JC Board of Education Meeting - November 9, 2021 (Part 02)

001like to call our meeting back to order we have already determined a quorum as well as our invocation and pledge of allegiance and going through closed session so at this time i'll entertain a motion to approve the minutes from our october 12th meeting october 27th and our november the 3rd meeting motioned by mr wooten second by mr johnson any questions or comments if not all in favor say ah motion carries seven zero at this time we'll have discussion and adjustments to the agenda starting with mr johnson no adjustments mr carroll mr burge no adjustments miss sessoms yes under item eight special recognitions uh move item b first robotics competition winners to the december meeting okay thank you miss sessoms we'll move the robotics to our december meeting miss andrews no adjustments mr wooten no adjustments

002i have no adjustments so all in favor of moving the robotics competition to our decent maintenance say aye aye all opposed motion carries 7-0 at this time i'll call on dr pierce before you have just your monthly update on covid and just a few numbers and then i'm going to turn over to miss andrews to highlight a meeting we had with dr pearson and her team so um good um so uh what you have before you hear is that uh vaccine boosters have been made available for all of our employees um since the last time we met that is something that is available now as educators are considered to be on the front lines so they are eligible to have the boosters ages 5 to 18 are now available to have the covid vaccine that

003came available last week the health department did do a clinic this past weekend they have told me that they had somewhere around 155 vaccines given to children between the ages of 5 and 11 and then as you see here 52 adults did receive their vaccines at clinic and we've been told that most of our pediatricians and pharmacies have somewhere in the range of around 200 vaccines potentially to be able to give to the age group of 5 to 11. the other thing is that you know johns county public health department is still encouraging us constantly that they want us to get and recommend the range of 70 to 90 vaccinated for our students and staff this graph here is from the north carolina department of health and human services continues just to show that the

004cases of cova continue to increase as of november 5th here's our current metrics and information from our dashboard from october 12th to now our number of active staff cases have gone up a little bit from 9 to 12 active student cases from 52 to 85 as of today our active staff quarantines from 17 stage to 17 and then active student quarantines from 286 down to 275. understanding that these numbers do take into account the number of students and staff now that are opting in to test to stay which i'm going to talk about here so since our last meeting we selected to move forward with test to stay we've had 60 students participate in our test to stay program these are individuals that have been able to stay in the school through test to stay

005we have had at least two through the test to stay to eventually uh to test positive after being in we know for a fact and we're still collecting that data and we will have that data for you at a later date once dr pearson gets it closer to thanksgiving but overall it's been a overwhelming positive result for our families whenever they get that call and i cannot thank our school nurses enough as they are handling the brunt of getting the testing done at all these schools and adjusting their schedules every day so i want to sing the praises of our school nurses for making this happen as i said we met with the dr pearson and her team on wednesday november 3rd to receive updates on where we currently stand as a county with coven

00619 and at this time i'm going to turn it over to miss andrews to discuss this information okay again we're enjoying our um cooperation with dr pearson and her staff along with uh some school health nurses to come in and help us with this we're trying to make informed decisions as always dr pearson is recommending that we look at two indicators one is the positivity rate and the other is case per 100 000. those are two there's actually four indicators but she's stressing two of them dr pierce has those up on your screen and you can see that our seven day positivity rate is 4.3 that's wonderful that's below 5 that's our goal another goal though is to get the case rate down the number of cases per day per 100 000 and you can

007see we're at 108 right now we really need to get that down that's at a high you have different levels you have low moderate uh substantial and high and we are at the high rate our goal is to get at the moderate rate and so in our discussion with her we just felt strongly that you know to continue the mass mandate um for a couple of reasons uh one we now have the opportunity for our five to 11 to get vaccinated which would help significantly with um our situation of positive rates and with quarantines um the big issue one of the big issues is with all of this is quarantines students who come in close contact without them if they do not have a mask on um and they come in close to contact with

008a positive case they are quarantined and that you say well when they don't have a mask on lunch right uh recess perhaps outside and that's where this takes place um we are what kids are wearing the mask in schools has has been mandated and so are faculty but that's where we are right now um and it is our hope that it certainly is my hope that we have um 23 school days between now and christmas break and that we um we take a look at getting through those 23 days and come back at the first of the year and have a serious conversation about removing these masks and making them optional but again our concern is quarantines um that's the concern it's uh you can you can look at surrounding counties and you can say

009well their positivity their positive cases are very similar to ours but if you look at their quarantines if they are mass optional they are having huge numbers of quarantines and our my my uh my my thinking is keep kids in school right now we have 200 and um 260 something maybe 75 275 students quarantined counties that are similar to our size that are mask optional i will use union county for instance union county right now i think has 14 or 1500 kids quarantined people quarantined that would be us without the mask they're only a thousand kids less than us we would have if we went by their ratio we would have 1400 kids quarantined right now we can't do that so uh anyways that's just my input from from our meeting we're having great meetings

010with them um and we look forward to the time of getting these masks removed we would the test to stay continues for two more weeks continue on through up to thanksgiving yes okay was it stop at thanksgiving um so we'll have the option on whether we want to continue uh potentially but at this point that would be the end of our four weeks for the study so and and um one thing that and i don't want to take all the time here and and i i just want you to know this i am i am honored to serve with this group around this horseshoe and we are here for the kids and we might not agree always on on this particular subject but um you know this is not something that's divisive among us this

011is just our opinions and our thoughts but um the test to stay to me perhaps if we can continue it after we lift the mask it gives kids still an option to stay in school if they come in close contact but that's a discussion we have to have with them but that's my hope that if we make a mask optional that we still have the test there in the schools if a kid comes in close contact because he doesn't have a mask on he gets to take his test and possibly stay at school we don't want to send well children home as much as we can possibly help it mr chairman i'd make a motion that we continue to mass mandate through to our next voting in december i would second that we have a

012motion by mr carroll to continue the mask mandate second by ms sessoms any questions or comments okay i guess my comment would be you know i don't know that the county will ever get to 70 or 75 or 80 percent of vaccine rates uh right now with 55 percent positivity rates less than 5 percent as the cases per day i mean how long is it going to take for 108 to go down to 50 or whatever the moderate rate is the option for students to wear masks is given to them by their parents if they want if they don't want their student to be quarantined they would need to wear a massive school but when i feel like we need to give them that option that's just my opinion on that the u.s has opened

013up their borders as of this week [Music] schools aren't super sweaters they're not getting they're not getting covered in schools they're getting outside the schools and bringing it into schools but i just feel like i still feel like it needs a bitty parental choice you know we've been here before right we do disagree and we do it respectfully but i mean we i mean the state fair just came and went i mean mass optional there but a logic for but nobody's going to change anybody's mind here so let's just go ahead and vote i just would i hear people say um well you know like i said state fair uh football games we have all that going on but those places don't have quarantine protocols in the schools we have quarantine protocols that we have

014to follow if we didn't have to follow them i'd be the first to say let's take them off but we have to follow them and when we follow them kids go home so that's that's it but look i love this crowd right here i love working with them and uh you know we stand together we disagree sometimes when we stand together and and the point is when you're the state fair when you're in a ball game you're not confined by four walls with 22-24 people within that room and i think the u.s is allowing vaccinated people only into our divorce yeah i tend to agree with mr johnson and and mr wooden that not much more we can say we all have our our differences on this particular topic and uh it's no need to

015be this anymore so at this time i'll call to vote all in favor of continuing to have the mask mandate raise your hand please all opposed motion carries 4-3 thank you dr pierce mr wooten update from the finance committee thank you mr chairman a lot has gone on since our last board meeting we had a finance committee meeting last week which i feel like is very positive there's proposed retention bonus to all 5 000 plus employees for johnston county public schools which will be presented today later in the meeting i'm really excited about that they deserve our employees deserve every bit of it as we wait for approval of the state budget for the last two and a half years now going on three um we took a look at classified staff uh salary steps

016and looking at compressing those those salary steps so that our classified staff gets an immediate raise and their steps will be more compressed where they can gain ground on on salaries as they increase their tenure with johnston county public schools our current system is archaic it needs to be looked at it's being looked at by the finance committee and you have 100 approval from this board once we have something in our hands to to approve on classified staff because you do a salary increase as well i appreciate the financial oversight of stephen britt and dr bracey of our school system we have a robust fund balance which is going to help this johnson county public schools do great things for students and employees and uh i appreciate their efforts and their hard work sometimes it's

017hard to figure out uh s or funds and what they can be used for at this time but uh johnston county public schools is in good financial shape matter of fact we got an audit presentation coming from our accountants for a recent audit that will be presented later on in this board meeting as well that that's all i have right now thank you mr wu now just like the echo that um you know we we appreciate every one of our employees in johnson county public schools and the classified especially and i believe i sat in on your finance committee meeting i believe it was basically the comment was drawing a line in the sand on the state budget we're not going to wait but so much further down the road for a state budget before

018we make actions and and do what's right for our classified employees i'd also like to say um mr chairman that you know we we need a budget pass in the state of north carolina there's a lot of i've talked to some of our representatives there's a lot in the budget for schools teachers but we've got we've got to pass a budget to get that so it's due time to pass a budget and look after the educators of the state of north carolina and especially in johnston county i appreciate it so reach out to your representation in raleigh and call them and urge them to pass a budget this year thank you mr wooten uh miss andrews no report at this time all right miss sessoms yes we met last month as we continue to revise

019and align our current policies with new laws as they've come down both from the federal and the state and and making that alignment with recommendations through the north carolina school boards association we appreciate mr sue's help and his colleagues as they help us navigate this our regularly scheduled policy review meeting these are usually the thursday after each board meeting well thursday is veterans day and i hope everyone will do something to thank the people that have served our country our nation and us as citizens while freedom is not is not free and it has taken the the lives of of dedicated individuals for us to be able to enjoy the the freedoms that we do have in this country so we will not be having policy review on thursday and i hope everyone will get

020out and celebrate our veterans in some way and we will resume our policy work in december thank you miss sessoms at this time i'll call on ms caitlin for good evening dr bracey chairman sutton vice chair sessoms members of the board and mr sue i'm excited to bring special recognitions for you tonight along with some in-person students this evening it's been a little while since we've had our students in person but we are excited to have them here tonight the first pers first group we have is the spartan regiment and like you mentioned we do have a group postponed for december both representing smithfield's omaha tonight so i know mr allen's a little proud the words i'm going to share with you about this group is from mr brian jones he's the director of bands

021and ensembles for smithfield soma high and he's also our teacher of the year this is what he had to say after an irregular year due to covet 19 the spartan regiment is very young of the 108 members 70 of those are new and have never marched in a show until this september the group has 10 seniors who have been a part of the program for four years these seniors lost their junior marching band season because of covet and have only had two years of experience coming into this year these seniors along with the juniors have done an exemplary job of leading the other young band members and helping prepare the future of the program on october 16th the spartan regiment competed at the u.s band's naval academy invitational held at navy marine corps memorial stadium

02218 bands from virginia maryland pennsylvania delaware and north carolina competed smithfield selma high's band won awards for overall highest visual guard percussion and effect and were named regional champions as the overall highest scoring band of the day and today we have a few of the students from the marching band with us they're all seniors i believe is that correct um so whenever i call your name if you will please stand there's some other seniors listed on your exhibit sheet but i'm definitely just going to recognize those who are in person with us tonight first we have mr brian i said it right outside guerra correct okay thank you i apologize um janiah morton carlin rogers aiden cevigne jamie suggs and then we also like i said had their principal mr david allen and the assistant

023for the band miss leanne deans so if you will please join me giving them a round of applause a job well done i tell people all the time i do not have a favorite high school i didn't have a favorite school in this system but i love me some smithfield salmon high and i love that band so i missed could you come in a second please you got a championship band and hopefully you have a championship football team i commend you for a job well done congratulations on your football team too mr allen's got a good thing going there at smithfield selma so we are thankful for him and his students and staff up next we're going to move on to our character education these students will still be celebrated remotely so we have their

024photos up on the screen and if we will just hold their applause until the end the first step we have clayton high senior harrison deutsch he's being recognized for exhibiting perseverance principal bennett jones had the following to say about harrison if you look up the word perseverance in the dictionary the definition will most likely include persistence even through difficult times while still achieving success harrison exemplifies perseverance the sudden passing of his father just before his freshman year significantly impacted his life in the four years that harrison has been a comet he has always reflected a positive outlook and has been a tremendous student and friend to those in the comet country harrison has excelled in the classroom led on the athletic field as a baseball player been involved with all aspects of the school through

025clubs and harrison's peers see him as a true leader and embodies our comments all in mentality he has led the comet spirit club for the last two years and his teachers recognize him as polite responsible and committed to being the best that he can be we are proud to celebrate harrison this afternoon next up we have miss mayar al-shala a 7th grade student at clayton middle where miss sandra morris is principal mayara is being recognized for exhibiting self-discipline this is what miss morris had to say about her she has every teacher's definition of an intrinsically motivated student she is always willing to lend a helping hand and assist her peers with different tasks she is observant and notices when students might be struggling to keep up and she does all that she can to assist

026she works hard to ensure her work is complete and done well she asks great questions and always actively participates in class with thought-provoking and insightful comments while being an obvious standout student she also manages to be an active and many clubs at clayton middle and plays a vital role in each of them all of her teachers are impressed and truly inspired by her passion and all that she does she turns the ordinary into the extraordinary just by being herself next up we have mr um cameron coleman from cooper academy and i got my pages mixed up i apologize he is a fifth grade student at cooper academy where mr jamie stoke is principal he's being recognized for his perseverance as well cameron is an enthusiastic learner who challenges himself and peers and peers encourages his

027peers to perform in the classroom at the highest academic level he works extremely hard to grow as a student while engaging in his assignments each day cameron has a never stop trying positive attitude that transcends the classroom into his daily life he is a loyal friend to peers and exemplifies being a good role model for younger students in the school cooper academy is fortunate to have students like cameron who are who demonstrate 100 effort to grow as a student and as a person we congratulate cameron for demonstrating perseverance in and outside of the classroom and look forward to hearing about all of his future accomplishments and extends and successes i'm tongue-tied today i apologize you guys next we have malachi fleming a fifth grade student at east clayton elementary where miss jamie tyler is principal

028malachi is being recognized for his perseverance as well he is a role model not only for his classmates but for the entire school each day he steps foot on campus he shows up with a smile and puts forth his best efforts in all of his content area classes including his enhancements malachi actively asks questions to help guide his learning to ensure he is working towards his learning goals and when he comes across a problem he doesn't understand he is going to put forth time and effort to do his absolute best to figure out a solution he collaborates well with his peers and enjoys working with others he encourages his peers to do their best and to not give up when they face a difficult task malachi never gives up next we have matthew nolan he's

029a fifth grade student at west clayton elementary where miss paige barnes is principal matthew has been being recognized for demonstrating respect this is what ms barnes had to say about matthew when asked to provide a positive characteristic for this student our staff couldn't stop with just one although we'd like to recognize matthew nolan today for always showing respect he exemplifies so much more this student is a friend to all he will stand up for those around him even when it might not be the popular thing to do he is humble and kind with a smile and positive attitude that is contagious he is sincere and ambitious he finds joy in challenging himself and those around him to do better and be better he is considerate and cooperative often bringing a different perspective to discussions and

030helping others stretch their own thinking he is a leader inspiring others to follow him down an appropriate path this student and his family are truly a blessing to the west clayton community and last but certainly not least we have miss carmen escobar she's a fifth grade student at wilson's mills elementary where miss andrea jones is principal carmen exudes the character trait of courage on a daily basis in and out of the classroom she enjoys school and her favorite subject is math because she likes multiplication and division she also enjoys pe and is taking violin lessons she is always there to lend a hand to a fellow student or staff member she believes that you should never give up and this perseverance is shown by giving being on a competitive gymnastics team in carmen's free time

