001[Music] do [Music] oh meeting to order roll call please mr ford chairman mcclendon here vice chairman robinson here mrs seal here mrs jones here mr perez here mr smith here mrs zimmerman here mr walker here mr wingate here mr macon interim superintendent dr townes here awesome i have received the following request to amend the agenda under the consent agenda item 10 g1 bids and contracts under item 1e the zendesk suite subscription please substitute the updated service order form and contract we have that at our desk and then add item 10 i1 chief operations officer dr justin robertson a grant application request ratification of the tdoe safe schools grant we have that also and then under board matters item 12 item c mask optional for staff per chairman mclendon and miss thurman ad under delegations uh
002miss edna varner and miss mari smith do you have a motion to approve the agenda so moved second roll call please mrs hill yes mrs jones yes mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs sermon yes mr walker yes mr wingate yes chairman mcclendon yes we have no executive session we'll move to our pledge to the flag and meditation by david corey principal of east ridge elementary school well good evening i'm sharon mcclendon school board and uh superintendent dr towns i'd like to introduce to you tammy aloe vera for our flagship please put your right hand over your heart ready begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and into the republic in which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty places for all thank you
003and you may be seated thank you [Applause] all right well good evening my name is david corey and i'm the principal at eastridge elementary school um i was thinking about what we could share tonight and i thought who could do that best but our students and so before we have some students come up and share about our school i want to just share um just a couple of background pieces we are a title one school we are also a level five school hey congratulations and right before prior to um covid and the shutdown we also became a lighthouse school and a lighthouse school is part of a unique group of schools that implements the seven habits of highly effective people with a focus on growing student leaders so with that said i'd like to introduce
004our teacher mr schmidt who heads up our student lighthouse leadership team hello my name is daniel schmidt i am one of the facilitators of the leader of me and the sponsor of the student lighthouse team at east ridge elementary school it is our responsibility as a leader in me school to ensure that students are setting goals for themselves that they are finding their genius and leading their own learning and it is habits of mind such as these that set our institution apart from others to help demonstrate we've brought along some very special leaders from east ridge elementary tinley oliveira eric campos haley garcia brandon robinson jr and cooper byrd thank you hello my name is eric campos our school is a leader in middle school the leader in me school is about making goals and
005reaching them and as and one habit that has helped me is put first things first this habit has helped me focus while i'm doing my work while other students are playing i focus and just help me reach my goal of being a fifth grade level and i ready [Applause] hello my name is haley garcia the seven habits are guidelines that help us to be effective people we use them to help us in difficult or conflicting situations they can help us to be good people like habit number one be proactive this helps us to be responsible and choose positive attitudes to do the right thing without being asked and even when no one is looking by using the seven habits of highly effective people we can be wonderful people in and out of school thank you
006[Applause] [Music] hello my name is brandon robertson jr at east ridge elementary we use the seven habits every day my favorite habit is habit number four think win-win because when me and my friends argue we find something we all agree to for ex for example i use this habit for when i'm outside on the basketball court and in group projects this habit helps us all succeed [Applause] hello my name is cooper byrd the seven habits makes her school different from other schools because it helps our students excel as people in school and out of school the seven habits can apply to can be applied to many different situations for instance students at eastridge elementary know to put first things first we know that before we do anything out of school we have to complete our
007work that we have to do like homework before we go out outside and play this half these it's it's habit like these that help that helps us reach our goals and uh reach our potential [Applause] [Music] as a school leader it is such a privilege to get to work with students that are learning leadership um each day when we start the morning we do a morning announcements and one things we talk about is drawing out greatness and that really is a big part of our mission statements how we draw out the greatness in kids and when we talk about doing a moment of meditation here for the school board you guys as school board leaders you help draw our greatness in what we do with the kids i want to thank you for that on
008behalf of our staff on behalf of our students leadership is influence and when we talk with our students whether they're in a position of leadership that has a title or not they're having influence on others and you guys help with a positive influence for our kids so on behalf of east ridge elementary school thank you and thank you for the opportunity to be able to come tonight have a great night [Music] thank you for that we'll move on to our exemplars of excellence we'll start with our national merit finalist dr neely parker and community superintendents to come forward at this time to introduce our students good evening i'm larry reynolds community superintendent for harrison bay and it's my distinct pleasure tonight to get to introduce you to the very best of the very best of
009the very best to be a national marriage scholar means you're in the top one percent of students in the united states of america we're talking about some serious talent here and to do that for harrison bay we have the principal of the school where these kids go brennell are here to introduce them thank you very much dr reynolds this time it's my honor and privilege to introduce two students from east hamilton high school ashley pake and lacia chella [Applause] oh [Applause] good evening i'm here to introduce four students from a rock point learning community from csas and signal mountain middle high and i've got principal jim bowles here to introduce our students from csas jim good evening in addition to our four commended students i'm privileged to introduce to you tonight our national merit seminar
010finalist veda he rethought [Applause] [Music] [Applause] we have three students from signal mountain signal mounts having their homecoming parade tonight and i think all of these students are involved in that parade so we're going to recognize them in their absence william marston william maston and lawton miller so [Applause] good evening it's my pleasure to recognize the national merit finalist for the north river learning community we have two and to introduce our merit finalist from hamilton county collegiate high i have amy blazek who is the counselor who is a key component of the success of students at collegiate high it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you vivian song who's been at collegiate high since ninth grade vivian song [Applause] [Music] and we also have not able to join us this evening but from the
011stem school of chattanooga jacob a griffith [Applause] now we'll go on to our recognization of the girls nation president so board chairman mcclendon members of the board and dr townes it is my pleasure to introduce to you miss annabelle hill if you would please come forward and it's okay if mr hill comes with you dad is here as well annabelle did something that's really quite remarkable she is currently a senior student at chattanooga school for the arts and sciences which by the way mr bowles is here you come on down to mr bowles miss hill was recently elected to a highly esteemed position as girls nation president the american legion auxiliary girls nation is a once in a lifetime opportunity for young women it's a week-long event that gives participants a first-hand experience with practical
012insight into how federal local and state government works more than seven thousand young women have participated in girls nation since 1947. what makes this so exceptional is you have to go from local to state and then national and so two participants at the state level are chosen among candidates from all across the state and then after participating at the state program two senators are elected to go to girls nation in washington dc and they get to participate in mock legislature they're responsible for submitting bills resolutions they participate in senate sessions and electing officials such as the president and vice president while in d.c the senators they get to visit the senators which by the way those are students in this case they visit capitol hill and they meet their state senators and representatives giving them
013a very special opportunity to discuss local issues and share bills and so on and annabelle i think what makes this really exceptional is and that's why it's so i love what we get to do is when students show interest we get to to link them and hook them to to opportunities for them to participate in annabelle was not necessarily going to represent csas and so she she went to her her parents and the principal and asked if she could pay her own way could she attend on behalf of hamilton county and who knew well we probably knew a little bit that you had it in you and so it is so great because you now are among like names of former girls nation or boys nation john f kennedy was a boys nation representative uh
014mike huckabee rush limbaugh um justice aliyah i think it was aaliyah did you know michael jackson michael jordan was even and john bon jovi and garth brooks were boys nations representatives and also a little girl a young lady from tyner high school in 1991 got to go to girl state and it changed my life and so to get here and to see you is amazing and so on behalf of um csas and the school i would like to invite our school your school board representative miss hill to to come and honor you with a certificate oh miss robinson i'm sorry but your mom can come too we are so extremely proud of you miss hill [Applause] i want in the picture too can i get it thank you for that uh dr parker uh move
015on to our presentations with our future ready 2023 uh presentation and back to you dr park busy night for teaching and learning thank you so much for the opportunity to present an update to the board around our strategic plan and so give me just one minute to get acclimated and make sure i can so i click this yes you're just talking the microphone but turn it turn it on okay can you guys hear me okay thank you as you know it is our desire that our students in hamilton county thrive and experience a future without limits and i am here to represent the strategic goals key performance indicators under the boards the strategic plans specifically around the areas of accelerating student achievement and just to remind you the focus five areas that are part of
016the work that i get to lead i wanted to remind you of those we call these our five gateways this is how we keep it real every one of these gateways for students is extremely important and each gate that a student successfully passes through gives them a greater opportunity to be successful at the next big gateway and the next big gateway and beyond aligned the actions that go along with those key performance indicators are these strategic strategies deeply understanding state academic standards clear learning targets you may hear as you hear teachers around the district or leaders they'll reference this as clts rigorous assessments sometimes we call this the what the how and the how well along with consistently implementing best practices and closing our opportunity gap you can't see it on this screen very well
017but in our department we've had so many opportunities come our way in the last two years and especially in light of esser and what you'll see in just a few moments with grant opportunities that have come our way it is our desire to make really key important decisions now to build towards a foundation that will be here for the future we say do now build towards everything we do now has to build towards where we want to see our kids in the future we have made a few adjustments to the organizational structure in my division and we wanted you to be aware of those key some of them are minor but in the big scheme of things they may be major one thing i'm very um i think just made sense to us was to
018take as we are working on literacy especially that first focus five area of third grade literacy we brought and closing the opportunity gap we brought exceptional education and language acquisition which is esol into my department also with the you know that we collapsed the chief of innovation office last year and as a result of that innovation work came under my purview so i wanted you to have an update leadership and learning still stays in in our organizational structure but those were three key areas that i wanted you to be aware of so to come at a high level and show you the big the big rocks that i would like to update you on we just finished giving our first quarter benchmark i would like to give you a high level overview of where we
019are at this point in the school year as we left off with the state of the system last year we were given bold ambitious goals towards acceleration and definitely literacy we would like to update you on our literacy action plan math and how we are responding to our data also how we're responding right now to what the data is showing us around middle schools and then as requested by our board chairman we will include as a part of this presentation the process for selection and recon consideration of instructional materials so let's start quickly you've seen these two slides before that i will show you but just to make a connection we always start with data to deal with where we are in our current reality to make decisions from there and i have to stop
020for just a moment and say this because i think this is a prime example of decisions that the board strategically made but also the heavy lift that our instructional leaders made principals teachers educationalists everyone who contributed to keeping the balance of everything coveted related and still keeping the focus of teaching and learning i think that's where you will see our data reflects we have some gaps but they could have been much worse we held it tight i believe and so really proud the board adopted our worked with us to make a i thought this was bold to adopt a brand new literacy curriculum and we believe all of the strategic alignment that we will share had a whole lot to do with our ability to keep an upward trend and not see a greater gap
021especially during the pandemic we saw smaller decreases in our area as compared to the state and i just remind you that where we were at this point last year post fall break we saw an extreme spike in cases for covid and we were having a lot of back and forth open and closed schools and students having to work remotely and so we did have some decline and decrease but it was not as significant as it could have been our english english language arts proficiency rates across all grade levels um held relatively steady with only a 2.5 percent decrease compared to 5 at the state and then in mathematics we did have an 8 decrease compared to 12 at the state level now that was t and ready now let's take a look at our first
022benchmark which was administered right before fall break so this is our first snapshot at this new year we have been in school thank goodness and so what you see in gray was last year and what you see in blue is this year so at the top if you look at the green box those are our lower grades and in the at the bottom of the graphic you'll see grades six through eight and then grades nine through twelve and what we see and i hope you can see in relationship to the strategic actions we've taken around literacy we are beginning to see our youngest learners show early signs of higher grade level proficiency rates than at this same time last year through this first benchmark our middle and high school learners are are showing some some
023signs that they're making up ground but specifically in math they are behind where they were at this point last year we do think it's important to note that literacy does still lag behind our key performance strategies in our district strategic plan for grades k-12 so what are we doing about that and what is what is what are we doing to respond at this point in our division so as you'll recall these um four steps may not look they may not catch you by surprise because these came from our state of the system address under our former superintendent that we must accelerate and we must focus on early learning and literacy specifically just as a reminder those were four key tenants that that came out of the state of the system and so since last year
024what have we done around the structures to support literacy learning using grant funded dollars as well as esser and the do now build towards approach we have built out a department the literacy office under the leadership of breck and duckworth and what we've really tried to do based on our data is to put key strategies and key opportunities aligned with someone who gets up every morning and thinks about those things like our time moments after school before school summer school how are we remediating where these gaps are present so you can see and i also say this as a former kindergarten teacher there is a unique way you have to build early literacy strategies to develop an early reader so we were very strategic in building out expertise in those key areas responding when kids
025are not learning how do we use time when it's summer school after school before school and what are we doing to really address the unique needs of our youngest learners the other thing that i'm very excited about as i shared with you earlier is we brought language acquisition which basically is a big issue for some of our exceptional students and our esol students we brought it under this office in this department so we could marry the needs of acquiring language we're also very excited to announce that we our team hears me say quite often it's time to start a movement look at the leverage and the latitude we've gained in our partnerships to pathways to post-secondary earlier this year in building on the foundation the great thing about chattanooga hamilton county is we already have
026a lot of community partners that have great interest in this matter early learning matters and so building on that foundational work on the early matters coalition the hamilton county children's cabinet the department of early learning under the city and in collaboration with chattanooga 2.0 through 2.0 we were as a community awarded the bright start grant and this will flow out of chattanooga 2.0 but it gives us an opportunity to influence and make headway in community in the community even before kids get to us because if kids are behind when they open the door when we open the door to them we have a lot of catching up to do and i'm i'm really excited about the work that's already begun to really look at our learning environments to look at the health and development of
027our youngest children and really look and i hope you'll see tonight we are really working to bridge parents as partners in this process um one of the you you may remember back in january that a special called session um their state legislature happened and out of that an early learning bill was passed around literacy and it is now required that our teachers must participate in early learning training it's called reading 360 even to advance their licensure and we're really proud to say through the the planning of so3 we're going to be able to pay our teachers for that training but it is a new requirement of all early learning teachers and i'm very very excited miss robinson you ask a question on monday i wanted to give you a little bit more information but we've
028used esther 1 esser2 and sr3 even in the hardest of times when everything was shut down we still opened our summer programming for our highest need students and we've set aside even more money through sr3 and today and this is not the way it was last year it took us some time to get those s or 2 funds in play but as of today we already have 72 schools that are offering before and after school tutoring we had many of those 72 schools set up and ready right after the labor day holiday so they have been getting those extra doses of time and supports in 72 of our schools we were not at this place this time last year so we're very very excited about that work and the opportunity that that affords our schools
029and our students and it's just for a little bit of a plug with 72 of our schools offering this we want to provide this this to our parents and our community if you are a parent and you want this opportunity for your child please reach out to your school principal with 72 schools of our schools participating there's an opportunity for all kids we also served over four thousand students this summer another key strategy we've developed over the last two years with our team is that we have to have a theory of action you've heard us talk a lot about mackrell balance leadership especially under dr johnson's leadership where we really focus we manage change and we build purposeful community but on our team our theory of action is very focused on what we do to
