001did you enjoy it you know everybody 2.2-3712 of the code of virginia i move that the closed meeting of the school board of stafford county on january 25th 2022 being 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 only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements were discussed in the closed meeting to which the certification resolution applies and to only such public business matters as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered by the board second all right we have a motion in a second do we have um roll call please dr chase agree this guy agree ms halstead agree ms healy i agree but i want to
002note that i was in for a portion of the meeting as i noted at the beginning i was not in for the discussion of the high school site ms randall agree ms siegmann agree dr warner agree madam chair the motion passes unanimously unanimously do we have a motion coming out of closed session yes madam chair we have a motion to authorize legal counsel and staff to initiate a quick take condemnation proceeding for the acquisition of an 83.4886 portion of parcel id number 3637 partial as well as a temporary construction easement and sanitary sewer easement on parcel id number 3637 partial including a provide the required 30 to 45 day notice to the owner of the school board's intent to file a certificate of take if negotiations remain at an impasse and after a successful comprehensive
003planned consistency review pursuant to virginia code 15.2-2232 filing the certificate of take within 30 to 45-day period and see if necessary filing a notice and petition of condemnation within the time required by law second okay we have a motion in a second i'm going to abstain from the vote on this motion since i did not participate in that portion all in favor of the motion please say aye aye aye all opposed and one abstention that would be me we have a second motion coming out to authorize legal counsel and staff to make an offer to purchase an identified and specific parcel or parcels of real estate necessary for roadway access to new construction of high school six at its appraised value to engage in negotiations with the owner for such purchase and to return to
004the board for review of the negotiated contract terms for approval second okay motion and second i'm also going to abstain on this motion all in favor please say aye aye all pose and one abstention madam clerk no further action from the closed session we're going to adjourn the closed session and we will open the meeting in five minutes we want to call this meeting to order madam clerk would you call the role please yes ma'am dr chase present ms guy i don't even know why i worry present ms hall halstead here miss healy here miss randall here miss sigman here dr warner here madam chair you have a quorum thank you do we have a motion for approval of the agenda move to approve the agenda second now you're fine was there an item that
005you wanted to take off no okay all right all in favor the motion to approve the agenda please say aye aye aye motion carries unanimously would you please stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the fire of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god and indivisible with liberty and justice for all we we'd like to invite the brook point high school navy jrtc to come forward with the i didn't know we had colors colors the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all right forward march um we'd like to recognize the members of tonight's color guard from brook point high schools navy jrotc cadet lieutenant samantha figueroa
006cadet lieutenant junior grade jalen guerrero cadet seaman hannah mcgowan cadet commander patricia tienge and master sergeant reed retired u.s marine corps thank you for being with us that brings us to awards and recommendations ms osborne a proclamation to recognize february 7th through 11th 2022 as national school counseling week whereas school counselors are employed in public and private schools to help students reach their full potential and whereas school counselors are actively committed to helping students explore their abilities strengths interests and talents as these traits relate to career awareness and development and whereas school counselors help parents focus on ways to further the educational personal and social growth of their children and whereas school counselors work with teachers and other educators to help students explore their potential and set realistic goals for themselves and whereas school counselors
007seek to identify and utilize community resources that can enhance and complement comprehensive school counseling programs and help students become productive members of society and whereas school counselors are a vital part of recovery efforts as they have adapted their programs to meet student and community needs in response to the kova 19 pandemic and whereas school counselors act as advocates for educational equity and social justice they empower marginalized students close achievement gaps and address systemic barriers and whereas comprehensive developmental school counseling programs are considered an integral part of the educational process that enables all students to achieve success in school now therefore be it reclaimed that the school board of stafford county hereby designates february 7th through 11th as national school counseling week throughout the school division adopted by the school board of stafford county on this
00825th day of january 2022 are there any counselors in attendance tonight thank you for coming ms osborne a proclamation to recognize february 2022 as african american history month whereas in 1976 african american history month was formally adopted to honor and affirm the importance of african american history throughout our american experience and whereas the history of people of african heritage goes back thousands of years and includes some of the greatest most advanced and innovative societies in the history of human existence and whereas african americans have played a significant role in the history of the united states from the early days of the pioneers to our present-day leaders in such industries as aerospace finance government and international trade and whereas african-american history month is a time for all americans to reflect on the rich history and teachings
009of african americans whose contributions are vast and wide and whereas during african american history month all americans are encouraged to reflect on the rich history and teachings of african americans and bear witness to the progress beauty and achievements they have made throughout our regions now therefore be proclaimed that the school board of stafford county hereby designates the month of february 2022 as african american history month throughout the school division we encourage the celebration of the collective ingenuity creativity cultures and traditions of african americans and encourage participation in educational events honoring the contribution of black americans adopted by the school board of stafford county on this 25th day of january 2022. now in honor of african-american history month principal eric underhill of shirley high middle school will read the timely address he shared with his school
010community regarding the lasting impact of dr martin luther king and how it is still impacting our community to this day good evening madam chair and members of the school board dr taylor it is my pleasure to share this address with you as a former social studies teacher i feel very strongly that our students see the relevance and their own connection to our historical leaders from the past and generations going forward this week we celebrate the life and legacy of dr martin luther king jr dr king has a significant impact on the society in which we live he promoted non-violent activism against racial inequality segregation and inequity dr king's legacy is one of inspiration one that calls each of us to make our community country and world a better place for all people it is our
011responsibility to treat one another with the respect and dignity we each deserve when we work together listen to one another and give kindness to one another we will always achieve greatness dr king's words inspire me each and every day he says quote the time is always right to do what is right we need to look outside of ourselves and consider one another with our actions our words and make a conscious effort to do what is right dr king stated life's quote life's most pertinent and urgent question is what are you doing for others as we return to school this week i encourage you to think about this question how can you positively contribute to something kind for someone else how can you do what is right how can you make our school and our community
012a better place another part of his legacy is perseverance dr king encountered challenges and resistance to his activism but he persevered he continued to speak mobilized communities and constantly called for action he recognized that progress and change would take time however he provided the the provided the consistent encouragement to all by saying quote if you can't fly then run if you can't run then walk if you can't walk then crawl but by all means keep moving as i reflect upon his words i think of you our students are timberwolves like dr king you each have goals for yourselves and for your community to achieve these goals you will need to persevere you will need to work hard overcome obstacles and you will need to work together with others keep your eye on the prize and
013work toward it each and every day it will take time but you will succeed as a closing thought dr king states quote the function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically intelligence plus character is the goal of true education his words inspire us to embody our timberwolf pack and pride together we are the timberwolves we are a pack together we are positivity accountability continuous improvement and kindness we each demonstrate our timberwolf pride of passion respect integrity determination and excellence thank you that brings us to item 4.03 recognition of stat presidential scholar and of student artwork for the scps fy 23 budget book good evening madam chair school board members and dr taylor the superintendent would like to recognize individuals each month who have contributed significantly to the goodwill and
014advancement of positive culture among their school department and community tonight we recognize two students whose academic excellence reflected greatly upon themselves their school and the school division ms oladipo if you could join us please dr simple why don't you join us later this evening dr taylor will present his proposed operating budget students in miss amy ellis's design and multimedia one class at mountain view high school created designs for the budget theme of the 21 renderings submitted miss ariat oladipo's design was selected for its bold fluid design that conveys movement and the strong conviction to move the school division forward her artwork is featured throughout the budget slideshow the executive summary and on the website as an artist miss oladipo enjoys creating original pieces that showcase her imagination creativity and the perception of life around her
015additionally her designs for the stafford soccer logo and heartwood hornets t-shirts were also selected as the first place artwork in two other competitions this year it is her hope that her work will continue to be appreciated throughout a distinguished career as an artist and digital animator thank you miss ellis for encouraging your students and submitting the designs for review congratulations miss oladipo we wish you continued success in your designs [Applause] miss divine if you'll join us please miss annie devine was selected as one of virginia's five nominees for the u.s presidential scholars for career and technical education ms devine is currently enrolled in the biomedical staff program traveling from her base school at brooke point to attend classes at north stafford high school ms devine has been interested in this field for as long as
016she can remember recalling when she earned her first aid badge in girl scouts her aunt a paramedic showed her how to use the blood pressure cuff and stethoscope which sparked her interest in becoming a first responder she began attending stat nights when she was in sixth grade with her older sister who also earned this recognition in the stat it program two years prior on her 16th birthday ms devine earned her emergency medical technician certification and later joined the national registry of emergency technicians ms amanda collette the stat biomed lead teacher at north stafford notes that miss divine has been passionate and eager to be involved since day one she emphatically jumped on the opportunity to be on the stat student council and help improve the stat program by creating opportunities for students to be involved
017in the community and to make a difference in the lives of others she has helped organize food drives adopt a family holiday giving penny wars for non-profit organizations annual stat t-shirts middle school visits to promote stat stat night and stat freshman orientation as well as running the program's bi-monthly meetings mr vine recently taught her classmates a stop the bleed training course she is a certified instructor and the course fits in the program's emergency care unit ms collette usually shows a video however ms devine demonstrated again her expertise and eagerness volunteering to teach the class and train students individually on proper tourniquet use and wound packing ms devine has also completed the certification process and was able to award each of her classmates with their official stop the bleed certification her year-long capstone project is also
018focused on making a difference in health care ms devine was the first to secure a mentor and has been passionate about her project since getting it approved congratulations mr vine we wish you not success not only in this nationwide competition but in your future as a first responder you are certainly actually a brilliant start a future we have a future nurses that brings us to item 5.01 the superintendent's fy 23 operating budget proposal dr taylor we're going to turn on all of our electronics here oh i'm going to watch it over here yeah i think it's going to go over there thank you madam chair we're getting we're getting intimate here for a second uh i didn't know that was part of the plan well thank you thank you so much for the opportunity madam
019chair members of the board and as you can see we've got our fabulous student artwork showcased throughout our presentation today and and some of that digital art is very marketable in today's world and a lot of what we hope to do for our kids is to prepare them for life after high school and life after whatever level they're in right now and we we are certainly very proud of our students as they as they make that journey i thought i would start off by telling you the punch line right up front i'm a fan of what we call a bottom line up front or a bluff slide to tell you what the punch line of this budget is and we have a lot of challenges in stafford county public schools and i have a handful
020of proposed solutions not a not a litany not a list of 20 different proposed solutions but really just a handful to target some really important details of uh some things that have been troubling us lately and so you're going to see this theme throughout today's presentation as we as we focus on trying to find responsible solutions given the amount of revenue that we have to work with so i want to begin by talking a little bit about who we are as a school system and uh i've got a litany of numbers here and i'm not going to list them all off but we are one of the largest school systems in virginia there are 132 school systems in virginia and about 100 of them are 2 000 or less students and we are by far
021the largest in our region and and our students are served well in stafford county public schools and we're also a very diverse community we have 86 spoken languages at home we serve them in 33 very different schools at 35 different sites with different programs that we offer we host a number of programs that are very competitive and that do help prepare our kids for their future we also serve a lot of meals in our school system we served 1.5 million lunches last year and 1.4 million breakfasts we traveled 1.8 million miles in our transportation department this past year we did so with 194 buses you have staff of 4 000 and 250 individuals who wake up every morning wanting to serve kids and i will say as someone who's been new to this community and
022this is my seventh week uh in your employ in stafford county i've learned a lot we have fantastic people who live here we have this great community that wants and cares very deeply for kids and wants to do the very best for kids and the teachers that i get to go to work with every day and the staff that i get to go to work with every day feels the same way it seems like a lot of money to have 341 million dollars and as a matter of fact it's kind of like a mega millions type of dollar like a powerball kind of number and to one individual that is a lot that is a lot but to the 30 000 students that we serve and the 4 000 employees it doesn't go very far
023and i want to talk a little bit about what that looks like today during our presentation we are so proud of our kids we we have been doing some pretty remarkable things with our kids whether it's operation warm where we're equipping the community with winter coats or we're banding together for hunger uh with our marching bands and our our schools are working to to do philanthropy in the community we're pushing the cutting edge with cyber security technology uh we are advancing our coursework uh where we can under very strange circumstances this pandemic has not been kind to us but our kids have found a way to excel and our teachers continue to find a way to excel too our kids are picking up national local and state recognitions for their hard work and it really
024is our goal twofold to to get our kids ready for life after they leave us but also to create those great neighbors that we want to have next door to us when they grow up but some things have happened over some time over the last few years and i want to point that out and there's always this big question when you talk about money is whether or not the community is getting a great value for their tax dollar and i can tell you that stafford county gets a tremendously good value for what it spends on public education but the question always arises is do you share your warts or not and tonight i'm going to take a little bit of a risk and i'm going to share some of our warts because i want to
025be very transparent about the areas that we need to improve and i want to be very clear about what i think it's going to take for us to get there and so right before the pandemic we were performing pretty well not amazing not at the top of the chart but pretty well i selected a handful of districts that i want to talk about stafford county obviously is a great uh example right there at the top and i've highlighted them in red the state average of performance and this is just sols and sols aren't the end all be all i need to be very clear about that it's just one indicator but it's an important indicator for us because it gives us one snapshot of our performance i chose arlington because it's a school system that
026is the closest to us in size it's a very different school system than ours but it's very close to us in size they have about 29 000 students we have about 30 000 students fredericksburg city obviously is right around the corner hanover county is a is a school system very similar to ours in terms of its geographic diversity in terms of its student population it's a good match prince william is right around the corner and spotsylvania county is also a good example and i could have probably put in falkier county too if i wanted to so taking a look at performance uh you know we were doing okay not great but we were right around the state average where we were several years before this was actually much higher but where we are today is
027pretty dramatic and it's important that we confront this face to face and i want to to put this out there that of course we didn't assess uh history and social studies sol is the same way and that content the same way that we did prior to the pandemic but performance has changed it's changed quite a bit and although lots of other places throughout the state also had similar performance drops some didn't and i would be remiss if i didn't point out that hanover county was in person for pretty much the entire time and arlington county was virtual for pretty much the entire time so there are some interesting things there that there wasn't a yo-yo effect of going this and that and back and forth and hybrid and not hybrid and that certainly has paid
028uh played a toll on stafford county and many other counties but it's up to us to look at how we can reverse this trend and how we can focus on our kids and give them not only the academic supports that they need but also the social and emotional support that they need to be successful in our schools there's also a little bit of a correlation between performance and money now i wouldn't be doing a budget presentation if i didn't make this at least a little bit about money and arlington as you can see is right up top and they're there they definitely spend a lot per kid and i'm not necessarily advocating that for stafford county i don't think that's a good fit for us just to be honest i think we can utilize our
029resources a whole lot better than that but every other county comparator to us just buries us and just even small differences have a tremendous effect on our bottom line so that you can see the actual numbers i thought it pointed out to you and there's some there's some steep realities with this and to spell that out even a little bit clearer if uh stafford spent the same amount on public education in spotsylvania county we'd have an additional 21 million to use for our classrooms if we spent the same amount as prince william per student we'd have nearly 45 million we spent the same amount as year be closer to 82 million now again i'm i'm not necessarily advocating for this but in arlington it would be close to 300 million which would be close to
030doubling our budget now the funny thing about arlington is they're the closest to us in size in the commonwealth and they have nearly twice the amount of money to support kids now money isn't everything and it certainly isn't uh the kind of budget that we're looking for and the kind of money that we're hoping to spend not even close i'd never make that proposition to you or to the taxpayers but it is important for us to point out how different each of these school systems spends money and where they choose to focus and how they choose to support kids and also what kind of performance they get in exchange it's called return on investment and so i also think it's important for us to talk about this ward and that word is that we're growing
031pretty quickly and if we were to look even a few more years into the future i know that this board would not be surprised that that bar on the right is just going to keep on going up the reason i chose 12 years and this being the 13th year on the far right is that our kids that are entering kindergarten in the 2010-2011 school year will be graduating next year and my how their school system has changed in the 13 years that they have been in stafford county they have added another 4 000 classmates it's pretty dramatic and i wonder what are entering kindergarteners next year how much stafford county will change during their time as well 2010 is an interesting year for another reason too it's also the first fiscal year where we had
032a dramatic impact tied to the housing market crash and we're going to talk about that again in a few more slides but we haven't quite recovered from that one yet so i want to talk a little bit about some of our needs but i want to do it in a little bit of a roundabout way so please indulge me again we see a lot of our needs tied to recruiting and retaining great people managing our growth and of course on time transportation i want to spend some time talking about that but the bottom line is that our families our students our community not only deserves a high quality school system but they demand it i think i got a few friends here today that would agree with me um now i know i'm going to
033get some flack for this so in fairness in fairness my wife is from maine and her first professional football game was the first game that tom brady played in as a professional athlete so in fairness this is a little bit to her but it proves a point tom brady makes about 45 million dollars a year and per pass he makes over sixty two thousand dollars per pass and a first year teacher in stafford county makes forty eight thousand dollars a year now that's just not a common uh commentary on tom brady or uh and notice notice i did put him in a patriots uniform too and i can't get used to the new scenario at all but but it's it's a it's a commentary on some of the things that we value and it's really
034important that we start to look at our teachers with a different value lens and take a look at what it takes for them to survive and for them to be a part of our community and to make a dramatic impact in this community so you would have to work for 20 years in stafford county to even get close to what tom brady makes per pass 20-year teacher in stafford county 61 950 in salary and the funny part about that is is uh that's tom brady's salary per pass not per completion his completion rate is only 67.5 and i don't know about you but uh i don't know if i'd be thrilled with 67.5 sol scores like tom brady gets but that's pretty tough and so looking at our teachers through a different lens i think
035is going to be pretty important because teacher quality is the biggest differentiator in our school system it is the single most important factor to school improvement you can have great everything else if you don't have a great teacher in the classroom you're not going to get the performance that you want and so we've been losing teachers at a pretty alarming rate now i would make a a pretty strong assertion that having some attrition is a good thing bringing in new ideas welcoming in new people to the organization that's really important but we've been losing at a rate a little bit higher than what we should expect and a good target for us would be somewhere in the neighborhood of around 10 or 11 percent our last year our attrition was 18.2 percent and several years
036before that it was pretty high too so you can't necessarily blame the pandemic although i'm sure that that had a role and of that eighteen point two percent less than twenty percent of that were done was due to retirement so eighty percent of the eighteen point two percent was through through attrition in the ranks not retirements matter of fact i think our retirement rate of that percentage was 16.7 percent substitute teachers another big issue for us to deal with before the pandemic we had a substitute fill rate of 93 percent during the school year it slipped to 83 percent in real terms what that looks like is it means that between 30 and 40 classes in our school system go unfilled and teachers have to give up their planning periods and other support staff have
037to give up their time to fill those classes and if you're doing some quick math my second slide in this presentation had to do with the number of schools we have and the number of campuses we have and we have 35 campuses so that's effectively one teacher per school per day that goes unfilled routinely friday is the highest number of requests for subs and the lowest fill rates we're going to talk specifically about friday when we get to our solutions our support staff play a critical role in helping to keep our school system going you're going to see a pretty significant uh target to address some of the needs of our bus drivers our outstanding very hard working and understaffed nutrition team and our school nurses who really have been working double triple quadruple time
038over the last few years we're very proud of them but they are who makes school possible behind the scenes it's also a really important note that 70 percent of our employees are residents of stafford county they pay taxes here they shop here they're not just employees that are taking the tax dollar they're also providing the tax dollar and that is really really important um we also have real issues that we're not going to go into a ton of detail about tonight like our growing community in terms of our capital needs we're going to talk about it in other aspects some of our aging buildings and the needs that are that happen when you have massive systems that go under like hvac systems roofs air filtration systems that need massive upgrades and of course our transportation
039system which definitely needs change so i'm proposing for the board a number of things for consideration and i've reorganized a few things for you tonight and i want to share them with you i have a few handouts for you and for our viewing public these are attached onto the board's agenda for our audience that's in the room we do have some paper copies if you'd like it we have last year's budget summary we have this year's budget summary formatted the same way and then i did something completely different i formatted it the way i like it sorry about that and i formatted a budget summary that looks like this that has your revenue something called non-discretionary expenditures which i'm going to talk about and then our discretionary expenditures and then inside a list of enhancements
040that could make our school system better the last handout that i have for you is all of that in a really tight summary form and i'll close with that handout to talk about so let's get into what our revenue looks like well the good news is that it's good news and that we are expecting due to a significant uh bump in state revenue that we are going to expect close to 20 million dollars a little over 20 million dollars at this time in our projected basic aid and thanks to our citizens in this community that have spent their tax dollars locally we can expect close to four million dollars in local tax revenue from purchases in terms of sales tax revenue our county government has programmed preliminarily eight million dollars as a placeholder in their
041local budget so that will be a county transfer and this is all new money in addition to what our budget was funded in the previous year and that's what our revenue picture looks like um just so that you have a kind of a glimpse of like where our money comes from it's about one percent comes from the federal government about one percent actually a little share just right above one percent comes from uh local fees that we collect or small things that we might have in terms of a building rental or something along those lines very small amount of money but 38 percent comes from our local county government it's it's a transfer from the the local government and 60 percent of our budget comes from the state it's good to know just to kind
