08/10/21 MNPS Board of Education

001cookville cavaliers the lacrosse team includes players from several metro schools including mlk hume fog and hillsborough big congrats to the state champs since lacrosse is not yet sanctioned by the tws double-a the team traveled to alabama kentucky east tennessee and around middle tennessee to play their games and finish the season with a 15-3 record before ending triumphantly in the state championship let's give them a round of applause [Applause] look at those chains congratulations okay boys [Music] [Applause] thanks for coming can we give them one more round of applause [Applause] and with that um congratulations again young people and your families on this feat but with that we will begin our public participation you will have three minutes to speak your piece to um mention anything that you would like us to keep in mind your

002name will be listed on the monitors uh you will hear this sign when your minute your time is up and we would ask you to close out your sentence and return either to your seat or exit through the side door with that we will begin with bible and negron all right jack wiley [Music] um could i have someone checking the hallway and see if there are members of the public who would like to speak who are listed for real we'll give the first two listed time just to see if anyone is in the hallway we'll move on to jenny halterman laura dietrich we have someone going out to check so we'll come back to these four but i'm gonna keep going until we they're coming in it's just trafficking okay fanny sung whalen please feel

003free to come on up good evening chair members of the board my name is fanny sung whelan i'm a parent of a first grader at aiken elementary my if my address is needed i'm happy to share with the board in private after the meeting i first want to thank dr battle and those board members who voted to reinstate a universal mass policy for mnps in-person learning to address learning losses as well as social and emotional needs are on everyone's priority list schools need to stay open in order to do that and without vaccinations masks are our only next step so thank you for believing in science and making the choice to keep our kids teachers and staff safe i'm further addressing the board today to ask you to consider a layered approach to mitigating the

004spread of covet in our schools specifically by supporting an alternative lunchroom plan the regulations we have now are less strict than that than what we had for the alpha variant without a hybrid virtual option schools are fuller this year than last i do realize the difficulties and the logistics of an alternative lunch plan would bring but i also fear that packed cafeterias with massless kids and little room to spread out will turn into a super spreading event within our schools i believe it's imperative that we tackle limiting the spread of covid from all angles and looking at cafeteria seeding is one of them i realize it's not ideal for kids to continue eating in the classroom as many of them did last year as teachers need a break too but there must be a way

005that schools can better utilize the space that is available to them both inside and out perhaps half or more of the cafeteria the cafeteria room could be moved outside which would allow for more space inside to distance between kids this would not likely require more supervising staff thereby freeing teachers to have their much needed break i know of at least one metro school that has asked parents to send a towel for their child to eat on in the school lawn another factor to consider is that any changes to lunchroom policy would be temporary only until our youngest kids can be vaccinated the delta variant has been dubbed the virus of the unvaccinated and the largest cohort of unvaccinated are the younger kids this variant is expecting children at a more rapid rate and the effects

006of this variant seem to be more damaging to them our students are vulnerable our rates of infection in our community are climbing we have to continue to do everything we can to keep kids teachers and staff safe and applying all mitigation strategies before coveted spread occurs in our schools is one way to ensure that everybody counts or nobody counts thank you for your time thank you very much for community members just entering the room we'll start back at the top of the list if you are here for public participation meaning you are here to speak to the board you will have three minutes to address us and you may either return to your seat or exit through a side door once you hear this noise your three minutes is up and we ask that you

007finish your sentence and either send us an email completing whatever you were going to say or feel free to come back to cs the second tuesday of next month with that we'll go back to bible and negron all right jack wiley jenny halterman laura dietrich daniel stafford thank you good evening members of the board my name is daniel stafford i have a second grader who just started his first day in second grade at lachlan elementary today i originally signed up for the same reason the fannie who just spoke did to you know implore the board to adopt a strict mass requirement to keep our children and our community safe uh the board has done that and so i came tonight to say thank you you guys made the right decision and i've been sleeping a

008lot more soundly over the past few evenings i'd also like to echo the previous comments that we do need to look more closely at cafeteria policy but mostly i want to use this time uh a few moments to preempt some of the comments i expect you will hear given the length of the speaker list and say that in making the vote you did last thursday you did in fact strike a blow for freedom uh the freedom to go to school safely to be free from other families making medical decisions for you by sending infected students unprotected into classrooms and lengthening the spread of a dangerous pandemic so i thank you for that and thank you for your time thank you mary klein barnes hi my name is dr mary klein barnes and i can share

009my address privately i do have a graph that i want to share with everyone may i approach originally when i signed up to speak today my plan was to advocate for mass requirement in schools for safety but things have been moving so fast with kovid and i want everyone to refer to this graph so that you're aware of how rapidly the number of hospitalizations are rising in children right now in tennessee before i came to this meeting i found out that there are several children that were previously healthy that are in the hospital at vanderbilt pick you right now on the ventilator with kovid so when i first signed up to talk um i was going to be advocating for mass and then today i had prepared a speech where i was going to be

010advocating for the best masks the k n 95 mats for kids and i was going to talk about how we really need to have a policy for children dying in the classroom for safety so they have cohorts my own children attend metro nashville public school this delta variant is dangerous the graph shows the rising number of hospitalizations of kids in tennessee and i'd like to thank you as members of the school board and school superintendent you are being asked to make many decisions during this pandemic that relate to public health more than education and the politics are very thick in our state especially at the state government level thank you for applying the ethical principles of equity paternalism beneficence non and non-maleficence over autonomy this coveted crisis certainly dictates that be done so i originally

011i had planned on advocating for the portable hepa filters and classrooms including the portable classrooms in the cafeteria and the gymnasium a portable hepa filter for every classroom and i had planned on advocating for outdoor dining and construction of a pavilion with picnic tables for the children to eat outside but what i'd like to do now is call your attention to the covet thermostat that you use last year the coven 19 thermostat and um i i'm sorry i'm upset do i have one more minute or is my time over i'm sorry your time is over but please feel free to either to email us or to come back next month thank you for your time i think that the coveted thermostat needs to be looked at today because our score is eight and that's virtual

012thank you david brooks katrina green sarah mannis pat mcdonald laura merritt gregory o'loughlin gregory thank you members of the board my name is greg o'lachlan i'm a former mmps teacher a member of the inaugural class of the teacher leadership institute back in the day of earl wyman and dave moore i'm the founding director of the educators cooperative it's a non-profit based here in nashville that supports teachers in all sectors and in all stages of their careers some of our teachers started teaching last year and some of our teachers are celebrating more than 40 years in the classroom we are entirely for teachers by teachers many of whom are amazing teachers here in mmps shout out to our program director amy nystrand who taught first day of school today fourth grade at cole nice work yeah

013excellent her and all the teachers i'm grateful for this opportunity to share details of our latest program report which i've provided each of you with copies there thank you for ensuring the safety of everyone in this room and our students by mandating masks as well last year we provided hundreds of teachers with thousands of hours of facilitated professional development moderated workshops resources and support to help navigate the changing modalities we created a report to help us understand more clearly the experience of teaching last year the types of supports that teachers found effective i've provided each of you with a copy there you'll see both a measure of our impact and the experiences of teachers as well as the stories of teachers working in extraordinary circumstances some highlights there include 88 of teachers had their teaching

014setting changed at least once last year and 63 of teachers were required to teach in three different settings virtual hybrid and in person each of these switches require dozens of hours of recalibration of lessons rewriting assessments reconfiguring lesson delivery each switch adding countless hours of work communication resetting of norms and classroom expectations each switch again subject to both political and epidemiological factors this and many other reasons led to more than 80 percent of teachers reporting feeling isolated and more than half of teachers surveyed considering leaving the classroom as a result a key factor that helped them feel supported and provided them with access to a community of learners and resources where these collaborates calls it was a free program open workshops hosted virtually every single school night from march 2020 through may 2021. we created

015a space for all teachers where they could receive live regular facilitated support and collaboration to address the challenges created by these circumstances we connected teachers directly with professors artists sel specialists community leaders observers and more to ensure that they had what they needed in order to best support their students teachers adapted to remain flexible and focused and handled every curveball thrown at them and delivered some of the most creative and innovative lessons and solutions to unprecedented crises both viral and political we hope you and everyone listening will spend some time reading this report and digging into the extraordinary work and resilience of teachers teachers are amazing and we're better together thank you very much thank you alex barcelona alexis paulson nicole torres good evening chair members of the board my name is nicole torres my

016address is 2813 hodi drive in east nashville i'm here to thank you for all you've done to protect our students teachers and staff from the spread of covid19 and ask you for future action considering that at least half of our students are not yet eligible for vaccination against covid19 i urge you to continue mandating mass universally until our youngest students can be fully vaccinated we must continue to protect our kids and reduce the spread of covid in our community regardless of the political tug of war when it comes to mandates my kids attend kindergarten in third grade at rosebank elementary my third grader has asthma and a rare vascular disorder which means we are in close contact unfortunately with many specialists at vanderbilt children's hospital every doctor we've talked with agrees that in-person schooling is

017vital for children's development and when universal masking is in place attending school in person is worth the risk again that is with universal masking as a mitigation measure in place i'm not advocating for universal masking because i want kids to wear masks masking is the only option i have right now to protect my elementary age students moreover universal masking in the classroom offers the most protection for all of us i do not believe it should be a parental or guardian choice during an active pandemic to spread a potentially deadly illness to my kids especially when we are so close to being able to vaccinate our youngest students which should drastically reduce their chances of hospitalization please continue mandating universal masking in our schools to protect my kids and all students until they are able to

018be fully vaccinated thank you for your time consideration and action thank you paula foster alex barcelona david kales hello there my name is david kells my address is one zero five three gwen drive i'm here to thank the metro school board for supporting the common and some common sense and simple safety measures of requiring masks for all students and staff while inside metro schools this measure worked last year and is supported by the cdc and the american academy of pediatrics i also want to thank both both board member emily masters and council person van reese for their correspondence over the last couple of months and for listening to my support of masking in schools finally i want to thank dr battle for voice message last night excuse me encouraging vaccinations when available to all of

019our students and explaining that these common sense safety measures will keep all of our schools open and our children learning in person really touched me thank you very much for all the you guys have done thank you for your vote last week thank you for continuing to support masking in our schools thank you kenneth van buren [Applause] kelly phillips good evening thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak i appreciate everything that all of you do i appreciate all of you being here no matter which side of this argument you are on because we are all parents and we are all passionate about our children no matter which side we are on we are together in that can we agree on that yes again i thank you all i've probably taken a little bit

020off my time um my name is kelly phillips i live at 201 lafeet cove in hermitage i'm a mother of three 19 years old 16 and almost three we have been told as parents to follow the science in my opinion if you follow the science you will see that masks do not stop the spread of a small aerosol particle found in a covid virus or a respiratory virus such as the common cold they never have and they never will kids are going to touch their faces more often especially younger ones with these masks on their face the masks are going to get full of germs by the end of the day they're going to put in pockets backpacks but at the end of the day they're supposed to be brought home and disinfected because that's

021my responsibility as a parent not to mention the fact that teachers have no way to police this whether they're placed properly here here or here such as an n95 mask if they're not put on right they don't do any good so why bother at all if they're not going to be used correctly the psychological toll on young children during this for instance my almost three-year-old he has a sensory disorder he cries when mommy has on a mask he cries when somebody tries to make him wear a mask therefore i do not go anywhere that makes him wear a mask dr battle said in her video that we don't know enough about this virus to make decisions to change our protocol exactly we don't know enough about it and i'm not willing to risk the long-term

022health of my child breathing in from a mask that we are meant to exhale we exhale from our body we don't recirculate it when will it end because if it doesn't end with this i guarantee you it's going to come to one of you and any of you and it will be personal and it will be more important than a mask because if we don't stop it now it won't stop i'm not telling anybody here that you don't have the right to wear a mask i'm not telling you you don't have a right to put a mask on your child i'm asking you not to take it away from me it is my god-given right i was charged with three souls on this planet [Applause] i will fight until my last breath for every one

023of them till my last breath like i said no matter what your stance is on this we are united in the fact that we love our children let me have the right and the opportunity to decide what to put on my child thank you very much matthew walsh [Applause] hi my name is matt walsh i'm a community member in nashville and a father of four um you and the school board have decided that our kids should go to school all day every day wearing muzzles like rabid dogs i have listened to your arguments and i've noticed that they're missing a few things namely evidence data science common sense and basic human decency you've presented no facts at all uh so let me do that now here they are covet poses almost no risk to our

024kids at all 4.2 million children have tested positive for covid a total of percent of them have died overall point zero zero zero four percent of the child population in this country i'm not i'm i'm talking right now in this country has died of covet twice as many have died by drowning each year a bathtub poses more risk to your child than covet your child is far more likely to die in the car on the way to school than he is to die from covet at school what about the flu the cdc estimates that 480 kids died from the flu in the 2018-2019 season that's more than have died from covid in a year and a half now did anyone on this board suggest at any point that year that kids wear masks did anyone

025in this room suggest that at any point anyone wear masks for flu which again is more dangerous to kids than covet that's a fact now do you know what it's called when you force your children to wear masks for fear of a virus that poses almost no threat to them it's called child abuse you want to look up a disease look up munchausen by proxy because that's what this is if you think i'm exaggerating then how would you respond to a parent who forced this kid to wear a football helmet every day all day for fear of falling coconuts and meteors your kid is almost as likely to die of covet as he is from a rock from the sky and yet if you saw that you would say to that parent that he is

026abusive that he is forcing his kid to participate in this utterly insane charade in order to satisfy his delusional psychotic hypochondria now do any of you know what sort of psychological damage we do to children by forcing them to cover their faces teaching them that the air is toxic that everyone around them is sick depriving them of the ability to see each other's faces do you know what kind of damage that that does have you thought about it have you wondered about the health effects of forcing kids to breathe through sweat and spit and dirt soaked rags every single day are you sure that there are no health risks do you know what the effect is on children developmentally if they're not able to read each other's facial cues what about learning to read and

027they can't see the teacher enunciating the words what does it do to a child's developing immune system if he has to wear a mask all day every day have you taken any of this into consideration at all well you haven't you're satisfied to place this burden on children anyway and why it's not to keep them safe they are safe it's not to keep the adults safe they can all get vaccinated if they want no you do it to make yourselves feel better and to protect yourselves politically the child's mask is a symbolic security blanket for you not them it's a disgrace and you should all be ashamed thank you for your time thank you amy grier amy greer i have a fourth grader and a second grader at granberry elementary it felt great to drop

028them off this morning for many reasons one of those reasons being seeing all the other children in math seeing the teachers in math seeing my own kids in their mask i felt much safer and i want to thank you guys for implementing the policy that you did the stats that were just presented about children dying of flu are inaccurate as of now we have now surpassed the number of children that have died from covid is above the h1n1 flu year which was considered a very tragic year for children as of this morning there were 17 children in icu icu units across the state of tennessee um let's face it this is pretty easy this is a pretty minor thing that we can do having our kids home last year that was hard i thank you

029for all the extra quality time but we've had enough um if wearing masks social distancing washing our hands if it first and foremost keeps our kids safe if it helps stop community spread and if it keeps our kids in school i i fully support it and i thank you guys for your leadership and i ask that you stick to the data do the research the papers are out there that do show that mask help and i appreciate all your leadership on this thank you thank you eli foster um i want to start by saying this camera angle right back here shows my bald spot so it makes me feel way older than i really am i also want to say thank you i really appreciate the thoughtfulness that all of you gave to the discussion

