January 20, 2022, EBR Board Workshop and Regular Meeting

001[Music] if i'd like to call to order the board workshop pathways so brighter future industry-based certification for thursday january 20th 2022. i'd like to read a public notice the public will be allowed to attend at a reduced rate of 50 capacity of the central office board meeting room space once capacity has been reached admission into the meeting space will be closed all audience members are required to wear a mask at all times masks will be available upon requests the board workshop scheduled for january 20th 2022 at 4 pm will be streamed live via youtube a link to watch the meeting can be found on board docs located on the school board website madam secretary will you please call the role district 9 president president district 4 vice president collins district 1 mr blue oh here

002district two mr lannis district three mr howard district five miss where jackson district six miss dyson president district seven mr goday present district aid ms menard president we have a quorum uh we move now to item c1 presentation of pathways to a brighter futures industry-based certification dr narcisse thank you president chapman uh and uh this this session will also be streamed as well um so before we start i just wanted to just say a few things um so first uh thank you for making the time today to to be here the goal of this workshop is to hopefully provide our school community and families more information concerning the pathway to bright futures work that we're doing specifically around the industry component i understand that we are sharing a lot of new information we're proposing some

003changes changes but ultimately all we're working to do is to give students and families more options on top of those that already exist in our school system see every morning i wake up as a superintendent of east baton rouge parish and i'm also a father of daughters when we're creating these initiatives and programs i'm also thinking about the type of opportunities that i would want for my own children uh i've yet to meet a parent or guardian who doesn't want the same thing that i do for my girls the absolute best opportunity and education for their child our pathways to bright futures work is providing our students with more opportunities to pursue their passion and more ways to succeed it's my hope that the information that we share that we're sharing tonight will help shed

004a little more light on the opportunities this presents for students across the district whether they are going to college or career bound so uh thank you for the opportunity to share with you all today and i'd like to invite mr ben nicase and miss latasha levantino to share a little more about the workforce development and integration into our pathways to bright futures all right work all right good afternoon president tapman uh members of the board dr narcisse my name is vinnie case and i serve as the associate superintendent of workforce development and tonight i'll facilitate a presentation of the pathways of bright futures crosswalk with the career tech education opportunities we offer in the parish we'll also have other presenters who will present or who will also present and then also introduce themselves when we

005move forward all right so tonight we'll begin with the agenda to give everyone an overview the first thing we're going to take a look at is the current graduation pathway overview so the two types of diplomas that you can earn right now in louisiana tied to that we'll then take a look at the pathways to bright futures associate degree and technical diploma examples so you'll see where we've been actually building out opportunities like this for a few years and then we're kind of beginning to actually move much more faster in ensuring all students have an opportunity to participate with the cohort starting in ninth grade and you'll get a chance to kind of see examples of what like a basic schedule will look like and then also what like a technical degree schedule would look

006like next we'll take a look at our talent action collaborative which is a collaboration with brac and businesses to really focus on connecting those businesses with our pathways to bright futures and part of that work also then goes into the internship and workforce experiences that students can have as in their high school career and we'll wrap up with next steps and questions and anything else after that all right so really tonight we would like to kind of start with just a reference and current state of what all students will look like next year and their different grade levels what experiences they'll have and what type of pathways or diplomas they'll be progressing towards so if you look on the screen what you'll see is starting with our ninth grade class next year all students will

007either be on a career pathway a diploma or a career diploma or a louisiana tops university diploma and so as you look at these comparisons right now we're in the transition in the state between jumpstart 1.0 and jumpstart 2.0 and that diploma pathway changes slightly with the amount of credential students can earn or requirements that students need to earn those credentials so we'll be transitioning and you can see through 9th through 12th grade students are going to be under different rules by the state moving into the louisiana tops university diploma pathway you'll see that that ninth grade class will begin the pathway is the bright futures cohort which is a tops university pathway cohort to start and then our uh bright futures glen oaks high school students who will be in year two of that

008pilot so again that's those students will be on that tops university um path our diploma path one thing i want to kind of make sure everyone understands and there's still confusion about this is that both of those pathways provide a student with a high school diploma so you get a high school diploma either choice you make what is slightly different is in the louisiana career diplomas which we'll look at in a reference chart here in a minute is you'll see that you can take slightly different classes to graduate so you may take different math classes or english classes you take less science or social studies possibly with the intent that you would be using those credit hours and that substitution into more of the career pathways so that you can either go straight into the

009workforce out of high school or you could then go to technical schools or like a community college you can also still continue to earn tops tech through this diploma pathway so students can earn tops to go to like a brcc or community college and the tops university diploma pathway students are taking four course subjects in your english math science and social studies that are more prescribed and they're taking more of a art focus foreign language they're taking courses that would be required to enter into most four-year universities or support them entering into those four-year universities so again very similar in that case you can still earn a diploma and you still get versions of tops as well one of the things to look at up here as well is there's a misunderstanding that students earn

010industry-based credentials only if they're jump start students or if they're in that career diploma path and that's not necessarily the case our tops university students also earn industry-based uh credentials in a lot of different areas whether it's carpentry or whether it's culinary arts or in it so students can do that in both pathways it just depends on what their goal is ultimately and what level they may achieve all right one note here i'd like to point out currently in that career diploma track 12 or so of our students were a jump start core student last year now that seems very low and there's a reason for that when we went into the covid year and students went virtual a lot of your career focused courses require hands-on credentialing so they have to actually test with

011hands-on materials and be part of like hands-on experiences fifty percent of our high school students were virtual so many of them stayed into a tops university track so they could continue to do virtual work so we saw a dip in the number of students who were opting 100 into jump start however we had 38 of our students earn an industry-based credential so that meant even though they were in that tops university diploma pathway they were still earning credentials all right if you would take out on your backup you have a handout that says appendix 1 or we'll take a look at this mainly just to make sure we're all normed on the two different options that students have to graduate by looking at this we have the tops university chart to the left the column

012that shows what students need to earn to get that diploma and basically what you'll see is they take four english classes for maths for sciences for social studies health world language arts the difference between this and jumpstart if you look closely if students in a jumpstart pathway only need two sciences and two social studies they also do not have to take things like a foreign language technically they don't have to take geometry they don't have to take physics so the intent would be they would be taking courses that would support them taking other credential courses or other courses that would support them in a career field so again slightly different what that does mean though is students can still take those courses so if i'm a jump start student or a career option student i

013can still take geometry and in fact probably should or i can still take foreign languages and they count as part of my jump start pathway but you'll see that there are differences the other thing in here you'll see is that there's substitutions that can be made for its advanced placement courses also you can follow the board of regents matrix and ldoe and you can take dual enrollment replacements for some courses as well this chart is one of the more important ones really to take a look at tonight and what we're looking at through this is basically showing how those five areas that make up the buckets for bright futures the type of associate or technical degree programs that we either already have approved through the district and through the state or other entities or ones

014that we are bringing online that have been tentatively approved and so one of the things to really point out here is those four buckets on either side not the liberal arts but the four buckets on either side really track a hundred percent with what we've already been doing at c-tech places like that and also what brac and the job outlook report shows is high-wage high-demand jobs in our area and when you include the liberal arts area so you include other things like business and criminal justice you get a full spectrum of high-wage high-demand jobs that are aligned to the brac job outlook report and so these were intentionally built it was very intentional to make sure students are falling somewhere in one of these pathways now the main thing about bright futures and the advantage

015of it is that what it's going to create is an intentionally aligned course progression for students to fit something in this regional job market um so again students could take dual enrollment classes in ap classes and it's important to note that our 10th 11th and 12th graders will continue to do that right and continue to do industry-based credentials but right now what we have in place is an a la carte system so if i'm going to take a one-off english class or one-off western civ class it will count for college credit if i achieve the right score or grade but i'm just kind of piece mailing pieces of college credits together right whereas with the bright futures goal we're picking a specific pathway with the terminal intent to say i'm gonna get a technical diploma

016a diploma or an associate's degree built through taking all of those courses so it's much more intentional with purpose to not only earn an industry-based credential but to have that evergreen credential of like an associate's degree so again that's a little different if you look across this map what you're looking at are things that have been in place for example probably the oldest one up there that's been in place now for almost four years is the ibm p-tech program at terra high school so that was really our first associate degree program where students were progressing with an intent to get an associate's degree and from there you see there's been a lot of building out so the pathways of bright futures pilot at glen oaks focuses really on that um the two right there with

017the liberal arts pathways and the medical we have other programs like the early college academy at ctec that focuses in several areas like process technology and manufacturing you see things like automotive in the transportation area so those have already been approved in fact you as a board approved that in april 2020 so those are starting can come online as well and then the overarching one that you see at the bottom and you see that our region specifically pointed out were fast forward programs so the state basically requested all the regions in the state to submit proposals for associate or technical degrees and we were region two and we led region two the three that we came you know submitted are there on the list and so you can see how there's basically a large list

018of programs that have been approved for the whole state through different organizations and entities that we can then use through the louisiana transfer degree process to begin bringing those online if they make sense for our area so with that i'll take a pause before we kind of go into the transfer degree example and what that looks like so uh i'll take a pause if anyone has any questions we don't have any questions or comments at the moment thank you mr nikki great all right so the first thing we're going to take a look at is more of a general approach to more of like a general studies type pathway so i'll ask miss levitino to come up and talk through this chart with you and show you some examples from this and then we'll go

019into a technical version from the fast forward program good afternoon miss levitino i'm one of the project managers with the office of the chief of staff all right so the slide you're looking at now is again a very general sample of what a combination of ap and dual enrollment classes could look like for a student pursuing an associate's degree or transferable credits so what you see in front of you again is you have an option there which we presented in the last workshop and where you would see that a student could take an ap course in place of the dual enrollment course however it does and span the entirety of the school term or the school year um in in contrast to the ap or the dual enrollment course that would be semesterized so that's

020where you would see the slash between the two uh the sequence is still very similar to the current sequencing for what our students undertake the courses are again mapped to specific courses and that is determined by the ldoe and the board of regents all right so this is also year three and four again continuing with a very simple general uh course sequence for year three and four of an advanced placement dual enrollment type schedule for student as mr nikes pointed out in order to earn an associate's degree or transferable credits so you can see a large part of the ap coursework or dual enrollment coursework in this sample appears in years three and four again because that is where the state maps majority of those courses as an equivalent all right and so what we'd

021like to take a look at now is a specific fast forward version of um what a career type progression would look like in that fast forward uh initiative and then like an associates in cloud computing so technology you should have a handout that says fast forward this document is a state document it's over 100 pages so what i wanted to do is just print out the index or the table of contents for you it will show you all of the different options that the region submitted that we would have access to to explore through a transfer degree type program and region three of course are the ones we submitted as on behalf of the district as you turn towards the back of that page you'll see it skip to page 38 which is what you

022see on the screen if you need to see it a little closer and so this document is really helpful and what it will show you is that this specific pathway was built out with baton rouge community college as a partner and it will give you the overview of what that specific pathway or that goal is for this program and also show you the credentials so students can earn these credentials either along the way or some of them at the end of the time that they take all of the courses so again when we talk about there will be opportunities that we will build out where students may have to off-ramp or they may have to choose a different pathway we'll have some flexibilities where they're still earning credentials but may not quite make it to

023an associate's degree so we want to be sure that that's built out as we continue these and build them out so in this example what you're going to see is the state was really wanted to norm everyone on this process so what they asked for is that we backload a lot of the dual enrollment courses in 12 11th and 12th grade so what you're going to see is a lot of your high school courses maybe a couple of dual enrollment courses early on in 9th and 10th one advantage i think that we'll have in the bright futures pathway is that we balance that out a little better so it's more of a balanced approach where you're taking four dual enrollment classes year one four and year two and you're taking a few more later and

024and it gives students a little an easier on ramp onto what they're doing with uh associate or i'm sorry dual enrollment classes so in this example in ninth grade you would see like a sample schedule this is built out to be on a four by four schedule but all of our schools are on an eight period day so they would take all of eight of these courses you know throughout the school year right now most of our schools are on an eight period day which is important to note that you get 32 credit opportunities in that schedule right the two pathways that we looked at for graduation require you to get 23 and 24 credits to graduate whether it tops you or with the career diploma so by us offering 32 opportunities that gives students

025a lot of extra credit time to do some of these pathway programs in addition that some of their of course core subjects are also substituted for dual enrollment or ap courses so as you progress through this you'll see the type of courses students will take we will have some flexibility to make adjustments in the course sequencing like i mentioned so to balance out some of those courses but you'll see like the type of credits and courses that a student would take to earn that full associate degree if you're interested in looking at other options again this is gives you at least a table of contents but as you go through this you can go look at the other regions and see for example what would a nursing pathway look like what would a pathway in

026automotive look like so you'll get a chance to kind of see how other pathways are connected in other areas and one of the things we'll be doing throughout the year is really building out formalizing which of these pathways have the most student and parent interest which ones connect to our businesses the best and so the tac and other uh organizations we'll talk about in a moment are helping us kind of determine that so that we build out the right pathways in each bucket all right so really the the next area we'd like to kind of talk about that's been a really instrumental in helping us kind of build around this is our talent action collaborative partnership with brac and i know i think we have mr uh knapp in the back and also uh miss

027ellis here as well from brac who have been great partners with us going back now you know almost a year uh doing this work and this organization basically has helped us build out uh commissions and uh you know groups that are helping us vet through some things so you're about to see kind of the work they've been doing with us the first thing is is you know these or these specific commissions and the work groups we're using are business-led they're also industry-specific aligned to those five buckets of the uh bright futures pathways and they're solution oriented so we're learning from businesses exactly what they need credential wise what experiences kids need from a soft skill standpoint exactly what students should have when they enter into the workforce or enter into the next level of college

028or post-secondary education so they can enter the workforce after that and so when you look through again it's not not dissimilar it's exactly tied to the bright futures buckets so you go across that line of construction manufacturing healthcare liberal arts we have somewhere between 15 and 20 people from each of those businesses and groups who have been recruited to really serve on those committees these groups the commissions do a lot of the heavy lifting their job is to dig into the details and you're going to see some of the work they did in a moment but they're digging into what are the soft skills kids need looking at our curriculum making sure we have that in the right places they're digging into what do you exactly do we need in the workforce what's the credential

029we need you know we don't need that credential we need this credential we don't want students graduating with that we need them graduating with this now so they're really doing the heavy lift on making sure we're aligned 100 percent to those businesses in the five buckets the kind of upper tier or the top of this group is the ceos for education and this group is about 25 individuals who make up kind of the heads of the organizations where the other members serve and they are really meeting quarterly so where the commissions are meeting almost monthly or bi-monthly the ceos for education are meeting quarterly and their job is to really start helping us push change so whether that is influencing policy helping us cut through red tape making sure that they clear out those obstacles

030that are going to cause us to have issues or or you know need to get students to move along they're really doing that great work with that um and so this group really our our steering committee our trailblazers who are helping us set the you know really guidance and that vision moving forward the strategic operations team is really kind of a negotiation between the two so they're serving as that liaison who's taking it that vision from the strategic ops team and they're translating that to the commissions the commission is pushing up guidance into the strategic op teams that's in guiding kind of the ceos for education and understanding exactly what we need from the workforce so a lot of the people on this team include the upper tier of district leadership as well as a

031lot of the hr managers and the people in businesses that really have are tied in close to what we need for students to really be successful in their corporations so again we've kind of covered most of that looking at the focus and there's been a lot of work already done the tax focus has been really in four areas right now and expanding into that fourth one soft skills support has been a big focus we've done a ton of work with that the commissions have been great we've received great feedback from them the next thing was pathway vetting so we're making sure that if students progress through that track for example the cloud computing track the it commissions are going to be looking at that saying yes that's the right progressions you know what we think

032students need to move this class back or move this one forward we think they need to get this credential not that credential that's where the pathway vetting piece comes in so really a lot of the yeomans work just any cases yes sir i would love to the uh mission knapp and from the um ms ellis and those of us that have been working for this throughout the whole year just allow them to come up uh just say a few words as they talk a little bit about this absolutely because important part that we want to make sure one knows that we've our goal has been to align with the needs of our city and state in terms of our labor uh markets to be connected to that as many of our students who graduate from

