Stafford School Board 8/17/2021

001to individuals that are part-time um i don't know what that cost would be chris but it's something that i would like uh the fab if it's not looking into that yet benefits to part-timers especially bus drivers um currently bus drivers are getting benefits and their timers five to five and a half hours a week a day so our bus drivers with six and a half hour contracts a six and a half hour bus driver is considered full-time so they're eligible for vrs and our health insurance anything less than that they're still eligible for our health insurance they would just pay the part-time rate that we offer all of our part-time employees so is that a yes that they are now getting benefits for health insurance yes if they're a six and a half hour contracted

002employee and at this rate we're trying to move more to you know as many hours as possible obviously but we do have some that are less than six and a half hour contracted employees sometimes that's by their choice because they would rather have a four hour five hour day and for those that don't have the health insurance is there a possibility that we're giving them like the county is giving them funds towards that um we are not doing that though man are there any limitations is that something that excuse me hold on a second is there something that we could consider like the fab could consider looking into that we could certainly look into it i don't think it's appropriate on the budget priorities which we're trying to keep to like three and and have

003but but as we develop the budget we can certainly look at it i'm not sure if we have everyone but where it was and that it it could fit anywhere thank you thank you chris real quick are there any is there any state law or limitations that would prevent us from looking at that in the future if we wanted to expand it to cover the what they call the part-timers um we would just you talk about the reimbursement if they don't participate in health insurance offering it to them and having us treat it treat the part-timers as if they were full-time um so yes and no vrs requires us to set the hours so for our nutrition workers and our transportation employees we've set that as a full-time employees at six and a half hours

004that we could adjust that to let's say six six hours and that would make them eligible for full vrs benefits with six hours you know there's pros and cons to that some drivers look at that as you're trying to cut my hours you're going to give me less hours we want to get them contracted for more hours because then they're they're making more on a daily basis which gives them more vrs benefits so we have some flexibility there we would just have to look at it holistically okay thanks other questions okay i just wanted to ask on our first bullet when we have um because this will be to me number one i mean i know it's in it is going to be a lead one um continue implementation of the multi-year strategy to draw

005adjustments to licensed compensation scale i think though the bullets seem to also go to not just our licensed staff i'm just trying to make sure and and you all probably debated it so i'm not trying to bring up a sort but i just wanted to make sure if we're leading with that we're looking at um phase two of adjustments to licensed compensation scale are just to make sure that there's also a broader does that yes and and perhaps what we need to say is to continue to implement a competitive salary scale across all sectors so that we're and and and i can i can adjust that because while keeping the the you know the plans that the supervisors asked us to come up with that we came up with um but i think we're also

006um chris have we we will probably need to look and see if we're still on track or if the fact that the state gave everybody so much money for salary that we may not be getting as far ahead as we had planned in three years i came up but you but you already covered it i think i mentioned this in fab is we need to we're pulling those scales together now from all the other school divisions as they become public um which allows us to do that comparison again you know when we originally did our three-year study of our three-year plan for our licensed employee scale adjustments that was assuming you know moderate percentage increases for other um school divisions well the state did the the five percent across the board for the school boards

007that wanted to persist participate so we know our competitive school divisions that we lose teachers to the most did more than a two or three percent increase so we need to take a look at that and really see how much we close the gap with you know prince william specifically a quick question i don't know where this fits but um these are the budget priorities that you just mentioned so you open up the door about the strategic plan so we had a strategic plan to try to get them to the at least base do we have another strategic plan to actually compete and hopefully you know compete with prince william versus spotsylvania in terms of um getting them to the mid so for teachers we looked at you know spotsylvania prince william fairfax were really

008the big three with really prince william being the goal that we um we compete with the most specifically in stafford and so we didn't necessarily target a min or a mid we did look at the average of those three um and trying to get halfway to where prince william is because spotty is you know i've said this before you've heard a hundred times we're barely above spotsies when you take an average of prince william and spotsy that's really an average of where we're at and where prince william is at so that was kind of our target but it's a moving target because every year we try to do a little they do a lot so you know if they're already 10 000 above us they're five percent going farther than our five percent is here

009and so obviously we did more than five percent um for the majority of our teachers the average i think it was seven point six seven point seven for our teacher so we were able to do they're able to do more than what spotsy or what prince william offered but on a first on a dollar basis when you take the percentage of the total amount that's what we're comparing now to get a better idea of do we need to adjust last year if you looked at that all right this is year where we want to be in year two that's probably shifted a little bit to try to close that ground is healing last year our priority was to develop a multi-year funding strategy and this year it's to continue implementation is this multi-year funding strategy

010in writing somewhere that we could this is what was part of the budget and we um we said we were going to phase it in over three years it was it was just in discussions i don't know if it was specifically written yeah i think it would be helpful i mean if we if we develop this multi-year funding strategy i'm assuming it's written down somewhere this strategy because we developed it the current the year that just passed and now we say we're going to continue the implementation so i'd like to be able to review that multi-year funding strategy and make that available to the public so that they see you know where we're going down down the road so do we my recollection was we were shown the salary scale and how each year how

011much of an increase to get to to move from a 39-year scale to a 30-year scale am i yeah before we do that that you may address the salary skills but this says our priority was to develop a funding strategy to address division needs and then participated growth challenges which is broader than the teacher scale so if we have in fact developed that multi-year funding strategy we should be able to make it available particularly since we now say we're going to continue it so we do yeah so to develop the funding strategy is is really a joint effort with the board of supervisors we developed what the strategy was to try to be have a more competitive licensed teacher scale and so we had a three-year strategy to complete that but obviously that requires funding

012whether it's state or local funds but as we saw this past year as we receive state funds that generally means the other school divisions are receiving that same incentive that we're competing with so we developed the expenditure strategy what the strategy was over three years roughly you know between 10 and 11 million dollars a year to try to get a teacher where we want at the end of three years that number has changed now as as i've already alluded to but the funding piece of that that's where we have to work with the board of supervisors to develop that funding strategy okay so this multi-year accounting strategy is limited to teacher salaries so i'm just asking okay whoever i don't know who is the responsible party here is dr warner then you have the answer

013so to address the multi-year funding strategy we're going to focus on the ppe which is how we get the county to give us more money so that we're competitive the first part of this is to address recruitment and retention of teachers and to do that we have to have competitive salary to get bus drivers we need competitive salaries to get everybody our staffing problems are partly due to the fact that they can go right next door to prince william and get more money so what we need to get yeah so i guess so so the fir right so the first year we set a multi-year funding strategy to address division needs and anticipated growth challenges so we've changed that that's my question dr warner what are the division needs and anticipated growth challenges that we

014address mr fulmer is telling us we address the teacher salaries which is absolutely an important part of that is that was it limited to that it seems to me that if these are going to be our goals we need to put them in writing and be able to understand so we're all interpreting them understanding them and knowing what their priorities are that's awful i don't i don't disagree well we did also license calories but there's a lot more right to it than that well we did also done yeah quickly if we haven't done it yet considering that we are now going to have a goal potentially to continue implementation it seems we really need to articulate in writing what those funding strategies are that we're going to continue to implement yeah we did bring all

015the service sectors up to the median we have been trying to increase hiring to and we're going to be meeting at the fab to address uh teacher loads of greater than 150 students and looking at both uh class sizes for middle school and high school so those are all part of this some of this we did manage to get done last year some of it we're still working on so it sounds like the ones that we worked on and the one we completed versus the ones that we're still going to work on right we just need to make it available written to the public per [Music] ms healing so yes and i agree they we should be transparent next um dr what about um as the bullet and just for everybody to think about so

016we don't lose the number one i really like that bullet under it of estab i wonder if our our goal is to establish a sustainable and competitive compensation scale at all levels which is that first bullet then this then kind of taking the number one and this is just me thinking because i think in outline the either continuing implementation for licensed staff i also think high need areas is is maybe something we might so it's kind of breaking down the big picture of compensation into identity i don't know that's just i'm trying to use the words and move them around you and i've been doing that a lot so i don't know if that's helpful or not well yeah i mean this is a draft yeah right and it's a work session so that we

017can clean it up everybody on board that's what we're trying to do understood so i and i understand ms hilly's point and i think that um i think instead of continued implementation of a multi-year strategy we should just say we need to address division needs and create a competitive compensation scale across all sectors and um and then break the points down and talk about continuing the phased-in approach to licensed staff and um the high needs areas and they need amazing car sizes middle school and high school i guess i don't see a problem with leaving multi-year strategies just somewhere you need to write what it is that's all yes there's nothing wrong with that especially since we developed it last year and now we're continuing it whatever it is should be defined yeah you know

018okay all right so so i will work on the wording for that before the next action any other questions or i don't i don't have any questions but i maybe you can avoid all of the these aches and pains regarding the way this is worded maybe just maybe changing the word strategy to continued funding request as as initiated last year with a multi-year um i wouldn't call it strategy i would call it call it something else funding request that might eliminate some of this back and forth is it only funding requests though sorry is it only funding requests well it's a strategy i don't i don't recall seeing as like ms healy said i don't recall seeing anything in writing that that looks at a a strategy to me would be a revenue sharing agreement

019with the board of supervisors which we definitely don't have so that's that's all i'm saying it's it's wordsmithing but i get ms healey's point and i think i think i i think that it just needs to be the phrasing needs to be adjusted to because there isn't probably a written strategy these are requests that we make but it's not necessarily and these are ways we're trying to make it feasible for the board of supervisors to work with us is by creating a long-term plan so that we know what our needs are as best we can so so i'm sorry a strategy is a plan we have a plan right we have a plan i just heard the plan it's a plan there's no nothing wrong with the word just know what it is know what

020it means and write it out there's nothing wrong with the word another gym i think it's good to have a strategy but a strategy to me is a way to approach a goal it's how are we going to get there what do we need to do you know what are we going to be asking for what are we going to be doing in house and and i think you know if we had in fact developed one last year we could just say here it is so if we did not develop one last year perhaps this is the year we should all the things that you mentioned are important and we should be doing that but they would be the end goal of the strategy and how we're gonna oh sorry and how we're going to

021get there that's that's yeah so so i know uh we had organizational goals i'm sorry we had organizational goals that's part of the strategy we had a plan of action that's part of the strategy so i'm not understanding why you know we're you were doing all of this so so if i might we we were at the three on three the year before last and a couple of supervisors when we pointed out that public safety had had their salaries increased in one year and the supervisors indicated that they would like to help us get our teachers or licensed staff competitive as well but said that because we had so many employees it could not be done in one year and could we come up with a multi-year approach and so last year dr kisner and

022mr fulmer brought to us a three-year sort of way of getting condensing the scale from 39 years to 30 years and moving salaries in the mid-range and the upper upper experience levels years of experience so that it was more competitive so that was a now was it for everything no it was for licensed staff that's my recollection maybe other people don't recall that but that's that's what i recall and like you also said that we were able to um condense the years for the uh other service employees because that was also supposed to be a multi-year and we were able to condense that one too you're good okay so we'll birdsmith that we'll add the details on what we've worked on sorry so are there so what other changes do does the board want to

023see in this document i like number two um addressing i'm wondering if keeping growth is the big driver of budget demands um we can and then i think we can kind of pull it out so we have i know i'm such an um outliner that we have two bullets under there i'm sorry but i think we can break that like class size cip 3r and capacity need i think we can kind of group them into because it's all there it's more just having more than one bullet because i do think this is a big bullet of so it was just kind of breaking out the because i think growth is a class size driver cip 3r and capacity you know it's all there i think it's just pulling them um i'm not sure if we're

024saying that we want to with regard to hiring qualified teachers and staff is it additional um or because i'm not sure that growth is the thing for the hiring of the teachers i think it's recognizing we need more teachers i don't know how and but um the concept is all there i'm just pulling those out because i think those make sense but saying that you know our special services esl populations and just kids in general is spurring the need for additional staff which right now in a very competitive time maybe more challenging than in the past i don't know maybe that's not even need to be in there can i um do you see what i'm trying to say about saying how the growth part impacts that staff numbers are going to go up and

025i don't know maybe not yeah i i one i have two questions one um stafford ppe is that going to be updated before before i don't know when the state gives us those numbers and then my other question is we don't really have anything here about addressing um the effect of the pandemic and the fact that um there probably is additional catch up that students are going to need and i don't know where the appropriate place for that would be but i would definitely like to see one of our priorities being recovering or continuing to um work through this um i think that could be added as a bullet under expanding the ppe and i think looking at remediation and i think it also covers under um in decreasing class sizes in middle school and

026high school and focusing on high needs areas i think we can and social emotional family that kind of thing that we have definitely talked about in the past that was our third bullet in that one from 2021 which actually i think was pretty well stated so just something yeah so i was thinking the same thing i wrote here a little note mental health and i wasn't sure where we were going to fit that because we we do have the counseling and we do increase counseling and and psychologists and psychiatrists and all that kind of stuff but um um should we not have it somewhere on here do you think it would work under ppe wherever you want to put it so i i mean i think yes we should i agree that we should add

