to um to do

111any wide scale shutdowns um like we've done in the past thank you um patrick i know that you said that tents are being are in the process of being installed are will we have all of them by the time school starts i don't believe my understanding is that right now we have all the polls for the tents the canvas is uh taking a little bit longer than um than we anticipated just because so many people are ordering those so i see that um schmidt turned her uh video on so maybe you can give us an updated timeline on that yeah so like many things are encoded right now we're having supply chain issues and this is something we've been working on for many many months so no it will not be ready for the first

112day of school but shortly after we have pieces of them and expect the rest of it any day now this has been a ongoing challenge that we will continue to pursue thanks um and again um i think probably ros and you'll have a lot to say about this uh given that we've had already what we think is likely going to be uh determined to have been an outbreak um i don't know what other mitigation efforts were in place i mean i assume that these are the same mediation efforts that were in place at that time during summer school when there were considerably fewer children in the school uh and we had those six cases so um i guess i'm i'm interested in stronger language and stronger policy or stronger action around lunch because it seems

113like an unmasked time i was a little dismayed to hear that people will be eating in their classrooms because you know when they talked about alpha transmission it was like 15 minutes that was sort of not a golden rule but a guideline but now we're talking about many fewer minutes in what we're seeing now with delta so are there ways that we can move lunch to a safer place so our current plan with lunch as dr mcgaughlin laid out is multiple places right and with the goal of just distancing as great greatest as possible so we'll continue to work with schools on the specifics of that um it is one of the greatest logistical challenges but you're right it's also the very critical time of day because of the unmasking so i don't have any

114other specifics to offer i think it's going to look a little different at each school but we will continue to explore austin and welcome to suggestions but our goal is to distance as much as possible encourage outdoors as much as possible i i would add uh one other piece that the local pediatricians advised ms schmidt and me about was the the pieces that were mentioned in the slide deck but also ensuring that students that are in like cohort groups together that they've been in those groups to try as much as possible to have them stay together including when they're in the cafeteria or in other settings where they they're going to be eating lunch or have some need to take their mask off for a break or something like that that was another piece that

115i wanted to offer but as the parent of someone who is you know newly going into middle school how would cohort groups work with those many different schedules so that is something that school principals will figure out and work on for example the in middle school and i guess we all know this but in middle school the grade levels stay together in in a group so when the sixth graders eat lunch these seventh graders and eighth graders are not so that would be an example of they've been together they're in the together in their classes and the school principals can figure out how to how to keep them together in those groups i just was offering that as another consideration that the pediatricians gave us to think about as a as a strategy okay i

116guess when i'm thinking about cohort groups i'm not thinking about them as like 100 sixth graders um so i don't see how that would work and then my third question is um and i really appreciate the hepa filters in on the buses and uh in all the classrooms and clinics and things like that um do we have any like extra ventilation or hepa filtration in bathrooms we have not added any standalone units now they're as far as hepa filtration but they have the same ventilation uh in the rest of the rest of the system but there's no standalone units in bathrooms okay thank you for for for students who are quarantined um what's the what what what's the opportunity for them to have distance learning is there any i believe i see uh miss collins

117uh coming online to answer that question at this time we're that we feel like it would be the least disruptive to have the student assign their given their assignments from their teacher in school so we wouldn't flip them to a virtual classroom and then back again into in 10 days it would be like if they're out with the flu correct are there any other questions from board members yes i know that some of our schools are overcrowded will they still have the three feet of distance there and i was particularly thinking about mountain view yes all schools are able to meet that three foot distancing okay all right any other questions uh i had another question uh what would happen with students who possibly attempt to like disagree with the mask mandate who like try

118to come into school without it will there be like any consequences or will they be sent back home or anything aj i think that's a great question uh kind of like with with all of the the rules and procedures that we have in place at our schools um the school principals would work with those students uh first in a in a way to have some conversation uh and hopefully some education around why it's important to be wearing a mask but ultimately students would not be allowed to um to come into our classrooms without masks those are going to be required for for everyone with the limited exceptions that we we talked about earlier thank you mrs ms lee has a resolution for the board to consider so ms lee will you please read the resolution

