Stafford School Board Meeting 9/22/2020

001tom nicholls chief academic officer for high schools and school safety scott kisner superintendent awesome all right well thank you all for um coming this evening the next um part is we have um an approval for the agenda is there a motion motion to approve second been moved and seconded any discussion hearing none all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed motion carries unanimously for this session item 3.01 discussion regarding the school resource officer sro program and i believe just discussing the random understanding and any suggestions or any comments that we want to have this may not be the only meeting that we end up having but it's um certainly a discussion so um vector because is there anything from staff that you all have or want to report on i just want to

002double check before we get started so uh microphone microphone turn it on oh the main okay um so uh briefly i had a conversation with dr nichols and and we have put some things together but felt that in fairness to the sheriff's department they should have a chance to look at it um before introduced at a meeting but also we very much want to get feedback from uh the school board um so uh that mou that we worked on is basically the mou that you have in front of you with some comments so um and then i think our next step would be um after the board gives us some thought some direction is to uh dr nichols and mr martin sit down with your you and your representatives and then work on an mlu

003and then bring it back to the board for uh action okay that that sounds great um if you don't mind i'm gonna um go to the board members first but i also wanted to give the sheriff um an opportunity do you have any comments too since we have our main people here if you have any comments sheriff decatur yes ma'am i just wanted to um [Music] express our commitment to the schools and and making sure that we do our very best with our sros and our overall department and our commitment to the community to make sure we're doing our best to be good partners and collaborate together because we want to make sure that we're doing our best to keep the school safe a safe place that is a conducive environment for learning and safe

004and i think it's very important that you know that we're with you and we're willing to work together to do our very best for our community and we certainly appreciate the support so what i thought i would do is i would allow board members if you have any specific parts of the mou or general questions either one um to go either way so ms young would you like to start i said i saw that i saw the eyeball so i got it it's rolling i had something in mind yes a good afternoon everyone thank you so much for coming and entertaining us um today and looking reviewing the mou um i just wanted to read this part first because i thought it was very very important in miu where it says all responses right under

005preamble primable parameter yeah okay all responses to school misconduct should be reasonable consistent and fair with appropriate consideration of mitigation factors and of the nature and severity of the incident students should receive appropriate redirection and support from in-school and community resources prior to the consideration of suspension expulsion involvement with the law enforcement or referral to the court and that was very timely i was happy to see that there and i went through the mou so i do have some comments i have um some inquiry so i don't know if you want me to do just one or um just two okay sure so the one um most important one and i'm probably you probably know the answer to this already um but we had a conversation in the past and i know um um miss

006yeah hollaback will remember that we discussed um you know consent um from uh a parent if the child is under 18. and um i wanted to ensure that that was in in the mou two if the child was special needs and under 21 i wanted um that to be in there because one of the important things that i found talking to community leaders and to parents is that if their child is autistic or if their child is not well mental that and they're they're 20 or 21 they appear to be man strong and not following orders if they're stopped so i just wanted to make sure that perhaps in the system somewhere that if the sros know that some of these kids that are 18 or 19 or 20 that they put a note somewhere

007in the system that says this child is you know autistic or whatever so that when they encounter them because they go to work they work in our community they're part of our community that if you um run into them that you would know okay yeah this is albert albert is autistic you know uh he probably needs to go to um whatever the name is over mary washington um so that is something else that i was looking at that's two i have more but so um there's healy madam chairman i have a question are we addressing the mou or i'm not sure if miss young is talking about issues outside the mou because that's what i thought the purpose of this session was this part of the mru like i would like that in the miu

008that if a child is under 18. no the the part about if someone stopped outside i i didn't didn't know we were going to be discussing things outside of this it was just an example miss healy that's something it's it's example why it will be needed in the mou to say if a child is under 18 or if a child is under 21 parent consent but also if they could put something in the system um if they're dealing with the child if if something could be in the system or in the miu that says that there is a connection with you know a child being under 18 or under 21 that if the child is special needs that we could put some kind of note somewhere so i don't know we could add that in

009the miu i'm just trying to see what the focus of this discussion is here because i i think we've asked the the law enforcement officials to come to discuss the mou i'm not prepared to discuss anything outside here because actually i don't think it's within my purview i mean as a school board member you know i'm responsible for issues in the school not you know outside in the community so i i just i don't know what message we're going to be sending here i think what i would summarize and as young say if i'm wrong is sort of developing with between the schools and looking at issues with once the age of 18 is met or 21 because we do have older students in our in our schools of are there special um things we

010should be examining in our that's how i would kind of summarize that i don't know the answers to that but if we're kind of posing questions on the 18 to 21 since we do have those older students is there something special even if it's not always in the mou but in our approach that we want to be united but if i have misstated that that's good um and if there's not then denture is not but these are my comments my observations or changes that i think interpretation the mou here and these other comments are you know on the side so to speak comments about if someone's stopped out okay publicly or you mentioned it said okay okay we're good okay um miss holler back and then i'll switch over to the side okay um chris

011isn't here is he no um sheriff decatur maybe you can answer this for me the um we had this conversation once before about funding and there's some discussion down in richmond about cutting funding overall when you guys are basically implementing our sro program here is that fully funded by the county or does the state give a contribution to that as well so all the positions for the schools in in our juvenile services unit or for in the sheriff's office or fund it through the sheriff's office we have received grants before for positions but that the last time we received a grant which is over was back when newtown connecticut happened several years ago we received state funding for um about a half a dozen grants at that time but that's over so all of it

012comes through out of our budget okay and the reason i'm asking is i thought maybe if there was some you know connection between the state and the sro program that we have here that if they had any power at all to say okay we're going to cut funds that we have a plan b that we can put in here like if the state cuts our funding for the sro program what's our plan b to keep you guys up and running in the school system um and if as long as i don't have to worry about that then i won't have to address it in here yeah and again if it if it allays any concerns we're fully committed to to serve in our schools and to continue no question in my mind about that i'm

013more concerned about what richmond has in mind for for our sro program across the state yes ma'am yeah so thanks all right anyone else with um some questions dr chase want to start dr warner so um just reading about the um interrogation investigation of students um and the investigation and questioning i think it's on page seven and it talks about how the student will be informed generally of the purpose of the investigation warned against self-incrimination and development the appropriate manner and given an opportunity to present informally his or her knowledge of the facts so um just out of curiosity do we record these so that there's a record that the student was actually informed of their rights and given the opportunity to not incriminate themselves so any any time we're conducting an investigation where um

014it requires uh someone's rights to be read which would be that you're being detained and questioned those are the two factors involved where it requires miranda to be read we we keep a record of that in the report that that we record as we do the investigation and then there's also um mandates that we follow of course there's updated laws that were just passed where it requires before we question juveniles uh we have to to contact the parents or guardian um prior to that unless and there are exceptions like um if if someone's life limb or property is uh if under an extreme situation where there's extra circumstances and you know then that's an exception to that but we have to reach out contact the guardian or parent yeah i saw that at the start

015of it said that that all um that that in a i can't remember the exact wording but that every effort would be made to contact the guardian and if possible to have the guardian there but i was just wondering whether there is a uh audio record or a video record of this so that that there can't be any question that the child was was given their rights and of course miranda writes are they read in a way that the child understands and and hopefully you guys are doing that but i'm just asking the question because i i don't know so yes man that's correct can i touch on that it's just kind of a follow-up question to that real quick um so i guess my question is if there's a student who's 18 years old

016and is being questioned by the principal trying to get to the bottom of what's happening and uh the student is has been kind of taught you tell the truth the whole truth nothing but the truth um and an sro is sitting in the office and listening to this confession um and is is documenting everything that this 18 year old is saying and um hasn't been read as miranda rights and that testimony that he just gave in front of the sro now becomes part of of his uh record even though he's not been arrested yet and then finally when he is arrested it's it's included in into the into the jacket as they say um for his arrest so technically based on what you just said if the parent wasn't notified and the um the student

017wasn't read as miranda rights and whatever he used whatever he said was used against him in court how do how does that happen and is that legal and is there a way that we can address that so if it's not legal that it doesn't happen again so if a child is in custody under law under the law enforcement we're required if they're being interviewed um or questioned about a crime and they're in custody we're required to read the miranda um with the school administrator um it's almost for for them to question a child it's almost considered like reasonable suspicion where for us it's a higher higher level so what that when the kids being interviewed by the principal that information is not what we use for prosecution i mean if if we're going to use

018any information that's been given by the child if he's in custody of the police um and then we're required to read miranda if he's in custody in question now if he's not you know we can ask questions but before we do that we're required to reach out to a parent and then there's exceptions as i mentioned earlier that allows us but they're they're few i mean that we have to have a guardian and then there and then the child is allowed to um to have to be on the phone or whatever there's a different different ways that they can that we're allowed to reach out it could be through telephone or through a video or in person and then that child is um by law is allowed to talk with his parent um before any

019questioning okay thanks appreciate it that hope it hopefully didn't confuse you too much so i had a another question which is just um [Music] i wanted to go back to your question because i don't think we really fully answered it yes when they're outside of the school system like it's after 2 30. does this mou still stand that they're students so if they're away from the school is this only when they're in school or is it outside school they're always a student from scps how does that work no so when we're dealing with students on school property at school functions the mou applies when we're say we come into contact with them at home the mou would not apply if it's not dealing with the school system or a school event or activity okay so

020that answers my question right there but a lot of the stuff that's in the mou it's how we conduct business anyway with juveniles if that makes sense yeah those are the questions that i've you know were raised to me uh based on you know how some were treated versus others and so i just wanted to make sure that if it's the mou it's standard across the board um but if it's just in school during school time or school functions then that that's a difference it's the same standard um it's just specific to the schools and how we interact and whether the parents aren't available at the time it's usually school staff that steps in until we can make contact with the parents so there's little nuances there yeah but when we're dealing with the juvenile

021yeah we still use the same approach yeah and i know you spoke a little bit about um special needs yeah because there's some kids that are older in the school system that you all have worked with and know that they're difficult and you know need restraining and you end up seeing them on you know outside and i was just wondering i know in the school uh sometimes you know you do intake or whatever it is that you do you know these kids but then outside they don't so i was trying to see if they're it it uh you know this mou continues on but you're telling me that that's really important is with the sro program is building relationships and so we expect that the sros are going to know the students that may have

022special needs um who or who react in a certain way and so they adjust their approach when dealing with you know those students and so you know regardless of whether they're below 18 or they're 20 um those are things that as they build a relationship throughout the years um they're able to influence it and yeah but the sros are only in the school so the sros are only in the school so when they're outside that you know the regular police officers are not going to know these kids so that's that's i was trying to figure out i'm not sure if you're aware of this so um say there's a call for a student that has said they're going to shoot up the school or something of that nature when patrol deals with those types of

023calls they contact the sro from the school that the student attends so they can get a little bit of the history perfect and there so there is perfect that's exactly what i was asking about and so hopefully that's clear and yeah thank you so much i'm sorry dr jason did you [Music] um so just looking at the at the mou um i don't see and and maybe i missed it um anything about like an annual review of of how many um interactions there are two sentences okay um okay so so just um you know for example we have an mou related to the um day school and they're supposed to be and sometimes it gets uh missed but there's supposed to be an annual report kind of um you know how is it going what

024you know so so do you all at the sheriff's office have some data collection that you're doing with respect to to what's going on in the schools or do we on the school side do some data collection just to you know you'd like if everything's going great to be able to check that box and say things are going great and and if something's being missed um to know that we need to put some extra attention in one location or another or to know that this particular school has more cases than another school what's what's driving that that kind of thing so we do collect that data and um we have put together um some reports in the past just showing that the high schools middle schools and elementary schools and uh the different different types

025of reported incidents that we have and um and you you see the trend of course as you move up into high school there's more more reports being um being written and uh we track that but for anything specific that you would like that maybe we can come together and you know figure out what it what type of report would you like that would be helpful and we can tailor it to that but we do you know collect that information and and we were able to show through our last report that we did which was put into a book where some high schools have more activity than others and and then that helps you kind of try to figure out what can we do to to to work through that but if there's if there's certain

026information that you that you want we can certainly um work together to put to put that together and then um on the memorandum you know it's uh the law now i think it says it used to be every five years but now the law says every two years you'll you know revise and go through the memorandum understanding but in ours i think we have we do it annually so yeah i mean i think just i know we as a board have been talking about restructuring our committees to have a committee that's doing some kind of you know and so it might be that committee or it might be uh greg martin's office or something just um i know for me as a board member i'd like to know if if one of my schools had

027a particular issue and i know they're all our schools um but one of the schools in my district um just to have a sense of that um and i don't anticipate that there's there's any issue but you know trust trust and verify so i would just um like to to to know that for sure that so that if i'm sitting down with constituents i can say you know yes i am aware of this or no there isn't a problem or whatever it is so yes ma'am yeah and also that kind of leads to um the change too with the law where what's required by a school administrator to to report i think it went from misdemeanor to felony isn't it correct and um so really it's based on really it really starts with good communication

028and trust and making sure we're working together because also if um if the school administrator doesn't report the things that are mandated that can lead to his or her him or her getting into you know a bit of an issue if they don't report it so i know that open communications is important and then again capturing the information you all would like because you're going to figure out kind of what metric and what are you measuring and what you want to look at and we can help you through that and gather collect that information dr warner i think you were next well to follow up on what dr chai said i was looking at the evaluation of school law enforcement partnership and it's pretty pretty small section progress towards achieving the objective shall be jointly

029reviewed at least annually by stanford county public schools and the stanford county sheriff's office i was wondering would you report everything that all the interactions between the sro and students are just specific incidents and how is that is it you know how can we audit those records and and make sure that um we know what's going on not only in our schools but if there's problems that come up between the way a situation is handled that we may want to look at and decide a better alternative for some some some behavioral problems well we do um i didn't know if you needed to answer um trying to figure out here so we do capture information that um requires a report to be written and also violations of laws that may not require it may not

030be a report but maybe some other type of issue but as far as like the code of conduct and those kind of things as you know and and it's been this way for such a long time we don't enforce any of the rules and the codes and those kind of things but um so we wouldn't capture those types i guess i'm asking what type of incidents would be reported on i'm sure like normal interactions probably you know would just be you know they wouldn't be but what type of incidents would you you the sro prepare a report on and what type of information is captured well like for an example um [Music] it could be anything from a larceny you know from an iphone we have a lot of violations of vaping in school um

031there's um i i know that's subjective what is a lot but we numerous types of incidents with vaping so that may be a that would be a report or larceny iphones being stolen uh shoes being stolen that kind of thing or it could be a possession and then there's a list of different crimes that are committed um that are felony and actually we are revising our mou now um to include the new law changes in there so uh so it's current and in that it will give you an example of the different types of violations whether it's you know larcenies or um you know assault and batteries that are that rise to that level and those type those type of calls and then from time to time sexual assault you know two occurs so yeah

032we captured that information and that would be things that we could we could provide or you know information to you of course we have to be careful about you know we wouldn't include names and that kind of thing because we have to protect the victims and the juveniles who are involved and i think one of the things that's important with that is one of the things that we found with our sro program is we allow the sros to have a lot of discretion and so while they may be documenting it sometimes they will step back and say we're going to it was a crime but we're going to allow the school staff to handle it but we're going to document it and then that way if there's progression as far as you know uh bad

033behavior criminal behavior um we can then show we've you know this time we counsel this time we let the school handle it this time we're charging so um that's important as well um so thank you ms randall did um i was curious i saw in here that you all have specific training how often are these trainings updated and the second part of that was evaluations for the officers that are in these positions who conducts those and how often so for every sro they're sent to an academy or training for school resource officers and then every summer um dcgs puts on a training that is updated based off of what the climate is and what uh sros across the state are dealing with in schools as far as evaluations is a tiered system so the sros

034are evaluated by their sergeants their sergeants are evaluated by their first sergeant and then my position i evaluate the first sergeant and i'm looking at the program and how it's it's operating we also take into account feedback from school staff and principals mainly as to how the sro is conducting themselves within the building ms young i know you had a few more we're going to extend just a small amount um because i do want to make sure that we go so go ahead okay so um see times about the section that dr chase referenced on page seven investigation and questioning there's a couple places where it refers to refers to interrogation i'm not sure that's the proper word or if it is we need to define it because it goes back and forth it uses

035questioning a lot more than interrogation and it talks about interviewing and the title is investigation and questioning so i don't know if that's intentional because i you know didn't draft this document but if we're if we are in the process of revising i would either define the difference between uh an interrogation in an interview or just refer to questioning in the place of interrogation because the the whole tone i get from here and and what i see you know from the sros this is not in on an adversarial uh situation where there's you know an interrogation it's it's more of a an effort to um intervene so it's just i i would look at that when we when we revise this and i think i counted what one two three three places where it re

036it says interrogation and many more where it talks about questioning so thank you thank you miss young thank you miss elise sorry yeah okay thank you so much um one of the things that i was looking at is when i requested the roles and responsibilities like i wanted to know what was on it and i don't know if i'm supposed to say it online but this is the 8611 and i almost fell out of my chair um because i'm like it had dragging in there dragging 100 pounds and i'm like oh my lord um but then when i read the mou the responsibilities roles and responsibilities of partner organizations and so if if this mou is for the school should we just label it that it says um you know scps or whatever because i

037was under the impression that this deputy share field operations is actually their job description that they go by and the sro job description is actually what's in this document here and so i think they need to match you follow what i'm saying yes ma'am maybe i can help clarify that so all of our most of our sros come they they start out many of them start out in the field operations so you have a standard job description for field operations deputy who works in the field on patrol and then you have we have deputies that work as investigators and there's a job description for them and then we have a job description for our course and um so we don't have one and that is um that outlines the job description for an sro um

038because they fall under field operations but that's something that that we can easily create and craft which isn't an issue for us yeah and this uh what i was thinking of when i was thinking about it this is just not one side this is just all of us together because i realized that the sheriff's office know what their job duties are and i think that we the school system need to do a better job of ensuring that uh the sheriff's um the sros do what they're supposed to do i mean you know they they add some some different things on and and talking to some um individuals um the administrators and the principals they set the tone and um if they set the tone on how they want students to you know to behave and

039then they put sheriffs in a position to handle some kids and they know it's not their responsibility i don't know where you you you know you you get that barrier like where do you stop where do you say okay you know what this is not my job um but i think that there needs to be some sign of going back to the training that needs to be um a collective idea like what is the responsibility of the sro and that the sro is not put in a position where they they're doing things that they know that it's outside of their preview and so i don't know if there's something that we need to do that the kids are like work with like maybe have a a principal that really has been around for a while