033um our system usually stay here so maybe we can have mr yeah sure come on up miss ellis and anyone else that mission has thank you adam knapp i'm the president ceo of the baton rouge area chamber thank you for the hearing today um uh i was really enjoying seeing uh mr nikkes present this since we've done it so many times it was nice to hear it from from his voice uh the long and short of this as you've seen on the prior slides is a commitment we made last year to the district that we would organize as many executives to this work as we could identify across these five industry sectors to be deeply engaged with the district in informing curriculum for this this work both hard skills soft skills and a path to

034what we think is really ultimately a long game to on-the-job learning experiences what we see as models in other states in south carolina and colorado we saw in florida examples of this on a recent trip and of course we see this around the world that real on the job experiential learning is ultimately a long path for a high school student to see a a practical learning experience we've seen this as an opportunity but to get to that we think there's a lot of hard work to do for businesses to become much more engaged with the district in this conversation about these opportunities for high school students and potentially down the path even even younger students if there's a way to do so so in each of these career tracks you'll see executives we're we're staffing

035that work with what ms ellis is doing to make sure she's engaging executives answering questions helping them get materials and doing playing that interconnect role not just with the ebr school system but with our community college partners uh and our our four-year college partners and our community to bring them into this conversation about how how business and education writ large be a lot be better aligned as a community what you saw on the very last slide that was on the screen was the work that we have asked each of these commissions to do and again align to the brighter futures categories you have health and pre-med long term it's really going to also include life sciences a technology track kind of coding and technology hardware hardware and software skills separately we see construction and manufacturing

036as an existing industry strength of the capital region and a lot of engagement across that that coalition the fourth has been in automotive trade and logistics companies that are uh involved in mechanical work uh all the way through to what we expect to see more of with folks like amazon uh with robotics factories that need to have this type of equipment uh with with teams that understand that work and then really a category that i think includes an important broad part of our community which is kind of professional services engineering services and small businesses which we think is encompassed by the liberal arts and management track and so we've been bringing a lot of companies to the table to give advice about many other opportunities in banking and finance and insurance and that sort of

037thing so in those five categories they're all going through what you saw on that last slide looking at soft skills looking at hard skills looking at worse work work based learning experiential learning and approaches to that so we expect this work to be quarterly at least for each commission as well as quarterly for the ceo's group and the strategic operations committee kind of going through each of those steps with action items that really are driven by the district and our teams to make sure that we're asking them to give valuable input and feedback to the progression of the district one of our executives is here from baton rouge general has been a part of the leadership team of of strategizing this we may have a couple of others who make it tonight uh hopefully to

038make give some remarks as well but hopefully that answers some questions or give you some context for the work that we're doing we have added this and this is a little bit of a lead-in to something we're going to do later this month but we're going to be launching a new five-year strategic plan in a few weeks in that you will see our five-year commitment to this work we have baked it in and been talking to our our business investors about the importance of funding brac to make sure we have the capacity to provide this service to the community as well so we we're raising money from the community to make sure we can staff into this work and we're excited to have that as part of our new five-year strategy that'll be coming out

039soon thank you so much sir and again i can't really uh say enough about the businesses that have really reached out and been a part of all of this process i mean we're talking dozens upon dozens of people who are spending their own time to help us with this work and it's been refreshing i know our team has just truly enjoyed this process and really had a chance to really get great feedback and open really communication that constantly continues throughout the month and so again whether it's with the com the work that has been done at ctec and all of their partnerships then tied in with the tac as well everything going on there we have some really great uh support from businesses in the district and that is just it's amazing um and so

040again going back to the presentation um one of the things also that we're working on are work based experience opportunities and this is some more work that's really starting from the ground floor up and so we'll get a chance to kind of talk through that more but one of the things that's truly important you'll see in a minute we do have students in our district who get internship opportunities for credit but what we don't offer is that to every student and so again this is a sea change this is something that will be a huge moment for students to have many more opportunities for this and you'll see that in a moment and then finally career experience playbooks as we bring on more partnerships and more businesses who will take on students really give them

041these opportunities uh the tac and and the commissions are working on giving very clear guidance and supports for those businesses on how they can help us do that so one of the things we're working on this is this is just from our our first initial look at this but the tag and others are helping us really hone this out is really coming up with what exactly is a work based continuum or experience continuum and so as you see kind of in this chart you'll see everything kind of starting even down to kindergarten first grade where we're having career exploration opportunities for students some of these are already in place we have counselors at the elementary level who do a great job of this already but some examples of this are things like our capital area

042promise school visits to brcc lsu and southern each year for middle school we have our ebr career day ctec career days where students go to that in fact we have an elementary school coming very soon to ctech to visit it as well and we also have opportunities for in-person and online site visits so even using some of our digital and virtual platforms we have businesses and companies connecting with students at all levels even to connect with them and kind of say hey this is what my business is it's what our company does this is an example of my work and so they're seeing that firsthand even if they can't get there in person sometimes also we have career exploration classes which are for credit and so these push down all the way into middle school

043sometimes starting around seventh grade and that ranges from the stem for careers course from lsu to quest for success which is a soft skills and career exploration course our jag courses even our jrotc courses are really great examples of career exploration courses we also have job shadowing that we're looking at really ramping up with that eighth through tenth grade year where you know students will have opportunities to do job shadowing experience and more one-on-one or small group examples in the businesses that then moves us into 10th through 12th grade looking at internships for credit and non-credit so the internships for non-credit may be a week or two experience at a company whereas the credit earning one would be if you're doing extended 155 plus hours things like that it falls under more regulation that we'll

044be working hopefully to look at that in the future and then finally apprenticeships which are much more specific job focused you're you're earning that credential getting a capstone and moving on maybe with the same exact company getting a job after a high school and so right now in the district we have about 179 students earning an internship for credit by the summer especially at ctec and through jump start summer programs we usually get to about 250 students so again when you think about 10 000 high school students okay 250 is not a lot and so the idea is we want to get many more students in those experiences again these are for credit so there's more restrictions on how you do that but even giving students two-week three-week opportunities for internships could be really a

045game changer and so that's something we want to focus on one more minute mistakes yes sir no uh wrap up in the board ask questions yep um and so again for your reference this kind of goes into the work based learning guidelines so again it kind of shows how if you're doing this for credit there are more you know things that you have to do and it requires a lot more contact time and it's a more robust experience and then as we kind of wrap up tonight some of the work that tak has been doing and really brac has been a great partner with this is really looking at some of those models outside that are doing this well so the career wise colorado model and also youth force nola who in conjunction worked with

046careerwise to get their version of a workforce experience online we've been working with both of those groups to really look at bringing that experience in and so really that's something we're going to have to get off the ground is you know that structure and format and staffing to really begin looking at how we expand this in the future and so really the wrap up and then move on to questions some of the things that we're going to be doing next is first developing clear pathway progressions for those options for all programs in the bright futures pathways so really starting to make sure we we select the right pathways enough for student choice but also not try to do too many either so find that perfect fit for what pathways we need to offer across the

047board also looking at creating those clear off-ramps so when students for whatever reason have to you know fall a little short of something but can still get a good credential we want to make sure we build that out the next is really beginning to fund and expand that work based experience model in the entire parish region and then again if you would like more information and it'll be i can get it to you digitally but our ebr workforce development team dashboard has a lot of great data that goes back historically to look at the industry-based credentials and different things that students have earned and the work that we've done moving up to this point okay thank you mr knee case mr goode has a question or comment right uh yes i think these are going

048to be mostly for mrs levantino so she can come up here um we have a lot of parents who express some angst going into this particularly parents of 8th grade students coming into this so could you i have a series of questions related to that could you talk about when the course catalog will be done so that parents can look at the course catalog and understand what the all the different courses will be so the course catalog is was constructed by the division of academics it is currently completed they are going through pre-scheduling huddles right now with the principals so they're going through that information with them so they can prepare the documents necessary to get out to the parents so within probably looking around february to where they have access to the link thank

049you it's digital okay and um one of the questions that has come up continually is the students who are struggling coming into this and how are we going to work with the students who say don't have a mastery in some of these courses as they come into dual enrollment how were the dual enrollment courses determined as to which ones would be see can you talk about that in general please okay so to address the first concern regarding students that are not quote on level uh the ninth and tenth grade sequences for students are actually built in to have an intervention course for those students to be able to support them along the way because the idea is if you can intervene along the way opposed to remediate you have an opportunity to intervene earlier and

050to deal with some of those deficits the second piece of that actually ties into the first so the courses that were selected to be dual enrolled were actually based on a list developed by the state so the state issues course codes for particular courses those courses have the de course codes and they actually map to some of your higher level de courses in the cases of english and math so a lot of the concern comes around your english and math courses because those are the areas in which most parents and school personnel look in terms of literacy and numeracy so there are no de courses that map to those initial english 1 english 2 algebra and geometry courses so you'd see a lot of those particular courses happening on the back end which then gives

051us an opportunity at the 9th and 10th grade level in those intervention blocks to be able to build those skills prior to the students entering those de courses at the later point and some of the specific questions i've gotten and i don't know if it was just from the example that was put up but some parents are concerned that say for instance freshmen will not be able to take band or art or anything like that is that could you address that please yes sir so the course prescription that you see is actually a general sample because as you know students come in with different courses or different specifications and different criteria or circumstances so that being the case where you see some areas like there's some slashing happening there like you could take this course

052or this course in this space that is where the students have the flexibility to do those things so you still have even with the prior prescription you had four core courses um for your english math science and social studies that were required of course your pe happens there as well so that leaves you three courses aside from the intervention course which we are prescribing because we'd like students to be able to work through that piece you have two other course spaces where you can manage band or art or music so if you don't need the intervention course if you're on the level so you have three so it's really no change from what you have today for electives for band and all those sorts of things yes no change okay um the the other thing

053i wanted to ask was hang on just a second um oh my computer died um so the students there's been a lot of questions and i think we've we've come around and done a lot of work on clarifying this because i think at first uh there was a misconception on the district park uh around the acceptability of dual enrollment courses and the ability to drop or add my and i'm going to say what i think i understand and please confirm if that's correct now if you take a course that's a dual enrollment course and you don't want that course to count as dual enrollment that decision needs to be made by the drop date of the university or the academic institution that is providing the dual enrollment course is that a fair statement yes sir

054students have the opportunity to withdraw from the course so they would withdraw from the dual enrollment course by the drop date not after they get the grade they would draw from the dual enrollment court at the drop date and at that time from that time forward the course would still be the same but they would be taking it for high school credit only yes sir okay and if a parent says i don't want my student taking any dual enrollment courses and it's in the sequence for them to have a dual enrollment course they would be in the dual enrollment setting but the activity that the the grades and things they would get would only be for high school credit no dual enrollment uh considered is that correct it would not reflect on their college transcript

055the goal is to ensure that students have access to the coursework okay and lastly then i'll turn it over to some others i've had many many people say that this is going to be trying to get rid of ap classes and if you go through all of the lists there's lots of ap classes and i think the only dif again i'ma say what i think and tell me if i'm correct the only difference here is going to be dual enrollment will be offered as an alternative and that the the demand will determine how many ap classes they are versus dual enrollment classes based upon what choices parents and students make yes and then also bear in mind dual enrollment classes and ap classes only map to certain classes correct so they're not available at every

056level right so wherever they were available previously you'd still have that option correct so there'll still be a lot of traditional classes uh occurring yes they're they're not de or ap options for all classes right okay i think that's all of my questions for now i'll pass it on thank you thank you mr goday ms dyasen yes um kind of to piggyback on um mr goday's question so they'll be so the university or technical college or whatever has a drop date and how will we make sure that all parents realize that drop date and act upon it you know how can we support that choice so currently at the pilot situation that information is already marketed out as a part of the packaging in terms of what it is you're doing so there's a calendar

057that incorporates that piece so in terms of when you're asking us to how you would know when that date comes up it's calendared it's almost like i wish that we could somehow put into the system that you have to opt for this one to have it included or to not have it included so we would know which parents have not responded to either is there any way that we can think through we can look into that because then it we would know and we could be aggressive in that contact to those specific ones who had not opted for either and they didn't miss a deadline we can look into that the other thing is once they get registered into the course so will they have this ability right out the gate to just go ahead

058and opt i mean it's not like you got to wait till this certain date to it's you can just go into it with so students are getting access to the coursework so in terms of the credit yes you have that flexibility you can go ahead right then and say no or you can wait till closer to the drop date and see what your grades are looking like yes okay all right um and then i noticed that some of that we talk about two credit course like courses that are worth two credits is this in reference to the internship yes okay versus at a university it would be three credits for an internship yeah one of the things that you're going to see is for that for the um internship we're talking about two carnegie units

059at the high school level so you can in certain courses you can earn multiple credits especially in your career tech courses where you're actually double blocking a course or doing more hours than what you would in a regular class so you can get two credits instead of one and you'll see in our career tech progressions especially the college courses they require like lab pieces where you're doing hands-on work and classroom work so it might be like a five-credit course so it just depends on the pathway you take yes ma'am and then mr nikki um so it looks to me like we've had this mindset in our district about stem or steam and it seems to me that when we look then at the pathways that really stem is kind of being divided up is that

060an accurate description i would think if you actually look across that whole continuum of the bright futures pathway actually stems just about integrated in everything i mean whether if we're looking for example like the associates in business with you know logistics you know we're talking about robotics we're talking about conveyor belts like so really you're starting to see whether it's an i.t whether it's in construction we're seeing stem integrated throughout all of our pathways now that's really what i had noticed somewhere where i had seen it was that you know a school may currently be involved with and offering things that would fall like you're saying robotics would fall under technology correct but yet they also have um sports management or sports sports medicine medicine sports medicine right and so um i think probably one

061of the maybe the answer to that question would be the things you're referring to really may be classes not necessarily entire pathways right or there may be a class that leads to a credential whereas like sports medicine could be then integrated into a piece that leads to a certain technical diploma or something you know that can give you college more college credits but then gives you a credential in a certain area or like that robotics class could fit into the logistics pathway because robotics are involved in some of the logistics courses so how will we keep robotics at a good many of our high schools now they could be one of the classes that you take in some of those pathway progressions but what if that school doesn't opt for the technology pathway but say

062they are opt for the health robotics is in surgeries and everything absolutely and i think our high schools have had a lot of flexibility and really it also falls back on staffing you need someone who's going to teach that course so it's not so much that they're going to opt in or out of one pathway or all i think as we build this out we're going to see there are going to be schools that are going to have a bigger focus in certain areas because they traditionally have either the staffing or the students to do that and so again i think that's something we're going to have to explore as we build out when i when we spoke about the specific pathways that we really want to offer what's a common sense progression for schools

063to do that and so i don't necessarily think we'll be taking away anything but we may be building it to be more intentional to get you to a more higher credential or an exit degree and so we might can offer both pathways robotics in the medical robotics in the technology all under one roof right it would be part of either an intentional part of a progression that makes sense or it could be an elective too so students still have some electives that they may take again this is a lot of this is further down the very specific course progression parts which we haven't gotten to but i don't foresee us just saying we're going to stop doing all these classes because again they fit in so many different areas so we're going to be intentional

064in making sure that for this example we get that robotics to be under both the medical and the technology pathway so that if whichever pathway that that child opts for they can do that right and again because not as an elective but as a course going towards their pathway and some of this is also because we're seeing it so much more integrated a great example is at ctec we have students who are doing computer programming we have students who are doing logistics they're doing conveyor belts computer programming kids would ultimately might be the ones who are programming the conveyor belt the students who are doing that may also leak over and learn programming because they're in the logistics class right so again you're starting to see a whole lot of walls come down and and

065you're seeing a lot of these industries connect to stem regardless and we saw that in miami where under one roof you would be having the different kind of modalities of that experience yes ma'am yeah okay thank you very much thank you miss dyson um before i go to ms swear jackson just want to point out that we we had set aside an hour for this i want everybody to get their questions answered but i just wanted to um with the weather coming in i just wanted to make everybody aware of the time constraints and having said that miss ware jackson thank you president chapman i'll i'll try to be brief um got three little areas here uh i want to get a little bit information about funding right now we're funded through esser and when