030align the district principals coaches teachers so that we are more effectively aligned to reach students in the classroom and one key area where we have an opportunity is if you see on both sides of that spine that's what we call it parents and student voice must be a part and we must bring our community into this this process with us learning should not be hidden from parents they should know what their kids are learning and what they're doing in school so as a part of our early learning our early learning work our first key strategy was to really hit what are the key aspects of learners and under the new legislation parents should be notified if their child is scoring below the 25th percentile so we are beginning the forward-facing work with parents through informing
031them and then offering supports and trainings our very first uh family literacy festival is being planned right now we have our first one that is on the books and scheduled for november 6th and another layer of key strategy here is as we are using data to inform and we're really looking at the specific key key things children must know and be able to do to be third grade to meet that third grade target we are targeting the two communities first that had the highest number of students within that 25th percentile so our two family literacy opportunities will take those things parents need to know we invite you to come you'll leave with strategies you'll leave with things things you can do with your kids books you'll get the opportunity to talk with teachers and and
032we hope to only see this take off and go in every community and have more of this our schools do a great job at the school level to have family literacy nights we would like for our district to also support that work food will be provided and there'll be giveaways and raffles for everyone who attends now in addition to all that we have been afforded through esser and um and and the the strategic uh work that we're trying to do to get that third grade uh meet that focus five area about third grade we're very fortunate to let you know that we've been awarded three grant opportunities that are state and federal one is called the connected literacy grant the tennessee all core grant and the literacy implementation network and in a nutshell these two
033these three opportunities give us the opportunity the chance to network and work more strategically with our community whether it be a community of schools and learners schools that are going through the same challenges we're going through as with the literacy implementation network everyone's trying to figure out this same problem and so through the literacy implementation network we get to work with other districts in the state we're doing walk throughs they come to us we get to learn and network from one with one another and dr yvette stewart is heading that up our other two connected literacy and all core grants give us the opportunity to double down and be much more engaged with our community partners and so this affords us the opportunity to do high dosage tutoring and to really work strategically with a
034community partner to branch out and do more at our community sites where some of our kids are going in lieu of our after school programming also we want to make you aware that we are working hard to build out a forward-facing family literacy site and we have a lot of work to do here but our aspirational goal is for this to be a hub and a place i used like i said i used to teach kindergartners and parents would ask me all the time what can i do to get my kid ready what can i do to help my child with letters or sounds we want to provide an easy accessible place with videos and tools and resources through our early literacy site on our webpage math what are we doing to respond to the
035call of need around mathematics i want to first of all elevate to the board that coming up in the 22-23 school year we will be working with an adoption cycle the adoption cycle will be coming forward to you by the end of the year next year around mathematics already this year because this was a gap year we purchased through esser dollars the newest version of the current adoption we already had which was ready math and we're trying to gain input and hear from our teachers how those tools are helping them and i wanted you to be aware of the timeline of what you can expect next year as we bring to you and work with our state on what materials we can look at for adoption starting in september and december that's when the committee
036will be formed in january and march that committee will get busy and really look at narrowing down selections and options and narrow that down to three and then work to bring the board the final decision on that process so what is the data saying about mathematics let's bring it now to wanted you to have that forward information but now what about where we are right now with mathematics and when it comes to grade level proficiency in math i mean just real talk it was the hardest i watched so many teachers try to teach mathematics through zoom and it was the hardest thing i saw some of them try to do i i remember hearing from another a teacher about her her husband from home would go by her shower board so she could try to
037show students the pro it was a real challenge and in our upper grades especially some schools had a lot of open stop and start and it is showing in our data so this is our plan and um an approach that's been used before but was not as successful was there is we will not stop and go back and try to touch and bring forward when we say acceleration every year in mathematics there are common themes numbers and operations algebraic thinking fractions percent things like and what we are doing right now is doubling down in the curriculum supports we give teachers to bridge the lost learning with current learning so it makes sense where they are and what they're doing in the classrooms instead of pulling them up separating them from what's current going back trying
038to go forward so we're bridging with the resources we have we're also working very hard at making sure we learned our teachers really benefited in literacy from having access to both digital and tangible tools and as we get ready for next year to bring you the resources and the adoption process we are really working hard to find the best tools to put in the hands of our practitioners another strategic move we made was we purchased a program called mathiaflex as you saw our high schools especially are struggling mathiaflex is a program it's it's really cutting edge and it is a really a one-of-a-kind program that is very specifically tailored to our standards for algebra 1 algebra 2 geometry and those upper-level math courses and we rolled that out we met with our principals in late
039september and we rolled that out at the last training day on october 18th so it is now in our in the hands of our teachers for us to use as i mentioned to you we're using responsive curriculum guides and not getting too far ahead we're as we assess we're we're making changes needed with curriculum of course we're supporting our teachers with professional development our middle schools i wanted to specifically address because um for years as long as i've been in education middle school is sort of a unique place it is not a place for elementary plus and it's not the place for high school light and there's always this sort of lost place sometimes with where middle middle schoolers fit in and so in looking at the trends or data trends we have to answer
040this question and that is how do we rethink the unique identity of this space in a child's development we do it with our youngest kids the developmental and the cognitive space that children are in in that time we have to look at what's going on with our kids at that space too so we took this to gather input from teachers from principals we put together leadership groups to talk about this challenge and we focus the discussion around the pillars of our strategic plan and out of those conversations was birth the sore opportunity for middle schools and what we would like to provide to our students using a combination of funds is a grant opportunity for middle schools with a lot of additional support to rethink and reimagine and innovate around the best way we serve
041middle school students you can see here what we look as what we're seeking as far as our impact and what we seek to transform and this is our timeline we rolled this grant opportunity out to principals on september 29th and schools are working right now on the application process and we will have our first review and and we've encouraged schools you can go as far as having a total transformational grant or if you would just like a planning grant but to really give schools the space and the support resource for them to be innovative to rethink the challenges that they are having so now as as chairman mcclendon brought before us and and i know that um since august we've had many discussions around instructional materials the selection and the review process so i wanted
042to thank you for giving us the opportunity to share with you the process that we follow when it comes to instructional materials and books for kids let me first of all start out by saying that there are two big buckets by which we have to consider instructional materials number one the first bucket has to do with when children are sitting in a seat and a teacher is delivering instruction around a material that must go through the process that is aligned and vetted through our adoption process state standards we depend on our publishers to work with us and any changes that transpire in the six year period a lot can happen in six years around the adopted materials that the board selects there is a very rigorous and tightly monitored and watched process as far as
043that goes and it takes a lot of nuanced back and forth for us to keep up with what happens over the series of six years so that's number one but then there is also a part of our schools where libraries and choice and selected materials come into play and when that is a part of of any part of the learning environment for students schools school principals have a lot of discretion latitude and leeway at the school level for decision making and i also want to elevate that as we work with schools in any capacity or anyone at the school level that goes through this process we do our best to always keep the board policy in front of them in our training and the decisions that we have to make so i want to first
044of all highlight for you that in 2018 thankfully the board took on this particular policy and already some revisions were made then 4.402 and 4.403 so i wanted to elevate that decisions can be made about what is what is uh in the hands of students at multiple levels at the choice decision where a teacher makes a decision where a librarian may make a decision a principle and then of course when we look at as scott would say at our floor our platform from which we deliver the standards we have to be really really thoughtful about that floor and how we we convey and deliver the standards as parents brought forth the concerns to us we realized and i want let me back up just a little bit i want you to be aware that when
045it comes to selecting text and as we are are working especially with what we bring before the board if it is an adopted curated tool we have an obligation to have due diligence to make sure those are tightly aligned and that guidance is provided at the school level at the teacher level at the like wherever materials may be used we have opportunities to get better we just really came fully back to school and i feel like this is the first year we're really getting to implement some of our new techs and we've got a purge there there's always a process of purging and bringing materials in and so on but when it comes to the curriculum curated materials um we there is a different process according to the policy for that versus optional choice reads
046and and again as i shared with you that is covered by the library collection process as well as selected materials one thing we found because this was brought to our attention was um actually a section of our website that started in 2018 under then tim hensley our communications director and tim had an idea at that time to use a family engagement strategy to engage parents in water i'm sorry excuse me schools and students what are you reading what are you currently reading and you may have seen over the course of the last two years every so often on our social media page you'll see the book of the week well in turn he took those books and archived them under a section of our website um that wasn't under the curriculum in the teaching site
047called suggested reading it's a parent section but the intent was for book of the week and the intent was for students and librarians and teachers to share what they were currently reading some of those books were not aligned to the current adoption they were not aligned with the curriculum that was adopted they were literally like if you stopped me right now in the parking lot and said hey dr parker what are you reading it was meant to get a conversation and engagement with our community to encourage reading and and i'm an avid reader i like to read but if i told you my authors they're not you know i just finished a max lucado book so it's it was an interest and it was choice and we have we uncovered that it was stated as
048suggested reading and we have in turn it started in 2018 we did not know that was a part of the way i believe our parents perceived this and in turn we've pulled it down because it was not conveying the intent it was intended to and so um i i gave you at a very high level where we are with with the materials to try and answer the questions and at this time i would like to turn that over to dr towne so she can summarize where we are great thank you i'll just say for clarification the book of the week is now in the newsroom section of the archive because it was released as a media release every week uh for the two years that we were doing those with mr hensley and so you
049can find them now but more appropriately its title book of the week archive not suggested reading list not a part of the curriculum so we wanted families to be clear on that so that when they referenced it they understood that these were not curated materials to the point the last slide nearly we wanted to just make sure that we summarize what we're doing around future ready 2023 and our accelerating student achievement the last time we talked about our results and outcomes we heard from the board that you all want to know the strategies that we're undertaking and i think you got a clear picture of the way that we're responding first of all to the formative and summative data that we have we're making sure that we address what came out of the pandemic and
050actually try to make sure that we move those math results for kids and we are elevating a comprehensive literacy plan we're aligned with the state's reading 360 program and so we're having a fabulous partnership with the tennessee department of education around that as well as with our community partners they are actually being engaged and we're helping to train them on that reading 360 foundational literacy skills around phonics phonemic awareness we're evolving our math practices as neely said we have to accelerate and remediate in real time we can't stop we have to make sure we continue to deliver current grade level curriculum for students and while we do that integrate those skills that we know there's gaps because of the pandemic so we're working on that middle school is a special time we want to lean
051into that developmental age and leverage what's going on with students in terms of their social emotional development during that time to be able to have a successful unique middle school experience that we hope improves those student outcomes based on evidence-based strategies and then finally with regard to the curriculum uh and instructional materials we are following board policy we are making sure that our educators and our administrators are aware of board policy around our instructional materials and so we are committed to making sure that we have texts that reflect the diverse interests of our students and that offer parent choice we have what's in our curriculum and even within our curriculum parents can always request an alternate text and of course anything that's in our classroom or school libraries is optional students are not asked or
052required those are definitely driven by family choice and interest so as we go to the next slide as we always say we want to elevate that we expect excellence and we want to make sure that every student has an excellent teacher and every teacher has an excellent leader and that we have excellent resources to meet the needs of our diverse learners and so we open it up for discussion questions mr thurman uh yes so neely you're saying that uh in order for these books to say arrive in our library um they go through the librarian so she gets to put people whatever book she wants in her library regardless of what they are and uh does the principal have a say in that does does the librarian read this material and think that it's okay
053uh how who is the last person that says this book goes on this shelf so in fairness to answer that question fairly it's hard to answer dfinity definitively with 75 schools it could be it could be the principal many of our schools have a team many techs are brought before the librarian because they are high high interest to students it could be the librarian in some cases if you look at the board policy the board policy really elevates that it should be um the librarian the prince the school the community of the school especially the principal should know it should be collective and where we have an opportunity to do better is to make sure that our principals and our librarians are our teachers as they choose books on shelves that they are working collectively
054to know i'm going to be really honest as we have done work sometimes the principals didn't know about a book or or this book or that book sometimes our students bring books into school because their parents avidly take them to barnes and noble and then they'll talk to a librarian about that book so to answer definitively at a school level decisions can be made by all of those people the librarian a teacher or the principal a leadership team uh okay i have i've received an email from a from a librarian and she listed uh all of the awards some of these books had won like that was going to make a difference uh that just shows me if these if these books got number one i wanna i would hate to see what number two
055was you know you only know how good number one is when you see what you lost to um the uh you know if everybody if the administration or librarian or somebody thinks this is okay i want you to get up and read some of the things i have marked some of the excerpts just get up the podium here and read some of the quotes from these books if any of you people that don't have a problem with this administrators no no no i'm not i'm not worried about context let me tell you something my grand okay here hey no ma'am no ma'am no ma'am okay no because i refuse to read it you want everybody to see if they want their tax money to pay for this the administrators think it's okay some of them
056do because kids talk like this okay when you read your comments do you promise to read some of the excerpts in this book okay i won't because i want the taxpayers to understand exactly what i'm talking about i'm not talking about a few s words or a few d words or a few h words i'm talking about mf i'm talking about g d i'm talking the f word till it's ad nauseum page after page after page i understand i feel your pain back there that uh it is absolutely ridiculous now i wanted the taxpayers to know this i have plenty of coffees up here i'll be glad to pass them out after several weeks if you want to see what i'm talking about i want everybody in hamilton county to know this is what your
057tax money's paying for now if that's okay with you it's okay with me that's what you want to spend your tax money on it's yours that's what you want your children to be exposed to that's yours but i tell you what i don't care what context my these names these words come out of my grandchildren's mouth i don't care what the context is somebody's in serious serious trouble we're supposed to be edifying students we're supposed to be building them up we're supposed to be preparing them for life as adulthood to get be out and be productive citizens in this society i do not see one thing in here about shooting cops mistreating sro officers blowing people's brains out i do not see one thing edifying in any of this i know that one of these
058books was used in a book club am i correct and it was up for discussion it was up for discussion and the kids did and i am just i'm just sorry but i'm telling you my grandchildren don't watch movies with this language in it not in my house anyway and i think that our the parents trust us to be the gatekeepers to be sure that they're not exposed to this with our grades being as dismal as they are and we just heard some of them we have a lot more to be worried about than filling our students minds full of this now that's my opinion now you know how it's selected uh it's uh the uh the librarians put them there sometimes with or without the consent of the principles some of the teachers i