040and knows what the rules are and that you all could work with but at the same time you need to have say for example the um sro that's in charge um you know having technical experience is one thing but having a background as an sro works better because then you know the community the expectations from the community the you know what is expected in the school system and that you can manage it a little bit better instead of managing from afar and so there's a collaboration i'm talking about with with a principle some training some standardization across the board um rather than every school is doing one thing here and there and then i have a question i'll let you all go about that part is our sro program and doing that at the beginning

041of uh every school year we do have a meeting with the staff and we go over the principles i should make sure i clarify i mean we go over what the expectations are reporting communication um i've given almost every principal in the county my number if they have an issue they can call sometimes especially on our side with the culture and the training and expectations they our sros know what they can handle and what they can and so there have been times in the past where they've been asked to get involved in the situation and they've told them that they can't so then i'll get a call they're not doing their job no they're doing what they're supposed to because we don't handle um code of conduct issues that aren't criminal so we do have

042that occurring already um so another thing for clarification that might be helpful too um of course for our job description that that's one of those hr requirements to fair labor standards act and you have to have a job description and and the person when they're applying for a job then of course you know the skills the knowledge and abilities and all those things that are incorporated into that and that's where an sro falls into that category before they can be hired as a deputy but then we have a policy in our department and then also our mou and then of course the training that they go through they go through almost a week-long training that lieutenant digit had talked about and then each year they go through annual training just for sro which is a

043conference and then we have mandated training of course our department we go above and beyond the training requirements that are mandated by the state of virginia but um there's in-service training that requires um cultural diversity training that's a reoccurring type of training and then implicit bias based training that we also do as well so there's a lot of training that we do but i understand what you're talking about you would like to see a job description that kind of lays out the duties of an sro that are kind of clear so it's not even about the job description and maybe i'm not being i don't want to stop our discussion unfortunately we have a consultant waiting for us to go into closed sessions but we can just real quickly it's not actually even a question

044um just two points one thing just to follow up part of this conversation some of the training has to be on our side the bulls are using the that's my point [Music] from you guys what's working at work thank you certain communities in virginia where uh the police department the sheriff's department has been a great partner with the school system getting mentors for what we often would call at-risk children so i really look forward to that conversation yeah and then the only other thing before um miss hazard cut me off is that um uh the audit right it said that uh school safety audits do um but not yet received i'm not sure we received them yet and then when you are evaluating your sros i think perhaps there needs to be like a 360

045in there since uh mr martin is in charge of security and we know how the sros are behaving that way you could get some feedback on how they're doing in the school system and you know this is how it helps you evaluate them a little bit better yeah we do that for our school protection officers too getting the feedback from school administrators as well yeah and i didn't know you know if you have time you could tell me about the sbo program how that was going because that was supposed to be a pilot and i know covet came and i wasn't sure if now it's extended or stopped or what we're doing with that that's still good two thumbs up yeah that was paid for by the board of supervisors um so i think what

046i want to say is we are looking forward to a continued partnership we want to um all of us care about our students our kids our staff for their safety and their well-being and i think these dialogues are meant to enhance where we already are and find out ways we can um partner more together share resources and get the job done so at this point because we do need to go into closed session ms hollerbach if you will read us in thank you all so much i move that the stafford county school board convene a closed meeting pursuant to section 2.2-3711a 19 of the code of virginia to receive from to receive from and discuss with the consultant that recently completed school safety audit which addresses the security of school division property and or the

047safety of persons using such property second all those in favor please say aye aye aye any opposed hearing none we are in closed session ready ms hollerbeck will you read us out of closed session please whereas the school board of stafford county has convened a closed meeting on this date pursuant to an affirmative recorded vote and in accordance with the provisions of the virginia freedom of information act and whereas section 2.2-1 of the code of virginia requires certification by this school board that such closed meeting was conducted in conformity with virginia law now therefore be it resolved that the school board of stafford county hereby certifies that to the best of each member's knowledge one only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements by virginia were discussed in the closed meeting to which

048the certification applies and two only such public matters as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting or heard discussed or considered zero seconds all right um at this point we will pull the board um this is how can we hear you yes we have dr chase hi [Music] all right motion passes was there any um motions or items coming out of closed session all right hearing none that will be for future consideration at that point i will close our work session portion of the meeting since we are um running a few minutes late i would like to apologize to those who are here we did have a close session on um a matter that was contained in there about security that has been stated in motion we ran a little late but please

049no it is for um a good purpose but again we apologize we do like to usually run on time so with that we are going to reopen our meeting this evening new agenda excuse me all right so i'm going to order our tuesday september 22nd regular uh meeting of the school board i would like each member again to just introduce themselves and the district they are coming from ms healy can you get us started from this end patricia healey rockhill district susan randall george washington district irene hollerbach acquired holly hazard hartwood district young the garrisonville district elizabeth warner wide water district sarah chase falmouth all board members are in attendance this evening so our next um item on the agenda is the approval of our agenda motion to approve with a in addition the addition

050would be for further discussion on return to school slash pilot second all right is there any discussion is there a um discussion that that would rather be 11.1 versus 11.04 for information items due to the matter being discussed i'm fine with that i'm just asking the board i would suggest it 1101 versus 1104. i'm fine with that yes all right all those in favor of the agenda as presented except adding a item 11 or a revised 11.01 moving the other items down to just the um how did you say it further discussion on return to school return to school pilot return to school plans um so all those in favor and the opposed motion carries unanimously all right we're going to start off um with awards and recognition which um with a recognition of our

051custodial staff i'm going to turn this over to dr kissner to get us started yeah so anderson will do this but it's been really um very rewarding to see in the last month or so our staff um um welcome mr andersen first of all [Music] [Applause] the board will recognize our custodial employees for the essential services that they are providing for our school communities along with normal degrees that include cleaning and caring for the building there are additional tasks that are now necessary because of the ongoing pandemic these tasks include disinfecting surfaces and also providing electrostatic cleaning regularly as needed to help make our building safer to occupy and have some very special stars from our custodial character tonight and want to recognize them individually representing the entire group but i have um justin bieberski

052who's the manager of custodial services sandra charles with hartwood elementary school vince gray with margaret brent elementary school dawn hacker ferry farm elementary school janam kakfay with hh pool middle school and then also with um the custodial team from abm services dorian harris is the district manager reginald harris is a regional manager melvin wright is with drew middle school monica reyes with stafford middle school madrid maria piedrita i'm sorry maria piedra and julio piedra are here and um maria's with colonial forge and then julio's with brook point high school and i just want to say that um our team understands that they have higher expectations right now because of the pandemic there's there's higher expectations from the community and the students and the staff and everybody in the schools that that they do more and

053the disinfecting is a really big part of it and these folks are ready for it and they're they're working hard they're going to do what's needed and they know that people are going to have concerns throughout the year but they're going to do the best they can and we really appreciate what you do thank you for being here tonight to represent and thanks for helping to keep our schools safe so and we know some of y'all have to get up early in the morning so you're welcome to stay for the meeting or not but um thank you again thank you a huge part of our stafford county public schools team thank you all again for all that you do and i know as stated many of you will be up early so again thank you

054for all that you do next we're going to turn to our staff reports uh with our covid19 update uh dr kizer i will turn that over to you and we'll reserve the return to school presentation if you don't mind during the 11.01 i think that would be easier for a back and forth dialogue does that make sense or it's up to you well i mean it's up to you guys actually but oh yeah um it's it's really whatever your pleasure is um we had it designed to go now and miss uh miss neely was going to follow that's how it's set up um so uh why don't you go ahead i would ask them the board if we are going to hear it more as a presentation and then for our discussion to be in

05511.01 is that all right okay i just wanted to make sure we had an idea going forward thank you very good thank you all right so um okay so um tonight my objective is to provide you information and the information is designed around a motion that was made on um okay oh sorry let me get this right by the time we get to it'll be number eleven okay i got so just to remind the school board um the motion that i was asked to bring uh the discussion tonight the motion and this is word for word health and academic data analysis will occur on september 21st i think we really met september 22nd to determine if an elementary hybrid model slash 100 remote option including the consideration of a pilot program should begin on october

0566. so that was the motion that was the third of um three motions so um what we set out to do as all of you know by now we discuss this actually at the last school board meeting um initially we were um and there's different ways one could define pilot um the way we defined pilot i defined pilot was to give us as much information possible to replicate what we would see when the um hybrid model goes into place and if you recall at the board meeting i kind of presented this notion of a k-1 some board members were asking for k-3 uh meeting with staff we looked at a k2 model which although i'm not recommending k2 or we're not recommending k2 i have to say though going through the process of deciding that

057k2 would not be a good model has been remarkably valuable as we move forward there's a lot of work that took place the last couple weeks to come to that conclusion which i will save that for miss neely who will present why that came to about so what is recommended um as it relates to so there's two parts how i read the motion okay there was two parts of the pilot recommendation and a recommendation on the hybrid okay so the recommendation as it relates to the hybrid i mean to the pilot is that we pilot a k hybrid model at selected schools and again i'm going to ask ms neely to get into the more details with a continuation of the 100 remote option to start on october 6. okay so parents would still have

058the option and we would have it at certain schools and she will let you know which schools the recommendation as it relates to the hybrid model and i know there's been this date of november 10th um talked about and i have talked about it but there is nothing in any of the minutes or motions that talk about november 10th i think what might have contributed to the november 10th date because in essence at the end of the first quarter and at one time when we were looking at earlier plans that was a discussion for the middle and high school kids to return on november 10th so i just mentioned that so you should not wonder if we're making the november 10th because that was never a date set okay i just want to bring that

059up but what we are recommending and again i know i'm going to sell a little broken record until ms neely gets here that she will go into the more details but we are recommending again a k5 hybrid model with a continuation of the 100 um remote option to start on october 26 at every elementary school okay so this one would be division wide now i think we have demonstrated you have demonstrated as a board and i believe i've demonstrated as a superintendent that health data will help us drive our decisions and if necessary change our decisions okay but i also believe you have to have a date in mind you have to have a target because i think you will respect hopefully by me saying it but i know you will definitely respect it after

060ms nealy says it that it takes a lot of work to to transition from where we are today to getting children back in our school it just doesn't happen overnight it does take weeks i would say at minimum three weeks because not only you have to give parents the option of not the option but the opportunity to change their schedules you have obviously you have to staff it you have to provide the transportation all that routing and you have to make sure food service there's a lot of work that goes into place before a uh returning that many children to school okay so i just want to mention that part the other thing uh health metrics um so last friday and i do want to thank um dr chase for joining us but last friday

061we so weekly we meet with the health department representative health department and early that day uh to my surprise i believe and i think every by surprise even the health department i think the way they were talking um the center for disease control presented a new model and this model does not specifically talk about a certain community or school system but you could take your data and apply it to this model and the health department truthfully did that for us because they knew that this model was not only new to us but in many ways it was new to them and there are three parts to the cdc guidance and what i would say that this guidance is more specific to a school setting than a community setting okay and the three areas um and

062i'm going to show you data from the virginia department of health which you actually saw yesterday i sent it to you yesterday you saw it last week and you saw it two weeks ago every monday it used to be on thursdays but every monday the rappahannock area health department sends us our local data but anyway so you may wonder out loud or you may uh you know wonder um and and just keep it to yourself is that um why is the data look different from two different organizations and the only thing i can share with you is they calculate some of it differently okay so the first indicator which um is similar in many ways to an indicator that you've seen last at the last school board meeting and also saw yesterday was the number

063of new cases per 100 000 person within the last 14 days and you see again it ranges from um lowest to highest and for stafford we fall in the uh second highest area okay we fall in the um highest level of transmission in school higher level transmission higher not highest higher okay in the percentage of uh people testing positive after they have a covenanting test and this one has much greater alignment with the cdc report we fall in the moderate level of transmission school or one might say the yellow color and then there's a third area the ability of a school to implement the five key mitigation strategies and again we fall in the green area it's either you know the lowest or the lower okay so you see um uh the cdc guidance and

064now what i'm going to do is um hopefully get this thing to turn okay oh well so is hey mike is there another way that i don't have to use this you can tell me you can say next if you want okay that's even better okay so another piece of data this is the week of uh september 10th the week of september 15th again you could if you're looking at get some comparisons where we were that week compared to some of our neighboring school systems that are all part of the rappahannock area health department you get a sense of the trend at least for a five-day period for stafford next mike so this is what you saw yesterday i just took two out of the four areas the two of these areas have more relevancy

065more relevant for a school system so what you see is and i know last time i told you it was orange colors and it was and then the health department changed it to blue colors but the definitions are the same okay but what is the case incidence rate per 100 000 and you see that we are 7.8 anything above 10 as i told you is high burden anything under five is low burden and i also shared with you that they look at 14 days trend and we're at a fluctuating trend and then the uh the percent tested positive with the covet test uh you see that we're at 6.8 i shared with you and it remains the same here there's only two indicators either high or low and we're at low and this one we

066have seen in stafford this is specific to stafford is 14 days of decreasing okay and this was yesterday's data so that we wanted to wait until we had the latest data mike yeah so i said i looked at this vdh guidance data before i came here tonight and i'm a little confused because that first bar cases where it says cases have been declining for two days it said they've been increasing for 13 days so i don't know i mean i'm just kind of perplexed by what this is what the health department is for staff okay next one please and it'll come out again next monday so we wanted to i wanted to show you a trend okay and we selected august 5th because that's basically when our staff was returning um and you could see

067that one could may conclude that we made a good decision in august not to return our children august was um had some of our highest weeks okay um and uh you could see that the week of august 13th and 20th i believe august 10th would have been the week that the kids would have returned that was actually a high burden week and again i know you could read the numbers on your own and then you see the percent positivity so you see another trend which i think if if we're hoping to make good decisions based on data um i think that one holds true next one please so again i don't necessarily need to read this to you it's just a comparison just so you know our meeting was around three o'clock on september 18th

068and then yesterday when i received the other data you receive it so it's very recent data and we will get the new data on the uh 28th uh the new uh metric bar next please so it's been asked we think it's a great idea to give you a idea of both staff and student and we're giving it to you in different ways and i'll try to walk you through it if you take the week of august 3rd we had four staff members that tested positive that the zero represents based on contact tracing and conversations that no one got positive because of being at school okay and what you can see is we also had three staff quarantine you also need to know i can't exactly give you the number but it would not be unusual

069for a staff member that was initially quarantined to get tested and also end up in the column of staff positive okay so if you take a look at the week of august 24th you saw that four staff members were tested positive too we could trace to events stemming from being at school okay and that gives you an idea so you could see and this is what we'll present on our website so the public could um you know understand what our local our school-based numbers are um i will say if you i've mentioned to some of you there's an interesting article on the i don't know if it's still up there but on the new york times website about the difficulties for the public to to track covert cases because pretty much almost every state does

070it differently and then schools within their own state do it differently as you might have noticed in an article i think in yesterday or today's vsva briefing so we're going to be as transparent as we can um but there you have uh next one mike the following one represents the students again this one we're only able at this point to show you the number of students positive and how many students had to be quarantined and again you have the averages the week average next one mike please so a question and we had this was a part of our conversation on friday with the health department what are factors to consider to either close a classroom or school closing and i mentioned to the health department that i saw two examples from two different school systems

071that were completely different in their approach not saying either one was wrong but i was just curious if there was a formula we could use and i think their response was that you have to look at every situation individually and they really can't say and i'll walk you through some examples so we constantly collaborate with the rappahannock area health department but if we had a teacher with a certain credential they're working with children with disabilities and they have the only license to work with that child group of children or child and that teacher tests positive we would in essence have to close that program down because they would be the only teacher there close that classroom we may be in another situation where we would have maybe one or two teachers and one and two

072paraprofessionals and if an adult tested positive we would not necessarily have to close that classroom down if with determination of the contact tracing and so on did not require it okay and then the extent of positive covert 19 confirmed cases extent of potential coven 19 transmission the outbreak data um which i think uh colette went over with you and then um we did recognize them but uh you know the extent and quickness of thorough disinfection and sanitization procedures at the classroom of building levels so that's a fact that we would have to consider we would not want children or staff back if we could not and this is for the buses too taking buses offline if we could not uh assure that we've taken the steps necessary to um to make them clean so i

073think mike i think i think i end here oh attendance i do not end here aren't you lucky okay but um the next one i just want to give you an idea of our attendance strictly focusing on elementary um so it's just so you know we took a snapshot of a tuesday and this is pretty this is pretty good this is uh you know we have to take attendance for the purposes well you always need to take attendance but obviously we have to take attendance as it relates for uh funding but you'll see that we're having a in a high 90 98 90 percent nine percent of our children on those days and looking at the other days it's all pretty much the the same number next number is this a virtual number ritual this

074is both both this is children uh yeah both um okay next one mike please so this next one thank you just just so you know we also want to track and just show those dips on weekends okay so that's why it looks like uh a camel something but um but you see that we're seeing some good engagement by the finding being at google made daily use next one and then again you'll see as time went on again the big dip is weakened so don't don't look that bother you you see that as people getting more used to canvas we're seeing more cameras and this is data that we could uh track by people um logging on next one mike so we're only i have to remind ourselves i have to remind myself that we are

075just in the second day of the fourth week okay so we're you know we're still early but this is part of the year even in a non-covered year we would start doing assessments of children um to see where they are so just we have some formative assessments but the other motion i think it's your first motion in late october i think the 26th something like that whatever that school boy meeting is um i'm uh been asked to present a more comprehensive review of the virtu of our programs and that's what we'll do and this will be part of the information that we will use next one mike please okay and now i'm going to ask carrie i'm sure she could work that that clicker a lot better than me mike do you want me to

076say next too let me see maybe it could highly have been made you think it's really working carrie being a good colleague she will at least make it that the first one won't work test test can everybody hear me good evening madam chair school board members and dr kisner as you're aware elementary schools recently reached out to parents to determine our family's interest in participating in a k-2 pilot to bring our students who we miss so much back to school the data that we collected led us to a recommendation from our elementary principals to recommend a k-5 return for a date of october 26 for elementary students and tonight i'm going to share a little bit more about the back story with that decision and then certainly take time for any questions that you all

077might have now let's see if i can work the clicker uh-oh mike [Music] okay we're good one more i don't know what i'm supposed to be pointing at but maybe that would help all right that's good mike thank you so some of the challenges that came about as we were doing uh phone calls to families and reaching out to families to find out their interests and if they were interested in participating in a case to return if they would want to stay with their original decision or if they would want to change their original decision and this worked both ways from hybrid from hybrid to virtual or vice versa and one of the first things that became apparent that elementary principles shared with me was that we had many parents who were resistant to change

