001All right, good evening. Uh, welcome to tonight's May 13th special call meeting study session. Uh, before we begin, I'm going to stand for a moment of silence followed by a pledge to our flag. Feel free to join me if you like. Thank you. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right. I call to order tonight's special called meeting. Uh we've got three items on the agenda to discuss. Uh first item is discussion or action regarding approval of the summer scholars budget amendments. Motion to approve. Motion to approve. Do a second. Thank you. Uh Miss Hayes. Um any comments? All right. Seeing none, all in favor say I. Oppos. All right.
002Motion carries. Next item on the agenda, discussion or action regarding purchases for Summoner Scholars program. Do you have a motion to approve? So move. Thank you, Mr. Tuck. Do you have a second? Second. Thank you. Uh any comments? All right. Seeing none, all in favor say I. Post. Motion carries. Last item on the agenda, discussion or action to extend the study session past 900 p.m. Motion to approve. Got a motion. I've got a second. Um any comments? All right. this just a safety in case you know Dr. Len goes on too long. So well just to remind everybody we got a hard stop at 10 by policy. Yep. So um awesome. All say I opposed. All right. Motion carries. All right. Uh with that special call meeting is journ session is now in order. First
003item on the agenda is 2425 general purpose budget workshop. And I I do want to remind the board um as we have done in previous years um you know tonight it's a chance to review the budget. You know I think this is one of the first years where you know we've had some insight into what the budget's going to be based on our last couple study sessions even going back so far as to January. So we've got at least a general outline or blueprint. Um you know as you review this tonight we're not voting on anything. Um it's an opportunity for us to discuss and ask questions. I'll remind you at the end uh of of our meeting tonight, but if you have questions, feel free to reach out to myself, uh Dr. Langford, uh
004Mr. Johnson, uh with those questions prior to the meeting. Don't feel like you have to wait until next week uh to ask questions. So, feel free to to to reach out during the course of the week if you have individuals reach out to you and ask questions, you don't know the answers. Um, you know, just again, you know, as board members, we have access to our staff, so uh they can provide some insight and guidance and hopefully help answer those questions. So, with that, uh, Dr. Langford. Okay, great. Thank you. I'll um sorry I'll go ahead as as the presentation's loading up. Um you know something I learned a long time ago is u budget is one of the most important things we do because it we can say we believe a whole lot of
005things. If it doesn't make it into into this book then we don't really we don't really believe it or we're aspiring to it and it's a not now. It's a not right now. So, let me also start as before we begin, let me say thank you. Um, so many people to thank, but Amanda Brown and Rhonda Jernigan uh, and their team have put in. There's no telling how many hours they put in. This budget is over 1,800 lines of data to analyze. And it's not just 1,800 lines. It's 1,800 lines that filter out of 35,000 different locations. And what they've tried to do over the last couple years is not just put together a budget book where the balance where everything balances, but put one together that really conveys the work that's being done in
006summer county schools. And so I am thankful to our finance team, our HR team, everybody that's worked together on this budget. And it culminates also, honestly, budgeting never really stops uh because it's an ongoing process. You know, we start basically with strategic planning in the fall. We actually start in the summer when we first meet with principles and we work through trying to figure out exactly what schools need because our goal with everything is to try to put into the hands of our kids everything that they need to be successful. And so I want to um I want to just I'm going to start by trying to cast you know it's not going to be a ton of vision but we are going to start the first with vision because I think it's important to
007know um I I think that it's time to really think through some big shifts in the way that we think about K12 education. So, I don't want to say too much there. As Mr. Daniel said, I'm happy to answer any questions. There's a couple break points in the presentation where I'll stop and see if there are any questions unless it's just, you know, if it's really pressing obviously, I want to answer your question, but I'd like to I'd like to get to those kind of pause points to take questions or of course at the end. And as he also said, you know, especially if you're a first-time board member, um I was on budget committee the first year I was on the commission and you sit there and your eyes get larger as you go
008through it because it's big and it's a lot. And uh but it gets smaller, it gets more comfortable, it moves slower, and you can figure it out. But you're going to have a ton of questions over the next week and that's fine. If you'll reach out to me or Mr. Johnson, we'll get you uh really honestly probably reach out to Mr. Johnson. It'll be faster if you do. And uh uh but you can also CC me in there and I'll I'll together we'll get it we'll get it to Miss Brown or whoever else to get the question because sometimes it might be like Amanda has the number but she may not know everything that sits behind that number. Uh because again it's 1800 lines. So let me let me jump in real quick and I'll
009just go ahead and get started. I want you to travel back as we talk about 2025. I want you to travel back with me to 1952. Originally, I'd planned to put a lot of really cool AI generated images here from 1952, but I ran out of time. So, if you can just mind travel with me back to 1952. Lot going on in the United States, Korean War, Elvis Presley, you know, America is changing a lot. We're coming off World War II. Um, one one of the areas uh that's really fascinating from this time is the birth of aviation. So the United States during World War II, primarily one of the contributing factors to the American victory was our air supremacy. And over the course of the war, I I mean it's crazy to imagine that
010we just, you know, we we talk now as an analogy about building the plane as we fly. During World War II, we built thousands of planes while we were flying uh and engineered new maps, new technology, everything. But by 1952 at at the height of the Cold War, um the US Air Force had really unlimited money. They had the best pilots. They had the best technology. They had the best training. And they discovered they had a big problem. They were crashing planes at an unbelievable rate. In February of 1950, they crashed 17 in one day. So, you know, as you can see, like uh you know, I I miss the days when everything was reported on newspaper, but there were newspaper articles all over the United States as these plane crashes and tragedies happen because
011you don't usually crash a plane without it being catastrophic. So, what happened as this was going on? Well, as you can imagine, you know, the initial response was blame. Blame the pilots, blame flight instructors, blame air traffic control, blame technology, blame weather. But in reality, there was one key component uh that contributed to the crashes and that was the cockpit. The cockpit, that cockpit is from a 1949 1950 jet. If you take a moment and look at it, you can notice one thing. It's really small. It's very tight. It worked fine when planes had two wings and propellers. It worked fine up through a big part of World War II. But the problem is is that this cockpit was built uh to reflect the average size of a pilot in 1926. So by 1952, you
012had after World War II, you had a greater range of the body types and structures of pilots. You also had uh planes that were going way faster, carrying more payload, and were way more complicated on the interior. So you're having to reach and maneuver and do everything else while you're trying to fly. A split-second decision led to death. So what does the Air Force do? They decide to do a big study. Their goal was initially to update the average to go from a 1926 average size pilot to a 1952 size pilot. So they got 10 dimensions and measured them on over 4,000 pilots and the plan was to calculate a new average to build the cockpit around. Anybody? So, Lieutenant Gilbert Daniels uh just graduated from Harvard, did a lot of work in math while
013he was at Harvard, and he asked a simple question. How many pilots are average across all 10 dimensions? Anybody want to guess what that number is? Yeah. Zero. There were zero average pilots among the 4,000. If you just pick three categories, you hit three and a half% of the pilots. So, if you design a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you design a cockpit that fits no one. Now, the Air Force's uh decision was to stop purchasing planes. It seems pretty common sense. This would not necessarily be the story of military contracting. Uh but the decision was to stop buying planes that were built for the average pilot. And instead, they worked together to design plane cockpits that fit all pilots, not just the average. What's fascinating is the solution was very simple. The biggest
014piece was adjustable seats. Right? Initially, the contractor said, "This is going to be fantastically expensive. It can't be done. There's not enough room. Obstacle, obstacle, obstacle, obstacle." The reality was in a couple months they had a solution. Adjustable seats, adjustable equipment in the plane. Uh, and it was not that expensive. They really had already just about everything that they needed to craft a solution. Now, most of us have never been in the cockpit of a 1950s Air Force jet, but we have been in a classroom. And if you look, one of the first forms of education technology was a desk. And as you can see, the desks that we use today are only marginally better or different than desks that were built in the 1920s. They're a little larger. Uh, you know, they're probably more
015expensive. that they, you know, the wooden ones are much nicer in terms of craftsmanship, but there hasn't really been a tremendous amount of change. We are also uh still using something that was founded in 1906. Our high school system was built on the Carnegie unit, which was created by Andrew Carnegie in 1906 because the problem that they had then is for the first time, you know, America's industrializing. Um, you've got schools popping up all over the United States and some places they go to school for 5 hours a day. Some schools they go to they go to school for 6, 7, 8. Some go for 180 days, some go for 240, some go for 120. Some it's totally revolved around the crops. Like even here, you didn't start school until after tobacco was cut. Huh.
016Um, you just didn't do it. And so Carnegie put together an educational system that standardized education across the United States and that was based on um 120 hours of seat time. So to get a Carnegie unit, you have to receive 120 hours of instruction um in that subject. It was built uh at the same time there was a man uh named Taylor who created the factory model to move the United States away from craftsmanship. You know prior to the industrial factories uh most people made products in shops. You had gunsmiths and blacksmiths and everything else. The factory model made workers uh unskilled labor. And what you had was a system where you had managers and you had workers. And if you look, it's hard to tell necessarily the difference between the factory on the left
017and the way the school is set up on the right. The system was created to sort students as either workers or managers. Students that did well went to college and became managers. Students that struggled learned a trade and became workers. All right. In 2025, we have a cockpit problem, right? because our system was designed to solve 1906 problems, not 2025 problems. And so, you know, our cockpit problem, I would say, is manifesting itself. And this is where we start moving towards towards what we're talking about tonight with our budget is I think we're seeing three key design flaws. Not in the way some county schools are designed, but in the way high school, especially across the country, is designed. Everything I'm sharing tonight is not a SR county issue. It's a United States issue. It's
018actually even a world issue. The closures during COVID brought this to the surface and it became apparent for everyone to see. You know, I joke about this a lot. I know I've said it in here. It was always easy for me to go to algebra 2 in football practice or basketball practice because my alternative was to go cut tobacco and haul hay. And I don't care how much I hated algebra 2. It was always way better than cutting tobacco or hauling hay. Not even close. But kids today makes me sound old. Kids today um they don't have that kind of thing sitting out there. Sometimes the hardest thing they do is go to school for eight hours a day. And what we are seeing across the country is somewhere between 50 to 60% of our
019high school students are checking out their board. The CEO of the college board. So mind you, the College Board is the organization that does the SAT, the ACT, AP. Their industry is testing, right? That's who they are. And he said, "We have to get more authentic assessments. We have to get more real world stuff because what we are measuring now doesn't translate in the same way that it did 20 or 30 years ago. And it's it's causing the hours and hours that we spend either in testing or gearing up for testing or measuring to see how well we're going to do on the test uh leads to by the time kids are in high school. I I would say a comparison is I think kids catch it from multiple places. Like h how many of
020us grew up after school if you played basketball or baseball or anything? You played it in a field, you played it in a park and you divided up teams, kickball, anything. And if you wanted to stay on the court, you had to win and you couldn't cry. Uh there was no structure. You couldn't call fouls. Um now we have created a billion-doll travel sport industry that rivals what we have in the testing industry. So much so that if you work in a high school, a lot of times kids in certain sports burn out about sophomore year. Um and that and that leads me to the next thing which is behavior. One of the things that I hear most when I'm out in schools talking to principles and teachers, I know you hear this when I
021talk to parents, is the fact that we have kids that have behaviors like we've never seen. Right? Some of this is a manifestation of COVID. We have a bunch of kids that are just now entering kindergarten, first grade that when they were in their years 0, one, two, three, um, they didn't get the opportunity because everything was shut down. They didn't get the opportunity to go to daycare or preschool or pre-k or Mother's Day out or anything like that and they had very little socialization. Even take CO out of the equation. So many people now work from home and their kids just don't have the same exposure to things that kids did 20, 30 years ago. And very rarely do we see kids out in the neighborhood, you know, playing pickup or doing different things
022like that. It's a very different childhood experience. One of the things that I want us to look at, it's not on the budget for tonight. the legislature passed a law that at first I had to really wrestle with um I'm really comfortable with it now and that's a access to these. You know, I think the research is overwhelming that phones are every bit as dangerous for students as anything else we put in front of them. Um and that's something we're going to have to hit and and work on. not going to hit that tonight, but I think we're seeing the physical reworking of children's brains based on exposure at a very early age uh to cell phones. So anyway, you know, some of the stuff that we're seeing behavior- wise will pass with time as
023we're farther removed from COVID and lockdowns and stuff like that. But the other part is a very real thing and that is we are seeing behaviors that are challenging and we are seeing behaviors that that are different than anything we've seen in the past and and so and then of course burnout. I think kids burnout especially our high achieving kids. One of the things I'm most proud about this year is uh Mr. Frank at Mel Hyde coming up with a new system to do validictorian and saludiatoran that pushes kids to be well-rounded that pushes kids to pursue a career interest. and said, "Hey, we may have more validatorans and saludiatorans, but we're also going to have healthier kids." I'm very proud. That's hard to do at a magnet school. I'm very proud of him for
024taking that step because the burnout in kids is off the charts. Um the burnout in teachers is off the charts. The burnout in principles is off the charts. Uh the wear and tear on our people is high. So, we absolutely have a cockpit problem. And so, what do we do? Just like 1952, if we jump back for a second, those kids, those kids in their Tik Tok, those kids and all their crazy things. I got the opportunity to speak to the Robertson County Chamber, excuse me, the White House chamber at lunch today and it was Sar and Robertson County. And uh Dr. Weeks and I both agreed, we want I'll share this tonight because we shared at the thing today. Um you know that there's no indoctrination in summer county schools. There's no indoctrination. from
025Robertson County Schools. We want to teach kids. We want them to be able to read. We want them to be able to do math. We want them to problem solve. We want them to be successful. So, I tried to dispel the rumors for the thousandth time. We have no furries. We have no litter boxes. We do have some kids that wear ears and stuff like that, but you know, a guy that I graduated with from high from from high school is on the chamber board. I was like, you know, Donnie back there thought he was the lead singer of Mly Crew when we were freshman. He wore concert t-shirts every day. He grew out of it and so are our kids. Teenagers are always going to be somewhat rebellious. We want to mentor them. We
