School Board Meeting - December 17, 2020

001just we'll just keep plugging from there okay um i called this special session of the alamo county school board to order i welcome each of our legislators to this session we are grateful for all that you do in service by our state and county we sincerely appreciate everything that you've done in the past to support public education and we certainly seek your support of public education during the upcoming budget session i will recognize each legislator that's here now and when i do please introduce yourself and tell us what part of alma county that you represent a delicate belt so i represent the 58th district which for your purposes would be the eastern part of the county from free union in the north to scottsville in the south and then everything to the east forest lakes

002holla mead um the students that you have go to those two schools brought us wood stony point scottsville some go to stone robinson and then they feed into most of my constituents go to sutherland or walton and then end up at monticello or albert high school thank you thank you delicabell delicate runyon uh delicate running or mr gold i guess right i'm sorry i got you so okay um it's my pleasure to be here with you all today it's did you all hear me no your connection is pretty weak so we might be losing you guys yeah i'm sitting stationary my apologies i've been standing um can you hear yes it's better okay all righty it's my pleasure to be with you all today virtually uh as the times require i'm looking forward to meeting

003you all in person i represent what i would describe as western albemarle with crozet being really the focal point uh up to the edge of the city with ivy i think the precinct's called east ivy and so it's that western portion and uh just a delightful group of constituents out there very pleased to be part of it thank you um delicate hudson thanks very much for bringing us together i know my name is delegate sally hudson i know it says jake gold on my screen my aiden and i must have been sharing an account um but i um i serve here in the 57th district which is the city of charlottesville and some equal sized portions of alma county and when i'm not doing that i am teaching at the university of virginia grades were

004due yesterday i think so we just wrapped up our semester and i'm excited to be with you today thank you and i hope you're getting your grades all in line on the system all right senator deeds yeah thank you very much um this you know i was talking to somebody earlier and i think i hope this zoom process really um outlives the pandemic it's very useful and makes it easier to to meet together even though we might be a good distance apart um as you know i the 25th senatorial district which includes most of albemarle county except for parts of the north eastern part of the county from keswick north um to stony point i represent the rest of alberta it's good to see you good seeing you thanks all right our school board members

005um dr kate akov please give us your district uh jack jewett district all right mr gianno alcaro i'm johna el carro at large miss katrina carlson look at miss coffee i don't see her on here yet okay miss judy lee i'm judy lee and i represent the ravana district mr dave oberg i'm dave oberg and i'm the white hall district so i share constituents with cree and with chris and maybe a few with rob though i'm not sure ms ellen osborne ellen osborne scottsville district and i'm graham page samuel miller district a brief intro for um our meeting this afternoon since march of 2020 albemarle county public schools have faced unprecedented challenges in accompli accomplishing its mission of establishing a community of learners and learning through relationships relevance and regal one student at a time

006our students staff and families have adapted to these challenges and changes with creativity flexibility and perseverance our teachers have continued to provide our students with a world-class education virtually our students have worked to master new skills on new learning platforms our families have helped to facilitate their children's virtual learning becoming tech troublesome troubleshooters and tutors in addition to maintaining their normal day jobs we remain grateful to them and proud of them for continuing their great work under difficult circumstances while managing education amidst the uncertainties of a pandemic alamo county public schools have simultaneously fought in the battle to end the predictive value of race and ensure the success of each individual student and staff member during a period of social unrest in our community and society we have worked to eliminate the opportunity gap that

007exists in our division so that we can eradicate it and build a system that works for everyone in our strong and diverse community of learners this work will help us all learn to understand difference and respect and champion the diverse life experiences of all members of our community we are so grateful to the virginia general assembly for its support for public education both over the years and during the 2020 special session we have seen how you make public education a large part of the conversations that you have around legislation and funding we know that you have made schools a priority during the pandemic crisis and we have worked to do our part in keeping keeping our county public school community strong as we push through this unusual moment in time a lot is being done

008to keep our county families strong our transportation and child nutrition departments have taken advantage of an fda waiver that allows the county schools to deliver meals to our students every day 7 000 meals are delivered to over 3 500 students by 62 buses this ensures that our students have nutritious meals and an opportunity to engage with their schools we have established a covet 19 hotline that would allow us to provide any available resources to those in need during the pandemic we also expanding our mental health services including training members of our staff in mental health first aid so that we can help lift the emotional burden that covett has caused in our community our extended day enrichment program mobilized to create a child care program for county employees public school employees currently there are more

009than 40 students enrolled in this program and we are extending it as we further hope our school doors are open to accommodate more of our employees over 1 000 hot spots have been provided to our students and employees in order to facilitate virtual learning for those who do not have reliable internet these were provided at no cost to recipients our anti-racism policy steering committee um has implemented a book study on glenn singleton's courageous conversations about race for our school board and leadership team members this work will help us ensure that our educators can help the division eliminate the predictive value of race in our school division our four items in our 2021 legislative packet is aligned with all of these programs and with the work our division is doing my colleagues will now speak on

010the subject of each of these four we'll start with mr alcaro who will lead the discussion on social justice mr alcaro thank you mr page and good afternoon senator deeds and delegates bell hudson and runyon thank you for each of you making time for our annual meeting i'm honored to be here with you today as you may be aware our school board passed the first anti-racism policy in the commonwealth of virginia during the first quarter of 2019 following six plus months of discussion and design much of it done by nine of our high school students implementation of this policy continues and will continue well into the future this problem is certainly not a quick fix but albemarle uh county school board members are dedicated to have our school division provide equity for all of our

011students and all of our staff and be anti-racist to its core over the last three months as mr page mentioned our board has spent 10 and a half hours of professional development time engaged in discussion of courageous conversations about race like glenn singleton i recommend courageous conversations about race to you highly i also invite you all to read the book cast by isabel wilkerson if you haven't already it is sobering as well as educational highly relevant to what's been mentioned so far and you may find that it hits very close to home in the overall county school board we employ the equity checklist was which was developed by our diversity and equity advisory committee during 2018 in not only the development of new policies for our school division but monthly in the ongoing review of

012all of our policies that we are required to review and modify once every three to five years i'll send a copy of this checklist to each of you at the end of my comments i ask of you all that you look at your proposed bills in the upcoming session and beyond through an equity lens does your bill and to the bills of your peers help all of the citizens and students of the commonwealth of virginia fairly and impartially no matter their age race ethnicity gender or party affiliation if they do thank you for your caring and for your diligence if not what changes can be made in the bills that that allow them to make it so in every situation where equity is a primary factor in consideration of strategy virginia becomes a better place

013to live lastly in our legislative agenda we ask that quote the general assembly provides school divisions with additional funding needed to implement proven methods of preventing and addressing misbehaviors that lead to suspensions and expulsions end quote our step which stands for short-term education program our step program is such a method the short description of this is that students who are suspended have the option to still attend school every day in a set aside room away from their friends and receive specialized guidance and instruction to catch them up if needed and to keep them up to date with their classes so they don't fall behind their peers during their suspension these numbers i think you'll find interesting recidivism for suspended students who have gone through the step program has dropped from the pre-step level of 70

014recidivism to 14 in the program's first year and 18 in the second year our original budget for this this uh presence or current school year had included expanding step to all of our high schools and middle schools then covet happened there's a lot more to tell you about step and a lot of student stories that'll make your heart smile but i must end here and ask for your funding of step and i thank you for your time for your attention and for your consideration mr page thank you mr alcaro um do any of um our legislators have questions or comments um related to mr alcaro's presentation on um social justice okay if not i assume that other other localities are doing or are perhaps have they have programs similar to the step program but that's

015unique to albemarle county at this point to our knowledge it is unique to albemarle county okay it would be happy to have it be a model if others want to do something similar and we welcome you know questions about it or people who want to come and see it in action i just wanted to uh um appreciate the charge that you gave us to prioritize equity in everything that we do i know that in particular in this year with so many students learning from home that has meant that ensuring basic economic sustainability at home has also been as always a critical part of their education but in a special way this year my top two priorities are about evictions and unemployment checks from the vec because we have had so many families disrupted and they

016don't have a home to study from and we also have a lot of folks who have lost their jobs and don't have their the basic needs that they are to that they need to to put food on those kitchen tables along with all those laptops and ipads and so um i really think that it's important you know now as ever to ensure the basic economic security of all of our families before they're sending their kids off to school thank you for your comments i agree any board members with anything else to add to or any comments on um social justice portion of our presentation okay if not moving right along we'll now have ms judy lee present to us about the state budget another of our important um items for the county thank you very

017much chair paige and um as with all of these they're very intertwined as you all know especially as legislators and delegate hudson i really wanted to appreciate what you said about um ensuring that families have stable economics at home because i think that's so many things are tied that we don't think about so i appreciate that i just want to introduce myself as my first meeting of this type i'm judy lee i joined the school board in january of this year i also have a son who has a fifth grader in a county elementary school so i've been able to see all of the virtual alerting up close down the hall uh and i appreciate the work that the division has done on that because i feel like he's gotten the best that has been

018possible at this time i also wanted to thank all of the legislators on this call for your efforts in restoring funds for education um and focusing on mental health and broadband we need these things now and we will need them going into the future in terms of the state budget our biggest issue is returning retaining an adm hold harmless for the biennium and we do appreciate the hold harmless throughout this year and your support for it very much so but we like so many other divisions have lost students to homeschooling and private schools because of the pandemic and because we fully expect those students to come back to us when this is over and for us to continue the growth that we had enjoyed prior to the pandemic we need to be able to plan