030about masking and i just want to say thank you i'm not here to talk about mask i may be the first one i'm here to talk about the bill that passed house bill 580. it's known as the anti-crt bill that we just found out carries financial penalties for schools that are found to have broken this bill and i want to ask a question the question is really who are we as nashville who are we see this question this is not the first time we've been asked this question as a city the year was 1960 right students at american baptist john lewis who we just celebrated on july 17th renaming the street john lewis way he was a student right diane nash a student dr james lawson is a student at vanderbilt divinity school gets kicked

031out of school for working for the sydney movement here in nashville the city movement was peaceful it was non-violent and it was addressing a system of oppression that was in place here in nashville see as the students came together as the students rallied together in nashville more violence came against these students as they said at the lunch counters they had violence enacted upon them and ultimately this violence met ahead in the middle of april at z alexander luby's house it was bombed these students marched quietly under the leadership of ct vivian and diane nash down jefferson street they marched to the courthouse to the mayor and there at the courthouse with mayor ben west mayor ben west was the first mayor in a southern city to say segregation is morally wrong nashville stood together in

0321960 the first southern city to say no more of this that's who we were then that's who i want us to continue to grow to be but as 1960s passed by 1968-69 we have white families by the thousands fleeing the city because they don't want their kids to go to school with black children they form segregation academies including brentwood academy nashville christian school and various academies at harding academy at that time so the question in front of us is who are we going to be so really my question for you is what can you do as our board you can appeal directly to the federal government based on the civil rights act of 1964 to say house bill 580 should not stand we need to pass by the state and say federal government please step

033in join together with memphis as we're challenging the bill that just got passed in the state of tennessee protect me as a teacher so i can teach this history to our students about nashville who we can be the nashville of 1960 and mayor ben west thank you all of you thank you we had a community member who was unable to hear his name but we'll go back up to number 20 kenneth van buren kenneth van buren good afternoon i don't know if y'all can hear me okay good afternoon to the superintendent and also to the chairman of the board um uh speaking today my name is pastor kenneth van buren at 2204 buchanan street apartment 7. i'm coming not today as a pass i'm coming today as a parent because i want to inform the

034board that you all pass a mass mandate on thursday of last week uh i've had three members of my congregation that contracted kobe 19. i want to inform you yesterday the second member that contracted cobra 19 of age of six years old died of copic 19. i had another one that died you passed the mandate on thursday the first member was 12 year olds died on friday of coeg 19. this is to the parents that refuse to allow their children to wear a mask in school no parent has a right to jeopardize my child because you don't want your child to wear a mess i have i have an 18 year old autistic ahad child that was that contracted the rhino flu in february the kobe 19 came out in in march and she's a

035member she's a student over at pearlcom high school they almost closed down pearl com high school just because of my child catching rhino she didn't catch it at home she caught it at school now what would happen if we didn't allow these students to wear meds and more than 10 cheers and students called kobe 19. you would rather prevent the train than to allow these children to be subjected to kobe 19. uh the the pac i'm the one who provided you all the package and the reason why i provided because on your on your meeting last week when the there was one loan board member that said she didn't have data i'm providing you data today 827 and you can add two more to that list today a six-year-old and a twelve-year-old died monday and

036friday so yes this is your data right here if you don't think kobe 19 is serious i would provide this to any parent in this room that do not have that has a reason to keep their child from wearing a mask in school i will provide this data for you and also dr lisa piercy of the tennessee department of health said herself that kobe 19 is not going down it's going up it rolls 35 today in tennessee we're not going down on the numbers we're going up on the numbers and i want to inform the board of that this evening thank you thank you all right we'll jump back down to 25 jesse sutton asia car hello that's the third time i've talked now it's asha how are you guys all right my name is

037asha thanks for letting me speak tonight my address is 2305 crescent valley place hermitage tennessee i came to speak tonight because i'm extremely frustrated you all decide to have a secret meeting on thursday at 11 o'clock when people can't come to our meeting and at least be here for when you're making decisions for a vast district i mean you couldn't wait till today to make this you had to make a secret meeting it's really frustrating so part of my reason that i'm here today is because on june 9th here's the email that i got when i secured my son's religious exemption that he would not be have to wear a mask anymore because it goes against our beliefs june 9th right here also i said is this exemption going to be honored in the fall

038yes ma'am it will be right here i get an email from his principal yesterday at 3 45 we're no longer accepting that exemption here's a medical paper my husband looks at it it says for two thousand uh 21 to or 2020 to 2021 not even an updated form so first of all how am i supposed to get anything from a doctor at 3 45 in the afternoon when he started school at 8 o'clock this morning also why was i informed at 3 45 in the afternoon so let me be clear the medical paper that i was given is not an exemption it is an accommodation so i am tired of hearing well we can get you a medical we can we can do medical it's it's not it is not it is an accommodation i

039have to wear a shield or isolate so i'm supposed to isolate my five-year-old in class is that what we're doing now we just talked i just heard this guy talk for 15 minutes about segregation and this and that and you're gonna isolate my five-year-old my hispanic five-year-old yes my hispanic five-year-old that's my options for your face shield or isolate my five-year-old i just don't even know anymore everybody you guys i told you last time let's make a plan and stick to it like three weeks later you guys changed up the plan again nobody in metro you guys ever hear over here and over here just make a plan and stick to it i mean it's just absolutely ridiculous so that is what my i i've emailed my principal and they still haven't gotten back to

040me about what i'm supposed to do for my child so today he was put a mask on him without my permission and nobody called me so i don't know who thinks that it's appropriate for to be touching my child without my permission but that's ridiculous and dr battle i would love a phone call because i don't know when you think that you you can let your administrator touch my child thank you tina hooper gina hooper hi it's good to see you tonight my name is gina hooper and thank you for allowing me to have a voice today i'm going to be reading some of what you've approved for my fourth grader my nine-year-old to read and it is pretty graphic so i just want to warn you it's going to be the type the book

041is called walk of two moons my mother screamed just once one long mournful whale and then it was quiet when the doctor carried the baby out of the room i asked to see it it had a pale bluish tinge and there were marks on its neck where the umbilical cord had strangled it it might be dead it might have been dead for hours the doctor told my father i asked if i could touch her she was still a little warm from being inside my mother i thought maybe if i held her she would wake up i slept beside my mother until i heard her calling my father when he turned on the light i saw the blood spread out all across the bed it had soaked the sheets and the blanket had soaked in the

042white plaster of my cast she wouldn't stop bleeding later my mother said they took out all of my equipment she would not have any more babies the teacher's manual gives three separate warnings for the emotionally mature content in this book with all of the great literature out there it's my question why are we reading a book with this many warnings page 91 of the teacher's manual states the sophisticated cognitive works builds a foundation for critical thinking including concepts related to social justice the next book is for also for fourth grade for nine-year-olds called hatchet his mother sitting in the station wagon with the man and she had leaned across and kissed him kissed the man with short blonde hair and it was not a friendly pec but a kiss a kiss where she turned her

043head over at an angle and put her mouth against the mouth of the blonde man who was not his father and kissed mouth to mouth and then brought her hand up to touch his cheek his forehead while they were kissing and brian saw it saw this this thing that his mother did with the blonde man saw the kiss that became the secret that his father still did not know about know all about to where he wanted to die he had settled into the gray funk deeper and still deeper until finally in the dark he had gone up on the ridge and taken the hatchet and tried to end it by cutting himself madness a hissing madness that took his brain there had been nothing for him then and he tried to become nothing but the

044cutting had been hard to do impossible to do and he had last fallen to his side wishing for death wishing for an end and slept only did not sleep it is completely inappropriate to teach our nine ten-year-olds about infidelity and suicide shame on you metro school board you are dumbing our children down with common core math and exposing them to this illicit reading material every chance you get you're forcing them to wear a mask for eight hours a day and we all know that a mass society is a slave society you all deserve a job in washington for what you've done here after a summer of hope that all things would return to normal parents control their children it was all revoked leaving us without a voice there is no time for other options nothing

045for my child to do but go to school in a mask in bondage with the literacy level at an all-time low your focus should be on teaching our kids not putting them in masks and teaching them this filth that's thank you and i'd like to remind you all that mayor cooper has instituted a mass mandate in all public government buildings and considering that this is a public government building we ask that you i'm sorry it has been mandated that you wear a mask in this building with that being said we'll move on to ashley stobler hi i know you have a very difficult job making decisions for so many kids so thank you for giving me the opportunity to hopefully open your mind to a new perspective my name is ashley stepler and i live

046in nashville i'll share my address off the record i'm a mom of a fourth grader and one that's going to school in two years and i'm here today to bring two items to your attention first the social and psychological effects of enforcing our kids to wear a mask and second the chemical cleaning products used in our schools are hazardous to our children's health these two items combined together are risking the respiratory health of our children and causing a psychological impact that could be short-term or long-term there have been no long-term studies on the psychological or physical effects of kids wearing masks for long hours most days of the week masks have a psychological effect on kids that struggle with anxiety or any sensory processing disorders masks can impair the communication between student and teacher which

047can lead to behavior problems a lack of interest in learning or other consequences mass can make it difficult for our kids to form friendships by covering the lower half of our face positive emotions are less recognizable and negative motions are more emphasized giving kids so many restrictions is going to inevitably cause behavior changes we don't know the long-term effects because we are experimenting with our kids health right now in addition to multiple effects masks can have on our kids the chemicals being used inside of our schools pose another issue the cleaning products used in our schools have ingredients that are not regulated by the fda i obtained a list of cleaning products that are used at my son's school granberry elementary both hdq neutral and peroxy from the company spartan chemical contain chemicals that are

048toxic to human health for the cleaning product hdq neutral on the safety data sheet it states harmful if inhaled and do not breathe in mist vapors or spray and on peroxy safety data sheet it states inhalation of vapors or mist may cause respiratory irritation how did this get approved to be used in our kids schools when there are so many safer natural options our kids deserve fresh air non-restricted breathing and a social environment that allows them to thrive and feel encouraged to learn not to be submerged in a distance restricted and toxic environment we know our kids better than you just as you know your kids better than i do and we deserve the right as parents to make decisions that impact the physical and mental well-being of our kids if it risks our health

049there absolutely must be a choice and let's be honest first are mask mandates and we all know what mandates are coming next thank you for your time nicole bynum [Applause] dr battle board members my name is nicole bynum i live at 1604 club parkway you know my name you see my face i put my mask up after you waited till 29 people that's fine i'm a single mom of two mnps students here to discuss masking iep and why it's so important to me to bring this up let me first disclose should i become emotional i am suffering diagnosed and being treated for extreme anxiety complex ptsd and complex grief sometimes i can't control my emotions also let me say as someone who spends their entire work day supporting pediatric specialists i take covet extremely seriously

050and i support every parent in this room to make the decision for their child to mask up just as i support the providers that i spend 10 to 15 hours a day making sure their life goes easier my life is dedicated to my children won and now as i mentioned i'm a single mom one just went into the third grade today it was me another oldest my oldest who should be graduating with the class of 2022 and turning 18 years old and 225 days he's not going to he died at 14 a month now nine-year-old sixth birthday he left hillwood high school got off the bus walked into our home took a bed sheet tied it around his neck to a ceiling fan and he took his life my six-year-old came up on his birthday

051to find his brother and his hero wrapped up with his neck broken and his face blew he couldn't breathe i'm sorry my son was an accelerated learner with plans to pursue medical school his focus was interventional interventional radiology my eight-year-old two months prior to losing his brother on his sixth birthday was tested and diagnosed with adhd dyslexia prior to that he had been diagnosed by his p primary with an anger disorder and now obviously he has ptsd my son cannot read he couldn't learn the entire virtual year because i was working supporting the physicians and i couldn't i couldn't sit with my hyperactive child and help him figure out virtual school we had five different laptops y'all all know my name my son was so excited to go back to school and now he's angry

052and he's confused and he doesn't understand why there's other people walking around without a mask and he has to what has he gone through what have i done now he's lost everything he lost his brother on his birthday in his words he said mom this just isn't fair it's just not fair my son is eight and he can't read i feel that you putting a mask on my son puts him in greater danger again i support and respect how serious covetous but do anybody in here do you all know the suicide attempts and the suicide rates do you all know those weights my son lost a year of learning already i just want him to be a child he's gone through more than most adults i'm glad you see my face thank you for your

053time [Applause] hello everyone all of you have received many emails from me over the many years that i have been a metro schools parent and a teacher i am a teacher at apollo middle school my husband teaches at j.e moss elementary and our son is at hillsborough high school so i watched the school board meeting last thursday during my lunch break i was a teacher in service and it just coincided with the time that i could sit down and eat my salad and then following that over the weekend i saw a news story that was filmed in this very room just following the vote where a parent unhappy with the mask mandate told the news reporter that america is not about the collective good but about individual liberty as shocking as i found her words

054i was glad that the argument for personal choice was put so plainly as a message of what individuals want and not what a school system needs i get that some of us need something different i've been working with children with ieps and 504s for years so some folks need something different but as a parent and as a teacher in my classroom family that i try to facilitate with my kids every day and with my own child at home making choices and taking actions for the collective good is exactly what i want to model we're in this together it's not about what we want now it's about what's good for all of us masking is simply a proven strategy to help all of us have greater health and greater success and stay in school i taught

055virtually all last year as did my husband our son learned virtually all last year i am so grateful for that option but it was really hard i want to be in class with my kids i want my student to be in class with his ib teachers i want him to have those rich conversations in person but i'm here mostly this evening just to say thank you because we know that this issue is such a hot button issue people get very worked up understandably but i appreciate the rich conversation that you have had looking at the data and making a choice that is good for all of us thank you so much thank you for your time olin babcock he's not here i couldn't get him in time to get him here sorry thank you kristen

056dillard friends hi my name is kristen dillard i am the mother the divorced mother fyi of a second grader at waverly belmont first day if you can't tell um and i'm sorry that i did not prepare a speech i was not sort of drawn here by any sort of organized anything i just really wanted to come and step up today and just thank you very very very much for taking the safety and the health of my child and my family and my community sort of first um i respect all opinions and i totally understand that we are all looking at the same set of facts and we are all prioritizing what our priorities are and creating opinions on what should be done based on our personal priorities and opinions of the facts and i respect

057every opinion of every person who has any bit of an opinion about covid but i appreciate this bodies rising above that and making a factual understanding and a recognition of what will be safest for the entire community and i want to promise you that my daughter is not a big fan of wearing a mask all day and i did have to keep her home all year last year so today was her very first day in a mask the entire day and so i completely understand that there are frustrations around that i definitely could spout off a lot of facts that would support my opinion but i know that we know all of them nothing is going to be surprising if i pop up some fact on this side or that side we've heard them all

058we know them all i know this i have mentioned that i am divorced there is only one thing that my ex-husband and i agree on when we are co-parenting and that is the one of us whose opinion errors on the side of more caution and safety that person's opinion goes it does not matter how strongly the other person's opinion is if i felt like my daughter could climb up the stairs at four months and my ex-husband felt like that was dangerous he wins because we err on the side of more safety and caution for our children and i appreciate you doing the same for our community and our families and i just just continue to want to say thank you i want to say thank you 20 times because i have never been so relieved

059about anything as i was dropping my daughter off to school today thank you for your time tom wiser my name is tom wiser i've been born and raised in nashville lived here my entire life what happened here was the gradual habituation of the people little by little to being governed by surprise to receiving decisions deliberated in secret to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand it could not be released even if they could understand it because of national security i thought the board of education would appreciate the historical excerpt from milton myers they thought they were free nazi germany 1933 345. now let me state this all face masks all of them face masks cloth mask n95 surgical mask k95 all

