001oh [Music] good evening everyone and welcome to this first meeting in september 2021 we have not quite established a quorum i know we have a few board members here that are not quite at the table yet so we'll give them about another minute before we can move on to business but we are excited to have community members here and we'll engage in public participation shortly all right so we do have a quorum now so we'll first begin with the pledge of allegiance could i have our two our new student board members who were just sworn in moments ago if you all wouldn't mind just standing and leading us in the pledge of allegiance and you can stand where you are through the flag of the united states of america into a republic for which it
002stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right again thank you for being here we will kick this off with board elections so with that i will entertain a motion for board chair uh mrs poopo walker christian bugs to be board chair for the 21 22 school year all right do we have a second second all right it's been approved and seconded any discussion all right all in favor please raise your hand all right thank you unanimous with two missing thank you all right now i'll entertain a motion for board vice chair uh mrs player peters i'll make a motion to nominate vice chair retrain elrod for vice chair all right we have a motion do i have a second second it's been approved i mean moved and seconded do
003i have any discussion all in favor please raise your hand again unanimous with two missing thank you now we have some awards and recognitions we'll begin with a presidential award for excellence in math and science teaching dr battle thank you madam chair congratulations madam cherry and vice chair well good evening everyone we've got several awards and recognition to share tonight first up is natalie boyd a math teacher at hume falk academic magnet high school natalie is one of just three state finalists for the presidential awards for excellence in mathematics and science and teaching the highest honors given by the u.s government specifically for teaching k-12 science technology engineering mathematics and or computer science she also was the mnps high school teacher of the year for 2019-2020 and is now in her 15th year of teaching
004in her 13th year with mnps congratulations ms boyd on a job extremely well done and please come on up for a photo and please bring your son with you [Applause] thank you so thank you [Applause] all right congratulations congratulations again miss bullock next up we will be honoring lauren england a third grade teacher at fall hamilton elementary school lauren was the elementary school finalist for all of middle tennessee for the state teacher of the year award for the 2020-21 school year she was also our m-p-s elementary school teacher of the year for 2019-2020 she is now in her 14th year of teaching in her 10th year with mnps congratulations to you miss england on this great honor and please join us up here for a quick photo and i hear your principal principal purtell is
005here as well i think i saw him come in why don't you come on up with her and anybody else joining you congratulations england all right one more time [Applause] and finally we'll have a brief presentation from mr trolka hannah a teacher at johnson alternative learning center representing camp's nashville foundation and aria music class piano studio mr hannah please come on up [Applause] good afternoon to everybody uh to dr battle to the board of education parents teachers guests one i want to just say thank you for giving me the platform to come here and speak over the summer we were able to gather several students across from nashville most of them from mnps and what they decided to do was something that is a mantra at my school which is johnson learning center which is
006they wanted to be inspiring and through this inspiration we came up with going to different establishments going to different locations and playing music just to offer a sense of hope just to offer a sense of i want to say release and just to kind of get away because music allows you to do that it was through the support of mnps that we found that without that anchor this event would not have been able to go into fruition we were able to provide school supplies to 300 students we were able to feed the homeless of 100 100 persons we were able to also provide practicum hours to college students and then also bring together the community and along with that students built benches they did artwork that went to the children's hospitals they also provided again
007music into the community where we went to the centennial park and actually did a huge event to just invite everybody so we just wanted to find a way to say thank you to the to mnps because there were several schools glencliff my school johnson pearl cohn glenview elementary and also i'm missing one cherry back's the middle so all of these schools stepped up to the plate and provided resources when they didn't have to so we found we we just wanted to say thank you because we told them individually but i think sometimes the community doesn't really see how much does the district really support the community so we wanted to say thank you to dr battle we have here a award that we'd like to give to you and this award says for your unwavering
008support and outreach that helped in leading our path to success you are being honored with much appreciation and gratitude your support help participating sixth through twelfth grade students receive volunteer hours from the healing through music program thank you [Applause] one so [Applause] okay beautiful all right thank you all so much uh now we will slide into our the portion of our program i'm sorry the portion of our agenda where we allow for public participation where members of our community can come up to address us you will have three minutes once that three minutes is up you will hear the sound i also know that there are some in our midst who are not quite from nashville so we do invite you to eventually move to our city but if you're here to speak to us
009today we cannot wait to hear from all of you with that we'll begin with robbie starbuck mary french trina mercer nicole warren rolling fanny sung whalen good evening chair members of the board my name is fanny sung whelan i am the parent of a first grader at aitkin elementary residing in board member abigail tyler's district if my address is needed i'm happy to share that with the board in private after the meeting i want to let you know i am continually impressed by the leadership you have displayed in the past year and a half i cannot begin to imagine the difficulty of the position you have been placed in trying to keep our community safe by mitigating covet spread within our schools while listening to the anti-science minority be extremely loud in their messaging and
010contending with governor lee's executive order this was an order that came last month mere hours after lisa piercy's announcement that the national guard had been deployed to our state to offset the overwhelmed staffing issue that is faced in our state's healthcare facilities which is ongoing crisis in our state now i'm in all of the strength and steadfastness you have all displayed thank you those of you who support the universal mass policy should know there are more of us in the community that support you than are against you we are here to fight the good fight with you to continue to stand up for science and ensure the safety of our kids teachers and school staff also a special thanks to board member emily masters for bringing to the board the resolution to not punish teachers
011who choose a multicultural approach in educating our kids as a minority mother raising minority children i believe it is important for all students to learn in a way that is not hindered by political agendas and for the teachers who make the choices in how they teach our kids to not be stifled by that agenda thank you to mrs masters for being an ally and to the board for voting to pass the resolution thank you for your time thank you kelly phillips good evening how are you all doing thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak here tonight my name is kelly phillips i was here last month my address should be on file from that meeting i'm a mother of three one of which is in district four and high school i could stand
012here tonight and speak about the science that we're supposed to follow but on each side of the argument whether you're for or against a mask there are doctors physicians on either side giving valid arguments but it's just that argument speculation there are no peer-reviewed studies that can prove the efficacy of these masks before i go any further i would like to uh check with miss master she seems to be popular this evening on the meeting y'all had on august 24th you were presenting something to the board i'm gonna just let you speak for yourself on this one white supremacy culture thank you for your participation but we expect to hear from you furthermore stand behind its adoption of curricular materials sorry i'm not allowed to say that she took off her mask because it was
013hard to read through it you can certainly speak thank you okay for anybody that wants to know that's on youtube it's also on the mnps website from the meeting on august 24th where he could not read through her mask you all are passing mandates that you yourselves cannot follow sitting in a chair in the air conditioning you can laugh and shrug your shoulders you did it you are up there because of we the people you were voted in we the people can also vote you out this is a declaration of independence i suggest you all read it mandates are not laws you have awoken a sleeping giant in parents that are protective over their children we are not the silent minority as people think we are a loudly growing majority i will be announcing my
014candidacy here tonight for the 2022 school board [Applause] parents will not be silenced we have a right as i said in my last speech here it is a god-given right it is not a metro nashville school board given right i suggest any of you that are pro for these mask mandates try spending a day as an elementary school kid wearing a mask starting standing outside at the bus stop riding on a bus with no air conditioning in the heat and as you promote on your social media website that they get to wear them during physical education running around in a gym and then ride it all the way home on the bus some of them are in them for up to 10 hours so you can turn off my phone and not let me play
015it but it's out there people have seen it and it's the most hypocritical thing i have ever seen shame on y'all that's all i have like i said last time no matter which side of this argument you're on we all love our children and that's why we're here some of us just have different arguments i appreciate everything that all of you do because i know it's not an easy task but you're up there to protect our children and serve in our best interest and their best interest and if it means parents needing to stand up then we will i appreciate your time bless you all thank you very much cheryl gorny [Applause] and please let me remind everyone to keep your masks on even when you are at the podium thank you regina helms smith
016pastor kenneth van buren mary klein barnes fanny whalen gregory o'loughlin martha sides hello i'm martha side shaw and i live in the waverly belmont district and i'm a mother of two i was told by mnps in tennessee was not approved for online learning this year by our governor i was wondering where the money went since it was given to every state by the federal government most states are allowing virtual learning and i just don't understand why tennessee is any different that was just it's more of an observation really i just wanted to be able to send my children virtually if i didn't feel comfortable so yeah i understand that this is not a question for you but rather for our government where is the money that's it thank you so much thank you kelly phillips
017i'm so sorry williams robin polson david polson linda robinson good evening chair bugs dr battle and members of the board my name is linda robinson my home is in district 1 represented by sharon gentry i'm here with the noaa education task force we're here this evening to recognize and advance black brilliance let me start by saying thanks and kudos to dr battle and the entire mmps school board for your commitment to our children's well-being thank you for supporting and encouraging teachers as they teach the clear straightforward historical truth about all of us you're successfully leading this district through extremely difficult times we stand before you to increase awareness around the importance of ensuring racial equity we're talking today about racial equity as it relates to increasing access to and successful completion of advanced academic opportunities
018for black brown and other historically underserved communities many good things are happening in the advanced academics arena in mnps and we want to celebrate those there's also many opportunities for improvement as identified in the data presented at the teaching and learning committee meeting on august 24th let's tell the whole story the good the bad and the opportunities for improvement for example let's own the stark disproportionality of black students in advanced academic opportunities this year and then let's work on a plan to eliminate that disproportionality in multiple areas together it's crucial that we identify real meaningful data-driven change but why are we even talking about advanced academics in a conversation that begins with the words racial equity everything in the district should be looked at through an equity lens as documented in the equity roadmap and
019that all important core tenant identify and eliminate inequities is exactly where we begin this conversation research supports the fact that when students are exposed to rigorous advanced academics curricula from an early age the students display stronger interpersonal and attention skills as well as higher level thinking problem solving and decision-making skills don't all of our children deserve to be assessed in a manner that identifies and recognize their their giftedness regardless of their race ethnicity or zip code don't all of our children deserve access to an equitable number of advanced academic opportunities regardless of their race ethnicity or zip code i'm sure we all agree that the short answer here is yes finally it's crucial that we resume the regular noaa education task force meetings with dr battle and strategic members of her team we're members of
020the community as well as representatives of noaa's 62 member organizations we are the community noaa has worked successfully in partnership with mnps on multiple initiatives we've done it before let's do it again noaa must have a seat at the table to help shape policies and programs thank you to ensure that we intentionally recognize identify develop and support brac black brilliance thank you thank you good afternoon wanna wait yes good afternoon board members and dr battle thank you all for all you've done and all you continue to do in the best interest of our children i reside in district four represented by john little i'm dawana wade and i am here in support of noaa's academics committee and i serve on the social emotional learning committee of noaa's education task force we are here to recognize
021and advance black brilliance it's clear that there are and have been egregious racial disparities in school discipline with black and brown students being over represented in punitive discipline consequences in mnps those same egregious racial disparities are evident in academics as black and brown students are under represented and gifted in talented programming in mmps there's certainly some connection between these two issues and each of these committees of the education task force are committed to addressing and eliminating these disparities in the past there has been some intentional meaningful engagement between noaa and mnps around these issues and there have been some positive outcomes in both arenas under both dr joseph and now dr battle's leadership unfortunately there are also challenges in that partnership and that engagement has ultimately been cut off by mnps since the metro budget
022season partnership does not and should not suggest never-ending agreement on all issues and tactics but it does require excuse me honest transparent communication even in light of this dearth of recent engagement with mnps our fight continues in bringing these issues of these racial disparities within the district to the nashville public the expectation is that mnps comes back to the table and engages regularly and in good faith with noah and because two things can be true at the same time we're asking mnps to provide ongoing up-to-date aggregated data regarding these racial disparities in academics and discipline in the pub on the public mnps open data site noaa must have a seat at the table to help shape policies and programs that ensure that we stop ignoring and crushing black brilliance thank you thank you pat mcdonald
023good evening dr battle and board members my name is dr pat mcdonald i live at 414 field crest drive in rachel elrod's district i am here with the noaa education task force we are here to recognize and advance black brilliance i worked for mnps for many years i was a school psychologist and i was coordinator of program evaluation in the research department under dr paul changus i've been concerned about how we identify minority gifted students for many years and i can speak both about the data that supports the underrepresentation of minority students in mnps programs aimed at gifted and talented students and from personal experience i'm going to focus on the latter i had a front row seat as a school psychologist so i'm going to tell you three stories about three black boys story
024number one a little boy who was in first or second grade at an elementary school that i served was referred to me because of behavior problems both his teacher and his principal were concerned about these problems when i observed him in the classroom i noticed that he was really quite bright i took the evaluation on i was ready my evaluation concluded that he was intellectually gifted they had referred the right child but for the wrong reasons story number two i was in a classroom observation observing a fifth grade student that the teacher had referred as possibly gifted while i was observing that boy i often observed the other children to get comparisons i could not help but notice another boy boy number one seemed like a good strong white student boy number two a black
025student demonstrated to me more characteristics of a gifted child i asked the teacher about boy number two she said he was a behavioral challenge at my insistence i evaluated both boy number two tested in the gifted range boy number one was just a good strong white student i was lucky enough to connect again with boy number two in high school i had a great conversation with him because he was fun to talk to and i talked to his teachers he was still in all advanced classes why was he in all advanced classes because he wasn't a total a student he was in all advanced classes because he had been certified as gifted somebody else had also taken the trouble of referring him to the thank you and please if i have not said it already
026if your three minutes uh if your three months minutes is up before you've been able to finish your comments please feel free to either come back to a future board meeting to speak with us or reach out to us via email or phone so really thank you for being here paula pendergrass dr pendergrass thank you madam chair board members and dr battle for giving me the opportunity to share my experience with mnps gifted program known by many as encore my name is dr paula pendergrass and although i am the current vice president of mnea today i am speaking as an mnps parent all three of my children siobhan keegan and lawson were part of mnps gifted talented program in fact lawson is a current sixth grader at meg's magnet school i would like to take
027this time to give a quick snapshot of my oldest son siobhan's academic journey siobhan began his foundation at granberry elementary he was identified as an advanced learner based upon his excellent excellent work ethics both as an academic student and as an elite soccer player he was chosen to take the code at twice but never achieved the desire the desired score to access gifted services consequently he had given up on the chance of being enrolled in the gifted program as opportunities within mnps began to come my way i found myself accepting a teaching position as a gifted educator this required me to take the tennessee gift employment standards at vanderbilt university dr donna ford one of my professors advised me to keep advocating first of on she told me to ask for a one-to-one testing environment
028for savon during his next colgate test as a result he scored higher than he had ever scored before and met the criteria to receive gifted services i was fortunate as an mnps teacher to be at the right place at the right time and to learn how to advocate for savann i recognize that many of our underrepresented parents may not have this privilege and or a doctor for it as an advocate does advanced academics really matter i would answer yes the gifted program and its educators helped savine to develop the confidence and resilience to take advanced placement courses in high school apply and get accepted at a division one university southern methodist university in dallas texas dr battle i truly appreciate the work that you the seven gifted teacher 70 plus gifted teachers my colleagues dr
029smallwood the gifted coordinator and dr herlon the gifted facilitator are doing to increase the number of black and brown students in our district i encourage you to remember siobhan's story as you continue to make important important decisions about mnps gifted program making sure that all parents have the necessary information that they need to advocate for their children thank you so much thank you reverend troy merritt good evening to our chair to our board members and our director dr battle i'm a member of i'm a citizen i'm part of district 7 37208 zip go zip code and i'm here with noah tonight to recognize and advance black brilliance in other words the recognition of talented minority and poor children in high school all students need access to multiple early post-secondary opportunities to prepare them for college