031she enjoys playing with her dog luna ice skating and jumping on the trampoline she believes in working hard to achieve her goals and rising to the occasion when confronted with a challenge please join me in congratulating these students for their extra character education and next we'll have mr bryan vetrano with our employees of the month thank you miss fur good afternoon board members it's always my privilege to stand before you and recognize wonderful outstanding employees we'd first like to recognize our classified employee of the month if ms kimberly smith would come join me ms smith serves as a bus coordinator for our school system in the transportation services department she was nominated by one of our assistant principals miss beth rein who works at west johnston high school ms ryan had lots of wonderful things

032to share about you i will share some of those with the board kim smith is one of the most dedicated employees i have had the pleasure to work with since joining the school system she works endless hours to make sure that students in her area arrive to and from school safely and in the most efficient manner possible her dedication to the job and to her drivers makes working with her a pleasure her knowledge of the area her schools and her students is vast and an asset for the school system this year has been a test for everyone however ms smith has stepped up and continues to step up to cover additional areas and assist students and assistant principals with all of their transportation needs ms smith thank you for serving as bus coordinator and for

033what you do above and beyond especially this school year with the challenges congratulations for being our classified employee of the month thank you again congratulations our certified employee of the month is miss brittany kelly if ms kelly would please join me miss kelly is a teacher at polenta elementary school she was nominated by one of your co-workers ms kelly davis who serves as media coordinator there and she also had many wonderful things to share i can't read them all but i'll read a portion to the board ms davis said that miss kelly is an amazing educator who exemplifies a positive attitude and is a team player on a daily basis no matter what obstacles or situations she faces throughout the day you will always see her with a smile on your face greeting those she

034sees and willing to do whatever it takes when it comes to the best interest of our students earlier this school year miss kelly who also has her cdl drove a few bus routes to help out when there was a shortage of bus drivers at the last minute when a child was having a difficult afternoon and was unable to get on their particular bus during dismissal miss kelly offered to take a spare bus and drive the child home with an administrator she walks numerous miles a day throughout the building checking on students and teachers to see how they are doing and how she can better meet their needs beyond her daily classroom she is also a member of the school's sel committee the sit team helps coach our science olympiad team and it goes on and

035on and on so in her spare time she sleeps miss kelly thank you for what you do each day at polenta elementary these things are not unnoticed and we appreciate you so very much congratulations [Applause] congratulations again thank you so much thank you all right thank you mr patrano we are now going to move on to our 2021 live in legend award um and as you all know this historically has been at our volunteer of the year dinner um our or our pta pto dinner of the year but in the past two years we've had the opportunity to bring them before you in the board meeting um and i would be remiss if i did not give a special thank you to miss carolyn ennis before we start this process she had to scoot home

036because the sun is setting early and she does not drive at night so we have got her on her way um and so i'm sure somebody will share with her that we celebrated her as well but she is a dedicated individual to this school system and she has written some very wonderful things about our recipients and you also know miss in this you know you're not going to edit her words so i am going to kind of share with you how we're going to do this process this evening so she made sure i would do this in alphabetical order so we're going to give our recipients their award i'm going to say a few words about them and have them come up mr sutton miss sessoms and dr bracy if you'll come up and have

037a photo and we'll take a whole photo with the board after each recipient and mr carr has stepped out to help me with that so receiving our award tonight is uh miss mary magdalene bell miss eve creech and mr thomas michael vinson the living legend award is given each year to three former johnston county public schools educators who were dedicated to the children they taught and left a legacy of influential teaching styles this award is presented to those who have been exemplary in their craft and left a permanent mark on johnston county so first we're going to recognize miss mary bell miss berry bell is an exceptional exemplary teacher leader and church and civic worker she is busier than the energy energizer bunny seen on television she has devoted more than 25 years primarily as

038a first grade teacher but also as an assistant principal and a principal presently she serves as a substitute teacher ms bell is a homegrown high school graduate of a school right here in four oaks and graduated from fayetteville state university where she earned a bachelor's degree a master's degree principal certification and a curriculum specialist certification she's a recipient of the distinguished service awards from the general baptist state convention of north carolina and the north carolina baptist ushers convention she also received association service awards from johnston district baptist association and the johnston district baptist ushers convention feed his sheep church and first missionary baptist church of smithfield educators and ushers awards she is a member of strickland grove baptist church in four oaks where she serves as usher's ministry president primary sunday school teacher and a

039member of the food pantry floral christian education mission women's and prayer ministries she serves as president of the north carolina baptist ushers convention on the general board a member of the women's baptist home and foreign missionary convention and congress of christian education ms bell stated in a letter of appreciation for being nominated as a living legend it has always been my passion to collaborate with colleagues parents and other individuals to provide the best learning experiences for children her philosophy of effective teachers for effective learning is model expectations for students ladies and gentlemen please help me honor miss mary magdalene bell as our johnston county public schools live in london [Applause] thank you very much dr bracey our superintendent very capable superintendent board chair of mr sultan and a long time friend from years a few

040years ago the vice chairperson miss terry sessom all members of the board of education and if there are any commissioners here i greet you this afternoon all parents former teachers i did see some this afternoon and parents and this community thank you so much for having me stand before you to receive this honor this award i stand on the shoulders and accept this because of others that have gone before me and i thank god for that it all has it had always been my my greatest ambition to be a teacher we had i'm from a family of eight sisters and brothers and mother just i loved my father but mother just instilled excellence in us at a very young age she said be prepared for all of you are going to college we had no

041other choice but it was my desire from the very beginning as a young girl and play in school that i become a teacher i thank god for what he has enabled me to do with students not just to input or give information that you can that a child could move from one grade to another i believe in life-long learning and there are those other qualities that make for a great child a future citizen learning how to work with other people learning how to solve problems on their own but be a facilitator for them learning how to build self-confidence i think i am so thankful that i had principals like eva cooper tom benton if many of you may know him elias sanders that enabled me that said mary do what you do best in the

042classroom implement programs that would aid children in becoming the best that they could be self-confidence i had none thank you to mentors like carolyn ennis a legendary and a legend in her own right that was always there ms ennis never taught me in the classroom but she instilled other things in me mary you can do it and it's those things that children remember later not for the education the input the uh knowledge that i gave him but thank you miss bell they call me now for for having confidence in me letting me learn how to love people being a friend there was no writing to me telling me to separate one child from another because i always thought we were one family in a classroom and we are to help one another build one another

043solve problems together so i'm a facilitator of learning and also character development i thank all of you for taking the time to hear me i thank you for all educators now i am indeed my heart breathes for you doing this covet epidemic but i still say teachers and i would say to all teachers be the best that you can be moderate expectation for children help children to believe no matter their ethnic background that they are somebody and you can do anything if you put your heart in it children have different learning abilities but help each child be successful every day and model those expectations that you have for children expect excellence in yourself always achieve and strive to improve i believe in life learning life long learning i steal that in children and that quality

044i'm still all about now with myself being the best that i can be thank you my son who has come to be with me tonight i just thank him so much um for being here and thank all of you for giving me this opportunity to speak to you as i receive this award [Applause] [Music] is that enough all right thank you miss phil next we have miss eve creech i had the the pleasure of talking everybody before the meeting so i'm kind of getting to know these folks a little better if i didn't even know them before whenever a former principal and co-worker nominates a teacher for the living legend award that teacher must be special not just for a day but for years of commitment to her profession as a teacher she has let

045her light shine so that others might see her good work miss eve creech is another homegrown student a graduate of smithfield selma high she received a bachelor's degree in elementary education from east carolina university she has taught first grade second grade fourth grade and fifth grades in four smithfield schools her first year she taught second grade in jacksonville north carolina she spent many years with her late husband mr paul creech i found out it was 33 years together pretty special they have two children melissa kelly and paul creech iii her professional affiliations include a membership in tao sigma at east carolina nea and ncae as well as delta kappa gamma she is a member of first presbyterian church and one of her major awards was her selection at smithfield elementary teacher of the year her

046philosophy of effective teachers for effective learning is respect and appreciate each student you teach as well as the parents and your coworkers use each day as a new day and an opportunity to open doors to learning and and knowledge be kind and never lose your sense of humor for 33 years she practiced these principles daily in johnston county public schools ladies and gentlemen we honor miss eve creech as a johnston county public school living legend [Applause] i'm not one that can stand up here and speak the way ms bill did i admire her for that so i had to make notes first i'd like to thank ms ennis and her team and the board of education for this honor it's been my joy and privilege to teach here in johnston county where i was educated

047but i can only accept this award okay i can only accept this award by giving credit to all the people i've worked with over the years great principals wonderful teachers and assistants custodial staff bus drivers cafeteria workers itinerant staff members everybody that works in a school it truly takes a village i was mentored by extraordinary teachers before the mentor program was created and i have tried to pass that on to other teachers even to our visiting international faculty when we had them good mentoring is a key plan for teacher success my advice to beginning teachers is to be true to yourself you've been well trained and you know your area of expertise well create a routine and always have a plan in place but allow for spontaneous learning because that will happen your mentor can

048provide hints that will help you get through rough patches in your first couple of years and ask questions good teachers ask for help when needed and then they give help in return to others be kind be firm be fair and be consistent students notice those things respect and care for each student you teach and take a genuine interest in each of them above all keep your sense of humor said that again you will need it our community needs to show support for the johnston county school system i know that the need for more money is the usual request and that's always going to be true but there are other ways we can let our employees know we appreciate them you can tell them at the grocery store at ball games at pta send a note

049to a teacher or some other employee volunteer provide classroom supplies and always be positive about our outstanding school system it's easy to stand back and stay quiet when people are so critical of our schools but if more members of the community would speak up and spread the good things that happened it would make a difference it would encourage teachers and all the other employees in our education system and that would be a positive for all of us it also encourages students to work harder and have pride in their schools we have excellent schools here in johnston county and our educators need to hear that from us the community thank you again for this honor [Applause] one two three we yeah thank you miss creech and i i had to be honest when i saw this

050next shoot on his name on here i kind of paused i said i've worked with this man in my time here so there's no way he's a living legend up next we have mr thomas michael vinson but as we all know i'm coach coach benson coaches are cut from a special fabric of patience faith and understanding of students who may be the worst or the best in their endeavors both academically and athletically their special external techniques are based on their internal instinct of the worth of each individual they serve as father figures for those who may not have had fathers at home they serve as counselors disciplinarians and role models of a gentleman's gentleman who is firm friendly and fair mr vincent is the epitome of a caring coach whether in the classroom on the

051basketball court or the football field he teaches lessons for life how to win how to lose how to learn from losses by working harder following orders and improving your skills he knows that academics is the first priority but also that athletics is the glue that cements the characters of players mr vincent taught health pu science history for grades 7 8 and 9 at middle and high schools he was like a rolling stone to and from selma to smithfield and back again and even to princeton high and south johnston high he's coached football girls basketball softball and wrestling he also served as athletic director at the middle and high school level he was the first student advocate at smithfield selma high school he is married to miss christie vincent who i personally love they have three

052children chad michael chad michael jenna and jesse he is a graduate of east carolina university his major awards include recipient of leading with the heart and an inductee to the johnston county athletic hall of fame he stated educators who truly make an impact can be recognized by their passion to invest their life in building and developing the self-worth of all young people when he said that winston churchill said it best we make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give ladies and gentlemen please join me as we honor coach michael vinson as johnston county public schools living legend dr bracey and board members i'm very grateful for this award i'm more grateful to be alive this is life is a blessing and every day is is a blessing

053and i'm so thankful to my wife and she's been so supportive all the years uh she's allowed me to mature and she stayed with me allowed me to grow and be very patient and i have a big heart for young men who are married to be kind and appreciate your wife is so so very important and i'm so indebted i'm so in debt at johnson county i came to johnson 1974 on dr brace from north hampton county and i hope so you enjoy it as much as i have i'm on a journey and it's getting better every day i've been so blessed i'm currently working as a custodial substitute at thanksgiving where my wife works and i'm very blessed to have been asked to uh tutor uh some fifth grade kids in reading so i

054feel i feel very blessed and my philosophy is you're either green and growing or you're red and rotten and so uh i i'm truly i'm truly blessed and i'll save you all the other great details of life but uh johnson county is fantastic miracles are going every day my grandkids doing this overtime virtual learning awesome teachers have been doing great jobs and i am truly blessed to be um allowed to work here in johns county for 34 years and continuing i'm looking forward to the next 70 years and i thank you again for your blessing and your honor hey coach v sit right there i got something to say before we before we celebrate um coach vincent um he coached me in high school it tells you how old he is so i don't know

055what you're doing but keep doing it um but i want to i want to thank you in public for the influence she had on my life and uh in high school of course i come from a split family and uh i could have fell through the cracks and academically athletically i could have just fell off the cliff at earth but you pick me up and get my nose to the grinder and uh not only the goddamn godly influence you had on my life but you were the dad the brother the friend the coach that i needed and uh you know i wouldn't be where i am today if i didn't have people like you in my life but i appreciate it thank you i'm not crying y'all are crying that smile we shall smell good

056one take a few one two three one two no problem thank you oh come forward we're going to take a small break before we go into our public comment time so at this time we'll take a short break speakers signed up for public comment citizens who have signed up to address the board during public comment will be called upon as they signed up and will have three minutes to address the board i will call upon citizens who have signed up for the time allocated on the agenda if additional speakers remain at the end of the allocated time the remaining speakers will be called upon prior to to the conclusion of the meeting not to exceed 60 minutes the board suggests that specific personnel or student matters be addressed to the school principal the johnson county

057public school system official responsible for the program or facility or to the superintendent and are not appropriate for this setting tonight our first speaker is kai yulani moses good evening to everyone on the board i'm here to talk about racism and bullying that my children have experienced while attending princeton high now because your mom said that she was slitting your wrist why don't you go slit your wrist or something and seeking attention this should have been talked about years ago you know black people get uh called stuff but not as bad basically white people get called stuff too but not as black as y'all my middle schooler went through let's play tic-tac-toe on your wrist you should go die go pick cotton musty black girl stop if anatomy you monkey black monkey go pick your

058cotton i understand self-harm because i do the same thing and everything that you said about racism going on at school is wrong and i am so sorry this is a parent my son too has been bullied and had a lot of racism comments made to him i've already emailed the school three times nothing has happened this is a teacher please whatever you do do not give my name because i cannot lose my job thank you thank you so much for being the start of the voice if your sister is the one who talked to abc 11 tell her good for her because that racism definitely is going on in our school as a white person i go to this school i had a lot of friends that were treated unfairly and that's not right how

059i wish i went to another school and graduated from somewhere different it's crazy my son got punched in the face teachers and principal didn't do anything because of you in brooklyn's courage i talked to abc 11 too i went to that school and i went through the same thing i am here because these children at this school have been able to get away with this type of behavior for decades and teachers and administration have turned a blind eye these children do not belong or deserve to go through these things politics do not belong in school as a parent i have a duty to my children to be their advocate and this is why i'm here to bring this to the attention of the board because this is a huge problem that us parents are experiencing

060i pray none of you on the panel have family members that ever have to deal with anything that my kids or any of the black or spanish kids have ever had to endure while at princeton high school it is a tough pill to swallow to know that in this day and age children are being subjected to this type of behavior on a regular basis our children should be able to go to school and feel safe and to know that multiple teachers as well as administration in this school have witnessed and stood by have done nothing is very concerning to me so i asked the board today or should i say i plead with all of you to investigate these complaints that my children as well as other non-white parents and students have gone through and