066we continue this what's going to be the funding source that's uh so if you can handle that then i'll ask about the glen oaks pilot yeah we've been working with the astro funds we're also working with we're going to work with the state as well and also um there's funding coming in that way so that's where currently our funds will be coming from from the from the state for the continuation yes and around the uh the pilot at glen oaks we started this pilot this semester i'm i'm sorry we're already in january we started it um last year and you know at the luncheon there was a student that spoke uh but i want to know about you know how has it ended up what are we looking like as as far as success rates

067for the the students that did it at glen oaks for the whole semester miss levitino good evening again okay so we already set and placed some quarterly check-ins for those students so we have that data i think dr narcisse shared in the last board meeting uh the cow that glen oaks students actually as a ninth grade cohort ranked fourth in the district for um being on track for graduation for matriculation so that's a high point to note uh because it communicates the idea that when you're looking even at those dual enrollment courses that they were taking and were engaged in it did not greatly impact them in terms of matriculation efforts but if you would like a full form or presentation of the metrics that we look at for that pilot we can get that

068to you what i'm really asking is about like a percentage of yes so about um there's about above 90 of the students have passed um their courses uh in the ninth grade first time ninth graders at gleno's high school okay above above 90 okay that's that's pretty good um and one last thing around uh senate bill um 214 and act do you know how us moving into this type of of of um learning uh relates to what's in that bill yeah so we've been uh you know again as mr nikkei share we we've been working on this for almost almost a year in this work uh which included the state as well and uh we're in conversations a lot with the board of regents uh as you know in 2025 uh their goal is to

069ensure that dual enrollments moved across the state and so we have been working really hard to um stay in hand-to-hand with them in that process yeah as far as you know students and parents having to sign off on um on certain certain curves you can talk certain courses um so that's that's what i'm concerned about as far as what that bill says now and if we move into it um this coming year and those things are still in place will we have any roadblocks so uh as you can imagine you know we were uh commissioner kim reid uh the head of reasons for asking which with us when we presented this as well as their uh board of directors um uh the goal is uh that they'd like to make sure that the whole state

070moves towards this and increase dual enrollment courses in the state of louisiana so we don't we do not anticipate anticipate that because they they want to move in this direction absolutely thank you thank you miss where jackson uh vice president collins um okay the courses they take the dual enrollment course so okay let me just state some concerns without actually putting the questions for the sake of time i'm not confident in the intervention that is currently being received by students in regular grade work much less will i have confidence in intervention for college level coursework for those that need it i also have concern around college level curriculum yes the parent may and i use the word may based on seeing different college requirements etc a parent may be able to choose not to have

071that on their college transcript but the at level high school student taking a course with college level curriculum still has the consequence of that lower grade on their high school transcript when if they would have been taking a high school level course with high school curriculum may have performed better because that is their level my question is how much money and i've asked this question already and i would like to see publicly some money numbers because curriculum is not board wheelhouse but money is how much money is this going to cost and at what point will the board be asked to vote on the money and that's all my questions thank you [Music] we can provide you with the information on the cost vice president collins thank you vice president collins miss bernard i'm looking

072at the five industry specific commissions on slide 12 and i see construction and manufacturing includes industrial and commercial construction chem petro and light non-industrial manufacturing and then i jump over to liberal arts and management and i see engineering over there and it's just very very confused because in my mind civil computer electrical chemical petroleum industrial and mechanical all go under construction and manufacturing so can we just move engineering out of liberal arts because it's definitely not liberal arts it's manufacturing uh we can look at that mrs bernard we actually work with the the chamber and the different groups on that with their ceos and so but we could take a look at that that should be a problem mr knapp is here and then under technology you could put electrical and computer engineering but they

073could go in either one thanks thank you miss bernard mr gooday yes i'm sorry i'm double dipping but i'll try to be quick um one of the uh things i'd like to make sure that we do if you particularly if you go back and look at the mou that we have with brcc there are a lot of detail about which teachers could be certified that are currently ebr teachers that could be certified to teach the dual enrollment course and i would hope that we are very proactive in working with brcc and our current staff of teachers to get as many of those teachers certified to teach the dual enrollment course as we can so i hope that's a very proactive you don't need to answer that i'm just saying that's a i hope we're very

074proactive in doing that and secondly change is always difficult and you know we have a lot of parents who their children are their most important asset not not assets not the right word their children is their most important thing that they have in their life and i fully respect that and i'm the same with my own children and there's going to be a lot of questions coming out particularly as we go through some of these changes and questions that impact the future successes of the students so how and i imagine we're going to have an overwhelming number of questions coming out very specific to an individual student or that sort of stuff how will we as a district try to respond to those parents to let them know whether they agree or disagree at least

075to let them know what the answers are to their questions because you know just now we talked about you know i had people telling me there was going to be no ban for ninth graders well that's not true so there's a lot of misinformation out there but a lot of really valid questions that they would like to get answers to so i would just like to know how we're going to go about doing that in a timely manner yeah our goal um we are planning to put a web portal up in on our website uh where any parent can go in and ask questions and then we can be able to respond to that in a process our goal is to get that up up and running by tomorrow with the delay and everything all

076right it might actually be up now is that correct it's actually up right now and it's on the front page correct amy it's actually up right now on the front page and so anyone can put any question in there and our goal be to uh get responses immediately and will it be like if you answer for one parent will that answer show up so other parents maybe have the same question they can already see that answer yes one of the the major um one of the major things is we've noticed you know some of the questions have been similar so we'll you know have a process on grouping that thank you thank you very much and i just want to thank mr nikes and mrs levantino for outstanding presentation uh appreciate it and i think

077you provided us with a lot of really good information so with that i will end just one last thing we will have town halls or information sessions uh that we plan on doing uh six of them in february we were supposed to do them in january but with the omicron variant uh we had to push that back but we wanted to make sure that uh those eights will be up on our website uh we'll be going to each of our regions across the city to be able to have conversations and also have uh partners such as you know the chancellor of brcc uh the commissioner of regents for those that make decisions to be there with us as we talk through this um we've been working on this for in almost almost a year now

078and so i think it'll be important for our families to hear directly from them as well as we answer their questions thank you mr blue moves we adjourn the workshop before i call the other meeting in the order we need a couple of people from outside the cadet lieutenant colonel we have a special seat for you all right they're coming as soon as i get it i need april okay i need uh i'll relog yeah would everybody please log out of board docs and relog into the correct meeting i mean board members y'all can too i'd like to call to order this regular meeting of the east baton rouge parish school board for thursday january 20th i would like to read some notices the public will be allowed to attend a reduced rate of 50

079capacity of the central office board meeting room space once the capacity has been reached admission into the meeting space will be closed all audience members are required to wear masks at all times masks will be available upon request the regular meeting scheduled for regular board meetings scheduled for january 20th 2022 at 5 pm will be streamed live via youtube a link to watch the meeting can be found on board docs located on the school board's website a period for written comment will be provided before the meeting as well as before each action item is taken by the board on an agenda item individuals wishing to make public comment about any of the posted action items will need to click on the agenda item in board docs and submit via the highlighted public comment hyperlink on

080the agenda item details online comments are available for public review i would like to ask uh for you all to silence your cell phones we're going to begin with an invocation to be led by board member jill dyson and our cadet is going to be introduced by colonel fulton johnson please rise please join join me in prayer heavenly father we come to you today asking for your guidance wisdom and support help us engage in meaningful discussion allow us to grow closer as a board and help us to nurture the bonds of our school communities help us to continue to grow our educational partnerships with an increased passion for and dedication to our work we pray lord for every child those with learning challenges and those who are soaring to new heights without limitations on their

081full capabilities we pray for our teachers paras and educational leaders across the district as we together maintain our dedication to the work of increasing lifelong opportunities for all students through our current challenges lord we ask for the joy of learning to be restored to students who are discouraged by their progress we ask for the joy of teaching to be restored within our t educators across the district we pray that they feel our high admiration appreciation and support we pray for all of our schools to be places of great discovery adventure respect and creativity in your holy name amen amen thank you our uh we'll be led by the pledge of allegiance however colonel johnson you want to introduce our cadet yes sir thank you good afternoon ladies and gentlemen mr tatman board president dr narcisse

082superintendent of schools and board members it is my distinct honor to introduce an outstanding jrotc student from tara high school to you today he is currently the supply and logistics officer and also the commander of bravo company in the jrotc battalion he's also a member of the trojan explosion band and the co-captain of the trojan strong air rifle team he is a district leader leadership student of the year for 2022 and he holds the rank of captain and a gpa of 3.8 upon graduation in school year 2023 he plans to attend southern university and major in civil engineering join the u.s marine corps as an officer and get his commission as a second lieutenant and his ambition is to become a f-35 fighter pilot he is the son of tarika and gerald brady ladies and

083gentlemen here to lead us in the pledge i present to you cadet captain quincy brady from tara high school i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all you all may be seated brady thank you for being here congratulations on all your hard work we're so proud of you and everything that you're doing and and we're looking forward to you defending our nation uh as a fighter pilot you can buzz us some time this is a superintendence medal on behalf of the superintendent and all of our board members we want to thank you congratulate you to tell you to keep up the good work [Applause] roll item b2 roll call madam secretary please

084call the roll district 9 president president district 4 vice president collins president district 1 mr blue here district 2 mr lannis district three mr howard president district five miss where jackson present district six miss diason present district seven mr goday president district 8 ms bernard present we have a quorum we move now to item c1 approval of the board of the school board minutes of the december 16 2021 regular board meeting the january 13 2022 special board meeting in the january 13 2022 committee of the whole meeting as published in the official journal do i have a motion moved by mr howard seconded by ms ware jackson seeing no questions or comments on the minutes from the board we go to the audience are there any comments from the audience on the minutes seeing none

085back to the board madam secretary please conduct the vote please vote sorry yeah you're up the motion carries minutes are approved we move now to item d1 student of the year recognition of the 2022 east baton rouge parish school system student of the year uh dr robinson's going to handle this for us yes okay dr robinson [Applause] good evening president tapman vice president madame collins to the board members and to dr north c superintendent every year schools select deserving students to represent their schools as student of the year each school goes through a rigorous process of submitting a portfolio which is judged and critiqued the top finalists of 5th 8th and 12th grades are chosen and students complete a writing prompt and participate in an in-person interview which is judged as well scores are tabulated

086and winners are chosen to hold the title of east baton rouge parish student of the year these winners will represent our district in regionals if one of these students is chosen at the regional level he or she will complete the state's title of louisiana student of the year please help me to congratulate our district winners and i will call them in order and when you come you can come to the circular area here first one is adeline guidry she's the elementary school student of the year from westdale heights academic magnet jalen jalen toliver district charter elementary school student of the year from inspire charter academy grace ding middle school student of the year from glasgow middle [Applause] gang maurice uh district charter middle school student of the year from inspire charter academy he's not here

087tonight but let's give him a round of applause and victoria williams high school student of the year from baton rouge magnet high school let's once again congratulate our scholars our students of the year please thank you very much for your outstanding work you have the appreciation of all of us here the lord thank you very much and i'm just going to say on behalf of the school board and superintendent congratulations to these students of the year you guys did a great job great job [Applause] awesome congratulations congratulations to all of you the best part of our meetings we now move to item d2 recognition of the 2022 east baton rouge parish school systems teacher of the year dr lashley good evening president tapman vice president collins board members dr narcisse i am barbara lashley your

088chief of literacy and on this wintry evening i have the distinct pleasure to introduce to you the east baton rouge parish teachers of the year i just wanted to say that as we honor and acknowledge the immeasurable dedication of our teachers and honorees we recognize that teachers play a critical role in influencing our students personalities and shaping their future they provide really the solid foundation for our students and so we want to thank them for that i would also like to thank first of all also the office of the human re human resources for putting together this election committee and we're proud of that tonight and i'd like to ask miss carrie larose who is from the office of human resources that's going to assist me in giving the honorees their awards so let's get

089started we have tonight miss carlyle gungora she is a sixth year pre-k teacher in ebr from villa del rey elementary school [Applause] okay she believes that young children need to construct their own knowledge and understand the world around them through discovery we have next miss morgan merriman miss marima may not be here tonight she wasn't able to join us but please let's give her a hand [Applause] miss casey walker buchanan elementary school she serves as a teacher of instructional area for fourth grade gifted students and she is also the grade level chair miss walker i'd like to also mention miss walker has 15 years of service in ebr miss kelly mcgrail works with sixth to eighth grade students while implementing individual educational plans with fidelity miss mcgrill has created also community in within her own

090school miss mcgrill thank you miss cara allen who is a teacher at belfair middle montessori magnet school she is here great all right all right miss allen has 14 years of experience here in ebr and curt currently serves as a sixth and seventh grade teacher there she serves on the teacher advisory council as well thank you miss out miss tanya dargan serves as a social study teacher at scotlandville middle is she here okay great all right so she also feels this is her mantra people do not care what you know until they know how much you care so thank you for your service dr dr carla miguez and i hope that i'm pronouncing that right she is an english 2 teacher at baton rouge magnet high [Applause] mr andrew holmes a veteran teacher of students

091nine through twelfth grade at astruma high school i don't believe he's able to join us tonight but let's give him a round of appreciate is it here yay all right [Applause] we also have miss sin claude cledesha i knew i would mess up the names although i practiced clydeesha wyatt who is from mckinley senior high school she currently serves as a sixth in her sixth year as an english teacher there at mckinley senior high school and she is has also served an 8th grade teacher there at mckinley high school let's give her a round of applause as well i give to you our 2021-22 teachers of the year [Applause] on behalf on behalf of myself and the superintendent and the president of the board and the entire board all planets of love and thanks and

092appreciation if we're going to come give you your medals for baton rouge high go bulldog blaster is mayfair down there nobody no mayhem didn't make it mayfair is not here resemble that thank you [Applause] congratulations to all of you and good luck in the next step we move now to item d3 recognition of the 2022 east baton rouge parish school system's principles of the year dr williams good evening president tapman vice president collins board members and dr narcisse i am sharon williams your chief of schools this evening i have the distinct pleasure of introducing to you the east baton rouge parish school system principles of the year these school leaders are being recognized as the best of the best and highly respected by their colleagues staff members and district office team as we embarked on

093this challenge our sense of appreciation grew out of the insurmountable challenges these school leaders have faced as we enter our third year of a global pandemic in pursuit of nominating the best candidates we closely modeled the louisiana department of education application process and requirements to measure our talented leaders amongst the best talent in the state to initiate the process educators and stakeholders within the community were able to nominate principals we gathered those submissions and consulted with the executive directors of school leadership representing each region the executive directors examined the pool of candidates and advanced applicants who demonstrated the vision practice and precision of implementation that are at the core of the ebr cornerstones and strategic plan the portfolios that these candidates submitted included a resume two recent years of student success data up to three

094letters of recommendation responses to two written reflection questions in one video prompt a very rigorous process after meeting those unnecessary prerequisites the scoring committee assessed the depth of work reach and influence within the community and their ability to articulate a vision for their prospective schools communities and constituencies as well as establish innovative practices around structures and resources with close adherence to building a social emotional infrastructure to meet the competing demands placed on teachers students and families each of our district honorees may advance to the state level where they once again will submit their credentials to be considered for the state principle of the year i am now pleased to introduce our principles of the year our first honoree is our elementary school principal of the year erica b aguilart miss aguilard submits her favorite quote

095ms al gillard what makes us different is what makes us beautiful erica blackmore aguilard is the principal of river oaks elementary school in baton rouge louisiana her passion for diversity and literacy has played a crucial role in the shaping of her inclusive campus miss aguilar's journey in education began as a first grade teacher before she became a technology facilitator reading coach assistant principal and principal for seven years she served as an assistant principal of an elementary school with a sizable population of english language learners ms aguilar's vision of an inclusive school where everyone feels loved helped move the school's performance score from a d to a c in 2015 aguilar was named principal of river oaks with inclusiveness and literacy as her focus there was an eight point gain in the school's performance school that