042of put in perspective and how we spend our money is really really simple and maybe this is over simplifying it but i'm going to make it really simple we spend 86 percent of our budget on compensation and benefits this is about the people that serve our kids that's how we spend our money the other uh portion the other 14 is how we keep the lights on and how we maintain our buildings and the materials and supplies that our teachers have that's that red pie slice and that may be an oversimplified version but it's a good indicator of what our school system looks like most school systems are somewhere in the 75 ish range in terms of compensation and benefits and they focus a little bit more on some of the stuff we don't have a
043lot of money to have a lot of stuff all of our money goes to putting out a sharp teacher in the classroom and supports around that teacher so that they can do a great job so our first big chunk that i want to focus on is our non-discretionary expense and these are quite literally what it would take for us to do exactly what we did this year again next year but with 600 more students and it would cost us about 12 million dollars to do just exactly what we did last year again next year but with 600 more students and what some of that looks like and i'm not going to go line by line with this because you have a budget work session to talk through that but new positions for growth you're welcoming
044over 600 students next year brand new so our our student account won't be 30 000 will be 30 600 plus and you will need additional personnel to support that and so that's about 60 positions that support 600 students that's everything from bus drivers to special education teachers to general ed classroom teachers it's the whole gamut okay we also want to accommodate for new kids coming into school and we do a per pupil allocation to the schools so that they can have some funds for materials and supplies that's factored in at just over a quarter of a million dollars and then we have some contractual requirements that we hope to maintain year over year that the board has started before a good example of that is that earlier this year in august the board increased bus
045driver compensation and set a new bus driver starting salary and in order to keep that going at its current rate will cost 1.45 million just to continue the things that you've already done uh this board has done something miraculous that not a lot of people have ever really considered in public education and uh it's really a bold thing and something you should be very proud of which is that when there's a health care increase you don't let it affect your employees on their bottom line you take the cost and the employer share of health care expense so when you give a raise to your employees they actually get to feel the raise and they don't have the adverse consequence of constantly raising health care costs it's a bold move and it's also something that has
046a big impact but it is also a big expense in order to maintain these things over time it does have a cost there's something that i'm putting in the budget as a placeholder for future years and i apologize that in my seventh week on the job i haven't had a chance to unpack this as much as i'd like to but the second to last bullet at the bottom is something called pay go major maintenance pay as you go major maintenance we have been debt financing a lot of our major maintenance projects through our capital improvement plan that has to stop and we need to move forward to a place where it's something that we build into our operating budget over time and so this is something that we should invest in by making contributions over
047the next several years to build up a fund where we can start dealing with some of our major maintenance issues without debt financing this is a really smart way to to handle major maintenance and a really sharp way to move our division forward so that we are not having to worry about some of those big systems going down and oh my gosh where are we going to find the money because we will have built up a fund to help support that over time and be able to manage that if you're looking for a target of what that would look like it's pretty expensive people who budget properly for major maintenance should budget somewhere in the neighborhood of two and a half percent of the value of all of their assets well the value of all
048of your assets is over 700 million dollars so if you're doing the quick calculations in your head that's about 20 million dollars a year about 18 or 19 million dollars a year that we should be budgeting for major maintenance we're not doing it so we need to take a hard look at what that might look like so that we can take care of these community treasures because our schools are community treasures they're they're hubs for the community and just to continue to keep the lights on uh the utility companies are are raising their rates over six percent and so we are we have an anticipated increase in our utility bill so it's a lot so just to keep the lights on next year in a sense it will cost us an additional 12 million dollars
049the last category that uh that i want to spend a lot of time on is our discretionary category and this is really just the area where we have a lot of say in what we spend our money on and i want to target really just a handful of areas i want to target our licensed teacher compensation and that's everybody from counselors to teachers to the folks that are working directly with our kids and as well as our non-licensed scale and increase compensation there i'm looking at a flat five percent increase for our non-licensed uh scale and our teacher scale i'm going to get into great detail with that momentarily i want to target substitute compensation in a pretty dramatic way if you've ever taken an uber on one day and the rate was a pretty
050low rate and then you took the same uber ride several days later at a peak time you probably paid a premium price well we should look at premium pricing for some of our subs on high impact days and so with that we have a strategy to address our fridays and target fridays as a way to help increase our substitute pool and our substitute fill rate the last bucket that i want to focus on is transportation improvements and um i think it's time that we have a school day that is long enough uh to accommodate uh a catch-up to learning that that needs to occur and to replace uh some of the the learning that that never occurred or that was lost and we're going to need some time to do that so in order to
051do that we'll need to return to a three-tiered bus schedule and that three-tier bus schedule is uh is part of a transportation recommendation that this board will receive at its february meeting i will announce this again during superintendent's comments but i'll be surveying our parents our secondary students and our staff as to their uh perceptions about the transportation schedule their bell schedule and the order in which schools go and that's that survey will be released tomorrow afternoon at 4 pm go into more detail about that soon i think it's really important that we figure out a way that we can be as competitive as we can in a very competitive market in a during a national teacher shortage and during troubling times that we're facing right now that top line you see is prince william
052county's uh salary scale the red line is stafford county's salary scale and the very light blue line is spotsylvania county's salary scale now it doesn't seem very dramatic because those lines look awfully close together but the dotted line is a new salary structure that i'm proposing for our license scale this like i said teachers counselors and instructional staff and it is actually pretty dramatic and i'm gonna i'm gonna drag you back to algebra 1 for a second and i'm going to talk about slope because our salary scale is an issue of slope the prince william salary scale slopes at three percent per year after the first several years so after the first five years which is relatively no change it starts to increase dramatically at a rate of three and a half percent ours during
053the first 15 years hardly has any slope at all and this is what's pretty dramatic so what i'm proposing to the board is to have the first five year slope at three percent to be price competitive with prince william and then every year thereafter slope at one and a half percent to give teachers hope as to what the future could be and what their potential salary could be in the future if we maintain a system like this the board can then in the future look at how it wants to start its starting teacher salary and what slope it wants for its wages looking forward based on the available revenue that it has for this particular initiative so let's take a little bit of a closer look when we look at our current scale against our
054proposed scale you'll see that it's very close together at the bottom not quite close together at the top but very far apart in the middle and it's this middle portion that has been really troubling because and i've used this analogy before and i think that that's relevant today when we were going through school our teachers were in their late 30s on average in terms of age they were our parents age but today our teachers are much much younger almost a decade younger on the average and that's a reflection because of all of the people leaving the profession they're not staying and our attrition rate reflects this and it's pretty dramatic our early teachers aren't staying our mid-career teachers aren't staying a few of our folks that are late career are staying to the end but
055we do need to incentivize our great staff to stay i think all of our community would agree that they've had pretty miraculous experiences with some really great teachers in our school system the trick is we got to keep them and we've got to recruit new friends to join the team and we have to incentivize that so it's pretty dramatic to make the jump that i'm proposing in the middle but i also think that it's necessary given where we are and what we need to do to reverse attrition so i'm offering a corrected and more competitive teacher pay scale or instructionally licensed scale the last section is the the guts as you say of this document that you have before you and it's a long list of enhancements that didn't make the budget it's a very
056extensive list as a matter of fact and these are things that we should start thinking about as a school district over the next several years and this list really is exhaustive i i really could have put together 20 slides just on this list of all of the wonderful great ideas that our staff came up with for budget requests but what it will cost us is is significant so we have to map it out over time i promised you responsible solutions and the most responsible solution that i can offer you is to not eat the apple in one bite it's that we have to eat it over time and we have to plan ahead and we have to do this year over year to think about the future not at one time but thinking about it
057in iterative terms so my hope is that once we get past this fiscal year that this is the last year that i present to you a one year budget and that's pretty dramatic i'm also hoping to bring to you staffing standards that we can fulfill that are true and honest from school to school to school that there's consistency and parity between schools that we account for the differences in our schools and what they need and that we stick to it that we start biting off some of these enhancement apples one bite at a time and it's not the appropriate time because the board has a schedule for when it talks about its capital improvement plan but rethinking how we might better serve our community and manage its growth with its capital improvement plan and it's
058going to take us several months to assess where we need to go going into the fall which is when the board adopts its capital improvement plan speaking of the four of the fall the board set forward three objectives in its budget priorities directing the superintendent now i wasn't here when you all adopted those priorities but i gotta tell you you picked three good ones you said that the superintendent needed to address staff compensation retention and recruitment you said that the superintendent in his proposed budget needed to address managing growth and we've done that and the superintendent needed to also take a hard look at per pupil expenditure and we've done that so i'm very pleased to bring you this budget presentation and to bring you responsible solutions on how we might recruit and retain great
059people how we might manage our growth and how we might provide on-time transportation through three-tiered bus system so i have just this last handout i want to talk to you about and i've detailed some of the changes and inside the handout on the upper left corner and i will say this it's got a very attractive cover very nice thank you it's too bad our student left because she got highlighted very nicely it's delightful cover but i want to show you what this looks like in actual numbers on a teacher pay scale so i have our current pay scale and i have um our proposed pay scale side by side and i picked a year very specifically i picked year 14. and this is a teacher with 14 years of experience this year that at the
060end of it will have 15 years of experience and will be on the scale at step 15 for next year and the reason i picked this is because this teacher who would have started 14 years ago with us started right before the housing bubble burst and instead of getting step adjustments every year they got percentage adjustments every year and what happened to this teacher is that several things happened to this teacher this teacher's salary got compressed and in addition to changes in the housing market and changes in the revenue picture locally this was also the year that the affordable care act was passed and health care costs skyrocketed so not only did our teachers experience compression in their salary but their take-home pay became less and over time despite lots of great efforts from lots
061of great folks trying to reverse this there hasn't been enough revenue really until now to take a step at how we might reverse some of that course and how we might create some wage growth and repair some of that so it looks pretty dramatic for that person and it is because they've been through a lot and the state right now is offering an incentive right now in the in the current states plan of a shared expense of 5 percent or more for teacher increase it's funny when governors say that they're going to increase teacher pay by 5 what they never for never really tell anybody is that they are willing to pay a portion of five percent not the whole five percent which is always interesting so we're starting um our our scale with a
062five percent change and then we're going to fix that slope and we're going to correct that scale and set a marker for how we might improve that going forward and on the back page i do have a little bit of contact information which i think is helpful folks who think that this is a good idea they may want to reach out or folks who think this is a bad idea may want to reach out to and share with their policy makers things that are important to them this is by no means an exhaustive list of all the things that we could or would want to do to make our school system better but this is a really important list and i narrowed it down to three really top priorities and that's where my focus is
063so with that madam chair i'll stop talking and i'll entertain any questions that the board may have knowing full well that the board has several work sessions coming up on this topic thank you dr taylor are there any questions that need to be addressed this evening if not i'd suggest that we send them and email them to dr taylor so he can be prepared at our work session on saturday to respond to them [Applause] that that was a wow presentation thank you all right that brings us to citizen comments i'm going to read our standard language here but right now we have 35 people who've signed up and i believe there's more coming more more lists coming so what i'm going to do is to call five names at a time and if the five
064people can line up and come one after the other then that will help us move more efficiently through here and also i want to note that the board does not respond to comments at the time of the meeting but that staff addresses comments after the meeting if we have your information we will be able to respond to to questions all right three minutes are allotted to each speaker or group citizens are encouraged to provide a copy of the comments to the board clerk who is ms mergo right here 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 the chairperson reserves the right to restrict the total citizen comments to a predetermined maximum number of minutes with the approval
065of the board 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 schools policy 1113 public complaints the three minutes is documented on the podium there are three lights when you start to speak the green light goes on after two minutes is it one minute the yellow light goes on ms merger could you stand up there so they can show them what i'm talking about with these lights and the reason this is important is because when you have one minute left to speak the um the yellow light will go on and
066then when the three minutes is up the red light goes on because of the number of speakers we have this evening i'm going to ask you to stop when that red light goes on and that is a courtesy to everyone who wants to speak sometimes we've allowed people to wrap up or you know finish um you know finish a statement but with the number of speakers we have tonight i we're going to have to stick with it with the three minutes exactly we do not have a predetermined number of minutes so anyone who wishes to address the board will have that opportunity i'm going to call the names on the sign up list when we finish with those names anyone else who wishes to address the board uh can come forward and we'll have a
067lineup for that as well so when one person finishes the next one can come down if you haven't already signed up after you speak there is a sign up sheet here that we ask you to sign up but we'll do that after you speak okay all right so so far we don't have another list but we have 35 that have signed up here so if you're not on the list you can come up after we get through the first speaker is shannon fingerholtz the second is kelly grissom the third is hayley purchell fourth gary atkins and fifth is jeff russo my name is shannon fingerholz my husband and i as most of the folks in this room made the choice to send our child to public school which is run regulated by the county state
068and federal governments we chose to co-raise our child with the government thankfully in our country we get to choose between public home school or private options we thankfully are also able to stand before you bringing issues and suggestions and how that education is handled i appreciate the willingness and bravery of folks that share their experiences and suggestions before the board and public even if they are different from my own like most reviews and stories we hear the ones with deep emotional attachment you all hear a lot of the exception stories sometimes the ones with great joy and accomplishments more often the ones with fear and anger my heart sincerely goes out to those parents with fear and concern searching for solutions for their children that have extra needs and are impacted with the covid protocols
069those children are important please know that i personally don't know a parent that thinks these mitigations will or should go on forever i wish for a community to hang on just for a while longer for the benefit of our fellow neighbors kids our school staff and completely exhausted healthcare workers there really should be metrics set for when to start winding down these protocols and once for when we need to step them back up just being frustrated and over the whole thing while a valid emotion is not measurable i want to express how much my child loves school loves her teachers and the administrators she loves seeing her friends in the classroom i love seeing i'm going to get emotional i love seeing how much she learns every day when she comes home excited about a
070funny story they read or what the class worked on in math i love that children and staff from different backgrounds and religions make up her school environment these are the things we celebrate about the school day i want you to know there are a whole lot of folks that you guys don't hear from that are teaching our kids not to be scared or angry but to be considerate make the best of a weird situation that sometimes new decisions need to be made and how great it will be that one day this will be a memory and a story of experience to tell trouble and challenges will always come every year every generation what excellent time to show our children how to manage those challenges with dignity respect hard work resourcefulness and with compassion be quick
071and equipping them to handle the ones that will come their way i want to thank our prior and current board and superintendent there's so many decisions you have to make while considering risk function of a school system individual impact and wildly different viewpoints your hard work is deeply appreciated i want to thank the teachers they are the warriors and caretakers on the ground every day with our children finding the balance of differing parental opinion fragile hearts growing minds and all the curriculum we truly have some amazing folks in this county co-raising our kids thank you [Applause] my name is kelly grissom i'm a father to an eighth grader in stafford county schools i also have two grown children who are recent graduates and matriculated through stafford county schools i'm a retired marine and i'm a
072former federal employee i used to work with this guy's husband but i see she had to leave or something [Music] i currently i'm a contractor part-time contractor where i teach members of law enforcement on a weekly basis the fbi and fairfax county police department and for 12 years i've been a business owner here in stafford i have a martial arts school that's on 610 near the home depot we've been there for 12 years and i just want to say very simply that we don't want your help on the mask issue that's it we can decide for ourselves and our families what is safe that's it we don't want your help second issue i got a martial arts school i got an average class size with kids as big as any classroom in the county i
073got kids from every school in the county two years while you guys have fumbled around with how to deal with this i've had healthy kids in my school working out no mass no restrictions no mandates families families managing their own risk as they see necessary and for two years while you guys have done this at my school on 6 10 we've had no problems none not masking kids is safe i have two years of proof period thirdly this legal thing i don't care they don't care we don't care everything that happened to slaves legal everything that happened to jews legal i don't care about legal i don't want to hear it what i want is morally ethically what's right for my kids you can fight the legal stuff in a court system i don't care
074we pay for it you work for us we don't want your help on this one issue thank you [Applause] wow my name is haley persha got two amazing boys right here patrick sixth grade rodney thompson middle school plays travel soccer finn is enjoying his freshman year at colonial forge high school proud member of the basketball team got a husband whose job demands high level of health and fitness i'm a personal trainer although i really wish i had a law degree these days to fight for my children we believe food is medicine i use local farmers for my meat and my produce i drive all the way to culpepper for my raw milkshare and while we believe in balance and we love sam's pizza and taco tuesday we have a very holistic approach to our life
075breath is life and as i mask my kids to send them to school i am horrified it goes against the core of my beliefs we are teaching healthy children their breath is dangerous may bring harm to those around them i will avoid getting into data and research we can all find data and research research that's going to support our beliefs please know that i am here tonight representing all parents mask unmask we're just following our mama bear and papa bear guts and the research that we're finding and trying to do what we believe is best for our children parents choice gives us all that opportunity i'm simply a mom who strives to raise my kids in an environment that nourishes their minds and bodies complying with these mask mandates will not be something that my
076family and i can continue to do i can't do it i need to be able to choose to allow them to breathe fresh air as i believe god intended i need to reinforce that they are young healthy boys with amazing smiles that should be seen and not feared please allow me the choice me the choice just me the choice to unmask my kids parents the choice and according to virginia code which i can't believe is a code that has to be spoken but a parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing education and care of that parent's child i should be able to practice this right in the stafford county public school system and not be forced to withdraw my kids in order to have these rights i encourage you all to
077do what is right for all students all students and allow parent choice please please stop silencing my family i don't want to walk away from the school system please thank you [Applause] okay well good evening my name is gary adkins i live in falmouth district at six long court i've been a long time resident of stafford county over 30 years i'm a native virginian and i wanted to take just a couple of minutes to say a few things first i'd like to congratulate dr taylor on an excellent presentation well done very clear concise and uh i think a lot of thought went into that uh the other thing i wanted to talk about briefly is uh the rights of parents you know we as a country were were founded on freedom and liberty and it
078goes all the way back to the early days of the founding of this country where people had the right to choose how they lived how they raised their families and make decisions about that for themselves there's been a lot of discussions about the virginia code and yes it does codify the right that parent has to make those decisions there's been a lot of discussion about sb 1303 which directs certain things to be done but it basically directs as far as practicable and i would submit to you that the practicable stops at a point where you're breaking the right of the parent so cdc guidance is simply guidance they are not an authoritative body to make law they do not make rules that you can that you have to abide by so uh with regard to
0791303 it just gives you some guidance right that's all it does so going back to the constitution of the united states the constitution of virginia the code of virginia it clearly puts the right of these decisions for these decisions in the hands of the parents i also wanted to say a few things about teachers i can think of no one very few people who influence a kid as much as a teacher parents moms dads grandparents teachers perhaps their pastors things of that sort but a teacher has a lot of influence on the upbringing of a kid in terms of his his and her makeup in terms of her ability to have the skills necessary to live a productive life and to go out into this world that we live in and and be productive and
080happy and so i can remember in my life my first teacher was my mom who sent me on her lap at the age of about three and taught me how to read all the books that i had to learn in order to be successful in first grade i think about my first grade teacher who loved her teaching job so well that she never seemed to ever want to retire and she taught sixth grades in one room about as big as this divider to that wall that's dedication to teaching and she she did it for decades and she has still an influence on my makeup and my character a high school teacher there's one or two that stand out so all of them i commend them for their dedication and hope that you guys will rescind
081this masked debate before mr russa starts his comments come on down i'm going to read the next five speakers nathan mallory lisa lineweaver mckenna daigle angela olenek and jack olynyk jeff rosa hartwood district proud parent of a colonial forge eagle good evening members of the school board dr taylor and my fellow parents here and at home since the mass mandates have dominated stafford county schools our community continues to be conflicted when the school board decided to continue selling division in the community by making a unilateral decision without parent or community input this board set a precedent behind closed doors the board failed to consider the legal conflict between 1303 executive order 2 and virginia code section 1 240 attack 1 the rights of parents the legal authority under 1303 has been delegated to a non-stafford
082county non-virginia entity the cdc over which virginia government has no say of note the cdc has changed their mass guidance approach 13 times since february 29 2020 your course of action was not prudent judgment rather it equated to proverbially kicking the can down the road the cdc does not have adequate procedural safeguards rather they are simply making suggestions as guidance with no con conclusive evidence no true randomly controlled trials demonstrating the effectiveness of mask and they have been discredited and contained massive confounds in their study results 1303 requirements emphasize that here's to law using statements such as to the maximum extent practicable applicable mitigation strategies and reduce the transmission of covid provided by the cdc public perception says you are allowing the federal entity guidance directing the opening status of our schools did the board
083hear from the local medical community or the virginia department of health regarding the impact of mass compared to the developmental delays of a child as a mitigation strategy did the board consult any strategic plan off-ramps to accommodate the executive order the answer is no superintendent taylor provided guidance advising parents they may request an exemption via collaboration with their respective school principals yet the guidance left parents in peril this past monday because there was no direction on when exemptions would be approved is the board prepared to re-vote on this topic should the preponderance of exemptions be granted allowing children to be masculine schools what evidence does the school board have that the current children with an exemption are posing a threat to those wearing masks how many children are exempt from wearing masks in a school
084and how many children have caught covet from being in school does the school board have evidence that more children are getting coveted after eating lunch or doing physical education what data is the school tracking to demonstrate children with mask exemptions are creating coveted outbreaks again decisions are made with non-conclusive data i argue the board failed in compliance to your own bylaws under section 1103 executing prudent judgment within the limits of the law the board failed to consider comment prior to the decision and the board failed to recognize a continued detrimental developmental effects to children and the board failed to be the effective leadership your constituents elected you to be the board must re-vote by abiding by executive order too the executive order isn't about removing mass for every parent or every child it is about