027a bullet that stresses that the most logical place is ppe and that's some place where the county funds help us both to be competitive and to add extra services above soqs so that would be an appropriate place in my opinion well and some of it can be using the funds that we're receiving from the federal government as well as making sure that that those monies are being sent to what they need to be spent on and this is the other the only other thing i'm looking at is the shell and the the shell and the should messily i was looking at number two where it says address demands of growth address demands or growth of growth or infrastructure staffing and transportation so that is a little bit not clear to me because i'm thinking the

028infrastructure itself it's uh it is not going to grow it just needs to be implemented if with development and things of that nature so i'm trying to understand how how you want it to how this is worded yeah i'm i'm thinking that infrastructures things like buses and trailers and other things that we may have to put in place to accommodate capacity needs especially in the absence of dis you know as we wait for schools to be built because there's so many different types right that's why i was wondering and so the infrastructure seemed to be more of us a word a term to describe hard goods that we may have to purchase okay um you know in just some listening to sarah and just thinking about the fundings that we currently have been given for

029kovit i'm wondering if it shouldn't just be a budget item in and of itself i mean it is a pandemic that we're trying to work through it is the social emotional the class size additional recovery programs things like that showing our side of what we've done with funding and then making sure that we're clear where we need more assistance maybe just a thought i think that i think she's she's going to do that susan i think she is going to put an extra bullet dr warner let me just give an an idea like i said i'm just i was wondering yep i address the ongoing and long-term impact and consequences of covet 19 on school operations learning law social and emotional development development um staff and student sorry i was just sort of because i

030really do think we really have to say it because we don't even know yet we have been open a week a week a week and two days of what of what of what our long-term impacts are and i know i'm i am very much you know if you can hone in but we may find as the school year goes on there's challenges or impacts consequences ramifica whatever word we want to use of covid that we won't know until we're in the classroom and then until we're in for even a few weeks and i just i'm not trying to be broad and say we don't know what they are but we want to be able to stand in there and i feel like i'm not maybe saying covet 19 i feel like we need to because

031we don't know what's going to happen in the next two months we we already are hearing from parents whose children have been quarantined and who are going to be out of out of the classroom for two weeks and then coming back into the classroom and and that's going to be disruptive and that's going to have an effect and so yeah it's this is not done by any means so i'm wondering if it would be appropriate to put in um a reference to the federal funds that we will be using those funds for these things as indicated and and talk about reducing class size quarantine social emotional needs so so that we're acknowledging yes we did get these federal funds but we also have a high demand for those funds in in putting them to work

032for the schools ms healey i think what is the estimated growth from for this year do we i know we don't know officially until september 30th but about a thousand i mean a lot of a lot generally drop off between the first day of school and september 30 is a thousand maybe do you think i have it yet because one thing we want to well chris is looking for it so chris jump in when you're right but with even still with regard to covid we may be using cares and other act money but i don't think that i think we want to begin to still fill those um if it's positions if it's whatever we want to be able to transition if those are needs we need to long-term address the money may be for

033i forget one or two years we may want to make sure we are already beginning to hire or address those so anyway just a comment just for reference those um the last assert funds are to none september 2024 okay but still we want to be ready sorry mr fulmer i figured i'd give you a little time no no yeah thank you we we had already run the numbers that needed to pull up so now keep in mind september 30th from last year to today um or or monday actually yesterday was about a thousand a thousand seventy five kids so but we we still haven't hit that drop period so we know some of those kids are gonna come down but that is a big increase you know we usually see that eight nine hundred and

034then we drop back down maybe it's 6 700 in a pre-covered year that we would see in any given year so a thousand is a lot now we expect a couple hundred of those to fall off after the after the ten days but still going to be a pretty high number so and what was the difference between the year before that because last year was such an abnormal year do you yes it works difference between so and so once again and we'll get once we hit our september 30th we'll give you the official numbers of where we fall but we're a couple hundred higher than we were two years ago after so we had a big drop last year in covid we lost a lot to homeschool private school but a lot of them we're

035hearing it from the principals about these home the kids that were out last year homeschooled and they've returned so um i um i'm trying to think of what the number was two years ago but but it's a couple hundred higher probably 300 higher than it was back then okay so so the fact that we have a significant growth this year is in large part due to the decrease last year if we you know that that's why when we get these numbers i'd like to get two years ago last year and this year and we know it's going to go down so a thousand that does sound like a lot that's actually what we were adding at around the two year 2000 every year we would add a thousand students for a number of years but

036we'd also add a new school you know we'd be increasing along that range but i just i just want to keep it in perspective i'm not sure that i'm comfortable with addressing the demands of growth on infrastructure staffing and transportation certainly that is a portion of the issue but there are demands on the infrastructure just because of aging there are demands on staffing because of the changes in the you know in in the students coming in you know one example is the the number of languages spoken here you know our esl needs and of course transportation you know that's that's always been you know a a a need area but you know with the increase in housing in the rural areas that's going to increase the demands on transportation because it's not the same as

037stopping you know on a quarter in a subdivision and you know having the kids get on the bus so if there's you know if there's a way we could expand that not to limit it to the demands of growth because if if in fact it's a couple hundred from two years ago i'm not sure that's as significant impact i i just think we need a couple more bullets specifically to what infrastructure you're reporting here and which growth and what is actually affecting if the growth is affecting the staff and because of xyz if it's um if it's affecting transportation because of the development you know maybe specifying that a little bit more madam chair yes i'm going to take your advice and i'm going to go ahead and say it i'd like to see a

038little bit more emphasis put on the 3r i agree with what ms healey just said about all of these other things the infrastructure is really important and i'm going to use brooke point high school as an example we all saw the email from um from shiloh today about you know we've needed chillers in that building for a long time and then we've got teachers in there with 35 kids and 100 degrees outside in the middle of a pandemic that's not good wearing masks wearing masks in that heat so the 3r list is just as important as all of these other priorities on here and i i'm saying it for the record so thank you just out of curiosity uh mr anderson is uh are the chillers at brook point one of the ones that are

039on the list for replacement this winner i can say i think they were originally scheduled to be replaced and they did get pushed because of funding so it was one of the unfunded projects that got pushed farther out i have one more i don't know where it belongs so we talked about the thousand editions of kids and that it may not be the right number um but i was thinking more along the lines of um virtual and i've been keying on this for a couple of months now and i just need to know um where on here because it's still going to be i think virtual is just going to be part of life in terms of the future of the school that it's not going to go away right now and so i think

040um that it needs to be somewhere on the list either under that last bullet where you have the mental health and all that stuff but we need to put it somewhere because we need to be able to pivot yep infrastructure dr jones was suggesting it could maybe go in infrastructure but i do think it's important to not invite the argument that we don't need new schools because we can just have a third of our students be virtual um and so i think it's very important that we um are not opening that door so this is not a door this is actually the window into the future in terms of while coalit exists while there's going to be different variances we need to be able to know when there's groups of kids that are going to

041be quarantined that we could move them you know hopefully fairly quickly and then when they're well to come back and then do the reverse i've just heard from supervisors who've stressed how important it is that we get everybody back in school and at the same time how we don't necessarily need a high school because everybody can be virtual so it's it's kind of hard to balance those two requests but i want to make sure that we're not at least unless the board wants to go in that direction i think we have to plan anyway i mean at least until what is it 20 24 25 that it's now state law that we have to provide in school um instruction five days a week so if a third of our student body decides to do it

042and they say oh gosh we want to come back we have to by law we have to accommodate them so and not only that we continue to grow we're going to continue supporting what dr chase just said yeah i'm not arguing so i don't know i know so my suggestion would be that when i add the section about using the federal funds that i will add virtual under that as another bullet point that we have to be able to pivot as long as we are have students in quarantine but i agree with dr chase i don't want to emphasize that this is an option that we aren't going to be moving a third of our high school students into a virtual environment that we need physical structures so i think it's better to keep it

043under those federal funds and um not make it a separate category as part of our budget well and like i said i'm sorry the only reason why i'm bringing that up is because that is going to be time consuming it is instructional design that needs to happen if virginia star whatever it is doesn't have any room then we have we need more teachers or we need more individuals that are gonna so it is work it is time consuming it's work and it's stuff that needs to be done and then when they're well they come back into the school system so there needs to be a rotation and we cannot burden the same teachers to do async and to do you know classroom instruction and and that's hard so dr jones you want to add to

044it i think we can get it through the infrastructure because what you're really talking about is how we're leveraging technology to engage kids who may not be in school so that's okay i would offer the infrastructure as an umbrella for how we might do that and doctor we're just i mean maybe i'm not making the i think we need to mention the federal funds with care that but that's not to me the emphasis we have to be preparing for a post i'm hoping covid or something and the impacts of that for a long time and i'm i guess and i'm maybe i'm not saying i just think we're going to be needing to start to put in our actual budget the ability to react to whatever we learn in the next month we may learn

045some of it in a year um so i just think and i don't and i'm going to look at dr jones i'm going to say i don't know what those are and but i want to say at some point it's going to have to be part of our operational budget so i i don't want there to be this reliance well you can just use the federal and i'm not maybe i'm just i don't know does that make any sense but i'm trying yeah i i think that under ppe i think one of the things that maybe we need to add is the flexibility to to adapt to you know unexpected things like none of us two years ago were expecting the year that we had so i think that's definitely something that can go under

046ppe but i don't i don't want the board of supervisors to think that those federal funds are a substitute for that's what that's where i was going right for me we we need teachers and we're going to need experienced teachers and when the federal funds run out we still need to have those teachers yeah i don't think we'll need to say oh it's time to get rid of you i have a feeling that's not at all what we're saying so it was just transitioning into the those become operational expenditures let's not all go and ask in one year for 60 million well maybe but i'm just saying just to be looking at that so perfect i i appreciate all the input if you would all like to send me some of your specific comments then

047i will work on uh editing this so that it will be presented for information unless there's some additional comments we don't have to send you what we said do we oh good no i just i'm uh these days if you got it missy got it yeah no i just i just meant if there's anything you think of between now and when we present it specifically please send it to me but i will go ahead and work on it unless there's something else i will go ahead and work on editing based on my notes perfect all right thank you all let's move on to our next um item is we're going to be having a transportation update and a discussion i will look at dr jones and looks like mr foamer as well to lead us

048accessibility i have a long sleeve shirt whoever brought me this time this was my library it didn't happen it was live this first year they opened up the pdc was the pizza hut building all fifth grade was there that's what we call them dedicated mr palmer you can get started when you want sorry i had to get high caffeine i don't know if we need to wait for miss young or is she coming right back i think she was saying i think she was getting some water so i would you can just go ahead and start with your intro all right so i appreciate you having uh mr baldwin and i back this evening to provide a little bit of an update of where we were last tuesday when we when we spoke with you

049and today i want to emphasize i'm going to i'm going to talk about some of the improvements we made but in no way are we where we want to be and that's going to kind of be an emphasis of we've made some huge gains from last week and a lot more kids are getting to school on time and a lot more kids are getting home quicker than they were last week and we've and we've improved our efficiency in a lot of areas but we still have a long way to go and so we still have some short-term fixes there in the next week or so and then we still have some long-term fixes and we'll talk about that not only in this presentation but also in the following presentation when we talk about those bus

050driver uh recruitment and retention strategies madam chair um are we going to hold all our questions till the end of the presentation let's do that great thank you board members so areas of concern i put bus driver shortage at the top that is still our primary concern of how do we how do we get out of where we're at today and continue to improve and we need drivers so we can we can improve communication we can condense routes but we can only continue so many routes and so either way we need the bus to um to fill our bus driver vacancies and this isn't something that's only occurring in stafford you know this is state and nationwide but i believe we we have a plan going forward where we can attract a good number of

051bus drivers and close that gap the communication i want to so first of all we once again have improved greatly with our communication trying to notify everyone that's on a double run we've we've assigned those double runs that they'll have assigned routes and bus drivers now so that we can get the communication out more timely they don't doesn't mean that they're the first run some of them have double runs which means they have to go back out and pick them up which means they're going to be late or they're going to be cutting it very close in some of those instances but we have improved the communication it is still a big area of concern one of our biggest reasons is when i just when i say the communication it's getting back to our parents

052timely not only reporting the bus driver the bus number changes and times our experts which are our lead drivers usually handle this for us well every single one of them and not the only ones handling this but they're a big part of that they can take those calls look at a route and say hey this is when it's going to be coming now based on this call out that we had all of them are not in the office they're all out driving buses um so that puts us puts us back and it's you know we've we've tried to add additional staff in transportation but it's a little different you need an experienced person that knows the system knows the in and out of of how it operates so that leads us not always responding timely