119thank you chairpage um this resolution of the board of education of el marrell county virginia school board adopting order number 21-3 of the director of emergency management for the county of albemarle virginia whereas the school board recognizes that albemarle county and the rest of the state of virginia and the united states are in the midst of a worldwide coven 19 pandemic that has resulted in more than 600 000 deaths in the united states and whereas the school board has responded to the challenges brought about by the covet 19 pandemic providing students and staff members with the technology and resources necessary to ensure the efficient delivery of instruction virtually and in person and whereas the school board has a substantial public interest in protecting the health and safety of its students staff and community and ensuring

120that the school division can provide staff and students with a safe and effective educational environment that supports student achievement and whereas school division staff at all levels are essential to the day-to-day operations of the school division and are responsible for the thorough and efficient education of all students and their social and emotional well-being and whereas a surge of covet 19 cases has recently occurred largely resulting from the delta variant also known as b.1.617.2 a highly transmissible virus that impacts individuals regardless of age and whereas over 90 percent of coven 19 infections are currently occurring in individuals who have not been vaccinated against coven 19 and whereas the overwhelming scientific evidence has established that the vaccines authorized by the fda for emergency use are safe and effective and recommended by the centers for disease control and

121prevention for all individuals except children under 12 years of age and certain others and whereas the school board has the responsibility to prevent the outbreak and spread of coven 19 infections in its schools and other facilities and whereas the emerg the director of emergency management for the county of albemarle virginia has issued order number 21-3 pursuant to virginia code 44-146-21-c mandating vaccines vaccinations or periodic testing for coven 19 for the employees of the county of albemarle now therefore be it resolved that the school board finds that there exists a public health emerg a health emergency that requires action to safeguard students and staff against the risks of infection illness hospitalization and death from covet 19. the school board adopts order number 21-3 and will work in partnership with the county of albemarle in the implementation

122of this order to control the spread of cobit 19 in the school division and community the administration of the school division is directed to develop procedures for the implementation of this resolution that are based upon order number 21-2 as modified to reflect the specific operations of the school division and school board policies regulations and code of conduct and otherwise take all other actions necessary to carry out this mandate the school board hereby delegates to the superintendent the authority to implement and modify vaccination and testing procedures based on changing conditions and to maintain conformance with the requirements of the cdc virginia department of health blue ridge health district and other applicable health authorities thank you ms lee could i have a motion on uh on the resolution read by ms lee we adopt a resolution was

123that a second second okay moved by mr oberg i'm second by ms dale caro that we adopt the resolution mandating um vaccination or testing for our county public school employees is there any discussion on that motion uh can you do it again i would just say that time is of the essence since our students will get be back in the schools in another week and we have the responsibility for almost 6 000 children under the age of 12 to do our utmost to protect their them and to preserve our ability to educate our kids thank you any other discussion i was actually just going to throw it back to you dr haas uh is there anything that you can tell us about timeline process any of this thank you ms lee and thank you for

124the resolution and i really appreciate the support of the board like you i believe that this is a critical strategy to protect our employees our children our community this week we put together a joint task force with local government staff to develop a process for beginning to collect officially collect vaccination information about all of our staff and we will be um getting that started i'm hoping to begin that process within a week from now so that we can have accurate records on who is vaccinated and who is not and at that point we will begin reaching out to those who are not vaccinated to start the process of getting their weekly tests or getting process to be vaccinated i would i want to encourage all of our employees if you are listening tonight or if

125you anyone root reads the news release tomorrow that if you are not vaccinated that please contact our human resources department to start that conversation and start that process we are here to support you in making that move and our our safety for our children depends on it thank you dr haas one thing i also wanted to mention in terms of modifying testing procedures based on changing conditions is that um i think when some of these vaccination mandates uh went into effect i don't know if um i guess if the delta variant and its shorter incubation period was taken into consideration but um a weekly test doesn't seem to make quite as much sense um with given the four day incubation period thank you we'll take that under advisement thank you and uh dr haas we

