ACS Board of Education Meeting February 8, 2022

001vacation and i'd recognize board member ramy robinson to lead us in our pledge please please stand attention salute pledge i pledge allegiance to the fire 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 thank you board member robertson in consideration of the approval of agenda if you would entertain two changes first being the liquidation of surplus property we can move that to the consent agenda and also report item current quarantined practices and tests to stay protocol move it to new business and if any other board member has any changes to the gen to let it be known otherwise an adoption of the agenda of motion please both to approve second have a motion and a second any discussion all

002in favor of the approval agenda say aye aye any opposed motion carries this time i'll recognize dr jennifer heffner for our honors and recognitions [Music] thank you chairman odom board member shrum will you come and help me with these recognitions please [Music] i'm very honored to be a part of the honors and recognitions it's my favorite part of the board meeting and when donna reed sent me an email a couple weeks ago i was very very excited to get the results from our beta club competition in greensboro alexander central high school beta club competed at the north carolina beta club convention in greensboro last month tonight we're going to recognize some students for their achievements the club is under the direction of donna reed she serves as the beta club advisor i'm going to start

003with just a recognition this recognition goes to ansley scott ansley if you're here please come forward i just want to say a job well done in the run for state president i understand that you had a great showing you did a good job in the competition even though you were not selected alexander central high school is very proud of you congratulations [Applause] mrs reed is that you back there saying no she's not here she's cheering she's she's at the basketball game okay okay very good we did have some students they were recognized as winners at the convention and all of these students are eligible to compete in the 2022 national convention in june that convention will be held in nashville tennessee we are going to start with a fifth place winner in the category ninth

004grade math congratulations griffin duncan [Applause] okay sure sure congratulations next we have a first place winner the category is ninth grade science a state champion and i would say congratulations alex floyd [Applause] so we have another fifth place winner the division was woodworking division one congratulations benny heath [Applause] mrs reed said he's not here so we have a third place winner in the division woodworking division two congratulations i believe this is his older brother nolan heath [Applause] and the heat guys are not here tonight okay thank you we have a first place winner in the category ninth grade spanish again i reiterate state champion congratulations jessica herrera [Applause] congratulations are you okay with that congratulations next we have a fourth place winner the category was 12th grade science congratulations corbin parker [Applause] congratulations we have

005another fourth place winner ninth grade agriscience congratulations braden robinson [Applause] congratulations that one has a special connection to a board member i might add the next recognition we have a third place winner the category was technology please join me in congratulating grant sizemore [Applause] okay congratulations you and the last award will be um a club award it was for um they actually placed fifth place for their campaign skit and i don't know who's accepting the award mrs reed but again congratulations to the group for their skit [Applause] back in the teachers um again and while i'm up here i want to say a special thank you to the club sponsor donna reed thank you i think i read on facebook you have some helpers carrie wimberly juan sierra did i miss anybody else dane chester

006that's right there were three that helped you please congratulate everybody and please tell tell the others that help you thank you so much and best wishes at the state convention okay that concludes our honors and recognitions and you're free to go or you can stay for the entirety of the meeting but and if you need some folks to go with you to nashville to the national competition just let us know [Laughter] okay so okay at this time we'll transition into the public comment period and i'll read the procedures each person signed up shall speak will have three minutes to make his or her remarks each person signed up to speak will only be entitled to the time allotted to them and time may not be relinquished to another speaker only one spokesperson will be allowed

007to speak for a group of individuals wishing to address the board on the same issue speakers will be acknowledged by the board chair in the order in which the names appear on the sign up sheet speakers will address the board from the front of the room and begin their remarks by stating their names comments that are deemed obscene profane or personal attacks on a board member school employee or others will calls for the ending of that particular speaker's time as determined by the board chair persistence in such remarks by an individual shall terminate that person's privilege to address the board the public comment to the board period is not intended to require the board to answer impromptu questions speakers will address all comments to the board as a whole and not one individual member of

008the board discussions between speakers and members of the audience will not be allowed speakers will refrain from discussion of in the following items items which are closed sessions and matters including but not limited to attorney-client privilege anticipated or pending litigation property acquisition or liquidation or complaints about specific employees and students in an open session this is in accordance with general statute 115 c-321 in the open meetings law which protects students and employees records speakers will be courteous in their language and presentations we have six speakers and the first speaker will be julia carpenter right there good evening thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight i'm speaking tonight on behalf of the alexandria county chapter of moms for liberty as a reminder of our mission we are dedicated to fighting for the survival of america

009by unifying educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government as you are aware we recently requested by letter that the board consider a mask optional policy we have also asked for each member's justification for their individual vote on the current masking procedure which i hope we will be able to hear tonight as elected officials you have a duty to serve those who voted you into this position what kind of feedback have you gotten from your constituents concerning the mass policy if i were a betting woman not if i were i would dare to wager that the majority of this county is not saying thank you for asking our children i feel so much safer i would actually bet that the vast majority are saying please give us the choice

010whether or not we send our own children to school with a mask on was anyone besides myself alarmed by the academic scores for 2020 that were presented by the middle schools in december it seems that we are so focused on masks and quarantines and sel that no one is concerned with the basics of education i'm worried that our children are not going to have the knowledge and skills to enter the workforce let's look further than the pandemic and think about the repercussions of today's actions in last month's public comment i shared the following quote from jay putachari we essentially or reorganized our society around the control of a single infectious disease when in fact health is plural a public action that benefits the reduction of one disease might hurt another disease look around you there

011are other things taking place in the world today besides the pandemic that require our attention and action and so i will once again share our request to make mask optional so this is that letter i would like to address the board in public concerning the mass policy although the current policy has not received a unanimous yes and alternatives have been brought up during public comment the policy was voted on as is without any public discussion from the board with a student staff population of well over 4 000 people 20 cases or less for a three-week rolling average represents less than half of a single percent i think that it's a bit extreme to mask over 4 000 individuals based on less than half a percent of said population furthermore are we analyzing which schools the

012cases are coming from for example if the majority of the cases were in the high school why do we need to ask students in the elementary schools that may have a significantly lower case count the big question here is when does this end i'll go ahead and end that since you already have this full letter in your emails thank you thank you miss carpenter [Applause] okay next we'll recognize katie hanchu good evening board members thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak tonight yesterday i emailed the board to address some specific concerns and questions regarding social emotional learning and the panorama education surveys that are distributed among students i would like to publicly ask these questions in hopes that they will be addressed either during the seo presentation or afterwards are the survey questions

013tied to the student's identification number if so will the answers from the survey questions follow that child through their k-12 education are parents notified when a survey will be given if so are they allowed the opportunity to easily opt out if parents are not notified can this be a procedure going forward this will allow parents to opt out but also to request to review the survey content prior to it being administered who exactly are the survey answers reported to if responses to the surveys are reported to a third party vendor are those answers anonymous what incentives if any does the district receive for using panorama education surveys are the surveys necessary for implementing social emotional learning is there an option to exclude surveys completely i've printed off copies of these questions for each of you

014in hopes you are willing to make sure they are covered in the presentation tonight if not i ask you answer them afterward if you're able to do so sure thank you miss hanchu next we'll recognize uh next we will recognize sherry witherspoon i'm here to speak on social emotional learning and how it's bad news for educators and families as if the expansion of the department of education wasn't enough in case no child left behind wasn't enough of an embarrassment and as if common core wasn't enough of a massive failure there is a new movement to introduce a conceptually flawed system into your student's classroom uh with a program called social emotional learning according to the heart ins heartland institute the reality is that subjective judgments by government employees using predetermined guidelines will decide how children

015rate on their ideological use sel opens a pathway for encouraging collectivist groupthink a socialistic mindset in ways more stealthy than already practiced in government schools like previous systems where the big corporations and big governments colluded this is another attempt to force collectivist ideas into the classroom with the ultimate aim of having it spread to the influence um and to influence the behavior of the family unit with sel students would be taught what the government thinks is proper skills attitudes character traits and values to succeed in school careers and life the case against seo can be summed up as such the whole child movement depends on the raw exercise of total talent totalitarian power to erase parental rights to thwart it parents must gain the clout to select schools that respect family values and help children

016become well-rounded independent thinking individuals this system if implemented would take more power away from educators families and students thus bringing an insidious opportunity to indoctrinate your kids to believing certain beliefs standards or systems that go against your role as a parent and believe as an individual thank you thank you miss witherspoon next we will recognize uh kelly moore good evening my name is kelly moore um i'm here tonight to give you guys some information that i think you're gonna want to listen to and i want to remind you tonight of your oath that you took when you were elected by we the people remind you of that oath to uphold the constitution not only the federal constitution but the state constitution in north carolina there's a general statute chapter 14 criminal law article 31 misconduct

017in public office that statute is 14-28 it's called buying and selling offices and i'm going to leave this with you guys tonight so you can review it but basically what it says is that you can't sell away or deputize your office either by taking money directly or indirectly is something i want to leave with you guys tonight okay your population is around 37 198 people in the last two years you've had 133 cova deaths that's around a third of one-third of a percent of your population that's not a pandemic this packet right here provides proof that every level an agency that received coven 19 relief funding that passed through hhs has been federalized these agencies are the exact key to directly controlling the population because they impact every citizen on a local level that includes

018you guys and your families please listen closely this is a packet that's getting ready to go to major media outlets it's been put together by myself and some other warriors across this state i can back up everything i'm telling you i have proof of it these agencies are the exact key to directly controlling the population because they impact every citizen on a local level state and local health departments hospitals health care providers and especially the schools our research cannot find this verbiage and coveted relief funding prior to biden taking office and appears to have started with the arpa which is the american rescue plan act although it was made retroactive to the previous funding such as cares day after day we listen to or watched reports on these outrageous stories such as loudoun county schools

019in virginia openly defined the governor reporting that governor ducey in arizona is going to sue the treasury over funding threats no one ever admits these outrageous stories are because hhs bought the authority and the power of your local agencies by using a version of contract law and completely bypass legislatures everywhere you embolden school boards local and state state health departments hospitals and more know that now you are required to do the following because you took the money comply with existing and or future directives and guidance from the secretary regarding control of the spread of code 19. you agreed to assist the united states government in the implementation and enforcement of federal orders related to quarantine and isolation this is in your documents that you've agreed to it's in your contracts i've seen it and the