026want to grow them. But we also want to understand that some of the stuff that happens today, especially on social media, is just blame. These kids are really good. All throughout our presentation tonight, sprinkled with Sar County kids doing amazing things that melt my heart and give me the drive to keep doing what we do. These parents, y'all, we've got great parents. We have absolutely amazing parents. Do they sometimes want to argue on behalf of their child? They do. But that's called being a parent. And 99.9% of the time when we sit down at a table, we can come to an agreement because everybody wants what's best for that child. So I don't blame kids. I don't blame parents. Uh a lot of times teachers get blamed. Teachers get blamed for so much stuff. Uh
027the day is gone. You know, I can remember like if I ever got in trouble at school, I just prayed that the teacher forgot about it and didn't contact my dad. I did not want to come home to that, right? Not exactly that time today, but it's not because I think when parents and teachers talk, they work really well together. It's a lot of times that we miss each other either through jargon or language or just outand-out busyiness. U that principal, y'all, we've got phenomenal principles. We got the best principles we've had in the history of Sar County. They really are great. We've got one of the best public education systems, I think, in the country. We do a great job here in Sar County. I'm proud of the people that we have and the
028work that they do. So, blame doesn't help us address our cockpit problem. Our challenge that I think you'll see hopefully that we can start to start chipping away at uh as a board and as a school district is how do we do like the Air Force in 1952, how do we demand and design adjustable seats? I love this picture on the left. I just want to stop and reflect there for a minute. I love a kid so fired up in class that he sticks his arms up in the air and celebrates. And on the right, the look of these two girls looking at plants doing a STEM activity at Clyde Riggs and being mesmerized by the way plants grow. You know, kids are curious. Kids want they're natural scientists. They want to understand the way
029the world works. So, let's start that as part of our challenge. How do we make this happen more every day? It's easier, we think, in elementary school. I would argue it's just as easy in high school. The good news, we have the tools to design the adjustable seats we need for Sar County students. I would argue that we already have many of the pieces in place. What we are talking about is not even a ton of innovation in a lot of areas. It's just readjusting, retooling, restructuring, aligning what we already have and also making space for the big innovations that we do regularly. I I will say compared to a lot of school districts, I think our innovation is so high that sometimes those pretty big innovations don't seem all that big because we're constantly
030it's not me, it's our group that are constantly innovating and coming up with better ways to do things. So I took the we took the five strategic questions that I shared uh earlier and we kind of we wanted to make them affirmative statements. So we think that it's also sometimes easy if you think about the air force example and the cockpit problem. It's easy to do what we've often done in America is say let's throw everything out and start over. Hear me when I say we're not talking about throwing everything out. We do a lot of things really well. So, we have to determine what are our core anchors. What do we believe are the foundations of our school system that we're going to anchor on? And we believe that's engaging students in academic exploration
031and creative problem solving. I I would argue that, you know, having formerly spent a lot of time studying Russia and the Soviet Union, the way that we do goal setting in education in the United States because of No Child Left Behind and the federal impact on education is it looks more like a pilot bureau five-year plan. Add 3% each year. If you don't make the goal this year, you just reset it and add the 3% next year. We can do so much better, right? But sometimes you have to move away. I don't think any of our principles or teachers got into teaching to try to help every kid improve 3% a year. I actually want more than 3%. Right? But I also want a school system where when a kid walks across the stage Thursday
032through Saturday this week, they've had the opportunity to explore academically uh everything that interests them, that they're curious about. And I want them to be creative in identifying problem solving. I want to be able at every graduation that I have the privilege of attending to be able to sit there and look into the eyes of the parents in the community and know that we have done our very best to give every student that kind of opportunity. I uh we coach students to overcome obstacles and achieve success. One of our adjustable seat items is we're going to stop using the word intervention as much as possible. I think intervention stigmatizes children. Right? We used to have red birds and bluebirds. We had fast classes and slow classes. You know, we've had all kinds of different things.
033Really, we believe all kids can learn, maybe at a different pace. It may require different levels of support. But when we build for the average, when we design for the average, we leave a lot of kids behind. Kids that are above average academically and kids that are below average academically, we lose the genius and talents of a lot of kids. So, what we want to do is see where kids are and coach them higher. If you're if you're below average on a test score, something like that, we want to coach you up so that you have all the opportunities to do everything you want to do in life. If you're higher, we want to coach you up to do better. If you coach Michael Jordan, you don't say, "Hey, you're really good. We're going to
034need you to bring that down about 20%." Go back to the average. No, you want him to ex achieve and exceed at an even higher level. and we're going to shift and use a lot more. We've already built an extensive amount of coaching into our system, but we want to be um we want to be consistent across everything that we do. We support students to be healthy and resilient. We have a phenomenal team, Katie Brown's team with Safe Schools, um crisis social workers, they work with our school counselors. They really do things to help kids be healthy mentally. Lisa and her Lisa Heron and her team work really hard to make sure our kids are just healthy. Uh we work tirelessly to make sure that they're healthy. I think an area that we need to
035work more on, you know, uh K Katie's group, they have a curriculum that we use in our schools called Character Strong. Part of that is to help kids build resilience. The number one measure of success that we are struggling to inculcate in kids now is resilience. Right? Kids don't have the same opportunity to fall down and get up and learn from it. We have made everything very safe for them. Made it hard to fail. All for well-intentioned, very loving good reasons, right? But kids need the opportunity. I read a thing that said um this weekend uh that was talking about how uh male students no longer get to do things. I guarantee you every male in this room that's over 35 at some point built a ramp to run their bike over and at some
036point discovered that they did not make the ramp out of the right material and it broke and they got dumped. Yes, probably every female too. But it said when boys don't have that opportunity, it completely affects their brain. Boys and girls lose the ability to take risks that later translate into things like entrepreneurial uh skills and things like that. It also reduces their resilience. So we've got to provide opportunities for students to make mistakes in projects. That's one of the beauty of our STEM schools. They give kids the opportunity to, you know, if you go to Silicon Valley, the first thing they teach you is you need to fail fast. Go ahead and make the big mistake right off the bat and figure it out and then adapt and adjust to it. We need our
037kids to have the same opportunity. We prepare students for their first and future careers. We spent a lot of time and millions of dollars investing in our career technical programs and we're absolutely killing it. I'll talk a little bit later about our first 15 summer ready or some teach summer grads that graduated last night. All CTE teachers. I guarantee there's not a more impressive graduating class at any college of education anywhere in America than the people that walked across the stage last night. We empower parents as vital partners in teaching and supporting our students. This is an area um I'll I'll give Frankie a shout out here. When she was doing title programs, they really made a huge investment in engaging parents first, but then empowering parents. A lot of parents feel disaffected by the
038educational system. You come into a meeting and you hear a jargonfilled vocabulary that no one understands. We changed the kindergarten report card this year. Next year it'll go to first grade. We want to change it, but we want to do it in a way where we implement it and roll it up so that everybody understands. That report card includes professional skills, looks looks adults in the eyes, shakes hands, speaks with a voice that can be heard, different skills like that while also giving parentfriendly language so they can understand. I'll be honest, like I've done as much in instruction as you can conceivably do and if you tell me a child struggles in RLA3.47216, I have to go get the book and look it up because I don't know what that is. Neither do parents. So,
039part of the thing is to share in parentfriendly language what's going on with their child, but also to begin a conversation that empowers them so that when they're at home, uh, they can help their child. The most effective form of tutoring is in the home and they're increasingly, you know, if you haven't done it yet and you're a parent, chat GPT is an amazing calculus teacher. If you say, "Teach me how to solve this problem." It won't give you the answer. It'll walk you through it. Uh there are a lot of other teams. Khan Academy now has an AI tool that will do the same thing. There are a lot of tools out there that will help parents, but we need to also empower parents by sharing from our resources and supports that we have.
040Uh Katie's team has been doing a thing on I mentioned phones earlier to help parents understand uh what's going on that you know, believe it or not, there are a lot of people uh that are fairly naive and they don't understand the dangers of things like Snapchat for young kids. Even if you take the name off of it, um, young boys and girls being taught that their value comes from the number of likes that they get or the number of hearts that they get. Uh, that's a dangerous game that we need to empower parents to help them. Um, I read I read a study this weekend that said that if parents sit around with their children every night and talk about what's going on in the world and encourage them that as a family they're
041going to work through everything and everything's going to be okay, those kids are 12 and a half times more likely to be successful. Just that simple five or 10 15 minute conversation every night. But if we're if we're truthful, I say this as a parent, we got so caught up in, hey, this one has to be here and that one has to go there and we had 10 minutes at dinner that sometimes we ate in a car. We didn't create the time and space always to have those kind of conversations. And when I listen to my grown daughters talk now, the things they reflect on are the times when we stopped and had those conversations. We can name that for parents and help them. We can provide them what I mean you know our kids
042in fourth grade are studying about the heart first sec first nine weeks of the spring they can have great conversations third graders about space second graders about civil rights there's great conversations those third graders know more about the space program than any adults in the United States I'd put them I'd put them up against anybody that doesn't work for NASA uh they really know the facts and then we connect students and serve others and give back to our local community. We've talked a lot about Summer Gives back and I'll hit it again a little bit later, but I really believe that the piece that we've missed in public education the last 30 years is providing students the encouragement and the support to connect and serve in their local community and naming that is something that's
043every bit as important as English or math. Um because when I go to things right, I get the opportunity and privilege to go hear about the new YMCA, to go to a fundraiser for Salvis, to be at Grace Place Ministries uh thing, to go to DCO. Like what I see is it's the same people at every event. I want our kids to get in that network and understand that there are people out there that love nothing more. They work not just to make money, but they work to give back and serve others. And I think that's what we all want our kids to have. All right. So, Sar gives back. We connect. Wait, did I miss a Oh, wait. Hang. Yeah. Okay. Sar gives back. We connect students to serve others and give back to
044our local community. Whether that's um I love this on um a lot of our schools are increasingly doing this. They not only have a Veterans Day uh program, but then they have a parade for the veterans and they treat it like a pep rally outside. It's one of the most amazing things. I'll tell you the significance of this. The second year I was principal at the White House, uh I had been with this girl since she was in middle school and she invited her grandfather to the Veterans Day program uh to get points for Beta Club. And he came in and he cried at the end of it because he said, "I was a Vietnam veteran, Scott. I was never thanked for my service. I've never felt comfortable at one of these. He goes, "I
045only came because my granddaughter begged me." And he didn't miss another one uh the rest of the time she was in high school, right? Because it was the first time he had heard the words, "Thank you for your service." And then we didn't do this then, they do this now. Imagine if you were never thanked for your service and you go outside and you got 800 to,500 students screaming and hollering and cheering for you or little kids making you cards. That that that's pretty amazing. uh you know on the left we've got our uh sleep in heavenly peace outreach that we did with our construction classes and in the middle that's one of our uh teaching as a profession students um teaching at Venus Stewart I don't know does anybody recognize that face uh the
046the older girl that is um Ava Hessen Jean Hessen's daughter who seriously wanted to stay there and just teach at being a do it the rest of the year. And I seriously thought about doing it. If we could figure out the credits, we we would have done it. But, you know, here's a junior in high school doing teaching as a profession, teaching at Vena Stewart a couple days a week, and now knows what she wants to do for the rest of her life. So, she's giving back, but she's also finding what her passion and skill are. Uh, so they're ready. We prepare students for their first and future careers. I love that elementary schools are doing career days. Uh, I love these pictures. In the middle, we have our robotics kids and on the right,
047kids making podcasts and videos and all kinds of other uh creative endeavors to to get ready for the future. So, what does it mean to innovate? We want to create opportunities for students to find specifically the point where their passion and skill intersect. Then, we want to not just have cursory experiences, but deep experiences. We want them to be able to delve deeper and find out if that's the career option. Classic case in point, uh our our our student from Liberty Creek that gave CPR to uh the gentleman at the YMCA was back and forth over whether she could go do nursing school because she wasn't sure she had what it took to be a nurse. she now knows and it's because she had the training and skill in the classroom but then the real
048world opportunity to delve deeper into what that was to find out. We'll have some other kids that parents are nurses or doctors and they feel like they need to do that and then they go work in the hospital and they see a bloody nose or somebody get cut and they decide not for me. I still want to work in medicine but maybe it's logistics. I like carrying this the the bandages and everything when they're still wrapped up in the plastic uh not when they're being used. And that's good. It's better to discover that when you're a sophomore junior in high school than when you're a sophomore junior in college. Uh to ensure our schools are safe and welcoming for all students. I want to commend uh Katie and her team. They have been absolutely off
049the charts innovative to make our schools safe. Everything from window film uh to uh weather certification. They're constantly looking and working to find new ways to help our students be safer. The biggest area that we've talked about a lot, so I'll run through this pretty quickly, is taking the walls off high school. How do we create a system where your zip code doesn't limit the opportunities you have for a future career, right? I mean, I I grew up in White House. Most of the kids if you didn't go to college you found yourself in an agricultural career or factory job because that's what was there. It's what you knew. Interestingly, even now, uh, between White House and Portland, there are probably 20 or 25 NES linemen, and there are a ton of kids from White
050House in Portland that go to lineman school. And linemen make incredible incomes, and almost no one else knows about it. But if you live in if if you live around Oakmont, then you know about it because almost everybody's dad or family member has some connection to NES and they do this and it's a great career. But how do we not limit that by zip code, right? How do we not have the southern part of the county with opportunities that are greater and more diverse than kids in the northern part of the county? How do we not create a tremendous amount of animosity for a new school? Because when we build the box new, we build it differently based on current standards. We don't want only Liberty Creek kids to have opportunity to do aviation. Uh,
