Board of Education Meeting--February 21, 2022

001as much call this regular board of education meeting to order like to welcome everyone this evening if we stand and have mr murphy lead us in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance i have a motion to approve the agenda second second any discussion all those in favor of the agenda all right opposed now our next item will be the work session and tonight that will be the lsic presentation from the martinsburg region it looks like mr sherman is up first good evening dr gilbert dr murphy board members thank you so much for allowing the city schools to come out this evening and tell you about some of the great things that are going on in our city schools which way am i planning this thing hit the right button there we go we like

002to always start out with this graphic um kind of shows the different directions that city our city students go to you can see we have students that go all different directions especially coming out of metro middle north middle which goes to three different high schools so at this time we'll turn it over to chad pence and he's going to tell us about berkeley heights all right good evening dr murphy dr gilpin and board members um i'd like to again i'm chad pence principal at berkeley heights elementary school um most recently we became a pre-k through two school we went ahead and sent our third grade on over to orchard view to dr smith um so we are pre-k through two now um we're averaging about 450 students in our building and over 70 staff members

003um and just a little side note it is our 50 year anniversary at berkeley heights elementary school so we want to make sure at the end of the school year we do something extra special to celebrate so i went ahead and threw in a little bit of academic data for our third grade so this is last year when we were doing our brick in our click school year and progressively since i went on board at berkeley heights as an assistant and then moving on up we've seen a steady increase so we've been able to move those scores up for that west virginia generative summative assessment state test the numbers aren't where we we want them but they are steadily on the rise and i think those are some great numbers to go ahead and send

004over for dr smith to work with at orchard view especially during that type of school year um if you look at currently our first grade scores and that's for this year in the fall and then our winter benchmarks we're seeing good growth so that's something we're very proud of that we're seeing growth under unique situations and circumstances again this year but the kids are adjusting well and doing good and they're in the building which is the main thing and something we're happy and pleased about so you can see where we started off at 61 there in the fall for our math star score and then we were able to pump that up to 69 um in the winter benchmark so obviously here in the spring we're hoping that that shoots even higher um we'll stick

005with math and you can see second grade we went from 26 percent obviously up to 45 at or above benchmark so we're seeing big progress um and again we should see more once we come to springtime the kids are doing great the teachers are working very hard um if you look at our eoa so our nsgra scores there um you'll see that we are 71 exceeding benchmark for first grade 57 for second grade um and then so just a little bit about that um if you go back for our math so i know you're looking at percentages and 61.69 what's kind of that mean so when we were looking in 61 we're a little bit below first grade level um so we're below first grade level when we got up to 69 now we're at

006about a 1.5 grade equivalency so they're right on their way to get to that second grade where they need to be for next year um and then looking at second grade they were at a 1.7 when they started out there in the fall so very good um and then right now they are currently at a 2.2 so they're on their way um and succeeding quite nicely um our attendance and behavior that's our attendance for last year 92.3 right now this year we're setting right around 93 a little bit above 93 um behavior that was for last year as well obviously we didn't have as many students in the building so we were looking at a 99.3 percent of students a percentage of students without a major behavior referral um this year we're probably right around

00798 um you know 98.5 98.3 percent um so the beavers have increased a little bit um but we have a lot of strategies that we're putting forth to um you know try to help minimize those for the teachers uh with pbis and several other things which i'll have my counselor here talk in just a little bit to highlight some of those with the climate survey looking at some areas to highlight so some areas there students say that teachers and other grown-ups in the school care about them so that obviously that's something that's very important to us as the staff and to me as a principal knowing that those teachers and those grown-ups that they care we care to those needs of those students from the time that they step off that bus to the time

008that they get home and sometimes even after that um if you look at this next one there of staff staff say that administrators support teachers efforts to maintain student discipline so through various things such as communicating clear procedures making that parent contact for that teacher helping them out in certain situations where maybe they've already made contact and then working restorative practices um so working with that child to see why they made that choice how we can correct it and what what's a better choice next time and the last one there in that areas up to highlight our parents say that our school is a place for learning so that makes me feel very proud um that they think that our school is a place of learning which it should be um and i think that

009just kind of in turns goes back to those teachers that they're promoting learning whether it's in the classroom or what they're sending home where they're communicating with parents um and then whatever we're trying to do with um outside activities so that parent involvement piece is very important that they're seeing that we're trying to bring that learning home as well and get those parents involved with their child um areas to consider so increasing parent involvement i think you'll probably hear that from most people the principals tonight and we had to use some unique um ways to try to figure out how to get parent involvement over the last two years so and i think we've done an excellent job of doing that whether that be with a drive-through trunk or treat or sending home books and

010getting parental involvement and them taking pictures different events there that we've done throughout the school year as well we have a drop everything and read program a deer program so in some of these pictures you might see kids wearing deer antlers so that was one way we could get that parental involvement at home as well and get everybody working continue to increase restorative practices to decrease disruptive behaviors so obviously continuing those restored practices getting that professional development for our teachers our staff and continuing to work with those students to work on that communication to make sure that their those disruptive barriers are decreasing continue to promote stronger instructional focus so in turn doing those professional developments through various assessments as well so really pushing on that star then nsgra working on those assessments and using

011that data that we do gather from those assessments whether it be star or our new assessments with the nsgra and use that data for a good reason actually look at it and how can this help our teachers within the classroom not just look at some numbers and then push it to the side but actually use that data to drive our instruction um at this time i'm going to end up turning it over here just briefly i have two individuals that will be speaking tonight alongside of me um rachel darlingto rachel darlington who is our academic coach and tammy tucker who's my school counselor and one of the heartbeats of berkeley heights elementary school so i'll turn it over here just briefly to rachel darlington thank you hello good evening it's my pleasure to be here

012oh gosh you didn't click it for me is it this one and it would be a delight it should go oh very good thank you okay so looking on the left column there coaching and mentoring as mr pence said i am the academic coach at berkeley heights i work alongside another part-time academic coach as well so it's great to have two of us in the building this year we're focused on student-centered coaching the county has offered a lot of training for us in this area and really the focus of this is to have student success at the center student achievement so looking at their data looking at their needs and their strengths and seeing what we can do in the classroom to improve those we're also working on merging the scholastic literacy which is a

013new adoption for this year and the berkeley county literacy model as mr pence hinted at with the nsgra that is a four component testing system where we look at student interests word knowledge listening comprehension and then fluency and reading comprehension so we take those four components from that assessment and we talk about how we can use that data to drive our instruction in our whole group and in our small group in our reading and literacy blocks in our classrooms we use the jan richardson guided reading framework here in berkeley county and we've done a lot that with that this year at berkeley through two professional development sessions and every teacher in the building has gone through a coaching cycle with myself or the other academic coach the teachers have responded really well and they've found

014that even though there may have been some hesitancy at the beginning that they're really seeing a lot of growth from this program and using it in their classroom to kind of pinpoint the student needs we've also done a professional development today actually on independent reading and using the classroom libraries that were purchased for the teachers um as you know all of the teachers and k5 i believe got hundreds of books for their classrooms in the fall and they are being used and the kids are loving them and it's really helping to motivate them to become those lifelong readers that we want our school is also part of a literacy grant called sparking literacy where we're focusing on word studies so some of our teachers have done that book study and are using the word study

015system in their classroom to kind of pinpoint the instructional need for their spelling and writing development we also are focusing on classroom management and using those restorative practices in the classroom to help um students understand the expectations and behave in a way that will get them achieving academically at a higher level up at the top right it says building partnerships between parents and community our school it's been difficult with covet and things but we've done a lot to kind of bridge that gap with parents so as mr pence hinted at with the drop everything and read in december if the kids were reading at home they could take a picture of them with their antlers like that little girl on the top right there and share it on media so that everyone could kind of

016connect that way they also did a storybook pumpkin in the library where they decorated a pumpkin at home of their favorite storybook character and then brought it to school and just played it in a library we're doing an after school book club we did one in the fall and we'll do one again in the spring we have about 35 students partaking in after school tutoring with about eight teachers providing that service we also did a trunk or treat in the fall which was a really big hit with about 200 kids coming and about 15 different cars serving treats at a safe social distance in the fall we've got after school yoga club going on as well the gym teacher at our school is doing that and it's been great she's even doing it on fridays

017so it's been wonderful for the kids to kind of have that chance to learn some coping mechanisms and then we also did a one school one author which was a big undertaking because um we had book boxes put together for every single student in the school with a book an eric carl book each grade level had a different eric carl book a write-up with some questions for the parents to ask the student so that it could have a conversation a little bookmark and a trinket and then some other title one information and all of those boxes went home and they got to unwrap them at home and look at them and it was kind of a nice little gift so that was another way that we were able to bring some parent involvement into our

018school and our community i think i'm going to turn it over to miss tucker now good evening i'm tammy tucker one of the full-time counselors at berkeley heights we have this year we added another full-time counselor which is wonderful and we have a part-time social worker with the martinsburg initiative that is at our school so we we work together well along with everyone at berkeley heights we have a great students and family support team we provide individual group counseling as needed as requested by teachers administration by family members who contact us we also do classroom guidance that both counselors provide classroom guidance two times a month to all of the children at berkeley heights what the other counselor ms zimmerman karen zimmerman does the attendance at our school um she does groups and does lots

019of awards and incentives to encourage the kids to come to school um backpack program is one of the food programs in berkeley county we currently have 54 students that are receiving weekly um food bags to take home the um commun this this fall i'm trying to think this fall for thanksgiving and for christmas we supported 40 families um through berkeley heights um staff and our local communities so we have were we we kind of felt like a taxi service we delivered the last couple years a lot of food a lot of um student books a lot of hot hot spots a lot of things that we've uh carry back and forth uh to the families and and i think a lot of the families are i think glad to see us on the way in

020we also have a food pantry at our school too one of the schools that does have a food pantry that we can offer extra food for some of our families if they do need it um title one of course is at our school i think we have six six title one staff that work well with our students and families and provides uh family support um our martinsburg initiative social worker is terri wilson and she uh is three days at our school and then two days at um burke street too so she's a wonderful addition to our staff and we all i think we do whatever is needed um for our kids project aware we do have we've had 12 kids in in project aware services this year i think right now we're down to 10.

021um but we do have a project aware therapist through eastridge coming to our school weekly to to provide a therapy services and actually she stays very connected with us too so we kind of know what's going on with the kids and the families that she works with too and i think that's it back to chad so obviously you can tell we're pretty busy at berkeley heights i do want to say thank you for letting us present this evening and i will be turning it over to mr todd cutland at brook street good evening everyone i'm todd cutlip and i'm the principal of burke street elementary and thank you for having us this evening burke street elementary is a pre-k to third grade school and we have approximately 130 students which is low for us over

022the past several years our population has declined somewhat so hopefully it'll go back up as we go into next year burke street is a title one school that we do have a rather high level of poverty and homelessness at burke street however we do have tremendous community support and a wonderful veterans staff that kind of offset those uh negatives there the little history about burke street was built in 1874 so it's been there for a while and at that time it was known as the second ward public school and it was rebuilt in 1929 after a fire damage to school and what's the trick to working this thing trent whoops wrong way so our academic data for 2020 2021 uh our third grade students on the west virginia general summit of assessment and math we

023had 70 of our students either in the exceeds meets or partially meets standards category in ela it was 83 percent of our students in those categories and for our benchmark assessments he measured which measured a year's growth for our students in kindergarten obviously it's a little difficult for them we were only at 18 percent in ela first grade we had 65 of our student math and 38 in ela that made a year's growth second grade 60 percent in math 72 in ela and third grade we had 67 percent in math and 67 in ela and our academic data from this year is not on that slide so i'm going to let mr jeff deco our academic coach speak to that thank you sure okay so just to go into a little detail about uh this

024year um so it's the start of the 2021-2022 school year when teachers assess their students independent reading proficiency levels using the nsgra step four there are about 32 percent of students below basic uh 17 basic 7 proficient and 24 advanced in the school and by the middle of the year there were 34 below basic 16 basic 8 proficient and 24 advanced so then going on to star math the following scores are going to be the average uh percentile rank growth for the students because that shows a rank in comparison to all the other students who take star math in the country so first grade students began the year at the 31 percentile rank and grew now on average to the 50th percentile rank in second grade students started the year at the 39th percentile rank

025and their and now their average is the 51st percentile and in third grade on average the students are at the 54th percentile and now they are at the 64th percentile thanks sir so this year we are seeing good growth in math our ela growth is not where we want it to be our assessment is new to us so we're trying still trying to figure that out and um i know mr dichecko and the teachers will do a great job of that and we will get that sorted out the next slide is our attendance and behavior data last year we were at 91.1 percent uh attendance rate and this year we are above that at about 92.7 i believe um some of the things that we are doing our counselor unfortunately teresa weller is not able

026to be here with us this evening but she works very hard at getting our attendance rate up and keeping the kids in school and getting them there as all schools do we have the students that are chronically absent that bring down our attendance rate and those are the ones that we work hardest on trying to get them into school but she has lots of incentives that she provides to the students to try to get them there she works with the parents and we also also have terry wilson berkeley heights does that does our social worker that works with the families as well on attendance behavior 98.5 of our students last year didn't have a major behavior referral now with that being said we only had about 50 percent of our students so our attendance in

027school was not as high as it normally is so that probably factored into that um somewhat this year we aren't having a lot of major referrals but we just doing a lot of teaching school some of our students have never been in school some of them haven't been in school for two years so still doing a lot of teaching school to those students our climate survey uh areas to highlight which we were pleased with this and this is was based on our student surveys they said that the teachers said have high expectations for the students uh they respect their individual differences and um the number one that um area that i enjoy there is our students feel safe at burke street school that that um makes me very happy that they are they feel safe

028when they come and at burke street school with us the areas that we want to consider and improve upon school cleanliness as i said the school was built in 1874 so well rebuilt in 1929 so it's a little bit old but we'll continue to work on cleaning it up for our students we also try and get them to take a little bit of a role in keeping our school clean sometimes that's not as easy as what you would think but number two students know who to see when sad or troubled and that to me um was surprising miss weller our counselor does a wonderful job with our students and that that surprised me so we'll have to check on that um and number three our expectation their expectations are clearly explained um so again that

029was a little bit surprising because if you the areas to highlight uh they said that they have high expectations but maybe they aren't i don't know we'll continue to look at those as well at this time we have melanie de long she is a parent at burke street elementary and her son adam is in third grade so she's going to come up and talk to you about what it's like to be a parent at burke street school hello thank you for having me here um as mr cutlet said my son adam is a third grade student and this is bauer's class at burke street school and it was interesting to listen to the climate survey from the children i it's interesting that small children are taking a survey like that i almost wonder if they

030understand what they're doing but because i know speaking of miss weller helping children helping families um she is there for the whole neighborhood if something is wrong in our neighborhood she knows they know where to go ms weller will help us berkshire will help us um so that was just something from that but i do want to say that um i know the berkshire school has high expectations of my son he knows what he needs to do as far as schoolwork and how to be responsible and i said before they meet his social and emotional needs um his teacher is really really good at communicating with me all the other parents between class dojo and folders and personal notes i think the most important thing is my son comes home from school sharing positive stories

031and excited he loves math and i just think it's really great that my kid is really happy at school that's the most important thing to me thank you and our last slide focuses on our social emotional programs and i don't want to be redundant because much of what berkeley heights is doing we're doing as well we have project aware as they do pass pbis air program now that is our responsible program and then we have our developmental guidance and enrichment activities as well so is there any questions i said i see vandergriff's voltage generator experiment okay well thank you very much for having us who's next yes sir are they keeping them in your school even if they're moving around yes thank um doctor i'm sorry mr murphy asked me if um the homeless students