060are under emergency use authorization as such they are experimental medical devices this is from the fda the government scientific agency responsible for issuing authorizations and approvals of diagnostics medical devices drugs and vaccines as a condition of authorization manufacturers and distributors are strictly prohibitive of all masks from claiming they can work that would be false advertising and i quote from the emergency use authorization the product must not be labeled in such a manner that would misrepresent the product's intended use for example the labeling must not state or imply that the product is intended for anti-microbial or anti-viral protection or related uses or is for use such as infection prevention or reduction anything else that any claim otherwise is a lie and it violates the conditions of authorization furthermore they are authorized for use as source control

061only meaning the wearer is infected and contagious all of you with masks on are communicating you are afraid you are infected and contagious right now based on this federally issued emergency use authorization it is psychological abuse to force people to behave as if they are sick when they are not it's called factitious disorder by proxy and it is child abuse when done to children you all have no excuse executive orders are not an excuse recommendations policies are not an excuse we are violating established medical research ethics informed consent and we all know they were derived from nuremberg germany yes thank you for your time suzanne doing good evening chair and board members my name is suzanne thowen and i live in antioch and i'm here to discuss the third grade a book called shark attack

062and how it damages our children first before i start i want to say that fear is not what we should be instilling in our children yet this book shark attack has very graphic illustrations of real-life shark attacks the first story tells us about a man who was attacked and it shows the side of his body caught in the shark's mouth with blood coming out then it shows another picture with a man tried to get away but the shark snagged him and pulled him under fortunately he escaped there's also a real photograph showing the entire bite and the scars left by it the second story is about a man who was attacked and it took six lifeguards to pull him out of the out of the ocean um the third story is the most terrifying one

063because it doesn't take place in the ocean they decided to include a story that takes place in a creek involving a 12 year old boy very close to eight nine year olds who are the the readers here who was attacked by a shark in the creek a man saw the child scream go under the water went to pull the child's lifeless body as it says in the book out when he felt a bump on his leg and realized that as the book says part of his leg had been ripped away they had been attacked by a shark both the man and the boy died even to adults these are terrifying stories yet this is what our eight to nine year olds are reading for english literature arts there are plenty of interesting and informative books

064about sharks that we can share with third graders that don't have to have terrifying stories or illustrations in this we must do better than this and really quickly because i have a few moments left no one wants anyone to get coveted but did you know there are three proven medically proven protocols that cure cure cure covid19 hundreds of thousands have been cured these have been suppressed by our media but they are hydro hydroxychloroquine ivermectin and budesidine combined with zinc vitamin d vitamin c they work they even help people in hospitals that have been denied early treatment and they've been told to come back when they're on their deathbed practically thank you very much i appreciate your time thank you i will again remind everyone in this room that there is a mass mandate in place

065by our mayor and this is a government building we don't care with that in mind we will empty the room we're going to pause this meeting empty the room and only those with mass will be re-allowed in board please take a break for about five minutes security if you would not mind helping us with that if you thank you so much the governor issued a different order thank you community members for your flexibility again we have cleared out the room to make sure that only the masked are allowed in if at some point you take off your mask and you are not eating or drinking actively please step out or we will ask you to be escorted out with that in mind we will pick back up with public participation where we left off jennifer

066conder good evening chair members of the board i'm jennifer conder i live at 908 steeplechase drive and while the hot topic tonight is the mask issue and among other things i don't want to lose sight of the big picture and that's actually what's being taught to our children in these classrooms and so i'm here to voice my opposition to the wisdom curriculum specifically i want to talk about the fourth grade curriculum which includes three different books that emphasize cannibalism the book understanding greek myth says it might seem unusual to us but many myths include stories of people mainly children who are sliced cooked and eaten in pushing up the sky there's a play that the children are called to act out it's called the cannibal monster the play uses phrases like run for your lives

067and eaten alive this is a story about how the cannibal monster wanted to kill and eat people but brown bear killed it however brown bear ignored the advice of the raven and burned the cannibal monster from the fire you hear the monster say you have set me free now i'll eat you forever the book says the smoke is turning into little creatures and a woman cries they are eating us alive the teacher's manual continuously emphasizes this has happened this happened because the people disobeyed and in the book gifts from the gods the story says he invited the gods to a banquet at his house and had his own son phelps cooked up and served as a meal nobody knows why he did such a dreadful thing also from the book is the story of the

068furies which include these excerpts wearing long black robes fastened around the waist like snakes the hounded they hounded lawbreakers especially murderers serpents twined through their long white hair and coiled around their arms blood dripped from their black eyes the men seeing the dark flapping shapes approaching ran in terror calling down curses the furies lashed their whips till the murderers bled down the snake slid winding twisting but never biting their victims instead they exhaled poisonous fumes that affected men's minds and the men began to rave refusing to give them any rest the furies chased and tormented the murderers until at last they went mad even though the furies existed to avenge evil all people good and bad we're scared of these goddesses for who among us has never done anything wrong as you can see there's

069just some examples of the terrifying imagery both in pictures and in words this is the stuff nightmares are made of this is the stuff that kids come in your room at night want to sleep with you because they're scared why are we what is this doing to nine and ten-year-olds and more importantly why are you teaching this to nine and ten-year-olds when there's so much good literature out there i urge you to reconsider removing the whitten wisdom curriculum and replacing it with something much more age-appropriate thank you for your time amity marsh good evening chairwoman bugs and members of the board my name is amity marsh and i'm representing moms for liberty i live in davidson county in district 2. i will be speaking on some of the books being used in the fifth grade

070that include inappropriate subject matter first when thunder rolling in the mountains this book is full of graphic violence i'm going to read the yellow highlighted excerpts that were pulled from this book to kill us setting fire to the tents shoot a soldier i shot him too bullet went in the back of his shoulder and came out through his chest so many bullets the bullet would strike him squarely in the back i began to squeeze the trigger i saw the dead people killed kill shot echoed antelope fell dead swiftly she grabbed my ear and thrust the needle through it a bullet struck him in the head we will kill them all killed the old man took his knife with a stone knife he cut the monster's heart from his body murdered soldier shot killed bullet struck

071her in the chest she got the gun from him and took careful aim and shot him in the face he smashed his rifle back into her face wiping the blood from his knife i felt a new slip around my neck uh i felt a new slip bar on my neck i it drew tight and the world went black kill i saw myself killed i will kill some soldiers we are all going to die the second one is the river between us this book contains many references to alcohol promiscuity and the negative portrayal of women this is a book that our 10 to 11 year old children are reading i will read the yellow highlighted experts that were pulled from this book she had a powerful effect on the male sex she came in handy she's

072meant for men what men do best is walk away from women paint it up little floozy i've held on to my husband unlike some i can name pressed her feather fan against her bosom and cast grape fringed eyes at him she's switching her skirt tails up and down front street even as we speak and the man in this town is staring holes in her the brazen little hussy he's drunk all men are drunkards some of them staggering drunk the other were half drunk drunk reeling drunk and fighting drunk rum i had to get him drunk to take his arm smoking their el sol cigars and drinking from small silver cups and i doubt it was medicine it's also discussed term blickage this is what can be found in the teacher's manual regarding placages what is

073blue cage describe page 128 how is the custom application help you understand delphine's family and their relationships she described page 128 the arrangement for a white man to take care of his colored mistress and their daughter it helps us to understand that daphne's grandmother and grandfather and her mother and father did not marry but they had children together what type of message do these books teach our children what about children that are within mnps who are esl one of the big concerns is how the teacher's manual instructs the teachers on how to teach the material how are these books encouraging our children to read thanks for your time thank you for your time cindy goddard good evening chair members of the board my name is cindy gardner i live in donaldson district 4 in the

074mcgavin cluster first i'd like to say i'm in total support of no mass because of their harmful effects for the children i believe parents should be given a choice but tonight i need to discuss the second grade book ruby bridges goes to school i want to clarify that mom's fear liberty is not against teaching about ruby bridges we support what ruby bridges wrote about we support her story we believe in what she did we believe in the fight she put up and most importantly we believe that her fight was worthwhile she created a change in our culture in our country that now allows kids of all colors to go to school together for years she has spoken highly of dr martin luther king jr and his dream she has even said recently the children are

075born color-blind miss ruby says children don't see criticism it is something that is taught our concern with witten wisdom and the way they are teaching ruby bridges is that it is teaching division drawing attention to division and it's creating racism rather than bridging the gap between the differences in people where kids do not even notice those differences this is an ell curriculum ela curriculum and it's having teachers focus on racial slurs negativity and does not give credit to the fact that ruby bridges changed the civil rights movement when she integrated her grade school there are two ruby bridges books the witt and wisdom curriculum uses the version with the n-word and then directs the teachers not to ignore it but actually instructs the teachers to draw attention to it and also ask the kids to

076have a discussion about it this is not acceptable teach ruby bridges teach accurate history but let's not teach our kids the n word the second book separate is never equal is also taught in second grade the teacher's manual states the text is too complicated for the kids to even read so instead the teacher has the kids focus on the pictures the illustrations include mexican children behind fences at a pool that has a sign reading no dogs or mexicans allowed the mexican children eat their lunch in a pasture with the cows and the flies statements from the book include and i quote they have problems with lice and pedigo and tuberculosis they generally have dirty hands face neck and ears one character asks do you believe white students are superior to mexicans in personal hygiene scholastic

077ability clothing and their ability to take part in the activities at school and the character answers yes these statements are never corrected in the book the story is about a remarkable family fighting for equality that they deserve but it's taught at an inappropriate level and the children cannot fully understand the gratitude gravity of the landmark decision it's another example of an age inappropriate and does not fully balance the historical account thank you for your time adrian figaro great pronunciation thank you madam chair distinguished board members good evening my name is adrian figueroa and my family resides in bellevue my children are zoned for harbour valley elementary fear fear is powerful fear can cause numerous harmful responses in children from weakened immune systems to gi issues anxiety behavioral changes severe depression and worse wearing a mask

078all day is a deviation from normal behavior and as such is fear inducing in children when people are operating within a state of fear their ability to think critically is compromised as fear produces anxiety it becomes difficult to make decisions to think clearly or more importantly to learn one of the most misleading lines to come out of this pandemic is that kids are resilient if that's the case then why are millions of adults working with professionals to process childhood trauma kids are vulnerable their mental health must not be ignored and it isn't just being ignored by the people sitting in front of me it's being dismissed as you have been prompted to operate outside of your authority we've been told to wear masks to prevent coveted transmission even while many boxes of disposable mass display

079a warning that they will not provide protection from coven 19 or other airborne viruses we should take measures to protect the community but these cannot be feel good measures that provide minimal benefit while imparting harmful effects on our children again we can and should take measures against this virus but mass mandates are not an acceptable mitigation strategy i would sooner propose temperature checks to be performed during morning arrival over our kids being forced to mask up all day long by continuing this charade we are perpetuating a world of fear you are perpetuating a world of fear for our children the negative effect that this is having on the well-being and education of our children is inexcusable allow parents to exercise their right to perform their own risk assessments and to choose what is best for

080their child take the mass off of our kids now thank you for your time mary french good evening chair members of the board my name is mary french i live on belmont park terrace in davidson county i'm a former second grade school teacher in metro let me introduce you to a book six-year-olds in first grade in davidson county will be reading this year this book is called seahorse the shyest fish in the sea first graders will read about the meeting and reproduction of seahorses the only fish that has opposite gender roles for this purpose the children are provided many illustrations and talk excitedly about the meeting process and the positions quoting they twist their tails together and twirl gently around changing color until they match the two of them dance till sunset and then she

081puts her eggs into his pouch a few weeks later seahorse finds a quiet place to hide among the corals it is time for the babies to be born he works hard all day and through the night bending squeezing and pushing and shooting hundreds of babies out of his pouch accompanying this lesson is a video that visualizes this process and ends with this quote we humans tend to think of who we are as mostly fixed but in the ocean identity can be a fluid and mysterious thing the teacher's manual goes on to emphasize how seahorse is mate and repeatedly talks about how the male is the one who has the babies reproduction isn't even a science standard for first grade yet they are focusing on mating and reproduction with first graders the question must be asked

082why did the writers of this book pick the one fish that has opposite gender roles to portray this i think everybody in this room knows why many of us parents and grandparents are extremely concerned and angry about this very inappropriate curriculum for our elementary school children and we ask you to do something about it immediately thanks for your time thank you for your time carolyn lutz good evening my name is carolyn lutz and i live in old hickory i've never done this before so forgive me because i don't actually have a speech i'm just very frustrated i actually don't even have my son in school anymore because after when covid started uh in 2020 and the school uh went virtual it was very very apparent that uh he was not going to learn anything so

083i started teaching and my daughter actually helped me teach him then this year when we found out that there's a very good possibility that we're going to be wearing masks i said no way i am not subjecting my son to wearing a mask every day especially since we've already had covid he got through it fine our whole family got through it i'm not saying that there other people haven't i get that but if you're gonna talk about the science let's really talk about the science science like for instance the cdc you know the cdc is not government they're a privately owned company so why are we listening to them about the science especially when they change the science like every week so first we're supposed to wear masks then we don't have to wear a

084mask then we all have to get vaccinated well guess what now vaccinated people are getting covet so what's up with that um you know and i'm not not saying that you guys have a job to do and i totally get that but i honestly don't believe that this mask is working at all and i can't believe that it just a normal human being can think that it does i mean i can you know you can you can breathe through it so if you can breathe through it a virus can get through it it just makes no sense to me at all why and especially why we're masking our children when they have a 99.99 chance of first of all not hardly spreading it and second of all uh of surviving it which again and how

085about the pcr test we we just found out didn't we all we all know now that the pcr test is not a good test they can't tell between covid and the flu so how about we don't know do we nobody knows we don't know if we all had the flu or if we had coveted or the delta variant which is there really a delta variant we don't know because it could just still be the flu i mean and it's not that i i i understand there is a covet i totally get that i understand that some people died from it but i don't think everybody died from it thank you for your time karen's son good evening chair members of the board dr battle my name is karen sun i teach at east nashville magnet

086middle and i reside in vice chair elrod's district i wanted to thank y'all for implementing a mass mandate last week i don't know um if other people's in my building felt the same way but i definitely considered quitting about like four times pretty seriously before thursday and it's not that i don't love kids but i also like you know being alive not struggling to breathe because of kovid and want to visit my family members at some point i know myself and my colleagues feel much safer with this mask mandate my kids understand that even though they don't like it it is really necessary if they want to keep each other their teachers and their family members and their caregivers guardian's parents safe i applaud your bravery and integrity and doing what is right even when

087there are those who spread misinformation that makes it particularly difficult to do so um i'm here just because i'm wondering um if there is a contingency plan in place if worse comes to worst if um when really the covid numbers and delta variant numbers continue to rise if the vaccine remains unavailable for younger children to move back to virtual which i don't really want to do or really want to happen but i think is a valid consideration at this point in time i also re-emphasize the need for the return of a continually updated mmps covered thermometer and full transparency on active cases within the district thank you take care thank you for your time cassie norton [Applause] my name is cassie norton i live at 2822 airwood drive first happy first day of school everyone

088i'm really grateful for the decision to require masks in our school so that we could have a safe and joyful first day back today and it was it was really joyful and i felt a lot safer having masks and i know a lot of my co-workers and students did too we know a year and a half into this pandemic that masks prevent the spread of covet and they stay live so thank you i'm here tonight to ask what other steps we're going to take to keep students families and staff and the community safe many members of our community are still unable to get vaccinated and the delta variant is extremely contagious but we have fewer safety requirements in place now than we did in the spring i'm hoping we can bring back the thermometer from