020reason we have seo and the reason our children have mask on is because of the guidelines that are in the documents where you ever accepted the money next we will recognize uh christy rosenberry thank you for the opportunity i want to take you back to about sixth grade when you were first introduced to the scientific method uh you probably were given a plant two plants same variety you put them in a window seal you gave one water and one knot and you uh got to observe the effects of not having water so essentially you were talked to you were told about a control group one that was given a medicine or given a treatment and one that was not so with that being said that is something we need to look in keeping reminder of

021with all the studies that we look at is there a control group second point is we need to look at who is funding the study how much do you want to bet that i could design a study that proves that oreos is the most healthy diet out there some of y'all would volunteer for it and if i base it off of past models that were used for studies in the past year i could give a group nothing but oreos and i could give a group nothing but even vegetables but let's just say i sauteed those vegetables and a chemical that was four times a lethal dose that's a study that was actually done last year with our tax dollars using medicines so do you think if you had lethal vegetables toxic vegetables or oreos which

022one do you think would win i dare say the oreos would look more healthy compared to because oreos that would be the purpose of that study so you have to look at who is funding the study so we're going to be looking at a study tonight that is funded that's going to be looking at whether kids should be in school and whether they should be masked and and how that works and that study is being provided by duke university a physician by the name of daniel benjamin if i'm not if i'm correct and in that study first of all he fails to give us a control group he just documents with counties that have been masked there are we are hemorrhaging counties that have been unmasked for a year and a half my nieces have

023been unmasked in texas south dakota never had any quarantine they they went to school the entire time through covid and they have never masked we are hemorrhaging studies from back in 2020 that show globally that students have not spread covered and that they have uh not been masked and it's not been an issue so when you're looking at these studies you need to keep those variables in mind who pay for the study the nih pay for daniel benjamin he is on his web page he is the director the children's director of the national institute of health i.e that's anthony fauci so that means when he is writing those studies he is being paid by anthony falchi to do that and if his studies are contrary to the narrative by the cdc the nih then i

024can assure you he won't get a paycheck so keep that in mind thank you miss roseberry at this time we'll recognize kelly flanagan hello my name is kelly flanagan i sent each one of you an email that contains 75 studies because i hear this board likes experts 75 studies on the harm of masking and why they don't work against airborne respiratory viruses i didn't receive a response i wasn't surprised i've always been underwhelmed by the transparency of this group and it's this has also never been about our children's health this has been about compliance and control and you're taking our children's dignity and their quality of life with it in case you weren't aware your oath of office is to uphold the constitution to your citizens despite the decisions based on an overreaching politicized health

025department look at the studies that were all sending you you are all guilty of breaking not only state and federal laws but international laws are any of you familiar with the nuremberg code i am serving you with a letter of intent to file claim on your school board's liability insurance due to your negligence and child abuse you are each financially responsible for upholding this insurance policy you have 72 hours to correct the infractions that i have cited before i file a claim they include masks optional stop taking funding for the covid narrative you've been presented with facts for two years from parents and you're not listening okay thank you miss flanagan that that concludes there are no other names that concludes our public comment period so yeah okay okay you have before you the consent

026agenda and as a reminder we added the surplus items to the consent agenda i get a motion regarding the consent agenda move to approve second i have a motion and a second any discussion all in favor say aye aye okay item three reports eliminating quarantine in universally mass settings daniel k benjamin jr md phd mph distinguished professor pediatrics duke university school of medicine board members if you will please we need to switch over to the seat so we can see the screen dr benjamin is zooming with us this evening and if you will turn your mic around when you do that dr benjamin can you hear us yes ma'am would you like me to start sharing a screen or [Music] what works for you i'll just wait until chairman odom is ready i just wanted

027to do a sound check yes ma'am okay proceed dr benjamin and thank you for your time mr uh so i'm gonna bring some slides up hopefully these will i'll come up for y'all uh can y'all can y'all see that yes okay so um we've been asked quite a bit about um not only quarantined but what's happening with the pandemic and spence alexander then a long term an effective partner and has done really well during the pandemic i wanted to provide you all with a few updates as you all know through publicly available data infections looked as though they have peaked in the united states there are one or two states considerably to the west of us where there's a considerable number of new cases but it looks like on the east coast by and large

028cases are rapidly declining other parts of the world as they've come out of the omicron surge have not uh had cases go to zero they've often times ended up with cases that are higher than some of the low points that we've had over the past two years and so numbers may still are still above the winter of 2021 here in the united states and they may not go quite as low as they did say last spring of course decisions around sir someone was coughing that's all it was oh sorry about that so um of course in alexander county you know our data here are available this says it was access 131 i updated the slides that about 15 minutes ago and cases continue to go down in alexander county now as cases either move up

029or move down folks tend to ask us what to do about mitigation measures and as you'll remember last a year we worked with you all as you all made a lot of really good decisions over the past 20 24 months you all were one of the first school districts to uh to open and remained open throughout the academic year in 20 20 21 in contrast to many school districts across the country and uh i've just made a lot of really good decisions over these past 24 months and i wanted to congratulate you for that but at each step of the way when you're making these kind of decisions you're making medical decisions on a risk benefit ratio and with the pandemic we've had we're at a point now where there's some real um balancing to

030do with respect to individual risk and benefit and that with respect to the community and i i think over the next uh four weeks uh eight weeks things will become even more clear than they are today just as a reminder this is a table where we look at by age of childhood there's hospitalization following infection so this is children with influenza or rsv or covid the two rows to really focus on are years five to 11 years of age and 12 to 17 years of age if you'll take your eyes over to the most far right hand column influenza actually from time to time causes hospitalization children it does so at a rate of about per hundred thousand in teenage children respiratory synthevirus really causes quite a bit of hospitalization in children under one year

031of age still can cause hospitalization in children um under uh and 12 to 17 years of age for unvaccinated children that this left hand column here 12 to 17 year old has a hospitalization of about 66 per hundred thousand um i've i've taken care of a lot of children with covid sick from covin at duke university i've never taken care of a child with covet or sick from coveted who was who was vaccinated for coca-19 but it does it will occasionally occur but you can see here for the level of the individual coveted for children is a very uncommon cause of uh morbidity and mortality and let's go to this next we're going to listen to his presentation we're going to listen and you're going to hush or you're going to leave um i'll um

032i'm happy to to take questions a common one that um a common one we'll get to here in a second um so um covet remains in the in a top 10 for cause of death for people under 20 years of age and this is the uh it's ranking uh by month now one of the questions that frequently gets asked is are these children who just happen to come into the hospital and test positive they are with covet are these children who are actually sick and dying from covet um i can tell you from my um i'll tell you two pieces of information once from the peer review literature published in december of uh 2021 and morbidity mortality weekly report that's from six children's hospitals they had 950 some odd 917 children admitted with cobit 19

033at those children's hospitals more or less were were really sick from coven that is children who they come in evaluated for respiratory distress they test positive for cova they go into the icu or they get room desevere they get steroids in my own personal experience there is a subset of children admitted to the hospital who are just happen to be test positive at an institution like duke however between two-thirds and three-fourths of the children who were hospitalized who are test positive for code that are actually sick from covenant when you compare these population numbers for covid as it relates to some of the other causes of death or hospitalization usually when we talk about infection we hold these infections to the same standard whether they're covet or influenza or rsv so the numbers that i'm

034presenting to you are comparable now there's really two questions that i get asked about all the time around masking one of them is does masking work and i'm going to present to you data about that and i certainly will present evidence around that and then the second big question that i get all the time is should we as a school district b masking and that's a very that's a separate question that i will not be providing a strong opinion about one way or the other i'm just here to tell you about whether or not um whether or not mitigation measures work and if so by how much and then the risk benefit decision is ultimately up to the policymakers so anyway it's very clear in 2020 2021 that schools should stay open and uh and

035and that schools could safely offer in-person education and we provided the research to show that that was the case and in our first paper that was based on uh fall of 2020 it was published in 20 at the beginning of 2021 we first showed that schools could off safely offer education in person if they provided masking to the children in that paper we differentiated between primary infections that is infections that come into alexander county schools and secondary infections these are acquired at alexander county schools as a result of being in school and the key deliverable for a school system is to prevent those secondary infections or infections inquired at school just like if you were to come to duke university as a patient or as a visitor lots of patients come to duke with covet

036but we don't want them infecting other patients and we don't want visitors coming to duke hospital infecting other visitors that's our fiduciary responsibility at duke is to prevent acquisition of infection on duke property now um eventually uh folks get infected outside of duke and um that's that's beyond our control so that work by us there were about eight different research groups working on this problem during 2020 2021 and they were working in largely independent of each other whether they were in missouri or utah or wisconsin or georgia or virginia or north carolina and time and again those groups showed the same thing that you could have this low secondary transmission or this low amount of transmission that is acquired on school property if you provide masking and it was definitively shown that we could offer

037safe in-person instruction and fortunately that is very fortunately that's required in the state of north carolina there are schools about a thousand schools right now across the country that are closed to in-person instruction thankfully that's not the case here right so in some schools started to have staff show up without mass and this was reported initially in the mmwr in marin county california there's a very high secondary attack race this is a california school this is a picture looking down on the elementary of a drawing of the elementary school classroom in this particular school in california classrooms are along the peninsula to take advantage of the ambient temperatures in california so on two sides their windows of the classroom floor to ceiling those windows were open this was in may this the door was open

038they had the air purifier in the room and the teacher came to school infected and unmasked and went on to in fact an additional 24 students half of them were students in the classroom and half of them were outside uh the classroom um and so this kind of very impressive very rapid spread of coben caused um folks to compare the data from north carolina and elsewhere that showed masking provided this safe learning environment and by x comparing to schools outside of the north carolina cohort saying gosh here's this real concern but there were legitimate questions raised in the summer of 2021 to say gosh you don't have a comparison group where you directly compare a few school districts who are masking in a few school districts that are not masking at the same time so