053we're trying to get back to every email every phone call timely there are a lot of them that has considerably decreased over the past week and have spoken to a lot of parents that have communicated that hey we've seen great improvements we'd just like to see more and what is that long-term goal so we're notifying the parents of the substitute buses however there you know there's just restrictions and limitations on what we can do so we can tell them hey you have a substitute bus we can't update in the app what that arrival and departure time would be depending on on the the bus arriving or the bus departing the school and them arriving home a lot of that is to do once again we have limited our lead drivers which our experts are out

054of the office but some of it is when we split a route so we know the bus 200 is going to be unfilled today we're now taking bus 190 and 195 and they're going to take half of those kids each and so we split that bus into two well that's not a very clean break where we can break it put them on the bus and then update the app to show that so we know there are a lot of concerns of folks that are looking at the app and saying hey the app is not giving me accurate information we know that um one of things we can talk about as we go through the presentation is we're going to kind of we're going to put out a one-page document that says this is when the

055app is 100 accurate which 90 percent of the time is true but when we have the substitute buses and the adjustments that app is not going to be accurate sometimes it's accurate but not until the bus starts its second run so it's not um it's not great so if you're on that second run and you're the third stop or the second stop it's not going to update in the app until the bus gets to its first stop so not the most useful information for a parent or a student that's tracking it wanting to know when the bus is going to arrive another big area of concern not only all of our students trying to get them timely to school but we know we have an issue with our travel students because of the time of

056the day and the rotation to getting them to their travel school and then back at the end of the day from their travel school so we're looking at different options there we think we've cleaned up a lot of it i think um and and tom mr dr nichols update me but um or correct me if i'm wrong but i think cgs is a lot better shape than it was in the previous week but some of our other programs we still have some work to do there and so we're a lot of times we're getting them there maybe a little bit late but getting them back because of the way it overlaps with our other bus runs is a challenge can i just interject there so one of the things we have to think about too

057is because we know students are still tardy now can we engage them synchronously virtually while they're waiting for the bus so that we're looking at those kinds of options we're also considering options as if can we offer if they're missing a core class why can we offer that course of course where they are so we're looking at every every available option we need to consider until we of course that will be short term oh i like to what i said on the before we even started the presentation which is we still have a lot of improvement to make but i do want to touch on we have made significant ground so um we're hearing continued improvements from the principles almost every day we're hearing hey we set a record today kids are out kids are

058out earlier kids more kids came in on time that's a significant you know that's kind of music to our years that's what we want to hear is hey more kids are reporting on time we don't stop there obviously because just because ninety percent of them are getting on time if there's two three buses that are arriving late those are the ones now that that we need to get earlier and that's where it's going to take some drivers and some route consolidation but we are reporting a lot more on time buses um i mentioned we decreased the number of our unassigned routes which means all of our unassigned routes have been placed with an assigned driver those are second loads though and we know that and we know they're late and so um started the communication

059on a daily basis to those second runs uh right mr baldwin of sending that out and letting you know hey your bus is going to be late today i expect it but but we have you know been able to consolidate that total number of routes just based on on how the first week has gone we're not eliminating students from the routes which i know is a concern that hey just because i haven't written now doesn't mean i need one next week and i'll get into that in a few minutes i want to thank our drivers our drivers have been incredible for the past week and a half we usually have just in a typical year you know 15 20 call outs especially fridays mondays can be very heavy call out days our drivers not only

060are coming to work but when they're here they are putting in some hours they are volunteering to pick up any extra run they can they will take kids home call in and say let me know what else can i do and so i can't can't thank them enough for the dedication that they've had over the past week and a half it was a concern as even as we add more drivers to our fleet eventually those call outs are going to come whether they're you know scheduled call outs it could be for medical reasons so we need at least the drivers to keep pace with the progression and those call outs our arrival times and afternoon dismissal times have improved and we we not only contract that but we can also hear from the principals and

061from a lot of parents and families that have when we receive emails that say hey just wanted to follow up and say thank you the bus was here on time today we got home on time today some of the evidences we track when is the last kid at home on a daily basis so not just when they leave the school but when that last bus drops that last kid off in the county last year or sorry last week those first two days and even as we slowly slowly uh decreased that time but yesterday was 5 50 today was 5 35 that is an over an hour better than we were last week so that is a clear sign of the improvement we're making and we're hearing it from our high schools about about how quickly

062now the kids the buses are getting there sooner to get the kids home we've improved our processes for loading and unloading so continuing to make progress there we want to get them home sooner believe me but making considerable progress so our next steps number one driver recruitment and onboarding i will i'll touch on that more um on on how we're going to do that with our scale and incentives but just a quick update last week i told you that we had 13 trainees in class it's actually 14. we got 13 just out of our job fair that we put put on about a month ago but we had one more that was had trickled in right before that that's finishing up their time as well uh they will all start entering our fleet at the

063end of next week around august 31st and then we have another clash starting later this week now they take several weeks before we get them in but some of our proposed changes is trying to attract drivers that already have their cdl license and we talked about that at the fabc meeting and there will be an emphasis tonight what we've what we've done is streamline what that process looks like you know it's not often that in the past that we've had a ton of experienced drivers come but we're seeing more now i wish i knew her name we have a driver that retired from up north came down here and she is actively recruiting from her former district of bus drivers that live in stafford and and that can retire from a separate uh retirement system

064and come down here and still work full-time and collect a paycheck here and up there and um i'm going to call i i told our hr people i'm going to call and personally thank her and hopefully she can keep that up so we have some proposed changes to our driver scale and in some additional incentives and that's what the next agenda item is about that's focusing on signing bonuses which we offer a small one now we want to enhance that and target certain groups we're also going to propose a scale enhancement which will impact our new and experienced drivers with one-to-one placement so if some of a bus driver comes here with 16 years of experience we're going to give them all 16 years of experience we're not going to cap them so you know

065you've got to start at the beginning of the scale so we'll discuss that soon i'm following this um so you know kind of our next steps too we're going to continue to improve our communications with parents about delays and our sub-bus coverage i already mentioned we've improved that greatly from last week we know where some of those limitations are um starting last week mr baldwin added on our website hey if this was your original run and it was vacant or you know here's your new run uh new bus number and then and then updating that you know in parent view and the uh the route finder so so it provides better information another thing we're excited about we looked into this you know before before this week last week it just takes some time to

066implement but there are tablets you can put on our buses and and not only can you track when a student comes on and off now that's a little bit more of a piece that we have to implement because there has to be some sort of you know proximity tag or something that you would touch when you're when you're going by there like a student id badge but we can track when a student gets on and off the bus but it will also show the driver who needs to get off at that stop so we can have a better track and show you know a picture with the student information it also allows us real-time updates for routing information so if a bus route needs covered by a different driver we're able to wirelessly you know

067send that to that bus tablet so the driver can pull it up it provides the gps the route sheet everything the driver needs instead of having you know to flip through the route sheet a piece of paper to know where the next stop is so there's a video there i'm not going to pull it up but but hopefully the digital version that will be loaded on the website it takes you to a youtube video and you can kind of see what that what that tablet looks like and what the um the really the goal of those tablets are and so we'll we'll come back with more information that in the future once we pull it all together but i wanted to let you know that that's something that we have been exploring and we'll continue

068to and try to implement that i don't know what the implementation timeline looks like if it's something that we can implement you know periodically you know bus by bus throughout the year or if it's something that we wait until next summer or over the winter break but but we will be exploring that and getting in more detail and then lastly we've talked about tweaks to our bell schedule do we need more time between each shift to provide more flexibility for our buses to get between middle school and high school it's just something we're not ruling out we will explore it we want to get our opt-in survey results back and see where we can consolidate our routes so we did a prior survey uh back at the beginning of summer and we had 18 000

069responses approximately 3000 people responded that they did not need transportation so we routed 26 000 students and that actually increased as we kept adding students but that's what we started with we put out a survey last week had a very quick turnaround sent a lot of reminders currently have about 27 000 responses with currently around 6 800 that have answered no to that we know we still have some a gap there of where we need to reach out to um so we are are taking that we close that survey this afternoon actually we take that data down we're kind of scrubbing it make sure you know we had some duplicate entries in there we had some folks that are already you know hey can i change my selection which will provide a little bit of

070flexibility but we're going to have to kind of close that as well so we can start routing this will allow us to update our routes consolidate hopefully after we call the other several thousand students or reach out we a lot of them we can probably eliminate they could be virtual students it could be you know a lot of the we're hoping principals and teachers can look right away and say hey little johnny he's gonna ride the bus every day i know that so he just didn't fill out the survey so we're going to we're going to try to close the loop on as many of those students that did not respond allows us to update our routes and we're looking at doing that for the rest of this week over the weekend early next week

071we're going to see how long it takes as soon as we feel comfortable with that we will roll that out to st parents send out new information and say hey here's your new um pickup time and and just or and bus number we don't expect drastic changes except where we're able to consolidate routes so i think a lot of people that are already on a first shift elementary school second shift elementary school are getting to school on time or if your bus has been getting to school on time you might not see drastic changes but some of our students will see changes and hopefully that's going to allow us to be more efficient and get kids to school on time i already mentioned this but but there is a note at the bottom that that

07227 000 roughly responses that is raw data total responses we know there's some duplicates in there we've already seen them so we've got to finish cleaning that up but we wanted to just give you the raw data we just closed it this afternoon so we're in the process of scrubbing that and so that is it mr baldwin i don't know if you have anything else you want to add before we turn it over to questions or if i was accurate you're good you're good all right let's holler back go ahead um so kudos to whomever came up with the idea to separate the car rider lines from the bus lines i saw some very complimentary things on social media about at least the high schools and the middle schools were able to separate the buses

073from the car riders and it when they did that it just significantly moved the process along so whoever came up with that congratulations and kudos um okay before you go on i i do want i want to thank the sheriff's department they have provided deputies and tried to help in our really um high volume areas and our troubled areas and then additionally you know we have principals that are out in the roads directing traffic trying to get them well we're trying to get crossing guards but that's a process as well of trying to get in here and greg martin is is helping us with that but but i just want to well i had a chance thank the principals that are getting out there and directing that traffic we've had some great ideas and sheriff's

074office is providing ideas too as well as as we try to do exactly what you said which was give the to give the buses a direct path um to get in and out of the school great takes a village right yes um how are we getting folks into the dmv to settle the cdl requirements through them or i heard there was a backlog you had to get an appointment all that good stuff well currently uh we we do not have a backlog we've been able to get all of those folks an appointment where the barrier is is when it's not related to their cdl so those are what we have but we have a direct line it's been a priority i've had an elect official reach out to help out and encourage if i need

075to get in contact with him to push the dmv he's given that contact so that's very appreciative so we're good with this 13 uh 14 that we have in class now we're going to monitor and track this next 15 that starts later this week and see how that goes great thanks i have one more but i'm going to hold it for the next it's probably more appropriate for the next item so all right go ahead sounds good i got a list i was just gonna okay ms young give give two or three two or three okay yeah um so i just wanted to thank mr baldwin and his team the bus drivers chris dr kissner he takes my calls at any time night and morning uh dr jones i really really mean this i mean

076that you all have stepped up the sheriff's office they take my text especially when the parents are are calling and um to those parents out there that um not only took their kids to school but picked up their neighborhood kids because i'm in some of these uh facebook pages where i see them like hey do you want me to pick up ben he's on my route and i'll take him to school and so i do thank every single one of you all for the efforts that you all put through and yes there are some good emails coming in and saying thank you it's on time oh my god the bus was on time two minutes early so that's a problem sometimes too right but thank god for that um i want to know what else

077we could do for you what do you need because if you don't tell us what you need we won't know all right be the best advocate right now encourage folks to kind of i've thrown out the idea of paying it forward volunteers sometimes i've tried to get out to our schools and i've met parents who have dropped their kids off and just introduced myself and it's like how can i help what can i do so folks are willing the parents that i've talked to on the phone about all the situations some you know understanding some are not but i understand we're going to work hard and i just need them to understand that that's what we're doing so when it comes to what i need we need drivers and i need folks to be an

078advocate and be a support to our kids and understand that we're trying to do the same what we all want the same is to provide a safe and timely arrival to our students we have the mic right there you can ask the public right now you need bus drivers right and we're paying good and all the time yes that's right so um i know that um you're in the office and you probably need someone to help you and i was wondering when you get the information from the ground there are some folks out there that know the roads and they've been around for a while that you might want to lean on them for information they get along very well with the with the with most of the bus drivers and i'm thinking that for

079the time being to have someone close to you to work with you to help you we're not taking them off the route we're just asking them to help you a little bit more until you have that support that you need in your office because i know somebody is missing in there that is not yet hired so i was wondering if you could just pull somebody in there with you to help well that goes back to our leads and like then they are on the front line between the parents the schools and the transportation piece whenever they're not on a route they are in the office helping i am constantly i'm still looking to fill certain voids in the staff and i have folks that have really stepped up in the office to do over and