126will be using the same um guidelines as the county as a whole right yeah trying to move as quickly as possible yes their their deadline uh the deadline that mr richardson put in effect yeah yesterday was uh september 15th as the deadline so that will be our deadline and we will be working in partnership and in tandem with his staff to achieve that okay thank you any other questions if not miss johnston could you please call the roll on uh the uh motion by mr oberg second by ms dale care miss carlson yes mr oberg yes miss lee yes ms osborne yes mr alcaro yes dr a cuff yes mr page yes motion carried so the motion carries unanimously so this is a great thing for us to do to make sure that we ensure

127the safety the utmost safety of all of our students in almost county public schools so thank you board members for that vote our next item on the agenda is our transgender policy and this will be led a brief discussion by mr holden good evening i'd like to provide a recap of the development of the proposed gender expansive policy before you this uh tonight's meeting virginia code section 22.1-22.3 enacted in 2020 requires all local school boards to adopt a policy regarding the treatment of transgender students by the start of the 21 22 school year that is consistent with or is cut or more comprehensive than the policy guidance published by the virginia board of education that's mandated by the statute the acps proposed policy is aligned with the virginia code vdoe guidance and the holding of

128the united states supreme sorry about that united states court of appeals for the fourth circuit in grimm versus gloucester county school board that allows transit transgender students to utilize the bathroom and other facilities that correspond with their gender identities this policy was presented to the school board at its meeting on thursday july 8 2021. on july 28 the acps conducted an informational session for the community following which the acps published faqs responded in writing to questions that were asked and reviewed and considered comments submitted to the school board draft policy before you now for approval contains a change prompted by concern mr oberg raised at the last meeting mr oberg requested that the policy make clear that implementation of the policy and resolution of issues that may arise there under will be the responsibility of

129the entire acps including counselors nurses principals and other administrators and not classroom teachers alone this edition is contained in the final section of the policy that discusses training and professional development if you have any questions or concerns you would like me to address at this time i'd be happy to do so and i appreciate your time and consideration thank you mr holden are there questions or further concerns from board members ms told and i would like to thank you for um giving us again the background leading up to uh our work and on the transgender policy that it's uh you know we have had quite a few opportunities i think for input and also um this is not well we've had quite a few opportunities i think for input on this and so i thank

130you for sort of bringing that out to us are there any other comments or questions i i i i have a question i would i'm going to say for the record i'm very much support this policy um so i don't want my i don't want my question to come across as if i'm not supporting it i do um the one provision which does give me pause is the paragraph that talks about the fact that the parents could be um not informed and it doesn't it doesn't seem clear to me when that would take place and who would make that decision and that just causes me concern are there other other other policies that are similar to that that we have and how do we follow those in those cases i think what we try to

131do here uh is to be as flexible as possible um we want to work in partnership with parents uh we are hopeful uh that the resources that we could bring to bear uh to help both students and parents address issues of mutual concern [Music] can be resolved but what we do not want to do is put a child in danger we don't want uh the child uh confronts or kind of confronts consults with a teacher or counselor and says look i'm going through this i i really want to talk about it but i'm not ready to to come out i'm not ready to tell my family um we would like to uh protect that confidentiality of course if the student wants certain concessions medical or otherwise we will advise that we cannot do that until

132such time as to have parental consent so it as i said it may sound imperfect mr oberg but it's uh trying to balance a lot of interests here to the mutual advantage of advantage of all both a student family and the school division i my concern is just in it and and i appreciate this role and i i very much respect what you've done i'm just concerned that it's it's too amorphous and so from a policy standpoint it causes me concern i i i would like it i mean it is there any other policy that we have that's like this that we could lean on and say okay well this is the circumstance this is how this works and if there's not i'd just like to and i understand that legally we have to pass

133a policy tonight um but that policy language causes me concern i understand and look we we're going to try the best we can this is a new policy for certainly for the acps in the state of virginia as we learn more as we confront issues we may have amendments that we would want to bring to to the board but right now we're going to count on our staff our counselors our nurses to implement this as best as we can with all the help we can provide um but as i said if it turns out that we need further definition and we get a better sense of what that could be working and implementing this policy will do so i think i see a question from aj i just have a comment um i know that

