Stafford School Board 6 14 22

001so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] over the last few years i just [Music] this compensation is [Music] let's enjoy your again first well yeah the next question though um and it's funny because i'm like you said fun about 14 different times and i was like wait i'm trying to follow you i feel like working back and forth but so the additional workers compensation came from claims being filed or is that just the natural like that increase for yeah great question so we've had an increase in employees right and then an increase in claim so some of that's related to just having additional employees so we're going to naturally see an increase in our total workers compensation claims okay um but our workers compensation claims could be you know from a maintenance employee that gets hurt

002on the job it could be from a teacher that's injured you know somebody trips on a curve and so the last few years prior to this year we've had a reserve that has built up a net workers compensation fund that allows us that if we budget 500 it ends up being 600 it's no big deal because it just decreases our reserve from like 800 to 700. okay well that's been depleted over the last few years and now we're to the point that we've got to do an additional contribution there just to keep it in the black basically and do we have that worked into our budget connection yes we did yeah we sure did we actually uh right on our budget spreadsheet hadn't been as a line broken up for that so i was projecting

003forward when we developed this budget i could see that we were on that trajectory of getting those additional funds usually that in health insurance sometimes there's a lag there because we have to see what the trends are by the time you've feel deflected a year and a half in a dance right we're playing a little bit of ketchup um also you know some of this is intentional because we did the premium pay to try to attract more substitutes uh it could be because of coded leave and things like that we have seen an increase in our substitute teacher line um our compensation and benefits with with all said and done are going to have about 500 000 remaining in those lines that's on top of the three million dollars that we budget for that we

004assume that we're gonna have savings so just a reminder that when we build our our budget we take all of our current employees plus the new employees we're adding we project it as if they are all here and then we deduct three million dollars from that because we know that we're not gonna we're gonna have turnover and we always you know typically are gonna hire a less experienced teacher you're not hiring a 30 35 year teacher to come in uh at the top of the scale when we hire it's typically in that zero or five range so you hire them cheaper and then there's sometimes where we have holes where we don't have every position field any questions on the expenditures so when you take the projected revenue shortfall and the projected expenditure savings is

005where we're left at about 1.25 million dollars right now reminding that that is preliminary also wanted to give a brief update on our sr2 and sr3 funding those were the biggest chunks of federal stimulus related to the pandemic that we received the sr2 was 6.3 million we've already expanded 3.1 of that also it was like we took the expenditures and put them up over two years so we have another 3.1 they're you know a little over a hundred thousand dollars remaining in those sr2 funds um sr3 was the largest chunk over 14 million dollars that we received uh before expenditure we've already incurred and then projecting through june 30th roughly about 5.1 million and then once again it was over multiple years so projecting forward of where we are right now with those is another

0067 million which leads us about 2.1 million dollars that is unallocated and as we get the state budget back in the coming weeks uh once the governor signs or makes his adjustments we will um probably come back and have to revisit that balance there there is a more detailed report for both of these it shows how those plans were spent attached to this so just summary 1.25 million and operating fund carryover of that about 250 000 in actual savings right now as preliminary and um hopefully that just kind of provides you some insight as we also look at our actual board meeting as an action item is the um year-end funding list and and can i just just for new board members i've never seen it that alone yeah that is a very smelly mom

007i'm like so my question then too goes back to the you said the remaining savings of 250 is fluctuates up yeah yeah so i am you know trying to be very conservative here that number can go up a little bit you know i actually just got an email from our staff today i think they need a little bit more money and fuel than what we had already allocated because prices have kept going up for so for summer school um so we actually might have to put a few more thousand dollars into that fuel line which means that 250 is coming down on the flip side um in the friday memo j included an excerpt about the ecf grant and some of those uh 1.9 million dollars were our fy 22 expenditures um roughly only about

008200 000 so that's actually going to cause that to go up so as i put you know prepared this um beginning of last week um you know this number has already fluctuated a little bit we usually don't see huge swings this ecf brand is probably going to be the biggest thing you'll see there but still monitoring all those expenditures we're going to look at our final substitute costs come they came through the end of the school year as we paid this next payroll and then we have leave payouts for folks that are leaving us and multiple things that we won't know officially until june 27-28 for the payroll and then we have our non-comp lines that we've got to project all the way through uh chris can you give them an idea of what the

009normal so a typical two or three percent is probably ideal to end the year with and we're at awesome so last year was kind of uh for us typically about two two million to three million dollars is where we're usually in the europe uh last year is a little bit different because of because of code and additional state money that we got we had set aside three million with because of uncertainties so last year we had like five and a half million dollars in capital projects that we were able to find at the end of the year from our 3r list that we normally would not have even been able to do so last year was an extreme on the high end this year was probably an extreme so just curiosity at what point do

010you push the staples panic button or do you not and just roll openly do we hold a bake sale like i don't know how does this yeah i can't just i'm not volunteering either but i'm just saying like because we've already budgeted that one million so we don't want to start next year in the whole of already trying to make up for that million dollars right but we're not in legal trouble unless this 1.2 completely banishes and that's okay and so we've got i mean i'm not intentionally spinning down to try to get this below a million dollars i'm trying to keep that above a million sure maybe even a little bit higher to get some cushion there okay all right i have a question so how does that affect the projects we're looking at

011tonight like the fire alarms okay so um as in years past you guys have approved that list for for us and so as we get into the end of the year come june 30th we take a look at that list as you guys have we tried to find what we can so we're going to find if these if we find additional savings in departments that you know what june 30 they didn't need another 50 100 a couple hundred thousand dollars we stuck that back up in the central office out of their department account because at that point we shouldn't be spending any money on june 30th for this fiscal year it'll be next year then we look at um okay this if we get this number up there two billion then we're going to start

012to spend that down to on these project lists that you guys are the fruits right so when we look at these projects tonight we're looking at them as essentially fund correct and if we did not approve them as potentially funded then they couldn't get done at all but they would also get it done as long as we're secure and we're not going to build credible working feeling just to find them right we're going to cut our cutoffs and you're going to select the projects based on what funding is available so right and so they're not prioritized at 39 000 the playground might have a good shot against that correct potential you know 400 000 for the fire alarm i might not have enough to do that but i might have 30 000 to do the

013rock hill playground especially because we have outside money that that are offsetting our costs they're willing to come to us and put 60 000 towards that yeah it's like puzzle pieces yeah as you have certain amounts of money you can maybe do one project or a different project machines they work yeah we'll get some good news yes you really don't know until again no really we won't know until after june realistically because you have an accrual period of pos that are open past because you may have a billing that occurs prior to the end of the fiscal year that carries over to getting part of the fiscal so you're going to reconcile that accrual period for two months yep even though we haven't paid the bill but we've we've set aside the money that money's

014been committed towards that project even though it's paid in august 1.25 those commitments are already correct all right well dr chase i feel better now than i did last night when i heard it was 250 because now i know it's a million 250. yes so that's and that that's not an obligation so yeah yeah all right no other questions i'm going to turn it over to dr taylor thank you thank you for being there is [Music] yeah i think they were thinking because there's one more seat down there um all right good evening everyone um this is an update to kind of the mid-year data report that we had um really much later than mid-year but around an april march time period uh at the mid-year report we took a look at map and star

015data which are screeners for mathematics and literacy respectively and then we also took a look at our panorama sort of emotional data as well as um some different data um the panorama is administered to fight figures so actually when we timed it last time we'd already seen both the fall and the screen sessions so this will take a look at our third administration of the map third administration of the star some updated discipline data to get us from first semester to second semester and then we will also take a look at some preliminary sll data okay so a few different things we're going to highlight we did definitely feed on epidemic performance from what i hope was kind of a bottoming out last year during the you know coded year of many students being all

016virtual or in a very low face-to-face instructional environment so we did see both in our screener vita um more students meeting their mathematics stroke goals in the spring springer than the winter administration um but overall there is a pretty steady consistency there um again preliminary sql scores you're gonna see from overarching improvements um but we definitely still have some significant gaps in recovery work through the division um low overarching discipline rates exist but you kind of see some perpetuation of some of our demographic gaps and um you will see significant increases from the fall to the spring data that's fairly typical in a school year as you move through the school year some of the kids are really trying to do a number of different intervention strategies with before we get to discipline stages some

017of some of that kind of bubbles up in the spring data so we usually see an increase in that data in this frame okay so moving into our math data so this is our um nwea map we're going to take a look at um grades two through five first um and you can see the percentages that that growth holds there and then i guess what how do we set those goals [Music] so nwea essentially sets them for us um but they have you know a very robust team of psychometricians that does robust study to set those growth goals kind of thing so they basically calculate based on a student's right score the estimate based around norms that that student should should achieve to meet their growth goals so um obviously you know you would hope

018they would then stay steady in their first hotel right so one of the things i'm looking at in my kids score is one not only their writ score of whether they improve but then did their percentile space steady or increase or is their percentile dipping even if their percentile is sipping that's usually when i'm calling the teacher and saying hey this isn't going in a direction i'd like to see even though you know so are you telling me that they could set a growth goal for somebody that would take them below their no okay so let me let me add one piece to that um effectively what they're doing is they're doing a regression study for every single kid and creating a line of best fit that actually stretches them a little beyond where where

019they would have targeted following that line of best fit so that there is growth and they're benchmarking that against the uh annual measurable growth for one year's worth of learning so so it is fairly robust so that if you are crossing that threshold you're actually doing something quite significant right and students are growing fairly significant so even if it looks like it's a fairly low percentage rate it's a pretty robust threshold to cross that to get to that penetrate much more so am i correct we don't have these numbers pre-coded where are we using that because not really good we were at the elementary level we were using numbers you wouldn't know what the percent that meant goals were then i mean it's 53 55 49 is that i could go back in and talk

020to your instructions and see if they have that historical data okay because i just i don't have any uh then i have a question i think just in terms of the growth goal itself is it i'm you know for my daughter she started it like reading level you know say she's at level c she's not but you know at the end of the year is her growth goal to be at f is that what we're systematically looking at here or are like first student are we saying like you should be at level r you should be a t and you should be at z like is that more realistic to the student okay so it's not like a specific age category growth process it actually does take into account where each student starts okay just

021making sure one of the tools um adobe map provides that i am hoping to really start utilizing more vision why next year is a really nice quartile map out where you can kind of see both your kids that are you know below grade level but high growth in your kids that are above grade level and low growth or high growth kind of thing and so obviously the sweet spot is our kids that are above grade level and in the hyperopia right so but if they're below grade level we want to at least see that they are definitely making we're really getting those growth pieces so hopefully we start to move them to the grade level and if they are above grade level but we aren't seeing them growing then that's also kind of a cause

022for okay we've got to differentiate our learning more so so just to go back to what i was asking for so do we do we know for just everybody who's been doing math for years what is the typical percent meeting from other school divisions that have been doing that what what kind of what percentage of students do most school divisions have meet their growth goals in a non-closed same school plant do we have a national effort right right that shows us that data i don't have access to that right now but i'll follow up go get it for you please [Music] is yeah [Music] just all right um same thing for students in middle the school piece there and i'll do the same thing across all the all the levels we'll get that historical data

023for you literacy data as you know we're going to be moving away from the star assessment um this will be the last administration about it and everything will be consistently in wee and back next year but this gives you an idea of grades two through five the percentage of gross goals and the percentage growth goals year end and going forward will these two be the screeners that we use it will so we've been piloting the literacy at a couple of our elementary schools they have found it really useful and um there's just mathematics for math and literacy is the strength so when you use it for both platforms when you pick the camera before it has both pieces on there for you so you can easily track your students progress and they try to get

024very much longitudinally so you can see from the time your kids start second grade through eighth grade how they progress that's nice [Music] all right so some preliminary sol data here um and i i want to clarify that this is very much kind of our assessment coordinations team best estimates right now of what the school quality profile accreditation data will look like um as you probably are aware the state has moved to a growth model for the sol and so um it's a little bit i i can get additional details on it but i don't have the full platform i think they are actually still defining exactly how they're contracted this year probably partially used to roll out in the midst of all the coveted pieces but right now our assessment team has essentially locally

025adjusted this for transfers and recovery and then it does not include at this point growth metrics or um the vita growth piece which is a mechanism for english learner students who do not pass the literacy assessment but who have made sufficient growth on the leda assessment which is our english learner assessment for how they're growing that can substitute as a you know essentially a past scene for the division so question did we lower the sll passing number so like you know like is it like uh what's the score to pass like i know like in a lot of things we lowered the score so it used to be like he says two years ago okay so now we're at like what's passing if i'm taking the test it depends on the test okay so we're

026not and i'm i guess i'm wondering because there's a significant difference between english and social studies just as i'm looking at the numbers and i get their different subject rates but i just want to make sure we're equal across the board on passing level like where we're at like 50. that's not so hard to pass another thing to keep in mind here is different tests are administered in different grade levels um and i also think there's been circumstances where you know teachers have prioritized different content area types of things um well i never like with the eighth grade science sol i mean it's everything you've learned in sixth everything you've learned in seventh everything you've learned in eight so if they weren't there for six they weren't there for seventh and they showed up right

027okay yeah it's kind of ugly and you will see that um and then this is the same thing but broken down by uh elementary demographic group um usually these three categories in this in at the end um i'm probably gonna move this longitudinally towards reporting those separately but ultimately long-term goals i have to do some regression work because the ecd is our economic students who are identified as economically disadvantaged um students who are english learners and are students with disabilities right so we've known as a division for a while that our students with disabilities is our largest staff group um with typically our english learners seeing our you know second greatest um gap group can i ask a quick question on that yeah i should have thought of this what six months ago when we

028are looking at things like this and you say a student with a disability is that any student with an iep or 504 so just even a kid who just is speech delayed isn't necessarily a learning disabled student or physically disabled student is a student with a disability regardless okay any student would play this bill so it is it is overly broad well that's what i that's why i wanted to know like how broadly or or not are we so you get into a little bit of a quandary in terms of what what would be considered small n uh issues in terms of if you broke it out further by disability on the division scale that's maybe not such a big deal you could probably do a whole analysis based on disability code and based on

029individual needs that the different groups of students have but at a school level you may be talking about like three kids yeah they're easily identified in the school community so using a broader categories is a little bit uh easier for for data comparison points between and you know for me not 504 makes it less broad than i was originally anticipating so and the other thing to keep in mind here is you do have certain students with disabilities who are not participating in the sols right so they're doing virginia alternate assessments and those sorts of things so you aren't capturing that entire category from that standpoint but you know so moving into the middle school by content area um that gives you a breakdown of that peace [Music] those numbers different from me looking at 38

030versus 52. seems like a therapy this is elementary this is elementary okay so elementary is 52. i'm just looking at the final column that just seems like a big difference it's the same same students i would in most cases they get a lot of support now when they when they get go from elementary to middle so you get a lot of support something that we need to be looking at this is what we're doing what we're not doing in middle school that that number will drop so i don't know i'm not a statistician right middle school is a tough transition right um i do know that um one of one of the conversations that dr schutz had with our assessment coordinators that she was taking a look at our middle school data um had to