032are kept at our school and yes steve mckinney vento we are able to keep those students at our at our school all right good evening everyone my name is krista matrudo and i am the principal at opecon elementary for the past six months um we currently have 454 students 40 of those students are in pre-k we also have 26 walk-in speech students as we are one of the hubs for that program uh we also have 127 students in six kindergarten classrooms 136 students in six first grade classrooms and 125 students in six second grade classrooms we have 43 professional staff members and out of that number we have three nationally nationally board certified reading specialist with our title one program which is a tremendous asset to our school our academic coach is also a nationally

033board certified teacher so we are strong in that area we're very proud of that and we have 20 service personnel members that work in our school as well this is academic data for the current school year in the fall our students took the star math assessment and the um nsgra for ela in first grade 64 of our students were at or above benchmark in math um and with our winter scores we have increased that to 75 at or above benchmark so we are super super proud of our first grade math scores um one of the things that we attribute the high growth with is our math recovery program um all of our teachers are trained in that program it's a research research based initiative where our staff are trained to design implement and analyze math

034instruction based on individual student learning and just to give a little piece of what that looks like we had 45 students in math intervention beginning in october and tow students were actually able to exit intervention completely based on some of the math recovery strategies so we are really excited about that program and um are just looking forward to seeing that continued growth in the area of math for second grade we started out the school year at 29 at or above benchmark and for the winter assessment we have increased that to 47 percent um at or above benchmark and star math for the nsgra um our first graders began the year 62 below benchmark and um with the last two years we have seen some significant um deficiencies in the foundational skills which have definitely impacted

035that so we are working on increasing that um we had 28 who were meeting benchmark and 11 who were exceeding and at that at this time um 15 of our first graders are exceeding the benchmark 28 percent are meeting and we still have 57 percent of students who are below that benchmark however we are seeing growth um in first grade we had 34 students 34 percent of our first graders grow at least three reading levels so that was a success that we were really proud of with first grade in second grade we began the year at 62 below benchmark um 10 meeting and 28 exceeding with the winter assessment um 59 of our students were still below benchmark uh 16 percent were meeting and 25 were exceeding so again as um several of the other

036principles when we are discussing things we're not seeing as much growth in ela as we would like but with the new assessment we think there is still a bit of a learning curve with that as teachers have to administer that individually to every single child so we are super hopeful just to continue to see growth in that area with the scholastic curriculum our teachers are really they're working hard to make sure that that is being implemented we are also utilizing words their way as a developmental spelling program secret stories as a way to just improve our phonics and phonemic awareness and really utilizing our interventionists to help with those interventions for our students who are not meeting benchmark this data is from this school year currently we are around 93 with our average daily attendance

037rate and for behavior 98 of our students do not have a major behavior referral and when looking at that data today we only have 12 students who have had a referral this school year some of them have had several referrals but um it's just 12 students out of our entire population so that is something that we are proud of it definitely has been a shift from the beginning of the school year when we were just helping students learn how to you know follow expectations and transition back into the school so now that we have had time we are definitely seeing students making growth in expectations and just acclimating to typical school expectations [Music] our climate survey from last year a few areas to highlight the first one being that staff members communicate the belief that

038all children can learn uh staff members believe that there's a strong academic focus in the school and that staff members believe that expectations for behavior are clearly communicated to students these are these are three areas that um i immediately was able to observe just from the beginning of my principalship at opecan the staff is incredible they are very collaborative group and they truly do put kids first and we are seeing even with the challenges that we have faced this year our staff really is coming together and they're truly doing what is best for our students and that's something that i'm very proud to be a part of some areas to consider increasing parent involvement of all kinds with the pandemic that obviously has impacted all of us but i do have some additional information on

039how we are improving that at this point with amanda freeman who's going to speak next establishing an ongoing effective staff development program based on student needs at the beginning of this school year i sent out a needs assessment to our teachers and just asked them hey what what do you need from me how can i help you and we have seen a lot of information from that survey in some areas that we have done school-wide pd just to help the the um the needs based on our staff we've had some success with a couple of after-school sessions with our academic coach and actually today we had artists john carper who was fantastic come in and do some steam related activities with our teachers so we're really excited about that as well we've seen lots of

040progress in that direction and then decreasing the amount of time spent on addressing behavioral behavioral concerns in the classroom we also spent about an hour on that today talking about strategies we have some school-wide expectations that our counselor is going to discuss in a couple of minutes but we have lots of lots of promise on the horizon and i am very proud um to be at opekin and to work with the staff members who care so deeply for our students um so up next i have amanda freeman she is one of our national board certified reading specialists but she's also a parent and she is going to discuss ways that we are improving parent involvement at opecon hello um i am a title 1 teacher at the peckin and i along with my fellow title

0411 colleagues plan the parent involvement activities for the school year parent involvement like many other things looked different last year due to the pandemic while there were no parent events community helpers or guest readers allowed parent involvement still happened it just looked different parents were involved with setting up a workspace for their child at home they were involved with logging their child onto teams for their meetings they watched or listened to their child learning and interacting with their peers and teachers some parents were even in the background learning right along with their child teachers had to find a way to enhance communication with parents we decided that class dojo was the best way to communicate class dojo is a school communication platform that teachers and families can use to communicate throughout the day to share

042videos pictures and messages communication through class dojo became even more important than in years past since we couldn't hold parent involvement events last year we sent a reading and a math bag with activities to do at home and these were distributed during ipad pickups last year we're slowly on our way back to normal students are in the building but we are still not allowed to have visitors since parents can't come to us we've had to send parent parent involvement activities to them this year we've had three parent involvement activities so far that involved families listening to read-alouds together online and then completing a fun activity together and then the activity was sent back into school to be displayed for the whole school to see a lot of this information was communicated through class dojo i

043along with another colleague have specifically sent videos to parents through dojo showing them what we're learning in class and ways to help their child at home with reading we've had positive feedback regarding our parent involvement this year and will most likely continue to keep some of these ideas in the years to come while these parent involvement opportunities have been fun i hope we can get back to inviting families into the building sooner than later i've seen in the past how students light up when they see their family members enter the building for an event as a parent myself i look forward to joining my daughter at school this year my oldest entered pre-k and i was hoping to join her for special events or activities read to her in class or even join her for

044lunch and it just hasn't been feasible so far this year when families can join their child at school it allows parents to focus only on their child at that moment not their siblings not the dinner that needs to be made or the dishes and the laundry that's waiting on them participating in activities and communicating with others is always better face to face the pandemic has forced us to be in front of technology more than we should but it has also enhanced parent involvement by forcing us all to learn how to use digital platforms like class dojo microsoft teams and seesaw although the pandemic won't last forever this new way of parent communication is here to stay and i'm going to hand it off to jody williams our guidance counselor at a peckin a little adjustment

045here good evening everyone my name is jody williams i'm the school counselor at opec elementary i'm not going to pretend to be able to see what's up there so i'm going to read off my notes here at opec elementary our social emotional programs include zooxango which is a school-wide attendance program we first implemented it back right before the pandemic shutdown but we saw immediate improvement in our attendance at that time so we're continuing it now our attendance also includes mckinney-vento students which we have about seven this year we usually teeter around five or eight students we have seven now we have some we started an attendance group and all this falls in with zuzingo and um we have students who have won prizes with zuzingo stuffed animals these students otherwise would not have won anything

046but now that we have their program they're even more excited to come to school but they also tug on their parents to tell them please take me to school so i can enter to win a prize so it's been very successful we have groups with the counselors we have a grief group going well several of those we have a study skills group going an organization group and an anger group we have another counselor this year so we're able to do more groups at opekin um developmental guidance is our classroom whole group guidance lesson we have an annual calendar for that and we've also added an extra layer of guidance for our first grade classes because we were having some behavioral issues there and one of the other counselors she goes and does what are called

047spot lessons to learn about their feelings and how to communicate what they're feeling as far as resources we have the national youth advocacy program or nyab we've made three referrals this year one family declined we have project aware the in-school therapy we've made nine referrals to them we've used up all our slots this year we've had to decline we have martinsburg initiative but it's not as involved this year as it has been in the past this year we've only had two referrals whereas um 2019 when we first started really getting them in we had about 45 referrals so that's something we're looking at again to revamp kids power packs is similar to the backpack program at other schools that's where the students get food on friday um and it's put in their backpack we have

048about 16 students this year whereas in the past we've had as many as 42. we've had national guard volunteers come in and work with the students breeding with them doing special projects with them but because of covet 19 and a pandemic that's kind of put on hold but it's still on the drawing board for us um we've done as far as um krista mentioned that we are very collaborative group we've done with the guidance department we've also done some parent involvement with muffins for moms donuts for dads and literacy night which usually happens in may always look forward to that one and um we have our school-wide behavior program it's called opec and cares this is really good because it does align with the west virginia career readiness and student success standards the seas of

049course stands for i will cooperate cooperate with others and adults and peers the a stands for i will show a positive attitude each day that makes a big difference for students if they change their attitude they'll have more positive outcomes the r i will respect everyone e i will strive for excellence and this is going on right now with developmental guidance because we're setting goals for academic improvement and behavior and the s is i will act safely at all times this is school-wide we make the announcement every morning students when they follow the opecon's cares program they're able to receive what are called a pecking bucks and they save their bucks so they can shop on the opec and cares bucks cart which will be making its debut next week which i'm really excited about

050so it's an incentive for the kids to not only do well academically but to handle the behaviors because we missed a lot last year and a year before coming back to school this year was very difficult for them to get in the groove of going back to school we've seen a lot of improvement this second semester and of course some of that goes along with development and maturity so we're holding on pretty good at opecon elementary and one last thing i forgot to add this past year we helped 11 families and when i say families for holiday assistance mom dad the child at our school any siblings we had a community organization come in and ask us did we have any families who needed help we had 11 and they took care of all their

051needs for the holiday season so we were lucky in that area as well but we really do a good job of using all of our resources in-house and community and i think that's it i cover everything all right thank you very much thank you so much for letting us speak about our school um next up i believe is rosemont elementary good evening dr gilpin board members dr murphy and other staff thank you for allowing us time to share some information about rosemary elementary with me this evening i have ryan michael assistant principal michelle ransom school counselor and megan mann one of our parents who serves as lsic chair a pta officer and a newly hired substitute teacher this is my 10th year as principal at rosemont i am blessed to be at an awesome school

052with amazing staff students and families this school year we have 400 students in kindergarten through third grade it is great having our students back to in-person school consistently this school year there have been challenges the students acclimate back to school but the success and happiness of our students so far have far outweighed the challenges academically our students are making good progress you will see how our third grade students did last year on the wvgsa we were super proud of them they did an amazing job also you will find our fall benchmark data listed for both math and reading our students just completed the winter benchmark portion and we're in the process of compiling this information from what we've compiled so far our students making are making strong academic growth concerning math our first graders have

053already gained a year's growth our second graders seven months progress and our third graders five months progress concerning um our reading information according to the nsgra from scholastic we began the year with our first graders uh 48 meeting or exceeding benchmark and now 68 have according to the winner information in second grade 57 began um with meeting or exceeding benchmark and now 61 percent are hitting those marks and in third grade we began the year with 57 meeting or exceeding and now we have 67 percent of our third graders so we're very proud of the academic growth they're making rosemont now has an academic coach to support our staff three title one teachers a full-time interventionist and a part-time interventionist to offer additional reading and math instruction to students as needed the additional academic assistance

054has been very beneficial to our students and staff i know that one of my colleagues spoke about this earlier we really appreciate the classroom libraries that were purchased this year the books are wonderful and our students are loving having such a large selection when they need to pick books for their book box independent reading is such an important component for gaining stronger reading skills and increasing engagement with text this information is current for this year our daily attendance rate is hitting around 93 percent and we um are having some issues with some students who are chronically absent and my school counselor will speak to that in a little while and again we're very similar 98.5 of our students have not had a major behavior referral this year we work with students daily on expected school

055behaviors in general i wanted to highlight some areas of our school climate survey that were noted as the strongest areas our school is a good place to work and learn where our staff exhibits a strong sense of pride i think that you can feel this when you enter rosemont it's a very positive place where our students come first instructional time is protected and interruptions are kept at a minimum a few areas to consider are ways to increase parental involvement we're always trying to think of new ideas and ways to connect our parents with our staff and provide them activities to do with their children communicating clear expectations to our students and helping them understand what it means to feel safe at school what adults are always available to them if they need assistance along those

056lines the addition of a second school counselor has been instrumental in helping our students my school counselors work very well together to assist our students families and staff again this year we are fortunate to have a full-time school nurse while i'm social worker through the martinsburg initiative to further discuss support services for our students michelle ransom school counselor is going to share some of the programs in place at rosemont hello my name is michelle ransom and i first want to say how thankful i am as mrs props mentioned um that we now have two full-time counselors at rosemont um i was there by myself for several years and to say in the almost 20 years i've been a school counselor at the elementary level i probably have not seen quite as much severe trauma that

057we've experienced already this part of the over half of the school year we've already seen so many instances with students that are just things that people would never even imagine could happen to children that age so having a second school counselor and i want to thank all of you because i know you were a big part of that um in allowing us to to have that extra person and what's great about it too is we also have jennifer burroughs who's our part-time social worker with the martin's initiative so the three of us now can be a team we can do a true team approach which has been just amazing um in my experience so i wanted to mention that first um so it's just some information about some of our programs um a lot of

058these you've already heard about but some statistics kind of to go with it um through the martinsburg initiative our social worker who's there three days a week and she's at winchester avenue the other two days she has a very large case load larger than she's had in the previous years she's working with at least 25 students i have a few more probably to refer to her in the next week or two so she has a very large caseload to be there just three days a week with collaboration again with the team approach we've been able to try to serve those students to the best of our ability through project aware which is the in-school mental health services that are provided we actually are pretty maxed out on that too we have a person who comes

059on fridays she is now seeing 14 students i know that says 12 but now it's up to 14. there really is no more time in the day on friday for her to see any more students even though potentially we could make some more referrals we work with east ridge very closely to make sure that those students needs are met we also are fortunate to have the youth advocacy program which is another community resource providing school-based mental health and they uh the woman who comes in for that is been working with us actually for several years she now has three students that she sees and a few more probably um that we will be referring to her in the near future um for attendance as mentioned um miss hampton chelsea hampton is the other counselor and

060i we have started attendance groups a while a while ago and we have about 35 students between the two of us that see us weekly they do little sticker charts to earn prizes and i'll tell you i'm really seeing a big you know some students this doesn't have a whole lot of impact because we know at the elementary level it's more the parents than the children the children want to be in school most of the time but sometimes it's the parents inability to get them there and a lot of the students are so excited they're asking me all the time when they get to come for our little friday group and do their sticker charts and we really have seen improvement with several of those students since we started the groups so i'm really pleased

061with that um i do one group that i try to do each year is a lunch i call it lunch bunch and interestingly enough we've had a lot of new even second and third grade students at rosemont this year probably more than usual and so i tried to have lunch at some point with all of those new students just to see how things were going you know get a feel for how comfortable they were or anything that they might need help with um and miss hampton and i kind of split up the caseload um she's working primarily with kindergarten and first and i'm working with second and third and that has just worked really well now once in a while i'll help with a student that's technically on her caseload or vice versa but we