085allowing parents to exercise their fundamental legal right as defined by section 240 tack one rights of parrots [Applause] good evening board my name is nathan mowry i'm a resident of embry mill right here in garrisonville i'm here to voice my support for parental rights when it comes to the care of our children this board's vote to force masks on the children in spite of parental choice amounts to a power grab by local government you do not have the authority to make health decisions for our children i encourage each of you to listen to all the parents that came here today took time out of their evenings to come here and share their opinions with you they just want to have choices for their own children and i also encourage you to reinstate parental choice for
086for the masks i also want to convey that we're all very proud of the votes that representatives maureen sigman and alyssa halstead took on this issue [Applause] thank you good evening stafford county board members and welcome to our relatively new superintendent dr taylor and newly elected school board members my name is lisa lineweaver i hold a masters in science i'm a mother of three a graduate of stafford county public schools and a citizen of stafford county not to be confused with a quote unquote subject of stafford county in the past we had a king presiding over the people before the american revolution our pledge of allegiance says to the republic for which it stands a republic is a form of government in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives the
087responsibility of whether we as citizens decide if our children wear a mask lies with our parents and guardians not with elected bureaucrats we elect our representatives to serve the will of the people and not to rule over them having been a military wife for 18 years i can assure you that freedom isn't free there's been bloodshed and personal sacrifice to preserve our freedoms here at home i'm a stay-at-home mom now and i have not had to wear a mask often however our youngest son who's in middle school has sensitive skin like me and is developing scars on his upper cheek bones from the masks he is a straight a student and likes to lean on one hand when he's focusing in class as many students do our older son has no scars as he attended
088liberty university online academy for one year and just completed pre-calculus and skipped half of 11th grade he just returned to public school the first week of this january so he does not have any scars on his face yet like the boys my husband is also gifted he had to work late and asked me to share this quote unquote i do not care who wears a mask but what i am concerned about is biologic biological boys going into girls restrooms and raping girls which has happened in loudoun county the supreme court of virginia will soon be deciding whether governor younkin's executive order to allow parents to make decisions on whether their child wears a mask in school is constitutional in new york the state supreme court judge has already ruled the mass mandate unconstitutional and declared
089it null void and unenforceable here in stafford county we ask that today you overturned the recent school board vote to mandate the continued wearing a mask for our students staff and visitors despite the fact that we have readily available vaccines for anyone who chooses to get one and to also pass to protect every child policy regarding student restrooms locker rooms and overnight field trip accommodations we need to focus on school safety in restrooms and on education may constitutional governance commit continue in this great nation we call the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands let freedom ring [Applause] my name is mckenna and i'm in fourth grade at rocky run i feel like it is important for you to hear math what maths are like from a kid's point of
090view i used to really enjoy school then covet happened since coming back to school this year each day has been harder than the last you see for us kids none of this makes sense and i feel like you have not listened to us i want you to know how hard this has been on me and other kids since september i have been trying my best but to be honest i just can't breathe in my mask and it makes me feel bad it makes me feel really stressed out the mask gets hot sticky and wet in just an hour there are a lot of kids like my brother who have autism and masks are just too much for them but because of your rules they can't even be able to take them off when they have
091a disability which makes wearing it bad for them do they not matter also if the mask works to keep you safe then we won't make anyone not wear one but mask makes some of us feel really bad how come our feelings and disabilities don't matter but your opinion does governor younkin says in his order that our parents and they are the real bosses of us should get to make the choice about what is best for us there are options for everyone of school age if you are scared or worried about coven then you have the option to wear a mask a free vaccine is available if these things are forcing on on people work so well then trust them to work for you and let me breathe trust my mom and dad to know what
092is right for me [Applause] tough act to follow angela olinick second vice chair of the stafford republican committee last thursday this school board met and voted five to two to continue the current mass mandate and prevent parents from making decisions about the care and welfare of their children when in stafford county school buildings as they say follow the money the school the county is receiving millions of dollars of funding from the federal government under the american rescue plan titled an elementary and secondary school emergency relief the program is sending billions of dollars across the nation but in order to continue to receive these funds states must submit a school district plan every six months through september 2023 showing they are fulfilling the following requirements for this s or money universal masking contact tracing quarantine isolation
093and vaccination for all students staff and teachers those of you that voted to continue absurd mandates are clearly in vehement opposition to your sworn oath in fact by issuing this illegal edict you are knowingly and willingly implementing a stall tactic that is perpetuating irrational fear violating our rights and ignoring the actual science and data that is in direct conflict with your current position the recent actions by some on this board and the disrespect shown to include unmet promises and disingenuous posturing have completely eroded the trust and confidence of your constituency additionally the result of that breach has reached the highest level of government in virginia tragically as a result of that broken trust what does our children what our children will know and remember about you they will remember those of you who were reckless
094by your reckless actions stole from them a portion of their childhood and you soaked a promising productive future just causing them great anxiety depression and loneliness they will know that in the face of overwhelming evidence this into this fact you've doubled down and caused the despair to become so intense that many children will have taken their own lives the damage these decisions and policies have caused and will continue to cause is irreparable in fact i consider it a catastrophic moral crime against our children that eventually you will have to answer for in contrast here is what our children will know and remember about us they will know and remember we love them value them honor them enough to stand and fight for their rights the safety and quality of life they will remember that we
095stood in the face of overwhelming criticism threats manipulation lies bully tactics and fear mongering and fought the good fight for them and no matter what happens we are not intimidated we are not going away we refuse to be silent under law and order is restored to conclude we're calling for immediate re vote demand the county step stop relying on esther funding immediately thank you miss sigmund and ms hall said to her [Music] [Applause] before the next speaker begins i'm going to call the next five names courtney downing bozarth william darn friends oh willa i'm sorry willa dorens amy heinz jason kaiser and catherine snyder good evening my name is jack olinick can governor juncken's executive order number two be enforced in light of the senate bill 1303 yes eo2 allows for parents to opt out
096of any mass mandates in schools eo2 also invokes the parental rights act both the parental rights act and sb 1302 are current laws in virginia the virginia paraparatable rights act provides the parents have a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing education and care of their children the statute became effective july 1st 2013 and has no expiration date sb 1303 provides that each school board shall provide in person's instruction in a manner that adheres to the maximum extent practicable any applicable medication strategies for elementary schools and secondary schools to reduce the transmission of kobe 19 that had been provided by the cdc this was an act approved in on march 30 2021 expires on august 1st 2022 it's not codified in virginia code do cdc guidelines contain a mass mandate for elementary and secondary
097schools no it does not cdd recommends universal indoor masking for all students ages two plus an order issued by the cdc on january 29 2021 requires mass be worn while on public transportation her cdc guidelines universal indoor mask masking is a recommendation not a requirement school divisions are called uphold parental rights to make decisions concerning their care of their children and to adhere to cdc guidelines to the maximum extent practical the primary objective of statutory construction is to ascertain and give effect to legislative intent senator dunavant introduced sb1303 she recently released a statement regarding the intent interpretation of the law the senator has stated that sb 1303 has been used against its intent this school year it does not mandate the use of mass in schools because cdc does not mandate mass further she stated
098eo2 does not ban mask it gives parents options just like sb 1303 does not mandate mask it gives school boards a road map to keep schools open the obvious and rational meaning of the statute should be followed the language in 1303 and the parental rates rights act is plain and clear apply cdc guidelines as much as practical and parents will make decisions regarding their care and education of their children when two statutes are in apparent conflict the virginia supreme court directs that they should be construed if reasonably if possible to allow both to stand and give force and effect to each reading the cdc recommendation as a requirement and sp 1303 as requiring it to be implemented without limitation in an attempt to nullify the parent's right to act with respect to mass the statement
099to the maximum state practical limits the implementation of cdc guidelines when they infringe upon applicable and valid current laws in virginia it is possible to harmonize sb 1303 with parental rights act by maintaining the universal masking policy with a parental opt out that's the key this this is possible and reasonably achievable the virginia principles of statutory construction instruct school boards to do so thank you hi good evening my name is courtney downing and i'm a parent of two very smart and beautiful children that attend stafford county public schools my daughter willa here is here with me tonight she's a brain cancer survivor she maintains a straight a average while struggling with many disabilities the mask you are forcing her to wear is physically and mentally affecting her since you are deciding fear over facts i
100am thinking home school may be the only safe option it seems that most of you believe i should not have parental rights that or your lawyer's opinions have swayed you to believe this to be true makes sense why spotsylvania's school board did not trust that lawyer i'm disappointed disgusted and discouraged one thing i do know for certain is i will do what i feel is best for my children just like i would want each and every one of you to have that same choice i'm an artist and i love to write so i decided to write a poem to try to convey my feelings in a positive manner undisputable science that says this is the only way this is not okay innocent children wearing a cloth mask eight plus hours a day this is not
101okay running in pe face is covered not able to breathe kids are resilient you say this is not okay suggestions from the cdc now dictate our lives our kids are suffering this is the price mass do more harm than good it should be a choice forcing our children to wear them against their will you have stolen their voice stop this insanity do the right thing today truth and freedom for all this is what i pray thank you [Applause] hello my name is willa downing and i'm a freshman at brooke point high school i am a brain cancer survivor we found it through my eyes when i was five years old and i've had vision impairments and sense impairments ever since then and wearing a cloth mask over my face has really made it difficult to
102navigate and just live my life i have a hard time walking through the hallways at school i have a hard time going downstairs they say that i can pull it below my nose but that's not very much different because it's still affecting my senses and i've tried to communicate with my teachers and my workers but they just don't seem to listen to me so i came here today hoping that somebody would hi my name is amy hinz and i'm a parent of four children and i'm a wife of a teacher in stafford county i was a teacher myself i now homeschool my daughter two of my children have special needs and i love seeing your face and your smile and my children with special needs need they need to see people's faces we adopted them
103at age of five and a half and six years old so they're already developmentally delayed because of being in an orphanage in ukraine and then to come here and have teachers have masks on their faces and not be able to read expressions and my son also has autism and he's afraid of medical places like doctor's offices and then with all these people with masks on imagine he feels like he's not in a safe place that he's going to be hurt i'm also here to talk about my husband who teaches and you know in a mask all day he can't communicate with his with his students he has a hearing loss it's hard to hear what kids are saying it's hard to read people at the end of the day he's exhausted because he's trying to
104exert his voice to be heard um it sounds like charlie brown when you're trying to talk through a mask charlie brown's teacher valuable time is spent trying to communicate through the masks i'm here for the teachers and for the people the staff they need to be unmasked as well you talk about budget what is the cost that these masks are having on our children and our teachers martin luther king jr said the time is always right to do what is right give the rights back to parents unmask our children and let our teachers also be amassed thank you i want to echo his comm the gentleman's comments earlier you did a great job on your breeze by the way um stafford county board dr taylor my name is jason kaiser and i live in the
105acquired district come here tonight exercise my civic right and responsibility to address you elected school board members i'm deeply concerned about this board's actions on january 20th 2022 when you held an emergency meeting followed by a vote to defy governor youngren's executive order number two which reinforces parents rights to determine what is best for their child this includes a parent's choice to have their child wear a mask in public publicly funded schools i request this board listen to the parents get a second legal opinion and take another vote this board kicked the can down the road december 14th and again on january 7th citing the reason for allowing public comment before taking a vote on the mass mandate this was a deceptive action taken by this board to subvert any parental input during public comment
106period hiding issues of such importance to parents of taxpayers calling to question your actions and the trust that we should have in you i'm truly shocked at the fact that there are academic doctorates as well as other educated members on this board and yet you are unable to find a single solution to this issue it's as though you've suspended critical thinking last week i attended dr dr taylor's listening lesson in lawrence session and executive order two number two was briefly discussed afterwards i met a parent who was concerned about mask removal it's a legitimate concern but she and i were able to discuss mitigation strategies that fit both her desire to keep her child safe and for me to keep my my child breathing freely and going back to a normal life it truly seemed
107like we as parents could figure this out i'm just not sure why this board is unable to do so and instead hid behind a state law that does not mandate mass but references cdc recommendations which are also not mandating masks [Applause] now you turn to contradict yourselves when you allow exemptions to the mass mandate now minus the religious and medical issues but you have kids blowing instruments inside school you have kids playing sports without masks that goes that is completely contrary to forcing children to wear mass inside schools i just wonder if if there if this is about federal funding identified as coveted relief funds can you tell the citizens of stafford county that forcing children to wear a mask is not about money are you are you selling our children to the federal government
108is this masks for money now i just didn't come here to complain i have a reasonable solution and developing a phased approach to removing mass that's fine you know get give folks the op out option start with 10 of each class population let those kids not wear a mask then after a couple weeks reevaluate the situation unmask more children that's fine come up with the solution so that our kids can continue to learn in schools that we pay for now i repeat my request i want this board to listen to parents get a second legal opinion from a neutral firm not somebody who's biased take another vote because i guarantee you this that you will forever be known by how you address parental rights [Applause] before you start i want to call the next five
109um that would be julius a jackson margaret lowery carol licer eliza cheneyvon and the alsup family thank you katherine schneider in the george washington district before i start i'd just like to say when you guys talk with masks and i watch at home i have no idea what half of you are saying half of the time and so but now i'll skip my marks um at the august 21st meeting the lawyer told you guys about sb1303 and back and listen to this meeting my takeaway from the meeting was she could force our kids to wear masks or not you could get sued either way but you'd be fine either way no matter what you chose even the most ardent forced maskers did not mention sb 1303 is a reason enough to force our kids back
110in august you were talking about case loads and the decision was pushed then northern's executive order came out before your plant september meeting so you guys said the ones that were on there said um oh well the executive order now we don't have to think about it that's why we're masking your kids if the board had said in august we're sorry guys this school year's mask due to sb 1303 this wouldn't be an issue today but that is not what you guys did you let the executive order be the reason our kids were forced to wear masks i am asking to see the mask removed not only for our students staff teachers visitors basically anyone in the school buildings i was volunteering at my child's school but after that decision i was so disgusted by
111your decision i was i'm done i'm not going to volunteer my child's school until i don't have to wear a mask at that school i'm also asking as a taxpayer that we get our money back for the legal fees because you either got bad advice in public back in august or you got bad advice behind closed doors in january i don't know which apparently was the same lawyer or go for a second opinion to figure out which of her opinions was bad but please remember there is a reason the lawyers are only your counsel and they offer advice and they are not tasked with making any decisions if you're just going to blame her for your decisions there's no reason for us to even have a board just have the lawyer issue opinions um and
112if you decide that sb 1303 is the guidance that we're going to follow that tells you to listen to the cdc as practicable as you decide which guidelines are practicable please remember that the cdc says we're better off being treated by a positive a coveted positive health care worker than we are being treated by an unvaccinated healthy health care worker and that is why we have guidelines and they're not absolutes because obviously they issue bad ideas not the least of which is don't eat rock cookie dough thank you evening board julius jackson hartwood district i don't know how i'm going to follow some of these people [Music] because mine's probably going to sound a little more boring in short i am here to implore you to comply with executive order number two constitution of virginia
113empowers the executive to make decisions and executive orders carry force of law period just as it gives the governor under emergency powers executive orders are law it's in there so by breaching and making your decision to go against the executive order you're breaking the law you're trying to hide behind 1303 but it's not supportable because either what governor northam did through his actions would be illegal as with this executive order or they're both legal you'll already got it wrong i implore you to fix that okay so under 1303 follow the best mitigation strategies cdc recommendations wrong with that recommendations carrying no force of law the other thing i want to say is shame you talking about staff problems you threw your administration under the bus i showed up on monday with other parents in my
114school walked my son in i hadn't put on his mask because i believe we follow the legal process but you didn't you hit a vote behind closed doors without parental input and you put your administration in a bad bad spot my principle felt so poor and having to explain to the parents why their kids still had to wear masks i saw one member there one member my member how many of the rest of you went out and supported your school administrations and explained to the parents why you're refusing to follow the law we're supposed to be example for our children right you're not setting a good example if you are not willing to follow your duty obligation and responsibility to follow the law you're teaching them it's okay to selectively follow the laws and executive
115orders should they do that with our school administration and staff and class i'm not going to follow the code of conduct i don't feel like it i don't think so i implore you have a re-vote and comply with the executive order number two it is lawful if you think it's not lawful then wait for it to go through the court system it cannot be vacated simply because there is litigation pending it's not it doesn't work that way you can't refuse to to comply with it because you don't like it without the court issuing a stay it is in fact period it is in effect you need to reconsider you need to do the right thing [Applause] good evening members of the school board and superintendent taylor my name is margaret lowery i'm a resident of
116the rock hill district and i am a former teacher counselor and administrator in the stafford county schools not here to talk about the mask tonight i'm here to urge you to focus on equity and the and parity in the athletic facilities in our five high schools i know you've heard me before but i'm going to tell you again specifically the fact that brooke point stafford and mountain view have had artificial turf stadium fields for the last seven and eight years with the exception of the spring of 2020 when the pandemic caused us to have to cancel activities north stafford and colonial forge have each spent at least twenty five thousand dollars annually to purchase paint grass seed fertilizer turf is aeration services and to rent turf fields at smith lake and embry mill for the
117past seven and eight years each of the other three high schools have had almost two hundred thousand dollars more because they're not having to fix their stadium fields to spend on other athletic fields equipment and just to maintain the cost of their turf field there is no charge we cannot continue to allow such financial inequity the figure does not even include additional revenue lost when north and forge home games have to be moved to another school's field in the district because they have turf nor does it include the additional stress placed upon the students staff parents and transportation department who must make last minute changes to the already overwhelming schedule now i know tonight's probably not the night to bring up budget but i am urging you to work with the stafford county board of
118supervisors and find the funds to install artificial turf at north stafford and brooke point and north stafford and colonial forge in 2022 2022 this year and i do want to just say thank you for choosing to serve stafford county i appreciate it madam chair members of the school board and dr taylor my name is carol leisher and i reside in the george washington district i retired as instructional coordinator in the central office and currently volunteer at north stafford i am here again to follow up on the parity issue of not being afforded the same quality competition turf fields that exist in three of our county high schools for the last seven or eight years i commend the school board for authorizing the funds for the design work for turf at north stafford and cornea forge
119this past summer knowing that the design team had been at our school was a big boost as we carried on the season with a grass stadium field but it was such a blow towards the end of the season when it was shared that the turf was not happening anytime soon we ended up doing our research and the newest and current cip did confirm two turf fields are now listed for the 2024 budget in digging further the previous cip for 2018-27 listed the colonial forge to be slated for turf in 2019 and north was slated for 2023 it didn't make sense to me that north stafford the oldest high school in the county was scheduled for the last turf installation and colonial forge installation date for 2019 didn't even happen high school number six is currently
120being planned and is scheduled to open its doors in 2025. i have to say is it's exciting time to be forging ahead for a much needed high school i can only expect that the high school number six will have a high quality turf stadium field it was the accepted field installation for the new stafford high school rebuild way back in 2014. in closing i need to leave each of you with this question that has come up in conversations with other stakeholders will the newest high school number six open up with a quality turf stadium field before north stafford and colonial forge get their recommended turf installations this school board needs to work together with the people across the street the board of supervisors to find the money to achieve parity in our school stadiums now
121we want we need your support in upgrading for equity in the county high schools and equity for your student athletes please fix this parity issue in 2022 before the new high school construction even begins thank you for the time [Applause] my name is elizabeth chinevong i sent you guys two emails this past week neither one of them were very nice one of them was the alternate legal opinion that was read tonight i hope that you had time to consider it considering it made a lot of sense both the eo and all of the virginia state laws can be implemented simultaneously by the way everybody here has a copy if they want it um the second email contained a video from an organization called tennessee liberty network i recommend everyone look that up they explain very
122clearly how federal money is being used against the american people in schools and in hospitals the bottom line is you guys have sold us out in order to accept federal funds you in turn promise to keep our kids in masks quarantined isolated and even vaccinated thank god we have a constitution i want you to know that i have an army of parents working to uncover how much money has been granted to stafford county public schools through covid relief and other grants and we want to know exactly how it's being spent we are also exploring all avenues of legal action until now virginia courts have refused to hear any covert related cases but with the new administration enriched in richmond that's all about to change so ask yourself what will this country look like in 10
123years if we continue to mask our children you have a role to play in this war on america what's that role going to be what do you want your legacy to be what difference does any of this make what difference does anything we do in our lives make if we can't pass our children a free country parents cannot afford to let this fight go america cannot afford to let this fight go you need to immediately call for a new vote adhere to the laws and the constitution and make masks a choice for parents only parents to be able to make for their own children oh and dr chase if you are so concerned about bringing uh teachers to stafford you should remove the masks for her as well excuse me we we don't have directions
124too okay you should still remove the mask for teachers you'd get a lot more substitutes i before you start i'm going to call the next five that's okay um the next speaker after the assault family is gina giarcia joggie fagan lucy ginny vaughn kelly loins and greg good evening brian alsop and this is my daughter micah we're likely to be in alyssa's district i'm here because my daughter asked me to come here an eight-year-old asked to come address those that are not letting her go to school on monday and forcing her to wear a mask so i will ask her a couple questions um micah do you have anything you'd like to say to them yes i think it's hard for us to listen and learn because the masks are hard to focus with because
125it's not doing what the school was built for if we're not doing what it was built for what's the whole point of it um would you like to say anything about the kids that are in your class i think they're a little nervous to stand up for them so i'm standing up for them and whoever's watching i want them to know i'm standing up for them the last question for mike and i'll give my opinions um as as you're well aware we attempted to go to school on monday how did monday make you feel i felt a little bit sad because i didn't get to go to school and see my friends okay um i'll use my last 90 seconds to talk about opinions so you've heard plenty of opinions today i would i would