039um we went ahead and did that we contacted all 13 800 school districts in the united states and ask them to um to work with us and to provide data and prior to this time very few essentially no school districts that were not having a mass mandate wanted to provide data in a comparative study but fortunately we were able to accumulate 61 school districts and these we put into three buckets bucket number one had universal masking throughout the entire period of study so this would have been late august of 2021 to um december of 2021. and uh a group of districts were unmasked during that entire time frame and a group of districts were they did a few weeks where they tried not masking and then a few weeks where they tried masking so we

040called those you know kind of variable masking districts in this uh in this particular study and uh if you if you look at these uh districts the impact of masking masking clearly reduces transmission at school by about 80 percent the unmasked districts had considerably higher um secondary cases so what this graph shows the red line is the no masking districts the yellow line is the districts that some of the time they were masking and sometimes they weren't and then the green line is the districts that we're masking for the entire time frame so if you are if to to kind of quantify this for school boards let's say that you had 150 primary cases of covet 19 where [Music] come into your schools you would be the cause of or you would generate an additional

04130 cases on your school property if you are not happy asking in order to generate 30 cases 30 secondary cases 30 additional cases on school property if you do full mask and it takes you about a thousand primary cases if you do universal masking so another way to to think about this is that when cases are really really really high the impact of masking is pretty profound and as cases get lower and lower and lower in the community masking is something that um quite frankly there's there's less cases to interrupt there's less cases to prevent okay so um if we estimate that the fraction of americans getting infected each day is nearly one percent during the height of the omicron surge in mid in mid-january masking in school districts has a profound effect to prevent

042transmission at schools but as cases come down here in 2022 and as they are coming down now and as they will we think they will likely continue to come down this spring masking has much different implications for schools so masking in 2020 and 2021 they kept schools open and they were a bridge until all children could become vaccinated and as we now are in 2022 every adult and every child who comes onto alexander school property can be vaccinated and families can unilaterally protect those children and their family members by a vaccination likewise when cases were really really high with the omicron variant masking was very effective at keeping schools staffed keeping schools open avoiding quarantine for people who are exposed to coven quarantine policies based on our work this past year has changed and has

043been reduced throughout 2021 and quarantined policies i'm going to anticipate for you will change very soon this spring as it relates to um advice that will eventually come out of the cdc in 2022 so quarantine is evolving and quarantine which maybe in the month of january quarantine to prevent that or to reduce that masking was really critical for a lot of schools that equation you know might be very different for you all later in 2022. so masking rationale has really changed in 2020 2021 masking was a bridge until we could get folks vaccinated we now have access to vaccines vaccine was a bridge to protect school attendance of family members and vaccine and masking in january of 2020 was very important because it reduced hospitalization and our hospitals were at the point where we were

044stopping elective procedures and [Music] and stress to the hospitals in north carolina stress in other states as you know we have a national program here for research in other states you know the national guard is at the point where they're staffing hospitals so i'm asking now however as cases go down um that rationale for masking in schools um becomes maybe um a little bit different of a risk benefit equation for a school board so community rates of infection we consistently told you all through 2020 2021 the community rates of infection really should not be used to decide whether or not schools should stay open and thankfully bipartisan legislation to the north carolina assembly was passed that schools are required to stay open but infection rates really should be something to help guide mitigation decisions that

045you all as a school board makes and you know you all had done really an outstanding job of number one keeping alexander schools open number two you all [Music] were really one of the first school districts in the country to take the perspective that you were going to look at some metrics of of your own to make decisions as it related to mitigation strategies and you know the kinds of numbers that you all have considered in the past are some of the kinds of numbers uh that we um think are very um very rational and very thoughtful um so you know in conclusion masking really reduces the spread of infection of covid 19. um this is why you're still going to wear a mask if you're a visitor or patient in a major hospital in

046the united states whether it's duke or vanderbilt or johns hopkins or stanford or wherever masking physicians have you wear a mask in the hospital whether or not you test positive or negative just as a matter of routine we're masking because it reduces the spread of infection masking reduces the spread of infection of coping 19 in schools respiratory physiology and virology do not change based on your physical address the data aren't perfect but the best available data support and are consistent with data from hospitals and major medical centers but as the pandemic recedes here in early 22 schools and school districts you know can use y'all's own data from your own county and from your own schools to determine for yourselves what is right and the right set of circumstances about whether or not requiring mass

047and a lot of the pressures that kept us masking in 2020 2021 uh are now um either no longer with us or are considerably eased compared to merely a few months ago and most importantly we have vaccines available to most children certainly children 5 and up and ideally all children by late by late first quarter 2022 the data in front of fda right now for children under five antiviral medicines work and those should become more available to the general public right now they are in such short supply that that they're being rationed considerably but in march and april those those anti-viral medicines will be widely available and now is a time that schools can use declining case counts to make informed decisions about what's best for their community and best to help um keep their

048schools open and and staffed um as we move into kind of the next phase of the pandemic where we've got vaccinations available for for all americans and with that i'm happy to [Music] take any questions that the board would like to ask i'd like to ask um board member shrum has a question yes when we when we first implemented our matrix um we didn't have anything to go by because we were one of the first to uh to jump in with was some type of benchmark and um but one thing that we did notice uh with the variant that was uh that was very strong at the time was that when our numbers hit in the upper 20s our quarantine rates went out the roof i mean i think what we were 680 at one

049point or something like that and so that's the reason that lower number was chosen now my question referring back to that is do you think there's going to be different guidelines to come forth for quarantining because our our numbers our our issue is not infections our issue is our quarantines because you know even last week which was a higher week for us system y was like 50 and and you know and i consider that a low number out of uh 4 700 students but but our issue is we're trying to keep schools open and and to keep schools open we've got to have better guidance for quarantine and i know that's a loaded question but do you see other recommendations coming for us i think that i i think it's fair to say i know

050it's fair to say that the cdc is evaluating that uh those data right now we've been in discussion with the schools group at the cdc we've provided them the most not only the data that went into our january publication also the data that went into the the plan a data [Music] we've given them also these data here from from the fall and the winter and it is my hope that the cdc will have a different approach quite soon okay and and one other question in your honest opinion professional opinion um you know the other thing that i have a real problem a real trouble with is is our students partake in all kinds of activities that are unmasked and i'm not saying that's a problem i'm just saying that it's so hard to you know

051to to make of a comparison when they're masking at school but not masking for anything else and like i said i'm not i'm not saying that one is different you know better than the other that's up to each individual but but it's really hard for us to draw a comparison when we're only comparing that mass time at the school because i can promise you in the community it's just not happening there for a while if you went to the local walmart or wherever you know majority of people at one point were wearing masks and now it's gone exactly the opposite it's it's unusual to see someone with the mask so you know us school board members we've been kind of hung out to dry because we really don't get guidance and we're not medical professionals

052and we're having to make these decisions and there's very strong very very strong opinions on both sides you know we on a daily basis we get people that want us to keep them on and people that want us to to to make it optional and there at some point there has to be better guidance from the cdc and it's just that we're not in the business of of making medical decisions we're in the business of trying to provide a sound education yeah i will say a few things one one i think is really worth um is really worth emphasizing for you and your community um is that you know i work i've worked i've had the privilege of working with several hundred um school districts um across the country and uh you know when i

053look at the quality of decisions that you know alexander county schools has made over the last 24 months you all are comfortably in the top one percent as it relates to the quality of your decisions you've done things like um not only be kept schools open um you've um uh you went you tried not masking for a while and then you saw how that impacted your quarantine levels in 2021 and you were you responded to your own data uh that's that very few school districts um do that you have your data where it's compared to other school districts across the country and you look at not only your data but your data in comparison to other school districts and other similar school districts across the country very few school districts do that you've really just

054made some outstanding decisions even though i'm sure every last decision that you made was widely unpopular with one or more aspects of of um of the community and i would tell you that um your decisions around um quarantine um i think my hope is that um you know we will get um a different approach to quarantine um here soon in in 2022. i think that that um i think we're very close to at the national level obviously i can't you know i've got to shepherd a national program i i i can't i said it would be inappropriate for me to speak about the county of alexander or uh the state of uh of of north carolina thank you very much board member cooksey has a question dr benjamin um i'm kind of one of these

055nerdy people that reads or tries to research things and i get sent a lot of articles from people and so i go and read them and some of them i can dismiss quickly because of where they're from or whatever that i'm not sure they're legitimate but then some of them give me question marks and on this masking thing and whether it's effective or not and one that's really bothered me and i can't quite figure it out i'm hoping you can a talk about the literature that says masking is not effective because i read many academic articles that say it is and you already quote it that it's still being used in hospitals so i kind of get that might be where you're coming from but can you talk about it generically but can you also

056discuss there was one article and i don't know if i don't sorry i should have prepared better but it was from the american journal of medicine and it was anti-masking and i read it and it was from the american journal of medicine which is a very reputable site and then i can't find it in the american journal of medicine so i'm a little confused on that article yeah i think you're talking about wallach w a l a c h wallet uh at all in jama um and it came out in 2021 and in it the authors see if this sounds familiar and if the authors say okay we put mass on children and they had high co2 levels and they had low oxygen levels and therefore this was bad for children because it was bad

057for the respiratory system and it was bad because they couldn't hear and it was bad because they couldn't um uh they couldn't understand folks um i suspect that's the article that you're talking about um and i suspect it's the article that you're talking about because that article was retracted so what that means is that article came into the journal the journal went ahead and published it folks were able to read it and folks were concerned about the um not only the quality of the data but the integrity of the data and the integrity of what the authors were saying and challenged uh the data and it turns out the authors were committing fraud and that paper was retracted so essentially the authors were making up data inappropriately and the reason why that's the case let

058me take these numbers let me take these concerns that folks have expressed about masking in part based on that paper which was again retracted masking let's talk about co2 and o2 first we all have areas of our lungs and our respiratory system where we don't have gas exchange that's in our mouth in our throat in our trachea in our bronchi gas exchange actually occurs only at the very ends of the respiratory tree at the alveoli so there's this huge amount of space where gas oxygen and co2 are not exchanged and a mask is really just a trivial addition to that space and so the idea that a child would become hypoxic from wearing a mask is that's just not consistent with respiratory physiology and because what children will do when they get a little bit

