Board of Education Meeting--February 7, 2022

001here thank you that's nice thank you we'll call this meeting to order good evening welcome everyone thank you for joining us tonight if i could have miss jackie long lead us in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance liberty i have a motion to approve the agenda a second second any discussion uh mr president i moved to remove on the consent agenda 8.8 the payment of the bills due to a conflict of interest to vote separately any other discussion all those in favor of the agenda with that correction [Music] opposed motion carries unanimously we now will move into the lsic presentation and tonight it's we will hear from the muscleman region okay good afternoon board members thanks for having us tonight we are excited to share some news about the south end of the county

002and i get to start i'm not sure if it's because i'm the shortest or the smallest school but i'm happy to go first we are 152 strong at this point with 29 in pre-k which is the same number of staff we have and we're running very high in kindergarten and first grade second grade is our lower grade with 33 students looking at our scholastic reading we do not have comparative data at this point because this is our first year working with scholastic in kindergarten the top chart we have everyone starting a little below benchmark because scholastic asks for benchmark to be at level a which is the beginning and this was done the first week of school in first grade you can see the gray part is was below benchmark which is something new scholastic

003is really neat in that it allows our teachers to test each child and there were some growing pains in the beginning trying to figure out everything the orange are our kids that are meeting benchmark and blue have exceeded and in second grade you'll notice that that gets a little bit larger we were also very fortunate in the valley to test and pilot let's go learn math we have started in let's go learn math in september also all of the blue at the top is kindergarten and it shows each of the different levels there's measurement geometry it breaks it down by each of the categories in math and we're looking for as much blue and green as we can have it starts our kids at the mastery level they came in at that and we have

004some that have exceeded the graphs then at the bottom first and second grade for first grade the blue is there is above we do have gold and some red in skills that we are working on and the same thing in second grade with all of that we've started and have almost all of our information from the second the blue and green have expanded and the red is going down which is showing that we are making progress the really neat thing about let's go learn math is it breaks things down for us when we see a child's test it will show exactly what skills they've worked on you can see that they were working on counting backwards has a plus they then moved them forward to cardinal numbers they didn't master that so that was marked

005as a minus and it then throws them into activities and assigns activities to them that will help build those skills so we're really fortunate we have an interventionist working with math and we also have a program that does that as well it's very kid friendly as you can see it was getting the kid to hop back by three so that's a neat part of the let's go learn math attendance at back creek we are running at 94.75 attendance and our chronic rate has come down from previous years to 12.8 and we're still working on both of those when we look at our climate survey we did a couple of spotlights um we were really happy that the staff felt very supported as well as parents think that we are working and helping their child to

006reach their highest potential so those are really stress that we liked when we look at areas of growth our lowest was 86 percent was regular communications about what is happening in the district and with students we were really excited to see that 99 of them do like to learn new things so we're working on getting one more percent to like learning new things as we all know mental health has been a good big thing here are some things that we're doing for student support services some of the neater things that really happen this is our first year participating in handle with care with handle with care we have not received any notifications which is a great thing but we have been given the benefit of some really great training on trauma and how to notice

007it and work with our children so we really appreciate handle with care and we did find that a few good things have happened from the pandemic i have that in meaningful connections one thing that we started doing just to make sure kids got in the building safely with distance and everything when the pandemic started was we each are assigned a bus that we unload we found that that worked so well because we started to make that connection each day as they come off of the bus they know that i'm going to be on bus 220. so those kids come right off and see us so we did really like the meaningful connections and thought that was helping our students and i'll turn it over to mrs barbara ferguson from jericho good evening i have with

008me angel ralston she's my social worker i also share her with mountain ridge intermediate school and uh we are going to share with you about jamestown right now uh so our enrollment at jarrah's town is 225 students 17 of which are in pre-k and you can see the breakdown for kindergarten we are full we are at capacity with kindergarten um first grade is is uh full but a second but we have some spots second grade we're completely full and i have a total staff of 41 students in the middle there you'll see our pathfinder promise we say that every day just to remind students of what their expectations are for being present in school being polite to one another and to stay positive and ready to learn we're looking at our fall assessment here and

009this is specifically for our ela and you can see that we didn't start where we would like to to start but um with a section of blue for us um in kindergarten and and i'm sorry i cannot see those percentages uh but um the largest part of our percentages in kindergarten were not where they needed to be that was the pre-a assessment um and uh the same was true with first grade that we started um a little bit below or most of them started below um and then our second grade also more than half of our students were below the benchmark where we would like for them to start off the grade level to be but we have a large area available to us for growth and we have our interventionists and luckily this year

010we have one per grade level which allows us to really um target students who we can see benefit from that we also have that small group instruction when we break into our reading centers and stations which really makes a huge difference we're very excited to see this next benchmark and i expect a lot of growth with that we also use rise which is an intervention program and reading eggs which the county provides for us another way to just engage and and encourage those students to get to where they need to be and this uh our mass achievement we are still using star and uh our kindergarten students do not take star star excuse me and so you can see then uh the largest majority in there in first grade a little over 50 were um

011below the mastery but we had a large uh percentage that were meeting and exceeding we do have some in urgent intervention which our interventionists help with that per grade level and again that small group instruction and talk math is what we use with that that is with our my math adoption and the second grade um we have a a larger group meeting but we also have room for growth there and the interventionists work with our second grade students as well and our attendance at jairus town our daily attendance rate you can see is a 92 percent and we have a chronically absent uh rate of 22 we are working on that with our attendance club we do a daily check-in with mr s as our guidance counselor he also does personal phone calls and meetings

012with parents we do home visits and we've started weekly incentives for improved attendance and then of course the nine weeks awards we have yearly prizes for faithful and perfect attendance such as the bikes that are donated by our business partner first united bank we have some discipline data to share with you um you can see that we had four reportable incidences and then and um those were just uh situations where students had to be reminded more than once about the same thing but we use our positive behavior intervention and support and we've had lots of success with that with our climate survey you can see there listed we have our total number of participants and this was last year of course um and we had that is about the number that we had of participating

013in bric instruction every day so we got a high percentage of participation we're very happy about that and our areas of strength the students really thought that the teachers and other grown-ups in the school show that they really care about students um we also had a large percentage of our staff communicate the belief that all children can learn because of course that's what we're there to do and a large percentage of our parents um feel that our school our personnel treat their child with respect and that's huge for us that's really what we want to make sure that everyone is uh gives us that feeling that they're treated fair and that's important to us and we have some areas to focus on an investigation in we've had 84 percent of our students think that everyone

014is nice to them well of course we would like that to be closer to 100 and we're going to talk a little bit about that with angel here in a minute um we have 58 of our staff um we want to improve that parent involvement again this was last year when we couldn't have a lot of people uh come into the building and i i do believe that that has already increased for this year and will continue to do so as uh guidelines are increa decreased and and we are allowed more people and then um our parents think both students and staff respect individual differences um we again that is pretty high percentage but we would like to see that increase as well and then here is mr allison to talk about our student support

015services just to share um that's our school counselor mr schaefer and he works with individuals and he goes into classrooms and teaches social emotional lessons and then as school social worker i work with individuals and i do groups so just some highlights for you guys to see how we're supporting our students emotionally and socially so our staff is trained with trauma-sensitive trainings most recently pat patton came to our school and he did a training for staff we have the berkeley county backpack program which provides food bags to families each week we have holiday assistance which we had an awesome turnout for that we work with community partners such as local churches and individuals and we were able to connect 25 families with holiday assistance in addition to that we also had our jared's town giving

016tree which it was our first year for that and so we had a christmas tree in our hallway and family submitted their names and obviously their names weren't on the tags but if they needed assistance children were able to get the tags off the tree and bring gifts into that and we had i believe 24 for that which was an awesome turnout so thanks to those parents and families and then we have project aware of course which provides in-school mental health services for students we have check-in check-out which she briefly talked about mr s runs that so it's a daily check-in it's a pbis program and students check in with him twice a day every day and then we have calming corners for self-regulation for students in the classroom of course they are modified for

017covid guidelines and finally um i run groups so currently i have four groups going with hopes of more so i have groups with self-control social skills emotional regulation and also i have a friendship skills one as well and more to come as the year progresses and with our local school improvement council uh we did have a parent who'd planned to attend but when we had to reschedule her her schedule did not uh accommodate that so i bet she uh and we've have we have a very strong local full improvement and we've gotten a lot of things done as i shared before we have the bicycles that are donated by our business partners first united bank and you can see in our other pictures coming soon and we are working on getting picnic tables for an

018outdoor classroom space um this year we were able to get that area fenced and so the next thing we want is to make that an outdoor learning space so we are working on getting those tables as we speak so that's a little glimpse into jared's town um we also have our entity the bookworm and that has a strong community support from our our parents and community um it's a book vending machine which we were able to fundraise for and we got a generous donation to get the vending machine itself in the building and then over two thousand dollars has been donated from parents in the community to purchase uh those books that stay in there and that um the kids can earn that doing anything um when you see them doing something positive they get

019a little token and it's really anything that is positive to reinforce that love of reading and that our community is very strong supportive of that and next we have inwood primary and mr ryan ott good evening and we're primary we are the shining stars always shining always learning look in our student enrollment we're 161 our pre-k hangs around 39.40 but at this time we had 39. our kindergarten is full with 46. first grade at 37 and second grade rounding up around 39 with 27 strong staff looking at our fall ela assessment data i mean if you look at the kindergarten in the upper left we're looking at 45 we're a little bit below again starting this classic like mr mr dillinger said so it's a new reading series if you look at the top right

020we're looking at first grade data we had 81 below which equated to us about 30 students we had if you look at the orange we're at um so we're looking at roughly about five percent or two students and fourteen percent um exceeding benchmark in the grade if you look down at the bottom center of the second grade and ela we're looking at roughly 50 of our students were below in the fall benchmark that would be in the blue area if you look at the orange that's at and we're looking roughly about three kids or 10 percent and for succeeding at 11 students 40 in the gray area so that is our ela fall 2021 data we're still doing star math for first and second grade if you look at the top for our first grade

021star math data in first grade we had at or above we had 21 students roughly 61 percent in on watch roughly three students eight percent for first grade um our intervention students for star math roughly five students or fourteen percent if you look at our urgent was about 16 to 17 in first grade if you look at the second grade star map we're looking at 20 percent at or above or i'm sorry 20 students at or above that's roughly 50 52 of our second grade students on watch we're looking at about 11 intervention about six percent and then urging about eight percent or twenty percent of our students so second grade math started pretty strong in the fall attendance rated inward primary school our daily attendance rate is 92.82 percent i did an average of

022all the elementary schools so we're right about where we need to be because the elementary average is 92.56 this is the most current data that we have and our probably absent at edward primary is 17.3 percent some disciplined data um i did have some suspensions unfortunately seems like the kindergarten students came in this year um had a very rough start um august september october was a very rough month for us if you look most of our responses have been kindergarten four different students with the combined twelve days of our school suspensions um so we break it down we need to look at that a little bit closer um classroom is where most of the incidents have occurred a lot of physical fights kids not keeping their hands to themselves some aggression and some disruptive behavior