134a lot of parents are concerned about the policy and i just kind of want them to understand that your child can't hide it forever it's just something that will make them feel more comfortable at school and it's better to respect that they're not ready to tell you um and it will be better for them to come to you instead of just having it thrown out by somebody telling you and you're not being able to understand it as well it'll just be told to you it's better to have your child come to you when they're ready and they're comfortable and they're not scared and tell you their own experiences and how they dealt with it and i think it's just i understand the concern and um wanting to know what your child is going through and

135what's happening at school but i think it's also good as a parent to respect their privacy as well i mean you know kids have their own lives to themselves of their own people and they can't keep it away you know forever they're gonna have to tell you at some point so it's not gonna be private probably not for a long time they'll probably come to you when they're ready or they feel safe enough thank you so much for those comments aj they really mean a lot thanks a whole lot are there any other questions or concerns uh mr page i think what i would also add is that um one of the checks for me is our policy on student records j.o which outlines parental rights to student information and i i don't see anything

136in the policy that mr holden drafted uh with with input um that conflicts with that policy um that was that was something i cross-referenced checked against it to be sure we're not in violation of what we say in that other critical policy and um so dr haas is it is it fair to say that that policy controls the interpretation of this policy yes okay and i think that any board member if you if you just go back and cross reference it against it take a look at that policy that one also undergoes updates and is very current and i think that you'll find that what we have there will you know what we have in the uh gender expansive policy falls in alignment with that thank you for that answer thank you uh i would

137like to have a motion on uh on the transgender policy as to how we should move forward with this i move that we approve the policy on the treatment of transgender and gender expansive students second movement moved by mr alcaro in second mislea that we um approve the policy our transgender policy on how we will we will be treating and acting uh with children that in that category oh uh there any is there any further discussion on uh may i ask that that we plan to have a report back to the school board within some period of time to tell us whether the policy is being how it's being applied how it's working whether we need to change anything um because i know it will technically we'll have to revisit it within seven years but

138i'd like to just have an update sooner as opposed to later because i suspect my expectation is that this is gonna work i would simply like confirmation of it right that's not a part of the motion though that's just uh kind of just explaining my opinion here okay any other discussion on the motion if not miss johnson could you please call the world mr oberg yes miss lee yes ms osborne yes mr alcaro yes dr acuff yes miss carlson yes mr page yes motion carried all right thank you again board i think we've made two huge decisions for the betterment of the kids here in albany county with these two um motions and again like um mr holden was saying uh it's not that things would really be hidden from parents if it's going to

139lead to some huge change with the student would only be if there's a possibility of that child feeling threatened in some type of way and before any drastic motions or movements would be made the parent would have to be notified is that correct mr holden uh yes chair page we uh as a school division there will be certain things we just we wouldn't do we couldn't do um without parental permission and what we would do is tell the student that we respect what the student has requested but we'll have to defer to the parents on that if the child says okay that's fine let's have a discussion we'll offer our help to do that if the child says i'm not ready then we will keep that confidence but also not allow the concession that the

140child asks for to be made without the parental consent okay thank you we are now uh ready for a break we'll take a 10 minute break it's now 8 37 we'll be reconvening at 8 so thank you board members see you at 8 47. all right good evening again it is now 8 47 and we will resume our meeting uh next we will have the superintendent's recommend recommendation regarding the naming of jack jewett middle school and this portion of our meeting will be conducted by ms jasmine fernandez ms fernandez good evening school board members once again my name is jasmine fernandez i serve as a project advisor and the anti-racism program manager with me today is principal johnson as well as our committee chair hannah peters just for some quick background and reminder in 2018

141you directed our superintendent with including our division values into the criteria process for naming school buildings moving forward the four newly approved values equity excellence family and community and wellness will be included into the criteria our school name review process is centered around three intentions reflection accessibility and inclusion as it relates to reflection this cycle in particular we have spent a lot of time not only reflecting on the name of the school but as well as our internal processes in fact it was during a community meeting that a parent offered thoughtful feedback on how we could improve the content of our community survey in terms of accessibility we really believe that it's crucial that we have multiple ways for the community to be involved throughout this process and so that includes participating and completing the