030and careers for example students who take advanced placement courses are more likely to get into and to go on to college from students who do not talent is equally distributed but access to opportunity is not keep that in mind currently students access to early post-secondary opportunities depend on their zip code going to school in 37208 37 two one six four three seven one eight nine should not limit your academic opportunities but the five high schools that are overwhelmingly black in these zip codes have the among the fewest early post-secondary opportunities for example only one to six advanced placement courses are offered some schools in the district such as hillwood and bail me offer over 20 advanced placement courses principals teachers and other trusted adults in our schools must believe that all of our young people
031can succeed in order for the young people to know that they can succeed when a young person is deprived of adults who recognize their gifts and talents it can be very hard for those students to to have assurance in themselves and when the advanced academic opportunities are not available in the school building poor academic performance becomes self-fulfilling prophecy we need all teachers and adults in our schools to equitably value black and brown children as gifted and to establish and maintain high expectations then provide the resources to prepare and support support our children at all levels young people will use rise to the occasion there must be an expectation of excellence we are asking uh that you recognize that on the average there are nine courses available and we would ask that there would at least
032be nine offered at every high school thank you let us have a seat at the table and let us meet with you and work together thank you reverend lorraine stalwart good evening board chair board members and dr battle since retiring from the district in 2019 as the coordinator for restorative practices i returned to the school i began at pearl cone high school once a firebird always a firebird i am here supporting the work of noaa's advanced academic committee and their push to see equitable distribution of ap courses for all students in mnps after returning to pearlcone i was shocked to learn there were so few ap courses offered to students you see i see black brilliance every day every day that i'm there often untapped brilliance but why are there less offerings in pearl cone
033than other schools is there a feeling that the students can't handle the rigor do we doubt the student's ability well we shouldn't i've been around pearl cohn long enough to know that it has graduated students who have gone on to become doctors principals teachers i.t professionals engineers nurse practitioners and the like how many stories from black ceos around the country have we heard where their their potential for greatness was ignored when they were in school dr harrington the executive principal is committed to breeding excellence into the building she has added a health care academy to to the school recognizing the wealth of health care opportunities in the neighborhood for her students because of dr battle's partnership with nashville state dual enrollment courses supporting the healthcare academy are also part of the curriculum but few ap
034courses creating a dearth in well-rounded kinds of students in lieu of of sanctioned ap courses in her building dr harrington moves her i her honors students excuse me into advanced placement course into an advanced placement curriculum exposure opportunity rigor breeds success and must be woven into all students we have been charged as educators to grow our students no matter the zip code i support noah's commitment to working with mnps to ensure all students are provided the opportunity to flourish in an environment that supports their brilliance thank you you billy sanders good evening my name is billy sanders i live in district 1 zip code 37209 i'm an attorney and i have three adult children who attended metro public schools i'm a member of the noaa education task force and i'm here to advance black brilliance
035sadly in 2019 only 25 percent of ap exams taken by black students received a passing score compared to 51 percent of ap exams taken by white students these these low pass rates indicate that adequate support is not in place to promote success in ap courses at some schools especially for students who have not had preparatory courses or participated in encore but this problem is not new my daughter grace is a graduate of hume fog high school spelman college and earned a phd at the university of michigan she's now a professor at the university of pennsylvania at hume fog she took three ap courses history english and calculus she passed the ap exams for history and english but failed the ap exam for calculus despite the fact that she made an a in the course she
036got an a on her high school transcript but she did not receive college credit grace loved calculus she understood it and she earned and she learned a lot but she was not a good standardized test taker she she recommends that halfway through the course the teacher should teach test taking strategies however she cautions against teaching merely merely teaching to the test because when this is done students often have not learned the concepts she also said that her class was too large the teacher offered no because it was so large there was no one no one-on-one help and no tutoring was available also we need guidance counselors in all schools who are knowledgeable about college standards and who encourage black students to excel too many black children hear from counselors that they are not college material
037teachers and counselors often give information about ap courses scholarships and other advanced academic opportunities only to the select few whom they deem worthy and do not make these opportunities known to all students and parents i suspect that you want to improve these past rates as well and noah wants to work with the school district to eliminate inequities and increase ap pass rates for all racial groups to above 50 and we specifically respectfully request that the administration resume regular meetings with us so that we can help to shape policies and programs to ensure that we do not stifle black brilliance thank you dr bethany riddle johnson good evening chair members of the board um and dr battle my name is bethany riddle johnson and i live on loan oak road in jenny poopoo walker's district i
038am an mnps parent and i am here with the noaa's education task force and first i want to express my deep gratitude to dr battle the school board your leaders for their efforts to keep our children safe at school by passing and sticking with a strong masking policy your universal masking policy is reducing illness and supporting more in-person learning thank you i am also here with ed noah's education task force to recognize and advance black brilliance i want to share how i as a white parent learned about advanced academics in the district i did not hear about it from the district i can't think of an instance of an mnps or my children's schools or teachers sharing with me that i could request that my child be tested for giftedness rather i learned about it
039through a network among other parents other white parents told me to have my child assessed for giftedness when they were in preschool so they could go to robertson academy one day a week during preschool and enter kindergarten already identified for encore they told me that if the district did the assessment the person wouldn't give time to allow my child to feel comfortable with the assessor and she might not do as well on the test rather they said it was better for me to have my child assessed privately to increase her chances of qualifying and as a first-time parent that's what i did this person came to our house on two occasions and spent several hours assessing her and writing a report and this report was key to identifying our daughter as gifted by age four
040for our second child we had her assessed by mnps for giftedness at age three and both of our girls were enrolled in encore beginning in preschool and throughout elementary and middle school and that success and that identification set them up in high school to be well prepared for advanced placement courses over the years both of our daughters have chosen from among 26 different ap courses that are offered at mlk allowing them to gain college level preparation in a variety of areas they were flagged and so they were always encouraged to sign up for ap courses sought out if they didn't and then provided with the supports they needed to succeed but many students do not get this type of early identification encouragement or support how to advance access advanced academics cannot remain this informal knowledge
041that parents privileged educated parents pass amongst themselves rather mnps must communicate regularly with with parents regarding all advanced academic offerings their benefits qualifications who to contact about enrollment actions they can take and finally noah must have a seat at the table to help shape policies and programs to ensure that we support brac brilliant thank you lynn hoyt good evening chair dr battle members of the board my name is lynn hoyt i live in district nine my child attends school in district 5. i'm here as part of noaa education task force and we are here to recognize and advance black brilliance i know we all believe that every child has a right to rigorous high quality education an education that prepares all learners regardless of race or ethnicity for successful graduation and college career and life
042pathways but i too have a similar story of gifted education access my pediatrician suggested that my oldest child get tested while he was in preschool in order to access the great gifted services offered by mmps and as a network of mostly white parents they also encourage private testing to better ensure he tested in families should not have to have insider access to know how to qualify for advanced academics and enrichment the truth is i use my privilege to get my kids access we bring this to your attention as it aligns to the excellent resolution regarding multicultural education identifying black students for gifted programming is also an every student known thing thank you for the multicultural resolution navigators your investment and sel care centers nurses and restorative coaches it's about healthy safe relationships and trust this
043is the ground floor to learning even if it means carving official space and government systems to commit to what we know is best for kids so let's keep carving we would love to know more about a concrete plan for identifying and eliminating inequities in advanced academics we think a powerful and meaningful action plan should include the following steps develop clear goals for remedying racial inequities and advanced academics accompanied by specific policies practices and procedures to receive the reach those goals communicate this plan to schools parents and the public at large what if every pediatrician and pre-k in this city help start identifying and processing gifted education finally we need to resume the no education task force regular meetings to shape this planning in action the no education task force should be able to meet regularly
044with dr battle and or her chiefs so that we may contribute to the ongoing discussion and planning and represent to represent our community we all want to make sure mps continues to improve the education and access to resources for all of our children this access must include black excellence i also want to thank you for the commitment to our children's safety thank you for the mask mandate you are leading a district through difficult times and i want to acknowledge that i appreciate your leadership i pray for your strength and in closing we would like to invite you all and dr battle to noaa's public meeting on october 17th at 3 pm it will be held online look for more information soon thank you again thank you melissa calvert chaz calvert dr elizabeth self uh good
045evening chairperson bugs uh to the school board and to dr battle thank you for having me my name is liz self i live on stonewall drive and i'm in district 8. i'm pretty sure i'm a former high school english teacher i'm a current teacher educator at a local teacher education program and i'm the mother of three metro school students a brilliant black child who is here with me this evening and i'm proud to have taught and worked with metro teachers for the last 10 plus years including a number in this room well this is the first school board meeting i've attended in person i've watched the last several through the live stream and also thanks to megan's twitter feed and what i listen to at home is part of what led me to attend tonight
046in short i'm here today to thank the board for the many thoughtful decisions it has made of late mandating masks for students faculty and staff encouraging teachers to get vaccinated and providing paid time off for those who nonetheless test positive and affirming the humanity of all persons in the district not regardless of but in acknowledgement of their race ethnicity gender and sexuality and i'm here to ask that the board continue to make such thoughtful decisions knowing that these are rooted not just in good judgment but also good evidence so i want to be one and what i know is a chorus of voices that is perhaps not making itself heard please stay the course having been a teacher and now spending my days trying to prepare teachers to enter the classroom i will be the
047first to tell you there is a lot about teaching that we don't know there are lots of questions that we don't have good answers to and there are a lot of issues on which reasonable people can disagree but the topics that have been in focus as of late are not these here are things we have good evidence for and i am more than happy to provide the peer-reviewed research that backs this up we know that masks and vaccines are both effective in slowing the spread of covet and if there are doctors out there my physician husband would like to have a word with them while he watches people die at the hospital every day we know that male seahorses do gestate and that ruby bridges did experience racism in school as many still do today
048at the hands of the system and other students we know that the presence of black resource sorry we know that the presence of school resource officers and strictly enforced dress code policies make spaces less safe for black children we know that denying someone's gender or sexuality has serious psychological effects for those who are not permitted to be fully present in their school or classroom and negatively affects things like attendance academic achievement and general well-being and mental health we know that feelings of guilt and shame are not unusual in stages of white racial identity development i have had many such conversations with my own white children so while i love the level of public engagement that has been present at many of the recent meetings i'm disappointed to see so much energy focused on these issues
049um just because you haven't read the evidence doesn't mean it's not there so we can two sides it all day when my kids asked me this morning what i was going to say here tonight and i told them my very 13 year old 7th grader said but isn't that just your opinion and he's right but he's also making my point for me i hope that the board continues in the direction it has been headed not because it overlaps with my personal opinion but because it is rooted in good evidence thank you thank you jared gray shanice tennell janie easley tamara slapok scott dillon jesse sutton shane utley sarah pascal elizabeth hines good evening board chair board members and dr battle thank you for this opportunity my name is elizabeth heinz and i'm the pack chair
050my address is on the signing sheet so i want to give you a quick update so the pack now has a website we are on twitter we are on facebook we are here withina tanya hancock myself of course emily masters we just had our first district pac meeting at some point about 200 people on the call we got lots of questions our secretary don johnson is currently scrubbing through the questions so we can get the questions over to dr changus so he can answer it so we can get answers to our parents i don't know how you guys do it with 86 000 people we had the by design documentary viewing on september 11th with pac officers this just this morning we had a meeting with the library and they've allowed us they're going to
051allow us to use their libraries to do these viewings are going to be eight of them all together all this stuff is on the website so please go to our website we have a town hall meeting coming up on september 28th at 4 pm it's in person we're going to look into having some virtual town halls but for now it's going to be in person i'm sure emily masters will talk about it more during her report time at these town halls we're going to be addressing all the issues that everyone who's come to the podium has talked about and we want to encourage people to join the pack and i'll say my own personal story i don't network very well i don't socialize well i stand against the wall i don't talk to anybody so
052i'm not going to learn about how to get your kid tested in preschool or how to talk to your pediatrician from being around other people because i just don't talk to people that i don't know so um i think the suggestion of posting these things on the website um is really important so that people like myself who don't know anyone especially if you're new to town you can get that information online but if you do join the pack and you're around other parents you will hear these similar stories you'll learn from other parents i have parents i go to when i have questions and i've learned a whole lot from them and it was because i joined the pack so i'm going to recommend that if you're new in town old in town interested please
053join the pack our email is mmps pack gmail.com like i said however many months ago i'm here i'm here till may 2020. i hope to contribute to this group and i really do appreciate what you're doing dr battle and the rest of the board especially dr battle because you have a lot of people who are standing some hiding behind you some standing next to you but us parents in the pack we definitely support what you're doing thank you thank you lisa vale stacy simplican linda wade susan thoren good evening to the chair and the members of the board my name is suzanne thowen and i live in antioch i'm here to discuss the second grade curriculum and its over emphasis on injustice students spend nine weeks concentrating on injustice and the teacher's manual mentions injustice
054314 times in a book that's 478 pages long what's missing is the emphasis on civil rights heroes that's what we need children are told to develop a non-verbal signal for injustice and throughout the nine-week period they are encouraged to use that nonverbal signal every time they perceive an example of injustice so you are training them to look for a lot of negative stuff other lessons on prefixes focus on injustice unequal inequality unfair vocabulary lesson protest refuse and marching day five what makes a good protest song these are seven and eight-year-olds um so what all i'm going to talk about are the is the emphasis on the negative in this curriculum and i have um some quotes from an article called greater good published by um or published through i should say you see at berkeley
055it says we humans have a propensity to give more weight in our minds to things that go wrong than things that go right so much so that just one negative event can hijack our minds in ways that can be detrimental to our work relationships health and unhappiness it asks is negative thinking bad for your brain researchers at king's college london found that a habit of prolonged negative thinking diminishes your brain's ability to think reason and form memories essentially draining your brain's resources remember it says brains get good at what they do negative thoughts create channels in our brains we're talking about eight-year-old very young impressionable brains this way of thinking can become your default thinking if you do a lot of negative thinking you wire your brain to be good at producing negative thoughts your
056brain also gets good at seeing things to think negatively about some of the examples on day one there are at least nine instances where the teachers who are required to follow this manual strictly discuss injustice um what injustices did people face before the civil rights act of 1964 these are eight-year-olds this is day one i know title vii i've been in human resources for 35 years and i'm a minority and i see life getting better not worse and maybe if you implement some of the ideas they have here from noaa which i'm new to tennessee and the ap courses those are positive this curriculum is negative um teacher the manual asks what might a just world be it assumes the world is only unjust and it's not thank you thank you cassar good evening to
057our bugs dr battle members of the board my name is kosarko assad and i live in district 7. i'm a lifelong national resident an mps graduate of hume fog high school and a representative of safer schools nashville a grassroots organization composed of mmps graduates working towards alternative safer alternatives to school policing and punitive discipline i'm here today to talk about security and safety in our public schools there was a story recently that an elementary school student had accidentally brought a gun to school while this has been distressing to hear it is important that we are not reactionary and punitive in our response to this the solution to incidents like this is not to advocate for more sros in schools let alone in elementary schools currently there are no sros and elementary schools and we should
058keep it that way research has shown has found that the presence of sros and schools increases the chances of students getting referred to law enforcement it wasn't that long ago that an elementary school student and mmps could be arrested there have been instances in the past of elementary school students being detained by cerros further studies have shown that the very act of being arrested at an early age rather than students rather than the student's own social and psychological factors before the arrest could significantly derail the educational trajectories of students davis county has one of the highest arrests student arrest rates specifically black student arrests in our states according to data from the u.s department of education's office of civil rights furthermore black and hispanic students and students with disabilities are disproportionately arrested in their white