078the status of one child moving back to a hybrid position let's say a kindergartner first or second grader when their third fourth or fifth grader would still be in another model and wouldn't be participating in that so they were having a difficult time everything from child care just to trying to keep their consistency for their family and so some of them said we really don't want to answer right now until um you know can we can we do this when we all come back together can we send both of our children back together so you can imagine that certainly created a challenge in trying to figure out how we were going to work with families in that area another area to consider is staffing one of the things that we're looking forward to is bringing

079our l students while we feel like our hubs are working very well we are excited to have those students back in our schools so when we begin this pi or not pilot when we begin to bring our students back k through five certainly will welcome back our l students who might be in a different building right now because of the hub situation due to staffing transportation is another issue that we thought about for our youngest students you know if we have all of k-2 first of all that's a substantial routing to figure out beyond that students would most likely have to change buses so you get them in a routine for two to three weeks and then they have to change buses when we bring k through five back so we were really struggling with

080this because the dilemma is you know our elementary principals uh and staff you know we really many of us want to welcome our students back and and all of us want to do what's right for students but that was a real challenge to figure out how to do that in a seamless way finally a huge challenge for elementary principles was class placement because in all of the requests to change from virtual to hybrid or vice versa we definitely saw that we would have to do some extensive work in our class placements and what that might result in is having to do that again potentially three weeks down the road when we open school up for k through five so elementary principles felt strongly that it really needed to be a k-5 endeavor because it would

081be a more seamless approach to opening and welcoming students back and so here you see the proposal which is essentially bringing all uh hybrid k5 students back on the same date to align busing staffing family needs we would contact parents to again find out in grades three through five where we are in terms of what parents would like to see moving forward for their student we do understand there has to be a point where we may have to say to parents you know we're sorry but this is your choice from this point forward and we may be limited in in making any changes that's just the reality of having to plan so many hybrid teachers and so many virtual teachers again that changed when we reached out because parents had changed their minds and and

082i think we can all appreciate that this is a really challenging time and there are many reasons that a parent may have changed from hybrid to virtual or vice versa and after a schedule for all students create substantial synchronous instruction four days per week for virtual and hybrid students so we're going to shift and i'll show you this in a second from uh two days a week um sorry synchronous instruction to four days a week synchronous instruction we will review that in just a minute and then of course we would begin on october 26th and so here you see just a um kind of a one two three of our revision of synchronous instruction again from two days to four days support uninterrupted communication for parents as we are now a student may have class

083on a friday but they may not see their teacher well they'll see their teacher for a morning meeting but they wouldn't have synchronous instruction for their teacher again until the following thursday and and that's a long time and we thought in our original plan that we had you know we had synchro asynchronous instruction that would be tailor made for those students but we're finding out that it's a long day in synchronous instruction and that they're not getting that continuous communication with their teacher who's their primary contact obviously in elementary school and so if you look at the next um the next page or the the next slide there is just a sample schedule of what this would look like and we're going to say this is an a student so let's say felicity if you

084remember her from our town hall meeting let's say felicity is an a student so she will continue to go to school on tuesday and wednesday morning or she would meet virtually on tuesday and wednesday morning with her teacher and then on thursday and friday rather than being totally asynchronous the entire day on thursday and friday she will actually have synchronous time with her teacher on thursday and friday afternoon to continue that learning for four days versus uh and the synchronous learning i should say for four days rather than two days and then of course on monday the teacher would connect as well with a morning meeting so that would be five days a week that felicity would see her teacher and then four days out of those five get direct instruction from her teacher and

085you see the goals at the bottom are the ones that we've mentioned that i've mentioned several times before and the current schedules would shift from two days to four days of synchronous instruction and again that just allows for more face-to-face time with uh felicity in this case is and mike if you'll thank you so just to summarize what we are proposing is a k through 5 hybrid model that would begin on october 26th this would provide consistency for our young learners it keeps siblings together there would hopefully be one bus assignment so that uh students when they come back will get in that consistent routine as soon as possible there would be a minimization of teacher changes because that would be another issue if we had a k2 and then we had to make additional

086changes after a k2 then we could potentially be looking at three different teacher changes we know that families we are going to have to make changes because we've had families request changes so when we make a high when we move to a hybrid model we are going to have to make some teacher placement changes in order to honor families requests for that and that's that's just a difficult thing but we do feel like in working with our canvas platform and working tightly in our plcs the the comforting part about that is the lesson and the pacing would be the same it's just a different second grade for example classroom teacher for some students but we want to minimize that as much as possible we also want to work to continue creating a canvas platform that

087is more accessible for our younger learners i just met with lod yesterday to talk about getting a start on making that process better making it more seamless for our youngest students because we know canvas was really designed primarily to use at the secondary level and and we know that there are many things about this that are far less than perfect we are trying to make the best of a very difficult situation and our teachers are doing an outstanding job i'll say dr jones and i have been able to head out to elementary schools and we're able to observe teaching in this virtual state while teachers are in their classrooms teaching and it's still a really magnificent thing to see students are incredibly excited to connect with their classroom teachers more than you can even imagine

088they are so excited to have that connection but we want to make it more seamless for them and then again we want to make sure our alignment of staffing is is is the best that we can possibly provide for all of our students including our l students and our students with learning disabilities and finally what we would like to remember recommend in order to just learn about some common best practices that we can implement across the board is a pilot for kindergarten students that would be in several different key points throughout the division what we are recommending is widewater rock hill conway heartwood and kate waller barrett and so those schools are distributed across the county we feel like it will give us a good pulse for studying our students coming back and learning from

089the schools that are implementing that i will say we're already learning we're learning from our head start and early childhood students kathy massey has been wonderful sharing different processes that they have learned by doing including welcoming students in and saying goodbye at the end of the day to students those simple processes are really going to take some time for us to you know zero in on and figure out the most efficient effective and safe way to welcome our students and to then send them off on the buses at the end of the day to make sure they get safely home so we are already learning we're going to continue to learn and i would just like to give a shout out to could i have my elementary peeps stand up over here they just showed

090up they just wanted to be here and i have to tell you if i were in your place i would take comfort that you have some amazing and i know i'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know but elementary principal leadership it's just incredible we have amazing teachers you already know that but you know it's hard work we're going to continue to do our best we're not perfect but we're going to learn as we go along and we are going to get better at this we're going to get better and better so at this point i know you may want to hold off on questions but i'm happy to answer any if you have any now yes but the plan was let's hold off till our 11.01 i think that is best i

091want to thank you um ms neely um for coming and presenting that i also want to give a huge shout out i know from all the board members to our principals who are here because i know you have a very early morning start you have a late day start and that you all are here what it demonstrates to me and i'm sure to all the board members is your commitment to our students and to delivering the educational and instructional excellence that stafford county is known for it's hard in this new environment but i know that you all have that commitment and again thank you all for being here this evening and i would just offer to our principals many of um our principals are also parents and so i'm going to say thank you for

092being here guys but please feel free to go home and watch the rest at home if you would like to all right dr kissner was there any more i just wanted to make sure on the health metrics i know um colette's here i just didn't know if there was if she had anything because otherwise i was going to move on to the staffing update but i wanted to make sure i wasn't missing an item okay i wasn't missing an item um so the next one on our agenda is our fy21 staffing update i'll turn that to dr kizer but i think mr burnett will be join us good evening madam chair members of the board from master glasses i'm grateful to be here tonight grateful i have the chance to share this update on where

093we are for staffing for this school year as miss neely just shared the staffing challenges were presented right now are critically important for us to be able to solve so that we can move towards uh returning to school and my hope was that uh with my presentation tonight and obviously happy to answer whatever questions you might have that i'd be able to share a little bit about what we've tried to do as we entered into this school year to bring great talent and keep great talent here in stafford county what we've seen so far in the returns with some year-over-year analysis and a current status report as well as what we're going to be doing next so that's what i'm hoping to cover here tonight i'm going to primarily focus on licensed staff numbers but

094if there are any questions about service staff as well more than happy to answer is the clicker working okay i'll just say next thanks mike so as we went into hiring for this school year we set out a couple of goals that we had as our priorities to focus on first was to emphasize early hiring we know from experience that candidate pools are richer the earlier in the school year that you start so we were pretty aggressive early on uh offering even before we knew we had guaranteed vacancies in place to make sure that we were securing as many candidates especially in hard to staff areas we also looked to expand our outreach to our local schools of education beyond just job fairs uh we've always done this with mary wash but we look to

095do this uh starting with the pilot with george mason as well to move beyond just job fairs to just showing up to have table events uh to organize uh lunch and learn sessions we did a resume workshop at george mason for example uh just to get our name out with candidates more and increase exposure for the division we also start to improve our retention the best recruitment strategy is a retention strategy that minimizes the number of vacancies you need to fill um i know that when i was last presenting uh to the board i talked about some of our efforts on social media uh the teacher feature that we've gotten a lot of wonderful feedback on we're going to be continuing to do that i'd also be remiss if i didn't take this opportunity to

096acknowledge uh the region 3 teacher of the year ms kim cannon from stafford middle school who was just announced on friday it was too late to get a special uh proclamation on the board agenda but uh thank you so much for members of the board who joined the announcement it was uh the best 15 minutes of my week last week and i think it was for many others as well um we also tried to make some very technical changes to uh improve our retention it's not exciting to talk about but getting contracts out faster is a great way to keep uh hold on people it was also a big priority for my office to and for the division as a whole dr kisner uh to diversify our talent pool uh particularly to identify more candidates

097and hire more candidates uh who identify as black or hispanic uh there we wanted to target some new regions that we hadn't traveled to to recruit before we had plans to do recruitment trip to puerto rico for the first time as well as to go to some colleges uh in the mid-atlantic region in particular that had a larger hispanic latino enrollment in their schools of education uh we also invest in participating in some greater diversity networks uh that we use through virtual learning pairs um and the last one and this is just particularly important to me is that we continue to evaluate our practices to collect the data to see how we're doing see what works make adjustments uh next please mike and then the pandemic struck and we had to pivot to see what

098we were going to be able to do differently instead of their reliance on in-person recruitment fairs we moved quickly to a virtual recruitment strategy where we used our resume banks to very actively out reach out to candidates to solicit them to sign up for virtual interviews and while some of the administrators are still here i want to thank principals and assistant principals who dedicated time to participate in virtual interviews with candidates uh we had over 300 virtual interviews they came into our website and uh there was primarily administrators that were staffing those and we were very grateful for their time the strategy that i mentioned about traveling to some new areas to expand our reach to diverse candidates those had to be shelved unfortunately all of those trips were scheduled after uh the shutdown occurred

099and having no presence in those areas previously we weren't really able to get the the beach head that we were looking for in those regions um and the last thing is that we had to look to utilize technology in new ways uh and so uh again while it's not the most uh exciting topic to talk about to shift to do more of our transactional work through our electronic systems and to make it more feasible for people to do their clearance process and sign their contracts interactively next please mike so the quick headlines to share uh some good some not so great uh the good ones that i want to start with uh is that our retention improved uh both at the school level and at the division level and i think those are both important

100to look at uh if i'm from my vantage point if a teacher stays with us and they switch schools that's great that's division level retention that's fantastic if i'm a principal that's still a vacancy that i need to fill in my building so i try to keep an eye on both the school level and the division level retention both figures better this year than they were last year and our figures now are in line with what came out the most recent state report on retention at both of these levels so previously our our retention had been a little lower than the state average we're now right at what the state average was an airport that came out in late 2018. the other thing is that we did secure more candidates of color to come join

101and work for our division uh we saw about two and a half percent uh higher rate of candidates identifying as black and african-american compared to our returning staff and a little over one percent of staff of color overall i don't want to overstate this game this is not enough but i do want to celebrate the small win that it represents on on the path to having a more diverse workforce for our students um the one quick note on this slide you'll see that there's just asterisks for uh percent latino hispanic uh for new hires that's where uh the uh the reporting number is low enough that it might uh identify individuals so i had to block that out next please mike so those were the good uh headlines they're also some not so great headlines

102we had fewer hires uh in licensed position new to the division than we did uh past uh in past years uh despite openings having decreased uh the number of open positions we had went down about five percent but new hires went down about 13 percent and natural result of that we opened the year with more positions vacant than we did last year mike can go on next one i'm going to talk about the factors i just want to pause and clarify the last two slides that's year-over-year data looking at uh the last business day before the start of school each year so it's uh august 15th last year august 28th this year uh just to give us that year-over-year comparison so it's not great to come before you and share that we had more vacant

103positions this year than we did at this point last year so i wanted to make sure that uh i went back through the day to try to identify what happened what led us to that position a couple of factors stuck out as i look through the data uh the first was a tremendous increase in late resignations and retirements i i shared some of this information at a bad meeting back in august uh but compared to the same period last year uh june 15th is the measure date because that's the deadline that's in state code for when teachers must be issued their contracts when there's kind of no consent needed transfers we saw a three-fold increase in resignations and retirements after that date among our licensed staff this year uh so that's about 30 uh positions

104uh increase of those late vacancies and those late vacancies are i don't want to put a specific metric on it but i'll say that they are substantially harder to fill uh the ones that you can identify earlier in the hiring season uh most candidates have already secured positions usually by around memorial day uh so the and i would say that generally hiring tends to lag about a month behind when you nail down a vacancy so it's why it's so important to me that we do as much early hiring even before we have vacancies identified so those mid-summer vacancies really hold you back we also had about a three-fold increase the number of rescinded acceptances people who we had secured earlier in the season and who either because of not wanting to relocate not wanting to

105change workplace concerns about economic certainty concerns about health or child care uh were unable to accept the positions in a normal year we would see fewer than 10 people rescind their acceptances this year we had almost 30 uh do so uh you take those two factors into consideration you pretty much get to the difference in the number of vacancies that we have one other thing that i would point out is that we did see a really noticeable difference in the demographics of people who left us from last year uh almost twice as many of the people who left the division last year were early career teachers in their first five years that's a much higher percentage than what we saw in the two years previous i don't have a firm conclusion on this yet but

106something that i wanted to note something that i'm keeping an eye on to think about what our support for our new teachers looks like the last thing i want to note here is that there were some factors that were less influential than they were in the past economic reasons were not cited as frequently for cause for resignation this year as they had been in the past and on a similar note fewer candidates indicated they were leaving to go to another school division uh not just uh overall but also uh splitting out so compared to last year were more than half of the people who indicated that they were leaving for another school division were going north um that was still the plurality of people but uh it was not the strict majority so i do

107not think that is a trend that will hold uh i think that that is a one year blip uh that is mostly related to the pandemic and economic uncertainty but did want to acknowledge it here tonight uh next please mike so i'm gonna move forward so everything i talked about previously has been that year-over-year time shot i'm gonna move forward in time to today uh i guess more precisely end of day on friday when we last reconciled our databases uh current positions open is now at 82 that's normal we uh usually anticipate seeing the numbers fluctuate a little bit in the first few weeks and they usually fluctuate up uh one or two and so there are presently 82 positions that are vacant but i wanted to provide the additional context of what are we

108doing with those positions because i think that sometimes people hear the vacant position and they imagine a room full of children or i guess now a google meet full of children that where there's not an adult present and that's not the case of course presently about a third of those positions we are intentionally holding vacant because whether due to enrollment or to class selection uh by students or the ability to spread students out into other sections of a class uh there's not a present need to fill that position so we are holding it pending for their enrollment or in some cases also looking to fill the position come spring if a course offering is warranted for the other two thirds vast majority of these these figures actually if you take away those hold or delay

109figures so you're looking at these 54 where we have actively uh addressed the position these numbers are actually remarkably similar to last year uh both in the numbers and in how they're being used so the vast majority being covered with a long-term substitute uh sometimes we use a part-time retiree to come in and help with a position and then we have other mechanisms of internal coverage whether splitting up an fte to have teachers take on additional sections or again redistributing students across sections next please thing i want to share is uh what are we going to do about this what lessons are we taking uh so we're going to continue to invest in early hiring but uh also in the high touch pipelines that we have uh contact with we're gonna continue to expand that

110presence with schools of education we uh appreciate our partnership with mary washington and uh i'm actually going to be doing a guest session for their students in two weeks on social media please wish me luck i'm a little terrified i'm not a teacher uh but uh we're gonna continue to do more of the appearances with schools of education both local and remote uh as possible um a little bit of sing for your supper will offer a professional development opportunity for their students and it gives us a free chance to pitch our division we're also going to put more emphasis into securing information about our student teachers and trying to lock them in early we found this past year that we hired about 40 of the candidates who were student teachers in our building but almost

111similar percentage didn't apply to teach here that's a tremendously missed opportunity and we don't want to let that slip by again and so we're putting some new processes in place to make sure that we have an affirmative answer for each student teacher that comes to train with us and the last item here actually the board has already enabled is increasing tuition reimbursement uh that's going to enable us to really deepen the pair to teacher pipeline those included in the budget for this year we're very grateful for that expansion we've seen a lot of interest in it and it's something i believe in very deeply because uh p our paraprofessionals obviously already know uh what the uh song strong and successful classroom looks like and they're the people who are most likely to uh once they

112become teachers uh be able to stay in the profession well it's gonna look to maintain our improvements and retention that we've seen so far again uh i mentioned that our retention figures were better than last year and that was in spite of all of those summer resignation retentions they were looking amazing prior to that we want to continue to make progress on that we're going to keep going with our public recognition efforts we also of course and we we know that the board is uh on this so want to continue to advocate for uh addressing the pay gap between us and northern virginia divisions uh the other thing that i i want to make sure that i say here tonight is uh prioritizing hr's participation in the diversity equity and inclusion work that roxanne mccarthy

113has been leading has been a priority that's been uh put out by this board by dr kisner while that work has rightly primarily focused on students for now roxanna and i have talked at length about how uh equity for students inclusion for students includes ensuring that they have people in their building that they can look to and see uh that are from similar affinity groups and that means we have to extend that work to our staff as well and so i look forward to partnering with her uh this year on that work and that connects nicely to how we continue to diversify our candidate pool especially amongst black and hispanic candidates um those those new regions for recruitment boy i really hope we can get this pandemic under control because i really want us to

