Stafford School Board 8/10/2021

001board members is participating electronically ms hall can you uh take the roll call please yes we have dr chase here miss hazard here miss healy miss heller back here miss randall here dr warner here and miss young here man i'm sure you have a quorum thank you i would ask for everyone to rise for the pledge of allegiance please i pledge allegiance and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you i um would ask if there's a motion to approve the agenda motion to approve the agenda okay it's been moved in second at any discussion hearing none all those in favor please say i i any opposed motion carries unanimously we will be starting with our presentation by bwp and associates of the

002results of our recent community engagement process this was planned um weeks in advance as part of our approval so i will turn this over to dr kasner and dr harris dr harris is going to have the first few slides i'm going to turn this now over to wayne and when you want me to advance after the first slide which has the pictures of all the board members just tell me wayne okay thank you kevin madame chairman members of the board and dr kisner it is my pleasure and dr kastner's pleasure to be back with you and to share with you the result of the community engagement activities uh that uh started to occur on july 19 with approximately 62 members of the administrative staffs of this of the schools continuing with individual interviews of the

003week leading up to july 28th and 29th during which time we had multiple uh individual meetings group meetings forums opportunities for anyone who wanted to share with us what they wanted us to look for in candidates to be considered for interviews so that the board could select the next superintendent i don't think we need to remind the board that the most significant action you take as a board is to select the superintendent of schools you have taken that responsibility very seriously understanding how important it is for the community to give input and i will tell you that you should be very pleased that a cross-section a significant cross-section of the community meaning employees students parents business leaders civic leaders faith organizations are just a wide range a microcosm of the stafford community participated in the

004opportunities that the board provided to give input uh just a brief word about the process as we collected that information our goal was to ensure that we captured the essence of what was shared with us in addition to all of the the meetings that we held the interviews that we held you also put on the website uh a link to three questions so that people who were not able to participate uh in those face-to-face interviews uh or meetings that they could respond as well and there were significant numbers which dr castner will talk with you about who gave feedback and input what are the qualities and characteristics you want in your next superintendent we have taken all of that information uh gone through and looked for the significant uh reoccurring statements the patterns and the

005themes under each of the three questions and put together then a draft leadership profile so this evening we will be presenting to you a copy a comprehensive copy of the report and then we will walk through the process what responses we heard and and i want to move to the next slide to say that there were four specific objectives related to the community engagement we want to remind everyone what they were so kevin if you'll go to the next slide it's been advanced when okay first and foremost uh the purpose of the community engagement was to identify the perceived strengths and challenges that the next superintendent in stafford county would face next and and maybe the essence of everything that we wanted to know we wanted individuals to identify the desired qualities characteristics and experiences

006the next superintendent should possess and demonstrate third we wanted to build community understanding and support for the process because after all your next superintendent will flourish given support from throughout the community from the board from employees and finally to ensure that the broadest possible community uh community participation in the process would occur which allows us then to be able to determine who are the best match and fit as we finish interviewing as we go through and vet candidates to determine who is the best fit and match to the leadership profile which we will present to you in draft form tonight kevin you're you can take it from there thanks wayne dr castle you can take your mask off for speaking up there that'd be great thank you of the things that you have before you

007this evening and the public needs to know the board members are just receiving this and what we will be presenting tonight will become public record and members of the public using the district website will have in essence a 97 page report i'm going to explain what's in the report and then i'm going to go through a few slides and we're going to outline some of the materials the beginning of the report it pretty much has a summary of the process that we went through and then it has quantitative data where we are summarizing the strengths with weaknesses and qualities and characteristics that will then lead to a draft leadership profile the thing that's most important though after the first actually 11 pages after the first 11 pages we then have the information when we had

008our focus group meetings where we recorded what we heard from the public their words not ours in the focus group meetings in the forums pages 13 through 20. and we actually grouped our people together you see their comments where they talked about strengths challenges qualities and characteristics more significantly an idea came through staff actually sandra had something to do with that and we did something we've never done before we open the website so that the community could answer the same questions that we were asking the people that attended the informational meetings that we had we've never done this before normally we would have a quantitative survey in which we would have had you know maybe a thousand responses the upside on this is we had four 573 people participate the downside and i don't think

009it's a significant downside is that normally when we receive things when people will write in emails to us or even to the point of making a comment at the last section of the survey we screen those comments we never allow a particular person's name to be out there in this case because this is a school system website verbatim all comments are there therefore we did not edit we did not deduct any people's names the long and short of it there isn't anything there that's that alarming in fact in some cases it talks about specific people in a most positive way including your own superintendent but of course that doesn't mean you're going to have a hundred percent of this or a hundred percent of that there even was a comment for dr benson again i

010don't think there's any problem with that but it's better to air towards transparency than not and maybe i don't know if people are going to have a time to want to read the 70 or 80 pages that's there but at least it's there in spirit so we're going to be using that information board members the first 11 pages or so are going to be the essence of our report when you get into the appendices and everything you're starting with this wide angle lens and then we're condensing it into a zoom lens and you'll have the opportunity if you choose to read that as would be your public so i do want to commend that when a school board invites a team like ourselves from bwp to come into your community you're allowing us to see

011everything we're not not putting what we hear we're using this information to have you know what we're hearing from the community against your own knowledge the other thing we do when we talk to members of your community we tell them that during the days that wayne described that we were here that you still have another three weeks or so that any board or any community member can still share their thoughts with you if they think we've missed something they should tell you and they should have conversations with people with you and talk about the main issue what you're looking for in the qualities and characteristics so what we did for your direction we actually did a targeted community engagement process and in so doing we were talking about going into these three questions that you

012see before you the strengths the challenges and the qualities and characteristics this first slide here we recently have been using this with bwp it's called qualtrics and i think your system also uses it when you get involved in community surveys but when you look at the all the information that we took in from the forums and also what came in from your website all those names came in there and then this in essence is what we try to do we try to find out what are the things that most repeat and everything that you have up there where you talk about the students the teachers the communication frankly uh it just shows in a i guess a metaphor how this thing all comes together now here's what here's what it looks like when we talk

013about the strengths the thing that topped itself in every conversation was excellent teachers and dedicated staff committed teachers principals and staff so your people are the top strength other comments again these aren't up here because they were said one time they're up here because they were repeated through all venues that we had the diversity of the great students in the community the multicultural connections the strength of the educational options and programs the variety of programs to meet the needs of diverse students whether it's going to be through special education esau career and tech other choices that students have whether that's going on to dual dual courses through your colleges all this was noted the strength of your district now is this going to help in recruiting yes it is because you have a great location

014you have a unique blend of urban suburban and rural you have the livers and you have the come here and you have the military all of that creates a pattern for your community it is a reputation that attracts family and a good place to raise families you have a supportive community you have parental involvement you have community values and you have a you support your schools and this means as much as also not just the school system but the combination with the support from the county government you also it came out more often than i would have expected without having the time to be here that stafford strives to maintain a small town atmosphere even as it continues to grow you know this i didn't but people know that and that's one of the things

015that they value and it's the type of thing they value when maybe you can't have as many competitive salaries which sometimes people might choose to go north what you have here with this field might not be captured if someone would work in some of the larger systems so when you go through these strengths you can find when you go through the whole appendices that this is what in our opinion what they narrow down to now you probably know all this but i can say now we've confirmed this through the efforts of the process that we've used now we're going to go to looking at challenges again when you when you look at this slide you can see issues such as covid you can see issues like retention you can see staff you can see board

016you can see teachers you can see learning and i guess the rather popular topic right now you can see mass all that came in you can see pandemic you can see growth now when we're talking about actually getting into this when you get into the challenges funding the challenge to have adequate funding to maintain competitive compensation for staff support to continue to build additional schools and address an engaging infrastructure regarding growth you're talking about overground crowding of schools the infrastructure need creating high school six impact on transportation and redistricting the need to continue building a relationship with the school board and the board of supervisors and the reality of upcoming changes in leadership some board members that will be involved in the hiring of a superintendent won't be there when the superintendent might come on

017the same thing is also true as we've learned from the supervisors so that whole issue is something that's going to have to be nurtured and grown and earned that you want to continue something that is perceived particularly when i talk to the county administrator that there definitely has been progress in this and he shared with me some of the documents he's been receiving that is giving him greater confidence as he's looking into how he's going to have to figure a way with his people in supporting growth the challenges again on educational options and program you want to continue to support your academic programs and all choices for your top students but you also want to support your cte and you're going to need continued support for technology and a lot of this issue as you

018increase diversity you're going to have different needs that you're going to have whether it's going to be esau whether it's going to be students that are you have wellness issues any of these type of things mean you can't necessarily maintain a status quo as the complexity of your school system increases and that's just a reality that you're going to have in growth you're not going to get less diverse you're not going to get smaller and again you see other societal issues that are coming into play from year to year as we'll talk about a little bit later the issue of equity balancing the needs of schools and the programs and providing resource to support all students with a system of thirty thousand again we're talking a significant school system maybe one percent in the country

019that's going to be this size this creates a complexity that will be part of a skill set that a leader should have not anyone necessarily is going to have that type of experience it's not unusual in fact i can't imagine there's any system that we've worked with in the previous years the issue of achievement gap eliminating disparity in discipline with students of color this type of thing data driven are the type of things that you're trying to move forward to make this work as best as you can for all students so diversity the need to expand programs to support the needs of all students and also increase the diversity of your staff that your staff can look more like your student body so you're still talking about quality but you're also talking about the extra

020effort and also the competition that you're going to have with a lot of the systems going after these same strong people you also have an issue that came up time and again the pattern of continued change of a leadership you've had too much turnover in superintendents you haven't had a chance for someone wayne and i had we're fortunate we both had about 12 years in a superintendency that created continuity as people come in and out there sometimes it's going to be some anxiety it's not intentional but the fact is that's just part of a pattern that you want to con continue to maybe do the best you can to find someone as they say going to live here stay here and you're going to look for that you also have hot topics out there and

021these hot topics are topics that your new leader is going to have to be maybe aware of and whether it's issues of mask critical race theory particularly in parents they went on record and i could say probably 20 to 25 statements they don't want to see it they want to make sure you're not doing it you're not doing it we know that but also issues on a difference of opinion on transgender accommodations all of these are part of what school systems not only in virginia or across the country are dealing with the fact that you have to have someone that can work with the board with an agility to make this all work in a way that is best for all students not one group the job of a board and a superintendent is to

022be strong for all students you also have this last one that's a reality the post covet issues that will address student learning and student wellness you don't know the answers to this yet we don't know what gaps have occurred during this last year with perhaps some of our more needy students but also students that miss the social interaction how's this going to come up when you're going to be seeing issues in your schools with your counselors what patterns are there going to be what are we going to learn from what worked in technology what didn't work work how about the attention span as the kids come back after they've been on the computer has there been any downsides have there been any upsides whatever it is you're not going to return to where we were

023that is an issue that's a challenge all the systems are facing it at this point i'm going to start with this slide on the skills and characteristics as you can see a lot of these things have to do with experience leadership the superintendent i also do want to note that in the information that we received when you're looking at this report that was very complementary of your present superintendent there are a lot of things regarding his visibility in the schools and how he has worked with the students particularly and scott you're to be to commend it now someone they might take a shot or two in there but i'm saying overwhelmingly what we saw was a very positive um impression that you've made i just want to note that now as we're getting into this

024skills and characteristics i'm going to turn this back over to dr harris and i'm going to put this slide here um wayne i have the slide up that has instruction communication management and personal qualities and i know you're going to take this now through to the draft leadership profile thank you thank you kevin madam chair members of the board dr kisner as we listened to the comments what qualities characteristics and experiences do you want us to look for people shared uh honestly with us and at one point uh as we were reading back what we had heard someone said you're never going to find anybody who comes with all of that let me reassure the board in the community there are excellent candidates who will be good match and fit to be your next superintendent

025we believe that based on our experience having done 35 40 searches and the fact that already as of today there were 14 uh 17 applicants and others who have contacted us waiting until the profile is hosted so that they can complete their applications as we look through all of the comments from all of the various ways that people shared with us we were able to put into four different categories what we heard them say and these categories are broad and when i describe the leadership profile i think it will help unpack what some of this means so the four categories of what we heard is they want a superintendent who is excellent and successful in the areas of instruction communication management and personal qualities let me be a little more specific in the area of

026instruction candidates that would match and fit would be innovative have a clear understanding of post covet issues and and i'd like to add i'm not sure we're at post covet yet given the resurgence of variance and the number of of students and others who have contracted the bottom line is the next superintendent will have demonstrated effectiveness dealing with covet issues will have experience boots on the ground meaning experience as a teacher an administrator so that they will clearly understand what it's like to be in a school as they provide support to school staff strong track record of positive student achievement and closing learning gaps and the ability to provide leadership with hot topic issues critical race theory transgender mask social justice and the list goes on in the area of communication over and over again

027the next superintendent must be an excellent communicator and demonstrate the willingness to collaborate be a good listener the students were very clear that met with me they want an approachable person one young lady said to me a superintendent who's going to come sit down and listen to me come to my class be in the school but also be visible in the community someone who is a relationship builder a team builder and who will be honest in sharing information demonstrate transparency and who is willing to work with all segments of the community in the area of management experience in a district similar to stafford county someone who is politically astute we heard politically savvy someone who is non-politician a politic someone who is not going to lean in one political direction or the other will understand

028have an understanding of what diversity the advantages of a diverse community someone who will support equitable distribution of resources experience with growth and infrastructure management and the ability to build relationships with the school board and in turn work with the board and the board of supervisors effectively and then personal qualities we heard over and over again honest straightforward carriage transparent will make a long-term commitment to invest in the community to be a part of the community to live here and work here someone who will promote trust and openness and will have demonstrated successful experience dealing with equity and diversity those are the four broad categories with explanations of what people said they want us to look for we then took all of this information uh really looked deeper and developed then the leadership profile so

029we are i will discuss with you now the draft leadership profile that we're recommending that you approve so that it can be posted with the vacancy announcement kevin if you'll go to that first slide building the leadership profile uh the slide on building leadership profile is there with the two bullets wayne tell me when you want me to advance it uh i don't need to to reiterate that essentially those two statements describe then what is next and what is next then is the leadership profile draft there are 13 statements on three different slides and i'm going to quickly walk through them uh but it the opening simply shares with candidates as they read it that the school board uh and the stakeholders have identified the qualities they believe will lead to success so then the

030individual that the board will appoint first and foremost will have successful experience in a school district similar to stafford county proven track record of managing resources effectively promotes a collaborative style in identifying and seeking solutions to complex issues such as growth and facilities and i would add to that the other hot topic issues that we have talked about second strong instructional background documented success in improving student achievement both overall and for subgroups will make a commitment to stafford county with the intention to stay for a long tenure and to make lasting changes next slide the sensitivity to an experience with issues of diversity equity and parity over and over again you saw this as a challenge and a concern we heard this in the comments about what we wanted they want in the next superintendent

031and it will appear in the leadership profile the next superintendent must demonstrate the ability to successfully address the issues of diversity equity and parity communication and collaboration skills to build relationships visible approachable building relationships increase unity promote trust and exhibit transparency do you see these reoccurring themes over and over again person who is strategic innovative and forward thinking and finally will understand the issues facing schools during the present and not so distant future pandemic issues will plan and implement strategies to support students learning during this time kevin finally go to the next one and there are five statements that conclude the leadership profile draft that we present to you for your approval tonight very first one we heard this repeatedly someone who have the political skills and the integrity to build relationships that will facilitate

032cooperation among and between the school board meaning first and foremost to build a strong relationship with the school board so that the school board and superintendent are working together as a team and in turn the ability to help build strong relationships with the board of supervisors and the entire community demonstrate the ability to respond to current hot topic issues i won't keep repeating that you know what they are demonstrate the conviction to follow the current guidelines regarding teaching the approved curriculum in the areas of history civics and social studies demonstrate that uh is politically savvy nonpartisan and has experience in supporting efforts of equity that guides what's best for students and finally an individual who is inclusive and collaborative who understands issues around racism social justice and cultural competency madam chair and members of the

033board this is the draft document the leadership profile that we have put together based on the multiple comments that we heard during the community engagement process and we presented to you in request that you review it and give us approval then to post it in order that applicants can complete their application kevin back to you here's what i'd like to share with the board all this is coming at you for the very first time we have 13 bullets we are not asking you to get into wordsmithing here this evening you need to look at the context of the report and see how the the bullets that we have here are data driven however if there's anything that doesn't quite capture what the majority of the board might want then you need to make changes that's