023so of course we have to react to data like that and we reimplemented our reach for the stars program which is our modified pbis program to help curb some of that um kids receive bracelets we try to catch kids doing good things um we have parent notification when a student needs some correction we call it fix it tickets and we utilize our seesaw platform to instantly let the parents know that we need assistance in helping fix behaviors a little bit about the climate survey areas of strength that i saw on our climate survey from the students we had 104 participants um do you think teachers and other grown-ups in your school care about you and i had 99 of the students um respond to that i know there was a different up there different one

024up there um it says are you taught to respect others and the belongings 95 um looking at the staff areas of strength staff members support respect and generally care about each other i'm really big on that family type atmosphere being a school family then i have the parent one teachers at this school want students to be successful and reach their full potential so that's parents inside some areas of investigation again it's a survey and it's unanimous survey students are most students at your school nice to you at 90 percent uh staff respond i spend a minimal time addressing discipline one hour a week or less the data from before kind of shows that we have had some had to spend some time disciplining our students trying to teach somebody back in school again um and

025the parent responded teachers already checked homer and returned it to students promptly again this is a survey um it's an area of investigation we utilize seesaw we have 100 participation in our seesaw platform and we can respond to any assignment or any question students have on the fly um some student support services we have project to wear bags a lot love where we have students in need that we do feed on the weekend holiday assistance programs we have trauma the sensitive training for our staff our past program um with cover 19 trying to get volunteers in the building it's been kind of difficult so what we did with our past program is i redid our schedule and we have time for unified arts to help with our past program and they were trained of course

026check in and check out with our students at this point and i'd like to turn it over to valley view elementary and mr brent gerard good evening everyone it's a nice to have the opportunity to talk about our schools and for several of us it's our children's schools also so it's close to close to our hearts valley view our attendance our student enrollment is about 390 with one pre-k our data uh for scholastic it puts most of our kindergarten students as well as everyone else's at uh at emerging um and you'll see uh we're a pilot for let's go learn and it just does the opposite when you get to kindergarten it places almost every kid at mastery or benchmark and then you work from there so that's a little something to look at first

027grade for this the blue is mastery the orange i mean is above mastery orange is mastery and then the gray is below mastery and the same with the second grade we had our second grades very strong this year we're looking into uh what we're doing there and the things are going well the blue is above mastery for our second grade students uh like i said we are a pilot school for let's go learn i didn't include the kindergarten because it basically places everybody on level blue is proficient for our first graders our range is emerging we had no we had no kids in the above a level blue for second grades above once again uh they're doing very well the orange is proficient and gray is emerging our attendance 92.96 with 15.3 chronic discipline you

028can see there uh it was it was a good year there were two for uh in september we had to put five people in uh in december and then january and it was a very good year the discipline was with with only one in-school suspension our climate survey we had total participation of 202 uh students we sent out numerous messages and had only 54 parent responses 28 staff i looked at areas that were significantly above the county average or what i considered significantly below our bright spots behavioral expectations are clearly communicated to the staff we do a lot of time talking about the students behaviors and what we can do to help them communication with parents from the parents was very high now we make a great effort to use we used to use dojo

029now it's see-saw schoology and touch everything we can use to to get messages out there areas that we were going to evaluate and keep an eye on at-risk students given additional learning time and i think that's a little frustration from the staff when years a couple years ago we lost title one and we don't have the number of interventionists they would like to have and then one for me being approachable i'd make an effort to talk to all the parents i have an open door policy so that's something i want to keep an eye on uh i consider myself very approachable maybe i don't look approachable so we'll work on that student support services you're a valley view star every day at the end of the day we read these on our announcements the teacher

030sends in a student's name on the back we read why they are a valley view star that particular day and then we post them in the hallways for all students to see a few years back we started what's called zuzingo for attendance uh every month is a different country different animals the students get cards for perfect attendance they're put into drawings for a small animal weekly and then at the end of the month they are put into a drawing for a large animal and when we initiated this a couple years ago you could immediately see an improvement in attendance and i think some other schools have picked this up also some support services we've been using morning check-ins attendance stars for our chronic absentees a social group for some aggression that we've been seeing uh

031on the increase lately a lot of anxiety this year we we've seen uh after covid a lot of students who exhibit that kindergarten not wanting to come to school and seeing it in first and second grade also but that's been helpful for our students and also the county project aware we have four students participating in that at this time and now it's time for bunker hill thank you good evening everyone i'm i'm paul baker uh at bunker hill elementary we have 424 students 76 staff um as we look at our uh daily attendance 92.46 chronically absent that actually has come down uh to 23.82 we are working hard on that one of our counselors will be speaking on our what we're doing for attendance later on uh this is our fall assessment after analyzing our

032data we we know that more students are below benchmark than we would like in kindergarten 100 of our students are below benchmark because the scholastic assessment has students needing to be at level a which means that they would be reading uh with this in mind we looked uh more at evidence of learning because uh this is more in line with our kindergarten report cards some additional assessments were completed such as letter sound identification rhyming etc this was the data we relied on the most for grouping our students for intervention we also purchased uh hagerty's phonemic awareness program for grades k through two we have one interventionist uh we like valley view have lost our title one but we were also able to secure uh second interventionists for this uh second semester uh which we are

033excited about um and for our as far as our math is concerned um our academic coach has been working with our staff using math in practice looking at our discipline data students have been out of school for a couple years we set some expectations early on so you see some discipline referrals in september and october that are higher than in november december when students started coming around and understanding what the expectations were we are proud though that 97 percent of our students do not have a discipline referral two percent have one referral one percent uh have two or more referrals as far as our climate survey is concerned we had uh 295 students participate uh 38 staff and 54 parents um and we found that our areas of strength were that our staff really cares

034about students we also believe that children can learn and the and the school buildings and grounds are neat clean and well kept as far as our focus areas our students our goal that we have for them is to cultivate a learning environment where students feel safe and supported also for staff we want to want to decrease the amount of time teachers are having to address concerning behaviors in the classroom as far as parents are concerned we want to foster a school atmosphere where individuals with differences feel respected we're going to move on to our student support and we have mrs elena swiger our school one of our school counselors that will present on that good evening the school counselors provide individual and small group counseling based on the needs of our students these can be

035referred by the students themselves by parents or staff members who have concerns our attendance interventions we have a couple of different things going on we have an attendance club where we check in weekly with students who have chronic absences and we're currently doing a whole school intervention where the classroom with the best attendance for the week gets a star on the cafeteria board and after month the winner we are hoping to have some sort of ice cream tree reward for them student recognition programs we have a picture there of our bears of the week so each week there's a bear of the week from each classroom they get a certificate they get their name announced they get a pin and then they also get a little water bottle for recognizing that um quarterly awards assembly

036that's something else we do to recognize students um after report cards go out we give out awards for attendance each of the specials gives an award and then the teachers also give awards for students who are working well in the classroom and then lastly community resources we work with a variety of community people members to provide things for our students looking at our lsic improvement council's accomplishments i have this in quotes because this is what we set out in the beginning of the school year to do um is to put up fencing um i chased two kids today um someone else chased one and caught them um so we we we're glad to have our our fencing up now um joe burton um really worked with us um you know i think i'm a professional

037noisemaker um just trying to get what we need at our school so we really appreciate berkeley county schools puerto rico board of education and staff over there providing this fencing for us but we have with us our lsic president this is uh brook roach who's going to talk about some goals we have hello so um this is what you're viewing as our nature center and we've had some issues with it over the years i've been with the school for 10 years and um over the years you know we've definitely had some struggles with vandalizing and we have a fish pond and there has been like some cool things done so the school and lsrc had worked to get another camera so we have a camera now that actually faces the greenhouse and you can actually

038see the pond um which is definitely a win for our school and now our goals is just to try to beautify it again it's obviously the last two years have been really hard to find volunteers that you know want to come out and help beautify it but our goal now is to get it beautiful so that our counselors and our teachers and our students can go out and enjoy it and learn um in different atmospheres thank you brooke and she mentioned about the camera where you see the bridge there there were fish in that pond there's very still frogs but some people had some i guess kids had come and um kind of went fishing and took the fish and uh so now we can see what's going on there but we we have a

039little bit of funds but we're going to be working hard to not only beautify this but even make it even better for our students next we have uh mill creek with miss beth mccoy good evening president gilbert dr murphy and fellow board members it is a pleasure to share with you this evening many of the wonderful things that we're doing at mill creek intermediate school we are the home of 570 students and currently 67 staff members at mill creek we provide limitless opportunities to all of our students and emphasize our core beliefs of responsibility accountability and kindness in all that we do in the fall our teachers administer the scholastic next generation guided reading assessments this was the first time this benchmark assessment was administered in our school as you can see from the gray

040and orange parts of the pie chart we had over half of our students who were reading at or above grade level our teachers currently are finishing the mid-year assessments and have reported that many students have shown growth and progress towards their learning goals 100 of our teachers at mill creek are utilizing the scholastic literacy program in all of our ela classes teachers are implementing guided reading to reach all learners on the next slide you will see the results of our star math benchmark assessment the blue part portion of this chart represents the students who were at or above benchmark in the fall the mid-year assessments were also recently administered and we saw a decline in the urgent intervention subcategory and an increase in the n one watch subcategory all other subcategories have maintained about the

041same this growth indicates that our students are receiving the intervention support that we need to show academic growth we would like to thank the board for approving an additional interventionist position this school year so that we can focus on supporting the academic growth for all of our students being responsible accountable and being kind are our three core beliefs at mill creek as we transitioned back to a full school environment this fall we saw students who struggled with self-regulation related behaviors as you can see from the data above we have been able to lower our discipline referrals to pre-covet numbers our teachers have been practicing conscious discipline doing re-teaching sessions of expected behaviors administration have been working with parents and counselors have been offering small group therapy sessions and referring families to county resources in the

042spring of 2021 the staff families and students of mill creek participated in the berkeley county schools climate survey this survey indicates that the overall feeling of students and parents is that mill creek is a safe place for learning since visitors and parents have not been allowed into the school due to covid we have had to be creative with our family involvement and activities as an area of an investigation at this time i would like to invite melissa gageridge to share with you some of our family and student events that we have been working on and the quicker there we go good afternoon for the parents the biggest thing that i think we have to keep in mind is that we are trying to help our children push from surviving to thriving one of the things

043that was extremely successful this year for the students was the fall fun day it allowed these children to get outside to participate in different activities and crafts and such and just be together in a safe way something i think that the children are really yearning for milk creek has also created an art club which is allowing an after school activity for these children so that they have the means to gather and also have some fun with support of the art teacher miss mann we're doing hands-on activities and experiments that's keeping the kids engaged in learning communication for parents and staff on class dojo it allows instant messaging for different teachers they send out all kinds of messages daily staff updates fun activities reminders for parents et cetera which i find to be very helpful we

044also have the singing cardinals which is an after school choir offered to our fifth graders strings which is an after-school program offered to all students pbis reward days which are fun activities offered for students who reach the pbis goals every four to five weeks and tutoring that is offered to the students at request of the teacher or the parent i find that working and adding these additional things has definitely helped my child personally and other children i know uh start to come a little more connected and feeling more comfortable in the mid of the hopefully you know the end of the pandemic thank you miss gatrick at this time i'm going to introduce carson reiser who is one of our school counselors and she is going to address some of the student support services that