062really do work well as a team also um we're going to have some new groups i'm very excited about this really is just getting in place this week so it's not even up on the on the screen but a community agency mental health agency a brighter tomorrow is going to be working with ms hampton and i to start two groups in the next couple of weeks one will be a grief loss group with some kindergarten first grade students we have several kindergarten and first grade students who have lost at least one parent in the past few years and then we're also going to have a group for third grade males that will work on like friendship and social skills so try to prepare them for intermediate school when they're going to have a lot more

063students around them and a lot more opportunity to make friends so we're really excited about those uh those that are going to start in the next few weeks just a few more kind of statistics that aren't up there um we have the kids power pack program which is our uh weekend food bag program and right now we have about 30 students receiving those bags um which has been is very helpful and i think the families really appreciate that uh we are fortunate right now to have the air guard is sending in uh three i think volunteers to mentor about seven of our students they come in on thursdays and have lunch with them and talk to them and play games and the kids really enjoy that a lot we also have blue ridge college is

064now sitting in on fridays some of their students and they're taking small groups of some of our third grade kind of at-risk students and working with them again talking to them playing games with them and so the the students really look forward to that also in terms of homeless students mckinney-vento students we probably have the largest um had since i've been there we have 18 students right now identified as mckinney vento we have been providing a lot of services many of them are getting transportation services um from we even have one in jefferson county who's who's being transported to our school due to a very serious child abuse allegation and we also have somebody living in inwood who's being transported to our school but that's allowed for stability for those students to stay in the

065school that they were used to so that it wasn't one more big change that they had to endure um so we have a very large kidney to populate right now and just to mention about christmas and like holiday programs we did help a few families with some thanksgiving meals through the rotary uh which has been helpful the last few years and then this year a holiday program was pretty enormous through the help from our staff members several retired people who still help with kids at christmas and then some other organizations a few churches we actually helped over 50 students with either food um or indoor presence and that equated to about 30 families that we were able to assist this year and then just the last thing i want to mention um something i think

066is pretty pretty neat that's happened just recently is we have some amazing third grade students so a small group of them started a little kindness club at recess before christmas and they talked to me about wanting to do a kindness project in the school which i thought was a great idea and so um we talked about what we would do and so in the last few weeks our art teacher made a huge red heart that we have on the wild side of my office and then a bunch of little pink and white hearts and so any time that a student or or a staff member somebody does something kind of caring for someone else they're to write a little note to who it's who it's for why they picked them and then who it's from

067and then we're taping those up and our goal is to fill up the whole wall and the kids just love it and so that i'm very proud of these third grade students they're just very impressive and they wanted to do something that would touch the whole school and i feel like that was a perfect way to do it so thank you so much again thank you and i will turn it over to dr long at tuscarora elementary yes the martinsburg initiative they provide i didn't know what the initials were oh yes yes i'm sorry yes the martinsburg initiative okay so i do not have the entourage that some others do but i do have a fantastic guidance counselor with me lynette everhart and she is going to co-host this week but my name is dr

068tyler long and i am the principal at tuscarora elementary school and we are a pre-k through second grade school right here in martinsburg west virginia we were founded in 1976 and this year we have roughly about 315 students and 68 staff members now you might be wondering why we have such few students and such a large staff well we have a large special education population we have six classrooms and we also have four pre-k classrooms so with those classrooms comes additional staff also we are a title one school we have three title one teachers mrs prisby miss james and mrs moore and a wonderful uh interventionist miss betsy clark and they do a great job with pulling our students for math and for ela okay okay so with that let's go ahead and look at

069our academic data and as you will see for mathematics we take the star test as we always have in first grade we have 55 percent of our students that are at or above benchmark and in second grade we have 42 percent of those students who are at above benchmark and typically at the end of every year and i've checked the statistics and i believe we will be there again in both grade levels we typically hit about 70 to 75 percent of those students at or above benchmark and the big thing is here and my colleagues have said we are looking for growth i scour the star reports and i want to make sure that our students are having at least four six months growth minimum as of now also we have implemented the new scholastic

070curriculum for ela this year and we're doing things a little bit differently we are taking the nsgra as you can see and we have 31 percent of our students who are either exceeding or meeting benchmark in first grade and in second grade we are doing quite a bit better we have 51 percent of our students who are exceeding our meeting benchmark and of course as others have said that is not where we want it but i know at the end of the year we will hit our goals special interest of that picture there and mrs everett will talk about that those are some great students who have volunteered for the after school kindness group and recently they have done many community projects but they worked with our friends at carehaven i believe and they did

071a care packet for them so they had a wonderful holiday season next we'll look at last year's data and i'll talk to you a little bit about this year's data for attendance and behavior this year's data for attendance mirrors roughly last year's data for attendance we are roughly about 91 this year and last year you could see we were at 90.7 percent now as others have said i believe mr cutlup said this and maybe mrs props we do have a large portion of our school unfortunately that is chronically absent in tuscarora's case i believe that number hovers around 30 percent and those are students who have missed 10 percent of the school year so far so we are struggling there and miss everhart has some great ways that we are trying to improve our attendance

072but as i believe mrs props said earlier so much of this relies on the parents at this age but we are working and we are trying now in terms of behavior last year it was amazing not a single referral i was truly blessed last year i saw others had in the high 90s i actually had a hundred percent this year we are not so lucky we have had many many referrals and that's expected coming off a pandemic and coming off virtual school you know last year we had 50 percent of our population in the school building this year we have a hundred percent of our population in the school building so we have had about 16 or 17 referrals this year focusing on a core group of about five or six students and we have

073addressed those and are addressing though fbas and vips and we are making things better for our students and for our staff next let's focus on our climate survey which as you know is taken by the staff the students and the parents alike and some areas to highlight i picked out three and two of them are very very special to me number one the school is a safe place for students and staff and sadly i believe nowadays mirroring with academics safety is 1a and 1b right up there with academics and we practice safety thoroughly at tusk aurora we go over safety drills throughout the semesters and when we started the covet pandemic unfortunately we had to put in very strict and stringent covet protocols and my my wonderful nurse lynn blackshear who is not here tonight

074but is just fabulous she helped with that and we had plans in place for the safety of all students and staff and then last the principal establishes a strong academic focus in the school and i'm sure every one of us does that and every one of our students and every one of our staff feel safe and they love to come to tuscarora and i feel like every one of us wants our school to be not only the best school in the city but the best school in the county and that's what we're working towards at tuscarora and like with many schools data drives our decision making data drives our instruction at tuscarora and some easy ways to explain that to you we have weekly team meetings which i sit in on and we focus on

075the weekly assessments and we also focus on what we're doing this past current week and then the week coming up for both ela and math we have leadership team meetings which we all do where we focus on what's going on this in the school as an entire entity and then last we have something which is very special to me and that is the vertical alignment team we have a member from every grade level on that team k through two and what we do is we look at our standardized test scores and we look at the standards we excelled in and we look at the standards we struggled in and we go back and we unpack those csos back from second grade to kindergarten to see what ways that we are excelling and some all-star ways

076that we are doing things in the classroom and some ways we are struggling and ways we can do better and i feel that gets staff buying and whole school buy-in and then some areas to consider or some areas that we need to change just increasing parent involvement and that has been an issue at tuscarora for almost 20 years now as others have seen it we would like more parent involvement and we will get that we've done some great activities and we have some great activities coming up so with that said i'm going to turn it over to mrs everhart and she is going to explain a little bit about the great things that we are doing for our students at tuscarora and then we'll jump on and wrap up so thank you guys good evening

077everyone i'm lynette everhart the school counselor at tusk aurora um i'm going to talk about some of the programs that we do at the school we offer um or i offer weekly guidance lessons that focus on uh it's the core essentials curriculum we focus on a core word and topic of the month one of the things that i started this year is an after-school kindness group i think dr longan mentioned and showed a picture of some of our students working on a project we've done cards for the va center for veterans day we have did we did stockings we stuffed stockings for nursing home residents and then we also for valentine's day the kids um made valentine's day cards and also gave the teachers a tree we walked around and hand delivered that to all

078the teachers um we have a social worker that's that is there two days a week she sees about 15 students um of course the backpack program this year we have a large number of i would say probably about we have 40 students on our backpack program which is to me that's a pretty high number we do weekly attendance groups for students who are chronically absent and that's an incentive program where you know they get stickers prizes for coming to school awards for academics attendance and citizenship are given out every nine weeks as well some of the other programs do for after school we do an after schools an after school steam academy for grade two students and then we also do after school tutoring and that's through title one our church and community partnerships we

079have partnerships with bethel assembly of god and shenandoah community health they provide school supplies for our students they've also provided water bottles for students and then this year we had um the swan pond 4-h club they were actually able to provide 15 meals at thanksgiving for students and families in need and then at christmas time this year we helped 25 students at christmas time the students and their families so that was to me that was a pretty large number that we were able to help out i think that's all i have so a few things in wrapping up first of all i want to thank mrs everhart for her fantastic after school kindness group that was her brainchild and we have some great students in there who are both mentors and members of the group

080and they are doing a fine job also too uh i want to thank mr jones mrs rohr and mrs turner who run our steam club we started the steam club five years ago when i took over it is an after-school club that culminates in a parent event we have a maker space out in one of our portables with several hands-on activities now we have had to modify this obviously because of covet but it has been going strong for five years and that is for our second grade students and really it is a great way for them to them to learn and it is a six week uh program and then last but not least without getting into who he is i want to recommend this uh i want to uh just give praise to that

081young man up there on the stage he up there on the screen he has done so much and come a long way in his career at tuscarora and we are very very proud of him so that is all we have for tuscarora it's been a pleasure to speak to you and with that i will turn it over to mrs wright at winchester avenue a good former teacher mr candy yes so yes i found out that today um mr camby was one of my teachers at north middle school and he will be sadly missed and we mourn his loss but he was a very great teacher good evening my name is kathy wright i am the principal at winchester avenue school our school was built in 1920 it is a beautiful neighborhood school we are truly

082a neighborhood school i always say if these walls could talk the stories they could tell it's always nice to have families that come through our building whether they're great grandparents grandparents children of just sharing the stories um that they have and the fond memories of they have they have of the classrooms and the teachers who have touched their lives throughout the years so we're very proud of our neighborhood school winchester avenue services pre-k through third grade so we have one universal pre-k program in our building we also have pikeside learning center attached to our building which is an off-site program and we also have norburn daycare and preschool universal pre-k program that is attached to our school as well um we have um i just you know i just cannot say we are a city

083school in the city limits of martinsburg with that comes a lot of challenges we're looking at transients we're looking at poverty we're looking at trauma but i can truly say our school with our staff our families we all want what's best for our kids they know when they come to school every day they're fed they're learning and they're safe so we're very proud of that so whatever else is going on outside they know great things are going to be happening at school every day and they want to be at school today with me i have my academic coach um jas decheco that i share with burke street he's going to be speaking with you and i have amber glennon um one of my parents and a member of my local school improvement council she's going

084to be speaking with us as well um so we'll start with mr dicheca if you want to talk about some academics thank you yeah so uh at winchester avenue on the uh wgsa 35 of our third grade students exceeded uh partially met or met standards in math and 62 percent either exceeded met or partially met the standards in reading and winchester avenue is also one of the pilot schools for the let's go learn math program and on the diagnostic 100 uh the first graders were at or above in the fall of 2021 as we're 92.6 percent of second graders and 79.4 percent of third graders and on the nsgra for the fall of 2021 81 of first graders were below benchmark as were 56 percent of second graders and sixty four percent of third graders

085but uh nineteen percent of the first graders twenty six percent of second graders and fifteen percent of third graders met the benchmark and finally uh regarding those that exceeded the benchmark zero percent of first graders 19 of second graders and 21 of third graders exceeded the benchmark and as you can see in our attendance data this is current attendance data that this is from this school year so our attendance um percentage is averaging right around the 90th percentile for our daily attendance rate um this is our behavior um percentage for this school year so the percentage of students without a major behavior referral is at 98.5 percent and i attribute a lot of that to the work that we have done in prior years establishing our school at expectations um of listening everyone listens and

086follow directions everyone works together we give respect to get respect our school is safe and we also have common behavior expectations for the common areas such as the playground the school bus the classrooms the hallways the bathroom and everything within behavior can be framed within those school defined expectations that we built as a staff together collaboratively next i'm going to have let me use the clicker first the climate survey is up next um things to highlight um is that we're rec the people the students and the staff recognize that our school is a place for learning our expectations for behavior are clearly communicated and we're proud that when students are out of trouble they know who to see for assistance and i would challenge you to ask a student and they'll probably tell you two

087or three people they could ask for that um it is just a great place to be for students and staff things that we're looking at here to consider is increasing that parent engagement in their child's education rethinking what that would look like as we're working starting to do our work on our school year 23 school strategic plan and our school improvement plan these are all pieces that we are taking into consideration and looking at our data and looking for root causes as we plan for our work ahead of us in the coming years looking at our instructional framework um we are as well as other schools i've heard say this evening um the got it reading framework is the assess guide decide framework so we do our assessments then we um make our decisions based

088on that data to make instructional decisions of how we're going to best meet the needs of our students and then we get that work and that can be applied in math it can be applied in reading science social studies board work it fits across the curriculum all and all avenues um and then the last one we found interesting and this was from our third grade students um when they answered this climate survey last school year and the spring was helping students understand what it means to feel it safe at school and when i talked to my third grade teachers what we found was interesting was when we looked at our student population last school year when this was taken half what 50 of our third grade students were not even from winchester avenue the year

089before they were all brand new to us so that was pretty interesting they had never been at winchester avenue before so that was interesting to us when we looked at that data all right miss glennon good evening my name is amber glennon and i am a parent and representative of the lsic at winchester avenue i want to take just a minute and talk to you about the social emotional programs at winchester avenue the programs that they have are positive behavior interventions developmental guidance kindness counts and social workers in the schools and we have partnerships that include the martinsburg initiative national guard mentors the backpack program boys and girls clubs and local churches and community partnerships all of these make manchester avenue a great school and personally i'm glad that my son attends there winchester avenue

090is a great school not only for the points that you've heard this evening but for many other reasons this is my son's home away from home he is eager to go to school every day and will often attempt to jump out before i could put the car in park um you'll see everybody out in the mornings there's high fives fist bumps they're saying good morning nate how we're gonna have a great day as he goes in and the same is true as when he's leaving and this just is not just my son it's every child um and this has been the case since the very first day of pre-k every staff knows my son's name and my son knows as miss wright mentioned what the expectations are and if he gets in trouble or he

091gets hurt she's gonna call me in four years she's called me once and he has self-tattled on himself every other time since then but this goes to show communication is integral to our students success whether it's him or his teachers or the administrative staff we have found that this is a priority at the school during his tenure he's had caring hard-working committed teachers so much so that at the end of his first grade year the pandemic year in 2021 my son was on grade level because of i believe the consistency between virtual and in-person learning that his teacher had every single day i was able to witness this being home with him and if every teacher in the county i haven't met every one of them but if every teacher in the county is as

092great as she was then we are truly a blessed county um we are excited for our younger son to be joining nate at winchester avenue next year thank you this for your time this evening next you will hear from dr smith at orchard intermediate good evening orchard view intermediate is the home of the freedom flyers and we soar that's our acronym for our pbis positive behaviors interventions and supports safe on task accountable and respectful we have 721 students so we are a growing school we added two pre-k classrooms and seven third grade classrooms to begin this year you know the things that you worry about the most never come to fruition and that was the case i thought more people more kids oh my gosh and it's just been uh quite the opposite our third