142survey submitting written comment to the committee engaging in the community meetings we have included and provide interpretation services as well as engaging on social media later today you will hear our committee chair talk about a way that one of our students hope to actually be innovative and how we circulated our survey and then there's inclusion of all voices we have continued to prioritize racial diversity and diversity of thought on our committees all of our committees to date have included our staff our parents our community members our alumni and most of all our students prior to jack jewett these four schools listed here have participated in the name review process and we look forward to continuing to partner with our upcoming schools throughout this process and to ensure that this process is both informative and engaging

143and speaking of partnerships at this time i would like to just publicly thank principal johnson and our committee chair hannah peters for their unwavering leadership and creativity during this time especially during the pandemic and with that i will turn it over to principal johnson hi good evening i just want to make sure everyone can hear me okay perfect thank you my name is ashby johnson i'm the principal at jewett i think most you know i was also a student at do it way back in the day so um jewett is definitely very near and dear to my heart um just uh just a reminder of just just a few facts uh jack jewett middle school opened in 1966 as a junior high school and became a middle school in 1977 and the school was named

144after jack jewett our advisory committee was composed of elmer county staff including myself hannah peters as the chair teachers a counselor and support staff we had a couple of community members who lived in the community without children who currently attended jewett and we also had parents from jewish students and parents of students from our four feeder elementary schools that composed the committee and then we had several um different alumni members including a i'm a high school student who attended jewett and i just wanted to thank again hannah peters and the committee for their work hannah did a fantastic job um with with this committee facilitating the committee the committee was extremely thoughtful and reflective and um we had a lot of great conversations just around the name of jewett and then some of the things

145we're thinking about for the future and hannah again you did a fantastic job with everything and i really appreciate all that you did and i'm going to turn things over to you to talk more about our work thank you so much um so my name is hannah peters um i have been a teacher at jack jewett for going on nine years um and i too wanted to thank um the committee dr haas the school board um miss fernandez this was quite an experience and our committee was um extremely thorough um and it was comprised of of many different um different people and it was quite an honor to be a part of it um so i just wanted to walk through um the process that our committee went through starting with um the two surveys

146that we put out the first survey that we put out back in may yielded about 709 responses which we were really pleased with considering we were in a pandemic and a lot of our students were still virtual so it was um it was a different task trying to get everyone involved um and and on the same page with um understanding what they were being asked to to do to fill out the survey um and then we also um put out a second survey that um we had a little bit more so 719 respondents that we were also very pleased with and the committee used this information as one part of the process in terms of being able to um look at this this feedback and information when we were able to discuss how we were

147moving forward but i also wanted to note that in both surveys a majority of respondents wanted to keep the school's name um but on separate questions about 90 of respondents said the school should be named either for a physical location or a name that reflected a division value or for a theme so again this was one part of the feedback that that committee took um and used during our closed meetings um we also spent a lot of time talking to the public whether it be within the school or out in the community and we held two community meetings both with spanish interpretation the second meeting we had several students write written testimony they were unable to attend and those were those were read aloud during that meeting we had several teachers parents and community members

148speak at the second meeting we also compiled every email some emails were just feedback that they wanted the committee to read some emails were filled with research that the community members or students or parents or staff had done all those emails were collected by um the committee and used um and read and and processed with the committee during our closed meetings and then um we did individual research as a committee again i i spoke about um research emails that that community members um sent us we also reached out to the jack jewett house in in kentucky we had a member of our committee reach out to the library of congress so we had a wide range of research that that yielded similar information um and um and and it was it was pretty clear that

149jack jewett was a man who after leaving the elmer county area moved to kentucky and in the late 1700s built a house and relied pretty heavily on enslaved labor for his operation um and then i would say the most important the most fun part of this whole process was engaging students both virtually and within our school we had several student leaders both were avid 8th grade avid students that stepped up um and one student suggested that we make a qr code specifically for the survey that qr code was circulated around our school and then in the community it was an easy way for um staff students and community members to access the survey using whatever technology that they had um it was also a lot of fun because it was an idea that was generated