051you know, if you went on the tour at 4 o'clock today, you got to see um just an amazing opportunity that we have as a school district. Um, and that is the Carolyn Smith County Innovation Center. Uh, this grew out of the work of Sumner Gives Back and Sar Ready. Um, actually it's it's amazing. It also shows the value of community conversations. Um the the the the Smith family has a trust fund in honor of their mother, Carolyn Smith. Uh Mr. Smith built Smith Travel Research. He sold his business a couple years ago. They've always been strong contributors to Summer County Schools. They just always did it anonymously. When their mother passed away, they wanted to do things that honored her legacy and memory. And so one of the things that they are doing is
052uh giving this at or leasing this to us at an incredibly reduced rate way way 75% below market share. Um, so it's a great opportunity because the thing that we've been missing as we talked about summer ready and Sumar gives back is the opportunity to have a gamechanging space where we could do things you know like uh this year will be filled with planning on how we do this but you know the some of the challenges that I think are really good ones are we're seeing our summer gives back take off right and our CTE classes around the county can do anything Kai Perry the aviation picture at Liberty Creek said, "All of our shops have the equipment that only the Delta Force has in the Army. They don't have the same machinery that we
053have at each of our high schools. Our kids can make anything. But what's the point of contact, right? We have career coaches, one in each high school. We have a lot of community connections with each of our high schools. But if you own a business or you run a you run a nonprofit, how do you get connected?" I think the answer is kids because I think there are kids across the county that would love to learn project management either as an entrepreneur or in the nonprofit setting or maybe a combination of both and they can have the opportunity to come together, listen to a pitch from a nonprofit about a need they have and then craft a solution to address that problem and then go out and we can pair them with mentors from the
054community that are in that field or industry to come up with a solution and execute it and then come in on the back end. Did you meet your budget? What problems did you hit? How did you overcome those? What would you do differently? What we do in the world every in adult world every day? But kids don't usually get to do that until uh they finish their post-secary education or graduate from high school. We want that opportunity every day. So very excited about this work. And that's of course um another connection that Miss Amanda Brown made. And you know, but because we're mission focused and we're able to talk about what we need and we're able to communicate that to the to the community, the community as always responds by investing in us. It lets
055us be innovative. Uh the aviation academy, spring of 26, we will kick off our aviation academy. Students will get four dual enrollment credits at MTSU over two years. Um it's access for all summer county high school students. Program will not be limited by zip code. We'll provide transportation January 2026 start date. Uh there will probably be a combination of the Carolyn Smith County Innovation Center and the airport. Uh the airport is undergoing some construction. Eventually we hope to have hanger space. Uh I know that there are some national aviation companies and groups that are interested in partnering with us. Uh but it's just a little early. You know, another area about having the the Carolyn Smith Institute is or center is that it makes us a serious player to go out and talk to Oracle,
056to talk to Meta, to talk to aviation companies, to talk to other big players. they can see that we're absolutely committed and serious because there aren't very many K12 spaces that are that are interested in doing this kind of work. Uh creative scheduling and career coaching. Creative scheduling is is a big piece in opening up and removing zip code. High school scheduling is a nightmare for everybody involved. It's like move if you ever played that game where you move cars out of the garage. That's what a high school schedule is like, right? So, we're using an AI tool, Timely, to help us build a schedule that lets us do a whole lot more, makes it a lot more flexible and lets us do a whole lot more creative things. Thinking differently, you know, for instance,
057the aviation academy, the kids can take two dual enrollment classes at the same time that covers transportation because a dual enrollment class usually runs Monday, Wednesday for one and Tuesday, Thursday for the other. So, you can take two blocks and put them together to build transportation time is in and you're not losing of credit. you're picking up two credits, you're just splitting the week. That's a deviation from the Carnegie unit that colleges can do that we can't necessarily do. So, very excited about that. Pushing hard to uh Carnegie is realizing that needs to change. Uh they're doing some innovative uh pilots right now with Utah. Uh I think Texas and Kentucky. I know Utah and Kentucky. I think Texas. Uh our career coaches have been really amazing. Um this is a a just an overview
058of their impact so far. Um they've done 4,221 one-to-one meetings. This Yeah, this is nine career coaches. Um 3,147 industry contacts, 872 classroom visits, uh 452 large group, 247 small group. Uh they've done campus visits for over 1500 students and industry tours for over 1600 students. This is two-year numbers. This is over the two-year run that we've had the career coaches, but to be fair, we got started late in year one if we got everybody hired and trained. So, this is probably like one and three quarters. It's really remarkable what they're able to do and they are vital parts of each of our high schools and high school communities. Uh steam investment. Uh 14 steam accredited schools were number one in the state in steam. And on the right there, you see Mr. Jeff Wit
059and an HB Williams student. Uh HB Williams uh this week became the first preK through two school in the state of Tennessee to get STEM accreditation. They also have a student leadership team which is really cool. I don't I don't know. I mean I I just got to go see that. That that's got to be amazingly fun. I bet their ideas are off the charts because a second grader can do some dreaming. Uh at the at this teach summer graduation last night, there was a four-year-old there. Uh, and I and her mom told me that she had decided she wanted to be um a veterinarian astronaut. She wanted to work on animals in space. And I thought that's perfect. We we need that. And we are going to, you know, the state after ESRE funds
060ran out, the state no longer STEM schools used to get $10,000 a year from the state. We put that into our budget this year for those schools that are getting STEM certified to get that uh to get that $10,000. Uh, innovating for the future, growing the best teachers. Uh, I love the I like school because I get to see my teachers, make new friends, and eat lunch. Uh, so this is where we are right now. The picture on the right is our um first graduating class of uh teach summer. So, shout out to Dr. Alexander and Miss Brown. Uh, we got to leave that last night. Uh so we partnered with S surb is a state board that helps uh helps us with our certification because basically what we're doing is we're replacing the college
061of education. Uh the guy that was over that that was at the graduation last night told us that our program is the gold standard in Tennessee and that they talk about us all over the nation because of the work that we're doing. And if you look at these 15, one of the problems that we've had is we've tried to go out and recruit uh CTE teachers especially is the fact that they're usually mid-career and to tell them they have to come back and get a master's degree and take on you know 40 $50,000 in debt, it's usually not going to happen. So to be able to do this debtree and make an investment in them in ways that they return to our kids, um you know, I think you'll be able to find him. Uh
062he's in the second row near the end. He's a retired New York City uh police officer. Um you know, Kai Perry in the very back on the far left is a retired lieutenant colonel, Blackhawk pilot. Uh chef, it it was a worldclass chef. Uh we have people that have run major industries. Um we have a doctor of nursing. Uh this is just each one of them is very very impressive. I think there are two doctors in the class. Uh the mechatronics teacher in the front row, the taller guy, uh he teaches at Liberty Creek Mechatronics and he is a doctor also. And then you know you've got Scotty in there, he teaches at Liberty Creek. Uh an absolute hoot, absolute school person. His brother teaches at uh West Morland. uh he drives a bus, he
063does everything the school needs. These 15 have not only accomplished great things, but they have um they have jumped in and really become a huge part of the school. Uh but you can see our numbers are increasing and this is only a snapshot. Those numbers will increase because we're adding more each day. It's become a huge tool as we're recruiting and hiring uh to be able to offer this. And I love the fact that we're able to get people out of career, not just for career technical, but you know, we're getting some math and science teachers that are coming out of labs or coming out of engineering uh work and things like that. They they bring a depth that really fills out a school faculty and provides wonderful points of contacts for kids. We also
064have 63 other job embedded teachers. My prediction, it's not just my prediction, it's going to be borne out by fact, is colleges of education don't have very many students anymore. They don't have a huge incentive to go out and recruit students. You only see a couple of colleges that have any number of uh college of education graduates. We are probably increasingly just going to go to colleges and recruit undergrads. We can use Teach Sumner. We can use our other job embedded partners and we can get kids turned around to teach. And if they've got a a math science background, an English background, whatever, my special education background, we'll be happy to work with them to get them in the classroom. Uh, I'm really proud of this. You know, one of the hardest things to do
065is is working across departments. And our team really dug in and looked uh at what the new teacher experience was, right? Because the first point of contact with new teachers is when they come in to be hired and how you orient them to the district. Like I when I started teaching in Atlanta, I was given a key to my room. They showed me where the room was and then they just left me there. Uh I had a meeting I think two weeks later. Um we've gotten a lot better, but what we really wanted to do was be intentional about what are the roadblocks that a new teacher faces. And so to start, new teachers will participate in a three-day learning intensive specifically designed to make their school year successful. I I think one of the
066things that you see in this picture is they've been in class for two or three years together and it's forged them into a community. They take care of each other. They call each other. They check on each other. They encourage each other. And that's part of what we're going to going to try to accomplish here. Each teacher will receive all their technology, their toolkit that will provide access to all curriculum resources. And then throughout the year, they'll have consistent mentorship, uh, champion seminars, regular classroom check-ins, coaching, and feedback support. Our champion seminars allow us to um to get new teachers with the best that we have, best principles, best coaches, best leaders, best teachers, and just hear from them and ask questions. Uh, you know, if you study the HR literature, you'll find out that
067you need eight or nine contacts with new employees the first 9 to 12 weeks. And if you retain them for that first year, you probably keep them. If you don't make those contacts the first eight or nine weeks, the attrition rate is really high. Uh continue to focus on developing strong readers. Uh you know, I think our move to consolidate all the Gallatin preks into one building. Construction is going great. I talked to Floyd. If you ever want to know what's going on up here, talked to Floyd and Floyd told me that the floors are just about ready. um that he told me that they're going to be ready for us to have our prek and the building will look great and it will. But we're really excited, you know, beyond just pulling those classes
068out of the schools and relieving some pressure on principles. It also allows us to take kids and put them in one space so that we can be way more efficient with the way we address their needs. Um you know, it's great if we could get every kid in prek. It would be wonderful. That that's gonna be a hat tip to Norma. Norma's been pushing this for a long time. If we could get every kid in prek, it would help tremendously. But we want to maximize our spots and get the most kids in prek and help them because the earlier we can find a reading problem, the faster we can address it and the easier it is. And we have great resources here. Uh Course Mojo, you had the opportunity to to uh to play with
069Course Mojo, to experience it. It will go to sixth to 8th grade next year. uh they are shifting they learned a lot this year. They are shifting the focus of their activities to a 15 20 minute part on the hardest lesson of each day's lesson. So that will give teachers vital feedback uh instant feedback about where kids are and how to support them. Uh student safety, you know, this is one of the things um this is one of the things. So Katie will be here a little bit. Her daughter is graduating this week. It's big time in the Brown household. I hate that I'm getting almost all the bragging in about Katie's team before she gets back, but this was really amazing. We took the day right before spring break. Uh we brought our team
070in to help um help train our staff. I have never in my career done a professional development day that had this much positive praise. Everybody felt empowered. They felt encouraged. It made them feel safer in school. And when our teachers feel safer, our kids feel safer. Our teachers feel empowered, our kids feel empowered, and you know, the thing that we need to say over and over again is there's never been a child shot or injured in a school shooting when the teacher and students were in the safe spot in the room and the door was locked. Um, we have great teachers and I love that they feel empowered, but to train 6,000 people in one day is pretty remarkable. Um, you know, but that's just a a tip of it. the tip line, handle with
071care, digital mapping of all schools, uh constant work with our first responders, emergency alert app, our storm ready school district, vape sensor install. Let me let me put this on the record. All right, I I want everybody to hear this before youth basketball next year. Next year, we will be able to differentiate between nicotine and THC. On Saturdays at youth basketball, we are doing don't ask don't tell. We are not busting parents for hitting vapes in our bathrooms. I don't think we'll be able to do don't ask don't tell on illegal substances in our bathroom. So, I would hope that um we can pass on to our parents and everything that the the the vape sensors work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Number one time our vape sensors have gone off is on Saturdays. Um it's
072really stressful in those youth basketball games. Uh reinforced entrances in windows and then parent education events. We've got to, you know, we talk about empowering parents. This is an area where we really need to empower parents. The dangers of THC, some of the different things that we see, texting, inappropriate pictures and videos, the pressure that girls and boys feel, catfishing. There's so many areas that we can work to kind of empower parents about uh what's going on that they need to go about that they need to know about. We innovate for the future because it helps us overcome boredom, behavior, and burnout by creating opportunities for students to discover that intersection of their passion and skill. We then connect them to professional experiences through our community partners. We coach them to develop real world skills
073necessary for success. And at each step, we encourage them to use their gifts to serve others. This is why we innovate. This is a great place. You have any questions on the first part. I promise we're headed to numbers soon. I know that's what you expect at a budget meeting and we'll be there real soon. Think we're good. Okay. All right. Let's talk about investment. We've made great strides over the last decade investing directly in our schools, our staff, and the innovative programs that make our district great. We continue to invest in those areas as we address the needs of our current and future students. So, let's look at our revenue projections. I tried to think of a way you could tie that into everything else, but sometimes you just got to look at the
074dollars. All right. So, uh this is and that that's just a mistake. Our slide got out of whack. uh $216 million from TISA and other revenue, 140 million from the county, a total of 356 uh.7 million. All right, so our revenue increase uh 6 million from the county. If you look from what I shared at the last board meeting to tonight, we lost almost a million dollars because CASS and TBR came back with uh basically the local contribution rate. I was shocked that it was this high because last year was the first year that said it and they went up.3 which cost us 1.3 million. They went up another.3 this year which I don't know that we've gotten that much more prosperous in a year. That seems a little high. Um, we're going to dig