059guess uh use them in book clubs or whatever that's there it looks like that's their call i would like to see somebody take a mark levin book or some other kind of book and and see if we get some kind of pushback from that and put it in your classroom let's see what happens but it's very sad that these books are allowed in our libraries and you took out huck fan you took out tom sawyer and to kill a mockingbird a book that literally almost made me cry when i read it in high school because of the injustice in that book and it was taken out of the la our libraries very sad that those are taken out yet these are allowed they were taken out for some one or two words in some of
060these books and yet this is allowed i'm sorry but as a christian i just cannot sit by and watch this go on and uh i'm just not i'm just not cut out of that cloth but like i say we we know this and uh now now all taxpayers will know it's on it's own live streaming right now so all parents will know the paper just made it sound like almost thurman you know there's a few bad words in this book and you know she's trying to burn books and you know she's always a troublemaker but i'm telling you i'm bold enough to get up and say i want everybody to know what's in here and if you want your children to read these books you can use your money and go i would not even
061go buy a copy of them because i'm not giving anybody my money for that so i've just got people to send me excerpts and pages out of the books i've had almost the whole book texting me at some time or other but i'm not paying them a penny for them uh so uh if you want your child to have them you're welcome to go buy them i don't want to burn books you can let your kids read whatever you want them to read but we should not expose everybody's children to that because a lot of parents have no idea what their kids are seeing in libraries and what they're what they're bringing home to read parent most parents don't pick up the books and read them when their kids bring them home but i do
062hope that we do a better job screening some of this stuff before it's allowed especially after people see what's really in these books miss jones i am a proud 1999 graduate of chattanooga school for the arts and sciences i started my matriculation there in the second grade i was eight years old and at that time prior to going to csas i have always been a lover of books and literature my experience at csas with summer reading and of course just the pidea philosophy as a whole the socratic seminar philosophy as a whole we read all kinds of things at a very young age all the way through and they still do that to this day so if a child attends csas or csla or most any other magnet school they are um exposed to a
063variety of literature because that's the way the world is there's a variety of opinions i will say that um every summer i went to the library to the kids floor and it was the highlight of my life to be able to sit in those big pillows and around circles and get the books i went to the library at school and i read books nancy drew the hardy boys ramona quimby their eyes were watching god possessing the secret of joy romeo and juliet a midsummer night's train the canterbury tales um the bluest eye beloved huck finn tom sawyer tequila mockingbird and when i got to college i read some of those same books um the autobio biography of malcolm x we read a lot of books and i will say um the books that are being
064discussed or have been discussed in our community i've read a couple of those as well too um i will say that no they're not the most pleasant words oftentimes in the books we're talking about today or in the books from the past and when we talk about what the books teach us or taught us or will teach our students not all of them even though they're considered to be pulitzer prize or award-winning english literature or going back for years like shakespeare's been around for years right but when i think about romeo and juliet i think about ninth grade miss carmen tatum now miss carmen beller telling me i was very cynical because i said this is stupid two people kill themselves because they ain't love this is stupid in hindsight at 40 i realized that
065if i had a really paid attention beyond the two lovers being so in love they wanted to live forever in love i probably would have been very disrespectful to my parents defiant because that's what it teaches you i probably could have committed suicide because that's what it could have taught me um i probably could have called people some derogatory names from reading some of the other books because in those books it referenced people that look like me with very bad words used in a derogatory term but if you define that word it means an ignorant person so i think often times what we have to realize is no we don't agree and wrong and i wouldn't want my little boy to read certain books either but i also know that we could be easily walking
066through food city and somebody spit off the f-bomb just as naturally i know that we could be in some other setting and somebody say some things that we don't want to see the tv has all kinds of things on it now ipads have all kinds of things on it now i really worry about the exposure our children get in a lot of places but what i do know is that libraries were created to house pieces of literature fiction or non-fiction cookbooks to biographies to documentaries whatever they're housed to teach us things and also allow us to expand our literature knowledge when you go to the library you select the book that you want to read nobody says hey you read color purple hey you read little leaders hey you read me summer nice dream nobody
067says that my librarian has never said that one of them is here today leo lee is right here from downtown when i was a little girl she was in the chattanooga library she never told me that miss gwenda gregory was my prince my librarian arts and sciences she never said hey you read nancy drew i went to pick nancy drew and there was some things that my momma didn't like either my point is is that libraries give you choice and for every book that one parent doesn't want their child to read there's another parent that's okay with that and so how do we take it upon ourselves to allow people to strongly encourage us to censor books but we don't take kindly when people want to censor us for things we say that might not
068be appropriate because there are things that we all have probably stayed up here on these days that somebody's mama didn't like somebody's daddy didn't like i'm just saying somebody's listening now don't like what i'm saying so what i'm saying is you can't censor when it's uncomfortable for you because that's just life life is uncomfortable i sit here on this day as a many a day and listen to things that i wish i could censor a whole lot of people for but i don't because i'm respectful of the fact that that's your choice that's your belief that's what you think i don't agree with it my mama wouldn't my grandma wouldn't and her mama probably wouldn't have but i understand and so i think it's a matter of understanding that no we are not making this
069mandatory in curriculum that's been clearly pointed out which we already knew that but it's been clearly pointed out that this is not required in curriculum these are choice books so i don't want to start censoring things because my baby loves cliff with a big red dog i don't want him to get to harrison elementary because somebody mom don't like clip the red big red dog i want to read paddington they take cliff to be red dog because my baby want to read clifford to be read up so now i'm mad because he want to reclip to be red dog where is it same thing and i'm using that as an example because we cannot feel like everybody wants to do what we want to do and nobody's saying that some of the language is okay
070but it wasn't okay when they were saying and i'm gonna say this but when i was reading to kill a mockingbird and it seemed like they were singing the word i wasn't comfortable with that and you're right rhonda that is one of the classic pieces of literature of all times and it does break your heart but for me i'm sure my heart was broken differently from why your heart was broken so i think we have to think about what do these things mean because history is history life is life and nothing that happened in the hate you give differs from what happened to families that i know who lost lives on the west side a couple of weeks ago from what happened with george floyd and sandra bland nothing is different that is the reality
071for some of our kids and i think there's some type of manic i don't know manic response to this whole theory that somebody making a whole lot of money off making all of us mad at each other when we normally wouldn't be mad each other because we'll be talking about the same thing in the grocery store that we liked but somebody is making money off of crt which is critical race theory that has nothing to do with k-12 educational pedagogy all because they want to instill fear because school systems around the world not just hamilton county but around the world are trying to do another crt and that's called culturally responsive teaching culturally responsive pedigo look it up google it it's nothing i made up now that one i didn't make up that is pre-k
072through 12. but people are afraid of that because representation matters and people don't some people don't want to see others know that they have representation or that they matter this ain't about a book this ain't about two or three books this is about something bigger than books and if you're not careful we always since we won't talk christian i'm gonna go real christian on you my pastor my grandma my mama even i know i believe that the enemy sends all kinds of tricks and he uses all kinds of people without them even knowing they're being used to try to defy a plan so you can take out the hate you give you can take out the other books it don't mean that they ain't go you're right you don't mean any mama not gonna buy
073it you don't mean they're it don't mean i might not buy it if a student asked me for it i have two copies of it at home we cannot do this we can't just teach people what we want them to know that christopher columbus came and discovered the world which he didn't because native americans was here slavery came it happened it ended and we're all in a perfect world what we're not if you all sit back and look ronda in a few minutes we might be reliving to kill a mockingbird the way the world is going some days i pray it does it because i ain't going back but i'm just saying you have to be careful about those things and we have to be careful about that because we're representing 44 000 children that
074look 44 different colors shapes forms so we are working with a melting pot here and it don't look just one color when you look at gumbo it's a whole lot of stuff going on in some gumbo it ain't looking like potato soup and it ain't looking like chili so we have to be careful when we begin to want to censor things because then what are we going to start doing sensory math books are we going to start censoring science books because you don't want to talk about reproductive systems i mean when is it going to stop it was perfectly fine when it was to kill a mockingbird and tom sawyer huck finn [Music] little house on the prairie books i read them too laura ingalls wilder they talked about all kinds of stuff in their
075midwives and child birth on the table we have to be cautious of that y'all it's just it's life is life and i have to say that because i i i don't agree i don't agree with the language all the time in books no i don't but i don't agree with the language all the time on tv either or in our governmental bodies and people that make decisions but you cannot start to censor stuff because if we was going to censor them we could i got a whole lot i want to censor miss hill [Applause] thank you karetza for that i would like a fact check please my colleague rhonda thurman said that huck finn is not in any of our libraries in hamilton county schools she said that tom sawyer is not in any of
076the libraries in hamilton county schools and that to kill a mockingbird is not in any of the libraries in hamilton county schools i'm going to turn my conversation to the topic of um our future ready board update and while i'm talking about that can somebody please fact check that for me let's call a let's call a librarian and let's make sure that if we've got let's do we have a i mean no just please let neely know not we aren't going to disrupt the meeting but um i just if we're going to talk about things i'd like to make sure that we're saying things that are true um correct so thank you for what you said and um your point about fear resonates with me fear and anger are stoked um sometimes for power i
077think and in this room i'd like us to be very much about fact um neely i appreciate what you have done um to to come compile this information related to accelerating student achievement and it's to me this is very important uh possibly the most important thing that we will talk about tonight um let me point out that i i um i would like to have seen a split of our subgroups within this data because this data as ms thurman said is is concerning um we know how hard our teachers and leaders work last year um and we also all know that there's no time to rest right that we have to push forward um and i know that in my district students particularly students in subgroups are not mastering course material at the level that
078that they need to so i'd like for us to continue splitting out that data as much as possible please so as i look at the the fact that we have these literacy and math action steps and even the middle school transformation nikia what i recognize is we have we are at the at the hard stuff so not a classy word but we're at the hard stuff of our strategic plan the low-hanging fruit the things that we could get nailed down we've gotten that we've got momentum and and you talk build now or do now and build toward with a phrase i had not heard before so i would like to understand how we as a board can best support hold accountable encourage the progress toward our focus five goals because i recognize that the easy
079is behind us and the heart is ahead of us and we're gonna we are gonna have to be disciplined as a board to stay focused so help me know tell me if you can what's the way that we can best support you in doing this work so um thank you for that question and i'll start and uh dr parker you can weigh in as well so i think that you're absolutely right that we have gotten the the initial gains and the you know the moniker fastest improving district we got there by taking steps to do things like align our instruction to the standards and make sure that we had a benchmark to check for learning that formative assessment and so that in and of itself was a strategy now we're at the place where we
080have to think about what's happening around classroom instruction every day and so we are leaning into our classroom practices that's some of the work that we're doing when you hear all of these acronyms tdg tntp that's what those people are helping us do lean into the quality of our instruction every day from a board perspective what we have right now is a lot of influx of resources because of esser right and so we're able to do a lot more and i think this is where dr parker is going when she says do now we're leaning into strategies and resources because we have those dollars when i think about the long term for the board and what kind of support we need is that as we begin to demonstrate what is effective right like which of
081these investments through esser have been affected we need to find long-term sustainability i've said before that we have done and this is the team and i just want to say i know that there are librarians listening teachers and educators listening they are doing a fantastic job yes they are doing a fantastic job no one here i've heard that librarians some of them are nervous about the work look we have kids reading more than ever we have our students engaged in in diverse types of literature that increases their overall literacy skills because you have to be a reader there's a lot of evidence and research that said the average secondary student only reads 25 minutes a week outside of school that won't do it 25 minutes a week so we have to get kids reading and
082to get them reading we have to get them with things in their hands that they want to read and a lot of that is reflecting their own lives so again i want to say to librarians we've been highlighting that component of the work and that's why they're responding by making sure that we have different types of texts not just the classic but also young adult right not just representing one community representing all of our communities 52 percent of our students in hamilton county schools as of this year are students of color 52 percent of the students in hamilton county schools this year are students of color they too deserve to see themselves in the books they deserve to see themselves so it is about making sure that we are able to maintain the investments for
083the things that appear to be effective and moving forward uh our student outcomes and that the work that we've done thus far there has been a feeling because frankly it is about resources right so what we're able to buy when you see all of that tutoring that neely's talking about before school after school we have more interventionists in our schools right now we've aligned and have now intervention support at the district level we've built out the esl team four years ago we had a half of a person working on esl and the half of that person working on rti we've now got a team of six people working on esl and we need it yes because frankly we're not hitting our growth targets around language proficiency so it requires investment we can only do so
084much as it's been said as my grandma would say you can't get flood from attorney so you got to invest to be able to support kids so it's about now we're evaluating what the impact is of the work that shannon moody's team data and information systems we organize to be able to know what the internal on investment of certain programs that we're purchasing and so as we begin to identify which of those have been highly effective we have to figure out a way to sustain it after fiscal year 24 right so that's what the board can do really hold us accountable for bringing you the data on the return and investment and then making sure that we prioritize it every budget cycle how are we making sure that we're putting this into the long term
085budget thank you that's really that's helpful and um i agreed to be the um the legislative rep before i knew how fiery and interesting this session is going to be thank you last time i got school vouchers and now i get bep formula refunding so this will be this should be a good one appreciate it y'all enjoy your friday mornings while i'm on conference calls but i had covered so you didn't have to move it thanks no i mean like yeah you handled it okay um all right thank you i appreciate that um do we have an answer as to the factual yes so in ninth grade um to kill a mockingbird is actually a part of our taught adopted curriculum and it is a whole class unit that our students are taught it is
086a part of the adoption so to kill a mockingbird is actually a book that is taught in hamilton county schools that is not banned from hamilton county schools i didn't say it was banned i said it was not that was not what i said you said it wasn't in the library that's right i sent people to look in some of our libraries and it was not there miss hill has the floor thank you to kill a mockingbird is a whole class text in the american voices unit of our ninth grade um adoption um huck finn and tom sawyer i believe were the other two huck finn and to kill a mockingbird is in every high school library we would have to dig a little bit deeper to find tom sawyer on every shelf but our
087lab they have confirmed that all of these books in some capacity may be in a high school library and then of course um the one book is a part of our adopted career okay so if in fact it wasn't on the shelf perhaps it was checked out by someone who was reading it it could be um okay just a final final question that came to mind as it relates to how classroom and library text are selected just to confirm a couple things that that i think i know but i just want to make sure that i know them um we have uh scott yes or no we have a code of professional conduct corru yes yes we passed one we do yes okay so we have that um nikia are are we committed to having
088excellent teachers in every classroom that is our commitment okay we are um what about excellent leaders is that part of what we do absolutely okay um and neely teachers are they professionals are they are they educated to do their jobs yes they are okay um what about librarians are librarians educated to do their jobs they have a master's degree would you say that that makes them professionals okay that's all i need to know thanks miss robinson thank you so much jenny for bringing it back to our future ready discussion um i actually just have a question in regards to the data that you presented neely you mentioned in one of the slides that 4 000 students participated in the summer reach program last year and i'm really proud that my kids are part of that