089the spring to track the risk as it changes i want to know what is the plan for testing and reporting data is there any plan to return to virtual or hybrid if cases continue rising and hospital beds continue filling these are questions that i have i'm also very concerned that there's no clear quarantining procedure in place many of us are being told that students and teachers who test positive are still expected to come to school if we don't show symptoms we've known for a long time that asymptomatic people can still give covet to others so that seems extremely dangerous i'm also concerned that staff are expected to take unpaid time off if we get coveted or have to quarantine after we've run out of sick days this is especially difficult for new teachers who just

090don't have very many sick days yet or teachers who have medical conditions so they have to be more careful and quarantine more often i'm hoping that you'll use coveted relief funds the esr funds to provide additional sick days and pay more subs so that we're not risking sick people coming to school and spreading coved the pandemic isn't over we can't go back to normal quite yet i know these are difficult procedures to discuss and decisions to make but you have a lot of wives in your hands so i hope you're taking it seriously thank you thank you for your time christine i perish good evening madam chair and members of the board my name is christina parrish and i'm a parent of a second grader at rosebank steam elementary magnet school i also happen to

091have the crazy task of being president of the pta this year i live on groves park road in east nashville i would like to thank the board for following the guidance of the cdc and the american academy of pediatrics by implementing a mask mandate for the current school year i encourage you to please keep this policy in place until students who are not yet eligible to receive the vaccine are able to and the delta variant is under control we chose to send our son to school in person last year because we felt secure in the knowledge that masks work we feel exactly the same way about his attending school in person this year i mean nobody really loves wearing masks but they work he was safe all of last year i want to express my

092sincere gratitude for your swift implementation of this policy ahead of the school year so my son and his peers can safely celebrate this new season of second grade i care for the well-being of my child but i also care deeply for every child in this community while it appears to be true that children are at a much lower risk for serious illness from covid than other segments of the population the fact remains that all children under 12 are not yet able to be vaccinated some of which are truly vulnerable to this virus it is no great sacrifice as far as my family is concerned to wear a mask when a mask could save a life many families have waited patiently to return to ins in person safe learning and we are happy to welcome welcome

093them back to school with a smile behind our masks until the day comes when vaccines are accessible to all kids and we can party again like it's 2019. i recognize that you are likely to experience angry descent after enacting this policy by some but thank you from the bottom of my heart my family's heart for following the science and trusting doctors and pediatricians and most of all protecting the youngest and most vulnerable populations who are unable to advocate for themselves thank you for your time thank you patrick o'brien [Applause] good evening thank you madam chair for your time this evening my name is patrick o'brien i'm a teacher at cain ridge high school in southeast nashville i'm also a member of our a resident in district six so i want to address you tonight about

094several things first of all the cdc is a federal agency it's not privately owned i teach government for a living the preamble the united states constitution does not have the word i or mayan at anywhere it actually starts with we the people and talks about the common defense and general welfare doesn't say anything about personal choice doesn't say anything about individualism as a matter of fact uses words that suggest that what we face is a collective action problem this collective action problem requires us to harness all of the resources that we have all of the information we have to make decisions that are best for a lot of students and a lot of people because it's a collective active action probably i want to thank you for the bold action you took last week school

095boards across the country right now in broward county and florida and in other places are taking this action in dallas texas because they realize with a lack of leadership at the state level individual school boards are going to have to take this action we as teachers thank you for taking this bold action in the face of some very sharp dissent it's going to save the lives of some of our kids there are some students that are going to be alive because we have a mass mandate in place the challenge that is the challenges that this presents are a collective action problem i'm going to echo what cassie norton said and say we do need covet leave if teachers do get sick we are limited with our number of sick days particularly teachers who have families

096particularly teachers that have families who might use those sick days for something else as it comes across in the school year it's 180 day school year we need to have that as an option with with the user funds and we we request that you do that we also ask again for the thermostat the thermostat was an awesome tool in the spring it was something we could explain to students and families really easily and was very clear and it provided a level of transparency um that helped us fight all the misinformation that's out there and there is a lot of misinformation there's a lot of folks who aren't reading there are 160 pediatric icu cases in florida right now a state where there was no mass mandate they have not even opened schools in most of

097florida and they have 160 cases they have more cases than the state of california which has over double the population this is a collective action problem and i just want to thank you on behalf of the teachers and the community for taking the action that you did thank you thank you for your time really [Applause] hi members of the board chair my name is julie trudell and i live and work in district six in antioch i work in a yacht high school i'm a nashville native and mnps alumnus in my fifth year teaching in this district as the delta variant increases we are again reaching reported case numbers that mirror january's cases while testing has gone down we now have a mass mandate and i thank you so dearly for that but that's not enough

098during the second wave now teachers are expected to use their sick leave if they contract code as cassie and as patrick mentioned where sick leave runs out we have to use unpaid leave putting teachers in the position of choosing between their livelihood and public health we have as you know we have 267 sorry 276 million dollars in s3 funds which only 20 percent are pre-allocated um and that's more than twice the amount that we had in march of 2020. we need to hire more subs and reinstate emergency kova's leave to keep our community safe and let learning happen um i was going to share that like on thursday i had a bit of a sore throat i am vaccinated and i had to take a sick day to go and like get tested and make

099sure it's safe negative on all accounts [Music] but i i can't imagine doing that with like and worrying about the kids and worrying about all of these other things and having to balance those priorities and we shouldn't have to um yes please please um approve use of the sr3 funds for more subs and covet leave pay thank you thank you for your time kellyanne graff hello board it is so good to see you again i live in peter players district and i teach in fran bush's district i teach at three good marshall middle in antioch we had we were hit the hardest by cloven like in the city um and i want to make sure that we are looking at student well-being and that their needs are viewed holistically so i want us to be

100thinking about the issues of community spread i want us to be thinking about how that impacts family health how that impacts employment and housing of families across our city and the ripple effects that the health within our schools has on our city and in turn on the mental health of our children so we've seen delta variant going up that it's more transmittable that it has a higher impact on children that half of our students are not eligible for the vaccine and i'm just really concerned i'm grateful for the mask mandate but i'm wondering what else i don't mean to be a tattletale right now but i want you to be aware of what is happening in our buildings being back for one week and a day we've seen parents come in teachers with children sick

101with covet at home and they're there in the building that day because that is their job they're vaccinated but this is what like the current procedures are or maybe they're not enforced enough or maybe they're not known enough we've seen admin come in with spouse at home with kovid we've seen teachers contract covid at school buildings from just one week of in-person pd and teacher plannings before students even arrived what else are we going to do to keep us safe to keep our families safe to keep our city operating and to end this virus that will keep mutating if we don't lock it down i'm afraid of taking my sick days to go get tested i'm afraid of my concerns not being taken seriously last year when my spouse was showing signs of covid i

102was told to come in because i was vaccinated i took the i took a sick day and i went and got tested but i was told to come in this is what is happening in schools and what are we going to do to make sure that those decisions for public safety are not being placed on individual teachers because we have seen that individualism is not solving this pandemic thank you so much thank you for your time michelle sheriff good evening chair dr battle members of the board my name is michelle sheriff i'm current president of metropolitan national education association and starting my 29th year with mnps originally i had a speech to speak about some of the things that you've heard some of the concerns echoed already about taking sick leave when people have to

103quarantine what are the protocols for learning to continue if teachers or students have to quarantine and i'm not going to repeat what you've already heard i feel very confident that we can work with the district we've developed relationships to resolve these issues to put protocols in place that keep everyone safe and learning what i do want to say to you tonight is just thank you i know it's a thankless job a lot of times so thank you for following the science thank you for doing what you know needs to be done to keep everyone safe and healthy and you have a lot of students you have a lot of staff and you also what mmps does affects the community as a whole so going forward we have new officers myself paula pendergrass jane riend we

104have an organizing director sarah duran and we look forward to continuing to work with you on issues in the future thank you for your time follow pendergrass good evening madam chair back to battle and members of the school board i'm dr paula pendergrass the vice president of mnea and i'm here to speak in support of the memorandum of understanding during the fall of 2020 the metropolitan nashville public school board of education and representatives of the professional employees of the metropolitan national education association as provided under tennessee cole annotated 495 605 enter into collaborative conferencing to reach agreements for the purpose of establishing maintaining protecting and improving conditions of employment through the course of two semesters both parties agreed to participate in good faith collaboration with the duly designated representatives of the other party upon upon

105viewing the mou you will see the various matters we discuss and finalize the content consists of working conditions french benefits grievances and procedures insurance attendance and level absence just to name a few we were able to improve the teacher of the year process to help ensure educators have a better opportunity to become aware of their colleagues work and credentials we also included language to provide adequate and appropriate space for all professional employees who work in more than one school building furthermore we establish equitable planning time for all educators to help in the district initiative of making sure every student is known i would like to personally thank the following teachers who gave several hours during this time while also juggling their other school and district responsibilities amanda baker mary jo cram sarah duran tara johnson

106amanda kale laura leonard kenny martin michelle sheriff and bev whalen schmiller thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak in favor of the memorandum of understanding thank you for your time that will close out public participation for today thank you to all of our speakers and those who stayed to listen to them with that we'll move on to governance issues and our consent agenda there's one amendment that will be made item c19 will be removed for some technical issues that need to be shored up over the next couple of days but it will be brought to the next meeting with that are there any other amendments to this consent agenda mrs tyler um can i pull item 1c14 the nashville teacher residency okay we have 1c14 any others all right with that do i

107have a motion to accept the amended agenda i move approval of the consent agenda as amended do i have a second second all right it's been moved and seconded uh all in favor please raise your hand it passes unanimously we will begin with the 1c14 national teacher residency miss tyler will you begin with a motion and then we'll open for discussion so i know that the tennessee state university got pulled because of some technical issues as far as just the adding of the money um but even if we readjust that there's still kind of a big difference between the amount of money that we're paying the nashville teacher residency for them to provide diverse teachers for our programs and the tsu to provide diverse teachers to our program so i just had a question about

108um why do we have such a different amount that we're paying to each entity for the same result dr battle thank you um dr herbert chairwoman bugs we need a motion before there can be discussion ah yes thank you okay miss tyler would you mind mrs tyler would you mind offering a motion um well i mean it depends i don't know that i want to make a motion to approve it if i don't get the right questions answered i don't unders i'm sorry i'm not sure what i should do well uh we can make a motion and then open this guy up go ahead just the point of order and ms roberts would it not be appropriate if she moved for deferral at this point you can make a motion to defer okay get a

109second then open for discussion you can then rescind your motion if you choose that the discussion puts you on one side or the other more definitively okay so i would say that i move to approve it aft you can move to defer now okay and you open the discussion okay i moved to defer all right do we have a second second all right so we've had a question from mrs tyler dr battle how would you like to move forward um dr barnes would you approach the podium please miss tyler i know we spoke earlier can you restate your question please yeah um just i know that we pulled tsu because there was a little bit of a discrepancy on the the last bit of it but even if we fix that discrepancy to the correct

110numbers that it's supposed to be there's still a pretty big difference in the amount that we're paying national teacher residency and tsu for essentially the same product and so i was just wondering why is there such a large difference and sure so the the cost of the of what gets paid to our employees is the same the difference is national teacher residency does have um five thousand dollars that gets paid after the close of the first year an additional five thousand dollars that they charge us after the second year we are up for the ability to to not hire those people so the money is contingent on us hiring them as as employees we have found that we really enjoy um the relationship we've built with ntr that their quality of candidates is very high

111they have a large cohort of candidates of color and so it just we appreciate the opportunity to spend a whole year getting to know them and work with them before we hire them and that relationship has been built over time so that's um they are one of the one of the agencies that does cost an additional amount okay and then the the only last thing was the nashville teacher residencies last year for the 2526 only includes their alumni but the cost per teacher is seven thousand eight hundred eight dollars instead of five thousand like it is for every other year because what we want to do is make sure by the time the contract ends that we have paid out both portions to the employee or both portions to ntr excuse me so that is

112a percentage of folks that would be getting both of their payments in one year and people who are getting their second payment and so they calculated that to be about 7 800 as an average okay and we want to make sure that we pay finish the payment out when the contract ends rather than the year after as we've done in the past okay that makes sense all right okay well i think those answered my questions and then i guess we'll just wait and see about tsu when it comes so okay any further discussion point of order madam chair do you have a question yes dr ginger i'm sorry i dismissed what is tennessee state all that you pulled off i missed your first thing it was pulled off um there's an issue with the contract

113so it'll be worked on and brought back in the the when you pulled off too though or was it just that one no no ntr's yeah pulled all ntr was pulled for discussion so 19 is not even in a minute i got pulled up okay sorry i just wanted to be sure that i have no i understand thank you for the question thank you okay all right no point of order miss tyler would you like to rescind your emotion yes and i would like to rescind and now i would like to move to approve um nashville teacher residency all right so that's 1c14 that has been moved and seconded to accept the the contract all in favor please raise your hand it passes unanimously thank you we will move on let's continue we will move

114on to director's report dr battle yes and i'm sorry while we were getting fixed i just have to say christopher had a phenomenal first day of pre-k in case anyone cares it he was welcomed at the door by teachers by administrators by staff i mean it was i felt very safe my uncle my aunt were there to welcome him and they walked away saying okay our baby is in good hands and that's a big deal so thank you educators wherever you were this morning thank you families for entrusting us with your babies i just i could speak forever about dr battle and her staff this was a good day for me and i didn't cry you're allowed to cry you're not going to tell him how he said goodbye he turned his back to me

115and then waved from behind he just literally did not even i told him well i think that's a perfect segue madam chair because i don't want us to lose the excitement of the first day of school thank you again chair bugs and board members i'm thrilled to join you here after a wonderful first day of school around the district i had the opportunity to visit several schools this morning and when i tell you just phenomenal work being done it was evident that the teams all across the district planned and were ready to welcome our students back it was so good to see smiling faces everywhere i went today you know a mask can cover up a smile but not entirely i can still see the smiles in the eyes of students teachers administrators parents and

116our support staff everyone i saw was happy to be back in their school building for a traditional first day there were plenty of hugs and high fives and even a red carpet or two we gave the first day of school the celebration it deserves but our school teams are also getting busy right away with academic instruction with social emotional learning and with making sure every student is known as an individual that started day one of the school year and that made me feel really good about where we're going to go and what we're going to accomplish in this 2021-22 school year so now let's watch a video that features some of our students and staff from around the district and what they are most excited about for the next school year we are back together

117again on the eve of a bright new school year we ask students staff and families what they are most excited about and here's what they shared [Music] really [Music] yes that was all their own answers so we didn't script that so our teams weren't starting just from scratch this morning of course they prepared for this day for a while and the result was a smooth operation across the district so let's look at some of what those teams have been up to starting with nutrition services which prepared more than 57 000 healthy nutritious meals at no cost to students and they'll continue to do that every single day for the next nine months so we're really excited that we're able to do to a waiver extend no cost breakfast and lunch to all of our families

118across the district our human resources team has continued to find excellent principals teachers and support staff members for all of our schools 87 of our schools started the year with zero classroom vacancies and we're working hard and quickly to fill any vacancies we do still have of the 78 remaining vacancies we're in the process of hiring for six and 46 classrooms are already covered by certificated staff those are certificated staff that are already within the school building so we are well on our way to making sure that our vacancies are covered for our students we've actually hired 98 approximately 98 more classroom teachers than we had last year which shows how strong our retention and recruitment strategies have been and once again we're so grateful for this board mayor cooper and metro council for making