093grade and pre-k have assimilated exceptionally well it feels like we've always had them uh we have again we have 721 students and we have 83 staff members orchard view began in 2002 and so you know we're still relatively new but especially with the addition of the new wing it's just absolutely beautiful and fantastic so i really want to thank all those involved in making that happen it's just pristine the restrooms are fantastic and you know we have room to grow moving into academic data the west virginia summit of assessment from the previous year concluded with 54 percent for fourth grade and uh 45 for fifth grade exceeding meeting or partially meeting standards for english language arts we had 59 and uh for fourth grade and fifth grade was 65 this year we have uh we're

094doing two different you know two new formative assessments uh let's go learn is our new formative assessment for math and the next steps guided reading assessment is our formative assessment for reading so it's been a learning curve for our staff i tell you what today was a great highlight of how we're continuing to grow and become comfortable with these new formats we had let's go learn professional development this morning with each grade level we did it with small groups so that it was more comfortable and more you know feedback was better received and presented and then in the afternoon we had a professional development related to our scholastic so you know we're continuing to grow in that area as you can see for math let's go learn third grade from the fall assessment we had

09576 percent approaching or above fourth grade was 55 approaching or above and fifth grade was approaching or above so uh you know we continue to grow we continue to take a look at um you know the three feeder schools that we have with winchester avenue rosemont and berkeley heights and build them together and then send them on to south and north middle school for the next steps guided reading assessment we had 46 percent exceeding our meeting benchmark for fourth grade we had 74 exceeding or meeting and for fifth grade we had 70 percent exceeding and meeting for attendance and behavior uh 94.2 percent was what we concluded with the 2021 school year in the spring as far as daily attendance rate goes and we continue to make those gains uh this school year um as

096the others have mentioned you know we're 100 back and uh with that and following the guidelines and meeting healthy attendance standards you know we continue to make uh the same types of growth uh for behavior uh the previous year we had 93 percent students who did not have any major behavioral referral and uh you know of those that did it was i believe five students so uh that may have had multiple infractions but uh this school year has been very positive uh i think our students have uh are extremely resilient they've adapted and we have a very positive climate and culture at orchard view intermediate kids want to come to school my son's in fifth grade there and so i'm like exceptionally connected to our student popular population i've just i know all the students

097all the parents okay for our climate survey i was actually going to have we have our parent miss valerie ledford um as she comes up i want to give her she's been outstanding support at orchard view she has uh you know great insight great recommendations um you know real quick things that i would highlight as you can see them are uh orchard view is a safe and secure place um and something that we are continuing continuing to work on is uh ensuring that we have parent involvement miss valerie ledford um i will say dr smith is a wonderful principal um he is very communicative and is willing to find the answer to just about any question and you can ask him because i've probably asked that question um so i'm i am also the parent

098of a fifth grade student at um orchard view intermediate um and she has served in both the special education and general education classrooms even with the restrictions in place with kovid my daughter is thriving and i couldn't be happier miss kohlberg and richmond have been amazingly supportive teachers for her and also for the rest of her family the culture of ovi even during all of these changes and all of the changes with the restrictions they have remained completely consistent with everything um all of the staff i have encountered actively listen and communicate effectively um my daughter is pushed out of her comfort zone even though she likes to talk a lot but she has broadened her academics for that and because of that it has contributed to her self-esteem and giving her the life skills

099to love learning and actually want to seek it out now i believe the teamwork and communication the staff do at orchard view not only supports them but also their students and most definitely their families i receive weekly photos of my child with her teacher every friday it's one of the highlights of my day and it usually comes with encouragement uh and information about the good choices and visions that my daughters made my favorite is the weekend homework that is sent home which is typically just to make memories with her family um so this will be the last year that we're actually with ovi unfortunately i wish we could stay there forever but this place will will most definitely hold a special place in our heart for all of these things thank you miss ledford and

100we're definitely going to miss madison but we'll always be here next we have miss whitney rinker she is our communities and schools coordinator and she is just simply a saint all of our staff our students our parents love her with no further ado hello everyone thank you dr smith for that kind introduction i am thrilled to be representing or to view in this capacity i absolutely love what i do and that has a lot to do with the fact i have a very supportive admin and a welcoming and inviting school staff and climate in this role as site coordinator i facilitate and provide leadership for the collaborative process and develop a continuum of services for students families and community members within our school community this is my third year in this position and i have

101found that the most effective component of change is building meaningful relationships and having a servant's heart once that honest genuine connection is made with families students and staff we definitely see positive results um our overarching goal through the cis program is to support and encourage health the attendance through positive engagement and the implementation of various approaches and strategies tier three more intensive support is offered to 10 percent of our student population which equates to at least 72 students cis also requires that the site coordinator provide at least four tier one support to the entire student body some ways this has been achieved is through the implementation of our beloved book vending machine our good deeds closet for clothing and hygienic needs a monthly healthy attendance competition among our third through fifth grade classes a monthly

102prize drawing for students displaying positive attendance last year's partnership with the united way to provide water bottles to all brick students and staff we also had a fun bicycle giveaway during last year's wv gsa testing week to encourage good attendance and we currently are working on a community garden as a member of our pbis program i have worked in tandem with our committee members to implement our quarterly wing flings and support the startup of our school store through securing grant funds for the initial costs tier two supports offered include our giving tree program during the holidays this year we were able to support 60 students and majority of our assistants came from staff members which which is extremely humbling um thanksgiving assistance was also provided to 35 families meaningful contact is made through is made

103daily through attendance calls and meetings and of course home visits are just absolutely crucial and ensuring that our students receive the educational needs and fill those gaps many home visits occurred last year to provide just provide basic needs supports as well as providing hot spots and you know filling those gaps i work very closely with our incredible counseling staff on a daily basis to provide social emotional and academic support for our students as students excuse me a student needs are identified referrals are made to services including group therapy project aware project learn which is our after school support for students attending the boys and girls club during that time tutoring is offered mentorship through the past program as well as to the martinsburg initiative the air national guard comes in for lunch groups on fridays

104and other youth service organizations the counseling staff and cis connect students and families to various community agencies such as alice's kids and that's an organization that provides basic needs support such as clothing and hygienic items as well the board of child care wraparound program food and financial assistance steps excuse me substance use support and many others cis also looks for opportunities to improve morale among staff one example of this is a staff bingo incentive and it has been a huge hit in fact on my first day of return from summer break i had a staff member approach me and ask when we're going to start our bingo games again dr smith takes the time to announce the daily bingo numbers to add that personal touch that gives everyone something to look forward to cis works

105closely with local businesses to donate some exciting prizes to include gift certificates and baskets full of goodies for our winners to enjoy we have such an incredible community of support here in berkeley county especially when it comes to showing love and support to our teachers and staff i will conclude my time with you today with a win that i hold near and dear to my heart there's a student i work closely with who at the beginning of the year absolutely refused to come to school no matter how hard we try she wouldn't come the student was overwhelmed with anxiety and fear that we were many times unable to get her to walk out the front door for home let alone through the front door of our school however through persistence partnership and communication with the

106caregiver many many many home visits and identification of the why behind the behavior we were able to connect this family and this student with a community mental health support that has dramatically increased the child's quality of life prior to the implementation of this support this student missed 41 days the first half of the school year since the student's return she's missed zero the student is well on her way to having perfect attendance for the third nine weeks the success story as well as several others is what keeps me going personally and i encourage everyone in attendance here today to hold on tightly to your personal success stories and use them as reminders of why we do what we do thank you for this opportunity thank you this evening for the opportunity to share some of

107the highlights at orchard view intermediate please always feel welcome to stop in without any notice we'll be happy to have you next up we have eagle school intermediate carrie rosen good evening dr murphy dr gilpin and board members i'm carrie rosen and i am entering my third week as interim principal at eagle school i've been there for six years and have had many different roles and with me this evening i've brought our academic coach who can speak to you more on this slide good evening my name is christine hubbard i'm the academic coach i've been in eagle school for eight years and in all my eight years i've never seen data this stellar so as you can see the wvgsa that was done in the spring third grade 38 percent for math 44 for ela

108fourth grade 49 math 52 ela fifth grade 44 for math and an astounding 51 percent for ela so that was really great for our fifth grade um as with orchard view we also are pilot piloting the lgl let's go learn it's been a little bit of a bumpy ride but i think we've worked out the kinks and as you can see it's we've benefited greatly so our third grade 76 approaching or above benchmark fourth grade 55 percent approaching or above benchmark and then our fifth grade 28 approaching benchmark and then we also have our ela our nsgra scores so we have 35 exceeding benchmark for third grade 33 exceeding benchmark for fourth and then fifth is 28 exceeding benchmark and i want to highlight those that are um meeting or at or you know meeting

109benchmark as well thank you um our attendance right here we have from last year we have a 92.3 daily attendance rate we're kind of sitting around similar situation this year behavior we were at 98.2 um it's a little bit different this year it's gone up a little bit but it is absolutely better than we were two years ago prior to covid which is a huge accomplishment for us in that area um areas to highlight there's open communication among the staff and our school between staff administrators and parents transparency is very important to us at eagle school as well as face-to-face contact my child is able to get help from the teacher on school work when needed and at this school there's an ongoing staff development based on teachers needs we do pride ourselves on listening

110to what our teachers are asking for and answering that call areas to consider spending minimal time addressing discipline parent involvement which seems to be a common theme and we do have a few ideas on on that once we hopefully start to loosen up with some restrictions and then i have been informed about the school rules for students and consequences for breaking rules um we do we actually did start working on that a little bit today in one of our professional developments and we'll continue to work on that area as well social emotional programs we have many many many social emotional programs a few listed here communities and schools um pbis project learn student support groups we have we have a team of five and a half i think at least social workers and counselors um

111that do work on self-esteem anger making friends emotional learning emotional classes um dealing with death of parents incarceration drugs different things like that that our students desperately desperately need assistance with and we also have many after well we had many after school activities they're slowly starting to return art club tutoring stem math olympiad band and tony m and now i will turn it over to south middle school thank you good evening my name is mark the principal of south middle school in my third year and looking forward to at some point a pandemic free school year with me this evening i have sheryl snyder our technology integration specialist i also have betsy morgan former school counselor at south middle school who unfortunately we lost to retirement but she's ventured across the river and working in

112washington county now i didn't give a lot on the academic data because when you look back over the course of the past two years you don't really have a lot to work off of so we look at last year's brick students and the click students who took the west virginia gsa and that's where we are as far as exceeds meets or partially meets standards that gives us a baseline to work off of this year but looking through what we had prior to that and the in the education that these kids received over the course of the past two years that's what we're working off of to try to build on moving forward and i feel pretty good about the numbers that are in front of you looking at our attendance state attendance data and i'm

113looking at the 2020-2021 school year and the work that was put in our daily attendance rate was 96 percent our chronically absent was down to about 12 percent put that in perspective this year our daily rate this year is about 90 percent chronically absent is in the mid-20s 86 total referrals during the course of the school year last year which is a highlight for me we spent very minimal amount of time during the course of the 2020-2021 school year working on discipline referrals part of that is half of our student population was not in the building with us they were on click climate survey at south middle school we work really hard to achieve a positive school culture for for teachers we're in a profession where we're chipped at we're chipped out every day we're

114chipped at by our legislature it seems like somebody's always coming at teachers on a regular basis and to overcome that i in my role and administrative staff at south middle school has to work really hard to create an environment that people want to be part of and so when you look at that climate survey if you've looked at the climate surveys over the course of the past five or six years and i've been there for a total of eight years you will notice there's no red areas you will also notice that the level of retention of staff has gone up tremendously over the course of the past few years last year we lost two people to other inn county schools we lost people to washington county schools loudoun county schools we're going to have that

115but to lose only two to other schools in berkeley county i think speaks highly of the environment that we've created at south middle middle school to end this i want to focus on the work that we did during the pandemic i think we went through that year we laid a groundwork we did a really really nice job and we're back to normal so to speak this year and everybody's kind of forgotten about what we did the work that we put in and these two folks behind me sheryl snyder our technology integration specialist and betsy morgan former school counselor did a lot of work during brick and click 2020 2021 to make it successful so i want them to speak to their experiences in that in that capacity one of the things that i appreciate about

116mr barney is the pen as a principal is that i believe that um he has the courage to keep it real and to focus on what works and so um he asked me today to speak basically on um how has how has the pandemic changed the way we do school and of those changes which ones need to stick we just can go back into the box our pre pandemic box there's so many things that we have learned to do better as a technology integration teacher you know for years i have been working with the teachers to try to encourage them to more effectively integrate technology into the classroom well i was leading that horse to water but it was the pandemic that made that horse drink school board as well the way we do our

117meetings the way the principals meet virtually oftentimes now we truly have learned how to move into the 21st century and use the technology that is available to us because we've been forced to do so and one of the things i know as a technology integration teacher and i want you to think about the fact that in a school where we have 750 plus students each of those students has an individual device we have 60 teachers they all have a laptop they have a desktop they have a projector some of them have smart boards they have document projectors and they have audio systems okay in addition to that we have our administration we have our nurse we have our guidance counselors and we have our classroom aides who also have devices my job is to make

118sure that all those devices are working so everybody can work and to learn okay in addition to the devices themselves we've got schoology we've got microsoft we've got google we've got clever okay we have um savas for our spanish learning we have mcgraw-hill for our science courses we have desmos for our math lots more software we even purchase things like vocabulary and brain pop at the school level okay so that's a lot of software that's a lot of devices where at any point in time one to 25 things can go wrong okay so i've learned how to triage okay so i need to know all right who needs their problem fix first and who can i rely on to just say um here this is what you need to do or who can i just

119say i'm going to send you a link i'm going to send you some instructions follow through on it who do i need to say let me come to your classroom and sit down beside you or let me fix it while you're keeping the students engaged or which child do i have to bring into my office to say let me reset your device for you okay so when the pandemic hit my sphere of support went from the classrooms and the offices in the walls of south middle school to the living rooms and the bedrooms of so many of the homes of our students throughout the south middle school district and it really changed how i had to think about my job and one of the things i immediately recognized was that many of our parents are

120texters so i texted my cell phone number i posted it because that was the way it was best for some of them to communicate all right they didn't have an email or they couldn't remember their email um we um immediately started on day one from the pandemic we started a daily newsletter that went out in the morning that was your homeroom dingbell when our letter went out and we encouraged the kids to send pictures of themselves in their new learning environment we asked them to send pictures of their pets so as their study buddies we had different contests and betsy's going to speak more to that where we use that newsletter as a way of keeping us all connected and we even said you know we may not be together physically but we are here

121we are together um another thing was we on our schoology platform we created a group specifically for parents and then i was an admin and i had a folder of tech support so the families could go on and look at anything they had the videos and things there but they could also immediately message me easily through that support group we also put our guidance counselors and our social workers and our community and schools representative on there and they continually put on positive affirmations they put you know advice about you know raising teenagers and that type of a thing and they were immediately accessible to the parents because the parents could take and just message message them right from that i found parents um i do send out the in touch so i found that many

122parents were um responding to like messages that got sent out and saying uh well we don't know how to do that or could you give me more information because they didn't like know how to reach out and to connect or to find the emails you know on the website and um i attended berkeley high school and i attended south middle school and i attended martinsburg high school i graduated a year before darren and i want you to know that as a community member one i'm very grateful that berkeley county schools coordinated all the vaccine programs my 85 year old mother we couldn't get her into the position we couldn't get her into the health center and that was the way that she you know became vaccinated and i was proud of that as a community