059counterparts in addition to school policing our schools have relied on harsh disciplinary measures that are that have racial biases for example three times as many african-american children were suspended as white children in the 2019-2020 school year making up 58 of in-school suspensions 65 of out-of-school suspensions and almost 75 percent of explosions minorities as a whole make up almost 90 percent referrals to law enforcement and students with disabilities make up a stunning 97 percent of referrals to law enforcement and mnps black students and mnps represent 77 percent of students uh referred to law enforcement despite only being 40 percent of the population just these statistics alone should raise the alarms while i don't want to minimize the dangers of gun violence in school shootings since it is an epidemic in this country the response should not
060be more police and security more police policing in schools data has shown otherwise that estros are successful in intervening instances of gun violence with only a 1.5 success rate of the 197 instances of gun violence in school since 1999. instead mmps and metro council should allocate roughly nine to nine million dollars for seos and actually invest in social emotional learning restorative justice initiatives and the necessary professional staff and mental health services for our students this rhetoric of more school pollution to spark widespread outrage not students wearing masks in schools thank you for your time thank you colleen davis good evening chair members of the board my name is colleen davis and my address is 37211 zip code of nashville i'm going to talk about the book woods runner which is by gary paulsen and it's
061part of the whitten wisdom curriculum for fourth grade fourth graders are usually nine to ten years old common sense media recommends this book for ages 12 and up while this book might be great in sixth grade our concern with this book is it's very graphic for fourth graders here's a brief summary of the book thirteen-year-old samuel lives with his parents on the edge of the wilderness in the british colony of pennsylvania samuel knows how to hunt and how to survive in the untamed forest where it can take days for news to arrive there are rumors that american patriots have begun a bloody war against the english then the war comes to him in a savage attack by british soldiers in iroquois samuel's parents are taken prisoner samuel follows their trail determined to find a way
062to rescue them each day he confronts the enemy and the unbelievable cruelty tragedy and horror of the war but he also discovers unexpected allies men and women working secretly on behalf of the patriots and he learns that he must plunge deep into enemy territory to find his parents chapter 1 one a man mauled to death by a bear that had attacked his horse while the man was plowing the man's head was eaten another killed by an arrow through the throat an arrow samuel knew that came out of the woods from a boat that was never seen shot by a man who was never known live long enough be slow enough get old enough and something eats you everything kills before the buck heard the sound of the rifle the ball would pass through the heart
063and out the other side of the deer killing it chapter 3 whole ranks of attacking men could be torn to pieces in a single shot the musket ball passing through man after man ripping them apart so again i just wanted to summarize that um you know we're just asking that the consideration would be made that this would be for ages 12 and up um and you know maybe sixth grade versus we just feel like it's too graphic for fourth graders and um thank you for your time thank you carolyn lutz evening my name is carolyn lotz i live in old hickory tennessee i first of all want to say that i do agree with the noaa group with a lot of schools in metro i was able to have my my first daughter be a
064part of um encore and i was not able to get my son to be a part of encore i tried and tried and they just ignored us so it happens all the time but i i totally agree that there needs to be more of those kind of classes in all the schools i wanted to say that first so i'm going to talk about the unpopular topic in everybody's in all of school right now i'm going to talk about masks and i really really urge all of you please do your own homework there's a i mean as we know there's a lot of science out there but there's a lot of science there's a lot of different studies and doctors and and i have to say the cdc is not always correct so out of more
065than 600 american deaths attributed to coven 19 361 were for kids and adolescents under the age of 18. in the much shorter 2018-2019 flu season there were 477 pediatric deaths we didn't have mass mandates then a common argument right now is the that the emergency of the delta variant changes everything currently some regions of the u.s are seeing a surge of infections and hospitalizations among young people but the numbers coming out of britain continue to suggest that delta does not cause more severe illness on an individual based basis to unvaccinated people or children despite being more contagious pediatric immunologist at a major university hospital said it is not biologically plausible but that the same variant somehow is more dangerous for kids in the us than it is for in the uk there was a study
066um a newly released study suggests that kids may be harmed by face wearing face masks intended to combat the spread of cover 19. according to the study the dead space in the mass collects exhaled carbon dioxide quickly and that carbon dioxide mixed with the oxygen increases the amount inhaled under the mask the author of this study the author of this study cites another paper [Applause] cindy goddard good evening chair members of the board my name is cindy goddard and i'm in district 4 john little's district i'm going to continue reading some of the graphic quotes from the book woods runner that a nine-year-old child might find disturbing not just the smoke from the fires but the thick heavy smell blood death he knew the smell came from someone he could not allow himself to believe
067it was from them from mother and father but as the search looped widened he began to come across bodies his neighbors shot down and hacked where they'd fallen most had been mutilated so badly it was hard to tell who they had once been chest and stomach filled with arrows his scalp gone so his face drooped without the top skin to hold it up there were nine bodies to be buried before the coyotes wolves and bears came three were children he cried over each corpse thinking of them living in chapter five these are quotes he saw where overton and others had fallen saw the blood now covered with flies where they had been hacked to the ground with tomahawks he could imagine the terror of the people in the settlement the war cries of the attackers
068mixed with the screams of the victims and the smell of blood and fear and death the last of the cabins were burned the surviving victims probably neck tied to each other with a rope lined up and pulled along the trail all the victims he'd buried had been chopped down with either tomahawks or war clubs and the attackers had taken the time to stop and slaughter the people who lived there chapter 6 ignored and allowed to die alone settle your affairs and make out a proper wheel because the rifleman will almost certainly kill you their prints were scuffed ragged and he felt his mother's anguish terribly she was small and thin and was very strong in her own way but this brutal treatment probably with a rope around her neck might be too much for her
069he found the first body he had been scalped mutilated one more body thank you for your time thank you jennifer ponder good evening chair members of the board my name is jennifer conder 908 steeplechase drive and i'm going to continue some more disturbing quotes from the book woods runner being read by nine-year-olds in davidson county chapter seven both of the men had fresh scalps hanging on the shafts they carried for the first time in his life samuel wanted to kill a man the overwhelming rage that he had begun to feel while following his mother's small footprints as she'd been savagely jerked along the trail was like a hot knife in his brain chapter eight one indian leveled his musket and fired samuel felt the ball grazed his cheek he felt the rifle buck saw the
070small hole appear in the indian's chest he watched the indian fall as he saw the other indians swing a tomahawk the tomahawk was coming at his head and he tried to duck but the white hot pain exploded as the side of the tomahawk smashed into his forehead chapter 9 untreated battle injuries often lead to gangrene which causes the body to literally rot away turning first green then black from infection that travels rapidly because antibiotics were unavailable in the 18th century amputation was the usual treatment if the patient was not lucky enough to be to benefit from amputation maggots would be introduced into the wound in an attempt to aid healing they would eat away the infection letting the patient die was often the only option at the time one of them put a musket ball
071in paul we knew he was going to die he died screaming it was bad chapter 11 he and maul were immediately gunned down the four soldiers jumped to the porch and bayonetted them they took the bodies of caleb and ma and dragged them back into the house samuel was sickened by the cruelty the absolute viciousness of the attack and he hunched over and wretched chapter 12 he wanted to punish them and could think of nothing to do except act as violent as they had kill someone find someone in a red coat and shoot him chapter 17 over 10 000 prisoners died of intentional neglect starvation and untreated disease their bodies were tossed overboard into the harbor or buried in shallow graves samuel hit the guard with a brick hard chapter 19 samuel gutted him quickly
072and left the entrails for scavengers samuel pulled the trigger on his rifle aiming up at the officer the ball taking the man just beneath the chin killing him instantly the men on the horses were blown off their mounts dead by rebel fire two horses were hit screaming staggering back into the brush the rebels reloaded and killed the wounded horses thank you amity marsh good evening chairwoman bugs and members of the board my name is amity marsh and i reside in district 2. here are some additional excerpts from the woods runner that's being used in fourth grade the epilogue he stayed until coop died streaming with dysentery over slit trench and agony of jabbering delirium killed by dehydration beheaded in guillotines afterward there is a tendency to clean up the tails of war to make them
073more palatable focusing on rousing stories of heroism and stirring examples of patriotism all clean pristine antiseptic but the simple fact is that all combat is outrageous thousands and thousands of young soldiers die horrible painful deaths lying in their own filth alone and far from home weak and hallucinating forgotten and lost the revolutionary war lasted for eight long slaughtering years approximately four thousand young men were killed in combat by musket ball exploding artillery grape shot from a cannon and a steel banner shoved through their bodies there's no doubt the revolutionary war was horrific but as you've heard some of this book is too advanced for a nine-year-old learning about war probably for the first time we would like to have this book either moved to an age appropriate grade level or replaced with something more reasonable
074for children of this age we'd like to point out that woods runner was removed in williamson county and replaced with two primary source documents king george's proclamation and rebellious colonies and the declaration of independence excerpts from both will be used other books we shared last month from the whitten wisdom curriculum have also been pulled in williamson county amos and boris for third grade was pulled and will be replaced with the snail and the whale shark attack for third grade will be replaced with shark lady and language of dolphins and other sea animals love that dog for fourth grade was pulled and will be replaced with little dog and thunder rolling in the mountains for fifth grade was pulled and will be replaced by island of the blue dolphins we applaud the removal of these books
075in williamson county and ask you to do the same for the students in davidson county we appreciate your time listening to the excerpts from the book tonight as well as from the books last month we hope you will see the need to replace these books as well since we all want what's best for our children moms for liberty has logged over 1200 hours researching every single book in the whitten wisdom curriculum and our suggestions for removing certain books are based on these findings we'd be more than happy to provide you all with a compilation of our research so you can better understand our concerns thank you for your time excuse me thank you michelle whidbey good evening chair and school board members thank you for the opportunity to speak with you tonight my name is
076michelle whitby i am not a citizen of davidson county i'm actually from williamson county so i am a citizen of tennessee i'm here tonight to bring some attention to an email that was actually sent to you today the email contains information on a coveted solution that i believe is what we've all been searching for to protect our children our staff and our buildings it is my firm belief that together we must work with each other to overcome obstacles that this new world is creating this device that you read about in your email is the first step to returning our world to the world that we recognize together uv angel is a solution that installs in your ceilings and purifies the air at a 50 cubit feet per minute rate and is 99 effective against covid
077and 87 other airborne pathogens ladies and gentlemen covet isn't going away it's here to stay we must adapt and adjust to our circumstances as a school board you are in a unique position you have the power to have these devices installed into your school and lead the way into tennessee toward a statewide solution we are all getting covered this this whole thing is covered with 100 fema grant that's right no cost to the schools or the county this is the first ever approved grant that's a preventative damage controlled by fema prms is a firm responsible for facilitating all these grants they process everything for you we will write your grant and they have already done this successfully in other states the grants will be rewarded and the funds are the whole entire process is taken
078care of by prms they will also write in there the soft cost and the two-year maintenance essentially it is 99 effective cova solution against covid and the airborne pathogens at no cost for two years to you guys i'm asking you today to follow up with the email set a time for you to be educated insert the process this is a universal health issue and now we have the tool to fight it so let's do it together thank you for your time thank you dwight withrow it even evening metal chair board members dr battle i'm dwight with the row i'm obviously about chattanooga uh the reason i'm here is uh last week i noticed on the news um board member uh miss bush had an article on there we were talking about what was going on
079in all the schools the same thing all of our kids are facing the same thing all of us are facing as parents and grandparents it's a mask issue so obviously what we have here with the uv angel is a solution it's not going to cost the taxpayers anything because we've already paid for federal dollars so i would like to ask that you uh take the lead in the state of tennessee and do what chicago district 53 dr o'malley them did with the school i know you guys received an email today with the video showing the technology of this equipment this is not the end of this covet obviously influenza coming next is what we're hearing on the news we don't know how bad flu seed is going to be all these viruses are basically treated
080by cleaning the air so we need to take advantage of this also i don't know how many of your schools here are swapped over from fluorescent bulbs leds but this grant covers that so if you want to save the taxpayers dollars save the school money you're able to do that so this is not affecting the cares coming out of the esther's grant this is a strictly fema grant this is there that a lot of people don't realize but the grant writers have the ability to do that that's what they've been doing every day for other cities and other states and other school districts so i ask that you just take a look at that i don't i don't work for this i don't work for the company i'm just a parent and grandparent as last
081week when my daughter called and said hey can you take off and keep the kids because we've got to shut down school for cleaning this is a preventive maintenance that's going to run 24 7. shutting down and cleaning schools is nothing but a snow globe effect and if you guys look at the presentation with the company the science behind it you'll understand it better so i ask that you just take a look at that and try to keep our kids safe keep them in the school buildings learning instead of remote because a lot of us parents don't have time to be teachers we can't be teachers we're not educators so i just asked if we do that and appreciate you having me thank you thank you courtney powers karen's son good evening chair members of
082the board dr battle my name is karen sun i'm a social studies teacher at east nashville magnet middle school and i reside in vice chair elrod's district i'm i'm here in front of y'all for two reasons today the first being my gratitude to the board for passing the resolution protecting teachers from h.b 580. legality has never equated to morality and regardless of the law that was passed by governor lee in may it is both indefensible and immoral to teach lies or have truth to children children at any age deserve the chance to try to make sense of the world around them i feel that though this is a commitment to the bare minimum of not being racist instead of a commitment to work towards anti-racism and i look forward to seeing what the board will
083do in coming months but this point in particular leads me to the other reason i'm speaking here today i've heard some worrying whispers that there are board members pushing to expand the use of school resource officers back into elementary schools which is a wasteful use of resources available to mnps i know how mma i know how mmps's budget works i am aware that the money for sros comes from mmpd's budget but it's not about the budget it's not about the budget this is what safety means for students especially for black and brown students mnps's own stated goal is to make every student known but putting sros back into elementary schools puts that goal into jeopardy we've seen reports about black elementary students getting violently arrested not just in tennessee um there's some that's i've seen
084in florida and know that it has happened in this district prior how are other students supposed to feel safe in schools around around sros after witnessing that and it will not be just black and brown students alone that are affected and this applies to middle and high schools too but also disabled lgbtq queer neurodivergent students or any student in the intersections of those our resources time could be better spent recruiting and retaining school counselors guidance counselors nurses more teachers in the classroom more support staff literally anything else that affects how safe students feel in school people that help students be known i urge you all to reconsider expanding the use of sros into elementary schools thank you and take care thank you marcus fryder lockett uh good evening chair members of the board my name
085is marcus trotterlockett i am district five i think christian bugs district i have been a resident of nashville my entire life and i'm a lifelong student of mps schools i hope to speak with you today about what was just mentioned the troubling rhetoric re-emerging around student resource officers in adulthood i have taken a deep interest in the safety success and well-being of our students and i've begun to work with an advocacy organization known as safer schools nashville given the tumult and unprecedented disruption of the last almost two years it has been a wonderful privilege interacting with learning from these same students through work as an advocate for them this has been an unprecedented unprecedented experience for all involved but has been especially hard on students and if we have learned anything i hope that it
086is just as we have had to reimagine schooling in a pandemic it has also become imperative to reimagine the future of how we approach student safety and their well-being i commend the school board for doing their best to support the success of their students in these times that truly no one could be prepared for but recent rhetoric and support of the increase of school resource officers at levels as low as elementary school just has mentioned would constitute in my opinion a severe misstep the news of any students bringing a gun to school is an unfortunate development for mnps but as touched upon by previous speakers an increase in officers in schools is reactionary and satisfactory for a litany of reasons ranging from appalling disparities and discipline by race and ability the already worryingly high ranking
087of mps and student arrests within within the state of tennessee and the inevitable effect increases in officers could have on the funding for the already inadequate amount of nurses counselors and psychologists across the district a punitive measures will always produce punitive results and as advocates have laid out tonight and in the past data and anecdotes do not support such an approach promoting student success it would even seem in most cases and in my opinion to serve as a detriment it is my hope that with this in mind mnps can take steps and response these recent events that aren't commiserate to the reflexive and reactionary policies that already punish and penalize our students but policies that reaffirm their humanity and well-being as central to their success the teachers in schools use the tools that they have