031do around kind of some different dips she was seeing as she was looking at some of the more detailed data and i know that um our assessment team has identified for example um creators in particular um some of our eighth graders who weren't in more advanced classes had particularly low scores which as you were pointing out not really unsurprising because sixth grade year you lost the last quarter seventh grade year you might have stayed all virtual and how actively engaged you were or weren't it's hard to say and then this is really your first you know year that you're great and so wouldn't that be the same situation i kind of took it as sample size as part of the available but what age do students typically start getting those services and have that label

032very early is it really i mean you know you have a whole child signed program like daughter started receiving services 30 days into kindergarten without our interventions or requests i'm just asking yeah predominantly elementary lower grades it looks like it's double the difference is all right so moving on to high school um we have our our high school class rates here and then again by demographic group that's different yeah can you put it back one more time it seems like it goes back up in high school [Applause] i will say that is actually there have been some economics professors that have done some pretty robust studies around middle schools and it's actually very much typical with stan withstanding coven for students for his death in middle school and then come back up in high school

033so it doesn't surprise me at all because that it's with normal patterns normal patterns that you see that yeah would be something that y'all okay so taking really good discipline data again this is very similar to the same types of graphs we saw um but then shifting into what this looks like can you tell me which is the black and which is the kind of dark grey this is the [Music] black [Music] but really short-term suspension long-term suspension and expulsion recommendation [Music] that's [Music] 96 incidents what does that mean 96 students were just one for long term or recommendations do we have any data on so we talked about in suspension we talk about short-term and long-term suspension we have any data that tells us what we do it's maybe just routine class management stuff

034that isn't handled in either of those three ways so that's that's a little tricky yeah there is any mechanism to record that in the classroom per se that's that's consistent across across all classrooms so i find the data troubling on the low end because this year has been a mess so i'm not 100 sure how we ended up being solo with the except that things aren't being you know the exceptions that things aren't being we're not being truthful because it's been a mess let's face it um and so i have concerns that our teachers don't feel empowered to report or don't feel empowered to discipline in the classroom and that's a huge deal moving forward to help them i mean we can't deny from the bus on through it's just hard how do we know

035that it's the best like do we have numbers or is this people telling us that it's well i mean i mean i just i'm just like they're anecdotal the numbers are actually very accurate in terms of consequences that were levy right okay so if you had a student that was processed for a discipline offense and a consequence that was levied that fit into one of those categories that is very accurate you see it present for the year right and so i think what mrs halstead is trying to say is that there there's definitely some anecdotal reporting that um that people may not feel as though there were consequences that that matched up with student uh disciplinary infractions and that there needed to be better alignment and that's not really representative that's right yeah i mean

036i get that i mean i definitely i it just for the board to be announcing that our school system is a mess is perhaps um i think we need to be honest with ourselves that we have we have a long way to go to recover and i don't think that not being honest about it is the way to go either i mean we have bus things that are going on our buses where our bus drivers have been with us for 30 years are ready to walk out the door before anything i mean we can't deny that to save i don't know why we wouldn't want it to be an honest discussion but i mean suggesting that the problems are worse or they're just they're they're i mean how are we assessing that they're worse than

037they were before precoc there's always going to be behavior problems let me let me just point out when we speak any time we speak unless there's some decision by the board we're speaking about ourselves so ms hall said i assume you're saying this is your opinion and certainly my interpretation right of what's been presented sharing that with the board so just say the board is making this statement is somewhat of a you know misnomer so just as you know when any of us speak it's our opinion and then we other people say i agree granted in our schools on the buses all the way through i mean teachers are playing referee not teaching either so i just i just don't think that you know in my town hall we have i'm going to feel comfortable

038to say they are not to feel like they don't want to make a fuss i want our teachers to say that they're having a hard time um feeling empowered to discipline kids who are being sort of i mean we get it some kids go through stuff but i just respectfully say that 96 incidents out of 30 000 students over the course of a year of having to do expulsions doesn't seem like a huge number and my question to you is how many infractions were overlooked i gotta say as a parent i grounded my kid in more than 96 times and that's one and we're talking about thirty thousand that's low reporting right and that's where this is if you speak with educators in the schools they are saying there is something and we're not necessarily

039seeing those numbers so there is something and i don't know what it is and we have to find the disconnect and that way we can address the problem and i do feel like that i feel like everybody is at a has a job there's a point in their job where they're like i don't want to tell anybody i i'm struggling because it's part of my job and i'm gonna look bad i'm gonna get in trouble i'm gonna look stupid and we you know as a community just i'm not great at you know yard work type stuff i don't do outdoors so i bring in the experts to help me with that i you know i get support i need someone else to identify every little thing out there because i'm pulling up roses when they're

040i think they're weeds and our parents our teachers need to know like whatever it is they're struggling with whether it's classroom management whether it's small group work whatever it is that telling us the greater us is not a sign of weakness it's this is how we and right now i think what we hear from both sides of the classroom is that bullying and classroom behavior management seems to be the prevalent issue and because it's coming from parents and students and a lot of teachers probably more than we've heard in history that we as a board are recognizing it more and why we want to address it because normally we hear parents complain about this teacher complain about this they kind of both agree but it is concerning to me that one group is getting a

041lot more attention in terms of discipline than any other group and that's hispanic students well and remember this is so can i ask is this progressive like are can we assume that if a hispanic student is on the first chart or is on the last chart that they were also on the first two because they were made there's a high probability like they're suspended and that's where they went it's not like some of these students could be repeated right but again the same incident right like you're suspended first and then you're expelled no no so there's the final there's kind of very distinctive codes that we put into that um recommended for long term okay there's kind of so you're not double accounting necessarily but he could have been suspended in april and then expelled

042in january correct okay let me just make this comment remember correctly the number of incidents doesn't dictate that you're going to be suspended no it's not it's just severity because that's what we used to do can i also say that i don't know where society learned how to internalize every critique is personal but i would like to i don't think stafford county public schools is any different than any other school system right now this year you know this year alone experiencing all these things i think we need to stop internalizing and taking things personally and just saying it is a systemic issue here but also everywhere else and we can spearhead moving forward to fix it and be the jurisdiction that changes the way we look at these things but i certainly don't want to

043know that i didn't help a teacher feel empowered to come forward and say i'm having these issues because we didn't want to look bad as a system i don't think that's our goal given all of our new strategic plan stuff we're working on i just want to throw that in there because i did see a lot about that but i mean i think these are distractions to learning and our goal is increasing academic excellence right and we can't do that when there's all these distractions and imagine how frustrating for a teacher i get frustrated just yelling at my kids again right the board has a work session in july exciting student code conduct and student disciplinary practices and looking ahead to next year so we're really excited about that so i do want to just

044say one more thing is it possible for us to see um a breakdown of like what these incidents are yes because that would i think also help maybe us maybe figure out where the strength or weakness and our policies are right maybe we're not offering enough targeted interventions for one population or another but i don't know what we don't know what the issues are just that there were issues i guess my my challenges is that these percentages of students incidents for short-term business short-term suspended and school suspension relatively low even if you double that i mean that's still only it's still relatively low i think we do have to be more honest in the recording and we do have to make sure teachers are empowered to do that but we also have to be careful

045that students aren't being disciplined for being who they are like sometimes well that's what cultural competency comes in yeah we ignore that so yeah so assume that it's a mess when it's you know maybe it's no different than any any other school maybe it's maybe it's worse maybe it's better probably yeah i'm only kidding here's the thing though that i think we're missing in saying in sms which is that i don't think we have a very definable system that's been followed it's not been consistent across the board correct each principle handles each school in their own sort of we have a code of conduct no no i get that i get that but some principles will let things i'm not saying it's negative i'm just saying that it's not been consistently applied across the board

046also are these long-term suspensions at elementary school level or are these just high school students it's really just secondary sex right suspending our poor little kindergartner who just is having a meltdown every other day like i'm just saying like i get that we need to be realistic but bringing the data out can make us a better school system and i don't think anybody should be embarrassed or you know not want that to happen so to send your comments around the strategic plan and some of the focus group work we had one thing i heard consistently from staff that i think hits this from two different angles one was kind of the some struggles with behavior this year another side of that however was a number of i also heard quite a bit in focus groups

047about people feeling like they needed additional tools and growth to know how to address things and there are some different things we are having to think through as schools that we put because students have missed so much of the formal types of education there's certain just you know i mean you how to be a student and just write some of the protocols right you see it in kindergarten classes and kindergarten teachers are you know amazing and how they can take kids who have done three years of preschool and take kids with their first day in a classroom and you go in there a month later and everybody you know suddenly knows how to do circle time and walk in a line and do you know do all the things that help kind of create those

048orderly structures but there's a lot of explicit teaching of that but wouldn't it also be wonderful to empower that teacher to handle it so it never reaches the principal level like isn't that sort of our goal the problem is that they're getting a different kid so a seventh grade teacher who's been there for ten years is now a seventh grade teacher with the kid who was used to coming in fifth grade doing show-and-tell comes into seventh grade with cars in their pockets and you're like no so i mean it's just you know who they got this year right is not their normal seventh grade student or their normal 10th grade student and our teachers like we have a lot of young teachers we have young teachers who have very little experience who are second or

049third year teachers who had very little real classes classroom yeah and so we have four which means classroom management their ability to manage yeah i get it right now they were managing dots on the screen and all of a sudden dr jones could hand them their token at the beginning right and say hey in here is everything you'll need to know about just waiting right now i know i know you do and i also know this year may be anomalous i'm not saying that either i'm just saying that i think we need to have our come to jesus conversation about it thank you thank you thank you rebecca queen up for next month there it is on the agenda as such actually oh i'm sorry finally you're not can i go or whatever i love

050how eager you are lionel did you add his baby to your account okay so yeah [Laughter] the guy who is supposed to present for cip is on his way to hustle and deliver his wife's baby is uh a board discussion on uh the proposed amendment to policy uh 1110 which deals with school board advisory committees the board has a couple of times and has asked for some time to to discuss and we have those uh remind me the colors again blue the red purple various various madam chair just to give a brief overview um this is a policy that uh miss vote wright and i have worked with the governance uh committee on in uh reshaping advisory committees uh to have some similar shape and form but also to spread out some of their reporting

051responsibilities and to create a more concrete process for each advisory committees giving them a sample bylaws a sample scheduled follow a sample meeting agenda which just might help with the organization uh behind this we loved a lot of the ideas that came from governance in terms and have incorporated all of that into these policies and regulations about uh you know giving purpose and direction i think one of the big successes that this board has experienced in the past year has been its transportation ad hoc advisory committee giving clear purpose and direction to that committee and receiving a report that was actionable at the end of their term of service was uh was great having those uh recommendations incorporated in quick order um shows a lot of value to the citizens that participated in that advisor

052they were an appointed committee and that i think really helped with the efficacy and getting the ground running because each court member was able to select someone they knew had some level of either interest intellect or both and that made such a big difference so we we feel like this is a big step in in the right direction and it really takes a lot of those ideas um forward and uh we're happy to have the governance committee's endorsement do we have a schedule of when we want start and stop times of different committees or not yet so we actually have the start all at the same time at your organizational meeting in january but their reporting schedule will will be different throughout the year based on different things that are happening in the school year's

053calendar uh for instance in your regulation you do have on the cte in september uh they do so you're now thinking yes and with staggered terms you'll have them operating 12 months not nine months out of the year and with that 12 month schedule the the committee's work will will have a little bit more fluidity because they're going to be reporting at very different times a good example of this is that it may feel early to receive a report from the cte committee in october but the cte committee reporting during cte month in a timely enough manner for the board to act on potential budget recommendations is a really positive timeline for them to report but if they take the summer off and they're not working during that time period that makes it a little

054difficult to do that so in examining some of the advisory committee structures from other school divisions throughout the state um we're a little bit of an anomaly in that we don't have 12-month committees that and we also don't have committees that start with the calendar but you have your organization i like that idea because then we get new members and new members you know in november who they are and they can have their important appointing committee right now new members don't really have an opportunity comes up so yeah i think there's some role so what are we doing just for my own direction i guess we've had our committees come to report um to us now so we are not going to hear from committees until january or to the keep the current committees as

055current committees for just that reason yes you would continue with the current committee structure that you have until january and then in january you would have new committee appointments that you would place under any instructions okay so we would have to get in touch with the members to see if they're willing to continue because technically when we appointed them it was for the school year but i mean hopefully they would be wrong i had questions about and i might have missed prior conversations remembering a superintendent may appoint one upper class high school student to each advisory committee i had online well like that it wasn't superintendent right it was application like yeah everybody else and i feel like some committees um made you better with multiple students um gifted by their committee we've had people

056from middle and high school different cgs sites ib students gifted students not in a program stat students so i feel like and i feel like cte might have the same impact culinary student versus a cyber security student have different understand yeah for students even i feel like we should encourage student participation and honestly it's very you know in having participation in our committees this year was difficult for the in-person piece i mean we had to quote-unquote cancel but we still had meetings we just couldn't vote or say or decide or anything but it's a very difficult thing sometimes for students so i would also agree that allowing more than one um you know would be helpful to the conversations my only advice and this is only advice is whatever you do be consistent yeah because

057you've gone to great pains to have a policy that that has strived to become consistent that mirrors a mid magisterial appointment structure staggered terms and things of that nature if you were to go that route saying something along the lines of up to five student representatives you know or something along those lines or up to three whatever you may decide be consistent but if you want to allow flexibility definitely do that the only the only suggestion that i would have with the superintendent appointment is that we can manage a process a little bit easier than putting that on a board a board member or an advisory committee to have to manage we can definitely with greater alacrity i wouldn't mind a hybrid like if for example if you wanted to appoint someone from your superintendent's

058advisory committee to each of these committees to then be able to report back to you um i'd probably appoint more kids more kids then yeah um and then speaking of attendance this is one of those out-of-the-box ideas and i don't know if it'll work or not um i don't know if you've noticed that sometimes now the trend in ptos is to have like co-presidents or co-treasurers they share the work they get one vote that way if one treasurer can't come the other one is there when we are looking at appointees is it possible to appoint a couple like if i have a mom that i would want on the special education committee and she's a mom so she's got other stuff i'm appointing mr and mrs smith knowing that one of them will show up

059depending on what's going on at home because they are both the parent with the experience that i'm looking for can that help with our i don't know if that breaks any rules governance wise so actually you absolutely can do that with the understanding that it follows the conventions and bylaws of the advisory committee and that there is one vote right like even if they both happen to show up because that's a crazy date night um and they can still share a vote but that way it might help with our quorum issues as well it is absolutely allowable within the realm of policy and permitted just as long as it follows the conventions of the policy i think we need to do whatever we can to make this whole appearance-in-person thing work for the committees because