0894 000. they had a great time whether they want to admit it or not and they will be returning in 2022 whether they want to or not um but i guess you know what stands out to me with that number is that that really is only a little less than 10 of our total student population and uh to me what's most important with our ssr dollars and the results of last year's performance um is that we we moved the needle on that number and so i'm just curious from a logistics standpoint how do we do that how do we we talked a little bit about this monday i recognize that i'm not trying to repeat that question but how do we how do we engage more students in our reach program and do we have
090capacity to improve that 10 percent number to bring more students into that program thank you for that question um one of the things that has been critical in onboarding this new position is the capacity to work with 75 schools to get it's a heavy lift our team is already working on the launch the alignment the strategy for how we begin recruiting early and targeting using data and using our communications outreach to make sure that our families know well in advance unfortunately because of the cycles of when dollars came in through the grant process it set us behind a little bit and and i'll be really on it's a heavy undertaking to i mean you're buying a whole new set of tools and we we hope to alleviate that by starting earlier having a cleaner process
091having a structure to that but i'll also add with some of the grant opportunities one of our challenges is what do our families need i'm a working mom and eight to five is really helpful for me if i have kids and so what we're looking to do better with this year is looking for those opportunities for us to learn but then have some extended time and extended opportunities to better support families so that while kids are there they're learning and it's quality but they also have it's a support for parents we're looking to enhance and only get better from what we've learned from our lessons so far um i think that's really great and i'm sure that number will will move this coming summer because of those efforts i think one thing that i i
092felt like the undertone feedback that i got as i was talking to parents not just in my district but really just even like my peer group um you know leading up to the summer was that i think a lot of parents didn't understand why it was so important maybe for their students to attend reach or um that maybe their kids really needed actually to be a part of it and so i'm wondering what we can do from a school perspective to help parents understand that data specific to their student and i'm just kind of thinking about thinking thinking out loud on this but i feel like some parents may also not understand the full impact of what last year you know and i really don't mean to make it sound like parents don't understand their
093students or their students progress it's just that none of us really do understand the full impact i'm just like borderline a tiger mom and so i was like no you will go to summer reach you know um but truly my son who's a fourth grader now is is absolutely reaping the benefits because they started studying fourth grade material during summer reach and he was able to really kind of get ahead before he even started fourth grade so um it would just be cool to like hear those testimonies and like think through how can we help parents really understand their specific students data and like how reach can help them like maybe maybe they won't see the fruit of that immediately but like over the next five six seven years as they progress through through school
094so just a thought miss thurman yes so there's a few things the data broken down by schools is that up on our website yet the state scores by school it's actually on the state report i know on our on ours the state website is so convoluted and so difficult for people to uh why why is it not on ours so we can definitely post it the state report card is what we typically reference from our website but we can actually put the static yeah because i've had people call me and they said they got tired of trying to figure it out on the state website because it's just very complicated um you know as far as these books are i had a discussion with the doctor towns it was on the two last tuesday in
095august and i remember the zone meeting that the two of us had when i was uh talking to her about when my first discussion about some of these books and just so everybody knows i had no idea the author of these books were black i still don't know two of them i still don't know what the race is nor do i care so it has absolutely nothing to do with race to me because i did not even know that she was black and i didn't know until somebody sent it to me just a few days ago so i did not know that uh i think that's when her picture was in the paper with an article about me so i had no idea that what race the person was so it has no idea about
096people of color or anything like that and also in the discussion that we had uh i mentioned to you that uh that some of these books were not in our libraries and uh that you know i said are you more offended by you know tom sawyer huck fan or by this language and you said it depends on where you've come from do you remember that correctly i said are you more offended by those books than these books and you say well it depends on where you come from do you remember that okay well anyway uh that was that was the discussion that we had and then i was told well kids talk this way well i don't think that's still a reason that we should be able to have this language in these books because
097kids talk this way kids smoke drugs i don't think we need to sit around i said to you kids talk about no no yes yes you did say yes you did say that to me uh well well you know young people do talk this way i do i think we recall what do you recall differently okay but anyway uh but you know i tell you what we're doing and what the school system is doing whether you realize it or not these administrators with some of our things that we're allowing to go on school you are promoting your own demise you're promoting your own demise i looked at the back at some attendance some enrollment figures from back in 1990 to 93. the enrollment of hamilton county schools in 92-93 with the combined with the city
098at that time no yeah combined with the city was 44 000. that's what our enrollment is now if it were not and as much as this town has grown as much as this town has grown you would think that our enrollment would be 50 000 students or something like that it's still forty four thousand what it was back in ninety two ninety three now if it were not for some of the i will say immigrants coming in and being part of our school system i wonder what our enrollment would be i just wonder what our enrollment would be people are making other choices for their students for obvious reasons we need to do a soul search and find out what that reason is and we can't keep acting like that this kind of stuff doesn't
099matter because it does i've worked for the public for 46 years all races all genders all everything i've worked with all of them and i tell you the talk on the street is that you know they're very unhappy about just a lot of things going on and they have been for a long time and a lot of people who can make other choices and i just think it's something that we really need to think about in hamilton county schools why our schools have not grown more than this more than they should like i said with all the with all the influx of people from volkswagen and all of that our school system has not grown we just need to ask ourselves why thank you mr perez um rhonda i'm gonna just clarify one second because
100i i wanna know that i didn't misunderstand you uh what's your concern about the immigrants in our school i'm not okay that's that that's what i believe we're not if it were not for some of them that as many coming in as has that we where who would be in the schools is what i'm saying all right i'm going to move on from that understand what i'm saying i do not have a problem with that i'm just stating a fact okay um regarding sorry i don't get triggered but that triggered me a little bit son uh regarding our future ready um i'm going to give a very high level concern that i have which is uh the teaching to the test versus developing passion and love for learning um uh and i'm not sure i'm
101not an educator and i do actually am very grateful for those of you who are um but i'm often afraid and math is one that i think about often because i'm one of those weird people who love math in school i just loved it you could give me a problem to solve and i would like i'd be giddy i get a problem to solve and um i haven't met too many who do and maybe it's because i was weird but um but i am afraid that we uh are so focused on software and this and that that we'll just get our students to answer those questions right for the test and be ready for the test and they don't have a passion for learning um and so i don't have an answer for you that's
102why i said this is incredibly high level i just today had some comment out there that i think there are good testers and there are poor testers testing to me is skewed i can speak of in my own family very capable children some who test incredibly well and some who need time in process and both get to the same answer and as i said in one case i as i have said to one of my daughters i would rather a doctor that gets to the right answer than a doctor who answers quickly and much of our testing is about can you get this much of our standards testing right can you get these answers quickly so one of them may walk away frustrated though the process she was capable of but and so a lot
103of this is my big high level concern is that we are um excuse me like when i look at our percentages we're still we're proud of our growth um i'm not going to knock it statewide we're at 36 reading level right our reading capacity whatever that 36 rates 34 32 and as far as i remember and i'm getting there halfway through my life or more we've always been at around those percentages uh and so then i often have the question like you know i'm working actually right now with the team that i work with to set standards and goals for what we're aiming and one of the first things that we want is to set realistic goals and this is the standard and so i sometimes wonder when we're always showing this i don't know
104i i'm i'm very high level are we like aiming at the wrong thing you know are we are we but at the end of the day we're required to present the same test to the same people so uh so somewhere there my big high level concern 30 50 000 foot view concern is that we will be so busy excited about metric achievements and then not realizing that our kids hate going to school every day but boy they know how to test well you know and and so i just throw that out to you as educators and i'm sorry because i know that even that first one is crucial i'm skewed because we all look at the world through our own lens and the reason i did really well in math all through school was because
105i loved it right and so i'm skewed to believe that if we love what we do we excel in it um i i think many have spoken about the reading and whatever i appreciate the fact that there are pathways for every parent to communicate to their schools some teachers that people they don't like i think every parent i i was thinking about this today a lot obviously this week a lot trying to understand the other perspective not my perspective regarding the concerns about books and i realized that um we all deal with this right right now i know first and second graders are playing squid games in the playground i personally don't think it's an appropriate show for first and second graders i would not have allowed my own children to watch or play squid
106games ever but it's none of my business if another parent thinks it's appropriate for their children and that has been my life through my kids who are passionate about reading and have read and it's that balance of trying to say what do i allow and i'll be honest there came a point where we couldn't keep up like we just couldn't keep up like we tried to read everything they were reading to be tell them whether they could or not and at one point it's like not to mention some of the books that the levels there are so boring to me that i couldn't get through it um i don't think this is a new discussion i'm from costa rica if you don't know that that's why i get triggered i was born and raised in
107costa rica guess what in costa rica we have the same discussion about the books that kids read and whether they're appropriate and the music kids listen to and and everybody has different opinions and uh and my view is you have every right every right to be concerned about your kids what they're reading and what's in the schools for your children but unfortunately you and i don't have a right to decide that for another parent that's that's i would prefer people don't watch split games in first and second grade but if they do that's their parents choice and decision and uh and uh and we move on um so i i don't think we're going to solve this because you know i i recognize one parent expressed a substitute book and she expressed harry potter as
108the list and i'm old enough to remember when harry potter because i was born evangelical christian in costa rica by the way which is a very small percentage of the population down there and we were not supposed to let our kids read harry potter back in those days because there was witchcraft and there was this and that so my point isn't to attack anybody or anything is to say this is the story always and will be the story 20 years from now regarding other books um and uh and again as parents i hope you're as involved i mean i i get the feeling some parents are reading every book uh on the shelves right now uh good at least we're all reading um but at the same time uh maybe you can reach out to
109your teacher say i would prefer my child not read these books but i don't think you can i don't think i can i don't think we should and the last thing on earth i want is for us in government to decide what your children will read and not read um and so so that's that's my point now on the other thing uh and this is my last comment uh because i've heard from a lot of teachers this week and i've heard from a lot of librarians this week and they feel attacked and i've never in my life thought that we would attack librarians or kindergarten teachers those are the two that to me would are holy um and uh and so they feel attacked so i wanna uh just speak up in gratitude for teachers
110and librarians and k through 5 and 6 through 12 and literature teachers who are trying to figure out what triggers their kids to read and excites their kids to read and builds a passion of reading and their children and their students uh and one of them asked me what are we supposed to do like we're now scared and i said i want you to do what you've done for many many years i want you to love those students i want you to educate those students i want you to do the best and let people get angry at us on the board because we kind of did this to ourselves so um so i'm sorry that there are those who wake up every morning trying to serve our children who feel that they're under attack right
111now um yes are there some bad apples i'm sure there are 6 500 employees we're gonna have a few that may have an agenda i think for the most part our educators are doing their best every single day to teach our students and serve our students and serve our community so um anyways i'll shut up mr walker thank you i think a lot of us wanted to come in today and figure out how books are chosen to go in the library we've got a little bit clearer pitch i don't know if we're all 100 percent uh comfortable with with the whole process or how it even goes you know we hear the department of education picked at the board picked at the state picked it so we still got some work to do on how
112we can make sure that our stakeholders understand how books are put in there i have no idea how this has turned into being about race or diversity or anything else we have a diverse population we need diverse books in our libraries for everyone to read and and understand how things work that's what makes this world work but this isn't about right or wrong this is about wise the language in those books are not wise could they do a clean version put in there i want people to understand i have no idea what it's like to grow up in certain areas of this city i never will but but this is just about our is the language wise i don't know what the even story is about and i'm fine with anybody reading a book but
113it's language wise and for me it's not so i just wanted to say that mr smith thank you mr chairman um neely thank you for for the report and you know she's real clear we've we've uh we've made some progress but we got a lot of work to do and uh the the creative things that you guys are doing uh man we just we just got to continue uh on that trajectory i you know i i i've really uh i've listened and uh really struggled with even whether to weigh in or not but uh i i think i need to i i know there's a lot of parents here and i can remember maybe a couple of months ago when some parents came in and when i first heard some of the excerpts that that
114are in the books first i heard it for the first time maybe i'm naive i don't know but i that was an emotional night for me when i sat here and i listened to that and i mean it was emotional for me uh because i sure want my grandkids today reading those things i would agree with what maybe has been said some people talk like that today i i would agree with that but you don't talk like that in my house um so i thank the parents who you know are reading these books and and making us aware i got a call um 48 hours ago maybe a little bit longer than that from a librarian who uh at one of my schools who i know very well she knows me very well she knows
115my story and my background well and she said to me joe have you read in these books and of course my answer was no and she said i want you to read not far from the tree and she said because that's your story and i did i read it in less than 48 hours and uh the language was horrible but the my wife and i cried through the whole book because it was my story and you know it it as we were reading it and it's about foster kids and i won't bore you with a story i encourage you to read it but as we read that book and and you know a lot of foster kids that we raise over the years that's the way they talked and then every time they talk that
116way we always use that as a teachable moment to not talk that way now my wish and i think it could have been done is that as the author wrote this very good book that he could have done it without using that language and i think he could have i think it could have been done but but the text of the book was very good and very educational especially if you don't know anything about that world i just wish that it could have been written without the divine language um rhonda thank you for for leading the charge with this i you know we talked about uh all of us have talked about for months now uh nobody knows better whether a child needs to wear a mask or not than that parent nobody knows better
117than that parent and nobody knows better whether child ought to be vaccinated or not than that parent and i always felt like that it should be parent choice so if if we're going to demand that that we want parent choice and i do my kids are grown now and but i got grandkids and i'm with kids every day and and i i i believe there ought to be parent choice so if we want parent choice around some issues then then we've got to allow parent choice around other issues whether we agree with it or not uh i worry about uh starting to try to censor books i i don't know where that would end that you know that scares me and and maybe this just sounds crazy but i almost wish we had some kind
118of system in place in our district and we're we rate books like we rate movies don't we we rate games they play don't we why couldn't we rate books um that what i've read these excerpts from these books is not acceptable we don't talk like that at my house and when i hear kids talk like that and some of them do it's a teachable moment for me and uh starts at home and you know with with parents and unfortunately we can't legislate uh morality we just can't nor should we try to but but there's got to be an answer somewhere in between where we don't have to start censoring books but at the same time we got to make people aware of what's in some of them if they're going to be on our shelves
119so i don't know mr chairman maybe some kind of rating system or something i don't know maybe that sounds crazy but we do movies we do books we but i i too i'm glad that mr perez mentioned the librarians i have talked to two or three that that have felt a little attacked through this and and uh i i know some librarians and and this one in particular that just called me out of the blue the other day and said joe i know your story and i'd ra i'd recommend you read this book that's being referenced in here and i did the language was horrible but it was life-changing so thank you any more questions concerns yes we'll say what's everything yeah uh really nobody's asking us to censor books or anything we're just asking