088provided and many schools across the district have found success in programs grounded in restorative justice social emotional learning and other forms of reimagined discipline as students will hopefully soon emerge from a long period of isolation and uncertainty brought on by this pandemic and opportunity exists in lieu of more student resources and in lieu of more sros direct or fight for cistern issues with adequate funding for the recommended number of nurses counselors and mental health staff while also exploring new approaches like report restorative practice assistance and investment in social emotional learning i hope the board keeps an open mind and i thank you all for your time and patience and i hope you really really think before making decisions on this issue that would penalize and further criminalize our students thank you so much thank you
089james franklin spencer iii hello everyone i'm going to speak on behalf of myself and also officer anthony martinez that's not here but on martinez i will leave you guys his speech so i'd like to start off by thanking dr battle thank you you've listened you've heard and you've acted so much that you've changed and hired a new chief operating officer that's going to be servicing us as far as our e o o maura black sullivan please take a long strong look at our security department the executive director's position and the swift change in that position should be done as well dr battle started the chemotherapy and you should finish because the toxicity toxicity is still there the longer you wait to make the changes to the security department the longer our students and staff in
090the district's safety are in question the issues in the security department will continue to get worse from no plan for a functional and thriving security department to no plan to retaining officers into the district officers are still leaving that's what happened with officer tony martinez it's a dog handler a search dog searching for drugs searching for guns gone because of the toxicity in the department so before you made the change he had already made a decision to leave okay someone is going to get hurt soon behind let's cover this up there's a reactionary plan to every incident and that plan is once it happened heads will roll but i myself have no chill about fighting for issues with my kids my money and my peace mnps has two on those checklists right now my money
091and my peace so i appreciate miss bugs clara peter players for the compensation conversation miss fran bush for bringing all of this to the light and i'd like to say thank you thank you anthony martinez tanya hancock hello thank you for affording me the opportunity to speak my name is tanya hancock i live in madison tennessee 37115 i'm a metro council i serve district 9 in madison and i'm in district 3 for the school board with emily masters and i thank her for her service and i'd also like to thank angelia and ebenezer for agreeing to serve on the board as well as cheer bugs and vice chair elrod for your continued leadership and all of you for the work you guys are doing here for our schools i ran for metro council specifically because
092of our schools and i wanted to fully fund our schools and make sure you had what you need because i know you know what to do with it i'm not an educator i have worked in education sales for um how many years now 21 years but that does not give me the right to decide what is best for all of our students and i trust that you guys know what to do i know that having dr battle at the helm has just been just a warm embrace for our entire community and we're very appreciative and put all of our tests in her for what she has done not only in the last 18 months as we've survived this crazy time but also for your entire career and your service to metro nashville public schools speaking
093as a member of the education committee on council we serve to technically review legislation that comes through about education funding but also to be advocates for the school board and for the school district i am serving now as bb heinz mentioned earlier as the liaison for metro council to the parent advisory council very pleased to do that and also super excited to see all the mnea representatives that are here today it's just another example to our community of how educators give and give and give and it's sometimes a thankless job and i just want to know i want all of you to know that you are thanked we do love you and appreciate you as everyone knows from the news everywhere tennessee is number one in the nation um not for something exciting like tennessee
094football we haven't been number one since 1998 but you know of course for covid and um that's not exciting something i'm really excited about is that mnps is the bottom of the pack in coded spread we're usually not excited about schools being involved in fact but that's an awesome accomplishment so thank you so much for the leadership that you're providing for our schools i have a third grader in metro nashville public schools he's currently on quarantine which i completely understand he's healthy right now and i hope that continues he also understands he misses his friends but he understands that he doesn't want to help anyone else get sick so for safety first he's staying at home until he's permitted to go back and we're doing any assignments we can and just want to know that
095we're here for you and let me know if you need anything thank you councilman thank you councilmember hancock and with that we will conclude public participation and move into governance issues uh we have a consent agenda do i have any amendments to that consent agenda is listed yes this is uh mrs tyler um i would like to i'd like to pull the esther plan and related documents off all right so that is consent agenda item c as they're planning related documents all right do we have any other amendments to the consent agenda is listed all right do we have a motion to accept it with the amendment pulling off answer pulling off item c motion to move um the consent agenda as amended all right do i have a second second it's been moved and
096seconded all right we will move on to discussion mrs tyler let's try that again so it's been moved and seconded to accept the consent agenda as amended uh all in favor please raise your hand all right is unanimous with one missing now we will move on to item c esther plan planning related documents uh mrs tyler i move to open up a discussion about the s or plan related and related documents okay the ques quick question so she moved to have a to open up discussion about the essa plan does it have to be actionable i'm sorry okay so mrs tyler looks like it does need to be actionable either to accept or approve or deny mrs roberge would you give us some guidance i can definitely scream loud enough i don't need the microphone
097um yes there needs to be an action item and then a second and then a discussion okay last time i wasn't sure if i wanted to make something pass or not and i would wanted the discussion and dr gentry said that we you could make a motion just to have a discussion session just to table it there just needs to be some motion action item okay so it has to be just a motion so it could be to accept to deny or to defer is that or disable it yeah okay okay um i'm sorry mrs uh did you have a uh go for it motion mrs player peter squared this is five plan for the esther plan and related documents all right so it's been moved to approve do we have a second okay we
098have a second all right um we'll kick it to miss tyler for discussion thank you great thank you um so just going over this i wanted to get a little bit of clarity on several other things in there and the first thing was i noticed that emblazoned across all of it was the tennessee state best for all program and so i just wanted to know what extent are we participating in the state's best for all program i'm sorry yes go ahead dr battle harry randolph if you want to approach the podium and um i'll begin speaking as you're coming up we've not made a commitment or decision or ramp is that the best for our program or am i mistaken okay the best feral program we haven't made a decision about participating or not we
099want to be very mindful about entering into such a programming commitment because we want to stay true to the needs of our mmps students and where the board's priorities have been over the last year two years definitely navigating the pandemic and so we're being very thoughtful and careful about any commitment in that space the truth of the matter is lots of things align to the buckets that are there but we wanted to create our plan first and not force fit our plan into to that particular grant opportunity okay um that helps tonight would we have to fill out a separate application to join that if that's what we decide to do dr randolph i'll take it to you that's a great question it's a little unclear the guidance we've seen from tdoe just says that
100they'll evaluate our submitted materials to see if we qualify based on my assessment we do qualify for that and so we'll wait to see what they say but that's not really clear at this point okay so is there a possibility that we could be enrolled just by qualifying with the amount that we're spending on their choices for best for all yeah i mean um the way that the guidance we've been given just really says it will make us eligible for other grant opportunities there'll be some commendations you probably saw if you looked it up but otherwise i think the what it just means for us is that there are grants coming out to districts who qualify that aren't available to other districts i just was trying to figure it out because i couldn't find anything
101about how to apply or not apply so it sounds like that's universally not well understood it's my understanding to your point i don't know about auto enrollment but i do think if we qualify that's what it will look like okay based on our application okay that's good to know thank you um and then i had some questions about the details in there so the first thing is what's the difference between the tutoring that we're getting through our own district that we're providing and then the tutoring that we would receive from the tennessee all core tutoring program yes thank you for that question i'll kick it over to dr randolph but to kind of kick off our response here we wanted to be very cognizant of sustainability for our tutoring model so that that high impact
102tutoring is happening for students now and in the future regardless of the funding mechanism but i'll kick it to dr randolph to talk specifically about the difference between the two i would co-sign with dr bottle so we've tried to be very thoughtful from the beginning about building a sustainable system and using sr as an opportunity to do that um the way all core works is the model that we're using qualifies for all core and it means we would receive matching funds 700 a student through all core so we have put in an intent to apply for all core funds but we've been in contact with tdoe and the model that we currently have is what we do it also i think you mentioned this makes some of our students are it opens up some free
103high school tutoring that tdoe is providing we don't have details on that i think they're still running an rfp process so we don't know exactly what that looks like and certainly we'll we'll be careful um and thoughtful about implementing that but but really it can support the work already doing and and leverage rsf funds to get additional funds for tutoring that's helpful because a second part of that was just wondering about if our if we're if our plan is to grow high dosage tutoring then when the money runs out how do we sustain that so it sounds like that's already something you guys have been considering all along that's good to hear um and um just a couple detailed questions about some of the the numbers so in the approved instruction instructional materials at the
104elementary level um it says that we're going to spend about 9 million for whitten wisdom materials alone is that included as part of the overall 17 million that we're planning to spend on high quality materials or is that in addition to the 17 million all right so the plan includes the plan that your event includes esther 1 2 and 3. esther 2 included 9 million for whitten wisdom of course that's our k-5 adoption the additional 17 million is for the upcoming math adoption again planning ahead we have these conversations on a yearly basis in other content areas so not just the math adoption there are other areas that we have to backfill in instructional materials you're asking that question because the template is confusing um and so what it represents it represents more than what
105you just what we've just been talking about in sf3 but a representation of esther one two and three um but in a nutshell you have that representation of dollars for the ela curriculum wooden wisdom but also for the upcoming adoption for math materials and other back filling for content areas okay so they are two separate amounts but they're from separate esser that's correct okay that makes a little bit more sense um and then i guess continuing on that then looking at that 17 million that we're spending on the high quality i noticed and like you said that we're really putting an emphasis on new high quality math curriculum materials and the state is in the process of adopting a new math curriculum but we don't know what that's going to be yet so i was
106just wondering why are we putting an emphasis on purchasing that if they're going to be obsolete do we know for a fact that it will be chosen before we have to spend the money i just want to make sure that if we're spending it on math that we're spending it on what we're going to use in a long-term situation instead of just until this new curriculum gets adopted yes that 17 million is specifically for the majority of it is for math and it is for specifically the upcoming adoption okay not a purchase or an adoption prior to the adoption cycle okay and is i'm sure that there is a date that we have to spend the money by and i know that the the um curriculum committees are meeting as we speak and um do
107i can't remember is there a date that they have to have that finished is that that's are we basically do we know for sure that we're going to know what the curriculum is before we have to spend our money unless they make any more changes we've been very thoughtful about that and can meet the spending deadline okay yes so we've we've paired the adoption timeline to the esser spending allocation deadline um so yes as long as there's not any additional changes because adoption was put pushed back a year or two years um spring of 23 spring of 23 is the adoption timeline and when do we have to have this money spent the esser 24. 23. okay even better all right um [Music] my next question is um i think it's worth noting that if
108you look at our student body makeup that it's kind of slowly been changing over the years and the greatest gain that we've seen in in the percentage of students are our students who are hispanic hispanic and so when we look at establishing sustainable teacher recruitment models are we putting an emphasis on recruiting teachers who represent our current student body um i know that we've long emphasized recruiting more teachers who are black so our black students see themselves represented in the classroom and we should be doing that and i just want to make sure that knowing that our hispanic population is growing at the leaps and bounds that it is are we also putting similar emphasis on seeking out teachers who are hispanic um absolutely if you recall back um it might have been a few
109months ago when dr barnes presented um around our hr efforts and recruitment we are we have been intentional and he was intentionally articulating on the need for us to recruit and retain educators and support employees who represent our student population so that continues to be a conversation in fact melissa and i have already had that conversation about our focused efforts um in that space as we move forward so that we are constantly keeping up and tracking our enrollment data the diversity that exists and aligning that to our recruitment efforts great that's it's so important that our teaching body represents the students that they teach and that they can see themselves in the classroom in front of the classroom so i'm glad to hear that i'm not surprised that you guys are already doing that so
110thank you we're working on it [Music] um oh i had a question about in the monitoring auditing and data collection reporting section it's said that one of the things that we're going to use to measure is the sel survey what is that survey oh uh great question kari do you mind talking about santa girl for just a moment at all so soon to grow something we have added to our navigator program this year and it has a research-based sel assessment that students are taking have taken are taking right now so that's what's referred to in those metrics okay so is it is it attached to something that we've already been using or is it something that we've developed separately we didn't develop it but our sel team did review it and it's aligned to the
111castle standards okay that we used um and uh i oh i also had a question about the money that when you detailed it out and then you had a section where it would say other in the category and um i noticed that when you broke down the other spending if you added it up it didn't always match the same number that it was in the top part um so like on page six in the application it expands on what the other contains for academics but it only adds up to about 38 million dollars but it says that we're spending 58 million on other so what are we spending that extra 20 million on that's not been detailed and there are similar questions as far as in the educator category there's 17 million that's not accounted
112for and in foundations there's about 16 million that's not accounted for all right dr randolph if you want to respond appropriately template is pretty frustrating i'll be honest um this is the state's template so we're taking our plan and the way they've broken it down by their funding buckets which i was aligned to to some extent is pretty challenging um we have the other broken out on our website i mean the best place to look at our plan is actually what dr battle has shared and is on the website we are trying to take that and kind of get it into this template that's required by the state so i just want to acknowledge that that's where some of this is coming from part of this has to do with the summary page and the
113way that this has been formatted and so probably the best example is when you look at the um student readiness category for example and you look at the chart on page eight that lists economically disadvantaged student with disabilities right that covers lots of buckets if you will or priorities for us and so these these funds cover that's that's the way we think about this the state really wants um the way the template works that makes it confusing when you go to add everything up so really we're working with them on that right now to make this more understandable to all of us but particularly the public but what's on our website is is our plan and we're just trying to make it fit their template so what happens is when you use their template sometimes
114the expenses show up in more than one category based on that strategic move so like pd for example sometimes materials the way that they break it out is not the way that we have um thought about it or been talking about it and planning around so it's a bit of a square peg round hole honestly situation we were trying to put this together this also includes sr1 2 and 3. i i find that to be a bit confusing so that's also that's where you'll see a bit of you know we have an approved sr2 plan we have an approved sr1 plan so sr3 is what's really simple to look at on our website so we're actually working with the state to make this a little bit more understandable but if you want to see what's
115happening with sr3 that's that's the easiest place to look and we're just working with their template so on our website it's detailed out much more specifically than it is and what we received okay well and it was it was the template versus trying to get everything in a very user-friendly um common-sense approach approach to what we're leveraging our esser funds for and that that template is very difficult and complicated might have taken us more time to figure that out than putting the plan together but we wanted to be very transparent which is why everything is posted on our school website while we did the stakeholder engagement the way that we did and other board presentations and retreats just to make sure that everyone was kind of following along with the board's priorities what we received
116back in our stakeholder engagement and how that was represented in our essa funds all right thank you and um so that's all my questions but i did just want to note that i'm extremely really pleased to see that you have line items specifically detailed and dedicated for strategic teacher retention and class size reductions both of those have been validated for years as statistically significant ways to improve student achievement and to make classes manageable for teachers to do their job so i just am very pleased to see that we recognize what the research has shown us actually works to help our students and that we're working towards doing those things so thank you thank you for that acknowledgement and and also the recognition of again this board's support and spiraling funds directly to our schools which
117gives them the ability to staff according to their school needs and so our school leaders our school leadership teams have really owned that space and leveraging the research-based practices to help meet the needs of their students and and really making every dollar count so thank you for that thank you dr randolph go ahead uh mrs mrs masters sorry you can just call me miss emily that's that's what everybody calls me it's fine um okay i have questions about measures as you might have guessed so um i'm just wondering so we're putting a lot of emphasis on the tutoring i'm wondering how we are going to measure the impact sorry of the of the tutoring programs in a way that we will know that was you know where the impact came from because of course they're