096year under miss aguilar's leadership river oaks was also recognized for receiving an a in progress in 2018 and in 2019 it received excellent rating for its pre-k program we appreciate your leadership ms aguilar and a personal anecdote concerning miss aguilar the evening that dr narcisse and i were to notify the candidates miss aguilar was nowhere to be found she was still at school i think it was 5 30 or 6 the day before winter break and we had a committee a search committee looking for miss aguilar because her phone was dead and her secretary had to run back to the school and find her but we did find her and she was very appreciative of the honor so thank you miss aguilar for your service [Applause] our middle school principal of the year is ms

097raquel matoya brown miss brown's quote i believe in inclusion diversity love and learning miss brown is the principal of woodlawn middle school in baton rouge louisiana her passion is to create a thriving caring and inclusive school community and wholeheartedly believes our diversity is our strength ms brown has served as an educator for 28 years miss brown was a former teacher of the year and teacher of the year finalist for the ebr parish school system ms brown's disciplined approach as a band and orchestra director brought 13 groups to state competition miss brown crowns her significant achievement is mentoring new leaders and a personal anecdote about miss brown when i visited woodlawn middle school i forgot to put on my principal shoes and miss brown as you all know according to her biography is a very disciplined

098leader and we went on a speed walk around woodlawn middle school that would rival any band director in the state so i really appreciate your leadership thank you for your service to our students finally our high school principal of the year is mr wanda johnson miss johnson's favorite quote in order to enter the brain of a child you must first enter their heart it is there the keys to the whole child are stored miss johnson is the principal of ebr's superintendent superintendents academy in baton rouge louisiana her passion is to change the perception of alternative education and shine the spotlight on students academic success and the road to graduation in 2013 mrs johnson opened greenville superintendents academy where students were who were two or more grade levels behind were able to accelerate a grade level

099within one school year ms johnson led the way for her middle school students to earn high school carnegie units in order to ensure her students were back on track for academic success and on the road to graduation ms johnson is a champion for the least of those scholars and holds very dearly her role in supporting them thank you miss johnson let's all congratulate and celebrate our principles of the year [Applause] i just want to congratulate miss aguilar uh if anybody ever has a chance uh especially any parents that want to visit river oaks elementary it's uh it's got a terrific atmosphere there and uh miss ms aguilera has a lot to do with that very welcoming atmosphere congratulations and i want to express our appreciation to all of you for going the extra yard thank

100you for being the leaders that you are and mentor leaders as you mentor others to grow in in their profession thank you so much and a big shout out for woodlawn middle school miss brown but to all of you on behalf of the superintendent and school board congratulations for your work job well done especially in the middle of a pandemic and all the things that you as educators and school leaders have gone through and we appreciate your service we appreciate the tough decisions that you have to make to continue to serve our district so congratulations and best of luck the rest of the school year [Applause] oh [Applause] congratulations and good luck on the rest of your journey i know you'll represent east baton rouge proud we now move to item d4 recognition of patch

101singleton with pat's coats for kids which provides coats to our students and our school district ms brazier good evening everyone president chapman vice president collins board members and dr narcisse i'm tirza brazier director of counseling i am honored to recognize mr pat shingleton who is probably familiar to most of you he has supported our school district with pat's coats for kids by providing many students the opportunity to warm up with brand new coats in december this is a great partnership and a phenomenal act of kindness with mr pat shingleton through pat's coats for kids and our school counselors for almost 30 years our students families and school counselors are so grateful and thankful and we look forward to the continuous great work and distribution day 2022 so i present to you mr pat shingleton [Applause]

102all those kind words i was afraid the ravenhurst boys were coming in i think the success of any campaign is because you have just some great great pieces of the puzzle coming together i could not do this without the great assistance from principals and counselors and guidance counselors and teachers they are the first ones that we contact to do this campaign and they are there with me as well when we do distribution days teresa was and dr narcisse and i got to share notes about the great city of pittsburgh and the pirates and the steelers but it was a day in which coming over was so cold i thought i remembered back there was one day and here's your probably remember we were it was a friday before and gosh we got this incredible snow

103storm shut the town down so we couldn't do the distribution but the school counselors were there to pick the coats up on the following monday and mayor president sharon broome she said you know pat it's it's an institution and i think when you have an institution it incorporates a lot of components in that so i cannot do it without the teachers without the counselors without the students and to have a warm coat on a day like today and tomorrow pretty special those babies thank you i just wish that i started the day with a message and i ended wouldn't it be nice to lead all the newscasts in this town with the great recognitions were occurring here tonight thank you for the work that you do and thank you we're there for you appreciate it

104thanks will mr singleton gloria it's nice to see you hey uh you were a little late for the meeting i was i was i was they're pretty used to that by now but let me just say this you're like the baton rouge walter cronkite thank you we love you you're revered everything you do for our community and for our students on behalf of our board and our board leadership and our superintendent we present you with this thank you thank you thank you so much and thanks for what you're doing there we go find a window i didn't want my face thank you that was for pat hey pat don't leave just a second i just wanted to to to give you a special thanks you know for all of these years doing this and you

105know i was at channel 2 when we started this and we didn't think it was going to be we knew it was a big deal but we didn't know we had no idea that it would go on for so long you know and we've blessed so many children throughout the years with this so i just wanted to say thank you and every time i see you i think about we play baton rouge and spinning that wheel yep yep that was a high rated truck so thank you you're such have a great a joy you pat we move now to item d5 uh recognition of the annual giving employee campaign winners i miss is massachusetts mr noel good evening we're here today we have representatives from the united capital area united way and the foundation are

106here to thank all the employees of the east baton rouge parish school district for contributing to this year's annual campaign this year we were able to raise over twelve thousand dollars and since we really didn't get to properly recognize the campaign from last year due to covet the total is uh up over around 30 thousand dollars for both years so um again we appreciate all the employees that participated in the campaign and especially during the coveted years and with the recent hurricane um here with us today uh representing the capital area united way are george bell amy shortest uh i'm gonna mispronounce this but here we go uh cruisy like diane drake i think that's fine with the foundation we have kathleen soaresville to my left and then we also have representatives from the defrock

107school principal aryan st julian and the campaign coordinator for the school margaret gordon and we also have another representative from the child nutrition program felicia barnes we'd like to we every year we give out two incentive awards and the winners of the winner of the those awards this year for the 2021 annual giving award is awarded to the school that provides the most combined support per capita and for the third year in a row that it belongs to dufrock elementary [Applause] and the quote on the trophy is from winston churchill and it states we make a living by what we get we make a life by what we give so uh thank you dufrot for your participation and for uh winning that award again keep up the good work thank you why don't y'all stay

108right there we'll get a uh cease and miss where jackson has come down for a picture okay thank you our second award is for those uh who participate and give over a certain amount to the foundation they get their name in a drawing for a prize the recipient the recipient of the individual award this year goes to felicia barnes with the child nutrition program [Applause] this year's prize was an apple watch that'll motivate people so again thank you to all the employees that participated and also thank you to both the foundation and the capital area united way for the work you do in the community thank you thank you all very much thank you okay so we move now to uh standalone items uh e one and i will turn the gavel over to superintendent

109narcisse okay i will now open the floor for nomination for the office of the president of the board are there any yes i would like to nominate mr tatman for president no it doesn't okay are there any other nominations i mean if we close nominations there was a motion to close nominations in a second okay so we'll take comments from the board first comments from the board all right there's no common comments from the audience no comments back to the board madam vice madam secretary sorry i'm so used to saying vice president and i'm secretary please call the vote please vote it's roll call no this is just a closed nomination you're correct the two parliamentarians don't know what they're doing the motion carries all right we will now call rule conduct a roll call

110vote sorry for president tapman as president district one mr blue what are my options again uh limited mr tatman district two mr lannis taven district three mr howard mr tatman district four miss collins chapman district five miss where jackson yeah district six miss dyson chapman district seven mr goday batman district eight miss bernard chapman district nine mr tatman and what are my options it was better when he said it tadman unanimous mr chapman all right i will uh open the floor for nominations for the office of vice president are there any nominations ms collins are there any other nominations i move nominations to close my second i moved the nomination segment if i law firm huh comments from the board okay comments from the audience back to the board yes board member jackson uh thank

111you dr dr narcisse um i believe both of these candidates are viable candidates i i just would prefer to see the the um the sitting um board leadership still in place just for a little continuity and uh this time goes by so quickly you know as soon as you get in the seat it's it's just about over so i just wanted to to make that comment thank you any other comments from the board all right madam secretary please call the vote nominations please vote yeah this is to close miss war jackson is she the motion carries all right roll call vote mr blue uh miss collins mr lannis collins mr howard carlos miss collins collins miss where jackson collins miss dyson lannis mr goday atlantis miss bernard collins mr tapman collins miss collins wins by

1127. thank you and and thank you colleague linus i appreciate that you got to swear in right conduct yeah okay we just need a minute to do swearing in um and miss and i didn't have the right screen up and miss bernard would like to make a comment i just wanted to thank both of you and say that i have every faith in this board and i see this board working together in such a a way that i haven't seen in a while and i'm i'm very encouraged and mr lennis i i wish you i wish i had known in advance i was kind of i would i didn't know what was going on here tonight and i committed to miss collins and i have every faith in both of you and in this entire

113board and i thank you all for being such a cooperative and well-meaning board and well-meaning people i really do appreciate you mr lannis and ms collins miss everybody thank you mr bernard yeah okay yeah we'll come down uh separate or together okay that will support the and constitutional laws of the united states and the laws of the united states and the constitution from the constitution and the laws of the state of the union state and the laws of the state of replacement faithfully and in caution and partially uh according to the best of my ability [Applause] if i might take a point of personal privilege i just want to thank my colleagues for their uh confidence in me and continued support i will need it i appreciate the work that we do together i'm humbled

114by the work that you do and your commitment to kids in our community and so challenge me and help me we're all going to need it and so thank you very much we move now to item e3 resolutions consideration of the adoption of a resolution proclaiming february 7th through 11th 2022 is school counselors counseling week miss well i'll need a motion first move by mr howard uh a second seconded by miss ware jackson and um miss miss fraser or we're going to read it first i'm sorry right yeah proclamation whereas school counselors are employed in public schools to help students reach their full potential and whereas the east bend rouge parish school systems school counselors are actively committed to helping students explore their possibilities strengths interests and talents as these traits relate to career awareness

115and development and whereas school counselors help parents focus on ways to further the educational personal and social growth of their children and whereas school counselors work with teachers and other educators to help students explore their potential and set realistic goals for themselves and whereas school counselors seek to identify and utilize community resources that can enhance and complement comprehensive school counseling programs and help students become productive members of society and whereas comprehensive developmental school counseling programs are considered an integral part of the educational process that enables all students to achieve success in school now therefore being resolved that the east baton rouge parish school board does hereby proclaim february 7th through 11th 2022 as national school counseling week school counseling better together thank you vice president collins um is miss brazier going to do any yes

116i knew you i knew you would want to we'd just like to say uh president tatman vice president collins board members and dr narcisse on behalf of our more than 130 school counselors thank you very much thank you um i just think that you all play such a critical role in the education of our children and i appreciate the work that you do and i wish we had 260 of you but the 130 i know are working hard and we appreciate you very much thank you [Applause] seeing no comments or questions from the board we go to the audience any comments on the audience on the resolution seeing none back to the board madam secretary please conduct the vote please vote the motion carries ocean carries we move now to item e4 consideration of the

117adoption of a resolution proclaiming january 2022 as louisiana school board recognition month good emotion from anybody would like to move by ms bernard seconded by miss dyson dr narcisse east baton rouge paris school system louisiana school board recognition month january 2022 whereas the mission of public schools is to meet the diverse educational needs of all children and to empower them to become competent productive contributors to a democratic society and an ever-changing world and whereas local school board members are committed to children and believe that all children can be successful learners and that the best education is tailored to the individual needs of the child and whereas local school board members work closely with parents educational professionals and other community members to create the educational vision we want for our students and whereas local school board

118members are responsible for ensuring the structure that provides a solid foundation of our school system and whereas local school board members are strong advocates for public education and are responsible for communicating the needs of the school district to the public and the public's expectation to the district now therefore i sit on our seas on behalf of the east baton rouge parish school system and community do hereby declare my appreciation to the members of the east baton rouge parish school board and proclaim january 2022 as school board recognition month in east baton rouge paris school system i urge all citizens to join me in recognizing the dedication and hard work of our local school board members and in working with them to mold an education system that meets the needs of both today's and tomorrow's children

119thank you dr narcisse seeing no comments or questions from the board we go to the audience on the resolution any comments from the audience seeing none back to the board madam secretary please conduct the vote please vote the motion carries the resolution is adopted we move now to item f1 for information only monthly financial report f2 personnel changes seeing no comments or questions from the board i'll move to g1 update from the superintendent dr narcisse thank you president tatman i just wanted to uh highlight uh just two things one is tomorrow is a delayed start this is a reminder that all schools will operate on a three-hour delay tomorrow due to the potential for some icing on elevated roads in the early morning hours all high school and middle school students will start at 10

120a.m and all elementary school students will start at 11 30 am this will allow our staff and students to arrive at school safely we will have the posting also on times on our website on another note we'll have a presentation from a net with andrew koski last spring we entered a partnership with the achievement network more commonly known as a net a net assessments have been implemented system systematically across the district in ela and math as we promised upon the approval of of this contract last april we've invited members of the a net team to join us for a mid-year implementation update at this time i'd like to call up andrea orkoski our chief of accountability and assessment dr holly fears partnership manager with anet and chris roberchat a net vice president of program operations

121together the three of them will share with us uh information regarding the status of this collaborative partnership and i just wanted to highlight as many of you may know and we use the anet as our benchmark our quarterly benchmark to assess progress for students for both ela and math across the entire school district and they will talk through some of those pieces mr coskey good evening everyone and thank you dr northeast it's my honor tonight to introduce you to two members of our anet family and i intentionally choose the word family because let me take a minute to explain to you their family has grown over this semester when we began this journey with a net last spring we were assigned an account manager and the equivalent of an instructional specialist or a coach who

122worked tonight she's local and she was in and out of our schools working with our team and and as my team and i developed a relationship with them every week we were on a zoom call or our teams call with them and you know i'm losing my touch a little bit because one week one of them said something and i said well what am i missing and lo and behold both of those ladies are out on maternity leave within three weeks of each other so the anet family is growing and we wish those two mothers very much uh best wishes on our behalf we miss them but like any good teachers do and like our staff is doing in our schools right now when our teachers and our principals are called out to be with

123their families their colleagues jumped in and subbed for them and didn't skip a beat and employ to whatever it takes attitude so with that being said i'd like to turn you over to our new account manager dr holly fierce who's based out of florida and subbing in louisiana territory she spent the whole week in louisiana this week and had this lovely not so florida weather and we're honored to have with us today dr chris rupert who's the vice president of operations for anet so i'm going to turn it over to dr fears but i'll be here to answer any district level questions yet if you use the arrows thank you and i absolutely love my louisiana family i have been working in east baton rouge in a variety of manners for several years and it

124actually made me tear up that the middle school principal of the year has sat in sessions that i have facilitated before so that just you know gives me the feels um so just to get us started we're going to go through a really high level overview of kind of where we are where are we right now knowing that we are in the middle of the year and knowing that we still have several months to go maybe okay so who do we work with across the state of louisiana we are not just working in east baton rouge parish but we also work with 31 school districts or independent charters across the state which includes about 153 different schools that are using the assessments alone we have multiple different services and supports that we provide but that's

125specifically the assessments knowing that those are being leveraged here in baton rouge so what do we do there are two different pieces on this particular graphic and one of the pieces i wanted to to highlight is on the right hand side where we talk about the ways that we support all levels within the school system so we start with district level uh district leader support making sure that we are supporting data analysis so that we're not just giving assessments but we're actually analyzing those assessments and supporting the district leaders with creating systems and protocols for how we analyze that data we also support school leaders making sure that that data is usable by our school leaders they're working through the data analysis as well as what does that mean for planning and supporting our teachers