080beyond what they've been asked to do on a regular basis so i do believe everyone is chipping in over and beyond and if i can find those persons that are willing to come in and help it's going to be in between our down time between that morning and afternoon arrival and and that's kind of the bulk of where we do the bulk of the work in a day so those leads once they get off the bus they come in and they immediately hit the phones in their email to try to respond um to the most apparent questions or concerns and that's not voluntary we're paying them right yes okay perfect and this is my third ones and i'll let it go by right um the uh the kindergartners and the first graders those color white

081and whatever colors there are are we planning on making them neon so that they could be seen where are we with that are we planning on doing that so you can kind of speak to it we are we're definitely exploring that idea we have to coordinate because white was originally selected because it was a color that none of the other schools were using for other tags and so we've got to make sure we can identify a new tag that's universal for every kindergartner and first grader that doesn't confuse the driver and and make a difficult situation so we talked about it i think it's doesn't i don't i don't want to make too quick of a change there it's a process that's worked for for many years but but it maybe is if it's something

082that we can hold off until we actually have this transportation um committee and we can bring in and get some parent and bus driver perspectives um on that as well okay sounds good pass all right ms healy you want to go next you you mentioned that the app is not as accurate with substitute buses um so could you define what a substitute bus is tell us how many substitute buses we have and approximately how many students are riding these substitute buses so a substitute bus is basically an unassigned bus in our system but right now every bus every driver that is driving has an assigned bus that can be used utilized as a sub bus so whenever a an assigned run has to be covered chances are it will be another assigned bus listed as

083the sub bus it's a little confusing isn't it well i'm just trying to get a picture of the students affected because i think that's who i'm hearing from the ones that either have an assigned bus that's not the number that's coming to get them or driving them home or there is not one so so if i understand you correctly you're saying there really are no we we defined substitute buses originally as buses with an unassigned route but now that we have assigned routes for everyone the definition of substitute bus is going to change to something else no we're going to keep it as a sub bus so in our document but but if it's an unassigned route so when you say unassigned route i got you when you say unassigned route that basically means we

084do not have an assigned driver so to compensate for that we are going to assign it to another driver so that driver basically will carry two loads so would that be a substitute then it wouldn't be in a substitute if it had an assigned driver i'm really trying to understand just it's the term of what we use in the industry so with the parent app it works on an assigned and a sub so we have a one-to-one transition an assigned bus is going to be substituted by what we call a substitute bus that's it it's just a turn so we had to do that with all of the unassigned routes so the unassigned route routes have a bus assignment in order for it to show on the parent app we have to do what we

085call an override in the system we have to cross out the assigned bus put in the substitute bus so what parents are seeing now they see that assigned bus and some of those and that's that's a bus number some of those buses are fillers because in order for it to be seen in the app it has to be assigned a bus number in order for a sub bus to replace it so that's where we have those some of those are fillers and those fillers were the unassigned routes so now we're able to assign it with a sub bus which in reality is just another assigned driver taking it so we've listed that on our web page that we keep it it's very fluid so it changes every day and so a school parents can go

086to our website and see that here's the filler number my 350. but for the am it's going to be bus 100. for the pm it may be bus 48 combined so we have kind of done some you know i call it innovative planning to make sure that we've given every route a bus driver it's probably the easiest way to do it is every route has a bus driver that driver may have two to four to six sometimes eight loads that they're taking within the morning runs and the afternoon runs wow so that is the they've really stepped up i mean the driver with eight runs is extreme we don't have many of them doing that but they may have an assigned elementary and a second load elementary they may have a primary middle and a

087second load middle and then they get to the high school so whenever that driver doubles carries a second load you have twice the time so the later the time we took it's a trickle-down effect so by the time we get to the middle in the high schools we are 30 40 60 minutes or glader late because of the second loads and that's primarily because we don't have the drivers to accommodate that and what we're doing in between time is anywhere that we can combine and still manage a bus to be able to get into a school where they don't have to go back out and get a second load they can get them all in one load coming in that saves some time doesn't say much it makes the run a lot longer but it

088does save some time so they can start their middle school and start their high school from that standpoint so if a student is on a second load are they going to be on a second load until we get more drivers chances are yeah i'm trying to figure this out because if say i know my child is on bus number x and i go on the app and the app tells me x is on time you're saying that could possibly be the first run that's on time not the second run is that is that where the problem is coming in it's possible so it seems like we need to fix that app so that the app identifies the second load i mean if if we know the second load is going to be the second load

089i mean and that we we used to do that you know what 15 years ago when my child was in elementary we had first and second load buses but well we won't go there but anyway um we need to be able to communicate with parents and it sounds like it's an an app issue but but if there's just one bus and it's going to have it's going to be filling in somewhere else and if i go in to look where that bus is i'm going to not know it's filling in unless there's something there so that's that's something we need to obviously work on do how many how many students are affected is this going to vary by day you know how many have these substitute buses it will it will vary by day because

090depending on the situation and the number of drivers that we have it may be a different configuration i will tell you that typically with a bus that has a second load in the morning where you are the second load in the afternoon you may be in the first load because as a general practice we end up in the mornings we bring in the longer to shorter runs together in the afternoon we would take home the shorter run come back to the school and get the longer run so it would flip-flop each day so um that's that's a practice that we have and it may not be a hundred percent for every route but that is a practice that we try to maintain so that kids aren't late all the time okay that runs into my

091next question you gave us the 5 50 on monday and 5 35 is the time the last child was dropped off what is our scheduled time for the last drop-off i might have to get back to you on that to learn what our longest run is well i'm just trying to figure out you know i i appreciate the improvement but i'm trying to figure out how far we have to go so if if we could get that information because just saying in a vacuum really doesn't tell me a whole lot other than we're doing better and i don't think we could do worse than we don't i mean we've got we've got to approve all right that was rhetorical my last question i'm going to ask has to do with with the travel students you

092said cgs was doing better with some other programs or not how was cgs targeted or or maybe they weren't maybe it's just like of the draw that cj cgs is doing better but there's a lot of programs in addition to cgs that travel so you know how did how did cgs get better and the other ones not do so well well for one um cgs has a zero block let me make sure i have dr nichols approval we have a zero block so those students are brought in at the elementary time and so there's a select group of juniors and seniors that we collect so there's not there's only a small number of buses that we utilize to collect those students for the zero block in terms of the travel students everyone follows the same

093schedule so the problem that we have is once they get to the high school then we have to take them to their tribal school and the timing is not there yet because of the fact that if they're doing doubles at the elementary and middle by the time they get to the high school they're later so if we have a target time of 9 20 to have those kids at a target school high school buses may not be getting there until 9 20. and so they have to load and may not leave until 9 40 and we're already behind the time so that's been that's our biggest challenge right now when we talk about the tribal students and and our cgs students and and ib students so all of those students in that program we're all

094trying to leave at the same time and move them to the different schools but we can't move them on time if we can't get to school on time right now so what's this cgs i thought they started with everybody else they are they getting extra because extra time yeah what happened was because cgs does broadcasts with other school divisions and the other school divisions did not change their schedule the solution that that staff came up with was what's called a zero block so the i don't know which grade levels of cgs it is but they're starting i'll let i'll let dr nichols yeah with the change in our schedule in order to have the broadcast our juniors and seniors are starting around 8 o'clock in the morning so they're getting picked up pretty much with

095the elementary run not with elementary but at the same time and those kids who cannot drive again we do allow kids to drive through permission slips and things they're getting dropped off at the governor to at the governor's school sites prior to the rest of the high school runs and then the juniors and seniors since they have zero block they finish after the regular high school first block so they're traveling back to the base school the juniors and seniors at 10 50 in the morning and they're getting a bus there's no other runs at that time so we have lots of buses and at the same time the 9th and 10th grade governor school kids are being picked up at their base schools and going to the cgs schools and getting their little after 11

096and then they stay until about 120 which again just before the elementary starts their runs and mr baldwin worked to have the elementary runs who are close to those high schools pick up the governor's school 9th and 10th graders at around 120 drive them back to their base school before they and then they go right into their elementary run so that's where the cgs with the shift in their alignment and programs we're not competing for buses for the other high school runs where the other cte travels stat travels are at the same time around eight o'clock and they're fighting for the same buses that are going out to pick up all our other high school students right but our elementary school students are getting there late and we're picking up cgs students and getting them

097to high school on buses that could have been used for elementary so i i wasn't aware of that so i i think we need to be looking at every program equally important we did hear from a parent last spring talking about offering zero blocks for lots of things and so i think staff heard that i think we may be hearing that for next year but yeah it's it's absolutely something that might be a solution to help with some of these travel student problems right i mean that's that's an instructional issue we're going to address independent but we're going to have to address that at every level all right well i'll hold my other my other questions thank you dr chase i'm i'm glad to hear that um things are starting to improve and i really

098appreciate all the work that everybody's been doing i wanted to remind all of us that miss healy and i before the covid pandemic started we went and met with bus drivers and we made a a adjustment to the salary scale at that time but i went on a couple of drives with a bus driver and we had put on our budget before covid on the last budget before covid to start having bus monitors and this was to help with the the stress of you know managing 35 kids on a bus while you're driving and having to keep track of traffic and and all of that and that got removed from the budget because of of covid so i would hope that we'll look at that again moving forward you know when we hear about a

099student running off the bus um at the wrong stop if there had been a monitor there that might be less likely to happen and so um i i would like us uh to to revisit that um a couple of other things just um i know that with this flip in the schedule um miss randall mentioned last time that maybe a psa for parents who haven't had their students ride the bus before to understand how to make that go a little faster we might want to think about staggering the start and having elementary schools start a couple of days before everybody else to give those elementary school students an opportunity to learn how to ride the bus and to give those parents a chance to take a photograph of their kid in front of the bus

100without it dominoing into middle and high school running late and then we talked in the fab and i hope the board at the next meeting will entertain the idea of having a transportation advisory committee to look at at the transportation study that we had done but also community parents have an understanding of what some of the issues are at their school they might have ideas about where we could add crosswalks those kinds of things might help and i just want to say you know all of this is budget right so if we're going to increase bus driver salary tonight uh we need to understand that that'll be written into our budget before we even start for next year and the public needs to understand that all of these things cost money and and absolutely we

101should have timely arrival to school but we also want to have licensed teachers when you get there so um it's a lot and um just to make sure that that the community understands that thank you ms randall thank you would also like to thank everyone because i know we've spent hours and hours reading some of these emails and i know you get them i know um you know i i just feel uh i feel badly for how things are going for you kiba for the staff but also for the parents the kids and staff i mean some of them we talk about some of the principles coming out but there's also teachers that are changing their clothes on those really hot days to help get the kids into school get the kids out of school

102you know when they saw a problem they called their sros called the sheriff's department and you know there's been a lot of herculean efforts to try to fix something that um is you know as i look at each of these sheets update of areas of concern one of the concerns i have and to continue it is you talk about travel students timely arrival to their travel school i'm just even worried about the middle and the high school getting to first block as a general thing and so i would love to know keeping it more to the positive is what percent of middle school buses are arriving now that we've been a weekend and maybe i need to ask this at the next meeting or it could come to me at the next meeting is fine

103what percent of our middle school buses are arriving to the school with giving those kids at least 10 5 10 minutes to get to their first block what percent of our buses are arriving to the high schools with the same thing giving our kids five to 10 minutes at least i mean technically i think it should be more but at least to get to their first blocks because i think you know one of the things that we have to remember and it's come up in many of our emails and i know i was very leery of the switch in the schedule you know hearing how it was going to play out still doesn't change the i was more worried about the times but what has obviously been a situation is the fact of the little

104ones taking much longer to load much longer to unload than it did the larger kids the high school kids you have a parking lot at a high school that excuse me i just choked myself sorry you have a hot parking lot for the afternoon at the high school where all you know 30 buses are there to get the kids out at one time that is not the same thing that happens at the elementary school if the elementary school has 12 buses to come in to pick those kids up there's not room for 12 buses to pick up all those kids at one time they're never going to be allowed to run out of their school and find their bus it's going to be a longer and much more complicated process so you know while i

105feel like we're going to can try to keep pushing you know this down the road of this switch schedule i'm i wasn't a fan then but i was really really appreciative of the work and the and the um the efforts and even the thought of but to me um protecting the morning meeting and the elementary learning and that sort of thing i definitely think that's a something that needs protecting but i not at the expense of i don't even know how many thousands of kids first block their angst at the bus stop going oh my god i'm missing my class i'm missing a period and to even offer the async you know now you're tasking a kid okay pull out your laptop and get in it's that's a lot of synchronous synchronous but even still

106it's that's a lot of pressure on that kid who's like ah crap you know and so or maybe it can't be done in that class whatever their first block is so i'm just still worried that we're going down a hard road that you know yes it is getting better but are we going to get to a plateau point or are we going to get every single high school middle school kid in because they're not missing a morning meeting and seat work they're missing core academic classes and they have four of them in a day and some of them are missing half if not a full one every day and so so far now i do hope it continues to get better but i worry what are we going to do if it gets to a