118moving back and forth from highly qualified teachers and to the tutoring so i'm just wondering how we're going to differentiate that all right dr randolph i'll kick it to you to talk through you know just our gold standard model and how we're identifying students and then measuring the impact of our high impact tutoring program so we've been very thoughtful about this and we have a research partner in brown university and the annenberg institute are considered leaders in tutoring nationally they've helped us design our our work and tutoring and we are doing a research study on it because the conditions are right and we can meet the needs of kids at the same time hear me say that so we all have matched cohorts of students so we're able to we're launching in 46 schools on
119monday and we will be able to compare those students we know a lot about them to match cohorts of students who aren't receiving tutoring right now we hope to grow this so it's available for all students so we've been really intentional around that design so that we can to your point isolate we're measuring across several dimensions so certainly academics right literacy or numeracy depending on the student area for tutoring we're also looking at seo measures right um and we're we're looking so we're looking kind of holistically at a student even around attendance and engagement and things like that sense of belonging is another area we're looking at thank you that's exciting to know that there's a research project included next question about measures since we are putting um so many eggs from so many different
120areas both from our regular budget and esther fund's entire advocacy centers same question is you know how are we going to be measuring the impact of those programs [Music] and and then within that hopefully measure the the the success of those programs around um behavioral outcomes suspensions and expulsions so that we can sort of gauge i know last year was a little weird because you know half the students were at home and the year before and well and then the year before it was a little weird because students went home so i'm just kind of wondering how are we going to be able to dig in and know that these advocacy centers are doing what we need them to do around helping us you know with restorative justice measures and yeah you know a few
121things again i want to highlight the the board's budget priorities are definitely represented in in our esther plan in fact the foundation for for building it we also have our focus outcomes that we will continue to measure we are keyed in on what outcomes we want for our students around literacy numeracy seo and their transitions if you remember back to our signature initiatives one of them specifically is around a research practice partnership um with with vanderbilt which you'll be learning more about in a couple couple of weeks that's another example of how we are monitoring and evaluating the impact of these programs now we have various partnerships happening the research practice practice partnership is one carey's talked about some of the university i'm evaluation happening i'm looking back at dr changus his team is all
122over the evaluate portion of our strategies and our essar plan and so we have identified particularly our high leverage investments and measuring the impact that those investments have on our intended outcomes around our focus outcomes but i will also yield to dr randolph or dr changus if you want to add anything to the evaluation portion of our high impact strategies i mean dr changus is the expert but we've been really intentional in that we are bringing resources to bear in addition to some staff and dr chang's team to run program evaluation and to make sure that we're getting return on investment across these so all i will add is that specifically with the question about behavior incidents obviously as i've said on the board floor and before in the past year monitoring data has been
123especially challenging in the past year however we can look at from our data warehouse at behavior over a range of dates and we can look at comparable data pre-pandemic in what's happening over that period of time and compare it to a reasonable amount of time in the current space but there are some challenges there but we you know we can establish a reasonable baseline thank you um and then to that same point um i can i want to be sure that we're not creating a system where teachers are referring students to the advocacy centers in the same way that in the past they were referred for behavior interventions so not to be like a broken record but i would love to see us talking about mandatory implicit bias training system-wide because i do think that
124could potentially play into referrals even to advocacy centers which are going to be a much more positive source of intervention and de-escalation but that's been my concern is that it's going to just be another version of certain certain students being referred for that resource i'll i was i didn't know if you had another question um so our advocacy center coaches um who are now in buildings are just now transitioning in because we've spent um several days weeks and dr springer training our advocacy coaches on our model um for support of students and that includes also the training that will happen um with our staff and so the intent is and we've said this from the very beginning advocacy centers are not in school suspension spaces there is a time limit there is a collaborative referral
125process that helps us monitor what supports are being provided in our advocacy center and when there are additional supports that are needed and so this model has been vetted it has been shared widely around what our intended outcomes and supports are for students in our advocacy centers we will continue to train our teachers every school kind of has has their plan of training for their teachers based upon the needs of their school implicit bias is definitely one of the offerings for schools as they create their pathway of learning but we will continue to train our coaches our teachers around implicit bias and the appropriate structures for advocacy centers all across our elementary schools thank you and thank you for your work dr springer um okay my next question is i see that we we are
126continuing to fund for nurses which is amazing and wonderful um i just kind of wonder where are we with nurses right now with vacancies and what sort of measures are we going to be able to take to and i know this is veering a little from esther although i think it's still related because we you know we continue to come up with funding for nurses but then we got to come up with nurses so i'm just kind of wondering where we are on that well we're fortunate that we um or um we're part of the elc grant that allows us to fund nurses and schools um this year and in conjunction with the funding sources that we have available um and i feel like i sound like a broken record here but just like in
127previous conversations around our teacher vacancies our bus drivers or nutrition services nurses are the same i mean what we're hearing from nurses right now is that they're being pulled in so many different directions expected to do a lot more as everyone is expected to do which is also um increasing the need for additional nurses in our schools so we are still recruiting and need nurses for our schools because our vision and our division of this board has been to get a nurse in every school and so we're still working towards that goal every school has a nurse assigned to the school we do still have a number of schools sharing a nurse where they might be there half day half day at a numbers school but the majority of our schools have a full-time nurse
128so we're still in need of nurses if you're listening if you know someone who is qualified and capable please send them our way because we're still in need of trained and qualified nurses to support us during this time and as we're beginning to navigate this pandemic more successfully okay i think that's all my questions about the esther plan and nice work on it i know that um i know that's a lot to work within those kind of templates and plans to create those applications all right any other questions about the asset plan before we vote i will selfishly say that if you signed up at pencilforschools.org to participate in tutoring with brightpath it's about five hours worth of modules that are quite intense but they are good and i feel prepared to meet my pearl
129home baby on monday for a 30 minute tutoring session and i continue to just challenge the community or even my board members that have had the capacity during the week to meet with the student for 30 minutes you can choose a child in your district you can choose a young child an older child i have a again a high school student so just something to consider all right with that um we've already had a motion to accept the asset plan as listed all in favor please raise your hand all right passes unanimously with one person missing and i do want to continue to acknowledge our two student board members who are here i know this is your first night but if at any point you feel like you have a question or you would like
130to respond please feel free to let us know just raise your hand and we'll call on you but they are because they were selected and not elected by the community they are unable to vote but they will weigh in just to offer student voice and continue to help us engage the community at large all right with that we'll move on to the director's report dr battle all right thank you again madam chair it's just a second to get the powerpoint moving here um board members you all should have a copy of the presentation in front of you you've also received an email version of my report for this evening first and foremost thank you for the perfect segue cheer bugs because i wanted to add my thanks and admiration to anjali and ebenezer for their
131willingness to serve their community and represent their fellow students on this board let's give them another round of applause [Applause] so let me tell you this work is not easy but it is extremely rewarding and i think you'll see that pretty quickly as you dive into the work of the board and start to get things done so welcome aboard and we look forward to getting to know you more in the months ahead and i also look forward to continuing to engage with you with our student voice leaders so again congratulations and welcome so now i want to shift a moment to celebrate and recognize the achievements of several schools after state accountability data was released to districts as a reminder last year schools were asked to conduct tcap testing with the understanding that scores would
132not count towards accountability unless they benefited them such as for exiting priority school status this year rose bank elementary was able to exit priority status after several years in that extra support network so let's give them a round of applause this is a great accomplishment that comes from a lot of hard work from this team and i've seen them in action they've been working extremely hard just like their peers all across the district we're also thrilled to celebrate glendale and lachlan elementary both which achieve reward status based on tennessee ready data showing the gains they made across all their student groups so let's give them a round of applause keep your hands warm because john overton high school and margaret allen middle school are exiting additional targeted support and intervention status as a result of
133the improvements they've made while blind cliff high school haywood elementary hull jackson elementary englewood elementary and jones padea are exiting targeted support and improvement status all in a pandemic year so kudos to those teams and i just cannot sing their praises enough our teams are working hard daily everyone from our principals our teachers nutrition services our bus drivers monitors everyone our parapros everyone's working so hard and it is evident every time i get an opportunity to visit a school and our students have returned and are doing great work really buckling down i'm enjoying and embracing every in-person learning day for this school year so kudos to everyone for their hard work last week we had the chance to go celebrate each of these schools and the leadership teams who made their achievements possible i'm so
134proud of these schools from the principals and their teams to the faculty and support staff all the way down to the youngest students and i wanted to show a short video we've made from our visits with us today and just a moment ago you did receive a cookie treat to announce that rose bank has exited the priority school status list [Applause] boys and girls i need you to right now to turn around and give a hand clap for the grown-ups standing right in front of you i'm listening so rosemary is a historic school we actually opened in the early 50s and then um so we we've been in neighborhood school for a very long time and then about three years ago we were recognized you know by the state as a school in need of
135support so we ended up on their priority status list so what this is so this is just this is a recognition of how hard they've worked i have i have the hardest working staff i am james brown i have the hardest working staff in the business they work so hard and they are they're conscientious they're driven they're concerned they want children to be successful and when you have that as as your team then this is the outcome on the right track yes so we're here to support i appreciate it [Music] [Applause] just informal yeah we will be congratulating and celebrating you the entire year so we wanted to personally come over and on behalf of your executives [Applause] to say thank you for all your hard work and recognize glendale as a reward school for
136the last year um making every child known we appreciate you and just want to say thank you this beautiful wednesday morning yeah i think building relationships that's one of our keys i think here to our success is that we literally we take it seriously to make sure that every kid feels welcome and to get to know them and not just the kids but the parents and our faculty as well [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we are [Music] [Applause] to exit the building and come out here as a symbolic gesture of exiting [Music] [Applause] thank you [Applause] principal wilson thank you for pulling your folks from their duties for a minute and coming outside we just want to stop by and deliver you some balloons hopefully you've already got some cookies for the day if not jason
137villa will be bringing somebody and we just wanted to celebrate you guys [Applause] we wanted to take a minute and celebrate haywood this morning i talked to you last week about the great news about the designation so we wanted to officially come out here bring you some balloons and celebrate with your staff how are you doing we just want to today by and say congratulations on your success last year and your destiny um and hopefully you've already uh received some cookies this morning for your faculty yesterday just wanted to tell you ladies thank you so much we appreciate the speeches is i'm very fortunate to have some really smart people around me and so all of y'all know that you can't do it by yourself i just get to sign papers and let them do
138their magic so anyways thank you i appreciate all the support it's been a wonderful wonderful wonderful supportive effort so thank you [Applause] [Music] all right another round of applause and i will just say again kudos to all of these school teams we have reward schools status schools all across this district our staff they're stepping up in so many ways you just wait for it more to come on this celebration end of high achievement and excellence for students for our staff this year and many many more years to come all right so we're going to switch gears into our kovin 19 update let's see if we can go to slide three perfect all right so kobe 19 remains a challenge to our daily way of life and the educational environment last week was a four day
139four day week and we had 504 students confirmed as positive for 19. with 2475 in quarantine or isolation that's down from the week before when 2971 students were isolated or quarantined among staff last week it was 75 confirmed positive and 108 staff quarantine are isolated the trend lines are going in the right direction however we've seen before momentary peaks and valleys in the overall trend and so we must continue to remain vigilant in protecting ourselves and others from the virus in response to the police from superintendents in our suburban and rural districts the commissioner penny schwinn reinterpreted the rules for quarantine remote learning to allow for classrooms and schools to be eligible for remote learning with a waiver that has to be personally approved by her a significant component in that approval appears to be
140the ability of the school or district to maintain staffing we have been fortunate that while staffing can be challenging overall we have been able to meet the needs of our students across the various departments and schools that serve them in fact i shared with the board last week a project that we launched in response to the needs of our schools and we've been met with pretty good success our relative success in this likely is likely a result of a high proportion of our staff being vaccinated which reduces the need to quarantine unless symptomatic and also helps our staff more quickly recover if they do contract the virus next slide please as a reminder here are covit mitigation strategies universal masking remains one of the most important mitigation strategies we have especially among our unvaccinated student
141population media reports indicate that nashville and memphis who have both stuck to our universal mass mandates have seen lower per capita cases amongst the student age population social distancing when feasible and we understand in many circumstances six feet is not feasible but to the greatest extent possible that is our guidance along with seating charts cohorting of students and other strategies to limit potential exposures in the school building washing hands using hand sanitizer and coughing into your sleeve remain best practices to reduce the spread of the coven 19 virus and other illnesses our custodial teams will continue using cdc approved disinfectants to sanitize buildings and contact tracing and quarantines are also critical to stopping cove and 19 from being transmitted in our buildings the medical science indicates that someone can contract covet and be contagious two
142days before they will test positive for the virus which is why it is so vitally important that we identify someone as a closed contact we keep them home until we know it is safe for them to return finally vaccines remain the single best thing we can all do to slow the spread of the virus and protect ourselves from serious illness if we do contact covet we know that president biden wants to roll out vaccine booster shots for those who are already fully vaccinated and if and when the fda approves this approach we'll work with our health partners to ensure our team members and students who are eligible to have access access when available we are still likely several weeks away from the vaccine being approved for children ages 5 through 12. next slide please now
143i'm going to shift a bit so that we can get a brief update on our map assessments that were conducted starting at the start of this school year next slide map results support two of our core tenants and you consistently hear us refer back to our core tenants the student data are part of supporting and monitoring a personalized learning experience for all students the segregated results by student group also help us identify inequities in our student performance the growth data from map are the primary reasons for literacy and numeracy focused outcomes our fall data establishes a baseline as we measure academic growth and literacy and numeracy over the course of the school year map data and the projections they provide are helpful in determining students preparedness as they transition from tier to tier or beyond
144high school map data also are important to several of our signature initiatives as are represented on this powerpoint slide next slide please now we will have you can go ahead and click through that slide we will have more detailed report on map results in two weeks as makeup testing just ended on friday and we're still digging into that data so we did extend that window just a bit just to accommodate students who might be in the quarantine space the measures of academic progress or math assessment were administered in grades two through nine between august 10th and 27th with an additional two weeks of makeups for students previously quarantined over 35 000 students were tested in language arts and mathematics with test participation rates above 90 percent in both subjects these results establish a new baseline
145for the 21-22 school year and assist us in identifying students in need of additional supports the preliminary analysis indicates scores have declined somewhat from previous years which is consistent with what we the entire state and schools across the nation saw last year so the data is looking to be pretty consistent from the conversations we've had during the spring and over the summer next slide please in addition to having step-by-step information and videos on our website to assist families in assessing and understanding the personalized student dashboard schools are distributing flyers and letters about the dashboard as well as doing call outs links to the student dashboard survey are available through our website and through social media and we encourage families to take the survey and help us plan for future assessments so we are pushing out
146the map data into the personalized dashboard that's starting to show up we'll continue to analyze lots of our data points as you recall as we ended out last school year we're extended the year by month with our promising scholars we've administered our map assessment but we also have our universal screeners happening um as well so we want to make sure that we are able to give you a fuller picture around where our students are and of course you know already our high-yield strategies in moving them forward and to close our performance gaps next slide please essential to many of our plans is engagement with parents to be able to track the progress of their students that's why we launched the personalized student dashboard in the end at the end of last school year this month