061will continue to go through if you choose to stay silent thank you mrs moses next brooklyn edwards i got a lot of painful messages that i don't for the last several years i've been called racial slurs as well and told for myself it really affected my self-esteem and made me depressed here are some examples this girl put the news article up and said you look slow this other girl said okay it's just a word this other some people reposted the news article and said bees be bonkers bees do the most get over it this one girl said because you left the school you were leaving everything behind and everyone at school perfectly fine without you this one kid said this one kid called me the n-word while a teacher was right beside us and she

062did nothing he told me to kill myself and told me that the word would be better without me this one kid told me to pick cotton on the bus this was the day of the flag incident and call me call me the n-word multiple times on the bus this one this person called me the n-word several times and took cotton out of his pocket dropped it on the ground and told me to pick it while we were in the gym this was also the day of the flag incident also told me to kill myself so hopefully i can reborn into a white girl this one person called me the n word said this is why black people shouldn't be in this world and has been racist towards me since the fifth grade this one guy

063called me a monkey while in the gym told me to kill myself and wanted to meet up so he can fight me this one guy called me the n-word and told me that he was going to get people to jump me i really hope that you all look into this school it's bad enough we have to deal with racism in the real world we shouldn't have to deal with it in school i'm speaking up for the ones that are too scared to speak up for themselves [Applause] thanks thank you brooklyn just real quick um please don't applause or make any comments while people are speaking everyone will get a chance to speak and i know you agree and disagree with some things that are being said and everyone will get their chance to speak you

064don't need to hear sighs or hymns or odds or try to speak with someone else's speaking and uh please hold applause also thank you appreciate it thank you miss edwards next chastity blake tonight first of all i am a former student of princeton high school not a graduate of princeton high school graduated somewhere else i have three children that were former students of princeton high school not graduates at princeton high school to have successfully graduated somewhere else the third will graduate out of state i wanted to talk to you guys a little bit tonight about what you just heard racism is rough right it's a big word we have to deal with a lot of microaggressions a lot of different things we hate to address i'll talk about culture culture is defined as a way

065of life a group of people and the behaviors beliefs values and symbols that they accept generally without thinking about them that are passed along by communication and intimidation let me define for you the culture at princeton high school when you walk through the schools you see students that have self-segregated because that's the way to survive this school encourages children and family of current teachers to go back and work at the same school limiting the presence of new ideas and fostering an environment that affects and limits differences kids are encouraged to play sports to stay out of remedial classes select kids are set at the back of the room sent out when asked to move discussion in homes between parents and children who have very similar experiences despite years of differences feelings of dread from students

066who are going to school in tears running away youth that have become discipline problems all leading to kids who are depressed and withdrawn teachers who are not held accountable so like students are encouraged to start exclusive clubs and others are discouraged from expressing thoughts or feelings that are uncomfortable to administration parents in the middle are made to feel like the issues are because of them and their kids are often defined as loud or rude this is my personal experience my kids experience but what you guys just heard which was super unsettling right that's going on right now we have a history of this problem at princeton i think it's a cultural issue but if anything i describe sounds like it could be a racial issue then the board has an obligation to look into that

067and to handle it differently if anything i said sounds like racism then i challenge you you need to address it because kids are getting hurt we're hurting our kids thank you miss blake next we have macy blake for your time today um welcome to princeton high school the year is 1971 and the school just integrated among the small group of black students was my grandmother who i called meemaw going to a new school is scary i know from experience i didn't graduate from princeton but imagine going to an all-white school as a young black woman mimo was a victim of blatant racism every day she had a dead possum put in her locker that staff held the key to she was demoted as the first black miss princeton and it was given to a white

068peer and these are only a few of the stories that i hear when i talk to my mom welcome to princeton the years are now 2014 through 2020. this is when i was in school and among the demographic of 8.2 percent of black students was me at princeton wearing a black girl's rock shirt is inappropriate but the confederate flag isn't my black lives matter hoodie was against school dress code but the blue lives matter flags weren't this is a school where teachers will tell black students to take off their hats hoods and do-rags because they could hide a weapon but this rule was enforced to white students last month and their explanation was respect welcome to princeton where i was illegally sent out of a classroom for not standing for the pledge because a teacher

069believed i was infringing on her right and lastly welcome to princeton where there was a flyer sent out of a republican club with trump 2020 plastered across the top of it but when my father questioned the administration about it there was no straight answer might i remind you that there is no democratic club some kids the same kids that bullied miami-ma at princeton high school are the grandparents of the kids who are taunting black kids now this is generational racism be the change for black students at princeton black students told administration that they felt uncomfortable in their learning environment and nothing was done about it until the news story broke hold those administrators accountable by ensuring that staff is diversified by including a minority club to help students become more comfortable hold white students accountable

070for making disruptive harmful and hateful statements there are a few these are a few of the many ways that you can change you can be the change at princeton high school and set black students up for success the girl who spoke before me wasn't the first student that has been bullied out of the school due to unjust racist treatment from staff and students and she won't be the last i stand here not only for her but for my older brother thank you thank you mrs blake next is laura moffat myers i'm here because i've had some sleepless nights i love my county a lot of you have talked with me and you know that i've had some of the most wonderful experiences here in johnston county as a teacher i've served this county as a

071special educator and art enrichment teacher during my career after retirement i have been involved with young people as a school substitute art camp director pottery instructor at the smithfield recreation and aquatic center which i still serve as after seeing the channel 11 media report concerning racial bullying at princeton high school from my own mental state i couldn't i have begun to create mugs that say my voice matters when signing my contract in 1994 i made a promise to protect and guide each student in the physical absence of the parent this is a sacred trust the students were our clients and our decisions were made in the best interest of the students not for the convenience of the adults [Music] we protected their dignity bullying was not tolerated and was dealt with i apologize if that

072seems aggressive i'm i'm really upset i'm sorry i'll try to calm down our decisions were made in the best interest of our students we protected their dignity bullying was not tolerated and was dealt with by showing equal concern for the aggressive student as well as the student that was bullied counselors initiated effective small group sessions students were unconditionally cared for even when their behavior was challenging in late october princeton high school students voiced their anger and frustration after being racially targeted and treated with disrespect over a significant period of time brooklyn edward's mother was a voice for her daughter and for others who experienced mistreatment i am deeply concerned about the evidence of racial slurs personal attacks and even physical posturing from other students causing disruption in their education and traumatic emotional disturbances in the

073video presented by the media teachers and school officials did not seem to intervene when student behaviors definitely escalated i've looked for a formal rebuttal i've initiated with the counselors a counselor at princeton with no phone call back why did these incidents continue until finally receiving media attention are students receiving support and assistance what's being done to create an atmosphere of acceptance and reconciliation johnson thank you mrs meyers next we have jennifer gurley i'm jennifer gurley one of your school nurses for johnson county public schools i've never liked public speaking because i was always too afraid to use my voice at three o'clock this morning i realized i had found my courage to speak tonight thanks to god and the values my dad had instilled in me throughout my life my dad's name was brought up

074at the last board meeting and his name was sergeant major bill davies my dad died at my home here in johnson county in 2019 the same year that i signed on as a johnson county public school nurse my dad is remembered as being an influential high school band director who never shared his political views and was extremely passionate about his work like my father i am passionate about my work and i am not here to share my political views as a nurse i am here to advocate for the patients assigned to me our students and our staff my patients are struggling with adverse effects of the decisions coming from our decision makers these decisions are implemented by our school staff and the outcomes are measured by the success of our students our teachers are constantly

075given more and more busy work so they can produce data to reflect positive academic growth of our students our support staff is given more and more work to accommodate entitled parents while covering the big gaps and open positions that no one is willing to sign up for our whole society has experienced unprecedented loss thanks to this pandemic a pandemic that is looking better but it's still not gone yet our students have experienced loss of learning loss of loved ones and many a loss of respect for our staff and for each other our custodians facility services team bus drivers cafeteria workers office staff including data managers receptionists bookkeepers administration teams teachers tas nurses social workers and a variety of therapists are the people in our schools keeping it going and the majority of the ones still

076standing in their dedication are struggling they are underpaid overworked and feel unappreciated and unvalidated as a school nurse i have a fortunate vantage point that i get to see and hear a lot of what our staff is feeling thinking saying and ready to do as far as walking away from our district and passion for teaching as a passionate nurse advocating for my patients i want to say on their behalf and all due respect lost my spot that our decision makers need to do better please listen to our school staff and their concerns please stop making decisions based off loud parents and higher powers that really have no idea what the day-to-day realities of our staff endures because of those decisions finally i would like to say thank you for your decision and grace to provide

077our district some much appreciated time to do whatever it is we need to do to stay focused on our purpose which is our students thank you thank you miss gurley next we have catherine moon hello [Music] i'm here today talking to you because i have a nine-year-old daughter that loves loving talkative and outgoing kid and all she wants is to be social and in school among her peers she don't care about kova 19 or if someone else wants to wear a mask she just wants to learn i think you're missing the bigger picture here as my child's mother it's not that i just want to get rid of her for the day i want her to go to school to get a good education and i want peace among everybody i want to feel safe

078to send my kid to school and not worry about someone to force my kid to wear a mask or be jabbed with a vaccine without my consent and i want to have choice and freedom not be controlled and told what we have to do or else it's our constitutional right and you're trying to take it from us also my daughter does the virtual learning and has sat in front of a computer screen for the last two years of school and if you you all remember before cover 19 too much screen time wasn't good for kids but now it's okay for kids to sit in front of a computer screen instead of teachers and classmates for hours on end doing school there are days that we start school at 7 00 am and don't get done

079until 5 pm to get the work done for the day and i feel that is a lot of work for a fourth grader i've never went to college to get a degree to be a teacher but yet you expect me to be one the virtual school has been a mess since it started and lots of parents could not even get on when they were supposed to because they never had anything figured out they winged it everything winged everything and then the principal that was there left and we got a new one that's trying to figure it all out but there's still so many unknowns it's sad because a lot of kids with disabilities and all kids are being abused and taken advantage of that don't have a voice to speak up for help or just

080plainly scared to speak up and these teachers are supposed to keep them safe and some of them are but not all of them being told to do this or lose their job so i am up here talking to try to help these kids to be the voice when they don't have one and say what are you going to do to fix it and when will these kids be able to be kids again and go to school and not feel like they're in a prison thank you mrs moon next is joe preston good evening everyone i was hoping to come up here and smile and give congratulations because i just had a feeling that something might change today but it didn't so i guess i have to not smile and that kind of stinks but i'm

081just trying to figure out at what point mr wooten mentioned this earlier at what point with the numbers do they have to be at for us to feel comfortable to change the mass mandate union county schools was mentioned earlier currently union county has 81 positive cases i heard a lot about quarantine numbers currently we have 98 positive cases so my question is is the mask efficacy is the is the goal of that to lower cases positive cases or is it to lower quarantine numbers i would think the goal would be to lower cases so i don't know if they're using a different toolkit if they're quarantining differently or whatever that their numbers are higher than ours are i don't know if it's the test estate program but i guess the point is if we've got

082a county that's had a few months of not wearing masks or mask optional parent choice and we've got a county that's continuing and we're basically the same number of positive cases i think that proves the point that doesn't really matter what you do in terms of a mask or not mask mandate i'd also like to ask i know that this session is not a question and answer session i address you you listen i leave i wonder if you could possibly have some sort of a town hall or any type of event where concerned parents from every side can come and speak to you and actually have possibly a dialogue around these issues rather than you just hearing from the same people like me every month coming up and saying the same exact thing um i

083think that would be uh very indicative of a true represent representative government the other thing that i wanted to say is i said last time that there are a number of people in the school system that don't feel like they have a place to go to speak i believe you mentioned a grievance board chairman sutton i can tell you they don't feel safe going to that so i would really think about that with that being said one of the things i've heard from a number of teachers over this past week is the retention bonus that you have offered they are not happy at all with that retention bonus because it has strings tied to it and that string those strings are signing up for i believe through the end of 2023 and if you leave

084before that they're going to pay that they have to pay that money back i believe we should just reward the faculty and staff that we have for their current service and don't have any strings attached to that appreciate for your time thank you very much thank you sir next is miss melissa bowers hey i'm melissa bowers um i just wanted to say what roughly everybody else has said or is going to say um and i just feel like we keep coming back to say the exact same things and we speak our piece and it doesn't really get listened to but i'm gonna say it anyway um so i feel like we are at the point where it's like when is enough enough i was a teacher through covid so i understand what kids are going

085through at school when they're sitting in a classroom with masks on and at first it was like we can't be close to each other now we can be close to each other we have to wear a mask outside now we can't wear a mascot it's like the rules keep changing but the numbers really aren't changing that much so when is enough enough that the kids can just be kids and our teachers can just teach the way they want to teach and our right now our kids are behind and you will never convince me otherwise our kids are behind and it is because they've been out of school for a year they've been back and forth they're in cohorts they're virtual they're all these things and our teachers are struggling we don't have support staff our

086teachers are doing way more than a person can be expected to do in a school day many of our elementary teachers are not getting a break at all our church has even looked into having level two volunteers go to give elementary school teachers a break during the day because they don't even get a single break their whole entire day and that's ridiculous and so i'm just i'm concerned that we're gonna continue to lose teachers if we don't provide the support that they need and that includes support staff and bus drivers and the money is nice money is great but what our teachers really need is support and i genuinely do not believe we're going to get the support we need until we allow choice in our classrooms because people want choice i would go and

087volunteer i stopped working at johnston county public schools this year and but i would go and volunteer if i didn't have to wear a mask all day my daughter wore a mask from 6 40 in the morning when i dropped her off at daycare last year until 4 40 in the afternoon that is a ridiculous amount of time for a kid to wear a mask and kids are doing that again this year and we might look at it as like oh well they get a break for lunch well i'm glad they get a whole 20 minutes to take their mask off during the day that's lovely um but i can guarantee you that not a single one of you sit in here every single day for 11 hours and only take your mask off for

08820 minutes to eat lunch i just don't believe it and it's not fair to ask a six or seven year old to do that either so that's where i stand but i truly believe if we're gonna get teachers and support staff and volunteers back in our school you're going to need to make things a choice thank you mrs bowers next is kara chester i would like to address the new policy regarding testing rather than possible quarantine i think this is an absolutely ridiculous policy why is it necessary to test kids four times a day who are healthy and not showing symptoms if parents choose to go this route so they don't have to stay home why can't they be tested by their own medical doctor rather than by just the school nurse i will tell

089you why i believe it's all about the money in my research i know duke university is funding this program my question is how much money is the school district getting paid to have this program how about if kids feel sick let them stay home just stop the nonsense i believe a teacher's job is to teach about reading and writing and math and history and science they are educated in these subjects to teach these subjects to their students they are not medical doctors they did not go to medical school so why are teachers giving medical advice to our students i know the covid vaccine is now being pushed on kids age 5 to 11. this decision needs to be made by parents and medical doctors not by teachers i know that i saw an example of

090a teacher in johnson county where she suggested to the kids she got a vaccine so should they i just don't think this is acceptable nikita khrushchev was a russian leader in in 1959 he said your children's children will live under communism you americans are so global none of you will accept communism outright but we will stay still keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you find finally wake up and find you already have kind communism we will have to fight we will not have to fight you we will weaken you your economy until you fall like over ripened fruit into our hands the democracy will see cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give it to those who would not fast forward to today and this