045we've offered during the school day for our students hello my name is carson reiser and i am a school counselor at mill creek intermediate i want to first start by saying thank you for your time and for having me up here to speak this evening as we all know the mental health crisis is an all-time high in this country and we are seeing the effects of that at the intermediate level we are striving to combat that crisis in our school by providing different social emotional supports for our students in a variety of different ways at mill creek intermediate we are part of the backpack program which provides weekend food bags to 26 families and that number continues to increase through project aware we have two therapists which provides in-school therapy services to 15 students and

046again that number also continues to increase when the supports are needed we have been working with sims health services who are working alongside me and mrs doleman to provide small groups for our students to help with impulse control and grief mill creek intermediate is the handle with care 2.0 school the handle with care program informs the school if emergency services are needed with one of our students we get a notice to the school to handle that student with care and to provide extra support if it is needed this program is also able to help provide our school with trauma-sensitive training for the entire staff in addition we have a social worker that sees a caseload of students through our school counseling program we are currently running an attendance group to increase our attendance rate of

04793.93 and decrease our chronically absent rate of 17.42 each student in the school can put in a self-referral to meet with the school counselors in a variety of formats there is a qr code hung in every single classroom where the students can scan that code and fill out the referral form they are able to go onto the website to fill out the form if they want to be more discreet and they can put a note in our mailbox outside the office doors individual counseling provides students with one-on-one social emotional support when needed and at this point we have met with 320 plus students for individual counseling we were just able to hire a second school counselor that started the beginning of january and i want to take the time to thank you for that opportunity

048having ms dolman at the school will ensure that we will be successful in our school counseling department by being able to meet with more students in an appropriate amount of time and be effective in supporting their social emotional needs and will allow us to focus more on small group counseling in our school which with her addition we have been able to start two extra small groups at the beginning of february in self-regulation as i close i want to say thank you so much for your time tonight and for listening to all the amazing things we're doing at mill creek intermediate and now i'm going to introduce miss autumn fry who will be speaking about mountain ridge intermediate thank you good evening ladies and gentlemen mountain ridge intermediate school will be also represented by councilor christine

049redstreet and parent cara carr as you can see from the beginning part of our slide we are just under 600 students averaging around 200 students for each grade level our staff is right around 66 and we actually just hired a part-time counselor which will make it 67. our fall data that is represented at the top shows the blue for our at or above for the grade level for our benchmark for fall ela we are using the scholastic measures and all of our teachers are using that 100 in every classroom for third grade we are just below half for at or above for fourth grade we are over half for at or above and for fifth grade we are right about in the middle for our math data you will notice that the blue also represents

050the at or above benchmark third grade to the left a little more than half and that orange is the on watch the students that we are watching to see whether they will teeter back and forth for intervention for our fourth grade a little less than half of our students and for fifth grade about the exact same our attendance at mountain range intermediate the daily attendance rate is just below 93 and our chronic absent rate is just below 22 and that is something that we are working very hard to change our discipline data that's listed at the top you will notice that is for this school year and we have compared that to two years ago the reason we did that was because the school year that we were in from 1920 at this current time

051we had similar amounts of months and days within that school year you will notice to the left of this school year the chart shows that there are only 18 that is the largest number on that chart whereas in the 1920s school year the number to the left is 110. although our graph looks very similar you will see the number is very different our climate survey we had 421 students that participated last spring with 44 of our staff members and 100 parents when looking at our areas of strength both our students and our parents stated that the school is a place for learning our staff felt like the staff communicates that all students can learn for our areas of investigation our students stated that they felt their teachers always don't always check their homework and return

052it promptly and we've discussed that we believe that might be because several things have been submitted electronically and students don't always go back and look at a response from a teacher as far as the area of investigation for staff they often will say that parents are involved as much as we would like and we believe that that will be changing in the near future as we have some guidelines hopefully lifted for our student support services i'm going to introduce mrs christine red streak good evening my name is christine berg but i did get married in april so the kids i've been trying to introduce myself as red streak but i just keep calling me berg so i professionally have stuck with that um i also work with miss angel wilson she's right back there um

053we're like a dynamic duo we always tell people that uh we come as a pair so um she should really be up here with me um if you look at this slide you can see pictures of lots of things that have happened in our school we've had community donations of coats we had a writing contest last year for kindness week if they if the students had a hundred dollars what would they spend it on and actually that's a bird house made by um bryn chirrard he's right over there too um and then in the fall we had a pennies for prevention it went alongside our red ribbon week and the kids the class who brought the most weight and pennies got to duct tape an administrator to the wall and so the kids brought over

054and pennies to duct tape an administrator to the wall um thinking of that it's kind of funny right you're like oh they just brought some pennies and we duct tape our principle to the wall uh but uh my social worker and i have this belief in maslow's hierarchy which is the triangle to the left that basically states if a child's basic needs aren't met uh then they're never going to reach self-actualization which primarily focuses on them being they're the best that they can be um so what does that start as it starts as one making sure their basic needs are met um and then two going into relationships i need the next slide so thank you good i didn't know how to work it so glad you took it so how do we do that

055how do we facilitate those relationships well we work with the berkeley county backpack program um i told my parent here that um these slides are very informational but i don't feel like it gives you a picture of truly what i do during the day so this week is actually national school counseling week um and the position of this week is really to just advocate for my profession so what is it that i did today well i got to work and i put candies in a jar so that i could have the kids invested into school counseling week after that i went and got water bottles for kids that were donated by our community community members donated 600 water bottles to our school so that every student in our school could have a water bottle and

056um so i took those water bottles and then following that i had an individual session but not before doing my check-in checkout duties that also my administrators do and i have special tea specials teachers do as well um that led into my individual sessions which um again led to communication with the parents um which led to me having a relationship with them um and helping them realize that some of the things that maybe are they're experiencing at home are happening at school and some of the things that are happening at school we need their assistance with at home um again that goes really back to that maslow's hierarchy and having those communications and facilitating those relationships with our families because we're not only facilitating relationships with our kids but we're also doing with it with

057the parents and consistently when i have these conversations with parents i'm always saying we're not only here to support you but we're also here to support your student and if our kids are coming to us and saying you know we don't have food or we don't have running water then i need to reach out to the family and then to the community to find those resources we've also implemented calming walls uh that's really our our pride and joy um to help students facilitate self-regulation they're just right outside the classrooms and students can go and use those coping skills to the best of their ability that they've been taught to use i appreciate your time i value what you do and i hope that you have enjoyed this presentation go school counselors good evening my name

058is kara carr i'm a parent of a third grade student at mountain ridge intermediate and i'm going to be talking to you this evening about some of our accomplishments and our goals the first of our accomplishments are four recycled picnic style tables uh they're being installed on the east learning patio two of those have been installed have been assembled and installed one of those is handicap accessible and two more are ready to be assembled we've also requested and completed a sidewalk connecting the east sidewalk to provide handicap accessibility to that learning area so our students are able to get to the tables um to access those another significant accomplishment is our schoology communication as a parent receiving regular and predictable communication is essential to maintaining my connection to the school and improves my ability to

059consistently stay involved in my students education at the beginning of each week i can see my son's assignments from both his classroom teacher and his specialist teachers in color-coded folders these folders include the full lesson plans that are not only accessible to me as a parent but also accessible to the administration and the school board this was extremely helpful when we were quarantined earlier this fall so i could see every assignment that needed to be done i could see what needed to be submitted including screenshots or pictures of workbook pages i can also view regular regularly submitted assignments and i can quickly access that teacher feedback that mrs fry talked about earlier as a parent i love to be able to see the feedback notes that are written on assignments so i can help support

060my son's education at home and then of course i can see his grades regularly updated but on the school feed i can regularly see updates from not only the school administration with her monthly newsletter but also i see counseling updates from mrs berg reg street for student council different projects and theme weeks that are happening throughout the school reminders from the specials team so if we have a book fair or if there's a schedule change music performances anything like that and then as pictured fun technology updates about what's happening school-wide and those are provided by uh mountain ridge intermediate's technology integration specialist dr anne methena and she always includes students proudly displaying their work which i think is really cool to see what the students are doing in their classrooms but most recently i've seen

061updates from math field day social social studies fair the 100th day of school and then my favorite a bulletin board in the school which of course since i can't go in and see but we were updated on a bulletin board celebrating female black herstory which had pictures of different female black individuals throughout history and their contribution our goals this year include reintroducing hawk slips with electronic shopping for rewards bringing back our pto auction to include an online auction with class projects and adding shade sales or umbrellas for our outdoor learning patio as you can see our hawk slips are given to students who are noticed for doing helpful acts and works of kindness we would like students who earn these slips to have the opportunity to spend them in an online store as encouragement for

062their continued positive behavior we would also like for each classroom to be able to share their creativity with the community through an online auction that would hopefully also include donations from local businesses in prior years this auction has been offered in person but of course under the current conditions we would like to offer the online option in the past these funds have been used toward various school improvement projects so the future plans would be based on the funds that are raised through the auction finally we would like to add shade to the tables on our outdoor learning patio that way students are able to enjoy their time outside comfortably and at this time i'm going to turn things over to dr branch with mountain ridge middle school good evening board members i'm ron branch principal

063at mountain ridge middle school and if you'll notice our mission statement the things that we focus on are academics and social interactions and so that's what we'd like to discuss with you a little bit this evening this school year we transitioned from the star program to ela and math ixl ixl is a program that allows us to assess students and to design a personalized learning plan for them and so what you see on the uh the board here is a representation of the skills that our students have mastered over the course of the school year we use ixl in the classroom but we also use it with our intervention program our pull out program and also with our lunch study hall so our students have put in a lot of work on ixl and from

064our first assessment in september through january we have mastered thousands of skills so our students are doing a really good job and our staffing is doing a good job of implementing the ixl program so that's broken down in the sixth seventh and eighth grade ela we also have math and you see the same trend there that our students have put in a great deal of effort and time in our ixl program and the results are showing there we've also made some progress in uh attendance from last year to this year on the left you'll see the daily attendance rate from last year as compared to this year and an improvement about five percent there five or six percent our chronic absence rate is coming down so from the last school year where our chronic absence

065rate was over 30 percent to this year right around 25 and we're hoping to see continued improvements in our attendance rate as um we are at the beginning of of a mentoring program that we're starting where staff would be members have volunteered to meet with small groups of students throughout the week and establish those relationships and help them monitor their grades and attendance as they go along student behavior now that is the area that we have struggled in the most starting off this school year so what i'm sharing with you this evening is a comparison between 2019 2020 and then this school year so i left out last year because we only had about uh two-thirds of our students in the building and the data is just not comparable so the number there underneath each

066um graph is the number of referrals that we had through january of that year so you'll notice in 2019 2020 through january we had 225 referrals this year through january we've had 557 referrals and i think it's a combination of students reacclimating to the regular school environment along with a higher than normal number of good but inexperienced teachers and permanent subs so we've been working with our our perm subs and new teachers to strengthen classroom management to strengthen their expectations and consistency we brought in a speaker to meet with all of our students to discuss decision making and we continue with our tail program tail stands for time and instruction loss and it's our discipline program at mountain ridge middle school it was actually designed by our own teachers um several years ago and this