060i can't imagine anything more frustrating than coming here oh yes i can come in for a second come down here for a meeting and find out i made in the castle yes i know what's in there done that separate education foundation this is but anyway i i just think that that we need to do what we can and it sounds like we've got some time yeah to set it up for them to be able to succeed and have to immediately have to be canceled and and actually if they're having meetings when they're not don't have the form that could be a problem because that's that whole sunshine act and we're not supposed to be meeting you know without an official meeting so i don't know i'm just that yeah i thought it was okay though

061if there wasn't a vote no your advisory committees are actually subject to foreign they are they are also subject to the same so they can't afford to thinking like sometimes i've seen committees have work sessions or like at this time of year just the people presenting will get together and work through and tweak the presentation is that technically an issue that we should advise against they should not do that oh they can absolutely okay because that's an assigned task or a subcommittee work or okay and just like this board does on a regular basis this board goes and does work and then comes back and and you review agendas offline you know june 14 if there are three of us that we have to announce it and we can't meet unless we have at least

062two in person out it's 30. presets we have all kinds so maybe what we should do when we do get these committees is to make sure that they know what the rules are so they're not inadvertently violating anything so glad you said that because they are actually required to be fully trained probably annually i don't think they work [Laughter] so maybe that should be something we cover in orientation when we do the kickoff yeah yeah i think so too it's not happening what do we want to do with the students what do we want to limit one or do we want to expand that now the students are not voting members same thing with with staff if you are there because it's within your adult function to be there not voting but we have some

063staff that live in the disc that live in stafford that apply to be on the committee to represent their vegetarian district and if they're appointed by the board they've been voting in that case if you again follow your bylaws and that is the circumstance that might be a little bit different you may have a little bit more flexibility again with an administrative appointment and maybe that's how we clarify bit better the superintendent may also appoint a non-voting student you know if you feel so sure so so you're saying that that is a school board member you know i could appoint a student from one person and then they're a full member versus someone that if the superintendent appoints someone they're not going to be a voting member is that the intent you do and if

064you're not voting then you don't it's really not that big a deal it shouldn't be not it shouldn't be voting because otherwise like my district could have three votes instead of two but uh i am especially when it comes to advisory committees i want to create opportunities remove barriers and community involvement and student feedback is as important as parent feedback is as important as staff faculty feedback so i definitely don't want to limit it to just one student so our bylaws template is actually silent on student membership but we can add something to that and again it's a template so it's not necessarily this could be anything i don't see it as is negative if they don't vote i mean in a way it takes some of the pressure off them just like the issue

065we had with the student on that gifted committee who had to yeah which should take priority or do something for school but they're not if they're not voting then they don't count against forum and if they don't come it's not so that that is actually something you reminded me that should be in the bylaws is that we appoint people but we should also be the ones that approve the removal of someone well yeah that is the case that is it i don't know i wasn't sure that was mishandled and that was taken care he of them i just want to make sure like if that's an error because of a gap in our policy that we failed again okay good that's easy so if you want the student not to be voting they could be

066indexed because officials are addressed in the violence so then it won't count against us if they're not at the meeting won't happen yeah yeah an exorcist ceo means what and there's no limit on those companies in the conversation like you you get to go to meetings participating in conversation but don't raise your hand don't even let me vote on no a student as our designee on the committee and they that would be a full voting member with the responsibility to report it and all that be there right i mean i understand what you're saying i think it's nice that it doesn't count against us if they don't show up but i think it's a honor to be appointed by the superintendent i want all my rights i don't want to go and be appointed by

067the superintendent and then not be able to vote that's how i would feel so i'm just saying we're not right on that one but whatever the consensus of the court is interesting yeah we just kind of come to a consensus and work it out and then you can have a minority report as well i've seen that in some you know where everybody was really big especially if that student gets direct line to the superintendent and everybody else is going to come through us they usually vote to improve the minutes yeah that's that is it okay that's a phone yeah like they don't like the actual reporting thing that's just decided by the committee that's not you know to issues no yeah just a minute i mean i it doesn't matter to me i just don't

068want these students that are appointed to feel that they're letting the committee down if they don't come because they're putting their academics first we've done what they're checking to do and it should it should be that way that's all i'm trying to and and this what happened this year yeah really brought this to the surface yeah and think about the time for the student too it would be one year term i think one year yeah because we just don't know where they go from last year um unless you graduate yeah just just for clarity um just so that uh um i i know where my boundaries are how many kids are giving me on each of these commitments right as far as just one okay sounds good but we can say that the committee meetings

069are open foreign so that's my prevailing question here i think so we appoint people right to be on the committee and then we have we notoriously not gotten a big surge in applications for people like how are we marketing these committees outside it depends on years yeah it's it's your phone book i'm not i'm not marketed as well i don't know about it um again what i would recommend is and that you follow a consistent process so one of the things that we've developed is a blank application template for somebody who is interested in being a part of an advisory committee select which advisory committee which magisterial district you're in why you're interested in that will you attend meetings okay okay that goes to you as the magisterial representative of that district and you have

070many um applications to evaluate if you meet somebody and you encourage them to fill out that application you have many more applications to evaluate it may be a good idea to come up with a process where you you talk to them you see what they feel about certain issues that aligns with your proclivities or not and that's maybe the person that you move forward at the point or maybe not but i think it's our responsibility to collect lots of names and some background information for those that are interested or those that award directs to their interest and we provide you with that information as a baseline for some recommendations or some suggestions that you evaluate those recommendations or suggestions based on you know your interests and abilities and then make a decision on your appointee

071based on that you know when i was on giving advocacy school provides the applications yes and we then choose from people who are because we need like people but i have recommended people then they decided not to do it sure you know those things do happen so and here that i did vip in 2019 there were over 30 of us but i mean when it got to the end and they were you guys had to make a special exception because there were so many of us but by the time we got to doing the report there were only 10. so i mean that happens like going out i mean it's not necessarily going out and finding people although you can sure it's really just getting the application well i think it's like you see that

072you've got no for it to start applications it is yeah that'll give you time when school starts to be getting the word out getting the interest and then yeah because it's very hard in september your principals yeah yeah yeah that's great yeah you know and you should always go to the pto meetings to talk to them and you also may just know people yeah find a complainer in your district and get them involved that's next up is everybody's favorite topic growth management i don't wanna oh sorry that's it what was i doing all right my mother would really appreciate you know um [Laughter] oh she just say that out loud just tell them to be quiet they're getting giddy i'm trash that's right [Laughter] improvement plan and our 3rd infrastructure list i'm going to go

073over some high level items it's about projections and why we're even just discussing the um cip and then we'll spend most of our time really i'm going to try to breeze through to get to the main slide which we'll talk about kind of what is on our cip funding sources so um first of all you know we need more capacity and we need more funding to do that and we need to look at a different approach which is what the communication has kind of been over the last six months or so um we're slated to grow from today over the next 10 years 5800 students which i think is a huge number over the next 10 years that's like so in the cip we have we land we need buildings we need renovations and we

074also have our 3r list to try to do our repair replacement renovations so just high level for some of our newer school board members the cip outlines our large construction project over ten years we submit that request to the board supervisor reported supervisor of the tech cip and the april may time frame um as i just mentioned the cip includes those large capital projects in addition to our 3r list which is adopted this year they take our three on those two yeah it doesn't mean it's all fun dude right right sure but they review that three hour list they really kind of have set funding for our three our list and we try to accomplish what we can with that funding though it's not just a couple years ago it was just a like uh

075maybe a floating member and then last year they didn't officially place a school staff member on on that committee so that you'll always have a crc yeah you know what they consider what our city we'll do i don't follows just remind me i'll make sure we do that this friday so um the trc is just a committee of both staffs and they take all the capital projects from the schools and the county and they rank them based on a matrix that the county provides you know based on hey this project like safety scores you know capacity you know different things and they rank them all so this is not a new slide but i love showing it because it's a great picture of the last 10 years and also looking forward for 10 years so

076you'll see our you know two percent growth pretty much each year each year in enrollment up until the coconut year we saw that dip we wanted the only if not the only school division in the state that not only made up all the students that left it and surpassed where we were private and then and then growing at two percent roughly over the next ten years it's two percent each year and that's where those 5800 students come in this is another way to look at our growth of where we stand right now today and where we would be in 10 years so in elementary almost 3 000 students were at it we need three elementary schools just to be in the same position we are right now today in 10 years so you're saying three

077school elementary schools will get us the full 10 years or will we be behind yeah right now so we'll be behind so what would be what would be the prettier picture five four or five yeah okay we need how many do we need today two or three times i think we need to add minus three so with that we're going to be minus six in ten years if we had none we're actually i think we have enough middle school is about about one school that we're adding but we middle school is the one area we have a little bit of excess capacity so i don't want to say that we have to add a middle school in the next 10 years we just have to add a new drew yeah drew will give us what

078we will fix and then in high school like what that's already at vip basically adding about one high school's worth of students high school six that's that's definitely the ten year high school seven is outside of the world yeah correct that's so in 10 years who's ever sitting in the hartwood scene is going to have to redistrict kids if we don't get four festivals there will be no more art and classrooms as well but this is what the county adopted um in in late april for their cip or further what's included for schools projects in the cip i'm not going to go through each one because it but one of the areas we made improvements is they didn't set aside and said one um i think these projects should be on a bond referendum which

079is not something we've done in the past the other big changes were they didn't provide us the additional money needed for high school six and the new parkwood elementary school rebuild up to open in august of 2025. but it's elementary 18 and 19 not opening until 29 and 31. confirming that high school six offset cost of the road development yes but that's not our estimate right but isn't our estimate higher than the cost of high school six no it's the total of these two it's about 165 including all the costs combined they came up on there [Laughter] this is this is preliminary also this is just for discussion you know we still have had some time we've got some more work sessions on the books to discuss the cip what those priorities are right now

080this is a kind of starting point for that discussion for the board when you say staff you mean their staff not our staff no this is there okay right now they're not trying to prioritize our projects we're trying to develop what we're going to propose on our next cip to the board their their bond proposal seemed like all of our extra projects like fleet services and the fine arts center yeah so our top two projects are the ones where technically have already been approved funding that we're in that phase where we're design phase and construction starting very soon so once we get into that one-year mark in that design they consider them approved hey you guys start moving forward with them these ones were outside that outside that window but what we did was try

081to group projects that we thought would be successful on bond growth so but but here's the thing i'm just like trying to and tricia explain this i thought that it was the school board's responsibility to say what we need and so i i mean you know we're definitely gonna have a conversation about heartwood but we have not voted in them for hardwood correct to be the next right you know and the problem with heartbreak being and i'm not arguing about yeah i'm just trying to verify that yeah the school board they are telling us what we have to do rather than our saying this is what our need is our design project is really a generic elementary school right it's not a heartwood elementary school or an elementary school prototype okay so it's applicable to

082any of those i have a question just on funding not necessarily though it might be site specific that's what i was going to ask yeah i mean are they basically saying we will fund a school in this district or serving these students or what they indicated at their at their approval budget approval meeting and they included the cip as part of that they did specifically say a hardwood replacement again that's part of this process this board has not voted on that so there is a discussion that needs to happen both here and there to come to consensus about the projects that move forward to that point we we do know that there are elementary school needs and have begun the process to solicit an rfp for a prototype design of an elementary school that that

083can be adjusted to certain properties whatever they may look like but agenda generally have a similar design when you go through many of our elementary schools now they work prototype designs and you you can walk the halls of one school and it feels eerily familiar to the schools down the street and that is that is very much a effective cost-saving measure and we're we're we're approaching the next elementary school whatever that looks like with that in mind that we would not use the same that set of plans just once we would use that set of plans but we can't say okay the heartwood elementary school is actually going to go in george washington district or is it an additional es 18 additional seats we have not decided that right the thing is is that and

084trish and i've had this conversation and i heard fab had this conversation that we have a three on three coming up in july and one and both separately but on the same page have said normally our cip conversation isn't until december but we've said we need it sooner seven on seven seven on seven all seven of us sitting together because you know this was there put it together but this was not and it may this may be what we vote on it may not be what we vote on but it needs to be a decision that we make for what's best in our numbers and in our situation and so in theory again yeah this is a new board member question we could say no we do not want a heartwood rebuild we're good with

085what we've got i won't but not like maybe can't we can't just take the money and not do that they know that the numbers are not specific money that we borrow whether it's outside of the bond if we want even if we're using bpsa funding we have to get it authorized they have to hold a hearing and it has to be approved but we're what we're missing here is this dialogue yes this communication 100 handed down right this is what we're going to do without any input from us to express our needs and really i mean we had drew as our first priority under the high school six yeah and then we have the other schools that and this is not about heartwood yeah specifically but it's about seats yeah and i guess that's my

086question which is the discussion we'll be having but but this is a discussion this board needs to have and we need we need to at least make clear you know what our priorities are and how we define the needs of the school system enough they just had one board member overzealously say this is what we they need and that's what i'm trying to find a conversation when we talk about structures not people not students but what is the difference between a heartwood elementary replacement and elementary school 18 because heartwood 600 because well but heartwood doesn't go away so the building still exists so either way it is still structure 18 zoned for elementary reservations so yeah there's there's another million dollars or shouldn't but i'm just but it's part of the conversation because the number

087of elementary schools that you're keeping online does matter because for every year that you keep some of your aging infrastructure online the cost starts to go pretty pretty significant so true is going to have a significant cost over the next five years heartwood is going to have millions of dollars worth of costs just like drew over the next several years just to keep up so it's going to cost you one way or another the question is how do you want it to cost you and what what is the best mix of projects trying to get that cost to shake out and i think i was trying to figure out why like i remember and again i was a citizen not a board member but with moncure part of the deal with rebuilding monk here i

088believe was turning over old montcure that was part of the map and i didn't unless i missed it that did not happen here they're asking for old heartwood back no no no but it didn't monster right so like the property was bought to be a whole heck of a lot of money and i don't think it's turned out to be what they thought it was going to be i do not disagree but the fact that they didn't even ask for this back well yeah there's still costs i have a question so the heartwood rebuild is 54 million and i'm reading that correctly the proposed high school or elementary school 18 is 51 million is the difference in the price the cost of raising the original heartwood um no some of it is land cost so

089high or elementary school 18 we potentially have proper land and it's also going to depend on the year that it's built if heartwood is replaced it's not going to be replaced on the site property because it's not well correct correct which is but this is opening a year later um but doesn't need land you see elementary school 19 is even higher than 18 but that's because what is our priority and how do we propose to fund it um now the referendum is a completely new option that's available and i think it's a good you know choice to have but we as a coordinator decides now the difference between a bond referendum and funding is it's an unknown you're not going to know until that goes for the voters that would concern me about putting a