114be able to get on the road again um and this isn't a personal interest i would not have been on the puerto rico trip so it would have been other people would have had that opportunity um but the other thing is to really try to expand and diversify and train a cohort of interviewers and recruiters i am deeply grateful to our administrators for the time that they give to support recruitment attending fairs participating in of the information that we've gleaned from our survey of new hires really shows how that connection with a peer with a teacher can be really powerful to influence people to want to come join the division uh principals and aps are our closers they're the ones that so often our new hire site as this is the reason i took the

115job uh but our teachers are the hook and so we want to expand our reach to try to find more teachers that can serve as the forward face of the division and to make it something that is appealing to them to offer professional development opportunities training that gives them an opportunity opportunity to be recognized as leaders as well for doing this work and the last thing i'll say is that we learned a lot this spring about recruitment in an all online environment i think we do look forward to being able to go to in-person reheartment fairs again but that doesn't mean we're going to abandon some of the things that we've done online we learned a lot about how people find our job opportunities and how we can successfully engage with candidates virtually and how

116that can expand our candidate pool geographically as well so we're going to continue to draw the lessons that we can from this year and we're going to continue to work hard to fill the positions that we have now to ensure that as we return to learning we've set our students up with the staff that will lead them to success and i'll i'm happy to take any questions but mike if you can flip to the next i'll simply note that i'm the person here talking with you here tonight but the people who did the work or the people whose names are here on this slide this is the team in human resources uh that uh almost every new hire interacted with at least one and maybe as many as half of the people on this list

117as they made their way uh to become our employee they do truly outstanding work every day and i'm really grateful to work with them so thanks very much happy to answer any questions all right any um questions from board members or comments ms young yes thank you so much for that information um i know you and i we we had some sidebar conversations and i was just wondering in terms of the diversity talent pool that you were looking at um just like we have that relationship with mary washington um did you pursue for example howard university and odu and if so how did that go to try to pull in the teaching schools over there and kind of have some kind of relationship with them to pull in hooking those students yep it's one of

118the things that we're emphasizing this year we're trying to take advantage of our current environment to develop more relationships with regional schools of education that may not traditionally send students to us for a practical experiences but in an all virtual environment that becomes a possibility um i'll actually give some credit to uh anne-marie bellino uh from lawd uh she came to me about a month ago and said that a former colleague of hers at west virginia university was struggling to find practical uh opportunities for students and so now we have a agreement with wvu and they have people in our music classes um but we are prioritizing that uh howard and odu were not specifically on our list but vsu and norfolk state uh were as an effort to both get students who might be

119interested in practical experiences as well as just to develop relationships with the leadership and the faculty in those schools well use me for howard oh [Laughter] off to um miss young's right before covid on the dean of george mason university and the head of the student teaching placement came to stafford and toured our schools they are the largest teacher education program in virginia and we will continue to establish that partnership but often they stop north of us and so we're i'm very optimistic that they will see us as a site for their student teachers awesome thank you absolutely we can offer them less traffic sort of dr kissner with that george mason would that is that something you look looking to have uh implemented by possibly next spring or is it even further out than

120that the answer is i would love to do it by spring i'm not sure if we're um we did create a cohort just so you know just to digress real quickly um with four of our neighboring school systems to start an ed leadership model so that um that that's actually should be going on now but for the student teaching um we were really going to start it this fall and that did not take place so i actually have a meeting with him a week from friday to continue the conversation any other comments i have a couple so of course some of this is all when covet is less comments but i was wondering if we survey our new hires on what was helpful in the process what was harder at stafford than because many new

121teachers i think apply many places and i'm glad we got them is there any thought to doing that or ability to do that we did it i love when i can answer a question like that um yes we surveyed all of our new hires who were new hires to the division so not people who were say pair professionals who became teachers or subs who became teachers but people who were new employees to stafford and that was not just teachers we surveyed all new hires because we wanted to get back across the board the questions related to recruitment we focused just to people in licensed positions but there are some questions that we asked to all uh candidates including things about going through the hiring process um i was particularly interested in that because you sometimes

122hear things like i was a pain to complete this application which i've heard every single place i've ever worked and you don't hear the details of but what was the problem and so we actually got some very helpful comments in response to that survey of here were the things that i found frustrating or i didn't know that this would happen and that was very beneficial for us following following on that um several years ago we had tried now i know this is not in covid is having a new staff member sort of get to know you about two months in usually at dinner food usually brings people as another opportunity for people to share and and find that i know this year it's not possible but i hope that doesn't fall off the radar because

123i actually think there's a lot um at the time we had like board members sit at different tables and just get to meet some of the new staff because it's sometimes nice to find another colleague that's maybe in your same like i said i understand we can't but if it was me i would love to put that back in the budget because i think there was a lot to be gained because it was also get to meet a board member and you know many of them do meet dr kisser but you never know and i just think that's a great opportunity for us to hear what brought you here and then i'm all about and i'm sure poor mr foamer will will cringe when i say it but i'd love to have if if somebody

124from a particular university came here and they loved it and then they were a rock star and went back and recruited at their some kind of financial okay you can't call it a finder's fee i don't know what you call it but something like that because many times um i remember when i went to school it's sort of a different thing all of a sudden a particular university became popular because somebody from the high school went there or something i mean it's very simple but you know what if we could make that attractive it's always nice if you go back and you hire your good friends and you know so just something to look into it's absolutely true and certainly that has been a huge pipeline of success uh for us is to utilize folks

125uh who are recent alums to come with us on trips and that's something that we really hope to be able to utilize uh where we tested out some different things in terms of technology this year to support recruitment um some of them worked out some of them didn't that's okay that's why we piloted them and made sure that we weren't locking ourselves into longer-term contracts when we didn't know if something was going to work one of the things that we're going to try to be doing this year is where um we're looking to add some social media engagement tracking software that we hope is also going to enable us to target hosts uh places so that we can get that regional amplification in areas uh when uh when warranted so you know we're talking about

126getting people here but we want to keep people and the research really does speak a lot i know patrick knows this more than i do but about people feeling part of a community finding friends feeling a sense of belonging wanting to be here and that's just something for the school board to think about are there strategies that we can partner with different groups you know we hire a lot of young people that are you know i was confused when i first got here i thought i was in pittsburgh everybody got a steeler banner and you know you're here you may not have family you may not really have friends in the beginning how do we get them connected there's a survey that a lot of school systems give on staff engagement and they have a

127question that is an interesting question but it has a lot of validity do you have a best friend and those that report that they have a best friend at work is uh it's a strong correlation that they will stay longer so um i i i know that's something patrick has been looking at um absolutely we actually we we had some really great conversations with our with our friends at sca about things where we could partner uh going forward about ways to uh where we could really jointly create different affinity groups for folks that came from different regions i won't use the example dr kissner did as a proud cleveland browns fan uh proud and long suffering cleveland browns fan but we we were looking for ways that we could use different affinity groups as a

128way to help build uh senses belonging beyond just your content group or your school all right thank you very much for bringing all that information we look forward to next year's report and for more successes our next uh item is our uh enrollment accommodation report uh dr kisner and i believe mr white will be come on down those who did not please appreciate the difference from previous years to this year on this report i hope there's a lot of work behind this report so i i'm going to thank them now all right because i'll forget later yes all right good evening uh chairman chair person hazard i'm the school board remember you're a tall person and you need to thank you we want to hear you okay is that better that's great okay i'll start

129over again uh good evening chairperson hazard members of the school board dr kisner uh this evening i'm gonna present to you the in the enrollment accommodation plan uh just to give you some background for over a decade the student accommodation report provided a comprehensive look at recent trends enrollment projections and building capacity to help plan for future seat needs this year what's new is the student accommodation report has been renamed the enrollment accommodation plan it's been expanded to be a much more robust long range planning document over the next 10 years new features in the document include more analytics maps charts and graphs to show demographic trends gis is used a lot to illustrate when and where additional seats are needed in the future based on our enrollment projections also from a house cleaning note

130what you have in front of you is the 2019-2020 eap and that was finalized in february of 2020 so if you look at the report you'll see that at the bottom corner this is important to note because this report was prepared pre-covered and the projections are based uh on september 30th 2019 so they have not been updated uh however next week uh planning staff will begin the process of working on the 2020-2021 eap and it will be a post coven 19 document just want to put that out there i also want to point out that you know this plan is driven by the enrollment projections and i want to make that absolutely clear none of this stuff is set in stone because enrollment projections they look at past history and based on those that history

131and those trends they anticipate what's going to happen in the future it's not saying that this stuff is going to happen exactly as the projections say and i just want to put that out there because sometimes people get a little confused when they see projections they think oh it's supposed to be exactly this number and i just want to be clear about that they likely won't be exactly that number of course the intent of the eap is to update stakeholders that being school board county the public about our 10-year enrollment projections as well it helps all to plan for future seat needs so what i'd like to do sort of browse through the document in front of you i'll mention a couple of page numbers of note more common pages i start off by saying

132that in the report there's information on past present and projected student enrollment based on our projections we're slated to grow 4 800 students over the next decade an interesting chart in the report on page 8 shows our annual growth percentage and one of the things you'll notice on page eight when you look at that chart number eight you'll see the percent growth rate uh what's important about that percent rate you'll notice it's below two percent two percent is considered a high growth rate so according to our projections we're slated to grow at a moderate pace i just want to make that clear also you can see on the chart the actual enrollment projection numbers and again these numbers are based on the 2019 projections all right i'll move on and jump to the chart number

13310 on page 11. usually with projections everybody asks what's your births look like and so here's what our births look like and you'll notice they're relatively flat at about 1700 or so burst resident live births each year from 2006 through 2018. so we've pretty much grown at a fairly constant rate which is good and another chart of interest is on page 14. uh that's our residential projects um so one of the things we hear is you're growing well why are you growing and everyone wants to obviously look first at well where's the housing coming from and what's it slated to be so the map on page 14 shows you where new developments are slated to be and we got this information from our account from our county planning department and they were also kind enough

134to provide us with information on the name of the subdivision how many units are planned and approved and so forth well the key takeaway uh from this map is that the county planning data revealed that there were a hundred active residential projects with a total of 7548 vacant lots and the breakdown of those lots eighty-two percent were single-family detached homes eleven percent were um uh town homes or single-family attached homes and then the remaining seven percent were multi-family units so what's important about that is according to the data single family homes is is the majority of this new development and we typically get really high yields from both single family and [Music] multi-family i'm sorry single family and town homes generate our highest student yields okay so now i'm going to jump to pages 31

135and 32. so in the past when we had the enrollment projections we had sort of a chiclets chart where you would see numbers and you would see yellow green red and to me first thing when i saw that thing i go what are you going to make of this what you can't see anything i mean it's there but to me it needed to be displayed sort of in a map format and so what we wanted to do as part of our enhancement to the report was to put this sort of in a map and so you can visualize what that means so i just want to point out on page 31 that this is our projected enrollment growth in 2024 the colors of note are red and orange those show seat deficits those colors and

136the numbers below the school names identify if there's a surplus of seats or if there's a deficit of seats and so that's how you sort of read that information and so we have this in the midterm which is 2024 and we have this in the long term which is 2029 and you can sort of if you flip between pages 31 and 32 you can sort of see how the colors change over time and they get uh the crowding gets a little worse so there are is definitely a need for more elementary schools in the future okay now i'm going to jump really quickly to pages 34 and 35 which shows the projected middle school growth and one thing to note on page 34 which is the 2024 growth we can see that pretty much along

137the sort of i guess you would call it the highway 95 corridor those schools are slated to have seat deficits and the majority of our schools at this time um are there are seats available most notably uh dixon smith in 2024 is slated for 333 seats open of course when we have this situation we typically look at things like boundary changes and so forth to balance enrollment so that we use the capacity that we have wisely and efficiently uh and of course if you jump to page 35 you flip you can see how those orange areas quickly turn red and red's not a good thing red's bad uh green's good we see that drew stafford and heim are slated and pool to have seat deficits there in the red okay so this clearly shows there'll

138be a need to balance enrollment and more seats in the future at the middle school level so now i'll jump to page 37 which shows our projected high school growth if you look at that map you can see in 2024 brooke point is slated to have the most crowding they're slated to be a deficit of 306 seats and if we look at the neighboring high schools we see that there are some deficits at neighboring high schools so boundary change not looking too good we'll have to definitely have more high school seats and of course we'll talk about that very shortly in our large capital projects cip so i just wanted to share this information with you um and i'd like to open up the floor if you have any questions madam chair lionel can you

139clarify we talked a little bit about this at the fab um but specifically that 306 seat deficit at brooke point um this does not include the estimated or the anticipated sixth high school this is this is pre building of high school number six that is correct and so you said we didn't do another map for 2029 right because we have an idea of how after we build high school number six how much that 306 deficit at brook point will go down um we do it will go down because uh when we add i believe it's uh 2150 seats okay it will definitely bring it down but then we'll also need to of course balance enrollment with those seats at a new high school of course so it will definitely help however if you look on

140page well actually it's not in this document but i did research this in the out years of the projection by 2029 we're still going to be we're going to be above 90 and we'll need to plan for another high school and so the just to sort of jump ahead a little bit we have uh projected crowding concerns at all three school levels and one school will not fix the problem and that's at the high school level that's also true at the elementary level so just want to let you know that in the out years we're going to be above 90 with the new schools in capacity so to sum it up basically we're in a world of hurt going forward well we're yeah we're we'll definitely need more capacity based on our current guidelines uh

141the way we operate when we start to plan once we reach 90 and just another quick question when you were putting um this packet together and you were doing all your projections the county played a role in developing these numbers too correct uh they did in terms of residential development uh so we have different data sources and it's sort of each data source is sort of referenced in the document we have birth data from the state residential housing data from the county also we have internal data for our cohort transitions and you know information like that from our synergy student information system so it's a combination of data coming from multiple sources okay so has the county seen this document yet not to my knowledge okay so when is your next um joint cip get

142together um with the county actually miss hollerbach let me um i know that poor dr kisner has been on my was on this i believe uh dr warner was on my i think this is a fabulous document i actually think if um i know there was maybe a a comment that for dr kissner every once a while to go over to the board of supervisors not when we have an issue exactly pending but to present data to me this is the document okay we need to make sure that is in their hands now whether we go and present it or not but i would just that's right well i was just going to say to each board member if you want an extra copy of it to hand to your but um i think dr

143kizer and i talked about i i do think this is a very well done document very readable um but it also needs to be in other elected officials hands and the security security one microphone thank you one thing we want to make sure is that you saw it right before we presented to them but even though this tells the story of our school system per se i also think that that it's very well laid out in telling a story to them about their about what's going on in the county in a different way than maybe they're used to seeing it as well so i mean while we'll say it tells a school story i really do think it speaks to more in a broader sense the county story so very well done thank you thank

144you any other comments or um concerns just a quick um housekeeping um so now we're calling it eap not sar so um all the other documents need to be changed or anything that we had in the past stays the same and then moving forward okay yes um going to ms randall's point um there are other statistics in here and i'm glad we focused on the growth because of the upcoming agenda items we have coming but i would just want to point out one particular fact in here that was fascinating which is on page seven says ten years ago zero stafford county public school elementary schools had free lunch populations above 30 percent today over half of our elementary schools have free lunch populations over 30 percent that's a figure that we as a school division

145but as ms randall was alluding to we as a county need to look into from a resource perspective there are many other facts that one to me was um thank you for stating it that way because i think that gives you know a 10-year swing we have to be planning um the only other one and ms healing i'm not trying to um go into your district i did look at some of the figures that you have for a.g right i have to say though every year ag wright comes in high for some reason now i can't speak to this year but just keep an eye on that school even though we always are projecting it goes lower somehow there always seems to be a lot of people that a lot of students at ag right

146just to keep that i'm not trying to my daughter went there so i know that as well and mine as well and we all love our principal as we is we love the principles in all our schools but i was just saying it's a great eye on that one it tends to run high even if we think on paper it doesn't so just from some experience thank you again for an excellent documentary miss hazard can i comment it sorted to piggyback where you described even the the change that we had in the um the uh free lunch we als i also think it's worth noting not just from our side but from the county side as well is our changing demographics i mean we heard it earlier and i think that uh it is something

147to note you know as we put resources for you know the different cultures different languages on school side i also think that it's appropriate for the supervisors to consider it in resources on their side too so i really appreciate the way you put the different elements that you put in this document thank you thank you ms young had a final comment yes thank you um again so on the land acquisition um you have it highlighted here on page 20 of course uh will be planned for at least two years prior to preliminary planning period but may occur simultaneously for all school levels um has anything changed in your perspective once you completed this document in terms of what you're looking at prior acquisition wise well one of the things is some of the preliminary planning

148and the land acquisitions those processes can run concurrently so that's one observation yeah okay so like looking at some of the data that you have here it seems like the north is also becoming more populated and so i was wondering um i think that uh at some point in time uh the land acquisition that you all were looking at was like catered in a certain location so i'm wondering if you're going to plan in on expanding that a little bit more to include other land that that was really my question oh okay the answer is yes um we are gonna be looking at that as part of next year's um or this year's uh enrollment accommodation plan so there'll definitely be some [Music] that'll definitely be a part of the document okay thank you so

149that should be added back in then yeah well yeah there'll definitely be some language about we need more sites and yeah thank you and dr kisner just as a final note and i'm sorry there are so many good facts about you know we've all named some of those i'm wondering if we as the school division maybe our um communications office might want to put kind of facts about um stafford county public schools or the county even based on at least some of the facts in here just something to think about going forward because telling our story to the community is equally is important maybe on the website is that what you're talking about something just just something to think about going forward i'm not saying the model you all have that but there is great

150stuff in here so yes lionel thank you for an excellent report thank you all right we have um two opportunities for our public comment this evening we have two separate hearings so there's going to be our public budget hearing first but i'm going to just go through the um the things that each speaker needs to do that will cover both of them so i'm just going to open it up for each speaker is allotted two minutes when speaking please first clearly state your name and voting district if known and if you wish to submit comments actually would have already had to have done that by now prior to the meeting we will ask you to come forward um to the podium and at two minutes i don't think there's the lights as well but um

151anyway we will be open for public comment this night first we have our public budget hearing i do not have anybody signed up to speak to that topic however if you didn't get your name on the list you are not prohibited so if there's anyone here tonight that would like to speak only on our um budget fy22 which is next year's budget a budget priority please come on down okay hearing nobody then i'm going to move same uh rules apply for our general citizen comments tonight i have one person signed up um i believe mr reichert if you would like to come on down and if there is anybody else who was here to speak if you would go ahead and stand on the aisle so you can quickly not crowding mr reichert uh come