034why we say it's a draft but i need it within a week the reason i need it within a week is with candidates when they fill an application out they will try to match the profile once it becomes the board's profile this is ours and what we a way to do it is perhaps the board chair assigns a person to take any feedback from everybody over a short period of time and see maybe what suggestions might be and then maybe at the next time you get together to maybe have some sort of all that information out there and then get to a point where you can then have a discussion and see if you can reach the consensus it's the type of thing that i don't want a 4-3 vote on this we want this

035to reflect you as a whole board again i think once you have the opportunity to see this there shouldn't be nothing up here that's a significant surprise now i'm well aware that you had a previous leadership profile within the last three years many of these issues are still the same issues in many school systems are far more similar than different but they also as you notice some of the things up here on this reflect the time in schools now and that's the type of thing that you're going to be looking for in the experience of who you might choose when we will recommend a slate of candidates to you so regarding the leadership profile holly if you want to make a comment on that and then we'd like to go to our last slide which

036is going to talk about next steps all right let me um say something i appreciate the work that has gone on and all those who have participated and for you all to do the summary for us this evening board members i know that if you would like to have additional time or if you feel comfortable with the bullets if we feel comfortable having heard them that is fine i understand you know as we try and move through the process with the um applications due september 1st we don't want to wait until like august 28th to um approve the profile so let me just get a sense of where board members are on this document and how to proceed best any thoughts dr chase um i think there are a few things that perhaps need a

037little bit of tweaking but for the most part i think it looks pretty good but yeah there are a couple things that i'd like to see tweaked so i would go ahead i'm sorry go ahead i thought you were going on this one i can go either way doctor one of god i i agree with i agree with dr chase i think that for the most part i think that this captures what we're looking for i think there are just a couple of the statements that i would like to see rewarded a little bit just a couple of changes so what i don't want is to change the community's profile of seven people against the whole community i want transparency and i don't want no 4-3 vote but if it goes 4-3 or whatever it

038is it's about transparency and no matter what what we do we want the community profile to be part of the community and i may add things but i won't subtract anything well i think we have to be sure that it is reflective of the information that we have received so i think that ms randall um since he would like this back in a week and we are meeting next week is it a possibility for as he suggested someone to collect some thoughts and statements as we each takes our take our time to review and you know give it to that person to then at least collaborate a little bit with thoughts and ideas so that we can be ready to go next tuesday that would be my thought ms hollerbach comment miss healy i'm just

039curious about what the doctors suggest needs to be tweaked that's something we need to be looking at because i agree with miss young if this is a community we have an impartial um i assume you're impartial third party just put this together from you know meeting with the community and and going through you know these hundreds of comments that were suggested so this is such a broad brush profile um you know unless there's something that you know there's some offense with i'd suggest we we go with this but if there's something particular you want to quote tweak um perhaps it's something we could discuss now and unless you need more time to review it well go ahead i can i can speak somewhat um it looks to me like we have two bullet items that

040are specifically pointed towards critical race theory i think that's such a small thing um and it worries me a little bit that demonstrates a conviction to follow the current guidelines regarding teaching approved history civics and social studies i want them to demonstrate conviction to follow the entire curriculum i don't care just about social studies i care about math i care about english um and i imagine most people in the community to do as well so that's a little bit of concern to me that we've got two bullet points right after each other that are clearly pointed towards this one issue so that that for me i would prefer to not have that be quite so um so blatant there in in terms of that but that's just you know that's just me yeah and i

041think that's a good question to raise and i think that's a question for the you know the people who put this together let me just share with you um we're not perfect at doing a leadership profile we have it driven because some things came up multiple multiple times we don't want to overkill i think the point you made about not just talking about social studies and history there are issues out there right now on math i just hadn't thought about that when i was putting that in i don't think math necessarily came up when we were looking at the responses but that would broaden what you're talking about so we do think that it's good for a board to have some deliberation we don't want a rubber stamp you're not a rubber stamp board we

042know that we want you now because each of you bring your own thing to maybe take the time you might just tweak a few things and if for some reason and it's very possible if you get this down to 10 great to tell you the truth we were we were under the gun getting this thing done and you know how when you do these things if you go back to them you can just tweak it even more and more but we just decided we'd want to get it out there because we know that you're going to have an opportunity maybe to improve upon it so that's just part of the process but i do appreciate if you can have it done in the by the next board meeting kevin may i may i just respond

043to i think it was dr chase who raised the question about those two items as we thought about how to summarize the number of comments around first and foremost critical race and other issues related to critical race there were also comments about teaching history which is why that particular one appeared and we didn't say the approved curriculum in general i don't think it creates uh any issue to say what dr chase what you said about the entire approved curriculum i don't think that diminishes the comment that we heard so i think you could you could do that and it take that out and it would still reflect what we heard from those who gave us feedback and and i'd just like to note that while you may not have heard about math i have certainly

044heard from plenty of people in the public about concern about the math curriculum as well as the social studies curriculum as well as uh the arts curriculum etc sure sure so um i i just wanted to say since dr chase and i were the only two that that raised this question those were actually the same two bullet points that i was concerned about and again um i have to agree that i want somebody who's convicted has a conviction for the curriculum i don't care you know what what we're teaching i just want to make sure that we are following acceptable standards in all all areas and math has come up science has come up history has come up so so that was the only the only thing i said and when we talk about hot

045topics right now critical race theory is a hot topic transgender issues are a hot topic there are a number of them but if a superintendent has to be flexible enough to deal with any of those issues that come up and has to be able to be prepared to address the community in a way that is sympathetic and understanding and expresses an honest uh opinion about what we do so so i think that um i i'm not trying to emphasize any one issue and i realize that the community is currently very concerned about this but i think that you know the superintendent i think what we were trying to say needs to reflect the ability to deal with any issue that comes up i just have a question um madam chair the number of individuals that

046answered the question are we saying statistically that the number reflect the 30 000 parents that are in our school system because i'm not even going to give credence to comments on on some of these things because people might throw words around and not really even know what they mean if you could tell me what it means then i will have a conversation with you about that but unless then i wouldn't even mention it but my question is statistically are we saying that what we have on this paper here is reflective of our whole school system parent community body yes here's how i'd look at that when we do a quantitative survey and let's say in prince william county for example we had five thousand responses on the form that they filled out when i looked

047at the responses when we were at just five hundred and then i looked at the responses when there were five thousand they are almost within a percentage point and when you have 597 i think it's reflecting a trend that you're the check and balance for if it's not right the other thing by having this document transparently there on your website if there are other people whose voices would be different then they need to come out and talk about it and that's all part of the process i'm not a statistician but i do feel that this also seems to reflect very similar what you had when you had your previous search team a lot of these things seem to be rather similar so i have a confidence that we're pretty close but i wouldn't suggest so

048that i'd want to get into knowing you know if it's 100 perfect the other thing though that i am encouraged about when i last talked to you in july i didn't know if we were going to pull off this abbreviated version of community engagement if we can say we had 700 people out there and they're pretty sincere we've honored their voices and so i think that in itself was probably even better than we thought we could have done and i think it's also because of the suggestion of opening it up on your website that all of a sudden went far beyond just the groups that we met here in the forums and the meetings so i don't know if that is a specific endorsement of this being 100 correct but i do have confidence that

049i do think it's reflective all right so for the board we are meeting i believe next um on august 17th my suggestion would be a um a work session type format for us to work on that and then if we um have a special call to approve um a particular um profile what i would ask though is for everybody to have done their homework ahead of time highlight hone in on the specific areas or bullet points so dr kazar let me be and dr harris let me be clear so you are really asking for us to approve is it this this document or both documents the only thing we're asking you to approve is the leadership profile which are the last they're the last um the 13 bullets on starting with slide it begins on

050slide 13 and 14. it's it's those three slides which make up the the content for the leadership program okay it's page nine and ten of the report our intention is it's verbatim i hope it is but the page 9 and 10 the report has the same bullets all right so the focus will be the 13 bullets potentially getting to 10. we'll see um for discussion next tuesday is that and then we can um so um let's talk about that when we get to board member um or um excuse me committee comments about the 17th and then we we will work through the timing for that so any other comments at this point all right yes miss randall um can you tell me going forward will we be getting updates at each meeting that will be

051shared with the public for each of our meetings you're that's a perfect lead into our last slide as we're trying to reach closure here um we're getting to a point that we would like to see the board approve the profile and if you can do that the next meeting that's fine application deadline is september 1. we have 17 applicants we'd be happy to provide the board chair where we stand as you have each of your next meetings with the applicant pool the numbers we certainly know that we have not gotten into vetting candidates in fact we're out there talking to several that haven't yet applied they are waiting for the profile the other thing i want to make clear and i've said this as we do searches candidates are interviewing you every time you have

052a board meeting and we know candidates have watched your board meetings and they're saying is this a place we want to work so it's a two-way street here and this is the time even as you and this is why i said having a 4-3 vote on a profile not a good thing when you're talking about trying to attract a candidate and how a board is going to work together as a team on this what i have noted though and i can say this even in prince william county when we had candidates watching some of their board meetings there were three board meetings that went until three o'clock in the morning but they went over these issues that are so prickly right now of whether you're going to you know have kids back in school whether

053you're going to do masks where do you do that they aren't specific to once the school system gets back to we hope a new normal so people have to understand that and so they're smart enough to figure that out they're in school systems themselves to know this but it is also you're in a fishbowl too and when they end up applying they're going to be in a fishbowl because we're going to do everything to scrutinize to make sure there's no surprises in whatever they're going to be bringing to the table if we were going to say that they are recommended candidates for you so we'll get to a point when we do make that recommendation there will be two things that happen when we provide the slate of candidates for you and we get to

054the point of saying these are the ones that at least have hit 80 percent of the profile that we have confidence that we're saying if it doesn't go right we'll do it over free with expenses in the next two years now we haven't had that issue we don't intend to start here the other thing we'll do there's another piece of document called protocols in which we talk about key things to know about interview process and what you can legally ask or not ask and also give you some sample questions that are related for the profile that you might want to consider when you're doing interviews so we are just we once we present the candidates then that's the last that will be part of this at that point then as you narrow it down and

055you go from perhaps a group of four to six and then you get to the point of second interviews you're going to want to consider of doing some sort of a background check and we can help you with that unless you have another means of doing it but you you need to do due diligence it can't be just based upon the written documents that are in the candidate's application and in that profile we've got to look at social media we've got to do google searches we have to look at legal issues we have to but the point being most of these people are in school systems and they've been vetted pretty pretty carefully but there was a case and this happened 10 years ago in montgomery county they had picked their superintendent great person they

056did a background check and they found bankruptcy that changed the game for them when you're dealing with such significant budgets so you have to in your process what and we recommend when you're getting into the finalists you do need to do the due diligence on that the other thing that i'll just say publicly you're not going to get anybody here on a mixed vote if people are going to bring their families here we hope that we can uh you can come together we'd like to make your job hard by bringing you great candidates but in the end it's your job to figure out who's the best match of who you want as your next superintendent for your community and i just would like to make the reminder to the board that we did discuss and

057as part of our motion that this would be a confidential search that um we will be protecting the privacy of anyone who is applying for this position and i just make that reminder to the board and just to reiterate what uh dr kaz kesner and dr harris have given us tonight so i appreciate you coming in making the trek to to us this evening and we will be back in touch after um next tuesday with the final hopefully our final report ready to move forward madam chairwoman i had a question just about the the next steps in the search process and it was simply in september you will have prepared a slate of candidates and present us with those recommendations um are you expecting us at that meeting to decide who to bring in for

058initial interviews because i would like to actually see the applications before i make that decision so just wanted to find out what the you know process would be dr chase um we anticipate coming to the board in a closed session and sharing with you the top four to six candidates in the general neighborhood of the middle of september when we share those candidates with you we will share the entire list of candidates who have applied you will have an opportunity we give you a list and you will see their last three jobs their current salary and we will talk briefly about each candidate and explain why they are one of the top four or six or why they are not we will then walk through in alphabetical order kevin will do one i will do

059one and we will present the top four to six that we believe based on everything we found out that they this candidate that each of these candidates are good fits and matches and we will recommend that you interview them we will not promote those four to six we will simply present them we will give you a synopsis a one-page synopsis that describes why we think they're best fit and match and answer any questions i'm going to get to you pam just let me finish this thing each board member is going to have a dropbox and they're going to have a private password and that dropbox is going to have the entire application it's going to have the resume it's going to have all the references it's going to have the transcripts it's going to have

060the google search you can't make a decision in due diligence without perhaps having that advantage so we aren't looking for you to make a quick decision you need to be timely but we wouldn't want that to happen normally we used to do paper and we used to collect it put it in a room and then everybody had to sign in and sign out we can we can now have that efficiency with the dropbox and we have staff that will help any board member in having that type of an access so again we will be asking you wayne just mentioned we'll give you a one-page overview that synopsis is a synopsis of everything but you need to do your own looking through and and so your point's well taken pamela you had a question miss young

061miss young you have a question um so i think we we had this question bef i i brought this question up before in reference to um how many um candidates were going to be able to see and i think um the conversation was about all but now i'm hearing and maybe maybe it was my thought in my mind but now i'm hearing um you're gonna recommend 406 and why you're going to recommend them i would like to also know why you're not recommending the others that applied even if it's a uh you know you're gonna give us you know their their their salary ex etc maybe a sentence or two why not like there's something that stood out because you never know i may be looking at one of those for other reasons why i

062think it's a he or she is attractive for um this community ms young that's what you're paying us to do we're experts but we do this if we recommend four to six and we're willing to stand behind it if any board member through the consensus of the board would like to bring forth another candidate we think you should have that opportunity and if you choose to do that then we'll get you all the information so we don't want to feel that we're so absolute that you might be at a point where we wouldn't be free to try to support you because all of this we recommend this is the board's decision and so i want to assure you that you have that freedom now here's something that we might mention maybe we don't feel that

063they meet the profile and maybe we haven't been able to get into vetting them now sometimes that can happen with an internal candidate the way that happens with the eternal candidate because this is a confidential search we are limited to how much we can talk and then give someone's name up you might know someone more than we do so i i hope that you understand that the board is can control here and we have had board members at a time sometimes bring someone else in if all of a sudden the board is tells us even more about them maybe we will consider the two-year after we know more from talking with you so i want i just want to tell you uh we want to assure you that that's part of the process thank you

064all right board members are we okay know where we are going forward all right we will be in touch probably wednesday morning probably not tuesday night after the board meets and we will move forward thank you again thank you thank you all right dr kissner i'm going to let you take the next one and um with our transportation update and i will let you um set the stage okay first of all i'm glad the survey was done before first days of school yes so there's no question um i'll talk more about the first two days of school because if we set the transportation aside we've actually had an excellent days of school but if your children are not getting on the bus on time or the bus is not coming to pick you up it's

065not a pleasant experience so we recognize that today was a a much better day than yesterday but again we still have too many issues that need to be addressed and each day we're going to address it so tonight um and i do want to thank kiva because i know he worked to almost midnight last night and as soon as he gets finished with tonight he's going back i don't know if you're going back to the office or going back to the computer um so chris and kiva and i might uh add but i see chris is up there so i guess he'll you're going to lead it yeah i can start yeah fine so uh good evening board members thank you you know for the opportunity to to share with not only the board but

066also the community a little bit of a review of our first two days as far as it pertains to transportation as well as some of the challenges and then some of the potential solutions we've identified that we want to move forward with so some high level things of our first two days and and just how we as we prepared for these opening of school we had 26 000 students that we um scheduled for transportation uh to and from school 190 routes is actually a low number because it's 190 simultaneous routes at any time we actually have hundreds more than that total when you include the two in from middle and in high school but any given time we have to be we have 190 routes going simultaneously at the school division what we're seeing uh

067observing many empty seats so of those 26 thousand we know they're not all riding the bus but we had to assume that they were uh based on the information they provided to us some of the this is going to come up in some of our challenges and concerns and then how we're going to mitigate it going forward but verifying students are on a correct bus that is vital and in the safety and delivering these kids home safely is of utmost importance so that go ahead yeah i just want to make this point yesterday was day one today is day two especially at the elementary level but truly at every level there's a greater level of care to make sure the right children are getting on the right bus you're going to see my report later

068we have a lot more children in our school system than we had last year and the year prior and many of those kids are new to stafford county public schools so just by the nature of the opening of school things will go slower because we want to make sure children are at the right loc at the right on the right bus i think he has a well it's the next one and then we have the multiple um responsibility for contact trade contact tracing and health mitigation strategies which mean we're cleaning the buses in between routes which also slows this down it's not excuses i'm just giving you the reality of what we have to do and i'll let chris continue yeah that doesn't look good up there um so i'm gonna quickly see if i