019our funding numbers to reflect that uh and to reflect what we'll need to do when we welcome all those students back into our halls as well as to reflect all the work that we've been trying to do prior to the pandemic um as i said before all of these issues that we're dealing with are intertwined with equity um you know as chair paige mentioned as mr alcaro mentioned you know we've been working hard here to close opportunity gaps in reading in math and gifted identification in discipline and other areas but we also know that the pandemic appears to have worsened these instructional gaps so after this very challenging year we anticipate trying to catch up and many of the ideas floated nationally to do that involve significant increases in teachers and teacher time so i

020just i wanted to ask the legislators here if you wouldn't mind telling me has there been any discussion at the state level on how to fund that type of educational recovery and in that recovery what are your educational priorities well i guess i get to go first um and i want to say that particularly with school funding um it seems strange to be in an albemarle school board meeting and not have steve colazar here um that he was always the greasy the squeaky wheel that needed to be greased particular grease particularly when it came up to funding um we we've got a huge number of catch-up jobs to do i i've really been worried you know my i've got a sister-in-law that's an elementary school principal in bath county and i've got a niece and

021nephew and schools over here and though kids there are a lot of kids are going to be all right in this pandemic they're all right with virtual learning but the the kids that i worry about are those that are learning to read k through three kids and special education kids those are the children that need hands-on learning they need to be in in a classroom with with someone who who can keep their focus keep them and we've got a huge amount of catching up to do i've not judy i've not been involved in any of those conversations i've never served on an education committee in the legislature i i do serve on the finance committee and and one of our priorities is going to be to make sure that our schools not only not not

022only is there a whole harmless part of the final budget that's passed but that we take a good long hard look a deep dive into what what we need to allow schools to catch up and make sure that our kids can regret regain the ground that i'm afraid they've lost you know unfortunately i think some kids that the losses are going to be irretrievable there's going to be so much catch up i'm not sure that we're going to we're going to be able to do it all but we have an obligation it seems to me to figure out how to make sure that we lose as few children as possible and we've got to got to work extra hard over the next several years once we get past this um pandemic well i i don't

023i'll speak next i guess i mean i think that there were predictions that the virtual learning would exacerbate some of the equity issues you're describing and they were pretty compelling predictions but now the data's coming in and they are reflecting just what you would think i think most of you know my wife is a teacher's assistant up at baker butler and the stories she brings home at night are consistent with what was what is seen in the virginia uh newspaper reports and the national newspaper reports which would be that the kids with a lot of support at home are able to somehow get through this and the kids who were most at risk at the beginning are the ones who are falling by the wayside and i'll just give an anecdote it was the other

024day and she said that there was a she's she's with first graders and they can't read i mean some can but the ones that we're talking about can and so for example when she's trying to direct them to the page so that she can help with the lesson the child has real trouble identifying the page from which she is then going to work from which she is going to make the ketchup and so you can see at the atomistic level the the breakdown and equity we're describing which would be with the parent that has excuse me the kid that has a college educated parent nearby who can say no honey 120 means the one the two and the zero and that's how you find the page and it's after page 119 and before page that

025kid's just a little slower to get to the information that the student spends the entire period unable to even find the page from which to work and i'm hopeful i assume that you guys have had meeting after meeting where the parents teachers assistants staff are describing this but in terms of a priority i would hope that we would i guess first realistically accurately completely identify how much we lost here i think we can be aspirational we should as you know so everybody's working as hard as they can but again all the data says there's a significant problem and then that would be where i hope that the budget would direct its resources i'm not part of the budget um cree mentioned not being on education committee i've been on the education committee and that's not

026where the money is that's much less important for the topics you're describing than senate finance or the house appropriations committee i'm on either obviously but thank you that might be a good spot for me to pick up um as one of the most junior members who is not have a seat on either senate finance or appropriations but does have a seat on house finance which is where we talk about raising revenue to fund critical priorities um so from that lens maybe i'll start by trying to say a few things that i hope are simple and non-controversial in this group that school funding is critical that virginia lags behind other states in how much our state puts into our system and that we've been asking too much of our localities for a long time and i

027think the state has not been picking up its fair share we took big steps on the finance side last year to start to do better by that with the equal taxing authority legislation which will make it easier for counties to raise revenue and i know that was a top priority for alma county but i think the reality is that that was just a first step and that there are a number of things that we need to do to fix the structural hole in our school funding in virginia um i know we're going to see with everybody running for statewide office in the coming year a lot of big conversations about big education plans and whether that's a billion dollars or two billion dollars it's going to be a big number and it should be because

028that's i think how far behind we are and i think that we're going to hear some comments about potential sources of revenue that could fill say a two billion dollar hole and we'll hear people talk about small options there will be people will talk about um more gambling revenue um from gray machines and we'll hear people talk about legalizing marijuana and cannabis taxes potentially and those are potential sources of revenue and they're things that we should take seriously but they're also too small relative to the size of the whole we cannot raise enough money from the kinds of gambling and substance streams that people are discussing to put two billion dollars behind our schools and so if we want to be serious about that and we should then we have a longer conversation to have

029about bigger picture structural tax reform in virginia i think that comes from three key sources sales taxes corporate taxes and the personal income tax and as a member of the finance committee i am working hard to start those conversations um and know that i'm not the first to have them but i am perhaps one of the more energetic folks who really sees that as a critical part of our work you know we we rely really heavily on sales taxes also to fund state services but sales taxes only apply to goods and right now we need to talk about potentially expanding the sales tax base to cover personal services as well so that if you buy a shampoo you pay sales tax but if you go to the hairdresser you don't um those are the kind

030of things that would um have a more equitable consumption tax across virginia that would make it possible to raise the kind of money that it would take to fill the to fund the kind of investments in our schools that people are talking about um so that's just by way of saying i'm glad that people are talking about major investments in our schools and that that will be front and center in a lot of our campaign conversations this year i hope that we can also ensure that when we talk about those big numbers we talk seriously about what it takes to put real money behind them because i think there are some items on the campaign trail that we're going to talk about that are just too small in practice to really deliver on those promises

031if i could follow up real quickly you know i hope you paid attention to what she said well the the grey machines which were only one time fixed they're supposed to to be we're supposed to be done with them by next year didn't produce enough as much revenue this year as they we thought they would and that's because people were when the stores opened back up people started buying lottery um moana there are some people that want to see that as as the sun but even in the states standpoint colorado and washington i can't hear anybody else the revenue has been around somewhere between two get summer money but that's not clearly enough to fix what we we need to do with education right senator i think you cut out for just a moment but

032i'm glad you said it because if that's you think actually the next point that i would have said too colorado and washington are further down this road than we are and they've managed to raise two or four hundred million dollars from cannabis and if we're talking about two billion dollars i'm sorry but that number's too small uh i'd like to offer and excuse me i'd like to offer in that i'm not on any of the money committees as well but i am on the committee that deals with broadband and i can understand and appreciate the challenges that uh educators are going through and trying to create a virtual environment i was curious to know and in your opening comments you talked about that you had put in a thousand hot spots uh does that meet

033the need does that fully cover all your students it it does not we still haven't we still have a problem with some of the kids do you know how many i don't have a number right off hand that's fine so perhaps if that number is available i'd be interested in it what is the cost of the thousand hotspots i know you didn't charge the uh your citizens your your students but somebody's paying something so what kind of number are we talking about we do have uh dr christine diggs here if you want to yeah um dr diggs would you address that question please sure good afternoon i'm dr diggs chief technology officer um we've invested um over a half million dollars in the hot spots and the primary reason is because we had to um

034we had to go with unlimited data plans in order to support the video that's required by virtual instruction over zoom and so that raised the cost significantly um and there were there were a little a little under 200 students that we had coming into our schools because we could not um either they preferred to come into school or the hot spot wouldn't work in their location to answer your first question okay well i appreciate that and and you know going back to what we're all trying to accomplish and that is provide high quality uh education to students in the environment we're dealing with and then be prepared as we move forward and so i know album marl has a number of unique challenges relating to broadband but uh the other counties that i represent have

035those have similar challenges so that's an area that you ask educational priorities that's an educational priority for me how do we figure out how to move forward in a substantial manner the ability to get broadband services into the homes not just for education but for health care and other quality of life issues thank you very much uh there are other comments from other board members related to this mrs hudson uh delicate hudson um i really enjoy it and appreciate all of your comments because um i think all of those things could be very good potential um revenue sources for our schools so thank you for your work in each of those areas i became an economist because i wanted to work on funding schools thank you very good any other comments or questions um related

036to our state budget portion i would just like to thank delegate bell or ask delegate bell to thank his wife who is a teacher up at baker butler baker butler recently was one of four schools throughout the state of virginia that received an award for basically eliminating the achievement gap uh within within uh its students and the numbers there were extraordinary and so uh delegate bell if you would pass along our thanks to your wife and the rest of the baker butler team i sure would appreciate that we were we were parents there too so that's where my daughter spent her whole k through five and um i'll pass she will i'll pass that on the school was just like you'd think the teachers were pretty proud of it the administration was very proud of

037it they worked very hard at that so i'm sure that you've told them that also but thank you any other comments related to the state budget all right next we'll have the mental health portion of our uh packet presented by dr kate aycoff well i'm not i'm not going to read my section uh we um greatly appreciate the work that you've done in the general assembly to increase support for mental health and mental health school counselors but as you know you have not fully funded your portion of that and that would be very welcome mental health is an issue for one in five kids nationally and i don't imagine we're any different and that was before uh covet we have um you know and as we all know uh children's uh social and emotional health

038is critical to learning anything and this has been extraordinarily stressful for a lot of our kids and and their parents we hear from a lot of them on a daily basis you might ask what in a virtual universe do our school counselors do and i know uh for at one of our elementaries well i did not tally all 25 of our schools but at some of our schools uh the guidance co the school counselors will pop on a regular course or classroom and say hello making certain that the kids know who they are uh and some of them they do directed uh activities such as learning how to categorize problems you know here's is this this is a problem is it a problem with your classmate is it a small problem that you can do