091is happening our government has been feeding us small doses of socialism over the last several years and the speed of this is happening faster ever since coven but some of us are awake to this the decisions you are making regarding masks and vaccines and testing and crt are all part of this plan and you are part of the problem by allowing this to continue to happen i would invite you to examine your conscience are you really doing what is the right thing or are you just taking the easy way out yes it's easier to go with the flow and do what the government wants take the money but is it right you have the power to step up and do the right thing which side will you fall on your true colors will eventually shine

092through i've never been impressed by money or social status or job title i'm impressed by this the way thank you miss miss chester thank you at this time we'll take a five minute break and come back and start our agenda continue our board meeting with advisory appointments starting with uh mr johnson yes sir smithville selma high school principal david allen has requested three new members latoya green baker shannon masado and rick mercer to serve on the smithfield selma high school advisory council thank you mr johnson we'll let that be our motion now we'll go to vice chair miss sessoms benson middle school the current advisory council members at benson middle school and the principal dr dana jernigan have approved and recommended the following applicant the prince uh um for pending board approval mrs molly hearing

093for a three-year term for appointment at south johnston high school the current advisory council members have approved and recommended the following applicants based upon board approval ashley anderson three-year term for appointment jamie pierce two-year term to fill john webster's vacated position thank you miss sessoms we'll let that stand as our second then we'll go to ms andrews yes mr chairman dr carrie evans principal of swift creek middle school recommends two new members kristen capps and brittany matthews to serve on the swift creek middle school advisory council thank you miss andrews dr bennett jones of clayton high school recommends two new renewal members miss addie rawls and kevin kevin hubbard and three new members tracy ashley lisa lee and kerry robertson to serve on the clayton high school advisory council for three years that concludes our

094advisory appointments tonight we have a motion in a second all in favor say aye aye motion carries seven zero dr bracy mr chairman at this time i asked that the board approved consent items numbers one through six entertain a motion to approve look motioned by mr johnson second by mr wooten any questions or comments if not all in favor say aye aye motion carries seven zero at this time i'll call on dr king good evening board members we tonight we have a number of items uh for your consideration a few for action and a few for information our first item is an action item and it is the west ed aptt academic parent teacher teams our executive director of federal programs ms faitha batten will come forward and share just a bit of information with

095you about that program good evening i'm bringing west ed aptt contract for renewal aptt is academic parent-teacher teams and this model is presented to teachers in schools so that there can be very in-depth conversations about how parents can more effectively work with their students so that teachers can give them tools strategies and grade level information so you think about conferences happening at the school level and parents may seem like they understand the data that's happening but through these come through these meetings parents are given the tools to give tea to give parents teachers are giving tools to parents so that the parents can go home and work with their students through activities and hands-on aptt talks about involvement is great at schools and that's what we want in this district is as much involvement as

096we can have but the engagement piece then takes it a step further and gives parents the ability to actually use strategies and tools with their students at home so there's not a guessing about the homework that's maybe doing being done right or the strategies that teachers are giving but the parents are able to use these tools through the strategies that are presented so that they are effectively working with their students and they can show growth over time aptt goes into schools three times a year these meetings that are held during plc so that teachers aren't pulled out of instructional time or after school whichever the training sessions may um go are then focused on standards so that then the teachers take the standards and look at what skills go into the standards and then the

097parents are presented with the information about where their children are on the data so you hear a lot about case 21 or map data and those scores are presented to parents so that um the parents are understanding they can work on the skills to improve those scores in addition to the parent of the teacher meetings get my papers right there's also going to be offered a parent engagement toolkit for the district level so that we can look at strategically through the district what information can be shared with schools through pd and talk about that engagement piece and talk about if there's barriers what ways to address that and the building the capacity for parents at a district-wide level not just title one schools this cost is for four schools this year we've had two that

098have been doing this um project so it is a renewal contract and the cost is one hundred and thirty thousand dollars are there any questions i can answer about that what okay two schools have been doing it yes so are we talking about uh selma elementary and selma middle yes yes okay so there and so we're adding to this benson middle and princeton e that's right okay how effective has it been tell me the participation of parents and students and is there a percentage you can tell us of the student population of how many parents have been engaged i don't have a number for that but i can tell you that this is done through each whole room at the school level and after the first set of meetings where it's advertised and parents are

099really contacted by the teachers to come and take part in this when there's barriers those meetings happen and the guidance counselor and teachers come back together with the coaches from aptt and talk about how to address do there need to be other sessions other than what's offered to begin with um and then address parents needs that way so that it's not just a one time we're done the other thing i can add is that some schools have said the two schools that have experienced this project have talked about the comfort level that parents they adapt to they they grow because they're able to understand the data they're not just hearing information and hoping that things go better for their child they're given activities which they can perform with their students or maybe a brother or

100sister could help at home so that they are actually seeing when there's growth they feel like they have actually had part in that and they can know that they are responsible for that as well right do we have a prescribed number of times we try to meet with them each semester once time or eat twice a quarter or whatever set up to be after the first semester after the first nine weeks there are meetings subsequently after that does that make sense um three times is when the coaches come and they do pre-planning with the teachers and then there's a parent night that is um which is addressed and parents are invited to come those nights so each nine weeks after the first one all right would parents be exposed to these coaches or is that

101just for our staff that's for the staff and the training that goes into there and then the teachers are held to give the information and um share with the parents is it is this sort of like parent conference on steroids um yes because the the information that is given is is quite a bit but it's done in such a way that it's very understandable and it takes the apprehension of not being able to ask questions or not having to be able to feel like there's barriers to the data any other questions this is an action item i'll entertain a motion motion by mr johnson second second by mr wooten ask one more question sure is it our intentions to uh continue this after uh this is for this is for this school year yes okay

102is our intentions to uh increase it continue to increase it across our district in our which schools are well it's title one specifically in our title one schools and then one of the components of working with aptt is that a staff member is chosen to be they call it a champion staff member so that when the coaching backs off there is a person there that can answer questions and be the go-to person for any challenges that may come up or to continue the process once um the coaching is backed off but is it our intentions to spread this out and have this done in all our title one schools or in certain title one schools um it is the intention for all time schools thank you all right we have a motion in a second

103all in favor say aye aye aye i'll oppose motion carries seven zero thank you ms baden our next item is the annual reform model report at this time our executive director of school improvement and support dr thomas will come forward and explain this process and share some specific information with you about the restore reform model great evening this is always an exciting time for me all right so our restart reform model schools we have six of them and annually they have to submit us a report to the dpi uh regarding how they use those flexibilities the year before and so as you can see on the slide when we speak about restart reform model this model actually allows schools that are continually low performing to improve using flexibilities that are charter like that's all it

104is and so with that said we have six restart reform model schools cooper academy north johnston middle school benson elementary benson middle selma middle school and west smithfield elementary school you'll see with the green check mark those are the flexibilities that each school has but where it says 2021 those are the ones that they actually used last year so you don't always have to use every single one that you're approved to use you use what's needed so that you can improve achievement for the children at the school that's all it is all right and so the report covers last year and really what dpi wants to hear is what types of successes have these schools had using the flexibilities and so with that said i'm going to take you through some of the evidence that

105we had of success for last year so at cooper they hired tutors using their budget flexibility and they work specifically with ask at-risk students from their identified low-performing subgroups so one such subgroup was the students with disabilities and we've heard many of our low performing schools share already those specifics i won't go too deep on that but as a result of these target tutors the students with disabilities subgroup increased by 3.4 percentage points in overall proficiency so they had success using that north johnston middle school had stipends and incentives provided to students who were tutored and then the school secured instructional resources so that students could have more hands-on learning experiences in math science ela and their enhancement classes subsequently the overall performance composite increased by 0.6 percentage points and remember this is during covet

106right from 36.6 to 37.2 north johnson was one of 103 schools statewide that increased in proficiency in 2020 and 2021 and 8th grade science proficiency increased by 8.8 percentage points benson elementary school used their budget flexibility and purchased gold book to increase overall achievement in math and reading as a result specifically third and fourth grade students demonstrate a 1.6 increase in reading performance and the students with disabilities subgroup demonstrated an overall performance increase of 6.1 percentage points benson middle school they focused on recruiting and retaining staff and they've been doing this for quite a few years this focus allowed the school to ensure that there were zero vacancies at the end of the last school year also there were two teachers they had secured using employment requirement flexibility in 2019. these teachers actually helped to

107improve the culture of the school and increase morale for their students and they have soft data that supports this information based on the relationships that those teachers built with their students at selma middle school and i promise you this could be so much longer but stay with me at selma middle school staff was hired using the employment requirement and this resulted in several staff members completing their lateral entry requirements so that they could move forward and receive full certification the flexible staffing allowed for a 50 percentage point increase on the spring 2021 panorama survey and the teachers and staff having a favorable perception of feedback and coaching so they moved from 28 to 78 favorable for coaching and feedback and then there was a 57 percentage point increase also noted in teacher responses to the

108question how do you learn about teaching from the leaders at your school so they moved from 25 percent to 82 percent please also note that at selma middle school science surpassed their evas projections in eighth grade by 3.41 for last year alone i'd also like to say for west smithfield elementary school which is our last restart before model school they use their calendar flexibility and they increased their school day by having a hyper focus on student achievement as a result of this focus and i think they had extended their school day by about 10 to 15 minutes and so as a result third grade reading proficiency increased by seven percentage points and third grade math proficiency increased by 11 percentage points so these are some of the evidences of success again i could be here

109all night with you speaking about successes but we won't do that we would would like for you all to share any questions you have and also move to just approve their 2021 report that's going to be submitted to the dpi any questions or comments i got questions go ahead all right when a school goes into the restart model are there expectations in terms of all right what is our timeline to move these students i i see all these numbers but these schools have been d and i hate to be a downer here but they've not moved so um what and for the public's consumption we have had school improvement plans presented to us by these schools and they have some really good plans and they have some really good goals but but my concern is

110as you look at what has happened you know they might meet growth one year two years out of three or five but mostly we're not meeting growth we're not moving our school score and i'm just you know i just wonder you know what is different i mean the results are students learning you know i like third grade reading in west smithfield and i like third grade math and i'm glad teachers are feeling better about the school environment but the bottom line is we're supposed to teach kids and we're supposed to move these schools so it's a broad question it's a frustrating question for me to ask but i have to ask you know when do we start moving and that is actually an excellent question when you think about where our schools are coming from

111and when they started with the restart model 2017-2018 our district honestly did not have systematic ways of supporting the schools okay which is why you see so many years of maybe flatlining so to say okay but when we think about the fact that we have designed a differentiated plan of support and we're literally wrapping our arms around every single school many of you are very you're all aware of our wrap around support meetings and our principals have spoken highly about that level of support mind you there's several other supports are in place but this one is very systematic and the intent is to ensure that the school has exactly what it needs because one size doesn't fit all so that's what it was designed to do the other thing is to ensure that as a

112district we are meeting the specific needs of each school they should be able to articulate to us as well as us have a command of their data as to what they're going to need to move that needle and actually accelerate that that pace to growth which is what we haven't yet seen there's growth but can we accelerate that pace and that's what we're looking to do by being more intentional so our wraparound meetings is allowing us to do that right now that's what's different as far as seeing those results we have to give the ramp around time we literally just started doing those this september and we're already seeing improvement and that's just one piece that i know i can speak to that will affirmatively move that needle for our schools dr thomas on the

113wraparound meetings we heard a lot of that during the school improvement plans but how often do y'all have the wrap-around meetings with each school right so our wrap-around meetings are designed the frequency is designed based on the school's performance level so if a school falls into that low performing category they have it up to four times a year and we're actually we've already begun round two for all of our low performing schools and then the other schools that said sliding sale they made me twice per year and again it's not based on how long that principle has been there it's not based on the expertise of the principal it's based on how that school has performed historically if they if if they need support other than the wrap around meeting y'all react as soon as

114they reach out for you for support oh we're right we're on top of it so it's not limited it's not restricted to that wraparound meeting now the the information that you're sharing here with us is what they did last year correct okay and um i so i guess uh and and i agree with mr carol you know we had some phenomenal for those in the community we had the school improvement teams from the low performing schools come and share with us and so we got a lot of good information and got really good insight into what's going on um sustaining it is the word that keeps coming to my mind you know when i look at some of these schools and some of the things they did they did that last year my hope and

115prayer is that it works again this year because it does you know what i'm saying one year in isolation doesn't get us where we need to go and um i i you know that i guess that's my concern and that's everybody's concern i'm not on an island by myself out here with this um is that you know we we move a school forward we got to stay forward and last year i mean unbelievably people were still moving forward it's very small amounts but still moving forward but um that's just my concern because i'm reading some things here that aren't this way this year i mean you know they don't they they do have vacancies they do so my thinking is you know this was last year that's good how do we how do we address

116this restart program this restart model in these schools that have new challenges this year well just just to piggyback on what you're saying um miss andrews you know with the the vacancies that we have i mean teachers are telling us that they have no planning time that they are covering each other's classes and and some and many are getting a stipend to do that but there's still not that they still don't have that time to sit down with each other and plan um and uh you know teachers are cleaning their own classrooms because there aren't enough custodians in the building i mean we are facing real challenges and as a classroom teacher i don't know how i don't know how you do all of that and um and deliver so you know i'm excited about

117the wraparound approach the the schools that presented to us were very excited about the wrap-around approach but we also need to take into consideration that we we have got true i mean we've got true holes in our buildings right now and how do we how do we make sure that learning stays the focus and i will as a positive you know when we had those you know every one of these schools came with goals a percentage and i think that you know if you're going to tell me what you're going to do tell me all right give me a number i'm going to go five percent i'm going 10 so i'll know where we're going you know we've got an agreement now you know and if you do better than that fine if you don't

118then let's talk about why uh but all of those schools that came were very positive and i think they have their you know they know what they're supposed to be doing and system-wide we do now have curriculum for math we do have curriculum for reading and we also have expectations and a goal for everybody and i think that's critically important in terms of what we haven't had in the past that we have now so i was encouraged by them that uh most of them was at 10 there was a 10 10 point improvement i think that they all embraced which is i think a fairly aggressive goal and i applaud them for doing it but you know as i said a lot of them we'll see you in june we'll find out and i think

119time will be the ultimate measurement but but you had what you mentioned but what i was most impressed by was the confidence that was displayed by the leadership i mean you can tell sometimes when someone's selling you a line and with those principles that came in here that was certainly not the case and i do have all thoughts that they're going to improve and what i was ultimately impressed by is the board went relatively easy on those principles as opposed to dr bracey who was very this is he's not even smiling now but he was very steadfast in the sense of this is what i expect this is what i hope to happen and for their sake i hope it does happen but in all seriousness i'm confident that these grades are going to go

120up especially in those schools based on the leadership and the people we have in place and the expectations set forth by dr brayson also with the three areas while we're doing this you know i think their expectations are high and the pleasure working with mr byrd for a brief time and i understand his expectations and you will meet those expectations and you know miss whittington and miss leathers as well and dr david pierce so i think we've got the system in place set up by dr bracey for nothing but success i agree i was i was uh and i know we're getting off topic here but in the presentations and for those of you in the public the principals can come in here and they can talk the data and i can't tell you how

121important that is when a principal can come into a meeting and say my third grade is performing right here in reading my fourth grade's doing this my fifth grade's here we need to get here when when our instructional leaders can can communicate in that way then we know that it's being communicated to our teachers and and then down into our and we own it and and i i agree with mr johnson you know i just feel so good about where we're going um because it it we can have those discussions now about where we are and where we want to be and that's that's the start of any good thing that happens i i couldn't agree more with everything that was said you know they they did analyze their data they dissected it down to