119our teachers the best paid in the state as we move on to our enrollment updates our enrollment center shifted into high gear over the last week helping thousands of families with enrollments and transfers to ensure that children would start the year today and the right place we also are expecting a significant increase in enrollment over the previous school year i would note that enrollment numbers will shift in the next few weeks as parents register for pre-k and kindergarten and update their enrollment information so we'll have a better picture of overall enrollment with a 40-day count later this year our english learners population continues to grow and our el team continues to serve families by meeting them where they are and helping them get the services they need to start off on the right foot that

120has included offering covet 19 vaccinations to newly registered families so we're greatly appreciative of that partnership as well our division of academics in schools had another busy summer along with so many other departments they were instrumental in the rollout of our promising scholars summer program and at the same time they were getting more than half a million textbooks into schools and delivering more than 64 000 hours of professional development to teachers in preparation for this new year our family information center is so often the glue that connects our families to our district they have supported nearly 7 000 families in the final weeks leading up to the start of school by answering questions and providing critical information on a wide range of subjects and needs and also i want to give a shout out to

121our custodial staff our bus drivers our bus monitors paraprofessionals our support hub team and all of our other certificated and support staff for your work in making the first day of school a complete success [Applause] i'll just close out the back to school portion of my report with some words from a couple of our principals that you can see here on the screens about the year they're looking forward to we have opened up with so much positivity and optimism from our school leaders and our school teams about what we will accomplish this school year we are going to have a great year and i appreciate every member of team mmps from the school-based staff to the support hub to this board who's working so hard every day to make this possible i could not be

122more proud of what i saw today and i know that's what i'm going to see throughout the entire school year and now i'm going to turn it over to dr paul changus our executive director of research assessment and evaluation to talk about last year map test results we want we won't have district level tcap data until it's released tomorrow but we've gone ahead and collected map data on our students so that we know how we're doing and how they're doing and can hit the ground running for this school year we needed this information prior to the first day of school we already have our road map in place so let's be clear we all know the disruptions the pandemic calls this year again we could not wait until after the start of the school year

123to respond we will not get that embargo lifted on district data until tomorrow so we leveraged the various data sets we already had in-house to make informed and strategic decisions about our plan for the upcoming school year there are no surprises here for us we know our needs and our students and we'll respond accordingly so at this time dr changus i'll let you take it away thank you dr battle as dr battle said tomorrow the state will be releasing the the the district level data but last week the state level results were released and we have been looking at achievement data from multiple map assessments over the past year have continued to see high correlations between our map scores and our tcap scores so that we don't feel that we're going to be surprised with

124what comes out tomorrow and then so and just in anticipation of that release tomorrow i'm going to review some of the highlights of what we saw previously and and relate that to what what's coming so we have our signature initiatives uh our focused outcomes and our core tenants and i have outlined in red the many areas where our achievement data our map scores our ten-ready scores support key initiatives are part of those initiatives with our core tenants we know that it's important for us to know our students to to personalize those experiences we need data in terms of student achievement in order to identify where there are in equities where there are gaps we need that data our map growth data and literacy and numeracy is what drives our focused outcomes our growth is measured

125by the progress our students make over the course of the year and then we have a number of of signature initiatives which utilize these data so to review some of the key findings we saw from the may assessment and just as a reminder that assessment was given immediately after the tcap window ended it was one of multiple data points we had on student achievement last year we did see a decline in mathematics and in english language arts and a greater decline in math and as a reminder our growth was looking at what happened from february of 2020 just before the start of the pandemic to until may what percentage of our students maintain their national ranking among students in a normal year we did see achievement gaps widen for our economically disadvantaged students last year

126what we saw with our achievement data however was that the students who remained in a virtual learning environment the entire year actually had slightly higher scores than the students who returned in person now i'm not saying that that the virtual environment had a greater impact on student achievement when we dig deeper into the data there's there's context around the demographics and what we saw is that our in-person learners represented a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students english learners and students with disabilities to truly evaluate the progress of those students we need growth data and so when we looked at the growth information in terms of what percentage of students maintained their ranking relative to to prior to the pandemic we saw small differences in favor of our in-person learners but we are talking about small

127differences that we saw in terms of those percentages and i'll be sharing some of that data shortly we also looked at the students who were eligible and and in a grade level or subject area that would normally be tested who did not come back to take the tcap test last spring uh and and what we saw was based on their map scores they were a slightly higher achieving group of students than the students who actually tested in other words their test scores would have helped us a bit in terms of our overall data this graph on the left is what the state reported last week in terms of overall proficiency across all subject areas english language arts math science and social studies going back to 2017 and of course we had no data in 2020

128that testing was suspended so this is the statewide proficiency levels and and you can see that there was a decline statewide in terms of proficiency which was was no surprise given the pandemic and which is what other states are seeing with the data that's being reported if you recall with regard to our map data last spring we also saw a decline in terms of the percent of students scoring at the median national percentile at the percent of students that that are are in the top quintiles the blue bars here on the right represent the students above the 80th percentile nationally the red at the bottom are those students below the 20th percentile so what we're seeing is more students that are scoring in the lower ranges of the test fewer in the high area on

129the left what we're seeing is achievement levels which which reflect the same types of patterns and normally the students in the green and blue or on map are the students who are going to score in the in the on track or mastery on tcap so again we're seeing consistency in terms of the overall statewide trends uh with our data that we saw a significant decline with regard to the impact on student subgroups the state reported last week that tcap showed economically disadvantaged students english learners and students of color our black and african-american students our hispanic students had the biggest drops in terms of their data statewide and that again is looking across all subject areas when we looked at our data this is this is the disaggregated data that we shared for english language language

130arts in may are actually presented in june from our may data we saw very similar patterns with with mathematics we saw that our economically disadvantaged and our black or african american students were the ones that had this the most significant decline in terms of growth compared to other students not huge differences but that they fell below their their classmates we did not see the same impact on our english learners and hispanic population that the state reported but given that that a large percentage of those students are economically disadvantaged it would not be a surprise to see an impact there so so far we've seen quite a bit a consistency with what the states reported and what we saw with map where we start to see a little discrepancy is is the reporting that came out

131last week with regard to in-person hybrid and remote learning comparisons so let me clarify this this graph at the top is what the state reported breaking up districts based basically lumping district-wide results together based on what was called the primary district operating model for the year in other words district-wide data was combined not separated based on what might have happened within the district as you know within our district we had students that did return to buildings over the course of the year what the state's reporting is that there was a greater impact for on those students that were remote learning in terms of a decline when we look at our data which we did disaggregate based on which students remained in remote learning which students from came back to in person during the course of

132the year we see a little different pattern unlike the state results which show higher achievement for for our in-person learners we actually had higher median national percentiles as you can see in the top graphs for english language arts and mathematics for our remote learners and again these can be explained by the demographics of the students when we looked at map growth for english language arts and mathematics we saw differences but small differences in favor of the the in-person learners so so there are there is greater growth for the students that return but again we're seeing very small numbers and i and i think as we look at our data that will be coming out with tcap i'm comfortable in saying that i think we'll see similar patterns tcap provides an important data point but only

133one of many data points in terms of student achievement that we have on our students this graph represents one of our rising eighth graders going back to their third grade scores back in in 2017 these are in blue the students median national per their national percentile score on the map assessment for english language arts from january 2017 through may of the green represents their state percentile ranking on tcap and their achievement level below that and part of part of the reason for showing this is just as a reminder we have a lot of data on our on our students over time and and that provides a valuable context this particular child when we know students have good days and bad days taking tests this particular child for the first time did not score on track

134or mastered on the tcap we don't know what that child's percentile ranking among tennessee students was we don't have that data yet but they scored at the approaching level now i will add that to be on track or mastered is a pretty high score typically around the 70th percentile or so depending on the grade level and subject but as you can see other than that one data point this child has consistently been above at the 89th percentile or above compared to their classmates this child was an in-person learner came back last year they took the map assessment in may in one of our buildings in a secure setting scored higher than 95 percent of their classmates nationally in a normal year i'm based on over 40 years of analyzing test data looking at this pattern

135i feel pretty comfortable in saying that this child is college and career ready regardless of what when one data point says and we need that context when we look at our students data when we make decisions educational decisions we need to keep in mind that we have a variety of assessment data we have classroom assessments we have our own observations and grades on students and and we will be adding another data point uh here in the next couple of weeks with with additional universal screening to inform our multi-tiered systems of support our map assessments uh our fastbridge assessments and and other data that we have again this is not to not to discount any tcap score just as a reminder that we have a lot of information already in summary i think we can all

136agree that the pandemic had a significant impact on student achievement which was anticipated whether we're looking at state data our own district data we saw it across subject areas we can all agree that the gaps did widen somewhat for our economically disadvantaged students where we have some questions is about the impact on our remote learners versus our in-person learners and we know that the districts that were identified in their reporting on remote learners are districts that have higher percentages of economically disadvantaged and english learners students who were impacted regardless of the the setting the learning setting last year i'm what i'm saying is let's wait till we see growth data in multiple data points i'll point out that when we compare 2019 to 2021 data there's overlap in who those students are but there's a

137lot of students who were tested two years ago who are no longer in tested grades and subjects and a lot of students that tested this year who were not in our previous data when i looked at our tcap grade tcap grade three through eight data and compared it to two years ago i found that over a third of our students 38 percent of students didn't have a prior score these these are not the same students and what we've been looking at with our map data is tracking the same students over time as we saw in our district remote learners had higher achievement but slightly less academic growth again demographics explain a lot of that and as i mentioned we have a lot of different data points from two years ago so where do we go

138from here there are a number of steps in terms of again making sure every student is known and getting that data out to our educators and to our families schools already have access to longitudinal map data and in the current tcap scores they've all been loaded in our data warehouse students who have changed buildings their data is as follows them where they're enrolled so if you're a current uh ninth grader in a high school your eighth grade tcap scores are already there so are your map scores the uh the the map and fastbridge data coming in the next few weeks again will help us inform the the multi-tiered systems of support process as we identify gaps and work to close those map scores from may are already in our personalized student dashboard and available to

139families tcap scores are being loaded and will be there soon and we're working with our communications department and others to provide additional information for families we already have some guidance information that's in the student dashboard to help families interpret test data we'll be adding resources to help with regard to access and interpretation of those results also some videos to help with access and over the the coming weeks we will start doing some surveying of families as well as focus groups to get their input and their feedback from what we've already provided and to help us with further development of that dashboard and and i will turn it back over to dr battle i know there's going to be additional information coming out about the instructional steps to come but that that closes it from the

140assessment side thank you paul board members as you can see we have a lot of work to do but we have the right people and processes in place to accelerate these outcomes for our students what we know is that we move we must move back to basics to get it right so that we have forward progress and success we're moving into a period of recovery and then quickly into acceleration and we have to get the fundamental inflection points right and so as we've been looking at this you know keeping in mind that again we've been moving strategically on the data that we saw last year there's no surprises here i haven't seen any surprises yet as we've been looking at our map data and anticipating what will be released tomorrow so we have a plan

141in place we'll use the universal screener screeners fast bridge will use map to make any needed adjustments at the beginning of the year as a reminder also we did run the largest promising scholars summer experience um this summer that was that happened after we administer both mab and and tn ready we know that this is only one data point we will take that information we will use it to the best of our ability to make sure that we're making informed decisions as we're moving forward so with that madam chair i'll turn it back over to you thank you very much for this information uh we'll open it up for questions before we move on to announcements say that again i'm opening it up for questions and then we'll move on or put the discussion and

142then we'll move on to announcements miss tyler um not a question but i just wanted to thank dr changes for including all the quintiles so that we could really see where the differences are instead of just those top two so i really appreciate that and i would encourage that to continue thank you all right mrs uh um masters can i ask any question yeah by the way okay i just wanted to ask dr battle about um it's not about data although i did appreciate that uh presentation um how we're doing i'm just wondering how we're doing on buses and bus drivers and and getting that fully staffed and having everything that we need there um well just like what's been experienced all across the country we i'm still in a space where there are bus

143driver shortages we have been able to maintain a cohort a roster of safe bus drivers who are leveraging various strategies to ensure that we're getting our students safely back and forth to school so we are still aggressively recruiting bus drivers into the district what we look at when we're recruiting and in our ideal space is that we have one bus driver per route if you will we are we are many driver short of that but we're in a manageable space that through the great efforts and teamwork of our team that we can run a b routes and using other strategies to make sure that we get our students to and from school safely but we're about um i think we could hire up to about 60 more bus drivers wow that would be our ideal

144space is to hire about 60 more bus drivers what can we what can the board do to help i mean other than spread the word that we're hiring best drivers i mean what can we do well the team is leveraging many strategies and recruitment strategies for our bus drivers we've also worked with other external driving companies to recruit bus drivers to mmps and it really is about getting the word out it's about you know the the great work and the impact that you have and supporting our students and families by driving here in mnps as i started out mentioning it's a national challenge right now just like in every front with education to make sure we have good quality drivers again who keep safety at the top of our priority list to come and work

145here so spreading the word telling the positive stories sharing the impact again that bus drivers and our monitors have on our students i mean they are the first leaders adults that our students engage with during a school day so they have a great role to play within the district thank you welcome all right any other questions for dr battle before we move on to the mmcv discussion mrs brush yes i just wanted to know when i was looking at the data i'm really concerned about the economically disadvantaged students which mostly are black and brown children and i just want to know how intentional we're being as far as helping mitigate their learning loss what is the plan for that i know we're trying to help resuscitate in the district as far as the amount of

146learning laws that we experienced during cobit but i'm really really really concerned about those younger students um that have had a missed opportunity those kindergartens go into first grade that did not have a kindergarten year what is the plan on help mitigating these students and with this learning loss because again as i mentioned most of these disadvantaged students are black and brown students so what would be the plan for that um so a few things that we are doing um first i think we all could agree that our priority are is you know our students keeping them safe and educating them at a high level last year while we did operate with both both virtual and in-person and kind of a hybrid of that um throughout the majority of the year all of our students

147experienced a year of learning it might not have been in our school buildings but our primary responsibility of course was keeping them safe but also educating them at a high level part of the plan that we've communicated in the past which is specific to our economically disadvantaged students are high-level strategies this is why we launched high dosage tutoring in our district we didn't wait for the data to come out tomorrow so we still the embargo is still there so we didn't wait for that we launched high-doses tutoring across our district based upon the data we're seeing we will continue to really target our first and second graders and literacy will be targeting our eighth and ninth graders in numeracy that's not limited just in that space but we know we have work to do for

148both of those subgroups it is also why we launched our navigator system because we know that particularly with our economically disadvantaged students there might be some challenges and barriers to navigating this pandemic space and making sure that they have the right supports in place to meet their individual needs it is why we fund it as a district interventions for all schools so regardless of the the student and which subgroups they might fall into including our economically disadvantaged students it's important that as we're following our mtss process that we have a good core instruction which is why we also invested heavily in those core instructional materials and pd for our families but the interventions so that when students are not performing up to standard we can intervene early and consistently across our district this is also

149why when we have built out our student-based budgeting model and leveraging our esser funds that we use the equity matrix when it comes to the funds and how we spiral those funds down to schools every school received a base funding amount and that amount increased based upon the economically disadvantaged students being served in the school and we did that with intention because we saw what was happening with our data and wanted to prioritize all of our subgroups of students but in this case we're talking about our economically disadvantaged but also because we know our school teams our leaders and teachers know our students best and so they were able to leverage those funds to meet the unique needs of our students based upon where they are and how they've been impacted by this pandemic um