075into that and kind of figure out I've already tried to talk I've already spoken to our legislators about the fact that um, you know, one of the problems that I see we have is is this number comes to us. It came to us what Amanda like on April 25th or something like that. So, we're about 85 90% of our budget. It's late in the game to lose a million dollars. Uh, if they would announce this number and lag it for a year so that we could plan for it, it would help us tremendously. Um, I've got some other theories, but I want to dig in before I don't want to share a conspiracy. I'd rather share a theory. All right. So, how are we investing in uh our school and student supports? So, these are
076positions that we're adding. Uh, five assistant principles. Let let me dig into this. One of the areas that we heard uh the most feedback from principles, especially elementary principles over the last couple years, is um the number of meetings that they're sitting into. Some of our elementary schools are doing a day, day and a half where the principal does nothing but 504 and IEP meetings. Those meetings are very important. Those are touch points with parents. Those are ways that we help every child ensure every child has a successful school experience. They are vital to what we do. It's also really hard. You know, historically, a school, an elementary school, gotten an assistant principal at 500 students. What we did this year, last year, we added two elementary principal support positions, and those have been invaluable,
077but it still just kind of highlighted the needs that we had across our schools. Uh, so what we did this year is we added um assistant principles. four of those are um at elementary school and they are done to you know it's elementary schools that are over 400 425 that have multiple preks CDC's and um behavior classes right because there are some that are a little bit closer to the 400 number but if you've got two behavior classes or two CDC classes and things like that there's a there are a ton of meetings that take place you can see we were able to shift teachers around and cut some positions. This year we kept, you know, over the last couple years during CO was really weird on our school population. Not just our overall number
078that stayed pretty consistent, but if you look, we've been cutting teachers the last two years at Jack and not teachers, but teaching positions at Jack Anderson. We added one last year at at uh Lakeside Park that we hadn't added a teaching position at Lakeside Park in probably a decade. But you're seeing kind of a a different trend in where people are living because of the cost of homes. It's really hard to get a home in Jack Anderson right now if you're a young parent. It's much easier to find a rental or an apartment in the Whitten area, in Lakeside Park, and some of the areas of Portland. You're going to continue to see some of that in our county. Uh everything else, y'all, we have nine we've we have carried the ball for middle and
079high school sports with nine athletic trainers. We easily need another five. Uh but five would have almost completely remade the the department and we don't really have the the money to invest that much in athletic. So we're going to chip away three this year. Uh if it weren't for our our most senior um you know Paul at Hendersonville, Andy at station camp, uh they lead the team. every one of them are invaluable, but you know, Andy and Paul really do a tremendous job of connecting everybody together and making sure with Dr. Sarver making sure that the middle schools are covered. Uh, but it reached the crisis point where we had to have more help uh to get everything covered. So, we added three athletic trainers. Uh you can see uh sped, school psychologist, behavioral support
080staff, nurses, uh one nurse, our prek building, uh office staff, school counselor. Uh and then uh on the right hand side are positions at the district that we're adding that still have a direct impact on school and student support. And and you can see that those positions there. That bottom one kind of got running together with the grant funded. That's a 0.5. Okay. High quality materials. Uh we voted a couple months ago on science curriculum. Um foundational materials for foundational uh literacy. We added the planetarium, a partnership with Summit County Schools and the Rotary Club. If the planetarium hasn't been to your school, one of your schools yet, when it comes, you should absolutely try to go. It's pretty amazing. if you haven't had a chance to be in it yet. It's really amazing to
081see a group of elementary kids in it. Uh we got Lisa's activity bus. We kicked it off. It's been used extensively this year, but we got to kick it off at Vena Stewart a few weeks ago, and that was a really special night. That's a partnership with Sumar Regional. Um and then you can see the cost associated uh with with our projects. And I wanted to share with you, we used to put this on every budget presentation and we stopped a couple years ago because we haven't changed it in a while, but I just wanted to show you the allocations. This is money that we send directly to the schools for them to spend on students. So you can see each school gets a $50 per student um allocation. And that's for this is where
082you'll see like high schools buy dissection kits. Um they buy books for classes, buy a whole bunch. This is uh paper, different things like that. Uh used to a bunch of technology. We've centralized a lot of technology with the student iPads and teacher iPads. So, we've kind of lifted that burden off the schools to give them more bang for their buck at the school level. The office gets $16 per student, library $750, and guidance $1.50. Uh support for all students. We have trained TCIS is what we start we did last summer. We made a huge investment. Um we trained to every we trained all certified employees except for 10. It's right at 2600. That's a real amazing run at doing a training. This is not the restraint version of TCIS. This is deescalation strategies. Right.
083Increasingly, we find that our kids, you know, if you ever work in a school, you will be able to tell if some kids are going to have a good or bad day based on how they get off the bus. You could look at their face and know uh what we need in those instances because we don't know what they experienced at home or on the bus or wherever else on the way there is to be able to deescalate them so they can have a good day. Escalating them does not work. And so having a consistent grammar and language um across the district is really helpful. This year's work will include ongoing training. We were able in the training process to certify over 130 of our people to be able to deliver the classes, which it
084was an investment last year. It saves us a ton of money this year because the training is expensive and we're able to do that in-house now. And and that's a that's a great gift for us. Um, we want to continue, you know, the next steps are to get that fully implemented into the school and classrooms to to provide the support at the school level. Uh, CPR training. Uh, we added last year an investment we made that was also innovative is we added a uh a professional development trainer on Miss Herren's team because it was getting harder and harder to get people trained in CPR. you know, especially after the events last year where we had a student that almost well a couple students that almost died had it not been for the school nurse, the
085AED and training. Um, we had a ton of our teachers and coaches and after school sponsors that all wanted to get trained in CPR and you can see over the past year we've trained over a thousand staff and 800 students. Uh, and as you can see with the situation with the young woman from Liberty Creek, knowing CPR is really helpful. And then safety training. We trained, as I mentioned earlier, all 6,000 employees. And then uh Katie and her team conduct ongoing school-based trainings. They liaz with all of our first responders, homeland security. They will be doing uh in the summer they do a lot of walkthroughs, update emergency plans, look at safety plans, take new evidence, new data, and work on it. It's a li very much a living document. In fact, now it's available
086on their iPads and they're able to keep it current and with them all the time. All right. Um, yeah, I apologize that the lines got messed up when we transferred the document. Uh, we made some significant student safety investments. Stop the bleed kits, evacuation vest, classroom door and window covers, uh, window film and doorork knob replacement, uh, AEDs. We replaced some AEDs last year. We've got another 100,000 in this budget to replace and add AEDs. You know what we're finding is is that we need AEDs readily available at sporting events, at school functions in the school. I mean, really, honestly, a month doesn't go back that we don't use go by that we don't use one of our AEDs somewhere. All right, let's talk about teacher pay. Uh we voted on this in January. So,
087we are going uh to 50,500 for starting teacher pay next year. Uh I think this is remarkable not to lose sight of that in 2019 we were at $36,100. We were the eighth largest school district uh I think the seventh wealthiest county and most of the surrounding counties were significantly ahead of us in pay. Uh so from 2019 to 2026 we've increased teacher pay by almost 40% to 50,500. Now the reality is we're going to have to keep moving. Uh eventually in a couple years we're going to need to be at 55 I would say. Uh that's going to be a lift but we're going to keep working to get there. But I'm excited that we go to 50,500. I was thinking like I didn't make 50,500 as a teacher until I became an assistant
088principal. So, I'm excited that our young teachers are making that. Uh, just to give you an idea, this is what the pay scale looks like, not just in year zero. A lot of times after a budget presentation, we get questions from teachers like, does this raise apply across the scale? So, I want to kind of give you a broad cross-section of what this looks like. Um, so it's pretty consistent. Last year, we um we normed the pay scales. The pay scale evolved over a lot of years and had different parts. So, it's pretty consistent um across the pay scale. So, you can see this is what pay is like for a bachelor's level teacher u across from year zero to year 25. This is what it looks like for a master's teacher. This is what
089it looks like for a teacher with specialist degree. And this is what it looks like for a teacher with a doctorate. And remember, of course, let me be clear, I did not put a slide on this, but special education teachers receive an additional $10,000. That stays the same. All right, so last year, let's talk about classified pay. Last year, 54.4% of our classified staff made less than 1367 an hour. Okay. The outcomes of that old pay scale were constant turnover, difficulty filling positions, and few applicants. I want to just show an applicant comparison from 2023 to 2025. CDC assistant at station camp elementary in 2023, we had two applicants. Their most recent opening, we had 28 applicants. Resource assistant at Nanny Berry Elementary, three applicants in 23, 13 this year. custodian at White House Middle,
090one in 23, six in 2025. Office clerk at Portland High School, uh, eight in 2023, 24 this year. Uh, Rucker Stewart Middle School has zero openings currently. All their spots are filled. We had 20 plus openings three years ago at Rucker Stewart. That's a testament to the work that Mr. Glasco and his team have done, but it's also what we have done with compensation, especially on the classified side, has moved the needle in getting applicants. So, last year it was imperative that we increase our classified staff pay scale to attract more applicants to be in the range of the market. Right? This year, as we do raises for classified employees, we want to continue to invest in our current classified staff. So what we are proposing is that each classified staff person will receive a
091raise of two steps on the pay scale. So let me show you what that looks like. I think it's it's hard to understand that in words. It's easier to see it. So if we take a teaching assistant, they are range 11. 2024 at the start of the school year, they would have made 20 or $12 an hour. Um last year with the $4 raise plus a step, they went from $12 to$,632. in 2026 with two steps they'll go to $16.98. So, you know, we had talked about last year when Mr. did his presentation of trying to get to $18. Like this takes us in last, you know, we said last year we could get to 16. It's what we could afford. Uh what we could afford this year is two steps, but if you look
092for our people that have been with us, it moves them close to that $17 amount uh at range 11. And that's about a $4 or it is it's not about it's a $4.98 uh raise over two years about $7,000 a year. A teaching assistant works two hours or excuse me 200 days 7 and a half hours a day. So that gives you a little bit of the breakdown on on their pay. A bus assistant salary range 13 started in 2024 1279 went to 1706 with a step and we'll go to 1775. It's a 27.9% increase over two years and a $4.96 increase. A head custodian at a large school salary range 17464 to $1865 last year to 1940. That's a $4.76 raise or about an $8,000 incre $8,300 increase a year. So compensation in our
0932026 budget uh came in at 13.8 8 million total. And if you put 2025 and 2026 together, we've increased compensation for our employees over two years by 42.7 million. That's historic. Uh in addition to our pay, I wanted to run through this because this is also good news. Um we made more additions to our health plans. We've been able to um add X-ray machines, add physical therapy. I was kind of skeptical of online physical therapy, but I can tell you it's really good. And like for me personally, I've been doing it for a couple weeks on my neck. There's no you can't come up with a reason to get out of online physical therapy except you just don't want to do it. And if you tell your co-workers about it, they remind you that you
094need to do it. Uh but so we've added online physical therapy which y'all has been a gamecher because we had a lot of our employees that either didn't have the time or didn't take the time and they weren't getting physical therapy which made injuries linger and made them worse in the long run. Uh we've added uh weight loss. Uh you know we we've had some problems uh as every organization has with some doctors figure out that they can write prescriptions for Ozimpic and gain the system and it's hugely profitable. Uh what we've tried to do is start off with diet with coaching conversations uh lifestyle changes then moving to some nonGLP1 uh medicines. Eventually if you go through the program and nothing is working or of course if you have the type two diabetes then
095we want you to get the medical care that you need. We just don't want you to jump to something immediately if we don't have to. Um, one of the great things for Miss Brown and her team, our health insurance program is managed so well. Um, you know, very rarely do you get to say that you can hold premiums the same from year to year. This will be two out of three years that we've been able to hold our premiums at zero for our employees because a lot of times they feel like you give them a raise and you ding them for a health health insurance markup. 0% increase for our employees. It's a little too early. By August, we'll be able to give you a little bit better feel. You know, last year, I think
096one of the most popular things we've ever done is we gave December and January without having to pay the premium for health insurance if you were on our insurance plan. That was a godsend for our employees around Christmas. Uh we are hopeful that we can do one or two months again. It looks really good, but we're only what I mean, four months, three or four months into this year because our insurance runs January 1 through December 31st. So, we'll need to get another month or two before she can forecast to see where we are. But, you know, I know some other insurance plans of people that I talked to, there's one up seven or eight% and ours is at 0%. That's a that's great for our employees and a lot of it is the work
097that our team does uh Earl and his team do in encouraging our students to get into our employees to get into preventative care. Our onetoone clinics really make a huge difference. I mean I hate it every time I go to the doctor and they go who's your primary care physician and I found out that for the last two years I've listed a guy that's been retired for a while uh and I got called out on it and they won't let you put one to one. But I mean I just go to one to one and a significant number of our employees go to one to one. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like getting haircuts like had this conversation with my brother like I have no idea who cuts my hair. I I just go
098to one to one. I mean whoever's there I'm good with and it's always good. All right. This is something I really want to celebrate. We did this last year as a board and I'm really proud because you know the state law changed and said we needed to do maternity and paternity leave for certified employees. Our board decided to do it for all employees. So this is the free. We also extended it for adoption and uh fostering. And if you look at the numbers, 108 this year, uh 66 maternity, 29 paternity, those are 29 men that would have not stayed home very long to help their spouse and and baby. And to make that, you know, my daughter is getting ready to go on, uh maternity leave in September. And in Kentucky, um they're just getting
099into this for educators, so it's nowhere near what we have. This has been great. And even a lot of, you know, some of ours are taking it on um gosh, I can't think of the word right now where they can take it over the course of a year. Intermittent intermittent intermittent so that you know they don't take all the days right up front and then when baby's sick or they need to stay home or something that doesn't it doesn't ding them up later. They also don't have to take all their sick days which is which is good. All right. So, just a refresher, uh, these are where our anchors are, and this is a highle overview of our budget, and I'm happy to take any questions that you might have. Yeah. So, I'm just curious.