059less oxygen and then they'll do the same thing that adults do they'll breathe faster and they'll breathe harder and they'll blow more air out throughout the mass setting aside the children who are very very special needs very very hard of hearing outside the mainstream curriculum for example severe autism those children really do warrant special consideration as it relates to masking i'm going to set those children aside the school board should deal with those children in kind of a special needs compassionate um sort of way as father of a special needs child who was in and out of the mainstream for a while you know those children that's just that's just a different set of work there okay for children in the mainstream curriculum you know masking thus far has not been linked um to um

060interference or substantial decrements and learning what's been um what we will soon be submitting for peer review is that if children have to miss school repeatedly for quarantine or children have to miss school because schools have to close or remote learning uh that definitely hinders school achievement but those other aspects of masking just the data are just not just not there it's you know folks may eventually show that but it's it's not there right now it's not in the peer review literature um let me know if that addresses um your question but saying that masking is harmful to a child from a cardio respiratory standpoint it's just not um that's just not consistent with cardiovascular respiratory physiology it's not consistent with medicine thank you that was the article i was referring to it was dealing

061with co2 are there other questions for dr benjamin all right thank you so much for being with us tonight thanks for your time and for sharing the data yes ma'am i'm good to be with you today and it's a real privilege to um to speak with theologists y'all just um it's been really impressive to work with you and i appreciate you all inviting me take care thank you okay at this time we'll recognize miss ashley weber the principal of wittenberg elementary school to provide us an update so good evening my name is ashley weber i'm the principal at winberg elementary um so we'll kind of go through a couple things about what we've been doing this year do i click or you click i'm sorry i'm new the way that it works if you will

062tell them the next slide all right thank you yes ma'am so uh wittenberg elementary currently has 273 kindergarten through fifth grade students we also house 48 head start students and we have virtual academy also with us in our building we are 78 percent white 11 hispanic 5 african american 5 2 or more races currently this year our free and reduced number is 41.78 percent and we have 16.5 percent of our students receive ec services speech included we have 16 homeroom teachers we have two and a half specials teachers we just added a new pe teacher starting today the kids were super excited about that we have three and a half ec teachers we currently have five teacher assistants we're slotted for six so we have one ta vacancy we have six bus drivers one and

063a half custodians and four child nutrition staff currently our after-school activities include tutoring we have five staff members on board with one bus driver 23 students we have before and after school care which is about 16 students in the morning and 17 students in the afternoon i included our school improvement goal team or school improvement team goals currently my all my certified teachers are on a school improvement goal team we divided into three sections this one this goal is based on academics so we're looking to increase our proficiency five to seven percent this year and that's measured by m class i-ready and eog results math reading and science our other gold team they're tasked with doing community involvement and engagement which has been a little difficult in the past couple years so we're using data

064that we receive in the first semester and the second semester and comparing how that looks so we've had a couple parent nights which have happened remotely we currently have a very involved ptw uh that meets once a month they've done a lot of great things for our staff and then our teachers are holding parent-teacher conferences first semester and second semester and so we're looking for a ten percent participation increase from first semester to second semester and our other one is based off student relationships we're looking at the number of office discipline referrals then the previous year there was 105 our goal is 80. so the way we're doing that is our guidance counselor has been doing monthly guidance lessons and we're doing a little bit of mtss behavior encouraging those positive behaviors for the school

065we use class dojo to communicate with parents and our guidance counselor also does monday mornings kind of like a mindful monday morning to set that tone with all of our students on the announcements our current partnerships are with lowe's food of bethlehem alexander county sheriff's office braxton smith foundation friendship pollution church and again our very involved ptw group we've had a lot of celebrations this year we currently do wow monthly student recognitions where students are nominated by their peers for displaying certain character traits and we recognize them once a month we also have spelling bee winners that will be here this week for the district wide spelling bee we've had soul and water poster contest winners and we've had district christmas card winner in our first grade class our student life they're very involved we've

066gotten a lot into technology this year our fourth grade students are currently using probots to do some geometry hands-on geometry one of our fourth grade teachers is actually in dallas presenting at a professional development on probots our music teacher has kind of thought out of the box with coveted restrictions and she taught all of the students how to play jingle bells on a variety of instruments ranging from drums to recorders and then we've partnered with jessica esposito a good bit to learn about body systems using merge cubes which is an app and so extending our learning we're looking at trying to get outside of the classrooms we had a group of students do a community service project which was led by rec teachers our fifth grade students were featured on the news last week queen

067city news they actually zoomed with a meteorologist to kind of expand that learning from their weather curriculum and then our kindergartners went on their first field trip last week and their favorite part was riding the bus any questions thank you thank you very much thank you thank you very much for that presentation miss weber and at this time we'll recognize miss melinda glenn she's the academy coordinator and she'll give a report regarding the alexander virtual academy good evening chairman odom and school board members i really appreciate the opportunity to share updates from the alexander virtual academy this evening with you next slide this year we have much smaller numbers we have 26 elementary students and 24 middle school students as the community overall fear of covet lessened so did our student numbers we gained 10

068students from home school this year who were homeschooled last year and are still currently enrolled with us physically our teachers are housed at west alexander middle school and wittenberg and we really do appreciate these schools being so welcoming to our teachers and students when they're in person we do have a back one slide sorry we do have five amazing teachers and you can see some great pictures of them interacting with their students and some of the different things that they do with them because our student teacher ratio is so low this really allows for real connections with our between our teachers and their families and that's that was what one of the things that our parents really loved last year so we've been able to continue that and increase it and it also the small

069student numbers really increases the student engagement for each of our students but this isn't as easy as it sounds you know it sounds like one teacher to every 10 students that would be super easy but it's not because each of our teachers has at least two grade levels and they're responsible for all the curriculum all the planning and all the assessment that goes along with two grade levels in every subject we even have one teacher miss priest who has three grade levels she's kindergarten through second grade so our general schedule runs monday tuesday thursday friday with regular zooms from 8 to 3 30. our students are not on zoom that long but our teachers are so just like in class in person you would have teacher instruction and then students would go to their seat

070for independent practice our schedule runs that way for our students they'll have a zoom time with their teacher and then they'll have an independent practice time which takes a lot of help from parents and we really do appreciate that partnership that especially our k-4 students have with their families having multiple multi-grade levels with one teacher really allows us to address intervention and enrichment a little differently than in person schools do our goal like everybody else's is of course academic growth for all and we address this in a lot of different ways we have win times which is that what i need daily through zoom for our students who are part of the mtss process that's kind of your typical intervention plan all of our students also receive wind time when they come in person on

071wednesdays we have an extra added aspect though for students who need a whole below level core you know some students are on grade level but they really struggle in math or reading and so for our students they can get that grade level appropriate instruction but because our teachers are in zoom settings they can also have below grade level instruction every day so we have some like fifth grade students who attend a fourth and fifth grade math lesson four days a week for our students who are well above and we have several of those students they've tested out in our ready being a full grade level or more above in reading or math we can not double dip them but actually accelerate their learning so instead of attending their math class they'll actually attend the math

072class with the teacher at the next grade level so on the next slide you'll see some parent comments from a survey that we did this just this month after christmas she said my student loves her teacher and i feel that she's almost received a one-on-one education and this is one of those students who attends multiple grade levels she came to us as a kindergartner who already knew all of her letters and was reading some basic words so we did not keep her in a kindergarten setting where they're learning you know one letter or sound a week we went ahead and moved her into our first grade classroom for the areas where she can succeed and is learning something new she attends math with her kindergarten peers so we talked about when on wednesdays but one

073wednesday a month is our favorite day of the entire month and it's our steam day all of our students come in with their grade level peers and this allows for them to have engaging activities that promote social interaction teamwork and problem solving on those days and you can see some different pictures there all of our students have teacher-led stem activities science technology engineering arts and math or math but they also in k2 have the chance to work with discovery legos which is um the result of our partnership with stemwest and in third and fourth grade they get to work with spike legos with coding also from stemwest and then our fifth through eighth graders get a chance to work with our cooperative extension agents in the county with teen cuisine in addition to their stem

074activity so on the next slide you can see lots of different pictures of all the activities that our students are doing when they are in person and you can see our dare officer officer rowe who is doing dare with our fifth graders and we're grateful for that partnership as well we'd love for you to follow us up on facebook if you check us out today you're going to see our 100 year old k2 students they are quite precious and i really think that comes from the days off this week that was hard on them any questions what kind of feedback are you getting towards next year from your family i'm sorry what kind of feedback are you getting towards next year for your families are most of them looking to want to maintain that setting

075or transition back and if i missed that during your presentation i apologize no you're you're fine from the parent survey that we just sent out most parents are still kind of on the bubble we have some who really love this program they love the flexibility that it's given them we have some who are really looking at coming back with the coveted numbers reducing um and since we have had them in person they're a little more comfortable with that now but most of them are still kind of on the bubble yes sir mine is just probably my own problem so i was just not 100 clear so on wednesday they're doing in-person activities so they come into wittenberg is that what i they do yes okay so on when every wednesday they have the opportunity to

076come in person uh three wednesdays out of the month they are doing that that win whatever i need so they're in not grade level groupings but skill level groupings so we actually have groups that have third and fourth graders working together or a third grader coming down to a second grade group and getting to double those interventions and then one wednesday a month is our steam day we have had parents who who have expressed concern about coming in in person and when that happens we make those interventions possible on zoom any other questions for ms glenn great job thank you thank you very much uh before we proceed to our sel update that's going to be provided by ms jessica anderson director of accountability um we have uh we've been at it almost an hour

077and 30 minutes and we're gonna take a little five to seven minute break so you can stretch you can go to the restroom or what have you and then we'll reconvene in five to seven minutes everybody for allowing that brief recess for various reasons and now we have the long-awaited sel update by ms jessica anderson the director of accountability good evening and thank you for the introduction um so this evening i'm going to be updating you on pardon me let me move this folder so it's not in mobile i'm going to be updating you on where alexander county schools is with in mtss for student engagement social emotional practices and behavioral practices this presentation is going to cover a lot of information it contains multiple links that are live and there will be parts that

078are tedious or technical language i have tried to explain or identify acronyms throughout so to begin i need to recap the related laws and statutes and policies that have mandated where north carolina school districts are now north carolina public school districts are now with scl so let's first look at uh session law 2018-32 house bill 986 but we're also going to be looking at session law 2020-7 senate bill 476 general statute 115c dash 376.5 and then finally school mental health policy shlt so those are what we'll be going over so we're going to first look like i said at session law 2020-7 senate bill 746 and general statute 115 c 376.5 okay this requires that the state board of education adopt a policy on school-based mental health plans for k-12 school units and a model