126we support teachers through again that data analysis and giving them structures giving them tools and resources in their teacher toolbox so that they can use this information to make instructional decisions for our babies our babies are absolutely the most important people in the building and so we want to make sure that we're identifying those areas of strength and leveraging those areas and building on those as well as identifying areas where some of our students may need additional support and giving teachers the resources to be able to support that we know that we're in year one of this overall support in that year we start really implementing the assessments and digging into those resources helping teachers and helping leaders identify ways to analyze the data and resources that are available to them that gets deeper as

127we continue the partnership so knowing that in the next year just like as we implement anything the first time teachers are figuring out how to use things as we continue to go in that partnership teachers are better familiar more familiar with the platforms they're more familiar with the resources that are available and we can continue to support them in increasing their knowledge so what do we do when we're supporting district leaders we have regular meetings with andrea with her team with data analysis with leadership we want to make sure that we are meeting the needs of your teachers of your leaders as you're going through that we also have working groups that are focused on really trying to put some systems in place across the district so that things are data's being analyzed and planning

128is happening in a really systemic way we also support the identification of those strengths and areas of need across the district and then try to provide those resources so that teachers can leverage that in the classroom and you can see on the chart there we listed out a couple of focus areas we have focus groups so once we were able to go through some of the data district leaders came together and said here are some high leverage areas that we really want to work in one of those being the standardization of practice where across the board leaders and teachers are analyzing this data in a standardized way so that we can make those decisions also looking at what professional learning do leaders and teachers need and then identifying for literacy and for math what are

129some of those areas of focus and how are we going to really support our teachers in providing those supports to students how are we supporting school leaders i think this is probably one of my favorite slides in the whole presentation because we were able to actually pull quotes from your principals and assistant principals from a recent training that we were doing in december and so to be able to see that school leaders agree or strongly agree that they're able to take the learning from these professional learning sessions and directly apply it in their buildings and with their teachers is extremely powerful if you see the quotes that are there the session gave me the opportunity to take a deeper dive into the assessment without interruptions and most importantly discuss the data with non-math instructors and

130we were looking at math data as well as english language arts data and then district leaders and teachers should have the opportunity to access analyze and interpret assessment data and so the fact that there were multiple quotes like that that we could have pulled from your leaders saying that this has been really beneficial for them was really powerful just to give you kind of an idea of the year and where are we with the assessments we start the year with diagnostic assessments in september we then move into the first assessment or the first interim which was completed october into november um january is interim two we're in the middle of the second assessment right now and knowing because covet happens um we have had some schools that have taken a little bit longer to complete

131the assessment than they wanted just because of things that were out of their control but we are in the process of absolutely getting those assessments completed so that we have that data to be able to use in your classrooms and then how many students took the assessment we aim for 80 percent of rostered students to complete the assessments we have met that 80 mark even as of the 18th knowing that we are in the middle of this testing window we were already at 68 and knowing that if we were to go and pull that data again today that number would be even higher and so we will continue to push to have those students complete the assessments because with that data we are then able to make instructional decisions chris great thank you holly um

132and i would just call out on the interim data in terms of the completion rates so far this year um we're at 83 those numbers are sometimes harder to calculate than you would think they should be student mobility rosters it's hard to you know it's sometimes a bit of a moving target so when you look at school by school data the majority of schools are over 90 percent of students administering some are at 99 complete so there's some variability when you're looking across schools there's also just nuances in the student rosters that make those numbers look a little lower than what they are the other thing that we wanted to bring to you all is just a little bit of data in terms of where we are in the year so at this point we

133have data from our math diagnostic our first interim as well as in literacy when we look at data from in assessments it's something that is done at a district level leader level and a classroom level teachers are looking at student responses student work and digging in and taking action at that level what we want to bring to you all is a bit of a district view where you could look at performance across grades and one of the things that we do within the a net platform platform and with our different protocols is look at performance by different demographic groups one slice of the data that we want to bring to you all today was the performance of students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged compared the district at large because those students were performing lower in every

134grade than the district overall in ela and in math so that is one data point that we want to share it with you all today um again this is analysis that's happening with the district teams it's happening with principal the ilt teams as well as i said in every classroom at the teacher level so i'll pause there i don't know if there's more detail that um folks would want to share but want to just provide that high level overview in terms of where we are in the year we don't have any questions at the moment but if you want to continue the presentation you great that's it okay well um uh mr howard thank you um i would just like to request that the next time you guys bring it if you can break the

135data down by not just social economic status but like demographics black white uh male female that would be helpful to understand how we are projecting um this overall district thank you see any further questions thank you very much for being here and presenting and thank you for your work in the schools thank you uh just just one last point i just want to highlight uh concerning the a network as you know the board we put in our strategic plan for all students to have three to five percent growth on the benchmark the benchmark is the a net so we are closely monitoring that three to five percent growth we also talk to each principal as they talk with their students in schools to look like their measurement of students the three to five percent growth

136per child and so what we do is at the school the district level and i'll let andrew talk just a little about that uh looking at the growth of of each school by how they did the um each quarter and so andrea i want you to share on our scorecard that's live on our website there's a drop down by school so you can see their their enter their most recent interim data as dr fear said we're in the middle of interim 2. once we get that data probably by about the second week of february it will be updated in real time and actually there'll be a column there so that folks can see the change also we are very close to going to print with our printable scorecard for each school we're going to showcase

137that for you in february so you'll be able to see more detail for each school and it'll have some special population data as well all right um president tapman that is my update thank you thank you dr narcisse we move now to item h1 any reports from board appointees to committee committees or agencies not seeing any so we will move now to the consent agenda ms bernard oh maybe it's not forgot consent agenda the following items are to be approved as part of the consent agenda and are considered to be routine and will be enacted with one motion there will be no separate discussion of items unless a board member so request in which event the item will be removed from the consent agenda and considered as an item on the regular agenda for a

138separate vote preceding the last item on the regular agenda focus choice school partnership with baton rouge general medical center consideration of a request authorizing the superintendent to enter into a partnership between the east baton rouge parish school board and the baton rouge general medical center center to establish a focused choice school specializing in medical studies serving grades pre-k 8 at park elementary school strategic alignment student achievement funding source general fund three school focus choice school partnership with lsu and the water institute consideration of a request authorizing the superintendent to enter into a partnership between the east baton rouge parish school board lsu and the water institute to establish a focused choice school specializing in environmental and coastal studies serving grades 6 through 12 at the evo laguard learning center strategic alignment student achievement funding source

139general fund for grants consideration a request for the approval of the following grant and grant application a quality science and math council qsm grant in the amount of 1499.41 to provide robots for the introduction to robotics course at broadmoor high school strategic alignment student achievement b national science foundation computer science for all grant application in the partnership in partnership with lsu in the amount of two million dollars to provide continued design study and support for computing courses for grades seven through twelve five professional services contract consideration of a request for the approval of a professional services contract between the east baton rouge parish school board and rethink autism in the amount of 160 000 to provide specialized professional development strategic alignment employee development funding source sr3 action two con six contract consideration of a request

140for the approval to renew a contract bringing the east baton repair school board in the city of baton rouge not to exceed 134 thousand one hundred ten dollars to allow the east bank parish school system department adulting continuing education to continue providing adult education classes and high set testing for inmates at the east barrage parish prison from january 1st 2022 through december 31st 2022 funding source city of baton rouge grant seven bid forest heights contractor consideration of a request for the authorization of staff to design advertise and accept the load meeting specifications and award a contract for the construction of the forest heights six through eight grade visual and performing arts middle school facility on the forest heights academy of excellence property project as specified in the a plan to improve facilities technology discipline and

141compensation in the east parish parish school system the plan as revised through february 22 2018 and reject any and all bids for just cause in accordance with louisiana public bid law louisiana verizon statute title 38 chapter 10 eight rfp facility master plan consideration request for to authorize staff to issue a request for proposals rfp to create and a facility master plan to include recommendations for efficient utilization of assets comprehensive review of facility and systems assessment and fiscal sustainability of current and proposed operational efficiency strategic alignment operational excellence funding source general fund nine rfq architectural design conservatory school consideration of request to authorize staff to issue an rfq request for qualifications to provide architectural design consulting services for the new visual and performing arts conservatory school strategic alignment operational excellence 10 policy revisions g a e

142and d j e d consideration of a request for the approval of the following school board policy revisions and related matters cg administrative records dje purchasing and djed bids and quotations that is the end of the consent agenda and i so move approval can i get a second i'm seconded by mr cody would any member like to pull an item yes i would like to pull item two and three miss where jackson item ten please okay any other board members wish to pull any other items seeing no other items to be pulled they will be voting on the consent agenda four five six seven eight and nine seeing so no questions or comments from the board we go to the audience on those items in the consent agenda are there any comments on the items

143that remain in the consent agenda great evening board i wanted to speak about the one that is for the children with autism i don't remember the number i think it's number five it's either five or six five thank you give me my time back miss april no he was ready for him yeah restart her time you can speak on any agenda item in the consent agenda except for two three and ten right right now yeah okay it's no longer in the consent agenda right okay so on item number five item number five is the one that provides training for our staff um that have that work with our children with autism i just recently dealt with a family that had their child arrested their child was arrested because the school system staff did not know

144how to deal with the children with disabilities that is not epr this is not ebr let me be clear on that one before everybody get to panicking it was not evr but i'm bringing that to your attention because so many times our staff that work directly with our children with disabilities don't have the necessary uh training and as a result people get hurt children go into juvenile detention or jail and it's just unnecessary it's mental anguish and trauma that's being um being introduced to the family as well as a child this child right now is so traumatized he don't want to see a teacher and don't want to go back into a school building so i ask that you really and truly provide all our staff not just the teachers and the paraprofessionals but the

145cafeteria workers the front desk worker the secretary the office the nurses the medical team my child has had to receive medical services and nobody could do anything for him i had to actually physically go in the building so this is something that i think that we really should do across the board and even the board members y'all could actually use it to to deal with our children with disabilities because i know i am the only one that bring their child to the board meetings but there's a lot of other parents of children with disabilities that would like to bring their kids here second i would like for y'all to look at number seven and make sure that we actually get contractors that can provide us with buildings that are in ada compliance so many times

146we have children that are wheelchair-bound individuals that are using four-point walkers um that use walking canes they cannot go into the building because it's not handicap accessible this board room is another example and i just hope and pray that we actually look at that um and last but not least the grants i do think that we should accept any kind of grant funding that is going to help our children because our children are our leaders and our future and they really need every single dollar and cent that they can get thank you thank you miss corley any other comments on the remaining items on the consent agenda from the public well that'll come up in order okay no worries thank you um seeing no other comments from the audience on the consent agenda we we

147come back to the board ms ware jackson thank you president tapman i just wanted to take the opportunity to express my appreciation for the grants on number four with the robotics at broadmoor high school i think that's going to be a wonderful thing for broadmoor excellent and of course the national science foundation for computer science that 2 million in partnership with lsu is just fantastic so thank you so much we really appreciate that and it's going to be wonderful for our kids absolutely thank you so much miss ware jackson seeing no other comments or questions from the board on the consent agenda madam secretary will you please conduct the vote please vote the motion carries thank you we now go back to item i2 consideration for requests authorizing the superintendent to enter into a partnership

148between the east baton rouge power school board and the baton rouge general medical center to establish a focused choice school specializing in medical studies serving grades pre-k 8 at park elementary school strategic alignment student achievement funding source general fund do i have a motion moved by mr goday seconded by mr howard uh mr howard thank you president tatman um so so i think that this is a great idea um i think that we need for a long time in this district we've been needing opportunities for families to access things like this and students to access things like this my concern which has been my concern since the last six superintendents i've been on that we've had since i've been on this board um is the way we communicate things to our staff i've i've talked

149about the importance of doing things with people and not two people during our last meeting i asked a question about how was this communicated to staff and several executive staff members got up to the mic and said we did this we closed this loop we closed that loop when i woke up friday morning i had over 50 messages from teachers at park elementary who had no idea that this was going on i have a problem with that because we know that this district has been stagnant for a long time and we know that they're going to be some growing pains and some tough decisions that we as an executive team and leadership team have to make but if we continue to get people or do things to people and not with them we'll never have

150the buy-in that we're looking for from district people district personnel and district staff so my request again to this board to the superintendent to this executive staff is to do things with people and not to them you will never get people to buy into the vision of this district until the changes that we're looking to make at the district if you continue to do things to them and not with them i don't care if you bring them a million dollars you need to do it with them like i don't think that's a hard request superintendent dr narcisse we had a conversation two months before this came before the board and the only loop that i asked to be closed was that loop there was no reason why the first hearing of this from teachers at

151park elementary should have been by a news story period and if anybody thinks that's okay that's where the problem lies people don't have to get on board with the decisions that you as a leader make or as executive team as a leader make but they are people and so treat people with humanity treat people with morals and a moral compass and we i promise the vision will go further we can rip the band-aids off all at once but we have to continue to do things with two people and people get and people have told me for the last three years this is my uh last year on the board in this term for the last four years i've heard we're gonna do better we're gonna do better when are we going to better how are

152we going to do better my request is that a teacher from the school at park elementary is a part of the steering committee to steer this uh this this work forward and that we do better at as communication and if we can't people need to be held accountable so that means people need to get pink slips because they don't know how to properly communicate that's what it needs to be thank you mr howard vice president collins so i i i echo those concerns i also echo excuse me i also carry the concern of staff but not just staff and and i've heard my colleagues say this and he may actually share the sentiment families it's one thing for us to have amazing relationships with business community and the labor department et cetera workforce commission and

153say this is what we need and perhaps it is what we need but again when you talk about community buy-in uh envision for students that's for parents and if the staff wouldn't communicate with then we already know what happened with the parents i'm not voting for this for two reasons okay and i appreciate the amazing emails and and concern for this it is an amazing idea my issue two issues there's no fiscal note and we have been going forward with various projects with no fiscal note attached as if we have unlimited resources and my concern is when the resources bottom out and they are projected to real soon just if you think about how we put 20 million 14 20 or 14 million dollars worth of 20 million dollars worth of recurring expenses on one

154time fund money and when that one time fun money run out that it's the schools above north florida boulevard that when we got a pull and yank back because the money ain't done it's not gonna be the new stuff that we thinking about without looking for my second concern we have not in fact we just voted item number eight on a facility master plan we are doing these things in silos okay at some point there are not going to be resources available that means we're going to be forced to make decisions and we are not taking a comprehensive look at what we already have to say this ain't working no more yes we heard from the business community and yes even families say they want this what we're going to cut out because we're going

155to have to cut out something we are and right now is really nearly what will stay and what will go and nine times out of ten is not going to be shiny and new that's got to go okay so then i'm in panic about what's happening in my area and some of my colleagues area so my answer is no i know that the people that sent those emails were very sincere and i appreciate it but because i understand it is my fiduciary responsibility to be concerned about the budget as well as the lack of comprehensive planning i can't in good conscience keep voting for stuff i gave my one pass with the conservatory and i said at that time if anything else new comes my answer is gonna be no and i'm sticking to my

156word okay thank you excuse me let me clarify anything new comes without a fiscal note and a comprehensive analysis of what we already have and how that's going to fit once we get past that i'm good but i can't i can't do that without this thank you thank you vice president collins seeing no other uh questions or comments from the board at this time will go to the item we'll go to the audience on item uh i2 any comments from the audience yes sir and this will be two you'll also have a chance at three so uh jason harris united faith leaders 200 plus members uh we do want to lend our support to the focus choice partnerships and hope everything else can be worked out as well because i think it would be tremendous

157for ours for our students so thank you mr harris any other comments from the audience on item i2 yeah hi i'm john bradford um i just want to caution around continuously building programs around one or two industries i firmly believe that evr schools has a strong curriculum as it stands and if we fully funded it fully implemented it and fully administered it to folks who need it to our students who need it then we wouldn't see the issues that we're trying to address that this focused choice school does not i don't consider um the lack of opportunity in the medical field as someone who's a biomedical researcher and i love my career um but this is not a pk through eight problem some examples as uh within the fields there was a new york times