069can open up the powerpoint version i printed it to pdf just so that wouldn't happen there we go uh so real quick on day one overall our first ship elementary had was pretty successful we were able to pick them up and get them to school on time what we ran into was in our second shift elementary and after so we ran into our normal issues with the first week of school across the division but there were some areas that were obviously ran into more significant issues the double runs were needed at all levels resulting in the late pickups and drop offs and a double run means we don't have enough drivers to do all 190 of those routes simultaneously so a driver has to pick up one run take them home or take them to

070school and then return back to maybe the same neighborhood or or street and pick up more kids and come back that's the only way we can get from do the driver shortage which i'll share with you in a moment to the 190 concurrent routes that we have our day one unable to transfer our high school students for their travel programs due to the lateness of our morning shifts getting in by the time we would have gotten them to their travel school they would have had to immediately return back so there just was not the buses available we improved on that in day two still ran into some snags and they were late returning so we are continually improving up front we need better communication that's if you take anything from this that is our biggest

071area of improvement tomorrow we we try to improve today over yesterday and i'm not talking about advanced communication saying hey expect delays and routes i'm talking about real-time communication of your bus is running late and i'm not going to make any excuses for that we did a poor job in some areas with communication and that that will continue to improve so some we saw significant improvements in day two elementary school we saw the most significant improvement but we also had improvements in middle school and high school most principals reported 30 to 60 minute improvement from day one to day two and that's a a very rough number somewhere over 60 minutes and that includes hey when did my last kid arrive in school and when did we get them on the bus and out of

072the school at the end of the day from the day before we improved communication that real-time communication elementary families wasn't perfect really targeted the students that we knew were on those double runs mentioning that we need continued improvement for communication for our secondary families our middle school and high school what we did in day two is we already started to consolidate some of our routes at the secondary level it is really hard to in real time consolidate routes we saw the most room for immediate improvement at the secondary level uh specifically our high school we know when a bus comes in and there's only five kids on it that is not efficient use of our buses and it's taking up a route that we could easily take those five kids move them to another bus

073um there's a long process that's not something we can do overnight typically to consolidate routes we have to identify which students aren't getting on the bus which students we could take from another bus and move so there is a process of of the bus driver checking almost each route um each stop who's getting on the bus and who's getting off so that we know who on that actual roster it's not as easy just to say i've got five kids on the bus let me add 30 more so we have to know which kids and then which kids still need transportation to make it more timely our challenges lack of bus drivers so currently in order to make the 190 routes that we have running concurrently we are 42 drivers short and that is after we've

074taken 13 other staff member and assigned them to permanent routes currently so that's office staff that could be our lead bus drivers that are supposed to be providing guidance while our current drivers are out in the field it could be other office staff it's our substitutes that we have that are usually filling in when we have sick and call outs they're permanently assigned so what that does is put us at risk when we have call outs from our bus drivers we already had some today then we're scrambling again because we don't have any substitutes we're having to double up more runs other challenge buses are unable to reach and depart the schools timely due to the traffic we know we know this area there's traffic we run into it every year this year has been

075worse and i'm not just talking about traffic getting down 610 down 17. it's getting in and out of the school most directly we have very long car rider lines a lot of that i believe too is the covet issue it could be i would say that some of it is in day two potentially because of the transportation struggles in day one i'll admit that but we had significant transportation in and out of the school on the first day of school and and a lot of that is parents like to drive their students the first day i completely understand a lot of that also could be due to covid last year we were able to um to social distance with one per seat and then as we got more kids in we went to two percent

076i'm trying to social distance as much as we can but a lot of the parents may not be comfortable putting their child on a bus lack of response to our opt out we issued a an opt-out for students for transportation late in the school year last year early summer as it might have ended up being we did not get very many responses of people opting out so and one of our areas that we want to improve on is looking at an opt-in approach in the future and and heard from a lot of principals that actually support that and want to do that now and reach out to families and get a very good response right there let me just expand on that you might recall that back in june a very an administration recommended to

077you to opt in not opt out why because we learned over experience that between sixteen to eighteen thousand students will actually take the bus and as you saw we planned for twenty six thousand because about three thousand opted out but then we have to assume that everybody wants the bus so one of the reasons why a lot of our buses have empty seats is because we're driving around looking for children and they're not planning to take the bus because we know it's not going to be 26 thousand out of thirty thousand kids taking a bus it'll be sixteen to seventeen thousand so i just say this respectively the opt-in option makes the most sense because then we really know who's gonna commit to the bus take the bus and we could plan accordingly so i

078that's um that that's really a variable and i and i just want to remind everyone about the june conversation so the last bullet on here is loading buses in a timely manner and that gets back to our point of we are very careful when we place kids on the bus we want to make sure they are on the proper bus that takes time not only unloading them in the mornings takes time tagging them making sure that we know which bus they're getting off of so they're on the right bus in the afternoon so loading and unloading buses in a timely manner has been a challenge this year and we've made significant improvements today we'll continue to make improvements tomorrow and that's not only that's a team effort between the drivers and the school members because

079the drivers are checking rosters as kids getting on as they become more familiar with which students are on their bus that becomes a much more efficient process so looking at some next steps and solutions on the the short term i've already mentioned the biggest area that we can improve is our communication to families and that's our real-time communication secondly is our consolidation to eliminate our empty seats and create more efficient routes across the board i already gave examples to that we are we are looking at that every night our route coordinators are reviewing that like i said we can't make immediate changes but we are looking at the most egregious methods of of where we can consolidate those routes the additional traffic control we're exploring how we do that so and that's looking at directly

080whether that's crossing guards whether it's our security officers that are out at the trying to navigate the the car riders and our buses our buses are constantly getting stuck in the roads unable to get to the parking lots to pick up or drop off kids because there's a huge car rider line and we need to find a way to get those buses around those car rider lines more quickly yeah not that you have to do this but i literally have spent the two day the last two days today i dehydrated i believe because i was out just watching buses and spent the last two and a half hours at brooke point i've been at parkridge i've been at pool i've been at north stafford i've been to others my point is i've watched at park

081ridge a bus take 20 minutes to go 100 yards to get onto the property middle school when you depart that entryway you try to make a left turn it is almost impossible and we have cars and buses backed up which means it's a ripple effect and the other buses um then the high school run you get my point stafford elementary school um you know your schools which ones um work well gale works well okay gail it's separated that works well so it's not all so i share that with you and i invite you if you're looking you know to do something to go to either the morning or afternoon and you'll you'll get a better sense of what chris was at cape walbara today took a picture he literally was a bus he was behind

082the bus and the bus i got criticized last week for taking off my mask for the public i have asthma and i have cancer and one of my issues is breathing so if you have a problem with me taking off my mask when i talk i apologize but i'm going to breathe so chris was behind the bus or kate waller barrett and that bus was crawling because the traffic pattern of cars coming out buses coming in and i bring it up not as an excuse this is just a fact okay it's the way our parking lots have been configured this is not new this is not new obviously um but as we get more and more children which i'm going to show you a little later it becomes greater of a concern going i'm sorry

083chris no thank you and i already mentioned the loading and unloading efficiency and and getting better at that um mid and long term solutions and so some of these are um closer to the midterm uh one being our bus driver recruitment that can be midterm and it's long term i say that because we know that we have 13 drivers currently in training they will be on in buses at the end of august so we're still a couple weeks away from them that's one of the biggest classes we've had training in a long time very promising we have another 14 ready to start class they're starting next week or very soon so that doesn't eliminate all 42 drivers that you need not to mention that we're using 13 in there but we have i think it's

084roughly 90 double runs across the division right now so that starts to cut those down which when you start cut down one double run at an elementary school that has a significant impact on saving time because not only it puts them late for the elementary school they're already late for the middle school and they're already late for the high school so every additional driver we get every additional route that we can cover and eliminate a double run makes a significant difference we're working with hr keeping myself patrick on an interest survey um we've actually had paraprofessionals coaches reach out to us and say hey i'd love to drive in the morning i'll you know pick up the kid take come in get a bus go pick up the students at k wall or barrett and

085park the bus go be a paraprofessional maybe drive in the afternoon maybe not maybe we have another driver come in the afternoon uh to drive that bus and take that same route home that would be a significant impact so we think we can get several drivers that way now that's more of a midterm solution because they have to go through class working with kiva's trainers and once we identify them we're going to set up night classes week in classes so that we can get them in off contract hours obviously so we don't lose them in their in their current position but it would be great to supplement our current driver pool with some additional support staff i already mentioned the opt-in for student riders that could be something we explore this year it could be

086something that we're setting up for the future that we get ahead of it for next year like i already mentioned we are looking at how we can consolidate but we're using our real data now that we have kids on the bus we can determine who's riding the bus and who's not and so it's better for us to do that if we do another opt-in survey to all students we're then starting over with all of our routing because we could have a lot of changes in there and so we're looking more at now monitoring it ourselves and then using the opt-in in the future even even before these first couple days of school been working with mr baldwin and dr kisler on the potential of adding an i.t support staff that's dedicated to transportation so we

087get we we have i.t support for transportation some of it's shared right now we need direct help so we can constantly be working on if we have routing issues with our software provider making sure our communication which is a glitch we ran into this week making sure we have somebody that is on top of that at all times so we're looking at a way to get that dedicated support staff to transportation and i will leave it on this because this is some of the most important information about what our our solutions are i do believe that we are going to see continued improvement every day just as we do in any beginning of the year we know that this year was um more challenging than previous years and we're completely willing to admit that just

088know that we've already seen con considerable improvement in day two and and fully believe we're going to see that in day three all right um comments or questions from board members um but i want to ask dr kisler it sounds like there's a second piece to this or is this the um presentation regarding transportation okay i just i just maybe i misunderstood there was a part two so ms young has asked to go first so i will start so dr kisner um i was at um hampton oaks i was just going to pick up some lunch and i made a left and the next thing you know i saw all of these cars and so i drove around and the line was probably about a mile long for parents picking up their kids and you

089know i asked some questions and you know i rolled up my sleeve and volunteered to help what i found was that the community is eager to help and i was looking at the solutions and next step and what i didn't see up there is i'm wondering if we so the community is already bringing their kids to school and i was wondering if we could take advantage of that opportunity and ask those parents that are carpooling right now with some of they're actually carpooling some of the parents are picking up the neighbor kids kids that they actually know and so and and uh maybe extend a a gas voucher to these parents that are already helping because they're they're they're um going the same way and they're taking uh some of the parents and i wasn't

090sure if that was something that we could do to the for those parents that are already doing that and help alleviate some of the traffic off of the road i don't expect every single parent to continue to take the kids i wonder we could take some cars off of the road and then those parents that are already bringing certain kids from the neighborhood to school what do you what do you think dr kissner first of all i do want to thank a lot of parents because with very short notice we have in many ways disrupted their schedule and asked them to take their kids to school and if it's kind of a mixed blessing to be honest with you to have parents drive their kids to school we're going to have to build a trust

091to get the kids back on the bus we we recognize that but if parents i think you might be mentioning things like carpooling so if you live in a neighborhood where parents know each other i mean i don't want to get into the carpooling business but if parents are friends with other parents and their children know each other and they go to the same school i mean we do see that you know every once in a while i saw that you know i think that would help um you know also walking you know some schools are much more um accommodating for walking um you know so you know the weather you know the next couple days i think is going to be pretty hot especially in the afternoon but you know our key is to

092get the transportation system correct so parents taking their kids to school is their choice it's not because there is no other choice um and we're going to get to that point it's as i've been said on nbc news today and i'm saying to the public now it's just not going to happen overnight but it's going to get better like it today as chris showed you we shaved off 30 minutes to over an hour in many of our times and that will continue to improve dr warner first of all i want to thank mr baldwin mr fulmer and dr kisner for all the effort they put in to try to resolve these issues i understand the first days have not gone as planned um i'm wondering if we need to start looking at some more long-term

093permanent solutions because clearly growth and traffic patterns are not going to change over the next few years except to get worse are there ways that we can start working maybe with the county and vdot and even looking at our own campuses to try to expand the lanes or access maybe adding a second access because some of our schools are on one way in one way out and and and is there any way we can maybe get another entrance on some of them is there some way that we can start working with the county because certainly the county realizes that all these houses and developments that we have we have to have access roads for the schools or that's the problem and there's nothing more frustrating than sitting there and watching your knowing your destination is

094in sight you're sitting there for another 30 minutes trying to get to it and and i certainly you know realize that these are this is a very long-term solution much more than what you've put up there yeah i i agree and we have talked about that and i think there are some you know immediate solutions of trying to look at the car rider line and we've been doing car lines for years so they're usually pretty efficient we've we've figured out the best way to route them and we've seen such an increase that it's it's gotten more difficult but a lot of we've already mentioned you know k waller barrett's the perfect example of it's tucked in and it's really one way in one way out and and so when our buses get stuck there is

095no way in so there might not be a whole lot of improvement there but maybe maybe some road widening or some other areas of how we could get our buses in and and given priority so some of the schools whitewater whitewater as an example they opened the building earlier today so they could move the parent line faster so whatever time we tell parents you you the earliest you could drop off we made it earlier today and um karen bingham said that that helped the other thing i just don't want to hop on it but we gave you the scenario of how many bus drivers were short that excludes when people call in sick so today we had i don't know how many but we had people calling sick yesterday we actually had someone called in

096dubai um and that was whitewater so we had you know so we have to adjust even when we know we're already just i just also want to remind you at the end of the 1920 school year before covert came in we were fully staffed i think that needs to be remembered that we were fully staffed so these issues that we're discovering not discovering that recognizing acknowledging we did not face in the spring of because we were fully staffed and we we hope to get to that point but you know that what's going on with hiring bus drivers and in many positions so it's just if you're wondering like why now why didn't we have this two years ago because we did much we were much more fortunate in our ability to track and retain drivers

097just adding to the the bus driver shortage i had it on the slide i didn't speak to it directly we actually have just from last week over the weekend and yesterday had six drivers resigned so six drivers that we were counting on and had routes for um have resigned right before the school so that obviously threw a hiccup in our plans as well sure miss hollerberg sorry i actually have a couple of questions and maybe a couple of suggestions um the the six bus drivers that decided they didn't want to be employed anymore with us did they get a sign-on bonus that would we pay them any any monies to to come work for us uh not not those six i believe those were existing ones that were already contracted with us it's really the

098ones we have in our classes now that are receiving the the new sign-on bonus okay what are we up to with that now uh we're doing a thousand dollars so it's um and kiva mr baldwin correct me if i'm wrong i believe it's 500 when you complete your training and then 500 after you start your route and um finish 30 days okay good um did we reach out to the sheriff's office at all they've helped us in the past when we've had traffic issues whether it's for events or whatnot did anybody reach out to sheriff decatur and ask him for his help they're there so yes we're still reaching out and trying to get more help and and working with him on that we've had some out at our schools even even in the last

099couple days really the deputies are out there for a safety they're not out there directing traffic though and that's where that's our responsibility to direct traffic and find someone uh to be a crossing guard or or direct to traffic i just think in an emergency situation like we had the past two days i think sheriff decatur probably would have gladly helped us if we had asked him for traffic control um assistance at some point just a suggestion for next time i actually have that in my agenda for the first thing to call a sheriff decatur tomorrow i'm sorry to call sheriff decatur tomorrow and have a conversation on how we could coordinate our efforts appreciate that um i gotta i received an email i don't know if it was a constituent of mine or not

100but um the the issue with the schools the actual building themselves parents were trying to call the school and then when they weren't able to get through saw them this morning saw the administrators this morning and they were told a that at a certain time the telephones shut off and they go to some kind of automated system i think that's part of the communication problem the other one was i guess versatrans stopped working at a certain hour five it was five o'clock last night it just parents were looking for their kids and versatran wasn't working anymore so there was no information gotten by the school transportation was too busy to answer the phones there wasn't enough people um to communicate with parents so i so i guess my we've seen this before the first week

101of school maybe perhaps next year i won't be here but here's a suggestion put together hire some temps put together a a phone bank at central office put a phone bank together at transportation and just have people there to answer the phone so that parents can get some answer information or hey look let me look into it i'll call you back because that's where the frustration is coming from um not being able to communicate with anyone and then the some of the communications tools that we used even for a snow day last year my my son was in a senior and we had a snow day and i got a facebook notification twitter notification instagram notification email um it was on the website it was i mean we over communicated and as much as people

102maybe complained oh they'll woke us up at five o'clock in the morning i can say that i appreciated the over communication to the parents because i got a lot of people saying thank you you guys have improved so much and we just didn't do it this time so my recommendation is is we have a bunch of tools in our communications toolbox we really need to start using them so thank you miss random i would very much like to say thank you to all the drivers that came back today after a very long hot running day even with ac buses you still have all the windows open the top popped open and it was an unexpected very long day so i would like to very much say thank you to our drivers who came back today