079mental health training program for staff and a suicide risk referral protocol board members again you're familiar with this as shlt3 then to the next slide it continues this policy that each school unit must adopt a plan for promoting student mental health and well-being additionally school personnel must be trained on implementation of said school-based mental health plan and a suicide risk referral protocol to the next slide okay regarding the compliance of alexander county schools in september of each year the district must submit to the north carolina department of public instruction the content of our school-based mental health plan and our compliance to the law the school district can be subject subject to audit to ensure or verify that the school district's compliance is in accord with the law public school unit compliance is then reported to

080the joint legislative education oversight committee and the joint legislation oversight committee on health and human services annually next slide please so this brings us to state board policy shlt3 okay the school-based mental health initiative which goes into greater detail on universal prevention through core instruction curriculum and environment public school units are to promote a social and emotional school environment incorporating existing initiatives and work toward improvement this policy goes on to say that the structure of the mtss system and teams like the school health advisory council shac and in alexander county schools the district strategic plan team for emotional wellness are all resources to fulfill the policy requirements the policy states that social emotional learning strategies are used across the curriculum and within the entire school environment many of you are familiar with character education which

081is some of the language that has been used in the past for this next slide please okay continuing the required submission of the school district plan is to include existing systems of early intervention for mental and social emotional health alexander county schools in our submission was able to include this because the district has a long-term implementation of mtss next slide please the district shlt3 mental health training plan and district social emotional learning and school mental health improvement plan were approved by the alexander county school board on july 20 2021 at the board meeting the approved plans were submitted to the state and implemented within the district in compliance with mental health policy next slide please this slide is just to bring your attention to the alexander county schools board policy 6120 which aligns with the

082state board policy shlt-003 next slide please okay if you'll recall i noted earlier that alexander county schools has long implemented mtss so i want to go into that a bit further to do that a few acronyms need to be covered so there's ada and i-d-e-a and these refer to the americans with disabilities act and the individuals with disabilities education act the others are used used and osep osep these refer to the united states department of education and the office of special education programs finally rti which is response to intervention rti and mtss multi-tiered systems of support are both the multi-tiered instructional framework and early intervention systems essentially they're two names for the same thing so if you see them interchanged or i interchange them just making aware of those two acronyms in 2004 idea was

083reauthorized and in this reauthorization response to intervention rti became law so i want to quote you just a portion of the osep memo on response to intervention excuse me while the department of education does not subscribe to a particular rti framework the core characteristics that underpin all rti models are one students receive high quality research-based instruction in their general education setting two continuous monitoring of the student performance thank you three all students are screened for academic and behavioral problems and four multiple levels or tiers of instruction that are progressively more intensive based on the student's response to instruction next slide please so with the reauthorization of idea which included rti the north carolina department of public instruction adopted mtss which is a multi-tiered system of support encompassing academic behavioral social emotional instruction and support next

084slide please excuse me i'm going to take a sip of water apologies okay so for engaging research-based behavioral practices north carolina department of public instruction joined the castle's collaborating states initiative north carolina sel implementation team again from dpi is a cross agency again from north carolina excuse me is a cross-agency team of the department of public instruction and the department of health and human services castle which stands for collaborative for academic social and emotional learning has five core competencies for learning will you scroll down to the next slide just to make sure no thank you if you'll go back up i apologize one of the core competencies is self-management terms that align with self-management stress management self-discipline self-motivation goal setting planning and organizational skills and initiative taking the second core competency is self-awareness demonstrating honesty

085and integrity growth mindset self-efficacy and developing a sense of purpose responsible decision making analyzing information anticipating and evaluating consequences using critical thinking skills relationship skills communicating clearly listening actively working cooperatively negotiating conflict providing leadership seeking or offering help social awareness feeling compassion understanding that different behaviors are appropriate for different settings and recognizing resources and supports next slide please social emotional learning is a component and it's designed that way in multiple programs and departments within a school system this slide shows a screenshot from ncdpi's sel implementation page next slide please thank you within mtss student engagement social emotional practices and behavioral practices all fall under the component of social emotional learning next slide please pbis which is positive behavioral interventions and supports is the multi-tiered framework of mtss specific to behavior with the goal of presenting

086preventing factors that negatively affect student behavior through one universal screening two database decision making three evidence-based intervention and four fidelity of implementation next slide please this slide shows a screenshot from north carolina departments of north carolina department of public instruction's north carolina healthy schools and whole school whole community whole child website next slide please so what is the wscc model and how does it relate to sel it's the cdc's framework for addressing health in schools two of the ten components are social emotional climate and counseling psychological and social services next slide please state statute 115c-31316.1 details the duty of a school counselor primarily amongst them is implementing a comprehensive developmental school counseling program next slide please school counselors are evaluated on modeling and teaching behaviors and life skills these skills include personal and social skills

087leadership ethics accountability adaptability personal productivity personal responsibility the list goes on next slide please school social workers school social workers assist students in developing academic social emotional and psychological skills through group or individual counseling by using targeted interventions they use early intervention and prevention to address social emotional and psychological factors that affect students school social workers provide prevention early intervention crisis response strategies for social emotional psychological and academic needs they assist students in developing necessary skills to communicate effectively synthesize knowledge think creatively and make informed decisions next slide please sel is embedded with in career and technical education skills of communication interpersonal skills self-management collaboration or working in teams problem solving critical strategic thinking next time please so mtss has sel integrated throughout the layers of support sel supports north carolina healthy schools implementation scl

088supports school mental health and wellness sel supports the mission of cte empowering students to be successful citizens workers and leaders in a global community next slide please let's look at the district strategic plan goal of emotional wellness so it is acs will improve student outcomes and resilience by using a continuum of social emotional and behavioral health supports acs will establish and implement policies and procedures to support emotional wellness for students and staff strategies 1.1 and 1.3 1.1 through 1.3 acs will develop a district team to identify the needs and strategies the team will be made up of various relevant personnel throughout the district the district team will complete various assessments the district team will use data gathered from assessments and other resources to support program planning next slide please so the district team began working

089on this goal beginning in 2019 as you can see by this slide it included counselors social workers principals exceptional children's personnel instructional coaches school psychologists behavioral specialists and district leaders next slide please the team collected and examined discipline data this is from 2019 okay so don't it's not now this data from 2019 that the team looked at showed that 42 of elementary discipline referrals were from third and fifth grade 35 percent of middle school discipline incidents were from seventh grade but generally balanced among sixth seventh and eighth from 2018 to 2019 there was an approximate 1.5 percent increase of disciplinary referrals in elementary and middle schools and 40 percent of high school discipline was from ninth grade next slide please the shape assessment which i'll talk about more provides a snapshot of mtss and district

090school mental health systems support the school health assessment and performance evaluation shape is a public accessed web-based platform that offers schools and districts a workplace and targeted resources to support mental health quality improvement shape was developed by the national center for school mental health next slide please from the previous slides graphics and this slide's graphic the team found mastery in 2019 of tier 3 services best practices used in student problem solving meeting and monitoring individual student progress however the team was unable to provide any score or a score of zero to screening mental health services restorative practices trauma staff trauma knowledge sensitivity training peer support and wellness resources the team did also note several early emerging components which you can see that the team would begin to build on next slide please the fam s

091it's a tool that measures school level progress towards full implementation of mtss based on school responses 74.9 percent of schools in alexander county had full implementation of tier 3 instruction and intervention 100 of schools indicated a need for social emotional learning and behavior support and 100 percent agreed that pbis which we spoke about earlier was a tier one or core instruction strategy or framework lastly none of the schools monitored instruction on behavior meaning there was no scope or sequence of core instruction to remind the board pbis is the multi-tiered framework of mtss specific to the behavior with the goal of preventing factors that negatively affect student behavior through universal screening database decision making evidence-based interventions and fidelity of implementation assessments and data indicated the need for universal screening database decision making was happening in schools

092as school teams used best practices in student problem solving meetings there was noted a need for evidence-based interventions and instruction in tier one core and tier 2 supplemental instruction and monitoring of behavior and social emotional instruction was needed as well next slide please using resources from the north carolina department of public instruction and castle the team examined universal screeners and focused on four options next slide please the four options divided amongst the team to individually look at the screeners examined were sabres which is the social academic and emotional behavior risk screener ssrs i said in reverse excuse me srss the student risk screening scale which is internalizing and externalizing factors desa the devro student strengths assessment and panorama ed social emotional learning measures and teacher perceptions of student sel excuse me the social emotional learning

093measures and teacher perceptions by panorama ed was recommended by the team because it is castle aligned it is for students k through 12 and allows for student voice the team also prepared to use the srss in case a screener could not have been purchased the srss would have been a poor substitute if we could not have secured funding because it screens for estimated levels of risk and north carolina department of public instruction has adopted castle competencies as sel core i want to be clear though universal screening tools are not used to label students they are not intended as an assessment of traits or personality it is used as one of multiple data sources of systems-level data that allow educators to assess how well school strategies systems practices and instructions instruction are meeting students social emotional

094and behavioral needs essentially the evaluation of core instruction next slide please this slide shows the alignment between castle competencies and the panorama edge survey measures castle self-management is addressed by panorama under the topics of self-management classroom effort and grit self-awareness through self-efficacy and growth mindset responsible decision-making through self-management social awareness emotional regulation relationship skills through social perspective taking supportive relationships and then social awareness is the topics of social awareness and emotional regulation under panorama ed these two graphics are of the same information just formatted in different ways next slide please so these are live links to our surveys and i want to take this opportunity to clear up some incorrect things that i've heard or have been reported to me or have been asked so first there aren't any questions on gender identity or student

095sexuality in the surveys none second the screener is not a psychological assessment just for your knowledge a psychological assessment involves standardized testing one-to-one or face-to-face administration behavior rating scales teacher input parent input developmental milestones observational data and would yield data and information to determine if a child requires specially designed instruction in a school setting if a clinical provider did it in their setting it would determine a diagnosis our screener evaluates core instruction and the results can be teased out to identify commonalities of deficits or growth areas in schools and these commonality commonalities could set up parameters to teach group skills on organizations self-efficacy etc however instruction beyond core requires parent permission is granted because that falls within the mtss model and parent notification is required beyond core instruction thirdly principals have been asked before each