090top priority that we need to have built in a bond referendum and we're back to ground zero and we still need it so it's just something and and i think we need a whole discussion before we meet the 717 and yes as ms randall said we're you know we're pushing for a seven on seven between the boards to discuss the cip and i think we need to have a civilized discussion about how this all came about i was pretty shocked i think we need to be censored to the fact i think it was someone said in 20 i think it was 2015 or 2017. like 65 of the individuals who voted in stafford county do not have students so i'm not putting any of those schools on a bond if it were me because you

091know sometimes different part points in your life you don't you value education or public education and you don't you know um one of the things that's just it makes no sense one of the things that we've said though because the way that they brought to they again they brought to us it was not us is they brought it almost as two referendums there's a school referendum and there's a county referendum and what we're saying is we are one county so let's put theirs what's that yeah let's do one referendum with our projects and their projects to all the voters because we are one county whether you need a fire station or an elementary school or a library or library roads whatever i think it just needs to come and be presented to our public who

092has children don't have children but are all taxpayers this is the needs of our county as a community supporter don't support but that's what we're asking for but in thought but we need to have our own conversation and have our own strategic plan before we come to the seven on seven and that's where you keep planning for just in case and you can't put anything you virginally need right away on a bond because you don't get that money time it does take time um so just a quick refresher on this um let's say a bond referendum passes in november of 23 okay you you won't be able to start raising funds for that bond until uh july of 24 and you will spend the better part of that year selling bonds and you won't receive

093a lot of the proceeds for that until much much later into 24 possibly into the spring of 25 so you're accessing funds for the first time from that referendum almost two years later actually a year and a half from when you when you voted on the bond so it's it's a it's a considerable amount of time your bond referendum is quite literally playing the long game and should be the the latter projects in your cip unfortunately you don't have any ladder projects in your cip their own right network projects that's the real struggle is trying to trying to prioritize for what could be later when in reality later is now and i like excuse you know most because for me it's these may not be the seats we wanted them to approve but as a

094constituent as a parent of students i'm honestly grateful shocked that they approved any seats in the next two years um because that is different than the board of supervisors i've been watching for the years i've been paying attention because it was like an eight or ten year time frame before we were going to add any more seats but the risk is is that if they dictate to us what they think our needs are and that's what they're liable to tell us when we come back and say we still have construction needs to say that's too bad we gave you an elementary school i agree but you know at least we could be grateful we'll still let them know the same 100 that's how our conversation is great start you're starting to see we've got a

095mom on the board we've got a teacher on the board over there like it is time to really reinvigorate these conversations because where you know we're a new board over here their new board over there new superintendent new county manager like clean slate fresh start these 500 seats or 300 seats are you know going to help for the moment but we have 10 years of students to find seats so why don't we want to have a fourth session as our board as our board just our board we think about that and missy can get back to us but that's what we need to do we need to talk about you know air priorities air timing and you know what whether we our bodies want to consider something on the bond and then we can make

096our proposal for them and then we can respond to what was approved just because it was a food for funding doesn't mean we have to just say oh thank you very much you know if we think we need something else more so think about that we need to we need to work right now at 6 15 says he needs 10 minutes so if we give 10 minutes and we can have a five minute break before we start our meeting at 6 30. otherwise we can if we want to continue this discussion we'll miss our five minute break so no okay is that good later yeah yeah so um so i know i just tagged this so i'm gonna i don't even think it'll take 10 minutes but you guys will have a long three r

097list is attached you know two-year the work session agenda this is just a summary of showing each year emphasizing the unfunded column this is 61 percent funded for the entire 10 years with quite a large sum of unfunded this is an accumulative it doesn't add each year that's for each year so in 2024 when we're unable to um fund these nine million dollars that's going to have to get pushed forward to the next year so in 2022 uh 2021 we were able to be able to fund with you know as we talked about in our year presentation we funded about five and a half million dollars for the projects not as much this year uh so um next year we're gonna have some items we're gonna push the 2024 [Music] the kids all going back

098into the cafeteria which is not happening has happened all year that's going to probably change some needs or things that the cafeterias has that come to his attention and are there is there enough money to cover that or is that also being done he has uh we have pretty good nutrition fun [Music] and we'll probably even be coming back and say hey we need to approve some more projects to spend that even more down well i just want to make sure you know they didn't have uh the lunch was put it brought to the classroom and now they need a a cooler for the milks out front you know whatever you've been doing that all year trying to replace them i will complete honesty there's back orders right we're waiting on stuff that we ordered

099last august or dishwashers and stuff okay and that money can only be spent on nutrition correct so you come to us and say okay i need we want you to approve 400 000 and we're like well gosh we'd really like to do that fire alarm right now yeah those are monies unless it's in the a kitchen of that reserve money nutrition fund is generated because of the federal reimbursements we got for each of the meals and it has to be okay thank you just kind of already talked this a little bit but just looking ahead um maybe we need to have a work session actually before august and what we put it not on here is adding another work session with the board of supervisors discuss that would you also recommend that before september before

100we vote i think you need to have that discussion before you fall over well i'm not sure i mean if we're gonna really vote on our needs what is the point about meeting with them because they're just gonna tell us what we can't do you know that we have these so we should be more certain of what we have i think we should i think we should know what our needs are and then have a meeting and then we can advocate for our needs and they say we can't do it well that's a conversation right need to we need to advocate with the community and get them on board so they understand that we can't just you know i i can't tell you how many times people say to me i don't understand why you

101guys are building schools gee i never thought of that good idea i don't think they understand the process and and i think it's important for us to make sure that they're advocating and if you go to bond it is a campaign it is a campaign it is all of us fully it's political just a couple things to point out um lionel will complete his enrollment projections end of october early november for the just updating the 10-year projections and we'll share that with the school board before we send it over to the county but um the county kind of sets the deadline that they want to buy a certain date for the trc to include that in their consideration and obviously additional uh joint meetings and then april of 2023 which is when the county would

102adopt a cip and most likely go this route set which projects would be and then with miss randall and i would like to see a seven on seven meeting prior to the one in early december i think we still need it early december one because that's after it's been to the cip well i think we should do it after september 13th we've already made our decisions and it was changed that some of us couldn't attend and it wasn't it wasn't so much a meeting it was just a little lecture it wasn't there was no reciprocity there or even the one that we went to where they didn't talk to her yeah oh okay i didn't that was supposed to be a meeting that was a meeting oh i was very confused by that okay i

103didn't i thought i was watching that was maya so this is just a recap slide so you know we're looking for additional funding to address the capacity that we have so i think the big emphasis here is adding a work you know i think a work session to discuss what school board is uh needs are and where we want to fall on that large capital project list but then in addition to that you know either keeping the scheduled meetings we already have with the board of supervisors or adding additional ones after you guys adopt a large faculty if we don't get these schools as we need them then we're going to have to have some kind of additional capacity whether it's trailers or we need a policy or we have let's do that so yeah

104we need a policy for that but we might want to be talking about that yeah absolutely which is which is why that one slide we already spent some time on elementary schools like i think we can all agree that we've got capacity issues right now and right now adding three years and ten years we're in the exact same position we are right now if not worse than we are right now with just adding those three elements well and you know i mean it's it's hard to break into this i feel like if we don't have more students and fewer schools than we need we're just pushing that off on transportation and then that becomes even a bigger problem because there's so many variables with fuel prices and traffic and parents driving and car all of

105it so when we have that conversation and when we make that potential policy which probably should be inflate like that should be a good thing to do even if we were to get this for future boards yes if they come up against a the same type of situation i would also love to see it clearly stated and dr taylor i know you and your people will make this super great graphic that will show parents this is when we would enact a trailer right super great yes um this is when and this is what a trailer means like for us yes but i want i want parents to also understand what that means when my kid gets a trailer listen this is important i want parents to know if my kid gets a trailer this means

106you know maybe we have to have people walking them from outside into the bathroom in security like all those things that are entailed i want parents to know that and not just think oh there's just one classroom in the trailer it's not a big deal because it actually is uncomfortable sometimes for students and everyone else who works there and it doesn't flow and it does mess with you know the cohesiveness of the school and i think parents should absolutely know this is what we're choosing for our students so if i can just uh agree with that and add to it in speaking with rocky ron um the principal he said it's it's super stressful for him because you know like he's like waiting on that walkie so if he's trying to do something and someone's

107like hey kids gotta go you know it's like is somebody gonna answer do i answer it nobody's answering it okay i'll just answer it so we're yeah i mean security the sooner we can get ahead of the policy on that the better off it can be and that will also put us in a good position when schools come in and ask for them that we can say okay do you meet these thresholds it's kind of like the trc where they have their safety threshold their whatever so is that something we want to to ask the superintendent to move forward with yes yes i want to ask my super great superintendent to do that super great graphics 45 seconds and then we're moving into our break times i just wanted to kind of expand on the

108messaging you want parents the greater messaging to the community needs to be tax dollars are going to be sent to solve this problem your choice is to spend tax dollars on building a school or to spend tax dollars on buses trailers fencing sewage lines increase security because of that yeah and the added burden to your kid's school because they're at 122 capacity and now and and that's a viable choice and maybe there are probably a library here cafeteria their art right but that's how we need to map out the choice not building school doesn't mean we're not raising taxes we're not spending money it's you are choosing then and that's even the message between us and our supervisor by not building you are then choosing for children to go to school in trailers to be

109on longer buses to and whatever seven day rotation versus the five-day rotation of specials and oh i've got a lady who calls me all the time because she thinks our kids should we shouldn't be building we should be going to school year round okay so nobody cares starting again at 6 30. and i'm sure you have a quorum do what do you want to do the agenda first do anything madam chair there were two items i wanted to remove move from consent to action should i do that now or should i do that when we get to the consent yeah so i wanted to move 6.03 and 6.04 to action in addition i need to move item um 9.05 to item 6.09 which is um consent for consent for review and yeah and we move

110to action deleted from consent and 9.05 which is the production of certain amendments to the consent but the it's being sent to consent for review right consent for review yes first of all okay is that clear so is that a motion doctor chase yes okay any other changes or proposals no all in favor all right all right wait a minute let's back it up guys um cast your votes on the on the agenda thing uh-oh i think all right i'm having a little problem here all right motion carries unanimously i move that the school board convene a closed meeting pursuant to section 2.2-3711a1 of the code of virginia to present an annual performance evaluation to the superintendent second passes unanimously do you think what do you think i want to let the people know what

111our estimated time for every turn here is it's about 30 minutes yeah right we expect to be back no later than seven o'clock because most of the workers of the code of virginia i move that the closed meeting of the school board of stafford county on june 14 2022 be certified by adopting the following resolution now therefore be it resolved that the school board of stafford county hereby certifies that to the best of each member's knowledge one only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements were discussed in the closed meeting to which this certification resolution applies and two only such business public business matters as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered by the board second madam clerk would you pull the board please yes we

112have dr chase agree miss guy agree miss halstead agree miss healy agree miss randall agree mrs sigmund agree and dr warner agree i'm sure emotion passes okay do we have a motion yes madam chair i move that we amend the superintendent's contract to extend the reimbursement of moving expenses date by 90 days second second all right motion by dr chase second by miss randall cast your votes tally the votes motion passes unanimously all right would you please stand for the pledge of allegiance 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 do we have a motion with respect to the consent agenda and just to remind members former items 6.03 and

1136.04 have been moved to action and former item 9.05 has been moved to consent for review purposes so we have a motion motion to approve the consent agenda okay motion by dr chase back second by dr warner any discussion all in favor please say aye all right cast your votes kelly the votes motion passes unanimously all right do we have any other things to vote on no good um madam chair i do have a couple of personnel announcements oh all right thank you madam chair uh i'm delighted to report that we've made several administrative appointments that were part of your personnel packet this evening the first two are not here because it is summer and they are getting downtime and some r r with their families but we are excited to announce them nonetheless and

114we'll bring them back at the next school board meeting to meet the board in the community formally the first is our new principal at kate waller barrett is rachel novak she is an assistant principal at wide water elementary school and we are just delighted to welcome her she's an outstanding member of our team right now and she's going to make a great impact at kate waller barrett and we are just thrilled to have her so even in abstention let's give her a round of applause uh for our next appointee who is not here but we'll meet again next month um spotsylvania's loss is our gain we would definitely like to welcome dr chandra excuse me shonda collins ritchie who will be our assistant director of core curriculum support she is the current principal at brock

115road elementary school in spotsylvania county we are delighted to welcome shonda collins-ritchie thank you dr and i've just got a few more and fortunately all of our friends are here with us uh this evening uh the first person uh to be announced and and when i call your name if you could come to the podium and say a few words when i'm done with your biographical information that would be great i'd like to welcome michael bolling as our director of academic programs [Applause] mr bolling joins stafford county as the director of academic programs he is currently the assistant superintendent for learning and innovation at the virginia department of education in addition to his experience with the vdoe he has served as the executive director of code rva regional high school in richmond virginia mr bolling

116has also worked with curriculum development instruction pacing and professional learning in both chesterfield paluten and the virginia department of education separately he began his career as an in education as a mathematics teacher in hanover county mr bolling holds a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and a master of teaching degree and secondary education both from virginia commonwealth university congratulations and welcome mr bolling thank you dr taylor members of the board i just want to say i'm honored and so excited about the opportunity to join stafford county public schools and to serve every child in the county to the best of my ability so thanks so much [Applause] monica cortez foreman come on up monica cortez foreman will be joining the department of human resources and talent management as our assistant director for professional learning she

117is currently a lead facilitator for stafford county public schools in this position she has developed and trained every staff member in the county at one point or another miss cortez foreman has collaborated with multiple departments in developing a division-wide assessment rubric for our open educational resources she joined stafford county in in the teaching and learning as a teaching and learning facilitator for secondary english prior to this position miss cortez foreman was an english teacher and a secondary esau teacher and english liaison in spotsylvania county miss cortez foreman has also worked with the northern virginia writing project at george mason university monica holds a bachelor's degree from arizona state university and a master's degree in education from the university of phoenix glad to see you again thank you for sticking with the team miss foreign [Applause]

118thank you so much for the opportunity i'm really excited to see what we can do in this new position with this new role and i hope that you guys will be proud of what we produce thank you so much [Applause] joining us again from spotsylvania county is megan stiffler megan stifler come on down megan stifler just finished her 14th year in education with spotsylvania county public schools she has worked as a classroom teacher in multiple grade levels and in content areas and at two different middle schools additionally she has pursued opportunities to hold several teacher leadership positions and has served as a coach a 504 coordinator and even clinical faculty at the university of mary washington she joins team stafford as the next assistant principal at brooke point high school her educational background consists of

119a bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary studies from the james madison university a master of arts in teaching from james madison as well as an educational leadership certification from the university of mary washington she's a passionate advocate for building relationships making connections and ensuring that every student is afforded the opportunity they need to foster passion for lifelong learning finally she is a proud wife and fellow educate of a fellow educator and the mother of two elementary age children we are delighted to have you ms stifler thank you for joining us congratulations thank you dr taylor um i look forward to the opportunity to serve the brook point community um and becoming a black hawk thank you okay real quick miss stifler come on back uh i think you brought a guest with you yes i do you