107plateau so um i do want to address it because we have a lot of parents that have the same ideas about hey what would we look like if we were back on last year's schedule so a couple of things first i actually love dr chase's idea of well maybe elementary starts a couple days early because there was a learning curve there of hey we gotta tag them when they get off the bus to make sure we know their bus number their route number when they get back on the bus you know the the learning curve of of lining them up properly loading them on the bus quickly definitely caused the ladies the first couple our schools those little elementary kiddos have been phenomenal and have really turned that around um and in the later part

108of last week and the early part of this week has been a tremendous impact of improving those times that we already talked about but i want to point out that our high school runs even take away any delays from the elementary middle schools our high school runs have over 60 double runs as it is so we don't have enough drivers just to do our high school run so moving moving them first means we're still we're still starting our delays first right so they're still going to run behind we're going to do double runs at the high school first puts us behind for middle and elementary and then we have potentially you know elementary kids not getting home until you know 5 30 6 o'clock and on our worst days around 6 30 so and obviously

109that's been improved i want to make sure i point that out but so instead we have our high school children getting home later but um i personally you know there's some advantages to that over you know a five or six year old not getting home until 5 30 or six so if all our problems are not solved just by going back to flipping the high school schedule it really comes down to filling our our drivers and i i do think with filling our drivers with with the the ways we're going to discuss soon um is going to make a significant impact and so this isn't an overnight fix i've already already said that but but we do have have some in the pipeline we've even got some experienced ones coming and then some ways to

110attract more but i also want to recognize too that impacting you know we're impacting the high school and middle school learning but we're also impacting their abilities to participate in clubs activities sports and things like that in the afternoon and while you know that's um just something else you know that again it's just that social emotional angst that we're putting on a lot of kids and i'm not saying that you know the solution is to flip it back i'm just saying that um i just wanted you know to see that we're going to help these kids with this first period no learning you know we had situations last week where they were sitting for three hours in a library and things like that so that's just you know my angst in this is how many

111kids what like i said what percentage are we getting you say better but what is that and so i'm just like i want to know how many kids are getting to school in the middle in the high on time and we'll give that to you it's fine we started working on it this week but because of the way the double runs and the split runs work it's actually a little bit harder to get you know right to figure out thank you dr warner thank you first of all i want to thank kiva and his staff i want to thank mr fulmer for all the effort they put into the transportation issues um i think that not transporting this many students for 18 months probably has contributed to some of our our difficulties um i want

112to thank the bus drivers i just and you guys have been rock stars thank you um my what i'm seeing and hearing from the elementary school is that most of them are getting to school on time is that accurate and they are so they are getting their full instructional days is pretty much uh intact for elements and there might be a few exceptions there it's not every bus you know we're gonna have a few that run a few minutes late but that tiered schedule for the elementary school has provided us a lot i don't want to call flexibility because we don't have any flexibility but has provided us that opportunity to get the majority on the bulk of those kids there on time and the the question i have is i know that we've you

113know efficiency there's efficiency experts that can look at how we do the busing and how we do the routes are we evaluating those routes to make sure that we're utilizing those buses and bus drivers as as as effectively as we can yes that is part of the process with the survey results that will allow us to better view because we know who we're targeting who's actually riding the bus so now we can really optimize the routes with the turn left right turn directions okay and the last question i have is do we have our possible alternatives for activity buses that we could could set up at each high school so that we could get students to travel programs since we wouldn't be picking students up like we would in a normal run could we get

114drivers from a different pool that could maybe handle just those travel options you would have to think about how they would get them because with if they're they would not be able to drive a school bus because they needed a cdl so we cannot use um passenger vans like 15 passenger vans they're kind of allowed through the photo federal motor motor agency from that standpoint so it would have to be some type of service where you would have someone with just a regular driver's license to provide that transport and the only other question i have is when we um but i'll defer this but you talked about the tablet program where students log in and there's a lot of data now being put on that bus in the wireless sphere i just would want to

115make sure that security issues are tight because that that could be a vulnerability yes thank you absolutely all right um we have another round yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna ask my questions first of course um again i'm not gonna echo thank you for you know all the work i can honestly say and um i know you get a lot from my district um which you know goes to the we start in the morning going to 17 schools which hopefully if done right we are trying to do neighborhood schools so that the buses aren't all over the place as we move through the day we move from 17 to 8 to five and progressively gets longer or i can at least speak to many of the students in in my district so i think that's something

116as we move forward and i know that this board probably next year we'll be looking at the r word whichever one you would like to use redistrict reassign whatever word you want to use that those decisions have major impacts on transportation and i'm just again i will not be how we can get maybe that analysis done as those decisions potentially may be required in the future is making sure that there's a real input from transportation i i know how much it it feels and i we love to hear we'll make it work but i do think the board or any of us needs to hear we can make it work but here's how it would work better so i'm just throwing that out as we move into um some we'll move into looking at that

117issue i think that's something that's very important um i would say one thing that i have gotten from some parents is it being unclear when either they get the phone call of which child it might be um addressing if they have multiple students i'm just going to open it that way and let you so that was a way to try to understand there were some instances last week where we did not think we would have anybody to cover those unassigned runs and so as a precautionary measure that's what that call was for but i am very happy to report by monday morning 6 30 all of those unassigned runs were assigned to drivers and we sent out another call to cancel that so we were able to do that and and so that started the

118day just fine and hopefully i will not have to even think about sending any calls like that again understood that was just one that came and then um i have long been not just a district but even not just where i live but in schools that my both my girls attended double runs and i remember every year asking how many there were and i remember when we were like appalled when they were 27 or something i know that the number i'm you may share it you don't have to is our goal though to eliminate double runs as time goes through and and i know that seems like maybe a naive question but having been in schools where my children attended that we couldn't eliminate them there was not a way and i'm not so is

119the goal with staffing because when i went and looked back at the 2019 numbers the ftes for bus drivers were 214 point something i don't want any point bus drivers i want a phone driver but we had asked i know during the budget do we need more drivers and maybe that i don't know if that is driven by do we want to eliminate double runs as a goal and does that need more drivers so that's just a dialogue i'd like to think about but i'd be open for your response i believe that for transportation and you mentioned about the impact and the opinions on any scheduling that may be brought up with the redistricting or anything of that nature we want to be able to have some set parameters to provide with instruction and anyone

120else that has the input about changes here's what we can do to kind of give you hear the nuts and bolts about it if you decide to extend the day or you want to move or implement a program and you want to move kids around okay here's what we can do for optimal efficiency from that standpoint because we we want to be able to transport as many kids as possible on the bus by their capacity as much as possible so when we think about those programs outside of the mainstream we want to be able to provide you with the parameters so you already will have because it does time and distance is a factor in this county so if you have a program that you want kids to attend in the southern end but you

121want kids from the northern end that's a big factor especially if you're using route 1 or any other roads so you have to consider that travel time in between to establish that so it's simple things like that we can have that conversation and work out a common solution for that i'll probably have much more on that later but i will i will leave it there all right ms young no i think um you started over there with the miss healy and miss anyone else with second round questions okay well i'll go um and i know we just talked about um benefits more benefits but and um dr chase mentioned these bus attendants and it costs money right and i think i asked this question i'm only going to ask questions that i think i didn't

122hear no recommendations that i didn't hear but you know i'm about solutions and they're innovatives you could take them or you could leave them no emails so the bus attendants i think all of the bus attendants would have a license that they could drive or they don't so the bus attendants would we be able to if they want to drive get them a license so that when we are behind or we need bus drivers they could drive you ever thought about it that way it's possible i mean right now we do have a program where we train monitors who desire to be their cd to get their cdl but the way we are right now as soon as we finish we put them on the bus of course they're not no one's on a standby

123nation nature okay from that standpoint and then um i i'll let that benefits and how you pay them differently or not to you all to decide if you all are trying to recruit that's something to think about right um so i don't know if this question was asked already are all it sounded like you said that all the routes are covered now double triple four runs um super women and men out there from what i understand okay so if all of them are covered and the app that you have the app that you currently have is you replaced the previous one you had right so you can't go back to the previous one you had this app that you have right now is what you're using yes and evidently it sounds like the substitute runs

124is not correct in terms of the time arrival or whatever because you just you you maneuvered it that you could actually put that under that so how are we communicating with the parents that i know you said you're telling them they're on a sub bus but are you also telling them that the time is not correct because they're they're watching that app right no that is that is that the area of concern and area we want to improve so conditions with that app if we are able to substitute one bus for one bus it works perfectly fine it will also work as long as there's no competing time so there's a window of time for school for the morning arrival and the afternoon dismissal is preset so once the bus falls out of that preset

125time you lose it and so that those are conditions so if i'm if my first load is 45 minutes that's usually as an example the window of time to read for a particular school so that first load is 45 minutes that bus has to come back for the second load well now is into that next school tier time so that bus may not capture because it's expected to be in the next two tier so those are just examples and that's where we want to have this informational sheet to better clarify at this point in time because the the app is built on primarily a scenario and it's the perfect ideal scenario it doesn't really meet our reality from what we're trying to do what we're having to do because of the shortage of drivers so

126when we have to split a route into two buses or three buses we can't track it and and so whether or not we decide to tell parents today because uh we're not going to be able to substitute your bus because we're having to split the route into two or more buses it's not what our folks our families want to hear but we're telling them why we can't do that from that standpoint it's informational so in short we cannot update the times if we have to substitute buses outside of the scheme that is recommended can we communicate to them that that's happening yes that was the reason for the informational sheet that we want to develop and share with our families and the other question is not for you but or or the comment is not

127for you is probably for dr jones in terms of um the help for these students that are missing every day they're missing half an hour hour 45 minutes how are we planning on helping them outside of what you're saying about you know synchronous they're behind a week um you know they're panicking anxiety how we're helping them like are we in terms of you know they're not late i understand that help with the work and some kind of assistance so teachers are teachers are doing that individually with those students and that's what i expect teachers to do as i mentioned uh if we do the synchronous it would be short-term until we it wouldn't be a long-term solution to be short-term until we have enough bus drivers that our routes are are fixed so it's never

128that kind of assistance is never intended to be a long-term strategy okay thank you that's all i have those students are not penalized for being late because we're responsible i wouldn't think so you have a line outside your door thank you all right miss healey nissan i just want to make sure i understand so if a bus is beyond the time that school starts we're not going to be able to track it and the app is that for that particular school you may not okay but what if a bus is beyond the time it should be at school are we going to be able to track it you may not so we need to do something about that app that app does not meet our needs i totally agree okay i just want to make

129sure because that assumes a perfect world that every bus is on time even i don't remember a time when that was ever the case who do we have working on these this app do we have consultants are we doing an in-house or you know what are we doing to to to fix right the problems with the so the first thing we go back to the vendor and ensure the capabilities the full capabilities of it and if that is not happening then we are looking to explore to find vendors that can provide the type of parameters that we need because we have to be innovative on how we do this and we need a system that can handle our needs and how we assign our buses and and chop our runs to make sure we get

130kids to school on time so it's something this is probably my third parent app that i've experienced with and by far this is the same every app primarily does this um that's their selling point but you have to talk to them that that's that's a what they sell is in a perfect world it never meets our reality in that standpoint so that's the choice of or not the choice but the goal is to find a tool that's going to meet our reality and do we have any estimated time that we're going to be able to achieve this goal i'm hoping to have a solution uh by december is my goal um to have something to present to mr former and then we can push from there okay well if there's anything we can do to

131move that up i'd suggest we we do it if we need to get people from the outside or you know wherever i mean this is not something i would expect the transportation people to have the expertise to be you know making adjustments in the app but certainly the vendor that sold it to us you know should be you know anxious to keep us as satisfied customers i would think um my other comment is more for the board um i heard you know suggestion about advisory transportation advisory task force that's i mean advisory uh committee and that's certainly something we probably should have thought of a long time ago but i also would like to look at a single purpose task force think about it not not for today not for tomorrow maybe not even next

132month but looking for long-term solutions that would be more than just the school staff we had uh a student driver task force set up many years ago and it was set up actually i think the supervisors initiated it mike rhodes was um yeah the the you know it involved the board of supervisors involved the schools it involved the sheriff's office you know involved vdot involved the community you know probably most importantly is the community because the only bright light that i have had over this past nine days is suggestions coming in from our community it's it's amazing you know how many ideas are out there that i certainly never would have thought of and either you know they may work and you know if or we can use parts of them or whatever but we

133would not be able to reap the benefit of this wealth of knowledge without putting it all together so that's something i would like us to consider long-term um you know not territorial not you know schools are going to be in charge or somebody else is going to be charged but sort of non-denominational task force that is going to be looking you know for ways we can improve you know our offering of transportation and this is not a reflection on the transportation this is just the fact there are things to do i mean i got an email that said can you put in a sidewalk at north from the tennis courts to the front door i'm like oh my gosh you know why why didn't we think of that you know we've got all these all