120the parents to do that not not us the parents they're the ones who have kids in school if they don't like it they have a right to say so that's right and also about librarians being attacked i haven't attacked any librarian that i know uh i've had a couple write me letters and i answered them back but that's about all i have called some and asked me some of these books were in their libraries and i was telling no so that's all i know i must have been calling too many elementary school library uh teachers in schools to go look in their libraries uh but anyway and that's neither here nor there but like i say it's up to the parents it's up to the taxpayers of hamilton county it's not up to us we're
121not asking the government to censor anything i'm not trying to censor anything you let your kids read what you want i don't care but uh but anyway that's just what i wanted to know it's not that's trying to say i'm not trying to censor anything not trying to burn books trying to do anything like that i'm just saying we need to have a checkup we need to wake up because the parents are making their decisions and they're making their decisions with their feet we need to wake up okay we'll move on to delegations uh vice chair robinson yes um i'm gonna i'll read this one time and so everyone that's planning to speak if you'll pay attention thank you for your interest in addressing the hamilton county board of education during your presentation please address
122the board as a whole not individual board members or administrators also please do not present complaints or concerns you have about an individual employee of the school system if you wish to voice those complaints and concerns you should contact the central office and ask for a meeting with the superintendent since the superintendent is responsible for individual employees please limit your remarks to five minutes i will tell you when you have one minute left and i will time you our first speaker uh it looks like uh jeanette o'markel from hcea is not here tonight um so we will have lauren sloan speaking i'm sorry there's someone here in her place oh i'm sorry okay i got it larry lewis larry lewis i apologize no worries all right mr lewis give me one moment all right i'll
123notify you with a signal when you have one minute left okay okay thank you you may begin chairman mcclendon members of the board and superintendent towns thank you for the opportunity to address you this evening my name is larry lewis i'm a teacher but also a member of hcea and also the chair one of the chairs of the professional educators collaborative conferencing team pekka and every three years the mou needs to be renewed our mou currently will expire june 30th 2022 and so we are here to present to you the petitions and as required by state law to go ahead and continue the renewal process on the mou the petitions have been presented to mr mcclendon and dr townes we were required by state law to have at least 15 percent of professional employee signatures
124and we got well above that and that's all there in the petition we look forward to working with the board and collaborating and conferencing and representing all employees members and non-members in the pekka process thank you okay uh lauren sloan i just want to say thank you for giving us a voice and letting us speak to you and i also want to acknowledge mrs thurman and miss jones your passion is really respectable and your energy is amazing so thank you for your voices school board members thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak tonight i'm here in support of ensuring that children have access to literature that is relevant enough to engage them is well written and develops empathy i certainly understand those parents and school board members who want to limit access to
125adult language to school-aged children i have many conversations at home about words that we do not use but i side with my parents and our teachers in the belief that the lessons that are important for our children to learn sometimes have harsh words in the context of a wider story i want to make sure the school board members have the ability to read the books so i've sent books to all your house so you don't have to buy them so you'll have them coming to you and you don't have to pay for them but hopefully you will read them if you haven't already the hate u give tells a powerful story to our children and standing up for what is right in the face of discrimination and far from the tree reminds us to love
126each other even when it is different to accept each other these are the lessons we teach our home at our home and should be part of our school curriculum in these really difficult times as a parent i'm the partner in education to our teachers supporting and reinforcing their academic plan i'm a mom of a fifth grader and a second grader at csas and my husband is also the middle and high school art teacher at csas i also have a seven month that will be a future hamilton county student my children are third generation chattanooga my mom was valedictorian at central high school and i'm a fifth generation tennessean i was a kid who reading did not come easily for i struggled with adhd and so reading comprehension was always challenging i'm a very slow reader
127and english and history were always hard for me because it was hard for me to read when the books were dry like grapes of wrath hamlet all quiet on the western front are not relevant to me like lord of the flies i just couldn't engage my senior year i had a teacher who included books like salvation on saint mountain about snake handling in north alabama and eli wiesel vizelle's night and night about the holocaust when my teacher introduced me to poetry like gwendolyn brooks suddenly reading clicked at night the main story is about the inversion of the parent-child relationship as his father deteriorates to helpless state and vizel becomes his resentful teenage caregiver as a child of a bad divorce i could relate to the role reversal the books were relevant well written and modern
128and i connected to the stories they connected with me and i finally learned to read after years and years of always feeling like a terrible reader i know we all feel that the world we see through the media on our screens is more complex than we were growing up the week that the troops began leaving afghanistan thousands of people were being hospitalized in our community i work in health care it's very traumatic due to the pandemic major findings on climate change came out and there was another piece of news that was released that was brushed aside due to competing international crises the findings from the 2020 census came out that week according to 2020 census data the number of individuals identifying with more than one race increased from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million
129an astonishing 276 percent increase most of those who identified as multi-racial were young the american or the america our children will grow up and it's not black and white only rather it is black white asian ghanaian australian hindi muslin evangelical catholic all of it this is the world that's out there the more we can expose our kids to in safe environments the classroom or out in the community the better our kids will be so they can really understand other people and understand what shapes them i work as a leader in a really large company and all business scholars will tell you that the most important skill leader can have is empathy for almost every profession doctor teacher nurse mailman you will see empathy is one of the main attributes to success in that profession why
130because when managing or interacting with another human being able to put oneself in someone else's shoes will enable you to transcend your bias perspective on their situation and help you understand what is best for that unique person so then the question is who gets to decide what is valuable lesson and how many adult languages or themes there's too many are one or two school board members or a small minority of parents enough to kill to keep a full set of children from reading a compelling and well regarded book when my husband a teacher in hamilton county heard the last discussion at the board meeting his first comment was shouldn't we just be happy that kids are reading these days i believe the teacher is the best trained person i'm just going to add the librarian
131my childhood best friend is here and we grew up and um she would read one book a night when she was in the night of my house and i couldn't even really read so um and she's amazing reader the thing she was reading by the time we were in high school i believe the teacher is the best trained person to make the decision for a full classroom of children is not just one child with parents who have one view or one set of parents with a different view but the teacher considers all our experiences in librarian and views and looks for a balance both of what books are on a summer reading list and what is in our classroom for discussion i hope that as parents we take the time to put the important lessons
132of the books and any adult language in context for our children our children are on youtube tik tok and all over the web and we cannot shelter them by censoring a few big books for a handful of pages but why i do get what our children read is very personal as a parent of three athletic white boys i will have them all read bear town if you haven't read it in ninth grade by fredrick bachmann this is a book about a girl who's sexually assaulted by the star of a small town hockey team and how the girl boy in town reconciled that crime i don't expect all parents to share the same reading list with my family i want my kids to go to university of tennessee or the university of texas where my husband
133went there they will get great educations but they will be exposed some very compromised compromised situation my hope is that i will discuss difficult situations and language with them before they encounter it in the real world i'm sorry it is a partnership and one that i hope will allow us to flourish us and teachers thank you rebecca day hey um last month i came to talk about policy this month i'm here to talk about state standards some suggest that the curriculum is a good tool because the county saw gains in scores however we just saw the ela decreased and is decreasing still decreasing so describing it as a gain is a subjective and that will help us meet our long-term long-term strategic planning goals but i would suggest that while you're trying to solve one
134problem you've created a much bigger one earlier this year in tennessee um we're the fourth largest conservative state lawmakers passed a bill that would withhold funding from schools when students were taught topics that create division curriculum issues that have been brought before this board include examples of bad language violence negative concepts about police officers and america hyper sexualized content division between races genders people groups parents and children all found in our textbooks not just the libraries and the libraries multiple examples exist for each of the band concepts and we can provide you with those i'm not an attorney but i can read so i will provide you with what i found in one story in one unit in one textbook that will demonstrate the curriculum contains band concepts a quilt of our country which is
135in the ninth grade ela book page 14 says america was built in nobody's image and stories of history are of bigotry so that would be an example of teaching the band concept number eight which is promoting the concept that the united states is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist page 13 describes america as a mongrel nation held together by a notion that all men are created equal though everyone knows that most men consider themselves better than someone this is a teaching concept 13 which says that all americans are not created equal and are not endowed by their creator with certain rights now let's look at two of the authors who wrote this textbook these men are entrenched in a certain ideology ernest morell phd his specialty is critical pedagogy thanks for saying that word that
136was great which principles include a teaching philosophy that invites educators to encourage students to critique structures of power and oppression it's aimed at social transformation it's crt a teacher uses his own enlightenment to encourage students to question and challenge inequalities that exist in family schools and societies kelly gallagher master of education he's also an author he has a blog right now that you can look up on the internet his on his personal website that's titled mass shooting unit it's about mass shootings and includes details of how he taught his students to march against gun rights in america if the goal when choosing this curriculum was inclusion and diversity it is not working because it's creating division i can't speak for everyone in this room but i don't think that the citizenry would be opposed to
137racial equality and diversity training in our schools ind efforts are essential the training should be carefully designed to advance belonging and uniqueness in our schools if done correctly ind efforts foster diversity of thought and bring people together it does not create division in the efforts should not be left in the hands of individual teachers or co-mingled with public school curriculum so my question to you is are you confident that the band concepts they're against the law in tennessee are not being taught in hamilton county because you shouldn't be i beg you to take a deeper dive into this curriculum find out for yourself that we are missing the mark as it relates to tennessee state law um one of you i just want to make some comments on some of the stuff that y'all said
138i mean maybe the the students don't have a passion for learning because this curriculum is depressing and maybe this you know you know i mean maybe the you said somebody said something about it that we um i don't know but those books about that cop hating it's the number 12 it's breaking that policy i don't i'm sorry i made notes but anyway that's all i have to say other than thank you for talking on monday about the parent delegation time it was a very meaningful conversation and y'all did a great job thank you thank you [Applause] jamie hall all right members of the board and executive committee um i'm going to preface this with saying there's no attack here and this is not about racism what i'm about to talk about um even though i
139feel like everything keeps being brought to that i am here today to address the ongoing concerns parents of hamilton county are finding in the public school curriculum and supplemental materials as you know a non-profit hamilton county group moms for liberty has been spearheading this effort made up of dozens of hamilton county parents i am one of those parents my name is jamie hall i am a mother of three school-aged children and one first-year scholar college student and i live in hamilton county we appreciate those of you who are giving your time and attention to review publicly review and publicly rebuke the explicit materials presented by hamilton county schools to our students but some in this room have made it clear that they are not concerned and i would like to address those individuals today just
140to clarify a few things when the parents and moms for liberty began reviewing materials we expected to find a few arguably questionable materials needing replacing what we found so far is much more widespread we're finding repetitive messages messages about parents who are portrayed as antagonists generally stupid frequently drunk and often abusing their children and i understand there are situations in children who live in these households however after working 25 years with students in ministry i have learned that these students need a safe environment with a hopeful outcome and better treatment than what they're getting at home and higher standards than what they're seeing at home um there's overwhelming dark themes including anxiety depression physical and emotional violence sexual harassment and suicide abound in one book the chapter is dead the character is dead and asks
141how come life seems better now that i'm dead life is better then we see anti-police themes there are four books so far where police officers shoot unarmed black children violence follows kids participate in the violence and often take a leadership role in one book the high school students even beat two school security officers and then what we've talked about tonight explicit language the f word is used countless times along with i don't really speak this way so um pardon me ass dick the n word gd etc when a parent submitted the request for reconsideration listen carefully when a parent submitted the request for reconsideration form for one of these books including the quotes from the book the email was blocked due to banned content confirming that the language is too explicit for the district's email
142server yet it's deemed appropriate for our students parents spend a lot of time putting parental controls and filters on their kids devices and reviewing ratings for movies and video games to avoid this type of material all while the school is provide providing it throughout the process of bringing this information forward since may of this year we have heard dismissals and excuses arguments from some in this room that this is just how kids talk today those moms just want to ban books from authors of color they don't even have kids in the schools and they didn't fill out the proper forms or go through the proper channels so let's clarify a few things we've filled out your forms we are filling out more we won't let bureaucracy and butt passing stop us from standing up for
143our kids and doing what's right we are parents who live in the district many not all have children in the public schools several of us including myself had children in the public schools and had no choice but to pull them once we saw what is being taught and we are all stakeholders as taxpayers and it's our money that's paying for these books with this explicit material some kids talk this way nowadays and some kids don't kids do what is allowed and what's expected of them low expectations inevitably equals low outcomes some kids dare each other to eat tide pods but you don't see anyone advocating we provide them in the school lunchrooms because they're toxic as are these books just because kids are vaping drinking alcohol doing drugs cutting or been binging and purging doesn't
144mean we need to provide materials that encourage or glorify these detrimental choices in some cases these are illegal choices we're the adults and we are owe our children better in fact we should try to help better and there's more i want to talk about i'm running out of time so here we are we're not going away we are peacefully and publicly asking you to pull these books from hamilton county classrooms or maybe have them rewritten without the explicit language some of the content or the the basis of the book is not that it's a bad story but the content and the language so these are some of the books we're asking to either be changed or removed on the come up by angie thomas far from the tree by robin benway madness so discreet by
145mindy mcginnis ghost boys by jewel parker rhodes the hate u give by angie thomas we're also asking you to do a thorough review of the rest of hamilton county curriculum and reading lists let's get rid of the filth and let's be clear this is not a problem with a book or two that the 4.403 your time is up okay well thank you and um i pray that you will consider this [Applause] taylor lyons mr smith i'm moving slowly forgive me so i'll tell you all my way up your rating system already exists it's called commonsensemedia.org it gives you parent and kid reviews of all types of books so that's a really good resource exactly what you're talking about [Music] members of the board dr towns thank you for allowing me to share our perspective about
146agenda item pertaining to literary content my name is taylor lyons i'm here representing the chattanooga moms for social justice again i know this will not be a surprise to many of you that efforts are being made nationwide by angry groups of adults to ban certain books and ideas that contain messages that challenge the status quo and present diverse experiences in life and perspectives sadly our own community is not immune to these efforts what we are seeing in our county is a small faction of predominantly conservative parents targeting books that are mostly written by authors of color and those books are written by the life experiences of their communities they are calling these books into question because of colorful language which we understand may be offensive to some people but you can hear that language up
147and down the hallway of any high school in our county and our country for that matter they are calling these books into question because of thematic elements that they find questionable they're calling these books into question because they depict life experiences that are a reality for millions of students across our country and that makes them uncomfortable and guess what we get it it makes us uncomfortable too that's precisely the point important books such as this make us feel uncomfortable because they teach us important truths about ourselves and our society moms for social justice strongly believes that every child in our school system deserves the right to feel seen heard and represented in their literature choices keyword choice these are not compulsory reads as such we remain deeply proud of our classroom library project which we