147and next we're going to continue encouraging families to sign up and get access to their students personalized dashboard many families already had access as the dashboard is housed in the infinite campus family portal schools just last week received flyers to pass out along with progress reports and we'll be working with our schools to help further get the word out to families about this useful service we also have a walkthrough on our website that shows the benefits of the personalized student dashboard and how families can use it to access the critical information we are currently in phase one of the dashboard and we're working to develop phase two along with tutorials we also have a survey where we're asking parents to let us know which features they would like to see in order to make the
148dashboard even better to show focus outcomes and the progress students are making to achieve them so we've already started this feedback process to make sure we're getting input and we can make the necessary adjustments as we move forward so again information on the website our schools are equipped with this information we also send information home with all students last week we were kicking off a campaign in our in our schools to get over 80 percent of our families enrolled and sign up in infinite campus so they can have access to the personalized student dashboard we do not want this valuable resource to go untapped so getting access is the key as parents interact with the personalized student dashboard they can give us feedback on what's useful about it and what additional enhancements we can leverage
149for the dashboard as we move forward and then finally i want to remind everyone of our ongoing celebration of schools campaign to highlight the great work of our school teams and what they're doing across mnps to ensure every student is known we are celebrating a new school every day that we are in session in the 21-22 school year so this calendar won't end you can you can find a school every single day in fact today we celebrate gateway elementary or the gateway to the great way as they call it gateway was opened in 1963 and is being led by principal ashley jackson who is new to the school this year after previously serving as ap schwab so please please please visit mnps.org celebrate to learn more about how you too can share in the celebration
150so we will keep celebrating all of our schools i mentioned earlier that there's a reward school in every mnps school more to come but we definitely would appreciate your support and learning more about the magic that's happening inside all of our schools and classrooms on a daily basis um so with that madam chair that will conclude my director's report and i will turn it back over to you thank you thank you very much for that report dr battle uh before we move on to the board discussion around mnps security board policy 5.501 are there any questions okay we'll go with miss tyler then mrs elrod and then mrs player peters i've had some parents and teachers in middle and high school not even just from my district but in other areas of the um throughout
151mnps who've said that they're a little concerned because their school is not cohorting their students the way that you're suggesting and so i was just wondering um i know that last year the the the principals were supposed to kind of check in and say these are the things that we're doing to prevent spread and if we cannot do them this is the reason why is that still something that you guys are doing do you have are there reasons why we know if these schools can or cannot do that cohorting and how can we let those parents know that so that they feel like they're in the loop yeah this is a recent adjustment that we've made internally we now require the seating charts and the cohort into the greatest extent possible particularly in our lower
152grades to help with our contact tracing and mitigating the spread of the virus so it is a shift that we made after we started to have the positive number of positive cases and the number of quarantines that we have so we've reinstituted that from our plans from last year to strengthen our mitigation policies strategies for this upcoming year but dr bellamy please add any additional details not a lot to add dr battle except that obviously is at the secondary level that becomes extremely more complicated right so um cohorting students at the secondary level can be quite challenging so and we are relying on seating charts as much as possible as well as patrolling hallways to make sure that we're utilizing the same simple structures that worked last year and making sure that you have traffic
153going specific ways and then things of that nature but i would also reach out to any parent that has questions any of our principles are accessible and would be more than happy to to discuss what what is and isn't able to be implemented in each individual building for sure yes ma'am here i'd ask y'all too then also on our website when we're looking at like the covid guidance on the mnps website it says that the school nurse is supposed to be the point of contact for all covet concerns but when you click on the contact your school nurse it takes you to nashville.gov and there's not really any way to figure out who the school nurse is and so i was wondering if there was a way that we could redirect it to maybe our
154school list where they could choose their school from that drop down and we can make sure that our nurse is included in the faculty and staff page of that or if there's something else that we could do so that it's easy for our parents to find the school nurse's information so that they can have their questions answered mr birthday yeah we'll look into that i believe nashville.gov just got redesigned so there's some broken links out there so we'll take a look at that and try to make sure it's the right link but there was at one point a health.gov on the health department website a listing of the school nurses yeah no it's not there anymore so thank you that's good to know um make sure that's everything all right i think that's all i
155had thank you all right mrs elrod excuse me thank you okay so um my first question is going to be about the nurses how many um nurse vacancies do we currently have dr springer can you recall how many vacancies we currently have excuse me yes thank you for your question at the last count we had about 54 nurse vacancies that number tends to be adjusted by the day as dr battle mentioned earlier about the challenges that we have with retaining nurses and recruiting nurses it's my unders i remember us all talking about many times that those are hired and retained by the metro health department and we are doing some additional work with them to help recruit and retain those staff have we found anything being particularly successful because we have such a high number
156of vacancies and it's an important role there is such a demand right now on health professionals that the strategies we once thought would help recruit and retain our nurses are not proving to be as successful that as we once thought they would be but we continue to be innovative and strategizing with the health department around what they're hearing and what the needs will be in order to recruit nurses to mnps but it continues to be a struggle just because of the demand and australian place on our health professionals right now i mean hospitals and other medical locations are having difficulty maintaining that staff as well when that staff is not available to do the appropriate quarantine processes and mapping who does that backup for them so while we have a number of vacancies in our
157schools every school still is assigned a nurse and so while they might not physically be in the building if there's a need for contact tracing they collect that information through the school team and they still begin that process so again every school has a nurse who will do the you know respond to the questions do the quarantining so on and so forth it does it is a coordinated effort i mean we everybody's having to pitch in right now getting information from our teachers our principals following up and reaching out as necessary but again we're very fortunate to have the partnership with the health department to have nurses in our schools who are truly leading the effort itself we are again i apologize for clearing my throat we are very lucky to have those nurses and
158being able to at least have the number that can be assigned to each school as that's much better than we have had in the past um that we do have a low number of not only cases but quarantines i understand that it's going to be increasingly difficult for those nurses particularly if they are assigned to multiple schools so i just wanted to make sure that we had it understood process a future does that in case of their absence my other question oh there we go um my other question is in light of public participation and asking for better recognition and identification of gifted students um in response to our map assessments i know we've talked about it many times whether it's been in committee or on the board floor but i just want to make
159sure particularly because there was so much discussion earlier today about that in response to our map assessments what kind of supports are activated in response of looking at those in our data meetings what kind of supports can be provided to students whether it's gifted to talent or not what is the smorgasbord of things that could be done dr bellamy is approaching the podium to respond about our structural process in response to the data we received and the meeting the needs of our students as it relates specifically to enrichment or identification for gifted services you'll recall matt nelson's presentation you know where there's a universal screening that happens right and that can be a first stage of course there's other ways that a child could be pulled out for that screening including parent request but then
160the process of um what will refer to response to intervention framework or at the rti squared framework we refer to as mtss here our first round of mtss meetings actually are going to happen next week where each quadrant each tier will come with their school team and will receive a variety of different resources and supports and collaboration as it relates to behavior sel and academics but that process kicks off at the school level when the school team their school psychologists sit around and look at results and and determine what students are in needs of what services so that it can be delivered through interventions or through enrichment if you have a child that's identified as being you know significantly above that the general general scores and in those sorry in those meetings we are not
161just considering their scores but also their growth scores within those decisions and supports so you're going to look you're not you're not going to look at any one data point as the whole story right you're looking at the child holistically and determining what level of services they may or may not need based on a variety and that universal screening is oftentimes just the first element that that will be raised you bring teachers into that conversation school psychologist is part of that team the administrative team is part of that conversation and you really look at each child and make every student known right and you're going to diagnose each children based on their data their needs and that classroom teacher is oftentimes going to have anecdotal data that is far more meaningful than just one data
162point in and of itself right and so it's all part of a collaborative process where they're going to discuss children on that level and oftentimes for your students receiving enrichment it's going to have to be significantly more than just a screening data point you'll see students in native enrichment um a variety of ways as a classroom teacher and and a little contrary to what we've heard a bit of we are continuing to expand our gifted and talented services our supports our teachers on on the ground and our commitment to schools have been you identify the students right and we will make sure that the supports are available for them and so we don't have a cap on students we want to serve through our gifted and talented or through our advanced academics or episode programs
163so i want to make sure that we're clear when we do our map assessments or data meetings um those are not the only time that your student can be assessed or recognized whether it's needing supports and gifted and talented or additional mtss supports that's correct just want to make sure we're clear on that absolutely thank you all right mrs player peters um in your report you mentioned about uploading the map data into yeah um what's the average turnaround time is it like three weeks two weeks i mean i have no idea but just as parents can start looking for after the kids take it even after the makeup um as we start that process thank you i'll invite dr chang and stuff to talk about um the question that dr chang is if you didn't
164hear it was was the the typical normal uh timeline of turnaround of data from the time of student assesses to it appearing in the personalized studies it's about one week we we didn't we did not upload the data until after the final makeup exams on friday that was the data was pulled on over the weekend and some of my team members are pushing the data into the into our systems uh and on the i.t side it it there's a little bit of cleanup that occurs but if not by the end of this week by the first of next week we anticipate it we'll be live great thank you all right mr little uh miss elros sparked a a really good discussion so we talked about the universal screening the rti mtss what what do we
165call this process in which we identify students based on the map map scores and the interventions we refer to to addressing student needs as mtss as a whole so the multi-tiered systems of support if you look at the state's manual they refer to it oftentimes as rti response to intervention or rti squared in response to intervention and instruction so we use the mtss umbrella to describe academic interventions behavioral interventions social emotional interventions and really all parts of the child holistically that way right so your mtss team could be discussing one student's needs in a behavioral setting while the next student's needs is purely academical and academic not academical and then you could have a student that that requires both right that they need some behavior interventions in order to access academic services the way they
166need and so in a in a perfect world after you give this assessment how how do we work with the parents to communicate that down you know your recommendations their feedback how does that then work so and i and i can we can talk offline but this seems like this is a whole process and trying to figure out and we don't have to take up time here but i'll be interested to know i think it's a great question and i'll give you a very brief answer this evening right um and i think when you see the pyramid we've shown before about our mtss structures and the public and parents in particular being our partners in understanding that the personalized student dashboard is a great huge first step in that connection right but that process should
167be ongoing it shouldn't happen just after a universal screening which happens three times a year it shouldn't just happen at report card time which happens at the end of each quarter or at progress report time ideally that's an ongoing conversation ideally it's parents logging in to schoology to infinite campus to the personalized student dashboard reaching out to to our teachers on a regular basis and understanding what's happening in the classroom and an ongoing connection but but a two-way connection right it's not just sitting and waiting for a teacher to communicate to you or the school to communicate to you but also proactively communicating you and your child's needs to the school um and and so i guess the short answer is ideally it doesn't stop and it's not just after those tests but oftentimes those
168tests tend to trigger more communications that way and updates that way but in ideal space it would be going on pretty well continually and last question how many before we created the personalized student dashboard how many parents were locked was the platform there for them to log in to see where their children were and if so if no how many parents were actually going into law again to find out you know i don't know if you have that yeah so the infinite campus historically has housed great like basic information so the personalized student dashboard is an expansive view of students all of our focus outcomes of everything from academics to discipline to graduation requirements so it is a more robust picture of a student's progress and of course our long-term goal here is to create
169more of that two-way communication where parents and students can like i want to know i want to read that a student is interested they want to know if their child is gifted or if we have more access to advanced academic like all of that information is is what's in our ideal space we will start to get in in the personalized dashboard and we can be responsive um too so it is it is a it is a more robust um platform for families and we were intentional about it going into the infinite campus portal so that we're not sending our families into various systems with different logins and passwords we wanted a one-stop shop for parents to be able to go and access that information okay so definitely last question so what is our goal to
170increase the number because even when i look at the esser plan responses like it may be 90 98 000 and we got 132 responses how do we create a robust plan whether it's meeting them at the car line at the tech center individual meetings to really help parents get on board and understand the process that development timely question mr our principals will be briefed on it first thing in the morning so i don't want to spoil too much right now but um we the the schools have been given um their letters to push out with um with progress reports last week um i think we're at about 23 of our parents right now i believe if i don't follow a thumbs up is that issue a few weeks ago we were at 23. okay um
171but we we will start a concerted effort starting tomorrow morning and working with our schools we're going to run that window through parent-teacher conferences because that's a natural time when parents are coming in or through teams regardless either way you've got a captive audience right there and so it's a great time to connect them and ultimately again the goal is is to create that ongoing cycle of feedback right and that's the way in which we'll do it so we've got a a concerted effort starting tomorrow that will be rolling out through the end of october with our parent-teacher conferences being the culmination in that when we hope to report back much much higher numbers to you smiling through the mask i just don't want to take it off and get scorned you can tell through
172your eyes sure mrs tyler yeah i also know that as a parent of student who's been in mnps for years and years that when their map scores come it even if they're before there was a portal we always got that information sent home in their folders and it told you what they scored and reading and math and it told you where that put them on which tier as far as intervention and it explained what each intervention was so that information should have already been coming home physically you know if in hand and i know sometimes it's hard to get everything from the school to your hands but yeah that's that's correct that is also another layer to trying to get that information to the parents in the best possible way i think you say that
173we just got to realize that that just hasn't worked and that's why i can appreciate this plan because just send it at home and parents really don't understand it like i mean they don't and so what he's saying now i think adds a layer an additional layer where it is partnership they have a plan to really reach out to parents because you're sending it at home just it's never worked i'm just letting you know that that's also been happening because you're asking how were parents getting into it and how are they receiving it and they spoke about online and i just wanted to make sure we knew that it's more than just one way that we've tried to reach out to families and for some families it works extremely well and it doesn't work for
174others just like an online portal is going to work extremely well for some families and not as great for others so i think we need to have something available in all the different formats so that we can reach everybody at where their strength is and what is going to work best for them but i was just saying right now the numbers are dismal and we gotta add in the extra layers of to get it out there that's what we're doing all right uh do we have any other questions mrs bush how many kids have opt-in for covet testing right now because i know the permission slips went out how many do we have so far um let's see dr springer do you have that number sean you made do you have the um total number
175of students who've opted in thus far through the student parent exact number but handbook was around 67 of people that had already provided their commercial forms of which that was about ten percent as of thursday of last week so we did another push we put back the deadline to try to get more people to fill out the permission okay and then my second question i know that daily we get colby reports positive cases from our students and our teachers how are we getting those numbers how are they reporting it is it going through the are they going out getting tested since we only have like that 10 percent that are opted in how are we getting these numbers that comes from the health department vr nurses um and yes that number is only reported if
176there is a confirmed positive test and they can come from going into urgent care and they can go into because i'm trying to understand all these numbers we get every day so they can go to other outside sources and then it goes right into health department health department then reports it to the schools yes or it could happen it could happen multiple ways sometimes the parents call us and report a positive case but the majority of them are coming through our nurses via our health department of confirmed positive covet tests but again these are all positive coveted tests and not just not just the word of mouth for our student cases and also for our staff cases yeah i just wanted to know because i know we get such a laundry list every day of