067program incorporates consequences rewards and communication you know making sure that parents students administrators teachers are all on the same page and if you look at our chart we peaked in october with almost 170 referrals that's by far the most referrals we've ever had in a in a month but after that you'll see each month that we've made progress and our discipline referrals are coming down and i've shared with our our teachers um just today that we're doing good things it's been a frustrating year in terms of student behavior but they're continuing to do good things they're making a difference in in student lives and we want to continue doing what we're doing so with our climate survey there are three areas that i'm really focused on this year myself administration helped with teacher concerns so

068at the beginning of the school year you know we always have those things that are in place school-wide but i wanted to know what teachers expect out of me how i can support them individually so we did a survey where teachers were able to respond and just give us some ideas of things that we can do individually for them to help them throughout the school year and we've been working to meet those needs communication is always a point of focus i communicate daily with our staff through emails i call those my daily updates send that out every day trying to be more visible this year in the hallways our administration between classes and then in the classes during instructional time and finally staff development working with our leadership team and just trying to meet teacher

069needs so our staff has had influence in the staff development that we've done this year the strengths from our climate survey the principal established strong academic focus the school is a safe place i've always believed that we got our oveah survey back last week and again for the eighth year in a row we're below the national average and bullying mountain ridge middle school is definitely a safe place for children and it's a good place to come to work and to learn so we do want to talk about some of the student support services that we are providing this year and to do that this evening i have jason breyer who is one of our school counselors hi as you said i'm jason breyer one of the school counselors and i want to start off also

070with thank you i had gone to frederick county maryland to work for two years and with the expansion of the number of counselors in the county that was the opportunity i was looking forward to to come back home so thank you for that expansion i really do appreciate that one of the first things i did in coming in as a first year middle school counselor was at mountain ridge intermediate i asked the teachers what sort of things were going on in the past what would they like to have back one of the things was the dude be nice program historically our dude be nice kids would have some training on just being helpful being kind and they would travel to the intermediate school to help out with all these lessons given the covid climate and

071everything what i decided to do with the dude be nice program was expand the number of students who could be a part of it so we had more students feeling like they were involved and had an attachment to something and those students now are helping out around the school a volunteer basis we have kids who have helped teachers clean the labs they're helping out in the cafeteria helping out pick up stuff in the gym just oh and one of the fun ones was they helped their nurse pack a whole bunch of ice packs almost too many ice packs uh the other thing that i really noticed was the amount of referrals we were having for vaping which was something that was a little new to me again first time in secondary so we have been

072in contact with the berkeley county recovery resource center and i'm awaiting some permission slips back we're going to be making some more parent contacts we're going to be working with them to create a small group that students can attend to help them quit vaping which i think a lot of that was just from the past few years you know kids being at home unsupervised experimental in addition uh we have the you know past program and project aware which really i don't think we could do without there they've been a wonderful part of berkeley county for well almost as long as i can remember because pass was there when i started project aware is newer but still old and it's been fantastic thank you for the continued support of those overall though i think the the

073best effort we are all making is putting relationships first the very nature of these past few few years having relationships and involvement with the community have been able to make our schools stronger our students feel safe they're comfortable and they're accepted strengthening and re-establishing those connections is the best thing we can do to give our students firm footing on the pathway to their own success so thank you and then to end our part of the presentation like to introduce will smith he is a parent of one of our seventh grade students at mountain ridge middle good evening my wife and i were asked why we were so happy for our son to attend mountain ridge middle we've always loved the schools on the south end of the county we feel that mountain red intermediate did

074a great job getting robbie ready for middle school especially during his fifth year at the beginning of the pandemic when we got to the middle school we were so impressed with how organized ready and welcoming the school was for the students and parents we love how the school offers so many activities from sports such as basketball wrestling cross-country and cheerleading to clubs such as band art green thumb club there isn't a day that goes by that robbie doesn't have a story about some new goal that he has had from one of his teachers this year mr albright the band director has pushed him to learn two instruments and join the jazz band for the first part of the of the year robbie tackled this challenge and is now mentioned he is wanting to get into

075the eighth grade band as a seventh grader there's another event coming up that he's looking forward to next wednesday at mountain ridge middle our jazz band will be playing while the art department is having their art show mrs abel the art teacher does such a great job getting students to show their artistic side during this art show students will be displaying their work other art creations will be for sale robbie and i have had the chance to go and to some of the basketball games where our jv and varsity students will play against other schools our cheerleading squad gets to show off their talents at each game at the beginning of the game we get to hear one of the students or staff members sing the national anthem academically we couldn't be happier with all

076of his teachers he's had last year and this for filling in all the gaps and having to go virtual we have found that there are so many opportunities at the middle school for every student to find their talent thank you and with that i'll introduce mr hillman from musselman middle school thank you i am mr hillman i'm the principal of muslin middle school as you can tell by our first slide we have a little bit under 700 students this year we have a total staff of 82. this is our team consists of me the two assistant principals miss rickman who's joined us here this evening mrs hall who's our tiss and math teacher ms hughes is the bus driver miss windsor apparent and mr faircloth from the state police as dr branch said this year

077is new i have been using ixl for a diagnostic measure so you can see it broken down by each grade level sixth seventh and eighth grade the ela numbers are in the middle column and the math numbers are in the right column and that was our beginning of the year diagnostic measure the next one is our middle of the year diagnostic and you can see some of the numbers that we have highlighted up there show some significant growth with sixth grade ela with 7th grade ela 6th grade math and 8th grade math one of the things we do at muscle and middle is consistently talk about reading in a positive way so just as jared's town we also have a book vending machine mrs lure one of our seventh grade reading teachers runs this book

078swap program you can see one of some of the pictures from her christmas theme program in which any student in the school is allowed to visit this room that we have in our school there's games involved her students plan the book swaps so it's usually centered around a theme then any student that enters the book swap if they're interested in any book that's there they take it home with them they don't have to bring it back they can keep it so there's a steady supply of books coming in all the time one partnership that we have this year is through wvu and the state department of education and that is the wv steam tacular so we'll be participating in this program late this month or early march and i believe we chose the projectile launcher

079so you're going to see what that's all about and hopefully help our kids with some engineering projects another partnership that we have is through the west virginia air guard and sergeant gillenwater comes in regularly and works with some of our classes he talks about various things that the students would not have access to otherwise so he shows them pictures of in and out of the plane various uh virtual field trips he takes them through and talks about his experiences and provides a solid male role model for our students to talk to for our attendance our daily rate up there as you can see is 91 but that's increased to over 92 percent daily attendance our chronic attendance rate was at 27 and that has dropped a little bit lower than that as well dr amy

080hader a new assistant principal writes a handwritten letter to every parent that gets a five-day notice for attendance and that's worked really well multiple home visits we've done we set up some attendance contracts and we obviously have individual student meetings as well if you look at our discipline data i have it broken down by the grade level there location 47 what's happening in the classroom by incident type 42 as disruptive behavior and 16 percent was fights we noticed that 50 of our discipline was happening in the lunch window so that enabled us to switch some of our lunchtime routines around we added more staff we added more adults in the cafeteria in the hallways and that has dropped significantly since that time for our climate survey some of our investigations through the staff survey we

081had open communication was something to investigate so we are consistently doing a grade level so each administrator is assigned to a grade level so we're holding those weekly we have many committees we formed a behavior committee at the beginning of the year and then we formed an electronic information station which i'll show you soon here i think the school keeps parents well informed was something that we had to investigate we did start a new school facebook page we have multiple in-touch messages going out we have a master spreadsheet in which we keep all the communication and we're having heavily utilizing google voice which is not tied to any of our cell phones but we text parents regularly and we have a lot of great response and text back through texting rather than through phone calls

082the expectations for behavior clearly communicated with something else to investigate we formed a behavior committee as i said we developed some new processes and we even held an assembly to talk about wise decision making i know you can't see all the links but this is our information station so every staff member has access to this and everything on there is a link that they can click on so for example if they want to take a day off there's a direct link to click on it takes them right to that if they want to see the for example there's a link to the county website with all of the report card and interim dates and the calendar so we tried to link every single possible thing that we could think of on there so that way

083teachers and staff members just go to this website only and every single thing that they need hopefully is on here and if it's not they tell us and we put it on there these are some examples of some facebook posts that we've had this year so the picture on the left is our uh parent drop off in the morning so we took a drone shot over the top and uh because we we realized when when you tell parents to enter the stadium entrance sounds pretty self-explanatory to me but apparently it wasn't so we did a drone shot put arrows on there and that's helped a lot we did our muscle middle concerts and you can see all the different impressions um we had 539 impressions for our parent teacher conferences when we did a the

084counseling department did a pumpkin contest that was our most popular facebook post we had over 2 000 impressions um and then also the last bubble that you can see that our team replies within an hour so we're pretty proud of that this was the assembly that we had through epic ryan parsons came in and gave a speech about some decisions that he made when he was younger and how to help our students make wise and healthy decisions our climate survey celebrations that were higher than the county averages i respect the teachers of the school that was from the students from the parents my child can get help from the teacher on school work when needed so we are proud of that and the principal listens to students from the students perspective so obviously that gives

085the assistant principles as well we felt proud of that that we were able that the students felt that they could trust us and talk to us some student support services we have routine administrator and counselor check-ins as several of the other schools have mentioned we have a lunch bunch program which students meet with counselors the talk to me program we have project aware we give we gave out candy grants and we have multiple theme days and we have some theme days coming up next week for counseling week other student support services we have a new dungeons and dragons club which we're really proud of that's all student driven they really wanted the dungeons and dragons club so we have that we have a new pop culture club which is students meet after school talk about

086music movies different decades and genres we have a drama club our drama club is getting ready to do a show a theater show the 10 best and worst things about middle school coming up the end of february and we have a couple other things going on we have the um dude and dudette and the dude be nice program as well just as mountain ridge middle explained um when we have new students coming to the school these student ambassadors walk them around walk them through their schedule show them how to open their locker and things like that and then lastly this is a picture of one of our partnerships through epic and the yoga program so this enables students to let out some aggression we give them breathing and calming techniques and this program has worked

087really well so with that i'll turn it over to miss rigelman muscleman high school [Music] good evening the best thing about being the high school i get to work with all the students and the incredible work that all of these principals do we are roughly at 1685. if you look we are growing in numbers uh ninth grade is our largest class this year at 500. and then our smallest is our 11th graders and then we have 391 seniors with 158 total staff members i want to start by reviewing our climate survey our students reported that their teachers expect them to get good grades on assigned work and test our staff exhibit a sense of pride in the school and it's a safe and secure place to work we also received our bullying questionnaire and that

088lined up with our students as well that they feel musselman is a safe place to attend our parents feel that they receive regular communication about what is happening in the school and district the areas that we are investigating my teachers make sure i've learned material before they move on this is where we're working with our teachers on providing reteaching as well as videos of lessons on schoology for the students to access the staff they feel there is not a lot of parent involvement of all kinds at the high school and when we look at this a lot of our parents are involved in our extracurricular activities and we're hoping as code restrictions are once covered restrictions are are lowered we can start bringing more parents as well as our past program volunteers into the school