120want to introduce your family sure that is uh derek stifler he is my husband and math teacher i'm pretty sure we have math openings yeah thank you madam chair that concludes this evening's administrative appointments thank you and welcome to our new staff we look forward to starting the new year in just a short time you a little time to get your feet wet before we bring everybody back that brings us to item seven special presentations we have two special presentations tonight the first is from the cip advisory committee with their report and recommendations for the school board [Music] all right good evening uh chairman healy school board members dr taylor i want to thank all the members of the cpac committee this year for their service to the community and this year's cip chair mr

121adam milsap he's unable to attend tonight's meeting due to very important family matters and i believe he's slated to increase our enrollment by one student so that's why he couldn't make it and lionel has already added him to our projections yes got him in got him so congrats to the millsap family and then i do have the honor tonight of introducing miss beth faber she was the secretary of the cpac committee this year um just to give you a little bit of background i kind of cheated i looked at her bio she's got 17 years teaching experience in the past so she brings a very she brought a very different perspective which was very refreshing to the group so in her presentation tonight she's going to talk about potential reforms to our land acquisition process

122so this i personally believe this presentation is really timely given the meeting we had about an hour ago with cip and schools and we need land for it so um best favor thank you lionel dr taylor and the school board good evening it's nice to see you here um so i'm beth favor and i'll be giving this presentation tonight okay and you say a lot of practice and prep work and so um we know we need land you all met at your last meeting at 4 30 and i saw that you've already updated the projects list that's effective june 14th and i do believe the first few items on the list are schools or school replacement so we know we need schools and we need to increase capacity for our student population in the future

123so the cpac this year looked at ways that we could procure land in stafford county so that when the need arises for new schools there are already options and solutions ready we already have four sites in stafford county that are available for schools we have two that are owned and two that are proffered and you can see that list right there but we do know that we need more land for the schools that we're looking at building in the future so currently stafford county looks for land donation profit sites land purchases and condemnation to get more land within the district for more schools however with the population clusters that we have in the growing community we don't have enough site areas that we can purchase land from right now we know that there's a lot

124of developers in stafford county and they hold a lot of that land that is available terms of it not being used right now but it's not available because it's slated for houses so how can we get more land when land is a commodity in stafford county right now so looking at other school districts in fairfax county they have a lower area that they build their schools on so instead of building a school wide they're building their schools high and so that's i consideration that might be looked at in the future also looking at what type of schools we need when we build it so if we're building a school for a special population and we can't fit 20 students in a classroom because it's only a classroom that is built for a special population where

125there would only be 10 students let's take that into account as we're choosing sites for those school buildings to be built on also just making sure that we're looking at this on a yearly basis and not just when schools are coming up to being built that we need a school where can we build it having that land bank ahead of time would help and if we do have a land bank being able to almost rent them out into the parks department or other organizations to use that land in the meantime would help bring in some revenue while holding on to the land that we would need in the future also co-location of schools putting a elementary and a middle school right next to each other middle and high school next to each other would be

126one way to help putting additions on to schools that are already in existence instead of using learning cottages we can just build on and that's going to decrease the amount of money being spent on a brand new school by just building an addition and so we know that we need land and we're not the only county that struggles with where to get land from but we do know that we are going to need land in the future as long as our stafford county population grows we need more schools so there's no one direct answer for this it's a unique situation but there's a lot of options that are out there to look at and consider so that as those schools are going through the process of getting built we already have the land ready for

127them and that part of the equation is already taken care of the check mark is done and we're just looking forward to building the school and getting the students in the seats wow do you have any questions any questions dr chase no i i just wanted to make a comment i really like that idea about reevaluating how much land we need for a school because we are we were set in almost in concrete and how much land we need but if we look at other schools and they need significantly less and one example here in stafford was when we built shirley heim it was built on about half the land that our you know our model says we need and i haven't really heard um issues coming out of that so i that's that's very

128creative i mean it seems like a simple idea but nobody's ever brought it up before so thank you thank you i mean among these other things that that's just what strikes me because with land being so precious it we we need to you know really evaluate how much how much we do need um ms randall did you have um yeah i just was curious did you have um you were talking about maybe if we have a piece of property using it for you know loan it or rent it out to parks do you know of any other communities that do that i do not but that was a great question and i would love to look into it and get back to you okay perfect but thank you i do know that we allowed um

129mary washington to use cliff farm for cross-country running at one point and i don't know if they paid us or not but yeah right and doesn't stafford high use clip farm as well right different different times okay i can ask thursday parks and rec meetings i will actually i i don't know if my miss guy feared anything to say no i thought it was really good i agree when she started thinking outside so i i don't know if i should go on the record then as saying that um we should probably start now planning because we want to put money aside every year for just fixing stuff that's broken um but also what's broken is not having land to put a new school on um so when you guys were looking at all this was

130there any other sense of anything that the schools could do as a system to support that finding money doing things like that like how do we all work together to keep us actively interested in i shouldn't say interest that's the wrong word actively involved in understanding the complexity of the number because we can focus on one like one or two things right we already know we need the schools but we're worried about the fact that we have all these developers coming in and building all of these houses bringing us all these kids that we can't teach because we're worried about finding we will teach them well you know what i'm saying like a challenge a huge challenge no but i'm saying like so any ideas that we can put forth to help us even help

131our communities understand the intricacy of maintaining these multiple huge pots of money that have to go into maintaining this school building the new schools oh you can't build a school in the air it has to go on the ground not yet not yet i know right so jetson's had it right that being part of cpac this year has definitely opened my eyes to a lot of those intricacies that yes i thought well it's stafford county school board we just build a school i mean it's right across the street is where the board of supervisors are just ask them for the money they'll give it we'll build the school no problem but the very knowledgeable members of stafford county who sit on the cpac as well as they explain those intrica intricacies to us about how

132it's not just a cut and dry that we have this land crawford but that doesn't mean we actually have that land we do but we can't build on it right now um or the land that we actually do have the other aspects of it that might not make it suitable for building a school on it so what are the other options for using that land that stafford county schools needs as well and so one way of getting more people on board i think it's just getting the word out and encouraging more just citizens to come to the advisory committees and sit in and learn and be educated and get educated and then that just gives that grassroots opportunity for people to learn together so thank you so much for sending it because we did also

133talk about advisory committees tonight and i think that's that's a huge deal too i mean i i skipped the advisory committee piece and came right to the school board me too i mean really i didn't want some advice i skipped to ptos um but but it's hugely important and i would also offer that even through our advisory committees letting people know there's some changes down in richmond that need to happen as well for for some of these land management concepts that if we could get folks actively involved in helping us change some of those land regulations the land use and all that other stuff that some of that takes place down in richmond as well so that's your next step i'm just kidding thank you for your presentation based on her question not really thank

134you very much i just had a quick question dr taylor is there somebody's task on staff that is constantly kind of watching for land evaluating land to jump on an opportunity or bring forth an opportunity so we don't miss the boat on stuff i think one to see all the land for sale over there you should do that one day there's lots of signs sure i will also say that in our three on three one of the things that the supervisors has mentioned is that they also have in this budget cycle started to allocate money for land not just for schools for other things as well but they're trying to build a land bank themselves for other things that the county needs as well well thank you and please wish your your chair a good

135evening yes have you heard any is anybody heard we haven't heard any news but we did ask him to let us know okay i heard he was on the way to the hospital when you found out you were going to do this you did a great job thank thank you [Applause] all right that brings us to the gifted advisory committee report and recommendations good evening my name is layla peterman and welcome to the annual gifted advisory board presentation for 2022. thank you to all the gifted art students for their amazing art on the slide i would like to introduce the vice chair deidra patterson and and hannah salas who has recently graduated from colonial forge we'd like to thank the chair ms healey and all scober members and dr taylor for giving us this time

136tonight and we'd also like to give a special thank you to mrs maureen sigmund for being our liaison to the school board good evening each year we end with recommendations for the next year tonight we're going to walk you through those recommendations and our accomplishments as you may remember we ended last year with a series of recommendations that the gap committee deemed necessary to achieve one of those recommendations was rebranding gifted services we'd like to so i think we've got one slide out here so so what we'd like to recommend is that we rebrand gifted services to scps gifted and talented educational services we recommend that you support this rebranding as your aware gifted education services provide support to those students that scps recognizes in need of additional or different services and programs as they

137demonstrate extraordinary intellectual and artistic ability these gifted students also require social and emotional support to go ahead and maximize their academic and creative potential next year scps is also going to support a shooting star's talent development program that will support potentially gifted students these educational services will help gifted students become lifelong learners and successful contributors to society the gifted advisory committee developed a recommendation for a registration survey to screen students entering scps for gifted services this survey was really focused on transitional students so transfer students students transferring into the district at all levels the intent is that gifted resource teachers share the survey with new transfer students the family or student depending on the level will fill out that survey then the results will allow the gifted resource teachers to better support the transfer students

138and this is our missing site [Laughter] our third recommendation is to develop and expand a bridging program from elementary school to middle school and from middle school to high school this year we hosted a rising sixth grade parent night for our middle school gifted resource teachers to share what gifted services look like in middle school versus what they looked like in elementary school over 100 parents attended the face-to-face meeting and 131 viewers watched a recording of the session in addition to that our middle school and high school gifted resource teachers also visited students coming to their buildings next year to get to know them and to help them transition to the next level of schooling we want to continue to expand this program to prepare and support our students as they enter a new environment

139our fourth recommendation the gifted resource teachers are working with school administrators to provide professional learning to classroom teachers these courses are vital as they support the gifted students as they perform support the professional learning to the classroom teachers the the students need support for academic social and emotional learning our teachers may asynchronously take these courses through the canvas portal or be provided face-to-face training in these courses these opportunities are essential for those classroom teachers to be able to fully support gifted and talented learners our fifth recommendation involves a glossary of gifted terminology that we've developed over the past year it will clarify terms used when talking about gifted services and will help facilitate communication with our stakeholders this glossary will be uploaded to the saps website by august we accomplished a lot this year but

140there's still a lot of hard work to do we're still working towards building support for students transitioning into those rigorous high school programs such as cgs stat ap ib and dual enrollment we want to expand opportunities for more language representation in our communication media and also ensure differentiated instruction is provided these will become our goals for next year our final recommendation for the near future is to support saps gifted art by hiring a second gifted art teacher if you look at the art on this slide if you think all the way back to the title slide these were these works of art were made by our gifted art students a second gifted art teacher will give these middle school students much more opportunities to grow and thrive in the fine arts thank you to all

141of our incredible committee members this year we appreciate all of your hard work and dedication to this committee thank you for your continued commitment to gifted services thank you any questions comments mr zigman would you like to start us off sure um i just want to clarify that i started this committee this year as a citizen representative and then transition to the board so for me the two things that i really was looking forward to supporting was the transition from middle school to high school we have as i said from fifth grade to middle school there's the visits both ways but unless your middle school student is planning to go into a secondary program there isn't that same type of transition and when you're going from a school of three grades and a thousand students

142to something twice the size knowing where those supports are who your you know who your gifted resource teacher is what supports are available if you're not in a program is crucial especially if you are struggling with some of the executive functioning skills which are our gifted learners are notorious for struggling in also i love the idea of a second gifted art teacher moving forward particularly when we have six high schools it's a nice even split and then having our middle schools in there as well i like the even numbers so it's a good time to have an even number of art teachers so thank you thank you guys dr chase yeah i just wanted to say i really love this idea of surveying new members new people coming to the community i our community has

143a lot of military and i have many friends who i have heard that their child kind of fell through the cracks for a year or two didn't end up in the right location and it would be really great if we could try to minimize that thank you thank you dr warner did you have any gums no no any others miss guy i just want to reiterate i love the the idea of hiring another um gifted art teacher i think that would really really help the the county out also i know just as a parent who's had kids in this program i i i know for me i wasn't aware that there was even someone at my kids high school until this year when i believe the individual who took it it might have been last

144year covid messes up my years are just but i mean i've been at my high school for 10 years so i didn't know we had someone because we do fall through even if you're in it already you fall through the cracks so anything that we can do to shore that up the reason why i know that he exists now is because he was my kid's focus teacher from so many years ago and it's like oh you're here but um i just i realized there's opportunities that my older kids missed because of that so i'm just awful doing it whatever we can to to give more strength to the program i think from the committee in years past that's one of the recommendations that the board followed through on was the universal coget screener in second

145grade where we do screen every single second grader uh four gifted tendencies and now screening transfer students it's to catch students who may be transferring in in third grade because they won't get that screener but maybe their district doesn't screen at all unless you ask they just don't know and parents don't know what to ask for so if we can ask them what is your you know what your child is good at where do they excel even if they're not gifted that's something that we can foster and support and it's great to know but if they are we know right then that maybe we need to get them started in the process because it is you know it is a process that takes some time and effort and gifted kids need that support thank you

146miss holstein so i think my comment was sort of on that but uh support for the students but at all levels i would say but if we were called during the bell schedule and stuff we had a lot of the ib kids coming in and just talking like feeling really stressed out about all the work that had to get done so anytime we can find a way to build support for the students so so other than emotion like what kinds of support would you be looking at is it being more actively involved in their day-to-day schedules is it i mean what is it that we need because you can't i just feel like you can't have enough of that right and so two years ago we moved to a coaching model for middle and high

147school and so those teachers those gifted resource teachers are progress monitoring those students and every four weeks they're looking to see who's struggling in their classes because we know historically something happens to gifted children middle school through high school that suddenly they turn off right and often it's they they don't know how to juggle multiple classes they don't know how to produce their work and turn it in and so these gifted teachers work with them to develop study skills to develop organizational skills and when they're really struggling socially and emotionally connecting them to counselors to support them and so we work as a team with the other coaches in the building and it's been really really effective in the last two years they have just done an amazing job we've been able to do that

148as a board you know this is again citizen maureen hat tip to pass boards because the board chose to have our focus teachers be focused teachers or advisors in the past a middle school focused teacher is the focus teacher but he's also teaching four blocks of math right right you know so when does he have time to do the focus stuff especially if he's supporting gifted learners that aren't gifted in math because he doesn't see them during the day like a gifted art student for example so that was a step this board took um a few years back and that this committee and hopefully all future boards it's just going to build on that momentum where we're giving the resources to the students that the teacher is supposed to be allocated for good i'm just

149i mean i this to me is so hugely important when i see the kind of level the level of dedication that it takes to be committed to this kind of rigorous like educational focus so i mean i mean clearly you would come anyway through maureen as well being on the group but i it you know if is it more pencils i don't know is it more time in the day but what you know this is what we're still working towards which is building the support so just making sure that you have it so that these kids feel backed to me that's huge right go ahead and say what you want to say um i also think it would be helpful if there was a gifted mentor for transfer students so basically what that would be