148shared the details with you about a few months ago you may recall that we worked very closely with hcde teachers librarians what was then known the opportunity zone administrators and local literacy organizations such as read 20 and ella library to cultivate beautifully diverse inclusive age-appropriate reading lists that reflected the life experiences of the students being served some of these same books that these groups are targeting are books that we were very proud to include in our high school libraries some of those books also incidentally made time magazine's 100 best youth fiction books of all time recently our organization's goal was to donate brand new culturally relevant award-winning critically acclaimed titles that you can find in any scholastic book fair in any reputable public library we wanted to make those titles accessible to our students by
149bringing them in the classrooms specifically to those schools that are historically underserved and lacking in resources in our area i have to be honest we never thought that putting culturally relevant books in the hands of our kids would be a matter of controversy but here we are we would assert that many of those targeting these books do not have children attending hcde schools and if they do their children are not attending the schools for which these books are a vitally important piece of representation and relevance now what we can agree with them on is it is important that we all know what our kids are reading to take the time to do a little research perhaps read alongside them foster critical discussion and as a parent if you are still uncomfortable with a reading assignment
150that has been given to your child you have proper policy and procedure to take to request an alternate assignment for your child but the idea that a small group of parents can try to strip away the liberty of the rest of the parents and teachers to determine what is valuable reading material for the 45 000 plus students we have in our school system all coming from a wide variety of backgrounds is just wholly inappropriate perhaps we can all take just the briefest of moments and be thankful when our kids are reading anything at all books are meant to inspire them to challenge their assumptions to broaden their perspectives sometimes to change their lives and if we were to try to scrub every book in our high school libraries with profanity with sexually questionable content or
151critiques on society then we would say goodbye to shakespeare mark twain dickens maya angelou langston hughes all of these authors which we now view and cherish as great masters of the written word were also subject to censorship in book bans in their time when would we ask has book banning ever been looked at favorably in history literature is art art reflects society so we can expect our contemporary writers to use the vernacular of our culture that may make those of us who are older a little uncomfortable but i know sorry your title that's totally fine we will continue to advocate for inclusive and diverse reading because we know that students perform better when they see themselves reflected in the books that they read thank you angela favalora vavaloro okay i have some things to handle
152hi i'm angela favaloro i'm in district five um and i'm i guess i'm walking up here there's a running theme of how representation matters tonight um young men up here speaking earlier and leading compelling his younger sibling to be brave and want to step up and speak as well a high school student taking on a role in national leadership inspiring other young ladies i'm sure to take leadership roles as desperately needed in our county this leads me to the wonderfully exciting discussion on redistricting this plays into how each of our districts deserve equal voting power and the ability to let those who represent us and our needs in our communities of interest something ms parker mentioned earlier was talking about that partnership between families and that input going into the education piece i'm here speaking
153tonight as a fair math advocate i represent moms for social justice with the hamilton county co voter coalition i also serve on commissioner jeter's redistricting committee one of the only commissioners to form a committee and in the efforts of gaining public input i come here speaking today first and foremost i know there's been discussion about a meeting between the county commission and the school board and on behalf of many many organizations and the public urging you all to clear as much as you schedule as you can to make that meeting happen with the commission as they've passed a resolution to move forward with a map and there's an intention to vote on a map by november 2nd we feel like that's a disservice without having the input from our school board at this time we've
154urged them to make that happen and we have been told that it is in the works but we know that trying to move both bodies to a consensus in a meeting is definitely a job all on its own and with such a short time frame we really want everyone here to be able to weigh in on all of your school districts and how these maps impact each of your districts especially if the county is moving to 11 districts what that means for the school board whether you're choosing to stay with nine some clarification may be needed from the attorney as to whether you're voting whether you would move to 11 and mirror their districts and let them write the districts or if you may stay at another number and attempt to write your districts during
155the wonderful selection of your superintendent which might be challenging in a lot of folks opinion i do want to touch base on a couple of specifics i shared a map with you this is the most recent proposed map for folks that are sitting in the audience this can be found on the hamilton kennedy hamilton tennessee hamiltontn.gov under committee assignments there's a redistricting area where you can look at this lap last proposed map from october 14th this is the proposed map one of the rules i have comptroller here guys if someone needs one i'm not sure if all of you are familiar with the process and i would assume that you are but if anyone needs one i have those to share as well some points to point out to each of your districts are about
156compactness that's one of the comptroller's guide about keeping your district compact not having any jagged lines and reaching outside of which can historically lead to gender mannering or disenfranchisement of votes because we want one person to equal one vote heavier districts with a lot more people dilute a vote and then when you reach outside and you start playing politics it gets really interesting for all of our constituents and then especially how our funding for our schools how our school districts are split up um so just to touch a few points because i'm not sure where i'm at with my time um i know that there's been some mention you have two minutes okay um in district one about flat top mountain being kind of interesting up there i know that the county commissioner made note
157of this i know there's been some requests we haven't had a new proposed map so some of those changes may not have taken place yet and cell creep being split we know that with the extra district that makes changes for district one and those are things that your constituents and you are probably highly concerned with um district two and six i know there's a lot of discussion about red bank whether it's staying together or not how that looks for the school districts is at the current map red bank elementary is not in the same district as the schools it feeds into and in my experience being in a lot of public input sessions with multiple commissioners and being involved um the commissioner and vice mayor have discussed that they want that together and that's a
158change that we need to see change before they make that vote district three there's some new changes around like gann road and celeste lane and some questions about lake site district four murray hills some main street questions and some east lake um kind of where district four and five and on this map um the new eleven uh where they all meet there are some interesting questions the public has a lot of questions there as well and district 8 the spring creek community would now be part of district 5 and there's some other changes as well so i just want to raise some concerns and hope that you all have the sense of urgency to reach out and make this meeting happen because your input is definitely going to be crucial especially on the education piece
159and then if there is a chance for the attorney to weigh in on how that process will go if you will be drawing yours or not um and how that situation may play out as to whether the process of going from 9 to 11 or not or the timeline for some of those things thank you i will say that probably 30 45 minutes ago my fellow board members donated us we'll do tuesday at 4 30 for a redistricting uh meeting joint with the county commission um that's what time yeah that's right afternoon spot yeah that's one time we uh could work it in with having commissioner spently there both liars and everything so it's kind of a quick turnaround but it's kind of the only time we could see it will be it will be
160in the board room you will be here okay thank you i appreciate that information we always have afternoon meetings because we're i know you are working professionals i'm just playing we at least work i don't know if our professionals thank you thank you so much all right we've got two more miss edna varner dr barner that's right dr edna varner thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight i come here as a proud graduate of our public schools and i hope in my contributions to the community i make you proud the way i made my parents proud i am also a teacher and a principal of our public schools um and i love our school so much that even though i am retired and the state of tennessee is paying all my bills uh i
161won't go away and like some other people have said tonight i do not intend to go away tonight i am here uh representing the naacp i am the education chair of the naacp you don't see us a lot at these meetings and i'll tell you why you don't see us a lot at these meetings because you have very capable people at the school level and at the district level and we have plenty of concerns about things we can do better but instead of coming here month after month to complain to you just because it feels good to complain we work with the people you have in place dr drake knows we feel there are some injustices we're working with her we work with our individual school members and having said that this issue of books
162and censorship we are so happy to hear you say that education is what we need more of not censorship because we cannot get in the business of banning books when we're a district you heard the presentations we're trying to encourage children to read and we're trying to improve reading but there is education that we need to do i look forward to coming to a meeting when we do not have another session of people reading about language and books we should ban i look forward to the night we can all come and say there are important issues and here are some books that we would all embrace that speak to the cultural differences and don't have some of the language and some of you have mentioned that that just seems like a better option than coming
163every week to complain we love questions and you asked some really good ones uh board member thurman we love those questions because we believe these people that you have and the policies you have in place can withstand the scrutiny i'll take a moment of personal privilege that said i went to our schools when they were segregated i don't when i get up here and hear people talk about books that are divisive us old folks we lived when that was policy we lived through segregation but i tell you what else i lived through i lived through black teachers proud black teachers who taught us to navigate around the n-word and to kill a mockingbird so that we would not miss its important messages one of the most if you don't if you ban to kill a
164mockingbird you don't get to kill a mockingbird i hope you can tell i taught english the most important message in that book shown through every character is do not judge people until you have walked in their shoes so there are plenty of ways we can come together without month after month about complaining when you have more important work to do you have capable people you have policies that can address books we got to opt out some people got to opt out of wearing a mask i wear a mask because i'm going to protect me from those of you who choose not to get vaccinated everybody has always had the option not to check out a library book you don't like we have that option and we cannot get in the business of banning books for
165all because some people find them offensive we need to educate each other we need to make sure that principals and district people know that we find something objectionable so i will just leave you with that uh and to say the naacp we're not that fighting protesting group we are here to help thank you thank you [Applause] [Music] barry smith i don't know if i can follow dr barner that was that was awesome good evening to the board and dr townes i appreciate the chance to speak to you i have two children in the hamilton county school system and i also am lucky to be in the leadership hamilton county schools class of 2021-2022 so i've heard a lot of these awesome people speak already i have spoken to many people in the community about the
166issue of curriculum and what books our children are reading and have access to in our public schools and i'd like to read some thoughts from local educators parents and students that i've spoken with you will notice that some have asked to remain anonymous as they were afraid that their job might be in jeopardy if they spoke out against this attack on educational freedom from a hamilton county school teacher although some literature may be difficult to read it is a mirror of life experiences when we provide students with diverse representations of people cultures and life situations with characters facing realistic challenges students are more likely to see themselves in books and broaden their perspectives to better understand the world around them all literature was once new every book that challenged tradition was first scandalous before it
167became a classic from another hamilton county educator banning books based on out-of-context excerpts or some profanity is troubling many of these books are powerful stories that can help students understand the point of view of someone else it creates empathy and understanding in my opinion this power outweighs the concerns about profanity which students are likely hearing on tv or social media already from ethan mills a philosophy professor at utc as a college educator i can say students are better prepared for higher education if they develop reading and comprehension skills through engaging with diverse and challenging sources furthermore encouraging students to become lifelong readers is a worthy goal for both their future civic engagement and their personal enrichment and this goal is better served by allowing education professionals to choose texts that engage and challenge their students
168from jennifer woods a hamilton county english teacher for 35 plus years freedom of speech also covers freedom of expression when we begin to censor expressions we don't like we're opening the door for the loss of all free speech the hate you give and books like it discusses their reality whether we like it or not and when kids see themselves in their curriculum their test scores improve from a high school parent here in hamilton county what happened to parents being able to decide i want my kids to read all of it reading and travel are the best ways to develop empathy and as understanding from others and reading is more accessible than travel a grandparent and hamilton county community member says as a parent and grandparent i believe banning certain books due to profanity or diverse
169life experiences is a short-sighted and bigoted decision as evidenced by the choices made on what should be banned from kalia a student at titur who i know you all uh heard from a few months ago these kinds of books will help students understand different cultures and backgrounds so when they enter the real world they have knowledge of the others around them it would be it would just be taking a few steps backwards in history as america's vision has been to push diversity and equality and without teaching it in schools they would have to learn as adults and the cycle that america has been in will continue and this is from another tyner student jalen who you also heard from being able to read culturally relevant books in school is extremely important students who are exposed
170to this kind of literature are able to have more open minds due to them being able to explore different cultures it makes the students aware for when they want to travel and it keeps them away from the history that's already being taught in schools today i hope that hearing from a wide variety of people in our community lets those in this room know that people care what books are available to students in schools but not in the way that some might think these students do not exist in a vacuum they have teachers friends community members and caregivers with which they can discuss what they read it's our job as a community to guide them and challenge them not shield them thank you [Applause] we'll move on to a to our board member disclaimer statement we'll
171start with mrs thurman and work our way down i declare that i have uh relatives who work for the school system and that the board's vote on any any policy the budget may have an effect on my relatives employment even so i hereby certify that i will cast my vote in the best interest of the school system i declare that i have a relative that who works for the school system and that the boards vote on budget policies etc may have an effect on my relatives employment even so i hereby certify that i will cast my vote in the best interest of the school system i declare that i have a relative who works for the school system and that the boards vote on budget policies etc may have an effect on my relatives employment
172even so i hereby certify that i will cast my vote in the best interest of the school system i declare that i have a spouse and sisters in law who work for the school system and that the board's vote on pretty much everything but especially policies today may have an effect on my relatives employment even so i hereby certify that i will cast my vote in the best interest of the school system i declare i have a fiance who works for the school system and the board's vote on budget policies etc may have an effect on my relatives employment even so i hereby certify that i will cast my vote in the best interest of the school system i declare that i have a relative who works for the school system and that the boards
173vote on budget policies et cetera may have an effect on my relatives employment even so i hereby certify that i will cast my vote in the best interest of the school system uh we'll move to the approval of the uh consent consent agenda do i have a motion to approve so it moved so i couldn't any items that need to be pulled mr thurman yes there's some i would like to pull just so the we discuss these at length on on monday but we're saying that i would like to to pull just to clarify some things uh j-1 in equipment and supplies management board policy and the board policy on open enrollment which is j1v and and then the board policy for student records and student records and annual notice of rights i guess both
174of those any other items okay miss thurman okay the first one the equipment is we gotta vote sorry sorry roll call please mrs hill yeah mrs jones yes mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs thurman yes mr walker yes mr wingate yes chairman yes now mr sterman okay the equipment and supplies scott that we talked about on monday when uh i know you were going to speak with some of the insurance people at the school to find out about that about the equipment that was bought by the sports boosters and what have you did we get any information about that or yes so um our insurance our deductible's ten thousand dollars so you know things under ten thousand we we just i'm just going to read this um so any loss under
175the ten thousand dollar property deductible is not covered so a lot of these items i think that you're talking about would be that um and let me make sure i get the right words here it can i ask a question here maybe this is because i know ten thousand dollars may not seem like a lot to the scheme of things for the school but for a sports booster it's a lot can can they carry insurance on those things if they technically belong to the school will the school can we carry a rider to the for some of these things i might need a little help from scott i think and i think that's one of the keys that i want to point out is whether the items are at the school have been actually donated
176to the school and placed in our fixed asset inventory so are they do they have to be donated are they automatically part of the school equipment when they're bought the policy says the pulse is written says that if it's there it's ours but but the practical matter is that some booster clubs have like sheds where um maybe they run concessions and so the equipment in the shed might actually belong to the booster club and so that would be a function of whatever agreement had been worked out with the principal so the policy is the default but if there is an agreement with the principal or the athletic director for the concession stand or whatever else then it might remain their own subject to that agreement to your question about whether the booster club could buy