158article yesterday that spoke how nurses during coved were heavily understaffed or were left in shifts that were heavily understaffed across the country so it's a staffing problem that we're seeing in the lack of opportunity and jobs in the medical field it's also a legislative problem funding lack of lack of jobs that are sent to facilities or supported for facilities it's also something that they don't talk about um to and and should it be discussed with pk through eight um the loans the debt and the affordability of graduate school and professional school there's real sacrifices with this that need to be addressed on the medical field end more than on the pk through eight end and then when it comes to diversity equity and inclusion that is a higher ed problem it's not a pk through

159eight problem and getting kids away from learning the basics and having a foundation in math science english all of the things is not the solution and we shouldn't be basing programs around a job market that's very much in topsy-turvy another article from the american american medical colleges spoke how there are emergency medicine physicians that are having a hard time looking for jobs right now even during covid so we need to make sure we're not building um entire student populations to just funnel into a job market that we don't know what it looks like a decade from now thank you thank you miss bradford good evening boy i'm sorry good evening board uh good evening dr narcisse um first i want to say i i totally agree with you uh don costa and uh chameleon howard

160but uh i have family from easy town uh with park elementary here you know and i feel like besides that school being built this is the best thing could have happened to that area so i'm i'm supportive of it uh i feel like that's that is a start for that area for us to grow you know so and again i do understand i mean i i feel you have to be transparent but at the end of the day i'm thinking about them kids i'm thinking about that area i'm thinking about how they living in that area i'm thinking about the opportunity that they have an area that they do not have and uh and and i'm excited about it thank you sir appreciate your comments good evening board i actually took out the opportunity to

161look at baton rouge general's website and i think the program that you're trying to consider is probably the radiology program because if you the the only two programs they have is radiology and nursing and their nursing program give a certificate if you know anything about the medical field certificate nursing has been phased out all nurses with associate degrees are required now to have a bachelor's you cannot go from a certificate in nursing and get a bsn so you would actually be implementing a program that is unuseful and wasting money secondly we need to consider all of these charter schools that were just approved on tuesday by betsy we had kendall discovery that came to our board that our board did not approve that just got approved at betsy that would now be a type 2

162charter additionally kenworth was not approved by our board the now would be a type 2 charter additionally you have dalton elementary their charter was renewed we have a total of six new charters that will be coming into our school district that will impact our budget significantly and we need to really and truly take that into consideration has anybody actually looked at what the budget would look like once those six charters come into our school system and start pulling children out of our district that's something that we need to look at we also need to consider what idea what ideas charter that's on plank road by winfield funeral home they haven't opened it they will be opening next school year additionally the helix school they'll be opening there's other charters that we approved that have yet

163to open but we'll be opening next school year i think we we also approved one that did classical arts let's stay on the agenda yes sir okay trust me i want my time back for that go ahead you got a minute but the classical arts that one will impact our um our budget so i'm saying that to say that we can't afford to create programs that we don't know how it would impact our budget when we already know that the vegetable or just approve things that is going to drastically impact our budget secondly the program is not going to work not for pre-k through eight eighth graders and cannot go into the medical profession at all so this would have been something that you probably should have looked at for the c-tech school not for

164a actual school for pre-k through eight thank you thank you miss corley any other comments from the audience on item i2 good evening my name is oscar carter and i just uh as about middle of october started working with the organization stand so um i am in support of um the focus choice programs both of them items are two and three uh anything is that going to uplift our children create various opportunities that were non-existent prior to this point um i'm in favor of but set the organization aside also as just a concerned uh community member um focus on the children and everything that's going on in in each and every district i just want to rename my support um and show my support both as a worker and as a volunteer person from the

165community thank you for your time thank you mr carter any other comments from the audience on item i2 good evening my name is michael vell and i'm excited to support the focus short scholarship school partnership i'm in the 10th grade of scrimma high school and i wish they could offer this now my question is is there any way possible is there any possible way to play sports at another school and participate in this program board please support dr narcisse to bring these programs to ebr thank you thank you mr bell any other comments from the audience seeing none back to the board mr goday yes i want to address a few of the comments from my understanding and please correct me if i'm wrong uh we're talking about k-8 that is going to be basically

166a stem-focused school with a medical bent so it's going to have biology and things like that so when you're doing k-8 yes you're teaching biology you're teaching medicine you're teaching some of these things but you're really teaching stem and after eighth grade those kids could probably go anywhere they want so we're not making just a pipeline for nurses and that sort of thing to baton rouge general even though we will have their help i fully expect that many of these students coming out of this will end up as lawyers or doctors or anything else because that's the kind of education they're going to be getting secondly on the financial side this school is in existence already there's already a building there's already a principal there are already teachers there are already all of these things

167in place we have a superintendent so the cost of that should be very minimal as you go forward particularly with working with the baton rouge general in addition we have a superintendent that as part of his criteria that we have and have his commitment that we will have a balanced budget it wasn't many years ago that this board voted to have a 27 million dollar deficit in their budget and that was a very hard hole to dig out of but many members of this board voted for that budget and now we have a superintendent finally who says that will happen again so i'm gonna put my faith in the superintendent and the monies that we have i do think we have the money in the system we need to use it better i'm also working

168with the group to update our computer systems and i'm i would be amazed if we don't have millions of dollars of savings as we come out of that through improved practices and things like that so we can't wait to have all of the answers before we move forward this is a wonderful opportunity to connect with the community the people in that community want it and i just feel like we would be depriving many students of what they need to succeed if we vote this down i don't want to make political statements with the vote i really want to vote for the kids thank you thank you mr goday vice president collins i'm voting for these children long term if it doesn't matter how much money we spend or we can only focus on voting by

169via promise regarding budgetary needs and what we do with facilities then why we even why do we even do a budget process why do we even why did we even just vote on the facility master plan we don't need to grandstand i made my statement i'm probably gonna be the only one to vote no to be quite honest but my position is let's be responsible long term and we can't be responsible long term for these kids if there's no fiscal note attached we talking about going from it's just 200 babies in there right now if this is if we're going to make this a great program the building should be full that means more money you know if it doesn't mean more money then where's the fiscal note saying it doesn't mean no money just

170just can we just be responsible in how we approach it i think it's going to be an amazing program but then also even when i advocate for my own schools i make it my business to research and make sure that what i'm advocating for is not going to hurt something else unintentionally in my district or anyone else's political district or across the district and we have to take those kinds of things and consider it's just basic planning we all are very familiar everybody in here probably have at least one degree okay i have two working on number three it's planning 101 and that's all i'm asking for won't get any words out of me you know thank you vice president collins uh miss mr howard thank you thank you president it's on my green lights

171on it's on okay there we go um so yeah my uh quick note is that um we we talked last week for this program that there will be no emissions requirements to get into the program but there were some mentions of what happens if a kid doesn't sustain um the particular gpa i think that right now we have some issues related to then what um so again in the steering transition to ms collins's point like some of these logistical things i think are make sense for us to know um i'm gonna like mr go to say put my faith that this time that administration gets it right um y'all making my faith of a mustache very little um but i hope that we could get within the transition plan what does those things look logistically

172like because three four years from now whoever sitting these seats gonna have to deal with those things of like now you have a mass amount of kids leaving the school because they they didn't have an entry requirement to get there but they have entry requirements to stay there what interventions what are supports look like what are supports like for families who want to continue in the program but the kids are not making the grades like we talked about the interventions all night there has to be some kind of actual plan not just she said he said that this is going to happen so i would like to see on paper like what does transition look like for students who no longer are able to stay at these particular schools thank you thank you mr howard

173mr jackson thank you president chapman um yeah first i want to just express my appreciation and uh my excitement too for uh um baton rouge medical center um investing in that in that community and at park you know when park before park was rebuilt i was a bit concerned about the population there the demographics and you know concerned about building that that new school and um it's had some challenges i really think that this would be a great program there you know that'll that'll really be wonderful for um for that territory and uh and connect it more closely with uh the efforts in mid-city so uh but superintendent narcisse uh i would appreciate it if you could address some of the concerns uh that we that we're here tonight and if you have um if

174there was a a presentation that you wanted to to do or speak a little bit more about the whole uh program yes uh we do we have a uh um a powerpoint we can share concerning the program um but we did not uh miss okowski can you come on up we did share the presentation at the cow but we can't bring that slide deck back up or just some some highlights with some help of the tech team i'm uh flattered to be asked to stand in tonight for my colleague mr a supporter who could not be physically with us tonight but through the magic of technology miss porter are you with us good afternoon yes i am there she is so at the board's pleasure we could run through the powerpoint um i can i

175can drive teresa if if you'd like to narrate if that works with you okay okay so we're on slide one okay so the focus choice schools as it was introduced um last week are schools that are designed to be aligned with pathways and also to are you there miss porter oh there goes the technology miss porter are you there highlights would be good yeah i'm here okay and and if tech team if you can hear me the slides are not moving on my command if you could help use the arrows yeah it's not and ms wilcox give this board we just need highlights okay so miss porter if you want to just hit the highlights i'm on the slide of what the focus choice schools are okay so the focus choice schools um the partnerships

176are intentional uh we have high quality seats and the rigorous coursework is designed to help students in an exploratory manner in order of which is aligned to the program theme in this case it would be the medical component once again it's exploratory so to mr to the point of the board member about whether schools would be aligned to a specific certificate they are explorators so we want to give students an opportunity to have a learning experience that's fun and engaging and it is stem focused next please okay your definition of a focused choice school okay so it's a portfolio that's theme based and it provides opportunities as i mentioned a moment earlier for intentional alignment with post-secondary partnerships for grace pre-k through 12. next miss porter i'm going to skip ahead a little bit to

177just park elementary and i'm on the slide that kind of outlines the programmatic piece of park elementary since we're only talking about park at this moment okay so so park elementary they're under capacity right now so we are looking at an enrollment of perhaps 45 students per grade level students who are currently there will be grandfathered in if a parent decides that they do not want their child to um be enrolled in this component then they would um we have options for them for example i'm doing a cow we talk about capital elementary and then there are other choice schools they can also apply to yes ma'am and i'm showing on the screen right now the the enrollment data for the for the board and the community at home who's watching okay i think this

178was the last slide on park so i don't know if there are any other questions that we need to address miss where jackson has the floor no that's fine thank you okay thank you um mr gooday yes thank you president tapman i just wanted to come back because i had forgotten one thing to mention people mentioned about charter schools and one of the things i hear constantly about charter schools is it forces us to compete and we want to compete i don't take it as a given that all of the charter seats that were talked about earlier and some of those are swaps dalton is a continuation kennelworth is a swap between what they have now and a little bit different grade configuration but i don't take it as a given that all of those

179charter seats will be filled to take that as a given says that we don't have any confidence in our ability to compete and i do think we can compete but this is the way we're going to have to compete you know you look at the charter schools what do you see you see an aviation school a medic medical school a stem school you start going through all these things and if we don't provide those options that the parents and students are demanding to prepare themselves for the world that it is today we will we will be run out of business to me this is the primary way for us to compete we have resources we have dedicated faculty we have great facilities we have things that we can compete on this we need to untie

180our hands and go out and compete we need to fill up these schools and filling up these schools maybe some of these charter schools won't be full i don't take it as a given that we give up to the charters as we go through this i want us to compete as hard as we can and to make our system as strong as we can because at the end of the day that competition will lead the best lead to the best outcomes for our students thank you thank you mr goday the board is miss dyson um i just would also like to um say that i am in support of this as an innovative school that we can hopefully grow across the district these are the kinds of things that our communities are all looking for

181is very intentional educational choices that they can make for their children and with their children and we have to offer these opportunities ourselves it's the only way we're going to stay relevant in this workforce and an economy that we live in and i very much uh am in support of this and i'm also very uh optimistic about what we can do in each area of our district as we move these kinds of opportunities forward thank you thank you miss diaz and miss bernard i too am thrilled about the opportunity to bring this type of programming to a neighborhood school like this even though i think i realize that children from other areas will be able to attend as well i do have concerns and i also thought it was important that we mention that there

182were a number of emails of concern i share mr howard's concerns about personnel being treated fairly being treated well they deserve to be communicated with they don't deserve to read it in the newspaper it is not acceptable for them to read it in the newspaper that cannot happen again it is not acceptable for families at the school to read it in the newspaper they deserve to receive communication as well i also share my colleague ms collins concerns about the fiscal note anytime i do something if i have a project i have to present a budget for the project how much money i need to to perform all of these things that go along with the project to completion and then i also have to know how i am paying for it what is the funding

183source for it i'm very concerned about the budget season that we are about to move into we are about to move into the budget season how are we going to balance the budget this year i don't think that the school is necessarily going to bring in students from outside the district who but maybe i'm wrong maybe i'll be proven wrong about that but it's definitely not revenue neutral i am supporting it i am thrilled and excited about being able to bring this but we have to do a little bit better job with a couple of these other things so let's let's let's address the budget immediately after we approve this tonight and the revenue source thank you miss bernard the board is clear madam secretary please conduct the vote please vote the motion carries thank

184you we moved to item i3 consideration of a request authorizing the superintendent to enter into a partnership between the east baton rouge power school board lsu and the water institute to establish a focused choice school specializing in environmental and coastal studies serving grades 6 through 12 at the eva lagard learning center strategic alignment student achievement funding source general fund and do i have a motion move by ms where jackson seconded by mr miss bernard seeing no questions or comments um from the board on the item we go to the audience are there any comments from the audience on item i3 all right angel bradford again um i don't think focus choice schools are exploratory if the past already chosen for the students i do think this continues to distract from the actual issues for our

185students in east baton rouge and if we want to get to the part of advocacy for equity in these fields that's that's a legislative fight that's a federal fight um there are plenty of certified and educated people in our country who can't find a job in these areas and so that's a larger conversation than six through twelve 12. beyond that i continue to be concerned as well about the fiscal note it feels as though we're coming up with new programs every time i come to a meeting and each program creates further stratification further segregation further exclusion and it feels like they're for few while sacrificing the greater good or the many and so i don't think the cost can be overlooked i think if the costs are concerned we shouldn't be voting for this um

186and then my final two points you know the strength of a democracy is really defined by the strength of its public schools and if we cannot provide across the go across the board good public school education and only specialized students into little you know cogs in the wheel as some folks say um then we're not doing our job and then finally climate change is here and now and so expecting six through 12 to really carry the weight of that um is very unrealistic and i'm very disappointed in this partnership because it's not grounded in the reality of the moment that we're in with climate change thank you mr bradford any other comments from the audience on item i3 good evening board members good evening dr narcisse my name is chris toombs i'm a resident in

187baton rouge particularly a resident in south baton rouge i've been i was educated all the way through south baton rouge particularly at the laguardia site which was once polk elementary i think it's a great neighborhood has a lot of good history good place to grow up i'm currently a graduate assistant at uh lsu and uh i love my school i think it's a great school i think they're doing a great job of honoring its commitment to community that they adopted in 1996 which said that they'd always be there to supply support to their neighbors in south baton rouge and i think they're doing a wonderful job of that uh my hat's off to the coast environment college and the water campus for fulfilling that commitment and now i've gotten all those pleasantries all the way

188all speak my mind now uh in my opinion for i'm gonna just drop a number on you first that's how many years mckinley high school has been educating the youth in baton rouge in this state mckinley high school is the oldest publicly funded high school in this country for a high school to be considered and it not be placed at mckinley a sacrilege especially in baton rouge um it is my intention and my hope that you will table this and revisit and speak with the alumni of mckinley high school the community of south baton rouge and then let's see if we can work out the details because i feel like something like this needs to be housed at mckinley if there are other plans and what not that we don't know about let's be transparent

189about it right but i will say this it would be in everybody's best interest i believe to just sit down and let's see how we can get better programming at mckinley because at the end of the day that is like the heart of baton rouge you have a mckinley graduate in every neighborhood in baton rouge like there's no way possible that we can realistically put another high school in the bottom like that's the i mean i just i don't understand that and so my suggestion is let's table this let's defer it and bring mckinley to the table uh i love the work that lsu is doing i'm not anti that i'm not anti other educational options in baton rouge but if you're going to be that close to mckinley and not afford them at least