039on your own uh here are some tools that you can handle that when should you go and talk with an adult um but some of the issues are related to what ms hudson was talking about in terms of poverty one of the schools that i represent is greer elementary which has uh two thirds of its students are black and brown 76 percent are eligible for free and reduced cost lunches it also has the highest percentage of english language learners and in terms of teaching second graders how to hold a pencil or to find the lesson on a virtual screen it's extraordinarily challenging the guidance counselors at greer do everything from being the coordinators with the toy lift that we just happened and explaining to some of our muslim families that their kids can get toys

040for a christian holiday and and if so you know where they could pick up the toys and sometimes they make deliveries um they have worked of course in terms of um child protective services which everything that i have read and that is reported to me it's much harder to detect when they're virtual and when they don't have privacy at home in terms of talking into their computer but i would urge a that you continue to reduce the rate the ratio of counselors to students toward what the american academy of school the mir the american school counselors association recommended ratio and then fund fairly fund your portion of that i like with kids falling behind and needing a marshall plan for postcovid education i think mental health needs to be a critical part of that whatever

041we are looking at with our kids right now um it may be exacerbated by this year of uh of um craziness i don't know how to say it i mean in addition to our younger kids we have some anguished letters and public comments from our high school athletes who are distraught that you know they can't continue their um sports during this period of time many of them you know are applying to schools and you know we're trying to get scholarships but many of them we had a very upset letter from a parent i think it was this week saying that we've ruined their kids and they're going to be definitely going to be a high school dropout i wonder about all the longer-term consequences and we need to have the mental health professionals in place

042um to deal with that and i know cree you and i went to a presentation at monticello several years ago of of students uh about mental health and uh we at albemarle are very proud that we have already even before the changes to soq's been um expanding our core of mental health professionals but it's still not enough yeah and i think rob had the same presentation maybe at a different time those kids though have have contributed to state law in a number of ways already you know we we've been what we've been trying to do the last few years is um you know mental health school counselors historically have been what's known as guidance counselors we need counselors that are prepared to meet the mental health needs of students help students grow up help students

043get ready for for life not not necessarily find a job or or the right college place but we can we can do that other ways um the the part of the good news yesterday with the governor's budget announcement was that he was going to restore the funding for to reduce the ratio for for school counselors you know that that's not enough but it's the first step and it's an important step i agree with you we have we have to um we have to focus we have to continue to focus on on schools one thing those kids from um well they the presentation was at at mo monticello but but the the kids were out there was actually a student from western albemarle and a student student from albemarle high school too part of what they

044did and rob and i carried the bills were was to um introduce um mental health education into the health curriculum for eighth and ninth grade students and that that's critically important in terms of reducing the stigma associated with mental health and also give kids the tools they need to recognize issues that might be first appearing among some of their peers along the way you know this is a very important issue and and and i think we've begun the begun the roadway that's going to um allow us to to break through and and make kids lives better and you should be proud that a lot of that work started in albemarle county and in particular in your in your schools so congratulations on the good work but we still have a long way to go um

045i have a question that we're in the middle of this came out of one of the cree and i serve on something that everybody but him calls the deeds commission is the mental health ongoing study commission and um we there's an issue that arose from aldemar called the therapeutic day treatment it goes by tdt and it's um what happens is a counselor has identifies a program which is needs more intensive care than he or she can provide and they are then sent to the tdt program and there was a change in the way the program was run and there's that you might recall a big article in the daily progress and this was the first so it was happening statewide but it sometimes happens somebody has to identify it first the administration swore that they

046now had eliminated that that it's all fine that other programs are taking the place i am always skeptical we just had that meeting can anybody tell me if it is i mean have had the tdt rates going back up or has an alternative equivalent program be put in place because these are the i mean i've got one in my head that i'm visualizing from baker butler but these are the kids that need more than an occasional check-in with the counselor this is literally where they do some triaging and identify can anyone share maybe i don't put anybody on the spot if you'd like maybe someone else can rob i mean i did speak today with someone with principal at greer and he was he was just saying he his two medicaid funded region 10 tdt

047counselors were taken away last year and he doesn't they were not replaced so i don't know maybe debbie collins can jump in and say i'm not sure who who the administrator was but it wasn't me and that problem has not been solved okay and in fact if i could add to that one of the things that we've had with the eric local county government is they've frozen positions so not only have the tdt workers not return we have social workers that have not those positions have not been filled okay let me make a request and this may not be the best place for it but somebody one of you is the right person and this will save us a lot of work and phone calls so at our last hearing senator deeds and i were

048we raised the issue and were told by the administration that it was a blip that they'd taken care of it that other programs were in place that were better and more effective and more efficient and we said that's not at all what we are hearing from region 10 or from the local schools or the local councillors and it's not just albar this was um flavanon green had similar issues and i i was skeptical and said i would check with our local people and see if what you're describing that it's been taken care of is actually a coming coming out in the wash all the way down at the tip of the spear if i hear you that it's not then what my ask would be would be if someone could just do a by whatever

049metric is fair don't i'm not asking for something that makes it look more or less than it is but how many kids were being serviced however's easiest by quarter by month by year but if there is an appreciable fall off and no equivalent program that is now catching those kids i don't they haven't been magically cured there's not there's always some new court moving in if someone could maybe provide that i think that would help us in our discussions in richmond we have a meeting on monday and i don't know cree you may know the answer whether it's even going to be on the agenda but i would sure not like to let this just slip along without having an answer from them if it's causing you all problems uh we can certainly have our

050our staff do that i'll i'll swap you if you can let me know who the employee was from mount mall county schools that relayed that information if that's what you're suggesting i'd like to have that as well no no the opposite we always we had good information from you it was the state it was the state people okay i got you all right yes yeah that that really concerned me we're in the middle in the midst of a big redesign and everybody understands in five years this is not perhaps the best program once everything is integrated but in the meantime that they saw a significant drop off in approval rates and what the kids were being approved for without an equivalent program in place to catch this kid and we told them until the new

051thing is in place this doesn't seem a sensible way to do this and they said no no it's all we had more we had more this year than we had last year and i was positive that seemed inconsistent with what everything was happening that's uh that's the fact yeah we so thank you rob thanks for clarifying that whenever i hear administration i think i pick local so uh we'll have we'll work with kevin kirst he's our uh executive director for intervention services we'll get those numbers to you tomorrow okay and obviously we don't need names this is anonymous data because we need to be able to show them huh you're saying that it's fine and that's not what we're okay thank you thank you thanks for bringing that up matt could you share that with

052the school board as well absolutely thank you uh delicate runyon or delicate hudson um do either of you have any comments related to mental health not putting anybody on the spot i certainly appreciate the conversations and uh uh i want to thank delegate bell for bringing that issue forward i know that that's been an issue in other localities as well and so i would be interested in hearing the results uh if i could be copied on that and so again i appreciate charles comments and i would just echo that i heard loud and clear the request for student counselor ratios and that at least in our chamber i think we're going to be having a lot of talks about how to prioritize that in the budget package okay thank you any other comments from board

053members related to the mental health aspect okay if not our last area that we are concerned with is on teacher recruitment and mrs carlson is going to lead that portion of our discussion hi everyone it's great to see your faces i feel like i have used to see so many of you guys in passing at events like uh delegate bell at graduation and sally hudson dancing in a reindeer costume on the side of the street um but maybe next year um i the last topic which it sounds like i know i came late to this meeting but it sounds like we were already doing some discussion around the budget is just about the generalized teacher shortage delegate hudson i heard you speak about teacher pay and how we we tend to lag behind other states

054i think we're 30 33 out of the nation in terms of what we pay our teachers and we would just like to um to push you guys how important it is to pay our teachers well and pay them competitively so that we can continue to recruit teachers i used to be a teacher myself um delegate bell's wife is a teacher they they honestly are making doing all the hard work you know when we talk about things it's really the relationship you build with your teacher and having good teachers is important um it's also i'll put in my personal little little thing which is that we've made a really big push recently to have more diversity in our teacher hires it's something that's been proven effective in terms of narrowing the achievement gap and it's really

055hard to do it's hard to recruit teachers at um the current pay scale does anyone else have anything they would like to add i mean it's pretty short short list just give us more money you know you are exactly right you know it's i remember you remember this is ancient history but there was a fella named chuck robb who was elected governor back in 1981 and his big idea that that helped get him elected was let's raise our teacher pay to the national average well none of us want our children to be average that always always always bothers me that we our goal is to be average you know we we ought to be the best school system in the in the country we ought to aspire to um produce the best the most qualified

056graduates um and and here's here's the thing it is about money sally hudson and i were involved in the conversation last night with another group and at the end of the day it's about money it's about it's about coming up coming up with a new new way to generate the revenue because the old ways just don't work here's the thing arlington fairfax county you know the average teacher pay is 90 000 and that sounds like that sounds great but you go across the river to the next county over montgomery county average teacher pays a hundred thousand dollars how in the world can even the best paying jurisdictions in virginia compete when their neighbors pay so much more we've got to figure this out we've got to figure it out and it's going to take real

057hard work and people are going to have to make decisions about things that they don't really want to have to face but the reality is if we are going to be the best we can be if we're going to provide the best environment for our children to grow up um we're going to have to make those decisions and we're i think those i think we might have some choices as early as this year um if if we're going to move forward yeah and i would just echo the senator and say that i think that that those conversations are now brewing in earnest in richmond and i think especially in the year ahead because we're all going to be looking at a whole bunch of folks who will be running to lead the next administration the