100We looked at um classified openings. Um, we compared, you know, from year to year. Is there something for teacher openings? like what was our you know how many teacher openings are there? Yeah, I I I can get that. I can tell you that it's traveling in the same way like you know two years ago I would say jobs even at um Jack Anderson station camp where we used to get 50 60 applicants we'd gotten down to two or three and now it's in the 10 to 12. It's not like what it was 20 years ago but it's bounced back and we're seeing a lot more applicants. I mean I think you see it at a school like Rucker Stewart where we've always had a lot of openings being completely full. Um so yeah um I
101think Miss Dan could tell us uh sped go ahead. I think I have five or six openings whereas uh year ago two years ago I had 35 at this point. Let me I actually have the screen I have some statistics. Let me let me pull that up and I'll I'll try to find that for you. Got another question. Go ahead. Oh um yeah. I just wanted to go back to that uh the slide that had um the new positions. Yes. On it. Um all the additional um paid positions. Yes. And um so I'm just so just a couple of those director of instruction, director of career technical. Yeah. I thought we already don't we already have that or how is that what's that? What's the difference? Thank you. Actually, Mr. I skipped over I didn't
102mean to skip over that. Let me let me hit that. That's okay. Yeah, thank you for pointing that out. Um, hang on. Let me find that online so I can see it. Okay, so you know, last year after my first year of being director, I wanted to weigh and really study. You know, I think if you look at central office teams, um sometimes they departments were structured intentionally, especially newer ones, and sometimes they evolve. Um if you take, um you know, there's no question with Norma retiring, uh we're leaving, we're losing someone with 41 years experience, uh that sat in a chief role, right? And she caught I mean everything in the middle. you typically have instruction and you have finance and you have everything else in the middle and Norma kind of helped us
103in all those things in the middle. So her retirement is a huge loss. So, you have to think about how do we structure when you lose, you know, not just somebody that's been an anchor, um, and I mean in a positive way, Norman, uh, been an anchor of our of our system for many decades, but been a core part of the director's leadership team for the last 12, 13, 14 years. And what how do you so one, there's challenges and then there's opportunities to step back and think how do we manage this transition? So, in one thing that you have is uh you know I y'all haven't really had at some point we'll have uh Julie Daniel come speak to you u because Julie is going to be she already is an amazing leader. She
104has a heart for our special education students. But to step into those shoes is massive, right? You couldn't take the structure that we had and expect someone in their first year in a cabinet level leadership position take reign on all those things. Just like when I moved from chief academic officer to director of schools, Frankie came in as director of instruction, not chief academic officer, so that she would have time to learn and and learn one department before you take over multiple departments. Um I think so I would say that in restructuring, one thing that I'd like to say is is with your approval, I'm going to start referring to myself as superintendent. Jeremy's pointed out that people refer to me in a lot of affectionate ways. Um, but uh I'm going to start using
105superintendent. We can do that by Tennessee law. I'm technically director of schools by law, but it's the Tennessee Organization of School Superintendent. I talk to a lot of people across the state, across the country. And when I introduce myself or I'm introduced as director of schools, somebody asks, "What what is that?" And I say, "It's superintendent." They say, "Oh, yeah." So, I think it makes sense that I'm superintendent. It also cleans up our hierarchy because like when I first came up, I was assistant director of instruction. And anytime I talked to anybody on the phone or anything, they would say I would say I was the assistant director of instruction. They'd say, "Can I talk to the director?" I go, "I am the director. I'm just called assistant director because we have a director of
106schools." And they'd say, "What's that?" I say, "That's the superintendent." And it's just it's confusing. And we are superintendents of school. So basically, the structure will be superintendent of schools, right? And then I will have four chiefs. Frankie will move into the chief academic officer role. Jeremy will be chief of staff. Uh Craig will be chief talent, so HR plus special projects. One of the biggest special projects Amanda and his team has been working on the technical side, on the financial side of time and attendance. That may not sound like much, but we caught a huge gain with um it is a lot. I didn't mean that the way it sounded. sound better in my head. But um but we caught a huge gain with the pay increase. One of the limitations that we have
107especially for lower salary positions is we only pay once a month. For us to be able to do anything there, we have to do time and attendance. You know, if you follow the financial management committee at uh on the county side, they've been trying to implement either the 1981 act or the 2012 act since 200, you know, probably since 1981, but they're kind of caught in the same loop is how do we automate our payroll, get everybody on the same page so that we can then look at things like paying more than once a month. Right now, it would be physically impossible for us to pay more than once a month. Uh Mr. did that in Metro. He led that charge because there's the technical side with Tyler, that's the financial side, and then there's
108the implementation at the school side. Mr. has a lot of experience with that, just like he did with compensation. We're in a position now where we've had um a lot of retirements, a lot of shifts in leadership. Uh our leadership pool is strong, but you know, just like everything else, you talk about ending average and not shooting for the middle, but shooting for the highest levels. Uh we're at a place now as a district where we need to innovate our leadership pathways not pipelines pathways. How do we create opport multiple points of contact and opportunities to identify recruit train leaders? So Mr. A's going to work on that and professionalizing a lot of those services. So he'll be promoted up to um chief um chief talent officer and then take on special programs. And then
109Miss Brown is already chief financial officer. She will add strategy. If you got to go see Smith Travel Center today and hear all about it, then you will see that's part and parcel of the work of Miss Brown. And that's the strategic sense. You know, we are blessed here to have a chief financial officer like her because she's not just an accountant. She's not just a numbers person. You come to her with an idea like teach Sumner, like Sumner gives back, like taking the walls off high schools. And she doesn't just tell you the dollars and pennies. She jumps in, learns, adjusts, and figures out how to make it happen structurally and financially. That is almost unheard of. And so her job is actually more uh is as much strategy. Also we had the fact
110that you know if we talk about the strengths a cabinet is built around the strengths and weaknesses of the superintendent. Uh for me I came in with a strong instructional background. I appreciate Dr. Phillips for many reasons but one thing that I appreciate about him the most is is that he gave me the opportunity to do more than just be director of instruction. He let me jump in and attack problems and and work with the rest of the team and figure out how to do things. It was a godsend for me in my professional career. He was particularly strong on the financial capital business side of operations. I am not as strong there. So where you know Dr. Phil, you know, you know it's almost like reversing roles. I need Dr. Phillips needed me more
111for the academic side or the instruction side. I need Amanda more because I need that strategic and financial part. Um you know, but and and I think it's doubly complimented because, you know, Frankie's actually better at instruction than I was. Um, so you kind of pick up two things there. You really hit the director's weaknesses. Uh, but um, but so that's that's the chief structure. Our current directors will become executive directors because most of them operate across more than one large entity. You know, for instance, Miss Heron has nurses. She also has uh coordinated school health. She has 504s. Now, those in homebound, those things don't sound related, but 504s were an absolute mess a couple years ago because you find yourself at the school level in an absolute bind because a parent comes in
112with a request and they've got a doctor's note, right? Doctors will write a note for almost anything if you ask them. And it's hard if you're a school counselor to say no to something um because you're not a medical person. And we want to say yes to benefit kids, but sometimes what gets written on a doctor's note is not what's actually best for kids. Um so the nurses and her team are able to work and Brandy Yubahar is amazing. They're able to work with the parents and with the doctor and the team to have a team approach to find what's best, what accommodations are best for the student. So those are executive directors and then directors will not be they're sort of in between an executive director and a supervisor. They work where I would
113say a chief works horizontally across departments to coordinate and align this way. The directors will work this way to take all the way to the ground the work of that department. So uh let me walk through Frankie's department, Mr. King, because I think that hits your question because those are the main ones that are listed. Um, I've heard ma some major concerns around behavior and our response has been twofold. One is to blame special education. Why can't you get these kids in blast? Right? We need them out of our classrooms. We we need them, you know, one to not do the things. And look, it is perfectly legitimate for a parent to be concerned that their child is in a room that has to be cleared multiple times. Right? That is a perfectly legitimate concern
114for a parent to have. It's a perfectly legitimate concern for a classroom teacher to have or for a principal to have. This is happening at epidemic levels across the nation and everybody throws up their hands and says there's nothing we can do about it. Um what I want us to do is to think about it this way. Another area, and I'll tie it all together just a second. Another area that we have is we have Julie coming, Miss Daniel coming in as a brand new director following a legend and having a lot of knowledge to gain, right? One of the areas that we've identified to grow is special education achievement and support for our special education students. That happens when instruction and special education are working together. Okay? So, under Frankie, you'll have your special
115education director. You'll have a director of instruction. The disadvantage I had the entire time I was chief academic officer is I was still director of instruction. I did all the work of the director of instruction and I picked up two other departments. I felt like my responsibilities were to work with Dr. Phillips to advise him to run the instruction department to be out as much as possible coordinating with schools the work that we were talking about for classroom and instruction and then to do all the administrative components of the instruction department. The problem that I had is I could do two of those things really well and the other two I had to kind of firefight and slide around. And it's because I had two jobs simultaneously. So what we need to go to the
116next level are the people that can do this while Miss Skinner is able to coordinate across. So if we can put at the same table to plan for what's best for our kids, special education um instruction, but then behavioral support. Part of the reason special education gets blamed is because special education has a vital role in helping students that have behavior issues if it's a manifestation of their disability. Right? That's where they need to be coming in to help support students that have a that behavior is a result of their disability. Right? What they don't necessarily have a role in is what happens while we're trying to figure all that out. that sits in between in the way we're structured the instruction department and the special education department. So there is a lot of work
117to be done. We mentioned TCIS. Some of it is escalation and deescalation. Some of it is helping principles and teachers understand the resources that we have available that they don't always think of when they're under the gun dealing with a tough problem. but also helping, having support. And so having that person to dig in and work out I'm not, it's not acceptable to me to say that we're just going to keep throwing our hands up and clearing classrooms. We have kids that are losing 20, 30 days of instruction a year. And it's vital to me that we find a solution for that. We are losing good teachers when they have behavior issues. At the same time, I don't want us to stigmatize a kid by labeling that kid as a problem child, right? And and
118that happens and is happening. It's not acceptable. So, uh the other thing is if you look at where we're going to go, if we're truly going to take the walls off high school, we have run our CTE department and STEM. Chase Moore and his team with three people, Chase, Mariah, and Becky Roy have run the most successful program in Sar County and in the state of Tennessee. And they've done it with three people. Um, it's director level work. If we're going to commit to the next generation of what we want for our kids, we have to have that person at the seat to work across so that we've got kids from the time they enter preK until they go to a two-year, four-year postsecary option where we're focusing on their behavior. We're focusing on their
119achievement and then we're naming the opportunities to help them fly and take off. So that's that's the investment there. Okay. So, just just to recap, Mhm. we're still going to have a chief academic officer, but we're also going to have a director of instruction. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. And we're and so it actually goes over. You have a chief academic officer, director of special education, director of the behavioral support. Okay. Director of instruction, uh, director of career and technical education. Okay. So, Miss Scar will still be chief academic officer, right? Okay. Right. Well, she's director of instruction right now. Okay. Okay. So, on the I'm just trying to figure this out. So, okay. On the principal and admin pay scale at the bottom it says CEO minimum salary. Did have we not had a