152forward i would appreciate it welcome mr reichert thank you my name is dan reichard i live in the george washington district and i teach fifth grade at kate waller barrett elementary good evening madam chair members of the board dr kisner it's all about kids those are the words i've driven by the past nine years as i arrive at kate waller barrett elementary each day it's all about kids a mantra holding the deepest belief in my soul every day every moment it's all about kids tonight i am here on behalf of the brilliant intelligent beautiful incredible kids of kate waller barrett elementary my students our students i'm here for the kids who now have a chromebook but an internet connection so weak they get kicked out of our meeting 10 to 15 times each day although

153internet cafe is an option for some it still does not adequately resolve the issues of freezing screens and drop connections i'm here for the kids whose families are working a second shift right now just to put food on the table and to pay the rent those kids who are trying to independently navigate canvas a learning management platform designed for students far older than 10 years old i'm here for the kids who wake themselves up to come to school each day for that special relationship and and that sense of belonging i'm here for our kids when i'm teaching a lesson in class i always ask my scholars how was my teaching did that make sense so after four weeks of google meets and canvas modules i have come to one conclusion our current model doesn't work

154my students my kids they're on the wrong side of an equity gap that expands by the day i'm not here to criticize decisions me my principle always reminds me to assume good intent i'm here to ask how can we make this work for our kids i invite you to visit one of my google meets from 9 a.m to 2 p.m not just a quick drop in or a wave hello all five hours use that visit to form your opinion ask all teachers how it's going give a voice to those who are so immersed in the work that they don't have time for the politics those educators need to be heard kate waller barrett is a home it's a place of love acceptance belief it's a home that truly can't be replaced in the virtual world

155it's time to safely bring our kids back home to school thank you mr reichert is there anyone else who wishes to address the board this evening all right hearing none i'm going to close both public comment and then we will be um moving on to sorry after our board committee reports um dr warner do you want to give us a overview of finance and budget please thank you madam chair um we met on september 14th and one of the primary things that we reviewed was the cip which we do have a recommendation which i believe they will be going over later but basically given the growth patterns that we anticipate we wanted to make sure that you know the high school number six is at the top of the priorities um elementary school number and

156we added middle school number nine we'd like to given the cost of renovations it drew and the limitations with that property it's only on 15 acres it's a one of our oldest schools in the district is to maybe reimagine and repurpose it and adjust the um the costs i think which were around 27 million accordingly it's always difficult to look at these long-term plans and try to figure out how we're going to accommodate all these students with so few resource with few resources we've discussed budget priorities which i think are still something that that we're starting to to form some ideas about and we talked about the possibility of establishing a budgeting protocol for our unfunded projects maybe a percentage from the county budget instead of a flat rate which might be more effective and

157it would also be a dynamic dynamic number that changes over time we were given a technology projects update which we had we have authorized number of technology infrastructure items on over the last i don't know year i just went back and reviewed them and some of them are helping with the supercoogees and the kgs um firewall systems and other other technology that we were updated on um we also um voted to recommend a um health premium holiday which i'm going to let mrs hollerbeck discuss she brought this to the fab meeting i think it was a great idea um actually this is something that's been done in the past um when uh dr chase was on the was on the fab and leading the fab um um i guess with some um i can't say

158excess money but um we had a little extra in our in our kitty and we gave it back to our employees through a a health care holiday um what we discussed was um actually chris would you mind coming up and just doing a quick let's wait till we get to that agenda item um yeah okay we'll rather do it we'll go ahead so we'll do that i don't want it i don't want to speak out of turn so when we get there chris can articulate that a little bit better than i can thank you ms randall would you like to chase was known by governance sure um so we met uh last week on thursday as a governance committee and the first thing was we changed charlene greene's professional development with us to october 2nd

159from 7 to 9. and we're working on a location we think north stafford in the area just outside the library um on the november 18th and 19th the school board dinner or service event we decided rather than doing a school board dinner with the cabinet that we off opted to do a service event and then um we decided that we got well we got excited in the conversation and rather than choose november 18th or 19th we decided to double the fun and double the pleasure and make it both nights for service event and that way our school board and staff could either sign up for one both or uh for participation and we're looking to make a dinner event that we host we prepare food we clean up we set up on and we're working

160currently on uh who that target group will be and hopefully even have some input as to location maybe one night in the north and one night in the south end to try and serve some of our families in our community the superintendent and clerk's evaluations i had missy send out your availability basically for the month of october if you would please i think there's only a couple of us that have filled it out but we need to finalize this if you would uh board members do so the last part was structure in the streamlining of standing committees and attached to this is a overview of what we're looking at in restructuring our committees as we go forward and i would love to get your input and from the board and suggestions and if you tell

161me scratch this susan start over i won't get my feelings hurt so just any input that you would like to give would be helpful and we look for this to be voted on in the november time frame to kick off in the january time frame when we renegotiate where we are with committees and such so that's where we are thanks thank you for the um great committee work next is our superintendent comments dr kissner two quick things first i want to thank kathy massey and the um rising star staff uh today we had um virginia's first lady miss pamela northam come visit the school and it was really a very positive visit she had a chance to enter many classrooms and just to let you know the kids were socially distancing wearing their masks and

162they were learning and then she uh kathy had all the kids come to the cafeteria and she uh read it to the students so it was a very positive uh visit i also um i know we've been getting some emails from people wondering why the day is so long like what can we do to abbreviate um the day and and believe me i i asked that same question and i think some of you know i spoke to the state board of education last week and but anyway i want to give you what you have in front of you i won't go over but you have the official memo from the state superintendent that helps explain and if you want to read any portion that's related to this notion of length of a school day either

163synchronous asynchronous i would read the page two the court instruction time requirements and top of page three that would uh kind of ask answer your question and you'll see very clearly they have not waived that component even in a a coveted learning environment so i just want to give you what i've been sharing with different people can you put this on the website for our parents to see absolutely thank you and is it do you think that there's a po will it never change or will is there a possibility that it could still change i mean what are we are we so i i never use the word impossible i know that um since uh my opportunity to speak i've been approached to speak more about it um i'm also going to be um sometime

164next week meeting with the um virginia school superintendent association whatever organization i belong to the executive board to have this conversation so um i feel like it needs to have more conversation i don't think they recognize what the ramifications are especially to younger children um and it's not even the children it's also the adults you heard um mr reichard completely accurate it's about the children first but a lot of adults are working remarkably hard and stressed out so i don't know what your governance structure is with vspa but i think it would not hurt if you have a uh delegate of or know who the delegate is to also bring this up uh more stakeholders i think greater chance it has a chance of being changed can i say a quick question i i heard

165on the radio yesterday and maybe it was in the vsba brief as well that one of the schools in richmond outside of richmond was shortening the day and i don't know if they were just shortening the amount that students had to be logged onto the computer or something along that line yeah i i read it also i'm not i'm not familiar with i think it was the vsba um i'm just really not familiar with it to give an answer i saw it i will say at the high school middle school i know mr dr greiter's here we actually had to increase more at the middle school because we recognized that we were not um a meeting and it's more hours at the elementary if you read it 680 at the elementary is 560 at the

166high s at the middle of high school in the core subject so um what we did talk about by this real quickly and some of you heard it at the end of the uh youtube tape that uh dr lane did give a good suggestion that i think we talked about it at the elementary principles meeting uh yesterday um you could read books you don't have to go on computer if you're working with your family if you're going to a pumpkin patch talk about the science and the art and then and the math of a pumpkin patch or sing a song about the pumpkin patch whatever if you're cooking with your your parents talk about measuring and things of that nature so i think and i've actually asked uh in our planning to begin to shift

167a little bit away from that term asynchronous maybe have something along with it because there's other learning and yesterday's meeting was at the falmouth library and we're sitting there i'm sitting there i'm staring at all these books i'm thinking you know these books need to be where the little kids are and um and and we talked about that so i i think even if the state doesn't give us relief this is really where i'm going with it we're going to design it and i think uh carrie already alluded to that we're going to revisit our model to get relief in a more natural way than just thinking that it has to be either live online or not live online i will can i just add one thing one of the things i would like to

168i you know he you sent it to me to watch what you were saying and and the conversation and how it was supported with other superintendents but one of the things that i i was impressed about with dr kisner in that conversation was how much he was advocating for the the uh undoing of our teachers right now with the amount of hours not a traditional work day but putting in 10 14 hours a day and they that this is hurting their families he was also speaking about the kids and yes elementary but you know as some of us receive letters in the middle and high school that you know we had an asynchronous day that might have just been atypical and i think as the kinks are being worked out they'll they will become better

169when as we learn to understand what asynchronous can be but you know we're talking about families that are stressed out kids that are stressed out the teachers that are stressed out you know and again speaking to what mr reichert was even saying they just want the kids back and i know we're working towards that especially in the elementary um and we'll talk later of course about the middle and the high but i just really want to say you know it was the letters that we receive is one part of it but dr kisner was very strong in advocating for what our teachers are going through and we don't want them sick we don't want them hurt we don't want them leaving we want them here and we need to find ways a of appreciating them

170but also be relieving them of these hours and hours they're putting in so i just wanted to give thank you dr kissner for your support of them and our families i have to tell you something real funny for my and i know i i broke a rule ms haley i apologize right now i checked my texts and my wife told me that the way i speak i guess we have translation under and some of my words have been translated differently because they don't have a new york translator so so i would just like to add on to um what ms randall said and and for dr kisner um advocating for us in some of those other areas i think something that for those who are listening and who write their elected officials it was not

171a year ago and in our legislative priorities we have put virginia is not at the top of our um payment scale as a as a state as you state the commonwealth and there has been um at least interest at the elected level of why why is this happening i would think maybe we can push that in the direction a little bit dr kisler where you're going but to say to our legislators you've asked us these questions why are people leaving we talk about pay we talk about that but we've also always talked about work environment and what is the legislature our department of education and others doing to make sure we retain our teachers i know we talked about it with mr burnett obviously tonight on what we can do in stafford but our hands

172are only so tied i mean we only can do so much if there's not some flexibility at the state so i would just encourage us maybe to re-examine and dr kuzner you're better at this than i am but that that that may be another way to sort of push that if that makes any sense all right moving on to our consent items which are three is there a motion motion to approve the three consent items nine second one two and three i've already heard the second any um deletions or comments hearing none all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed all consent items are approved action item chair can we take like a three minute break but we've we've been sitting here for almost two hours now and i think the next couple

173of agenda items are gonna keep us in our seats a little bit longer all right then we will do a point of privilege everybody five minute a break get up walk around um and be back please in five minutes he's always out here [Music] okay [Music] all right i would like to welcome everybody back um thank you for that um moment to get up and walk around for just a moment board has been receiving information since 5 30. so on our in we will be starting with our action items uh first action item is our approval of the proposed plans for the resumption of extracurricular activities motion to approve second all right there's been a move in second however i believe because last time um there were not the written materials associated with it with

174the word like a quick overview of um what's being brought before the board tonight so there can be time for questions has it not been put on the agenda since then yes but i think an overview isn't is an order since it has not been i just wanted so i don't know if it will be dr nichols or who will be presenting uh this evening i just wanted to parents know that it's on there this time yes it has been on since uh thursday night okay yes we provided for the public we provided our timeline for the implementation of activities and athletics for the community where we would start training our coaches and have them trained by the 30th if approved tonight we'd start for a three-week period on the 5th of october and go

175through the 23rd oct of october with a phase 3 at which time we will review with our athletic and activities directors and mr justice myself and we'll review these processes to make sure everything's going smoothly at that point we would go into phase three which the difference between phase two and phase three is that you're doing individual skill development more conditioning activities in phase two phase three would allow some equipment and specific drill skill development and then we would then hopefully go into the winter season which starts on december 7th and again other activities and teams would still continue with their phase 3 out of season conditioning and again out of season conditioning was not required as it we've had that all along for many years and it's not required it's optional for coaches and

176for athletes we also have on the website the parent consent form which just to emphasize some of the testing that we would do as far as temperature checks on sickness some of the hydration making sure students bring water bottles they're not sharing gear picking up things that do not belong with them and then maintaining wearing a mask and maintaining a six feet of social distance unless they're involved in a strenuous activity in which 10 feet is maintained during that strenuous time and then we also have is the staff camp public schools phase two and phase three plan which was adopted from the federal the national federation of high school and then the virginia high school league and we adopted that to meet stafford county's needs and all the three documents were posted last week all

177right thank you mr nichols are there questions dr chase start with start us off so first of all i just want to say i know that dr nichols cares a lot about the kids in stafford county and there's no question but i have a lot of questions and i just want to get that out there i was curious where the plan is for the non-athletic vhsl sponsored activities so broadcasting debate forensics robotics theater band i didn't see any plan and i'm getting emails saying please let us have extracurriculars back but i didn't see a plan for anything but athletics we had athletics activision marching band and jrotc when we spoke last time with the other activities the non-or the vhsl academic activities commence in the spring okay and we would develop and again following if

178we're back into school or not in the timeline that you put forth earlier we'd be back in our buildings at that time um with that um we are recommending that right now they're continuing to do their virtual meetings right now and again these were out of season conditioning activities and there weren't a lot of conditioning for those with the exception the rotc and also marching band which right i just didn't see anything that referenced anything specific for rotc or banned in the plan i just saw things that were specific to athletic conditioning so i just was kind of curious where that was we we worked with the athletic directors and activities directors and high schools and we also worked with mrs anna marie molino with the marching band and part of that is also phase

179two is the conditioning part where they're doing their steps they're doing their uh laying out their performances where they would do the conditioning aspect phase three with marching band would allow instruments to come back into place where they could start doing tuning and we did put together a model plan for the marching band that she put together with her directors which would include where they would once they finished their uh testing they'd have a time where they would do some marching stretching preparing for the strenuous activities of going through their processions and then also doing tuning and also playing the jrotc and talk with them again they do a lot of calisthenics which could be conditioning activities using their own body weight running sprinting preparing for their marching which was all part of what we

180put into the activities on the conditioning and phase two and phase three okay and then um so i see in the timeline you know you talk about some conditioning activities it also says here that you will discuss the option for certain sports and activities to move inside for continued conditioning and skill development activities examples of basketball and volleyball so can you tell me what sort of health metrics you'll be using to make these decisions what specific information you'll use to decide about allowing athletes to be indoors yeah we are going to be tracking our metrics when we are testing all our students when they get there as far as their temperatures answering questions to make sure that they haven't been exposed whether how they're feeling those forms will be collected each evening after practices they'll

181be emailed to the athletic director into mr justice he'll be keeping those records and tabulating we're going to be working to make sure that any cases or outbreaks we'll have to follow mitigation plans that falling and working with colette just as we are in the schools and looking at our current data from our schools as far as number of participants who are coming out we've heard from several teams that probably will not be utilizing the conditioning because their kids are involved in some travel teams right now some of the i guess fall activities um but we'll be evaluating the processes based on feedback from our athletic directors who will be out there watching supervising along with the coaches and their quantitative feedback man okay and then um i saw in the vhsl guidelines that a

182parent helpfully sent to me under guiding principle number two it states individuals who are at higher risk for severe disease should take extra precautions or sometimes choose not to participate this includes individuals who have chronic lung disease moderate or severe asthma serious heart conditions immunocompromised or take immunosuppressant medication severely obese diabetes chronic kidney disease or dialysis or those over 65 years clearly 65 years doesn't refer to our students but um can we can you include that in the consent form so that it is in writing to people that they need to be aware that um that if their children have moderate asthma if their children are diabetic they should not be participating yeah we also are requiring if you look at our phase guidance we're requiring athletic physicals for all students to participate in the

183conditioning and on their physical forms they do identify conditions and the doctors would identify whether they can participate or not okay so so and do we usually not allow children with diabetes to participate in sports no no we allow them they just we're just made aware of it so we can maintain their health plan okay so i'm just saying that given that this is a different situation i just want to make sure that that that i mean i don't know if you have a completely different physical form or if it's the same this is the same virginia high school league forum that we used i think that would be in violation of the american americans with disabilities act wouldn't it to simply say be aware i think it may be a better a a different

184approach would be to consult your physician something to that effect but not i mean i could tell i mean not that i really want to get too personal but i have a family member who's asthmatic and she's also an athlete and she has it controlled and i and if she was in high school she would play um and but we would probably consult with her doctor but i surely wouldn't want the school to tell her she can't play because she's right especially the students that are that operate under a 504 we would clearly be in violation of right now it wasn't suggesting that they that that we would but what i'm saying is i want to make sure that i the assumption that doctors will always tell you during a physical about the risks of

185coven that may or may not happen and so i just want to make sure that we don't have students who are coming in to play and that they don't understand that there may be a greater risk so i don't know if the physical form says be sure to talk to your doctor about covid risks or something i just don't want that to fall through the cracks so that was just um another sort of thing that i was concerned about and piggybacking on that in looking at your participation consent form it doesn't say to have a physical so maybe adding that in there and then referencing maybe some of the uh concerns mis that dr chase has might because it doesn't say it in here obviously you're saying it needs to be there but as part

186of the consent letting parents know your child must have a physical please be advised that you know during covid you might want to pay or make sure that your doctor is aware that your child is participating in a physical uh activity at their high school during this pandemic or covid or whatever you want to call it and to make sure they have approval something wrong and then um in the vhsl guidelines you had like everything they had except the part that said students must be encouraged to shower and wash their workout clothing immediately pod returning home so you might want to add that as another thing that that is recommended by by vhsl and then the other thing that i read there that i wasn't sure i saw in the plan due to the possibility

187of recurrent outbreaks in the coming months schools must be prepared for periodic school closures and the possibility of some teams having to isolate for two or more weeks while in season development of policies is recommended regarding practice and or competition during temporary school closures the cancellation of contests during the regular season and parameters for the cancellation or premature ending to postseason events and competitions so have we developed these policies man what we've presented tonight was the out of season practice for phase two and three okay if approved and we can move into contests and that's approved for december we'll have the return to action okay thank you all right anyone on this side ms healey you want to start us dr nichols i've asked in the past when we've had this discussion are we going

188to provide any transportation for students um in the past we've had activity buses that take them home but that's then they were already at school i mean i assume that based on this there's a plan for a lot of students to be either driving themselves or driven by their parents but we have a significant population that is not going to be in that category is have we considered or are we in a position to offer activity buses to transport students to and from this this conditioning yeah i spoke with mr suddus regarding the transportation based on need traditionally we've not had issues with kids getting to the out of season workouts talking with our athletic directors and our principals i'm not to say that's not different now but in talking with mr suddith he did