058richmond one um that we that we take really seriously deciding to to support the people who will tell you how they're going to do it because i think we know that everyone loves telling you that they want to raise teacher pay when they're running for office and then somehow it slips further down the priority list once they're serving and so i just hope that you know i know all of us here are deeply committed to that work and that i hope we will support our communities in in really trying to pin people down and make sure that they sketch out how they're going to do it and then make them deliver once they're in office one thing that's sort of out of the out of the box but it's a possibility i would think is

059some sort of loan forgiveness for curry and our educational other educational institutions for teachers who remain in virginia um there's a you know i mean the reality is going to curry is not an inexpensive and inexpensive thing i mean it's not like it's you know and and you know if you if you go to law school and you pay a hundred thousand dollars and you come out and you're making 150 000 that makes a lot of financial sense but for a lot of our teachers it it it quite frankly financially does not make sense and maybe that's one way to start is to to start making it financially viable for people to go into education and encourage them to stay here i i think that that's a good idea i confess if i'm going dollar

060for dollar and i have to choose between raising pay and doing loan forgiveness i would rather just raise pay because it just maximizes flexibility of the person being paid they can use it to pay down debt if they want um and if they have other priorities like paying for a mortgage or you know buying that first car they can do it and i just think it takes the burden off the state of administering that loan forgiveness program i think especially at the federal level we have seen loan forgiveness programs offered you know for years and remarkably low take-up rates or people who can successfully navigate all of the hurdles of getting those loans delivered and so from my perspective i'm not sure that it's worth the headache of administering the program that pays you back

061for one and only one thing if we could put those dollars dollar for dollar into just raising wages but that's sort of my take but i i do think the load forgiveness idea is one worth exploring you know but you know again it's not easy and it's about it's about money putting money behind programs like that you know for for example uh years ago we identified real needs in every area of mental health provider from counselor to licensed clinical social worker to psychologists to psychiatrists and we we've found a plans plans that worked in other states built around loan forgiveness we've tried to get those things funded and we just haven't had success doing that um the the shortages of workforce are really are very real in that area that's just one instance where we've

062tried this before and it hadn't we haven't been able to convince people to fund it um so it's worth exploring i don't think it's i don't think it's it's a cure-all i would just chime in and say that my mom tried to do the loan forgiveness and she's a smart lady and somehow she still fell like a year short of whatever requirement she reported in time and they are difficult to navigate and i would also add on that one thing that's really positive about you guys providing more um budget and providing the space to provide teacher raises is that there's when you think about the state as a whole i do feel very confident in what we're doing here in albemarle and how we pay our teachers we do a really good job but i

063know that we pull teachers from rural areas where they don't pay as well i know my mom used to work in stafford she now draws all the way up to alexandria from fredericksburg to work there and she's an experienced veteran teacher so when we're looking at equity across the state i i'm appreciative of the fact that this is on your on your mind because it's creating habs and haves not within our state well the point you make is is exactly what what we've got we've got a feeder system of teacher development counties like bath where i live we get our teachers from west virginia because we pay more than west virginia but nearly everybody else in the state pays more than we do so our teachers unless they have some connection to bath county they

064stay here a few years and then move on and they they move up to the augustas and then they move to the albemarle's and then they move to the prince williams and henricos and loudons and fairfaxes eventually i guess it's a feeder system and we have to we have to be out fixing it all right thank you uh do either um delegate bill or delegate runyon have any comments related to teacher recruitment no and thank you i do have to have a hard stop i appreciate everybody's comments today and i look forward to working with you thank you thank you delicate bill are there any other comments from any of our school board members i'd just like to thank all of our representatives for all the work they do for schools and for getting on

065a zoom meeting i i'm sort of with cree it is easy to do zoom uh in some ways we may be able to have uh we we're we're already look talking at the schools level that some of our kids actually like maybe some of our older kids actually like um virtual but um it's still much more fun to see you in person it is my fourth zoom of the day wow yesterday mine too craig we had nothing but snow and ice and i had three zooms i did them all from my dining room table all right office today okay i'd just like to echo the fact that this to me has been one of the most worthwhile of these sessions we've had in a number of years i mean it would be better if we

066were together but this has allowed uh you know a real give and take um even more so than than some of the ones we've had in person so thank you all very very much i i gotta tell you john i prefer you virtually many people do dave right i was just gonna add thank you to all of you what you have managed in the last year is nothing short of herculean and keeping our schools running at any time is an enormous task but under these circumstances you have really held up the world and everything else falls apart i think as we've learned again um without our strong school systems nobody can go to work and you know none of the other wheels of of our communities can be churning without you so thank you for

067for navigating it and for shouldering so much for so many okay thank you to everyone all of our delegates delicate hudson runyon uh deeds senator deeds and delicate bill thank you all for attending today really thank you for your input heard some really encouraging things so we'll be looking forward to the budget session as it begins in january uh maybe just for a few minutes dr haas our superintendent um do you have any comments to give to us in closing i get to make the closing remarks mr page oh wow that's exciting so no i just want to echo what our board members said i i just think these opportunities uh for our local boards whether it's the board of education or the board of supervisors having the opportunity to speak with our legislators in

068richmond is absolutely invaluable i i want to say this that and i mean it sincerely your knowledge of what's happening here locally really impresses me you really know what what we're dealing with um you really are in touch with your constituents and it shows through your engagements in meetings like these so um i consider it a privilege to sit in a sit in on these meetings to hear what you have to say to learn from you and to learn from the interactions that you have with our board i know that you're fighting one for what is right i know that you value education and i want you to know that that we have your back and if you need anything from us that we we will help you any way that we can and again

069thank you very much for for showing up today it's much appreciated during this very busy time thank you okay thank you dr haas and again thanks to all of our participants all of our legislators um so the board we will adjourn until 4 30 and then we will reconvene for um another session so thanks again to everyone in our attendance hey chris i hope everything works out i think he's gone i think he's gone thanks everyone thank you okay it's now 4 30 p.m eastern standard time and um just to make sure that we are legal i think that our minute should reflect that this meeting is being held electronically pressing it to virginia state law and alamo county ordinance because of the covet pandemic and in this meeting we are communicating it to the

070public through soon but we do not have public comment um during this meeting so we are now ready for our afternoon session on budget development and i thank dr patrick mclaughlin is going to lead us yes good afternoon board members i'm pat mclaughlin chief of strategic planning and i'm here with maya kumazawa to uh to lead you through our work session today and we've really got three parts of this work session that we're going to work through um the first is going to spend a little bit of time uh thinking back to dr haas's presentation from last month to unpack the state of the division report then around five o'clock we're going to hear a little bit about our budget assumptions and expenditure considerations and then finally we're going to have some board discussion and

071breakout groups around budget priorities for the coming fiscal year so just to frame up a little bit why do we talk about the state of the division and the budget at the same time and really it's because we've got a cyclical process that we've that we've started over the past couple of years so it all kind of begins with the budget and each year the board puts together a budget and within there lists the priorities and the goals that they have for the division and recently we've started using that budget document to directly help inform our school improvement and our department improvement plans so when you take a look at those you should see for example every department in the budget has outlined some kind of some things that they're looking ahead to in the

072future in that budget and you should see how they're going to put those into practice in their department improvement plans at the end of that school year the departments report back to us and that report becomes the state of the division and the state of the division looks at what's working well for us but it also highlights some areas where we could continue to use some improvement and that should then start the next cycle where we go back to the budget and start to think about what are the programs that we want to continue uh and what programs might need some additional support or be abandoned or uh you know what makes the most sense uh in terms of our fiscal priorities for the year and so today we're gonna spend a bit of time

073unpacking the state of the division um uh you heard a pretty comprehensive report on the state of the division last month from dr haas and uh and we're going to just use that to kind of prime the pump a little bit and refresh our memories to really go into the heart of our work today which is which is around the budget priorities and so if you recall the state of the division report is pretty comprehensive it's it's about 70 plus pages long and so we clearly won't have uh won't have time to read through the whole thing but i would what i would encourage you to do when we do our first activity is take a look at the table of contents what stands out to you is it the equity report is it human

074resources is it reports from our individual departments that you want to take a look at and we are going to uh open up a jam board for you all if you remember that those are those boards where you can move some post-it notes back and forth and the first thing that we want you to do is just individually take a look at the state of the division and start identifying areas in the state of the division that you think are strengths for the division you know what we're doing well weaknesses areas where we could improve opportunities you know what are some trends that are out there right now that we could take advantage of and what are some threats to the division meeting our goals while you're reading through that and you and you identify

075those strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats write a post-it note and post it on the jam board and put it into the correct uh quadrant up on the board you'll see that you've got the link to the state of the division report and this is what your jam board's going to look like just to remember you're all going to be working off of the same one and there's going to be multiple pages to this board that you can get to up here the rest of the pages pages two through five are going to be a second activity that we do with miss kumizawa uh when she comes on for her part but just to remember to add a sticky note you click over here on the sticky note icon you type your message uh

076that you want in there and then you click save it'll appear on the board and you can move it all around you can change colors i know we've got some board members who really like to uh to personalize and put their own colors on there for this activity i'm going to ask you to keep them all yellow because in the second part we're going to do a group activity where we're going to where the colors are going to become more important so um for 10 minutes take a look at the state of the division and i will um drop our presentation for today into our uh into the chat in just a second and you can access the state of the division uh through that presentation there's a link there and you can access the

077jamboard through that link so let me um stop sharing my screen for a second so i can get this into the chat i'll put a direct link into the jam boards too that first link is the state of the division the second link will take you to the jamboard and i'll go ahead and put the state of the division link in there too just to make things easy and then the third link is the state of the division and so i'm going to step back it's 4 36 we'll go until about 4 46 i'll put the jam board up so that everyone who's tuned into the meeting can see what you're putting on there but your charge over the next 10 minutes is to identify a few strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats and i'm sorry