103even to our staff that you know jumped outside to help with buses and car writers i just want to say thank you one of the things that we've talked a bit about elementary school and so i wanted to give a comment and a suggestion for that as well is i was at rocky run this morning and i've checked in with some other schools too but the car rider line i think because it's again the first couple days and it's stopping up the traffic for next year um maybe we need to make a psa it can be per school per division or whatever on how to do car rider lines because i'm seeing cars come up put it in park parent gets out comes around unbuckles their little sweetie lifts them up out of the car

104puts their backpack on hug in love oh wait you forgot your snack and that is taking a congested long amount of time and so if we could do something with kids like the sca at their schools make a little video that shows how car rider lines should be done so that they do move a lot more effectively that's just a thought but shifting gears towards the high school because i'm hearing a lot of middle school and high schools for the exorbitant amount of times that they have waited and buses have in some neighborhoods have not even come for the last two days and i'm seeing nodding heads and so that is a big concern to me that we have kids that are feeling quite anxious about coming back in because we had way more elementary

105kids than we did middle and high school kids in so there's going to be a little bit more anxiety and about coming back but then to sit there and go oh my god i'm supposed to be in first block oh my gosh i i you know i'm a little worried about attendance and tardies because we still have attendance and tardy policies are we relaxing them are we negating them i would like to give us these kids some grace periods some are trying to earn their exemptions if we're doing all that again but i'm a little worried when we talk about things like traveling kids the stat kids that have to travel and now they didn't make it to their school and they sit and they're not missing their necessary class at that school they're also

106missing their math their english their science they're missing everything and um the other piece is that i just worry you know now they didn't make it to their school but today they made it to their school they didn't make it back to their home school they're missing practices they're missing jobs they're missing appointments i mean we already moved the high school you know we all had a little bit of hesitancy with that but you move the high school to the end of the day and now you've extended this day until in some cases we're getting emails six o'clock and you know like i said these we told we backed the time up to 3 30 so we could be a little bit more thoughtful to the life of a high school kid after school and

107they don't even have that and you know i just um it's a lot of angst in the middle and high school situation um in how long if at all they get picked up and or dropped off dr chase yeah i want to first say welcome mr baldwin to your first year at stafford county public schools and your first year running our routes and it has been challenging it is challenging and i would like to echo other board members comments about thanking drivers i want to say that when i was visiting principals this summer i heard the praises of route coordinators sung because of all the constant changing of routes that had to happen with covid and i assume this is continuing and and so um and and just a uh a plea to parents to

108please be kind to our bus drivers they have a rough time of it and we would really like to keep the bus drivers that we have um i want to say mention something that that dr kissner has said many times which is that we sometimes over promise and i wonder to what extent you know we as a board pushed for the schedule to be changed beyond what was initially brought to us and asked that that that elementary schools start a little later and that high school end a little earlier and staff likes to please the board and if maybe we inadvertently um put a little pressure that that perhaps exacerbated this problem but i'm concerned moving forward with the lack of with the bus driver shortage and let's remember with covid we could have bus

109drivers quarantining for a couple weeks at a time and that that could could make it worse and so i you know i understand you think it's going to get better each day but just to ask that we think about whether you know maybe we need to go back to families and say we're sorry your your pickup time is going to have to be this your drop off time is going to have to be different than what we originally said um and and be more uh realistic about what that could be um and then again i want to say that reiterate what's been said about travel students who you know we need to make it a bit of a priority for those students to actually get to school they can't be missing all instruction for the

110day so but again i i and a lighter note i asked my daughter who was a stafford student many years ago and i can remember times in the first week of school where she got home two hours late and i said do you remember that what was that like she said no i don't remember i was probably reading a book and so our students are are often very resilient so hopefully hopefully that will be the case thank you i have a question and then comments the improved communication to families can you be more specific about that what is the plan and when will it start so it'll start tomorrow but uh most directly we we have the access to send out direct notifications to an individual bus when we know that bus is going to

111be late and so we need to do a better job of one testing it ahead of time but two making sure we get those messages out so we improved upon that but we still have some room to grow and and that's where tomorrow we need to make sure all of our secondary families are getting those notifications typically in a and once all this is is ironed out in a typical year obviously it's it's a few buses here there that are late because of traffic or some other concerns and so right now it's you know many of our buses are are running late and so we're not trying to blast the entire division but trying to identify the buses that are running late and sending those direct notifications to those families many years i've been the

112person that have asked our community to give us a chance bear with us you know give us give us a week give us a couple weeks to get these things straight that's when buses were were late i have never received reports like i've received now i you know this is not personal against anybody but clearly the system we we stafford county public schools the school board starting you know with us have failed so what are we going to do i mean we're going to tell people oh i'm sorry i'll tell you now the bus is going to be three hours late i mean i'm getting reports buses are not only three hours late or more they're not showing up at all you know we've got kids at the bus stops that are there for hours

113and it's hot it's muggy it's it's hard i mean i'm like i said i'm i'm not pointing the finger to anybody but the system the system has failed and not that long ago we had a report to this board that things are looking good you know we're doing test runs we've got the drivers we've got the schedules down we're getting the people the information i mean this was such a shock to me to hear what's happening and i am somebody said you should be ashamed i am ashamed i'm ashamed to be part of this i'm very happy that we have a plan but you know that plan's got to work and you're saying you're rerouting buses you're you're changing because there's less kids on them well just think one of the reason the kids might

114not be on them is because we're calling the parents we're saying please pick up your kids bring your kids to school so we're you know we're creating part of this problem here with with the car riders we can't plan on a year with what we've got on the bus today i'm sure many parents took off work today and they changed their whole schedule so they could personally make sure their child got to school i mean i i asked for this i i know you know others i had miss hazard on the phone first thing this morning and said we need a report we need to we need to find out what went wrong and something went wrong between the time we last got a report and now because i mean we know about the covid

115we know we have to clean we know we're short on drivers and i appreciate everything you do and i god bless our bus drivers our attendants everybody in transportation i know they're working as hard as they can but we're not we're not giving them enough support and if we have to spend more money we've got it we have the money you know we our budget was funded we've got coven money surely some of this can be associated so we can use that we have you know paraprofessionals i remember many many years ago our paras were trained by the sheriff's office they wore the the sheriff's best and they were out there directing traffic if we've got problems getting buses in and out if if we can't get you know the sheriff's deputies aren't available and

116and i agree with miss hollerbach you know sheriff decatur has always gone out of his way to help stafford county public schools and you know we need to start there but then say what can we do on a long term basis short term i think we can we can ask them what can what can we do to make this better and i know i've i've been at schools where the car riders it's nothing like what you you know described miss randall's the staff opens the other door helps the child out and that car is gone i mean it's it's very efficient in some schools but i've got reports even today that a bus didn't show up no bus shows up now how is that ever going to be acceptable ever parents aren't being informed and

117i'm glad they are and i'm this this is just very hard for me because i've been the one for many many years saying please give us a chance we you know we we have to work these these issues out but this is this is not that situation this is just a nightmare for everyone and we need to know what has to be done to get this fixed and if we can can we contract bus drivers i don't know i don't know the answers but there's employment agencies that you know have people available and i understand we'd have to do background checks or whatever we do you know for employees but in an emergency situation you know we have to be out there saying what can we do and and our parents it's it's just unacceptable

118it's unacceptable the burden we put on the families and and the kids that the high schoolers you know they're sitting there twiddling their thumbs for hours because they're not in their special accelerated program because they can't get to the school well are the classes going on for the other students and these are just missing them and then the little ones you know the first day of school they can't go to school because the bus didn't come or a parent who you know is off at a job you know many miles away they can't concentrate because they don't know what's happening with their kids i just i'm i i am i'm ashamed and and i apologize not that that is gonna help but this is this is just totally totally wrong and if we had any

119idea that this was coming then i sure didn't get that memo because the memo i got was we're under control we're moving forward and moving along and and i never heard anything from the school system i got my news from parents sending emails i mean certainly whatever district they're in they're all equally important so we can't do anything fast enough for me to get this thing fixed but communication i'm glad you put that first because there has been almost zero communication or maybe zero accurate communication from with at least the parents that have written in that i've seen this this is this is a nightmare this is i i'm sure mr foley you're thinking oh my gosh i should have stuck with finance you know now i got the buses and you know but it's

120it's all of us it's all of our responsibility so i do need to comment and i'm not okay no i just i just want to end i have no excuses there is in my mind there is absolutely no excuse for our failure the only thing we can do is to move forward as fast as we can to get this thing done okay and go ahead i want to tie it back to your superintendent search okay and i want to tie a little bit to dr chase's statement and something that was tiptoe around this is not to place blame we're looking for solutions but i do want to remind the board that your administration came to you with two recommendations that you chose not to follow the schedule and the opt-in trust me because we've had

121a lot of meetings this has adversely impacted besides the 40-plus drivers that were short so i agree we want to fix this we want to fix it yesterday but as you move forward you're going to have recommendations and what i heard and if you go back to the minutes in june when we were saying well the constituents don't want to opt in it's not fair to them and i actually said the opposite i said it will be fair to them because we won't have children waiting on the buses on the streets because we'll know exactly who we need to pick up so i say that respectfully because we anticipated i had a question today by the news did you anticipate we anticipated back in may and june based on our recommendations if you don't follow

122these recommendations we're going to run into this problem and so i say it not to place blame i say there's a partnership with your next superintendent that we want to work together but if we're always going to be over right in our recommendations then we all have to take responsibility for the outcome [Applause] dr kisner i like to make informed decisions and we take a recommendation if you anticipated something like this my question would be why was that not brought forward now i understand you know there's recommendations you win some you lose some the board makes the ultimate decision but we can only make decisions on the information that's available and i don't recall any discussion about their this could have a horrendous effect there you could your kids could be out there for hours

123or whatever so you know to make a recommendation is one thing but just give all the fact not you is going to be sitting here the board needs all the facts to make an informed decision on the other hand this opt-in opt-out if i opted out and then my child needed to ride a bus where would i be this school was obligated to provide transportation to the students so there i think there's other issues involved with that as i said i don't have an excuse but to say if you made a different decision this this wouldn't have happened or this may not have happened to me we should know we should know what is anticipated and as of what was it last month you know we were told things are looking good that's that's what

124bothers me more than anything if we had any idea our public could have been informed they could have been prepared our schools could have been ready for more bus riders we could have sent an an alert out an sos please help us parents you know can we can you drive your kids to school we could have had traffic control people out we could have been prepared but as as i understand it i mean i'm assuming given the benefit of the doubt that nobody anticipated anything like this because that would be just cruel to let this happen madam chair i have a comment for chris so can we talk about just running through the next step in solution so to make sure that the parents know what to expect the next couple of days again um

125reiterating thank you all for the work that you've done staying up late uh this week even when i was out this week and i overheard a parent looking for their child a child happened to be 13 years old i called dr kistner he answered right away found the child and in in seven minutes you know the child was already home so um miss hollowback asking the question about communication about in the future i want to know what we're doing now in terms of opening up the phone because when i did call brook point it happened to be one of your children um the phone turned over and so i couldn't help right then and there i was wondering if we could do something about that now that we're leaving the phone open and making sure

126that i know we have a cell phone a cell phone policy that the parent the the kids can't call the parents in school or whatever the case might be in class or whatever but we need to relax that a little bit so that you know the parents would know that their kids are safe and um the buses that are not showing we need to do that's something that i'm concerned about when i'm hearing um kids walking on courthouse road to school i'm concerned that that's uh um something could happen so we need to make sure that these kids are safe right so we need to let the parents know dr kisner can make a statement of chris what we are going to do the next couple of days things are going to get better i

127know that and you know i apologize to every single parent out there because i know your heart is racing when you call me or send me an email personally i talked to a couple of you all today i saw the phone number in the email and i talked to them and so they're very grateful um these are good parents caring about their children so we just need to make sure that i know our first priority we're trying to do is keep them safe we have a lot of new students and i know that they didn't have a bus so they're new to our system and we're making sure that they're safe by making sure that they have a bus on day one so i just want the parents to know that we are caring for

128their kids but give them the next steps let's round out make sure that we're not bickering back and forth but we're actually letting them know what we're planning on doing for the next couple of days do you mind just going through that again and then finalizing that yeah sure so um i already already detailed the direct communication realizing that we we have heard that as well that um not everybody has been able to get through whether that was for transportation i can assure you the transportation lines have been open we're not intentionally sending anybody to voicemail we've had six or seven people here in the central office building taking phone calls in addition to who is that transportation and at the schools um i i have heard where um our phone lines have gotten overloaded

129and they automatically go to voicemail so we're looking into that and and trying to find additional staff we have the staff but we'll place them in the appropriate place so they can receive those phone calls part of the issue with that is when they answer the phone calls we won't be able to provide answers and so they need to have access to the system we need to be trained on what what to actually do in those situations and sometimes the schools are the best place sometimes transportation is the best place to get those answers and then following up on the next steps as you requested ms young is the biggest thing is is becoming more efficient with our routes we have too many buses that have very small ridership numbers and we've got to consolidate

130those and that opens up that bus for another run and it eliminates those double runs and then the traffic control is key so that we can get buses in and out of the building and getting them once they're loaded or once they're at the at the school we have to get them out of the school as quickly as possible and so that honestly just comes with time we always have a lag there every year of learning which students get on which bus making sure that that little kindergartner is getting on the right bus so there are lots of checks and balances there before they go on the bus and the bus driver checks so every day that gets quicker and and that's where i said we already saw considerable improvement in that today but we

131have um more improvement to make okay is it possible um i've mentioned this to fab very briefly and i talked to miss randall the the other day what we learned about some of the bus drivers that left last week they live in spotsylvania and they had their children it wasn't worth it for them and one of the things that you have gotten emails from non-licensed staff is the ability to have their children in our schools and if we're going to pull out all stops to keep drivers you know we're going to bring it to the governor's committee or the fab committee or the committee or the whole board that policy i just want you know that's something that we've recognized we've identified as maybe an incentive to get drivers um who live outside the county

132to come work for us so i just want you to know we we we picked up from a couple of those that left that it just wasn't worth for them to have their children in one school system and then work at another school system so i just want to talk a little bit absolutely we were planning on putting on the agenda dr kisner miss hollerbach um i just have one more i guess question and i don't know chris is this if this is in your wheelhouse but um right before um redistricting and when we see communities that are being approved by the board of supervisors or the planning commission there's usually a discussion that goes along with it about re-examining some of our um the walking zones do we need to maybe put that on

133on our on our plate for you know the next coming months to re-evaluate where we're at i got i got an email today from someone saying that they they're one they're one street away from their school they didn't say what school it was but that um they've had the same bus driver for many years and they've never had any issues up until this year so my question is is if they're one street away from the school why are they taking the bus can i miss hollerbeck we put that on the uh three on three for discussion with the board of supervisors unfortunately we have not had those meetings have been cancelled twice now but it is on the agenda to discuss with them increasing the number of people that's good to know but but i

134think just from from a school board perspective that's that's more a school board discussion to be had um walking zones are specifically in in our it's because in some some schools we would need to have sidewalks added and so the question is can the board of supervisors help us with that but i think it would be worth it to actually bring have the board have a discussion about it and maybe a work session about it and so that you have facts to bring to the board of supervisors to say these are the areas that we could you know minimize buses in if we could put sidewalks in to have children maybe more children walking so i just wanted to throw that out there for a conversation piece next time right i actually agree with you

135it's something that we need to look at again because it was looked at several years ago in identifying those safe walking zones i coincidentally was speaking to a family yesterday unrelated to walking zones but trying to resolve a transportation issue and i noticed i just happened to be at that school earlier that that morning and and noticed based on from the discussion with the parents where they lived that there was what seemed to be a very safe a walking path a sidewalk all the way down um and and so i asked them and they've actually said we would love to be able to have a walking zone and so those are the areas that i discussed with them and i'm i'm going to circle back with greg martin and see what the next steps are

136of doing an analysis of this neighborhood and other neighborhoods to see if we can't add additional walking zones great thank you and we can we can do that on our own for parkridge and cakewall or ballard i remember specifically we as the school system had paid to install sidewalks in both those cases we worked with the hoas we had to get you know land um you know dedicated for those sidewalks but it's something that we can do as a school system we don't have to you know go to the board of supervisors for that i think that's an excellent suggestion all right i haven't had my opportunity um i mean i want to echo you know certainly what everybody has said and as i talked to parents and stuff i mean the only thing i

137felt that we could say was this we failed we need your help we need the great people that we have in our system to work together to solve a problem that's what we do in education from my perspective in the heartwood district certainly no i read everybody's that's not what i'm saying but it did seem in our area we had extreme amount of problems no buses no opportunity to walk to high school i can tell you from stafford lakes to colonial forge to the end of where the folk your county line is to walk to mountain view it's just not even possible i i would like to have those areas looked at especially because it did seem like there was the highest number of the ones i was reading now perhaps they were targeted but