096survey administration to communicate with parents through a method of their choice phone calls dojo newsletters web pages whatever their their medium is finally there is a school board policy regarding surveying students which has been followed and i've linked the present linked it in the presentation but it can also be found on the school district's website within the district policy manual as a reminder universal screening results are used as one of multiple data for systems level resources i'm going to talk about the other systems level data that we use to assess core next slide please the additional systems level data sources used for evaluation of social emotional core are the fam s which you've heard about the shape assessment discipline data which is out-of-school suspensions in-school suspensions office discipline referrals we use attendance data which is

097an indicator of student engagement we also use thread assessments and intervention plans as well as student risk assessments so measuring from august of this year to december of this year there have been 14 threat assessments and there have been 75 student risk assessments meaning there were 14 students that verbalized some level of threat to self or others and there were 75 students that verbalized or indicated threat of self-harm next slide please alexander county schools uses a range of programs practices strategies or frameworks in teaching core student engagement behavior and social emotional learning resources for resilience stanford harmony skill streaming conscious discipline zones of regulation super flex leader in me second step i could go on to be clear panorama ed is a library that we pay to access for research or evidence-based practices programs frameworks

098or strategies from various organizations or curriculum providers next slide please so the north carolina general assembly makes the laws about educational practices elected officials which then comes down to dpi and then from dpi down to the individual school districts to comply i do want to say that if parents have any specific concerns about social emotional learning surveys curriculum in schools please contact your student school counselor or principal and set up a time to go and view materials lastly i did put a slide a hyperlink in there dpi updated their seo website one day after the january board meeting so 1 10 22 and i just want to include that if anyone wanted to access it that's all okay questions uh question but i would like to add that policy 3210 is also uh parents can

099review anything so we already have that in place i just wanted to mention the number you're welcome i want to ask the question for some clarification there i went in and read the links for the house and the senate and the state board of education policies there's a lot of information you presented a lot of information we're required to have a plan but are we required to use who we're using no we are not could could we have an in-house could we basically create our own plan in-house our own screener yes no we could come up with questions but we don't actually have a psychometrician on staff that could correlate whether or not what we're asking is measuring what we need it to measure so we we do have to use an outside group or

100hire a psychometrician because it seems to have gone i mean you know before i left classroom here mts was still growing and i remember dr curry was heavily involved with that and you know we we do through our seminar here to high school a lot of uh you know it wasn't nothing outside and we we monitored the attendant you spoke the attendance part the grade part you can fi you can you can watch a student's attendance and see a lot of i mean you see a lot and you know uh that that worked well i'll be honest with you it worked we've seen we've seen a lot of improvements i think it was i'm trying to i can't remember how many years ago i think it was when mr owen was still principal here when

101that started and it just kept kind of growing uh when i left we've seen a lot of improvements and that was something simple in-house and uh you know uh mts has grown uh yes mtss let me get my wording right but uh you know i wish there was a way we we could do more in-house without having to use outside groups but you know you do notify parents you said we have to notify parents we've we've i have contacted principals via email or in a principal's meeting and said the survey is going out please make your parents aware select your your medium of choice however you typically send out notifications does does a parent have the opportunity to to opt out if they want to that we have had parents opt out that's in our

102policy yes okay i just i knew the answer to that i just want to make sure that that was clear the instance i can recall recently we asked the parent to come in and review the survey and the content just so we made sure that there was no misunderstanding about what was on it um and the parents still chose to opt out which is just fine and so we've we've just made a note that when we do the surveys uh again for a benchmark or measurement those students won't take it and another question is when you were talking about the students the amount of students that showed threat towards themselves or um is that something that tracks with them all the way through in other words is that identified to that child so yes we

103do have that student's information that's not in a in a database or system anywhere that information is kept by student support services and and it it's used as a um a lot of these students after have these they've made the statement there's an intervention or a safety plan we do make sure that follows the student for their safety okay parents are involved in those parents are contacted so parents know that yes but yes so parents know that and i'm just one one follow-up to that is so if the child was you know in younger grades that that designation would stay through in with them through 12th grade so we don't designate them anywhere okay that would just be similar to when students moving from elementary go to middle school and the middle school team meets

104with the elementary team and we talk about where so-and-so's reading level is and who has what intervention this information would be shared with that student specific providers isn't the term but like ferpa it is ferpa we only share it with the staff that have relevant need to access it okay i guess my my in the long roundabout way my my question is say a student a great academic student and and is reviewed for a prestigious college are they going to see that we we don't house those in a um a cumulative folder okay that was my question no we make a a there's a and i could not recall the color of the sheet if it's a bright color that says you know if you need to access such and such this is here go

105see so and so okay but you see my point if a first or second grader that made you know had an issue one year and we don't want that to be to where a college in their in the 12th grade and then that's looked at and i think you know they have huge numbers that they can choose from until college and are they going to choose someone that they feel at some point was documented that there was an issue so that that is a concern so but if if we separate that out then then that's that's uh that was in it that would also be discrimination from the college okay can you oh i'm sorry i i'm a harry you confused me there so i'm just going to be honest maybe it's because it's getting

106late is the social emotional learning this to me there seems to be a difference between a student that's expressing a threat or doing something from the social emotional learning piece of the surveys and the stuff like that is there not a difference between that because i imagine when i was in school there was no social emotional learning but if i expressed a threat that concern would be explained to my teachers your next teacher so to me it seems like those are two different they are and that's why i'm confused no no so when it was noted that is part of the systems level data that we look at as a district to determine whether or not we are adequately providing core instruction core instruction on behavior core instruction on social emotional learning for those those

107numbers for the threat assessments and the safety assessments those individual students with parent contact are given individual plans so there are two separate components to that and so to me what i got from and like i said if i'm wrong correct me and i do not mind the social emotional learning actually is an evaluation of the curriculum more so than its evaluation of students is that not what i gathered yes the screener okay so this screener yes if a principal were to drill down he could see individual students responses however we work on training staff social emotional student support services and principals they're not using that as a single data point in a single day over a single moment they need to take not the student's information they need to take their whole school's averages

108not down to an individual student and say okay this school has very low response ratings on self management so when we do our curriculum plan for the coming year we need to include some lessons for all students on self management when we move beyond the whole school or the whole grade level that becomes tier 2 or supplemental instruction in mtss which i noted at that point a parent guardian is involved so a lot of the concerns being raised is about the data that's why i'm clarifying here i'm not picking on you well and my point was um i was using that as an example not not right but i think that separation needs to be kept is what i'm saying in the discussion because when this data is it number one is is it being

109sent out are they collecting and saying statewide we're improving we're not improving so is the data contributing to a statewide view is one of the questions no when our data from the screener is viewable to us our data for discipline information not individual students but ratings and scores that's collected by the state so there are things that are statewide systems level information i don't think i'm answering your question no you are i'm saying that the concern has been it's what harry was getting at but is a student's responses to this survey if they say things like you know i'm unhappy i'm sad i'm sad no is that being is someone going to say matt cooksey was sad when he was in juniors you know at school is there a way that this would travel be

110part of connected in that data world that we now live in no that stays with us in our platform to access that information we don't we don't post that we don't um print those and put them in their folders we don't that is for us to look at how well we are providing instruction it is an evaluation of us really whether or not we're getting to the core of what we need to be instructing how effective are we at our instruction [Music] it's not open to the audience well i was going to ask the question can you explain the process of once the student takes the survey what happens then between like who when you're saying the screener can you explain once the survey is taken the process certainly the survey is completed and so

111we have a window of time to which we're accepting responses so the survey is active okay so we close the survey and then the company that we have a a service contract with or a service order with calculates that information now that's like any third-party vendor that a school system uses they are bound by ferpa and i think copra don't quote me on that so they have legal obligations to protect our data as well okay and then it's sent back to us yeah we have that it doesn't disappear from us right there yeah when it's calculated yes then we it comes to us we keep it and we use it for the the reasons i've been discussing yes okay so an outside vendor cannot see it nobody outside our system can see the results except

112that company that calculates correct held to the privacy correct okay and and could you tell the process if uh say a principal sends a an email out to the parents um what would the process be for the parent to object to it or to view it just to call they just need to contact their principal i would ask that a a parent if they're listening if they would just be willing to come in and and make sure that we don't have any misunderstandings because i just want to communicate so if you've come in as a parent or guardian and you patiently listen to what um the school has to say and they hear your thoughts and views if you still disagree that's unless you're right so a parent has a way an individual parent i'm

113not talking about an activist proposing to speak on behalf of 4 000 students a parent and their child if they come before you and they come to you their child does not have to be subjected to that survey no well that's you know that's similar to if a child if it's medically advantageous for them not to wear a mask we have a waiver for that as well so if an individual parent regarding their own child seeks a waiver from the survey they can certainly get that we don't have a a form per se we have not had enough that it's been difficult to track if it ever becomes that we could certainly set up something in-house but no it's at this point it's as simple as let's have a discussion um you listen we listen

114you still disagree we write it down okay and would i just hypothetically would if enough parents did not want to partake is that there's is it at some point the state says you're not providing accurate data because the numbers are skewed so we don't provide them our survey data okay yeah we provide them how well we're implementing mtss which this would be a component of well the the thing that perplexes me is it seems like this panorama education is in the spotlight and this product is certainly not a new product because it came out in 2012 it's been implemented with the dallas independent school district the orange county public school system in florida it's been contracted with 21 000 schools in 1500 different school districts across all 50 states it's real simple if this is

115a tool then there's got to be a market there's got to be other vendors maybe some of these 21 000 schools and 1500 school districts across all 50 states maybe they need to craft an rfq request for qualifications and then then you'd see you would you would claim the market out so you know i don't understand we're we're a small small school district we pale in comparison to dallas independent school district or orange county in florida if the parents have a way that their child does not have to be surveyed if that's their wish then there should be a road map for that but it must be a fairly decent it's a well-used product because 1500 school districts across the united states have used it so but uh much has been said about it but