123member as a teacher i want to tell you i'm so proud of what berkeley county schools did throughout the pandemic i have teacher friends on both of our neighboring counties both of our neighboring states and we did we got a lot right but i think there's a lot in terms of the leadership in the county that we need to um keep doing all right so when the parents called me i recognized that just like i can give teachers all teachers directions over the um phone or through an email i needed to go out to their homes i had a parent call me and she said my eighth grader is texting me and they um haven't been able to get in their schoology classes you know so then it was like well then you give me

124their number and then i can actually let them know i'm going to call them then calling the student i had a mom say i've tried and tried and i cannot get this device to connect to our internet and so we tried talking through it and she said i this does not make any sense to me and i said would you like me to come out to your house and i sat on the front porch and we communicated through the front window and i took a device and i showed her step by step how to connect a chromebook to her wi-fi and she uh then was able to successfully do that i had a grandmother screaming at me on the phone i've been asked by a teacher to um call the family because the there was

125a young lady that wasn't getting online and wasn't doing her lessons and the grandmother um i said ma'am you know calling because whatever does or anything i can do to help and she said she's just gonna have to fail i don't know what to do and she doesn't know what she's doing and i said well um if you can let me talk to her i know i can log onto a chromebook just like her and her account and we can work through this together and so then she put her granddaughter on and then we went through step by step how she needed to get to where she needed to do and how she needed to get her assignments up and that kind of thing and then you know we did an assignment together and when

126we got done in that conversation and i said you know you can always reach me and so i think we need to think about making ourselves available textable because it takes down so many barriers i think that's something we need to continue to do about the way we've changed school and how we do school um but then this young lady when we got to the end she said can my friend call you too because she doesn't know what she's doing and i said yeah that would be great okay and um part of the reason why i wanted to kind of go through these things today is because when i was in berkeley high school i was one of the first classes in fifth grade where they gave us the pink tablets and they had them

127stew it so that the students who hadn't been taught properly by their parents to brush their teeth could see where all the plaque was and i was one of the first eighth grade classes where they sent the notices home and my parents had to sign it was okay for us to take sex education and then when they did it in two years separate classes one for the boys one for the girls and the guidance counselors did that and then when i was in martinsburg high school they started bringing in the um band groups that were the real you know cool rock bands to sing songs and to encourage us not to do drugs and i think that those programs have grown and have grown and when we look at all the programs that we're offering

128through our schools i mean how many more can we do and i don't think it's that schools are failing i think that its families are struggling and i think we have tried so hard to provide all these programs to prop up our parents but we need to maybe in the county to lead in a different way work differently with dhhr instead of just finding referrals we have a lot of money coming to our programs through martinsburg initiative and a small part of their program is working directly with families and i think we need to start shifting some of those programs to the families because just like i had to go out on the front porch to provide tech support i think that in order for us to help help the families the sport needs to

129go in the home the school's not where the throwing the drugs the school's not where they're being sexually abused we need to get some of that support so we can do school into the homes so that the families can thrive well it's a it's a pleasure to be back in berkeley county and i can't be more excited to um to have worked with an amazing group as mark barney and leah and all the other folks and cheryl one of the couple of programs that um i really was excited about at south we started actually pre pandemic and it had to do with parent engagement and so we took actually took the show on the road and so we went out to three different locations but when the pan and did our presentation about social emotional

130health of a child in middle school what to expect in middle school and and the technology in the middle school cheryl provided the pandemic hit we had to do it differently and as uh sheryl mentioned we did the newsletter but i think the ones that stick out in my mind are the ones that we collaborated with with um north middle and community in school and the social workers and everybody that was involved it was our virtual the first was virtual paint night i think brandon facilitated that and then we did cooking nights after that where the students were engaged in cooking uh cooperatively with i think i did one i can't recall dude i think colleen oh brandon didn't the other one and so that that meant a lot the students got quite a bit

131out of that they got the parents involved they were excited about participating and and then the other one was of course most outstanding most improved it was such a delight to see the expression on the students faces we did this weekly during the shutdown i would go out and take a picture of the student and bring it back put in the student newsletter which went out every week and i can't tell you the parents were over the moon as for the students on on just being a part of the school community via the newsletter so i i hope that these things continue um i just appreciate being allowed to do these things and thank you very much for listening i know everybody's interested in time and and no no person more than me but for

13222 years betsy morgan served berkeley county schools and betsy morgan left mid-summer and never got her farewell farewell from berkeley county schools i'd like to take a minute a minute to acknowledge the work of betsy morgan for berkeley county schools that's good all right so good evening and i'm going to be as quick as i can my name is rebecca eiler i'm the proud principal of marksburg north middle school and our mission statement is whatever it takes and we say that every morning we at north middle school are committed to doing whatever it takes to ensure that all students reach their highest potential and we truly believe that we believe that we provide for students what they need when they need it and tonight i'm not going to spend a lot of time talking because

133i brought two really important people um i want to introduce them and they're going to be talking in a few minutes i have krista kaiker with me she is my sixth grade social studies teacher my lsic chairperson and she is a parent to two beautiful north middle school children cece and chloe and then i also have brandon serena who is i just can't say enough good things he has my communities in school site coordinator and without him um i don't know how our days would flow but he um makes a difference so i'm going to start off really quickly this is last year's academics and i'm looking forward to this year where we have all of our students in the building and we can look at our schools for our results for all of our

134students this is those that met exceeds met or partially met standards for last year and that's mr boswell in a cone because when we say whatever it takes that's what we mean this is our attendance from last year was 95 percent it is now around 92 percent um again quarantining i think has hit that a little bit um however our behaviors we had 24 students with a referral last year that has increased i can tell you that for sure um in the area of our a major area was disruptive and disrespectful behavior but we try to be proactive this year and we start it with derek oatfield coming into our school building doing professional development on restorative practices because we truly believe that proactive people are highly effective people and that's what we want our

135students to be as highly effective so we not only wanted to um i know mr cutlet said teach school but we believe that pre-pandemic and post-pandemic it didn't change that we still believe if you have an engaging curriculum you can build relationships with students and again a caring and consistent culture in the classroom everything else will fall into place so that did not change with the pandemic those things are still needed and we just feel like it's a foundational thing to build relationships with students um chris is going to talk to you about our climate survey sorry hello thank you for having me um i just want to highlight a few things from our climate culture survey first of all students said that our school is a place of learning second parents feel that teachers

136treat students with respect and they receive regular communications about what is happening in the district and third staff feels a sense of pride in school and the school is a safe and secure place to work areas of concern which i will go into a little bit more detail in a minute describing some ways that we are continuing to improve these areas first we want to continue to provide excellent communication with our families we are doing this now via in touch with weekly newsletters and schoology messaging and email second to increase restorative practices and to decrease disruptive behaviors and third increasing skills in all content areas so at north middle school we began our school year with professional development based on restorative relationships we read articles and compiled research backed practices to use in our classroom

137to promote positive outcomes through lesson design inclusivity assessment and relationships we have used these practices inside and outside the classroom to reach both our students and our families in our classroom there has been an increased focus on project-based learning and student-driven work we provide foundational knowledge for the students to use to research content and then have the students apply what they have learned to individual or group projects outside of the classroom we have after school clubs like yearbook and newspaper where students collaborate to share student and staff highlights with our school family we have a weekly newsletter that is sent out via intouch to keep families informed of events at north middle in school we have activities like the student versus staff matt ball basketball volleyball and flag football games these are super fun most

138recently we had a badminton tournament between our office staff and our 6th 7th and 8th grade teachers during our planning time students helped us warm up and then cheered us on during the game in conclusion we have found that using restorative practices relationship building belt abella instruction and project-based learning in a student-centered climate promotes positive relationships with our students and families and promotes a safe and positive school environment building positive relationships with students strengthens classroom management skills which in turn translates into a more um more time in class learning and less time dealing with behavior issues so this is a work in progress but i feel like we are making a lot of progress this year all right adjust that good evening as ms eiler mentioned i'm brandon serena the commute and school site coordinator

139for martinsburg north middle school as you've heard from other schools cis is a program that works with students and families to guide them to school and community-based resources to support the students in achieving academically each cis school can have a different school-wide goal in either attendance academics or behavior our goal north is to decrease disciplinary referrals by 10 percent by working with students who have increased disciplinary infractions using tier 3 supports and services as well as providing school-wide tier 1 and tier 2 supports and services to do this we work with several community partners locally and nationally such as project aware catalyst the martinsburg initiative pass mckinney-vento assistance the boys and girls club united way several local counseling um services alice's kids and one partner in particular that is new for us this year is

140shenandoah community health who does our school-based health program they have they've been a huge asset in helping our students with their health needs uh schoolwide each year we also continue to help with the basic needs um with our basic needs closet which has new clip new clothes new shoes and plenty of non-perishable food items also our holiday and gift assistants this year we did over a thousand gifts with 45 families a lot of those families were like seven seven person families six person families and we helped even the parents um so the kids could give gifts to their parents as well um which is what is unique about cis is that while the goal doesn't change the approach usually looks different each year we got the services with the goal in mind to meet the

141needs for that particular year for instance last year we focused on helping students and families by doing well over a hundred home visits to help with the click learning process help with the internet and help with basic needs also we also provided materials instruction for virtual family engagement paint and bake nights which was mentioned by south to connect with our students and families equity is a large part of this program providing students what they need when they need it this year we have focused more highly on restorative practices social engagement and whole classroom interventions to ensure the best learning environment for our students thank you for having us well it's nice to be everybody's favorite guy tonight because i'm the last guy talk a little bit to you about marksburg high school i want to

142start out by highlighting some of the behaviors of our students some of the great behavior of our students and one of the programs i want to highlight is our students in the baking and pastry class that we have who have done things throughout our school and throughout our community all year here they made treats for the humane society they do a cafe for our for our teachers and our staff on a weekly basis they're doing some great things our band led by casey rogers has done some great things this year they hosted the honor region 9 honor band just recently our science national honor society large group inducted there our show choir now has two show choirs it's not just good times it's glitz which is a female show choir and good times as well

143our a day where we had nearly 300 students with all with straight a's and any student who had an a got a a treat and then our football team got to play on the field again this year or finally this year and they won a state championship so just some of the great things doing at martinsburg high school as you talk about behavior and attendance we have 90 of our students on average in our school daily attendance we do have 40 chronic absence which while that number seems big that's still under what the state's chronic absence number is as far as discipline goes just like everybody else said we have two classes here who have not spent a lot of time in school in the last two years so not really normalized to school behavior

144so about 70 percent of our discipline referrals this year have come out of our 9th and 10th grade classes because those are folks that we have to as todd was teach school to and show them what the expectations are also our baking and pastry students had the opportunity to go the greenbrier and take some classes and things down there so that was a really good opportunity for them we talked about assessment i put these numbers up here because i want to show you a pre-print pandemic s-a-t score and then if we look at our post pandemic s.a.t score they didn't or during pandemic sat score they haven't really changed that much if you look at ela they're almost exactly the same number math has dropped a little bit and then in the middle is the

145score for students who wanted to take the sat during the 2020 school year so much different number for students who were desiring to take the sat and were most likely college bound what are we doing to improve our academics we're doing ixl just like everyone else is doing our math and english teachers have made some common goals based off of what the fall the fall exhale assessment was you can see we answered over a million questions our students have and you can see the skills that we've mastered proficiency and in practice and we're linking our students college board at khan academy accounts so that they can do some specific practice i want to highlight this student right here francisco lopez he matched to the university of chicago through a program called quest bridge and he

146got a full ride scholarship for four years to the university of chicago so our common survey some positives like these guys are school's a safe place we make decisions based on data our teacher professional development is ongoing and working well focused just like todd we have an old building built first built in the 1920s so cleanliness is always a struggle and one of the things that we did have the opportunity to do over uh the pandemic when we were remote is our custodians had the opportunity to do some things to beautify our building a little bit do some painting things of that nature and just like everyone else we need to get our parents involved in this picture up here our football students are up picking up trash and trying to clean up around the

147community so at this time i wanted to introduce to you one of our parents he's also a lsic member as well as our football booster president so he can talk a little bit about that and his students experience at marsburg high school randy brown thank you for that trent um thank you guys for giving me a second just to speak um randy brown i'm born and raised here come through berkeley county schools i'm on my third child now that's at martinsburg high school last one thanks thankfully um i can i i'm supposed to speak about martinsburg but i can speak about all these schools here whether it be dr smith um you know this props over there uh my youngest rj um he's an athlete plays football baseball as well as in uh made jazz

148band as a freshman um kids 14 and he has a job my kids come through martinsburg high school they come through berkeley county schools learning responsibility our family is big on it takes a community it takes a village and all these teachers for what they do i mean hats off to them i can tell you now i can speak for a lot of parents when it's like man just one kid at home and i'm like oh i want to struggle to strengthen this one but you know these teachers have a lot of kids they've got to deal with um the responsibility and the things that you know my sons three boys have learned coming through martinsburg high school the responsibility that they've picked up they've all been athletes they've all worked while they've gone to

149school they've all carried um great gpas my oldest now is anthony's 26 he's in arizona now he's um working he's with a federal officer with customs border patrol um middle son is clinton he's 20. he's at west virginia university right now clinton actually is a double major business marketing and accounting and he's a year ahead just because of the encouragement and things that he got through school and i can guarantee you that the education part didn't come from me um you know my wife is from pennsylvania and when she moved down here from that area she was amazed at you know the sense of family the sense of community that they get in schools um the caring that these uh kids see and receive in schools i think that's often overlooked i mean just world

150two i speak to my youngest now who's a freshman at martinsburg when he comes off the football field and first thing he sees is again not talking about more other schools than just martinsburg but he sees dr smith over there and i mean his face just lit up you know it's like and i thought he was excited to see dad and he's running past me to go high-five as principal from intermediate school so that says a lot about the people that we have in berkeley county schools um just a lot about what these kids get to do at martinsburg high school um yeah my kids do play football my kids do play baseball and they get no special treatment we want no special treatment because that's not the real world and these kids are learning

151learning responsibility if you want to play you've got to go to work out if you want to go where if you want to work out you've got to go and get your grades so it's all it's all cyclical and everybody they have to do everything correct to get where they want to be and these things are things that they're learning through martinsburg high school and the oldest down to the youngest they still talk every day on the phone about how hey how was your day and they're bragging talking back and forth about their teachers their experiences with their teachers the teachers keep up with them i see the teachers around the school um and they're asking me hey how's anything else clinton these are my kids that have been going anthony's been going for six

152years and his teachers still ask about it so that that's that's a different level of caring and that's what my kids see every day when they come through martinsburg high school that's what my youngest is seeing now and i look forward to that continuing to grow and again my hats off to all you um educators um the board and all that stuff thank you guys for giving me a minute to speak thank you randy uh at this time we'll ask mr glover assistant principal to come here and talk a little bit about social emotional resources our focus at martinsburg high school is on relationships first always we recognize that our teachers have a plethora of information to share but those relationships are vital to be able to share that information we've done a lot of

153similar things that other schools have already talked about meals at thanksgiving presents at christmas we have a bulldog boutique to offer clothing to some of our conversations um involvement in extracurriculars anytime we see a student that's struggling with attendance struggling with behavior struggling academically one of the first questions we ask to try to be more proactive what are you involved in what do you like to do and if it's something that we don't have we create that club we find a sponsor so it's about customizing martinsburg high school for each and every student in terms of school counselors we appreciate the added counselor this year we were able to transition to a ninth grade counselor to work directly with our ninth grade administrator which has been very helpful especially as those students are dealing with