120CEO? Not since I when Tom became director. She was director of instruction. Okay. All right. So, so I'm just curious. So, these these positions, do you have any idea what what they're going to pay? The new the new director positions salary wise, minimum salary. Uh, the new directors, um, yeah, it's going to depend on the experience and what the field is. Obviously, like if someone takes a director position and they were a principal, you know, to be honest, one of the things that we're working through is we've had a lot of compression. Um, for instance, and I hope I hope you don't mind. I'm going to share a little personal dare Frankie because I'm going to share it and you can forgive me later, but you know, we didn't do administrator pay increases until 2021,
121Amanda, 2020 or 2021. Prior that that table that you got, Mr. King, that's when we first did administrator pay. And so what we had before then, I'll just narrate it real quickly and then I'll highlight the point. When I became principal of White House High School, I made $72,000 to be principal at White House High School. When I left in 2018, I made $82,000. When I came up here to be director of instruction, I made $92,000. When Philip Holt came up here to be a supervisor of instruction, he got less than a $300 raise because he couldn't make more than me. When Frankie went from elementary coordinator to um supervisor of federal programs, I don't think you got a raise at all because we were compressed. Right. We had our cabinet level, we had a
122system where certified assistant directors made a little bit more, you know, significantly more than classified uh assistant directors, but it was still really low. If you look at our executive pay compared to other school districts, it's pretty low. It's not competitive. And we've been trying to close that gap. Um, and so part of that is to create some delineation between the different levels. So for instance, you know, like when we started hiring instructional supervisors, right? We wanted a system where we could bring people with principal experience, not all principles, but some principles. The problem is is that we had, it's not a problem, it's a celebration. We made principal uh pay much more competitive in our regional market. Right? Like when when I left White House in 2018, I made $82,000. If I'd been a
123high school principal in Williamson County, I would have started at $120,000. You know, I don't think the former high school if I if I'd gone from White House to Fair View, I would have made about 25 $30,000 more. um you know our high school principles one they deserve every penny and more uh but we did a good job of getting them market comparable but to me it's fair when I am looking at my team that does such great work to say that someone that sits on my cabinet should make equal to a high school principal and so then that gives you the room to walk back because there is some compression still Mr. king between where I think the director positions and supervisor positions will. So it' be kind of department by department and some
124of it is the history of one of the things that I hope to destroy before I leave here is the difference in leadership between classified and certified. Right? You're just a leader. Right? If you're on the finance or HR side, you're every bit as much a leader as someone on the instruction side. Yes, we want to accommodate for higher degree and experience, but we also want to say if you're leading a department, it shouldn't matter if your background um you know was an HR degree versus you know a teaching certificate. So are the cabinet director positions going to be I know those those minimum salaries were increased. Um is there going to be another increase or are they going to be based on experience and I mean like how how would that because right now
125there is a table for that. Is that are we going to do away with that? Um there's a table for principal pay. There's a formula for principal pay. Uh yeah, I would say for you know where we are with supervisors right now, it's really better if we can look at the position and the responsibilities. I I mean cabinet direct like there's on that same table there's cabinet director minimum. So yeah but I just chiefs will be 150. Okay. Because they are supervising major departments across the board. Um underneath there, our um executive directors, uh there's there's a little bit of variation there, but they're all pretty much right around high school principles. And then supervisors are it kind of depends on their pathway, right? Because I can't ask someone to come to the central office
126to take a pay cut. Thanks. I think I think in two or three years we'll probably be at a place if we can eliminate the compression in our high level leadership positions. If we can eliminate that compression, then we can kind of come back and look at a pay scale. If you ask me what my goal would be, it would be that you would have um basically like directors and large high school principles aligned and then you would have supervisors and small high schools aligned and then you would have coordinators aligned with either like high school APS. I think those are comparable type leadership jobs. And I think it's if you look at like if you compare our salaries to neighboring counties, um we're still with these moves, we're still well below what those other
127districts pay. Miss Bernie, um I actually really liked hearing how we're changing that structure. It definitely mimics a very effective leadership structure that we see across the board in um in the private sector. So I think we'll see a benefit to our team with with doing that. Um my question was I see we are adding two school psychologists and one school counselor where there'll be will there be schools that still have part-time support staff in that in that area in the county? Yes. Uh so we will have um North Sar and Oakmont will still split. This will give Melhyde a full time at elementary, middle, and high. Okay. That was a big need. We talked to Mr. Frank. We we work were able to work that out. Um you know, we looked at North Sumar
128and Oakmont. There's a couple different issues. One is comparability of the report that we had to file with the state. The hard part that you run into is the way that we're judged on comparability. They don't look at the nuances of the school. They look at the numbers. And so if you look at the ratio at say Gallatton High School compared to Oakmont Elementary, you know, it's hard. Uh we looked at it hard. Um I know Mr. Halman met with um both principles and they worked out a schedule for the part-time counselor that seemed to really work well for both schools. And I think what you see there is is um what our schools do really well is if there's a crisis, it's not just a crisis at your school. You know, like if you
129take Oakmont, um they're a firm partner with all the White House cluster and the Portland cluster because their students go both places. So if there's a crisis, they can get someone from one of the other places to come. Miss Brown has crisis social workers. We have a counseling coordinator that can fill in. a counseling coordinator for elementary and a counseling coordinator for middle school and high school and those people jump in in the event of, you know, of a crisis. Absolutely. I think for me the next level down when it's not what we would define as a crisis counselor, but it's a student who's in a personal crisis. Yeah. Um I'd like to see us get to a point where we can get someone who's there every day who's consistent. Um, if that's an issue
130with numbers and ratios, I' I'd love to see if we can get creative around having that consistency. Yeah. And I think it's just weighing out, you know, like we do every year. I would love to have an I'd love to have an assistant principal at every elementary school. I think every elementary school needs an assistant principal. We're going to keep chopping away at that. You know, it's kind like we started with like 14 SRO's and we chipped away, you know, not we the county chipped away each year until we had one at each school. We've done that in the number of areas. We used to have Lisa like I mean a very small number of nurses. Um I I mean I can tell you the whole time I was principal it was really hard to
131get a nurse until we added enough. And you know, now we're looking at now we've got the flexibility with our nursing team to look at not only do schools have nurses, but to look at the acuity rates and the special needs of kids because I 100% agree with you. There needs to be somebody there. The question is is like if I weigh that out against things like we also need athletic trainers at all sporting events and other things too and um you know and we need assistant principles and we need you know so it's kind of weighing out and chipping away. We've come a long way. I I agree personally, you know, one of my goals over I'd say the next two or three budgets is to get rid of all part-time counselors, getting AP
132in every elementary school. Those are things that I think are big needles to move. Great. As long as we continue keeping our eye on that one that Yeah. Um I will also add it's obvious that the biggest change here is salary. Outside of salary, should what what would you highlight in the budget? Maybe it's Amanda, maybe it's you. What would you highlight as the significant changes for this year? You go. Um, do you want me to ask? Yeah, I would probably really highlight um what I would call the instructional like I kind of did a overview of some of the the big differences and changes. And what really stuck out to me was what um we're investing in our instructional um supplies and materials directly in the hands going into the hands of our students.
133Um we've got you know the STEM the money for our STEM programs. We've got um um sorry we've got um some sa amazing safety supplies. Now those are not necessarily children but directly going into um our schools and protecting our children. Um we also have um instructional supplies, textbooks, workbooks. Um Frankie can talk to the um the um investment in curriculum and instructional materials within our organization. Course mojo and some of the other amazing things that would be probably the next largest increase. And also um that next round of that iPad roll out that's also a really big u piece and a big investment. And so I think all of everything else is minimal. Honestly, we obviously always have operational cost increase. Your, you know, electricity is going to cost more, water's going to cost
134more, insurance, you know, liability, workers, all that's always going to cost more money, unfortunately. But, um, there's, you know, a cost to doing business, but the main, I say, the larger investments are those instructional funds within the to the buildings. Thank you. U, let me let me jump in and piggy back off that. Frankie, jump in at any time. I I would say one of the things I'm most excited about in this is um we've made huge investments on the over the last five years in curriculum ELA and math you know substantial and you know we had to change used to you know curriculum was cheaper but it wasn't as it wasn't high quality basically you were buying textbooks that were going to primarily sit under a desk for a long time long time. um
135you know, as we made the jump to a strong ELA curriculum, strong foundational literacy curriculum, uh we got that embedded where now we're going back and kind of replacing books, uh replacing workbooks for foundations. Now, that's a substantial cost each year. Uh but then, you know, we add egeneuity. I'm sorry, not edgenuity, we add um Eureka and elementary school, I Ready in middle school. So, we've added a strong math curriculum. I was concerned specifically about science because, you know, most over the course of my lifetime, most science textbooks were find the bold-faced word and copy what comes in between the copy, the commas. Um, I used to have kids when I taught AP history that thought that they would look for the bold words and just copy whatever came after. um you know so to
136see a science curriculum K through 12 that is focused on you know kids getting real world science experience at an early age when we talk about um when we talk about lighting the fire of kids for their natural curiosity and exploration and building all the things that we talk about all the time that starts in kindergarten and it's perpetuated all the way but part of that is having them it's hard to light a fire in a kid when you're asking them to do the questions that and and our teachers do way more than that. But if the only materials that you're giving them for consistent teaching are those type of materials. It's hard to ask them, it's expensive, it's time consuming, it's hard to do with consistency. I'm excited to see our middle I'm excited
137to go into middle schools and high schools next year, especially middle schools and seeing them do lab-based work. That's I'm really excited about that. Mr. L. Yeah. Can we go back to that uh additional I really just have a question kind of slide I'm sorry uh the additional we were on there for a little bit. I'm sorry coming in late. I might have missed other stuff. Basically it was the Yeah, there you go. So tell me a little bit about this behavioral support staff because that's probably the biggest uh you know thing since my time on the board. The biggest complaint or issue that parents seem to have and you know I've dealt with it with my own kids uh is you know where you have behavior issue in a classroom and the teacher has
138no yeah outside help. Is this from what I from what we're saying here is and what I understood from the synopsis you gave just a minute ago this director and these staff positions are going to focus strictly on behavior issues. So so this is kind of a both end. I believe the behavioral support staff are in the special education department. So these are kids with this is like BCBAS board certified behavioral analyst. So these are kids that are certified special education that are typically in a BLAST class that need support from a licensed professional. Go ahead, Norman. Well, um, so we do have an increase in a board certified behavior analyst. We already have uh with one and we contract with another. So this will be adding a third option for us. Uh, and those
139people work with uh students on uh creating plans to improve their behavior. Uh so uh that was one of the positions we've added. We've also added a uh behavior interventionist and that is a a position a new position in which they would be working with uh in classrooms uh mostly special ed classrooms uh where we're working with uh students who have uh the most significant behaviors. uh the board certified behavior analyst. Now, they work with all kids in all all special ed students in all settings. So, that could be a student um who's uh spends the majority of their day in a regular classroom. It might be a student who uh has uh different levels of behavioral support, but we're trying to target it so that we find the most effective behavior plan to work
140with that particular student. Will these positions work I mean will they work more directly with teachers themselves provide the support d you know not necessarily directly but you know the biggest I guess thing I hear from from both you know teachers and parents is they don't know who to go to necessarily sometimes they get lost on where to go and some of it's because well the students It's not necessarily a special education issue, but strictly a behavior issue. And so, I mean, I got, you know, Yeah. I mean I there's a variety of different types of supports that that we uh that we provide uh not only through the board certified behavior analysts but through uh different staff that also work to train people on on the appropriate techniques or the the particular behavior plan.