190a cup of coffee or the community to have some type of input that's just you know unbeknownst to me so i hopefully you will take these words as um you know not being complicated but just wanting to see all parties involved thank you mr tombs appreciate your comments any other comments from the audience okay and thank you mr tongs for speaking i actually second that opinion now see i'm actually shocking y'all because any other time i probably will speak against it but i actually think that mckinley high deserves some great programs um in addition to that i actually think that baton rouge general medical program should have probably went over there as well but this water program i don't see any middle schoolers or any other grades that would actually benefit from that because most

191of them don't know how to say a lot of these words um in addition to that that's close lsu is in close proximity to mckinley high when we talk about children being able to walk or catch the bus because lsu have many buses that ride in close proximity to that high school and take them to the school that would actually be beneficial as you know mckinley high school lost a lot of their programming once lehigh liberty higher reopened and they never was restored and made back home and that's a problem because we forgot about those students and that's a problem because that's not every student every day that was just some students on that particular day and so when we have a model like that we're supposed to consider each and every student and if

192i'm going to speak realistically they also have a great scholars program a gifted program that should be restored and i know plenty of students that are in those programs at mckinley high that would love to be a part of this and when i say that i say it wholeheartedly so if we're gonna create or think about any programming let it be to that school and let's not create any more new schools and also think about those charters that are going to be in existence thank you thank you ms corley hi i'm hacker anderson and i thank you all for the opportunity to come in on this item i too stand with the mckinley alumni i am the vice president of the mckinley alumni association and when this news hit the paper we did share the

193article throughout our alumni and many of them were very heartbroken to see that there would be another specialized high school right down the street from where we're located not because we would not want to offer those services but we would rather see those services at our school there was a tax proposal a few years ago to expand mckinley high school from 7th to 12th grade from it's now current 9th to 12th grade and now you're saying that you would like to place a special system down the street that would go from 6th to 12th grade if at any way possible if you could please table this discussion to go back and think on it just a little bit longer to see if you can add these programs to our existing high schools within 5 to

19410 miles there are two magnet high schools outside of mckinley high school baton rouge high and lehigh and liberty high school so if you all would please consider putting some special programs at mckinley high school for the traditional students also for the gifted and great scholars i think that would be an awesome opportunity thank you any other comments from the audience seeing none we uh returned to the board miss dyson i thank everyone for all of your input tonight i am hearing things that i had not thought of and i always appreciate your input i too would like to see when we have these uh exciting innovative ideas and and the i can tell that a lot of groundwork has been done we know that it has informing these partnerships i have been wanting us

195to have these partnerships for so long but i would ask that we follow this vote tonight with um showing us and the public the fiscal ramifications and how we how we're planning that aspect of it we did not see those um specifics in the um presentations on either of these and i think that um on these we'll i'm just asking that we get those and then going forward let's just always have an idea of how we're going to sustain these partnerships and you know who's contributing what and you know what we how we're going to sustain it once we uh develop these programs um and will there be a certain number of students that will need to be serviced at these schools in order to maintain these programs because one thing that i've seen is

196you know you have a certain number say i'm just using this as an example in our gifted programs but we've never gone back and monitored it doesn't seem that you know you need this many students to start a program but then it's there and then who's monitoring it to still have that number every year to be able to stay there it's it's a matter of sustaining programs across our district i believe is is our fiscal responsibility so we just need some of those kinds of specifics on on these things um and and on other programs that we're offering across the district on an ongoing basis where are we at this school offering this how many students are being serviced there and and how close are other options um and and would we and i'm really

197glad to see that we're going to have this external audit in that we need the whole picture instead of piecemealing we do we we we've needed it for quite some time i very much do not want to slow the this progress down and i'm going to again vote to approve but i am very much wanting a master plan on where we're going and how we're going to develop these programs across the district and the schools that would be receiving from the school when the child is no longer able to maintain or cannot maintain a gpa then what are our plans for the receiving schools because there there's always going to be the receiving school and so how are we going to prop them up and give them the support that they need both the students

198and the administration and teachers and you know at each individual school so thank you so much and i appreciate very much that this item is coming forward and that we are implementing positive change we just have to be so thoughtful about how we do it and what then is affected by this change and how can we best mitigate any potential negatives that could come thank you miss tyson we had a little technical difficulty here miss collins um of course i want to echo the sentiments of my colleague as she just mentioned um and and i am being exceptionally consistent uh my viewpoint about having a comprehensive plan and having a strategy and yada yada i have as well as several of my colleagues on the board have said that prior to this particular superintendent's administration

199and at some point we got to stop talking about it and be about it um i i must myself and one of my colleagues who will probably speak for herself actually had conversation in agreement with some of the public comment we passed the tax plan for mckinley high we have not determined programming there but they're going to have an amazing building of 30 million plus dollars in renovations so taking all kind of stuff into consideration that's an excellent consideration and when you're thinking about there will be money that needs to be spent on on uh what a water institute needs beyond a regular traditional school building and if we already spending 30 plus million dollars down the street literally why not put it there uh so for the record my two primary concerns which which

200include the 30 plus million already allocated towards my big blue the am i correct in uh big blue being the first black high school in the state of louisiana oh that beautiful history okay for the record to be clear it's not that i'm voting against amazing ideas that can be beautiful and an asset to our students i'm simply asking for one a fiscal note in consideration of our budget in light of the fiscal note in a comprehensive analysis of all of our schools i.e a completed master plan in which we can facilities master plan in which we can consider all of these amazing things in the context of us being a whole district and not pulling from adam and giving to eve and then pulling from eve and giving to joe bob and then etc

201thank you oh and then one other point to lift up i apologize real quick swing space poke is currently swing space and if we don't have that for swing space have we thought of what we'll do thank you thank you vice president collins miss bernard um okay so i'm looking at the the item here and it is to approve to establish this at the evil agar learning center and i'm wondering if miss where jackson who's the maker of the motion and i'm the second i i again i'm i'm thrilled about offering the programming we did receive a number of emails of concern i love my constituent mr toombs idea that we would consider the input of the mckinley alumni and the mckinley faculty the mckinley neighborhood the mckinley students and parents um i think those

202are important considerations so i would like to either possibly there's two things that we could go about we could we could do this mr jackson if you're willing i'm the second you're the maker so so one one option is that we could approve the item without establishing at the eva guard and come back and determine that the site later because we might decide but i'd like to have a town hall at mckinley high school in the meantime before next month so we could either make a substitute motion to postpone this to next month or we could we could change our we could take this as a friendly amendment we could change our our main motion and our substitute our second to approve it next month and have a town hall meeting at mckinley high school

203in the meantime or we could approve it without stating the site have a town hall meeting and then decide on the site at a later time what are your thoughts ms boyd jackson well my the only the only concern i have about this is the site you know i have a a problem and i've talked about this with the superintendent and some board members um you know i love the idea you know the only thing that really stuck in my craw so to speak was that it was just a stone's throw away from mckinley and um you know that's that's the hard part you know because we don't know we don't have anything in particular for mckinley on the table now i know there's some talk about some things i know you know that there

204is something down coming down the pike but that's not well known so i would i would like to um you know i like the idea you know i could go either way we can approve the idea without naming the site or we can just wait a little while until we have some more discussions about this so um so from a point of order standpoint i think what miss bernard actually has the floor and she's asking you if if you would consider what i believe to be a friendly amendment to say we approve the project without specifically approving the site i just re rephrased that i could be wrong and she's asking if you agree to it then that becomes the main motion if you don't then we we move on i know mr goldie wants

205to say something hey hang on let him go on but but i i would i would do it yeah i liked i love the idea you know i love the partnership that's the only piece there and without you know i like hearing the the voice of the community and you know i may not have graduated from mckinley but i'm panther to the bone and i got two panthers in my den so you know i have to be very very careful when it comes to mckinley so do you want to to change our motion then to approve the program and come back and revisit the site um in the future and when we have some time to hear from the community we can do it next month if we hear from the community in the meantime

206yeah we can do this next month okay you know so we'll go ahead and approve the program without the center of the program without so count counselor we need a little help drafting okay thanks and then and then you're next to speak and then mr goday is next yeah so so i just want to if it's okay let's just take a deep breath and let's look at um let's get the motion correct so we know what we're talking about you know what we're debating i'm sorry i know we know what we're talking about so we have some proposed language for the amended motion okay and then i'll explain how we and why we amended it the way we did make a recommendation all right so it would be a friendly the freely amendment is to

207consider the request authorizing the superintendent to enter into a partnership between east branch parish school board lsu and the water institute to establish a focus choice school specializing in environmental and coastal studies serving grades six to twelve that would be the end of the motion and then a board member can then add an item next month um to approve a location so essentially you're amending the motion and removing the location specifics from the motion from the uh the item that makes sense what's up that's up to the mover in the second yes okay so the move the mover and the second agree to the amended motion so we're now the item before us is to approve the item without a location yeah give me a second um i feel like we got to go back

208to the audience because i think it hey we gotta go to the board i'll take i'm gonna go ahead and run the meeting mike thank you i appreciate that um i'm trying to make sure mechanically we're doing this right and so because i am i'm going to go to the board but we're going to go back to the audience but i just want to make sure that we're in the right place okay so we are on now the main motion that's been amended and miss where jackson has the floor well i've said it and uh the gentleman in the back spoke my heart mr jones you're good i'm good okay thank you mr jackson mr godaddy yes thank you and i apologize that's right chapman a couple of things i think we need to think

209about since this is all coming up at the very last minute uh superintendent this school would start next year correct at wood grade level i would start next year upgrades with grade six okay it would start a small school it would start it would start next year at grade six so if we delay this even if we delayed to where it is and all that sort of stuff we have all these committees put together with lsu and everything to work out curriculum and do everything else if we put it next year at mckinley you'd have six graders on the mckinley site which i don't think is appropriate secondly is i think it would delay because we're trying to get this up and running by august and if we're trying to get it up and running

210by august that would be extremely difficult if we don't know the site thirdly the numbers are the things i've heard because i went and talked because ut is now in that building and i went and talked to the principal and things like that ut would still be in that building and there are very minimal changes that need to be made to that building in order to start this school there is nothing to say that three or four years from now after we've made the investment in mckinley because right now mckinley doesn't have the space for it and i don't want to put sixth graders over there if we made the investment at mckinley with this in mind i have no problem if we end up putting that at mckinley but if we wait for that

211i'm either putting sixth graders on mckinley or i'm delaying the program for several years which is a detriment to the students so i don't think deciding how we do this is one way or the other either it's not mckinley or it is mckinley we can start this school there swing space as she said earlier it's swing space let's start it there we'll test out to see what the demand is we'll know what it is and then i think mckinley is in year six of the tax plan i don't remember exactly either i don't know of him but we have several years for mckinley to come up and if that's what we decide to do we can use that money to build into this program so i think i think not to go ahead and approve

212the amen approve the item as originally proposed would be a detriment to the program and a setback for the timing of this project and really doesn't serve any real purpose because it can still go to mckinley later it can mckinley can we can plan that into whatever buildings we want to do and if we don't want it mckinley it's not at mckinley so i don't think this the uh substitute motion really has any bearing on where it ends up unless you decide you want to put sixth graders next year on mckinley high school and i'm not for that so that i'm going to be voting against the proposal the revised but i do support the original thank you thank you mr gooda mr baloo thank you president chapman um and i had a couple of

213questions for superintendent narcisse because that i know the the plan was like mr goday said to start out with 50 students per grade and started sixth grade and really the the school was the way it was set up was when it at maximum capacity was gonna be 350 students so mckinley has over a thousand student or around thousand students so it all i guess if it's at mckinley it'd almost be a separate school within a school um like mr goday said i you know i i guess down the road if once it's in once it's going it could always be moved there if if necessary but can you tell us what what your thought process was when it was set up for evil guard and and why you didn't choose to put in my in

214my conversations with focus choice model schools they're not models of schools to be in large comprehensive schools and it's a school to provide additional choices for kids um we were actually and we haven't had a discussion yet with mckinley because we've been to thinking through about what would be the process of what programming at mckinley but we haven't thought through that process yet but for us we don't see this as a limitation we see this as an end i think to think that because this school comes up means that mckinley is going to be heard i think is not the approach and the thinking i think what we have been clear about and as we've been paying attention to our district is that people want more options and i think that with mckinley open i

215think even originally when i came to baton rouge and met with their staff we've talked about you know making sure that we engage them in a conversation about the programming that they would have and those things but i don't think that this school would hurt mckinley because it's just another choice option focused choice schools are smaller schools they're not meant to be in a large comprehensive approach it's just another model it's also what we learned when we went to go visit another district that did this and so i think the the what i'm hoping as we continue to work through around programming is that we don't begin to think that there's only a small limit of children in the school system we actually have many children in our school system and we just have to

216create more opportunities and choices and so i see that the opportunity for mckinley i was just writing down notes you know let's have go have a conversation with mckinley because we've been thinking already about what are the options there because um you know when we look at the staffing at mclean we don't have no offense to lsu but we see most folks in mckinley like as i've been always having concert with southern university so we've been trying to think about what the partnership at southern would be uh for that but that could you know but that's a conversation we have to have with mckinley uh staff their alumni and the different groups but i think the to limit this choice option to think because one school is going to come up it's going to take

217another i think that would not be the approach focus choice schools are just smaller choice schools or options mckinley is actually a much larger comprehensive school i would not be recommending a focused choice model at mckinley because we wouldn't want to tell kids at mckinley who didn't do a particular gpa that they couldn't go to mckinley mckinley has a strong history i think that um they have a strong leader there now there's a lot of other programming approaches that we can do uh also the question is about who would their partnership be do they want to be a partner with the lsu only or a partner with southern university they have more students so it's much more complex than that i would say but my my push again is is i i i think we

218should not think of a zero-sum game in this approach if we do this then it's going to take away from that i think it's a it's a matter of and and i think there's a lot of potential in that mckinley has a building coming up soon and our goal is to be having conversations with them around that because they have more students they can offer different type of programming but uh and if focus choice they want to build in that and that's the conversation we have then we go down that model but i think that uh to slow down this process for because we're concerned that mckinley may have a challenge i don't think those two are in the same same place at this time so my intention is to make a substitute motion to

219go back to the original proposal um so i guess this this would be the appropriate yes you would yeah you you have the floor so yeah i'll make that motion is there a second so it was dice in seconds so we are now on the substitute motion which was the original motion okay well my um is that that's it you're done after that good and um and i was simply i pressed the button just to allow the superintendent to speak and you did based on what um you know mark's question so i'm good i'll pass over so ms dyson so i think this is it it brings out the intentionality of what we're doing and starting small and um i i think because especially because mckinley is in the tax plan in a very large

220way and we're going to have the buchanan land i think that there are a lot of potentials that can be created for mckinley and i think need to be created for mckinley and that area and i think because we're having additional dollars going to go and also land we've got i mean the sky's the limit on you know and as long as we can afford so i am in support of this as the uh original motion and the new substitute motion um and i do believe that these conversations need to be had in every community uh what do you want what what kinds of uh pathways and i think in some of our larger schools we might have to have multiple pathway options um because you know these are our larger schools and all children

221aren't interested in the same exact pathway so multiple pathways to me sounds like a really good option um if we can have this these types of partnerships built around these pathways like our the partnerships that we're having for these focused choice then they'll be desirable as well so thank you board member where jackson thank you vice president collins um you know when i saw this i you know i was excited about the um about the the water campus and all of that because you know we've been talking about that for a long time um i think though uh you know after we talked about this and you know there was so much support for doing this at evil a guard for all of the reasons that were mentioned earlier um i got kind of nervous

222you know dr narcissa i was telling you know what what about and you know you told me about the the research and and you saw that you know more students the majority of the students that were at mckinley were going to southern university well i have to confess i got on the phone and i started talking to someone in particular at southern university who is always at any of our big meetings and i told him what my dilemma was about this whole thing and how i was torn up about it and he gave me a laundry list of ideas that they're chomping at the bit to partner with southern about and um and and i wish i had that list with me um one of them in particular was was um esports and and then