122the core and they owned it like miss andrew said and you know it wasn't them looking at a sheet telling you what their data was they were actually spilling it out from from memory that they knew their data and where they needed to improve and you're right dr thomas um when when restart started we had no clue what to do what how to support them um and it was like they were on an island of them by themselves but now there is a plan there's a focus and their structure and we just hope they continue down the path of success which i think they will because of the leadership they have in place so thank you for that at this time we this is an action item so i'll entertain a motion to approve the

123uh reform model school report so i moved motioned by miss sessom second by mr byrd all in favor say aye aye all opposed motion carries seven zero thank you dr thomas board members next is our jcps grants update and this time dr cherry johnson who is our director of grants and research will come forth to talk about uh the work that she's doing around grants and particularly uh focusing on a recent very significant grant that our school district was awarded ms johnson dr johnson excuse me good evening as all of us move forward together toward reaching our goal all of us in the same boat reaching that goal of all schools being an a b or c school by the end of the 23-24 academic year we are using grants to help us propel that

124[Music] in particular this is part of our alignment with the north carolina department of public instruction comprehensive needs assessment rubric that rubric indicates to us that leading districts are seeking grants to go beyond the allocated funding to get where we need to go we certainly want to be a leading district and we want to be able to demonstrate that as we are approaching our reaccreditation process we have managed to do well through with grants even through covid you can see that we we held steady even though some applications were not opened up by funders during during the coveted period when students were not in buildings and we have recently been able to move forward when more applications were opened to do even better since the fiscal year began july 1st we are at well over

1253 million dollars in grants and we anticipate a significant amount more coming through so that will certainly help us toward reaching our a b or c goal and most recently we ranked nationally in a grant that we got it was a united states department of agriculture rus grant that will help us with some technology that will also address some of our sel needs help our staff be better equipped and this was particularly significant because not only were we the largest grant in the state but of 105 that were awarded nationally we were third and third by only a few dollars because the cap was a million dollars and we were right at that amount so we're particularly pleased with that and again this will help us with our alignment and reaching the leading school district

126status that we would like to reach using the assessment rubric so at this time i'd like to address any questions that you have and say that we look very much forward to continuing this mission of propelling all of our schools forward using grants any questions or comments for dr johnson go ahead well i was just going to ask i was looking at this list and see that south johnston will this um will this aid them in their ideal academy the russ grant not this one in particular south johnston is one of 19 schools that qualified based on location and poverty level for this grant but even though this is a usda grant it is through rural services it is through the rural development office and rural utilities services so what they do is take technology

127in education and telemedicine to areas that are in dire need and that is gauged on a rubric by the location and the population and the income levels so while they will be getting a significant amount of technology it will not directly impact only the ideal academy you know it states here that leading districts it's going to support schools of meeting sel health and technology which you were just talking about can you give me and can you give us an example of what that support would look like is it is it sel is it health is it technology or is it all together or what's not all of the above specifically what this will do is put technology in the schools each of the schools on our list will receive some larger units for communicating by

128distance as well as within the classrooms and some smaller units to go in counseling offices or nurses offices wherever is deemed appropriate by that particular administrator and so it will allow for a multitude of things it will allow for professional development across campus that will help teachers deal with students in crisis and families who are in crisis it will also allow access remotely to certain services we are actually in a mental health care provider desert i was i was quite shocked when i was running numbers for this grant application north carolina is significantly significantly behind some other states in the number of providers that we have but johnston county is far below that average and in the meantime one of the focuses of the grant was the opioid crisis and they wanted to know how

129many families we have how many people were impacted and we are actually in a high opioid area as is our grant partner terrell county so helping our staff deal with this is good but then also the other piece to that is going to be that as school personnel and the parent deem appropriate we will be able to provide some support now that support may be part of a student's behavioral or mtss plan it depending on the treatment protocol and what has been developed for that particular student that could be something as simple as being able to talk to a behavior specialist when we don't have enough to have one on every site and so we have the smaller units to have some privacy to do that or if the parent says i need for my

130child to visit a mental health provider but there is not one in johnston county who can see my child for the next four months which is sometimes happening we could then upon agreement allow that child to see someone of the parents choosing by distance and then anytime that we are not utilizing equipment for those purposes then we also have it for instructional purposes so it's a winning situation dr johnson can you tell us the duration of the grant is it just one year or several years the grant is a three-year grant it is when i say three year grant it means that we can spread the money over the three years or we can spend it all at once it is finite for us because it is a purchase it is not to fund an

131ongoing staffing issue so that will be between um miss michelle turnage and her staff and mr britt and his staff to develop the exact rollout as to whether that's purchased all at once or if it's purchased in a couple of orders was there a criteria for schools to qualify to get the grant or participate in the grant or was it open to everybody that wanted to try to get in no to be eligible the district has to look at a matrix that they have in place and some some much akin to a rubric and look at poverty levels within those attendance boundaries income levels a rurality score so you come up with several scores that are used to determine which schools fall into the category so we had 19 that fall into that and so

132we got something for all 19 schools and then our partner is tyrol county they have three schools in a district office and they are each getting something yes sir the ones that qualify yes sir well dr johnson first of all i want to thank you um for your hard work on this because as you said we are in a desert in in terms of in our local area in terms of mental health providers and this is going to be a valuable asset for our families and in keeping our children in school so thank you for for making this happen and i know that we have several other schools that have entered partnerships with other areas that have on-site uh mental health so this is this is just broadening the effort in reaching our children thank

133you any other questions for dr johnson who is it i thought would be based on any kind of period you know maybe qualify for this and i just noticed that there were some of our performing schools with pretty high percentage disadvantaged population that are not on the list that may be because of where they physically fall they have to be in what's considered a rural area to qualify favorably for that area under usda regulations you have to be at a population of 5000 or below and they they do that based on certain geographic locales that's on their map so we have to use their mapping system to determine that thank you dr johnson all right board members in your october meeting you approved the school district to enter contract with an agency to provide a

134professional development materials for teachers of english language learners on that night we promised that as we got closer to the beginning of that session we would return and advise you as to the amount that we would need to spend relative to materials tonight dr keebler williams our executive director for elementary education and title 1 director will come forward and give you an update on that spending thank you dr king good evening everyone um as dr king mentioned i am here tonight just to ask for your approval regarding the amount of funds that we'd like to set aside for materials and stipends if needed based on scheduling for professional development for teachers of english learners so we are asking to use title 1 funds and set aside up to 66 thousand dollars for that purpose this

135is an action item i'll entertain a motion motion by mr carroll second by mr wooten any questions or comments when is the when is this training done it will be done uh it is set up to be scheduled by at each school so they are doing it at their school sites virtually so the first and they are divided into cohorts so the first cohort will have their initial training starting next week and it actually spans over the remainder of the school year by cohort and what we what we have done to be responsive to principals and to teachers about the amount of training that is being provided overall is to break the training for into instead of having the full six sessions this school year plus three coaching days we're just doing two sessions this

136school year plus one coaching day and then we'll return in the fall for with another cohort scheduling for two remaining uh four remaining sessions next school year and two um coaching days next school year so oh so i realized it's just sixty 66 000 for a specific professional development but the people i talk to who are in the classroom have expressed concern that there is a tremendous amount of professional development going on especially with the ever-changing things that they're dealing with and you may not be able to give me an idea of this because this is just for you know english language learners and that pd but like how much how many hours a day a week are these teachers spending on professional development in lieu of their general duties that they have dr bracey

137or ma'am dr king can you come forth and answer that question i know we have a lot of new things happening when new things come professional development we do have high expectations but i want to be reasonable in the amount of time that we expect you know certainly it'd be difficult to speak to that specifically but what i can tell you for instance with the math roll out and that is probably the most extensive professional development ask that we are doing right now what's being asked of teachers is that by grade level they are generally being asked to come to a session that lasts for approximately two and a half to three hours and i believe each grade level has done one session uh so far and we are now beginning we've gone through the

138elementary grade levels we're now in fact we had our first middle school sessions actually today um and we'll begin the high school sessions in short order these particular sessions again this is a part of our division-wide title one project and it's important to note that this is a this is a program that was developed based on principal input based on what uh you know title one is not we aren't required to have a division-wide project so we did reach out and ask if that was something that principals were interested in us doing uh once they suggested that it was something they were interested in doing we then went back and asked them what they would like that project to be focused on they suggested support for english language learners we went out and really put

139together a cadillac program in terms of this professional development principals did share with us that they have some concerns and so we did and i appreciate the effort of dr williams to try to provide some relief in terms of this program one of the things that's important to note though is that we recognize that you know much of this support much of this professional development does add an additional level of responsibility for our teachers but in every instance the programs that we are using and that we're working in are responsive to the fact that we are facing significant challenges in those areas our english language learners are our fastest growing population in this school division and frankly with the possible exception of exceptional children we are frankly doing the worst job of educating them of

140all of our students and so we are in a matter we are in a scenario where we are in an emergency situation as it relates to their support obviously with the math program um you know it's a new program and so it's not possible to roll it out without professional development and so we do recognize that it has been a challenge but we are trying to make sure that what we ask folks to do are only those things that are the most essential um at this moment um so i hope that answers your question no i mean and i mean i don't know if anybody else is hearing the same concerns but i do know that you know i had a friend tell me that she is out of the classroom two or three times

141a week in some instances trying to get the pd done over a period of time now i mean i'm reading it now but i mean there's just quite a bit of pd it seems like as far as you know with all the new stuff we're doing and i know we're having new programs and new rollouts and i just want to be sure that they can manage it because i mean it's not just one source i mean i've as has anybody else not heard this i mean they're saying that there's a tremendous amount of pd and that expectation on them is great just math pd we're primarily doing math we are in the third year of the rollout of um the english language arts and i think we've only but i think there's only been one

142english language session so far this year okay but now we've done we've done math for elementary you said you did something but we've done some for high school haven't we i think there's been one session for high school so far one yeah i i've we've heard the same thing i've heard the same thing as mr johnson now this particular pd for ela when i said when would it be done is it going to be something that's done during the day is it something how how is it being rolled out at the school level so it is it was intentionally scheduled to try to prevent teachers from having to leave during the school day so it will be scheduled at the school's discretion after school or before school session would be how long one hour and

143i think we had the discussion when we were talking about our math curriculum we were talking about you know we knew we were piling on a lot of professional development and we also acknowledged that this was going to be a you know an unusual year but once we get through this year i think we're over the hump is that right dr king come on man come on help me here [Music] you know um mr carroll i'd love to say yes um to that to that question but we we had a a an interesting conversation about that the other day you know the way the way i characterize it to folks is that you know we really are facing a bit of a new normal um and so the challenges that we are facing in terms

144of implementing um curriculum and resources um that we are facing today are the challenges that we are facing today i i don't know that there won't be new challenges tomorrow is is what i am you know just in a place to say to folks honestly the reality is and you all know because we've had these conversations the reason that we are kind of in the place that we are in terms of english language arts and math is that we haven't had a curriculum in place as i understand it for now on the two decades that's also the case with social studies and science and so the reality is the only way for us to address that is is we have to go out and identify curriculum resources and i don't believe though i know it

145is a challenge i don't believe it is the desire of this board for me to go out and ask you to spend 2 million on resources and then kind of just plop them down in buildings those resources will only be as successful as we train our teachers in terms of their use now in addition to what we have as realities here in our district there are some realities that are coming to us and impacting us at the state level um in in in short time we'll be talking about um letters training that the general assembly has required um all k5 teachers to complete and we are currently working on a plan to make that happen in johnston county we are in cohort 2 which right now is scheduled to begin in the spring we are

146working very hard to develop a plan that would and will come forward and ask this board to help us with that plan such that we would be able to provide some opportunities for our teachers our k-5 teachers to do that training in ways that won't require them to leave their classrooms but that is going to require a great deal of support from you all and that is certainly going to require a great deal of effort on the part of our of our of our teachers i also want to be clear we we have um you know significantly um a state superintendent who has a relatively aggressive um program and plan for revising and altering the way we do school in north carolina and so you know what i told a group of folks this week

147is she doesn't allow a whole lot of grass to grow under her feet when she decides that she's interested in doing something she moves very quickly um and you know this lettuce training is a perfect example and so i think we are in at the front end of learning about many of those plans through her polaris project and so while i would love to say that we would be over the hump at the end of this year i think we'll be over this hump at the end of this year i don't know what the next hump will be but if if the pattern holds you know it will it will continue to be relatively aggressive in terms of what is being asked of us to do uh from the state level and again we know

148that we'll need to add at least one additional content area in terms of content materials next school year thank you dr king this is an action item i'll entertain a motion so moved not on this one second sec miss andrews made the motion second on miss sessoms all in favor say ah all opposed motion carry seven zero [Music] uh final item tonight is a summary of our fall panorama fall uh survey uh miss christy thompson our director of school accountability will come forward our executive director of accountability and testing we'll come forward and share that summary with this group board members thank you for your patience this evening good evening chairman sutton lady vast chair sessoms dr bracey board members as dr king mentioned amanda allen dr allen and i are here tonight to give

149you an update on our recent panorama survey that we we gave the file administration was given in early october october 4th through the 15th all of our schools did participate we surveyed a little over 18 000 students which is about 61 of our population in grades 3 through 13 this survey is given in those grade spans that is up from 50 percent from last spring we also surveyed over just over 2 000 teachers which was about is about 89 of um of the of the group surveyed spring we were at 81 percent so in both categories we we saw an increase there we do offer two additional survey windows throughout the the school year we do one in early january that is an optional survey because several of our schools use the panorama survey data

150as a progress monitor for where they are specifically for their sel goal and their school improvement plan and then in the spring is when we survey all of our stakeholders to include not only our students and our staff but in addition our parents we had the panorama survey outside of the the typical measure of of culture and climate panorama does help us measure where we are with social emotional learning because we know that creating and maintaining that positive school climate is essential to fostering social emotional learning and we know the huge impact that that has on academic student success as well and that slide's a little bit messed up i'm not real sure what happened there but panorama does provide a rather extensive bank of survey questions and it's tailored so that districts can select

151topics from which they want to to assess and i hate i think if you look at this on your pdf or that it's formatted correctly but what you would see is for the student survey there are um two different surveys that we give there's that support and environment which includes the topics of engagement engagement rigorous expectations sense of belonging and valuing of school and then there's the sel portion which covers the domain areas of learning strategies self-efficacy self-management and social awareness now for our file survey we only focused on the sel component of it because we really in addition to using panorama for surveys we also use the student success platform which pulls in multiple sources of data to help schools and teachers with database problem solving and that is that sel component that populates

152that piece in the student success platform we did have 19 schools also opt-in to give the full survey which includes that support and environment as well with our teachers and staff survey the only portion we utilized this past file was the professional learning about sel again to gauge where we are in terms of social emotional learning and dr alan will speak more to that in a minute because her group is really utilizes this data to inform things such as pd supports and what schools may need added supports and then in the spring the categories that we will survey our families with are listed there but as i mentioned this is just a sampling of what panorama offers for us to choose from so that we're really designing a survey that's focused on our strategic plan

153goals as i've mentioned we utilize panorama to support both our district and our school's continuous improvement efforts an important part of the continuous improvement of continuous improvement is utilizing feedback from stakeholder perception data we use panorama's research back survey the seo competency and climate across all of our stakeholder groups to inform decision making in the continuous improvement process one of the con one of our district initiatives within our plan is to create school environments that foster the social emotional well-being of students and this data is what helps inform that from a district standpoint the data that we collect from the surveys help inform our next steps in terms of pd pd supports that may be necessary in addition to using it at the district level every school has an sel goal in their school improvement