150is if a transfer student comes in i'm a gifted student myself at brooke point high school um and i think it would be great if you had past gifted students or current just like whatever in the school system come in and kind of introduce transfer students to the gifted program and just that kind of thing and that's why that's amazing students on this program yeah that's amazing amazing sounds like an ambassador program for students yeah i i have to say that every student that i've seen on our committees has just made our committees more rich in terms of the the perspective and the views and you know it's it's just really special to have students there because you can pave the way to make it make things better for the the next group and congratulations

151on your graduation where where are you going i'm going to go to germany oh wow that's one of our partners in addition i'm going to brag on hannah i've known her the entire time i've been a gifted advisor committee she graduated from forge but then she also passed her emt so she is wow through our program at forge um prepared there so she is you know out there saving lives and wow did that through kovid which is a hard program to be continuing in when things aren't really happening so congratulations so if you have time sign up for another committee i'd love to have you back i want her back thank you thank you very much we appreciate it and we we appreciate the recommendations and they will be going um you know through the

152superintendent coming back to the board so we'll see what we can do i'm curious about the name change just make sure that legally we can do that we have certain you know criteria that that's in the law so if um certainly if there's no restriction on that i i have a feeling that'll be coming back shortly okay so thank you very very much all right that's the end of our special presentations it comes to citizen comments three minutes are allowed for each speaker or group speakers are encouraged to provide a copy of the comments to the board clerk speakers shall identify themselves by name and organizational affiliation if the spokesperson represents an organization speakers shall also announce the purpose or topic of their comments individuals desiring to submit their comments in writing rather than in

153person may do so using the public comment form at www.staffordschools.net slash digital public comments there is a 2500 character maximum on the form which is equivalent to approximately three minutes of speaking time the deadline to submit the public comment form for this meeting was two o'clock this afternoon citizen comment which is profane abusive or which threatens imminent physical harm shall be ruled out of order by the chairperson although the board provides the opportunity for citizen comment individuals desiring to register complaints against division employees or division programs services or activities may also utilize the procedures outlined in stafford county public school policy 1113 public complaints we have three speakers who signed up this evening our clerk will read those names and then when those speakers are finished anyone else that wishes to address the board can

154come forward madam clerk yes ma'am the first speaker will be tara durant followed by lily tipling and then jeff russo hi good evening thank you for having me um my name is tara durant i represent the 28th district in the house of delegates and so i wanted to come here today and share a couple of highlights now that we are just about to finish up our extended special session one of the highlights i wanted to share with the board and with our superintendent is governor younkin announced in april of availability through grants of six hundred thirty one thousand uh two and thirty two dollars through the department of corrections that will allow for public schools to create digitally created and detailed and accurate floor plans um according to officials the digital mapping program for virginia

155k through 12 schools will fund up to 3 500 per public school and i've already spoken with chris silcon i understand you unsurprisingly um he's all over it has already filed it and and is is already got the vendor chosen so i'm very pleased to hear that but not surprised at all um just a little bit background on this um this was in conjunction with delegate bellsville that passed unanimously it requires schools to create these plans these plans are exempt from public disclosure so they remain only available to those who are authorized and it will help replace the obsolete one-dimensional plans currently in use by using technologies that can provide site-specific common operating pictures enhanced communication during emergencies accurate floor plans with high resolution imagery emergency response pre-planning and gridded overlay combined into one map

156and the floor plans are available on cell phones laptops and the ability for a quick uniform response by all first responders just a little bit i wanted to share also about the budget that we'll be signing on friday there's great news to share with with k-12 education particularly we have a record allotment of additional 3.2 billion dollars and direct aid to education and as teachers and other school employees will see a five percent increase at both in both the years in the biennium and including a one thousand dollar bonus through a combination of grants and loans this will also fund 3 billion in school construction and renovation school divisions will receive 145 million over the biennium for at-risk students and an additional 10 million will be allocated for to ensure every elementary school has a

157full-time principal another 45 million is set aside to fund resource officers in our schools via grant program and also finally it's a hundred million dollars to launch lab school partnerships with our historically black colleges and universities so i think there's a lot of great information that i wanted to share with the board and was particularly excited um that we really were able to offer this um in our county so thank you very much for coming and sharing that information it's my pleasure if you'd like to submit anything to our clerks you can make it part of our record if you either if you have something to save you know you want to send it to her you can send it tomorrow right miss hall okay i'll have something then we can make it part of

158our official meeting minutes so and please don't hesitate to reach out with anything at all and i'm happy to be a partner just a reminder that i do sit on the education committee and i'm on k-12 so um i am directly got my finger on the pulse and i'm ready to to be a voice and advocate any way i can thank you very much do we have two other speakers missile yes ma'am oh here we come a smiling face hi i'm lee tipling from the falmouth district i go to dixon smith middle school welcome to stafford county public schools dr taylor and all new board members i've come today to present a widespread issue in our county that greatly affects many students this is the lack of protection against harassment targeting sexual orientation and gender

159identity i have personally experienced bullying and hate speech because of this exact problem i am called homophobic and transphobic slurs mocked and harassed because i am gay sometimes these encounters result in physical assaults i have had things thrown at me i have been shoved into lockers and walls and i have been called a plethora of slurs i refuse to speak these words for clarification in a public forum because of the hateful demeanor and their negative impact on the people affected by them this occurs on a daily basis i am not the only person who has experienced this i have had many friends who have been afraid to even come to school because of the relentless bullying this issue is not even specific to our county according to the trevor project a national survey on lgbtq

160youth mental health 42 percent of lgbtq youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year i myself know and care about multiple people who have been affected by this our current harassment policy 2402 does not protect lgbtq students this means that any form of harassment towards these students based on sexual preference and gender identity is not considered bullying or harassment how can we expect to have a healthy learning environment when the current district policy fails to keep these children safe and alive this is our responsibility what is unfolding is something that we have the power to fix our county has already implemented policy 240 or 2420 against discrimination towards sexual orientation and gender identity why protect these students from discrimination but not from harassment with these parameters a student can be included in opportunities but

161still degraded and bullied by their peers we ensure that students are able to participate but what good does that do when they are too afraid to because the relentless harassment they face as a result multiple other counties around us such as prince william and alexandria city have already put these policies in place so it isn't a new or revolutionary idea it's the protection of our students i would be happy to collaborate with you in the revision of policy 2402 if this policy continues to ignore and neglect the safety and well-being of lgbtq students in the continuation of their suffering and potential harm due to relentless hate and bullying is on our hands thank you and good night [Applause] good evening school board dr taylor my name is jeff roser from the heartwood district public comments

162over the past year regarding the infamous chromebooks have increased within our community organizations and within this room these comments were parental concerns centric to sexually illicit sites social media sites gaming sites streaming service sites all accessible from the chromebook by a child recently an inquiry made to the stafford county public schools produced a dichotomy of responses first being the acknowledgement that chrome's book chromebooks can't be misused secondly it was stated administrators teachers library media specialists and students must monitor the use of technologies for grade level and content appropriateness ethics and safety and finally school principals direct the level of filtering based on their community's input if principals are engaged the community seeking feedback on the filtering capability of chromebooks parents would have opposed a child having such unlimited access to illicit sites through their assigned

163chromebooks it's based on teaching community that's an entirely different issue to address some stafford county public schools follows the guidance of the children's internet protection act enacted by congress sipa require school systems to use content filtering and monitoring by school devices if they want to receive federal education money schools and libraries subject to sipa are required to adopt and implement an internet safety policy requiring certification stafford county public schools has two levels of filtering one maintained at the division level and additional categories filtered by the individual schools content is filtered on all devices based on the configuration for that particular school student chromebooks can then be taken home for an additional content filter that runs on them and the settings align with the filter in their local school if stafford county is certified and received

164federal funds under the e-brake program there's a risk for violation per cipa and please refer to the enclosed handout in the highlighted section schools and libraries subject to sip are required to adopt and implement an internet safety policy porn sites represent inappropriate matter on the internet unmonitored social media sites risk the safety and security of minors proxy hacking represents unauthorized access and unlawful activities by minors online minors signing up to online sites represents disclosure use and dissemination of pii to minors if principals are responsible for the level of filter filtering content are they compliant with sepa when children are accessing inappropriate material in school or at home what measures are employed to restrict minors access to these online materials governor yonkin signed sb 656 sexually centric to sexually explicit content and there's a deadline coming

165up july 31st where vdwe has to develop policy to prepare for policy development i would recommend stafford county public schools utilize any surplus operating funds to procure an independent i.t cyber audit to provide a baseline to support any type of policy development is there anyone else who'd like to address the board oh here comes a familiar face come on down miss lowry where's your shovel she's she's she's out of town names elisha's not here tonight she's got one of me good evening madam chair members of the school board superintendent dr taylor my name is margaret lowry i am here again tonight to discuss the lack of parity among high school athletic stadiums wrong speech [Laughter] i am here to say thank you i want to thank you for your support for the installation of the

166artificial turf fields at north stafford and colonial voice high schools it was exciting to be part of the groundbreaking and both fields this afternoon my sincere gratitude goes to the school board and the board of supervisors for uniting and approving and funding this project special thanks are due to superintendent taylor for his involvement and support to dr nichols for his encouragement to james barron for his articles in the freelance star to mr former and mr anderson for expediting the financial plans that will allow us to have those two turf fields begin this summer thank you to ms healey for your leadership throughout the entire campaign i know this decision came at a time period when you had so many difficult decisions to make with masks redistricting new belt schedules making needed repairs to the school

167i sure hope your summer meetings will be a lot less stressful i want to thank the stafford county community who took time to voice their support to you this project is going to bring pride and benefit the entire county on behalf of carol elisha who couldn't be here and myself thank you for choosing to serve stafford county [Applause] okay we don't usually respond to comments but i just want to say thank you to miss lowery and miss leicester for for making this possible for the the students at forge and north i have no doubt we would have gotten turf fields sometime in the future but it most certainly wouldn't have been this fall so we'll look forward to seeing you at that home game the fourth game in the season the first three games are

168going to be away so by the time they get home for the home field we're going to have that that turf and and everyone here will be invited all right that brings us to action items 9.01 adoption of the values mission vision and mission for the new five-year strategic plan stage one of three do we have a motion motion to approve the adoption of values vision and mission okay we have a motion by dr chase second by ms hall said all right do we have a uh discussion or we're just delighted that we think we landed the plane on this after a robust discussion last night and reflected in uh board docks we think we got the language right and and captured uh the board's will and uh we're pretty thrilled with this so thank

169you well i want to thank dr taylor and dr towery for all your work on this i i mean i only went to a couple of the sessions and you had dozens and dozens but that's why this document is so complete because you have reflected this community's involvement and last night the board got to put our finishing touches on it as well so if there's no other comments cast your votes tally the votes motion passes unanimously we have now completed stage one of three i think we deserve a hand we only do this every five years all right that brings us to the next item 9.02 approval of facilities projects pending availability of fy 22 year end funds do we have a motion motion to approve second okay so we have a motion by ms

170sigmund second by dr warner any discussion yeah um do we want to think about uh the speaker who spoke to us about doing a technology audit it's the board's pleasure yes we do that's that's exactly what i thought when i heard that i was like oh man we gotta add that too because that makes tremendous sense what was the cost on that we don't have a cost yeah okay well that that is something that we would have to procure i mean it's not impossible no i'm just asking the cost to be put to put it in perspective because in our earlier work session we were advised there's significantly fewer funds than we had originally anticipated that will be uh left over and available for these expenditures so is that something you want to suggest we

171do for for this year meaning we'd have to we'd have to award it before the end of the months right i just have a question my understanding is that we're in the process of of doing um creating a policy and a technology plan a strategic plan for our technology would this be something that maybe could be included in that discussion for future considerations so you got you have a number of things going on um you you actually have a work session presentation on cyber security internet safety and and a whole lot of things in the internet sphere coming up on august 9th whether you want to include this as a project it probably would not be a 3r project but but maybe more generally year-end funds and as you've noted you have considerably less resources

172to close this year than you did in previous years where a lot of these projects don't look like they line up with the dollar figure that's available you know i think funds available is is a pretty important qualifier okay dr chaser do you suggest i just don't know just asking about it especially given that we were told a date of july 31st for the the state so i didn't know what the board's pleasure was with that um as the list shows we have many needs and we're anticipating only having 250 000 so um not a lot but it's certainly something we can discuss at a future date or perhaps as part of that plan as dr warner suggested okay ms sickman i was going to ask in the absence of our action at you know

173right at this moment how does that put us in compliance for fully in compliance and i guess my question is then is it possible to task mr fulmer or whatever to help us understand the totality of like what financing that would look like i mean i'm not even sure are we looking at the hundreds of thousands are we looking at the tens of thousands like what we need uh in fairness this is so 10 minutes old um so we would need to go and chop that well yeah i mean so so do we need to put this on hold while we do that this item no you need to act on this item because you do have year-end things that will happen between now and june 30. okay so um dr taylor am i right

174in thinking that we probably won't make it down to the 500 000 for the north stafford theater i would say that that would be improbable based on the amount of money that you have right now um because as long as that's the case i mean otherwise i would ask that we divide this item because i have a problem with spending that money when falmouth elementary school's roof is getting pushed back so i just um as long as as long as you're telling me that that's the case i can support this i i would be surprised if you made it very far down that list at all might not even make it to the first item correct unfortunately i i think it needs to be made clear that what we're proving here is the award of

175these contracts pending funding being available and our very realistic conservative estimate we were given tonight is in the range of 250 000 not to include the 1 million that we traditionally carry over so um i'd be very surprised if we ended up what would we have to do multiply that times six to you know to get down that far yes ms randall um dr taylor so the july 31st deadline that's approaching for this um will we get in will we get information about that and if we're asking about the audit and i'm not asking if it's like impossible for this week but is it something that we would be able to get in our friday memo oh absolutely you if we get a a procurement process completed in a in a reasonable amount of time

176yes as quick as possible we'd provide that information to you okay i will say you have no worries about meeting any deadlines or meeting compliance okay that's that's not a concern of ours you will receive a robust report that will include that at your at your august work session okay thank you all right any other further questions cast your vote vote motion passes unanimously that brings us to 9.03 adoption of proposed new policy 4054 employment references for certain individuals and revisions to policy 4107 non-discrimination eeo and anti-retaliation do we have a motion motion to approve the two hr policies second okay motion by dr warner second by ms halstead any discussion dr chase yeah is this am i correct that this is just bringing us in line with state regulations yes all right nobody else

177cast your votes tally the vote we are on a roll ladies motion carries unanimously all right the next uh action item 9.04 adoption of proposed amendments to policy 11-11 school board committees do we have a motion motion to approve promotion by ms sigmund second second by miss randall um and i would note that this is for committees that will start in january is that correct yes ma'am that's correct all right just so and and that the just to put it on the record what we discussed in our work session was continuing to to the extent that the current committee members are willing to continuing those committees with their current enrollment through december and they'll be receiving notification from the clerk that we're asking them to do that if if they can and are willing to