134these three r's but if kids are walking they they shouldn't be walking on on you know the between the grass and the road or that just all kinds of suggestions coming in um and our employees certainly have lots of suggestions so so i'd like us to to think about that and and i'd like to set as a goal to do it sometime before the end of this year when we lose uh you know some of our members who are have chosen you know not to stick it out but but i i i just i would like to to think about that you know and and have some suggestions and you know what can we what can we do to help you know help stafford county public schools our parents and and our community so um

135um miss healy just in terms of the sidewalk um we did have vdot um mr dutin heifer and i we we discussed that and with the um developer the car wash and everything and so that is something that was is being considered so it's not like we we didn't discuss it it's not there yet but um in the future so right but but we need more than just discussion and consideration we need we need to it's something that is discussed to be done yep any other question yes dr chase i thought so but then yeah so um i i two things i'm going to piggyback off of uh miss healy about this app you know call me old school there was no app to track where my kid was on the bus if the app

136isn't providing anything maybe we shouldn't have the app because it's another example of us over promising and people get really annoyed when their promise that this is going to show them where their kid is and it actually isn't showing them that and you know i get back to what are frills and what are necessities for educating children and i'll tell you software developers i think make a lot of money they're not cheap and so it's just a question i mean i i if if what you're telling me is correct that it really isn't providing the information it's purported to provide then maybe we shouldn't have it but if it is providing something then then that makes sense so that's just my editorial comment um another question i have one of the things that's great about

137being on a board like this is we all bring different experiences different uh perspectives um for me and and this is really a question for miss neely for me the main the main driver for flipping this schedule uh was i looked at last year and for me as somebody who's taught developmental psychology i have an understanding of language development and literacy there being kind of a critical window in which to achieve those skills and i think we're all aware that last year with the pandemic many of our students were very concerned we'll find out soon but there's a lot of concern that that window is shrinking for some of those students so my question is has this transportation change this schedule change do we have a sense yet whether we're getting the amount of instructional

138time that this change we were told that this change would provide for those elementary school students yeah and and i think that you know a week and two days into this you know certainly that is our hope that we would prioritize elementary but it is it is early and we do still have our second shift elementary schools in particular that are also delayed so i just would say we don't want to forget that we're getting better but we still have some kinks to work out there so i don't think we have a true sense of that right now but certainly as we move forward and we make improvements you know that's what we would anticipate so you'll get back to us absolutely all right let great just make one comment when we did this in

139in may and we talked about this um i did make this i went back and looked and we said we would get a quarterly sort of update so um on how what the impacts how things were working and we said quarterly i think at the time so we can figure out when that quarterly is but to your point so ms randall go ahead sorry i that my comment was right with that one so okay so um i wanted to know i'm sorry chris can ask you a question sorry you had mentioned something in our fab meeting about proposing um peras to be drivers has that happened or has people take or has that not been uh no it did we no we sent out a and by we i mean actually okay mr burnett's office

140sent out a survey targeting those groups of employees coaches and parents yeah mainly payers and coaches um asking kind of gauging their interest on would they be willing to get their cdl and then provide assistance whether it's we can we can basically put a bus at their school location so i'm an anthony burns paraprofessional we can we can have a bus there or pick a school that has a good parking lot for buses they come in in the morning actually take that they go do a run they come back their pair for the day maybe they then run those same kids home in the afternoon well that eliminates two routes for us right so um it's a it's a great opportunity right doing the same with coaches that then can help us cover those you

141know special activity runs for sports i just didn't know had it gone out yet and all right yeah it has gone out okay so the other thing is um when we have these kids coming in late to the middle and high schools can we be assured that they are actually fed as they come in because i've only i'm not seen but just a couple i just want to make sure since some of them are like an hour or more coming or 45 minutes or whatever coming into their school that that you know someone can make sure that they're afforded their breakfast thanks thanks i appreciate that and then also um uh carrie i wanted to ask about the elementary so i think the year prior to coveter coming into covid wasn't there just um four

142elementary schools i think in the center that were kind of um doing this the similar split there was only two elementaries okay and so is it possible for us once we get more drivers just throwing this out there is it possible for us to maybe move more elementary schools to the earlier shifts and less to the second instead of splitting the county i just if i don't know what the how that worked scenario works as a pilot but i'm just wondering is as we get more drivers is it possible to shift more elementary schools to the earlier start start time so we can work in the middle and high yeah so a great point we're actually kind of looking at that now to see if it even makes sense now we need a few drivers

143probably to make it work but it wouldn't be three or four elementary schools because that defeats the purpose right now it's i think a split of nine and eight i forget which eight nine or nine or eight and um so we're looking at maybe moving one of them to the earlier shift and then that would you know get them in early get them on time and then that would free up that maybe to get to the middle school a little bit earlier or to help on that second shift elementary school um so as we consolidate these routes and get better numbers we're looking at that as well mr fomer and mr baldwin before you all even touch those two schools park ridge and winding creek make sure you talk to the principals and some of

144the parents because we did that for a reason okay that was alternate because we did that for a reason sure um the other thing while i was talking about the the app and all the stuff mr j back there knows about it with the background of technology you could turn some of those features off in the meanwhile because i'm sure you're using some of it internally so the ones that are externally you may want to look at turning those off and see if that works and then send communication out to the parents a different way thank you okay i i had one more i think that i wanted to add was um we how many buses you did tell me and i'm i'm a flight brain sorry um how many buses do we have air

145conditioning on total right now and are we targeting or looking to add air conditioning to any more of our buses or are they too old to be doing that they're too old so we have we are developing a replacement cycle for school buses so as they reach a certain number of years a certain number of mileage we're transitioning them out and so that's kind of what we've done i think with some year in money now and what we i think we have a proposal for some more school buses that will automatically come with air conditioning or some other features all right any other questions i have two but i'll just okay mine are hopefully fairly short since we're talking about sort of checking out whether an app or something works again please know i never

146come from the technology angle i come from the i just want it to work when i turn it on so i will save i know we're talking about some of these tablets and gps i would really like for us to then say to the developer i want you to take it around in stafford county i'm sure ms warner has some spots down in wide water we'd like to see if you could get any reception i can give you some places where i would love for you to drive the bus and see if you can get reception with some of these features and things that we yes many things look good on paper right stafford is unique as you have recently learned we have lots of things any of those kinds of things let's try it

147on our own before we purchase or before we purchase significantly because some things may work and sometimes they may not um the only final thing i would add is with regard to what i was just talking about with the quarterly update i know and i look at you know the educational chiefs i certainly want that to be part of that update on how the flip works but i will say there's another part of that that i also would like to make sure that we're talking about is with our mechanics our safety our safety checks how is that working and i'm not asking for a question but how are we able to get in the sufficient time i know right now we also have cleaning but there's a lot of safety stuff that goes on how

148has everything been impacted there like i said it doesn't have to be but i'm just trying to let everybody know that will be an additional part of some of my questions would be at a quarterly update education is certainly but also safety and how we're meeting those needs in our fleet services so just real quick our school buses have to do a 45-day inspection and the fleet director mr jeter has already presented a calendar of dates when buses are due so they roughly do from four to six buses a day and that is on a rotating scale throughout the school year he just wrapped up the summer maintenance which is a more in-depth inspection of the 45 day those guys worked very hard because they were pushing six or seven buses out a day and

149in this shortened time period from the time school ended until we started up so he has shared that with us and we maintain it our drivers know when to bring the bus in if they can get it in earlier they will so that is an ongoing process because that is a requirement that's a mandate that we have to do that and he's also recommending any he's he's been able to see any places where we can make some improvements um get a bigger bang for lesser value from that standpoint uh he's done that and so i think as far as the safety of our buses is is doing very well and um mr fulmer in august of 2019 if we can all remember you all you and at the time uh mr seth presented a um

150overview of our buses our fleet how old all of those things i am not asking for that tonight you all have plenty but i do think that that is an important document to also continue to share with our community of you know these are the kind of bus i still have the i never throw anything out um found it but under bus um because i keep files on everything but it was a very interesting overview of stafford county and our bus fleet aging infra just going into what we have all been talking about we have a lot of needs we have a lot of stuff but we have a lot of stuff that's getting older and just i know we have talked for years about trying to get cyclical bus replacement as part of three

151hours and capital improvement so this may be another opportunity to revisit that so um all right all right seeing no others thank you all for coming tonight now mr foamer are you and mr burnett presenting the next one or is fab or how i don't know who's taking the lead on this one i apologize i'm just going to make a quick statement um to ms haley's point about a task force i think that's an excellent idea we're going to start with i think miss randall has put on the agenda for the 24th we are going to set up a transportation committee advisory committee like we have for other committees we've already reached out to a number of parents who've presented ideas to us to be on it and to start addressing some of these transportation

152issues in the community but i do agree that some of this is a a problem where we need vdot and others to look at it the fab did talk about a number of uh things to try to improve uh recruit bus drivers mr fulmer will be presenting on a new bonus structure uh the hourly rate we're going to be updating the hourly rate recommending an hourly rate which i think we will also be voting on later change the pay to pay scale for our drivers to a bi-weekly which would help them and continue to work with the dmv to get the training through because we've increased i think the times have been improved but i think there's maybe still some some areas of improvement to try to get our train our drivers through the cdl

153training and the other thing is we've talked about uh recognizing our existing drivers who've worked so hard over the last nine days maybe they've put in i don't know a month over the last nine days anyway mr fulmer all right so i have several things i want to go over i've you provided you a hard copy of this memo it's probably easier if you follow along there you're more than welcome to follow along on the screen as well so what we're proposing is adjusting the pay scale and i'm going to get into that second actually even though it's first on here because that's a separate document and that's where there's probably a lot more discussion so i'm going to jump actually to the proposed signing bonus that we're discussing and and i want to let

154you know that when we met with a few of our our drivers earlier earlier today um some of our leads mr baldwin and then one of our drivers uh experienced drivers just so you know they knew it was coming and i didn't want to do anything to offend them and make sure that they were on board with the changes we were making and and they had some other ideas that we'll continue to explore but they were um fully supportive of of these options that we're proposing to you tonight so first of all we started it this past summer a thousand dollar signing bonus to any new driver that comes to us um in order to try to attract drivers we want to maintain that thousand dollars but also offer a three thousand dollar bonus which

155is included so not not four thousand but three thousand total if a driver comes to us already with their cdl and their bus driver designation so if we can attract an experienced bus driver we wanna offer them a three thousand dollar signing bonus and for both of those bonuses it would split between you know 50 percent you know when they finish their training or their first 30 days if they do have a cdl and then 30 and 60 uh respectively for a non-cdl and a cdl license so um the the drivers we spoke to really thought that that would be huge we also were going to keep in we started a referral program with our existing drivers and staff that um we actually gave them you know little name cards business cards that identify them

156and they hand them out to a prospective driver that they're recruiting and so when that new driver comes in signs up they would provide that with us so we know that um hey laura recommended me uh you know to come in and to interview or apply for this position and and so and that's been helpful i already mentioned we we have a couple drivers that are that are referring folks and and getting experienced drivers so we know that right now we need drivers quickly so when we bring a driver in it's a five or six week process to get them trained know all of our protocols before they're on the road so we really want to attract experienced drivers and at this we know we're not going to find 40 or 50 experienced drivers that

157are willing to come to stafford tomorrow but so we would still offer that thousand dollars and we're still anybody's listening we're still um you know accepting any application cdl or not our ad will always say no cdl required because we're going to put you through that training we're going to pay to put you through that training but that 3 000 bonus we really think is going to be a great incentive to attract drivers with that cdl already and then before i jump to the scale and i want to mention that we're going to have retroactively so if we hired a driver with a cdl since we put in this into place over the summer we're going to go back and retroactively apply that full three thousand dollar bonus um to the to the thousand dollar

158bonus they already would have received or the two thousand dollar difference to clarify um it is not just drivers that are um that were they were having trouble filling that um there's an internal equity issue as soon as we adjust our drivers significantly which i'm going to show you but we have route coordinators we have our lead drivers which really lead drivers is a bad example because we're going to address our lead drivers when we adjust our our regular drivers because our lead drivers as i've already mentioned are our drivers and some of our best drivers that are willing to really step up and go that extra mile so they're going to be adjusted when we adjust our regular drivers they're they're right now one tier like one scale higher than our our regular drivers

159and we're looking at analyzing that going forward too because um believe it or not not many drivers want to take on the extra duties and responsibilities of the paperwork and and dealing with um the issue track and going through that while they're still expected to drive every day because we don't have enough drivers so hopefully that can change in the future but we're also looking at adjusting the tier structure for our lead drivers um i i want to mention that we need to look at our fleet technicians that's been an area that we've had a lot of feedback from in the past they were included in our service scale enhancement that we did this past year but that really just targeted let's give people credit for their years of experience so it didn't look at