126ask that you remember that those are opinions i suspect during the closed-door meeting that we were not a part of that a single lawyer gave you her opinion um i think that you should consider that that person may also have an agenda that has gone through and i would ask you to have the courage to motion for another vote tonight and realize that one single opinion does not contradict the entire district that's here i'd like to say that let's get back to normal learning thank you [Applause] so the bible tells us that from the mouth of babes comes wisdom she actually stole my thunder because she made several points that i was getting ready to make my name is gina ciarcia and i am running for congress here in our new 7th congressional district so
127i am here standing up for everyone in the seventh congressional district particularly the parents i'm the mom of five and i too am a teacher i've been involved in education for over 20 years um education has made really big headlines particularly this past year in 2021 and it will continue to do so education is more than just a transmission of knowledge and like the little girl said if we're not doing what we're supposed to be doing at school then what's the point anyway education is not just about learning the facts but it's forming the child it's developing character and intelligence it's teaching that child a world view and their place in the world and it is transmitting hopefully our american culture and values and the way that we educate defines who we are as a
128people and who we will continue to be as a people mass mandates have caused great upheaval fear helplessness anger bitterness frustration and harm long ago i'm history teacher so long ago uh there was a great athenian patriot named demonthe sunnis who cried out to his countrymen when they seemed to be confused and divided that they needed to stand against tyranny and he said to them and this is what i say to you in god's name i beg you to think think i'm a teacher i've interacted with many students they don't even wear the mask properly okay they don't basic understanding of germ theory can tell you that a cloth mask is ineffective and it's even less effective when the kid is not wearing it properly too much harm has already been done to our children
129this whole issue with mask is a distraction covet is now in the endemic stage it's here to stay it is yet another pathogen that the human race will encounter regularly it's time to live normally with covid in the picture teaching is the most noble profession stop sullying it by promoting fear and tyranny and trampling the rights of these parents [Applause] hi good evening board dr taylor my name is jody fagan it's a new day in virginia and the parental rights of its citizens have been restored it would benefit the school board to recognize this fact sooner rather than later the citizens of this county primarily the parents desire to have a transparent relationship with the school board for the sole purpose of serving the greater good for the children our children recent actions and unmet
130promises by this board have proven otherwise it appears that the board adopted a legal opinion the e02 is somehow superseding sb 1303 it's not simply put sb 1303 requires each school board to offer in-person instruction to students enrolled in a local school division eo2 is about parental rights which amplifies the tenants of the parental rights act in fact the word mask does not show up anywhere in sb 1303 additionally the reference to the cdc in sb 1303 only enforces the disconnect with e02 the cdc continues to recommend wearing a mask e02 allows parents to opt out of a mask mandate in schools in other words not accept the recommendation bottom line the government is not on your side the governor is not on your side the lieutenant governor is not on your side the ag
131is not on your side the at least 75 percent of the citizens in this county are not on your side the law is not on your side it is clear to all that this is this is stall tactic the board deferring the action to follow the law and lawful executive order this clearly illustrates that it is not about the safety of our children and has not been for a long time the true crime here is our children are being used as political pawns you are willing to grant us an opt out in september when the mask issue was to be revisited until governor northrup set forth the mandate which we reluctantly abided by and now you are unwilling to abide by governor younkin's executive order covet is not hurting our children you are i ask
132for a re-vote tonight thank you [Applause] uh hi my name is lucy and um i don't agree with mass and i um i could give you facts but you guys don't listen to it anyway could you pull that microphone down so we can hear you better thank you okay um i can't breathe with it when i wear it to school so and then so i pull it down and then i get yelled at so every day i have to pick either if i want to stand up for my freedom or if i want to focus on school and that's no one in america should ever have to make that decision so when i ask them why i'm getting yelled at the nature say it's not my decision it's what i'm told to do so um
133and so did you know that 60 million jews died in nazi german nazi death camps and a thousand germans worked there so then there's a relation between their two excuses because every day they just went home and they just said they were just doing their job so um in 30 years from now could you say that you did everything you could to keep america free because i know only two board members could say that because they took they're both traveled and um they didn't take the easy way out like some other people did um and uh so i asked you to revoke and while you're re-voting um ask yourself if you want to be a patriot or a trader thank you [Applause] my name is kelly loins and i'm from the rock hill district and
134i'm here to talk about parental choice at this time it's pointless to talk about the data and science of masking since many of you willfully ignore the detriments of masking and continue to hide behind a law that has nothing to do with mask requirements each of you knows that senate bill 1303 was never written nor ever intended to be a mask mandate if it was then former governor northam would not have instructed former health commissioner norm oliver to make a second one for you to sit here and say that senate bill 1303 is anything other than a requirement for in-person instruction is disingenuous and false the parental the right of parents a parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing education and care of the parent's child no one here is more
135qualified than a parent to make any and all decisions regarding their children for example my daughter is neurotypical and in the focus program my son is autistic and in the special needs program at no point in time are their needs ever the same at no point in time do i ever make a unilateral decision regarding their care medical educational or otherwise that would be ridiculous concerning considering that their needs are so different what you're doing is ridiculous by making a unilateral decision for every child in this school system you do not know each child and what they need to have a successful learning environment parents do and we have been telling you for two years and you refuse to listen why no one is asking you to make a unilateral decision banning masks we are
136asking you to respect our rights codified in virginia law to have a choice in the education of our children our right to choose what is best suited to meet our children's needs parents know best you do not support parental rights and parental choice thank you [Applause] okay before the next speaker i'm going to read the next five um gary thibodeau bill anderson john i'm going to ask the uh for some assistance in this one it's it looks like it's h a t z b okay sorry about that and um and also dan mccleese thank you okay hey thank you good evening board uh dr taylor thanks for being here um i too uh greg danae here rock hill district i'm here to object to the mask mandate as well before i get started let me
137thank you for all the work you guys do be behind the scene take a break from the mass for a second i know it's hard there's a lot of hard work and a lot of it goes unnoticed but thank you for that this issue though is easy you can fix it tonight i hope you will let me start i want to read a paragraph that represents my opinion i didn't write this this was written by dr lee merritt published in the journal of american physicians and surgeons winner of last year's about a year old but it's an opinion piece just a summary uh quote there are at least 18 there are there are at last count 18 controlled studies of mask wearing none showing benefit and diminishing transmission of small particle size airborne viruses most
138recently u.s marines in quarantine barracks wore masks practiced social distancing and disinfected the environment they were supervised by other marines to ensure compliance masks were worn when not eating or sleeping the study was published in what's supposed to be the world's premier medical journal the new england journal of medicine predictably these measures failed to decrease the transmission of covet so that pretty accurate representation of my informed opinion because i read smart people so that's where i'm at we all we all have opinions on this matter i get it um masks are not banned by this executive order they are simply made out there it's putting the authority back where it belongs in the in the hands of the parents we should not need an executive order to give parents decision authority on masks on their
139kids we already have that authority this board needs to recognize that and i hope you will do that tonight you know i understand the board we've talked a lot about opinions legal opinions um and i many others have said it uh it's an opinion i watched the virginia attorney general on the news today he had a very different opinion he supports parents having this this is this authority back the board has wide discretion to interpret this executive order and existing law um it's your it's your decision it's not that lawyers okay um the shuttering of schools churches and businesses happen by executive order certainly not rooted in the virginia or u.s constitution these actions were taken because we didn't know details of this pandemic and it made sense at the time for a temporary time
140period supposed to be 15 days if you remember those those those days we're two years into this it's time to do what makes sense now reverse course endless mandatory mass policy recognize that parents have the authority to make this decision thank you very much for your time i'm gary thibodeau i'm a father of three that are here in the stafford county stafford schools right now i came up here prepared to read much of what you've already heard masks don't freaking work and uh and every time i see one of those spittle soaked bacteria infected face diapers it just infuriates me because everybody knows it's only hurting you and that's it and that brings me to another thought so i've served the majority of my life in a couple different capacities one way was in the
141boy scouts watching my son come up from a cub scout i was a den leader i was leader i later when we went to the troop i served on the troop committee until i was asked to be a scout master i taught my scouts honor integrity i taught them just like it says in the good book let your yes be yes and you know me no the mask is a lie and you present it every single time you strap it on and you're making our children do the same thing you know i don't need these i also served in the united states army 27.5 years i joined in 1988 and i retired in 2015 a green beret the men i served with and what we fought for it was to keep this from our shores
142[Applause] i stand here now and there you are and it does infuriate me let me tell you you've got a choice to make it needs to be a good one you owe us because let me tell you what the brothers and sisters that didn't come back with me or came back changed they did not fail this country or this community you did bill anderson falmouth district i'd like to start by thanking my school board representative for a phone call earlier today while there are some areas that we massively disagree on i appreciate your willingness to have an extremely cordial conversation about the situation thank you madam chairwoman mr superintendent members of the board i would like to first address some unaddressed behavior from last week a former school board member who sat on this board
143for several years and numerous times asked people to respect the decorum of the board and not react to words of the school board however last week when moved to when you moved to maintain your mass policy she reacted for the sake of making her stance known to the people in the audience by standing and saying thank you jesus and walking out she then re-entered less than a minute later this was a demonstration act that went unaddressed by this board however when another member of the audience asked to be heard on this matter he was told that he needed to be quiet just in case you've forgotten that board member is no longer on this board and i am requesting that the school board treat her as any other attendee would be and if she cannot
144maintain decorum then she should ask to be to leave as well on to the issue at hand on august 4th of 2021 the school board which included several members of the current board discussed how the school district would handle masks in school at the time it was asked if for the mass to be optional by parents and this board said that it could not do that if the governor put an executive order into place because you didn't have the right to go against that members of the board what is different now under a new governor that you have decided you do have that right now furthermore on that day another school board member asked if under the law could the school board be sued if a child within the school district dies of covet and
145you have not followed the law the response from legal counsel and open forum on august 4th was no i do not believe you could be sued because you have sovereign immunity members of the board has something changed from the legal guidance you were given before finally every member of this board that voted to continue this violation of parental rights stated that the law requires the following cdc the following of cdc guidelines i couldn't agree more what in fact is the guideline recommends masks i don't feel like i need to define what recommend means but maybe i have to a local principal sent out an email to staff within the last week stating that if you're unhappy with the policy you should contact your legislative representative and let them know that is what we did by
146voting for a new governor [Applause] private is not going away but eventually we have to get back to letting parents make parental choices and make the decisions that are best for their children earlier this evening i heard under the superintendent's budget that hanover county is one that is comparable to us and that we're behind them hanover county voted yesterday to remove masks this is another area we're behind them [Applause] uh let me adjust this a little bit uh dr taylor and school board good evening my name is john hances and i live in the rockville district i'd like to start by saying hello to dr taylor i think it's really neat that you're traveling the county to meet with people i heard you went to a moms for a liberty meeting which i think is
147really awesome to bridge the divide between plants and administration it really takes guts to face constituents that may have different political beliefs than yours and for that i sincerely thank you i'd also like to thank ms sigmund and miss halstead for the vote last week there must have been a lot of pressure from unelected bureaucrats to compromise your morals and you didn't do that both of you really have guts and bravery however i i must say this it appears to me that guts bravery and willingness to listen to constituents is something particularly lacking among other members of this board uh firstly i was truly i was appalled that the school board usurped the authority of the people and our duly elected governor without even having the decency to hold public comment it's very striking to
148me um and and and i really think you should do that i think the question here isn't even about mass it's just whether the school board will enforce the rules so we can buy them signing the effect by the governor of virginia requiring an opt-out that executive order is taking effect and the author of senate bill 1303 senator donovan said that the bill does not require masses in schools this is a daily elective this is a democratically elected governor here who's doing this order you're required to file it so you're not just overthrowing democracy by ignoring him that's bad enough you're holding students parents and staff hostage what i don't know i mean you tell me i i don't know why you're doing this and i'm sure you're nice people i truly feel bad for
149the situation you're in but that does not change the fact that you did what you didn't know he was wrong and and and i must say this it's not too late to do the right thing you know i learned in my government class and as you can see today voters are very reactive people but they're all but they're also forgiving if an elected official they trust you know does something they disagree with but then apologizes and does the right thing you know voters will move on but if they don't apologize hold the course and continue to to do things that voters disagree with then quite frankly they won't be forgiven and voters will take their discontent all the way to the ballot box myself included and quite frankly no political posturing is going to change
150that i'd like to thank you mr sigmund thank you yourself said good luck dr taylor and thank you for your time [Applause] that's a that's a tough act to follow all right before you start i'm going to read the next five names okay i'm going to read the the next five names which are the last names on the list jamie decatur amy lynn smith carla alsop casey durst and isabella adams what a bright young man he's got a staffer county education just like me so hopefully i can meet up to the measure there i'm a father of two young girls first grader and a kindergartner in the hardware district in august i approached this board and spoke about resilience and how we should be teaching our children it to our children and tonight i'm here
151to admit a tough lesson in resilience with masked mandates i asked my two children to mask every day because we were told it was temporary they did exactly what they were told without a single complaint and recently with the governor's eo i i asked my daughters how they felt and i out of my own selfishness i didn't think to do this before because i just assumed that they would be resilient it turns out the kids are not resilient they don't have the skills to communicate the harm that we have done to them they're young and they don't know how to communicate effectively my oldest daughter first grader said her exact words i want to breathe fresh air daddy to me this translated to this is not okay daddy i'm here tonight to ask you to
152do two things and honestly i don't care how you accomplish them whether you ignore a governor or law or guidance whatever you have to do number one you need to let my child breathe number two you need to let chill healthy children stay home in school or stay in school healthy children should not be out of school not off for 15 or 5 or 14 or whatever they come up with next it's some twisted game of cooties in timeout if you don't do these two things immediately the last poker talked about constituents and voters but they're all taxpayers out here if you don't do these two things immediately the community is not going to support you anymore dr taylor talked about revenue you're going to lose revenue you're going to lose raises for teachers people
153are going to move to other communities they won't support building more schools or ball fields there will be more trailers less bus drivers and the whole shebang will be gone if you don't start listening to the people that opportunity seats that pay the taxes i need you to make two things happen like i said i don't care how you get there do it today do it tonight tonight on the agenda you have uh adopting vdh guidance that came out in december it's already a month old we're learning more every day about how vaccines don't even keep you from getting infected there's a whole list of things that go on you're behind today you can get ahead you can make a decision you can unpeel this onion these layers that have just restricted our children they're
154not resilient we've just ignored them we thank you [Applause] hi board members dr taylor welcome um jamie decatur griffith widewater there are 133 school divisions in the state of virginia congratulations on being one of eight that just made national news on january 16th dr taylor sent the division an email regarding executive order number two by the 18th there was an emergency meeting called and by the 20th the school board effectively undermined their own superintendent by voting to maintain a universal mandate imagine her hurriedly calling a meeting and naming it an emergency because oh no the parents might exercise their rights on monday what you did this past thursday was terrible leadership and bad governing and this is the second time i've stood before you this school year to talk about bad governing there is a
155process and you know it new information item public comment action at the following meeting you know that the public deserves ample time to understand action items and opine on them what you did on thursday was wrong it was wrong because you undermined your new superintendent it was wrong because you disregarded your constituents it was wrong because you rushed into an emergency closed meeting and then right back out of it to pass a motion in order to circumvent parents exercising their rights come monday finally i'd like to note that item 10.01 indicated that you're taking a vote tonight to update reduced quarantine timelines based on the updated vdh guidance that document also includes updated guidance regarding masks i found it intriguing for a lack of better words that you're following updated guidance on quarantine guidelines but
156antiquated ones for masks just for good measure the guidelines from the cdc still only recommend masks the right thing to do would be to rescind the motion bring it back for public information and before you bring it to action or you get it let's see who has the gumption to finally do what's right even when it's hard [Applause] good evening board dr taylor i've had the pleasure of meeting you thank you for that at one of those moms for liberty meetings too yesterday you all may have seen me on the news the national news abc nbc new york probably some other places you saw me there because i took my daughter to school yesterday the young lady who spoke earlier micah and she was turned away she was turned away by her principal who's a
157wonderful man you guys segregated those students you made teachers and principals do your dirty work because you were too afraid to do it shame on you for doing that on any of you that didn't vote for this shame on you for that paul mildew put out a petition a few days ago no promotion nothing it was up to 200 some signatures just in the last two hours were over 300. this fight is here i am not going anywhere i will be here at every meeting i will be in your face i will be in my school space until you fix this vote tonight fix it because you can clearly because on thursday you did that so i don't know why you can't do it tonight we will not go anywhere none of us here will
158and i will be on the news again and again and again until people stop listening which doesn't sound like they will thank you for your time [Applause] how about that right in uh good evening so uh my name is casey durst my son attends fairy farms elementary school uh and i always got to try to start things off with a joke right so he gets off to school last week and he's six and he's playing with his friends and he said he runs up to me says hey daddy what do you call a fish with no eyes i don't know he goes right so he's going to be a great dad with jokes like that someday hey so parents uh i want to say this right you're not alone we're not alone right we're not
159alone it's all of us in here and the parents throughout this county we're not alone uh you've heard a lot of what people have to say some of you disagree some of you agree one question one question i have not been able to determine is what legal statute what executive order what policy law or anything granted you judicial review to a school board in your hours of closed door a few days ago i can only assume that that question was answered as we know there's a system that we rely on in your decision you overruled the legislature the executive and acted as a judiciary the reality is an executor is in play until a judge with authority or court or legislative body are able to determine the validity of an executive order not a school
160board that's not how this works you know it i know it and we all know it but you did it anyways worst of all is that you do it you're intelligent people which means you are which means you know you aren't exactly able to do what you did which means you did it for political reasons or because you're a narcissist you like the power you love the community knowing who you are it's not because of the law and it's it's because you if you didn't base the mass decision in august on on senate bill 1303 you based on a looming executive order that may be worse than being a political hack so the next question is as we play this game together and i haven't looked at the upcoming agenda so maybe this will be
161brought up but members here use senate bill 1303 for the purposes based on their decision when the court comes out hopefully quick confirm the executive orders in line with with senate bill 1303 i expect the next day to have my kid go to school without a mask as your policy will be out of line of executive order number two so we don't need you to revoke second when you do have some vote to resign the latest policy when you see a 7-0 vote you all need to ensure and you also you need to ensure that there's anti-discriminatory language including your policy to ensure that students aren't called out or segregated by teachers admins or staff this would have been easy to handle in november when you knew that the new governor the incoming governor was
162going to have the executive order there's decisions that you could have made in communicating with the community and i'll guarantee if you gave parents choice because they need to protect students that are that have issues that most of the parents in here would have said i will put a mask on my kid if there's a if a known issue is is in a classroom for a certain amount of time if there was trust that was built but you didn't do that you you absolutely did nothing i don't expect anything this board it's amazing to rely on the state to listen to our voices more than members of our own community while parents hope that the executive order is found out to be compliance and many hopeless win the law you have hurt this community you
163have not built bridges like you expected to do we're all done with covet we we're done with the government's response and best of luck to you sir very best of luck [Applause] good evening my name is isabella adams and i'm a student athlete at north stafford high school today i have here with me a student athlete for field hockey and a member of the marching band today i'm speaking on behalf of the school and the athletic teams to bring light to the matter of turf fields at our school as you may know north separate high school was the second high school to be built in separate county but one of the last to receive turf fields turf fields are a great investment because unlike grass turf is recommended sorry recommended and made for year-round sports
164and inclement weather many times our schools had to cancel games postpone them or even play a different high school this takes away the thrill of playing high school sport by not being able to play your own school one season a few years ago we didn't have a home one home game a whole season due to the soccer conditions and inclement weather and the grass not being fit to play on this affected the entire season not only for the players but for for the students who wanted to attend the games but didn't get the chance wanting turf isn't only for girls soccer but for boys soccer football lacrosse and field hockey chair fields would affect our school in the best way possible and on behalf of my school i asked the board to look into the
165value of turf fields with this being said i'd like you all to think about north side high school as well as colonial forge and how important turf fields are to everybody thank you so much [Applause] hi i'm lauren i'm a junior at north stafford and excuse me before you start can you hold that time um anyone who speaks now if you could please sign the sign-in sheet on the uh podium there oh thank you um when you when you finish okay because we we need to keep a record and i appreciate you lining up anyone else that wants to speak you know please you can line up on either side and take turns or however it best works so i'm sorry to interrupt you but i want to get that straight thank you i'm a
166junior at north stafford high school and originally i was here to talk about turf fields but after watching everyone in this room speak on masks i'd like to share my opinion first hand as a student regardless of what anyone else thinks in this room it's very nerve-wracking to stand up in front of all these people and speak when i have a very different opinion than them but i feel the need to do it anyways i think the safest option is masks especially sorry i think the safest option is masks but with people with medical issues should be excused from them without any question with without questions like where's your mask why aren't you wearing your mask i think from what dr taylor said the rate of teachers leaving the system has increased throughout the years
167i've heard many teachers say if masks are uplifted they no longer will feel safe to teach while keeping students safe is a priority i also think keeping the teachers and staff is safe the teachers and staff safe is important too while parents opinions are valid very much so i would like to see a lot more students share their opinion first hand at the end of the day we all have opinions and they all have negative and positive i think max masks should stay in place for the safety of not only the students but the staff as well thank you [Applause] hi my name is alan leia i live in acquire harbor i have raised three boys through the stafford county school system my youngest is now in 12th grade so i'm almost done now as