154plan and this is just this is an example of if you were to review each school's sdl goal and their plan what domain area it falls in and when you look here at this data the several of our schools have a focus on that sense of belonging and engagement and this these goals were developed based off of their spring data from last year some of our schools also actually have like two different areas that they are supporting so for example they recognize sense of belonging let's say if we increase that we would also potentially see an increase in student engagement so some of our schools have selected to to make their goals around multiple domain areas just speaking a little bit to when schools and teachers get data back from the survey the survey itself

155the sel component in student success this is a sample of how the data is presented that first column there provides the school leaders with kind of a distribution of the percent of items answered correctly or where the strengths are and then it breaks it out into the various domain areas that we've assessed or surveyed on on our survey there so then within those different domain areas school leaders and teachers are able to see either from a grade level standpoint or their class standpoint where potential strengths or areas of opportunities lie drilling down to the student level we are not able to see specifically how a child answered but by domain we are able to see what domain area may be of particular strength or area of focus for a child and as you can see

156here this is looking at it does give change over time as students take multiple surveys and as long as we keep our domain areas the same it'll give us that little graph of is the student staying at about the same place or are they improving also panorama has a built-in tool kit that can just quickly give like quick tips for for things that based off of where that student files quick tips for addressing that domain area so i'm going to ask dr alan to come forward and speak specifically to what what did our data say from our recent survey thank you it's great to be with all of you this evening i want to point out some of the things that christy shared were about how this is strength based strength focused this is looking

157at the big picture it's not looking specifically at you know what did this child say about these specific questions when you're looking at sel data you're looking at what's happening in the core content for each of our schools what overall is happening in our schools that's how we primarily use this information so that we can get a pulse on what's going well and we can continue to build on strengths and support students where support may be needed so when you're looking at your grades three through five you can see where we have percents percentage favorable responses it's important to note that we have five options that are given to students to respond and i don't know how many of you frequently do the middle option on a survey but if the middle option is done

158it's not favorable so all you're seeing is data from those those top two tiers of responses just to keep that in mind and you can see uh in the column where it says compared to others nationally this survey is given these different components are given nationally so we're able to norm our information across the nation and this shows where we fall within that and then all the way over to the right you can see our comparative data from when the survey was given in the spring so we're up across the board for our three through five students and you'll see that there's not any indicator for self-efficacy and that's because that's a new area that we're measuring this year and self-efficacy is a very difficult word especially for our elementary children but that's not a

159word that's actually said on the survey what that is measuring is our student's confidence level and it's asking questions like how confident do you feel or or how sure are you that you can complete your schoolwork you know it's really talking about how they feel they can complete tasks in age-appropriate language for our grades 6 through 12 you can see how students rated keep in mind again that those middle responses from students will not go towards our percent favorable responses we are up in self-management which makes me very happy because self-management is a skill that indicates your success later in life we want to continue to always grow in all of these of course and then just like in the other survey the self-efficacy we're not going to have a comparative measure yet so for

160our teachers and their professional learning as christie already shared we had over 2 000 teachers respond overall from their responses last year we are down a smidge and we've got that broken down to where you can see where we're up on these items when it's talking about how helpful your colleagues ideas are about sel how often social emotional learning professional development opportunities explore those new ideas and overall how much you learn about supporting your students social emotional learning from leadership at the school and you'll see that there are some areas where we are down and it's important for us to have this information to know where we need to go next and we see in this data that teachers crave individualized information like they want it very applicable to their fields as they should so

161we're going to continue to grow in this area while also understanding that professional development is plentiful right so we're going to time things in a way that makes sense and we're going to make sure that everything applies directly to the content areas that they're teaching one of the ways that we've done that this year is through sel three signature practice calendars where teachers have these pre-made calendars of activities where they can do engaging activities by clicking on links that we've already pre-designated so it's taking out of the planning time for our teachers to have welcoming activities end of lesson launch or summary activities and engaging activities in the middle of lessons just to make sure that our students are staying engaged and building relationships with the teachers to maximize their learning opportunity so that's all

162we've got for this evening if you have any questions we're happy to respond thank you dr alan and stevenson any questions for either one of them um backing up a little bit um why and i know the answer to the question but i'm just trying to you know why are we addressing sel at all we are addressing student social emotional learning for a myriad of reasons one of which which is why johnston county started addressing it is because this is directly tied to student achievement and we want what's best for our students especially in the classroom and if you get to this presentation online and you click to one of the very beginning links where it's got all the survey data you'll see that the majority of the questions are about how you are as

163a learner how you're accessing your learning and growing those skills for students to know how to be wonderful students is of course going to help them manage themselves and manage their academic load as well however we also have the required mental health and social emotional learning improvement plan now so johnston county started to focus on this because it's what's good for education and now the state has picked up on this and they are continuing that with our required improvement plan yeah i just wanted to make that clear that people understand that this is not something that we're just we're doing because it's good practice but we're also doing it because this is part of the education of students in north carolina um and that's why our schools are addressing it in their school improvements um

164let me ask a question about the panorama surveys it's been a lot of information out there about the and christie i know you can answer this or either one of you but um we asking children in johnson county schools about their sexual orientation do we have any surveys out there you've given us a copy of your surveys they're on this powerpoint that you've just shared with us are we asking any children in johnson county about their sexual orientation and and the as we said the power the the surveys that you have um have you given to us are the surveys that are shared with the students in johnston county that is correct and one being the social emotional learning for students and one being support for students is that correct and then teachers have a

165separate one correct and we can make the um the one that'll go out to families as well if i didn't put that in the folder i can as soon as we get that one generated i can we can put that in there as well i just want to make it very clear um that you know despite what might be said that that is not our mission in johnston county um and we are we are trying to address this in a manner that is best for students and for teachers and trying to help our young people um grow to be the citizens and the people that we all want them to be and um i just want to make that clear and as i mentioned panorama has a huge bank from which to choose from they

166do surveys like that for other people but i will say like if you were to go and download their handbook that with all the topics you can choose from panorama does offer a service where they will help help districts write survey questions that are specific to their district initiatives so you know you you won't find those type questions that you were asking me about in their handbook but they could have if a district came to them and said we need questions and i think that what you are referencing is what actually there might be some surveys out that the panorama did that had to do with those topics with specific district initiatives not in johnston county and none of this data i think following up on that this none of this data is collected and

167sold so we make a profit off of what we're gathering absolutely not and this that faq on this last page if you click on that link it actually takes you to panorama's website and they talk about their data security processes but we we do not they we do not and they do not sell student information thank you both of you all mr britt good evening board members dr bracey i have two items for you tonight the first one is a item of information i can uh i can sympathize with schools when they talk about the stress of going through testing our in our financial world our version of testing is when we are audited by our external cpas no offense but that's our stressful time it makes you question whether or not you've done everything

168over the last year or correctly or not so just to give a little background for those that aren't familiar with how this process works or for school districts public schools are produce financial statements every year and those financial statements are audited by external cpa firm that reports to the board and so tonight is our presentation of our fiscal year 2020 2021 uh financial statements and with that i'll turn it over to adam with anderson smith white to make the presentation welcome adam it's hard to believe it's been a whole year since the last time i was here addressing you but i appreciate the opportunity tonight in front of you and also in pdf version you received a copy of the 72-page financial statement it's a 72-page puzzle it includes basically the tale of of two

169reporting entities you have uh what's called net position which is important to accountants important to the gatsby all the regulations it's uh makes up over half of the information in here and then there's also uh the tale of of fund balance and and that's where management lives the board lives where the budget is and so i'm here tonight just to point out a couple pages where you can concentrate focus on that fund balance number rather than that position there's we'll go over i'll point out a reconciliation that takes you from fund balance to net position that includes hundreds of millions of dollars of plus and minuses for assets and liabilities uh the value of buildings a lot of those pluses and minuses are related to giant liabilities for the pension plan for the post-retirement benefit

170plan those are really liabilities of the state but again requirements have you showing you're reflecting your very small percentage of that giant liability so again in front of you the 72 pages i want to start on page one we were contracted to provide our opinion on these financial statements and page one is our opinion letter and at the bottom of page one is our opinion paragraph that basically states that we believe these financial statements are accurate and reflect the financial position of the school system as of june 30 2021 and the year then ended so this is what's considered a clean unmodified opinion letter i will say also the you hire us to conduct the audit of management there is also a third party involved in this contract the local government commission they approve the

171contract they also review the audit the audit has been submitted to them and is in the process of their review so after the opinion letter there's 10 pages of discussion and analysis and again when you read through that it's uh important to note that when you're reading whether you're reading about net position which includes that change in expenses for pension expense depreciation expense the changes in what are called deferred inflows and outflows related to those pension plans and oped plans or whether you're reading about fund balance again which is i think where management lives where you live where your budget is so again anytime you're reading through this keeping that that information whether we're talking about revenues expenditures and fund balance or are we talking about revenues expenses and net position and they're two different

172things so the first two exhibits are balance sheet and income statement at the net position level i would have you skip those and go directly to exhibit three page thirteen this to me is the most important page in the statements it's the balance sheet for your governmental funds you have your general fund state public school fund federal grants other special revenue capital outlay and individual schools as your governmental funds the first column being the general fund that's your local fund at the bottom of that uh column shows that your fund balance for the year end of june 30 2021 is 23.4 million an increase of 13 million from the previous year i think last year when i came and presented the 9.9 million uh increase or the 9 million increase he asked me to come

173back again next year and do the same thing and and then i'm here to doing the same thing so a significant increase in fund balance uh as of two years ago june 30 2019 you were at 900 000 of fund balance you can't even cash flow at nine hundred thousand dollars of fund balance and so um because of uh changes in the budget changes in uh responsibilities oversight and also covid created an opportunity to replenish fund balance and that's really what it is this is you've replenished fund balance to a viable manageable level in the last two years and with that 13 million dollar increase again a lot of that being you received this year over 16 million dollars of federal coveted relief funds through the education stabilization funds which is cares essers and also

174coronavirus relief funds that came through the state also federal funds that 16 million dollars played a large part in increasing the fund balance by this amount there are also cost savings related to covid less transportation yet less utilities just changing the way education is done in a pandemic again allow for some cost savings as well as the additional funding so every district we work with this year has added fund balance they are all utilizing the opportunity to replenish fund balance it's it kind of comes in waves if you look at the last time this happened it's 2008 a different crisis a financial crisis allowed for a lot of federal funding that allowed districts to replenish fund balance and even in the name of the funds coven 19 education stabilization so those right in the name

175is the intended consequence of the federal funds is to help stabilize uh and replenish so this is no surprise here uh and this is not abnormal in any way across all the districts i work with and most the districts that our firm works with so 23.4 million dollars of fund balance as of uh june 30 2021 as well as 700 000 in other special revenue some grants that are restricted for state and federal purposes also some funding that's not restricted that used to be included in fund 2 10 years ago it's separated out into this other special revenue fund again a lot smaller than your local fund but it is still local fund balance so you have seven hundred thousand dollars a fund balance there as well as 2.5 million dollars of unearned revenue revenue

176that you will earn when you accomplish uh the task of utilizing those funds for the designated program that they're related to so that's really like a kind of a revenue waiting to be earned so between that and the fund balance and local you really have access to over 25 million dollars of future appropriations there's also 1.1 million dollars of capital outlay fund balance a decline of 81 000 last year capital outlay of one million dollars won't buy you much this in these days but you have significant projects going on all reimbursed by the county so when you look at your net position again which is includes assets you're actually at a positive net position you have constructed your way into a positive net position a lot of new buildings a lot of value added in

177brick and mortar that offset the negative liabilities related to pensions so you're actually in a positive net position because of all the construction that's been going on in the last five years you also have 2.6 million of funds at the individual school level spread across all schools are there any questions again like i said to me this is the most important page um in the book followed by the second most important page which is two pages behind it and we'll go over that next if you don't have any questions as we go down the road and these things appreciate yeah as in comparison to our obligation to the so depreciation yes the rhodes net position and which is important to accountants it's important to you in the terms of what is the average age of

178our buildings what is the capacity of some of our older buildings what what what needs to be replaced rebuilt where where's the new construction need to be uh in the next five years so uh yes certainly um depreciation does road net position but one of the bigger factors unfortunately is that pension and uh post-employment benefits by one-tenth of a percent of an actuaries decision on a discount rate or even just a change in market conditions stock market conditions or changes in how much administrative costs for medical expenses go up those changes change those liabilities by tens of millions of dollars just for you alone so this year we saw the pension obligation go up that's the retirement benefits for individuals that are retired and that went up but the post-employment benefit cost liability went down

179those two far exceed the erosion based on depreciation those will only live in a small range they'll go up and down as fluctuations occur in life and in in average age of life expectancy all that those liabilities will never go to zero so they'll live in a certain area and the depreciation will continue to erode and so when you end up back in a negative net position it won't be any shock or anything unusual in fact north carolina governments operate in negative net position because of these liabilities at the state and because counties counties they take on enormous amounts of debt to construct buildings that are then capitalized on your books so there they have negative net position because they're carrying the debt you have not as big of negative because you have those assets

180to offset so um the the the standards that are written to capture the financial position of governments nationwide are written by the gatsby the governmental accounting standards boards they're written to reflect all potential assets liabilities and in north carolina it's a little the the way the governments are set up is different this school board the school system does not issue debt you don't create bonds whereas in other states you might so the the rules that were intended to capture important numbers that mean something for the city of chicago doesn't mean the same for johnson county schools but you have to play by those same rules so again that negative net position is not as important you know financially and in the near term as the fund balance it's very low relative to how much is

181spent because because elementary schools are 30 plus million dollars middle schools are 50 plus high schools 60 70 80 million those the kappa outlay is really managed by most larger districts it just feeds directly from the county the county issue the bonds the county provides the funding to to construct you need a capital outlay on hand for smaller projects um for a little bit of cushion to um you know if a track needs resurfacing and the county you know just wants you to you know here's your allocation here's you you know we've not approved that construction use that fund balance for that so uh this is this is not unusual um and actually sometimes it's it all depends on the county there's districts bigger than you that have less because they get 100 from the

182county they must have every project approved and refunded by the county so if you turn one page real quick this is just to show you um page 14 how 27 million dollars of fund balance becomes 8 million dollars of net position again the 27 million dollars being most important to you but this booklet contains information and stephen is in charge of uh maintaining accounting policies and procedures that help create and calculate the hundreds of million dollars of pluses and minus between that 27 million dollars and that eight billion dollars of net position and so those are all the reconciling items again most of them related to pension and post employment benefits those amounts are actually maintained calculated uh by the by the state auditors so exhibit 4 page 15 is the income statement for those

183governmental funds we already talked about those increases in fund balance and this is where you can see those first column the general fund net change in fund balance 13 million added to that beginning fund balance of 9 million 868 to get to that 23.4 million you can see the other special revenue used 471 thousand dollars of fund balance capital outlay used 81 000 and the individual schools added 149 000. your total revenues for the year were 393 million dollars and expenditures were 382 million dollars when you say 380 million dollars it kind of makes 23 million dollars look a lot smaller um and so and that's just one of the the issues why two years ago nine hundred thousand was really a dire position so any questions about any of these uh statements or columns

184um the state public school fund's your biggest source of revenue 258 000 uh the federal grants fund 26 million dollars again a lot of new funds in that 26 million dollars over 16 million dollars of of covet funds between the state public school fund and the federal grants fund like i said 16 million dollars flow through related to covid and then 30 million dollars of new construction in the capital outlay fund so you have the statements for your governmental funds you also have two business type funds if you turn to page 21 you have a school food service fund and a child care fund these two funds were probably most significantly affected by coven not being able to operate after school programs and the difficulty of providing meals to students in the middle of a