160where they were placed on our uniform scale overall so knowing that we're doing these adjustments for drivers we need to go back and now look at some of these other areas and what equity issues we have to to clean up our bus drivers you know they were placed on the uniform scale as all of our service scale employees were we were actually proposing to take them off of that uniform scale which is like a a pay band of 1767 up to you know 33 dollars is roughly the top of our scale now per hour and we want to put them back on a step scale where we can say hey one year of service you're here five years of service you're here we were kind of doing that behind the scenes anyways because of the

161uniqueness of bus drivers so at this point we just want to develop that scale which i'm going to provide you tonight and then going forward in the budgets we're going to show that there's still no guarantee that you're going to move up a step every year we can't make that guarantee but it is very clear that we need to make sure that we differentiate between our experienced drivers and our new drivers and that we show that a new driver is at x and an experienced driver with this many years is that why if we can if we can get these changes pushed through for the drivers those will go into effect on the october 1st payroll if we can then are going to [Music] analyze these other positions that i've mentioned and then those would

162go effect on the november 1st payroll so any questions on that before i jump into the actual changes in the scale proposed my question is um in reference to um are we planning on implementing this without any amendments or like is this set this is it what you're asking for because i'm looking at benefits i was thinking about benefits yeah so there's still other areas that we need to explore and that's what well when we get this committee together with drivers we can look at some of these other areas um like you know maybe it's not six and a half is what we consider a full-time driver you know we already offer health insurance and as i've already mentioned but maybe we need to tweak when that is and do a comparison of other localities

163as well and then i think this is not a long-term issue hopefully not but those that are doing four to eight runs i know i ask that if they're getting paid and you said yes but how um are they being compensated for you know for those runs just not with pay but i don't know is it double like you know i don't want to go into specifics but in order that's not maintainable for a long run some i'm wondering if you're giving these um you know these bonuses and then they're driving for the eight runs how how what are you doing there for them yeah so any any driver that goes over their contracted hours is going to be paid hour for hour and then if they go over 40 hours it would be a

164time and a half okay what is the cost of this program if it were approved as it's presented um so including the new pay scale which i'll share with you is about annual wise is about 1.5 million dollars the signing bonuses i'm not concerned about you know relatively they're a small amount compared to all the vacancies we have and the savings that we have so it's really the um and because especially if we bring in an experienced cdl driver we would have paid them in training you know the cost of going through the training so it starts to offset each other but the cost to do the the pay scale adjustments with leaving a little bit of room for the other adjustments we need to do for the positions listed at the bottom is about

1651.5 million dollars so is this this covet are you taking it out of covet for the next two years or what it will not um so let me let me show you the scale and and kind of the comparison that we're looking at and then we can get into potential funding so i because i know this was small i definitely printed this out for you to take a look at so you would have a hard copy and blue here we have our our current um what would be our step scales for our current drivers at one to one experience the yellow is our proposed green just shows the differences between those two and on the far right in the um it shows a little bit differently up there it's kind of like a pinkish red

166color is our prince william hourly rates for drivers and then the spouse of any hourly rate drivers so in the past we would have come to you and said hey prince william's paying 18 16. let's pay 18.25 or whatever that has not gotten us where we need to be so we are proposing prince william's at 21 and 34 cents spots he's at 18 16. we want to leapfrog everybody and get a starting pay of 22. even so that we can actually attract drivers from our most competitive divisions we know we have drivers that live in stafford that are driving in spotsy driving in fairfax and driving and prince william prince william already mentioned that prince william spotsy in fairfax so we want those are who we want to attract if we have experienced cdl drivers

167out there that are living in stafford we want to make make them have that conscious decision that i'm not going to drive in stafford and it's not because it's not going to be because of the money or the benefits we know actually with the six and a half is um we're good there typically what we we um contract for you know maybe some improvements there and that's where talking to the bus drivers will help one thing we're also looking at not to get off topic from this is how we can expedite our onboarding process not only for cdl but for non-cdl and let's contract them right away instead of just saying hey we're going to keep you hourly for 30 days until we place you on a route we know we have the vacancy we

168know we have the need so we need to contract them as quickly as possible so that drivers aren't concerned about coming to stafford and saying hey i don't i can't go 30 or 60 days with health insurance or or that uncertainty of of of that contract time so we are looking at all the ways of expediting that process and getting them on-boarded and contracted right away so what we did is is selected 22 dollars so that we were above prince william and spotsylvania and then went with a 2.25 it ranges a little bit if you see here in the right in the yellow right in the middle of the screen and that's just because the rounding you know a penny here actually um can make a difference when you get out that many decimal points

169so it's supposed to be 2.25 percent increase all the way down and we replace them at a one to one so this changes our scale from a 1767 up to approximately 33 dollars an hour it now takes it from the 22 dollars an hour up to 45.88 an hour so a very big increase you can see um the the dollars per hour and the percentage that we'll see from from the top to the bottom as a new driver or as an experienced driver and i would like to again we're going to offer one-to-one so it's how most all of our drivers are now is they're placed at a one-to-one so if we get if we can get a driver with 25 years of experience we're going to pay them like they have 25 years of

170experience because there's no reason we should be turning drivers away right now or providing a barrier for them to want to come to stafford county when they can stay and go ahead um do we are we going to retroactively any bus drivers we've hired are we going to upgrade them to one to one or have we already done that yes that's been done yeah when we when we did the pay scale adjustment this past year we started giving people years of credit it was actually done back in 2019 when we did the service scale adjustments bus drivers were placed on a similar scale but it was a one-time placement so that we give our experienced drivers credit for all those years and so we've stuck with that and now formalizing it and actually putting that

171written step scale system in place so it's very clear that when a driver is looking at staff or they can look and say hey i know i've got 30 years this is where i'm going to be here 15 years or 12 years mr foamer if a driver comes to you that is anywhere has 18 to 33 to 32 years experience why would they want to drive in stafford uh so one with these changes in our on our scale we make it much more competitive we are are far above spotsylvania and um all the way up until 15 years i believe it was is we're kind of you know either above or dead even that's where prince william starts to pass us because their percentages like all their scales grows really rapidly and it's and it's

172hard to keep up with so we're targeting the ones that that live around us we know there are drivers that live here and they work in other divisions so we want to we want them to make that decision of i live in stafford but i'm going to drive farther away to make less money or we're making the gap so small that it's not worth driving to to prince william or faulkier or fairfax because the only reason why i'm mentioning that is because i'm not saying that the the retirees are more um the ones that are going to come for these jobs but i'm just looking at 17 and up and it's opposite of what prince william is offering so um i was just commenting on that yeah yeah we definitely don't keep up with prince

173william there and so we start to trail off there at the most experience but it is still a considerable increase and an attractive rate for for other experienced drivers i want to mention because it was cut off there at the bottom just because it would have shrunk it down more but spotsylvania's scale actually goes beyond step 33. we're proposing that we stop at 33 and that be our top of the scale for the same reason that we're trying to get there with our teacher scale is we don't want a scale that goes up to 40 we want to show where that top of the scale is and 33 was our target with the teacher scale and so we're targeting the same with our bus drivers mr fulmer where where are we getting this 1.5 million

174dollars from yeah so good question and and that's the big question right so we know we have savings this year just from vacancies and we're going to continue to have them whether it is how do we know that well because we know our vacancies exceed what we budgeted whether that's licensed vacancies or our service scale vacancies including the bus driver i'm not saying you know we budget roughly three million dollars in budgeted vacancy savings and and turnover of um salary laps um and vacancy savings every year and and for the past several years we've been more in the four and a half five five and a half last year with the anomaly because it was a covered year and and so there were some positions that we left more vacant so actually that number rose

175but i reported that in a prior report to the board but what what i want to propose is that we go to i've talked to the county staff dr kisner has talked to the county administrator to give him a heads up we want to go to the board of supervisors we have carryover funds we've accumulated from the past couple years because of covid year in 2020 and last year of 2021 we've accumulated a you know schools fund balance on the county side you know we don't get to carry over those funds automatically um as most board members know it goes back to the county and they set it in a separate reserve so i want to um request from the board of supervisors that we appropriate that in this year of 1.5 million dollars it's

176still going to be our responsibility to budget it going forward because it's going to basically be a one-time cost to us this year that we take those funds from that capital reserve fund and then going forward we would budget it and identify it in the fy 23 budget dr chase so are we saying if we were to vote on this tonight we would be voting contingent on the board of supervisors approving this money us being allowed to use this money so yes and no so it's kind of up for discussion to see what you're what you're comfortable with i don't i would prefer not to delay it any more than we can if we're going to have it effective on the october 1st payroll we really need to act sooner than later knowing that it's

177going to be several weeks before we can get to this to the board of supervisors that um we go ahead and start moving in that process we approve it and and it's up to me to make sure that i know based on the vacancy savings that we have in license staff and our bus drivers we've already accumulated probably a couple hundred thousand in bus driver vacancy savings just from the point of when we can fill all these positions that that cuts into our deficit that i want to move forward now so put put that burden on on making sure i track during the year and i can report back to you um in the meantime so let's start moving forward and we'll still go to the board of supervisors and request those funds um as

178needed for fy22 okay so i make a motion wait i haven't finished my phone just decided to make a lot of rackets let me turn that off there we go okay so um so this means that when we put together our budget for next year we will already have these extra funds spent what is 1.5 million translate in terms of a salary percent salary for staff yeah let me think for a minute um i it's usually around two and a half million for every one percent that we do uh 2.2 2.3 million but i haven't calculated that for this year and the priority is about 2.3 for every 1 so in some ways we're kind of gambling on the idea that the folks across the street the state will give us enough money to offset

179the fact that we're spending 1.5 million now on this is that right i mean i just i and and i've certainly heard from supervisors that they're very concerned about this they're hearing from their constituents but will they remember that come march and april of next year that's rhetorical yeah just quickly so the 1.5 million extra is on top of the 2.5 million extra that we've had to put in for the salary adjustments and everything that we already put into the budget from last year yeah so those were put into the already built into the budget um it impacted bus drivers very slightly because they had already seen the 2019 impact but because the adjustment was a little bit greater than what they saw in 19 there were still some drivers impacted by that um so

180but but that was already budgeted and identified for those staff yes ma'am but but that was already built into our base so it's not a new increase next year that was built into the fy 22 base missile i'm i'm going to be supporting this because we need to do something drastic but i'm concerned about our other service employees and we have a lot of critical positions you look in our in in our offices you go into the the schools and and the the staff in those offices are generally understaffed underpaid and overworked so we we finally got our when we get our pairs up to you know the close to the bottom of the you know the the competition scale um there's a lot of other staff that we need to think about and i

181i don't want to lose sight of that while we're dealing with this this crisis because this school system is only as good as our collective staff and we start with the focus on the teachers because you know they're they're the ones on the line you know in the classrooms you know with with the students and and certainly they are incredibly important and valued employees but you know the paris that are in the classroom the the cafeteria folks you know that feed everybody the you know the the administrative staff you know that's all part of this whole education that we're providing so i i would ask the the fab to be looking at that because over the years we've had many reports and you know our service people have always been if if not at the

182bottom of the you know the comps below that so i've like i said i'm going to support the bus drivers because they've always you know had the issue as well but if if we're going to be able to do something like this for the bus drivers we need to be addressing and i'm not talking about years from now you know we need to be looking at it for the next budget what we're going to do for our other support staff quick question [Music] with respect to the bonuses for um the thousand dollar or the three thousand dollar um are we are we going to require is there going to be an expectation of time served to make that so they don't have to pay it back we're doing six months we do in a year

183are we not saying are we silent on that topic at all or what's going on so in the in the past with signing bonuses like these and mr burnett is more than welcome to jump up here too um because he can speak better to it but we haven't had you know that claw back provision because it's you know not necessarily always effective and honestly we can get a bus driver for three or four months we'll be we're going to be happy with that we are having the requirement of they have to if they're if they're a non-cdl they need to finish their training when they finish their training they'll get half of that so they'll get 500 and then after 30 days of of driving with us they'll get the other half and you know

184at that point we've we've kind of hooked them in and have them i've i've talked to some outside folks that even when they get cdl licenses it's you know most like trucking companies or other ones you know they really want to see for insurance costs they want to see somebody with an experience so they're typically not leaving right away but yeah we could lose a driver in six months or a year after they've gotten their cdl you know and then for our um and and i apologize got to update it on the memo because we we made some changes to this but our cdl license ones that we retain or um attract that we're offering the three thousand dollar bonus for it'll be 30 and 60 days so we'll give half at the 30 days

185and a half at 60. i don't want to push it out any further because that's taking that carrot and dangling it really far away if we want to attract someone it really needs to have that immediate impact sure okay great thank you all right any other questions of mr foamer or mr burnett on this it's not a question it's just a comment that [Music] we are a growing county and we need to transport every year more and more kids and so [Music] we need bus drivers we can't get the students to school then teachers can't teach yes i agree that the whole school system needs to be paid above and beyond what they're doing in the schools but back in 2005 the budget was the county's budget was 70 percent um for the school system