168the young man said earlier i assume you guys are all nice people and i think you probably think you're doing the right thing what i'd like to do is not talk laws no i'd like to apply common sense if you're scared of covid and so you feel we're scared we got to protect everybody if you believe it's so bad and if you believe the vaccine works get vaccinated and leave the rest of us alone it's as simple as that secondly barack obama said a while back elections have consequences after loudoun county flagrantly ignored parents desires they woke up a sleeping giant i've never been to a stafford county school board meeting ever but you woke me up loudoun county world cup is a sleeping giant of virginia and we have a new governor because of
169that now as barack obama said elections have consequences if you want to keep your job i suggest you remember that you work for us because you haven't worked in a sleeping giant and if you don't start listening to us you probably won't be keeping this job very long thank you very much [Applause] hi good evening um i don't know if i'm overwhelmed from the emotion of just protection of my children or just um the wisdom and articulation that i've heard this evening from so many people um i'd like to recognize dr taylor thank you um and uh miss maureen sigmund yes ma'am um you were so prompt and getting back to me uh when all of this was going through um on friday my name is amy smith and i have been a stafford county
170resident for over 20 years i have a summit as a junior in high school and two daughters in grades fifth and first first i want to thank the board for the opportunity to speak and express the gratitude for my representative and getting to the point we could argue semantics theories conspiracy theories science junk science databases of information and misinformation and lord knows it is all being thrown at us and in overwhelmingly unstable states of chaos and confusion i could start with factual cdc report numbers but i've never been good at anything like that with it either but i can do math without a calculator and from what i see children from the ages up to and including 18 only account for one ten thousandth of the sphere effects of the of the covet um and
171to shame someone or accuse them of being selfish or uncaring because they disagree is gaslighting sounds like it sounds like a narcissistic and manipulative relationship to me but you are elected servants i had a 15-year career in environmental science and now working in holistic and alternative healing based on my research the risk to benefits ratio has been represented in gross disproportion when it comes to the masks we have yet to understand the communication social and developmental disruptions that our children will have to overcome ask any pow or mental health professional and they will tell you that isolation is the worst form of torture isolation is becoming our children's normalization and being agreeable just to keep the peace is a trauma response please stop treating mental health as a secondary health crisis i teach my kids
172to respect and not fear stop making our kids hide their identity it is my american right to freely make choices concerning my children and their well-being please stop trying to convince us that our rights are up for debate they are not this choice is not just my choice it is all of our choice and it's not just one way or another but the american way the american way is freedom of choice more so it is my god-given right and obligation to steward my children as i see led to do i am declaring that our kids stop being used as political pawns god bless america and you thank you [Applause] excuse me could could the last speaker please sign in amy miss osborne can you give that sheet to people so they can sign in after
173they speak please oh she's she wore on those oh okay all right thank you thank you your turn okay hi i'm bryson marshall i live in embry middle in the garrisonville district and i'm in sixth grade at hh pool middle school i was very excited when my parents had gotten an email saying that i did not have to wear a mask starting january 24th and they had gotten an email before that monday changing your mind saying i have to wear it and i was very sad that i would not be able to see my friends faces after two years we also do not have to wear a mask when running or when i was doing field hockey or while i'm eating so my question is when will i be able to not wear a mask
174in school thank you i am had no intention actually of speaking and this is my first school board meeting i honestly don't know any of your names i'm sorry so all that like stuff that they're saying welcome and all this stuff i don't have it i don't have like i don't have like numbers and codes to say laws or anything like that i'm speaking to you as a teacher not from this district from a neighboring one i've noticed there haven't been very many teachers at all coming up here i think it's maybe because they have fear for their jobs i know that's why i'm not speaking at my district school board also i know they're not going to listen anything i have to say i'm here unmasked gladly i want to be but in school
175all day long and i teach 10 classes and 260 kids a week i wear my mask i have breakouts all over my face i'm covering with foundation it's it's part of the job i get it but i can tell you as a teacher the kids they they're struggling they're struggling with masks if you have kids that have issues and you want to wear a mask and you feel unsafe i am totally cool with your kid wearing 10 masks if they want to however many masks you want to wear but for those of us parents that don't want to mask our kids and for those of us educators who by the way i do a much better job when i don't have to muffle whatever i'm saying with the mask i have kids in the back
176my classrooms are over packed with kids kids in the back they can't understand what i'm saying so i'm constantly pulling my mats down so what what good is that doing the kids can't hear what i'm saying and i'm constantly saying pull your mask up pull your mask up they're not learning anything that i'm teaching so it's not really helping we're breathing on each other there's 30 kids in the classroom i teach filming consumer sciences by the way so we're cooking they're all over each other they're tasting food are we supposed to take all that away from them and not do anything so i'm just asking you because i feel strongly about stafford my kids are in stafford schools because this is where i want them to be so i'm asking you guys to do what
177i know this county this district is is able to do that my district isn't going to do and do what's right and let the parents choose what's best for our kids thank you [Applause] the next one hello my name is carmen lemaire i am in the rock hill district integrity dignity community as a parent a teacher a doctor public officials the community in general it is our responsibility and obligation to protect our children assist them to learn and grow think for themselves make good decisions and encourage them to accomplish great things children are extremely social they crave interactions with other children it is essential for their growth and development masks are contributing to the physical and mental decline of our innocent youth we rely on facial expressions and mouth movements to read and write to
178learn phonics masks are prohibiting our children from learning that with the decline in the education curriculum and the increase in the woke indoctrination of our children this is catastrophic as we already have kids in high school on a fifth grade reading level i know four four okay by forcing your fears and anxieties on our children we are seeing severe increase in anxiety depression and suicides in our youth a smile and a kind word has been proven to change a person's decision to take their own life love and laughter are the greatest healers yet we continue to cover their beautiful smiles shame them into obedience just to put the vaccinated adult at ease when did we as a community decide to sacrifice our children to protect adults how dare we every single one of us should
179hang our heads in shame and beg forgiveness that we let it happen one day one i tried to comply and compromise your mandates and my morals i bought my son face shield so that he could breathe and be seen he came home in a mask and told me he was not allowed to wear them that is unacceptable where there is risk there must be choice doctor studies show prolonged use of mass can lead to lung disease mostly associated with mold hospitals change their mass after each patient or every 20 minutes to prevent bacterial growth a diaper is left on a child too long causes diaper rash and yeast infections that we are choosing to put them on our children's face knowing that the mouth is the most filthy part of our body this is not
180health or safety by defying the governor's executive order you are studying the example that like you we the people can divide any defy any executive order with no consequence until the court makes a decision you are in violation of that law the compliant i'm sorry the complaint regarding the order is that it breaks state law state law states that it follows cdc guidelines and cdc guidelines state that masks are recommended i can recommend that you use mashed potatoes for your ear plugs that does not mean it is the best suggestion nor are you required to follow it mandates are a violation of our constitutional humanitarian and civil rights but more important it violates our natural right to breathe natural that natural law advises a person cannot be prosecuted for actions taken to defend their natural
181right it surpasses all laws and for jfk freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction we do not pass it on in the bloodstream the only way that we can inherit the freedoms that we have known as if we fight for it protect it and hand it to them with the knowledge they must do the same excuse me if we don't we may very well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was like when men and women if you would like to submit your comments for the record [Applause] i've been asked by board member to have a break so i'll say at 10 o'clock we'll take a 10 minute break and then we'll continue with the public comments so we've we've got about 15 more minutes before
182we take a break thank you or do you need [Applause] okay we got it does dr warner know she had to break now okay all right go i'm sorry come on okay yeah we're gonna we're gonna at 10 o'clock we're going to take sorry my name is danielle farley and i live in the rock hill district i'm here because um i am a homeschooling mom i homeschool all four of my kids and what i continue to hear is the theme is parental choice they are wanting perennial choice i have the ability if i want to do public school if it comes to my family and when we need to i can do that if i want to do private school i can do that or home school it is my choice my husband's choice and
183based off of our religious convictions these parents are asking for you guys to allow them to have choice and i think it's important even for homeschooling families because my concern is that at what point will you override my parental choice as a homeschooler i don't think that is fair and at what point if the cdc came out and said it's okay for kids to view pornographic material would you ignore the parents when they're saying i don't want that in my child's school there's so many other issues this one choice sets the stage for how you guys will direct any other concerns that parents have about what's going on in their school or what's going on with covert mitigations however you all want to frame it but it's time to let them choose thank you [Applause]
184i'll fill that out after all right very good well thank you very much for your time uh chairwoman school board dr taylor uh all right so my name is thomas holliday and yes i spell it like dog holiday from the old west but i am not your huckleberry uh the reason i'm here is because i'm a dad i'm a concerned citizen i'm a taxpayer in this county i'm originally from the great state of ohio i've been here for nine years uh brought here by government work i've supported the war on terror twice for all of our freedoms okay i'm an eagle scout my dad's an eagle scout and my oldest son who's a stafford high school senior just got his eagle scout all right so very important i was very excited when governor younkin signed
185the executive order saying that mass were no longer required i told my children i said hey you get to go to school without a mask on and this is great and they were excited too only to find out that there are some elected bureaucrats that decided that their choices were more important than mine i'm the dad you're not the mom and dad and my kids right i didn't give up that right nor will i it's not going to happen so let's take us a moment to think about this pandemic we got a pandemic we got a virus on the loose uh people were told to mask up 15 days to shorten the curve etc etc and then all of a sudden people start suffering from bacterial pneumonia and there's an issue with that right i
186mean this is a severe health crisis now people wear mass and they have bacterial pneumonia but the elites don't care they have their food they have their comfy ice cream and clothes and whatever and it's the common folks that suffer and that tends to happen i know because i also ran for the house representatives in the state of ohio in 2006. so i know what politics is i've seen the good the bad and the ugly okay but what i just described to you was not our current coveted pandemic what i just described was the pandemic from the spanish influenza of 1918 100 years ago they wore mass too and they suffered from bacterial pneumonia that killed scores and scores of people so each one of you that's wearing a mask i pray for you why
187because i don't want you to get bacterial pneumonia i don't want you to die in the 15 seconds i have left here on my clock is that what i really feel is that there's a spirit of fear the only entity in the universe i know that is focused on fear is the devil praise god focus on good [Applause] good evening my name is jesse belt i have uh four girls here in stafford county and i have to ask if you all are starting to feel like you're on the wrong side of history because except for two of you you all are i think that's starting to become apparent out of all the people that was here today there was one woman who gave a plea that sounded like she's kind of four masks was a
188very emotional plea i have respect for that and one democrat party dog that had a cyanide there i don't know if you all know this but he packed up his sign tucked his tail and crawled away and there's a reason for that y'all are supposed to represent us and you're not now i have a whole bunch of things about facts and all the sort of data to back it up let's get down to it these mastercard desks are just decoration we know it is the cdc said that we are supposed to wear an n95 mask because these pieces of cloth are too small for the omicron variant why are we making our kids do it not only that but our kids are the most resilient to this disease we know that out of people who
189die the majority of them had four more co-morbidities the cdc didn't even test to find out how many comorbidities actually had or how many children actually had comorbidities when they died there weren't that many there's only 592 that died over the last two years and i say only not to be callous but out of the thousands of people who have died it by and large were not children and it probably weren't healthy children so why are you making this policy i'm going to assume that you guys are able to look up cnn and google fact just as much as i did so i'm not really sure why you made decisions not based off of real facts i'm going to guess that it was political and so let's get down to brass tacks politics there's a
190reason why a red wave happened and why it is happening there's a reason why governor yonkin was able to win his election it was this issue it was parent choice let's be honest mcauliffe was probably going to win until he came for our kids and now you're coming for my kids one of the biggest things that we are seeing you guys are begging for money but i'm seeing school grades drop and i'm seeing depression anxiety self-harm when children rise you are hurting my children every time some kid filled with anxiety and depression takes a razor blade to his or her arm you're helping make that happen i will not vote or support you if you do not change your minds with this and change it quick i will find another representative who will represent me
191and i don't know if you saw all the people that showed up they're not voting for you either this is your chance to fix it before we fix it you all have a good night [Applause] how you doing i'm paul zavada i have a two dollar two daughters in rock hill uh district i work for federal law enforcement and one of the first things when i have a case is uh i make sure that i never ask the lawyers their opinions that's first thing second thing is i moved back from japan in and since then i've never had one correspondence with my school board ever not one email nothing so not a lot of opinions have been asked of us i'm busy i haven't had dinner tonight i i came here i just couldn't stand
192on the wall anymore so i'm just kind of winging it right now i'm here for my daughters you know i sent you all an email i got one response thank you mrs halstead the rest of you pretty disrespectful didn't even respond just want to let you know that you're my person and if this doesn't get fixed i promise you i will be spending all of my time making sure you're not the next time you come up for election [Applause] hi my name is rachel johnson i'm in the rock hill district i don't have anything terribly articulate and really not much different than what's been said here but i was a proud stafford parent i was in my kids schools every day it was bacon pies i was raising money i was doing all the things
193and two years ago i was told that my iep child who has special needs was meeting minimum standards that's their only goal and that's where this all started and covet happened they couldn't meet his needs again so i homeschooled all three of my kids last year this year my youngest wanted to go back and i god i love her teacher and i love her principal so i sent her back this year on and on over and over she has a viral rash that breaks out on her chin her pediatrician said it needs to stay dry to heal i kept brushing it off brushing it off finally filed for an exemption where i was told absolutely she can sit in another classroom so i tell her and she's like mom i'm so happy to have my
194friends again i don't want to be in another classroom cool so this virus her doctor said can spread to her eyes and make her blind no one cares my kid doesn't matter this is ridiculous masks don't work the cdc who you guys are listening to has said cloth masks don't work children aren't getting severely sick germany the uk they have not universally masked elementary school kids in either of those countries their numbers aren't any worse than ours we were told two weeks then we were told until vaccines were available for everyone school agent up the can just keeps getting kicked down the curb i have a husband who's severely immune compromised and has been hospitalized with the flu i get it sucks my expectation is never on anyone else to keep him safe it's for
195him to do what he can do keep himself as safe as possible for him he got vaccinated his choice my choice is for my kids to go to school and be part of the school that i pay tax dollars for i made abundantly clear your tax numbers dropped in 2020 because people like me pulled their kids let us send them back okay this will be the last speaker before the break and then um we'll reconvene thank you perfect i'm the husband uh one of the reasonable combinations for my daughter by the way is a face shield which i politely told the principal who i have the most respect for who's doing your dirty work that's not approved by the cdc nor is sitting my kid in a corner six feet away from anyone so that
196that's kind of the game we're playing but anyway i didn't plan to speak today so i apologize for the rambling but i've been here three hours with dammit i'm gonna get my three minutes um so i just took notes on stuff that i've heard today so to the couple of folks that disagree with the vast majority in the room i applaud you for getting up and speaking and i further applaud the audience for being respectful i think that's awesome second um is uh the ppe for teachers my daughter's geometry teacher is elderly she's a retired annuitant that you've hired back because you couldn't get good teachers she's high risk like genuinely if anyone's going to have a fear of covid it's her she's wearing like three masks how are you as a county not providing
197a proper ppe how are you not giving her an n95 mask that was in my email that congratulated you on releasing all this was buying proper eppe for the teachers and staff that want it i don't think that even hit your inbox before you guys change your mind so that that needs to be addressed uh even if you keep this as it is and you don't change anything by damn ppe for your teachers and staff so they're using proper cdc got approved stuff um winter north stafford basketball game uh two weeks ago my daughter's in the basketball now nobody wears the damn mask the kids it's around their chin their nose nobody corrects them and so again i i hope you just go into a school and see that um because you might feel good
198about what you're doing but it's not actually happening um teacher turnover i know sir you were here talking about budget understand but if stafford was a great place to work people would get paid less to stay here and so i think you need and you're new so i hope you work on that culture i hope you send our administrators and vice principals to leadership training i think a lot of those folks were great teachers who got promoted and aren't great leaders and i know at our elementary school like that was a problem like there was disagreements with principles and they were leaving down to a minute left so let's go uh let's see um yep talked about the reason oh um as a north stafford alumni for i'm old now so like 20 some years
199ago give him a damn turf field for those poor ladies that picked the wrong meeting to come to like come on and that goes to this the parrot like the parody and all that crap you know my daughter's going into high school so i got hit with this wave of like there's all these programs i got to apply to like my daughter's got to pick her career now in eighth grade you know this is stupid but i'm like learning like my kid can't do uh part ib because they're at north stafford and they can't do this because they're at this school i'm like that's a bunch of bull you know so if we're gonna build a new school we're gonna make sure that's one of those things and poor nor stafford i went to that
200basketball game it looks the same damn way this is when i went there 20 some years ago that is an armpit of a school that needs a dress appreciate you all right we'll reconvene at 10 10 for the next speakers good evening members of the school board my name is ezra jackson and i'm a junior at colonial forge high school last week i was here in attendance as the school board met betw met behind closed doors for two hours and came out making a decision that no lawyer should have approved they made a lawyer they your lawyer decided that the school board would supersede the governor's mandate a mandate that the governor who was elected by the people in november chose executive order 2 section 4 reads a child whose parent has elected that he
201or she is not subject to a masked mandate should not be required to wear a mask under any policy implemented by a teacher school school district the department of education or any state authority i think that speaks for itself e02 does not override sb 1303 rather it works with it parents are able to make a choice and their choice of sending me to public school is not signing away parental rights sb 1303 was in effect in august when you voted to put a 30-day mass mandate in before before former governor northern northam put a mandate into effect why at that point did you not consider sb it was in effect and you guys decided to put in your own mandate if 1303 was in if 1303 is the legislative piece that you say it is
202why did you not consider it to be the piece that it was when it was written when it was passed when you guys voted as an aside by the way i was out there and i used the um water fountain you guys have working water fountains here the schools don't do you think all these people would be here and the people who were here before that left do you think that they would be here if they did not care did you think that do you think virginians voted in a new governor a governor who is honestly across partisan lines from where virginia stands do you think that they'd vote him in if they didn't stand for these issues the issues that he passed on day one the people spoke in november please listen to the
203people you claim to stand for tonight all we need is a motion and a vote an aom second thank you excuse me mr jackson could you please sign in oh you got did you get everybody okay great thank you hi my name is christian zwilneth i'm from falmouth district uh dr taylor welcome board and uh sorry that this is where you guys start things off but you saw you know what you signed up for and we appreciate you coming on board um i am here uh on behalf of my daughters who are not able to be here because it's past bedtime and they asked me to be their voice they are in sev they're in second and fourth grade at conway elementary we had a conversation with them we walked through every part of the
204executive order we walked through every line of sb 1303 to to have an honest conversation with them because they're smart kids they understood what was being asked of this board and where this board took a decision that was not in their right my daughters were in tears not because they had to wear masks because they didn't want to defy their parents they didn't want to defy their teachers and you put them in that position you use them as pawns our principal and our in the parents are now in this to fight it out because you made a decision without any care or any voice from the parents on on what behalf do you have the right if you have no legal authority executive order stated what there's option to opt out your motion was to
205remove the opt out option executive order directive 4 says you don't have that right you do not remove the right of the parent so i ask you to follow suit with every parent that stood here before you make your motion second remove your decision the superintendent spoke in his email on the 16th that said we will follow that executive order you all made the decision to speak in defiance of what the superintendent stated he if you had started with there's some confusion well we're going to work this out then we would have been okay with that but that was not the position you went you found your loophole you talked to a lawyer who could wiggle it around for you that's not how it works there's legal precedent follow it it's the rule of law
206our children want to follow the rule of law that's what we have taught them and we will continue to teach them and they i'll make sure that i get their words in you should have the right to decide what your kid should do and be able to follow the executive order if you want to i end with that thank you good evening my name is stephanie mohica and i reside in the garrisonville district i'm also a member of moms for liberty some of you voted to continue with the mass mandate i want you to know how your decision has affected my 11 year old daughter in a negative way she told me right before the school board had made their decision last week to continue requiring masks that she was going to wear her mask
207regardless of the outcome it wasn't out of fear of catching covet as she had the delta variant back in october and being unvaccinated her symptoms were mild and recovered with no complications her reason to continue wearing her mask is because she feels insecure and wants to cover up her beautiful smile she hides behind her fabric mask and sees it as a comfort blanket for almost two years now i have heard from other parents with similar stories you have helped to set kids to believe that they can hide behind a fabric mask to cover up whatever little self-esteem they may have i have lost a lot of trust and faith within the school board you say that you want to keep our kids safe but your actions don't line up with keeping our kids safe in
208contrast you are stripping away parental rights and deprive our children of a proper education coming from a parent and taxpayer it is a disappointment to see how much control our elected officials have especially when it's not in the best interest for our children this quote was already shared but i'm going to go ahead and share it again it's by ronald reagan freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction we didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream it must be fought for protected and handed on for them to do the same or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the united states where men were free i hope this sinks in for some of you who are supporting
209mask mandates if you claim to care about the mental state and well-being of our children then show your support by your actions and not your words thank you [Applause] good evening school board dr taylor my name is lucindra gracowski we're part of the garrisonville district and i'm coming to bring some attention to the way this matter was handled right plenty of the people that spoke before me covered the data covered the law things like that that you guys you know make this decision on i want to address how this matter was handled because it was a complete disregard of our the parents that are in the school district our children and your administrators that are at your schools so come sunday night we get the letter and it goes out mass notification i had a
210couple friends over there's kids go to stafford county as well our phones ring and we get the mass notification that there's a notification from the superintendent going out about the new eo that went out by the governor great we read it i disclosed to my children that this is gonna this is gonna be compliance for them they get to go to school on the next the following monday after all of our snow days and they don't have to wear a mask anymore because this is something that they've been doing for the last two years and it's not normal to them um they were thrilled excited we had a couple snow days all of a sudden you guys decided to host a meeting an emergency meeting which was never disclosed in the first initial so it
211was hastily put out so if you guys were even in the opinion that this was going to be a topic topic of discussion that should have went out on sunday night when the rest of the information that went out there so it wasn't you guys did it behind closed doors great no mass notification came out on friday a couple emails here and there i never received an email from our school period so if i wasn't up on social media i would have sent my children to school let them walk to school like i do every other day they would have showed up with no mask and then been forced to wear a mask at school thankfully i follow social media walked my kids to school on monday in fact turned away because they said that