138i have to say it seemed like those outer reach areas were really the problematic ones now i understand as we get behind i don't know if it's something we need to look at as a board for that we may not always order the huge buses maybe we need some smaller buses i know that sounds counter-intuitive however it just seems like to have the routes that we have people choose to live where they do so i'm not trying to make i know where people live in my district are very far out i think ms warner has a doctor winner also has people so that is a choice but can we come up with ways to perhaps pull the outer reaches so we are not cascading when something goes wrong just something for us to think of

139i think as a board and i will certainly look forward to um information from you know the experts but i do think we have to look at that um i really hope that we get that um not just the communication but having those buses there on a second note though a parent who i saw today said my bus has worked perfectly another individual in the heartwood district but her comment to me which was heartbreaking was she said a parent came up to the driver of her bus that had done a great job had been on time and almost stormed on the bus was screaming at the bus driver take my child i know they're not supposed to be on your bus and she said her child was like wow what happened so i just invite

140i know that we are all frustrated i know we're hot i know we are tired but we are all being watched and we want to to do the best thing we have great bus drivers i need to keep them we need to keep them and we need to recruit for them so as you think about posting on on social media and saying everything you can say about i'm here i'm elected i i will take it does it hurt yeah but i will take it but remember this is a person driving your child their job is to drive a bus safely i can speak for the roads in hartwood that isn't an easy job when i don't have 20 to 50 people behind me and when you ask and you say about a cdl license let's

141just be honest if you had a cdl license right now you could drive for amazon and you could drive packages and guess what packages don't say anything and it's going to be they may make a lot more so i understand the frustration and i do apologize to those that happened but please let's not lose the community greatness that we have it was discussed in the report tonight whether you agreed with all of it we like our schools we love our schools actually i think the strongest communities we have this is difficult it's the most difficult one i've been i've had on nine years please know we are going to move through it we will re-examine stuff ms healey on the may 11th meeting when i went back and looked through those comments about our start

142to school you had asked at the time we re-evaluate the start times as we go through the year because we were promised that we were doing some of these things to help transportation i understand we have other decisions as well but we do need to analyze and we will and i want parents to be involved in that however going forward tonight is focused on where can we improve we have talked about that we are moving forward i would just ask i hate to say it because i am usually i am very much a big pitcher but heart would just we were missing buses a ton there i know that's a hot spot however we can meet that please please let me know let us know how can we do that because students being there alone

143as the weeks go on is going to be um a major problem if we need to hire out emergency let us know um we will meet next tuesday now we have several topics if there is some recommendation that the board you need approval for bring it next tuesday because this board will approve it i imagine i mean as long as you have the money but i think we do to fix this because this is the most important um thing is getting our children to school we want them there five days a week we want them there but i do have to say remember we are all a community many of these bus drivers live and play and work in this community please don't scare them off they are doing an amazing job and i want

144to thank them because we're trying to recruit more so please please i got two compliments in emails in the midst of an email that was very frustrated they were a frustrated parent and at the end they ended up saying but i would like to compliment kim in finance for taking my call and taking that time so even in the midst of the frustration you could still put a silver lining so thanks to that parent because it made me happy that yes we didn't lose our humanity in this we are going to try and fix it if there is something we can do by next tuesday we will approve it and we'll move forward term woman hazard i know you mentioned heartwood a couple of times that some buses was missing i i don't live on

145anvil road but onville is not here probably somebody didn't mention anvil buses didn't come to anvil road over by cbs and i'm hoping that you all are looking at that to make sure that a bus do pick up those kids you may not have an email you may not have a call but i'm letting you know that someone told me while i was getting something to eat on bill needs to be looked at not just hardwood nothing against hartwood but onville is an area that they need to be picked up thank you ms randall we're next um so in the solutions i guess i'm a little concerned with still what are some of the things that we are willing or going to try to do differently for the students that were transferring for like the

146stat programs or um ib or whatever other programs when we're moving the high school kids you know there's word about what they're eating but also you know uh getting those kids back to their base school but you're running the other runs so they're stuck there i'm just curious like is there something that's going to possibly be done differently um in the next week or thoughts of for that situation that seems to be um not going well yeah i'm going to ask mr uh baldwin to come up real quick because i know he we were discussing it today already working on a solution to address some of those immediate problems now that we've seen where the direct issues are with those travel students and and where we potentially could shift some routes so i'm going to

147let him respond to that and thank you mr baldwin for coming back into us today no problem no problem at all good evening i'm sharing board members um to address your question ms randall what we're doing is looking at what routes are finishing and that's where looking at the attendance and size of it and where we can minimize and and provide a driver designated for our tribal students so starting tomorrow we'll be able to look at some of our governor's schools students getting back to their school in addition with those travel students the midday we should be okay but some of those kids start coming back before we start our afternoon which is the elementary that's where we use the bulk of our drivers so we're trying to minimize that and look at the area

148where they may begin their elementary school and get some of those drivers to go pick up those kids from school and drop them off at their base school near the elementary so we can do that very easily and then after that it's just optimizing being able to take a load maybe combine it with another load free of that driver that we can designate to take our tribal students to their schools so that is something that will be coming and hopefully we'll have a better solution by the end of the week and we should be starting well not probably not until september but um i'm assuming then we'll have a lot uh we'll be able to transport kids to their sporting competitions because i mean the road that's kind of running late right now but i'm

149just worried about moving those kids too so that's friday because i'm hearing we have a bunch of scrimmages football season is around so looking at the times that the schools request to be transported we may run into a little difficulty but here again we can optimize with the high school runs because they're less kids so that gives an opportunity to combine buses or routes onto one to free up drivers to take or travel our athletics to their respective locations i apologize to be honest we're sharing with you that we're short 40 45 bus drivers we're also sharing with you that 12 of those bus drivers are people that work in his office why the phones are not being picked up are substitute drivers and we're also sharing with you that on any given day we

150can have drivers call in sick we need to be honest with the community that everything that we have done in the past may not happen right away and may not happen for a long time because that's just going to frustrate people more we are working to get people into the classrooms so they could have their instruction and many of these other activities yes we all want it there's nothing that people are asking that we don't want but i don't want to leave this community mislead this community to say we're giving you all this information and now we're going to go back to to normal it's not going to happen i'm just going to be the one to tell you it's not going to happen we're working on it he needs to get out of here

151so he can work on it okay we're working on it and and i just ask all of you this is just a second day of school okay today a lot of the stories that you guys told were yesterday's story okay so i'm just asking you to i'm not even asking you to be patient okay because i don't if you know me you know i don't have a lot of patience okay but i'm pretty pragmatic of the situation that we're under okay and all this is not surprising to anybody that we've been short bus drivers we've been talking about it for a heck of a long time fab there's not a meeting hasn't gone by that this hasn't been brought up so to anybody to say wow i just found out with short bus drivers i'm

152sorry that's not accurate okay and we're open to solutions some of you have race solutions we will continue it thursday we have fab which is on the agenda um salaries do count incentives count a lot of things count that's why i brought up that policy that was something years ago prior to my time here that you were looking for teachers we need to look at our drivers and other positions the same way so i i say it respectfully because i'm hearing all these requests but i want to bring us back to the presentation we have a real challenge right now i'll use the word problem i try to avoid that word but we have a real problem and we just need to be honest with people we want to get the elementary kids in we

153want them instruction we want the middle school kids in the high school and and he's trying his best for these um the travel students i mean i was at brooke point i know we had a lot of mountain view travel kids waiting to get back to mountain view thank god our driver has been great but i do want to make another group of people the administration and building administration because i watched upset parents today go up to principals and i really respected how our principals have are very good listeners understand where the parents are coming from because again all of us up here are parents so it's not like we don't understand the parent perspective okay but i just ask you you know all your things that you're asking just to please also tell the

154public that it's going to take time for this to happen okay otherwise we would have fixed it yesterday thank you all right any other comments i will make one because i didn't get as many thank you mr belvin for coming tonight thank you for coming here i know this is difficult and i know this is hard i know you know that this is the future um i think what the board is saying is we are open to solutions we are open to funding them but we're also open to analyzing what went wrong what things can be done training other things we all can look at that and i think that's healthy i don't think us not examining things i think that makes it then we're not being honest with ourselves our decisions and other decisions

155i think that's something honest um and should be done um [Music] we we want it to get better you want it to get better absolutely and we want to support you and the staff in those ways we understand that communication is key for our parents i think a lot of communication has been done even tonight highlighting the issues that are going on and they're not unique to stafford however when i tell a parent that they don't care how it is in nebraska they only care how it is in stafford that's right that's right so we want to be the most competitive and the place that most bus drivers would want to to work and um so i do appreciate the the welcoming accolades for our drivers because they do work very hard i've had a

156chance to be out there and just see them in action and they do do a good job i'm gonna commit to you to make sure that we do the very best job because making sure our kids are safe and getting to school timely is the most important factor and making sure that we do not pass up anyone that we have and that we visit to every stop i will make sure that we improve on that that's something that is just the fundamental purpose of what we do so we will make sure we work with that and if there are any concerns we make sure we will address them formally and with our recommendations and just know that we are working our folks are doing a great job handling and stepping up to the challenge and

157filling in where there's a need to do to help get our kids home safely and sounding so thank you thank you thank you all right with that um we will move on to our citizen comments um i will get us started tonight oh you didn't have anything else no i'm just taking this okay just wanted to be sure all of a sudden i didn't want to make sure i missed anything so three minutes are allotted to each speaker or group you're encouraged to provide a copy of your comments to the board clerk who is sitting down to my right speakers shall identify themselves by name and organizational affiliation if you represent an organization if you can announce the pop the purpose or topic of your comment there will be the stoplight system up here green

158will be when you get started yellow will come on when there is one minute remaining when there is when the red dot or the red goes on um you will please stop speaking and provide your comments the chair reserves the right to restrict total citizen comment received at any particular meeting to a predetermined number of minutes with the approval of the board citizen comment which is profane abusive or which threatens imminent physical harm shall be ruled out of order by the chair although the board provides the opportunity for citizen comment individuals desire to register complaints against division employees or division programs services or activities excuse me may also utilize the procedures outlined in stafford county policy 1113. one thing to remember about student comment i mean public comment is it is comment there is not

159a opportunity to dialogue with the board members if you ask questions those are things that we will be taking notes on but it is not a dialogue between us and the members of the public i have six people signed up initially to get started what i will ask is if your name is called go ahead and stand off to the side so you can quickly move forward when a prior speaker is finished then there'll be an invitation for anyone else who may wish to speak all right i'm going to start with mary radozwitz okay if i mix this up phillip stevenson cassandra corcoran dillard wentz michael wood and emily powers and you all can just choose your order just come on up come on down all set okay well thank you my name is phillip

160stevenson i'm in the hartworth district um one thing i do want to point out too last week you created a policy here that all while on campus all persons and i just went through the policy we'll be wearing a mask it doesn't just prefer for speaking and you didn't do justice to someone like mr kinser who has a disease for a medical opt-out policy i've not seen that come out yet you have till the 21st of september on that when someone like mr cancer a cancer survivor asthma you didn't give him the opportunity to opt out but you allowed other members here to speak without a mask on so i want to point out that for record you violated your own policy tonight that you put out there last week as for transportation many if

161not all of you have received an email from myself last night i did receive a note back from um a board member but there are some things that still were out of line with transportation one communication sucked ten thousand different ways you guys can communicate transportation has their own twitter account even when school days happen mr kendra's account is the first account to even post it why is that why does the board have a problem communicating why does the school have a problem communicating with parents sub buses if those happen we're lucky to find out if a new bus number comes out so that parent may be tracking the sub bus or maybe tracking their original bus who's now in garrisonville district or somewhere deeper in heartwood those things aren't coming out to parents fast

162enough um some things that are really poor that we're not taking consider mr baldwin i hope you've considered next week those students the buses were coming they're coming two hours late so by the time i picked up 10 students in the neighborhood three runs to different schools the buses were still coming through so i don't want to say that the buses weren't coming they were just coming late and there's no communication that they were even there so hopefully a parent got to see that bus and come through so that's something to consider next week while you're rerouting and doing all of those things consider that the parents that took their kids in this week because the buses showed out those buses aren't going to be empty they're going to be like they were every year

163they're going to be four four to a chair or three to a chair or even sitting in the aisle like they have in the past and the bus drivers allow it because they have to make it in down in the hartwood district we have a huge problem with driver speeding because they're trying to get down to all the different schools and get those districts those routings properly so we have an issue with that too through the neighborhoods 25 miles an hour you're going to take out kids it's only a matter of time before it happens it's happened before and on top of that the parents who are discouraged because the bus is late they're racing around the buses and creating more issues um i apologize there's so much more i have here to say and

164i will put in an email and put out to the clerk but my time is up and i hope other parents share that concern that transportation is a real issue and just to say we're gonna fix it a committee or something needs to be put together to take this longer and give us a plan thanks come on down thank you for being here this evening my son is one of the unfortunate ones that does not have a bus to ride just cool he waited yesterday for two hours at his bus stop only to call me and say i need you to take me to school now i get insurance from his school that he will have a bus to ride home he doesn't he was told he doesn't have a bus i have to go

165pick him up no problem he'll have a bus tomorrow he doesn't have a bus thank goodness my high schooler's bus picked him up today finished her route and then took him to his middle school thank goodness for her he got to school today then in the afternoon he was told he has a bus waiting at school an hour i got an email from the school i have to go pick him up there's no bus route there's no bus driver for him so now my option is i have to leave work to go take him to school and back home i don't know how many jobs we'll let you just leave take your kid to school come back and then leave early to go take him home i'm missing pay for this my son's frustrated he

166has not been to his first period this year and i know it's the second day and i know buses are going to be late i'm understanding with that he has no bus no bus at all and i do know that there are a lot of bus drivers out there doing multiple routes all morning and all afternoon they are not getting a break and i understand that and i appreciate that and i know we have a short-term plan and a long-term plan but what's being done right now who is going to get my son to school tomorrow the next day this is completely unacceptable it's not that they're late there's no bus no bus at all it's really really frustrating i do want to thank you guys all for your efforts and all of this it's

167just beyond frustrating as a parent and my kids are frustrated too it's absolutely ridiculous i want to say thank you for all your efforts and your help hey there i am cassandra corker and i talked to several of you got emails back and forth thank you very much for the communication i appreciate the individual communication i've had however i wanted to read what the delay afternoon bus arrival email was for me today now i have graduated one yay i have two more in at two different schools i get a forum email that simply says this afternoon your students bus route will be covered by another bus the bus may arrive past scheduled time please use my stop app to recalculate arrival times i don't know what boss i don't know what kid i have no

168idea how late ma'am just i go to ice address justice board i go to the my stop app i put the information in it gives me for both kids the original bus stuff and says it's on time which is not right so that's number one in communication you can send an email but that does not qualify as communication i understand the difficulties of this i understand the frustrations i know there's a million things going on in the background that we as parents don't know about i appreciate all of that but what i can tell you is i live on cranston lane which i believe is in hartwood sorry renew to that address and uh we did not have bosses two mornings in a row i work from home my window faces the street it's a

169dead end i notice every car that comes by no bus after an hour my child my oldest that will be leaving soon to go to college took the boys to school all right she sees kids coming from the colonial forge area neighborhoods walking up courthouse road middle schoolers there's no sidewalk there's not even a shoulder because stafford is crazy pants and um these middle schoolers are walking on courthouse road to get to rodney thompson this is unacceptable today i went to go pick up my child from rodney because he'd been there an hour no bus is home not for my high school or not for my middle schooler and there is a parent there asking if she can have her child be a walker she lives in the augustine right it's just a cross court

170house road there's a sidewalk to the light you cross the light you go over they say no that is not a walking zone because of the cross to cross to courthouse road that is unacceptable if you guys are looking at walking zones please god do and please look at that when we first moved here we moved literally across the street from park ridge elementary school we were encouraged to have my child take the bus to go literally across the street because they didn't want people walking from our direction to the thing these are things that need to be looked at thank you and i just really want to know if we're going to have a bus tomorrow a little short for this my name is dilara wentz i'm a new resident of stafford county i'm

171a military spouse a parent to a first grader at park ridge elementary i'm also a local real estate agent and i just wanted to bring it to the board today that i feel like there's a huge lack of communication with the stafford board when it comes to approving new residential just homes so there's a thousand units that are approved now for the east side of stafford correct yeah a thousand units and we're having an issue with buses already there's also at least 400 more homes being built in embry mill there's also dr horton who's building houses on courthouse road as well as drees homes there's new town homes going off of route 1 there is also another subdivision going in with atlantic builders i believe in the hartwood district there is a lot of residential