186and today with this growing county uh it's uh 55 so um that's definitely going in the wrong direction right um i'm sorry oh it's 40. no i thought it was 55 i don't think it's 40. um but but either way so i'm i'm good there uh to giving the bus drivers and probably for the fab also to look at the rest of the staff like we did in the past to get them up to where prince william is thank you ms randall um chris you mentioned in our meeting the other day too that um there was going to be some efforts to make um evening classes to be a little bit more attracting are we beginning those so you know once we get the additional drivers in you know so those evening and weekend classes

187are going to be great for the paraprofessionals that you know are working during the day um it also helps with attracting outside drivers because you know maybe they can do their training on their own or in the evenings while they're still working maybe not in as if they're getting their training then they're not a cdl one we want to get them right away so so we'll expedite them but the ones we need to provide classes for we're looking at at nights and weekends and so it might be that we need to revamp our training or bring in some additional trainers in order to to facilitate that okay thank you so um in the fab you sort of mentioned that at the end of 2019 our salary was competitive with spotsy but in the interim spots

188he adjusted their scale and then we were not competitive anymore i just want to encourage you all to keep an eye on that so that next year in august we have an idea of whether we have to adjust things before the school year starts so i just just just ask that you'll do that thank you all right any other comments on this topic all right moving on to our last topic on our work session this is um of our um review and discussion of the proposed superintendent leadership profile i would like to compliment and thank dr warner on a lot of her work on this this document to make it a more i would call it succinct hopefully attractive for our next superintendent i will ask if there are any major concerns i'm i'm sure

189there's a few things um that we can always wordsmith but i'm really hoping that we do capture the essence of what we are um looking for in our new leader so the only question i have [Music] is this is what we were given by the consultant is every one of these reflected in this do we have a red line that shows what was taken out the summary here okay so so there was nothing that was deleted from this list was they may have been combined that were very similar because some of these were pretty similar so i took all the repetition out of what had been provided by dwp and sent this summary page to miss hazard and so the everything so oh sorry i took the um document from bwp and deleted duplicates and

190just summarized everything else everything else they had written is is there okay and then ms hazard sent me a document i sent her this this and dr chase and i had actually discussed that this was an acceptable way to do it but um miss hazard rewrote and then i edited her document so that's that's how we ended up with this okay so it was there so this back side of that question is was there anything added that wasn't initially in this one and if so can you point out which ones those are i i can speak some of them just from having read it so this paragraph about or this section about stafford county public schools is virginia's eighth largest school division has ranked first or second and st all of that has been added

191um i don't know what else has been added that was pulled from our press release so it came from a document about the school system so it did come straight from from those documents um so just okay then that's fine i'm more concerned about the bullet points that that are here versus the explanation yeah and and i i would say my concern is you know we talked last time about we would do some tweaks and so the summary looks like tweaks to me this looks like a lot more also it says the school board of stafford county has prepared the leadership profile whereas this other one says the the stakeholders and then in the summary it says the stafford community so that's changed a little bit i would say my preference based on what was

192said at the last meeting would be to go with this because this is closer to what came out of the community stuff but we can certainly go with this one we have two because when i read the profile provided by bwp um i felt there was some redundancies in it and i felt that um there was an emphasis on some areas that i thought were less critical and for example growth was hardly mentioned in bwp's profile and um i felt like that was an important thing but uh critical race theory was mentioned like three times can we just pick one i mean can i add something um so one of the things i did was um i looked at bwp's leadership profile that was done i think it was with arlington and um i i

193like the the things that liza restructured and i'm sorry dr warner restructured in here there are a couple things you know that i think could be tweaked to still but the one part that i did like about just because i think it um develops you know it kind of goes with the different word groups that he gave us about like what came out is i like having the bulleted breaks of characteristics that we are looking for um and so i'm kind of thinking if this can be divided into because this is more the succinct wording that they originally gave us but even to divide it into some of the words that came out the settings in the headings yes uh that came out um in our but you know uh profile that he profile report

194that we received um that would be my suggestion i do see that there's a lot more added into this and i'm not necessarily opposed to it i just feel like this kind of makes it very clear to who we are looking at to know um the areas that we're trying to emphasize i guess so the summary with the headings yeah i just have a concern about we're supposed to get this done pretty much today and um i think a lot of work has been done by by board members already so i you know i can go with either one i just feel like we probably ought to make a decision tonight and and not be asking people to to do more um i mean if other if if you want to do it please feel

195free but i think um it's a lot and i'm not sure how much people actually read these things is there a um i have a question oh yes i'm sorry i missed it i'm just wondering where the the line was drawn between the must and the should and the desires and just doing a real rough count now it looks like there's four if you count the expects as much then maybe six of those and about 12 or so of you know should or what we're seeking no in is this am i looking at the right document there are two leadership profile and desired experience there was this one which was that's a summary i'm not looking at it i assume that this leadership profile and experience desired experience for the next superintendent stafford palin county

196public schools is what you're proposing be published is that correct am i looking at the wrong one i think it could be either one of these oh so you're saying it could be it could be either right okay well i'm just curious um well more than curious but where we say some say must some say we seek some say should there's two that absolutely don't even have a subject and a verb i mean out of all these they're all sentences except for two of them so where where did that come from is that coming from the the profile the must and the showed in the expectation or desire because whoever is going to be applying is going to be looking at this as to what we're looking for i i so so it is actually

197very important to let the applicants know you know what what it is so i'm sure is that something that was in the in the in the profile i'm not talking about a will and a show in a may i'm talking about the the actual words must be must understand i think i counted foremost this is more similar to what was in look i will be will need to be so where how did that distinction come about i think that how i looked at it was we took all of those summaries but i felt like this summary document for me did not tell me what is the person we're looking for i felt like we needed to name them i am fine to go with the summary at this point i don't care however i do

198think that i mean for me these are the things that were listed i don't know how many i mean i know several of us spent a lot of time reading that profile i did i read it cover to cover read every comment so i please know i read it i know that others have read it so to me it was trying to put our best foot forward to say to somebody because i feel these are the things and i believe that the board does own this we may have a community profile but this is the board saying this is who i'm looking for who is who are we looking for i felt that these headings um gave more interest to a person than reading all these bullets personally but i am fine to go with

199the summary um i just um know that it takes a lot of time to read through that six 90 pages of stuff to get to this and so i was trying to pull it out you know me i'm a summarizer i'm trying to be a summarizer so that somebody can go hey i think i want to commit to the community i want to be an instructional leader i'm collaborative i'm a planner and i'm an effective communicator i feel like that's what i wanted them to do but i am not tied to it i just for me i feel like we are putting out a job description and this more to me look like a job description although it's a profile it's still a job description to me but for for the time that we will

200take on this the the individuals and candidates who need to get theirs in is by september 1st they would like to make sure they can see it for the interest of time i am fine with the summary i think this is more effective though to tell you as a job description what i'm looking for but well i i think if i may i think miss healey brings up a good point though of we don't want it written in such a way that it it turns people away i mean we we may not find somebody who must you know who has all of these things and so if it's a little more open so that that somebody could look at this and be like well maybe i'm missing bullet number five i can't you know but

201i think i got everything else that they would still think about that we would still consider them but but i don't know if that's what miss healy was thinking were you not thinking i'm sorry i thought i heard you say that there were some places had must and others didn't yeah so there and then somewhere moves if you say you're if if you interpret expect just be must then then there's i'm just did a rough count but and then they moved on the other sheet what well this summary to me i and i understand what you're saying miss hazard and i i would that's what she said agree with that if in fact we had analyzed and discussed each of these and why we were putting must and why we were putting what we're seeking

202and you know what we say we expect you know all these different levels that i we haven't had a chance as a board to to to talk about and and certainly we're not going to have time tonight and i agree this needs to get done so i'm not comfortable making these distinctions about some somebody must have these things they should have this and we're seeking something else and like i said two of them don't even have anything they don't have a subject and a verb it's just it's just a description so well for me you must be willing to make a long-term commitment that's a must for me so any candidate who's watching that's a must for me right but but what canada did over the past 20 years that i've been involved in this

203there has never been a candidate that did not make a long-term commitment now whether that commitment is followed through is is another issue but i would not expect somebody to come and say well i'm just looking for you know this short term at this point i'm not willing to fight over the wills because there's a lot of stuff in here that we are expecting as well but if everybody does not want to continue to discuss this we're fine and we can adjourn and then bring it back no we're not bringing nothing back i'm good with this summary i think i think that it gives the full picture we're not going to find a candidate that has absolutely everything here but i don't want to preclude a candidate from applying because they not might not have

204one of the musts so just in my defense i'm going to say it does say who can demonstrate a combination of the following qualities am i missing something i don't see any must on the summary i see must on this sheet right what she's talking about right this is this is what we're looking for yeah so we we're all in saying the same thing we're in uh agreement we'll go with the summary sounds good should we adjourn i need five minutes okay sure all right let's adjourn our work session and we'll be back on or off okay now i'm on all right i am going to call to order our special called meeting of august 17th of the stafford county school board no one needs to participate electronically ms hall can you do the roll

205call for our special called meeting yes ma'am dr chase here miss hazard here miss healy here miss heller back here miss randall here dr warner yeah and mission here made i'm sure you have a quorum all right is there a tool for the agenda second been moved in second at any discussion hearing none all those in favor please say aye okay i would ask um that there be for the closed session if you could hand me the that we would be convening a closed meeting um pursuant to the appropriate section to consider the appointment of an interim superintendent and interim associate superintendent is the board okay with that particular amendment yes yes all right um go ahead okay all those in favor of the um uh amended amended agenda please say aye any opposed motion

206carries unanimously we have two action items on our agenda motion to approve the pay scale and bonus structure is presented for the bus drivers second all right is there any discussion i believe we would be saying that the attachment i'm sorry i have up my wrong three-point wrong meeting i just want to make sure what is attached is our correct um the memo for the proposed compensation changes and the proposed bus drivers scale yes okay i just want to make sure they were attached and they were as we discussed all right any comments from board members i will make one quick one i i too will be supporting this motion this evening i believe as we have done in the past we do meet times we have critical needs because the transport of our students

207um is critical it starts it starts off our day however as indicated by ms healey and others this is not only our only critical need area it is our currently crisis critical need area but i do believe having heard about the teacher resignations over the last week and other things that we may have additional crisis needs however right now we do need to get our students safely to school we have great bus drivers i want to reward them as well but i do want to reiterate what has been said this is not the first time we will do it and this will not probably be the only area that we will need to do it going forward i hope our community embraces and understands the complexities of a school system and also teacher shortage other

208areas of shortage all of education may end up becoming a critical need area going forward so with that all all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed motion carries unanimously all right next item motion to approve approval of a superintendent leadership profile seven can we specify which one it is is it this so miss randall can you specify that in your motion yes i'm specifying the summary leadership profile second all right any further discussion all right well um i'll just make another comment with that this will then be submitted to bwp to be able to be included in their advertisement and further materials for any of the candidates who have submitted and those who may come in with the closure date of september 1st that is the reason for this all those i

209will have them put on the bottom adopted by the board or approved by the board with this date at the bottom can we also put that on our website so that it uh potential candidates could have perhaps quicker access to it can it be included in the minutes or on the you know for the meeting i don't know how that yeah it will be but probably by the time those come out we hopefully we'll have our candidates having their submissions it'll go on the area of our superintendent tab i'll make sure that sandra includes it all right any further if not all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed motion carries unanimously all right we have a closed door at closed session i move that the school board can be in a closed

210meeting pursuant to code of virginia section 2.2-3711a1 to discuss and consider the appointment of an interim superintendent and an interim associate superintendent second it's been moved and seconded any um discussion all right hearing none all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed motion carries unanimously we are in closed session all right because we didn't open the other door now you're ready i moved that pursuant to section 2.2-370 of the code of virginia the closed meeting of the school board of stafford county on august 17 2021 be certified by adopting the following resolution now therefore be it resolved that the school board of stafford county hereby certifies to the best of each other's knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted for open meeting requirements were discussed in the closed meeting to which the certification

211resolution applies and two only such business matters as were identified in the motion competing the closed meeting were heard discussed or considered by the board ms hall can you pull the board second or somebody second second dr chase agree miss hazard agree miss healy yes miss heller back my grade mr randall agree dr warner agree and miss young yes madam chair motion passes thank you is there a motion coming out of closed session i believe dr warner motion to approve the appointment of an interim dr stanley jones is interim superintendent and dr tom nichols is interim assistant superintendent effective 8 26. excuse me you mean associate associate i'm sorry associate superintendent effective associate interim superintendent second all right i'm sorry ma'am did you say what date effective 8 26 thank you all right i think

212it's been moved and seconded and madam chairman can we just put for the record that the 25th is going to be dr kisner's last day you know it on site we'll just say that i just don't want somebody think we're just right arbitrarily arbitrarily setting the date of august 26th but that's when we need you guys who was the second please i believe it was ms young thank you all right all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed motion cares unanimously thank you [Applause] thank you we need you now though too you can't wait till the 26th