189say that we could implement based on need and reaching out finding if we have a need he said we could probably do a reverse activity bus where we'd have similar to a uh a neutral site or might be a pickup at one elementary school and then drop off again at the end of that activity the same similar to what we do with activity buses it'd just be a reverse of our drop-off it'd also be a pickup yeah i would be in support of that and i would want to make sure that the students and their families are aware that that is an option because i i want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to to participate in this that that chooses to participate and i just had one other question madam chairman i

190understand the requirement for hydration and that the students need to bring a water bottle but i would suggest that we reach out to support groups whether they be athletic support groups or the ptos or ptas to see if they would be willing to sponsor providing water bottles or at least an initial water bottle to every student that chooses to participate because there might be some that don't have it and then the requirement that if they don't have a water bottle when they come they can't participate i i know we want to teach these students to be responsible but they are teenagers and they may forget them and you know if if your parents are sitting in the car you know most parents are speaking for me um i'd probably go out and buy some water

191but that's not always going to be a possibility so i would like to try to to to have some mitigation for that i mean we don't want to encourage kids to come regularly with no water because we'll supply it but then again if someone forgets or they don't have it i don't want to say you can't you can't do anything today particularly if they've taken the activity bus and they're going to be sitting there for up to two hours waiting you know to to take it home so it's just something i mean i'd be willing to you know help contribute or to ask people to um you know supply cases of water i know we can't have you know what we had in the past but it it just well hey in my free time

192right um yeah i call me if you need some help i can uh i can buy water so thank you all right dr warner do you have any since i'm just going back and forth thank you dr nichols i know you've worked really hard on this i guess my concern is so we're currently in phase two based on the governor's status what the governor's set the state at correct phase three ma'am we're in phase three so we're i guess my concern is um are we going to be monitoring local metrics and if they don't comport with even though the state may be at a certain phase are we prepared to cease these outside these athletic training activities and conditioning activities if the metrics do not match much i would say that we'll be following the

193same metrics that dr kisner and mrs colette will be following we will be following the same metrics the school uses if they determine that we need to shut down or or stop just if we would school or classes we'd have to do that and miss ocana has also been a part of our planning team on this process well i guess my concern is is that we're currently at relatively high risk given that we're 81 out of a hundred thousand uh new cases and our we're moderate risk is the percent pcr positive at six point eight so we're not really at optimum um in an optimum position to be doing this so my concern is is that your timeline may be moving a little bit too quickly i do see that they are supposed to have

194a vhsl physical prior to the athletic participation and it must list all underlying all underlying existing health conditions must be noted on the current physical form um so what are your protocols for um if if there's a problem within a certain athletic group define problems somebody's let's say that you get a coveted positive kid or coach what are your protocols for that group right we're going to follow the same protocols that we use with school we're going to make our contacts we're going to trace and definitely we'll have to stop that if it's a pandemic in that specific group or activity not sure we can mandate a yeah let me see i'll defer that to colette i was going to save this comment to the elementary but i need to say it because i didn't

195say it earlier we meet with the health department i directly ask them friday can we have our children back in school and they said yes so i just want to make sure that's in the record because i'm not going to play medical doctor and i'm not going to interpret this i think what you saw with the numbers they go up and down i specifically asked that question based on the metrics that we all had in front of us so i i you know i just want to make i just need to say it because i didn't say it before and it needs to be in a record because i asked him uh dr chase was there and that's not what i heard well that's actually what they said so what what i heard them say

196is um that's a tough decision and um we we think kids can be back in school but um we're here to help you make the decision and they were not they did not seem willing to give us a yes or no answer again i i don't really feel like i want to debate you but um i heard that the cdc number uh if we're just going to stay with that number then as a school board you may not want to you might as well just tell the public today we're not opening up school okay and um they were in the cdc report there was three parts as i shared with you tonight the third part was what they said they believe we are prepared because we follow the mitigation strategies that are there so again

197i am i hear i'm here to give information okay um uh and i know people don't want to compare to other school communities so i won't do that i'll just stick with stafford but um i believed i asked that question and i believe they said based on your strategy you could have kids back in school dr winnery is randall um i i would just also like to remind that we're not intending to start this until about the same time that we're allowing the um elementary kids in um and also uh i i would also like to point out something you had in phase three and i'm just questioning going into like the sport the actual sports season in phase three uh of the part that you described i know we're not entering that first in

198phase three you have on there no travel um but won't we be in phase three when the sports season starts and then won't we need to travel technically that would be return to learn or excuse me return to activity phase oh not a three then the phases present to you were for the out of season practice for phase two and phase three which phase three would follow throughout the remainder of the seasons okay um a season that would start winter season which starts december 7th we would follow the vhsl return to activity process where they are allowed to compete at that time okay and so um the f the is there an option one of the things that you had on there was um coaches put their plan to the athletic directors and i'd like

199it to go one step further in having those um plans going to mr justice as well um just for the sake of typically uh i mean just in the conversations that we have sometimes people like skip the steps of first talk to coach then to the a.d then so on they just go boom straight up to the top so i'd like for him to make sure that he has the information to either answer the family concern or parent concern because it's always going to be you know i need to know and upset and you know it would just be nice if he had the plans with him as well sure [Music] all right miss hollerbeck miss young differ i will get um well i i made the motion to um to move this so um

200clearly i'm gonna support it um we're working real hard to get our you know esl kids into the school in our special education kids into school and and and there's another side of of our student body um that needs to be doing something other than sitting in front of a computer um the the the athletic fields are an extension of our classrooms we've we've said that i've said that and our this whole board has said this for as long as i've been sitting on here so so it's not just that you know a bunch of you know kids want to get together and just throw a ball back and forth with each other it's part of the learning experience um and that is why i am going to definitely support this is young sure thank

201you so much mr nichols i know you've worked very very hard on this and passionate it looks in the work that you've done and thank you so much for answering the questions that i've asked already and that you shared with the board um i'm a little bit confused in terms of the number of students and i talked to one of my school board colleagues here and um some confused if this is athletic students or all students because the number that you gave me was 250. when we reached out to our athletic and activities assistant principals to ask them for their estimates based on their conversations with their coaches and sponsors on who would be participating the numbers we received back were anywhere from 150 to 250 um students at that time and if you don't

202mind speaking up i don't buy it i can't hear you very well the athletic directors and activities directors reached out to their coaches and sponsors to get the anticipated numbers for teams that would be participating in the conditioning if we start october 23rd and based on those requests we received anywhere from 150 students to 250 students now again what they're seeing mostly is a lot of teams that would be participating in the winter season some teams that would be in the fall are already involved in fall baseball or travel volleyball and those coaches were reporting they most likely would not have any out of season again these are optional voluntary conditioning as far as the jrotc units they thought they would get back out so they can start doing some of their pt and start

203working on some of their competition drill teams and then we also had marching bands some schools did not see the need to start as early with marching band and most likely would wait until closer in the winter months before the fall season when they would be out marching with their at a football game or things of that nature okay so that's why the numbers were low okay thank you so much and some of these kids are actually you know my kids they're all in sports and so some of these kids are or were on traveler teams and so i'm wondering if there's any covet testing i think this question was raised and you said um that's a no no ma'am we're not okay so for those that are asymptomatic um and they did strenuous uh

204exercise they could take their masks off and we know now that's in the air right because we're not we're trying to figure out who we need to be listening to vdh or cdc and i made a comment a couple of months ago about cdc not being cdc and i got an email so please send me an email again but it is what it is right so i'm trying to figure this out um hours without fever reducing medications and improves i think um dr chase spread that symptoms and 10 days after onset and symptoms prior to returning 10 days not 14. 10 days not 14. okay okay yeah there you are okay so where is this metric from cdc or vdh or is it both have 10 days back in july the cdc recommended i'm sorry

205back in july the cdc recommended that we no longer use a testing based strategy for return to work or school or anything because the coronavirus can be present in swabs up to 12 weeks after the illness has subsided so we are go basing our return to work to school to play on the symptoms based strategy in which it is 10 days from onset of symptoms or 10 days from this the positive test as well as 24 hours fever-free and a reduction in symptoms so they have to meet all three of those criteria to return so so back in july um the positivity rate uh was five point five three you know what it is today i believe it's six point seven point four three we're going in the wrong direction here um back in july

206there was also not as much testing readily available correct so i'm unclear vdh is using the 14-day average positivity rate or the 14-day trend but it looks like they're using seven-day average from what i'm dangerous right now because i took a statistics class last year in my doctoral so uh right elizabeth so um you know i said well let me exercise this and so the test percent positivity rate at seven day in july was 5.97 for um that was the cdc and then now it's seven uh 7.40 so all i'm saying is like you're are you you're one person are you going to be looking at all of this across the whole stafford county schools i have the nurses helping me do this i'm not doing it alone right exactly and then athletic directors are

207also monitoring these children for symptoms as well and their second temperatures as they arrive um and then we're also expecting it you know we're not going to necessarily get a note from a doctor returning them but we are going to be monitoring when to tell them to come back if they've been positive so when part of our contact tracing if the student is found to be positive we're going to be discussing with the family the date that they had the onset of symptoms and also or the date that they tested positive and telling them what day plus the other criteria the improvement of symptoms no fever for at least 24 hours without medication as well as it being at least 10 days from onset before they can return so it has to be that three-fold

208um criteria before they can return to school or work or to play so a case incident is like 127 um so are we keeping a benchmark like in terms of positivity case rate across the board for the whole stafford county or are we doing it by school or by sport how how is that going to be recorded we're looking at them we're looking at the positivity rate for the metric for the area but then we look at each individual program class or whatever um based on what is going on with that particular program to determine whether we continue so if it's a sport and there's a child that's positive we're going to contact trace that child to see who was a direct contact which would mean six feet of or less distance for 15 minutes

209or more contact to determine who was within that spacing and time frame to have them quarantined because of being a direct contact okay so and the older children we're going to be able to just look at their direct contacts and withhold them from school this was based on conversation and training that we had with the health department contact tracers and the lead nurses um a week ago monday so um we're going to be looking more closely at actual direct contacts for exclusion and for stopping a program obviously our children in our lower grades especially kindergarten preschool first grade we're going to probably need to exclude an entire class based on the activity level in that classroom in other words because those children don't really do well with seat time and and maintaining social distancing the

210likelihood of them having that 15-minute contact is higher so we would probably keep that classroom home but in a high school we're going to be able to have children sit for longer periods of time in that six foot social distancing and be able to monitor their activity better and be able to just determine who they had that 15-minute contact with is this before or after we we just found out that it's airborne and uh it's not this is based on contact tracing for a number of other respiratory illnesses like tuberculosis as well so this is standard contact tracing got it tom i have a couple of other you could stay right there if you want um so in the plan it says um the re-acclimation to athletics and activities um i guess what athletics and

211activities are you referring to you already mentioned that so thank you for that and you said about the temp checks um in one of the columns and my eyes are getting tired here each sport appears to mean you have to be playing a sport and it's not including everyone so we talked about that already and we talked about that up to 250. okay um i think all my questions are answered okay i have um just a couple comments um with regard to what you all have handed us with the phase two phase three if we could if this is what's going to be posted instead of saying any student athlete must obtain i would like that to say every because i believe that's correct is that correct dr nichols it's every that and that has

212to be um provided prior to um participation in the activity is that correct i'm not sure how the when when does that form have to be completed and returned the physical form needs to be completed prior to any type of practice okay um and um so that would be that i think it should say every so it's very very clear to that anybody participating in these um i do note that it does say about the temperature checks will be taken prior to students exiting the vehicle we are confident we will not run an activity unless we have sufficient staffing to accomplish that would that be correct yes ma'am um i guess the other i am i am supportive of this but i do have some concern not because of you or the us athletic directors

213or mr justice i just listened to colette give us how how we go back this board member has particularly kept saying we don't even have the metrics really to know i would want to feel a little more confident um as you if if there is a transfer into the phase three which moves from 50 persons to 250 students and moving from outdoors into indoors um for me i would want to have some update and i don't know if the board would like to on the 13th or something of october or 27th because i just feel like if this is approved tonight i really need to have an understanding of what metrics in general and i understand i am not the medical expert i really wish i didn't have to know as much now as i

214do about these rates i just feel like if we are beginning to broadly look at our division and opening it up that i know i would want to at least have some idea of how it's going before moving to what i would consider an indoor and let's see five times more students that does not mean i'm not willing to move there but for me i would need i would like to hear that before we would move there that's just a broad comment for the board to consider i would agree i i just um i feel like this it's a big step that we're doing this in the high school arena and i feel there should be um board inclusion and not just um again aps and mr justice not again because we don't trust but

215it's just it's we're going to get hammered with the letters or did you see these headlines and stuff like that so i kind of feel like we need to be a voice that answers to that [Music] all right any further comments or um [Music] yeah for for me as as it currently is i can't support it but if if we were having it brought back before we were having students go indoors but i have a hard time saying that students can be in our buildings for athletics but they can't be in our buildings for school and i just think that's a tough a tough thing to be saying um i i absolutely appreciate people who've reached out to me and and talked to me about the very low rate of transmission outdoors and i agree

216with that so i mean i can i can probably support uh the outdoor activities i have a little bit of trouble just uh saying yeah we're gonna then move indoors um without without you know and i think about the metrics and stuff but as far as i know i i don't correct me if i'm wrong we don't have the data dashboard up on the website yet um i would like parents to actually be able to look at that and have a sense of that if they're sending their kids to our buildings or sending our kids to do sports dr warner i can i pers personally can support the idea of the student-athletes being outside for training and conditioning where i start to falter is that the bringing them inside especially since we don't really have

217um any clear metrics on how we're going to monitor the status of covid in these schools and you know we you seem to have you know there's a calendar here and we're going to do it this by this date and we're going to do this by this date but there's no criteria for assuring that that's clear and that it's safe so i i certainly want our kids to get back um to conditioning but again i have to agree with dr chase i have a hard time bringing kids into the school when for for athletics when they can't bring them into the school for academics i'm sure you know where i'm leaning i would love the kids to be back in the school but i can't see um not bringing the kiddos back for education and

218have the kids outside i don't know if board of supervisors opened up the parks and recreations locations already but if it's just for all students to be able to work out no matter what because that was the discussion we've had and i didn't think that that's what it was i i knew that this is what it was for training and i move into their group sports and i would not be able with good conscience to support this and not education for the kids anyone miss missily ma'am chairman i agree about the not having students in school however i think it's something that we should consider looking at i mean we made this decision last summer you know the situation in my view was dire with the you know the reopenings and the case numbers going

219up we had vacations coming up um and i and i respect what my colleagues are saying but you know i am not adverse to considering moving the middle and high school students back into school prior to the end of the first semester i mean that date was set for um convenience it was the end of the semester there was not going to be an expectation that it was going to happen in october and november but if in fact it is safe and we find that it works with the elementary i have i have no objection in fact i would like to revisit that date so if if the objection to not having students come into school for conditioning is because they're not coming in for education my response is that perhaps we need to look

220at bringing them in for education because one of the the the issues that that i recall that was of a great concern was being able to maintain that social distancing and you know with with the number of students in in the hallways and the class changes and the parking lots and and you know other situations which i don't think is going to be an issue with the athletes i think that our coaches take this very seriously they respect the students and their families and they're going to do everything they can to make sure that the conditions you know are safe so i i don't see a significant difference from inside to outside other than of course statistically i'm sure outside is better excuse me may i finish i i didn't hear you miss young but

221i'll ask you um you know i i think it's something that we should consider looking at you know not just well we're not going to bring them in for education so we shouldn't bring them in for conditioning so perhaps we should be looking at bringing them in for education before the end of the first semester she's talking about me i'm i'm done now thank you madam chairman i just wanted to respond to your comment uh go ahead ms young i'm just saying i just wanted to respond to your comment i'm not saying just because they can't come in for education they can come in for athletics education is a different story and the ventilation in the school system is not prepared to handle students in the school if the schools are old heartwood uh drew

222falmouth um north stafford these are old school it's the ventilation fix that's questions that i have um about inside outside's a different story but i'm not gonna you know support a plan that has space one two and three all together where you can move from outside to inside because insight is not ready for not education or uh training uh unless my questions are answered about the ventilation thank you so perhaps maybe we'll i'm sorry i'm here but perhaps maybe we need to um divide this uh to where the agreement pieces are and then check to see where the disagreement pieces are maybe go forward with a phase two vote possibly then a phase three vote one other piece that i'd like to ask mr nichols is that you know in typical fashion um mother nature

223stafford county they uh collide quite often so i'm not sure what would be our plan for inclement weather should i mean sometimes we know about it rainy day cancel everything but then other times it just comes up on top of us where would those kids go we get a tornado warning we get a thunderstorm that was only supposed to be rain what do we do with those kids i mean my inclination is obviously we want them safe inside but if inside isn't an option what a what are our thoughts or plans with that would you like a response we would follow our current tornado hurricane crisis evacuation drills if we have students at football games or were out for pe we would have to keep our kids safe for that threat at that time so

224we'd have to follow those safety procedures mr madame truman that we say man yeah um i i don't really want to get involved because i know there's a lot of passion but i just want to remind you we have kids in our schools every day we have hundreds of kids in our buildings at the high school level we have our in many ways i would say our most vulnerable children and if we're looking for metrics i already presented to you how many kids which is not many one is too many let me make sure i say that but if you want to look at the percentage of kids that have been in our schools for three weeks and positive cases i think you get one narrative i also just want to say this and this

225holds true for me too we all could cherry pick the numbers we want to use okay if you want to use july i could go back here from the presentation that i presented tonight and show that we went down significantly just from a few weeks ago so i just think that we have to be passionate in our discussion but not choose numbers that are going to help support your physician that's just my suggestion to the board i understand no one is wrong on this no one is necessarily right on this it's it's your belief system but the what what i think miss hazard said this a few months ago it seems like a few months ago just been a few weeks ago we're being asked to be doctors scientists okay and and what the data

226which i showed you tonight is remarkably inconsistent okay and but you should also remember we spent a long time in june may and early july talk about health mitigation strategies and i don't want us to lose sight of that we're not masks six feet social distancing washing hands you get it colette and her team we are more cautious than any school system i could think of on reporting suspected and obviously when we're required so i i just need to bring that up is that we do have children in our schools and we are going to follow nothing has changed in the health mitigation strategies that you guys approved throughout the month of july and finally and your final adoption on july 28th thank you if i could make a suggestion which is where um i