172being built over the course of the next two at least years off of courthouse road mine road off of the mountain view area and i will let you know that my student's classroom is full i can't even request a teacher transfer right now he should not be in the classroom that he's in right now because i did not get a great impression with his first grade teacher and i should have been able to make him go into another classroom i wanted to also bring it to the board's attention that there are 10 other builders that are building in the stafford county area there are also 95 apartments planned for the embry mill area as well where publix is so my question to you all is with there are classes already being over the amount of

173kids that can be in one school one being at 112 percent already over the next three years when these new residential homes go in what's the plan i feel like stafford county does not talk to you all a thousand units and we can't even get our kids on a bus i feel like it's completely unacceptable thank you good evening my name is michael wood and uh first and foremost i do want to say thank you to the bus drivers i unfortunately got to meet one very well yesterday what i want to talk about is accountability we haven't addressed this right we're talking about a shortage of buses your system is broken i heard earlier someone say it's vital to deliver kids home safely i wouldn't agree more greater level of care making sure our kids

174are on the right bus that was interesting excuse me just address the board please those were things that were brought up earlier the school first and foremost the school park ridge couldn't even give me a bus number at open house couldn't give me a bus number the friday before school started how am i supposed to know where my kid is still to this day i don't have a bus number transportation office i'm gonna get to the store with my daughter my fourth grader transportation office yesterday couldn't give me a bus number i called the school again because my daughter wasn't at the bus stop like she was supposed to be dropped off the school told me to call them the transportation office told me to call the school that's when they did answer my child

175is not a pawn it is your responsibility to tell me where that child is when they are in your care finally yesterday her bus stop 239 was to drop off i understand it's the first day of school i did i i gave a little bit of wiggle room however my daughter never made it to her bus stop the bus driver literally got out of the bus trying to help me locate my daughter buy a walkie-talkie nobody could find her you know who found her my neighbor after 5 30 p.m accountability we need to address that not just the number of buses my daughter will continue just like she was today i took off work early to be an early release student every single day i picked her up today at one o'clock at park ridge

176she will continue to to be that so i can avoid this this is just this is just a bunch of oh we need to look at this we need to look at that it's a bigger issue the accountability of our own children last i want to i want to end with something it's unrelated to the buses but i just it caught my attention while you guys were sitting there talking about looking for the uh the searching for a super attendant for the school district and i was searching for my child the people have spoken they said that earlier they don't want politics in the choice of the next superintendent well i ask you to go look at those 13 bullets again where the leadership profile has numerous billets listed as a political skill political and

177politically savvy take the politics out of this trash all right i still have um i think dillard went i don't or okay um if there is anybody else who wants to come um speak go ahead and stand off to the sides if you don't mind and then just individually come forward after you have spoken there is a clipboard to my left it would be to your right if you would go ahead and sign in so come on down hello my name is alexandria noel and i am a sophomore at mountain view high school and let me just say that this is absurd um so waiting to go home yesterday and today we were standing out there two to three hours 90 degree heat plus humidity made that today a hundred degrees we have no water

178we have no shade we can't go inside and just sit and you see in the cafeteria at least while they call out our buses my biology teacher told me the latest the bus came to pick up students to go home was 6 10 and 5 o'clock so the communication with the app they told us to also download to track our buses that's not helpful either because we don't know if it's there we just log in it says hey it's all arrived on time my mother got an email saying there was a change in the buses to where i was going to have to be on a substitute bus didn't give me the number i checked it told us to download the app and check it check the app says it was gonna be i was

179gonna be home on time by around four i had no idea if that bus left without me i didn't get on it so i'm sitting there two of my neighbors are there as well we're sitting there twiddling our thumbs wondering if it's there or not did it already leave what else are we supposed to do i have to hit your ride from my friend to go home an hour after school ended my other friend walked home he didn't even make it halfway because it's so humid and hot outside he has to call his mother to go home this is insane that's that's really all i have to say thanks thank you good evening i'm dan mccleese i'm a graduate of north stafford high school i went to a.g wright and garrisonville elementary school i'm also

180the father of two students in the hartwood district over the years growing up here i've made a lot of friends and lost a lot of friends thanks to the military from all over the world okinawa japan camp lejeune north carolina oceanside california for the last 40 years here in stafford has always been growing surprise we got a bus problem it's always been changing and it will continue to change but one thing is certain diversity is not new to this community i make this point because any change in philosophy or curriculum that implies that this community is not diverse is simply just a wrong assumption as we look to continue to improve our schools we also need not to change things that aren't broken this community has been diverse in thought in background and diverse in

181culture and i say that with emphasis that diversity is not necessarily based on skin color or race you know that i know that because you taught me that i listened tonight to this bus fiasco my suggestion offer health insurance to bus drivers you'll have a line out the door easy problem plenty of retirees probably looking for health insurance it all relates to this board not listening you all cause a lot of your own problems you didn't listen when they didn't want to change a school schedule look what we have you didn't listen last week when every parent that stood up here wanted a choice for masks it's time for our elected officials to start listening to what we want and what we do and ask and not with the and do what the superintendent recommends

182and do what the consulting companies you hire tell you to do again you cause all your own problems you don't have to issue mandates you don't have to follow the same policies that are created in communities because you didn't want you want to be more like northern virginia we live down here in commute north because we don't want to be associated with the mess that those communities have created start making decisions start being accountable for your role as elected officials stop analyzing and trying to one-up everybody well listen to your stories up here stop delaying plan ahead and by all means let the people who voted you in that seat help you by doing what we ask you to do thank you [Applause] good evening i'm cormie larson i have a son at drew middle

183school we have a bus assigned to us but i've never seen it so yesterday he didn't get home until 6 30. it was because a random bus decided to give him a ride all by himself he got a ride by just one bus driver it was amazing um a few things that could maybe help open the schools earlier so that parents can actually drop them off earlier maybe you know open that cafeteria at seven in the morning so we can actually get them into school that is uh you know that's your answer for all those cars backed up school buses not being able to get in i mean my whole road my whole road potomacron road they broke down today the whole road just drove all their kids to school so you have to start

184thinking about this is an emergency you're an emergency situation and you have to think about how you're going to handle that in an emergency also when you're talking about communication all the kids have cell phones my kid can't call me he couldn't call me at all he couldn't message me he couldn't let me know what was happening you need to open up and allow those kids to call their parents that will help them i mean those are two simple answers that will could make a huge difference in this problem you have because you don't have bus drivers you don't have other things so you have to you have to be creative in how you're going to fix this that's all i have hi my name is susanna schneider i have two boys that go to

185mountain view high school their bus never showed up we live 1.8 miles away on vista woods road the bus never i can see the bus stop luckily i work from home and i can see the bus stop behind me and they stood out there for an hour this morning at 9 40 school started at 9 20. i had to leave my job and go take them and get them over to school the first day it took over an hour to get 1.8 miles from our house to mountain view high school and then for me to even get back home after getting out of there was another half an hour to 45 minutes and now i'm missing an hour and a half two hours work the second second day i don't know why you thought it

186was better today because it wasn't they sat out there this morning for an hour and a half when i finally got done with my meeting i was able to take them to school when they i got the text message at 207 pm their buses changed how am i supposed to let them know that now and it didn't tell me what bus number it was changing two how am i supposed to tell them what bus to get on it was ridic they sat out there for an hour and a half today their bus never showed up my husband had to go pick them up 104 degree weather out there outside and they've been sent out there for almost two hours it's completely unacceptable we have had our kids in five different school systems in two states

187and this has never happened this badly you said that you knew for months you guys had a bus driver shortage why didn't you take care of this in the summer or after school why didn't you delay the opening of school for two weeks while you can get bus drivers in here to get these kids they're being left out at bus stops for hours and in places that are not safe they're going to get hit they're going to get run over trying to get from the end of our neighborhood over to mountain view high school you've got to walk across mountain view road and luckily we did have the sheriff there the first day that i was coming to pick him up monday afternoon the sheriff was out there somebody in a police officer's uniform was

188out there directing traffic on mountain view road so that was good but it still took almost an hour to get from my house to the school it just i i don't i don't understand what happened i don't know where the disconnect is with all this if you guys knew you were 42 bus drivers down why didn't you take care of it before school started or delayed the opening of school until you had enough bus drivers it just doesn't make any sense to me fix it i don't want to have to leave work again tomorrow morning or tomorrow afternoon to pick them up or take them fix it thank you good evening my name is isaiah escobel i'm from amber mills and uh the big topic tonight is transportation so i'll touch on that real quick

189i think it's totally unacceptable what happened and apparently it seems like the scheduling was the biggest issue with the changing of the school hours added to the big problem second thing about the kids being over two hours late and two hours coming home so what's that four hours minimum that they're missing throughout their day between school and their off time for homework or anything like that is uh their promise breakfast and they get to school and the schools aren't allowing them to eat so now these kids that depend on this and some of the families their food now they're not eating why is that earlier this year when we were doing hybrid the school bus made it pretty close to when school started but they allowed them to go to the cafeteria get their food

190bring it to class why has that ended let's see i think that the students should be able to eat their food with their class i think the communication needs to increase significantly and having the students out without talking to their parents is unacceptable but i think that's pretty much all i have to say about the transportation i appreciate your time thanks yep i was gonna just say can you come back and sign in for anybody who's already spoken i'm not sure i was no no go ahead and speak first and then sign in it'll keep everybody moving sorry thank you my name is marsha whaley and i live in the wide border district and i just want to offer just a thought of a suggestion just a little bit on the last speaker that was

191up maybe it might help transportation maybe not they maybe go back to having high school start first and then middle and then go back to elementary that will measure having all the different dope double routes and things that they have to do and they get behind that's a trickle down affect the metal the circle down and back to high school that's it i do also say thank you to your time up here and also thank you to the bus drivers i know they're working really hard thank you thanks hi my name is amanda grace and i have two children at widewater elementary i just wanted to offer some some advice i have been assisting miss karen bingham our principal with the transportation for the last two days with band bus banding and making sure the

192students get in the correct cars and on the right buses we have very minimal mishaps at widewater my current my background was in the military i was in the marine corps was motor transportation i think something that you could do is reach out to those of us that are there are so many of us inactive and active military service men and women who could offer advice that would may aid in providing some ideas for how to better handle transportation whether it's routes or how to move cars a little bit faster i've seen ways which we can even move it even faster at wide water but our system that we have at wide water is working so i feel that we could if all of us collectively start working together and maybe reach out to some

193of us parents who are in and out of the schools being that i'm the pto president there i'm at the school a lot i see things i can offer advice i can help and there are many of us out here that can do that so i feel that someone brought up earlier that spoke and putting together a committee maybe having a committee of parents from the various locations of elementary high school and middle schools would be an optimal sense in order to create a better sense of what's going on because we may see things that you're not seeing it from and vice versa so we can collectively come together to resolve this issue and i think it would resolve itself more expeditiously if we had more outward input from the people that are there every

194day and experience it and seeing it there are things that we can do to help one another as a community so i appreciate everything that transportation has done i know it's no easy feat i did it for four and a half years it's not an easy feat when you're trying to get things from point a to point b and mayhem collects its way but in the military we always have plan b and i think plan b was kind of missing from this element and i think we can create a plan a plan b and a fallback plan plan c if we work together as a community i appreciate your time don't forget to sign in thank you good evening my name is deanna fisher i have two children in the garrisonville district regarding the late

195school start times for high school i think it's not just a bus problem my son drives himself to high school but his 10-minute drive normally this year is 45 minutes to an hour because the cars and the buses can't move on the streets near the middle schools because even without this even you know just regular years the middle school drive-off line goes out into the street and the cars can't move so now with the time so close together the high school students can't get to school no matter which way they're going and so my son would rather go to school at 7 a.m like all the other years in the past so he instead of spending his morning in traffic he can get home after school after marching band practice before 6 pm i also

196have comments regarding the mask mandate you have failed the children and parents of stafford county with your mask policy you have heard from numerous parents that do not want their child in a mask in school you have received numerous correspondence informing you that you are in violation of federal law and violation of our constitutional rights you are picking and choosing which laws you want to point to to justify doing what you personally want to impose on our children you are hanging your hat on one uncodified virginia statute with multiple conflicting interpretations our constitution has a supremacy clause which says federal law supersedes state laws and mandates and cdc recommendations your mandate violates federal law our constitutional rights a codified virginia law as well as your own stafford county public school code of conduct for students

197you do not have immunity from lawsuits for violating federal law or the constitution and i have had enough thank you thank you for signing in uh my name is joshua pacheco i wasn't prepared to come here tonight 10 minutes ago i was at my house and i just figured i had to come you all want to make excuses for all of this you've had three months to prepare you'll say that you were prepared for 26 000 students to be going to school on the first day if that's the case none of this would have happened i think the decision of having elementary school kids go at the end after middle or elementary school gold at the beginning was just a huge mistake on your part we have the most amount of our kids are elementary

198kids i don't know why we're talking about hiring bus drivers right now why was this not talked about three months ago y'all got my email last night no one responded i did i've said 20 emails to all of y'all without a response at all and i think that's ridiculous the last thing i want to say is about a mast mr kisner you said earlier today when i was listening at home that you're dealing with cancer and asthma and you said pretty much you're going to take down your mask and we just got to deal with it because you got to breathe well what about our kids can we take out can they take down their masks thank you don't forget to sign in sir hi um my name's true well i got two high schoolers

199that go to colonial forge high school so um i really don't have a lot to say um but my biggest things are is that i know that there was a comment earlier about um that driving our kids to school isn't a choice you know that we or is is a choice that we don't have to do it but um some of us like we're essential personnel so we have to go to work like a lot of us work in the city so we're making long commutes there and back so it's the it's our decision either we're gonna let our kids sit at the bus stop for hours and hope that they get a bus and and go to work or don't go to work or go to work late and take them to school if

200that makes sense so i mean it's a parent sacrifice that i know everybody understands but um the biggest so another thing is that um i don't think there's any clarification or maybe just not for me maybe some people have the clarification is um the tardies i know it was addressed earlier the tardies and classes how the classes are being ran while there's no while most of the kids are still trying to get to school so with my kids being in high school that's what they're that's what they're freaking out about you know and with my daughter being a senior if she's not getting the stuff or she's failing tests you know what's repercussions down the road um and i kind of feel bad for them because i mean they're doing what they're supposed to be

201doing and it's it's it's just frustrating and then i know that it was a dress about food so i know that my kids go out there to wait for the bus and they're waiting forever so they can't just come back home and grab something to eat just to go back to the bus stop whenever they're running late so um hopefully i'll be addressed as well so that the kids um can make sure they're getting fed and um for me one of my biggest concerns is leaving the kids at the bus stop for a long time um i know that there is a problem with the transportation but it's just me as a parent i get i get nervous i get nervous for my kids and they're in high school but then i see a whole

202bunch of elementary kids just standing there by themselves um i didn't know if there was something that maybe could be discussed with the sheriff's department that maybe they could have more people out kind of doing rotations through the neighborhoods you know that maybe kind of give the parents some more ease that you know that at least something's being happy something's being done so that there's some kind of overwatch because really when i leave for work at you know 4 30 in the morning my kids are at the mercy of whatever you know i mean i know that there's a lot of parents like that you know um i don't know it's really only things that i really wanted to address but thank you thank you you signed in good evening i'm maya guy and i

203live in the acquire district it's late and i'll try to make it quick thank you guys for all your hard work i know it's not easy reading the crap that we say about you well not we i'll say it but you know what i'm saying i know i know it's not easy and i know it's frustrating but you know someone's got to do it i think and i appreciate um your posture of you know look we just we screwed this up but this isn't great like i do i love that you know just seeing you guys be candid but i i would love the posture also to be to us parents and i guess i'm saying it because people are watching we get what we pay for and we're getting what we pay for we

204needed to be advocating at the board of supervisors for fully funding the school board and also when the school board does get underfunded 5 million here 10 million here 7 million here about maybe 80 million for the past decade i imagine we could have better facilities better paid staff and more buses buses with acs we could have windows that open in some of the classrooms i mean there's a lot of different things that we have to deal with that we might not have to had we gotten money years ago but also i think it's time you guys start maybe being a little bit more creative and thinking outside the box and get committees of individuals who i know exist who will advocate consistently if you guys lead us and i just i just think that

205there's something there that we can be doing differently than you guys just sitting here talking and talking about policy and it's a little bit confusing but y'all still aren't getting funded right so we could work better if you communicated with us and maybe had a liaison or something y'all all have my number like i'm willing to help too but let's let's figure out how to get us fully funded because i think if we had more money i mean 17 an hour that's like 34 000 a year we're seeing these people are essential that's chump change so we need to do better thank you make sure you sign in thank you all right anybody else who wishes to address the board okay i don't see anybody running forward so all right then i will close a