185pandemic from remote locations or on split schedules so the business type funds because they're business type funds they they're accounted for in fund balance and net position where they fund balance equals net position their assets are recorded directly in their net in their fund balance their portion of the giant liabilities are recorded directly within those funds so you can see at the very bottom that their net position is negative for the school food service fund and only three hundred thousand dollars for the child care fund you do not have negative fund balance in those funds you have funds available so when you look at these funds i like to look at the current assets cash and do from other governments your school food service fund has 1.7 million dollars of cash on hand and a

186receivable of 555 000 the cash didn't change much i think it only changed by like seven thousand dollars this year but you have a a lot more receivable because of the ability to serve you served a lot more meals in june than you did a whole year ago so last year you had a receivable from dpi for uh federal reimbursement meals of 75 000 and this year you have 555 000 so when you look at both what cash did and what that receivable did you really gained about 475 000 of current assets that's that's positive cash flow 500 000 of it delayed because it was received in july but that's really cash in the bank come mid july so that's a positive operational outlook right here income revenues were down significantly in 2019 you had

187food sales of 3.2 million dollars this year you had food sales of forty nine thousand dollars uh last year in 2019 you had 8.7 million dollars of federal reimbursements this year you had 8.3 million dollars of federal reimbursements the school system is operating under the summer feeding program it's a different type of food being provided more prepackaged ready to go deliverable and it's also a cheaper food but it is at a higher reimbursement rate so you still received over eight million dollars of federal reimbursements but your food cost is significantly lower because it is again those the types of food being provided your participation is down but again that reimbursement rate is up so being able to manage the decrease in participation by utilizing effective food cost and food management and salaries salaries is a

188significant expenditure for child nutrition and not knowing what kind of participation you're going to have throughout the year that again became an issue that we've seen across districts some using fund balance significant amounts of fund balance because they just weren't able to provide that participation and then also mismanaged uh the the salaries and the staffing levels at all of these kitchens so um being able to increase current assets by 475 000 while feeding during a pandemic is again a a very positive uh position to be in so any questions about those two again the child care fund just very little operations 200 240 000 of revenue there versus 1.3 million in 2019 so but those staff were moved into other positions so you only used um 208 000 of cash and still have 1.4 million

189dollars in the child care fund for that fund so after those those two statements we have pages and pages of footnotes again related to both net position and fund balance details on all of your receivables payables roll forwards of your fixed assets including how much is in depreciation your depreciation runs um almost 19 million dollars a year so that's a significant erosion of net position but you also added again 30 million dollars of construction so you're outpacing your depreciation right now that won't always be the case there's also pages and pages about those pension and opeb liabilities post-employment benefits including all of the information that the actuaries used to calculate some of the key assumptions used showing your percentage of uh of that liability as well as some charts that show those pension and opeb

190liabilities over the last 10 years and how they've grown and how the contribution requirements to those amounts have grown so uh the current 20 21 reimbursement rate is uh it's over 22 for every dollar of salary of a covered employee you're having to pay 22 cents towards pension and post-employment benefits and that's fine with state and federal or state employees mostly because you get that position reimbursed and all the benefits but when you're paying federal employees those are federal dollars those are real dollars that decrease the amount of service you can provide just because of that increased retirement cost anybody paid locally that's real dollars every year when they increase that retirement rate and that retirement rate is showing no no sense of decline so after the financial statements there's a second part of the

191audit which is the compliance part page 61 starts three letters one letter on internal controls over financial reporting and over compliance one letter an opinion letter over state compliance over your state major programs and one letter opinion letter over federal compliance with federal major programs all three of those clean unmodified no significant deficiencies and internal controls no question cost noted no exceptions noted in your those compliance requirements for your state and federal programs that we audited your federal programs have to be audited to the tune of 20 of your federal dollars every year and every major program what has to be audited once every three years so we don't come in and audit all of your federal dollars for compliance every year i will say with the new covid funds they are considered higher risk

192and have to be audited every year this year we audited child nutrition the covet 19 education stabilization and the covet 19 coronavirus relief funds as your three major federal programs same thing with state we don't audit every state program every year for compliance the state public school fund the largest component does have to be audited every year so we we audit 98 of your federal or your state dollars just by auditing the state public school fund but we also picked up the career and technical education state program for both the state month's employment which are positions and the program support funds as well as the driver training program so those were your four major state programs and that's that is all i've got um happy to answer any questions either now or even in follow-up

193my phone number is at the bottom of each of these opinion letters i'm happy to talk uh financial statements anytime with anybody so um the only the only question i got is the final report all the stuff that you altered there's no findings anywhere in the audit correct that's correct yep uh if two bullet points 13 million dollars of added fund balance and local and no findings no deficiencies positive findings all right you know and i think the the good i the good thing about that fund balance the growth of 13 million of course obviously it came from two things you pointed out one coveted not having to operate but the other thing there has been significant improvement in uh mr stephen britt's accounting ability and and how understanding of how state budgets work and

194educational budgets work so fortunate others to understand it that's right thank you for this good report thank you very much mr britt thank you for all your hard work my pleasure you know i love to love to talk numbers if i could i'd like to just point out one thing we talk about spending 383 million dollars in a year and we talk about having a hundred million dollars worth of covet and we're talking about having 7.9 million dollars of funding increase from the county those are big big numbers and it's hard for most people to even wrap their brain around let me give you another number and that's 111 11th so there are 115 school districts in the state of north carolina there's 100 counties plus 15 city schools johnson county public schools ranks 111th

195in per pupil expenditures so how much money does johnston county schools spend per child uh from our operating funds funds one two and three state federal and local in a year and that's where we ranked in in 2011. i think in 20 or excuse me 2021 in 2020 i think we were 110th or 112th and then in the year let's see i think it was 2019 where we spent you know where adam was just talking about spending down fund balance to almost non-existent amount of of leftover fund balance we were still ranked like 109th so even even with spending more money than what we brought in we're still ranked at the bottom meaning there's 110 school districts out there that spent more per child and so that that's it's kind of hard it's kind of

196hard to wrap your mind around how could that those two things be true how can it be true that we have 100 million dollars here and 383 million dollars there and it's because we're a large district you know and why are we why are we at the bottom why are we near the bottom with our funding well that's a whole other discussion i don't know that you all want me to get into tonight but there's a whole plethora of reasons and it can't really be pinpointed to just one specific cause but that's just something i wanted to point out to the board and to the public that when we talk about a lot all this money we're we're not you know out of all the counties that border us none of them spent less than

197we did on there so just wanted to point that out mr chairman do we need to do you need a break before we move on to the to the hot topic let's keep going okay presented for your consideration tonight is probably one thing that most people are looking forward to discussing the most from finance tonight and that is a proposed retention bonus plan so how does it how does it work so we're looking at we're proposing a a plan that has two different groups you have one group for employees that were employed as of march 1st 2021 and then another group that was hired subsequent to that and so just a little bit of justification you know i don't need to tell you more about covid and and and what you know what what has

198transpired and what what has challenged all of our employees uh this year uh to jump right kind of to the to the numbers and and eligibility would be basically it's it's all our full-time staff so full-time staff would be would be considered anyone's a permanent employee it's working at least 30 hours a week that it also includes all bus drivers would assign routes and so it's it's a pretty all-encompassing you know group it's custodians it's teacher assistants it's school nutrition assistance it is it's uh basically everybody in a permanent role working at least 30 hours a week and that includes clerical staffing clerical yes ma'am so we're talking about 5 000 people talking about if 4 000 and change yeah it might not be quite 5 000. so it's a it's a very very large

199group it's basically everybody and so the uh and there there's the definite you know how we're defining you know what what full-time means and what does permanent mean and that uh and that you can read for yourself the um so what's the dollar amounts we're looking at so for that group that was hired prior to march 1st 2021 we're looking at 2500 total per employee amount that would be offered and i shouldn't say that it would be offered it is not required for any employee to receive it so we would have a it's optional for employees to receive this retention bonus and they say we'll have a opt-in and opt-out process that we'll share with all staff so how would it be paid well it would be paid half in december and half in june

200and the reason why we'd split it up that way is to try to help alleviate the tax burden you know to pay part of it in this calendar year part of it in the next calendar year and with june being for 10 month employees not typically not a large paycheck depending on the job that you're in it would typically lower your tax burden more so you get to take home more of that bonus than what you would if we were to pay it in november or a different month source of funds it's s are funded with some exceptions and that would be uh there are certain jobs that you that's difficult to to uh to put in with esser funds for for various reasons but predominantly s are funded eligibility we already talked about that

201the next group would be those that would be hired from march 1st of 2021 through may 30th of 2022. so these are our new hires and so this group would have the same kind of rules the same eligibility but the amount would be lessened so the intent would be to have a higher bonus for those that have been have worked through two basically two school years with covid and a little bit less for those that are our new hires coming in and so that would be depending on when you're hired it could range from 625 dollars up to 1250 dollars for those employees and so uh documentation we would document um you know there will be a process that we'll roll out to all the schools and departments and it would basically be an opt-in

202process so total cost of the program would be about 13.4 million dollars so it adds up quickly just like we're just talking about at a district higher size it adds up in a hurry so the the goal and the hope with the retention bonus is to to reward employees for for staying homeless you don't have to turn on the tv or or i mean you don't have to look at much to to see that there's a tremendous amount of turnover and tremendous amount of vacancies in a very very tight labor market and so what i hope is that we can hang a carrot out there and incentivize employees to stay on with us press through you know there's better days ahead you know we're in kind of the toughest of the tough now and to

203reward employees for for going through it i kind of you know i love analogies i i i uh so i'll give another analogy of you know what the thought process is with this you know in the military military does uh re-enlistment bonuses and uh it's kind of like a retention bonus you know you you uh sign on the dotted line re-enlist for three five eight years and we'll pay you ten thousand dollars you know we don't have ten thousand dollars we can give you know all 5000 employees you can do that math real quickly how how much that would be but we can do we still can do and offer a an incentive for that so this is kind of mirrored off of that same same thought process there mr chairman i would make a

204motion that we adopt this i don't know i'm sorry you're taking taking a break just get i apologize taking a break to uh yeah yeah yeah he was just trying to breathe i i asked mr britt to share these next slides so the board will have a clear idea where you are as far as extra funding is concerned you may be surprised yep so we talk about 104 million dollars and that number will grow a little bit but there's still some programs that haven't been awarded to us yet from the state so that's what has been awarded and approved by dpi to johnston county public schools as of this date and just as a reminder just because there's a budget out there doesn't mean that we've received the funds for it those are two different

205two different things and so we start with 104 million dollar budget we have spent 21 million of that and we have 83 million left over as of today and so of that 83 million how what's the forecast like how how are what are we looking at spending uh funds on and that that um that's kind of a breakdown from by from largest to smallest of what we're looking at you know i think it was last month we did the more very detailed uh breakdown of spending esser funds and we've got that on our finance webpage along with our financial statements if anyone wants to read that 70 something page document all of this is on our finance web page and you and it breaks it down by line item just stephen as you talk through

206these you look at that 21 million for summer school that's through 23 24. is that correct that's correct 14 million for tutoring that's through 23.24 that's projecting out 14 million for student and staff devices that's the refresh we're going to do that's the refresh and that is probably the tightest of the allocations that we have it we're probably going to need to pull from other areas to put more into the to the refresh and obviously you have the 13 million retention bonus that'll be voted on tonight in this as well those that four million dollars for school safety improvements is that 323.24 yes sir okay the science and social studies curriculum that we're gonna put in that's the four million dollars there we have projected three million dollars plus for hvac improvements of course 1.7

207million dollars for subs and teacher planning period stipends that we're doing just to keep everything rolling right now what does that add up to mr britt 70 something million of the of the 83 million i think it was that we have so it leaves about 11 million and and that's not to say that that we don't have the 11 million dollars budgeted it's just in smaller dollar breakdowns than what you have up here that was i was going to ask so when you start talking about subtracting we're talking after this little this that right there we're talking 11 million probably around there and with it just being 11 million what you don't see there is a bonus for next year i just want to be very transparent you don't have the budget as currently constituted

208to do another staff bonus and you're doing this year and next year right now which is very beneficial for you because a lot of districts are doing a thousand some are doing 12.50 you're doing 2500 which is great sort of like you're giving it to the staff up front with the hopes that they'll agree to it and stay with you through the 22 23 school year you know we've gone not gone through but we've received 103 million dollars spent 20 of it 24 million that's right and the way stephen's mind works and my mind works he and i already think about when all this is gone and we're starting to make moves and do things for personnel and staff perspective to make sure that we can sustain this when all this money is gone because

209folks this money is going to go away and a lot of times we sit at this desk and we talk about sir esther there's not much left to give and on top of that dr brazier has a deadline on it i mean they're all september trigger dates on them yeah yes sir september 20 24. well and i would even look i look at the 4 million for science and social studies curriculum that's that seems like load that seems low to me but i don't know i i'm you know whatever i'm just saying that it could be more expensive than we think yes ma'am you're right i just want to be clear these are all needed in wonderful purchases but it doesn't last forever is what i'm saying right so what we do not the situation

210we do not want to end up adam is where we were pre-covered with the 900 000 in the bank we can't live that way we just can't live that way but i applaud this board for the retention bonus i i really applaud applaud you for that and give it to the staff upfront with the hopes that they'll remain with the district through the 20 to 23 school year and and just to be clear the one percent increase that we did on the teacher supplement that's not coming out of this that's local local appropriation by the county commissioners yes ma'am and there was a bonus given last year to teach to all staff that came out of the previous karzak money that's great it came out of what was called crf funds or coronavirus relief funds

211we did the original money we got that's correct yeah we did it uh 400 in december of last year i think the one thing i would like to do to kind of supplement this discussion is to i mean obviously we're going to vote on this tonight but there seems to be a penalty for retirees if they retire within this period of time then they would either have to play back or forfeit this bonus and i would like to see us come back next month with a plan to address that because i don't believe now i get it if you decide to leave the district i get the meaning of a retention bonus i understand that but i don't think that we should penalize people who retire who stuck it through who paid their time who

212would remain here but they've done their time it's you know and they want to go home or move on i don't think we should penalize them so i know dr bracey and we spoke about this briefly during one of the breaks and we can't crunch those numbers tonight but i would like to see next month we come back because i think the six of you would agree that it's not right to penalize someone who would stay here but they've done their time so that's one thing i would like to see changed we could maybe address that mr britt do you think you could have those numbers ready for the december and it wouldn't be like it'd be any additional funds because you budgeted for them anyway right okay and we can come up with a

213plan to kind of address that sure we could definitely do that i will ask for accuracy mr toronto stephen how do you know who's retiring right now and and you know they have to give you what 30 60 day notice sometimes before they retire it depends on the employee okay well that's a wide window of time we can all agree on that so we could have a potential bunch of retirees and i would sure hate for them to retire and then we say hey we need that 2500 back you know that wouldn't be a wouldn't be a good look for us now i agree we've already budgeted for it it's no need to uh penalize the retirees um they stuck it through the pandemic with us and are still here and we're going to wish

214them well deserved retirement and uh i totally agree we shouldn't ask them to pay that back as well so um that's something that i think we'll all can agree on that retirees should not be penalized in this retention bonus so i'm not sure mr johnson what we can bring next month not knowing how many retirees we can that we will have but we can certainly change that language just make me a promise if one does decide to retire don't go get that money just let them hold it till we figure it out all right well if the i mean if they're already figured into the formula it you know it should not create a hardship if if they're already if they've already been figured into the formula that should not create a hardship with full