116uh we actually received some comments that um evidently are untrue talking about gender and and things of that nature so none of those questions were asked no and the surveys are linked and i i have them if i mean i'm sure you don't want me to read each question but it's not this will be on our website so parents can go in and see those questions it's it's been on our mtss website okay yes ma'am and you know what i'm thinking is that the there's a great possibility that what's caused so much conversation is probably their school systems that have asked more in-depth questions and i mean that this is not a set of questions that they're providing these are questions that that fit the the criteria certainly and there could be much more evasive

117questions asked and that's probably what has brought us to this point so i will tell you it is the option of the school district to craft their own questions we we didn't broach that that wasn't because we wanted to measure the five core competencies as required by north carolina department or mtss and last month in public comment some survey questions were submitted by an individual and it would lead you to believe that the school system had been asking those questions upon research with that i discovered that it was a student initiated survey that was part of the capstone project assignment so teachers were not asking those questions it was a fellow student that had submitted and issued a survey through the media coordinator did disseminate the survey but the student had created the questions that

118were read in the public comment and and that at that point those students still had the capability to opt out oh yes it was an optional survey nobody was required to answer the first question on any of the capstone assignments okay well one prevailing concern that i think is being overlooked by many we're we're fixated on panorama but we as parents if we if we enable our children with a smartphone without sufficient parental controls be rest assured that every fortune 500 company every s p on the dow and every unscrupulous venue in smartphone world they're mining your children for data they're mining you you can see it as you use your smartphone what apps pop up after you've searched a certain thing or you've had you've answered a survey so you know google triple negative

119breast cancer and see what comes up on your facebook feed for weeks all it takes is one google search any other questions for miss anderson i think there was one question not answered specifically in your presentation what incentives if any does the district receive for using panorama education surveys from the company i would assume that's what the question we have to we have to pay them we don't receive from them thank you okay that was okay thank you certainly this time great job great job it was very thorough this time we'll recognize dr betsy curry associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction for our mid-year academic data report good evening chairman oda members of the board dr hefner thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk with you we can go ahead i'm going to

120do a mid-year data dive you've heard a little bit about the mtss process one of the tools that we use to measure academic achievement is iready so kind of like panorama ed happened to be the screening tool we use i ready for screening of academic data we do this at the beginning of the year middle of the year and the end of the year it is nationally normed data and there's a strong correlation to north carolina eog studies they've recently done a um or strong correlation to eog data through a norming study it's used for k-8 students and it provides support and individualized instructional opportunities for this year kinders will not be in the red in any i ready data because they can't be two years behind so this is actually for this year and

121every year because if you think a little kindergartner could be two years behind then we're starting them out really in a deficit so they're either yellow or green the three colors are red yellow and green and that can be divided into five bands with green being go or on target to meet grade level standards yellow is a cautionary sign in red we need to do probably some intensive interventions academically not every child in k2 took the reading i ready test as it's not required because we have dibbles as well the coaches brought up that the largest impact we may have seen would be in first through third grade with the pandemic due to the systemic phonics instruction and daily repetition is necessary for mastery next slide please we're going to talk about math first this

122slide is very very interesting if you look at the 1920 bar remember i told you that green is on target and yellow is caution we need to these kids are at risk in 1920 44 of our students at mid-year were on grade level in 2021 it was 37 percent but here we are in 2022 or 2122 and we're back to pre-pandemic levels are nearly there in math 42 compared to 44. next slide please we also get these grade level distributions where you can see where each grade levels for example looking at um let's see a big maybe discrepancy grade four you can see that grade four there was a lot of green on that first bar that was 1920 that was pre-pandemic the biggest impact was last year's middle of the year data where you

123see a significant decline but you can see how that green is already back where it is our children are very very resilient next slide please this is just the same slide for grades six seven and eight the reason we use this data again is is multi-level we use this to examine the health of our core instruction so when we get to a different graph that i'll show you can see how it would tell us where we're lacking in core instruction or core curriculum next slide please these are the historical national norms nationally in the winter of 1819 about 42 percent of kids were proficient national in 2122 was 31 percent and our district this current year is 42 so you can see we're well above where we were nationally on the i ready which is

124nationally normed um that's why it baffles me when people say that we're really not doing well we're really doing well particularly in the area of math now does anybody want to be 42 percent of their kids on grade level they really don't but when we compare to what we're doing nationally and the standards we're really doing a good job next slide please this is the the data plot that really informs curriculum this is a universal screener what this does if you look in that first quadrant those are the grade levels that are performing very very high nationally normed and have high growth the second quadrant is low performance but high growth and the way i equate this to teachers is we want to see high growth because eventually if we have high growth we're going

125to have high performance so if i look at this graph i see high performance low growth in sixth grade so if i were a problem solving person on the problem solving team i would look at this and i'd say what is happening from fifth to sixth grade and we would begin to make some hypotheses about what might be happening they're still high performing but if you look at fifth grade on that graph look how far up they are i know it's probably hard to see from there but they're nearly to the top of the or to the top highest point okay next slide this was our data last year during the pandemic and that's quadrant three low performance low growth and those are just the grade levels dispersed so i wanted you to see how

126that's changed from one year to the next next slide please now we'll talk a little bit about reading again this is 1920 of the students were proficient 20 21 46 21 22 46 again this is reading so we've come down four percent of our students in the green and this was middle of the year for all of those years so what this tells me is we have a harder time catching up to where we were in reading so reading makes more of an impact but we know that's probably the case due to that phonics instruction because we do problem solve this data next slide please historical national norms in 1819 were national in-school population today winter 2122 41 and our district is at 46 so while we're not quite as high as the national norms

127were in 1819 you can see that we're considerably higher than the nation in the reading and these again have been nationally normed next slide please this is the same quadrant graph so i can look at this and i can say it looks like we're struggling in seventh and eighth grade and i can even drill down with this data to see if it's a particular school or a particular classroom so that we can begin to problem solve that data or i can look at that and say what curriculum are we implementing and are we implementing it effectively in those grade levels this was the quadrant from before or the year before okay next slide please okay now we're going to move on to what um we call educator effectiveness data and that comes from evos so

128what i would like to talk about here is that this is a comparative data and what this compares is how well our teachers taught kids compared to the growth of all the other children in north carolina so if a teacher or a school were to be in that range of a negative 2 to a positive 2 that would mean that they met effective growth compared to all of the other teachers in the state of north carolina or their students grew at an average in an effective way if it is above a 2 then what that would be saying is that our schools or our school or our teacher if they're above in that range was way above where the majority of staff were in the state of north carolina and of course if we had

129teachers that did not meet growth then they did not perform as well or teach as well or their students did not do as well as well as all the other students in north carolina with that similar testing background next slide please so i want you to notice that ninety percent of the schools in alexander county exceeded growth expectations only one school met growth expectations but that was by four one hundredths of a point and they would have been exceeded so i just ask you to look at those numbers and you see that alexander central for example is 9.43 bethlehem 4.5 so if you'll go back to the previous slide you can see how well our teachers did comparatively speaking during the pandemic what this tells me is our teachers continued to show up in alexander

130county they continued to teach in a very difficult situation they continued to do whatever it took to reach their children no matter what age those children were whether they were kindergartners or they were 12th graders or high school students you saw those scores and it is compared to how other teachers did during this past pandemic year next slide please looking at this compared to the state the first graph on the left is the alexander county schools graph where you can see that the blue and the red are about the same size like we had 18.2 percent of our teachers exceeded growth and 3.1 percent did not meet growth if you go to the state you'll see that that number is very much the same but they have a lot more teachers that did not meet

131growth and fewer teachers that exceeded growth so the green is almost identical but our blue is much higher and our red is much lower next slide please that is it i did that in a nutshell but i am very proud to say that i think that the the way that we have been doing our teachers work hard they work really really hard and they show up for kids and they've they've had a tremendous amount of stress but i know for a fact in talking with my colleagues in larger school systems or other school systems even last year was not a good year for many people and a lot of people didn't show up to work and a lot of kids didn't show up to school but i have to say that our teachers did whatever

132it takes whether it meant knocking on doors phone calling bringing them in doing whatever they could do to help close that gap and summer learning which was not easy last year so the credit goes to the principals for making it happen every day in that school building and the teachers who showed up consistently so thank you very much any questions any questions i'd just like to say reiterate what you just said we've got some very passionate teachers in this county and this data shows it right here i mean they they they have been in the trenches for two years now i mean next month it'll be two years that it's been a whirlwind in education kudos to them because they've been a lot of late nights early mornings saturdays and sundays drive by school and

133not all them cards are basketball games on weekends those are a lot of teachers in the building kudos to them for all they're doing to get get this get through this and get these kids caught up where they need to be and because you know the world's going to need a workforce and no matter what pathway they choose this education is the best thing we can give them that's exactly right and and i'm just going to reiterate our showed up day in day night and day out and we do have a lot of resilient children who have persevered through this entire pandemic the rules continually change the language changes but but they have done the work and the teachers and they have certainly done done their their fair share and then some and frankly um

134i think all of us on this board have had children in the school system i have two in the high school now but you know the students that i engage with at basketball games football games are the ones that hang out you know if they've got an issue or a concern they convey that and um you know frankly i'd like to hear more from more from them i mean they've you know for the past nearly 12 years the students have always seen that we as board members could be approachable and if they had a situation or a concern but but hats off to the children and and the teachers because it's it's truly been they've been in the same environment for for a long time they showed that grit don't they they gritty kids ac

135strong thank you thank you thank you okay are there any specific board committee reports that any of the appointees would have okay it was reflected in dr hefner's comments but the policy committee has been looking at the survey question and we are doing an overview of student surveys and what that system might look like and should look like and and the faculty are weighing in on that it's not really us weighing in on it but uh they're working on it and we're trying to look at our policies and see what they might need to be and so that was a concern and we are looking into it okay thank you board member cook see any other committee reports um the foundation committee education foundation committee met last week and the main purpose of that meeting

136we really just elected officers for the year which i'll stay on as president misty oxentown is our vice president dennis smart remains treasurer and dana benfield will be the secretary good news any other okay at this time i'll recognize dr hefner regarding our award of honor guidelines thank you chairman odom the alexander county board of education has established the award of honor in order to recognize those individuals who have made exceptional contributions to alexander county schools this award represents the highest honor that the board of education can bestow criteria for the selection of this award shall be based on exceptional contributions to the alexander county school system or any of its individual schools in the areas of academics athletics administration student achievement or community service to the schools the contributions may include recognition on a