078pat you were clear about the colors but i uh missed what you said should we be using one color or yes please if you can leave everything yellow for right now um that would be uh that would be ideal yep okay all right so 10 minutes ready go you realize telling me to leave everything yellow hello c so one more minute to add any strengths weaknesses opportunities or threats you'd like all right so i'm going to bring you back together for a few minutes thank you for uh for jumping in there looks like we've got a lot of um of uh ideas to work with we've got one very threatening bunny that uh that made its way on to the to the board as well that we'll um we'll deal with in short order so

079clearly that's not a comprehensive list that we uh that we created in in 10 minutes but it's a good start and and it's it's very interesting we did a similar exercise um with our strategic planning design group the other night and and i see a lot of similarities to um with what you're identifying with what they identified there as well and so for the next step we really want the board to to work together on this and start thinking about what are the of the threats and weaknesses that were identified and of the strengths and opportunities that were identified what are the most important for you all to be considering as you start to have a conversation around the budget in other words if if we could identify some threats and weaknesses that if we

080got rid of those if we took out those barriers uh which ones would have the most impact on improving the student experience same thing for the threats the strengths and the opportunities what is it that's working well right now where if we expanded on it or um or used those ideas in a in a more expansive way what would improve the learning experience for our students the most and so this is where we get to play with the colors a little bit what we're going to ask you to do is as a board start talking through those and as you come to consensus around which are most important for the board to be focusing on in the future open up that sticky note and turn it blue and we'll keep the the notes that turn

081blue will just give us an indication that that's what uh rose up to the top of that conversation and that's something you can keep in mind as maya takes us through some of the budget work that we're doing so we're going to give about um 15 to 20 minutes to uh to do this work and again i'm going to step back but i think feel free board members should feel free to open up their mics i'll have the jam board up for everyone who's viewing to see and you all can have some conversation with each other around that and i'll be listening in the background i'm happy to jump into the notes and if you find one that you want to turn a different color i can go in and take care of that also

082if during the course of your conversation you say hey we really should have put this up um feel free to to continue to add to the board so we'll take it's 4 48 right now we'll take until um a little after five o'clock maybe 505 to go through this so i'm going to step into the background and let you all have some conversation around that are we just supposed to start up i think yes this is just this is just open conversation for the board um at this time i'm having problems seeing the uh sticky page so i think what i've done needs to be overwritten in some way you don't see the screen share gram with all the sticky notes on it no um so mr paige it should be coming through in the

083share on the shared screen for everyone and if you can't see that i can send you the link again and you can open it directly and you can see it on your screen just send me the link again absolutely i'll do that right now i can um chime in about the strengths let me tell my kids to be quiet real quick guys stop talking um uh the one that stood out to me that i really like is we are great at teaching advantage students and and with some examples um less advantage and i know that can be sound a little negative but i mean it is it is a strength of arts we have really good programs there are kids that do extremely well and have extremely good outcomes and it is something we do

084well and if we acknowledge that and figure out ways to fold in and to get other students into those programs i think it's a it's a good strength i like whoever put that a good strength with the the caveat okay still not seeing it so patrick could you do the other step i'm sorry the um because i can't the chat box won't show up at the bottom of the screen for some reason let me do this how about if i send you an email mr page with a direct link to it as well okay would that be helpful it might yeah all right let me try that hey graham if you go to your view options you've changed the view option go to the view option and put it so that it allows you to

085see the presentation go to side side-by-side mode what do side by side mode on your view screen okay i don't see that either see dave the five zoom meetings are paying off right um okay well all right move on i don't see that either dave uh all right well keep on we'll see what i can do graham we could email you the link do you have your email yeah i might have to sign off and then come back on again okay um but try yeah try emailing it we're working on that now mr page i like um the potential to establish a foundation uh are we talking about all of the quadrants right now i'm sorry i missed the the parameters of this but um i liked that as an opportunity but i also um

086want for us to continue to have that conversation about equitable donation uh and i know that we've had some of that conversation already but i think we need to continue to have that conversation i don't know if that's here um it's obviously not here in this discussion but i want us to not lose sight of that a la the bunny kind of piggybacking off that just a little bit i i am excited about the potential of establishing a foundation as well in the threats category kind of covered up i put excuses because i think it's really easy to make excuses and i think money is something that's an easy like we had more money these problems would go away or we could fix them and i feel like that's that's definitely not the case and

087there's there are plenty of school divisions that have a lot less resources than us that have much more equitable outcomes so um still appreciate starting a foundation but to tie into threats one of the ones that stands out to me is excuses and figuring out what you can do with what you have for a second that i like rethinking the education model for all students and i think there are a lot of different directions we can go in with that which could be everything from year-round school having the schools open year year-round to to other different models of instruction of uh of structure overall i think that's going to be a a subject that we're going to need to put quite a bit of work into in in 2021 i mean the the weakness is

088there's a there's an absolute binding theme there that we're just not our school system is really good for a lot of our students and not so good for others and yeah that comes down to you know katrina's issue of excuses we have a thousand excuses for why that's true but we all know it's true and that you know from my perspective that that has to continue to be our our top priority that we that we address that and you know address it with our staff address it with our students our families and quite frankly i think communication with parents that's also a big part of that i don't think our communications are necessarily reaching out to [Music] all agreed and i think that our communications um i know that we have translation in a lot

089of our communications but i think our communications quite often assume that there is a high literacy at home it assumes that there is a high uh often it assumes that there is a high access to technology and comfort with technology in this language uh so i i do think that the community is definitely second communication with parents and and just because it translates doesn't mean it translates exactly and there are a lot of there are a lot exactly cultural norms that you know you might assume that we really don't want to assume necessarily and so i i can you know my my one of my my favorite stories is from one of my high school classmates um thought that embarrassado was a cognate for being embarrassed and her host family was very concerned when she

090said that she was embarrassed which is pregnant um yeah it was very it was you know she assumed it was a cognate it's not we have you know just because you can translate you can use google translate doesn't mean that we're reaching in a way that we need to and it's got to be on us it's got to be our responsibility not the responsibility of the people to whom we're not communicating yeah i can't remember the number of languages we mentioned in the state of the division it's like is it 91 or something like that 81 81 yeah so we're definitely not translating into 81 languages i'll jump on as the one one i didn't put a sticky note in was in the weakness category um that brings up one thing which i feel like

091a lot of times from our conversations we leave out our spanish-speaking population i know that i'm personally guilty of that a lot i focus on african-americans or black students but you know we have this other large minority group that i don't know necessarily maybe i'm just saying my own weakness i don't know if we focus on them as much as we should in our conversations kind of seem to support that like or some of our biggest drops were um what is the one i'm thinking of where it was it's like a big drop it's how our english as a second language students were doing in something you know i agree with you on that katrina because it is our largest minority group and it is one of the smallest percentage of teachers from that minority

092group you know and so um it's not an either or situation between you know minority groups it's got to be an end and we've got to make sure that it's that it stays that way for for everybody right yeah i think we should probably have is one of our goals making sure that our um teaching staff represents our complete student population um instead of where we have been focusing not saying that we have to stop focusing there and make sure that it really reflects everybody and then another one to switching um the senior exit survey data how much information are we receiving from that and um how is that data being used how long has it been in existence i know we've saw it i talked about it but i didn't know we actually had

093it so so i can answer that graham this is this is actually the the first year we've pushed it out to seniors post graduation uh we just started leaving their their k12 albemarle email addresses active uh with last year's class and so we didn't get a huge response there but it's a start you know we've talked about doing this for a while and so this was um really year one for for collecting that we hope that builds into a bigger source of feedback for us uh in the future one of the things that's interesting to note about that one of the questions we asked our seniors who just graduated are are you interested in working for al morrow county public schools and we had um about six or seven say yeah please contact me so

094we're working on some some reach out to them to build some relationships and uh and they they kind of run the gamut of the different departments they want to work in so um so that's something we're hoping to expand upon a bit in the future interesting and pat is the um is all that data from the survey uh disaggregated uh we have you i've got to go back and check miss lee it's been a a little while since i took a look at that um uh so i can find that answer and get it to you great thank you yeah i'd love to see it by various groups and by a feeder pattern really and that potential to establish a foundation is really something we should focus on because that could take care of some

095of our inn county needs things that would be strictly for almost county i know pef helps us some but if we had our own foundation it would really be great i think i know the city has a foundation already so we need to enter that arena too you know it's interesting i'm i'm somehow confused in terms of the foundations and i want to pick this up another time because i know uh there's the desire to do one regarding um pgo you know contributions and there's one that appears to be interested in helping uh families uh that have been really hurt with the pandemic and and other situations and so i i would love to get some clarification in one of our regular meetings about that one other thing that i just wanted to throw out

096is that in the rethinking of the acps educational model for all students i think one of the things there is and it says it in the lower left-hand corner we we can probably we need to probably build some virtual learning in at certain levels um for for more students we know we've got students doing virtual learning in the high schools already for school for courses chinese arabic uh other types of courses that we don't offer anywhere uh in the system that that they're already taking and working on getting credit for i think virtual learning is going to be something that is proving its worth and in some cases and needs we need to include going forward so um for weaknesses it looks like you just highlighted the we continue to be played by the opportunity

097gaps i would second that i mean that is the it's not even an elephant in the room we all acknowledge it i mean the data was not particularly promising in terms of making progress on those the metrics that we had we had called out and i think we um need to do better i will say i do appreciate the focus on reading i saw in there about being a reader how we continue to support that i'm hopeful that that will be reflected soon and um narrowing some of those reading gaps and the pals assessments picking up more more students because i think by the time i others might disagree but i feel like we have some tracking going on so by the time the kids get to high school and um middle school it's hard