177so many positive cases so i just want to know where it's coming from because when everybody's not opted in for testing so i just wanted to kind of make sure i was clear let me be clear those numbers are not from testing or random testing in our schools these are confirmed cases where a student has been symptomatic been a close contact whether they be at home or school and they've been tested in that manner but the the the numbers we have right now are not due to our testing program or random testing random testing across our schools okay thanks all right any other questions or comments all right we will move on to board discussion mnps security board policy 5.501 complaints and grievances but to be clear the policy yes the board policies about complaints
178and grievances so i move that we review policy 5.501 and any suggestions for updating that policy during a governance meeting and then bring it to the full for the full board floor once the entire board has had a chance to review it do i have a second second all right it's been moved and seconded any discussion around moving the policy so we have a chance to review whatever suggestions are made around it in a governance meeting and then moving it back to the board floor for full review all right but go ahead yeah something for discussion so right ahead uh mrs masters um we so we've already spoken about having a governance committee meeting to talk about some other policies so our is what you're suggesting to also add this to that governance committee meeting
179yes so every policy that we review comes through governance policy committee meeting so that we can look at it ask questions of our attorney and then we bring it to the board floor to vote on it so that's just what i'm moving that we do okay and so then should we do that and then it would be spoken about on the board floor like after that like should we decide to make changes or yes well i mean in governance committee is an open meeting too right this committee is an open meeting but even when we discuss the policy and governance it still always comes to the board floor it just comes to governance first so that we have time to review it so that we're not sitting here reading through suggestions as we are being
180asked to vote on it because we typically have to have questions about returning to make sure that whatever updates we're offering or suggestions that we're making that we're discussing are in line with tennessee code and to the state law okay thank you for that clarification mrs bush okay so i just want to make it very clear right now i never asked for any changes to the policy for it to go back to my governance item for any changes this was put on the agenda and any board member could have had an opportunity to go back and review the policy that's the reason why the policy was put on the agenda so if there was any question because i'm not we're not trying to i'm not recommending anything to be changed by the um regarding the
181policy it was to discuss questions surrounding the mmps security and the process and procedures that took place so it doesn't have anything to do with changing any type of governance so i just want to make that clear well thank you if that's i want to know a protocol because i'm not asking for any changes no changes certainly so i think you want to make sure that it is coming if you're wanting to defer it so that everybody can have a chance to review the policy that is perfectly fine but i am not asking for any type of changes or any type of alterations to this um this this um this policy nothing dealing with governance this is only what's in place right now and what the questions are surrounding the enemy ps security department and
182the process and procedures surrounding this policy that is what this supposed to be about but if you're saying you want it to be reviewed but i want it back on the board floor for discussion just as i told you via text and via email and then when we spoke on the phone that because every policy is reviewed and discussed in governance that is why i'm asking it to be there so with that all in favor oh that's our go ahead so i'm sorry this is masters when we have when we talk about this policy and governance will we have the opportunity to talk about in the context of security issues and ask you know our attorney questions and within that context as well be honest that's why i wanted it in government so that we
183could have ms roberge and so that we could all understand whatever mrs bush was trying to get accomplished so this is roberge or dr sevier it has been the practice of this board to address policies first through the governance committee and then the second reading by by your own policy policies require two readings and that second reading occurs generally on the consent agenda because you've already dealt with sort of hammering out all the the questions and nuances uh if you wanted to have a discussion about how the policy is being implemented i think that's probably not uh within the realm of of the scope of the of the governance committee itself could i ask a more appointed question dr severe and mrs masters from mr roberge if it is dealing with personnel uh a specificity
184i mean it how do we handle that do we i'm assuming we cannot just how do we handle that i want to make sure i understand your question so i have a lot of questions okay that's why we so i think that's why we all went round rob in the past week trying to understand exactly what the request was for the agenda and that's why i ask that we talk about it in governance but we could have you hash it out for a long period of time and really understand what mrs bush was trying to get accomplished she would not respond to me more specifically so i'm not sure if maybe she'll respond to you and help you kind of flesh out where it should go and how we discuss it so right now the
185motion is to refer the complaints and grievances policy to the governance committee to echo what dr sevier said that is typically used to discuss if there should be any changes to the policy it appears that the confusion is coming from a lack of clarity on what this particular agenda item is about and so because there is an action item on the floor it would be my recommendation that that action item be voted on and see what the outcome of that vote is and then how would we address any questions miss bush had for i guess for her original request it could go on for discussion again i'm not certain that i under that i'm clear on what the request is and so it may be miss bush if you could clarify that request to shape
186the discussion so that it's not just a free-ranging again if this is about policy that is typically the board's purview individual employment matters typically rest with the director of schools okay so you give it sure so i think there's a couple of different options on how this can proceed first a vote on the motion that's on the table which is does the complaints and grievances policy need to go to governance for review that's the motion from there the board there could be another motion on what type of discussion to have or if there should be a discussion or there that could be the end of business and the meeting could move to announcements okay so i can either rescind my motion because it doesn't sound like she wants to make a suggestion even though it
187is listed as a policy discussion but she doesn't want to change anything about the policy so i can rescind it or we can just let out vote against um reviewing it at a future governance meeting correct all right we have a question from mrs alright go ahead and then i'll call for the vote i have a point of clarification with fran i just want to make sure i understand so fran has been clear she doesn't want to change the policy but she does want us to review basically the implementation of that policy in this specific instance because it's a review of those policies process and procedures though it's no change to that policy it does feel like it would be once again it's not a change it's true but it would potentially have a discussion
188about changes to it as a board discussion so would that fit in that process of having it in the governance meeting is that that's my point of view i don't want you asking mrs roberts i'm asking real quick if that's the perceived understanding of that there's maybe not a change to that direct policy but a change of how that policy is implemented does that go to governance potentially okay i think it's again i think it's still a little unclear on what is actually being discussed again if it is changes to the policy or um anything of that nature it is appropriate for the governance committee and so it may be based on this discussion that there should be a governance committee meeting to discuss if there's any changes desired by not just miss bush but
189all of the board okay and then mrs bush you had a question or comment so i i guess i'm gonna have to make myself clear again i am not trying to change anything about the policy period does everybody understand that yeah okay i'm not trying to change a policy i'm not trying to amend any of the policies not this policy i'm not doing that i want to have a discussion surrounding the policy not being followed questions about that that's what i'm doing all right there's nothing to do with that does that is that a discussion that we engage in around personnel either following a policy or not while my tenure has not been particularly long i'm that it's not generally how the board operates whether or not the director is following policy would come up
190within her evaluation and so that may be a better space for this to live in okay so as the motion stands it it still wouldn't fall under the purview of the governance committee then again based on miss bush's representations it does not appear so okay so what would be your suggestion if mrs bush wanted to support a change in i don't know compliance does she speak directly to dr battle because it sounds like that is not something that the rest of the board engages in i don't want to put words in your mouth but what would be a an appropriate next step for mrs bush if that's something that she wants to address or have addressed there was a lot there um and so i think the first step again is to take care of
191the pending motion second step is by policy there is a directive that board members reach out to the director of schools on employment matters i don't i can't cite the policy it's one point yeah one point something and there also could be a board vote on if this is something that the board wishes to continue to debate and discuss and have brought up okay okay so we'll go ahead and at least close out this motion so again my first step yep okay so again my motion was to review policy 5.501 and any suggestions for updating it during a governance committee meeting before bringing it to the full board it was seconded all in favor raise your hand all right all opposed all right it moves i'll abstain just because i it was my motion and
192it just feels stupid to vote against it i should have rescinded it but thank you all right so with that are the now i can open it back up for motions or for a closing of the discussion mrs roberts or dr sevier that was the action item related to the discussion there could be another motion made that i had alluded to previously or that the discussion could proceed it would be at the chair's discretion okay well is there a motion before we move forward with what's the discussion there is not one i move that we move forward with the discussion around the policy all right so he's moving that we move forward with the discussion around the policy do i have a second can you restate it just restate it into the mic mr little
193okay i'm sorry i i make a motion that we talk about the board discussion which is the board discussion of the war policy mnps security board policy 5-501 okay repeat that one more time the whole thing i'm sorry okay i make a motion that we have a discussion about discussion board discussion mnps security board policy okay do we have a second all right it has been moved by mr little seconded by mrs bush i'll open the floor for discussion what would be the appropriate i'm sorry okay mrs masters yeah okay sorry i'm sorry so what would be the appropriate way or format for us to get an update on the current you know the status of the security discussion or are we is it done uh i guess this is a really a question for
194mrs roberge or dr battle if you wanted to chime in so the motion was for a discussion amongst the board members and so the appropriate way to proceed here would be for the board members to have a discussion on the topic as moved so and i want to make this clear for the rest of the board and for the viewing public that we between about four or five of us board staff board attorney myself and ms bush we went round and round with tsba to understand exactly what the request was how it should be listed and then how we could support it so that's why this seems a bit confusing because there just was not any specificity so this is again a discussion since that was how it was asked to be listed uh this
195is elrod thank you um it is not my desire to have a discussion without information being provided um we've had a discussion previously and there was not information provided in advance of it i think that prolonged the discussion and it frankly was not very effective that was my hope in us moving it to a committee was allowing us to be better prepared as it's not a change to the policy which we all could quickly and easily access at this current time but it's about more specifics of how that has been followed or not followed in individual or group settings and i think that that deserves some respect of having the information to us so we can review it in advance and of course have a more robust conversation that respects the potential real issue that's
196at hand so i don't really want to have a discussion without having materials ideally in advance but particularly at this time and so that would be my concern with having a discussion on the board floor like the last time where there was not time to review it and to give it the appropriate amount of what we're supposed to do for board um education and you know preparation mrs bush uh let me just be clear every board member got every info all the information from mr martinez there was nothing that you all have not received to review so let's be clear about that every single thing that mr martinez officer martinez who is now gone who left our district is no longer with us who tried desperately to get our attention we all got the same
197information and we got it so you've had time to review the information secondly if you had a question about the policy you all had time to review the policy because it was on the agenda just like anything else that we want to review and we want to ask questions about so it has never been anything that you have you are not privileged to so you all have the information so it's nothing that you don't have you have officer martinez every single email that he sent to the board regarding his ask for an appeal he also sent follow-up emails that everyone received and if you didn't receive it please let me know because we were all on the email so tell me what it is that you have not received go ahead mrs elrod i'm so
198sorry um my response to that would be if it's for information that we have already received there's no new information here then i don't know why we'd be spending time to discuss information that's not new to us if it's purely information that we've received and it's a personnel issue that is being taken care of but again there's no new information and there's no policy changes then that does not seem that it is a useful um time for the board as we i i will trust our colleagues that they have read those emails as they have come um be that from him or from legal or from hr whomever but if there's truly no new information then yes i really don't understand why we would have a new information or discourse about this and that's just
199my statement all right mrs masters i'm going to form this as a question understanding that it is at the chair's discretion since this is a discussion to decide whether or not you want to invite staff members to answer the question but here's where i am so in reference to policy 5.501 page 2 lines 17 18 and 19. that allows for an employee to appeal a decision to the board by making a written request to a complaint manager and then those materials are promptly forwarded to the board i at this point have not received such materials and so my question if it seems appropriate within this forum for it to be answered is is i think we have 30 days from the point of receiving it i'm not sure how long they have to give it
200to us anyway is there such an appeal in process at this point should the board be expecting or seize those materials and then exercise that 30-day so i feel that's kind of the only thing policy related that i can come up with that would i think helps shed some light on where we are with this in relation to the board we can ask mrs bush yes that's exactly where i was going with the discussion because we have not received that information from hr that we should have received based on the appeal by mr martinez and seven other officers we have not received that information so that's what the discussion was going to be around is ask those questions why haven't we received that information so that we can review the information so that's where we're
201going with this um giving that time to talk about it and i will be able to articulate that information so that everyone be clear about what was not followed in the policy that we should have been receiving from their appeal because they went through appeal process and it was done it was denied and the next opportunity was to have the board they appeal it to the board which they did file the appeal which we would we have not received anything i appreciate the clarity now mrs bush this is why we were going around with emails and calls and texts to try to understand what it is you were trying to get done so the board can only discuss so much without at the very least leaning into our director who oversees all of the staff
202i would again recommend that we at the very least tap into dr battle and not just leave it as a board discussion where we are moving off of hearsay versus concrete fact or at the very least um foyer requests this is roberge do you have any thoughts or suggestions on how to move forward with this new information that has come to light about what the intended goal of the agenda request is i'm sorry i don't know if the full board is not up here go right ahead mitchell burst again this is supposed to be a board discussion and not a back and forth with staff with staff and so as the board's attorney i would recommend that the discussion take place if there is specific information requested listing that out would be helpful thank you
203i wish we could have gotten that information before tonight so with that i still have a um statement made um i'm sorry say it again i have a statement to make go right ahead mrs um to your to what you just said there's no hearsay there's never been a hearsay about of getting clarification on where we are with this particular situation with the mnps security department everyone knows right here in this table all the issues the grievances the mountain grievances and complaints we're currently have 33 officers employed 33 which were down so many we couldn't even pull one officer in every school my major concern is security around these children and if our officers are still not in getting their due diligence and getting their fair opportunity to have some type of justice and we
204continue to try to spearhead or backpaddle to try to stop it from happening because we have an issue here we have a security issue here and we have a issue of our children being having the support they need for safety so we have a problem here we have a serious problem with security and so they went through the process and some of these officers are my constituents so they have come and they have done their due diligence by following the right complaints and going through the right steps so there's no hearsay this is all information that i wanted to present and this is where we are so that's what my statement is is that we continue to do this every single time when it comes up for discussion if there's something coming up when it's
205very important for our kids now ms roberge i do want to make clear that when we specifically asked miss uh bush about this that we discussed the idea that we've already hashed out the conversation around security and that that will move forward under dr battle we can have discussions at um during director's evaluation or even uh with mrs player peters who was working as an advocacy liaison with security guards so with that she is out of line because we've already had that discussion now she wants to bring another discussion or even updates to a policy that is appropriate and is there anything that i'm missing yeah you're missing everything it doesn't happen i was not asking you mrs bush okay go right ahead mrs roberts number 14 through 21. go right in the appeal this
206is where we are and this was the question surrounding the mnps security department this is a totally different go right ahead mrs roberts don't you do that again given the contentious nature of the discussion it may be more productive for there to be a motion on if this if this warrants continued recurring conversation so that the issues that miss bush is raising can be addressed the issues that miss elrod are erasing can be addressed that may be a productive way to move forward all right then i will entertain a motion ah we do need to vote on mr little's current motion can you repeat that mr little so we might vote on it and make a motion been getting the mic cut off tonight uh make a motion that we have a discussion about the
207mnps security board policy complaints and grievances all right it was moved and seconded all in favor please raise your hand yeah the motion was on the board floor so again we have to close out the motion so please raise your hand if uh if you agree discussion is over for some all right so we have two in favor all opposed please raise your hand only force emotion fails so we continue the discussion there's an emotion on the floor anymore his motion was to discuss so considering yeah oh i'm so sorry you're right so now we need a motion to a motion to move forward in some way come on somebody i know what i want but i don't know how to make it i'm sorry mrs masters i know what i want but i don't