089during the day our parents feel that the teachers don't always check homework and return it promptly we found with schoology that the parent the teachers go back and check the work but the students don't get a notification so we're working on figuring that out so that they can contact the students and then they can go back and see that they actually did check that work um the high school we give the psat which is just the pre-sat 9th and 10th grade and then the fall of junior year and then our juniors take the sat in the spring so i want to focus on our 11th graders our our current 11th graders they took the psat in the spring of last year and then they took it again in the fall and if you look at

090the school level our english and language we increased we are above the district but we are a little bit below the state with math we remain the same and i'll talk about some of our interventions at that level we are a little bit above the district but we are below the state i'm really anticipating seeing how our juniors do on the sat when we give that in the spring our focus for the year data teams so on the professional development days our teachers meet in subject areas and they analyze our psat and our sat they actually can look at individual students as well as areas that we need to focus on in our classrooms we've implemented math i excel math and english and i just printed we have mastered 9740 skills this year so far

091khan academy so the students psat data links directly to khan academy and creates an individualized program for each students to work on those skills we also have an act and sat prep program within our school day and we really try to focus on those students that are right on the borderline of meeting the requirements for the promise scholarship our attendance our average daily attendance rate is at 89.64 percent i did check this number this morning and we are 89.9 so we are making some improvement our chronic absence rate is 35 we're working with our curriculum team as well as lssc to put incentives we want to start doing weekly incentives for perfect attendance as well as monthly and yearly our renaissance cards are also linked to attendance student and parent conferences continuing those and working

092with our attendance worker to make home visits our school management our number one referral and also included in this are tardies um is skipping class or again being tardy for class we did we have had 391 referrals for that we've implemented some interventions at the semester we transitioned to an e hall pass system which holds our students accountable for where they are in the building we do our weekly oveas lessons student and caregiver conferences and what we've found is the highest number of students being tardy or not going to class are our ninth graders and we think that's because sixth grade was their last regular school year so it's learning how to transition to classes learning that time management of you only have a certain amount of time to get to class and we also

093switched to block scheduling today so that or this year i'm sorry we switched the box scheduling so they have a different schedule a and b days our start our student support systems as the other principles mentioned project aware has been extremely helpful in getting the therapist from east fridge in to help with our most our students that really need that we have handle with care we have 20 plus clubs all of our clubs are based on student interest the additional school counselor is invaluable at the high school level a lot of our counselors are working on scheduling and career readiness so having that other counselor to really work with those students on emotional needs has been invaluable we're implementing the too good for drugs program next week in our health classes which is a 10-week

094program to work with students on addiction and then our renaissance program that's a program we've had at musselman for 15 years and it's about recognizing students for doing the right thing and catching them doing positive things at muscleman high school i'm going to turn it over now to mrs lester she is one of our lsrc members and she's going to discuss our appleman clothes closet thank you mrs rigelman and good evening everyone as she said my name is jennifer lester and i'm here for lsic as a parent and a staff member and first i would like to thank our community for the outpouring of donations that have helped stock our clothing closet we provide clothing and essential items to any student who asks on average we have two students a week that reach out as

095you can see in the image we have a variety of items not only do we have clothing but we also have toothbrushes soap and food items and now we are working on providing snacks for after school extracurricular activities and for students in designating locations thank you one of our continuing goals of lssc is to increase communication between musclemen high school our students and our parents as well as the community we use instagram twitter and facebook to reach our parents our social media has been incredibly successful we probably have 4 000 followers we try to post something every day and our philosophy is we want to tell our story and we want to get the positives out about musselman high school in the lower right corner we do a weekly s'mores letter we started this when

096we had students that were brick and click to bridge that communication gap and it has everything from yearbook ordering to caps and gowns the parent teacher conferences and that's posted on social media as well as in touch every week i'm going to end with this slide our ultimate goal in south berkeley is to prepare our students to be college and career ready and that may look different it may mean entering the workforce it may mean attending a two-year technical school it may mean a four-year college and at musselman high school we are really proud of the class of 2022. 69 of our students are in a cte class or dual enroll rolled in a college class so if you look we have 72 musclemen students that will be career completers this year 21 at james

097rumsey and then 177 that are dual enrolled in a college class and that's just the class of 2022 this year so on behalf of the south berkeley community i thank you all for taking the time tonight to hear all the great things that we're doing to rep to prepare our applemen and we're going to end we have a video for you [Music] do [Music] so [Music] me thank you guys so much for the presentation this evening you want to take a 10 minute break all right sure no break then one question um mr hellman from muslim they will just stage or see and i noticed that in the testing schedule this uh record that that the tests were given between january 4th and whenever i was wondering where we get the latest uh results like

098we did at the fall during the fall test yes i i can answer that question we have scheduled uh three meetings this year where we're going to be providing you with updates on the academic progress you've had one of those reports already there's another report coming up in the next two meetings and then we'll have a final report and the in the booklet we received in your strategic plans uh it said that you would either have mastery or one year's progress and that i've seen that over the years i was just wondering and and i saw you mentioning there in the slides the mastery points but how do you plot the one-year progress for those people who are below mastery and do you have a how far below grade level are these individuals on average

099and how many of the students improve by one year grade level well could i could i ask you a favor could one of you please come forward to the to the microphone and i think that may and if you could just give an overview and if there are some specifics then uh we'll we'll get those questions answered for the board members but i think this is a good mix of intermediate and middle school you can kind of give an overview in regards to some of those questions can you ask your first question again please oh um you say we're going to either do mastery or have one year's progress and i was just wondering how many of the students are meeting the one year's progress and what's the average years behind mastery are the or

100the students below progress this is something that we uh assess ongoing so i don't have the number off the top of my head about how many are you know below that mark but you could see in our benchmark that we had several below that mark but also we have over 50 percent that are achieving a one-year growth so if they come in and they're multiple years below grade level you know to ask them to be on grade level by the end of the year might not be realistic however if we're showing that one year's growth so right now you know about half of our students are showing that they're going to be in line by the end of the year benchmark to make that growth right let's go ahead and just say i can just

101piggyback off of mr hillman's response for the elementary most of us are involved with guided reading practices and guided math practices where students meet individually or in a small group with their teacher to tailor their individualized instruction and that is part of our reading curriculum and our math curriculum that data is looked at on a regular basis through data teams i personally do compelling conversations with with teachers i know a lot of the other administrators do when they meet with their data teams with their teachers and constantly charting the progress of those students whether it's through an iep working with another special education teacher or in the classroom and and that goes with not only our students who are needing extra support but also advancement and making sure that we're reaching all of our learners

102the uh we always see at the lsic meetings what your strategic plan and goals are but and i recognize we have to talk about not last year because last year was but the prior years we have never been told well we reached this goal or we reached 50 percent remember we're only talking about 50 to of our students being on level in a lot of schools in a good thing so we also have to follow as a board what's the other 40 percent achieving whether they're making a year's progress and where are they on average below that grade level i think that varies from class to class in school to school and particularly the school year you know returning from a pre-coveted to post-covet instruction you saw from the data from especially from the primary

103schools to the middle schools and high schools you know our students really are all over the place and a lot of that comes from the support they receive in the home environment whether they were click last year whether they were brick last year which is why that individualized instruction is really important and just a show of hands from the group i believe that virtual was a wonderful effort and a lot of stress but i believe in person is far better for instruction how many of you agree with that assessment yes what is pbis positive behavior intervention sports any other questions just one last question we were talking about the discipline initiatives and you were given numbers how many of you principals are finding yourself with less than a handful of students who are habitual problems

104a major part of your time did you raise your hands principles my question i don't think somebody heard me i know you have the numbers for the discipline problems but my question is how many of you are finding that you have a handful of students or less who are make who are consuming a major part of your time and taking your consuming your time as principals rather than being principal leaders would you raise your hands thank you our next item is the school calendar public hearing okay so we'll wait another couple minutes this good evening president gilbert and dr murphy and members of the board of education i am here this evening to present our proposed school calendar for the 2022-2023 school year um we started with a committee that had a number of individuals

105on it representing service personnel teachers principals assistant principals directors parents grandparents and we met to create our calendar for the school year we also shared this proposed calendar with our senior staff and also members of our association representatives to afford them an opportunity to comment as well the state department provides us with a booklet which guided our work so with that this is the calendar that we have proposed a few talking points i'd like to share with you this evening very similar to last year's calendar teachers will start on monday august the 15th of 2022 the first week for teachers is provided and they will have professional meetings faculty senate professional learning and also student orientation during those five days the first day for students is proposed to be on august the 22nd of 2022

106we have six faculty senate scheduled within our calendar two are embedded within those professional learning days for them are two hour early dismissals we have an election this year which is held on november the 8th 2022 thanksgiving break is again a week long and that would be starting on november 21st of 2022 winter break starts friday december 23rd to january 3rd and one of the um issues that was really important to parents and staff was to provide that professional learning day on january 3rd so teachers will come back and work that day but we will not have students that day as we prepare for the second semester and that was a huge request by both parents and members of the the staff that were on the committee we also have a curriculum development day on

107april the 7th that is a work day for staff which there would be no students again our spring break we are asking for a week long spring break which would run from april 10th through the 14th 2023 and tentatively our last day for students would be friday may 26 of 2023. thank you very much thank you i'm sorry you take a break yes let's take a sis seven seconds we'll take a 10 minute break and come back at uh let's say 6 45. a little bit before seven o'clock we'll go ahead and resume the meeting next are our recognitions our first is our student recognitions ms elaine bobo will come forward to present that good evening superintendent murphy if i get this little closer dr gilpin board of education and guests first lady kathy justice

108and the west virginia department of education are pleased to announce there are five finalists for the golden horseshoe sword smithing design contest and among the finalists are two of our own jillian eicher and avery nine both members of the musselman high school art club students were asked to combine their knowledge of west virginia with their creative ability to design the sword that will be used in the golden horseshoe ceremony for years to come the selected design that will be used to forge the official sword for the ceremonial knighting of the 8th grade west virginia history students in each county as they become knights and ladies of the golden horseshoe jillian and avery decided to collaborate on the project and enjoyed the opportunity to learn from each other as they brought their unique perspectives together jillian

109traditionally works with drawing media art and photography while avery focuses on drawing and painting their design uses the state seal along with other design aspects that represent to them the golden horseshoe and traits of west virginia they will now collaborate with students from james rumsey to have their design fabricated and brought to life one grand prize winner will be announced on may the 12th and may they will receive additional prizes that will be awarded so tonight i want to recognize and thank avery and jillian for joining us this evening and i'll ask them if they have anything to say they're both a little shy no she says no what's anything come on over after we well when we partner with james ramsey we're definitely going to be involved with the process as much as we

110can even though our knowledge about swordsmithing is very limited but we should hopefully be done with the sword by april 29th recently participated in a zoom call with james rumsey so they said that we would be we wouldn't be directly doing hands-on stuff with them but we will be collaborating with them on fabricating sword and bringing it to life so yeah so how unique is that for these two young ladies to go down in history i think with the um golden horseshoe and the in the nighting of the ladies and gentlemen of the golden horseshoe so we're very excited for them i would ask them while they're here maybe to introduce any family that came along with you so i got my so my dad my mom and my sister are present with me tonight