178to continue all right any discussion cast your votes telly the votes all right we pass unanimously again all right now this brings us to the uh the new action item 9.05 approval for the award of a contract to solient health in an amount not to exceed 142 500 for one school psychologist payable from budgeted fy 23 operating funds do we have a motion motion to approve second motion by ms randall second by ms sigman all right discussion dr chase you asked for this to be it was my understanding with our budget that we were going to be hiring a substantial number of additional school psychologists um are we finding that we're able to hire those do we still need this if we've been able to hire these i just wasn't sure what was going on

179we are making progress uh this is the continuation of an existing contract that you had and dr hummer can can definitely chime in on that um but but this is effectively fulfilling something that you already have in place and it seems to be working given the arrangements in the terms of the contract i mean i just know that that contracting is more more expensive than having somebody on our payroll and if we're hiring 12 and a half school psychologists do we actually need this yes um and and i would say that under the terms of this this contract and what it's providing and that the type of services are a little bit unique and that's the advantage of this particular contract and what they're they're targeting to do and it and it's it's a daily

180rate and it is very laser focused and so when you say it's a daily rate we may not actually get to the 142. correct it's because got it thank you okay any other questions and so is this person exclusively at pphs or is this an individual that has multiple responsibilities across our high schools did you say exclusively at scp yes exclusively at brooke high school like is he exclusively there does he go high school to high school like well right now we want to make sure that we get all of our coverage taken care of we want to assign a one psychologist per high school so if we don't get to that point then he might be shared between multiple buildings but the goal is to get him at one building okay so so right

181now our vacancies pending i guess yeah right we're making probably making progress okay so so really he could hit this i guess my concern is over 40 hours logged in one week that's a substantial jump as well no no no no i mean you're saying no he won't hit for over 40 hours not exceed that okay cool that's all i wanted to know this is a generic key right it could be a he or she this is a he okay of this particular point this particular person is a continuation of existing services yes well is there a contract for a particular person or is it for a psychologist it's for a psychologist okay so it could be at some point a he or well i know but but but we're not contracting for an individual

182we're contracting for the services of a psychologist if this individual no longer becomes available our contract is still in place and solely it will provide a psychologist i just you are correct i just want to make sure we're not saying he when it could be or she it's important oh i'm sorry i just thought he i just saw the name on see i look at the contract technicalities yes okay all right thank you very much thank you no further questions cast your votes tally the votes oh my motion carries unanimously all right we got one more chance this is it this is like the ultimate motion to approve 9.06 approval of an increase of 450 000 in the fy 22 workers compensation fund transfer yes yes thank you a second all right that was this

183guy you gotta jump faster i told her all right that motion was by miss randall and dr warren do you want to you want to give it to her all right we'll give you that one this guy of course we will expect a little shuffle interpretive dance uh you're such a woman of many times all right we have a motion in a second do we have any discussion dr chase yeah i ask that this item be put on for action because it is not budgeted and just a little clarity if i could uh this 450 000 is actually coming out of current funds so putting this 450 000 into workers comp means that we have 450 lefts for those projects that is correct okay and so this is an actual need like we're we're that

184is correct okay and so are you saying we need this more than we need fire alarm systems in two schools now i'm just asking because if this didn't come out of 22 funds it would have to come out of 23 which means we'd have to find room there but i think dr chase makes a a good point if this money we're not taking out of 22 then we would have a chance to at least put these fire alarm systems in in the two schools that um that need them replaced yeah so our goal is to for our workers compensation fund to end that with a positive fund balance or else we kind of get dinged in the audit process and have to disclose it through our financial statements so because we've depleted the reserve that

185was there and now our expenditures are exceeding the um transfer that we currently have put in there um i'm recommending the 450 000 transfer so we maintain that positive fund balance and don't run in the red so we don't have a reserve in our in our work session you said that we were reducing our reserve so you're saying there is no reserve this will this current the last two years has depleted that reserve and then with the current expect with the current expenditures this year we will run into the red and the reserve will be gone in that workers comp fund how much are we in the red um well the 450 000 will like 25 50 000 if we don't do this transfer this will get us slightly back into the black wow that's

186i'm a little concerned that when we had this discussion earlier it was more generic and this i'm going to direct this comment to dr taylor um this i got the impression and the discussion that we've always had a very healthy reserve and and we've been you know expending more funding so our reserve is not as just you know healthy as it's been i had no idea we were we would go in the red if if we didn't get there i mean that sort of changes the picture for me so a couple of things that not going into the red in your operating fund this is a separate fund for workers compensation where we draw from this to to pay claims so it is is almost thinking like insurance and having a fund to cover your

187insurance this is adding to that fund it's a wise decision there there has not been a substantial enough ad over the past several years to to take care of a lot of the claims that that we've had we've had a substantial amount of claims i would say in a higher than than the normal amount of claims um in the past uh in the past year and that is going to come at a cost um and and making sure that this fund has sufficient uh enough to cover is is a wise investment can i ask another may i ask another question yeah so um mr fulmer have we budgeted more for next year to go into this fund yeah we increased the transfer by two hundred thousand dollars for next year and we'd already increased it

188in fy 22 so 22 and 23 we've increased it both years okay so hopefully next year we won't have to do this again but but we don't have a crystal ball yeah and so you know our claims is going to fluctuate and so i explained in the work session we see that fluctuation and we're also kind of we always trail behind and so we don't have to carry a reserve in the workers comp fund but if we don't have that reserve then we've got to make sure we fund it each year to keep it in the black as preferred or else as i mentioned we'll have to denote that in our financial statements so this is just to get it back so we're running basically like a pay as you go to make sure and

189we just don't have the reserve built up i just wanted to i mean i'm looking at the increases and i can understand that 20 to 21 there's statistically no increase because kovid we weren't like why would we go from a 10 000 increase to 200 000 increase to a two hundred thousand dollar increase yeah and all yeah so um less employees or less employees at work you're going to have less possibility for incurring those claims so as we've added employees added employees on site and in all honesty it's kind of like health insurance you could have just a few claims that are driving that up so pre-2020 what did we have a you know our homeowners insurance goes up a certain percentage every year it's like 103 103 do we have us a growth percentage

190every year that we are now exceeding because of whatever but um yeah so i don't know what the percentage was but for several years actually um we've had our insurance company come in and do presentations and they would actually very much praised our program because across the state we were one of the best had the you know like the highest experience score lowest i should say as far as the number of claims and what our factors were so they were extremely complimentary of how our workers comp um was funded or um excuse me how it was what our um you know claims were um but then you know like i've mentioned we've just had a few um extreme claims that have kind of driven it up over the past couple of years okay so so

191i i feel like i know workers comp but now that you're talking i just i feel like we're talking about two different things and i just want to make sure i understand the dynamic here so i get hurt on the job and i follow workers comp claim right my insurance the school insurance right covers my initial injury and then i can't work for two months my worker with this workers comp fund then is covering my what mainly all the medical bills so you have to say it doesn't cover so you have coverage so insurance doesn't cover everything yeah we're self-insured we're self-insured here right so then so then how does the investigation into the incident occur because clearly there needs to be one right yeah and do we have a fault at fault like a

192no fault at fault like how does we have all that right so who does that us we have a department of safety security and risk management and so um sometimes an initial investigation might be performed by a school-based administrator sometimes we have video footage of an accident or something that might have happened because we have cameras throughout all of our schools um and sometimes it is done like a claims investigation and and in extreme cases we may even have a third party um associated with an insurance company perform a claims investigation but but it is a necessary part and claims are sometimes denied claims are sometimes accepted um and when there is fault or no fault the the appropriate assignment is made so it runs a lot like insurance but to mrs healey's point us

193being self-insured this is this is part of it and we have to ride the roller coaster of of claims experience and sometimes it's good and sometimes it's not good but having having a reserve to cover that is is good financial sense thank you okay so my last question is if we approve this then there'll be approximately 25 thousand dollars reserved after the rest of this is going to be applied to meet the current claims needs through the end of this fiscal year yeah so projected right so we haven't incurred all of our claims yet for this year and then some of the claims are still paid out after a year in for for instance that happened during the year so this was based on a projection okay well i'm going to support this based on

194this explanation but if we did not need this to bring ourselves out of the red i would prefer to use this to you know for these these the projects like the fire alarms so i i appreciate the explanation but i i would ask if we get in a situation like this in the future that the board be given you know advanced notices or the fab um you know this would be brought to the fab you know when it becomes known so that they can you know look into it because certainly to me it's really not a choice right you know we i have a question i'm not able to do that miss guy just trying to understand um because maybe i'm not understanding there's so many different accounts and so i'm trying to learn what

195you're speaking about does this mean that if we didn't if we don't approve this then would we have six hundred thousand in reserves like the carryover or are we still there you get what i'm saying there's no reserve if we approve this we're gonna have about 25 000 in reserve as i understand it is that's true they need i'm trying to see if it was the same the savings in the operating fund yeah so that's the same pot so we're going to have to increase the transfer to our workers comp claim fund out of our operating fund so that 250 000 will now go up to 700 000 if we were to not do this but then we wouldn't have sufficient funds in the workers comp fund to cover all of our claims okay because

196in my brain i was subtracting this already and i'm like well now we're going to jail yeah because we're at the negative yeah we would get a negative audit report which we don't want to have i'm not doing stripes the 1.25 number was already adjusted for this thank you all right well thank you all right dr chase thank you for um bringing that to our attention though because i think it's that was an important discussion all right cast your votes to approve this transfer tally the votes perfect score tonight i think i think miss hall we need to make a note of that and everyone head out and play the lottery really i i don't recall i i don't recall any time back to your community a board agreed on what six different action items

197all unanimous wow all right well that brings us to superintendent comments and reports dr taylor your turn thank you madam chair um and and we are we're definitely making progress and i think we're definitely hitting our stride either that or it must be summer and so with that i have a handful of updates that i want to share with the board and just some really exciting news we have been doing kindergarten enrollment throughout much of the spring and into the summer and we are already at 75 percent of our kindergarten projection in terms of enrollments that's a good thing because we knew who we've got coming but we still have a long way to go with summer so we we are monitoring this very closely and watching this very closely but it is exciting uh

198to see our families come out to our mobile enrollment centers and uh to be a part of stafford county public schools and sometimes they bring their older siblings and sometimes they bring their younger siblings and sometimes they bring no siblings at all but it is all very exciting we have a number of events for the school division that's coming up and we are excited to share those we are hosting uh county government and the community's juneteenth celebration this saturday at colonial forge high school we invite the community to come and participate and we're excited to play host uh this year we have a county-wide blood drive on july 6th and we invite the the county to participate in that event as well and then throughout the next couple months uh we have our giant round-up

199dates um at uh giant foods um and we are rounding up funds and resources uh that uh the division uh will use to commit to helping with food insecurity in the community and that will run from june 17th all the way through august 11th lots more information on our website and speaking of our website i wanted to share something we have a feature on our website that is called submit a story and this is an opportunity for members of the community to submit a little something about uh their experience with stafford county public schools or just their experiences they want to share and tell us about and so i would like to share a very short story with the board and it comes from presumably a student and i'm and i'm going to say thank

200you to sophia and i'll leave off the last name and her story is i love the third grade and that's it but it was a delight she absolutely loves the third grade and we just wanted to share um that that at least we've got one very satisfied customer in third grade and just is thrilled with that um of course i'm delighted that uh we we got to stick shovels and dirt today and uh and that's really just a great sign of teamwork of this community coming together under the banner of common cause to say something very loudly to the community which is that every student matters and that every single one of stafford county students is important and that our community supports them and is behind them i hope that it is an omen of

201many more uh ground breakings and future ribbon cuttings uh to come but we are are very excited about the progress i'll close by saying that you know we've had no shortage of challenging times in the seven months that i have been your superintendent and it has been an absolute joy to close out this fiscal year in your service and in the service of this community as we had the opportunity to go over my evaluation this year i just reminded of how absolutely grateful i am for this opportunity to serve with my fantastic team the outstanding principals and teachers in the school division and it really is a gift to be here but it but we are living in a very challenging time in a challenging time for our community you're going to see several presentations

202over the next few months and work sessions that have an overarching and general theme tied to student and campus safety we want to make sure quite candidly that stafford county public schools are are not just one of the safest school systems in the in the commonwealth but one of the safest school systems in america and and we don't think that that is a an unworthy goal for us to try to accomplish so to that end at the board's july school board work session you'll hear a presentation on student code of conduct student discipline and ways that we can maintain safety in our our schools and our campuses followed by in august you'll have a presentation and an opportunity to discuss some of our challenges and some of our strengths in terms of our digital environment

203and how we might maintain safety in that space so we will have this and many more as we enter into this dialogue about student safety and about campus safety as we go into the fall and we're hoping to to share this out with our community in a very broad way as we start this school year so that not only we can make the 22 23 school year the best school year in stafford county public schools history but also the safest and that's really what our objective is so with that madam chair i just want to thank you very much for this opportunity and i appreciate the time to speak this evening thank you dr taylor that brings us the board member comments any volunteers to start miss halstead yes please and actually the reason thank

204you for that the reason why i wanted to go first was because going back to our last meeting when dr taylor was talking about some stuff i wanted to say something i got robert ruled um so what i got robert ruled so i was still like would that be by me kind of i mean it happens you know oh um but we were you know he was thinking about the graduation put that lady on the governance committee i have waited very long to make this comment i just want you to know that it's like the top of my list here but um i know so we were talking about wait a minute where's miss hall is she going to get this coming oh she's not here it's on it's on record don't worry i'm sorry

205i'll do a podcast tomorrow if i need to i'm just kidding so um so we talked about colleen ford's graduation and there was a moment there and and dr hamright will share this as well about how amazing the moment was there were two students that walked up on that stage to get their diploma um and i was so literally moved to tears by particularly i mean the the heart that it took for these kids to do it one being exceptionally disabled um from the wheelchair understanding but what i was most moved by and would suggest that we do something to recognize the three teachers that stood the one teacher stood behind the boy and basically just almost carried him up the ramp until he was steady enough to walk across the stage and it was

206such i just a moment if any moment could be captured on video i wish and i hope it's that one to show what our teachers do for these kids and they i don't know what the apparatus is that they had put the other student in but there was a one woman teacher working with the student and then she was struggling a little bit and right away there was another teacher right on the other side and i'm telling you i could cry about it now i feel like miss randall over here but it was such an emotional moment and i thought you know we don't get a lot of visuals for what it means for what these teachers really do for our kids particularly our special needs ones but that moment in time i i mean