227was my suggestion would be um that if if the motion maker and seconder would be open to it that um for approval of this however i would like to have something com excuse me come back to the board october 13th or the 27th those are our two board meetings so just a report before anything would automatically move to phase three part of that is not just please no it is not a trust issue we are also trying to also gain um and serve the trust of our parents and students and if they have done very well we need to say it and if we have some challenges that will help us going forward any of these programs as we move and phase into things i am very much a fan of that if everybody doesn't

228know that because we learn each time i have to say again please no it is not trust but i believe that the board and the public needs to be aware of how it went over those i could pick the 13th but that's a couple days earlier than when you all were going to meet on the 23rd then the 27th falls after it so i i don't know which date to pick i don't know if there is um if if there's some thought on that but i know i would feel more comfortable at least knowing if they were moving because as i've said we've gone from 50 outside to 250 inside i just would want to have a little more understanding but i think that it is possible i just would like to see how we're

229doing if that works 250 is not actually all inside you're still maintaining phase three outside also that would be sports like a basketball team and we still would try to well keep them within pods too can i can i amend the motion to say that we're gonna i'm gonna make the motion to approve um the first portion of this and then let's let's get off this hamster wheel i i'm getting tired um then we can bring it back and you guys tell dr kisner when you're ready to present to us again and then we can vote on it again and we just we confer with colette and we we look at the metrics and we make a decision then on the second half of the plan so let's get off this hamster wheel that's that's

230my motion okay so the motion is to approve the phase two implementation with a report coming back prior to any movement to phase three correct would that be somewhat of a good state okay there you go second all right madame chairman i i just want to to note for the record as the original seconder of the motion i'm not going to support that motion because i think we have a plan that has been in the works for a long time i think it's a plan that's in response to the needs of our students and their families we've been talking about the the the mental health the needs of meeting the needs of the students and i think this goes a long way and i appreciate dr nichols mr justice and all the ads and the

231work that has gone into this and i think there has to be an element here of of trust and i think the superintendent has really gone well beyond what one would normally expect in a leader in a division in ensuring the health and safety of the staff and the students and and balancing that with meeting the needs of the students their families in the community and and i think to break this up is is is just a slap in the face to to the people that have done all the work on this project and i would expect that if a problem arose here that it would be this crew that's bringing it to us now that would be back here and saying we've got to stop this we have a problem because of the great

232desire to to look out for the safety and health of everyone so i'm you know i i want this to go through i want our families to know the students everyone that has been crying for something like this to know that there is a plan and for us to say you come back here two weeks after you get started you come back and then we'll we'll make another evaluation you know what does that say we don't trust you you know we we will listen to what you say but we think we know more and and i i know you all think i think i know a lot but i i don't know this and i'm on mr justice's uh student health and whatever the acronym is welfare committee um and i've learned a lot on

233there but but this is not an area of expertise for me and i think there are some some areas that that we need to defer and i i don't know i mean it it's it's i'm just not going to support the the change in the motion i i just i think we we spent um almost an hour discussing this and and as and i wouldn't expect us all to agree if we all agreed it'd be a little scary because you know there might be something that we're missing but i i just i i'm i'm disappointed that that we are you know we're trying we're what are we doing trying to get a consensus among us i mean we're here for a reason we're here to represent our constituents in our community and you know we

234can certainly pour our personal knowledges and and beliefs into it but ultimately you know it's it's what four people think i mean i've been on the the winning side i've been on the losing side and what whatever it is but but this i mean this is worse to me than splitting the baby because we're saying go do it do it for two weeks and then come back and we'll make that decision again so when i vote against this it's not going to be because i don't support it it's because i don't support breaking this up and and doing only a very small portion of it right now i believe the clarification is before it moves to phase three i do not believe it ends phase two just for the record young did you have a

235comment and what what is this motion i mean exactly what is this motion i thought we were going to go forward with the first part if i misunderstood then i apologize but if if someone if miss egan if you could state that motion and i know it's getting late and you know i i understood it to approve the first part and and hold off on the rest of it and until we get it it's not holding off on the second part it's it's having these guys come back to us and tell us how everything is going and then we address it if if it's not going well then we're not going to approve it if it's going well then we approve it to move on to the third phase i mean it's just taking baby

236steps instead of just throwing the whole enchilada out there it's it's you know giving some reassurance to the to the rest of the board and it's not like you said it's not that i don't trust these guys i do but for those who might be you know hesitant like how are we keeping an eye on things and school board what are you doing this gives us a little bit of latitude to tell everybody look you guys can hear it for yourselves when we come back in two three weeks how things are going and it'll make people feel better and make us feel better and make this coaches feel better it's just kind of an update on what's going on i mean again i just want to get off this hamster wheel and get started i

237want i want these kids out on the field exercising because it's not happening right now they're all playing sitting there playing video games all right ms young sure thank you so much um i i am definitely not playing medical doctor and i definitely do trust but i am also representing the community um new york is at one percent and they just opened school yesterday i'm sure they had kids in the school already um but i looked at harvard and yale best practices i compared and i'm not picking and choosing numbers i compared um vdh and cdc from july to yesterday and so like i said before i stand by my word the numbers are going in the wrong direction and right now i cannot support phase one two or three all right is everybody ready

238to vote on the s was it i'm chairman i think we need a whole new motion since it's a second or i did not approve it so i know i mean i'm sorry let's do this let's get this procedure straight and do it right okay so why don't would um mizzegan would you withdraw any current motions on the table first let's do that first and start from scratch sure i will withdraw my substitute motion and i will revert back to my original motion to approve what was presented by staff which i seconded to begin with and i will second now all right um well i see um so everybody needs to go ahead and vote uh their conscience on um whether we will not be bringing this back all right all those in favor please

239say aye aye no i haven't gotten to the nose yet i was going to say i'll say i those opposed no no no all right miss hallway miss hall will you please pull the board dr chase no miss hazard yes miss healy yes miss hollerbach yes miss randall yes dr warner no and miss young no miniature emotions passes four to three thank you all right moving on to our next item we will now be looking at the cip and the three our list is there a motion motion to approve the cip thank you and the three hour second all right there's been a motion and a second is there any discussion okay i am going to have some discussion madam chairman i would just like to thank dr warner and miss egan for their their

240work on this this is my first uh rodeo on the finance and budget committee and um really yeah i've managed to avoid the finance and budget committee every year for 20 years and finally i i uh i got i got i got put on it but anyway i i think they did a a an amazing job of trying to balance the uh you know the the needs and and the the resources and you know i think we all know nothing's perfect and this is a living document so i'm i'm i'm very impressed with the work that was done i'm not not including me i was i was an observer from most part but i'm learning [Music] um i will make a couple comments i too thank you for the work i think the document that

241we saw earlier is going to um well certainly is the underpinning for for this document we need seats um i am pleased to see the flexibility that we don't say exactly how we're going to meet the middle school but we need to come up with different options um we also um you all know i do represent the heartwood district it is hard for me to see heartwood being pulled off of there because there are many needs at that school drew in the same in the same way so i have said long and hard we need two elementary schools we need one on one side of 95 and we need one on the other i don't see how we will make it in 10 years without that at a minimum i just don't see it so

242i think we still need to have those conversations i will be though supporting this tonight because i believe it is the right going forward however as i would say to any of us who have older schools those three 3r lists have not been updated based on what we came up with i know that heartwood has a new roof and other items so i would ask and i will tonight support the 3r list i would like to amend it in a few places for several older school projects to move them up higher so i would like to just say to staff please at least i don't know if the board also for our older schools please re-look at that 3r list saying that perhaps some of the projects we are now pulling off is we're not

243sure what we're going to do with our older schools some of those projects for renovation repair all those may need to move into higher um sections so i will say that as a comment i will not be amending tonight but um i think any of us who have those older schools we need to be sure that um with this potential change some of those projects may have to move up the list if that makes some sense so can i ask a question and i'm just going to use this as the new person thing but why is it that um the schools being such a large part of cip on the technical review committee only has one person how come we can't have lionel and john just asking i'm trying to learn it's a great fair

244question there's a question that's asked every year if john or chris well i'll ask chris because he's got history he's got a different answer he didn't say it but i just feel like the information that like what lionel put together for us tonight for that's very county pertinent as well as school pertinent and then you know john with the knowledge of the three r's and what's going on in our buildings our needs and things like that i just feel like it's a good one-two representation for schools who take such a large part of the pocket to not have both of them talk and represent it's just a question i have i didn't want chris to feel like he wasn't speaking tonight i'm sure i'll be back up later so just a little bit of history

245so rewind two years ago we actually did have two members on the cip trc committee their policy process was amended last year and actually we don't officially have a school's member on the trc they have two floating members and they choose to let the schools be one of those floating members we have been in talks with the county staff over that um and are still working on that and i'll just say they've had a change of leadership over there so hoping that that process can be amended going forward mr fulmer if you could share i probably have it in the thousand documents that i have at my house um of when that change was um i i can still see the document my head of the trc if that could be circulated to the board

246that would be great so we can possibly share that with um our of supervisors member concerning that going forward if you could and one time it was like the reiterations of how it changed whichever version you have correct yeah there's multiple versions but i can i can get the original version from a few years ago and then the new amended version that would be particularly helpful so um for board members all right madam chairman i think that would be a good topic for the next three on three meeting i thought because that's that's ultimately where the decision is going to lie with with the board of supervisors i thought so too so if that could be shared that would be yeah we can add that to the agenda and then one question with the fab

247um are you all completely comfortable with the dates of the opening dates that were given to you did you feel like they needed to be sooner rather than the dates stated i'm just curious of your opinion i will be supporting um because i feel like you've guys done your due diligence but i'm just curious if those were comfortable for you based on information lionel has shared and such thanks i think that we would always prefer to have the schools sooner it seems to take longer to get them from concept to fruition but um as um chris has pointed out and dr kisner it's a living document i think that this reflects a lot of our upcoming needs but i agree with you wholeheartedly that we need more representation the schools and the school budget is

248such a huge part of their capital projects that it doesn't make sense to me that we don't have better representation on the trc so i i do agree with that and i i appreciate my colleagues on the fab and their assistants and getting this done i i i think i think we can i think it's a good document and i think again all these things are going to be moving targets as data comes in and as our projections become more solid and our student needs become more clear okay thank you all right then i'm going to um ask for uh a vote on the proposed uh cip and our three hour infrastructure list all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed motion carries unanimously when this is sent i hope we send that

249excellent report that was also prepared i i do want to remind that at the fab meeting there was a discussion which i would like us not to lose sight of the look at the formula that we're getting for three r projects there was and staff is working on that is there how are other school systems funded is it a percentage is there a a multiplier each year because i think one of the things uh that we're all discovering is that the list keeps on accumulating and that you know it just needs to be revisited as as we add more schools and have more children i have a quick question for chris if you don't mind sorry um during the fab meeting we talked about putting in the document that we were going to send across

250the street with an asterisk that talked a little bit about um there's a possibility that we would be not really looking at um well liza brought it up earlier not doing a renovation of drew but repurposing the building and then building a new drew that has greater capacity we were going to put that in there so that when we kind of shift gears in a few months when we start talking about cip again um that it wouldn't be a big surprise to the board of supervisors that we'd already started that discussion yes ma'am that's that's in there it is yes okay i just wanted to make sure that it was in there before it goes over yes thank you it also mentions in the footnote that if drew the capacity projected for drew uh assumes

251that the um that the day school would be relocated and the alternative is to repurpose drew and build the new middle school so thank you for putting in my thank you for doing that thank you okay moving on to our information items this was our further discussion regarding the return to school plan um pilot as we know earlier this evening ms neely presented to us at the end of her presentation i believe it said do you have questions so guess what part of the program we have reached we have reached the um program dr kiser do you if you have any others i was just going to have ms neely come up but no if that was we want to answer uh we want to answer the questions you have so you'll be in a

252better position to make a decision all right who wants to start us off well miss hollywood i made the motion to do it i just i guess i want to start by saying thank you to carrie for her presentation um i i like the plan i liked dr kisner's initial plan and then after this other plan came on july 28th i voted for the pilot plan and i i'm i'm just i'm confused i'm going to be honest i'm confused i mean things are changing so rapidly it almost seems like every week or two my only issue with this plan is based on my assumption from our july 28th vote was that teachers would be brought back on a voluntary basis um and after the the letter went out it was kind of everybody was going

253back and everybody was going on hybrid it is what it is parents are frustrated teachers are frustrated we're all frustrated staff is frustrated this is a horrible position for all of us to be in just trying to make the best of it and if there are certain things that we can do to um is there anything that we can do to accommodate those that are adamant that they want to stay virtual um you know is there a priority list or is there a degree of of uh uncertainty or discomfort that we can look at um have we have we talked about that um are there any cares funds that we can that we can use as stipends for some of our teachers who volunteer to go back to the classroom versus the ones that really

254desire to stay virtual um these are all things that you know that might take the sting out of um you know what it is that we're trying to do here yeah i'll address that um so just to go back to july 28th and again it seems very long time ago i recognized so the conversation about seeking people volunteer i recall it and the minutes reflected was about our preschool program because that was the first one we were bringing back on the other hand i we talked about this yesterday at the principal's meeting that we want to work with our teachers we want to have them as partners although we have health exempt we also may have teachers that have another reason that they want to discuss with their principal why they rather remain on the

255virtual side of the equation than um the face to face soon we got to come up with another term than face to face i'm so tired of that but then the other part is again i don't want to pick teachers against each other we do have a lot of teachers that are coming back and our workers and again i know many of you have seen them so i will just say how i feel absolutely we want to work with our teachers we want to understand their needs make the accommodations if we can but i always will just say and i said this yesterday in front of all the principals that we have children that i know are struggling and i know that uh adults need to be with these children and um and their teachers

256and their paraprofessionals and yesterday this is maybe a bad example but as i left a meeting at falmouth i saw five or six food service people they are giving out foods to people they're working and i don't want to sound harsh or uncaring but they were working because children are being fed and out and and i know there are teachers that generally have concerns and we want to work with them absolutely we want to work with them so um i just want to i'm just a little cautious about the term voluntary because i'm just concerned that we will have a potential of not having the children that in need of a good teacher not having that teacher so but absolutely if a teacher raises a concern with a principal we need to listen to them

257and we need to figure out if there's a way we could uh make uh the accommodations to put them um in a position that they would feel more successful at thank you sorry any other questions okay dr warner goes first first of all i want to thank um the central office for all the work they've done miss neely i appreciate talking to you today um i like the idea of the pilot program for the kindergartners i'm very excited to get them back in school i think that the schools they that are shown to to be prepared to do this will be outstanding i know that our teachers have been struggling trying to create an entirely new paradigm for teaching and especially with our younger students it's been frustrating for both the teachers and for the

258parents and the families and we do need to try to start getting them back in school i think especially our our younger students so i um i'm very impressed with it and i really i do support this plan thank you is there a reason why moncure isn't on the pilot program and the reason i'm asking that is are they still the highest free and reduced um population it was i mean it was well over 50 before carrick why don't you go over the how we made this how the decision yeah so um this decision we had multiple things going on one we wanted to get a sampling across the division we also wanted kindergarten full teams if possible who were competent and and beyond just a willing to do it actually wanted wanted to do

259this you know their full team was invested in it but the other thing that we have going on is we already have certain things going on in different schools mind cures an example we already have a significant portion of ells coming into moncure so in a way we have that we could say it's a somewhat of a pilot experience because they have a greater amount of students already um at moncure so um those and we have some title schools we have some non-title schools and and we did want to start small i think that's what i heard clearly from the board to start with a small pilot so that we can learn from each other and grow so that when we do implement we'll will feel like we have a pool of best practices that

260will work for everyone and then the idea of kindergarten was we know that certainly our youngest students are our students who need it the most and um you know we know we're doing it successfully at head start so we feel like this is the next kind of logical step but certainly you're only talking what three weeks down the road if we go with the plan that we would be bringing back k5 okay and then my other question is i just want you know i want to hear for the record that the earliest that it's practical or or doable to bring these students back k to five is october 26 because my preference would be to bring them back bring them all back you know on on this first date so but i but i i

261understand and and appreciate the presentations with the the difficulties that you're anticipating and and wanting this to to go smoothly once it gets implemented but but i would i would like to you know be told for the record that that is the the earliest we can bring back k5 because if there's any possibility even if it's a week earlier that we could do it you know and feel confident that it will be successful you know i would i would like to do that yeah i mean we certainly want to do it as soon as possible we do realize that we have transportation we have we now need to reach out to our three five parents and make sure we align that we have some class changes teacher changes that we'll need to make there's scheduling

262involved we want to flatten out that synchronous model so that we have a more frequent um whether you're virtual or whether you're face to face you would have those four days of synchronous time with your teacher so i really do think we it's not a luxury of time it's it's a we want to really do it right because you are correct it is going to be an undertaking and we want to make sure that we do it well okay and and i respect that but i i just needed to hear that um now am i correct in my understanding this pilot is strictly for kindergarten right so i mean you just mentioned three to five needs to come on board so i want to i want to be clear because we've talked about k2 we've

263talked about k3 and and this is kindergarten so we are just talking about kindergarten right and and i think it's also because i i think it also needs to be known that we're talking only five schools five kindergarten uh uh all the kindergartens all the parents who chose for the that so um i may that's what's the beauty of having great colleagues um differ a little bit um on starting small just to be truthful i was hoping to k2 i cannot lose sight of the emails and the parents i speak to and the stories i have observed but i think we learned a lot and i concluded by listening to my colleagues back there and of course carrie who i think we all have the greatest respect for that k2 could not work for multiple

264reasons she already went over it i don't need to go over it again so we started to so you know on ms hill just to give you a little satisfaction on that november 10th date and said no that's too late let's move it i talked to miss hazard said you'll be i'm sorry call you out but if you could move something closer so we discussed and we moved in november 10th to october 26th and that was a date that we felt we could do it right um so our my preference and i think many of us our preference was k2 um uh we initially started off with k1 just to be truthful with you getting some feedback from different board members um i already stated that some felt maybe if we could look at k3

265k2 made sense to us because we were bringing back about 50 of the children if we just divide sixth grades um so yes we're going to start with a pilot of five elementary schools and very quickly work with the families so they have enough notice to get their input if they want to participate and they could arrange their schedules thank you thank you dr chase um yeah thank you again um i just wanted to ask so the other 12 elementary schools do all of them have students currently going for some program or another i can't answer that with a hundred percent confidence i mean we all have internet cafes available and they're they're kind of changing daily in terms of what's happening there because dr kisner has given them the the authority as principles to