212they didn't want to wear a mask and i had already made the decision that i wasn't going to force the mask on my children if they were not comfortable doing it so we walked away a couple of their parents followed suit had a great conversation don't get me wrong our teachers have been great and our principal has been great and accommodating but at the end of the day you guys are violating the sb 1303 law that you're fight hiding behind by denying my children in or in school learning because they refuse to wear a mask you're violating the law right now okay so get that understand that second everyone's talking about votes and how they're going to reply and votes and all that kind of stuff under the virginia code 23 22.1-87 we have 30
213days to file a lawsuit against you guys and i plan on doing it thank you hi my name is christy henson my daughter attends uh rodney thompson i have never ever been to a school board meeting and i've never obviously stood up here and spoke um i am so angry i can't even begin to tell you how angry i am got your letter everything was great my kids were excited we followed the law we followed the rules right that's what you're supposed to do i taught my kids that that's what you do we listened we did what we were supposed to do so then the new governor changes it so now everybody's excited now we get a new law to follow my kids are beside themselves i have a nine-year-old and a 12 year old
214they hate the mask it's been two years they hate the mask kids don't get it the way adults do they don't transfer it the way the adults do we know masks don't work they've had the science right my kids who've been asked for two years have had covered twice both of them twice and they're okay because they're kids and for the most part the kids around here are resilient right the adults want to be vaccinated get vaccinated they need no fear i wasn't even vaccinated and i didn't get it i did get vaccinated and then i got it right so let's just say enough enough we did it we followed the rules so let's continue to follow the rules right should be that easy now my daughter was told that when she showed up on
215monday without a mask that she was going to be removed and sat in the hallway until we'd come and pick her up so you're taking my kids education and how is that counted is my kid going to be in trouble from missing school because we had a law that said they didn't have to wear a mask anymore so they don't want to so now they're not getting an education right if i don't send my kid to school i get in trouble if you guys don't teach them if the teachers don't teach them what happens does my kid fail because the governor passed a law that you don't think is okay there are teachers i have a friend whose husband is a teacher with a medical problem he has a heart problem and he has to
216wear that mask and it's hard for him to breathe and they've told him to pull it down sometimes he's a teacher with a heart problem right so if everybody wants to be vaccinated and asked great but if you don't want to be masked for the kids they should not be masked for the adults who have medical problems i personally don't think that any i think that you should always have a choice adult or kid but if you have a medical problem you're trying to teach these kids how is that helpful for anybody you're killing the morale of the students you're killing the morale of our kids and you're ruining their education we had an ability to make it right and you guys voted behind closed doors with an attorney that we didn't even know to
217go against it [Applause] hi i'm kaylee brown i'm a sophomore at stafford high school i love going to school i love my friends my teachers and being back in school i was so happy when i was told last week we wouldn't have to wear a mask anymore then you secretly voted and changed that it was no longer up to my parents to just to decide anymore you decided for me and every other child in stafford county you choose that my little sister who's in middle school in stafford and for my little brother who is in kindergarten in stafford county my anxiety has been been by through the roof been been through the roof because of all this i am now on anxiety medicine and my anxiety attacks come on even worse when i'm wearing a
218mask for over six hours a day while at school i ask you to please revoke and remove these masks we can't breathe it's like these masks are in place want us to sit down and be quiet don't stand up for what you believe and i've always stood up for what i believe in and will continue to do so again i ask you to please please let us remove these masks let us breathe and let me see my friends faces my teachers faces my staff faces at my school for the first time in two years [Applause] hi my name is david andrusko um didn't really know what to talk about tonight so i just kind of took notes on the way out there i was actually expecting a lot more people wearing a mask today to
219come in you know congratulate stunning and brave voters who voted to you know uphold the law and all that great stuff but you know only the first speaker which they hold on a little bit longer just a little bit longer students i think i've seen this movie before the last two years two more weeks to slow the spread to slow the spread it's airborne virus everyone's going to get it everyone even god fauci has said everyone's going to get it it is what it is so i did some digging and stafford did get i think 4.9 million for covid relief funds looked at how they were spent there's like four sub-sections with no details so i don't know when i filed for a exemption for my kids in the fall i was able to get
220a face shield or mask breaks neither of which are approved by the cdc but whatever we're allowed to follow those i guess um i guess that's the same thing that's going on right now same lawyer in the fall said it was fine this is just kind of regurgitating what everyone else said but so apparently it's political at this point you know people say it shouldn't but we got people on the board who have activists on their twitter you know keynote speakers at uh victim complex organizations we've got other ones who post edgy memes that are very offensive and hurtful to i don't know somebody um you know it's it's frustrating the last time i spoke with the staffer nurse i said uh so on your quarantine programs you know like how many of those contact
221tracing people have come down with kovit who have had a close contact she said you know that's a good question i said that's a good damn question maybe you should know that you know that's your job as the nurse um i don't know if we've got that number it's probably very few to be honest with you um let's see here people say even the compromised kids i want to say that there are already policies in place if say a kid has cancer they do have the ability to be i guess in a safe area who had the talk with their kids before they came here anyone had the talk yeah well my talk said i'm going to this school board i may catch covet and die um so did anyone else have that or was
222that just me no all right stop it guys my name is joshua pacheco and i wasn't planning on speaking tonight but after seeing some of the slides early on today by our superintendent i couldn't resist i'm not going to speak much about mask as i'm sure based off my emails for the past two years you know my stance i know a couple of you on this board are new to this year so my comments are not directed at you my comments are directed at the rest of you you might have a title in front of your name but that doesn't make you smart that doesn't make you have common sense when covett hit myself along with many parents stood up here and discussed that our children need in-person learning and virtual doesn't get the job
223done we were told that it will have a detrimental effect on our children and that our kids will not learn as they should well you didn't listen to the majority of us and made your decisions based on politics you decided to go against the overwhelming majority and look at what this has cost us the past rates of sols with our students dropped 35 percent i hope this makes you feel horrible as it should i hope this makes you feel like you failed which you have you have failed our kids and let down the parents who entrusted you to make the best decisions for our children please make the right decision now and give us give us parents a right to choi a choice to send our kids with or without masks [Applause] let's go or
224just start talking hi i'm mark bowie i'm part of the hardwood district my kids go to falmouth so first i thought i was falmouth district found out i was hartwood thank god all right so this is my first time attending school board my uh my kids they they've been going to school here for a few years i got stationed here we're going i'm retiring so we're going to stay here so i got another one that's going to be getting in school so obviously i have i'm invested into this process and this last vote y'all did thursday kind of just brought me out and i'm like all right i got to get more involved i got to come save my peace or at least support um so i had a speech prepared um i didn't make
225the sign up and then after hearing everybody else like my i couldn't hold water to what some of these people were saying so um we're going to scratch that and i just made some notes of some things that uh i'm going to talk about here real quick um so as one of the things leaders vs followers um dr taylor thank you for being a leader thank you for uh sending that initial email out that obviously you had to retract that but it takes a lot to be a leader and you showed that by doing that because that was the right decision i apologize that you had to retract that email but again thank you you may make some decision later on that's going to piss all of us off but that was a good one
226and i appreciate it thank you for being there for the parents on monday um standing with them maureen thank you for voting against uh this mandate last thursday and if anybody follows stafford county social media then everybody was well aware that the folks that opposed y'all's vote was going to be here tonight speaking about it clearly not many of them showed up to support y'all that of those that made that decision to up you know uphold the mass policy there's a few that did there was even i believe a young lady that you know goes to school and i applaud them for their you know their differences or their difference of opinion but uh i just there's a lot of support here so that should tell you something there's a couple of you that i'm
227not sure you're gonna try for re-election the two that i'm talking about are ones that we thought would agree with alyssa marine i'm not sure why you didn't but i don't think you're planning on going for re-election because you know if you are that's not gonna look good um last thing is i'm gonna talk about a story real quick i got 27 seconds so my kid got noted we got notified an hour before school was out on a friday this this happened a little while ago but i feel the story is relevant to the silliness of all this an hour before school was out on a friday we got told we had to come pick up our 10 year old because of being close contact or whatever the case was like okay there's an hour
228left like well what about our other kid that's with him all the time rides a bus i'm sorry um a long story short he was able to go back to school on monday because of the timeline piece so we literally picked him up an hour before school was over on a friday but he was able to come back monday just ridiculous thank you all i hope you'll revoke thank you again is there is there anyone else who wishes to address the board if if there is anyone else please line up so we can move on because we have other work when we finish these come on down you can sign in when you finish okay thanks hi my name is jennifer hansen i'm the mother of four children in stafford county and i wasn't planning
229on speaking tonight i usually have very severe anxiety and so it's just hard to even come down here but i heard a lot of things spoken tonight i'm not going to repeat it all we all know kind of the topics that have been brought up but there is one thing that i did not hear and so i just thought i'd go ahead and speak on that um sorry if i didn't address you um respectfully and appropriately thank you all for being here and thanks for listening to my concerns and everybody here i don't think that people are using common sense concerning the issue we're bringing the kids to school masked they are shoulder to shoulder in a lunch room without a mask the entire time and when we're social distancing they say 15 minutes more
230than 15 minutes would be a positive contact they're there for 20 minutes having lunch so i don't know what you think would change by removing the masks covet doesn't take a lunch break just because the kids do and so they've already been exposed there's no difference in their exposure according to social distancing of like i said if if they are in close contact for more than 15 minutes than if the masks were removed all day that's all i had to say um it's just the one thing i haven't heard yet and thank you very much [Applause] one more all right if there's anyone after the next speaker please line up he said we don't have anybody lined up we're going to close the public comment period so if we see you standing on the side
231we'll know you want to speak good evening to the board dr taylor thank you so much for coming tonight and i had no idea i had heard before about stafford county teachers and i've heard complaints before about pay but that curve is pretty ridiculous so i'm kind of ignorant to that and i'm glad that you showed us tonight i i didn't have anything prepared so forgive me uh i would go into my children and not liking to be masked but everybody has said that very eloquently they've been respectful and um i appreciate them very much for being here tonight and staying here and i've been here long and i don't even know if you have a vending machine but i'm pretty hungry so after this i'm going to look for one i want to talk
232about the teachers because i i think that's been left out a lot you talked about it you talked about supporting the teachers i think if there are teachers still watching me they know that i have supported them from day one i have volunteered in the classroom i have brought a brilliant chocolate fountain for my children's birthdays before it's been amazing um i have not been allowed to go back in and volunteer i have to stand at the door to get my child when i go take them out so i'd like to get back to that i would like to unmask our kids i would like to get rid of the ridiculous testing that is completely inaccurate um i would like to release the pressure off these teachers that are policing children on a daily basis
233and i think it's ridiculous and um school nurses taking away from things that need to be done with these children some of these children are diabetic some of them need daily meds and they have to run to rooms to give them their meds and by them sitting and counting each child that's been doing their contact tracing that's taking away from that so all in all yes we want our kids to be unmessed we want them to go back to school and smile at other kids we want them to interact the way they should but we also want to support our teachers we want to collaborate with them again i love doing that i've had some of the best parent-teacher conferences where i've cried and hugged teachers and i want to get back to that i
234want to do the best thing for our children i think you should vote tonight vote on whatever you need to do but i'm waiting here until you do [Applause] i see no one else standing to come forward so we will close the citizen comment period and come to the board for standing committee reports are there any standing committee reports madam chair i have a point of information what would it actually take to move to a vote on executive order 2 tonight [Applause] uh [Applause] we can't conduct business while there is other distractions so thank you for your respect of this board as we move forward with their business ms sigmund that's a question that we can send to our parliamentarian is uh miss built right here i ask that we that we get that information
235from her after we go through some items were not on the action part thank you i apologize for my i'm day 25 i don't know at all yet okay well right right now we're on board committee reports madam chair i'll keep this short most of the fab met last week and dr taylor presented his his budget proposal the emphasis being on teacher pay and trying to get us into a standard where we're competitive we talked about the pay for substitute teachers and some of the premiums for friday and we discussed trying to increase our compensation plan for nutrition workers which are abysmally paid the other thing that i would like to talk about is i went to the sba conference in the capital conference there are a number of legislative items there was actually i
236think 118 legislative items reviewed i will not go over all of them however one of the things that stands out is that there is in the budget argued an access so they're trying to delegate more money for modernization and construction of schools the vsba has opposed any attempts to divest local school boards with their constitutional authority there is trying to retrain remove the support cap so that we can higher so that more of our our personnel are covered and um i think that's pretty much it i have attached these documents to the committee reports section so you have some of this information to review and miss randall and i will be going as individuals school board members to lobby with our our respective delegates all right is there any other committee reports for the board
237seeing none that gives us to the superintendent's comments dr taylor thank you madam chair i'll make this very brief uh what a wild couple of weeks we've had since our last school board meeting just two short weeks ago i certainly want to thank our teachers and staff as well as our students and parents as well as our principals and my team that have been working very hard despite a lot of a lot of interruptions and a lot of instability um and they've they've done incredibly well we we've had uh clearly as a demonstration tonight and in our inboxes a lot of parent voice and i want to thank the parents that came tonight for a couple of reasons one we've received a lot of positive feedback from outside of the community about how stafford county
238can sometimes disagree but without being disagreeable and in the local context of what that might look like in other parts of our broader community that's a real positive i'd also like to thank our parents that at the height of your frustration and the height of your concern and frustration across this community in lots of different dimensions some folks found humor and tried to keep it light tonight that wasn't easy uh it wasn't easy at all actually and because when you're pushed to your limits and you're pushed to your breaking point to show up in the first place and to advocate for children and advocate for your interest we appreciate it we thank you for it we're glad that you're here we hope you stick around for a few more meetings not uh not that you
239all came for the budget presentation tonight very clearly but uh man that'd be cool if you did next year be awesome um just throwing that out just a suggestion because we'd love to keep you involved um and everybody else who's not here tonight too we have a we have a lot of diverse interests in stafford county we have a lot of needs and we have a lot of challenges and the only way that we're going to face those challenges successfully is when we do it together and soon we'll get over this and we'll move forward we're going to work very hard to build trust with you and we're going to work very hard to build trust in this community so that teachers and parents and principals and school boards that there's a seamless line of
240support for the kids in our community so with that i do have a couple of updates i've had a great time visiting folks in this community just last night i met all of our pto and pta leaders from many of our schools not everybody was there but we had a great time the folks that did show up at forge last night i've been meeting with my parent advisory council my student advisory council i met with faith leaders in this community this past week and it was a it was a great meeting because a lot of folks had said that they had never met some of their colleagues in the county in the faith community before and that was really positive got an opportunity to meet some of our business owners business leaders and community leaders
241all of which super focused on how we can support the schools and how we can build two-way partnerships together how exciting is that it's pretty fantastic actually really warms your heart we're doing something a little bit different this year we're having some budget town halls in each magisterial district to talk about some of the issues that i raised tonight there's a lot of things that are heavy on our hearts about how we're going to move this school system past this pandemic and we hope that you're going to be involved with that i'm doing another listen and learn next week on wednesday morning at augustine golf club and then i'll have another one after that at night and i'm just going to keep doing them just so that i can get to know you a little
242bit better and that i can get to understand your issues a little bit better i'm just not going to stop i had a great opportunity to meet with the board over this past weekend at a retreat and i got to tell you that was really positive because bringing new school board members into a team and having nearly half of the board represented by new members it's a steep learning curve and i got to tell you our our three new members are rock stars and they're trying very hard and learning a lot in a short period of time and they didn't they didn't hesitate to give me some pretty strong marching orders they've tasked me to develop a communication plan between me and the board they've tasked me to create a frequently asked questions sheet that
243i can share on the school board's web page about how school board meetings work and how the school board works they've tasked me to help create a decision tree on how to solve problems at the school level at the district level so forth and so on the classroom level they've tasked me to create a framework for serving our constituents better through a constituent services office they've also tasked me to create a digital uh comment option for public comment so that the folks that couldn't make it to a meeting like tonight or didn't want to stick around for three or four hours that they could type their comments and they would be read into the minutes in whole how about that pretty fantastic and they made a commitment for their governance committee to create a governance
244handbook a code of conduct and to review governance policies all these things are huge step forwards and these are things that this board created themselves it's very impressive i do want to add one last thing before i yield my time and that's to talk a little bit about transportation i mentioned this a little bit when we did the budget presentation and i would like to thank uh my colleague and assistant superintendent chris fulmer who is our cfo as well he double duties and uh he was a huge help and instrumental in in this budget presentation as well as sandra osborne who's our communications director she helped put together some of the pretty materials that we had tonight and rebecca towery who helped with the presentation but i noted that we're going to be sending out
245a survey tomorrow and here's what i hope please take it really seriously and here's why because like uh your public comments that we'll collect digitally i'll be sharing out all of the comments that are submitted on this survey the raw data all of it because i want to build trust with you by showing you that we can do a synthesized report of our data collection and then show you the data that helped make that report because we want to hear what you think about how the past couple years have gone in terms of bell schedules and transportation and certain things that you think that will help make us better now don't get me wrong we got some ideas but we also think that you have ideas too and we want to leave that door open
246so that you can come in and share those ideas with us i'm going to present that information to the board on february 8th which means the turnaround time for this survey is one week so check your spam boxes where all my other surveys go and make sure that that gets filled out if you don't mind and on february 8th uh the board's uh transportation committee the ad hoc committee that they put together last year is also going to be making a presentation for their findings so it's kind of kind of be the transportation themed night and hopefully uh we'll get some some settled direction on uh on where we'd like to go in the future and allow an opportunity for you to opine on that and for you to share some of your thoughts and
247uh that we can set a clear direction for what bell schedules will look like for next school year what bus times will look like and the order in which buses will go and how long the school day is going to be which is really important to me so with that i just want to thank the board for uh this opportunity um you have presented me with a tremendous amount of learning opportunities and as a teacher and a learner i definitely have enjoyed my time and enjoyed these learning opportunities and i look forward to the future because i do know that the future is bright thank you madam chair thank you dr taylor that brings us to the consent agenda do we have a motion move to approve the consent agenda second motion by dr chase
248second by ms randall any discussion all in favor of approval of the consent agenda please say aye aye aye aye all opposed motion carries unanimously um your questions still be in research mr sigma that brings us to action items 10.01 consideration of recent cdc quarantine guidance change now for action items we do have a motion before we take a vote for when we can have a motion uh before discussion we can have a motion for purposes of discussion is there anyone that would motion to approve madam chair 10.01 we have a second second okay we have a motion by ms randall and second by dr warner you can do the presentation now absolutely good evening madam chair school board dr taylor i am available to answer any questions about this new guidance that came out
249from the cdc we also have virtually with us allison balm's john she is the population health coordinator at the vdh she helped us answer your questions from the last board meeting and she is available to answer any additional questions that you have claet hocanna our nurse administrator was also supposed to be on so she can help us answer any questions or to elaborate more on the answers that we provided to you with your questions would have any questions for um i mean i i have many questions clearly where are the two people you're talking about there's administration i don't know if they're so they're up there yeah they're virtual okay they're in the ceiling that's weird all right just to clarify first of all i mean i i have questions about this but they're all
250i need actual real information from the health department as well and i'm hoping that real information will help inform and help these guys see have a little bit more enlightenment as to what's going on here so my first question most of my questions are for the health department directly i would like to know what types of health education on any type of viral outbreak or bacterial illness that they've done since the pandemic started are do they have any age-appropriate level training that they're doing are they going into the schools and teaching kids about viral loads and sickness and those kinds of things i'm going to ask that one first okay as a general question before we get to the general questions can we look at the the issues related to the quarantine and the whether
251the well i'm hoping they feed into it by their answer all right so you guys can ask your questions do you have another question i do but i feel like the the the biggest things here i mean if you read what we put together here which i understand i mean i did this for a living for a really long time and even i can't figure out how we came up with this like i literally cannot understand and if i can't understand it i don't know how the parents understand you know we've got six days six to ten days of isolation if you came in contact with somebody but you don't know when you came in contact with that person because you don't actually know how long the virus incubates for and if you don't know
252how long the incubation period is and you can't actually go back and figure out when you came in contact with that illness and then you're going to take a test which we don't even know when your exposure was so if your mild symptom or whatever you could be well over it right at the time you're being quarantined is that correct which is almost unfair because then you have to get another test how many days later like none of this makes any sense to me it doesn't speak to any of the consistency in education that we need to get reinstilled in our schools now where there are some really strong mitigation strategies available i don't think quarantine in isolation is it so i'm asking what are our other issues like how do we how are we
253supposed to take this information right when it does it's i know where the guidance comes from and i know what they're doing there's a lot of cya involved i get it okay i did it for a long time but at the end of the day we're not answering the right and appropriate questions about how a normal disease process gets integrated into a school system without causing this level of distraction and disruption i didn't know if you were going to speak oh no i'm waiting okay um so so i'm trying to figure out if we did this every flu season what would our lives be like right if we're going to do this now right now to implement it back in when we're trying to get these kids back to some semblance of normal this mean
254we've got kids we're going to unmask kids eventually so what does that mean all the unmasked kids are just going to have to quarantine for even if we reduce it like how do we get our kids to stay in school i mean i've got parents telling me their kids are out of school 15 and 20 days on quarantines and some parents have had to quarantine their kids two or three times like because they were a close contact in school in the supermarket in the other places they're not wearing masks which by the way they're not wearing masks anywhere but school so at so at the end of the day the quarantined isolation protocol literally makes no sense to me whatsoever maybe we should have a recap of what the background is here and what the