223coincidentally someone from uh bernard terrace uh called to invite me to something that's taking place tomorrow around esports at bernard terrace and uh i confess that i didn't know a lot about esports but that's the thing that jumped out at me when i saw his list and they mentioned that coincidentally that they were hoping that this program would progress into mckinley because they had all of the equipment and everything that was needed for uh esports so you know i say all of that and and um you know but but the bottom line is that you know if if only you know we could have had conversations um i mean you wouldn't know that this was going to come up but i just knew it was going to come up that you know that the mckinley

224uh territory would would be thinking well hey you know who are we chop liver you know because they've been passed over for different things and certain things came they had one thing and then it got you know a program got moved to another school and you know and you know they feel slighted you know and i can feel that so uh i know that there's a whole lot of opportunity in store uh for mckinley particularly through southern because southern's so eager to partner with mckinley and uh and i say that you know um i graduated from lsu um but you know that's my territory and all but when you you know i i just want what's best for mckinley you know period i want what's best for the district you know so it's really tough

225for me to say um you can tell uh i'm uh it's it's a it's a hard choice but you know i know that this is progress uh i just want to see something extremely good for mckinley you know and i know that southern university is chomping at the bit to dive in and partner you know so um and you know that's i guess that's that's all i should say you know except that i'm i'm eager to uh to get with the alumni you know to talk more to have some deeper conversations with uh the uh panther territory and see you know if we show them these options you know if we can get southern to the table and uh show them these options to uh so that you know if this isn't the right thing

226for mckinley because it doesn't fit there are better things for mckinley so thank you but remember how i work thank you vice president collins um and i would just be brief to say that this is why i believe that a communication strategy for whatever we're doing is vitally important because there's no reason why you're building a school within a one mile radius of another institution and you have stakeholders coming here tonight saying that they read something in the newspaper whether it affects mckinley negatively or positively or whatever like we can debate that for hours but if you have a communication strategy the first part of that strategy should be let's contact the stakeholders within the five mile radius to tell them what this means for their institution period we have an entire communications department but

227it seems that we are lacking communication strategy on a lot of these items so again i will ask that we get better at providing communication strategies because we see how we can become the pitfall to us breaching whatever vision we're going for thank you board member uh bernard thank you i agree again with my colleague mr howard is miss porter still on the line she is okay uh miss porter can you hear me yes i can hear you sounds like you're in the room that's fabulous okay i wanted to ask you about the magnet schools of america grant the magna schools of america program grant is mckinley in that grant so the msap grant which is the magnet schools assistance program grant the board approved a resolution and a voluntary plan to include mckinley high

228buchanan elementary the ebr conservator and broadmoor elementary school so we will not know until september 30th october 1st whether we received a 50 million dollar grant or not but to that point mckinley high school one of the things that we focused on was innovative arts communications and also a teaching academy so the post-secondary institutions such as southern such as lsu we are we bring those groups to the table and we get them to help us develop this model so we're in the initial stage of writing the grant oh we're writing the grant now so can we build something in for this program or not i guess it depends on where it goes if it's not going to be a mckinley then so the board voted for the specific schools and we would have to go

229back and revise what those schools are but i'm saying if we move this school i i too do not want to put sixth graders on the high school campus but and i don't want to separate them from their their peers the seven through twelve but again i want to take input from the mckinley high alumni and the community i want i think i think mr howard's point about communication was an important one he said that we have to do a better job of communicating we have a lot of stakeholder routes we have internal stakeholders which is our employees and we have external stakeholders which are the commit the community and then the parents are kind of a little bit of both but they're really external communica external um so um i'm just i'm just i

230i want to support the program i don't want to vote against this but at the same time i have some of the same concerns that i had with the baton's general medical partnership at park um it's a little different because evil laguard doesn't actually is not actually used as a school right now except a swing space but i want to see the funding source i want to see the budget for the for the facility for the program how we're going to pay for it where where are the other additional funds what funds have been committed by other entities to the program because are we paying funding at all out of the general fund or have there been financial commitments from other entities that are partnering with us and what are those financial commitments and mr

231chamberlain have we received those financial commitments in a form that we can sign um a contract with them because i think this is there's an implication here that that when through the partnership there's a financial commitment from these other entities and i don't that's what i don't understand so i guess i'm just going to vote for it even though i don't have all the information and even though i want to hear from the community in the mckinley area particularly i'm thrilled about the offering for the students i want to offer more choices i think it's a great idea i do have reservations thank you thank you ms bernard vice president collins i just would like to say that this whole entire discussion is uh affirming my point number two at least in my mind and

232my little heart that we should make these decisions considering all of the factors that need to be considered so that there aren't unintended consequences to other campuses thank you [Music] thank you vice president colin so we're going to go back to the audience um we are on the substitute motion by mr blue seconded by ms dyson which is actually what we were debating originally before there was an amended motion so if you'd like to come up and speak again you are welcome to and love to hear from you well i didn't uh again i didn't expect all of this but i will say this so i think you guys having this colorful conversation definitely opened my eyes to uh the choice school dynamic uh the point that you made uh is it uh is it

233school board member go day yeah yeah and um also i want to thank my representative miss bernard for stepping up for us like that and just everybody on everybody that uh spoke on it um i think that the town hall idea is a great idea because uh you know like i said i like the fact that lsu is making its commitment to community a reality in south baton rouge i'm excited about that um i love the coastal environment college i love the water campus i love what they're doing i think having um you know our students in the community being able to learn under their tutelage is a great thing but um i also think this is a great opportunity to and i hate to shift gears like this but hold this board accountable to

234make sure that what mr jackson said is exactly what happens uh you know i'm not anti this dynamic i think that again you should not make sixth graders with high schoolers i think that is a good point but please uh when it's time to do this town hall meeting um definitely with the history that mckinley has with the people that mckinley has produced the talent that it has produced it is imperative that it is a beacon for education in this city it's imperative and i think that we can all admit that there have been multiple opportunities to do things for mckinley that we've missed the ball on and i think this is a great opportunity to um get everybody to the table get the community involved i think that if the community is aware of

235what it is that you're doing these types of conversations are not as uh tenuous and we're able to work together and get things done for the collective of baton rouge um i'd like to highlight what uh my good friend karanda and um miss anderson said uh pretty much mckinley is a vanguard and i think that you all have definitely expressed your want to help us and i'm excited about that and definitely love to see what comes out of these town hall meetings and getting the community involved and i think this is something that we can get behind but also like you said a superintendent if it's a if this is a situation where this school is going to be like a little small collective like that and not infringing on us i think that's something

236that we can talk about and i think it's something we can work with and we look forward to working with everybody thank you thank you mr thames hello my name is juana modeno i am yes i mean it was very interesting this discussed discussion first i would like to talk as a mother my older son was a graduate of mckinley it was the best highest school she got a wonderful education after mckinley he went to university of chicago and all that was funds to the education he received in mckinley now as a faculty at lsu as a partner with the be advice initiative in computing i mean lsu you can work between mckinley and lsu and as a faculty there and i know many faculty in lsu will love to partner with mckinley i mean

237it's just so close so is we are no taking advantage of the opportunity that there are several schools bukhanan um their race is there and we should use the proximity to have more programs supported by lsu so that's what's all what's mostly related with mckinley and the neighborhood community thank you thank you ms anderson again i just want to respond to some of the comments that we had mr goday i know that you said that you don't feel comfortable putting sixth graders at mckinley high school and we too shared those sentiments however i believe that we're scheduled for a rebuild for 2024 which is in two years now and we will be adding seventh graders to that campus of course the campus will be expand um thankful to the tax proposal superintendent narcisse we did

238have a wonderful conversation about expanding programs at mckinley high school and i i feel that mckinley is the only traditional high school in that area so when we look at children who can come into a program without any prerequisites it's mckinley high school there is no other school that they can attend in that area we're it you know it's not just because i'm alumni but it's because that is the school that services the community um we do take hits when we open additional programs in other areas because you take students from mckinley high school to fill those spots at other schools now i do understand that it will be a small pilot program and i can appreciate that however if we do not place this program at mckinley high school in the future i understand

239that your urgency to start it next school year if we do not choose to start this program at mckinley high school because of the logistics and things like that that are not ironed out just yet i would appreciate this board just as you voted for the tax proposal to go and seek what pro what programs can be offered at mckinley high school because they deserve some specialized programs as well to help to enlarge their career paths as well we have a lot of students graduating from there year after year and we want to make sure that those kids are prepared to go out whether it be a four-year uh college plan or whether it be a career plan so please just take the time to see what programs can be placed at mckinley high school

240thank you thank you when we spoke when we had the community forum for buchanan and university terrace to be renamed the name for the school one of the options was northgate i think that came up from mr goday that was because the school was in close proximity to the north gate of lsu mckinley high is closer this will be a great opportunity for a university that's within walking distance less than a two mile radius for a child to walk directly to the university and actually get an education why hinder that buchanan buchanan and university terrorists actually supposed to be merged and be the mckinley elementary for next school year and they will be in a new building so we actually have time to actually have this programming to impact and affect the sixth graders that

241will directly feed into the seventh grade at mckinley high the one proponent that we're missing from this sustainable community school model is the community's input and i echo the sentiments of board member howard our communication department sucks but that's neither here nor there this is an opportunity for us to actually get the community involved and hear what they have to say and hear what they really want and one thing that i know that the children want at mckinley high is programs they want excellent programs they want the excellent opportunities that you talk about each and every time we meet at a board meeting so why not give them the opportunity to have an education or a program that leads them to another perfect and wonderful opportunity that's within arm's reach if you want to make

242it small and we don't want to have it where is gpa founded they have a regular program at mckinley high so i think right now what we have been doing is trying to come up with excuses for why we should not have it there when really there are none that is the best choice that is the only choice that is the best option and that is the one we should do i know dr narcisse talked about wanting to make sustainable community school models expand throughout the school system this is your opportunity thank you thank you miss corley any other comments from the audience seeing none we come back to the board ms bernard i have a request from the community for the communications department regarding the meeting at mckinley high that we notify everybody in

243proximity from all the schools that are in that zone mckinley middle as well maybe we can meet at mckinley middle but i think that we could meet at mckinley high but choose the site and that we have a virtual option at a hybrid charrette town hall some of both meet in the main theater have a small we're going to talk about the format break up into small groups have some topics that we're going to discuss come back to the main hall or maybe just go home from there and then compile all the communication that was given to us in the individual breakout rooms into some usable report of some kind thank you i'll help thank you ms bernard um mr howard um let me just clip something for the record i did not say the

244communication department sucks i said that we need communication strategy no matter the item or agenda thing that we're addressing so i just want to clear that up for the record i think that strategy is a different word than sucks so thank you yeah i think we understood mr howard but thanks for the clarity um okay so the board is clear we are on what is the substitute motion which is the original item as it was presented uh that is what we're voting on first uh the substitute motion so madam secretary will you please uh conduct the vote for some clarity mr tower yeah go ahead the substitute motion restores us to the original motion and if this motion fails there's nothing to fall back to well there's the uh there's the underlying motion so the

245underlying this is just my opinion but the underlying motion was amended and so therefore it becomes the main motion and the when it was amended it was amended from being what was the original motion which is the approval of this okay and then there was a substitution motion made by mr blue and so we're on the substitute if the substitute fails we go back to the main motion which would be where we approve the place i mean we approve the program but not the but not the place okay that is my understanding are we all clear i just want to make sure that's clear before we vote yeah i'm surprised i actually was able to go through it okay so all right oh thank you thank you so madam secretary please conduct the vote on

246the substitute motion please vote the emotion fails the motion wet fails sales okay we are now on the main motion which is to approve the program without a location everybody understand madam secretary please oh let me take you a minute no please vote the motion carries motion carries we move now to item i-10 consideration of a request for the approval of the following school board policy revisions and related matters cg administrative records dje purchasing and djed bids and quotations and i'm going to let miss ware jackson make the motion because i know she just wanted mr shamlin to uh go over it correct that's uh absolutely miss miss ware jackson and seconded by uh mr howard so um knowing that would you mind yeah yeah so we um we're looking at three revisions to current

247policy the first is is administrative records as a recipient of disaster recovery funds federal statutes and law requires us to retain records five years from the closing of the grant so the language in the change in language administrative records now requires a retaining of those records for a period of time to match what federal law requires and that that is um required to keep us in line with the law the second two revisions are to purchasing and bids and quotations in both cases the statutes the policies are revised the language is clarified there are several specific issues addressed through each specifically contracts administration when and how contracts are signed and what cases they're required and also how contract extensions are happened as well as a number of other clarifications around procurement and so these are

248standard um as i said as i said at the cow these um these the second two policy revisions have gone through our procurement department they've been reviewed heavily by mr williams and he has approved and so um general counsel recommends the approval of these revisions um i have it you need it now um let me see where jackson bernard i'm sorry i was she was looking for seconds on previous motions um let's see miss dice yes this was on the previous item and um oh i'm sorry it's okay what i wanted to do was i was trying to get clarity on if we had a date specific there's no date specific so um the recommendation from from from my my seat is that a board member per policy can add an item to the agenda

249for consideration um the soonest would be february at the february cal so um i would suggest speaking with the superintendent and planning with him around community input and then bringing an item for approval to the board in february possible i thought i very much believe that this needs to be done right away that we don't need to be having um delays on this because it's it's in motion and if you'll send me an email we'll get it out of it that's great okay thank you thank you miss dyson for uh clarifying that and what i was saying before was they were trying to we were behind on motion so i was just trying to clear it up i'm sorry um okay so we are on item i-10 um any comments from the audience on uh

250number ten seeing none uh back to the board um madame you'd be good madame chair you got something my house [Music] one of the policies yeah go ahead you got you good yeah um for beds and located locations bids and quotations [Music] well i may haven't answered my i may have resolved it for myself actually i apologize okay yeah thank you that's awesome thank you miss collins um seeing no other questions or comments from the board uh madam secretary we please conduct the vote please vote the motion carries motion carries i'd like to take a moment of personal privilege if i could uh dr williams could you come up for a second please i'm not positive but i think this is your last meeting with us and i just wanted to uh thank you for

251your service to our district i appreciate all the work you did and i know it's was challenging times and i want to thank you for that and on behalf of my fellow board members and i want to wish you luck in your future endeavors thank you so much for everything that you did thank you would you like to say something uh yes of course so thank you for allowing me to have this opportunity to serve the scholars here in the east baton rouge parish school system truly one of the treasures of my time as a professional to be able to be here with you during this very challenging time i have full confidence that our school leadership team and support team will continue the good work our interim chief of schools has worked under this

252leadership since july and i have confidence that he'll be able to continue to support schools in a very high manner so thank you for the opportunity and thank dr narcisse in his absence for the opportunity to serve the scholars here thank you thank you dr williams we appreciate you we now move to uh j one organizational items announcement of meetings ms collins vice president collins committee of the whole meeting to be held on february 3rd 2022 at 5 00 pm at the central office boardroom public forum not an official meeting of the board to be held on february 5th 2022 at 9am at woodlawn high school some or all board members may attend redistricting board workshop to be held on february 10th 2022 at five o'clock p.m at the professional development center on north shorewood

253forest boulevard public forum not an official meeting of the board to be held on february 19 2022 at nine o'clock am at park elementary some or all board members may attend a redistricting board workshop to be held on february 24th 2022 at five o'clock p.m at the professional development center and another public forum not an official meeting of the board to be held on february 26 at nine o'clock am at the instructional resource center some or all board members may attend thank you mr shamlin you have a comment yeah a brief announcement for the board in the community we are in the process of working up a web presence and a process for the community to submit information around redistricting the i.t department the communications department are working diligently to put something together and i

254meet with the demographer on tomorrow so we should have some specifics to the board by monday or at the latest tuesday where we'll be able to increase community access in this process and we'll give you specifics at that time but i won't let the board know we're working on that i appreciate that thank you for mentioning that mr shaman and i i want to ask dr narcisse i know we've spoken about this but i want to do everything that we can to communicate to the public these meetings where they will be how they can be involved in particularly the public uh the forums where the anybody in the public can come and meet with the demographer and have conversations so i hope you will help me with the communications department to make sure we're getting

255that information out to the public so thank you so much mr goday has made a motion to adjourn [Music] so [Music] do [Music] you