154a lot of social emotional issues this year we have three social workers who are vital for student success project aware is still going on to tie therapy services with students especially as private therapy continues to be more difficult to find the talk to me program is still going strong at martinsburg with mrs wright relationship with community agencies this year has also been vital that's what has allowed us to do things like a day lunches for student groups when they've made it to state competitions and even speakers in the classroom a lot of those have still been able to be done virtually by bringing those speakers in on teams or something like that two new things that we've spearheaded this year at martinsburg high school are in telespark and sources of strength peer mentoring um sources

155of strength you can see eight pillars in that diagram it's a best practice youth suicide prevention project designed to harness the power of pure social networks to change unhealthy norms and culture ultimately preventing suicide bullying and substance abuse so we have a team made up of students and teachers guidance counselors who get together and work with students to help them finally intellispark is the last thing that we spearheaded this year and i've presented it at a few instructional meetings intellispark basically gives us a profile on every student and allows anybody that's a part of that student's team to see the information that students profile on that profile teachers or guidance counselors or administrators are able to raise flags enter certain tags in so we all have the best the most amount of knowledge possible about

156a student to serve them we are also able to give them surveys you can see the little screenshot there is from a social and emotional well-being survey given to the students and then we can run lists based on those surveys to see um all of the students that have a a low well-being score or maybe students that haven't gotten any high fives in the last 30 days and then mr sherman can have have lunch with those students it's really been for the high school level where we have teachers that aren't necessarily grade specific it has been one of the best tools in my 15-year career i've ever seen that has been able to get everybody on the same page about students thank you lastly i'd like to say uh thank you to my faculty and

157staff i know each of these folks here would say they have the best faculty and staff in the county and i'm saying the same about mine i want to say to my colleagues thank you for the work you're doing to board thank you for your support and what is far and away been the toughest year in education in my 20 years so thank you very much thank you to the martinsburg area schools appreciate the presentation any quick questions just a couple of i'm just jotting down notes here and i was impressed by richard views the advanced results in the nsgra i would suggest a couple of schools where the staff satisfaction marks show up read the senior staff i know you're doing it and continue doing it focus on those schools because we can't we

158want to retain people and when those red marks show up we need those people need to at least be heard and both sides need to discuss the issue the i'm not going to do a show of hands here crowds are large but we need to look at the schools that one of the schools mentioned 12 students or a major behavior problem in that school we need to look at the amount of time principals are losing with a handful of students disrupting the program and those principles are deprived of an opportunity to be the instructional leader they're just trying to suppress a problem there and i know that i i'm gonna bring it up in the budget process alternative school for things and i know there's other people on this board that feels the same way

159but overall mr sherman said it best this has been one of the toughest years i know in october you thought you were in may because of the cause of the stress i appreciate the people the parents who have supported the safety so that we could keep all the kids in school and to be taught in school and not virtual but you all made some good points today and i commend you and i'm sure that feeling is universal up here on this board thank you anyone else i'd just like to remind everybody that we did miss 18 months of school and some of these kids that were in kindergarten went back to the second grade and ninth grade with the 11th and so you need to remember all that when you're looking at our next item

160is the face covering requirements and i would entertain a motion to the face covering mandate i make a motion that we discontinue the masking policy with the exception if a parent wants to send their child to school with a mess that they'd be able to do that so we have a motion to have a second um are you making a motion on this before us yeah okay what i mean this version of it i mean so we have a motion to have a second second discussion okay i just had a question uh of staff was this distributed to us before the meeting or here at the meeting because i didn't i didn't see it on my thing but i may have missed it on the on the um i mean are we just getting it

161here now this version of it yes okay i i think miss long's motion is getting us started here but i'd like to work with something in black and white before me um i would appreciate i have listened in silence for months to people who criticized this policy mr president and i would appreciate the courtesy to talk uninterrupted by anyone in the room here on the stage or beyond i i think that we need as a government to be able to deliberate in a calm and reasonable fashion and not in a noisy uh disruptive fashion so if we have any law officers here and we have people who cannot constrain themselves mr president i hope you ask those people to come forth and be ex uh in excellence this board has sat here and courteously and

162and patiently listened to the concerns of this community and now it's time for us to do our job in an environment that we can contemplate and deliberate without being disruptive so mr president i know you're going to do your job and i appreciate it getting back to the point that we have before us uh the motion that miss miss long has presented i support the pot in in theory but i think we need to work on the policy that we have before us and amend it and perfect it to the will of this board and i i don't want to do something off the cuff and tell and then allow the um allow the staff to modify we need to send a document that we have here before us to staff to implement first thing

163i want to point out is that we have a federal law that says that the transportation department and i'm from correct or incorrect dr murphy or staff i i would appreciate being corrected but we have a federal mandate that all of our students and staff must wear masks on transportation and that hasn't changed am i correct that's correct sorry folks so i think we need to keep that part of the policy in before us miss long are you agreeable to that okay uh i also think that the language that's before us and i'll read it it's not on the screen the berkeley county board of education hereby revises its universal masking policy to strongly recommend that mass be worn in berkeley county schools and board-owned facilities effective tuesday february 22nd i believe that we are

164not being cleared to the community with this language and that's what i think ms long is trying to do here we are trying to encourage the mass to be continued but we're leaving that as an option and i believe that the language that we should have in this policy should clarify masks will be optional except on buses that they don't want to hear any applause this is cool it also goes on to say consistent with its past practices berkeley county schools will continue to vigorously promote mitigation strategies i don't believe that anyone that i've well talked with or worked with would be against that cleanliness versus filth students and staff who are sick should not come to school i don't understand that because if you're sick you shouldn't come to school or students but that

165that's a concern there school nurses will monitor students and staff for symptoms and dismiss those who show symptoms typical of communicable diseases that's continues what was before the pandemic as well as what we have been experiencing here next paragraph the superintendent may take other necessary action and may implement practices and mitigation measures that he deems necessary in response to the covet 19 pandemic provided sex actions and practice are consistent with the rules and policies of the board i support that it's going to be tough to put the toothpaste back into the tube but i i think that we have to have somebody in charge if it breaks loose this board meets every two weeks we can call a special meeting even an emergency meeting but i think we need to have somebody at the top

166and that's the superintendent having that authority to make that decision ms long do you agree with that i i just want to to change this policy that we have in front of us to read okay paragraph one excuse me the berkeley county board of education here abroad advises its universal masking policy to recommend that mass be optional in berkeley county schools and board owned facilities effective tuesday february 22nd mass will be required on all school buses due to the federal mass mandate for public transportation and the rest of it stay the same i won't we won't read the rest of the okay i'm sorry you made the motion sir amendment is there a second to that i'll second that any other discussion well i want to reiterate the point that we have more variants floating

167around out there and i i'm worried that we're going to become a petri dish of variations of this cobin and i i'm supportive of the recommendation of mrs miss long but i know that we we have and i didn't get my notes organized here but we have another variant that's cropping up and we'll continue to have them and there may be a time this long that we're going to have to go back to this this mask that's causing us to have cabin fever we're getting tired of it but but i think that uh we need to as we initially did when we adopted this policy the fluid with the situation and the cases are down our side communities are relaxing it and i think that if if we can do it we should do it

168but we should also realize and this is this last paragraph says the superintendent can reimpose this process i'm sure he'd bring it back to us but if something breaks out that's killing people left and right or sickening our children in severe cases we need to get back on the wagon we'll have the ability to hold a special meeting okay for that is there any other discussion yeah that's a quick question dr murphy i haven't looked at jefferson county oregon counties um what they did um but are they requiring basement at someone oh fussy i i actually don't know there is some variation with what others are doing throughout the state uh i can't speak specifically to what each county is doing but there is variation gotcha so this was legal council's version correct um but

169did they say that they had anything about the transportation option um as far as just requiring the mass on the buses yeah it's a federal mandate um obviously you can go against the federal mandate i'm not advising that but if the board so elects to go against it that's the board's choice um that's going to be in place i believe right now until march 18th so it could the federal mandate could change sooner than later but right now they have it in place until the 18th of march thank you any other discussion so we have a motion [Music] in a second all those in favor [Music] we have an amended motion amended motion original okay always in favor opposed motion carries unanimously thank you our next item are recognitions and the first recognition are the

170national board certified teachers miss and lasky is going to come forward to present those good evening superintendent murphy dr gilbin board of education and honored guest good evening and welcome to a very special evening for berkeley county schools we have gathered here to celebrate and honor the efforts of all involved in the national board teacher certification process i am anne lasky i'm your mathematics instructional specialist and coordinator of the national board certification program and also a national board certified teacher the national board teacher certification is a prestigious recognition tonight we are honoring two new certified national board teachers and 19 educators who renewed their certification bringing the total number of national board certified teachers in berkeley county to 121. with our additions tonight berkeley county schools continues to lead the state with the highest number

171of national board certified teachers national board certification is a voluntary rigorous performance-based peer review process created for teachers by teachers national board certified teachers must demonstrate advanced teaching knowledge skills and practices completion of national board certification signifies that teachers have developed and demonstrated the skills required to become an exemplary teacher so on behalf of berkeley county schools we salute and celebrate you tonight to reach this level of accomplishment these outstanding educators completed a grueling process that included a portfolio of classroom practices including samples of student work video recordings of their instruction use of asses assessments to effectively plan and collaborate with others to advance student learning a national board certified teacher is not a permanent certification and must be renewed this signifies their commitment to excellence in education and validates their continued professional involvement in

172a variety of areas that is consistent with high and rigorous standards this program within berkeley county schools has experienced success due to an outstanding mentoring team i am fortunate to work with national board certified teachers who do a wonderful job mentoring the candidates their willingness to provide support assist with recruitment and organize and present key information at monthly meetings goes above and beyond so at this time most of the mentors are here so i'm going to ask them to stand um first is sanya shaki sonya is um teaches the hedges of a high school and is certified in history and sonia was one of the original mentors with myself um next is sandy marchese she is not with us tonight but dottie pannell is donnie pinnell is now the academic coach at opekin elementary and

173assists me with a lot of math programming in berkeley county schools next is maggie beth ponton okay maggie beth is currently assistant principal at tomahawk intermediate and she is certified in music uh jessica ruckus is also here she's also one of my mentors who works at spring mills middle school and is certified in music and also rebecca catlett helps our team but she is not able to be here tonight so without further ado i'm we're going to let's recognize our new national board certified teachers when i call your name i'm going to ask you to come down here to the front so i can present you with a certificate and a small gift bag so and when when you've received your items you want to go back to your seat and we'll take a group

174picture at the completion of all recognition tonight so i'd like to start with our new national board certified teachers with us tonight is jennifer kisner and jenny teaches at hedgesville high school and is certified in english language arts our other national board certified teacher was unavailable tonight but i would like to tell you that it's elena jewell and elena teaches at bunker hill elementary and she's certified in literacy reading language arts so as i said before we have a many many research and certified teachers tonight so we're going to start with kevin frankhouser kevin is a guidance counselor at hedgesville high school and is certified in school counseling next we have michael napper michael is a music teacher at musselman high school and is certified in music next is bethany miller bethany teaches at inwood

175primary in a certified in literacy reading language arts next we have mallory painter who's a pre-k teacher at mill creek and she is also certified in literacy reading language arts next we have erin peralta who's a teacher at mosma middle teaches spanish and she is certified in world languages [Applause] and next we have one of my mentor mentors which is maggie beth potten assistant principal tom hook intermediate and certified in music next we have gina pratt who teaches at bunker hill elementary and is certified in literacy language arts next is april rarick and she teaches at valley view and is certified as an exceptional needs specialist next is one of the mentors jessica ruckus who teaches at spring mills middle school and is certified in music next we have samantha sloan who also teaches at

176spring mills middle school and is certified in english language arts next we have lisa taylor who teaches at hedgesville elementary school and is certified in early childhood generalists and we have amy usolini who also teaches at hedgesville high school and is certified in english language arts i would like to at least read the names of those who are not witness tonight that earned their renewal um those who now with us tonight who receive their renewal will be mark albright from mountain ridge middle certified in music laura bohr spring mills middle school certified in science alonda hall who teaches at spring mills primary and is certified as an early childhood generalist nancy mcdonald also from spring mills middle school who certified in english tiana mcgrathy spring mills middle school and is certified as a middle childhood

177generalist cassandra price muscleman high school and is certified in career and technical education and christians patero musclemen high school certified in mathematics so i would take this time to thank our board members for their continued support of the national board certification program as board members you are witnessed and appreciated the impact national board certified teachers have on our students i also like to thank the mentors and especially the family and friends of our honorees i know this process requires a great deal from each of them and i'm sure your support had been appreciated thank you again for joining us this evening quick question yes sir how many do we have now 121. who leads the state we do we do [Applause] can we have those national board certified teachers mentors family friends colleagues please stand

178one more time just a reminder national board teachers at the end of the recognitions we're going to do a group picture thank you again for all that you do and all that hard work that you put in to accomplish this we really appreciate it our next item and under recognitions is the distinguished service award and krista denmark emma trudeau i always have trouble with that i'm sorry we'll come forward to present that good evening dr gilben dr murphy board members and senior staff i stand before you this evening to recognize the attributes of an exemplary employee mrs debbie rimmer rimmer is a kindergarten assistant at opekin who goes above and beyond for her students and colleagues every single day i've only been the principalito pecking since august but i very quickly learned who the go-to

179person is for just about anything you could need are you in need of some kind of a hat or a prop go see mrs rimmer how about an idea for an engaging lesson lesson activity go see mrs rimmer what about accessories to dress up as scrooge or the grinch or the cat in the hat you guessed it mrs rimmer has all of that too mrs carpenter who works alongside mrs rimmer in their kindergarten classroom has many positive things to say mrs rimmer is truly like a second teacher in our classroom she teaches the students as much as i do she was a preschool teacher in her prior years so she has brought her knowledge skills and supplies with her into our classroom everyone in our hallway knows that if they need something mrs rimmer probably

180has it or knows where to get it for our weekly themes i just let her know what we'll be doing for the week and she'll see what she has to incorporate into our lessons we bounce ideas off of each other and she has inspired me to think more outside of the box she is so creative she keeps me organized motivated and i know i can count on her for anything not only is mrs rimmer a wealth of knowledge and resources she is also caring kind and passionate about her job mrs carpenter believes that mrs rimmer is one of the reasons that parents request to be in their classroom when all of bcs was learning from home in the spring of 2020 mrs rimmer came up with the best academic gift ideas to hand deliver to

181each of their students they delivered a we miss you gift at the beginning of the shutdown a sightward egg hunt during easter in a kindergarten graduation gift at the end of the year mrs rimmer is extremely humble and most likely not wanting to be in the spotlight this evening it is also her birthday i am extremely proud to be able to share with all of bcs the wonderful attributes that mrs rimmer brings to o'pekken each day with the help of my kindergarten friends cam carper and oliver hammer and also dr arch our assistant principal we proudly present the distinguished service award for the month of january 2022 to mrs debbie rimmer okay mrs remmer thank you so much thanks for joining us tonight we really appreciate all that you do at opecon thank you the

182next recognition is another distinguished service award and mr patrick ashton will come forward the director of transportation to present that award good evening everybody thank you for having us tonight uh as dr gilpin said my name is patrick ashton i'm one of the directors at our transportation department i am here tonight to recognize charlie aikens as our distinguished service personnel staff member charlie is one of our mechanics at the transportation department he and the team of guys in the shop do a great job servicing and repairing our equipment in the county among many other things a lot of those guys also drive buses for us as they are also certified bus operators they go out in the mornings in the evenings and do their mechanic work in between and thank goodness for that this year