255proposal is as i understand it the proposal is for the school board to consider reducing the quarantine period that is correct okay so could you just give us the the the current periods and the the potential shortened periods that is before this board for consideration absolutely so for quarantine for a direct exposure it's seven days with a negative test ten days without and parents are still opting to do the 14 day which is the goal say we don't have a lot of parents that are doing that but many of them are doing the 7 and the 10 day for quarantine so that that is the current requirement that is the current that's for quarantine for isolation it is 10 days so with the these new guidance that came out over the holiday it was to
256reduce down to five days and then if you do return from day six to ten you are required to wear a well-fitted mask all right according to the cdc guys what about the isolation the current isolation current isolation is 10 days okay the current is 10 and what is the proposal reduced to 5. no no i have other questions dr chase yeah so um i just in this um the preparation that you've done here it talks about cdc and then it cost talks about vdh and uh so is this guidance from the cdc or is this guidance from the vdh a combination of both a combination of both so what are the two pieces what's cdc what's vdh i don't know what specific question you're talking about i mean if you can reference which one
257i can have allison jump on and see if she can answer that question but a lot of time i don't want to speak for allison because she does work for the vdh but a lot of times the cdc will come out with guidance that the vdh will either adopt or they will embed in their interim guidance for schools okay i'm just trying to figure out what the cdc is recommending to reduce down to five days for both quarantine and isolation great thank you so much you're welcome mrs sigman uh thank you for kind of simplifying that for us i just want to clarify based on what i'm reading are we not considering any of the there's some stuff down here about restricting children's access to education based on their vaccination status is that not something
258we're considering at all because that's what's on our prepare our statement here it says that students who are vaccinated can come back to school more quickly than students who are not correct so if you so if you if you if you are you talking about quarantine or isolation mrs sigman if the individual if the individual is unvaccinated or has not yet gotten the dose the booster dosed the individual should quarantine for five days as long as they do not develop symptoms if they have received a booster or a second shot they do not need to quarantine following an exposure but should wear a mask for 10 days after the exposure went around others i thought we don't discriminate based on health status in this country excuse me if if the audience would please be respectful
259for the board as we asked our questions and try to get information in order to make a decision we would appreciate it because we cannot conduct business with constant interruptions ms sigmun i'm trying to figure out is we are recommending that we restrict access based on health status allison i don't know if you want to address that question that's something we have talked about in our weekly meetings allison are you there to address that yeah i'm here to address that so i mean this is just straight out of the cdc guidance 99 of the time vdh adopts cdc guidance this is consistent with what's already been done when it comes to quarantines that individuals who are fully vaccinated should be monitoring closely for symptoms testing is recommended but they do not have to complete that
260quarantine period at home um individuals who are unvaccinated do need to complete a quarantine period at home so that is actually not a large change in this guidance um it's it's just the lesser time period for the quarantine um i so i apologize if i could because as it turns out tom didn't get my original email which had a separate set of questions related to this which is why you look so confused and i feel frustrated so also because like three hours past my bedtime um as anyone will tell you right but anyway i do believe that we i mean we still have a really important question in front of us which is and i will state this even though i know no one wants to hear this in the united states of america you
261cannot legally quarantine a healthy individual that's just the way it is i have had health department after health i mean i worked for health department where we tried to quarantine an individual with active tb and we were told no and he was going to work and everything else but because of the hipaa rules and because of the fact that he has the right to privacy and he doesn't have to self-report it even though he had to go to d.o.t and all he wasn't abiding by his d.o.t none of that was happening and the judge specifically said to us and he was sick you cannot legally quarantine a healthy person in this in this country it is not enforceable unless and then he gave like a list of things but so i don't understand why we
262continue to quarantine our healthy kids and keep them away when i mean honestly can we we have to really start to look at this from a sense from from the sense of rebuilding like from the second this pandemic was declared a recovery plan should have been put in place at the school level with the help of the health department that addressed all these issues based upon a phasic approach which they've always known was out there pandemic curves are not new information it's just not so i'm i just look at this and i think to myself i mean there is so much stuff in here our kids individuals can participate in in sports as long as they can adhere to strict mask usage and distance on six to ten days i mean where are our kids
263going to school i feel like i do feel like we're in nazi germany sometimes and i'm not trying to be argumentative with you i know it's not your rule so please don't take that away take it that way but at the end of the day i think we need to start going back down to brass taxes and really looking at the mitigation strategies the protocols that are in place for isolation and quarantine and how to safely and effectively move past this black hole that these kids have been stuck in and i don't know how to do that with what i'm looking at right here except to say that it doesn't make sense none of this makes sense to me none of this actually tracks back to an effective covid mitigation strategy all right is there
264anyone else on the board that has any comments or questions if if we're not ready to it make a decision on this this we can have a vote and if this doesn't pass us then we will stay with the current policy which would keep our students out longer correct that is correct this reduces the requirement for the quarantine but if the board is not prepared to move forward on it we can leave what we have in place madam chair i would ask you to call the question i had a point i wanted to make it all right i had a discussion i wanted to we did we did not all get a chance so okay um i'm i'm kind of struggling with this uh with the same reason as um miss sigmund um just exposed
265was the uh like i'm i'm better with the five day but i'm not okay with um some of the other details of this um i'm just not comfortable with that right now so um i do i don't i want to support less time because our current policy is 7 10 and 14 and that took me two months to get that up and i'm i just want less and less because gold standard is in person but i'm not for discriminating for those that are vaccinated versus unvaccinated i'm i'm not at all for that um so that's just my position right anyone else who hasn't spoken miss guy i'm just um excuse me i i don't even understand how do we know who's vaccinated or not vaccinated or do they have to say i'm vaccinated so i
266can come back early or how does that so when we go through the contact tracing that's one of the questions that we ask so you are asking that oh correct madam chair oh maureen um doctor warner i wouldn't give everybody just a chance the reason that the difference between vaccinated unvaccinated is because your risk is different if you're unvaccinated you're more likely to get it if you're exposed so it excuse me please respect the process here this is this is the business part of the question is is there a interest in amending the motion to table this or does the board want to go forward with the i would move the table i would like to call the question well do we you you could make a substitute motion if you wish sure so i
267would what would the to table this to indefinitely i don't know can i i'm sorry dr taylor has asked if i can or has said if it would be okay since the health department's on the phone i'd like to ask a few of these questions they may help though let's get through this if we haven't withdraw my motion if i have to if we have further discussion i'm not supposed we're not supposed to be here right i was going to say if we if we have a substitute motion we have to vote on the substitute motion okay so your substitute motion is to table it correct all right and that's to a date uncertain correct all right is there a second to that motion okay motion fails for no second that brings us back um
268did you you have a question we we're going to need to to move forward dr chase has called for the question i wanted to give the people that had not had an opportunity to to speak to speak to it so i think at this point we need to call for the question which means all in favor of the motion to approve this change as recommended by the staff and dr taylor please say aye aye all opposed no no no madam clerk would you pull the board please dr chase aye ms guy hi miss halstead no miss healy no miss randall no miss sigmund no dr warner aye madam chair the motion pills all right thank you that brings us to 11.02 adoption of a resolution an award of two delivery orders one to bluebird oh
269i'm sorry i'm i'm moving ahead that was uh that was two on the next one approval of the 2022-2023 middle school program of studies course catalog do we have a motion motion to approve the course catalog second motion in a second any discussion well let's just go down the row would you like to start dr chase do you have any discussion no dr warner i just would like to say i think that this is a great course of study but i would like more clarity to the parents what programs we actually can and cannot offer because i know there's a lot of teaching short or teacher shortages so there's a lot of these electives that aren't even aren't even really offered i also would like to say that that maybe instead of asking students to
270rank all of them they could just pick their top 10 and we could focus on the ones that they're most interested in and the ones that we're most likely to have teachers for so second question first the plan is to have students rank what are the top 10 choices and then as the program of study says in several places in the program that it depends on staffing to a large extent whether the elective options can be offered i would just like to offer 10 really great electives and have them be successful than make promises we can't deliver on and build our program because i just worry about that but i think that ideally i think the program of study is is good i i like the fact that that our middle school students have more
271options ms sigmund i've expressed my concerns on the middle school program of study i won't reiterate them and i appreciate you taking the time to review them with me and look forward to another three years at as a middle school parent thank you this guy i agree i think the program of study looks fantastic but i think with current staffing shortage historical staffing shortage for the past couple of years i think we need to be a slightly a little bit more realistic having kids in classes where we don't have the teachers for them or you know having their hopes get dashed i mean the awesome thing about middle school you're looking forward to it by third fourth fifth grade is having those electives and when you get there and they don't manifest it's really frustrating
272so i just think we need to be a little bit more realistic with what we do have instead of what we hope to be able to do it's halsted um i mean i love the con oh sorry are you um i love it too but i'm i'm so concerned with the numbers that we're seeing like with with kids being behind in math and all that other stuff and i just feel like taking away but but i feel like it's it's a to me it's a lose-lose right because here's this one with all these wonderful opportunities and stuff for the kids but i don't like the idea of giving up core subjects for um for that so and and i don't even know enough about it to speak really well on it it's just what i've
273read so for me i'm just not comfortable um i really respect the amount of time that you and dr strike gave me for me today i still have my concerns i see the picture i'm just not a fan of the vertical conversation from elementary to middle middle to high where a child that comes out of fifth grade where they just maybe changed a couple of classes to then being responsible for eight graded classes as a sixth grader i just feel that that's uncomfortable for me um also the you know the understanding the staff staffing shortages but still feeling uncomfortable for me about having teachers that um are told you know we need we need a computer science teacher boom you're it um they already have one planning period and then now they're having to do
274flex time planning plus their elective period and plus their regular classing and i know that's staffing and not program of study but i feel like the program of study is directing the staffing which like i said is also further complex by teacher shortages i also think that i'm a little concerned about the stud the the work time that students have for math especially with two years of being behind to have this kind of every other day or not even enough time to get into writing which you know at the high school level is such a problem currently but also because of covid also because of a million other things so um this isn't something that i can support i feel like the kids are getting dessert before their dinner there's a choice of their electives
275which is nice but i still feel like there's a factions of the the electives that serve just certain students it's not equitable between some of the kids that are needing extra support and i feel like we need to be eating our meal of our cores before we feed our electives so i will not be supporting this this evening but i i know that it will be supported enough on this board because i wouldn't want to create a tornado of middle school for middle school planning next year thank you thank you miss randall i'm going to be supporting this motion because i think we need to have a course catalog for our middle schoolers and their parents to start reviewing and getting ready for next year and i trust dr taylor is hearing what the board
276is saying and will you take those comments into consideration as we move forward i know i've had concerns in the past about offering courses that there's just no likelihood we're going to have somebody to teach and i know we footnote it in the catalog but i think i agree with miss guy it's it's it's hard to not get what you sign up for when there's no reasonable expectation we're even going to have somebody for it so i think we need to to move forward and get ready to to get those registrations in line so all in favor of the motion to approve the uh 10.02 please say aye aye all posed no no would you pull the board placements marco dr chase aye ms guy aye ms halstead no miss healy yes miss randall no
277this sigmund no dr warner yes madam chair the motion passes all right 10.03 approval of recommended changes to the 2021 2022 school calendar and authorization for the superintendent to make emergency calendar changes in the future as needed with ratification by the board at a subsequent board meeting dr taylor uh yes ma'am i have one additional request to add to this list and that is the request that there be no further inclement weather we would like to take a break from that until next year thank you motion passes madam chair motion to approve 10.03 second promotion in a second any discussion dr chase i just wanted to clarify that we are just giving you approval for emergency changes for this year otherwise we would need to go to policy right okay thank you yes madam chair
278um i would also like to ask is this current right now with the number of days that we have i know we've been using our asyncs and if you could give me a head count as to where are we yes we're we're we're in the hole three asynchronous days which is okay because we've got seven more um but we are uh in terms of in-person hours we are two hours short so we need to take at least a day um right now okay so um we what this motion is definitely requesting is that february 18th which is a friday on a four-day weekend would be converted to a regular school day and we would look at the menu of options presented to the board right now should we find ourselves in a in another unfortunate
279situation yes thank you actually madam chair um that is actually part of why i'm asking for this emergency power so that we don't have to wait for another board meeting for us to notify families of of a change in the calendar it can be so frustrating to have to adjust for child care and a bunch of other things so so it is that's that's really the progeny of this request for right now well that completes the action items that we have on the agenda we have to vote oh i'm sorry this week it's a long day go ahead we know you're telling me it is a long day this should this should be fairly simple i hope all in favor of the motion please say aye aye all opposed motion carries unanimously yeah can we
280take a a five minute break before we move forward i want to confirm ms sigmund sure the instructions that we're getting thank you okay well it's almost tomorrow we want to call the meeting back to order ms sigmund did you have a new motion and that will be action item 10.04 i do thank you and thank you to everyone who helped me figure this out i move that we amend our prior uh our action from thursday that read we the school board direct the superintendent to continue to enforce the universal mass mandate with no parental opt-out for pre-k to 12 students staff and visitors in school buildings consistent with the 2021 virginia acts chapter 456 sb 1303 in effect through august 1 2022 including exemptions identified by the cdc and the following additional exemptions individuals
281eating drinking or sleeping individuals exercising or using exercise equipment any person who is playing a musical instrument when wearing a mask would inhibit the playing of the instrument so long as at least six feet of any physical distance can be maintained from other persons any person who has trouble breathing or is unconscious incapacitated or otherwise unable to remove the mask without assistance any person who has a disability or meets at-risk criteria for those assisting such persons including but not limited to individuals with individualized education plan or 504 plan under the rehabilitation act where wearing a mask would inhibit communication or the receiving of services when necessary to participate in a religious ritual and persons with health conditions or disabilities that prohibit wearing a mask to read that the school board direct the superintendent to continue
282in force to enforce the universal mask mandate for pre-k to 12 students staff and visitors in school buildings consistent with the virgin with the 2021 virginia acts chapter 456 sb 1303 in effect through august 1 2022 including exemptions as provided by parents [Applause] that's it i second that all right we have a motion in a second before we have discussion i'm advised by our parliamentarian that the motion to amend something previously adopted requires a two-thirds majority vote so um we can have discussion i would just like to ask do we have virtual options for parents who are going to want it immediately i'm going to ask actually dr jones if he'll elaborate on this if necessary but yes we do have virtual options should we need it and what is your recommendation my recommendation is
283that the board definitely deliberate over this issue because there are is a lack of clarity for the board to consider right now you do have a pending litigation that is being on the table and the board should definitely consider all of its options i don't have a direct recommendation for you this evening because we get we are prepared to do either of the options that the board is considering i have a question ms skye uh when you say you do have a virtual option which is great is that forcing teachers to concurrently teach who don't want to or how does that play out in many instances teachers would have to teach concurrently is that what is happening for parents who are being told that their children cannot attend school without their masks right now are
284there yes other questions um yes madam chair um how many students have we had that were not been allowed to come into the schools ask about social one second the most recent data that i have is from just on monday and we had 20 students that did not come into schools division wide because of the mask the mask requirement and there was 20 refusals at the door we had seven students who initially entered the building refusing to wear a mask but then eventually war mask and so far we've received 54 mask exemption requests thank you can i say something oh grab one no you haven't yet go ahead um i so i it's more of a i guess it's like a question statement question or whatever it is i mean i think we've heard enough
285tonight from everyone to kind of really feel the passion that the parents have for education i think that we would be looking at maybe i don't i don't think we're looking at an all-out tomorrow everybody's filling an exemption and putting it out so we're saying this is this warning maureen that you guys have have put in front of us just says with parent exemption what can you read the last word to me the last line including exemptions identified by identified by parents okay i realize that that probably will include everything else on the list i could reread the list and add parent choice at the end of it if that yeah okay i just wanted to be a little clearer the wording to be a little clearer that it's with so does this substitute motion
286this is an ending emotion what do we do this is just what what we are discussing is a motion ms sigmund is making for this board to amend something that has previously been adopted which was the motion adopted at the meeting last thursday so this motion is to amend that motion because it is a motion to amend something previously adopted it requires a two-thirds majority of this board to pass my question was just the motion was made and seconded and then all of a sudden we're talking about changing the motion i think ms miss halstead is asking for it to be read again because it it it is it's it's late so and and this is very important that we understand what we're what we're sure asked to vote on i move that the school
287board direct the superintendent to continue to enforce the universal mass mandate for pre-k to 12 students staff visitors and school buildings consistent with 2021 virginia acts chapter 56 sb 1303 in effect through august 2022 including the following exemptions uh i'm sorry including exemptions identified by the cdc and the following additional exemptions individuals eating drinking or sleeping individuals exercising or using exercise equipment any person who is playing a musical instrument when wearing a mask would inhibit the playing of the instrument so long as at least six feet of physical distance can be maintained from other persons any person who has trouble breathing or is unconscious incapacitated or otherwise unable to remove the mask without assistance any person who has a disability or meets at-risk criteria for those assisting such persons including but not limited to individuals
288with individualized education plans or 504 plans under the rehabilitation act where wearing a mask would inhibit communication or receiving services when necessary to participate in a religious ritual persons with physical health conditions or disabilities that prohibit wearing a mask or which would become number eight parental choice of a question since this motion involves directing the superintendent to do something which will mean directing the staff to do something i'd like to to know the intent of how this would translate to transportation in the board's view and as well as our federal head start program ms sigmund could you address that part of your motion the as the cdc does not have exemptions i understand that the cdc's transportation is an order that is why uh and the cdc does indicate that school buses are part of
289public transportation which is governed by an order which is why i have come to the belief that it is recommended in schools because it is not an order i am not seeking to amend the order that deals with school buses or transportation that's much higher pay grade than me head start i'm assuming in the same camp yeah okay i have a question okay sorry it may be that that needs to be clarified because the motion has stated you did say the universal mask mandate so universal is across the board but we're still discussing this now but as as as the motion stands it would be listen i asked for help like an hour ago and i just got told to read this motion take out the words i don't want read it again with the
290words i do want and now we're quibbling so please help me do this the right way instead of trying to make me look like an idiot okay please just make the substitute motion how like you want me to well i mean let me let's see let me be clear no one is trying to make anyone look i asked these questions back there and you told me to take out the words i didn't want and and add the you know we talked about it excuse me ms sigmund i did not give you advice on this i said you need to state the motion with the changes that you want in it because your intention is to amend it i cannot tell you what to put in it that is your motion and your choice what we're
291asking for is clarification because well the ocean is emotions at school let me just finish let me just finish the motion is going to direct the superintendent and i think and he's he's asking because as it's stated it would be a universal mass mandate correct so as identified by the cdc if there are high i mean buses aren't mentioned on here in this motion so that's my question it says universal masking mandate in school buildings right it doesn't specifically say i mean universal i understand where you're thinking the word universal is but i say universe i'm thinking the way she's reading it just universal to the building because she specifically says the building i'm honestly trying to keep it as similar as it was because i don't have a problem having a mask mandate on
292the books that is honestly what the governor recommended just to give the parents the opt out so i'm literally trying to change it as little as possible because i believe in the integrity of the original motion with the exception of the three little words no parent opt out correct if there is a better way to do that please advise me because we didn't mention head start before we didn't mention buses before i'm literally just trying to address three words and and there was no need to address head start because it was universal and the head start is in in one of our buildings so that's that's why there was and i was under that we were advised that head start had its own rules regardless so i didn't think we had to readdress this in
293our own county policy because it is already covered under a federal regulation or rule or whatever it's called randall madam chair um and we are speaking of students not visitors not staff is that correct i don't have it right i don't know i'm a paper person i haven't in front of me so i don't not seeing it i see visitors in here i'm on the fence on visitors i understand that staff is also was included in this because they are covered under a different mandate from department of labor which we cannot overturn at this point because that still resides in richmond so as much as i would like to talk about that right now that's not on the table for discussion um my goal is to follow the executive order number two or to the
294best of our ability while still strongly recommending all other covid recommendations from top to bottom from hand washing to vaccination and anything in between that families decide is best for them and that's all i'm trying to do i think it's um one of the things that i in you know other jurisdictions i did try to look up their meetings and they also met behind closed doors with their legal teams as well and one of the things that i actually ended up doing was picking up the phone and calling members in other jurisdictions and one of them i spoke with i won't call out but um what i liked about what she said was when we made a decision it felt like it was this or this was our choice and what i liked about what
295they did was they made it and similar to what you're reading to me it's not choosing executive order 2 over 1303 it's 1303 and executive order two so i'm more comfortable marrying the two together i'm just one you know we can't go as deep and wide as staff no but and we can do students except for head start and um and this for me was i guess i'll get to my discussion and but the visitor piece is still where i'm kind of like where are we i'm uncomfortable with visitors to speak because i think that i just the more you expand to the audience of people who can come into the school the greater you can you turn your microphone on please doctor i i'm uncomfortable with allowing visitors to the school go mask free
296i think that i think that it creates an environment where somebody could come in and the greater the risk that they could expose people i am very i am totally okay with one variable at a time i also worry about throwing out a contact trace curveball by the ups guy on which tuesday two weeks ago could impact things for our schools i'm one thing at a time i'll tell you what as a as a constituent um just a you know joe citizen the whole discussion has been eo2 is trying to reinforce virginia code parents rights and then come in sp 1303 they appear to conflict and i you know i went to law school long enough to take legal research and writing so i looked it up and the case law in virginia says that
297if two laws seem to conflict you must do your best to synthesize them and carry out the original intent or the primary intent of both laws it's commonwealth versus zamiano if anyone wants to look it up and that's what's caused me to lose a little bit of sleep um because i don't feel like we're doing a good job synthesizing that and bringing that together and that's something i think case law and our you know legal i think our legal burden kind of is met when we try to when we try to do that plus public feedback plus just seeing other districts having success in doing this and you know also reading what their legal advice may have been the quotes that their lawyers have put out or their board spokespeople have put out about why