098to close those gaps so i like that we put that focus i'd like to see that continue in the next budget that focus on elementary i'm reading i don't i don't know if we're at threats but my threat was was somewhat humorous it was also very very serious um i think we get distracted a lot um a lot of the time it feels like we're playing whack-a-mole on this job that it's sort of like one crisis after another and we have an idea of where we want to go and then something happens and you know the pandemic is an obvious example of that but i've been on the board for five years now and it it is not uncommon for us to have you know a high goal a high a high purpose and then

099something happens and you know the next three or four meetings are obsessed with that that responsiveness and so you know the the the man who chases two bunnies catches neither right um i think that we just need to be aware of that that the more different diffused our attention is the less likely we're going to get anything accomplished you know one to that point dave um i think one of the things that we don't use enough and i think we've only got one or two currently and uh is subcommittees and you know to to get some members you know two or three members to substantive as opposed to sort of procedural correct and to really you know put some some thought into it and then bring organized um not reports you know but organize subject

100uh and and and and next steps so that we can go about a lot of these things in in an organized manner and uh and stay stay on subject and so maybe in each session uh the chair asks for the ex you know subcommittee what do you have this week and then you know and then go through the three or four or five of them that there might be and so we're getting updates and there and and uh and and build ourselves up to making decisions uh based on uh information given to us by those groups so just being a little mindful of time here and and respectful of um of the board's time i think this gave us a great start you know this was uh i hope that we we did what we

101designed this to do just to get you thinking about what's important to be thinking about right now um as we go into the budget season what's working well what opportunities do we have that we might want to um develop further in the county what do we have to watch out for that um that can be a threat to the work that um that we are doing and so uh i'm gonna stop my share for just a minute but if you've got your jam board open leave it open because we're going to use the same boards a little bit later in the presentation and i'm going to turn things over to maya now so she can take us through the second part of the work session which is taking some of these ideas and using them

102to think about budget and budget priorities for the coming fiscal year so maya great thanks pat and good evening everyone for the budget portion for this evening we've outlined some three high-level goals there to review and provide feedback on budget strategies in order to give us direction for a proposed funding request in february and also to address school board concerns and questions many of these goals align with those of the budget advisory committee so we have invited some members here tonight who i will introduce to you a little bit later also i'm just a reminder that this meeting is just the first budget input meeting out of future ones and as you know we've built in a little bit of extra time this year the proposed funding request will be presented in february so there

103will be time especially in january to continue providing your feedback i thought i would start off with an enrollment projection for next year as you know this has an impact on both the revenue and the expenditure side um we've the last few months we've worked closely with a lot of stakeholders including principals um the walden cooper center on the long-range planning advisory committee and the leadership to to develop an enrollment projection in an unprecedented year where we really have a lot of uncertainty but we have landed on something that um there is pretty much consensus on and that is an enrollment of 14 000 students for next year that's the blue line that you see on the yellow dots over the years you can see is our actual enrollment and the current year we are

104using a september 30th enrollment of 13 hundred students i've also added an orange dot kind of at the top to show that was our projection so last year at this time we were projecting growth to fourteen thousand two hundred students and that growth was only going to continue from there um our projection in the blue of 14 000 is in line with um what walden cooper has projected for us as well and it is a sort of a middle ground and yes we will expect to see students returning but not all and that's what that represents next i'll move over to our preliminary revenue forecast currently we're anticipating no revenue increase in the local transfer and so far this year the projected local revenues have been on track with what's been budgeted and right now

105there's been really not a lot of new information to really look at any increases for next year in january though after the real estate assessments we will have a local revenue forecast that will turn into a local transfer for us so this number may change in mid to late january on the state side um we have just recently received the governor's proposed budget for the current biennium and um it is a very positive uh proposed budget that we are excited about um we do anticipate based on that proposed budget i mean there's still a lot of um time between now and by the time it's adopted but based on that budget we anticipate seeing about a five million dollar increase from the adopted 21 budget to next year's budget the proposed budget by the governor

106does include a revision for the current year as well as projections for the next year so this increase is not is not an increase from what we're projecting for this year but rather what was adopted back in the spring so that's mostly what this large increase is um made up of as back in the spring we made some pretty conservative projections about the economy so about over a little over two million dollars of the increase will come from soq funding which includes sales tax revenues a little bit under 1 million will come from lottery revenues and then um a little over a million dollars we're expected to see from a hold harmless or a no loss funding if we um base our other revenue streams from the enrollment projection that i just shared with you

107there are a few other revenues that we'll see in the school fund federal revenues and local school earned revenues we will probably be projecting lower school local school revenues as there are a lot of programs that have been put on hold due to the pandemic and we are still working through those but those will not be lowered in any significant way switching over to the expenditure side we've categorized how we're looking so far preliminarily how we're looking at expenditures into these categories there aren't too different from what you've seen in the past they're slightly different as you can see there's a lot of restoration instead of future growth on we'll i'll go from left to right and briefly describe each of these expenditure considerations so that you have a better understanding of them first in

108the non-discretionary column every year we have a baseline adjustment this is an adjustment it's typically a savings to account for who's on board now so the employees who were on our payroll last year have changed between last year at this time to this year and typically this is a savings because we have new employees on board and typically they're paid at slightly lower rates than those last year because those highest paid employees are retiring we do anticipate the savings to be a little bit more than usual just because we have seen more retirements than we have in past years we also anticipate seeing a health care rate increase of a significant amount this is because in we did not budget for an increase in plan year 2021 which is the same as calendar year 2021

109but we did see an increase in the health care rate in in plan year 2021. coupled with a potential rate increase in plan year 2022 on this will impact our fiscal year 22 budget and we will have to budget and increase and then finally a voluntary early retirement incentive program rates those may increase as well as i mentioned we have seen on higher rates of retirement during this year our next category is operational restoration during our revised budget process for fy 21 we had to make a lot of reductions these are all in detail in your fy21 adopted budget and i still have copies of those if anyone still wants to receive them for reference we reduced our annual transfer to the learning resources fund we cut 15 operational positions both department and instructional and

110then we also institute a 5 reduction in operating budgets throughout every department and every school these could be considered to be restored for the next budget we also have a category called instructional restoration as you may recall we changed our class size ratios in order to accommodate our reduced revenues for the current adopted budget so this restoration would restore our ratios of how we allocate ftes to students and then we would also restore the special education teacher growth that we were originally planning last year and the esau teacher growth that we were originally planning that had to be cut the next category is compensation and we have three general categories under that one option under compensation is to continue moving forward on the minimum pay rate this was in order to move last year we

111were talking about moving the division to a 15 minimum pay rate and it came with a pretty large price tag but before the pandemic we were we had enough projected revenues to cover that unfortunately that proposal was taken off the table so it could be a possibility to either to phase into that as much as we could this next bullet is a as a small tiny sliver less than a hundred thousand dollars really to make a an administrative change and also to benefit some of our part-time employees this is to provide health insurance benefits for part-time employees who are 0.5 to 0.69 to a benefit level of 0.7 to sort of ban them together to provide them a little bit of a better health insurance benefit and we already do this for part-time employees who

112are 0.7 to 0.99 they receive health insurance benefits at a rate of a full-time employee and then finally of course we have salary increase for both teachers and classifieds that would be up for consideration in next year's budget the last column is new proposals and this is really just a section of proposals that don't fit into the other category so these are new items that may be considered during the budget the budgeting process we have a couple here listed already but again this is very preliminary and on this this evening might be a chance to continue adding or asking questions about any proposals we might have and we'll have plenty of time to talk through these in your breakout groups but before we jump into the breakout groups i wanted to introduce our budget advisory

113committee um this was uh this is a group that was pulled together a couple years ago by dr haas um in order to analyze evaluate and advise the superintendent and division staff regarding budgeting practices and priorities from a business perspective the committee is comprised of business professionals with significant budgeting experience since a lot as i mentioned a lot of the goals of this committee align with the goals of this session i'm dr haas has invited some of them to join you tonight so if um julian gerard and paul could turn on your cameras and say a quick hello and introduce yourselves that would be great good afternoon everyone i'm julian bivens i am a resident of jack jewett district so i have the pleasure of knowing intimately eight o'clock in the morning and from two

114in the afternoon to four o'clock in the afternoon the bus traffic on lamb's lane it's uh you have really good bus drivers i can tell you that because some of the parents who drive on those roads are not very good drivers and your bus drivers do excellent jobs getting getting getting students back in and out uh i sit on the block which is wonderful because uh every time i say it it reminds me of uh baccalaureate which is the french degree and i spent a good many years living in france and let's see oh i can't i lost the other thing my my device just went [Music] uh that's it i've answered all the questions that my i said that she wants us to answer all right thanks julian and my name is gerard smith

115um so i am born and raised uh here in albemarle county um out in barbersville in the ravana district um so graduate of of the alamar county public school system from top to bottom dr haas actually was my principal back in the day um when i was at albemarle high school so um here trying to get back stay involved um currently um in the funding i'm in the field of finance as a financial forecaster um but always trying to get back to the school system and keeps on the right track in terms of budgeting so hi i'm paul mathern uh i think we've lived in november county now for this is our 33rd year um i work at the university of virginia in the school of medicine and also at the darden school of business

116um we had four children go through uh albemarle county schools all of whom are are grown and and out of the house now um uh actually matt was principal when our youngest two went through all morrow and we actually lived next door to matt for a little bit so i was just looking up a long time ago in 2004 to 2006 i was a member of the school board's long range planning committee and for one brief terrifying year i was on a redistricting committee so i gave that up for lent a long time ago so i'm happy to be on this uh on this committee and feel very strongly about public education and especially almond county schools we live in earlysville now thank you so um we are going to break you all up into