150with um by one of our student leaders um these pictures are the bottom the bottom two pictures are displaying our community mandala project which is sort of how we kicked off introducing um the name review process to the students so we really ask them to think about who are we as a as a community and who are we trying to be and a mandala is a visual representation of personal values but in this case we ask the students to think about um their values as a community and so we were we got 100 dollars although i'm sure there are more um we got a lot of virtual ones that we printed off and put up there and then a lot came um came from students within the building but i know that there's more sitting

151in schoology somewhere too but this is sitting outside the library and it's a beautiful representation of who we are as a school community a lot of what was really interesting is a lot of commonalities were seen visually and the committee was able to look at these and and talk about what what was important when developing and reviewing a name um and then you can see all of the students in these pictures are avid students that um helped with this project um the top picture is our eighth grade average avid mural project although that wasn't directly related to uh the name review i wanted um to include it because avid is a huge part of um our school community and their mural specifically this year really depicted and went well with um the who who are

152we trying to be and who are we now um and so that is their avid mural it's the world with many different hands um around it and that's right in the front hallway all right so the committee and the superintendent recommend changing the school's name to journey middle school based on the criteria below the committee felt very strongly that the name that was chosen needs to reflect the values seen in our school and the community it was vital that it was representative of student staff and community voices and then allowed all to be seen and then most importantly that a name provided excuse me it provided safety in a welcoming environment for all that walked through the building and then i just want to leave you with um a quote from a student and this

153was one of the written testimony quotes in times like this we must move forward and embrace change to that so that we can continue to grow i feel strongly that we should change the name to journey middle school i started my journey in middle school and i take a lot of what i've learned with me so um we welcome any questions or comments thank you i would uh i would just want to really uh say to hannah and jasmine and ask you just how grateful i am for your leadership in this process i really think that um you did an outstanding job of not only conducting the process through a challenging time and getting a great deal of input and a lot of in-depth conversation but i especially uh appreciate in light of our values

154your inclusion of student voice at the school and the the approach of using mandalas was being very creative and it speaks to what the the true values of jack jewett middle school which will be expressed with the new name upon board approval journey middle school so thank you very very much thank you miss fernandez ms uh miss johnson and miss peters for your great work in uh the in coming up with this proposed new name change thank you so much we can't express enough appreciation for your work are there any questions or comments from members of the board for the committee i just really wanted to second what dr haas said about the student engagement and involvement i think that's really wonderful and i just really appreciate your work thank you ashley i just hope

155that if we adopt this name that at every graduation you play don't stop believing absolutely it just begs for it you know i was very taken by the quote uh hannah that you had on the last slide because um it kind of reinforced when i first heard this the name i knew it was going to grow on me you know because it wasn't one that i just went oh yeah but it is a journey and and especially coming out of middle school and going on to high school and i i think it's it's i'm very taken by it and that quote um you know just reinforced you know my feelings about it nice job everybody congratulations and the sixth graders will be welcomed with open arms no dave i'm impressed uh mr oberg true could

156i have a motion in regards to the recommendation from the committee i move my move that we approve the renaming of jack jewett middle school to journey middle school second it's been moved by misdeal cairo second by ms doberg paige are isn't the next step supposed to be the recommendation from the superintendent it was included i think in the slides okay i don't think that he was going to add anything to it is that correct that is correct that is my recommendation right thank you all right so it's been moved by mr alcaro second by mr olberg that we approve the renaming of jack jewett to journey middle school is there uh do we have any discussion on the motion all right hearing none miss johnston could you please call the role miss lee yes

157ms osborne yes mr alcaro yes dr acuff yes miss carlson yes mr robert yes mr page yes motion carried thank you we are now down to uh redistricting study and this will be led by ms schmidt mr schmidt good evening my name is rosalyn schmidt chief operating officer so tonight i would like to present the scope of a proposed redistricting study the item is for information tonight and will be on your consent agenda next meeting for action so due to the overcrowding overcrowding in the crosie area additional seats are being constructed at crozet elementary brownsville elementary is overcrowded but due to its already large size further expansion was not recommended at that location so students will need to be redistricted from brownsville to crosain the addition is under construction if you have not been out