150as a reminder we've already spiraled down on leveraging esther 2.24 million dollars to our schools based upon our equity matrix that definitely is grounded in our economically disadvantaged students so those are some of the highest leverage strategies that we've implemented across the district and will continue to adjust as we move forward and how do we when we identify those students so it sounds like the teachers will be able to identify and assess those students and how soon with this high level of of tutoring that will happen how soon will that happen as far as that type of connection with those students so our first palette of high doses tutoring happened in the spring so we tutored students with our gold standard high doses tutoring model back in the spring for about 500 students and this

151year our goal is to tutor up to 7 000 students with our tutoring process we have been able to see some strong data behind what the high doses tutoring did to support our learners all across the district and we are in the process now of identifying students getting volunteers trained all across the city not even just in our school district to begin that implement implementation immediately again this is why we needed various data points with with new data it is very hard to leverage these high impact research-based strategies to meet the needs of our students thank you miss bush mrs pupa walker so i just want to say that you know mnps has led the state really in having really strong data systems for many years and that is to our advantage now as we

152know that we have staff who are trained in teams and departments and grade level teams all using data and dashboards to talk about how students are doing and now we have the personalized dashboard for families i just think all of that is going to be so essential here i appreciate us talking candidly about where we are and not sugar coating where we are i think it's but i also know that this is the case across the state across the country um we're not alone in seeing drops in achievement for students and so excited to see us dig in on you know what we know our research-based strategies like tutoring and and things like navigators and all these different tools and also just want to remind us that we are also hiring all these folks in

153these advocacy centers all of these additional people in our buildings that are going to provide this wrap around support that we just didn't have access to before that we need so desperately so looking forward to the conversation about the data tomorrow but also recognizing that we're already on it so thank you and if i can just uh make one comment um in response not in response it going what uh ms popo walker just shared greg kudos to dr changus and his team we can speak about this today because of how well trained and versed our team is we were able to predict this there are no surprises here for us even as we're waiting on the data to be released tomorrow i also want to acknowledge that because of the investments we have with technology

154in our district today for the first time after the first day of school we were able to bring all of our principles together and we did so virtually one to congratulate them on the job well done um for today and they've been telling me leading for i mean weeks leading up to this they've got this they're ready they feel so prepared but we also on the first day of school we're able to have a conversation about another conversation about where we are and reinforcing the plan we have moving forward i could not have been more proud today walking through school buildings and we're already talking about every student known academically socially emotionally and seeing that play out across our school building so again kudos to dr changus and his team we all know that everybody

155across the state and country relies on our team and their depth of knowledge but also just the ability because of the investments in technology and our platforms to be able to bring everyone together and not delaying this conversation and we talk with our principals today and they are still pumped and they are still ready to go and they know the plan the path forward for us as a district thank you dr battle mr little um you just want to give kudos i mean as as dr changus like thank you for having the stomach just to give us the the hard details with academic data and and really kudos for this team has worked really hard to like change the culture the scariest thing right now is that we're just now turning this around and i

156think the the scariest point for me what happens if we don't get it right next year what happens when we don't get it right the following year and as i look back it was 69 below average so i just sit here we debated the mass mandate for 45 minutes crt for 45 minutes and as a board member i'm trying to define my role on how do we come back from the injustices like how do we sit here right now and say it looks really bad and we have a really good plan but i i feel like i'm on the outside looking in on like how do we really help and this is this is not a finger pointing at anybody this is just me expressing myself to say where our results are now we have

157lost a generation of children and i think we have the right team on the ship but it it's hurtful to even think back to generations parents who now have kids in school as we look at nashville and we're losing our affordable housing this is this is just i don't know like i'm this is hard for me and maybe i need a little therapy but on one data point i think dr changes said let me go back it was essentially a person of el student still scored higher than a african american student on the map test which if a kid has been in school for years and years and again this is not a finger pointing to currently but just what have we been doing in the past years where we're having kids who are not

158getting educated for elementary middle school and high school so i did i don't even have a question i'm just like looking at these results it's just so hard to stomach and i have the faith that we can turn it around but i don't know what i can do to help turn it around but i want to be helpful somewhere because we can't keep producing this and and think that we're going to have real equity in the city we can't keep producing this and thinking our children are going to have access to the new jobs that are coming when you think about amazon and oracle and so i'm gonna stop at this point but i'm i'm hurt by these um scores and i just really want to do whatever i can to help change course well

159one thing i do want to clarify what we what you saw was a comparison of what the state real is released for the state right every district for last year's tcap scores and a summary of recap of what our map scores were from last spring so but historically our data has been worse than the state when we look at our so when i see the state and i see the state numbers i look at mnps and say maybe it'll be on the same path but historically it's been worse and and again that's what gives me pain to think all right first thing in the morning what do i have to look at and then how do we help thank you mr little um dr gendry before you go if i when i brought my son

160to school this morning i was so of course excited but there was a lot of preparation before then because the data that i've seen the data that i know is that 30 percent of our mmps's first graders come into first grade come into mnps already when full grade level behind that's not spoken by the state it's not discussed in the community no you know parent meetings we're not talking about how communities are under resourced and then how those students then show up at schools and so i appreciate the rallying call to let everyone know that you can't keep laying these issues at m p s feet and then expecting us to run with it in a way that is truly transformative for generations not until the community sees every child as their child that needs

161to be supported until we start seeing more equity in in neighborhoods we will not see equity in schools until we see inclusivity in our community we won't see as inclusivity as consistently as we should in schools and i mean we could i could stand up on a soapbox for hours and preach about what it means to be a community member what it means to be an educator and then now what it means to be a parent but as a board member it's always going to be my job to advocate for mnps and to remind everyone that not only should we all be collaborating that it is not any one person's issue it's not any one person's fault it's not any one person's thing but i i can't help but advocate i can't help but dig

162into the data and then i can't help but to try to offer a narrative in context that says stop blaming educators and stop blaming parents stop pitting us against each other and let's collaborate the community as a whole in nashville is not what it needs to be you know it because you grew up in nashville just like i did we when i walk into buena vista it's very different than i walk into some of the more affluent schools in my district i could talk about how race and affluence and choice and all those things have impacted these different schools but we cannot keep acting like that doesn't impact our children i i'm gonna just stop there because i can just ramble dr gendry and just if you don't mind i'ma let you but dr gentry

163i'd like to hear what mr little has to say all right go ahead mr little if 30 are already coming in and so we can never catch them up the hard question has to be why run a school system for a kid that we can never get to grade level why run a school system for a kid who would never realize their greatest dreams because they didn't receive an education because back in the first grade they were already two grades behind i think the the toughness of what we have to figure out is how do we change it do we have the ability to change it in our roles and our positions and our support and if we do i think it let's let's collaborate if we don't we need to figure out because this

164is yeah i'm gonna stop like yeah i'm past him dr ginger dr gentry thank you so i'm always troubled when we when we uh when i hear um the challenges and and our data contextualized and sort of the exclamation point on it is there's a lot of buzzwords and a lot of a little bit of hyperbole some innuendo and and mr little what i would agree with you is that um it's a challenge and we are consistently challenged the problem that happens and i've been saying this now going on 13 years is we because because we don't want to be here 30 hours we're very topical in what we discuss and so we don't always have a holistic conversation about the data what we looked at today was a data point and as i say

165also data is a symptom it's not the problem the problem is not the numbers that we see the problem is what's contributing to the numbers that we see and so can we take a student who comes to us two great levels behind and get them where they are of course we can with all other things being equal but they're not and so as i also said during this pandemic we had 83 000 classrooms we couldn't standardize them we couldn't ensure that that that engagement was consistent we couldn't ensure that social and emotional supports were where they needed to be we couldn't ensure that when translation was needed it was readily available we couldn't ensure those things because it was 83 000 classrooms and so the question becomes are we clear on what our our resources

166are and the levers we can pull as a school system a teacher or a building level leader can pull in a classroom and then are we clear on all those other aspects that are necessary which is why we push a budget that talks about social emotional support which is why we push a budget that wants to put community in chiefs in every school which is why we push a budget that talks about nurses which is why we push a budget that talks about psychologists and in an ideal world we shouldn't be talking about any of those things we should be talking about books teachers and curriculum but we're not in an ideal world and so we've got to stop being the harbingers of despair at this board table and be very realistic about what it's

167going to take to get that single student if you multiply that student by however many of those kinds of students we have that show up to us never being having touched a book never been read to never been to a library doesn't have a stable a home environment may live in a homeless shelter our our variables are are innumerable when you when you then take and do the um the extrapolation into how many combinations of aces a student can show up with and so i'm not saying all this to be to say that we get a pass or to say that it cannot happen i'm saying that we've got to challenge ourselves to have a more holistic conversation when we talk about the numbers that we see and we can't leave our district or our

168director or her staff saying you just got to make these numbers look different so what is your role as a board member i would offer up is that to continue to have the conversation it says we have because these challenges do show up at our doorstep not just the fact that a child can't read because if all i had to do was teach you how to read i think we'd get that covered if i had a child that showed up socially and emotionally healthy and strong if i had a child that showed up prepared to learn in the primary language in which we teach if i had a child that always showed up physically well meaning they're not hungry they're not on any mood altering medications they have no other challenges to learning if i

169had that child that showed up every day that that was comfortable and and safe and and and confident sitting in the classroom because they know they were going to return to a comfortable and healthy and supportive environment when they left me i could always teach that child to read but that's not the children that we have and so we've got to continue as board members to have the conversation that says the resources i need to get that student and just a simple example of a student who shows up with everything else being equal but their two grade levels behind in reading just that child and what that child who that child typically represents in our society here in nashville if i had our job is to advocate for all the resources necessary to get that

170child to where he or she needs to be on or above grade level and so and to stop having the conversation in a silo even though time requires us to do it stop articulating the problem as a data problem quit articulating the problem as the percentages of students who can't read because that's just the symptoms the percentage of children who are below grade level is a symptom of a city that you've said yourself is not a singular city we have multiple versions of nashville and that show up in our classrooms across the district every day and so what it takes is the energy and the stamina and the fidelity and the integrity to have a conversation that's bigger than those numbers a conversation that's bigger than paul changes being challenged and asked a question about

171what's the plan a conversation that's bigger than looking at dr battle and and not you know not being able to wait to to ding her on her evaluation it's the conversation that says right collaboration but it's more than collaboration amongst these resources how do we bring the right people in the city who are causing the disparities that we have in access causing the disparities we have in incomes causing the disparities that we have and just the ability to take advantage of all the things that make this city the its city that everyone says it is there are families in here who've never been downtown so that's what i would say is our charge is not just to look these individuals in this room in the eye and ask them what they are going to do

172but challenge everyone else in this city to come to the table and bring their resources to bear to move the needle not just the academic one but the social one the emotional one the access one the financial one to move those needles for all of these students in these families so that they are best positioned to take advantage of what we have to offer here in mnps thank you uh mrs player peters yeah i want to go back to like what's our role as a board member and i think it goes back to why did you run i mean i ran you know because i'm a unicorn i don't have any kids probably i don't have any kids i i don't come from academia i'm not a teacher not a certified teacher never taught one

173day a life in school and i think for me one of the reasons i did it was to advocate for our schools from my over decade of year of observing on the other side of that wall of what metro schools can do and capable of doing and who's advocating for that and i stand because when i was literally going door-to-door for candidates people would say well i don't care about schools because i don't have a kid in school and i'm like i'm here 90 degree weather going door-to-door sweating for children i don't have children that are not blood to me because i care about my community and the talents i bring coming from an advocacy world coming from governing world of how to articulate what metro schools is doing has been doing and can be

174doing particularly to other elected officials both on the local level and the state level of saying this is your misconceptions about mnps these are the accurate conception mnps but it takes a collective world and i bring the talent of understanding how to budget how to govern how to look at that and how to advocate for that in that but to say our role as a board member and what do we do is the fundamental reason why we are here we have to do the hard lessons of what does it mean as a government as a society to educate our children and we have to answer those those hard questions we have to do those hard things of figuring out the past that's why people elect us to be leaders to come up the solution that

175is not easy because it was easy had already been done and someone would have made that pathway but we it's ourselves that we have to do collectively as a board with our individual talents coming together as a collective whole to guide dr battle and her staff to come of those answers whether it's advocating for resources that's one of the reasons why we're suing the bep funding because it's not adequate because we as a state don't value education way of funding as the other 45 states that gives school boards taxing authority because they want to invest in the financial resources of our children to give them the best education possible so part of it is we have to find our individual role of what that means to be a school board member and then with our

176collective roles in the individual that comes to the whole to lead the way that's why we're elected officials that's why we step up and do this lovely job that's almost full-time and a part-time salary thirteen thousand dollars in a way because it's it's called public service because it's service it's hard it's not easy we've been through even the last week of making that difficult decision well it wasn't difficult for me i think it wasn't difficult for both of us but making it difficult in the in decisions to move it forward and it's not easy and that's the part of governing that we are the leaders that have to came come with the direction to do it and if if we don't have the answers to that then we have to examine why we're leaders that's

177why we're reading the book that we are about being a central school board it gives a pathway of how other school boards increase their testing scores increase their literacy rate increase that is a guide way to give us our own unique mnps way of doing it that's why we hired dr battle because we believed in her vision to to solve these issues now it's going to happen overnight absolutely but it's one of those things that we have to take those hard things and also believe in resiliency that there has to be a pathway to growth and we have to hold everyone accountable to do that so i think it's a combination of finding your own path to do it but then also leading in that way and finding those answers and it's not easy it's

178not hard i mean it's one of those things that we have to have those difficult conversations and those transparent conversations to do it um so i think that's part of discussion like at retreats we need to continue to have the discussions we need to have that what do we bring individually and then what we bring as a whole to govern through these hard issues to get to the answers that we want to because governing is hard i wish it was easy it will make a whole our society and our life much more easier but that's part of being democracy is that we have to come together and find out how do we do these tough things given everyone's rights and abilities and talent and being being responsible for the collective whole mrs tyler um yeah

179i just wanted to kind of echo a little bit of what dr gentry and miss player peterson was saying we act we do know how to help children even ones who have aces and we know that smaller class sizes works we know that one-on-one instruction works we know that strong social and emotional learning works we know what works the problem is when you don't have the ability to implement the things that work so how do we support the system to allow for smaller class sizes how do we make policy that increases sel learning how do we make our budget reflect that and all of those are the things that we have some sort of control over and that we should be looking at and encouraging one another to think about and and i just i

180just have to say as a former teacher one of the things that that is so important for people to understand is that for the last decade or so teachers have been asked to put more and more hats on it used to be that you literally just taught what you needed to teach and over time they have taken on the role of social worker guidance counselor therapist they have taken on the role of surrogate parents sometimes sometimes they've taken on the role of social worker and all of these things are taxing our teachers in a way that leaves them emotionally deficient and they leave and our great teachers are not staying and as we know one of the ways that we can help our kids learn is to have great teachers and in fact that is

181the top way we teach our kids to have good quality teachers so we have to start thinking about how do we approach the problem and one of the things that i've always said is you know when you're looking at the different taxonomies maslow's has to come before blooms has to you cannot teach a child who has current trauma in their head because of the way their brain reacts to it and if you can't reach that child to teach then all you're going to be doing is crowd control all you're going to be doing is putting out one fire after the other so um i just i really want to encourage us to look for not the nitty-gritty detail of what should the teacher say in the classroom or what should the principal enforce for their