117three groups for most of the remainder of the session so you can really jump into the items that were discussed mostly with the focus on expenditure considerations and then we will come back again to report out what was discussed in your small groups some guiding questions to talk about in your groups we will have a facilitator with a jam board in each group but some questions to get you started are what are the guiding principles for these areas and by the areas i mean those colored categories that are presented by expenditure how do you want to go about tackling those areas what do you prioritize what are your must-have items for fy22 there's clearly not unlimited resources to do everything but we can do something so what would you like to see me move forward

118on and then what are some other priorities for you that you know we may not have listed what are other ideas or maybe even reductions that you can think of as we go into this process it would be great to hear from you so are there any questions before we jump out into groups mr ribbons will you be putting that your the guiding principles will they flow with us um we will um the facilitators facilitators will help make sure you don't you have this can you can you remind me what the learning resources fund was um that is our formerly known as the textbook replacement fund it is a special revenue fund that typically sees an annual transfer of about half a million dollars to support division-wide learning materials for the division okay um if

119there's nothing else um miss johnston would you be able to pop us into our groups and keep us there until about 5 45 yes i will hit the button now okay i think we we are group one uh we are still in the main room just as a reminder um we are i'm gonna bring the damn board up and we're i'm gonna sit back and let you guys chat um as a reminder the first thing we want to do to get some feedback in is some guiding principles on these big buckets so for instance a gutting principle could be make sure you restore everything first i don't know if that's a priority or not or in compensation it could be make sure we are matching the state budget those are very foundational um principles but

120um so before we get into the the weeds of it let's just talk about some guiding principles as matt's considering weighing these items [Music] so i have a question i'm just kind of just i'm obviously very new to this um these buckets i was just trying to understand operational restoration versus instructional restoration distinguish them for me yeah it's a good question we um we made a lot of cuts last year right and we try to organize them in a way the instructional ones are more related to growth and we downsize um what our class size ratio is and a number of teachers to students the operational side does have some instructional components some of those operational ftes wore our administ ap interns and instructional coaches there were some instructional pieces to that but they are

121more um established positions in our operating budgets but the instructional restoration are more um we changed our class size we didn't fully fund growth but i wouldn't spend i wouldn't worry too much about no no i i just want to i just want to throw out there just one way at least that i'm thinking about this in in my head and that is and you know again this is my first meeting you guys have probably gals have probably already done this but it's i'm having a hard time thinking about the buckets without thinking about the goal um and and to me especially given what's just happened in the past year and and quite honestly what's been a fortuitous budgetary uh gift in that there's actually more money than folks thought was going to be there

122because we had revenue was much better than projected it it seems to me like the driving premise of this has got to be to um and i see under proposals learning recovery there's been a gap that's been widened this year not everyone has been able to learn remotely um uh and i just think the disparities are just gonna be amplified and so to me it's like which of these operational instruction or compensation is going to be or is it a special program that's going to address the gap that happened then secondarily with covid it has just been highlighted to the country the disparities and as a health care provider it's been really highlighted on that but i've also read a lot about the disparities in education that have been highlighted by covid so moving forward

123especially if there's a brief amount of windfall how are we going to use that money to address the ongoing gaps and so as i look at these things i don't know which of these buckets you all would put money in to address some um what i think are just huge issues that need to be considered so i think those are that's some great thoughts and i would say there are so huge that that's why i move the box to the top maybe there's some overarching guiding principle i don't i wouldn't worry about which bucket that fits in but an overarching guiding principle is this budget should be focused on existing gaps and increase gaps or you know you can be more articulate existing gaps in covet gaps because i think there are some coveted gaps

124that happened which might be relatively not easy nothing is easy but they would have a different solution than dealing with some of the entrenched um gaps in the educational system that's not just albemarle county you know alberto county will come up with with great ways to solve it um other thoughts about some guiding principles of reasons we would or would not do some of these items well i mean i think the whole the learning recovery and addressing existing gaps and sort of beginning our marshall plan for post education post covert education i mean paying our teachers more and having smaller class sizes and paying our staff more all are in the service of equity and learning recovery it seems to me and it seems to me that i mean one of the challenges i have

125in the budgets from year to year and i've been on here a while but is and i know we're in the process of developing our five-year strategic plan but the budgets are i won't say ad hoc but they are year by year and we don't have we're going to invest this much in teacher salaries for the next five years and get them to this point or we're going to reduce our class i mean i don't know how to get there but yes um classroom teachers these are teachers special education teachers and learning recovery would all be moving into that into both of those new boxes equity and learning recovery and addressing some of the gaps um that covet has exposed because we really need to work with our um maybe our students who would be

126most likely affected by some of the things that have happened and these are teachers and the special ed teachers we really need to make sure that we are sort of filling in those positions that we aren't losing any of those positions because they are extremely important to our kids and so i think they would also really work into that learning recovery part i hate to even ask this question rosalind but we are all assuming that we're snapping back to normal next september i mean that were gung-ho stage five everything's hunky dory and now we're just going to we will not be back to normal i don't that's what i that's what that was my point is that this is built on that premise isn't it don't we have to build in some wiggle room or

127no matt we're not we're not assuming we'll be back all the kids back in the building's businesses okay good i just we had not made that explicit and i'm assuming you know hopefully assuming maybe at some point during the school year but yeah not in the fall right yeah but even if we aren't back to normal i think with um stage four there were some concerns being expressed that we were losing some of our specialty specialists and i'm not sure whether um the special ed teachers and the esau teachers were some of the ones that we might lose but even if we aren't back to normal i think in order to move back toward normal we would have to make sure that we are trying to do as much as possible to bring in those

128two groups to increase those two groups yeah and graham we're not uh the the just to clarify with um stage four it's not about cutting staffing or losing people they would be uh doing it they would actually be providing classroom instruction for more students right it's just a shift in purpose temporarily okay so all of the reading interventionists would still be working on reading but maybe with a large group instead of just a small okay yeah they'd be teaching yeah temporarily temporarily yeah but we're not i want to assure you we're not uh reducing outside the budget cycle right because that you know keeps cropping up as something that some of our teachers are concerned about i have i think understand about 10 more minutes so um let's move on from guiding principles to talking

129about some of these items um before we start um the task is to identify those must-haves um but before we do that are there items that you would like to add to this specific either a new proposal or something more specific in any of these categories so i i i know that um as we look at um the expansion of our culturally responsive teaching model um we're going to have to look at um either adding staff or looking at shifting staff in order to accommodate our needs we have submitted a a proposal um to our hr department that effective immediately for all new hires moving forward they would be required to go through our micro credential or certification process within three years so that is going to um more than double the number of books

130that we have to train and run through our certification process and it's going to be very challenging for us to um meet the needs for the continuous growth of the crt program without some sort of expansion so is that a new category to increase uh um equity specialist i would not say equity specialist resources um resources um to deliver um um equity and culturally responsive and anti-racism initiatives okay all right i was typing as you were speaking there bernard sorry i said add or realign positions to support crt expansion yes okay because when bernard started speaking i was thinking about outcourageous conversations um work sessions and how we have to make sure that we think of what those work sessions have told us that we always have to keep in mind when we are looking

131at things so i thought i'm glad you brought that point up so that that could be a priority that you have not listed which is to maintain our focus on anti-racism and equity yeah okay now we don't have the the sticky without providing priority to go with it i i think that i realized that last year the minimum pay had to be um shelved for for appropriate reasons but i would certainly try and make that a priority again this year i don't know exactly what formula um i mean there are smarter people that can deal with that but i i think that would be an important thing to kind of move to the front of the line um i think it's perfectly reasonable to have entry-level positions but people who've been working for the school

132system for you know uh more than a year should be moving toward a um moving toward a wage that they can survive on in elemental county i agree i mean i think we um kind of realized during the pandemic you know the most essential people were often the ones that were making under 15 an hour and that was just crazy it's just you know again i'm not saying it's an across the board but but if you have an entry level position you ought to expect that a year later you're going to move up and if you're still working within the cool school system at two years you've moved to a level where you could support yourself what other items would you identify as green or must-haves and we were asked to identify five yeah i

133would like esau teachers and special education teachers to be in that group and classroom teachers and classroom teachers too that would bring us up to five unless we consider all of them together well i i would love to see a teacher salary increase yeah and and that would include everybody is that correct dr acuff is that what you're saying everyone yes yes thank you bernard is that giving us six things we've got at least six and you're five you've you followed the directions well we we expected you to break some rules so you're good because i wouldn't want to cut out any of them they're all important can't you make that blue one green too to show that it's not any difference in that well the technically we want to see which ones were added

134so obviously if it's added it's uh that's the word make it turquoise got it i only have limited colors make it bright right right to show that it's still there okay all right i'd like to have some more information about redirection of sro funds we had what 250 000 up to that if we don't do our traditional sros and are we talking about where that funding could should go correct yep staff is developing developing a proposal on that as far as the school missing the right term knowledge school safety positions in lieu of the sro um okay that would be okay and that report should be what in in uh we're spotted a new year it'll be it'll be part of the budget pro budget conversations as a proposal because it's a realignment of funds

135and there's some opportunities to send more if it didn't necessary we have about five more minutes i like everything everything that we have so far i mean if you really stick to you know if if the goal is around equity and addressing gaps um i i think you know these are some very important ways to to to do that i mean fortunately overall the school system does well and there is nothing wrong with focusing to bring everyone up to the same level it's not gonna you know it's not gonna decrease the level of of others but it's gonna be a better system if everyone's performing at the same level true remind me rosalind the operating but restoration of operational restoration the operating budgets all the departments were asked to cut five percent last year yes

136all departments in schools see i think you have to be very careful personally before you just say oh put it back because five percent may have been devastating to one area and another area was like we didn't miss it and so i i just i mean you do better with constrained resources you have to be more efficient you begin to get innovative and so i i yes i would evaluate the impact before i restored and i would make somebody come back and say what specifically are you going to do that's going to improve the metrics that we judge your area on with this five percent i wouldn't give it back automatically i mean i i generally agree with that i do know the five percent across the schools acros our schools vary enormously and one