298they've made that decision and i thought it was worth revisiting because i just i don't feel right with the legal i feel like our legal is burden our burden is met by doing both as directed madam chair goodnight yes um i so of i mean clearly i agree with maureen i i can you help everyone understand especially those who are concerned about this you know the paranoia whatever you're you say you're prepared for both so that means you have a letter ready to go to parents to say you can opt out we've got all our mitigation strategies are still in effect you're ready to have like everybody gets hand sanitizer bottle on their way into school i'm i'm joking because it is late but also curious like let's help put everybody at risk maureen's right
299the community's right this was i don't believe it we know i don't believe it was and i don't would never want it to be the authority of this board by the way to have to tell a parent what to do with their child or how to raise their child i mean you know i use the analogy today jokingly but you know it's like you telling me your child hates bananas but i force your child to eat a banana every day because i think the banana makes him better um or gives him more power somehow or another so that being said and having to really compartmentalize this issue and and begin we need a starting point to move forward this seems to be it for me it's very it can be a very phased approach to
300it it allows the parents the freedom maybe tonight to come maybe not tonight it's like don't wake up your kids you know to begin to explain the process of unmasking we still have a ton of kids who are afraid to unmask we have to undo the damage we've done already with masks before we can really move these kids forwards i don't think tomorrow we're going to find you know 30 000 stafford county students showing up without masks i think we'd like to see it mitigate it but i do agree it's time to admit that e02 and sp 1303 are not in conflict per se but we have to marry them and we have to make sure that the intent of the governor with the intent of the law are both because legally the burden is
301both so if um this passes will we be able to give or do we have the funds or the availability to give um n95 mass to all the staff because there's a lot of staff who you know i mean we have their survey but 78 of them want i've got two questions on the table i'll answer the n95 mask question um now we actually distributed n95 mass to every staff member at every school on friday so that's been done and that that is a part of ppe that our staff has access to they they do have a certain duck bill like quality to the ones that we purchased but we they are the the top of the line option for safety for those who need it those who want it to answer mrs halstead's question
302no it's probably not a great idea to to do this in less than you know a few hours because our bus drivers will start waking up in about four or five hours and hit the road and you know there's a little bit of confusion and the more time we can give staff on any kind of decision period the better i think that that speaks to the governor's lead time even in trying to give a week to staff to make adjustments i think that those things are helpful i'm not saying we need that much time but um any time that we give staff in in a gracious move in in this type of of change would be helpful and i think i think we are prepared um for this inevitability i think there's every single person
303in stafford county cannot wait until we have a mask-free stafford county every single person as a newbie sorry go ahead but but but i think you know there is some trepidation i think we have a long road uh to go in terms of dealing with some of the emotional distress and some of the safety concerns and dealing with some of that um and that's that's not a super overnight process as we all know with our kids and with our adults so it is going to be a struggle but but i think we've all been conditioned to be prepared for this inevitability at some point um again newbie here what would you say on your experience would be a reasonable recommended amount of time to make this change and could we potentially use that time to
304provide some very i don't know the right word but in-depth educational materials to the families about the impact of this change and how to make that decision for their child the more in-depth materials that you want us to produce the longer that timeline well i don't know if there's stuff that exists thanks to places where this stuff exists even our covid i don't know our covet dashboard but just something so that it's not just here is the rule or the change but right this is why and this is how parents choice is a thing and i think that the board will be prepared to to hear from an equally vocal group of constituents that are concerned about that type of decision too um and and we'll want to have some kind of conversation about that
305because this was not something that was on your agenda um but to that point um we would be ready as soon as the board requires us to be ready because that's our job and we are ready to to to move forward when the board decides that we're ready to move forward so madam chair um i think uh you know we have i mean the room tonight was one side but good god we know we've got at least that many or more of emails for the other way of thinking feeling and i don't feel like an overnight decision or you know an overnight switch is appropriate for those families and i don't think it's an over an overnight switch is appropriate to our administrative teams in the schools in our central office and our teachers so
306i i would just ask that if we continue with this motion that we make sure that we have identified a start to date so that we are being incredibly because this was not on our agenda so teachers are in bed bus drivers are in bed they don't have any idea that this is being spoken about thought about or considered at all um so i would just say that we need to make sure that we have identified a date if if this even passes um did dr chase did you want to say something yeah so um you know back in i think it was just jan november i asked for something and i was told that because the agenda had already been approved i could not add something to the agenda so i gather the parliamentarian
307has now given us different guidance on that but i would like to make that point madam chair another point i would just like clarity what is two-thirds of seven it's five i was told it was five okay so it's five i just just wanted to know what's two-thirds of seven um so i do want to reiterate or or um it's late uh well it's actually early yeah really it's early tomorrow you know i received i received at least 500 emails and i was tracking them for the first 280 and then i stopped but in the first 75 percent of folks wanted us to maintain our masks so i know there are a lot of people here but there are not 270 people here the other thing i want to say was when i was knocking
308on doors back in excuse me please let us when i was knocking on doors back before the election what i heard most from people was they wanted their children to have in-person school i am very concerned that we may have a situation where teachers won't be available or the health department will shut our schools for periods of time and i mean we've definitely if you read the virginia school board association news every morning there's one school division or another that's having to close a school for a week at a time or close another school for a week at a time so for me this is really tough and i still have the legal question and the fact that i would be voting against what our legal counsel recommended so i'll i'll have to sit here
309and think for a little bit more but offhand i don't know that i can support this well let's let's go down let's go down the line and go ahead dr warren um i'm concerned because in reading the governor junkins guidelines it requires social distancing we can't put six feet between students that are unmasked so those requirements are still in place those requirements are still part of his guidelines so you're trying to to shift that i'm very uncomfortable with this for first of all it goes against what legal counsel told us so we've got that so we either follow the law or we just make up our own whatever i'm concerned that we are in the midst of a surge where we have a 45 positivity rate and we have hospitals that has a field hospital
310in the parking doc those are realities right now on the ground we have people being sent home from the hospital to take care of themselves at home so we're going to add increased risk to our schools right now right now and i'm just i'm just not comfortable with it and now we want to make a decision at 12 12 05 in the morning on on 1205 in the morning and one of the people that were here tonight the people that were here tonight do not represent all of the people in stanford and for every person who is here dr dr warner this is a board meeting i've asked the public to refrain from commenting and i would ask you to address your comments to the board it's a board discussion of emotion before the board
311i know it's very emotional but we need to maintain our decorum we have asked the audience we have received emails even tonight from people that are deeply upset about this they feel like they suddenly have had the rug jerked out from under them because now suddenly we're going to change the rules and they're very unhappy about it and we have to consider those voices too thank you ms sigmund a couple of things um we already feel like we've had the rug pulled out from under us because we were told we follow executive orders until they are proven to be illegal or otherwise northam it's five-day five-day education was challenged by northam and it was thrown out and it was upheld until we had sb 1303 second we talked about um i guess that's the big
312thing this shouldn't be a surprise the second we put masks on we should have a plan to take them off third anytime the supreme court could have ruled on monday and we would have been ready to take the masks off on tuesday um however our legal burden is to both recommend masks and provide an opt-out just like we have mandatory vaccinations to enter school not one of them requires is required for a student step foot through the door which makes this piece of fabric from hogwarts literally the only health requirement in the state of virginia that prevents the child from receiving an in-person education so that is really really really frustrating thirdly parents do not have an advocacy arm organized to send emails all day uh we are a grassroots movement of parents that don't
313have another voice um and i forget that i'm up here now and not a parrot but parents don't have an advocacy arm to help send emails and to draft emails for them they are organic thirdly again i don't i feel like i am breaking the law by upholding by ignoring an executive order that is in place that is not overturned and i know that the parents that were here and the parents at home and the parents who have sent emails and the parents who have said nothing at all would completely comply and understand that if we were held out of order if the supreme court said we had to put masks back on we would because we have been wearing them for two years because the government told us we had to and right now
314the government is giving us the option to opt out so we are trying to exercise that right we've been law abiding the idea that we wouldn't be if the law changed is you know silly at best and you know insulting at worst guy um i'm uncomfortable with this entire thing just as maureen maybe for different reasons but we can acknowledge that this ain't awesome right um and i understand that parents don't have an advocacy arm to send emails all the time nor do they have the ability to stay here as long as these people have like you know this group of individuals is not the entire county it's absolutely not what we've seen in our emails and so and i know a lot of people consider coming but with people not being mass i mean
315i understand that people don't want to be in the room with some people not everyone has access to an n95 mask and so they chose not to come that's on them and that's fine but i'm just saying we have to acknowledge that not everybody can be here right um if we throw out the legal advice which i know the lawyer because i've been following school board for a long long time the meetings and i know that our lawyer is respected i don't agree with a lot of her stuff but i know that she is she is very respected um but if we throw that out i'm left with um of the belief that potentially mass do slow the the transmission rate but i also know that you can find a study that says that and
316you can find another study that says it doesn't so then i'm left with the the people who work in the schools and the survey told us that 78 of them want math to stay and so if i have to think about well we need teachers in the classrooms or on the video screen to teach so i have to side with the educators and so i'm going to do what their their survey asked thank you miss guy miss halsted well this is not command okay so i just of course i disagree i mean let's face it i disagree and i disagree on several reasons because uh dr chase i also tracked emails but lucky for me i had a lot of free time in my hotel room and i didn't stop at 270. i had over
317975 emails in my inbox a lot of those just to me personally and not addressed to the board because they know i'll advocate for them a lot of them were teachers too petrified to talk that wouldn't take an sea based service survey that that data is completely skewed and as far as i know the teachers in stafford county virginia are dying inside for their kids particularly the kindergarteners first second and third graders they can't communicate with their kids their kids can't see what they have we've got second graders where a teacher can't go to the bathroom for more than 10 minutes because they think she died of covid on her way like this is what we've done to kids it's enough it's sincerely enough at what point do you justify the spread of covid which
318by the way if you know disease you know they come highly transmissible highly pathogenic highly pathogenic low transmissibility low transmissibility low pathogenicity you know they center in a box that's just the way they work we are in the omicron piece of this it's super fast spreading amongst people but it doesn't have the pathogenicity that the original viral strain had okay i'm going to address a couple of dr warner's things a 45 percent positivity rate for covet omicron covet is not high no one there's literally the statistics if you look at them across the board it's a pretty normal statistic for this piece ninety percent of the people that i know which by the way i kept tally track because i like to do it with public health diseases 90 of the families that i know
319which at this point is over 200 people now they're not all my friends clearly i don't have that many friends but um their friends and friends and friends of family okay they have all been told the same thing by the doctor yes you tested positive for covet go home drink your gatorade get your chicken soup and rest because the body only heals itself when it's at rest if your symptoms get worse come back and see me we're going to get you something different so i don't know where the rest of this comes from but this is all very obscure to me that we're going to start to say that and if teachers are going to quit what happened to the teachers that threw themselves in front of bullets for kids and stuff like that now
320we've got teachers that are gonna they're gonna throw down and quit and give up pensions when they haven't even heard how we're gonna protect them if they stay they haven't even heard a mitigation strategy for what happens next so that we can easily remove these masks from people that's short-sighted and very disappointing i want to talk about a hospital for a minute i have gone at mary washington hospital probably more than i've gotten to the poor health department people and the reason i've gone at them for is because they have not delivered on the bed census requirements that i've asked them for they have not told this public that they are always at capacity this time of year and alternate field hospitals are very common by the way it's what should have happened when this
321pandemic first started so to use these statistics to continue to implement this kind of restriction on our families when all of these people have told you what's happening to their kids i mean my god how much more do we need so who's going to leave the school the kids that are afraid of covid and we take off masks or the kids that are tired of masks and done being afraid of covid we are in a lose-lose situation lucky for us governor yonkin took that away from us he was like you know what school board parents choice we i don't understand the continued need to look at this and beat it to death i i i feel so frustrated for my constituents and my parents the parents that do not want masks have lived for two
322years complying with mask mandates to make the people who are afraid feel better when do the people who are afraid say to the people who aren't it's okay go ahead and start living again we're gonna help you when did this when did the school system give up its obligation to help people feel better and safer they didn't when did the school because we say parent choice doesn't mean we're asking every kid to roll in you know whatever it is amazing to me that we can that we are going to continue to have the same conversation after almost four hours of comments from parents whose each story is heartfelt each one from both sides heartfelt and we have heard from the other side we've heard from them for two years the difference is we're just now
323hearing from this side so to not allow parents today to build faith in this board the option to the the requirement to opt out and just let the governor be upheld again we have failed to meet the burden of this board and we have failed these people and shame on us miss randall i i've said what i said before you know when we made the original decision to mask kids i said this in our last meeting that you know i'd step away from the board go cry in the bathroom wipe my face and come back out and vote mask them it sucked and um because i just never felt that it was the right thing to do but it was the thing we had to do okay now we get into our sorry my husband's
324worried where i am now we get into a discussion that with our attorney about the different sides and considerations the 1303 versus and we did it versus e02 and i you know like i said having talked to other divisions and listening to how they said it's an and for us it's not an ore then i reached out to some friends of mine that are teaching at um in spotsy and they have said it's amazing it was a surprise to them how many kids came to class with their masks on but that there was an incredible respect between those that were masked and those that were not that was not what the teacher who's actually going to be retiring um thought she was going to have so i kind of i i want to give our
325you know i feel like this is so late and this is going to be a sledgehammer to a group of parents and a group of teachers that might have a different viewpoint at this late of an hour so i'm a little uncomfortable about i'm very uncomfortable about that i just feel like you as much as these folks have stated and it wasn't an emergency meeting it was a special called meeting and emergency special call meeting but we followed the protocol of what we're supposed to do we checked on all the check those boxes and i feel like you we announced that we were having this meeting enough that you know we did get a lot of comments a lot of emails not verbals but we did get a lot of emails and i just feel
326like it's a little as much as the what the public said to us tonight about feeling not heard not notified i feel like there's another side that was could feel that way tomorrow not heard not notified so making sure that we're very thorough about when we start this or do we table this or i call another meeting i don't know i'm thinking about it i'm really thinking about it because i and i've had conversations with other board members where the and thing was what i really wanted to hear and i didn't and now i am and i'm hearing it from other divisions and i i prefer the and but i'm thinking okay i guess i'll talk can i make a little clarification because on the survey we received we did get a very informational survey
327outlining staff and faculty opinion on masking in buildings and non-school buildings they got 1700 responses which is fantastic response for them um of those 1700 um supported masking which equate 40 to 50 as school employees so it's 32 percent represents 32 percent of our school employees based on that research that support masking in the buildings this is not a matter of numbers for me it's it's it's not a matter of the the rates the numbers for me this is a matter of the law and as governor yonkin said advised listen to your principle and trust the legal process that's where i am that's where my decision was based last week there there is a potential conflict there now this matter is before the supreme court and we are told we are told this is going
328to be you know an expedited decision i mean or i shouldn't say we're cold this is this is what i've read and this is what i've heard from people my preference is to wait till we get that decision if that decision says the executive order is enforceable i'll be the first one asking for a meeting but right now i think it's a disservice to make a change when we're going to be getting the decision very shortly that could enforce it could not and and i also share miss randall's angst about not having notice to everyone for a i'm happy to add a later date of this of this motion i mean i i wish i had a crystal ball and i know when that decision came out because you know to me that's it madam
329chair can i can i can i finish my statement i promise it won't be much i mean it's already tomorrow so you know um last week was a very hard decision for me those of you on the board know where i was last summer i want parent choice i haven't changed where i personally stand where my district a number of people they're they're both sides but you know my vote was based on the legal advice and the law of the executive order there's there's lots of talk and you know lots of people are giving us interpretations but i can tell you i looked at every single word you know they're saying it's a recommendation but the what the um what the guidelines say is that we will follow or the the guidelines or recommendations but
330what the law says is senate bill 1303 says that we shall adhere to all currently applicable mitigation strategies so you know this i'm not trying to give a legal analysis here but i studied it i heard what our attorney said and that was the basis for my vote i i respectfully you know advise my colleagues that that i will not support a change at this point if the supreme court decision is that that executive order is enforceable you know i'm here for for a meeting i'm i'm hoping i heard maybe it would be this week but we still don't we still don't have it yet so that is the reason why i'm not going to support this motion tonight um we can you know vote on it if you if you want to defer it
331you know that would be um you know i don't i don't know if if someone wanted to make a friendly emotion amendment um that could be done but at this point we have we have a motion we have a second and court decision yeah we can we can take the vote it does require five let's just call the question all right all in favor all in favor of the motion to amend the madam chair can i give a friendly motion ocean well you can you can ask um a friendly a friendly amendment only if the motion maker and the second agree to it so would you be comfortable with moving this decision to monday so that we can see if we get a legal opinion i feel like if we get a legal opinion we're
332going to have to reconsider anyway well i also feel like it's a an opportunity to you know for because we brought this on so late that it gives other i mean we've heard a lot i'm not going to say we're going to hear anything different but i just don't want to like feel like we're sucker punching some staff that maybe not are aware i'm just wondering we got the executive order and we got feedback and then we voted and we got feedback and then we met and you know just like in regular school board cycles we always get feedback the meeting after something happens so we've continued to get feedback and as we're sitting here we're getting feedback i feel like we either need to call a question and then revisit when you know if
333it doesn't pass then we revisit when the legal comes to our side but i'm not postponing another vote okay madam chair can i ask my question from earlier um if we if we did vote on this motion tonight would it would it make everyone here feel more comfortable if we said what's a week from say february 2 this goes into if this motion goes into effect that would give you an opportunity your principles to work with your teachers to instill your stuff but also we would have parents sending emails requesting the exemption and that would give you the opportunity to determine what's the load we're looking at of children that want to be ma unmasked right then at least we have given our constituents what they've begged for we've followed some level of the law
334we've rebuilt a little of the trust and you have a little bit more time to sort of negotiate and then we can get our comments in it so i feel like why don't we just say can we amend the motion just to put a start date of oh my god it is wednesday weird um to put a start date of you know next wednesday parent expectation is met we can work with the teachers maybe we can call upon our health and safety folks to give some briefings to the teachers about how to kind of redo their classrooms and whatnot i don't understand why we can't create a win-win on this one i just don't if we if we give everybody a week that addresses your time comfortability that gives the eo the supreme court a
335chance to hit on the eo it gives these parents who are an utter angst something to finally look forward to and it helps those who are fearful it gives them the opportunity to ask more questions and get more information which can fuel their decision madam chair i would just like to point out that if the executive order is overturned by the supreme court then we yank the rug out from under these people again [Laughter] please ms hall said my my request would be to give an opportunity to everyone to address the board on this issue we have heard from you know from a number of people tonight there are two sides the other people have not had an opportunity because they did not know this matter was going to be brought well we didn't know
336this matter was going to be brought to the board this evening and i i think that would only be fair and reasonable so my suggestion is that if we're going to consider a later date that we set up as ms randall suggested a meeting i maybe i misunderstood i'd like to finish because if we have interruptions we're just going to have to to stop to set up a meeting i would certainly consider that as opposed to just voting you know against this motion but to have a a special meeting just for just for this matter but it it's that if that's not you know something that you know the board wants to consider then we can we can vote on this motion this motion requires five votes to pass um [Music] i've do i have
337to again procedural question i apologize do we have do i i know i don't have to but it's the question now to add an effective date is that what ms halstead was recommending like ms halstead is recommending a effective date miss healy and as i tried with a friendly um amendment is to effectively call another meeting as we are trying to get to five votes um i know what you're saying but we're trying to get to five votes the meeting could be as early as next week and he's ready either way to i'm not looking to postpone the vote um i am happy to postpone the implementation to give the division more time to prepare and provide educational materials but i think we need to call the vote if we want to i don't know
338if a monday or a wednesday makes better sense for the division from an educational standpoint i had been thinking monday she had been saying wednesday how much time is the board is willing to to give me just because it would be helpful okay then wednesday february 2nd would be effective date all right so we said this amendment certainly you know for a friendly amendment then okay friendly amendment all right is that accepted by the person that seconded it are you talking about setting i'm so lost you're setting up that you're set we're setting an effective date now right like that your emotion emotion will include and not accept a friendly amendment to have a a meeting that would allow other members of the public and especially staff and things like that to be involved correct
339that's their accept that edition the effective date of february 2nd yes all right so the yes yes the does everybody understand what we're voting on the motion to amend the motion no you don't have to read it again unless you want to the motion that was passed last thursday to amend that motion to add it parental opt-out is that what you to add that to be effective on february 2nd is that that's the motion ms allstate is that your motion that you're seconded okay sorry we need to be crystal clear because it is rather rather rather late all right all in favor of the motion please say aye all posed no no madam clark would you pull the board no miss guy no miss halstead yes miss healy no miss randall no miss sigmund yes
340dr warner no madam chair the motion fails all right that brings us to information items fairly quick 1101 adoption of revisions of policy 1108 school board meetings thank you dr taylor thank you second one is for consideration the early purchase of 23 buses next year's purchases we still haven't received the ones that we ordered this year we would like to actually have these buses before this one year that's the price of this request the third request is to uh to adjust the compensation for our nutrition workers uh to help stimulate uh some of the supply and our nutrition staff they've been working very hard and short staff uh we've been augmenting with some of our staff from the bandy office to help out with some of our nutrition team the last item is approval or
341consideration at your next meeting for premium rates day we'd like to try this out for the remainder of the school year in march april and may to see if our friday plan works we may even be able to get it started in february if the board approves in at its first february meeting so we've got three things they're all within the board's budget and boards consideration and that's it 1102 1103 and 1104 will come back to the board at the next meeting is there any um staff reports what about 1101 did we i thought we were going to defer that we're going to prefer that we can defer that to uh later in the spring yes thank you so that'll be yes and definitely deferred all right no staff reports although it is another day
342it's a new staff report today hey dr taylor well i did just get an email oh thank you all right well that brings us to the next board meetings the budget work session on saturday january 29th regular board meeting on february 8th and in between there will be a number of budget town halls and we are now done and good night good morning whatever i have a hard stop once