111can you guys stand all right thank you and directly behind them my dad came so please join me in congratulating these young ladies and their pursuit of being the winner congratulations and good luck thank you for joining us tonight thank you family members for coming as well the next item is the caring educator award mr hillman principal of musselman middle school will come back forward to present that thank you dr gilbert dr murphy i'm honored to be standing here tonight with mr josh meadows who's an eighth grade english language arts teacher at muslim middle school mr meadows is very deserving of this award he is very innovative he never stops learning and that prescribes down to a student he was a click teacher last year solely click and i entered his classroom his virtual classroom

112several times it was very exciting the students were having several conversations going in um there's just many times where students are creating not just consuming information so that's very uh welcoming to me when i walk into his room he's very trusted students trust him he's very calm when he approaches students when students approach him he's very sincere and you know that's very important for our middle school students because they trust him with information they trust working through problems with him he's an asset to all of our staff oftentimes in a building with a large staff you might not see a sixth grade science teacher for example working with an eighth grade english language arts teacher mr meadows works with all teachers that he's a go-to person they come to him they ask him questions and

113he always has time to help our staff as well and finally he's a pulse reader um i don't mean the crystal ball type but i mean the type that i can rely on um i can say hey mr meadows what how's it going upstairs how's it in your corner of the room or in the building and he knows he can tell me he is a good pulse on what everyone's thinking in the building and that's a huge asset to me as the principal so i'm happy to present mr meadows with this award mr meadows congratulations thank you for joining us tonight our next item is citizens forum citizens forum is a time for the public desiring to address the board on any topic at a regular meeting to keep the time for citizens forum to

114a reasonable level we will allow we have determined that we will allow two minutes per speaker to speak tonight [Music] derogatory comments profanity and appropriate comments and or referencing an employee or student by name will result in a muted microphone and removal from the active zoom meeting once again there will be two minutes our first speaker is joining us via zoom and that is tanner beckman everybody hear me all right yes hello my name is tanner beckmann and i am currently a secondary english education major at um shepherd university reading is my passion i love to read and i love to write which is what inspired me to go into the teaching field in the first place i want nothing more than to share my love of literature with students yet that freedom is constantly

115being challenged i am horrified and disgusted to see the nationwide banning of books and am even more disgusted that parents are calling for the bluest eye to be banned in berkeley county i have read studied and written about the bluest eye and know that it's an amazing and powerful book that deserves to be read by high school students tony morrison is an outstanding writer who has not only won a pulitzer prize for literature but has also won a nobel peace prize for literature morrison shows that injustice is faced by black americans and shows the harsh realities of racism rape and abuse the bluest eye has some dark topics in it but those were all warned about in the syllabus for the english classes not only was awarding given but an alternate assignment was also offered

116berkeley county schools did everything they should have done to approve the book i am here to urge the school board not to listen to the parents who call for the banning of this book to all the parents and people that are urging the board to ban this book let me ask you this have you paid attention to what your child is watching on tv what about the video games they are playing have you checked their browser history lately all the violence and sex you are against is in almost everything your child watches yet you will still try to ban a book that is exploring the disgusting nature of racism and rape to make a comment specifically to one man's concerns who said this is pollution to the minds of our youth our future have you

117read the bluest eye do you know anything about the book besides what you saw on facebook if not you have no right to call for the banning of the bluest eye with having no prior knowledge of it finally i implore you the board to not listen to these calls for the banning of the book books like the bluest eye help students not harm them to all the parents who call [Music] our next speaker is face stump via zoom can you hear me yes thank you my name is fay stump i live in hedgesville i am the grandmother of two berkeley county students my career before retirement spanned 43 years as a library media specialist english teacher and administrator i passionately believe that censorship is a violation of human rights while parents have the right to

118ask for alternate assignments for their child if they have a valid reason for doing so no one has the right to prevent others from reading especially if the book in question has been written by a pulitzer prize-winning author who has been widely considered one of america's most gifted modern writers i understand that the issue with bluest eye is a sensitive section that involves family sexual abuse i'd like to share three points regarding the attempt to censor this book first without revealing details that would embarrass me i once was involved in a disciplinary discussion with a middle school student that young man taught me the meaning of a sexual term i had not heard of before today's youth have each other in the internet to teach them more about sexuality than any book used in a

119literary unit they certainly know more than my generation did at their age second great literature reflects the realities of life while it may be uncomfortable for a teen to read about parental sexual abuse it has been uncomfortable for me to read about poverty homelessness hunger prejudice mistreatment of women and lgbtq individuals alcoholism war genocide and other sensitive topics many times the things that make teens soon to be adults uncomfortable lead to important discussions that help them to address or prevent problems in their own lives it also makes them more informed citizens as they gain an understanding of those whose lives are different than their own three if board members decide to be on any particular book chosen by teachers your action will lead to widespread requests to ban many others an unthinkable injustice to me

120because reading widely has enriched my life and influenced my decisions don't go down this dangerous next one is candace eckert for hearing me this evening um when i posted about this i did not think it would get this kind of reaction but i would really urge you if you have not read the book um to read it and see how graphic in nature it truly is this is not about race this is not about republicans democrats and the things that this uh whole article has brought it out to be this is about the vulgar nature of this book i realize you know teaching about racial injustice is it's crucial but it needs to be done without this book there are students that are less mature that may not be able to handle the nature of

121this book as the graphic detail that it goes into um you know it's i understand that they had an alternate assignment but that wasn't made completely clear you know children trust their teachers when they're giving them these books you know they're not going to go up against the teacher and say hey i don't want to read this you know my daughter luckily came to us she was very open about it there were other students but they might not have that relationship with their parents to come to them besides you know there is you know students that have faced these sexual assaults you know what is that opening up for them i'm not saying not to teach about racial uh inequality um i'm aware that you know um the author was a pulse you know she

122was a prize winner but this book is way too graphic for high schoolers college maybe um i still think the graphic nature of it is is too gruesome if you have like i said if you haven't read it please look into it i just think for high schoolers you know they they do not need to be exposed to that i realize that they're you know they know about sex they know about you know i know what's going on uh i'm not you know um stupid to that fact but regardless teachers shouldn't be teaching from this book and the graphic nature of it michael alder first off the simple fact that we as parents even have to show up tonight to discuss a book that goes into explicit detail about a father raping his daughter is

123disturbing to say the least maybe we as parents have been failing by putting our trust into a tainted school board that sees this book with content like this acceptable for our children i encourage each one of you to go home and read this to your child or grandchild if you can do that and see absolutely no issue at all with it then you are part of the problem you are the reason we will show up at every board meeting and give you hell about it if you say well this list this list of books has been around since the previous board then you should do your job and review that list because obviously there are issues there you can say you weren't aware of it but now you are the ball's in your court and

124the parents of berkeley county are watching you do the right thing for our kids and ban this book don't make us parents have to continuously show up to these board meetings because i promise you our numbers are going to grow we will fight for our children because unfortunately it looks like this job and our children are nothing more than a paycheck to you and you could care less there are some people and maybe board members here who will say well there's worse what they see and hear on tv or social media our jobs as parents are and to justify it by saying well it's everywhere and they will hear it eventually isn't a justification that's the definition of stupidity you guys go through the motions and have these meetings and sit here and roll your

125eyes and probably aren't even listening to what's being said we see you we hear you and we're watching you fan the book please said [Music] carry on cameron alter sorry board ladies gentlemen and people i am cameron alder a sophomore respectively at springles high school a student who has read and studied the bluest eye by toni morrison starting off this is not about religion this is not about political parties this is not about your ego this is not about race it is about the fact that we students do not want to read in-depth descriptions of an active incest rape scene for those who are unfamiliar with the book it follows an 11 year old african-american girl named bacola who wishes she fit the societal beauty standard bringing the name the bluest eye however in the

126course of the novel cola is raped and sexually abused by her father leading to him impregnating her not only this but by the end of the book she goes mentally insane from schizophrenia this is said to be because of the sexual abuse and her obsession with blue eyes the themes of the book include but are not limited to rape incest domestic violence alcoholism infant mortality i am now stating that the messages of the book are amiss however the explicit and graphic details are hoared and left much of our class feelings sick to the stomach the book is stated to be for children over the age of 14 however it is rated for readability and not content pbs has banned the book altogether and the book has found its spa on the american library association's list

127of most challenging books due to sexually explicit material lots of graphic descriptions and lots of disturbing images and also an underlying socialist communist agenda i've taken a class and studied african-american literature and cultures i've read books such as fences to kill a mockingbird i have been to another school to study different cultures and i've taken part in an international campaign for human rights however i cannot wrap my finger around to how this is an appropriate book for 10th grade students or high school students in general as i have said it was not the message of the book or the mention of rape that made many of us uncomfortable it was the thorough and disconcerting scenes many school boards across the country have already banned the book the winsfield school board voted to ban the book

128what i do not get is how the perks of being a wallflower the hunger games the diary of and frank the fault in our stars and batman the killing joke got banned before this book did thank you janelle joseph i yield one time with a lady over there christian waskins was called good evening board members thank you for the time to speak to you today what is the abuse of our kids going to stop they are still wearing the masks the school meals have not improved they're being wasted and thrown away served improperly frozen meals meals limited bathroom breaks are still continuing abuse in the schools by teachers verbally of students is continuing in our county my own daughter got to experience that who suffers ptsd and anxiety and it hurts to see her you

129all are charged to take care of our kids you have failed that is my vote to y'all you have failed me and my kids let that sink in for this book the bluest eye i read that one page i can't get that picture out of my mind it's very damaging and it is shameful it's on the approved books list it should be removed i highly suggest that you familiarize yourself with west virginia state coach 61-88-2 that basically states anyone who knowingly and willfully distributes any material to anyone under the age of 18 obscene in nature can be charged with a felony there's your warning for those of you all that are up for re-election i wish you luck may 10th is coming and on that day the county's going to say you're fired [Applause] melissa

130power so in the fall i stood here and addressed every single one of you told you about books that were in our school libraries that was an issue i didn't talk to you once i didn't talk to you twice i talked to you three times about it and you did nothing and now you've subjected even more trauma to children i don't know how you call yourselves adults i don't know how you don't turn in your resignations i don't understand what i find very interesting is that one of the statements in our wonderful journal that got published was that this book appeared on an approved list almost four years ago do you know what happened almost four years ago the equity and inclusion policy got enforced well i'm not one to necessarily make the two connections

131here but what i will say is that i look for underlying threads i look for how it how things connect and it's very interesting that the timing kind of coincides with each other now i know two of you are not going to be on this board next time but there are two that have declared their candidacy have fun because we the people are remembering we the people are going to be voting you out palmer i wasn't going to bring any of this up but i'm going to i don't need a mic honey i got a loud enough mouth i'm asked to all you all a question have you all ever been to have you all ever been raped have you all ever been molested have you because i have and for you all to sit

132there and let these kids you all had to know it was on the list someone didn't do their job you all don't know what these kids go through that are already mentally screwed up and now you've got you got these kids reading this garbage if you all have any ounce of courage left in your body you will not only resign but you would you should take and fire the people that actually put this crap in place because you all don't know what it's like not to sleep you all don't know what it's like to try to brush the dirt off you all don't know what it's like to feel that dirty for years upon years and the fact that you're letting hostile kids read this stuff is insane it talks about an 11 year old