266continue to monitor students who aren't plugging in for whatever reason and a principal may decide that student needs to be in our internet cafe so that's kind of changing um i was just kind of speaking to the mon cure piece i i know that but the other thing that you know i did ask for because i heard that from the board was you know for this pilot at least we certainly want teachers who are not only willing but who are in the want to category we want those those teachers to participate first but there could be a ton of reasons why it might not be the right fit for you right now maybe you're hosting more than your own school for the elves or maybe you're you know they're just a ton of fairy farm

267you know might be an example of a school that wouldn't be quite ready right now i'm asking the question just because i am concerned about a school that has had no children in it yet on october 26 going k through 5. so um i i just want to for the record say that i have very serious concerns about a school that has not piloted anything going from that that they're going to know how to handle that and and i mean perhaps you know professional development and and visiting others i agree with you if i'm sorry to do my new york party um i if the board is comfortable with this we gave you a proposal with five right i we did talk about if you give us just 24 hours and i would just shoot

268you an email and say and i'm i don't need to pick a school but if there is a school that has no children very funny what's that fairy farm yeah right we'll just stay with the exception fairy sorry and going back to what carrie said we have teachers that are willing we have a principal that understands that i might shoot you an email and say school xyz we're going to include if you guys are comfortable with that because um i do think one reason i really did want it and we all wanted i don't want to give act like we were against it of having it at the 17 schools because it's one thing learning by collaborating with another by learning by doing and experiencing it so we're not going to have that advantage um

269but we will definitely learn something from this but i think we have enough kids we have a few i mean i don't know what the real number is but five six hundred kids in our elementary schools already between all the different programs and it may even be higher than that so i i would say i do agree that if there's a school with no one that we look at that i'm sorry she's just speaking kindergarten elementary okay i just was wondering that statistic you gave was it all all schools or just elementary the five to six hundred no say ask what is it all schools or just elementary that has five to six hundred coming in oh no no that's i'm talking about between el special ed and the internet cafe i mean we have

270a lot of kids in there but i'm not sure they're at all 17 schools and if there's a school that doesn't have anyone i would ask harry to approach that principle to see if it's not one of those schools on the list to see if there's an opportunity to bring their kindergartens back okay can i yes please so so that was one of my issues um the other thing i want to just stress for people who might be listening um the the date october 26th is of course going to be dependent on health data and we certainly are hoping very very much that the health data is going to be good but um you know the virus kind of decides the schedule if we have a big outbreak you know right on the 25th or

27123rd um i'm sure that you guys are going to come are going to make the safe decision so absolutely thrilled at the thought of getting kids in october 26th we'd love to get them in yesterday um but i just want i don't want people to to think that we promised october 26th without looking at the the data um and then i just wanted to know when we're going to have that dashboard up on the website because i do think when i show tonight yeah we'll have it tomorrow it'll be up tomorrow great because i i think parents rebecca tomorrow in in making their decisions um you know what what i've found what i found at the the university level is that um people do look at those dashboards and they sometimes decide to keep their

272kids home or they decide to stay in their dorm room they may have picked hybrid and they may be doing hybrid but when they see a spike you know i mean when i see 70 70 staff have been quarantined over the last six weeks that's a pretty disruptive number of staff to have out and so if we're going to be going forward and seeing more of that when we're letting more people into the buildings um it's just good to it it's good for people to know that we do have covet cases in our schools you know happening to our staff right now so that's all i have to say thank you thank you all right ms random um i i don't know if this can happen or not but um can we go back to

273the sample a student schedule i don't know if that can happen but um i i have two parts to this the morning meeting check-ins is that for attendance purposes or what is that morning meeting for on an asynchronous day right so it is it's twofold um one we've been doing morning meetings for several years in most of our schools um it's part of what we have been invested in in responsive classroom and building our classroom community so it is it is that connecting piece that we know needs to be even stronger now because we're less connected so it is an attempt to connect our students intentionally and all of our students because remember they do it with the students who are in both groups a and b will connect in that morning meeting so that

274hopefully if we get to the point where we can bring all students back then they're all part of that same classroom community okay but we also take attendance um through morning meeting okay it's not the only way we can take attendance okay but it is one way we take it okay and then um when you're talking about the uh force synchronous days for the elementary are you saying that student a will be synchronous in the am tuesday wednesday and synchronous in the pm thursday friday that's correct okay so just okay so i that i just wanted to be uh but the when you write the asynchronous is that student b no that would be what student uh and we probably do need to get away from the term maybe a little bit as dr kisner

275was saying but that would mean and we still have times to work out that's why i didn't put the times in here yet well that was my next one yeah yeah but it's going to be similar to so essentially they had five hours if i was an a student i had five hour synchronous tuesday five hour synchronous wednesday so 10 hours but that time and we may morph that a little bit would be spread out among tuesday wednesday thursday friday with you know asynchronous slash homework the kinds of work that dr kisner was talking about where you're creating a mural to show you know uh learning or you're doing you know gathering something from outside to show you're learning those kinds of things so it's not necessarily online okay but it's work at home that

276they would be doing okay okay and then um what time are we looking to start kindergarten uh coming back face to face like are we looking to have an 8 a.m start time the 7 30 i mean i know we kind of fluctuated some things while we were doing the virtual only but now that we're coming in are we thinking in terms of getting a bus and a start time that will eventually work when we work with the middle in the high school so that was that was part of the reason that we started with that shift one and shift two that would remain in place so one you know one set of schools will be the eight o'clock to one o'clock shift um and then one set of school now that's going to change

277a little bit in terms of the end time for the the synchronous face-to-face learning right because students will be leaving earlier done with their synchronous learning so that the teacher can then move to another group of students for the afternoon to touch base again we have to work out the time on that and that's where you know we really want our principals to be able to go back and have those conversations with teachers to get their input on what they feel would be both manageable and and be a healthy balance that we're trying to achieve okay and do we know i mean you were just alluding to conversations with staff and principals and such but are we set okay staff wise with uh enough teachers to do the hybrid as well as enough to do

278the virtual like the whole virtual we have the staffing um we just have to adjust where students are you know depending on the changes for example that parents have requested we may need to ask a teacher who was originally going to do two uh face-to-face classes you know to do one virtual class or the other way around depending and it really is in talking with principals it's very grade level specific um you know the challenges they're having depending on the feedback they got from parents okay thank you mm-hmm so everybody knows that pam's plan wanted k through five right but that was when covet numbers were a little lower than it is right now um so i have a couple of questions in terms of i know we have kids in school right now but

279when we bring more kids into school especially in the older schools i mentioned that before what are we doing about ventilation so i don't know if my friend john wants to come up and answer that one yeah phone a friend um yes for ventilation we are um we're ventilating earlier in the day and later in the evening so we're actually running the systems much longer and we've already started that process we also have filter upgrades that are funded now and we're going to be changing the filters more regularly we also have an assessment from an engineer that is going to help us to assure that all our buildings are operating properly and the building codes really help us know what is required for ventilation so we're meeting that and um that's something that is not

280caused by the pandemic you say you're meeting that are you talking about the merv 13. no i'm talking about um building codes and ventilation rates are our buildings need to be functioning properly and so that's what the assessment is going to help us assure with our operation and maintenance staff and an outside engineer so we're taking this very seriously the um the ventilation is not going to stop the spread of the virus it's just going to help improve the air quality and help basically bring in more fresh air and so that's what we're focused on with all the schools so you're telling me the schools are safe is that what you're saying if somebody has the virus right now um in this room then i'm not saying that the ventilation system is going to keep

281somebody else from getting the virus but the schools are are being maintained as designed and we're assuring that they meet the um the basic requirements of of what they were designed to do as far as the ventilation and the air changes and the fresh air that that is brought into the schools so are they properly commissioned right now before the the most of the kids start coming or are we still i'm not gonna say that these are all um perfectly commissioned and operating perfectly and that's part of what the assessment is about it's going to be an ongoing process so if we identify a problem then the goal will be to fix it um right away and and that's that's that's basically the the work that we have going on and i've asked the question

282of our operation and maintenance staff and our engineers um do we have issues with schools that are not meeting the requirements um there are really part of the code and um the answer is that um we don't have we haven't identified any um as of yet we may identify problems when we're doing the assessments and we're going to address those as we come as they as they happen and this is certainly a different time for our team and the whole school system to be you know dealing with issues and problems with the buildings because they are going to happen they happen every year and um so when we have an issue with a building we'll have to decide what do we do how does that impact on the delivery of classes and obviously we've had

283where a chiller is broken in a high school and it disrupts the activities in the high school on a normal year now it's certainly going to disrupt um what's happening in the school so we we definitely have a different time ahead of us as we open and we face any problems in the schools and i don't i don't have any to report today but it doesn't mean that's not going to happen okay i'll also i have a list of questions and i'm going to send you via email because i don't want to hold up everybody okay miss neely's hiding behind you i have a couple questions um so um yeah i already knew that the little kiddos can't possibly be in front of computer and figuring out and there we talked about that earlier today

284where they're probably disappearing and don't come back to the computer so i would love for them to start school but it's about safety right it's about safety and the health and um i know about the underserved and i know these individuals are working and you know some are at home by themselves i know some of them but i just need to have that comfort um that um the percentage the covet rate is going in the right direction and so covet has no date so when we choose october or november i want to make sure that um that the 14 day trend that we're looking at it's actually going in the right direction before you know we we do this opening pilot or not um but um so i know um i keep saying new york

285is at one percent um and we're not but um help me understand um so what are we going to use to you know to use as that metric because like i'm looking at um the world health is that they're saying five percent is recommended uh vdh um and iran i think vdh or is it yeah so they have rand um as uh doing the studies for them and rand suggested uh five percent is a good rate right where are at we're at eight so i'm just asking like what are we planning on saying are we saying okay if in two weeks it's going to be at whatever whatever then we're good to go so parents need to know that and going back to what dr chai said earlier at some point they may say oh

286that's too high for me i'm staying home um versus you know so we just need to be transparent as to what the rate is what the the the metric is that we're going to use to say that we're going to open or when we decide to say that we're going to close because for whatever reason we have an outbreak here or there and that you know because we have socially distance and all that kind of stuff that we need to apply so i just want to see that somewhere yeah don't need to answer that i think i already presented all that information no put for then this this is the the metric that you're going to use in october and november you're saying with the rate that we're going right now the rate is right

287now we're at eight are you saying you're good with eight is that what october 26 yeah i think i've already demonstrated on july 21st july 14th i was telling you hybrid on july 21st i'm telling you no we can't come back okay not yet the data wasn't good i have no interest in putting people in harm's way so what is the number so but there is not a number oh okay because i already showed you that every week the number goes up and down yeah but i'm saying and new york i just got to tell you i'm not going to debate what what's happening really in new york but i know a lot of what's happening in new york i mentioned new york because it's at one percent and we're at eight all i'm saying

288is that kisner if we're gonna open up we can't say the number fluctuate today six and tomorrow's eight at some point in time we need to say okay you know what we're we're i said okay let me just remind people what i said this couple weeks ago sure i said if the because i'm still staying with the vdh pandemic dashboard on stafford i said if it hit high burden i would not recommend to this school board or i would take action to stop children and staff and being in our schools that was what we saw a lot in august okay the again i don't collect the expert but i think i know enough about the positivity rate it doesn't it indicates a lot about how much testing you're having in your community okay i would

289also say that the state health department and i'll be honest with you i don't want to sound political but yesterday i see we all got an email about somebody claiming cdc posted something three hours later i was about to write back to that person cdc withdrew what they posted so i'm not going to spend a lot of energy and time in interpreting the cdc because i look foolish six hours later but um but the virginia department of health i have to depend on their local people and we meet with them and the ten is when you go to high burden okay five you are correct below five is lower i mean they contracted with rand that's i'm just going by what they're saying vdh says that they contracted with rand and ren suggested five so

290i'm just asking the question but i guess what i'm sharing with you i presented to you yeah multiple times so i'll be happy to keep asking answering but i'm gonna give you the same answer okay above 10 is high below five is low in between is moderate or mid-range governor if we want to know i want to use the governor because i saw his wife today he has set for the state is the threshold so i guess going to go back to what i stated i want to go back to what mr reichert stated i want to go back what you guys already approved we have a lot of health mitigation procedures in place we're forgetting that we we have this we have social distancing we have um we've done we have a lot of

291things it's not like we are just bringing kids back to a building and say you're on your own okay and i appreciate that dr kinsman the only thing i was saying we're bringing more kids in and so the less social distance we're gonna have and so that's that's all i'm i'm arguing with depending on how many people but thank you so much for that explanation madam chairman i i just want to note this this is completely voluntary on the on the family's part to send their children back correct there is always an option for a parent or guardian to say i want my children or child to stay in virtual so there is no mandatory return to school is that is that correct correct we're still having the 100 virtual thank you all right i'm

292going to make some final comment on this first things i would like to say is thank you to all those who have put in a lot of work on this one thing i would like to note one thing that stanford county public schools has decided to do which they did not have to do and other school districts have not is allow parents to change their mind many school districts said whatever you said in july or june or whatever it was is what you're sticking with i believe that stafford county public schools is going over and above to allow parents exactly where ms healey is going who may as time goes on make a different decision however that flexibility then does result in additional work because it's a change so i would like to say i

293think that stafford county public schools is doing the right thing by parents to allow them more time to evaluate the data but again flexibility results in additional work um i wish it didn't happen that way but it doesn't but i believe of those two options i would prefer to give parents the option to change their mind that may not stay forever but at least in this immediate time given what's you know july was a whole different animal to give that option so i would like to say thank you because i know that is a lot of work and i know the principals spent a lot of time calling families and that was just you know half of our families so i thank you because i think that was the right decision and i think some

294other school districts may even regret that decision so but we'll see the increase in synchronous learning i really applaud and appreciate because that doesn't just impact the pilot families it impacts every family and that is something i think all of us or at least i know my emails are a lot about that um [Music] asynchronous so i appreciate again it's showing again we are listening to feedback and we are trying to adjust again adjustment if i can remember and i'm rounding it was like 11 983 if i remember correctly elementary students please remember that that is a lot of students to make changes for and we are all trying to look out for each one of them um i do appreciate the pilot program most of you know that i think um we need to

295engage our youngest learners that they have a teacher that they can see and and move forward i don't want to lose our youngest learners going forward because for them i think it is the most difficult for some of them this is their first experience in school the way to capture them i still i can still see my first kindergarten teacher that's how much i remember that person and i'm thinking i want other students to have that same that i want them because we don't know if we all had the crystal ball we could be making a million bucks dr kizer and i have talked about it a million times if i knew what everything would be in january or december but there is always looming over us the fact that we may go all back

296to all virtual but i believe those students need to have that connection going forward so i am supportive of this if i was to um say if for some reason you want to add schools to this that somehow part way through they i am fine with that because that is getting more students in what i would suggest but i know i talked to this with ms neely we have the best staff possible let's though use the learning models and i don't want to burden our student our teachers but if we can come up with a way for those who end up being part of this pilot program what did i learn how can i teach others how can i bring you all along i don't know how you pull that off and i know our

297teachers do that among themselves but you've got rockstar teachers let them help teach each other we always talk about train the trainer these are some of the best trainers we're going to have so we can learn from that so that when we get to the 26th which is our hopeful date but it does have an asterisk it has to be work i still want us though as a division to be working towards that date and if it has to change i know colette will be working with us and others but i don't want us to lose sight of let's work towards that date um so am i hearing among the board members um a support of what has been brought to us and the ability to um add to if you want to and it

298sounds like if you can move updates i know that's not possible but we're going to give you the option um and just to keep sort of us um informed going forward absolutely from the board i do want to just clarify we haven't ironed out the schedule exactly but so for example now there are 10 hours of synchronous instruction over two days right we're going to flatten that so that there's synchronous learning in the morning and in the afternoon so obviously it's not going to be five hours in the morning and five hours in the afternoon we can't do that you all figure it out it sounds like i just want to make sure that it sounds like we're addressing an issue on asynchronous that came up in almost at least many of them and even

299the synchronousness was an issue i mean for that low level they was like too long for those shortened days so i'm so thankful that you you heard that that you've been able to mobilize yourself in a different direction i think huge applause workouts work out the details i think moving forward um is that the sentiment of the board okay we have i believe two more items i'm sorry i got lost online chairman can we put the budget priority discussion off to the next meeting i'm afraid it's uh at this late hour it's not going to be a very i did see that 1102 had a um date on it um if we wanted it to be oh no it was still on october i'm sorry i'm i'm talking about the budget discussion budget priorities i

300think i can wait till the next meeting is maybe we should put one number you are the one head of fab are you okay with that or do we i think we heard you yeah no i think that we can postpone the budget um priorities discussion i think maybe the fab should focus on it at our next meeting i think it's the 5th of october and um for now i think we should just move on with this last item which is 11.02 and and call it a night mr fulmer can you give us a truly um cliff notes version i don't know you may be too young to remember the good old cliff notes but i do the the policy re approval revisions the policy and certainly that's information i guess we have any questions

301we can send them to the superintendent i know it's to meet the state requirements but just wanted to check it off mr fumbler if you could just i think for any employees watching at least when we have this in the record of of the overview so clifford next version mr mr fulmer yes ma'am so we have a health benefits fund which is a combination of employee and employer paid premiums as we did a few years ago we offered a health insurance holiday to employees that was a six-month holiday we wanted to revisit that this year at the request of some board members we discussed it at the finance and budget committee what the finance and budget committee requested or ultimately suggested was a 75 reduction in the health insurance employee premium and that would be

302for the remaining eight months of this fiscal year so starting november first through the june 1st payroll uh deductions um and the attached reductions in those rates uh the uh amended rates are attached to the agenda so you could see them that would be funded with the savings that we have in our health benefits fund which has accumulated over several years just want to mention that the board of supervisors also have some savings in their health benefits fund and they've actually suggested for the county and we're working with the county staff to do this jointly to actually look at one-time bonuses or stipends to employees as well so we'll be coming back with some additional information for that but that did come up at the fab with uh by mrs healy and so i just

303wanted to point that out that um i actually think it was maybe the next day at the board of supervisors meeting that i was attending that came up so i've been working with the county staff on that as well i'm sure mr fulmer that's that's for employees who don't have the health insurance that would be for all employees yes for all employees so i thank you for following up on that yes thank you for that i just wanted to make sure we had that into the record in case anybody's still watching and i appreciate that uh the other items will be deferred our next uh board meeting is on october 13th thank you all for everything this evening and we are adjourned you