208know how to make an emotion just just try we we all trying out here i got you all right um mrs oh okay mrs elrod um my motion is that um any outstanding materials that are to be delivered by the board a list of those materials that's outstanding emotion is that a list of outstanding materials is provided to the director of schools and to the board and in response to [Music] the appeal that we have not received information for all right do we have a second oh yeah that is it's not microphone working all right mrs master seconds yeah i'll second that that's what i want yeah i'll try my best i'm so sorry guys i stumbled over that um my emotion is that a list of materials that are needed for the appeal that
209has not um that we have not received materials from that that list of materials is provided to the director of schools and to the board and i'm being stopped just as a point of clarity there isn't a current appeal the letter that was submitted was submitted by mr martinez right and mr martinez is no longer an employee that's true okay so i'm sorry if i could clarify so this was listed for one person for a personnel there were multiple signa there were multiple names listed but not all of those individuals have grievances the policy doesn't recognize group grieving necessarily it is my understanding that dr barnes sent a letter to mr martinez stating that there is not a current appeal so that is my understanding of where the facts currently are okay i resend my
210motion mrs bush i'm going to make it very clear on the board floor and i'm going to make it clear for the public all you're doing is covering this up there has been an appeal and they have done it in writing it is not one person and mr martinez is not along with us but there are seven other officers that signed onto the appeal and it was not just one specific it included what was in 5.5.501 so i want to make it very clear on this board floor for the public viewing that this is nothing but a cover-up because they went through the right channels and this is not a shock that you addressed this doctor um i am speaking right here but i asked you to address doctor here so i'm able to mrs
211roberge please take a seat because all uh all stances and questions should be addressed either to myself or to dr battle so try again and i'm going to make it very clear she can sit down i don't care about that because at this point this is what y'all do this is nothing but a complete cover up and i'm going to make it clear on the board floor and i'm going to make it make sure it's clear for the public we have a mnps security problem they have gone through the proper process and steps to get their appeal they have gone through everything they could possibly do to exercise their rights for justice for their department and it has failed to have some type of solution no resolution and they have gone through the right proper
212channels and it doesn't matter if mr martinez is not here you have seven other officers that have signed on to this appeal and you all have decided to find a way to manipulate it so that it cannot be um the appeal cannot go through just as they could even get an outside investigation like you said so we can stop it now but i want to make sure i was clear on this board for what y'all are doing that's good all right i want to make sure [Music] i'm taking another stab at emotion all right uh my motion is that fran uh directs her concerns and stated needs to doctor battle and follow up to the um unapproved appeal all right is there a second i'll say it again one more time my motion okay point
213order go ahead i mean oh go ahead mrs player peter can you speak into the microphone just to make sure everybody hears you so i think there's a there's a clarifying question that has to happen um is there an official appeal there has been correspondence for a request of appeal but has there been an appeal to truly process for an aspect i think that's i mean i'm going to stop there we're all confused so you're not by yourself okay well i was gonna i didn't want to complicate it so i think we need to start there is there a formal appeal there has been correspondence there has been there has been correspondence about the security guard issue the question is is there a formal appeal let's stop there well we don't we can't address that
214because it has been determined that this is a board discussion so this is something that we as individual board members either ask directly to dr battle and then have her bring to the board if that you know if a change to a policy or governance needed to happen but so can i can i offer a friendly amendment to me all right please so yes what you said what was your emotions of trying to direct your concerns so i will make a motion that miss bush directs her concerns and state it needs to doctor battle the chair and the chair of do you have a personal committee no we have an advocacy committee and frankly mrs player peters you are acting as a liaison so you can be included we can cc you on anything can
215you withdraw your motion i would draw my motion i'd like to make a motion to a point i make a motion to ask the chair to appoint a haddock personnel committee ad hoc mrs player peters you were already assigned as the ad hoc committee okay so i mean when we had the first discussion around security right you are right okay you we did that so i make a motion that mrs bush gives her static concerns to me it stated to the stated personnel committee to have a discussion about this issue so this is so just so we're clear though we cannot have board members talking about personnel just because of ferpa laws and because it's not under our purview so it has to be worded in a way that still falls under a state law
216that does not take um correct yes does not strip the director of her duties so as we when we originally began this conversation around security the first go round you began to liaise between seiu i'm sorry between the union and some other members i separately had conversations so we got the ball rolling if your suggestion is that we pick that back up or that you want to have conversation with them to make sure that they understand appellate processes miss bugs can i make a suggestion yes please as a first step since there seems to be confusion on what has happened with mr martinez's letters and what the responses were i will work with dr barnes so that you all have that information along with the rationale and the procedural posture of these appeals after that
217information is received ms bush if or any other board member if they would like to put it back on the agenda for discussion it can be tailored in that way and if the board would like to discuss it the board can discuss it and if they would prefer not to discuss it they can do that as well so if that is just a suggestion for how to proceed to kind of address some of the confusion now that we've had some clarity about what the goal of the agenda request was yes correct okay so does that require emotion are you okay yeah mrs roberge she says no frida's motion is still on the floor right if the disc i think you could also at this point just close the discussion unless there was an objection i
218withdraw my motion okay so the emotion has been withdrawn we will close the discussion and move on to announcements all right we'll begin with our student board members who have had a riveting yes please know that you can pass if you'd like ebenezer will begin on your end um i don't really have any announcements but i would just like to take this time to you know thank all of you for especially um giving me a warm welcome i mean both anjali and i and i think from what we've seen today it's you know it's evident that we're going to be learning a lot especially in the next two years and i just want to say thank you for the opportunity that's pretty much it thank you very much all right mrs poopo walker um i
219want to congratulate glendale on being a reward school i want to um let everybody know september 17th this friday is future burroughs night at hillsboro for the football game all uh middle school or elementary schoolers can come and letting everybody know to tell your friends in the class of 2022 that the tennessee promise application is open it's time to start applying thank you all right mrs bush i just want to make sure that i'm i'm clear i understand my announcement is is that the policy 5.51501 was not followed period there was a formal complaint and appeal that was sent it doesn't matter if it was a one page or two pager a former plc is what a former appeal does and that is stating their state your grievances and what you what your ask is
220and i just want to make sure that once again the viewing audience have witnessed this tonight and understand this is what the board does this is what happens when we're trying to get some type of solution when it comes to our employees who have become deficient in their work because of poor poor poor leadership and this is the result of why we're losing officers this is the result of why our students are in such harm's way because we continue as a board to ignore the problems that these departments are having which highly highly impacts our children but we can keep this up and god forbid that nothing happens to our children because i want to make this sure that i am very firm that i pray that nothing happens but our children are highly impacted
221by the decision and that these that these leaders that these the poor leadership that we have in these departments and that's the reason why we're suffering and that's the reason why we're not going to be able to be successful as a district because this is what we do and this is another example of what is happening and everybody tonight got a chance to see it exactly and we should be ashamed of ourselves ashamed you can fight me all day long but at the end of the day the results are the results the results will be the results and i don't have to say no more because it always comes true but god forbid and nothing happens to these children because we have failed them because we amongst ourselves want to want to be catty and
222and and try to figure out a way to hide and cover up that's what we do that's why we'll never move forward but my care is for these children whatever your personal agenda is it's not mine i'm gonna continue to fight for these students i'm gonna continue to be a voice and i will not be silenced even when you think you think you you think you have an agenda to silence me but it doesn't work so i'm gonna continue to do what i do my compassion is for this district and for these students so that we can make sure that they're successful and that's what i'm gonna continue to do so whatever your agenda is trying to silence me it doesn't work this is all recorded and people will be able to see for themselves
223of who we are as far as the safety for our kids and academically how we're moving this district and that's my announcement mr little yes ma'am i want to say next tuesday ruby major will be celebrating their designation as a 2020 2022 national ptl school of excellence and so we'll be doing a celebration next week next saturday september the 25th i have a virtual district four community meeting with miss patterson who leads the ct works some of the ct work at mcgavock and also being votes who is the chair of the mcgavin freshman academy just to get a chance to put out in the community great things that are happening at mcgavig and then being able to answer any questions from parents lastly i had a really good meeting with some of the district staff
224shout out to dr bellamy dr changus i got a lot of clarity around the plans i'm coupled with tonight and i don't think dr bellamy is here but he is a man that has a lot of courage and i can appreciate that it was a breath of fresh air to just hear him talk about his vision for the district academically well thank you thank you mrs vice chair elrad thank you um all right first i would like to recognize that it's college week at haywood elementary and college and career month not just a week at john overton high school additionally both of these schools were just recognized this afternoon or this evening so sorry in the director's report in response to their movement for needing additional supports so congratulations to them and thank you for
225continuing to do the good work and not just providing support to our students but to their students families and really focusing on their whole whole child additionally i would like to thank my colleagues for putting their faith in me again as vice chair of the board um again i i know our desire is to have a professional working governance model and i continue to look forward to us improving that and working on that throughout the upcoming year mrs player peters uh yes i'd like to offer my condolences to jermaine norman's family he passed away he was a school bus driver here in metro schools his wife was one of my classmates at fisk university and so i just want to offer my condolences to the norman family i know it's lost to have someone so
226young to be able to who passed away and also had a great impact with his job here at mmps being a bus driver also flu shots starting tomorrow are available for free tomorrow in my district at glencliff media center i'm hopefully my work schedule doesn't hold me up i will be there tomorrow getting a flu shot so if you go on the website there's um places from september 15th to october 28th to get your flu shot hopefully so you can stay safe this winter and then last about need school yay to glencliff for exiting their status they're on the video all right i'm done thank you mrs masters thank you so i just i want to first thank linton middle school i gave a book talk there today they're recognizing september as national literacy month
227and i got to share with them about a book that i really enjoyed called clean getaway by nick stone and it's historical fiction and i think they liked it so it was really fun and it was great to get into litten and see what's going on i also wanted to mention that maplewood high school is celebrating four years of the relationship with ascension st thomas they have a community health clinic there where they've been serving the community for four years and i actually had the honor of touring that facility more than four years ago while it was still under construction and so it's just really exciting to see that it is still thriving and they'll be celebrating that thursday morning i also wanted to mention for any hunter's lane parents that are still tuning in
228from home um that the the parent academic advisory team is still seeking members um they meet three to four times a year virtually and by emailing principal kessler you can join that group i want to thank noaa's academics committee for meeting with me yesterday i thought we had a really great discussion around um advanced academics a lot of the things they were talking about tonight um the intersection of that with sel and i'm also really excited that i'm gonna have some stuff to share with them because it happens to be what we talked about in our last teaching and learning committee meeting so i've asked dr david williams if he could share that information with me in in some shareable form some cleaned up form so i can follow up with noah about that and
229last but definitely not least i want to talk about the parent advisory council and all of their amazing work and they met on august 31st virtually had more than 200 folks on that call which i and i really need to thank mnps communications for sending out the information about that via email to all of our families i think that really affected participation this past saturday i joined the pac members at the downtown public library for a screening of the national public education foundation's film and then we had a discussion afterwards and it was really exciting partnership with all those groups and with the library and as bb mentioned during public comment they'll be having eight more screenings at library branches the next one is in bordeaux in october and you can find information about that
230but i encourage all of the board members to go to the library screening in your district because community members are there and then you can talk about stuff and it was just it was neat i felt like i was like back in a class having a discussion it was fun um and then finally on september 28th at 4 p.m right before our meeting we will be having it's an advisory council meeting in essence but i will be then handing the floor over to our parent advisory council where they will be hosting a town hall style discussion featuring information about our diversity equity and inclusion initiatives and about our parent dashboard and data with special guests from our data team and our dei team to talk with the community about that and i think it's a
231wonderful intersection of advocacy and the work that they're doing because they're really more than just parent advisory council their parent advocacy council and and i love the direction that that's going and i'm sorry i had so many announcements i do need to also say though much appreciation to everyone on the board who reached out to me when we had a family tragedy recently we lost my mother-in-law way too soon as a result of covid um which she contracted even though she was fully vaccinated so breakthrough cases are happening in our community and if you are eligible to be vaccinated and you haven't yet been please do to help protect the others the more vulnerable in our community and i really appreciate my fellow board members and the members of the pack for for um reaching
232out to me during that difficult time thank you mrs masters uh mrs tyler um i just wanted to remind everybody that mnps has extended the due date for our required annual permission forms um to this from last friday to this coming friday september 17th so they should have either come home in a hard form in at the very beginning of the school year or you can go to permissions and that is with an s it is plural permissions.mnps.org and when you get there you will need to have already signed up for infinite campus because you have to enter the email that you use for infinite campus and you will also need to know your child's school id number so that you can complete the forms for your for your child and it covers everything from
233um if they're allowed to have media exposure if they're allowed to share pictures of your child too if they're allowed to do random testing for covet on your child if they're allowed to so it's all the permissions for the school year and you can choose to uh let the district know your your thoughts on what you want and don't want for your child so that is due this coming friday if you don't have the hard forms again you can go to permissions.mnps.org all right um new student board member angelique um thank you first i wanted to just say thank you to all of you for allowing me and admiser um this wonderful opportunity to get a behind the scenes of what happens um especially in our own school district my announcement would relate to another
234youth-led organization that i'm a part of mayor's youth council we actually had our first in-person meeting yesterday safely masked and distanced when possible we are preparing for our annual mayor's youth summit and that's going to be on wednesday november 3rd and that's open to any student and adult in the metropolitan nashville area it's a great opportunity and we would love to have anyone be there it's actually mainly comprised of mnps students and yeah open invitation more information to come thank you thank you so much for that now we had a couple of forgotten announcements so i'm going to go to dr battle mrs elrod and mrs player peters before we conclude not an announcement just a clarification earlier when we were speaking about nurse vacancies i want to clarify there are not 54 they're 31.
235okay so that correct number of nurse vacancies is 31. every school does have an assigned nurse but we do have 31 positions still available to field thank you thank you mrs elrod the mrs player peters thank you so much i forgot to mention and i i really apologize that mnps is going to be participating in nashville pride this weekend i really appreciate everyone's internal help on that whether it's through the support hub or through our individual schools and those leadership groups i really appreciate mnps supporting that decision as you can see we have flags up we have shirts we will be in the parade and we also have a tent spot that is probably not the right term but we have a spot also at pride for both day thank you my gracious onside appreciation
236on saturday and sunday and we will be there to of course answer any questions and give support and frankly to show visibility to our students and staff so i appreciate once again mnps being involved in that i i asked for it wasn't sure we were going to get it so i really appreciate it and i look forward to seeing everybody this weekend mrs player peters um in absence of our fellow board member dr gentry um this thursday september 16th uh from six to seven p.m we will have a public meeting regarding the robbery little school um and so i always like to let the public know um about that so this thursday 6 p.m 7 p.m at robert e little library 3200 kings lane 37218 for your gps and we'll discuss um the building um
237usage yeah building usage there we go that's it all right so yes to echo that we have a lot of different building buildings that are vacant right now so if one is in your area please just be on the lookout for information on how you can make your voice heard about the future use of that building we just had one around the future use of buena vista and i'm sure there will be more to come so yes reminder about the the lillard conversation on thursday i could say so many different things but lachlan englewood rose bank that are all in my district congratulations for your new status and to my home school jones where my baby attends congratulations to them and be there no for their business oh step nope one last thing uh the
238first meeting in october will be cancelled because it falls during fall break so we'll be working with dr battle and her staff to make sure that all contracts or immediate needs of the district are met either before that meeting on october 28th or at the second meeting in october be there no further business this meeting is adjourned [Music] this has been a service of the metro nashville network if you would like to see this presentation again or for more information about this and other programs visit nashville.gov [Music] you