158that way i encourage you to do so it's a quite a site there's a lot of a lot of fun and good stuff going on but it's quite the construction project so that is scheduled to be complete one year from now for the 22-23 school year and it will add 340 seats to crozet elementary we are recommending that the objective of this study be to find a solution to address the current and projected overcrowding at brownsville elementary and the scope of the study will involve brownsville and crozet elementary schools only we propose the following guiding principles for the committee to consider as they select their recommendation and they're outlined here including a time frame comments around geography transportation and demographics the last bullet number one question we get asked in redistricting is grandfathering whether current

159students can remain and that is decision by the board we are proposing the committee be comprised of 10 members 4 from each school and then two members that are required by policy one from the long-range planning advisory committee and one represented recommended by the office of community engagement these committee members would be supported by staff including staff from planning transportation and the committee this year will be facilitated by dr mclaughlin here's a little look about how the schedule will unfold so again this is for information tonight but if the board ultimately approves at your next meeting we would advertise and receive applications that committee would meet in the september to december time frames meaning multiple times meetings would be open to the public they would host community meetings for input and then ultimately make a

160recommendation to the superintendent who will in turn make a recommendation to the board so turning the corner to 2022 that's when the school board would host a public hearing and ultimately vote on the recommendation that allows transition activities to occur between february and the start of the next school year and the new boundaries would go in effect for the 22-23 school year so next steps from tonight again information only this will be on your consent agenda for action and the recommendation we are putting before you is that you approve the objectives and the details and direct the superintendent to convene the redistricting advisory committee so then again after approval we will advertise for committee members and start the work are there any questions rosslyn um on one of the earlier sides you were it said

161that this the plan for redistricting would be good or covered three to five years with a five to seven year range possible that seems pretty short to me and so help me out yeah so our goal obviously is to make the most long-term solutions right but realistically when we have enrollment data enrollment projections um the accuracy of those projections uh are less reliable in the out years so we want to make decisions on the data we have in the in the short term now obviously the goal is longer but that's often a topic that the commit past committees have wrestled with early on so i think it helps to give them the starting point of look at that five-year window as far as deciding how many students to move thank you there are other questions

162from the board are we all in the agreement then that um we approve the plan presented by ms schmidt of having this item on our consent agenda for our next meeting yes yes is there any opposition to having it on the uh next meetings consented not for me okay all right if not thank you all right um that's the last item on our agenda for tonight uh do we have any other school board business or superintendent's business i do just have one piece of business and that is that the next school that we will be looking at in our name review committee will be broadest wood elementary school and so we we've talked with the principal and um we're going to be we're going to talk with the staff as soon as possible next week

163and start that process uh when will the uh long-range planning advisory committee uh be giving us their their uh report and i'm asking it from a cip committee uh point of view so that we can get be prepared for that uh to include as much of theirs as we can possibly include the committee had their last meeting um last night and they are scheduled to come before the board and your first your business meeting in september thank you and and secondly i really appreciated the doctors uh being here with us tonight and and i applaud you know all of them i also want to give a shout out to our school health advisory board um you know my representative uh on there has been so helpful and and kind of guiding me through uh some

164of the the medical uh issues and terminology and and sharing her opinions with me so to dr abernathy i just want to shout out and say thank you so very very much thank you mr el caro are there any other uh any other business coming to us so many other board members tonight alright in response to some of the comments that we heard tonight about the school board conducting its business through zoom i'd like to remind our audience that we are only doing this because of an ordinance that was passed by the board of supervisors in the spring of 2020 and we'll have to continue uh meeting electronically the only way that we can stop this or have our meetings in person again would be that the board of supervisors rescinds that ordinance and so

165i'm not sure when that will take place in light of the delta epidemic or insurgents but again just to remind our audience that we are only doing this because of that ordinance that was passed by the board of supervisors and there has been some positive things with our zoom meetings tonight i think at one point we had up to 255 people that were listening in and i think that sometimes we've had as many as 1 000 people who have listened and so even when we go back to in-person meetings it would still be nice if we could have some way of doing something electronically at the same time but again we are only meeting uh via zoom because of an ordinance that was passed by the board of supervisors so if there are no other

166comments or business from the board this meeting is adjourned and thanks again for everything that happened with the board tonight everybody have a good night everybody