215benefits or retired partially or either or yeah we'll discuss that but if cause there's a big difference in that yes absolutely uh-huh i guess we can mr have another finance committee meeting and discuss all that yes sir this is an action item yes sir that's great and so just a promotion can acknowledge that this is subject to approval by dpi as part of our overall plan yes sir that is great we've done some preliminary work with dpi and it looks like it's okay but we don't you're absolutely correct we don't have that uh the official review by dpi and thank you for uh for reminding me thank you you know one last thing when you're looking at the grand scheme of things and when you come here you're trying to create an organizational culture that

216encompasses retention and i know we've received minimal criticism for this but whenever you look at this you look at it through you're trying to obtain a competitive advantage and you're looking through in a competitive scope and my ideas for this and i don't know about you all but my ideas for this is if dr brayson can get the results that he's told us he can get and we can stay on this path of financial well-being that brit has put us on then moving forward if we can create a culture of success and this being a part of that formula i have no problem going to our county commissioners or anybody and saying this is what worked this retention bonus worked and we're gonna need more money to continue something like this i'll have no problem

217advocating for that so for those of you who may be on the fence about this or you may be questioning the motives we're trying to create a culture where we compete to keep you and we won't mind going to bat for you on a local level to get this money to try to keep putting in your pocket so i know you said we don't have the money this esther funds will run out yeah not in s or we don't have yeah we don't have it sir but we will try to go get it somewhere else and i think we can all get on that same page certainly well and i know we've already laid that groundwork in terms of the incentive pay of for performance the performance incentive pay that we discussed this past spring

218so we've already laid that groundwork for that oh absolutely and i don't i'm not sure mr otrano excuse me when you get that information as far as turnover i guess you get it august september sometime teacher turnover from the previous year that'd be that'll be interesting report to give to the board as mr johnson says as we look at the impact of the retention bonus but that's i think i had that conversation maybe with mr sutton earlier about even though the extra funds are are being spent on learning loss and things like that as they should be and we and you got in there approximately three million dollars in hvac issues as well but there are sources like our local commissioners if this works if we perform we can go back to them and have

219that conversation he and i had that conversation as well this morning so we're on the same page mr johnson absolutely and our staff deserves it because they've worked very hard for us yeah i was just going to reiterate that dr bracey you know this retention bonus in no way is um is is trying to minimize what our staff has done since march of 2020 um and i know that those of us sitting around this horseshoe do not even have a full understanding of what teachers are dealing with every day um so in no way are we trying to say or show in any way that we are not appreciative of what people are enduring right now what they have been enduring this is simply an attempt to retain staff it is a retention bonus um

220and it's to help us move forward i agree with 100 is absolutely not to minimize is to say we need you this year and next year and beyond as well so certainly we're appreciative maybe we can make wake a little less enticing you know what the more staff the more staff we retain the less we have the work that people are having to do in the schools the the covering classes i mean that's this is what we're trying to do um it is it is meant with a um a sincere heart for the people who work for johnston county public schools i couldn't agree more miss andrews and it's disheartening to get emails to say otherwise that we do not care because we do care and we've shown that throughout this pandemic in many different

221ways and just last just last meeting we gave two days off at you know veterans day and the day out with the day after veterans day and then the whole week of thanksgiving um you know this board is caring and we want to do everything we can to retain good talent and just like mr britt said this you can opt in or opt out um we're not we're not asking you to sign up if you think you're going to be leaving and moving to a different district you know when my wife saw this on the agenda she's a teacher she said where do i sign up that's the kind of people we want we want that kind of mentality of hey i'm here for the long haul and we want to keep everybody but we

222understand that some people may not want to stay on board and and there to point out there and there's a piece of the pie for new hires coming on board too so if you if you get hired this year you know we we have money for you in june and just another caveat to add i know dr king has had some conversations with us about and dr pierce as well about some ways we can be more efficient in summer school so dr pierce is good with stretching dollars dr king is good with stretching dollars mr britt is the master of stretching dollars so we may get more bang for our buck out of that 21 million than we think right now for summer school so we may be able to come back to the table

223and have further conversations with the board so thank you let's have those conversations i'm sitting here saying oh we shut out we've only spent 4 million on facilities and uh and it's pretty much i mean but anything we need to direct if we have any savings we really need to look at that to help you know carry us down the road with our facility needs and whatever maintenance we can do to reduce a bond or at least allow our bond to go further down the road than it might we definitely need to have those conversations mr carroll so the the board can give us an indication of how much they want to invest i just want to just keep in front that a large purpose for these funds was for learning loss i don't want

224to lose sight of that i know you're not absolutely mr moore you have an ally right here this i have to agree he's got he's got two allies on that mr chairman i make a motion that we approve the retention bonus and appreciate the finance committee and other and uh with with the oversight of dpi and approval of dpi and i appreciate the finance committee and other board members of the support of this retention bonus because our greatest asset is our employees and uh but i make a motion that we approve this retention bonus subject to dpi i'll second i think we all second it but don't for the record go mr johnson we'll go with the record mr johnson second and i think the whole board would go with that um any other questions

225or comments if not all in favor say aye aye motion carries 7-0 thank you mr brit we can break for about two minutes before we get set back up for public comment get back to our public comments uh the first one up is mr kevin donovan afternoon board um god kind of works in some crazy ways so uh i didn't realize this morning i was going to type a speech and then this afternoon my fifth grade teacher was going to show up and get an award so whenever somebody asked me who has the biggest impact on your life in the school system i was born and raised in johnston county went through the whole school system miss creech would have definitely been the one so to see her come and and get that award was

226was pretty cool the rest of it i'll rapid fire based off the items that happened today uh the i'm on the princeton parent advisory council we got to see some of the um the parent teacher academy that's going to happen that was approved tonight so we're looking forward to it it looks really cool to get the the parents and the students together with the teachers to kind of learn and see what the kids are doing in the schools as far as the mask mandate you guys had a meeting a couple months ago to get the metrics i was happy to see that some metrics were were created i'm kind of bummed on the 10 per 100 000 i think that's going to be kind of hard to hit so just something to keep in mind

227um and as far as it being geared toward the case count even vaccinated kids can can get breakthrough cases so you can still drive the numbers up with vaccinations implemented as far as other than the mass because it is a small distraction from what's really going on in the system you guys have been fully funded with quite a bit of money and i hope that parents are paying attention to where this money's going i'm excited to see that the teachers are going to get bonuses not really big on the the strings that are attached to it i feel like they should be given the money because of what they've done so far since 2019 uh so between that and making sure the kids have their resources and um and and schools are brought up to

228date i saw that some money was brought for the hvac system so that looks good um other than that i think that's all my time i appreciate it thank you next is mr sam carter good evening everybody so as a teacher i'm here to say to hold bonus money over our heads in the way that this board has proposed and voted on this evening is not a retention bonus it is a loyalty test every single staff member deserves an honest thank you for the work we have already done and a positive working environment that's going to keep a whole lot more people here than whatever this is i would also like to add from my original statement after hearing the stories of that have come out of princeton high school tonight action needs to be

229taken not words action thank you next miss april lee good evening dr bracey chairman sutton madam vice chair sessoms and members of the board i'm encouraged to hear you say that you're ready to give our classified staff the increased pay they deserve despite the inaction of our state general assembly but i want to encourage you to move quickly our classified staff can't wait their bills can't wait their children can't wait and our students can't wait because our schools don't function without them i would also like to encourage our district to hire more school nurses we continue to ask so much of them especially during a pandemic they need relief and our kids deserve a nurse in every school every day um then i wanted to talk about the retention bonus and i'm still going to

230talk about i'm still going to talk about it um i'm glad that you guys are reconsidering how retire or future retirees are going to be treated toward this and i thank you for that i know several week people reached out through email about that particular issue but i'm going to agree with sam i think that our focus needs to be on keeping teachers and staff in the classrooms in the schools and our district this school year many employees are seeking other employment right now some with other districts and some outside of education altogether let's keep them here now and reward them for the work that we are doing and have already done if anyone is retiring in january they should receive that bonus which you guys have said you're already going to try to look

231into providing but there are other ways that you can also appreciate our staff let's also look at lightening the load on our educators and classified staff before we implement a training based on a bright and shiny new program we've just purchased we really need to ask ourselves is this necessary right now what else are we asking our people to do will this take away our staff's time with their families these are the ways we actually retain people besides paying our foes a competitive a competitive living wage so i'm sure you know that i'm disappointed with the fact that we have strings attached to this i've been vocal enough about it um we've worked really hard i'm in my 20th year i have no intention of agreeing to that bonus because i don't think that it

232is um the right thing to do thank you next we have anya sippin good evening i am here to read a letter submitted by a classified staff member who drives a bus after school so um she asked me to come and read this letter since she couldn't be here to sign up to speak for herself dear sirs and madames of our board of education of johnston county everyone has a story this is mine unfortunately due to bus responsibilities for three schools i will not be able to read this letter in person my name is molly e carwright i have been affiliated with our school system since 1998 the year my oldest of six kids started kindergarten at mcgee's elementary firstly i was a parent and volunteer then as my own kids got older i chose

233to substitute for many years lastly i decided to apply to become a ta and bus driver for jcps since my last two kids are still in our county schools i was always there so i wanted to be on a team the best decision i made was to stay with my mcgee's family i sincerely love my job i love my team and most of all i adore the littles i take pride in my job and i am dedicated to go above and beyond our scope especially during this pandemic i did it's time for a change now in how classified staff are being treated i am the voice for many many hard-working classified staff members that are teaching and aiding and growing our future respectful educated individuals for the real world needless to say we are lucky

234to help but we need to be recognized monetarily the pats on the back and the you do you do a great job are not enough we are overworked and underpaid to say the least we do tasks that are not in our scope every single day tas are covering classes every day and the load is not letting up and getting comp uh and we are not getting compensated for all this extra work we all feel stressed and many have left due to the poverty level wages yes poverty not life-sustaining wages we all need to join together and do the best we can we did now board of education you need to do the best you can no exceptions no excuses no strings attached real livable wages now to the bonus we certified and classified employees working

235during this pandymic hung in there and were exposed to the virus we are your front line workers we are still here we still have a pandemic that has not changed we all deserve a gift no strings attached although the board of education was kind to implement something finally this is still not enough can you imagine a single parent or a struggling family one of our county families who desperately needed this bonus and accepts it and signs that document to stay until 2023 and then their family moves or a family tragedy occurs they have to pay back a bonus after services were completed that's so heartbreaking i love our schools and our community our parents and our kids enough to say that enough is enough we need more from our board of education we deserve more

236from our board of education we as classified staff are your flowers but take care of them water sun and fertilize or they will leave the garden thank you mr stacy lee i want to thank you board uh and i mean that sincerely because i've served on boards and taught school for 42 years and and you have a commendable job you've committed you for what you've done tonight and the long hours you put in and and the expertise which everything was presented mr britt uh i would like to ask uh you uh at some time i'd like to see the comparison of our county to other counties since we rate that low down and and where they're there they spend their money and and which items go straight up more directly toward the academic development of

237our children you know if you add buses in and bonuses and all that stuff i don't know about it the other thing uh it came off i'm gonna have to abbreviate a little bit but we talked about pandora panora is that it panorama say how much i was paying attention don't you uh panorama uh that word kind of popped at me when it was said because i remember uh merrick garland the attorney general of the united states and his son-in-law and daughter he's sending on a dollar to run a business and i thought it was named that and i'm just curious if that is i'm not asking you to answer it i'm just i'm just curious that is because it's connected to critical race theory and critical race theory critical theory is a marxist term

238critical race theory was used here because race is the hot subject uh critical the the escapee from north korea a young lady that spoke to us at a meeting said in in north korea it was critical class theory and we know hitler it was critical anti-semitic theory so i'm just curious if that panorama is related to uh merry garland's family because i have some of the information i could share with you on that but anyway that's that's beside the point i do i'm i'm pro-public education i was in it uh it's complicated and it's gotten more complicated covens made it super complicated and i think you guys are doing a good job i don't i get around i talk a lot and i don't hear a lot of criticism from this board i know they're

239not happy with the coveted mask and things like that but i'm serious i'm serious i appreciate what you do uh teachers i don't hear a lot of complaints about teachers some of them well they're not doing as good a job as i'd like to do i don't think they know much about you know this but that's just talk but as a as a rule you know our teachers are not taking the blunt of of the problems we have and i appreciate you taking care of them now what i wrote on my list while i go and i don't have this is textbooks and the last thing i said the last time about textbooks was our children are not being told history the way they should and when i come back one more time i'm going

240to talk to you about what i learned from the dpi in 2006. they were not going to teach us history pre-civil war history in north carolina thank you mr lee next is mr ned walsh now first thank you board for the work you do god bless you it's a difficult task and uh you're to be commended for the vital work you do with our most precious resource our kids the most unfor this most unfortunate incident at the princeton high school is best summed up in a song from the south pacific you've got to be taught to hate and fear you've got to be taught from year to year it's got to be drummed into your dear little heart you've got to be carefully taught you've got to be taught to be afraid of people whose

241eyes are oddly made are whose skin is a different color let's put it that way bishop desmond tutu while addressing the united nations said racism is a cancer in a community or in a society and it starts with the individual and the family and i believe that here in johnston county these students were so misdirected and i believe that if you follow the dotted lines it'll go back to a lot of family life and and i'm sorry to have to say that in an article a recent article in indy week and referring to a survey conducted by north carolina state university found the following nearly all black teenagers experienced racism and anticipatory stress of discrimination the cert the same survey found that 94 percent reported experiencing racism to some degree i fear that what this

242student experienced is not isolated it happens every day in all of our schools i have two black nephew a nephew and a knees my brother has had to have the talk with them on numerous occasions what to do if a policeman pulls them over what to do if they are called the n-word i'm very aware of this issue racism is one glaring example of what is taught in the home not our schools these students were not born racist racism is learned racism is still alive and well in johnston county and silence from any of our leadership must never be tolerated they you will either be a part of the solution or by silence be a part of the problem there are no there can be no one standing on the sidelines there are no spectators

243in this struggle the darkness of racism is with us you will either be a part of the struggle to defeat it or your silence will be a part of the problem thank you mr walsh next we have jessica baskerville thank you guys for hearing from me tonight i know it's late so i'll make this quick um kids are gross you know they get sick they do things my problem is is that when our kids get sick and they're home they're not learning like they are in school um i have a fourth grader he's failing fourth grade right now because in the past two months my kids have been out of school a total of 28 days because somebody else in their class has tested positive because my youngest tested positive because my oldest tested positive

244and everybody stays home i am very excited that you guys did the test to stay policy because that means maybe they have a chance but i still if they get sick outside of school or somebody tests positive near them they're lost and we're not getting the kind of resources as parents that we need at the moment to be able to teach them correctly my kids i was becoming their teacher i was coming up with lesson plans because i didn't even have a framework in some of these instances and it's scary to think as a parent your kid is getting left behind so i don't know what the solution is i think our teachers are overworked i think that sometimes things just fall through the cracks but i think our schools need to do better and

245as parents we need to do better and communication needs to be better so thank you for your time you guys have a great night thank you mr baskerville the last one is kelly casper okay she left okay that concludes our public comment for tonight our next board meeting will be december starting at four o'clock for closed session five o'clock open session i'll entertain a motion to adjourn motion by mr johnson second by mr byrd all in favor say ah motion carries 7-0 we're adjourned