133girl whose father couldn't control his urges and it uses the words like vagina for a high school class and it talks about how the father couldn't control his urge so he actually had sex with an underage girl you know what we call that that's called pedophilia do you know what else that's called that's called y'all normalizing that garbage and as far as i'm concerned i will do everything in my power to make sure none of y'all are sitting here next [Applause] rebecca dunmer the board of education is the most important government body in every county its decisions will impact children for a lifetime education should be taught to help children to succeed in life but according to west virginia 18-5-15 a the policies for west virginia children are all multicultural and global instruction equity race

134inclusion diversity collectivism etc because schools have exclusive access to every child children are always targeted and indoctrinated even brainwashed to transform to socialism is it any wonder that west virginia ranked in uh here is revelation there are two sexes males who use male facilities and females who should use female facilities the board approved this book the bluest eyes is promoting elitist ideologies including division and hate the fact that the book published in 1970 was not approved then but is now approved is evidence that children are being abused to change values and morals the erotica in that book will have a lasting effect upon these children leading to more intercourse unwanted pregnancies and abortions and experiment think of the first photo portographic pick you saw that pic is still vivid in your mind isn't it the

135erotica in this book is to change morals and values it is deliberate the parents fault has been trusting but not verifying we will be verifying in the future and there will be changes in may god's promised us all matthew 18 6 if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea travis bost dr murphy members of the board members of the community i'm going to go a little off topic and this one's kind of boring but it's just for the board i have a copy of the policy governing the county board of education meetings adopted june 17 2019 this is what's available on the bcs website

136section 5.3 citizens forum says the board shall not consider discuss or take action on items addressed during citizen forum that do not appear on the agenda of that meeting so i do not expect any comment from you guys tonight if you look at section 5.7 parliamentary procedure the board shall observe robert's rules of order as a guide for conducting business if you feel that anything you've heard tonight is worthy of comment as i understand robert's rules someone can make a motion to suspend the rules someone can second that motion and you can suspend the rule by a two-thirds vote i may be wrong and someone on facebook or maybe someone in this room is a parliamentarian will let me know but that's the way i see it if something moves you tonight make the motion

137second to motion suspend the rule and acknowledge these people that have come to speak thank you valerie ledford good evening um i came with something t-totally different to talk about but um i can't do this i can't this makes me sick all of it makes me sick i understand there's an issue with the book and we need to discuss it but the disrespect i is this what we want our kids to see that we can't that we can't get i'm not i get to talk right now i get to talk right now because you you've been tough you've been talking all the time so let's not follow any rules so our kids don't either i appreciate the fact that you guys are going through something very hard right now the whole world the whole world

138is kovid changed everything but this is not okay [Applause] don zimmerman i'm off topic too [Music] funds elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund in 2020 and 2021 congress passed trillions of kobe related stimulus funds a portion of which went to schools major strings were attached to this money for the schools in order for the schools to receive this money they had to submit reports twice a year through the fall of 2023 to the doe schools must include how it will maintain health and safety of students educators and other student staff to the extent to which it has adopted the policies and description of any such policies on the cdc recommendations universal and correct wearing of masking modifying facilities to allow for physical distancing with the use of cohort and potting hand washing and respiratory

139etiquette cleaning and maintaining healthy facilities including ventilation contact tracing in combination with isolation and quarantine in collaboration with local state and health departments diagnostic screening and testing and efforts to provide vaccinations to schools communities berkeley county received 38 million two hundred and twenty one thousand eight hundred forty five dollars and eighty cents in escrow funds this school year and the grand total for all three years is 60 million 383 134 dollars and 30 cents so parents this is why you are con why you see the continued masking in school choir gym class and pictures it's been stated that the masks are to keep the kids in the school and that they can't use the lockers because of social distancing if the social justice is such an issue why are the wrestlers rolling all over each

140other and why are basketball players up in each other's faces unmasked in this county let that sink in substantial high and low to moderate design is a no win for the kids it's not about the safety and well-being of these children the doctors are now saying there has been irreversible damage done to these children physically spiritually and emotionally from these egregious guidelines and the bottom line is money i would suggest that you look into the esr funding because what i've given you here is just a sample of what it is and just the tip of the ice diana wall good evening i'm going to read out of revision children obey your parents in the lord for this is reign honor your father father and your mother which is the first commandment with a promise so

141that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy a long life on this earth [Music] be strong in the lord and in his mighty power put on the full armor of god so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes for our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers and against the authorities and against the powers of dark world and against the spiritual forces of the evil and heavenly realms i have come here not to disrespect for many days last time the lord laid that letter on my heart those were not my words those were his it was a warning not to just all of you but to all of us to our communities to our churches to our schools to our staff to our faculty

142to everyone that can hear he is calling to turn away from the worldly ways that we have learned to justify and to make excuses and to put it under different names you may not believe the way i do but i'm telling you this now the day is coming every day is closer and it is coming damon wright can't read with my driving glasses all right so um actually i wanted to touch briefly about the issue that's been brought up on the radio in other places regarding uh the push-to-block critical race theory from k-12 education here in west virginia i wanted to announce that i agree i think it should be blocked now since both people on the left and the right have been misrepresenting what it is i thought i'd share some facts crt is

143a graduate level academic term describing the analysis of how racial power structures have been upheld in the legal system that's it it is not taught or proposed to be taught in any k-12 school in our country let alone here in west virginia i'm not sure our students would be able to keep up with the curriculum even if it was crt is not the teaching of accurate history as the left would have you believe and it's not teaching white children to hate themselves as those on the right would say it is also not diversity equity and inclusion or culturally responsive teaching as several speakers said at the stubblefoot institute forum on teaching history history is complex if parents think that accurate teaching accurate history to students will make them feel bad we must ask what why

144we feel our students here in west virginia a state that left virginia due to its slavery stance would side more with the slave owners than with the abolitionist for those of you that are being misled to believe that is being taught in berkeley county schools in particular in west virginia in general i ask that when someone tells you it's being taught ask for specific examples and or ask that they say what specifically is factually incorrect as many have said previously we need facts over feelings i understand parents getting upset even about this book this evening but it it takes conversation and not yelling at each other to get to the bottom of things if students were offered an alternative if parents were sent the syllabus home there was some transparency now there could be could

145there be more transparency of course but there was some offered and i hope parents will take advantage of it adria barzinger the person parchin juror it's sparshinger um i am a parent of a third grader in berkeley county and also a graduate student of berkeley county before i begin i want to be clear that this is not an attack on our teachers i know a lot of good teachers who care about our kids and i believe there are teachers who want things to be different but they don't have a voice i wholeheartedly believe that the best solution is for parents and teachers to work together because in the end our children and their education and i stress education not indoctrination is the important thing according to the site for national center for education statistics students

146in public school decreased this year by 1.4 million students as parents moved their kids to private school or homeschooling with the increase of sexualized material being assigned to talk to our children i can see why obviously covet as well but the book the blues eye contains a detailed child in sex rape scene by her father and as a christian parent i have major concerns with my kids reading this type of material at school or in my household and in which is truth consider pornography i just don't understand why my family's beliefs values and opinions are not as important as those that push this topic on our children i also work in law enforcement and i can tell you i see this all the time and this is definitely considered child pornography or pedophilia which is

147illegal um just because it's a child's mind and not their body being subjected to this filth doesn't mean it cannot harm them is the teacher or the school being investigated for these things can you list the process for parents to request a change in the book list curriculum and or to ask for specific teachers that align more with the parents and family's values thank you jen bishop thank you very much for allowing us to speak tonight i'd like to start by saying protecting our children should be the goal of each and every one of us it is not censorship to protect minors from exposure to adult-themed books i'm going to say again protecting our children should be the goal of each and every one of us it's not censorship to protect minors that are under

148the age of 18 from exposure to adult themed books do parents who want the their children to be able to read these books that are that don't want these books banned that's fine they can let their children read them outside of the school system so can we be more transparent can we include information on the website like what books are in each library there should be an inventory list for these books can there be a process for parents to request a ban for a book is this going to be through the american library association if so please put those links on the website in addition can you allow parents to block their kids from checking out these library books if in fact they do stay for some reason can we work together to find a

149solution for this can we in addition to blocking can we allow can parents be allowed to block the library book in addition can we see if we feel that a book is inappropriate for our children can the curriculum then be included that's being taught sorry let me rephrase that can you include the curriculum that's going to be taught at school with the teacher as well as the list of books that will be read in class or at home and can you include the parents in the decisions with the books that are before or put in the library or that assigned to the child and can we work together for the benefit of the child versus benefiting an agenda and again i will say it is not censorship to protect minors from exposure to adult theme

150books thank you misty mason good evening thank you for listening to all of us tonight i know jim was just talking about transparency so as you can hear parents are upset they're taking their time to be here this evening i'm sure they would like to be anywhere else but here but they're here tonight because they are so upset and they care about their kids they care about our kids in the school system and they don't feel as if there's adequate transparency whether that is more information i mean syllabus is coming home from kids do they always make it home with the kids i don't know i don't get all my kids stuff when they come home so help parents out provide more information on the bcs websites please i'm going to get into accountability it

151seems strange asking to align our children with the teachers values and beliefs i know adria just mentioned that a moment ago but this is unfortunately where the liberal agenda has taken us our kids should be here to learn about math science history language so they can become a contributing member of society it is not the teacher or school's responsibility to teach our children about rape molestation incest gender confusion and pronouns if you think this is a 10th grade issue only it is not and i'm going to get to that in a second the devil has been allowed into our school so why isn't god also allowed into our schools are there books for our kids to read about god to choose to read about god on an approved list from their teachers or about marriages

152between men and women so you're sadly mistaken if you think this is just a 10th grader issue last year i witnessed first hand over zoom a fourth grade teacher discussing a book with my son's class where in the book the father cheated on the mother with the secretary fourth grader my child is no longer in the public schools neither one of my children what values is provided to your children i'm left wondering whether folks have been read or a sign that parents are not aware of you guys have heard about the blue sky how is this educational out of the millions of books available today on race and culture and inequality how was this book chosen we want answers and we want accountability [Music] our teachers are quick to handle any varied emotions like the

153job we talked that surface from children who have suffered from this type of trauma don't sweep this under the roof now that this happened where's accountability how long has this older other's life have been circulating through school libraries and how many children have control and other books how many minds have been desensitized to think that raping a child or any kind of right period is normal what will you be doing to make sure this book is banned and other books like this will not be introduced at the school lawn boy out of darkness losing girl me and earl in the dining room the nerdy and the dirty all boys are a clue jack of hearts for every year a handsome girl i found these very quickly online google search summaries of what the books are

154about and realize wow how inappropriate they've demanded texas i mean how can we not figure out which books should not be in the school systems and which ones can't no answers our next item is the consent agenda contained within this consent agenda are the minutes of the regular meeting held on january 25th we have four schools with chaperone requests we have no student transfer requests we have six curricular and extracurricular trip requests we have one pass volunteer we have 24 use of school property requests for the primary election we have the budget supplements and transfers and we're going to vote on item 8.8 payment of the bills and approval of invoices we're going to vote on that separately can i have a motion to accept the consent agenda sure any second second any discussion all