177insurance um you know i'm sure there's probably some carrier out there that would go ahead and write it if they're the ones who are using the equipment pursuant to the agreement with the school they would have an insurable interest so my answer off the top of my head is i don't see why not but i think that's one of those things that we should probably communicate to our to our people so that they're aware they can explore that because there might be a gap yeah i just i just think that they i've been asked this question and i need some i just need for them to get some clarification so they don't know what to do i mean you know you spend you know a few thousand dollars on a lawnmower or gator or something
178like that you're right i mean that's that's a maybe an entire summer's worth of work for for booster clubs to raise and make a donation and if they lose it either because of theft or fire loss or whatever else um that's a lot of disappointed parents so i mean i think that i think that's one of those things that brad jackson's team certainly could discuss with the athletic directors because probably those are the ones those people who are going to have the contact with the booster club presidents who are going to be the most concerned about this okay i just i just want to be sure that we don't drop the ball on that we pursue that if you don't mind i'd appreciate it thank you well i'll follow up with brad tomorrow morning okay
179okay i know that we approved this unless there's any more just do i have a second real call please mrs hill yes mrs jones yes mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs thurman yes mr walker yes mr wingate yes chairman mcclendon no miss thurman okay and the uh another one the open enrollment i'm just i'll just pull this one so parents will hear uh that there is open enrollment i think this was done at the state level and if there are available seats in our schools then parents will have the opportunity to take their children to those schools this is something we did in hamilton county back in the back before 1998 and that was bjr before jesse register that was we used to do this and so uh but anyway if
180there's there's or if there are vacant seats in a school um you'll be able to uh put your child's name in to go to that school if you provide their transportation so i just want parents to know that is going to be available is it next year when it's going to this is when this is going to start is it next year uh yep so we'll post those available seats by november 1st and the school it'll follow the same process as the school choice lottery so which will open on november 15th it'll close january 31st and we'll run the lottery about a week later okay so if there are more if there are more students apply for these seats in these these open season these schools there will be a lottery process and i just
181wanted parents to be aware of that because i knew the deadline was coming up so it's november 1st okay all right are they open it's open it opens up no the number of seats will be posted on the first and then the app the application will actually open on the 15th okay of november miss robinson yep i just haven't i just want to like clarify okay so there's the regular open enrollment lottery process and then there will be a second open enrollment pro no yeah what am i missing here because i feel like are we are we double are we are making this harder on ourselves than it has to be can you just explain the whole like timeline of this real quick for me yep so parents can apply um with one application into
182the school choice lottery school school choice which is not the same as open enrollment which will include magnets and open enrollment and they'll have up to five selections whereas previously we just had three they'll now have five so it can you can apply for any five a mix of magnet open enrollment futurity institute and your name will go into the lottery for those choices all the same okay i brought this up to like to my workout group this morning and the moms were like wait so you're telling me there's two open enrollment processes this is ridiculous and i was like oh i'm not really sure actually so nope okay just one yep okay this will be interesting thank you mr walker and just to be clear we talked about it last month i think what
183is the percentage we're going to like up to 95 percent of the capacity of schools that we said or 90 what was that yep so we used enrollment projections and building capacity from the mgt report to try to hit 95 percent thank you yep [Applause] and then the hardship process starts when so oh oh you weren't here monday night and i asked that yeah get my answer yeah so um hardship process is uh in the month of may okay and that is for medical or so we're only doing we only do medical hardships at this point stay one time legal legal legal yep can you give an example of a legal situation that would qualify as a hardship some um some legal hardships that we have so if um if parents are um divorced okay
184like a custody issue yes and um there have joint custody to attend a school that's maybe halfway now that may be okay a legal issue okay thank you mr thurman do i have a motion to add it back yes i have motion promotion to approve please second the second real call pleavement ms ford is this heel yes mrs jones yes mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs thurman yes mr walker yes mr wingate yes chairman mcclendon yes ms thurman uh yes nobody will know this but scott um just wait i might know it yeah because this happened this happened and scott remembers when this happened at one time i asked for and and the reason i just don't like passing policies because of one instance something happens and then you get upset
185about it and we're just gonna pass it just so one person can't do something because this happened to me once on the board and i was trying to find out who was going to a school to prove that the magnet school lottery in some cases was stacked and i asked for a list of the parents who had students in this particular school so i could prove my point because it seemed like all of the parents lived in one exclusive subdivision or a lot of the new applicants and it was a miracle they all got selected in this lottery process and so i was wanting to prove that in fact there was a few strings being pulled behind the scenes it was not a true lottery process so i asked for that and was on the
186process of getting it because i had gone to the state and i was told i could get the information so then there was a policy passed which made it impossible almost for me to get that information and scott that's why i say scott would be the only person who remembers that because he remembers from that when that happened the board passed a policy uh that night just so i could not get that information but i turned out being right anyway but anyway uh so i that's why i have a problem with this because i know like it says in here a lot of people already have this information people like the people who make our pictures the people who do a lot of other things they already have this information and we really don't know
187what all they do with the information they know your name they know your phone number they know your address they know how many children you have they know what grades they're in and i'm not saying all of that i'm not saying that everybody should get all of our information about our students should be out there i mean because i have two grandchildren in the school system which is more important than children for people that say people don't have children and their grandchildren are more important than your children and so um so it's very very important that's it out loud we now know who the favorites are i don't have a problem with it uh but anyway um but i guess i just have a problem with doing this i won't say in haste but doing
188it so quickly just because of uh one person one girl told me she said well mrs thurman they're going to know my name my phone number and my address i said we've done that for years it was called a phone book so you know i don't um you know i haven't really had a chance to absorb all of this yet scott we just we just received this monday and i've kind of looked over it but i'm trying to think of how many like when you have the fundraisers you get all these things on email they want to sell things you get all these things on the email so those are out there already a lot the emails the phone numbers the names the students um and i'm wondering how many of those how much of
189that's getting um put out in in the in the public already so i'm gonna vote against this strictly because of what was done to me just to keep me from getting the information and then i just don't like things like that i just don't like doing things just maybe too uh if we do it because it's the best thing to do for everyone fine but just to do it you know just we never talked about this until this happened and like i said i just i just have a little problem because i really haven't had time to absorb it and just think about exactly where all where all this could lead and are we picking one group of people over another group and i even thought it would seem to be an attorney getting sued
190over something like this that you're letting one group of people do it and not another group of people do it i'm not real sure about that so that's why i wanted to pull it just so i could vote against that and let people know it's not that i it's not that i you know think every information about everyone should be out there uh that i'm just wondering about picking one group of people over another and like i say been there done that so i just wanted to be able to pull it so i can vote against it thank you mr prez so i i agree with your statement uh mr thurman uh regarding the sense of rushed uh and you spoke of that on monday right um and i actually held on to the comment
191if we need to review this to correct it then we'll review it i also agree that i i don't like policies written because of one situation um but i've also never seen the community pull together as quickly i tell people the most brush fire event that i experienced because it just blew up um on thursday evening on a thursday evening when i was with my workout group um that was a joke [Applause] is it all moms who it's their only social outlet no i'm sleeping i've got the floor for christmas i gotta hang out with people um no anyways and and it blew up and then and i i appreciate that uh that uh the person who put the request recognized the public was against it but my immediate thought was all we need is
192a person who is excited by all the public against them right like someone who's like great i got 44 000 parents who are angry at me right now that's what i wanted so uh so i will i will vote yes because i think we need something immediately but i do think it may be valuable to then review carefully the policy because i'm sure there's you know any policy that's written quickly in reaction to to i mean yeah but in reaction to a situation i'm sure there's things we can tweak that that make sure that it is a very fair to everybody in every circumstance mr bennett sure uh so a couple of quick things so the the policy that mrs thurman's speaking about um is actually an administrative well it's a policy that was incorporated
193into section one of the board policy and for whatever reason my policy manual was not loading right now but there's a section policy manual that that specifies that when a board member asks for documents from the administration as a matter of courtesy the administration should share the same amount of the same documents with the rest of the board it goes on to say that if the judgment of the superintendent the document request is to burden some then the director the superintendent can ask the board can say no thank you take it up with the board and in that instance the board decides is that it is the hill worth the climb the board member still has the right to go through the open records act and to get the records like any private citizen would
194so that's that's the policy mr was talking about you know you as board members are privileged and you have access to certain information um but at some point in time if the records request becomes burdensome and it has people stepping and fetching the the superintendent can say you know timeout um so that's that's the the policy mr thurman's talking about um and to my knowledge it hasn't been invoked since then uh just to be fair oh it was just for me so but but to the the meat of this particular policy i will say that i've discussed this extensively with ben torrez at tspa um and uh spoken to lots of of of folks and even have had a vetted internally to ask the question have we missed something is there some use of directory
195information that we might accidentally clamp down on too tightly um and and miss bronson's team was able to identify a couple of areas where where i hadn't thought about uh i believe yearbooks that would have been great if we had said you can't have yearbooks uh but also alumni alumni information the the area where i think the reason that i'm not i'm not uncomfortable about the rushed nature of this mr perez is because what i have really done is i've taken the same protections we applied to students and i've applied them to parents and and where i think we're going to have to come back and do some tweaking is that under the tennessee open records law student records are confidential but there's no similar protection for parents and again talking mr torres this this
196whole thing started a conversation because there are a lot of parents out there who were insensitive jobs and it suddenly occurred to them that they could be found through their kids or their kids could be you understand what i'm saying and so um the conversation that tsba and i are having right now is um how much of the open records do we need to change can we can we get by by simply saying parental information at least from us the school system is protected um mr torres suggested that maybe the parents should be entitled to an opt-in right so we amend the statute to put to plug that in there what i have here is i have identified i've taken advantage of a provision of the federal regulations that allow us to define directory information
197differently and so i've included in our definition of directory information parental information i don't know anyone who's thought about that before i mean this is this is new but i don't think it stretches the law i do hope the general assembly takes this up and gives us the belt and suspenders look i think built-in suspenders is very fashionable if you don't want your pants to come down so i do expect that we will probably have to come back and tweak maybe add some legal references but if the general assembly doesn't touch this i feel like our people will protect it yeah and so just one comment to that because one parent did call me afterwards they immediately sent an email saying please opt me out because there was an understanding that if they sent that
198email um and then they got concerned that it may affect their students uh college scholarship possibilities and then they were talking to me saying did i now ruin some opportunity so that's what i mean it's like i understand we got to do this at the same time i appreciate that we this isn't set in stone that's exactly right and i want people to understand we're doing what we know we need to do and if we become aware that we need to tweak this we're not afraid to tweak this we have we have a process of policy review and ms bronson's team and i will be the first to bring it to you and say we we overshot thank you do i have a motion to approve let's not move second roll call please so we're
199clear is that both um a and b under under uh number two yes yes um in the motion marco president got it thank you roll call please mrs seal yeah mrs jones yes mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs thurman no mr walker yes mr wingate no chairman mcclendon yes that will move us down to administrative business matters um under miss penny murray insurance proposal request for approval we'll have our dental insurance driver motion to approve do you need to say anything miss murray good okay do we approve each other do we need to approve each item yes yeah that's my fault so to have a motion to prove the dental insurance okay thank you mrs hill yeah mrs jones yeah mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs thurman
200yes mr walker yes mr wingate yes chairman mcclendon yes do i have a motion to approve the life insurance so moved out [Music] roll call please mrs hill yes mrs jones yes mr perez mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs sermon yes mr walker yes mr wingate yes chairman mcclendon yes uh do i have a motion to approve the long-term and short-term disability insurance so moved second roll call please mrs hill yes mrs jones yes mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs sermon yes mr walker yes mr wingate yes shannon mcclendon yes do i have a motion to approve the worksite accident insurance and worksite level uh term life insurance second roll call please mrs hill mrs jones yeah mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs sermon yes mr
201walker yes mr wingate yes yes uh do i have a motion to approve the work site critical illinois illness illness and worksite hospital insurance so move second roll call please mrs hill yes mrs jones yeah mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs sermon yes mr walker yes mr wingate yes chairman mcclendon yes that will move us down to board matters um do i have a motion to approve the bus depot absolutely i'll allow that one for him that's been a long time waiting roll call please mrs hill yes mrs jones mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs thurman merry christmas joe yeah thank you very much yes mr wingate yes chairman mcclendon yes do i have a motion to approve the pump station uh at howard so moved second
202roll call please mrs hill yes mrs jones yes mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs sherman yes mr walker yes mr wingate yes chairman mcclendon yes uh motion to approve the architect's selection i'm sorry who who did it roll call please mrs seal yes mrs jones yes mr perez mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs thurman yes mr walker yes mr wingate yes chairman mcclendon yes that will move us to a motion to approve the franklin middle school property deed restrictions with the charter chattanooga charter school of events moved to approve second roll call please mrs hill yes mrs jones yes mr perez yes mrs robinson yes mr smith yes mrs thurman yes mr walker yes mr wingate yes chairman mcclendon no uh that will move us down to um action c
203mask optional for students this was added um oh staff sorry staff that's important uh mask optional for staff that was added um for me and miss thurman um for starting uh on monday this will just follow the same procedures allowing our staff to option out of mask if they so choose move to approve second any discussion yeah just click some clarification here uh staff i think that with this sense would this go for uh bus drivers as well the contract bus drivers as well uh i know the first student would have to make their uh make their uh legally uh that's controversial um the the department of trans transportation does require people on buses to wear masks okay so they could knock down we um there has been a real question about whether the federal
204dod guidelines can be made to apply on school buses for students the federal government says they can the state government has said no but in my opinion i think i think the federal guidelines would require you to continue but they're they're not federally federally regulated the buses are not they are actually there's a specific aspect of the dut guidelines uh dealing with the uh you know the federal highway and transportation earlier we were told they weren't now they are so i've always said that that aspect of that regulation applies um i didn't have a chance to take a look at this my my concern would be well if we don't have the latitude it's very simple if you don't have the latitude to to make masks optional under federal law they don't think we should
205if the if the pleasure of the board is to lift the requirement for all employees who are not subject to the federal government then i think that's the best way to move forward and i'll get a legal opinion out before monday about whether we can do that for our drivers okay so do we need to do we need to tweak the emotion then i would recommend that maybe a friendly amendment that's that's subject to any any federal transportation guidelines okay uh any other discussion i've got some lights okay so we need to go ahead and make the motion then any discussion or can we just discuss it out like this well it's the pleasure of the board i i saw the chairman not his head so i don't know if if mr smith and mr