206citizen comment and we will move on to our board committee reports dr warner thank you madam chair the budget calendar is up for um uh action tonight i think or information i just want to point out a couple of changes we are having the work session on the 17th and then it sounds like we want to have a meeting afterwards to [Music] approve the recommended uh superintendent uh profile so uh could it would 6 30 be an acceptable time to start that on 6 30 the 17th okay so that will be one so we will firm that up on the calendar and the other thing is is that we have called the special meeting for the 21st of september which is also when we plan to meet with the ptos and ptas if it would

207be acceptable to the board i would like to move that to the 23rd which is thursday and that would be available virtually so it wouldn't be something that people would have to attend and if that's acceptable so those would be the only changes to the budget calendar just to reflect changes that we have addressed in the board um are there any any questions about any questions or what was the second change that that's the um pto ptsa meeting you're moving yes yeah september september 23rd so we would be adding a september 23rd we would be moving the meeting with the ptos and ptas from the 21st to the 23rd in order to give them adequate time to express their concerns to us regarding budget matters these the fab will be meeting this this this thursday

208and there are several things on the agenda specifically we will be addressing the bus drivers the training the retention and recruitment because we've known this has been a problem we've been working on it this is something that we have had on the fab agenda several times we've got it on the agenda again the other thing that is on the agenda for this thursday is policy 2105 which is the policy that was referenced about the transfer status for out for non-licensed staff so we will be discussing those things it doesn't solve our immediate problem and for that i think we all feel the same uh anger and and shame because it is on us however the only thing we can do is start looking for solutions and i think that um one of the things that

209that we can do is is try to find ways to be creative recruit our our bus drivers and try to keep the ones that we have we can't afford to lose them especially when it takes us so long to train them so so those things will be addressed um on thursday at the fab um if there are any questions about the calendar i will address them when we uh get to that thank you excellent all right any other um board committee reports all right hearing none board member comments anyone wishing to make board member comments i'm going to actually take volunteers or anyone any comments defer okay dr chase this young um i'm not to defer okay i i just wanted to uh comment on the mitigation strategies i'm not sure that um parents or

210the emails that i've been receiving think that they're clear so one of the examples was given to me or i'm sure you all seen the emails that i forward to y'all as a team was around and i think dr kizna mentioned it was about around um the um the outside bars how they were going to clean them but also um on the inside what we were doing to clean the tables and the chairs and things of that nature because we said they're going to be clean in the classes and in the bathrooms and the halls but some of the parents want to know how it's done and then the other concern that was raised is and i brought it up on several occasions that we need to have a plan a mitigation plan for quarantine

211if we have a breakout in a classroom and [Music] so i just need to know that we have that covered i know virtual is not what we want um but we have we need to have a plan we talked about you know transportation and buses and having a b plan and a c plan but i would like to know that we have a backup plan if uh the delta variants comes to us i didn't intend on talking about the virus but you know you cannot be oblivious of watching tv or the news and know that that's what's on so we just need to have a plan because our numbers are not great here um so and the other thing i mentioned was the the masks as i walk some of the you watch some of

212the kids and um the mask is sliding down and they have all kinds of different masks and hampton oaks had such cute little masks for the little kids that fit nicely and they were kind of light and i was wondering if we could invest in that for all the schools to have that for the elementary school because they fit nicely just to have those and they will have a change i mean they could still you know go back home with their own mask but it would be nice if they have those masks all of them look the same they're all light and they would visibly you could talk very light through it so i think that would be something that we need to look at and i know um like i said earlier i'm very

213sorry to all the parents um that had to go through you know the anxiety yesterday and today i hope it gets better we take responsibility we're working hard thinking outside the box i'm one of those that think outside the box so the community is reaching out to us about writing our kids or you know carpooling or whatever ideas they have i don't know if it's time for committee or not but um i second that to work on something we could work together i'm always willing um to work with the community so that's all i had thank you is randall um i just wanted to say uh i had a disturbing thing that i learned today that happened to a teacher that was working the car rider line where a parent was obviously very frustrated and

214called the teacher a fat cow as she drew and other things as she drove away and i just want to remind our parents as frustrated as you are please directed that frustration at us and not our drivers not our teachers and not our administrators they're really doing the best they can that it's hot outside they are staying outside they're with the kids they are with they're there they're putting in the hours they're putting in the work but please do not address poorly kids are listening kids are watching and that isn't something that we want like i said it's a it's a tough start this year i feel terrible for how kids are feeling how parents are feeling how staff are feeling you know mr baldwin has the weight of an enti as a new division

215employee has the weight of our division on his shoulders and late nights early mornings and i'm sure every dream is going through in his mind everything that he still could do better and is trying to do better so i just want to remind you the kids are watching [Music] and i really really i just adored walking into the classrooms and seeing full classes of kids and their morning meetings and inviting us in to come and participate don't you want to be in our morning meeting it was just adorable i loved it so welcome back really welcome back everybody thank you miss lee i'm gonna limit my comments because it's late but i i do want to um to note that it was uh brought to my attention today that um our superintendent had been invited

216to a board of supervisors meeting or uh to discuss the critical race theory and he's not going to be available which i understand perfectly but i was advised and that the reason that we're not sending a designee to that meeting and that was a supervisor's meeting next week was because the chair and vice chair had said that the school board had to be briefed first and that would take place on august 24th so my my question is since this invitation had been rendered earlier this summer apparently the date has changed why would we not accommodate a request from the the supervisors and you know schedule schedule briefing for us in advance and and be able to send a designee there i mean we we talk a lot about improving the relationships and reaching out and

217you know they're canceling this or we're canceling that or or whatever but it's it seems that that's something that we need to work on and also as a board member it's unfortunate that you know i would hear about this from you know someone on the board of supervisors as opposed to from my own board so i know we've got so many problems right now but but you know this to me this is this is important that we number one communicate among ourselves and two you know reach out you know to try to work with the supervisors this this was an opportunity and you know it may be an opportunity missed i don't know what the briefing is going to be for us but i think everybody here knows i'm usually send me the memo i'd

218rather have the memo than have a briefing the transportation update was the first time i've ever asked for a briefing you know rather than a memo so i i just want to note my frustration with that in terms of communicating and i i don't know if it's true or not but that's what is being put forth that our chair and vice chair you know communicated this to the you know to the county so if that's not true then that that could be set forth but it but if that's not true then why would we not send someone to respond to that invitation any other board comments okay i'm sorry i know i said i was going to defer but i do want to send a shout out to i know several principals have made adjustments

219because of the transportation problems mr underhill at shirley heim made sure to communicate parent with parents in real time that buses were delayed students were still at school he had activities planned for them today so if buses were late he was already set for him i know at widewater elementary school miss bingham had parents were allowed to drop their students off a little bit earlier so i know that many of our administrators are working very hard to to help us deal with these these problems and we are working to try to get them done but i want to shout i want to give a thank you to those administrators who have adjusted to make make sure that communication is going on and to try to help us get through this early stage excellent all right

220i will make some of my comments first um and then i'll address the issue ms healey has raised um first i would like to say um again a shout out to everybody but most of you know how i feel about that and but i think the one thing we can never get away from i'm going to be the same person i say every week about growth we are growing and we have no support to get new buildings we neighborhood schools would certainly help us a lot with busing because we could get a little closer my students that live out in hartwood as i said you've got a long walk to get to mountain view or to colonial forge high school even when a long time ago when you used to take your bike and go

221millions of miles this would still be a pretty far far piece we need to work on neighborhood schools that will help us on many many levels that also takes us to class size we haven't gotten there yet but we will and we're going to be close we're going to be in tight quarters we're going to have large classrooms we're going to have them in our main classes and we're going to have them and we may not be able to offer other classes i know we do everything we can but sometimes yes there are things we can learn from covid and we can do some things virtually but we are large school district and we are growing so with that i just would like to say please don't lose sight in the midst of all of

222this that part of our issue is we are growing we've heard many people saying well what were you doing about the bus drivers we asked at every meeting if you go back to the may 11th meeting you will hear what they were doing and that the state didn't particularly help us because they didn't open dmv to allow us to train drivers mr sedath at that time said usually at that time of year he was in the midst of training about 20 and he had trained four because he couldn't get into dmv so again i raised that with my state i don't remember it being in the new budget request that they opened dmv for us to get bus drivers i will keep reiterating but any of any additional help would be certainly appreciated also another

223unfunded mandate from the um that came down to us on thursday afternoon is uh the contact tracing it's going to be full contact tracing and that has been now put onto our nurses i can tell you this board has fought tirelessly to have a registered nurse in every building i can tell you it's not for them to sit there and paint the walls they have many kids with lots of issues and they need to be available not on the phone i would like to compliment dr kisner because unfortunately he received my phone call when i talked to my nurses i couldn't even speak i was so angry it's probably one of the times that and i will say he and the staff are responsive to say this is coveted money we will try and we

224will hire contact tracers because our nurses cannot have the added duty to be there i i worked part-time in special ed i won't even go there let's just say our nurses are there for a reason um so i would like to thank the staff for fielding my hysterical i will i will i will own it call because at least i know at one of my elementary schools that nurse was on the playground and saved a child's life that's where they need to be not that being on the phone is important but this is not and that is an unfunded mandate my biggest fear is this will open up the um oh let's see what else school nurses can do for us that is my bigger long-term fear so for my colleagues i will not be

225here after january 1st that is my fear is now we have this great open way for our nurses that is not what they need to be doing so sorry that was my big soapbox because poor dr kuzner had to get that phone call um and i do thank you for reacting to um and for all the staff to help us accomplish that um with regard to the invitation for dr kisner he has been asked i believe several times and canceled from the board of supervisors meeting to come and speak on the topic of critical race theory when it was approached to um ms randall and myself we were talking about it with dr kisner i know he's unable to make that particular meeting in the past our board has usually been briefed on any large

226topics that have gone to the board of supervisors we have tried to always have the information to us first miss randall and i felt that we were going to bring that on to the 24th agenda as tonight's agenda did not seem like well we were hoping it was a quick meeting but it has not that we would be briefing our board or having something from um staff on that topic to clarify any um misunderstandings or um ask and allow to have questions on the august 24th um the board of supervisors has asked that he come on the 17th we felt that that we should delay until our board had had that time so in full disclosure that was the discussion that we had it was not being hidden from anybody but that has been our

227usual procedure so i know that dr kisner is not available that evening we would have to task another staff member to attend any of the that meeting and we have a lot on our plate but um so i will certainly defer to the board of what decision you all would make be made um we felt that it was in the protection of not only just dr kizner and our staff but also just making sure that the board felt informed on that particular topic that was the thinking whether correct or not that was the thinking at the time and ms randall if i misstated please let me know no i don't think you've misstated um it was the intention for him to deliver a conversation with us at the last board meeting and and he wanted

228to be the one to do it it was a request that i had asked him to do and so i feel still it's our business from our employee first and then i have no problem with the board of supervisors if they would like to be invited they could come or they could watch and if they feel like they still have comments or questions i don't mind um you know i don't mind accommodating that after we have our briefing for our public first thoughts i don't that's it oh is that it all right is everyone our majority comfortable with that we will make that invitation available and and if at a future date so yes ma'am are you saying that we are not going to at some point in the future uh agree to an invitation

229from the supervisors to have our superintendent or designee go to a meeting and because that that's what i mean it's one thing of course we don't even have to invite them to watch you know it's a free free show that they're for whoever i think my concern was more hearing this from the other board not knowing anything about it when traditionally i mean i respect you know our chair and vice chair but traditionally when some you know potentially um i'll just say significant issue comes before the chair who you know that that there is some informal uh contact with the board members or gathering of a consensus so i didn't know if maybe i was just left off the list but it sounds like there was no list so um i i would just it

230was just actually an ask that i had to i asked him if he would make the comment during his superintendent comment if he could clarify things before because i've seen in other boards where things have kind of escalated and i just said could you address it for our public where stafford is and that's how the conversation i just said can you do it under comments but he wasn't here so that's why he got delayed okay well i it's it's just i you know there's a lot of communication issues this is just one that i would see is is another potential one and this this is among us and you know you're the chair and you can communicate but it's nice if if i know what the communications are going forward that if someone is speaking

231for the for the board so that you know that that's one and two i have heard if i've heard it once i've heard it a hundred times that we need to have a better relationship with the board and a lot of times it's it's finger-pointing you know they're canceling this we're not doing that back and forth back and forth and when we have an opportunity to have those communications you know i would encourage us to take to take advantage of them generally so i'm just gonna leave it at that but i i do think it's important that that we know you know as board members what is being communicated on on behalf of the board and and hear it from our chair or if you want to delegate to the vice chair rather than hear

232it from our counterparts across the street comment sure i don't even know where to start with this but i will just make it short um i'm not sure what we're talking about here right you were out of the room yeah that's fine i'm out of the room but what i'm saying is not because i'm out of the room i don't know what we're talking about but i'm not sure why we have in this discussion it is not a significant issue like you mentioned it it we should not do political business as a board when i heard this comment today um i'm appalled that we're taking time to sit here and discuss this i am not going to discuss something that we're not doing in a in a school system and wanting to address it in

233the board i don't understand this why did why is it even coming up and why are we even like what is this back and forth i mean is there money they're trying to give us to to learn about it i i i can't answer that my my question is more of an internal communication on on the board well even even that if i could just finish miss healey because i i didn't interrupt you asked a question i'm sorry i tried to answer so all i'm saying is that when you addressed it to me today i i was just concerned that it feels like i hear things after the fact after it happened and and so when when you come to me i don't want it to be after the fact i want it to be

234before it even occurs if we're planning on doing something because this is a board we're aboard together we're making decisions and policies together not after the fact just one final comment um i know that dr kisser has been asked several times and has been canceled at the board of supervisors for him to come i would prefer all superintendents all of us always operate differently um that invitations from the board of supervisors would come to the board in some manner we have had lots of covid has not helped with communication in general even though everybody says we have phones we are all trying to maneuver and provide the best information at all times i also would just take note of the particular request for the timing on the second week of well the second week of

235school i also um believe part of the job of um the leadership is to protect our staff's time at a critical juncture when other things are going on that's all i'm going to say on that matter dr kisner maybe because i'm a grandfather i feel like i could give some grandfather advice okay and maybe because i only have 21 more days i feel more bold to say it i agree that the school board board of supervisor relationship can improve that's probably true in every community across this country it's not unique stafford you have a structure called this three-on-three that really needs some some rethinking okay because you by me going and not going is not going to improve the relationship it's just not just so you know in july i was planning to go they

236cancelled my presentation just so you know it's not like i've been avoiding this i was planning to go it was scheduled they cancelled they had some other business they had to deal with but i'm just suggesting to you that i'm a big believer that the only behavior we could change is our own and i would just ask you to think about that but more importantly i know transportation we've discussed it enough but the last two days i've been in a lot of classrooms like some of you and watching the children with the adults from the custodians to the secretaries to the bus drivers cafeterian teachers have been very powerful and for some kids they have not been in school since march of uh i'm getting all the years march of 20. it's been a long

237time and yesterday uh i don't know if you follow me on on twitter if you don't you should i'm trying to get up to four thousand people i want four million away from britney spears or not for the uh taylor swift but um my point is like my pictures were kids hugging teachers okay parents hugging teachers and people just hugging each other so it was very beautiful what i provided you um is the enrolled students okay not the attendance i will talk about it this is yesterday okay so what i want to show you and i love those somewhere in the room right thank you hi lionel it just shows you how good he is but you see the enrolled students and the projected students and then you see the percentage okay and the bottom

238line is that you know give or take two or three percentage points our enrolled and projected is is pretty strong and if you just look at the aggregate um you see again kindergarten i can tell you right now in the last a day or two we've registered more children this is uh this will be this is probably already but you get an idea i do want to let you know though the attendance so these are the kids that actually showed up okay so yesterday this is yesterday i don't have today so yesterday we had 28 thousand this is not including preschool we had twenty eight thousand five hundred twenty six k twelve students now why that is significant we rebounded completely from covert okay remember there's a lot of conversation kids are leaving they'll never

239come back well some of those kids may not have come back but a lot of other kids came and joined us so there are 288 more students in 10 i'm using 2019. yes last year would not be you know there's 288 more students attendance for the first day of school this year than back in 2019 so not only did we rebound from covid we actually exceed now i will just say a little footnote for many i think all of you notice the first 10 days of school if children don't show up they get dropped from the roles that's that's you know state law so there could be a kid that moved to prince william to idaho to paducah kentucky who knows and if they didn't ask for their records they're still on our rolls at