141You have to figure out for each individual student why things are not going well. I think they're also working on uh through students who aren't in special education. Uh I think those are supports also that that they are looking at. I I think a way to think about Mr. Nish, I've tried to think about it, it sits in between at least three of our departments and the school. And so, you know, it's like which card do you pull to address something that I think is one of the most significant problems we face as a school system. I would you jump back to Miss Breny for a second. I think that the the academic investment is big, but allowing kids to flourish in the classroom is also huge. And I think so what I've learned is
142is that you have to think about the perspective that you're looking at. So from Miss Stam's department, they are typically focused on working with the individual student to build the skills that they have to be able to navigate and be successful. They do work with classroom teachers and support them and things like that. But I think like to your point, which I think is also really valid, is if you're a parent or a teacher or principal, what are your resources? What are your supports to know how to do that? And I think that comes from two places. I think Katie has a team. K. Brown has a team, a crisis social worker that they're looking at because, you know, a lot of times with behavior stuff, it's not coming from stuff that happens in school.
143It's coming from stuff that happens in the neighborhood or the home. And so sometimes we have to dig in there and find out what's going on to provide support for the student, for the teacher, and for the parents. Um, so Katie's team works a lot with the individual student also to be successful, but from kind of a a social big picture individual way. I think what we're talking about for the person for the the group under Frankie in the instruction department is it really hits on kind of what your question is. I'm a principal or I'm a teacher and I've got a kid that is showing behavior. The problem is especially in elementary school that kid is most likely not going to have a special education certification to be able to take advantage of all
144the resources that exist in special education. that triggers with principles the need to get that so they can get the child some help because I think all of our people are working to try to give the individual child and the class help. I think where we need help is as a group to work out systems and structures at the school and classroom level to support the student with the discipline behaviors but also to support the other students that are in the classroom to support the teacher and to support the principal. What we have been missing is someone to take that part because sometimes it's having somebody to work and notice like hey um we notice that our child can stay in class for 30 minutes before they get frustrated and a behavior happens. So we're
145going to put a structure in place to start. We're going to say let's try to let's try 25 minutes to do something to inter intervene and then or coach them through to get that and then we're going to start trying to stretch that to 40 minutes and then to 45. Uh what we have not had is a team to work to try to provide teachers and principles that support. And I think Mr. I think you're exactly right. Their thing is to just throw up their hands and say, "Dear Lord, I need help. This is bad." And there is no one answer out there across the country in education right now that anybody feels really confident about how we do it because it is really profound. Um and that's where I think it's not that I
146want to throw staffing at a problem. I think we can get the right people to really dig into this with our classroom management specialists, with some of the people that we have here that have been working in five or six different areas to really focus them and say like your job is to figure out what works. Try try different things and figure it out and then to lies with special ed because they have a great working knowledge base of how to help individual students. If we can put all that together, we can start crafting solutions. some, you know, the other point I think is that we're going to try at Rucker Stewart this year. If you look on there, it's grant funded as a community support person is to have somebody, you know, the position
147is to have somebody that can build relationships with students, mentor them, counsel them a little bit, but then also build relationships with their teachers and with their family members to tie everything together. uh because we have to have a whole family, whole community approach with individual parents and individual students. And you know, if you get the right person in those jobs, it goes a long way to to build that, right? Like part of what we have to address is is that our social fabric has been frayed over the last decade. And it's not like it was 20 or 30 years ago where you had multiple generations in a family that lived in the same place. There's a lot of mobility, a lot of trauma, a lot of brokenness. And a lot of times it's not
148there's not a band-aid. It requires a system. And we got to have all the components of the system to create an environment and a culture to work for the individual kid, the classroom of kids, the teacher, and the school. I don't know if that really gets it. Yeah. I mean that's the the biggest issue that I there's you know and some of it's just by the way you know privacy and things like that but the you know you have if you have a a child in a classroom that's a behavior issue and you have to you know get out of the you know abandon the classroom or leave the classroom you know multiple times during the year. You know, you've got that child that you're concerned about and and you know, a plan for that
149child. You have 20 other kids that are depending on their age, could be seven, eight years old that are witnessing this and not, you know, ace scared, don't know what's going on. Then you have a teacher that's gettingounded by those 19 parents that are saying, "Why aren't you doing something?" and she has nowhere to go or or he has nowhere to you know when I say not have nowhere to go there's nobody she is speaking for her class so if this you know anything that supports that teacher in saying hey you know here's what you need to you know tell your other kids tell your parents kind of how to get around that issue as much as possible and and you Yeah. While also building a plan for that that kid from a is it
150a behavior issue, is it a a special education issue? Um, you know, that's that's the the biggest issue that I I get from from teachers is, you know, teachers like, well, we need support. But that and it's not that we're not providing support. not want to say it, but just if we can get something to to capture that behavior um and support that and also but at the same time, you know, I just don't want it I would love for it to be something where the teacher has a more Yeah. direct role in in getting feedback from whatever this person is. Yeah. And and I think Mr. Lancaster, I think that's what I 100% agree with that. I think the thing is is that we don't have someone we don't have a team right now
151where that's the first and foremost thing that they do. And so like I can say Miss Dam and I've been talking about this since it I mean she was talking about before we talking about since 2018. Every year we have a group of kindergarters. We've had that forever that come in and they have extraordinary needs. The problem that we're seeing now is it's not just those eight or 10 kindergarten students each year. It's an increased number across the county. It's reached the point now where we've got to have a, you know, like what I think this team does is work primarily at the school and classroom level wherever we have children that have these needs. And so it gives them, you know, kind of like what Norma has with the uh BCBA. They can come
152in and observe a student. you know, we need people that can come in and observe the classroom, can observe the school, can observe the individual student and work with all the different resources to address that. I just want to emphasize that at each school there is a complete team of people working with every student. There there is there is a complete team. There are uh therapists, there are teachers, there's teaching assistants, and we're all working uh to uh to help the students in the school. So I I don't want to put the a huge emphasis on this, but I'm not trying to imply that there's not. I think the the biggest thing that that I I I'm definitely in agreement with this position and this this need. I just think the the biggest thing that
153I get feedback from is we just need we we need help, you know, in that transition period between, you know, the the teacher, the principal, the the special education committee and als but mainly from the standpoint of understanding the process and helping, you know, communicate to parents. on those issues. Yeah. I and and I think just to reiterate what what Norman said, I think that we have a lot of different groups that are working towards a common goal. What we don't have is someone to connect all those different pieces together to to your point to communicate with parents so they understand to communicate with the principal to communicate with the classroom teacher if nothing else to have somebody to go sit with that teacher so that they know they're not alone. You know, there's nothing
154worse than feeling powerless in a situation to help a group of kids that you love. And that's what I want. like I can't sit here and not try to put the resources that we have in this county to work towards a solution because I think mish I agree with you wholeheartedly that you know I know that Norma and her team work tirelessly to address the needs of the kids and to help them build the skills to be successful and they've made tremendous changes over the years as we've um you know identified and trying to work through a rapidly increasing problem that we have here and across the nation. And I think that there are different pieces like I think it calls for a you know you got to have a systemic an operational and a
155tactical response. We've got most of the pieces there, right? Like the problem is I think Norma's team is working with the individual child and that requires a majority of their resources having someone to come up alongside to help in that process on the other components. We've got those resources. We just got to tie it together and get it all moving in the same way. Thank you, Miss Hayes. Yes. Thank you, Chairman. Um, each of us on this board have probably gotten those phone calls from the parents. So, Mr. Lancaster, yes. Um, I appreciate that you see the need, the ever growing need and you we are addressing this in the form of positions in in the budget because there is a need. Remind me, did you say that the two behavior support staff and the
156one director of behavioral support, will they fall under sped, Miss Daniel? No, the the two where will they the two behavior support staff are in special education? Okay. And the one director will be that's under that's under instructor academics. So it's a team effort working across from sped students to and we have two classroom management specialists right now. Uh they will be under this director and so okay uh as will RT Fiser you know a whole other part that we haven't really talked about is we're in a really stable position with RT Fischer right now and so Dr. Kman's doing an amazing job there. Uh we're continuing to try to work you know not every kid that is struggling you know behavioral academically needs to go to RT Fischer that is a behavioral coaching intervention
157to provide targeted support for specific group of kids. We need to use the full arsenal of tools uh that that we have. I mean, you will sometimes get calls, right, because if we have seniors that do the inevitable THC vape 35 ft from a teacher or administrator, you know, it doesn't make sense to send them to RT Fisher. It makes sense to let them finish on egeneuity. We're not clogging up our, you know, that that those spots at RT Fisher are really important uh to try to intercede and get kids back on the right track and coach and support them. we're going to see a whole lot more nuanced u you know Melanie and her team in attendance do a tremendous job of trying to sift through with the board of principles and then sit
158on discipline panels to try to find the right placement for kids not just the fastest placement um they're doing so our behavior is structured across all but our classroom management specialists they are really good at going to classrooms and helping address problems uh we got to have some but what we have to do is is like we have two of them and a director. You know, we have to work on models and systems to be able to push that out, you know, to what to like what Mr. Lancaster is saying to be able to where teachers say this is what I do when this happens. This is the person I contact. These are the resources that are available. This is what'll happen that'll help. This is very thoughtful. These aren't just these are positions that
159we know that we need to do what we do well to continue to do what we do well. Ballpark figure what is the total of these um investing in our school and student support addition just you will never get a mana to give you a ballpark figure. Well, uh I'm not a man sees a little girl running the halls of I'm just telling you I'm her boss and there's a better shot. challenge. I'll give it to you. Hold on. I'm or exact. Oh, you're going to get exact. That's what you get from Amanda. I'll get I'll get it. I'll get it for you. Okay. Just kind of wanted to know what these new additions were going I have it. I just we question. Thank you. She actually gave it to me like yesterday, but we've
160moved the pieces around number since then. Thank you. All right. Thank you. You know, one of the things I wanted to add real quick is is, you know, I appreciate your your narrative today talking about the wise behind where we're trying to go and the reasons why we're trying to get there and the importance it has for the education our community. I think back, you know, when I think about innovation um back what 8 10 years ago when Dr. Phillips approached us with the middle college and we didn't really have any idea what it was, but it sounded like a cool thing and now it's really taken off and we've been able to continue to add new programs. we've grown CTE and you know and I think back a little bit to when you know
161I was in school um and most of us were probably in a similar situation. we think about the way we were taught. Um, you sat in a classroom, you read a book, you looked at the blackboard, you wrote down what you saw on the blackboard. And I kind of, you know, kind of being the construction industry, I kind of think about it as um the old style of how homes were built where you had a bunch of rooms that were walled off. uh you had a dining room, you had a den, you had a kitchen, you had, you know, bedrooms obviously, you had um sitting areas, you know, and they all had their designated purpose, but there's a wall around it. So, you went in there and that's what you did, right? Um and you
162couldn't do anything else in there. And now you've got this more open living space where there's so many more opportunities in front of you of how you can use those spaces. And and I remember when I was in school, there's a lot of no, you can't do that because you don't have transportation there or we don't offer that program within your community or I think about AP classes. And I know I've shared this before. I took one AP class in high school. It was my senior year because when I was in eth grade, I didn't test high enough on whatever the test was that allowed you to take AP classes. And so depending on that test score, you either took AP classes or honors classes or standard classes and where you started as a freshman
163is where you ended up. You couldn't move up. It's it's because you just weren't equipped or you weren't ready or you didn't test high enough. And so it was constantly being told no, you can't do this or you can't do that. And now, you know, I hear a lot of talk about, you know, teacher's job, it's reading, writing, arithmetic, and all that stuff is important. But I really think what a teacher's primary goal is to teach our kids how to dream to see what they can be. Um, and I think with everything that we're working on, everything that we're trying to implement, and I know it's not all being done this year, but whether it's our athletic programs, our academic programs, the CTE programs, we're giving our kids an opportunity to see what can I
164be instead of what can I not do. Um, and I'm really proud of our county and our community and what we've invested in it and the opportunities that are in front of us and the people that we put in place. And I don't just mean in the, you know, chief positions or the supervisor positions, but um, the individuals in school that are principles, our APS, um, our counselors, um, our custodians, they all play a role in helping our kids be successful. um and the investment that we're making in them now is going to pay dividends down the road for the students that get the opportunity to come through our our school. So, I appreciate all the work that's going into it and and and the work that our our our staff and our teachers and
165administrators do on a day-by-day basis. So, thank you. Any other questions? So, I'm going to caveat it. So, it's about 5.6 million. There are some federal employees that have they're not new positions, but they have been in our federal budget and because of, you know, that federal budget stays pretty stagnant. And so, as we do raises and other things, sometimes we have to shift those over. So, that does include a couple of federal employees that are coming over in the special that aren't listed because they're not technically new positions. So, I apologize for that. But that does include th um those are all um special education um assistants and a few teachers. Okay. Miy does that include benefits as well? Yes, it does. I'm sorry. Taxes t taxes, retirement and medical and dental and life.