183or this year would be even more challenging we are very appreciative for our guys in the shop charlie aikens has been with bcs transportation for did i do the math right 27 years all right he is also one of our shop performance he is in charge of our inventory and equipment he handles a lot of our billing and paperwork for the inventory and supplies and he stays very busy with paperwork charlie's wife kelly is also one of our bus drivers she drives a special needs bus and they're they're both just wonderful people charlie is also my right hand man when it comes to equipment and supplies for our special needs buses he has taught me an awful lot about special needs equipment such as the strollers the wheelchairs the car seats and the safety harnesses

184and i'm very thankful to him for that charlie is also the lead guy that works on most of our vans and other county vehicles you see on the roads such as the epic vehicles he and a couple other guys in the shop work a lot of overtime especially this year on saturdays to stay called up on what's needed we at transportation appreciate charlie more than he knows his years of experience and dedication to our department shows in his excellent work and we're proud and thankful for what he does please give him a round of applause from celebrating his honor of distinguished service personnel employees just one more one more minute um i wanted to mention this evening um tomorrow is bus driver appreciation day we want to celebrate our entire transportation department if you see

185a mechanic a bus driver a bus aide an office staff member please tell them thank you as you guys know it's been a challenging year um with our lack of staff but i am happy to report like i told senior staff this morning we have 25 to 30 people in our training program right now our training team is doing an amazing job to try to fast track this to get all these men and women ready to go so i did want to share that bit of positive news and just really show my appreciation to all the like i said drivers mechanics aides office staff and everybody out there thank you congratulations mr aikens we really appreciate it patrick thank you so much we know it's been a difficult year working as hard as you can

186we really appreciate it thank you next item is citizens forum [Music] um citizens forum is a time for the public desiring to address the board on any topic at a regular meeting tonight citizens forum each speaker will have the opportunity for two minutes comments any derogatory comments profanity inappropriate comments and or reference referencing an employee or student by name will result in a muted microphone and removal from the video first speaker is dr kathy funk thank you for providing the opportunity i'm a public servant i'm a physician in this community i'm a proud mother of a child at martinsburg high school i appreciate the public school system more than most people for the fact that it's given me opportunities that i would not maybe have had many organizations who serve the public have extensive training

187like myself preparing for catastrophes which we hope we never need we have command centers chains of the commands and respect for each other we have policies that allow us to be effective and provide the most appropriate care with the best outcome for everyone at times it's a difficult decision when we have to think of everyone's rights but we have to look at the picture sometimes even amongst ourselves we don't agree but we stand by the principle of respecting each other's decisions and having an open discussion unfortunately schools aren't designed to be catastrophic places you're the community the students the teachers support staff and administrators that we entrust our young minds to help them flourish but we also want you to keep them safe i appreciate and admire everyone who goes into this calling you have

188to call it a calling because they are not compensated in an appropriate economy [Music] um [Music] hmm [Music] more [Music] yes [Music] our children [Music] okay [Music] today [Music] uh [Music] matt mcdaniel mcdaniel don zimmerman the constitution of the united states of each state and the bill of rights protects we the people we the people are tired of force masking contact tracing testing social distancing quarantining and pushing vaccines the masks have now been made parent choice by this board but don't forget the children of this school district have been allowed to have not been allowed to use their lockers been punished for not wearing masks correctly at all masks and distance while singing in choirs masks while playing sports mastering recess and gym or not being allowed to have or participate in normal activities at

189all the chil these the school-aged children are the least age group affected by this virus they have a 99.97 survival rate i don't know how many times we need to hear this but yet they have these egregious guidelines on them for the past few years but the real reason behind it behind the guidelines is money the money is in the sr forms and it's received funding that were filed every six months from the state and they're filed to the state board of education showing the guidelines were being followed in order to receive the funding a total of sixty million dollars three hundred and eighty three thousand one hundred and thirty four dollars and eighty cents to berkeley county for the years of from twenty to twenty two of all it was requested to make the

190mass parent's choice and ignored by every member of this board we the people have voiced our concerns presented facts for the past six months this board refuses to address us when we ask the addressing of the mass mandate tonight and making it optional with further restrictions or guidelines that allow the mass to be put back on these children is unacceptable joshua huff this evening the three of you dr murphy dr uh mr gilpin mr butts you're being served with the notice of intent to file claims against your surety bonds held by travelers casualty and sure d company of america the papers served to you contain both complete notices of intent abbreviated versions both which include corrective measures required in the signatures of 17 people who are who are ready to file claims in addition we

191have more people with whom we will be sharing the information of violations this week you have a surety bond because state law requires one to ensure faithful execution of duties as promised when taking affirming the oath of your office if you fail to faithfully execute your duties you are personally liable and we the people have recourse sadly you and the board have failed to uphold the constitution failed to faithfully perform your duties and so are in violation of multiple state federal international laws many of us didn't cite international violations in this noi the violation include but are not limited to advising medical interventions without a medical license transferring obscene material to minors failure to attain to safe air qualities in schools deprivation of rights of parents students and staff if you do not cease and

192decease these violations the next step for us be to file the claims with the bonding agency there are a few violations that need to be corrected immediately so you show your attention to that aside from personnel money out of your pocket if you have to many claims filed against you you become [Music] it is very sad that it has come down to this it is up to you how we proceed from this nightfall michael foreign good evening um you know i i just attended this meeting um a few months back i didn't say anything but now you know mr murphy you really um i used to have a lot of respect for you that ended tonight you're trying to scare everybody and you i don't even know if you've read any science and some people

193i talk to uh one other member of this board who tries to make this political or partisan and i really don't think it is you've probably heard of this guy robert andy jr most people wouldn't consider him right wing but he wrote a very detailed book and since you want to try to scare everybody with facts that are just in your own mind consistent i'm going to read one paragraph consistent with dr falchi's earlier statements the peer-reviewed scientific literature has steadfastly refused to support masking the healthy as an effect and this is a cited source by the way this isn't robert kennedy junior speaking and i'll point out the quotes effective barrier to fire will spread and dr falsey offered a citation to justify that in his change of heart furthermore some 52 studies all

194available on nih's website find that ordinary math quiz mask masking less than an n95 mask that is properly fitted it's basically worthless doesn't reduce viral spread rates even surprisingly in institutional settings like hospitals and surgical theaters moreover some 25 additional stub uh studies contribute to masking a grim retinue of harms including respiratory and immune system illnesses as well as dermatological dental gastrointestinal and psychological injuries that's also a sighted source i'll just do what everybody else does i'll just keep speaking i just have to face this paragraph 14 of these studies are random eyes peer-reviewed studies is no other instruction study that persuasively suggests that nascar convinced the efficacy of their struggle 19. now further end i just had a discussion two of the last two weeks old another president and one with a very highly

195respected researcher of the ted fda approved drug this virus the original one is an aerosol you can wear that mask [Music] changed just like you doing ron hurst good evening dr murphy dr gilpin rest of the members of the board i just want to address the citizens of berkeley county and ask how does it feel to have your rights given back to you by your public servants i want to cite the west virginia constitution article 3 section 10 states no person shall be deprived of life liberty or property without due process of law and the judgment of his peers now i don't recall a court of due process in the past two years that has stripped us and our children of our liberty or our property what crime would we have committed to have warranted

196this the west virginia constitution in article 3 section 2 states all power is vested in and consequently derived from the people magistrates are their trustees and servants and at all times amenable to them this is just a small percentage of the people tonight and it's not just about the mandates people are dissatisfied with the way some of these things that are occurring in our schools the allowance of perversion that has been going on we are dissatisfied as taxpayers and we want things to change i'm looking at the camera because i want people to see my face ron hurst iii i'm running for board of education on may 10th is the election thank you all [Applause] misty mason dear board members and superintendent thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight i want to talk about

197a topic that i think and from what i hear from both sides i feel like we can all probably agree on this ron did touch on it a moment ago it is about choice but i think even if we relaxed the mass mandate we still need to have choices parents still need to have choices parents want a voice they want a choice they want to choose what is best for their child and their family some parents want their kids to wear masks some do not some parents don't want to ban any books from the school library some parents do want to ban books from their same library that they deem inappropriate for their kids because they want a choice some parents want schools to teach crt some parents do not all parents just want a

198choice some parents are passionate well i would say most parents are very passionate about their stance because it impacts their children my kids are fortunate to go to a school that aligns with our family values and our family morals they go to a private christian school we're very fortunate for that they do not wear masks i don't have to worry about that but i'm still here to speak on behalf of the other kids if all parents had the option to choose their school then every parent could choose the one that aligned with their beliefs and their values if that school wanted to continue wearing masks by all means and i want my kid to wear masks go to that school over here doesn't wear masks i don't want my kid to wear masks i can

199send them to that school the school over here wants to keep having any kind of perverted books in the library or whatever by all means i don't want to ban books i'll send my kids there and they can read whatever that book deems or whatever that school deems that they can read i want the choice all parents should have the choice where to send their kids and their kids taxes follow them to the school [Music] amanda esposito christian moscow good evening board superintendent thank you for the time allowing me to speak to you all today i'm happy that the masks have been made optional i was filled with joy to get home and tell my kids guess what guys you can see your friends smiling faces and read emotion learn about how emotions transfer from

200human to human but wait a minute they can come back i want to say sorry to you children i took an oath to protect that constitution in the air force for eight years i will honor that oath to my death i am also a candidate for berkeley county schools board of education and i know we have a veteran on the board and it hurts me to one of my brothers just doesn't want to defend that constitution vividly it bothers me and it hurts and on a separate subject two weeks ago we were here talking about the book lewis dies in all books associated with that superintendent i thank you for your email today it helped me understand the processes and procedures thank you very much for that sir but why are we reviewing books that

201in my opinion violate west virginia code 61-88-2 it should be removed they're in violation of state code i don't understand my common sense thinking 78 days till may 10th seems like a long time but he can't get here fast enough the people have been speaking to you for months in the fall you voted five nothing to keep the mask on these kids now we're voting five nothing to remove them election time is fun isn't it very fun it's amazing how things change may 10th is coming remember those are up for re-election good luck valerie ledford good evening um thank you guys for allowing us to speak tonight like you do every time i really appreciate it um i do want to ask you to really go in depth when communicating the guidelines and how they

202will affect our schools so that teachers staff and parents really understand this because they don't see all the background from the department of education and they don't understand how much you guys have to follow to understand and make the decisions that you make so let them know that yes masks may be disappearing but a lot of the guidelines for kovid and the way the students are doesn't magically go back to the way it was either if that is the case thank you and i'm valerie ledford and i'm an author [Applause] damon wright uh good evening um first of all i'd like to say i'm very happy to see all the parents here tonight this evening it's i've been coming to board meetings for years and attendance is usually pretty light um i'd also like to

203acknowledge the lsrc's that were earlier this morning they mentioned i'm sorry this evening they mentioned the need for parent involvement as part of their climate surveys almost every single one that i've watched and attended has talked about the need for parental involvement so i'm hoping parents will continue to take part in these board meetings even after this mask issue and everything else goes away as well as the local school improvement councils the talk to me program volunteering to mentor or tutor students in your neighborhood et cetera we don't want to be seen as parents that only come when we want to complain about something but we also want to be parents that are proactive and do something positive for our community to help with discipline we a couple schools talk about discipline issues uh i

204would suggest that parents possibly talk about teachers and the staff do not discourage your children from becoming teachers or service personnel to model the behavior that we want we are setting the tone for the coming generations if we are teaching that rudeness and threats and it's my way or the highway are the way to go we can't be hypocritical if others use those same tactics against us if there are rules and requirements in place are we teaching that we don't have to listen or are we teaching that we're going to listen and we're going to go through the proper channels to change to make change what are we teaching is the question again if you're interested in the talk to me program you can see me after the meeting or you can check the berkeley

205county school's website please stay educated on what board the board of education can and cannot do what crt is and is not what equity inclusion is and is not do not believe the lies also since everyone else wants to announce their candidacy i'm also running for the board of education rebecca dunmeyer decisions and policies have consequences in 1973 wrote versus wade two lawyers wanted to make abortion legal one of those had already had an illegal abortion glockester county uh grim court case a girl wanted to be a boy two judges argued the case one said that male and female was archaic or chaoic the second agreed with the summary the bluest eye published in 1970 was not accepted in 1993 its author received the nobel prize for literature from an organization of five people decisions

206policies have long-term consequences because of two lawyers millions of babies have been butchered because two judges thought male female was archaic schools now favor students identifying as the opposite sex in nature there are two sexes in humans in animals and plants in insects will the next step be regulating teachers to oink at a student who identifies as a pig in a space of 23 years an unacceptable book has become approved for 10th grade students west virginia ranks 47th in education but instead of policies for teaching academics the state's policies are all for changing culture and society uh so the clear goal here is indoctrinating our kids into socialist marxist government i hate the lasting effects on our kids from the bluest eye but i am also grateful because it has opened the eyes of parents

207the most important vote on may 10th will be who will be making this decisions for our children when we were kids and did something wrong our dad always said i was asleep last night but i'm awake today um he was paraphrasing god in ecclesiastes 12 4. for god will bring everything into a judgment including everything you think whether it is good or bad may 10 is the most important vote that you will [Music] ryan kuhn brian [Music] betty dehaven matte coffee good evening dr giltman dr murphy board members and community members i'm not running for anything tonight so i'll just go ahead and get that out front i want to thank first of all i'd like to thank we had something very positive tonight the beginning of the meeting um the news of all the

208teachers that have either been recertified or certified um and i'm afraid that these other events have kind of overshadowed that so just like to take a moment to acknowledge the fact that we have so many teachers working proactively to improve their craft and be better mentors to our children so thank you to them now i've heard a lot of things that seem out of place in a non-partisan board of education i've been watching for a long time at home and this is the first time i've come to speak but i would agree with a lot of the people that have spoken tonight that may 10th is going to be a very very important day for our county maybe for different reasons i think i probably represent the large moderate majority of parents that don't see

209a conspiracy in every decision that a board makes that realizes that a board has to make decisions not just for a very vocal group but for all students i'm happy that masks are off as you can see i'm a day early i took mine off sorry about that but i cannot believe that we could be in a situation in may where we have a board of education that would focus on banning books that would think that a book taught in a honors level high school english class is perverted when it's actually about rape which is a horrible subject because monsters do exist but i want to thank the board very much for sitting there stoically i couldn't imagine listening to some of the things listened to over the last few months and not responding and

210i'd like also like to thank some of the speakers seem very moderate and they have open mind running for office so thank you [Music] next item is the consent agenda [Music] contained in the consent agenda are the minutes of the regular meeting held on february 7th in a special meeting held on february 10th we have three schools with chaperone requests we have 27 curricular and extracurricular trip requests we have no past volunteers we have no student transfer requests we have three use of school property requests we have the budget supplements and transfers we have the payment of the bills and approval of invoices we have the financial reports and the treasurer's report can i have a motion to accept the consent agenda a second second motion in a second any discussion [Music] one of our

211levy recipients is the west virginia university extension service simply removed the mass to transact i'd like to request that the senior administration review who can use the buildings i think the extension service 4-h ceos be considered to be allowed to come in since they are a recipient any other discussion all those in favor of the consent agenda opposed motion carries unanimously next item are the action items the first is is the cfp cefp amendments mr joe burton there we go on now i'm here tonight to cover some proposed amendments to our comprehensive educational facilities plan there we go tonight we're going to revisit some of the data from our population and enrollment study i will identify some major projects needed across our district and present to you a complete list of cefp amendments for your