240the same time there could be kids that are moving in okay we are as you will probably have figured out we might be the earliest school that opened up in this region so there might be we know there's children registering we got that ferry farm parent last week yesterday a kindergarten child and i know from talking gum winding creek registered like five or six so i just know there's more kids but my point really being is even if no one ever showed up we already are at the pre-covert levels and we're actually exceeded at so um again september 30th is the trigger date you have to give it a couple weeks to get that data clean the state kind of verifies it so at your end of october your your second october meeting we will

241present you um they will present you um you know a real attendance an average daily membership and all all that but anyway i think that's um interesting i also want to let you know that we have about so these kids that i'm sharing with you are in the enrollment we're still trying to verify if they're in the attendance or not okay but we have 706 students it breaks down to about 176 elementary students and 530 middle and high school students that parents have chosen virtual for their child and that's the elementary children you know k-12 inc the middle and high school children are virtual virginia i will tell you and i'm not re-litigating this when you made the decision to go mandatory mask the the uh the trend of people asking to go on virtual

242stopped okay uh we we at this point not really even sure if we need our own virtual academies um i know jan strike's not here but we're looking at different vendors we would prefer not to do it ourselves because that would ask a teacher to do a planning period we'll pay them of course but still they need they need to plan they need to rest uh but that's how we would do it okay so i'm not saying it's not going to happen but i'm saying right now we're not playing we we don't we don't have the um we we feel like we're covered we could cover through the two virtual vendors that we're using and k12 inc although we've been saying it's elementary just by the name it goes up to the 12th grade okay

243but i don't want to give you an impression i will let you know in two weeks if we're gonna if we do have children that are going to be taught um by our staff for a virtual um experience so because of time i'll just end there and i always invite you to visit the schools um and and i think again it's it's a good place to be um maybe my other last grandfather advice and some of you do it all the time and all of you do it at least a few times i would recommend for board comments let's focus on something positive before we get into what some of the concerns are because if you just watched the staff at school board meetings the last few months you would think nothing well is going

244on and we got a lot of great things going on and um so i think we could model that behavior by just pick pick something that you're proud of give somebody a shout out anyway i offer you that my grandson jordan he will be tired of me eventually when i keep giving him uh this advice when he when i know he could actually listen but anyway thank you guys now let's let's let's try and keep going at this point all right is there a motion for the consent items motion to approve the consent item second been moved in second in any discussion hearing none all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed motion carries unanimously um next one is our action item is um two action items but first one um dr warner

245um thank you i'd like a motion to approve to adopt the fy 23 budget development calendar with um by setting the school board work session time for august 17th at 6 30 pm and by adding the pta pto meeting with the school board and superintendent to discuss budget considerations for september 23rd right it's been seconded i'll let ms hall um sort out who it was um any further discussion on that item yes yeah i'm not quite sure why i maybe i missed it why we're moving from the 21st to the 23rd because we already have the meeting on the special school board meeting uh we have a sp oh for the other okay and then um what are the times for the joint meetings with the board of supervisors um chris isn't here uh um

246i i just ask that we get told what the times are at least with regard to the yeah for those meetings so we can put them on our calendar and we actually know when when we need to be around for those meetings so i i certainly the ones that are after january could wait till january but the one that's in is it october october yeah i'd like to know what time madam chair i was told by the board of supervisors clerk a few weeks ago that the one in october on the 19th is at 5 15 it will be a dinner meeting terrific thank you so much thank you and i'll get the other start times as well for you thank you that edition all right all those in favor please say aye aye any

247opposed motion carries unanimously all right who will be the delegates at the vsva annual convention or can we pick somebody and i'll volunteer all right if it's all right sure was anybody really volunteers are good all right i'll be here alternate all right so thank you all right does anyone want to make a motion please move to a point dr warner for the delegate to the vsba annual convention 20 2021 and uh miss randall as her alternate is there a second second all right all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed motion carries unanimously all right information item first one 12.01 this is regarding for contracts for food milk bread and non-grocery items using budgeted fy nutrition funds any questions i'm i'm hearing from various folks and i don't know you know you

248hear things you don't necessarily know if they're they're accurate but that children are receiving you know food and then just throwing away because they don't really want it and it's not very tasty so i don't know i just want to make sure we aren't purchasing a lot of food that our students aren't actually eating since it's so late we can make sure that we have appropriate staff and please know i don't want staff to feel bad that it they know that that's fine that's why i can't make sure we have that covered all right 12.02 is about the replacement of two chillers at uh parkridge elementary school i'm going to look probably mr anderson or someone if there are any questions um it's not a question is well yeah it is a question i wanted

249to know was this one that we talked about that you wanted it early for this to put it in in the summer i mean we're here already in fall like what was the time period for this um chillers get changed in the winter because that's when they're not used okay so so it's no rush for that okay i'm sure can i make a call yes i just wanted to make one comment that i thought was kind of interesting was that this assessment that this parkridge chiller needed to be replaced was in 2007 and it's now 2021. so i'm very appreciative of mr anderson's ability to make some magic happen on the 3r list but i just was kind of thrown back a little bit that the assessment was in 2007 the work is 21. that's

250not good and it's only for part of what the assessment requested can i ask do we know what kind of warranty there is on this chiller that we're putting in two two chillers that we're putting in i know it's going to be a good warranty and i don't have that information in my hand could we could we get that next time because i'm i'm hearing from some constituents that are concerned that we do work there's a warranty but then the company is no longer around because we went with the lowest bidder and and so what's going on with that so i'd just like to know what the warranty is okay i'll let you know all right 12.03 uh this is our capital improvement crew excuse me program and the three are infrastructure come on down

251good evening uh chairperson hazard name of the school board dr kisner okay so this evening's presentation there we go the purpose of tonight's presentation is for me to update you on what's new in the cip landscape so in terms of some of the new things that we have going on firstly we have two new large capital projects on the proposed large capital projects list secondly with regard to the three r projects there have been three projects added we have a phased approach going for drew hartwood and gary melchers and additionally there's been a change in the county's assumptions and their inflation factor and i'll talk a little bit about that so due to increased prices for labor and construction materials as well as a slow supply chain the county had to adjust their inflation factors

252and what we have in this slide is the inflation rate for 2022 fiscal year 2022 and fiscal year 2023 what i want to do is just sort of point out one of the obvious outliers on this slide so if you were to look at project inflation for fy 22 in gray you see that it's 4.5 percent where it says years affected for the first three years and then 3 for the last 7 years conversely if you look down at the same information for the update we see that it's increased to 12 so that's really the the and that's only for the first year but then three and a half percent for the last nine years so that's one of sort of the big outliers in in their assumptions and their changes is to sort of

253compensate for the drastic changes in prices that was what was done in this year's assumptions and you know if you're interested in seeing the others this information is available for you to see where the differences are and of course it's relevant to us because as these inflation factors change it changes the cost of projects in our cip as well as in our 3r project list so that's sort of the relevance of this information so speaking to that before i get to this slide i also want to mention with regard to the assumptions and the inflation factors they can change annually depe based on current economic conditions so if economic conditions improve supply chain gets better next year the the inflation factors and so forth can adjust all right so this slide we're talking about the

254proposed large capital projects list planning staff worked with the fabc on july 22nd to develop this list just to point out a couple of interesting facts the first six projects on this list are identical to the school board's approved large capital project list last year no change in the priority order of the first six projects what's new is elementary school 19 and high school number seven they've been added to the list and uh in the county's fy 2022 cip they recognize of course our need for more seats and they have provided at least in that cip some funding for this school and at least recognize the need for these two schools and so we agree that yes we need these schools and this is the order on the list what i'd like to get from

255you is your feedback if you have any questions or concerns on the priority of any of these ranked projects on the list or any other questions related to these large capital projects i do go ahead so i'm not gonna say that i recognize that there's a change in ranking so these ranking and correct me if i'm wrong these are not the ranking as to what what goes first or what goes second is that what this ranking is uh the dates sort of align that way yes so in terms of priority last year we said the high school was first and that's true this year and so so what happened to what happened to heartwood renovation because i recall that because ferry farm was a renovation hartwood was going to be a renovation now we're talking

256about land and making sure that the land is large enough to put an elementary school on it and ember mill is busting at the seams and there needs to be a school in the north and i'm not sure if this elementary school 18 is the school that's supposed to be in embry mill versus are we now went from renovation to hartwood to a new school in hartwood i'm kind of if you could explain that to me a little bit like where are i mean i'm not saying there's anything on here that says this is the location but what's the intent here okay so um the intent well let me just back up so with heartwood i believe last year the hartwood project was removed from the large capital project list and put on the 3r

257list so that explains why hartwood is not included here and then your next question was related to so this elementary school yes ma'am 18. do we have a location for it it was just down here saying that you know the school in 2020 that hasn't been destroyed okay okay and then drew wasn't drew higher up i know we debated drew for a while here i know the year is august 2026 are we saying then that's the reason i'm asking about the ranking is ranking three it's b behind elementary school 18 or are we gonna try to get things done in the renovation prior to um in terms of the ranking i believe last year this is the same order if you look at the requested opening date the elementary andrew are uh were were asked

258to be open by august 2026. so um john if you want to help me with the true renovation is there have there been expedited yes we have the comprehensive plan being produced now that takes some time we've been working on that and we have meetings with the principals of hartwood andrew coming up to discuss the preliminary recommendations so right now we have three r projects that we are adding for drew and we're keeping this large cap we're working with the consultant to try to get the best estimates we can for this report okay this is going to be ongoing and we'll also we're updating this request every year and sometimes we're sort of in the middle of it like we are right now because we've just funded this comprehensive study for drew and hartwood also

259there are three art projects being added for heartwood and you'll see more about that on august 24th we'll have more information about the 3r list okay thank you so much gentlemen i appreciate that information very helpful i'm just curious about this um elementary school 19 being in 2031. does that say we're not going to be over 100 capacity in our middle school projections before 2031. okay you've really confused me a little bit with that question so you said the elementary school 19 that's slated for august 2031 right then you said something about the middle school no no the i didn't mean to say something about middle school i'm sorry it is late my question is the if we generally put the year down there for the requested opening date based on the enrollment projections yes

260and i i know we've got to be very close now for enrollment does anybody have our numbers for enrollment current this year's enrollment elementary percentage what i can well what i can communicate with you is in terms of the opening date it was tied to for elementary school the program capacity exceeding 100 percent and then for the middle and high school it was the design capacity with the exception of high school number six it's going to exceed its 100 percent in 2023 but that school isn't slated to open until august 2025 but all the other projects are based on a hundred percent capacity and again it varies whether it's program or design okay well then that explains it for whatever reason i would have thought we would exceed 100 capacity in elementary schools before to

261you know after elementary school 18 is built so that's good so once we build elementary school 18 we're projecting we've got five more years before we get to 100 capacity yes okay that's that's good news i'll be surprised but right and this is based on i won't be sitting here i can assure you of that well well i think you understand that this is your priorities it may not align with the priorities of the board of supervisors so you may have august 2026 for the 18th elementary school i think they have another date in mind so that's part of the conversation you you guys have to really uh have soon because there's a big difference between when you want it and when they feel like it's needs to be built and as we used before

262and i i i think that's very nice of you to put school board requested opening date i truly think we have to have the column of the need date this is the date it goes to 100 capacity and that if it's 2023 for high school we need to show it i'm sorry we just we got to be honest with our figures too i get that we can't open it in two years i completely understand that and we can put that as the requested but to what we're saying if when we get our september 30 figures and high school um i mean elementary 18 or pick any project here we look at that run the numbers and say well we think this is the realistic date and i'm saying that in quotation marks but we need

263the need-by-date in there i i truly liked when we did it that way because it also proved it showed to us when because the first question we're always asked is we'll prove it okay on our chart on this date we get to 100 capacity in 2024 or whatever the date is i would just suggest that we continue that or at least have something that shows that tracks with where we're coming up with the figures or the the requested date i think it's important for us to do it and to be able to prove why we're saying it and i will be interested as we go forward and see what our september 30 number ends up being yeah dr chase so i don't know if we're open to general questions yet yeah so um the you

264know with this uh change to the inflation level then all of the projects become more expensive and the supervisors when we've gone over to visit them they have sort of said this is our um you know this is how much debt capacity we have and so this is what we can fund each year and we can't go over that debt capacity or we will no longer maintain our aaa aaa bond rating so what are the ramifications of this increase in um i mean have you all heard from anything from from staff on the other side of the street about are we not going to be able to fund these projects as we currently have them because there will not be the debt capacity to do that um that process is sort of underway now and

265in your cip calendar i believe and it'll actually it's my next slide so if i can just jump for a second so the trc will review the proposed cip project and i it's my guess at that time the they'll start to begin the process of figuring out what we can afford uh definitely in october by that probably that october 19th meeting we'll start to hear more feedback at this point we've been provided these inflation rates and have been asked to update our numbers based on that and so that's where we are now but um that will we'll find out that information you're asking in a little bit i think it's important for the public to pay attention to that because we could find ourselves in a situation where we're being told that we can't get

266these projects done because there aren't the funds right and one thing i would like to point out um for us it works out that we don't have a large capital project next year fiscal year 2023 because remember that 12 in the first year that's only the first year so if you look at the difference it goes from three percent to three and a half percent when a lot of our projects are coming on so it really only went up about a half a percentage point so what you're telling me is this 150 million uh for the high school is only if it if it were opening in 2023 no no okay no what i'm saying is that it was originally 141 but with the inflation and this is numbers we've we've received that i've received

267this is going to be the adjusted price 250. 150 and that's not just inflation but the other costs of if i just flip back here in terms of project inflation project management all these other factors the numbers have adjusted thank you mr mr white i recall the trc um having the trc having a specific statistics or formula that they were using when they're calculating these things and we did require i know i did request that um we pair it where it's equal what we're looking at and how we're calculating versus how they're doing it that we're seeing the same thing have we done that and i know that you're part of that right so are is there calculations still different than ours that's my question are we comparing apples and apples when we yes i

268think you're speaking about the criteria that's used yes so um our criteria is a little bit different and our process is a little bit different because we're really working more internally with our operations and maintenance group we're looking at facilities condition assessments we're looking at capacity for schools so their criteria on the trc and i'm on that and lionel participates right in these as well are really more focused on broad county projects and i think they still run into this limit which is the biggest issue yeah and it's the issue they have for the roads it's the issue we have for the schools because when you run into the limit then at least the last year they were saying we couldn't build these projects fast enough and that's a real problem so i think the

269priorities are important but really this limit they're running into is is causing delays on a lot of really important projects including the schools that we need to build soon yeah because i thought that when we went over there to give them the presentation mr white gave you gave them the presentation so that they could better understand how we're looking and how we're getting to our criteria and our calculations that didn't change their um it doesn't really change their criteria and our projects are mixed in with the county projects so um that criteria is really meant for all types of county projects whereas we're using our criteria to rank only school projects and our criteria is very clear um we're looking like at capacity which is obviously a big concern for the schools and for the

270county so maybe i'm not being clear i think i understand okay are you talking are you referring to when we're talking about program capacity and design capacity and so therefore when when they're saying no you do need this or you don't need that they're looking at their criteria versus we're looking at it a different way right the presentations and all the stuff that you right talk to them did not change their perception to say okay when we are talking about the school's building we have to go along with how they're looking at it with their criteria not their own right we're working with them very closely we've so in their ear now they're aware that we're using uh program capacity for elementary school okay and in a draft document that i saw i did notice

271a reference to program capacity and the comprehensive plan in a draft version so it may be that they are accepting willing to accept that okay we'll find out more okay good to know thank you um correct me if i'm wrong didn't they love like 25 million off of our high school is but did they put it back or is that just uh to the best of my knowledge that has not been added back no okay so this 150 million is what we expected to cost but the county expects it to be 25 million less well what that's going to make sure this is our request this is our request based on the based on the inflation right and based on our what we're you know our our anticipated need right but the county's value for

272that construction project is less correct what they have they've ranked it at yes i believe the last number was 125 million and our number was 141 million plus additional off-site costs of 12 million right and so that still has to be worked out thank you all right any other questions at this time all right hearing none um let's see the um next one is regarding the head start policy council um i know this doesn't have to come up till next time but um just madam chair i have spoken to um miss massey in the head start and i would like to stay on for another year if that's not you can hold that until the next one um but if anybody um put on the consent miss healy i thought you were interested i wouldn't

273want to take it from dr warren now i sort of understand what i'm doing so i figure i'm half trained all right the next one is going to be for the authorization for any newly elected board members to attend the vsba we can deal with that next time um other than that we are adjourned and i will see you all next tuesday