206walker may accept that as a friendly amendment that you know subject to any applicable federal guidelines and if they accept it then we all need to go through the motion to amend it's okay to amend your motion you good with that mr smith um i've had a question about regarding federal guidelines uh for us as the public school system as my understanding is there will be a rule that applies to osha protections and so on and so forth are we under [Music] that as a public school there's i hate to say that there's some debate on that but there's a lot of debate on that right now uh one of the issues that we're dealing with in the next week is going to be the special session called by the general assembly to discuss the
207applicability of mastermind base the the second thing uh as i feel this false i personally uh feel this falls straight into the same conversation we've had so many times that it's uh you know we're looking at the administration i also feel like i would i'd be happy if i felt this didn't um squash that whole discussion from a while back that we've had many times um i'd be i'd be great to discuss it but the the other thing is i feel this came i mean i didn't know about it till today and i feel the public hasn't even had an opportunity to speak into this i haven't heard anybody comment on this so for that to me this speaking of rush things this is too rushed then i'd love to have time to discuss it
208miss hill thanks um yeah i agree with uh marco that this is a repeat of a similar item we have voted on twice now really we we've decided as a board twice that we were going to give operational responsibility to our superintendent to determine procedure for employees [Music] and our superintendent has created a very active coveted reopening task force that takes into account everything that's happening in the community and making recommendations i am not in favor of of this current motion um and frankly i wear a mask every day because we ask our employees to wear them every day and i wear a mask at city council even though i'm surrounded by plexiglass because the mayor has asked that everybody wear a mask inside and i think that part of being a leader is leading
209through example and that's why i do it um even though i'm fully vaccinated and going to get a booster soon so i am not in favor of this motion however i would be in favor of a motion to request that our superintendent study with our covid task force where we are right now with regard to um covid in our schools and make a recommendation on how choices like this can be handled in an orderly fashion so i'll wait and see what the discussion is before i make that motion but i support my my fellow board members desire for you know continued evolution in the face of a pandemic but this motion is not the motion that we are speaking about is not the way that i believe we should do it as an orderly organization
210ms robinson um you know i've got a lot of thoughts and questions on the topic in general so i would like to have more dialogue um just chairman and um mrs thurman since you guys brought the topic to the board i was just curious like what are you hearing what inspired bringing it bringing this topic to the board i'm also curious if um our super our interim superintendent has views as well to share um probably no better time than the present to have this conversation even though i know it is late but uh this is a pretty important topic so i just want to hear more from my board my fellow board members that you know brought this up and then of course like whatever views you know our administrative team has or is hearing
211from staff and teachers i would be interested in hearing that one thing that um uh if it's okay tucker if i'll go here okay uh how many uh we got we get a coveted update uh over there 11 students last count i had had coveted 44 000 students and there were 11. um everybody that wants a vaccine has had a vaccine everybody that wants a booster can get a booster um i personally have had covet so i'm more protected than a lot of you that had your both of your vaccines so a lot of people have already had covid are vaccinated by god so um by the time by the time you count all of those people i would say we're just pretty close to hurt immunity if we only have 11 students and i'm
212not sure how many faculty at this point and i don't know how many faculty actually have it or are they all phone quarantine i'm just not real sure but i've been at the ball field and really if i just didn't hate to see people me making people's teachers pictures i would do that i see these teachers out especially one of them i know was very adamant about making her children wear a mask all the time the ones that are supposed to have masculine pulling up over your nose making sure they're on properly see here at the ball field sitting in the stands everybody around her no mask you know and everybody a tennessee football game over a hundred thousand people in the stands nobody you know very few people with a mask on they're at
213the ball field i've been at the ball field you know almost every night for the past few weeks for my grandchildren hardly you can't hardly find a mask there people at the ball fields high school football games basketball games cheerleading practice i mean they're everywhere but every time somebody gets sick they say they got it at school i've been to the skating rink it is just unbelievable the amount of kids there the junk park i mean it's not like that that wearing a mask at school is going to stop covid for uh the people here who are here because you know there's a lot of like i say we can find a we can find a study that says anything you want that they're not that effective to begin with and so uh you know
214i just think it's time in my opinion to give the teachers a break some of them you know a lot of teachers have said please you know we'd like to see our students some of our students do not even know what we look like they would not know us outside of this classroom we want to interact with our students smile at our students be personal with our students let them see our lips move see how we say things you know we are so ready to be get back with a personal relationship with our students and also an is tucker i said you know i guess we can follow the same rules that we have for students who opt out are we still treating students differently who are masked and unmasked i know some people were
215putting the math students on one side and the mask on the other side if we're doing that that needs to stop if some people are still doing that that needs to stop i see some parents shaking their head yes because they know what i'm talking about so uh we cannot be treating students differently we should not treat faculty students faculty any differently if this happens but that's my feeling i mean i look around and i just think it's almost hypocritical because a lot of people i see at restaurants no mask i see them out everywhere and then when they get in school they they immediately mask up like the hamilton county department of education is the only place that has covet or something um so that's that's my feeling about it i just think it's
216time for teachers to make the decisions themselves because they are professionals they are adults they are educated and they should be able to make that decision for themselves and like i say our numbers from what i see who has the numbers latest numbers i think 11 was the last i saw students with covid is that correct the website is down right now so we can't see the dashboard that 11 number i think was on monday coming out of fall break and students weren't back yet we certainly had cases coming in this week now that students are backing yeah and they didn't get it at school that's my point they didn't get it at school and uh so it's out there and uh i'd like to say i just i'm just ready for the teachers to
217be able to smile at the students and talk to their students i mean the kids go to school it's just so impersonal to continue that that's all they see um and i just personally think it's time to give the teachers a choice yeah i've been pretty common since on on mask and it's been the last probably two weeks right before fall break and then a little bit of on fall break i think our teacher vaccination rate is around 72 74 and a lot of them i honestly wasn't even thinking about this until they were like you know 70 is the number we've heard out in the media that's hurt immunity whatever but they're like we've we've been asked to get vaccinated some of them are getting the booster shots already um yeah they have to
218come to school and wear a mask for eight nine ten hours a day um it is the exact same thing that if you want to wear a mask you can wear a mask in the school if you don't you don't and so i think one thing that has bothered me about our mask policy right now and it's sort of out of our control this is one thing we control is we have no off ramp for this and so this is saying if you want to wear a mask you can wear a mask if you don't you don't have to um and just a common sense approach that says thank you for getting vaccinated if you got vaccinated if you haven't we have ample opportunities and we'll have more opportunities for you to get vaccinated and
219your booster shots but just to kind of give our teachers a little bit of the in the light at the end of the tunnel type of thing while we are right now in this law i think mr man your your number of 11 was i think the number of staff if i'm not mistaken that was on monday that number i think i looked two days ago and it might have creeped up a little bit more than that but i just think it's it's it's time for us to show our staff we can't really do anything about students doing lawsuits and stuff pending throughout the state but we do have the opportunity to show our staff that hey we're not going to be in this for the long haul and here's a little bit of an
220off-ramp for them as we move forward and kind of navigate this this pandemic so i do want to respond to ms robinson um i did send in the board update on monday some data around this because chairman clinton did mention um uh his thoughts to me and uh let me just say this we're all exhausted by covet in the schools we're exhausted by the safety operations we're exhausted by contact tracing like nobody feels this more than educators in our building what we've also noticed in terms of our operational concerns is that right now we can only get about 100 to 125 substitutes a day and that's averaging between 50 and 60 coverage of classrooms we're also wearing out our teachers covering additional classrooms what we did notice of course about mass boring in terms of
221other respiratory illnesses were down last year and so i will say that if we make this optional change now which is why we hadn't been talking about it as a senior leadership team is that we also know on the other side of that we have an operational concern that when all the other respiratory illnesses show up we don't have subject and we will need to shut down schools if we then start running the regular flu season illness which is about six to seven hundred teachers at its peak being out in a day we can't run schools if we can only get 100 to 125 subs so i just put that out front that there may be an unintended consequence we are telling people to stay home when they're sick which means the stiff the sniffles
222is sick right so we are going to see an uptick i would suspect now that we're entering into flu season around respiratory illness the other thing i'll say is what i said in the board update which is when we went to mass optional for everybody and nobody wants to be more free than me i want to be free from this mask and i was thrilled on june 1st and we were all over schools during summer reach and having a fantastic time with nobody being in mass june first the seven-day average of new cases in hamilton county was 18 daily new cases we're at 82 today the doctors that sit on our reopening task force send an open letter to the community um i think it was on our about august the the ninth right before
223school was opening where they recommended a five per one hundred thousand uh uh seven day average which will be around 20 which is where we work where we all felt very comfortable and free the other thing i'll say about the vaccination rate we are very proud of our staff to be 70 74 vaccination you're right our staff has really stepped up we try to protect each other and our kids but our school community is staff and students and that's about 50 000 souls that are in our buildings every day and when you consider the 50 000 souls knowing that children 5 to 11 aren't even eligible for vaccination children 12 to 18 are running at 30 or 40 percent we are nowhere near 70 covered in vaccination rates so again my view is that to
224the point the board has historically entrusted administration to try to make these decisions i think what we've been is cautious trying to be cautious even though we're all exhausted like if i could stop doing all the code protocols tomorrow and not think that there would be unintended consequences i would because we're all so tired of it but i don't see evidence yet that we can do that and so i just say to the board as i said to you all in the board update on monday the board can make this action when i was asked about it i think i gave you all my rationale in terms of why we're not discussing this action and that even this full data on monday would be artificially low because we've been out for a weekend fall break
225and so i think what i said to chairman mclennan at least let's wait and see for a week or two what's happening post fall break uh in terms of what cases look like and what's happening with community spread because my hope is it's declining like at a rapid place pace we might be back at that 20 daily case average which would put us squarely in what the recommendation is when the doctors on the task force so again i know it's the board's pleasure i'm giving you the rationale of why administration hadn't moved on it um well actually oh sorry i was just gonna call since she was talking to me i'm just gonna call my back i've just one of my questions was like where would we be today if we still had the tracker
226and i think you just kind of hit on it so yeah it's more about right the 20 we would be in the quote-unquote phase four where we want to make sure we're less than that 0.1 percent and again we do know we have vaccinations as a key medication strategy i don't want to imply that we don't see that we have protection because uh many of our staff are vaccinated but i do want to follow the the most recent advisement from the open letter of the doctors that said 5 per 100 000 is when you can really back off of masking as a mitigation strategy and we're almost there we got there in june i hope this is the worst last wave we have but we're not there yet and i don't want it to be
227premature and then the next thing you know we'll be reading about the zeta variant god forbid and hearing about another wave that we didn't anticipate mr wingate i i think uh dr townes addressed it i was going to ask did obviously i was not here on monday night but so you did bring up the question to the administrative staff about do you think there's an opportunity not on monday but me and her i think well it was monday but it was me and her conversation on monday about it it wasn't discussed in the agenda session on monday okay but what i'm saying is so the question was asked of administration do you think there's a possibility to be able to make masks optional and then you got a definitive answer that we don't think that's
228an option right now okay um i just nobody wants folks to be out of my ass more than i do um and uh you know i where i work they ask us to wear a mask so i wear masks when i'm at work um most other times i'm not going to um but what i really struggle with and i've said this before [Music] this i just don't think it's wise for this board to enter into the space of making medical and community health decisions i don't think this board is qualified to do that um i think you're gonna think you're gonna step in a rabbit hole when you do that um and i think numerous boards around this country have stepped in that rabbit hole and uh yeah again nobody wants to be out of
229it any faster than i do what i know is for all of the mask drama and that's what i'm gonna call it then i said that before that's gone on for the last year and a half this school system has been a leader in having kids in school fannie's in seats and i just i'm just telling you as much as i want it all to go away i i just don't think there's anybody sitting here that's qualified to do this and not only are you not qualified to tell somebody when they can take a mask off then you're going to step in the poop of having to tell them when they got to put it back on and now you're going to become the expert of when you put a mask on when you take
230it off when you don't have to wear it when it's optional i just don't think there's anybody who's qualified to do that and it's just my two cents mr thurman yes i i have the update it was october the 10th uh student cases 10 staff cases 11 of october the 10th it was the last i think the one that was sent out by uh dr town sent a sent to us we did get the update for today it is 67 for student cases today 67 today for student cases do we have the staff cases yeah um we're getting ready to grab it but 67 students we'll get the staff i'm sorry go ahead okay but that's that's the one that's the one i was looking at but to mask up for the flu we've never
231masked up for the flu ever and if we're going to mask up for everything we're never going to get i mean it's it's like it's the nauseam i mean it gets to the point that it just gets to be crazy uh you know a stomach bug you know it will it will never end because kids are all the time getting something and you say we we never seen anything that said that going without mass work i'm just going to say one word florida they've been doing this for a long time and uh they're the bottom is dropped out of their cases as have in ray county no mask and i haven't seen it i think that their numbers are probably about like ours so i'm like i say i just say there's no evidence of
232things there's lots of evidence around if we look mr walker i apologize we'll be brief uh correct joe we're not medical we don't have that background to be able to make those decisions but but my vote is based on allowing those teachers and staff to make their personal decisions uh it's not me being the doctor it's not them being a doctor but but it's time it's just time ms jones i haven't had a faculty or staff member to ask me to not wear a mask and people pretty much know where i stand with this from a professional level and from a personal level having lost a lot of people in my life um due to covet because of the effects of what it has on the on the african-american community and so for me i'm
233gonna just go ahead and tell y'all i'm not voting to discontinue my excuse or allow them to make the decision i think they are i mean i'm just not and and i'll take and i'm a big girl so i can take the grunt for that if people from district 5 are upset with me but that's just where i'm at and people can shake their heads and do whatever but um no offense ma'am i don't represent you per se i'm not elected to represent you you didn't vote for me i'm sure i'm sure you didn't because we have conflictive views i've seen your video about me ma'am ma'am so at the end of the day um if i get if i get comments or something otherwise then i will consider that i'll look into that and
234we'll talk about it at that point but i agree i am i am not um gifted i haven't been gifted the ability to know if it's okay for me to make i mean i wear mascara i mean i wear masks and i'm vaccinated and i had covered so i guess the lord blessed me twice but i'm just saying at the end of the day i i will not be voting for that and i apologize in advance to the to the constituents that i represent district 5 that are teachers i'm sorry y'all but i really want to see you next year next month another year from now so that's just where i met with that we did get the data on staff so we had 16 staff cases as of today 67 student cases so that
235changed from monday to today having been back in school three days we're seeing what the trinity because they didn't get it at school if they already show up oh no i think we know that it's just about community spread we're not implying that people are getting it in this home we're just trying to protect our school community ms ford roll call mrs hill no this is jones no mr perez mrs robinson no mr smith yes mrs thurman yes mr walker yes mr wingate no chairman mcclendon yes we'll move to uh information you have the legal services report in your agenda we'll move to uh events and announcements report cards will be sent out october 22nd we'll have parent teacher conferences through uh october 25th and not november 19th i will have a board agenda session
236on november 8th at 5 30. uh we have a remote day on november november 10th and then a board meeting on november 11th and again we will have a joint meeting with the county commission on the topic of redistricting uh tuesday in this room at 4 30. miss jones um thursday october the 28th at 6 pm commissioner kathleen jeter who is my the commissioner for district 5 is hosting a redistricting meeting about um the county commission redistricting and that's open to anyone that lives in hamilton county but it will be held at brainerd high school at six o'clock any other announcements um i want to make sure that people know we're having another vaccination and booster event on saturday at easter egg elementary from 9 00 a.m to 11 a.m student board member jamal down
237here in the end he's pretty quiet but he won't be for long sitting by rhonda but his birthday is on saturday so wish this young man a happy birthday [Applause]