155those in favor opposed [Music] our next item is the payment of the bills and approval of invoices mr martin is going to recuse himself can i have a motion to accept payment of the bills and approval of invoices second second any discussion all those in favor opposed motion carries unanimously the next item are the action items dr schooley good evening president gilpin members of the board personnel actions dated monday february the 7th 2022 are as follows we have six new coaching appointments or seven new coaching appointments excuse me four paid three unpaid we have three resignation of coaches two new uh or two resignations of extracurricular contracts five new health care appointments we have three new unpaid leave of absences one new uh one seventh appointment we have one new professional personnel appointment we have

156one change of assignment with leah bass on line 24 from technology coordinator to the executive director of technology we have one policy five thousand we have one resignation of professional personnel and four retirements at the end of the school year on line 31 we have the appointment of a specialist of secondary teaching and learning with dr anthony ponton we have 10 new service appointments we have one rescinding of an appointment the gentleman did not show up to take the position we have two new change of assignments then we have one mutual agreement to take two halves into one full-time position at the same location we have one ratification of a suspension and termination on line 46 and that's jamar ridley we have one service resignation we have three service retirements for the end of the

157school year we have five service transfers from one location to another eight upgrades for secretaries due to having their eight years of service secretary experience in these got missed at the beginning of the school year so we want to make sure they get paid properly we have eight new service substitutes to add to the substitute list one reviving revising of a long-term leave of absence appointment the individual has resigned from that appointment we have six new substitute teachers we have 28 substitute teachers to remove from the list as they did not return their contracts and have not worked at all this year we have two teachers substitute teachers that did resign from the substitute list for a total of 107 personnel actions with the superintendent's recommendation dated monday february the 7th i have a motion

158to accept the professional service coaching and substitute personnel actions dated february 7th a second second any discussion dr gilbin uh i am going to abstain from voting on it number 24. the employee's a relative any other discussion uh mr president um i'd like to table i think it's line 31 dr ponton and ask that the staff reevaluate how we're doing this i'd like to table it and they bring back another recommendation with dr ponton finishing out his principalship this year at spring mills middle but also being allowed time to transition into this other job as well as the principle that will be taking his place next year i don't i i don't want to throw any negative connotations on to dr ponton i think he's a good man he's a good administrator in our school

159system and i've talked with the administration about their goal with the 25th but i just think it needs to be massaged a little bit and then he finish up in a part-time basis finishing up his school as well as in the new thing i'm not harming anyone's timetable here because this position would not become effective until the april 25th but i would just urge that we table it and let the administration bring back uh a different proposal that's my motion is there a second i'll second it so we can discuss it a little more any discussion [Music] um [Music] are you are you saying that you want them to bring it back with a um different date for well it's i'm really trying to compromise um a trait that's being lost in our nation today

160but not here in the county i'm trying to compromise uh mrs long miss long that the administration has some good reasons why he should be allowed in april or 25th to work with people between now between then and the end of the year but i also feel that on a part-time basis he should also remain at his present school to help in the transition to his absence as well as in the the uh the normalcy of having him there at a very critical time during the school year and i have a change and at the end of april and then may i hope we're not in school in june but i i'm asking if basically he stay in some way sometime at a school for the remainder of the year while allowing him to go

161into this transition that the board administration wants to i'm not asking us to vote it up or down i'm just asking that they they return with a little modified schedule here that they they presented before us what i wanted i want us to be consistent i mean we've allowed individuals to go before the school year i would like this for people to finish out the school year but we have not done that in the past and uh i think we have to have some consistency with what we're doing can't pick and choose who were yeah well i first i want to thank you for the second so we can have this discussion um i was reminded to speak into the mic and i'd look at each other here and you bring up a good point

162we just accepted a resignation of another principal to go to another county and uh i i defer that you have raised a good legitimate point but uh i and i hadn't thought of it at the time when when we accepted it but and looking at this position i i think it's best for the students in that school that we keep keep the principal there in at least a part-time basis so that we have the consistency to the end of the year it's also offering the administration an opportunity to one get him out into the system on a part-time basis to start in this new role but also it's allowing him to also work with the successor if we bring somebody on because we'll have to replace it but i i believe that his position should

163remain at the school at least on a half-time basis thank you for your good comments until june 30th until oh no i just well the 30th of may i mean he would he would transition he would be there to the end of the year on a part-time basis another month in a week i would recommend that you either vote the table or not the table because without the superintendent's recommendation of effective date it wouldn't be a legal action so i would vote to table your action if you so choose that you couldn't put a date on it or the way to do it without the supernatural foundation i'd like to be brought back at this time as you were suggesting yeah i'm asking that i just you know i'll just have a chance to bring

164it back for the next meeting for his modifications any other discussion [Music] all those in favor of the amendment to table that item i opposed let the record show that was four to one opposed so we had a motion and a second on the original personnel actions is there any other discussion i i'm i'm going to vote for the motion uh doesn't like losing the amendment but i think i think we have to move on any other discussion mr beckwith is recusing himself from the one item one action all those in favor aye opposed solution carries unanimously thank you thank you board announcements um i've been contacted by somebody in loudoun county they have a of course they have 16 high schools i think down there or something but i was asked to pass along

165and we begin working on it if it's the will of the board and the administration to visit one of their charter schools magnet schools on stem and we'd just be going down there to visit to see what they do and it's uh the invitation is by one of our former employees who was a science teacher in this county so i just like to tell the staff i'd like to work with them and find a date where we could go down those who are interested in visiting this school any other announcements superintendent announcements dr murphy yes thank you uh dr gilpin i've got a few announcements this evening while we bring up the powerpoint so we've got several recognitions for national weeks uh during february the 7th through the 11th and the first is to our

166school counselors uh and i want to recognize uh christy heaton and the 62 school counselors that we have in our system 21 at the high 12 at the middle 11 at the intermediate level and 19 for the elementary level and the count school counselors engage with students in examining abilities strengths entrance interests talents and also working with parents uh not only with their academic uh studies here in k-12 but also post-secondary experiences and i just want to thank all our counselors we've been actually able to expand the number of school counselors that we have in our system uh as a result of uh some of the funding that we have received and i think they are definitely making a mark and their leader christy heaton is doing a fabulous job along with all of them

167we also want to thank our school service personnel it is school service personnel uh week and from our hard-working aids bus operators cooks custodians secretaries and maintenance teams for all the things that they do not only in our schools our classrooms our buses and cafeterias but how they support students and make sure that they're successful in many cases our support folks are the first uh individuals that our students see to start their day and they're the last at the end of the day so a big thank you to all of them for the work that they do we are also kicking off our annual mock interview schedule for our 11th graders and part of the mock interview schedule is to prepare students for summer job opportunities or future job opportunities and also college interviews part

168of this is writing letters to a prospective employee seeking references and then also completing the application and as you can see from the schedule that is on the screen we have that arrayed over uh all four of our high schools starting in february and extending through uh april we want to thank uh those individuals that are going to be supporting this effort and do that annually interviewing our students and helping them prepare i think it's a wonderful activity to get them on the right track some upcoming events that you may want to make note of uh this coming weekend we have the social studies fair and that will be at musselman middle and that kicks off on early saturday morning we also have high school parent teacher conferences on monday february the 14th we have

169another early two-hour release on wednesday the 16th and we have a professional learning day with no schools for students on february 21st so you'll want to mark your calendar for those events in relationship to some of the comments that were made earlier this evening i want to try and provide a little bit of an update as far as where we are and i'd like to kind of break this into a variety of different pieces so we have an understanding of the direction that we're moving and then thinking about what we're doing and what we're working on and how we're going to move forward we've also been examining some of the things that we have currently available for parents to access online so the first step in this process is we're going to be posting a

170lot of the curriculum that we have and it's part of the state standards which the college and career readiness for k-12 and we use that information and our teachers use that for developing not only their curriculum maps but their pacing guides so we're moving very as quickly as we can to get that information posted and make that available to families and parents and to students and we'll be making an announcement when we put that information up but that's kind of the initial step uh that we are going to be taking uh we are listening and we did hear um not only uh some of the comments this evening but comments that are made prior to this evening and while i recognize some of the concerns that were raised we want to make sure that parents

171are aware that if they do have concerns about some of the materials that they know that an alternative assignment is an option uh and part of that may be we need to look at how we're communicating that and communicating that better but right now i want to make sure that i'm communicating that and we're getting that message out again that information will be posted made available on the web website last year we adopted the english language one more one more piece there's three pieces to this last year we adopted the english language arts textbooks um and at the elementary level we adopted the scholastic series and at the secondary level we adopted mcgraw-hill as part of that we also recognized that there were supplemental reading materials and that was what was being referenced earlier this

172evening or addressed earlier this evening by some of the citizens and citizens forum we want you to know that we are going to be taking the supplemental materials under a review process that process is currently under development and what i will be doing or we will be doing is we'll be reporting back to the community about how that process will be undertaken and reviewing not only some of the books that have been raised in question this evening but also all of those supplemental uh reading materials so um in in the essence of letting folks know that action is being taken it is uh it's going to take us a little bit of time to get this underway but those will be the steps as we go through each one of those steps either i or

173members of the staff will be updating folks where we are a lot of that information will be posted online so uh it's a beginning point i think some of the uh issues that citizens raised this evening um have merit and so as i shared i believe um with some of our local media we want to work with parents sort of finding a solution and arriving at a point where everyone can feel that they have some choice and also some flexibility as far as how we move forward all right moving on we've got a special board of education meeting coming up on thursday february the 10th the discussion will be about real property that board meeting will convene at 1453 winchester avenue and the meeting will start at 5. we will also broadcast that meeting via

174zoom or on our our web page but i also want to make folks aware that we will convene the meeting and then there will be a motion to go into executive session um the board will then go into executive session because we are addressing real property matters and then after uh that discussion they will come out of executive session and reconvene if it's necessary to take action on any items that were discussed that will occur in public forum so the uh the public portion of this meeting will probably be i would imagine very brief so i just want to make sure folks are aware of that and then finally uh the next regular board meeting which will be here is february 21st uh it will be an lsic meeting uh followed by the regular board

175meeting um let's see the only other issue that i want to address that's not on here is that because of covid we have moved to this auditorium and i want to thank the folks who have made that possible i also want to recognize one of our students this evening who's sitting at the sound board uh it's jamie right jamie you want to stand and get an applause because you've actually helped us out tonight with the sound board jamie is a student by the way here at spring mills uh what we are looking to do in the future so we begin to make people aware of this is we will probably finish out the year here at spring mills i don't want to entertain or invite any change with meeting space but we are looking at

176um arriving at a permanent meeting space which we are thinking right now will be musselman middle as a former former high school site that has a lot of facility there we would be able to leave it set up and not be in competition with some of the activities that are going on in the school so i'm forecasting ahead that's something that's probably not going to happen until this summer but in the essence of making people aware of what may be happening and when it may be happening i wanted to share that with you uh this evening thank you very much have a good rest of the evening dr murphy um you know i don't want to belabor this but in the future for these books uh since i'm a new sitting board member i'd like

177to see the list before the book starts i'd like to see those lists those approved lists that's fine yeah i think the board members should see this yes so we know what's out there thank you thank you i have a motion to adjourn have a motion in a second all those in favor all right