137of the schools in my district is greer which has the highest poverty rate and the most number of the highest percentage of english language learners and they have the highest need for additional funds that would be easy to justify their pto raises about twelve hundred dollars a year and you know if you go to some of the wealthier schools it's forty five thousand dollars a year so they're able to supplement that so i would like some greater differentiation across the schools it's time to end that differentiation it is time to the central administration to backstop that i'm not saying take away from grier to give you know to somebody else or but but it it is no longer acceptable in 2020 just because one area is affluent and has parents that can give and volunteer

138to have a school have more than others that is that is just that is propagating the problems that we have and if we have budget opportunity now to change that i think now is the time to say that's not possible anymore but that's just me our operational budgets do are differentiated with the frame reduced lynch component but this again is an opportunity to re-evaluate if they're differentiated enough right okay but when we were talking earlier about the foundation i think one thing that that foundation at some point had been sort of considered as being able to help would be the discrepancies between the ptos in the different schools so could we add another proposal there of like some startup budget to either implement the foundation or some way of studying how we should implement foundations

139that could take care of some of the problems like inequities in different schools along with other things i mean one of the things that greer a parent at greer did is do a gofundme page to raise five thousand dollars and they are using that uh for gift cards to help the students families buy groceries or a winter coat or that i mean that's i mean we can't we can't solve all of those issues but we could perhaps put our thumb on the scale a little bit more right yeah because you when you when you compare that to like a huge amount of money for a playground yeah yeah the elevated fitness track oh she had a difference right so again we're in the main room so i imagine people are going to start joining us

140back okay thank you hey roslyn didn't see you earlier hey bernard i've seen all sorts of people i didn't see earlier did you guys see my bunny you mean on the first screen or you got another one on the first screen oh okay now it's by the money the the dollar signs a quick question bernard do we have an agenda for tomorrow you have a powerpoint uh in an email that was recently sent ah okay pretty recently then okay there's there's no homework but just to review and just prepare yeah and i have good news i can actually attend tomorrow because my trial got settled oh wow okay we'll be glad to have you i'm glad my trial comes around that means we'll have to extend the meeting for another 30 minutes bernard i feel

141like i haven't seen you in forever but to be seen i used to see your wife all the time at the gym but weird times we're living in who are we waiting for yeah who is there one group that's missing oh i think everyone's here yep okay everyone should be back welcome back everyone all right um if we could just have a board member report out just in a couple of minutes i know that was brief but again this was preliminary input um if you could report out sort of what your group discussed for the benefit of everyone else that would be great we'll start with group one and i will share their board oh good okay do you want to start you want me to john i'm happy to let you do okay um

142we had a pretty interesting conversation uh in terms of prioritization uh and in terms of strategic uh budgeting uh the the subject of zero based budgeting and zero-based budgeting version two which was doing different departments at different years oh so have that that work over time uh that you know those subjects uh were raised um we we talked about uh salary increases uh both the prioritization of uh the minimum pay raise uh for uh people to uh who are currently under 15 an hour you know as a priority and and the salary increases which would include that as a broader subject uh esau teachers you know that we were looking to increase them last year and the uh you know and then that that got cut back and we know that's a uh one of

143our constituencies that's that's growing um operating budgets we threw in there because it was it was so broad that that we just wanted to uh we figured we've got to we as a board need to not be micromanaging what the um what the superintendent is recommending in his funding request but we sure would like to to understand and see what's being put back in to the budget that might have been taken out before what question what's on those two three pink ones it looks like uh you know i test can't read now let's see the one next to operating budgets is how we how can we be deliberate about what's being put back into operating budgets and under salary increase is anybody's guess question what is the cost of raising the minimum wage um because

144i we couldn't remember i couldn't remember the the amount that it was costing us in last year's budget uh to make the jump to 1275 or 1325 and then you know add on the rest i thought it was around four million dollars but where i'm sure and the other one says questions how many of our lowest paid employees have children grandchildren yes yes yes yes right better eyes than i have right are you good mr alcaro what you're saying i i am done i i also uh i just see that learning recovery uh was in it was uh included in that as well sorry obviously my eyes are fading on me um you know because that's something we have to make a real uh determination of you know how much learning has been lost and

145how we can get it back strategies for that thank you we will move on to group two next mr o'berg i just want to say for the for the record that i won nose goes and it wasn't observed it's not recognized by this committee um the first thing we talked about was the minimum pay raise salary increase um the way i put it was i want to put back what we promised our employees and we certainly didn't take it away from them intentionally it was obviously unplanned because of the pandemic but i think we owe it to them to start with the perspective that that's where we're starting um we talked about you know the esau teachers and the the special education um because we think that those are the two of the groups that

146might have been most impacted uh by the pandemic and might be the the places we need really to address going forward um and we talked about um assessing the students not just academically but um you know emotionally developmentally um even physically to make sure that they are where they need to be in order to advance and i i raised the issue and i will continue to raise it even though i know people get upset about it not the board but some of the public doesn't like it that i think that we have to be prepared to offer our our parents the opportunity to have their child held back if their child did not get what they needed this year because otherwise we're just we're just advancing for the sake of advancement uh i will also

147mention that we talked about the fact that our job is to present a needs-based budget and so if the minimum pay rate or other things may um uh seem difficult to ask for we still have the responsibility to make that ask and we've and we've already made the arguments well my frustration is like we we put so much energy and so much to get where we needed to be we've already i don't want to start at ground zero again and go to go to hr and say well this is the you know our our group and we know what the answer is we should just do it all right thank you and we'll move on to group three you need a volunteer maya that would be great thanks um we had overarching principles of equity

148and learning recovery which is clearly targeting addressing the existing gaps and the covet gaps and we use that lens to look at all of the different proposals so we looked a lot of it was staffing instructional restoration all three that others have talked about and we also looked at minimum pay rate and salary increase we talked about the minimum pay rate in terms of maybe after the first year one of the formulas that we looked at last year you know if someone has been there a year okay but then after that they have a pathway to minimum wage or maybe we can afford to do that but it was all focused on uh keeping our teachers and staff in in a strong position so we can accomplish our overarching goal we did talk briefly about

149operating budgets and those if you all recall were five percent across the board all departments and all schools wondering whether we should tease that apart a bit in terms of schools versus everything else or even within schools but we didn't get any further than that and maybe to add in we had two additional ones uh one was to add in light of making sure that we continue within our anti-racism policy and our crt training um we realized that we probably need some extra staff possibly in uh dr harrison's um in anti well equity team equity specialist so we added that as maybe another possibility and also we talked about maybe a foundation that might be able to address some of the problems that we can see within the county whether or not it's uh inequities

150in ptos or anything else so we just thought about that foundation as being something that could be pretty broad and we thought about having some startup funds to sort of start the foundation or investigate a foundation for the county so those were two add-ons that we had thank you um i'm impressed that that by the results of the jam board i really wasn't sure if we'd end on anything but it's it seems to be clear that you definitely have some priorities in mind and that will help us move forward dr haas do you want to um add anything or close us out oh yes i do actually i've been taking some notes because i just uh i just want to say i really am starting to see alignment uh from my from my seat um

151and it's no coincidence i sat in on the strategic planning community meeting on tuesday night and they were talking about many of the things that you were just talking about right now so they're not off in another solar system from where you are um the conversation we we had with defiant with the budget advisory team this afternoon of whose members attended tonight and i really appreciate you all hanging around and joining those conversations and i i it was very valuable but the conversation we had with the with that team uh was aligned with what we're talking about the uh we had a project management oversight committee meeting today to look at one project for the coming year and that is uh coveted recovery with equity and the conversation we have the staff level with the

152cabinet and the project management oversight team was the same conversation that we're having everyone um in all three of the the groups that i joined you talked about different ways of going about tackling the the key themes but the themes are are really coalescing and and are the same and so from my position watching that happen and then knowing that we we're gaining a great deal of input from the school board prior to um bringing a spending plan at the end of january and early february it really helps me have a great deal of confidence in knowing uh what your priorities are and what you would like us to do and it becomes much less we used to talk about oh this is first it's the superintendent's budget then it's the board's budget then it's

153the super no it's not from the beginning it's our spending plan working on it together and i really appreciate your input um these conversations were in depth you know your school system you're really get starting to get that foundation of knowledge that that a great board has to make to make really solid decisions for albemarle county schools so thank you very much for for the work you did tonight and maya you shouldn't be surprised of the quality of what what the conversations were because you did a great job setting everything up and you know glad you work in schools because you're certainly an educator i think everybody learned something tonight and you did a great job with it so uh thank you very much i know i know this is you make it look easy

154but i know it's not thank you okay so thank you maya and patrick for the presentation um this afternoon and i think yeah you've been to two main present for our presenters and thanks dr haas for your input uh is there any other business from board members okay if not hearing nothing none remember tomorrow we have a con courageous conversation at 2 pm so we are looking forward to everybody being there 2 p.m eastern standard time miss carlson did you hear that ma'am [Laughter] i'm sorry ms carlson i didn't mean it some of those have been conflict i've attended the ones that i can and i will be able to attend tomorrow thank you all right and uh jared smith and julian bevins for being part of that oh yes right right thank you thank

155you uh dr a cup for bringing that to my attention all right board members be sure to uh found about 10 minutes or so to review uh the presentation that's planned for tomorrow it's it's going to be i think you need to kind of refresh yourself on some of the um the concepts uh singleton's concepts of the four agreements um the three critical factors and the six conditions up to be prepared for our discussion tomorrow thank you thank you all right so there's no further business uh meeting is adjourned thanks happy holidays