207i just i don't know that the teachers are watching i hope that they are but just the gratitude i felt at that moment that stafford county has that level of dedication the parents of those students the joy that they must have felt being able to watch that happen so i just i wanted to take a minute three weeks ago but anyway i wanted to take a moment to make sure that we i at least acknowledge the fact that that was one of the single most amazing things i've ever seen um and if anybody has that on video or if colonial forge has a video where we can watch that and just hot see video um it it just to me i think again we don't get to see humanity in its greatness very often and

208to me that was just a huge sign of of how great we are as a school system but how great the people are that work with our kids that's good news stuff oh i probably should end it with that anyway now um i'll end on a low note who cares no i'm just kidding um so after our last meeting um there was some kickback about moving to one meeting a month and everyone was afraid it was it meant limiting comments which i understand but i i didn't vote for it to limit comments i voted for it so that i could get more involved in the community and to that end i've asked dr taylor and miss osborne to help us or help me establish that second tuesday as a dedicated town hall night so i

209will be in one location every fourth tuesday of the month to hear and sit and speak with you um i open it to everyone i've asked them to public notice it so that all districts can come all school board members can come and this way we don't have to worry about like if there's two of us in a room or three of us or whatever we can just all be there together um and i'd like to make that my promise in an effort to kind of let everyone know i you know this was so i couldn't get robert ruled anymore so that i could just sit and we could walk i mean this only works if we work this out together and so i think that by us all kind of having a moment in

210time and i didn't want it to feel like it was hard word verses because it's not it's stafford county um and so the best way they said to do it was public like make it an announcement pick one place let everybody know where to go and be and then this way like if we all show up great right because then we don't have to worry about any of the illegal meetings um so that will be happening the first official one is june 28th it's at um the 29 stafford parks and rec parks and rec building right at the parks and rec building you'll see me i'll i'll stand outside and wave like the like a walmart reader um but to that end i think the big one of the biggest things that i would like

211to have dedicated in that meeting is and i'm moved by the student i'm sorry that they left because i feel like the bullying issue is so pervasive and it's so heavy and i don't i don't want any child i hate to say i don't want any child to feel like they're alone in the bullying because that sounds terrible because it's not just one kind it seems to be everything and i don't know if that's because our kids are hurting so much they don't know how they don't have an outlet for that hurt so it comes out as bullying i don't know but i do think that we need to really take a look at how we handle that and to his his point i'm sorry i didn't catch his name so i'm i'm sorry for

212that one but i i need them to him what was it do we know who it was yes okay so i just really to that end i heard you and i don't think i i mean i don't think i don't want you to feel like we're not addressing that because this school board recognizes that it is a pervasive issue and it has to be handled and so it unfortunately it's not just one category it seems to be all the way through so i think as a community if we come together the the main topic for me has always been trying to heal our hearts from all the hurts right um i mean i'm not necessarily the most squishy person and can do that easily but i certainly would love to help us all find a

213way to do that and i think it comes from letting the kids know we hear you and i no one should be afraid to go to school no one should be and no child should feel emboldened or empowered to speak to another child in a way that is harmful or hurtful and i don't know how we got there i do know social media has had its play in it and i do know we the parents as it were are a huge part of the problem sometimes we think we're protecting our kids by you know yelling at the other person and maybe we are maybe we're standing up for them in our own personal way but but our kids pick up on that and then they think it's okay to talk to other kids that way

214so as a community and i guess maybe in the vein of lifting up another person and helping them walk across that stage we have to start somewhere and so i hope by opening up the dialogue at this one town hall we can just it's just a pivot point for us um the last thing i will say is it gets very exhausting when i talk to because i feel like any anymore like you just have to qualify everything my you and i have had this conversation right like you have to start every like i don't mean everyone it's not just so i just mean this category and so you know it's kind of like have you ever sent a text and you're like oh i forgot to put a smiley face now they're gonna think i'm

215serious and i'll do it to my husband and he'll he'll call me people like you're mad i'm like no so in the event that i don't qualify something or i don't say something the right way in a town hall i implore you to please raise your hand and say that came out the wrong way can you clarify for me because it's not oh i'm not always going to put an emoji at the end of everything i don't sometimes i assume that i come across the right way and i don't want that to be the case either so i am i am riding high the track meet was number one and now the colonial forage graduation and so i am riding high on community and the fact that i think we can we can make this

216the best school district in the country that's all i got to say thank you miss halstead i told you you're going to love graduation it's the best day of the year all right and but one one suggestion i would have though when you advertise these you know pre-set town halls that you put some little asterisk or footnote in there that in the event the school board needs to have a meeting then this is subject to um to change because we did agree when we approved the new schedule that we would all hold that fourth uh tuesday uh you know as available for a meeting if the school board if it should be required okay thank you all right miss guy would you like to go next sure um i think it was great that alyssa

217prefaced her town halls with just in case i piss you off don't get pissed off just raise your hand that was really smart and because we all make mistakes and i i keep my foot in my mouth all the time um i do it just as a thing and i'm so happy that we didn't vote to go to jail i was really sitting up here like my stomach was hurting absolutely because i just got confused with the pots of money um i just want to say um we have spoken a lot about our advisory committees and how hard it has been to meet because people want to go back to meeting virtually because they're so busy or they work far or they've got like 25 kids and they've got to be at soccer or here

218or there so i did reach out to our representative tara durant who showed up today as well and i know she said she spoke with you dr taylor and you asked her if i called her and did something and she said no and she told me to let you know she was mistaken i had called her twice and emailed um but she got she got confused with her constituents and anyway um she she explained it's super confusing why our advisory committees have to be a particular way i know they're they're under foia laws or rules and she also explained that they are working at it at the state level to try to get it changed but the laws like it says you can do this and then it says but don't do that which is

219saying that you can do it so she was saying it doesn't make any sense they're working on it this is just something we have to be patient with but she absolutely understands the gist of it and um she believes it's something that we're going to be able to fix so that our advisory committees can now will eventually be able to meet virtually and then they can have their quorums and it can be easier on everyone so that's a nice little update although i don't know when that's gonna happen because um you know there's red tape with everything and um that's really it i'm happy to be here and um i'm getting along very well with all of my colleagues which excites you lady french and new lady presents my children what they call these women

220here these amazing women they call my lady friends you're new ladies my new lady friends but i am i'm very happy to be serving and i actually um like most all of you actually i love you i like although see i told you my friend sees him i like you an honest woman we appreciate it no i think you should leave it the way it is and then we'll just have to guess which one of it is that you don't like well it could it could be subject to change still on the reserve on any given day it's all right i i love her anyway it doesn't matter and we we know miss guy is a woman of many talents hello yes i am very well educated in interpretive dance and if any constituents need

221me to help out i'm always available okay we may need you all right i'm going to be very brief i had a very good time today at uh north stafford and colonial forge for putting time to put the gold shovels into the dirt for the new turf fields really kind of cool being at north stafford because that's where i graduated my husband and i both actually graduated from uh so it was really kind of cool being on the field and putting the shovel in the dirt to make way for a new turf field so uh that's all i have and i'm just hoping everyone enjoys their truly long summer thank you ms siegmann um gosh i uh first want to go on the record and say i uh due to unfor medical issue i was

222unable to attend the graduation i was scheduled for and so i do offer my greatest apologies i did tune in virtually but i was literally not on my feet and was not feasible for me to be there i did however get to help anthony burns elementary school with their fifth grade promotion certificates and citizenship awards which was stupendous it was in the uh colonial forge auditorium because there were just so many people we did not fit in the uh cafeteria or in the uh auditorium i will say i did that on one foot and some wheels which was and then came directly here so that was my olympic event for the year i also attended persons of the year appreciation kind of reception at park ridge stafford business leader appreciation event with our with our

223you know some of our community leaders and our supervisors and i've been connecting a lot with some of our community and residential groups the residents of embry mills had myself dr taylor ms osborne some of our our central office staff come to address a sizeable group of their homeowners to address concerns specific to embry mill and i think that was a fantastic use of our time because you know some of our our educational concerns are very specific to our neighborhood as far as you know which schools our children attend where our children wait for buses or how they get to school which after school programs they may or may not have access to so having us come for those kind of neighborhood specific our area specific conversations is fantastic been invited to address moms for

224liberty at the end of the week if you have a community group moms group sports group whatever group it is i'll be there because i am happy to answer questions that are specific to your group and i'm very grateful to central office um and even schools to provide me the support and the background information i need to be prepared for those meetings because it's really really important and every mill even live streamed it so that constituents couldn't be there were able to go back and watch it i am really looking forward to the work we are doing this summer that being said these are not just student issues or school issues these are community issues so i do you know encourage employ invite implore everyone to get involved look at the code of conduct and

225see what's no longer relevant what should be here that isn't look at our safety issues because safe schools are a safe community we don't want you know whether you have kids in schools or not safe schools are important and it comes back to our advisory committees we need our citizens to participate in our advisory committees your feedback is crucial and essential to their success and our success up here i loved turning dirt today and i was especially glad to see so many of our board of supervisor counterparts join us it wasn't just a school personnel it wasn't just you know those of us up here um it was many a majority you know in some cases of our supervisors that were there for the event as well because it was a true partnership and i

226look forward to moving forward so that's all i have thank you ms sigmund dr warner thank you madam chair first of all i'd like to thank everybody for giving me the opportunity to serve on governance and fab and i am looking forward to not having to do those things i do appreciate graduation and it was i did go to north stafford's graduation and um since i have students there as well and um it was nice to attend i have a lot of respect for dr hornick and he will be missed i wish him well in his new position at orange county or republican as a superintendent so he he will be a very difficult position to fill i do not envy our superintendent that task as well um in reflecting on the last uh 200

227days of our superintendent's first first year with us it has been i think the the board was very helpful and i think we did a good job of the evaluation which is something we have never successfully done since miss randall and i have been on the board so um i was i do appreciate all your help and support and and communication i think it went really well thank you um and i'm glad that our kids are in summer school and i'm hoping that they're having a great learning adventure and i look forward to popping in and checking on them during the next few weeks thank you thank you dr chase yeah so i i do want to say a couple things that because we didn't have um committee reports and there were two items that

228came up in the fab that i think are worth mentioning one is we looked in in the aftermath of what happened in uvalde we asked to see what kinds of insurance and protections we have for staff in the case of an event like that and so i encourage you to look at the minutes from that meeting so that you will also know sort of what kinds of insurance and things are there and i think we're going to look at that some more in august when we look at overall safety i also appreciate delegate durant for coming um that but i do think it's important for everybody to know that that thousand dollar bonus is only for soq positions and so it comes with about a two and a half million dollar uh we have to

229find that additional money in order to actually give that bonus to everybody and it's important to realize we don't even have the option of saying okay instead of giving everybody a thousand we'll give everybody 750. we have to come up with the extra money to give that bonus so fortunately dr mr fulmer and dr taylor are trying to find ways to make that happen but it's not quite quite as as sunny as as was presented i also went to graduation we had our our moment at our graduation as well and and we do it every graduation there is almost always some some event like that that is is really remarkable um i want to thank dr taylor for sticking with us for 200 days and i i hope we get uh at least at least

230365 more and yeah it's a dutch dog days right yeah and uh i have uh been very pleased to hear from the principals uh that the falmouth constituents go to they're going to meet with me this summer and in fact i want to shout out to mr ray bolt at conway who invited me to go to the fred knats stadium with the summer school class next friday so i'm very excited to go to that and that's it thank you thank you i just wanted to to let the board know this afternoon while we were at the the groundbreaking and i didn't check my emails until much later i received an email from elizabeth ewing who is the director of legal and policy services on the virginia school boards association to notify us she sent it

231to ms hall and dr taylor me that she was going to attend our our meeting virtually tonight it's an informal visit so if you're still there we're almost done it's a good thing i even checked because i went from one groundbreaking to the other groundbreaking to here and now we get to go home but i also wanted to to thank um and this i promise i this is the last time i'll thank miss lowery publicly but without miss liary and ms slicer i have no doubt we would not have broken that ground today i mean we of course played an important part the supervisors played an equally important part but it would have not raised to that level if we had not had these amazing women that came to speak on behalf of the the

232students and significantly they are both retired stafford county public school employees who care so much about our students that they they made this their their mission and their passion so wow just it's it's just incredible so i look forward to your next uh project and and making things better for the the students in stepper county public schools and some of the coaches were there and they were really excited about the opportunity for their students to be able to compete and compete because they're not able to because of the the lack of the the practice the practice fields and and the playing fields um also want to thank um our supervisors we had six supervisors that were at ford's today and i think there were four at north and that's that's so great that they care

233to come to celebrate with us you know what we're able to do for for our school so you know thank you for coming today but also thank you for making it possible because we can you know we can say you know we want it we want it we want it but without that funding it wouldn't have happened so this this is a this is a real plus and i i i give dr taylor credit here maybe i don't know if it was something you did i think you are a very good influence you know and there are our traffic across the street and back i i think people respect you and they appreciate your your demeanor the way you treat you know everyone and um of course your your your skills and your competence as

234well but thank you because i i i want to give you credit you know as well and of course without you know as as ms larry mentioned you know our staff your staff this wouldn't this wouldn't be happening because it's pretty darn amazing to get something approved in late spring and groundbreaking and you know in in in the summer to be ready for the for the fall um just wanted to also thank the um mount ararat for hosting our retiree dinner wonderful wonderful food they paid for everything and miss osborne and mr berry just had a superb evening planned and and these beautiful little glass you know um i don't know what you call them trophies you get a trophy when you when you retire uh but they they're amazing and i was like mr

235berry had all these white gloves so he wouldn't get fingerprints on him that's how thorough they are it's just amazing but it was it was a great event and it was truly a celebration there were so many smiles from the the people that are that are getting to retire and i wish them well and and welcome the new ones coming in and so that's my last my last comment question um i want to know what we can do as a board and what the school division is going to do for the new teachers coming in because we've talked about this and and tick tock you know the next meeting we're here will be just a couple weeks before school starts so if you can let us know you know what we can do because we

236we've all indicated we want to help oh yeah you can do the entertainment will you be in charge okay and you include your lady friends you know to to the extent i mean we all have different skills just call me miss roberts ruled roller on the robert i had to do something called work and they would not let me out in time so i apologize for not being there i would love to have been there but i just could not make it home from woodbridge well i could have but then there's that whole speeding thing and so i just tried to but okay congratulations so miss hall has asked us to set dates i'm not going to ask you to do that because i think it's time for us to go home but we will

237our just our committees we we know who we're on the committee the governance committee and the fab committee i think that may have already decided when you when you're going to meet you have to pick a date did governance pick one but it comes with dr taylor so we have to come up with another one and she's well you can have a designee okay we'll get we'll give the man a break you don't have to come to every meeting what day did we pick was i involved monday my own nine o'clock no 11 okay all right well anyway well we'll get you we'll get to the miss hall the next meeting is july 12 20 20 20 20 22 when 4 30 p.m for the work session 6 30 p.m for regular business so no

238irregular business at the next meeting all right we are now adjourned so thank you it was a great fun night you