182teachers that's not our job our job is to figure out how do we give everybody the tools using our policies and our budget to support what we know and what research shows works and so that's high quality teachers that means not necessarily recruiting brand new teachers but working to keep our great teachers here smaller class sizes sells making sure we have nurses in every school making sure that we have guidance counselors in every school those are the things that we have some sort of control over and i think as long as we continue to have these conversations and we continue to put those things as the highest priority then then we are going to start to see the needle move on the symptoms of the problem as dr gentry said it so that's just kind

183of what i had to say about that and i also had a question about if groups are community groups are wanting to join and be tutors who would they need to contact to get some sort of training so that they could be part of their community to to help support thank you for their call to the community to help us out here with our high doses tutoring i'm going to invite dr kerry randolph up to the podium to share the the great news about how one could get involved thank you for the question and we opened um a call for volunteers this week actually um i can send around the um the web address but the best way for community volunteers is to go to pencil they are our lead partner on recruiting community volunteers

184um and we're looking for a lot of them but we have great opportunity training and support for tutors so yes we'd love for you to help spread the word thank you dr randolph all right mr little yeah and and just to be clear and and this is responding to miss player peters i think the question is why why did we run i think for us to set up here for the money we ran because we have a passion for the community right that passion says you want all kids to succeed and then you look at the roles of a board member and you ask yourself is this me and so when you think about all kids and you think about year in year out again this is not pointing the finger but i'm saying we

185have to do better than it's been done before we we do have to come together as a team in order to do it and i don't think this is a like a teacher thing like it it's no fault to teachers because teachers are not in leadership teachers follow like state policies that come down they get frustrated because people who make the policies don't understand what happens in the classroom but i can't help but saying what has happened decade after decade after decade and again if that's what we're gonna do like i'm i'm all in but i can ask as a as a board member as a parent who cares like let's do it like i'm actually like stepping up to the plate because i think we have to take a a hard approach because this

186looks it looks devastating right it looks devastating to say the kids that we get historically they have never been able to read on grade level by the first grade by the time they graduate you have people who are coming out who still can't read they're not going to college at a high level they're not finding gainful employment so all these things really exist in our city my question my passion right now is as dr gentry said like let's let's really do something different for kids i just had to express myself that that look the data looks hurtful because i know the data translates into reality and and if you go into any community right going into dupont hadley going into mcgavin this week like you see what we you see what the data says and

187what our kids are struggling with and so all i'm saying we can't we can't forget that year in year out you know i've been paying attention since i was in elementary and we had different superintendents we had different teams we have set in this board room we've passed budgets and nut and academic achievement hasn't increased that means college college acceptance college graduation like all of that stuff has been dismal for decades and so i'm fine with being in this room with this team because we really got to do something different than we have really ever done before and listening to people in the community a lot of people have lost faith because they went to school and didn't get the proper education in it and now they have kids and so if you never learned

188how to invest in stock it's hard to teach your kids how to invest in stock if you had issues with reading when your kid comes home to and they they need help reading it's so hard for you to do it i'm just saying the buck stops with us any other questions or thoughts all right we'll move on to mmcv but i will say a couple of months ago soledad o'brien came to visit nashville and the title of her documentary was dismantled disrupting dismantle and she was focused on 37208 and that's i remember the to be honest when she came into the room to interview me i could tell she was ready to attack she was ready to suggest that mnps was the issue that we were the linchpin we were the reason for the school-to-prison

189pipeline but as soon as i started talking to her and explaining to her that both dr battle and i were from north nashville that i that i paid for my house you know from the teacher money to you know in 37208 and then i was sending my son to 370 the school in 37208 she flat out asked me so why keep fighting why do this and i said because i have a son who will go to this school i mean it was such to be honest such an asinine almost hurtful question so people say why do this why do we do this work because we are passionate about children it is going to be hard it is going to be something that systems of oppression we have to dismantle and disrupt but to to suggest

190that you know any that anything other than collaboration will be the fixture we just we can't allow that to happen so many words to say but we'll move on to mmcv with that we have some questions um i guess we will begin with miss bush you asked for a few questions to be answered dr battle how would you like to move forward um we can receive the questions and respond accordingly okay so i will start with the first question that was submitted when was the mmcv ink for profit company formed all right i would like to invite mr hank clay up to the podium to respond to that question madam chair meharry medical college was formed in 1876 meharry medical college ventures which is a wholly owned by moherry medical college was formed in december

1912020 to model after the structure that vanderbilt university uses thank you what is their past business record and relationships with other school districts the partnership was created in response to the pandemic and since that was unprecedented no one could have had a track record with other districts all right when did the contract start and stop the contract start date was february 15 and the contract has ended ended on june 30th 2021. um it's asking for an itemization of all services rendered we have detailed invoices and those have been widely circulated and provided to board members as well okay and then an itemization of all hourly rate pay for all staff members and their positions and the contract was structured based on deliverables and services provided to the district um the it wasn't structured with an

192hourly billing rate except for some additional items and if those additional items were asked for and provided then those would have been built a highway rate but very limited okay and an itemization of all training hours i would have to refer you to mahari on that how they train their employees okay and monthly billing costs the monthly billing range from except for the startup deliverables between 1.3 million dollars and 1.9 million dollars okay and then total amount paid for the contract the total amount paid so far for the contract has been twelve million three hundred and five thousand two hundred seventy three dollars all right thank you for that dr battle and staff with that okay well i think we have to have a motion to have discussion melissa i just want to make sure

193that i'm moving appropriately it's listed on the agenda for discussion so you guys you all can discuss amongst yourselves okay i saw miss masters and miss tyler oh okay so 12 million and change um so far but does that mean there are still some outstanding invoices or is that that's end of the contract um mr clay you can approach the podium thank you we have not paid for the june invoice and how much do we know yet how that much that is um that could be up to 1.9 million dollars we had it as an estimate and we're still working to verify the the work performed and have not paid it out yet we have a very robust due diligence process can't ask another one are we going to go right here um also um

194so i recall in the discussions that there was going to be a roll out of a website that was part of what mahiri was to deliver um and i don't i never saw that rolled out i know that it was in process um so i'm just kind of curious what happened with that portion of it where it was going to offer a whole lot of transparency around um coveted cases and and all everything going on in schools i said i'd go ahead and respond that website was backsafeway.org so that was rolled out that's where parents could sign up that's where they can provide um some information about covid in addition to that the district provided kind of centralized data tracking through the coped through the copic thermometer referenced earlier so the so the backsafely.org site

195was part of what was funded through this contract yes ma'am well like all of the okay um i'm also wondering about so initially there was an an assumption whether correct or not that part of the mahari thing was going to be to offer the vaccines which of course then didn't end up being included as a part of that because that was done through our our health partner um so a was that assumption correct and if so um was is the pay rate was it adjusted appropriately to account for mcharry not being a part of the vaccine effort mr clay feel free to respond thank you um so the vaccine advice was considered so for example as we know dr hildress said on the national advisory he sat on the fda committee to review the vaccine

196that provided robust almost very valuable information for us it was not built into the contract for mahari medical college or anybody else to provide the actual vaccines to students that would have been inappropriate because it is covered through insurance or through the government itself so at the point when vaccines became available to our teachers and now to some of our students we have partnered with uh with vanderbilt university to do that but that again is not billed to us that is through the insurance um and through the federal government um okay thank you and then um i i also just want to clarify that this was esser money correct that we are using that's correct i want to distinguish um it was the federal us or money given directly to the school district it was

197not part of the mayor's allocation investor funding okay so that it that's a new one for me because i was under the impression that it was the mayor who provided the esther funding specifically for us to contract with mahari for these services just go ahead and respond as you probably remember through some of the powerpoints one as recently as a couple weeks ago at the border treat in every single one of those powerpoints it was listed as part of sr2 so i had to go through the state approval what you may be remembering is s before 2 was allocated we were in conversation to see if the city could allocate dollars that never panned out and then the school district received the federal funding through sr2 and that's how it was paid for and that

198is something we've been very transparent about well we leveraged esser ii um about i think that could be referenced in all prior presentations around those funds and the intent for those funds coming directly to school districts okay so back in december when we were talking with the mayor and mahari about sort of wanting to do this that was when we were still under the impression we might be getting money from the city for it that was when we were trying to explore every avenue possible to open our schools safely congress had not passed esther funding yet and so again we were trying to do our due diligence to ensure that we could safely reopen schools as soon as possible and to keep them open so yes you're correct that we're trying to work with the

199mayor to see if there was some sort of city funding that became unnecessary when school districts across the country receive the federal resources um do we have any plans to do an rfp to try to get a contract to do the randomized testing and again or i mean is that something that we might consider mr clay you can go ahead and respond um it's always on the table and um just to reiterate what you just said um we had an emergency contract due to the emergency situation at covid we are no longer in that situation and so if we were to do something we would do a request for proposals and have a competitive process and we do not have current plans to do an rfp but we'll go through that process if we did

200we are testing on a as needed basis with our school nurses but we're not doing the randomized kind of blanket approach that we had done in the spring thank you mrs tyler um i just had a question so when we had talked about this um when meharry sent a representative we were asking about you know how how many employees are they going to have how many people are are going to be part of this program and and why they need to ask for that much and i think they had said that they were the plan was to hire 400 people if i remember that correctly but they didn't actually employ that so do we have any recourse for that monthly fee that was non-negotiable when they didn't fulfill the number of people that they had

201promised that they would fill does that make sense okay wait instagram um so miss tyler has provided a memo to before the monthly fees have adjusted based on the services they were provided so that's when a reference back in february it was 1.3 million dollars in march it was 1.8 and april was 1.9 in may 1.9 that's to reflect the ramp up of hiring to be to be able to provide those services there was a fir it was a service based contract one way to think about how to if i remember that conversation correctly how to visualize the scale of the district was they were talking about the number of people i would have to defer to them on exactly how many people they hired to to do what we asked them to do but

202we we evaluated the contract based on whether they provided the services which they did and then after we evaluated the monthly invoice to do our due diligence we either paid or did not pay so and is it typical to when you create a contract with a group for something and i know this is really unprecedented there really hasn't been something like this before but how frequently do we guarantee a monthly amount no matter what is that typical of our contracts i um so i would characterize it differently um i don't think we guaranteed a certain amount um what we did was ask for a service if they provided us service then they got paid for that service okay so we we definitely evaluated whether we had the coverage in our schools we evaluated whether they

203provided the goods that they said that they would provide if they did then we paid for what we agreed to we were building a comprehensive net services to accomplish these specific goals that is how the contract was valued okay and then um could you just kind of i know this had to come together so quickly and that we were all anxious and i think it is important to continue to remind everybody that when this negotiations happen there wasn't a vaccine we were still trying to figure out how to get kids back in school that was our highest priority to get them in person safely so that we could take care of them and teach them um so i just was wondering if you could kind of just give us a little bit of insight on

204how those negotiations have like who came to the table for that and how quickly did we have to decide this when were you starting to discuss creating a contract up to when we actually voted on it yeah great great question so um very quickly um and did not know exactly what we needed we needed we knew that we needed to go to experts so part of the context of this is that mahari medical college stepped up for the city to very successfully provide testing centers across the city we then went to those well-respected professionals to say what would it take to be able to get back into school in an in-person learning environment as quickly as possible what would allow us to basically um operate in the environment that we were and just to echo

205this this is at a point in time where we had phased in our elementary and exceptional education students and we were making a determination that we need to go back virtual as everything was ramping up in november and december so we just cannot lose that context because we were in a space of doing whatever was necessary we even even had that talked about when we're talking about math to get our kids back in an in-person learning environment that just cannot be forgotten in this conversation go ahead mr cleveland to very specifically answer your question we went to them in in november and december to say what would this look like most of that happened in december it was uncertain about what the scale of setting up some i mean we talk about the advocacy centers

206how much that cost the scale of setting something up in very short order all the conference of need so we started talking about that in theoretical terms we did not know if there would be funding then as we talked about earlier the federal government came through with the funding to show that resources would be available we then worked through the broad ideas of the contract brought that to you all for you to approve um we and we got more and more specific as we've learned more it was um they continued the negotiations and went into effect on the february 15th and then they had to stand up and operation from nothing to then cover as many schools as possible as than the cova cases as we were able to go back to school in person

207because of this as well and they were able to do that for march april and may and then in june as well thank you i do think it is important to remember that context i think that gets lost sometimes in this discussion um if i may yeah no go for it it also the lessons we've learned from that and that experience and their expertise also has residual benefit for us now because as we see the cases are increasing and we are able to be in an in-person learning environment now so it has the contract has ended and we're still benefiting from that research and expertise great um and then my last question was um i know that several parents have mentioned being supportive of temperature checks going in the schools and i know that we

208got those infrared cameras as part of ours and those we bought them they belong to us correct so are there plans to use those again this year are we going to um and then i know that there's a lot of detailed information they can provide so what what's the limit of how we're going to use them go ahead mr clark um we will use them as a tool to help out they are not meant to scan every single student coming into a building because that would impede the flow of traffic but if for example a class has several people that had symptoms you would be able to very quickly use that you could use it for a special event and it's it's mobile so we have the ability to move it from one location to

209another we also throughout the entire pandemic have been uber sensitive about private information and so we have been very we want to encourage as much participation as possible so we've ensured that that privacy is maintained okay thank you that's all of that's very helpful and one term that was slightly misused with the with the the temperature scanning units is it recognized that there was a face and where to scan that's a little bit different than facial recognition yes that is very different thank you for clarifying that all right i'm good all right all right go ahead mrs bush okay i have several questions for you hank um number one this is a a problematic um contract for one it's a no bid number two this is a company that was formed that has no prior

210history in working in the school districts and it's very dangerous to have not have line item billing so when i got a chance to look at the amount of money that was billed for the contract or for the services per month i could not identify what was done that was embedded into those fees and so that's the reason why it becomes because my background is in healthcare and i used to do reimbursement i used to do illini building and i've never seen a contract like this before where you cannot identify what was done and what kind of services were rendered for the cost of services so that's that's problematic so in the contract where it states on i think page six it says that we are to get anything if we need those line united

211billings we should be able to get that from um from meharry ventures and i guess my question my first question is where are they i've never seen an appeal being billed for a large sum of money and there's no itemization is there any itemization um dr battle would you like to respond thank you madam chair i'm just glad you can respond thank you i would disagree that there's not itemization madam chair if you don't mind this might take a while but i'll read the itemization on the invoices so it's things like data integration aggregation software maintenance there are one two three four five six seven line items itemization on that for logistical planning and maintenance there's one two three four five six seven items on that for resource distribution and maintenance there's two items uh

212listed there for planned by next administration there are three items there the covid policy oversight monitoring reporting there are two items there for program management there are one two three four five six seven eight nine ten items there mr clay my apologies for interrupting but yeah i think so you can actually hang you can actually pause on that and if you can if you can provide that information that would be great because it's something i have not been able to see or the board has not ever been seen as far as these itemizations that you're speaking of right now i know what we have received is a group or a a bulk uh item billed per month so if you have all that information that's fine you can disseminate that amongst the board we're talking