166Yeah, that's total. Any other questions on the budget before we move on? Um, again, I just want to send a provide a reminder is this is a voting session. If there's more information you need, if you've got requests, if there are things like you'd maybe like to see added to the budget or discussed in the budget, um, reach out to Mr. Johnson, um, reach out to Dr. Lenford, um, and we'll get that information in your hands. again, you know, as new board members, um, long-term board members, shorter term than long-term B board members, if you've got questions, don't feel like you have to wait until next Tuesday to get those answers. Mr. King. Yeah. Just I'm just curious. Every year we get a report on um how how much in reserves we we're budgeting. Is
167there um is there a figure on how much of our reserves that we're putting into our budget? on page one 45 million. Okay. Thank you. All right. Seeing no more questions, we'll move on to the next item on the agenda, which I can't see from the I did have I did have one other thing. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah, Mr. King. Sorry. Yeah, that's okay. Um, so I did want to um I sent an email out today about um looking at um getting getting some funds for some inclusive playgrounds and um I so that's something I would like for us to explore and um possibly allocate some funds um to include for our vote next week. Um and ju just just a couple of things. One one concern I have is the actual law itself.
168Um the the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 states um no qualified handicapped person shall because of the recipient that's people receiving federal funds because of their if their facilities um are inaccessible or unusable by handicapped persons. No handicapped person shall be denied the benefits of, be excluded from participation in, or otherwise be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity to which this part applies. In other words, they don't allow for any excuse. Even if you even if your facility does not um have accessible or usable facilities, they still in other words um you you still have to in other words, you have to provide that uh is what that seems to indicate. Um I I I just think some of our playgrounds could use a an upgrade for um for students with with disabilities, especially
169those that are uh wheelchair bound. Um, I know some of our playgrounds don't even have um a walkway, an accessible uh walkway to get to the playground. Uh, some of the playgrounds the um the surface is incompatible and then some of the equipment is not inclusive. And um I know the law says ADA compliant, but from what I understand the law uh simply means you can um for example a wheelchair wheelchair bound student. Um you're in compliance if the student can just roll up to a piece of you know playground equipment. That's kind of you know the the legal minimum. Uh it doesn't mean that you have to you that they can use the equipment. They just have to be able to go up. We can look into this and get a report. I don't
170think that you fairly represented the state of our playgrounds, but I would be happy for next week to us to get together a report to look at that. I'm not dissing the playgrounds. I'm saying there's a few of them that don't don't have a have a like a paved uh access. Sure. I mean, I think that our team I know Miss Dam's team and Mr. Brown work hard to make sure that happens. So, it's not perfect, but we'd be happy to put together a report to look and see what we can do. Okay. Um, well, I I I plan to bring an amendment to um to add add funding for that. So, all right. Thank you, Miss Bernie. Definitely agree. Um, improving our playgrounds is not only beneficial for our students, it's beneficial for everyone
171at school and um I think inclusion is benefit will benefit everyone in the school. I want to know if we've had a chance to look for grants that would cover that. Um, I know I can't ask direct questions, but if we're bringing amendments to the table, I think it'd be amazing if we also brought at the same time grants that we could look into because from my research, we there's quite a bit out there. Not expert enough to know what we um are accessible, what is accessible to us and what we apply what we can apply for. But I think that would be an amazing way for us to provide for our community. So I I don't know if you remember last year we had added to the budget a grant uh writer and she's
172doing some really amazing work working across all of our teams and one of the things she is actually looking at right now was um more accessible playgrounds and how how look that so we're definitely looking into those and I want to also say I think you guys will really like the new prek um at the the the Gallatin what is it early learning center uh the otter. I think you're going to really love the new um the new playground that we are putting up there. We were very intentional um about when I we were planning that. And so I'm super excited for you all to see that when it gets in I'm sorry if I could add one thing real quick that I missed. Mr. Brown, let me know. So one of the areas and
173this brings us to a question you asked earlier. Um, another thing that we did is, you know, schools have had to buy teacher computers and things like that. Historically during COVID, we used so much err money to really upgrade our mobility because when CO started, we were not mobile at all with teacher devices. So, uh, they were able, we purchased, 1540 MacBook Airs. We're getting on a rotation uh, to lift the cost of covering teacherbased technology from the schools and to rotate those out. And then we're also replacing um principal and assistant principal iPads. Uh they're able to use those when they do their evaluations, but also equally important or more important is safety. It gives them a device where they can look at the cameras, they can look at all the safety stuff wherever
174they are in the building and they use them pretty. So that's an expense that we've been able to shift. It makes sense where we are now as a district to do that from the center instead of asking each school to determine that. It's just a lot easier to manage for Chris and his team. They've done a tremendous job doing that. So, that's another big area that we didn't hit in the presentation. It's pretty important. And I I don't think we hit it hard enough too for our new teacher supports. We are also our new teachers will be be leaving with their devices, new devices in hand, you know, not something that the principal is just trying to, you know, script together and figure out. So, that was a big investment and something we felt like
175was really important for the district. Mr. Evans. Uh, yeah. Two things because I've worked I mean, especially the parks with Mary's Magical Place. Um, I do agree. I think the timing is tough. Like, we're literally looking at when does everything have to be turned in by? I mean, to the state. Budget has to be approved by September 1st, but we've got to get it to the commission soon because they're going to hear it in June. Yeah. Now, I don't disagree. I just think this something hopefully that we could work on over the course of the next actual year. Looking at six weeks is really tough. Um, because I agree. Uh, I grew up in a play on that playground. I mean, you know, but uh and even more so, I'd say this because a lot
176of our neighborhoods are not building are a lot of our new neighborhoods are not building playgrounds. So, you see more people on at these schools on the weekend. Um you know, it's kind of in a weird way. It kind of goes back to like what we're doing with the bleachers. Like everybody just thought you were taking care of it and you were taking care of it. Um and for the most part, our PTO's were for the most part we're building these playgrounds. Um at some point that has to not be the PTO's responsibility. Um, and I think that that takes the I would say that takes us working together on that the course of a year, not next six weeks to do it right. Um, and to establish what that looks like for the future
177moving forward. Um, on the second second thing, uh, I know we lost ESRE funds for school supplies. Um, something that personally I looked at I looked at the school supply list and I and I know this is just more of a conversation. Um, who did did like I'm Sass. Did you like specifically determine that or who determined that school list? Because I personally from just like my wife being a teacher, my sister-in-law being a teacher, and being around a bunch of other teachers, some of that school supply list does not match up to what's really needed, I think. And so, if we're going to take away that funding to pay for it, I think we need to be very descriptive on what we're telling parents they need to prepare for. So, we did have a
178committee that reached out to teachers and principles to form that list. Um, and we were trying to be really intentional about cost and actual school supplies that are needed for academic learning. So, what you'll see reflected on there is teaching materials, not necessarily uh things that they won't use for learning. So, just because you I can I ask a question about what the cost was last year? What was that cost last year from ESER funds for school supplies? Uh, probably 1.6 to 1.8 million somewhere in there. We could I don't have to check with Jamie. I believe it's about 1.6. We can find that. I believe it's around 1.6 million. So, our chamber of commerce is out there. If you guys want to, you know, come together and take care of our school supplies, I'm
179talking to you, Mr. King. Yeah. I mean, I I you know, there's a lot of things in the in our budget that um are going to be worked out over time. Um you know, there's an initial step to get the get the ball rolling. There's plans. Um, I I you know, I think we can do it. I mean, we you know, it's it's not that difficult. Um, it's really kind of a no-brainer. Just we're going to, you know, I plan to bring an amendment um to that that the board allocates funds uh to start um looking at to to rebuild and renovate some some of our elementary playgrounds, make them make them inclusive. Um I mean that's I mean that's pretty simple. So, I think that um the planning of that will, you know, work
180itself out over time as many of our many of the other proposals in the budget. And I just think it's it's something that we can lead the way on. It's um you know, we've heard a lot about innovation and investing and um this is an area that we can innovate uh and invest and I think it's worthy of our of our our doing so and I think we're capable uh financially of doing that. Um, so anyway, like I said, I'll be bringing an amendment for that uh next week. Thanks, M. Yes, chairman. Thank you. Um, Mr. King, will there be a I think it's great. I think it's I think it's wonderful. Will you have a fiscal note tied to that amendment? Yeah. Yeah, I will. Great. Do you can you project? I know we
181gave to Mary's magical. That thing was six million or more. that part. I know we're not talking that scale, right? The equipment that they have for special needs students. I mean, it's just you're identifying like the scale of it, the scale and scope of what I'm not disagreeing. I think we we've got to do this. Just saying we're going to be able to do it without I mean, foundationally um just redoing surface area in the short term. You're not even talking about equipment doing it right with the right engineers. Like I I just think I I look I feel for those parents. I know one in particular parent that's on our Facebook groups all the time talking about how I wish her son had access to be able to play on the playgrounds. I feel
182for her. But we got to do it right because there's going to be more of those kids, not just hers. And I think that to do it right, we have to have a real plan and talk to like and again I just don't think six weeks warrants that being done correctly. You can't get a plan. You can't put an RFP out that quick to get a plan back. Not realistically. All right. Well, I think you know per Mr. King, he's going to bring an amendment next week. It's going to have a dollar amount associated with it. Um I do know with amendments and when you're doing a budget, you're not saying that that money has to be spent in six weeks, maybe it's money set aside that can be used to plan during the next
183year. I don't know. But let's wait till the amendment. Mr. King will bring it. Then I think we can kind of discuss it then once we've got something uh to discuss in more detail. So, um, with that, um, I'm going to move on to the next item on the agenda. Before I do, I want to take a quick 5m minute recess. Um, just to give everybody a quick break. It's been about two and a half hours, so I know we can go a little bit longer. We've got till 10. Uh, we might not need that, but just in case anybody needs a quick break, recess 5 minutes. We'll be back. 23. We'll be back at 8:30. We All right, I'm going to go ahead and call us uh back into order real quick. Um discussion
184uh will be uh regarding teacher bonus resolution is required by the 2025 education freedom act. Before we get into discussion, I'm going to have Mr. Johnson chime in real fast. So, I just wanted to tell everybody that before y'all get into discussion, we ask that you can discuss and add whatever you want to, but according to TSBA and our research, this is what it needs to say in order for us to get it to the legislature for teachers to get the $2,000 bonus. So, we just ask that you not remove anything from it. And with that, I'll turn it over. So, this is to to clarify this is the minimum requirement. This is the minimum requirement of what it needs to say in order for the legislature to process the bonus properly. All right. Thank
185you. Um I have heard a lot from my constituents whether they're teachers or students or parents or community members on this particular um bill and this particular resolution. So, I want to make sure that I clarify right off the bat that this resolution is not supporting the Education Freedom Act of 2025. It is simply saying right now that we are going to take the dollars from the state and give them to the teachers. That said, the TSBA has an anti- voucher sample resolution that I think we should consider adding text from, whether we use all of it or some of it. Um, that would clarify that we believe that the voucher bill as it stands does not benefit our community and it does not benefit our schools. Um, and that overall we disagree with this
186the statements made and the and the bill that was passed this year while also still allowing us to accept the bonuses that our teachers uh should should have. Um, so I'd like us to consider adding at least some of the text from that TSBA anti voucher sample resolution to this um, document. Thank you. Any other comments? All right, seeing none, next item on the agenda is discussion regarding policy 6411 wellness prior to first reading. Comments? Mr. Johnson? Just a quick comment. So our uh wellness and nutrition people went through we had a what was it? State audit law change law change. So we had a law change combined with a state audit and we have went through and removed everything from the policy that is not required to be in there in order to clarify.
187And so this is just it study session appearance. And then you know while I've got the mic I'll go ahead and say that the next one is the second study session appear appearance of the vehicle policy. you all remember from last month. Mr. Lancaster. Uh yeah, this one I had a question because I try to get to where it talks about it in here. Okay. So I I guess my question on this one is we're we're making some changes to this is but this is not related to the recess law that changed because this is that is mentioned in this policy and it's the current wording the new recess law hasn't kicked in yet. This is the word for the current law and my understanding is we will meet the new law requirements next school
188year. Okay. That that's because that was where I was that's coming this summer. Yeah. When I read this it was like elementary schools must offer this and I said wait a minute we just changed the law or they just changed the law coming soon to a board new year. So we're basically doing this and then we're going to do it again. That's fine. I just want to make sure that we're not you know. Yes. Okay. That's where I was because I was reading the time and all that and I was like well this is why we're doing this and then I was like well wait we didn't change that. So yeah, sorry. Any other comments? And I think that was discussion regarding special use of district vehicles if I'm not mistaken. So with that, I
189don't think we have anything else on the agenda, Mr. Johnson. You have anything? Just a reminder to if you haven't given me your director's evaluation, please do. We'd like to review it at the uh May voting session. Perfect. And with that, we are journed.