212approval in our district we currently have 19722 students enrolled in 32 different school buildings those buildings are getting crowded many of them are at or approaching their maximum capacity and they are also aging the average age of our school building today is 53 years old and we have eight buildings that will turn 100 years old in this 10-year period our last efp that was done in 2020 one need that was identified was to get more accurate data on growth in our community since that time we've reported to you on a couple occasions about our growth and enrollment study conducted by mr preston smith and business information services a major finding in that study is that we can expect 4 000 new students by the year 2031. so we were forced to go back and look

213at our plan for the future and look at the best way to serve the growth in our area [Music] so we'll talk about a combination of new construction remodeling and additions to some of our current buildings the results of the growth study point us to the age groups most affected by growth in our area as well as showing us some of the hot spots for growth in our county geographically so what we're proposing is a possible new construction of eight new buildings and these are not proper names for the proposed schools they're just to point out the geographic areas but we'll look at a new elementary school in the falling waters area another in the georgetown area pre-k centers in inwood and in hedgesville a new intermediate school in the north end of the county

214and another in the south end of the county a new hedgesville middle school to replace the current building and by the end of the next period a possible new high school in the gerardstown area also look at repurposing some of our existing buildings including remodels to marlow elementary beddington elementary and pikeside learning center for pre-k centers as well as continuing the project that's already underway our berkeley county schools warehouse renovation the grow study also suggests the need for additional square footage in some of our additional our existing buildings we'll look at adding square footage to south middle school tomahawk intermediate hedgesville high school and musselman high school the two high school additions will be bigger or smaller depending on the construction of a fifth high school in the jarrodstown area sorry i've got a little

215delay in addition to the new construction projects we also have a need to add some facility improvements to our existing cfp document these include roof replacements at berkeley heights elementary beddington elementary and hedgesville high school window replacements at valley view elementary and hvac replacement at winchester avenue elementary i met with the athletic directors at all four high schools to discuss the need to restore and or improve our athletic facilities this is a comprehensive list by high school in hedgesville high school we look to add a multi-purpose synthetic turf field field house construction renovations to the weight room a new baseball press box softball batting cage tennis court lights and restrooms at the track complex martinsburg high school looks to add a new softball field renovate the concession stand the field house a new coating to

216the track and lights on tennis courts musselman high school also looks for a multi-purpose turf field team facility and locker rooms a road relocation project and some fencing baseball and softball field tennis court resurfacing and lights and coding to their track in spring mills press boxes for baseball and softball batting cages batting cages for baseball and softball and their 10-year replacement to their turf field uh mr steve campbell is good enough to come to the meeting tonight to answer any specific questions about the athletic facility improvements when we get to that and just so you understand these are just the new amendments the projects that we would look to add to our cefp but there's already many facility improvements identified in the cefp that's been around for a couple years these include safe school entrances

217replacement windows replacement doors and frames security camera system upgrades roof replacements intercom systems fencing hvc plumbing and electric upgrades fine arts upgrades and additions and some additional athletic facility upgrades so tonight is just one more step in the process to move these projects from planning to construction we've already met with our cefp committee in the community several weeks ago to review this list of projects and tonight i bring them to you for your approval upon approval from this board we'll be able to submit to the state and then the projects can be added to our cefp document once added to that document we can make formal requests to the school building authority for funding on our new construction projects and begin to solidify a bond package for to come back here for your approval once

218we've solidified that package we'll begin making information available to voters and continue to move forward towards the bond election so i went over a lot of projects and i'm happy to revisit any of those and take your questions [Music] right yes sir first um have we uh we included i'm very serious could you repeat that please i don't have specific projects identified to expand facilities in existing schools there are some bathrooms identified as being remo needing remodeled at that time we could uh expand those facilities two portable uh classroom complexes each having a capacity to hold 100 students fourth last one 11 restrooms in each of those conflicts with some of our other schools with 325 students which is more efficient for classroom instructional time we utilize our modules [Music] lasting they also need to

219look at special education freshman facilities they need changing features they've made the new shadows for some reason but that's that's it fields become more than just six books actually three year folders we're going to return thousands classrooms there's a remaining grass we couldn't use it as much but i'm concerned about the other things that we're going to do but yet we're going to have impediments to instruction because we have limitless questions original cef because parents have expressed concern about the safety of the buildings the original cemp we are going to try to design [Music] that's right and that's where you see the 14 schools on the list for safe school entrances we i believe we only have one right now only one as far as i know no marlo i'm not sure if there's another

220well they're all very close so you make a constipated state of attorney and you don't redesign the school you're going to have a constant lack of a thorough justification i certainly agree with you and as you point out the construction of the modular complexes it's it's new construction and as we look at the new construction of all these buildings we can certainly keep that in mind and we will make sure the facilities have enough fixtures to accommodate the population and that they're accessible to all students 100 years ago they weren't worried about the the number of students that we have today or the accessibility so we do have some challenges in the older buildings imagine i could ask if he went to another high street the young [Music] but i'm sitting there looking at a

221because sir we haven't put a order of projects on any of this and i will just remind the board that this is a vision for 10 years of projects and some of these projects including the facility the athletic facilities are 30 years plus old and are in need of maintenance so why might not be the first priority it is a project that may be done in the next 10 years also when we agree to add these projects to the cefp we're not identifying a funding source we're going to find that it is a project that needs done in our county facilities [Music] thank you for that explanation mr burton [Music] i also want you to get there [Music] can we have a motion and then we can carry this on in discussion can i have

222a motion to accept the cefp amendments as described have a motion do i have a second second discussion well i just want to add what mr burton said these amendments are for a 10-year plan and they're not in concrete so it doesn't mean just because they're suggested that we're going to be doing all these right by adding these projects to the cefp we're just identifying a need for projects and these are all major projects that would be over fifty thousand dollars it's a needs assessment still that needs to be and the cefp committee needs to be addressed doesn't mean that we're going to add all these doesn't mean that we're going to add all these amendments more of what's even in the direction it does not guarantee that we would have the the funds or

223the ability to do all these projects we're just identifying a need for them if they're not in the document however then we can't move forward with the with the projects yes i just wanted to clarify you that you mentioned if you sat down with the athletic directors you just sit down with the art directors i did not did have certain uh fine arts projects that were identified i'm he went down and sure sat down and gave my wish list we didn't move the arms we didn't do it or science claims we just let the athletic department do it [Music] 250 million math and science and all these other subjects and yet who might sit down and ask them what do you need in that but i have just now realized we are sitting there letting

224one segment of our community question this list and we should involve the instructional people the arts people in this process and you're making a mistake if you pass this out right now understood and i could also add that your decision to pass these projects tonight would not limit these projects to the only ones added and if you were to request further conversation in addition to other projects to add to the cefb we could certainly do that we have an opportunity almost monthly to make amendments to the cefp it just takes a while to go through the process i suggest that we have conversations with those individuals there's uh department heads and other instructors in those fields that would be up to the church it could be amended again is there a second to that hearing

225none any other discussion let's have a few questions for um like the safety entrances i know it's been a priority for us to see if is it priority one or is it like a two or three it is a priority one gotcha is our timeline if the bonded pass of those projects would be started would be like immediately we do not have an order of projects yet we haven't got that far in a process but that's what we're working on right now as we get projects added to the cefp and have some discussion with the school building authority we'll move into that phase of putting projects in order thank you mr fifty thousand feet intermediate ten thousand six point but the number of students enrollment capacity the south middle it's 280 students for four million

226where industrial high is 300 additional students from 20 million there is different math depending on the level of the school the formula for a square foot per student i believe it's allowing for the larger common areas and some of the other facilities that you'll have in a high school that you may not have in the smaller schools [Music] it seems like this list has these kind of problems well it's certainly still it's just still a work in progress it's based on the numbers from our population study looking at the you know the areas that need the larger school facilities where we're expecting the most growth and the size of the additions on this sheet we're just based on the formula for square footage needed per student to add space in those schools million dollars mr

227murphy let me say it again this is just recommendations for a 10-year plan two years from now you could come back and change this plan absolutely so it would it would uh be short-sighted to think that we have a very clear vision of exactly what will be happening in 2030 today we can just basically on the information that we have and make the best projections that we can any other discussion [Music] all those in favor of the cefp amendments opposed but the records show it's four to one mr burton thank you appreciate it [Music] our next action item is bc file kcb naming schools and school facilities dr schooley good evening president gilpin members of the board before you this evening you have policy bc file kcb naming of schools and schools facilities we bring

228this policy to you as an assistance to naming future school facilities and existing school facility name changes to establish a practice within the district as we did not currently have one for this process during this period you put play for comment review from january the 26th through february the 8th no comments are received during this comment period so the superintendent is recommending the policy as presented can i have a motion to accept bc file kcb naming schools and school facilities have a motion and a second any discussion [Music] all those in favor aye opposed motivation carriesly personnel actions dr schooley good evening again the personnel actions dated monday february the 21st 2020 are as follows we begin this evening with eight new coaches four are paid for our volunteers we have one interim appointment for

229coaching as well as 64 renewals of contract to begin the spring season next week and those are on pages one through six of those renewal contracts so then if you turn to page six we begin uh with the remainder of the person elections we have three coaching resignations one extra duty appointment and one extra duty resignation we have three new appointments for health care procedures we have two unpaid leave of absences that are new we have one that is on intermittent leave that would be unpaid and then we have a correction to a previous uh leave of absence that's also to be intermittent we have three new appointments of professional personnel and i'll draw your attention to line number 87 brandy davis we're coordinating facilities and maintenance another one on our bridge worked at our

230transportation department as a secretary with her degree is moving from the service classification to a professional boy we have one new one-seventh appointment we have two policy 5000 reassignments for next school year we have five resignations of professional personnel two transfers of professional personnel and beginning with the service personnel we have four new appointments three of these are new appointments and one is an extra duty appointment paid on timesheets we have one change of service we have one ratification and suspension that's ratification of the suspension and termination on line 105 and that name is corey shelton we have six service personnel resignations we have five service personnel retirements march and you'll see most of those at the end of the school year march one is the deadline for the early retirement notification so that's why

231you'll see all those for the end of the school year we have one transfer of service personnel we have two corrections of transfers uh with the dates and then one with a title we have two individuals rescinding their transfer they chose to take those positions we have six upgrades these individuals has achieved a new uh classification and we have one correction on page 12 of an upgrade with a date beginning earlier we have eight new service substitutes to add to our substitute list on the service side with three corrections allowing them to start that they started the day before we have five new substitute teachers that had the list with removal of one substitute teacher and the resignation of another for a total of 145 personnel actions dated monday february the 21st 2022 with the

232superintendent's recommendation can i have a motion to accept the professional service coaching and substitute personnel actions dated february 21st have a motion a second second any discussion all those in favor opposed thank you dr school thank you dr murphy if we could skip over board announcements and hear the superintendent's announcements please not a problem catch up right or left unless you would rather uh or mr i've already started though so uh let me start out by saying uh congratulations again to the um two new uh national board certified teachers and the 19 renewals i especially want to thank anne lasky and presented this evening and also all of the mentors uh that play a very critical role in shepherding folks through that process and it is a very uh um you know it's a very

233rigorous process and uh they have definitely earned their stripes so we want to recognize them again and thank them and also thank the board uh for their support of the program not only the training but also the financial support we also want to recognize in this slide three times state champion the musselman lady album wrestling team they went down and defended their state championship six of the team members placed individually and two of them placed as finalists in their specific weight classes we are going to be celebrating all of our winter athletes here later in march as well as our art and music students and those that were state qualified so congratulations to all those that's kind of the latest news so i've got two pieces of information here first i'll start out with the

234county social studies fair uh and that just recently occurred we had over a hundred intermediate middle and high school students uh participate across the county as well as those students at st joseph's parish school and that was held at musselman middle school i want to thank the folks that organized that most significantly uh amber beckman and a team of judges as well as parents who supported it there were 74 participants that received a ribbon and the first place finishers are going to be advancing to the regional event and that's going to be held at musselman high on march the 4th i also make note carolyn mcintosh and a team of school leaders also helped with some of the judging at that event shifting though now to the science fair the junior regional science fair was

235uh just held this past friday at ransom civic center and that's in this in the eastern panhandle here tomorrow we have the senior regional science fair and that's going to be at potomac state and then all of those first place finishers will go ahead and advance to the state fair a little bit later this come spring patrick ashton talked about recognition of our school bus operators and i just want to thank them for what they've done we're going to be celebrating them tomorrow with a host of different things and some of the local businesses have also played a role in supporting that so we want to thank and recognize all of our drivers our aides our mechanics and all the folks that support that administratively we also have maintenance appreciation day coming up on friday

236march the 4th and mr burton and his team do a host of different things from plumbers electricians carpenters hvac techs heavy equipment operators uh and just general maintenance work and kind of keeping our buildings in shape and running and well maintained this is especially true when we have inclement weather where we have issues that we need to do in emergency situations um joe has been very responsive here recently for some reason we continue to experience powder power outages in the hedgesville area and we've been able to work very closely with the local power company and trying to remediate a number of those things finally i've got two items that i want to bring to the bird's attention and also the community we pushed out a message on friday about the college and career standards k

237through and making those available on our web page so if you go to our webpage and up in the upper right hand corner of news and updates all those materials are now available so we've had several requests for those materials and so we have posted all of that on our website i want to make a special thank you to miss tanaberkar our assistant superintendent for teaching and learning in leading that along with the folks in communications elaine bobo and tabitha porterfield getting that information available i also want to address an issue to make our community aware of a concern that has been expressed about one of our supplemental reading materials in our english language arts class and that specifically that is a supplemental book the bluest eyes we have suspended the use of that book

238uh through the remainder of this year and putting in place an evaluation process for us to review that so we're in the process of doing that those procedures by the way will parallel same procedures that we have in place for um library adoptions and i think this will have us all have a better understanding of how we're going to do that we'll be transparent and how we move forward and then we'll keep the board apprised of the direction we're going so i wanted to make uh sure folks were aware of that dr murphy yes we'll be able to see those procedures yes and then finally we have the next regular board meeting coming up on monday march the 7th and that board meeting will be here you know i'm i'm not sure that i know

239the answer to that yes more students feel [Music] yeah there's like a that's a point drop or i know there's the act it's like a point drop but for the promised god it's based on the test score i know christy heaton is working very closely with all of our students and the school counselors on that so they're probably up to speed with that i know we've also been encouraging them to complete their uh college fafsa um the numbers are a little bit low right now but we're pushing that they would complete that as a well scholarship online but was that the only change uh the value increased as well okay thank you thank you uh board announcements mr president first i'd like to announce that the west virginia school board association voted to make this

240long regional representatives the second thing they did is that they voted to not join the national school board association that would make us the first state pull out at association uh we're also encouraged and for consideration uh this is our super and our counterparts involved in economic [Music] i do have a contact from the west virginia manufacturer's association that [Music] and talked about that to senior staff and uh the last thing is that we were asked as school boards to raise if we feel this way to raise our opposition to the uh change in the constitution where we would then be identified as partisan politics school board association at the state yes announcement type comment uh as i was listening to citizens forum this evening it occurred to me school board members we have a

241policy called political activities berkeley county filed g-a-h-a one sentence out of that the berkeley county board of education opposes those actions which transform schools into arenas for political activity including the espousing of any political party or of any candidate for public office board members i encourage you to read that public it's on our website we may want to uh consider adding that to the rules to go by for uh citizens forum thank you any other board announcements can i have a motion to adjourn a second question a second all those in favor aye we are adjourned