213about everything is what i'm looking for a month for the organization mr clay if i'm not mistaken we circulated the itemization um for this particular contract that's exactly right this is the same i'm reading from what was sent to you all i haven't seen that um the itemization if you're reading from it i have not received that if you want to forward that to me that would be great because i have not received any itemizations any breakdowns of the fees and services yes you asked for these specifically and we provided those i haven't received this one so we can we can reconfirm those because they have been provided previously thank you mr clay also um with the nurses i know me you spoke about the nurses and you had said that we were paying them

214they were paying on 125 per hour 125 i'm sorry yeah 125 an hour and it's listed on their contract that that's what they'll be doing as far as those without services with our nurses you're shaking your head but it's in the contract so tell me about the nurses i'm sorry dr battle you do thank you better chair and i just want to make sure that as we're going through these questions we can do so in a professional manner we're always happy to respond to the questions but i want to make sure my team has an opportunity to respond to the questions that are being presented and in a way that is most productive mr clay you can go ahead and respond so meharry medical college has not invoiced us and did not provide nurses what

215you're referencing is in the contract to provide in the event that we needed them to provide nurses at what rate they would bill us that was not embedded in the monthly cost that would have been an add-on which we did not solicit they did not provide they did not bill for us and we have not paid okay so no nurses inside those itemizations is that correct dr betta thank you madam chair mr clay you may respond there may be a person who is a nurse but no they did not provide nurses to us as you're referring under the nursing contract right so just so i'm clear when you just said it may be an a nurse was it a registered nurse or was it just i will actually respond to this one we contract with

216the metro health department for nurses in our schools that's who provides nurses to our schools they might contract out for additional nurses as part of their recruitment process but our contract is specific specifically with the metro health department yeah i know it's with the health department but i'm referring back to the contract so the contract had nurses at a rate of pay of 125 an hour again i'm specifically looking at the contract if i see it in there that's what i'm asking about it's not trying to go i know we our nurses are contracting the health department i just wanted to make sure that that my answer my question was answered when it comes when it came to the nurses that i saw inside the contract mr clay if i can um ask you directly

217here did we pay my hairy for nurses no thank you okay um again i want to see all of the itemizations of what meharry did the services that were rendered because that is the question of the stakeholders i can't answer those questions this came up because of stakeholders in the community that wanted to know and wanted no answers that they they needed to know i don't know those answers to those questions and when you have members of the community that are questioning a contract like this which the rates are very egregious very egregious to have the same rates of services every month and it just gets real tricky and it gets real i mean it's just become red flags and so that's the reason why i wanted to bring it up so that we can

218be transparent and making sure using federal dollars that it is utilized according to what the services that were rendered and that's the reason why the itemization is always important so that you'll be able to see la 99 line item billing and if you have all the line item billing then that's what i want to see dr rattle just in response to that and for the sake of transparency the itemization has been provided to the board and at the request when we've received them and so there is itemization that optimization has been shared and just again for the record that did not include billing us for nurses as a part of that contract and again i haven't received it so if it could be forwarded to me that would be great if the rest of the

219board has already received it that's great i just haven't received it so i can put my eyes on it any other questions mrs bush how soon can i get that information dr battle i'm sorry what was the question yes how soon we could get the information the itemization that was sent to us um we typically will recirculate that in our updates to the board so we'll make sure it's included one would be the update i was just trying to get a timeline i always submit those updates updates to the board by the end of the day on friday at the latest okay so in your board report i mean your um your report director's report yes okay but i don't want that grouping i want itemization because i got that before i saw that i

220don't want that bulk billing is what i was saying before we will we will provide what is considered itemization the itemization report as a part of that update again i don't want no ball billing that's what i'm trying to say i'm just going back and forth with both because you get you're putting all of the money into one pot to say this was this was four things that were embedded into 2.3 million dollars we need to see itemization of the services that were rendered for each school that they provided services for and that's what's important thank you mrs bush so dr battle says she will send that back out to the board by end of business friday do you have any other questions before we move on to mr little my only question is with

221just so much discussion what will we do differently if this were to come about again if as we look at delta variant surgeon and we think about like bringing someone in to help keep our kids in school what will we do different what are some of the the things that you learned that you may do different or keep the same when it comes to contracting dr battle how would you like to respond oh sorry and you can it may be nothing i don't know if that's a question for you mr clay it might be a question for mrs roberge to echo what mr clay said the best practice would be to have an rfp procedure and so if that is something that we anticipate potentially needing we would recommend getting that process started okay so

222we would need an rfp if we were to want to render any services in the manner which um harry potter mmcv vive thank you partner with us this this prior school year but again let's not lose the context about the dire need we had back in the fall to get our kids back in the in person learning option for those families who chose let's also not forget that throughout the spring semester when we were able to offer the in-person learning environment we had a continuity of learning operation for our students so we did not in the spring have to close one school at any point in time and this partnership is to be acknowledged for that work because they were able to be very responsive for us that was contained when we did have potential

223outbreaks in our school community thank you madam chair thank you and with that we will move on to announcements we'll begin with dr gentry from district i one okay very good good god um so i just wanted to uh echo um i thought i wrote her name down but miss cassie's uh comment that it was a joyful first day of school in spite of the traffic which i literally forgot was going to be a thing this morning that we were on time but just in riding from the furthest northernmost part of the county all the way down through district one it was just wonderful to see the students gathered and and actually excited even high school students about returning to school the teachers out there lining the walkways and enthusiastically in in inviting the the

224children in um haines had those little billowy character things going um the churchwell and cresswell teachers were out there in forests haynes had a big tent set up and so it was it was really really great to see them i also want to share that dr griffin and i and other members of mmps got the opportunity to celebrate the ribbon cutting at white's creek high school for their indoor facility you can all be jealous we'll appreciate it we'll take it um one-of-a-kind facility within mnps um they have filled in their what used to be their pool all i wanted to do was jump up and down on the floor they really wouldn't let me dr mr church will talk about me breaking bones it was horrible i was really treated poorly but it was a

225wonderful wonderful opportunity we had some band members there and some majorettes so all the students are very excited what was also very exciting was to see the support from other schools within the cluster so dr beard was there and she'd already booked an event to bring her students over onto the facility and just to hear her and dr mills talk about the collaboration that's going on within the cluster with haynes and on the other feeder schools into white's creek was very very exciting um i'm gonna say it anyway uh you know i i also want to point out we talk about mandates and executive orders in the midst of this pandemic in spite of what we may think or believe it is our very own governor has issued what i call calling out the coast

226guard an executive order that is going to give out-of-state physicians the ability to practice in the state of tennessee um and give retired uh health care professionals the ability to practice within facilities here in the state of tennessee because he does in spite of what has not happened in this state i think he does recognize the seriousness of what's going on as an employee a current employee of hca healthcare we are monitoring numbers we have re-established our war rooms on corporate campus and our emergency management teams are meeting daily looking at the dashboards and watching the numbers of our facilities that are over capacity units that we've converted to covet wards and children's hospitals that are at capacity especially in the state of florida and as has been pointed out here in the state of

227tennessee the children's hospitals are full with covet patients so i appreciate the commitment of those parents who are encouraging their students to mask up my child doesn't like it i don't like it but we know that it is necessary and so we're here to do what's necessary for the greater good thank you miss bucks thank you mrs poopo walker i want to thank all of the board members and staff that helped onboard our new student board members on friday spent some time with them in the morning and they're excited they will be sworn in by judge callaway our first meeting in september and will be up here with us uh and so we will be on our best behavior in front of the children and so um and i suspect they're going to have a

228lot of good things to say i do um we are going to host a community meeting on next wednesday on the 19th from six to seven hillsborough to discuss the future of the stokes property on belmont boulevard i've already heard from the 1959 graduate from stokes about that meeting so it promises to be a good one i want to thank pencil and all the partners that are helping us now deliver services to our kids programs organize volunteers organize resources it is a going to be a um something that i think all everybody can pitch in and i'm thankful for that and then i know we had a lot of emotional uh testimony here tonight and people were tearful on both sides i think it's fair to say that this pandemic has been hard on every

229single person on this planet regardless of what you believe or what you know to be true and i think we just have to acknowledge that people are struggling no matter what position they're in but i want to encourage our parents and anybody else to not penalize or go after our teachers and our administrators on masks let us come here and tell us about it which you did tonight let us be the ones that take your frustration principals and teachers are doing what we've asked them to do they are not the deciders on this and so i hope we can all agree that i'm willing to take that on on their behalf and i know that they're going to do everything they can to make it as good a situation as possible in a very difficult

230situation so okay that's it thank you mrs poopo walker mrs bush yes i just wanted to give a little report of the back to school bash or celebration that was done in district six i was very proud of the outcome we gave over 1500 backpacks and school supplies to students so they could go back in school and style and the event was a huge success we had over maybe 2500 3000 people out at the southeast community center and i just want to give a shout out to stronger than my father who helped who partnered with me with this amazing event and it probably would be an annual event so i'm really excited about that so we'll be working next year to do the same thing for our students and i just want to give a

231shout out to all of my principals and teachers in district 6 and and across this district i am so proud of the first day of school and how successful it was i heard nothing but great things and i'm really excited and my last son i don't have one boy now going to in high school normally he has two or three brothers that are in school with him and now he is the only bush boy so i am so excited to have a 10th grader and uh and he's by himself without his brothers and i'm so proud of him and uh i'm almost an empty nester but they do come back home so thank you guys and have a good night mr little uh just wanted the the pencil back-to-school pep rally was a success got

232a chance to play basketball eat pizza and really celebrate teachers last week i want to give a big shout out to dr armstrong and the dupont hadley team sat with the support staff stuff envelopes but really listened to what they do as support staff to really support the children i mean they talked about giving rides taking food clothes and it was it was really heartfelt to listen to them second the mcgavin jamboree the new and improved mighty mcgavin football team is having their jamboree this thursday as you walk into the school you can see that a change is upon them and it brings a lot of happiness not only to the football players but to the students third natural propel as school starts back up as we look at families who still may need school

233supplies we're having a back to school bash in partnership with mount carmel with bishop and lady campbell this saturday from 11 to 3 at the church another event silenced the violence this saturday with reverend lewis who is going to be at hadley park it's packed today to talk about education and how we end youth violence and i wanted to do a moment of silence for braylon murray who was killed to gun violence although it was in memphis i've been knowing this kid since he was 11 had a bright future as a singer and and sadly also rolanda stewart who was one of our fellowship alum at nashville propel she passed away today and so i just wanted to do a moment of silence for those two individuals thank you mrs player peters no but hope

234everyone had a happy first day i hope you have a healthy and long and productive in-person school year thank you well mrs masters thank you i wanted to give a few updates about activities of the parent advisory council they now have a website up and running and social media accounts um on twitter it's at mnps pack so at mnpspac um they have the first districtwide pac meeting on august 31st and it will be 100 virtual um so that will be streamed and you can get to that through that twitter account um they also some of the things that we've done together over the course of this past month is um they met with the metro council education committee at city hall and we're very grateful to tanya hancock for being our liaison to metro council

235they also invited chair bugs and myself to participate in an information session on tennessean.com just talking about masks and covid and all the things we can do to be safe in school um our pack chair and one of the secretaries were featured in a chalkbeat article and they also had a meeting with ashford hughes to talk about diversity equity and inclusion and the family engagement department i know they're also going to be talking to dr changus about how they can get involved with spreading the word about the student dashboard and and then we also have coming up starting in september we'll be having town hall style meetings as a part of my work as advocacy chair for the board but also as pac liaison where they'll be tackling different um topics with each of those

236just to help spread awareness and i'm just so grateful for the advocacy of this group of parents um i think we've seen um you know what can happen when parents decide to get involved and advocate beyond just their own households and i think the pac is a really amazing uh example of that work uh they are still looking for some representatives um ms bush they actually met a woman at your event who wants to be the antioch cluster and i need to get that person's contact information if you have it so we still need someone from stratford cluster um there's a few others they sent me a lot of notes y'all so um so if you're interested in getting involved um please reach out because we want to have representatives from across the entire district

237i'm very excited about this um and then i also just want to say thanks to district three uh everyone but specifically district three for having a really great first day of school um my guy had his first day of eighth grade and i did cry so i don't know what's wrong with you christian i cry every first day of school um but came out all smiles and i'm just so appreciative of all the work that that is taking place in our schools every day and i'm gonna stop talking now in case i start crying again thank you mrs masters it's tyler um i have several um so i met with the district nine bus drivers yesterday and i just kind of want to reiterate on the floor what what i'd what i talked about with

238them is that our schools can't function without bus drivers because we got to get our kids there and we got to get them home and they are such an important key piece to what our schools need and what our schools can provide and they are often the first metro employee face that a kid sees walking on the bus and they're the last one that they see getting off the bus and when they create relationships with those students they make that first and last touch memorable and positive and so i just wanted to i mean yesterday i was able to thank the district 9 bus drivers but i want to take a minute and thank every bus driver that works in metro because you guys are irreplaceable and we want to make sure that you know

239that we care and that that we are supporting you and recognize how important you are so that's my little bus thing and then i wanted to advocate for finding a way to keep our students safe but have a little bit of flexibility so that students will be able to have their needs met so i want to encourage parents or ptos to look at getting masks that have the clear spot to donate i just bought enough masks with clear spots to do kindergarten and first grade in my son and daughter's school and they'll be passed out there it would be great if we could use some esser funds to do that but i'm afraid that if we wait to do that it will be too far into the school year so um again i would love

240to have that kind of support but um in the meantime if our community could step up and look at for our young young students as a way to kind of engage and help make this an easier process and finally if you would like to volunteer we talked about it a little while ago but if you want to come in and you want to tutor you want to be part of that part of that high dosage tutoring we would love to have you we will train you so that you know how to do it and you just need to go to pencil4schools.org and it's spelled out f-o-r not the number pencil for schools and there's a spot where you can volunteer and it'll let you sign in and you can sign in as a group if

241you have a group of people who are willing to do it or as an individual so please come and help us let's get our kids back on track the best we can and um just glad for our first day of school and looking forward to a good year thank you mrs tyler i think it's important to note especially with tonight's conversation around critical race theory or about curriculum that the state of tennessee the department of education has released guidance on how districts will be impacted if complaints are filed but they are there's still time for you to make your voice heard through tomorrow evening or tomorrow at five o'clock p.m if you visit tn.gov go to legal services public notices and then you will see the bill that was voted on prohibited concepts in public

242education you can offer your thoughts i cannot stress it enough how important that is to make your voice heard around what curriculum looks like or how we're able to teach curriculum and mnps i would also like to say thank you to jones padel elementary school and all of his partners had a great back to school bash a couple of days ago and we were given big bags of food masks toiletries i mean the the community really does wrap their arms around jones and i'm so excited to have my little baby in that school i remember a parent saying you know that she wasn't able to see her child's cubby last year i wasn't able to see my child's cubby this year it was his first day of school this is his first in what 14

243years of education i miss that milestone but it's not about me it is about our children and their safety it's about the educators and the people not individualized uh wants or desires i also want to just shout out pearl cohn for all the work that they do to bring the cluster together they're really helped doing a great job of helping me connect with other john's parents the mnps pack is also so you know wrapping their arms around me i appreciate that also hub nashville.gov if you've ever heard of particip participatory budgeting excuse me mayor cooper is allocating some funding to north nashville please visit hubnational.gov or email pb that's for participate participatory budget at nashville.gov to look at how funding in north nashville can be disseminated in a way that really supports the the district

244i'm sorry that really supports the city long term i will just continue to say that schools really are where community issues bubble up and if we're not going to talk about these in silos we've got to be calling uh giving a call to action to the community to really embed their voices and their bodies and their minds and their finances into what will best support our students but with that being said be there for 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