137regional statewide or national level as well as local notoriety and shall have allowed our children the chance not only to grow and meet their full potential but to excel as well the final yardstick by which all nominees shall be judged as to the merit of his or her application is the positive effect on the quality of education in alexander county as recognized by fellow students teachers administrators and the community in general the guidelines are as follows a committee shall be established to receive and screen recommendations for this award neither current board of education members nor current school system employees are eligible for the award the final decision shall be made by the alexander county board of education nominations may be made from the second week in february through the second week in march of each

138year nominations will be kept on file for up to three years each individual nominated must have a minimum of three letters of recommendation by non-immediate family members the award shall be given annually at the time determined by the board of education and finally nomination forms are available at the alexander county board of education office so get in those nominations if you would proceed with your superintendent's report please thank you chairman odom and this is also attached to your agenda along with several other attachments that i wanted to make available to you all right in getting started i want to say that i'm excited the strategic planning process is slated to begin invitations have been extended and dates have been established all meetings are going to be held from 9 00 a.m to 12 p.m we

139will start virtually through zoom but hope to meet face to face as we proceed through this process we have meeting dates scheduled on february 22nd march 22nd april 26 and may 31st and you would ask what do we hope to accomplish with the strategic planning meetings we want our meetings to be opportunities for representatives to share perspectives and visions for the alexander county school system at the end of our meetings we will have a comprehensive strategic plan for our school district that will span from 2022 through 2025. parent focus groups for each school have also been established and dr curry and or i will meet with each group in order to have a much needed parent voice in our educational vision in alexander county also february is career and technical education awareness month so i

140am excited to share the cte connect january's 2022 edition with you again is one of the attachments on tonight's agenda the newsletter showcases some of the amazing things happening in career and technical education in the school system this month focuses on highlights from the first semester as well as the skills gap in the workforce and aligning efforts to ensure students are career ready this newsletter is always highly highlighted excuse me on social media so if you want more facts and highlights of the program check them out on facebook or they also have an instagram account bullet number three per legislation each lea superintendent shall report the following information to their local boards of education no later than february 15th of each year so if you will please go to your school mental health support personnel

141report on your agenda and you will see the guidelines there that i just mentioned and then the report on mental health support positions that's really what i want to communicate to you each year i need to tell you the total number of each category of school mental health support personnel employed in the school system and then the difference from the previous school year and the total number of each category of school mental health personnel employed in the unit you can see that we have it broken out in psychologists guidance counselors social workers and nurses and you can see that the only difference as far as a reduction from 2021 to 2022 that is in guidance counselors and the reason for that is because when we compiled the report we had a vacancy where a position

142had not been filled so that's the deficit of the one position but something that i'm really proud of we increased school social workers by three going from six to nine and then with our school nurses super proud that we were also able to increase by three positions going from seven positions in 21 to 10 positions in 2022. any questions about that chart number four i have attached a memo from campbell shatley's attorney of the law office it is in your agenda as well the purpose of the memo is just to communicate the arrangement for services to the board of education effective july 1st 2022 and again it's just an item of information i wanted you to be aware lastly i want to update you with the number of minutes remaining in our calendar for bad

143weather days as of today we have just over one half day remaining and i want you to understand we have had four full remote days and on a remote day we only get credit for 4.5 hours so we do not get a full day's credit on a remote learning day so that eats away at those extra minutes also just like this morning with the fog and the potential for that moisture to create black ice on the highway we had a two hour delay so we had to deduct two hours out of our bank of minutes that we had banked and again like i said we have just over one half day remaining in extra minutes but in the event we have more bad weather i will work with the central office team to readjust the

144letters training for the elementary teachers i don't want to do that but we have that option that we can do that so that we don't have to extend the school day and we don't have to talk about things like going during spring break or weekend school all the things that in alexander county people they're not real fond of talking about so i'm going to do everything in my power to make sure that we keep spring break intact but i just felt that tonight i needed to make you aware of it because we certainly have had um some bad weather days any questions do we have any just straight up snow days remaining we don't they had one snow day to just go out and play and that was their one and only this year okay

145do you anticipate possible uh waiver from the state since a lot of state was affected the other week has that happened in several years not for snow it'll happen for a hurricane but it won't happen for snack okay the lettuce train had to be completed in the school calendar year or i can't remember exactly on that i can't remember the schedule either but i believe it will be the remainder of this school year and then all of next school year if i have the timeline correct in my mind so in the event you have to take some of those days is it possible to eat some of that on not not just require them on top of what they do have this school year i'm going to have to refer to dr curry she's been

146the guru with trying to get that schedule created and she talked about some possibilities but she's the expert with that okay it is actually four semesters worth of work and so the first semester has to be completed within the first semester but what we did in anticipation of that was when we had this last snow day we planned in advance so for one of the work days i gave them an assignment for this remote work day so that they could stay ahead of schedule in case we lose a day so we're trying to spread that out and make it as easy on them as possible but i think that they're pretty well still caught up if we have another snow day the plan is to do the work that we would have done on one

147of those elementary days on the next snow day if that makes sense roughly how many hours do they have this semester finish i hate to say out loud but i want to say i i'll guess around 60. and i think it might be a little shy or a little bit more of that but i remember counting for somebody who needed some literacy ceus um but i can certainly email that information to you all it's pretty extensive for two years it's the equivalent of a master's degree that's 60 contact hour in this school year yes it includes reading assignments actual module work and bridges to practice work and it and it may be 44 this semester and 60 the next semester but we had no idea how this would unveil itself which is why we made

148the calendar change at least going into next year we know going in and can plan for that for the next three semesters actually it's great training it's just one more thing too it's one more thing and that that's one thing that that our teachers all teachers are exposed to in north carolina and nationwide when you add 60 hours here 10 more hours there go work gate duty at the ball game add those other things you know they they don't have a normal day and there's a huge misconception teachers only get paid for 10 months of the year they don't get paid for 12 months and then you have all these things that are added to them which you have no recourse because it's mandated by the general assembly yeah it's general statute the general assembly

149has passed this legislation and has modified the route to achieve legislation to require this training yeah okay well thank you very much okay now we have some unfinished business and and i'll recognize uh mature mahappy our chief financial officer for some proposed boe policy revisions secondly thank you we have two policies up for second reading i asked for input and i have no questions or suggestions so i would ask for approval on second reading you have the policies before you and have had a chance to review them what is the inclination of the board regarding these policies as presented move to approve second i have a motion in a second any discussion all in favor say aye any opposed say no motion carries [Applause] okay and we have we have seven policies up for review

150for for this coming month and i will um ask for input and bring those back to you next month okay okay thank you very much uh this time we will enter into the new business and its current quarantined practices and tests to stay protocol dr robin hilton executive director of exceptional children and miss donna mayberry our lead school nurse thankful to have have you folks here this evening i've been thankful to have them for about the past two years well hopefully we're on the you're all in the home stretch now but i'm um don and i have come tonight to talk to you about an opportunity that we have that's been presented by the abc collaborative um dr benjamin and his group are doing what's called test to stay i've given you a folder you'll

151see a manila folder on your table so all of these things are in with the board documents but i gave you paper copies uh i if you're like me i like to see things in paper i like to touch it with my hands and that might be a little bit old school but it's just good reference and it's something for you to keep if you'd like to and i'm going to refer to some of these in a few minutes but first donna is the expert i am by no means the expert sometimes i'm the voice underneath and out front but don and her nurses i do want to say we can't say enough about them and the challenges they meet every day before she does start to talk about the um the test to stay

152she's also going to talk about quarantines and how we're handling quarantines right now so i think that's probably the first document she's going to talk about if you'll turn to that red pink document if you turn to the second page just have that handy because she's going to talk about that last bullet on there [Music] and then that'll kind of help you but i did want to make a mention that dr hefner just went over the um it's kind of like student support services folks um and she talked about nurses i do want to make a note that we have been fortunate that we hired two additional nurses and that was to help support nurses when they were on quarantine and when they were out and some other types of leave currently we are down

153two positions we have one individual on the leave and then we have one vacant position so if you're perusing through this folder what i did was i added the number of students that each nurse serves and the number of staff that they serve and monitor and i added those two together so if you happen to look at this white sheet and you look where achs aec ssc they do have two nurses they're serving 1 1595 people so sometimes i hear things like well every school hasn't every school has a nurse well we don't every school does not have a nurse and we are doing some sharing up in the elementary school so um just keep that in mind there's a lot of moving back and forth there's a lot of filling in going on a

154lot of phone calls but i do think it's interesting and i think harry already mentioned this about the quarantines how they've changed why they've changed and where she's going to kind of give a state of where we are in alexander county right now and then consider this test to stay [Music] good evening board dr hefner thanks for having us um i'd like to start out by giving you some information on our latest quarantine guidelines and this was changed in our north carolina strong schools toolkit on january the 10th first of all if you will look at the data sheet that was provided in there i tried to compare a couple weeks that had relatively the same amount of positives for students so i use the week of august 30th through september the 3rd back at

155the beginning of the year and then last week january 31st through february the 4th had similar amounts that first week had 59 positive students and then last week we had 51. also our county as a whole numbers for those two weeks were very similar as well uh that first week our seven week you know how the health department reports the seven week seven day average um was 217 and then that last week their last report was 243 so it's very similar but what i wanted to note you notice was that on that first week we had 600 students in quarantine that was back before masks were required and then this last week or last week we had 117. couple reasons for that one of course the mass requirement is in effect now but also the

156update to our tool kit so there's a copy of that in your packet that's in the pink and red piece of paper on page 16 down at the very bottom that last exposure paragraph explained that so we were able to reduce some of our quarantines because it now says that individuals in a mass required school setting do not need to be excluded from school after a close contact including unmasked exposure such as at lunch or extracurricular activities if they have no symptoms it goes on to say that they should get tested on day of notification and day five it says should it's not a requirement and then it says that this exemption applies to in-school exposures as described above as well as non-household out-of-school exposure so if you were exposed at church or a ballgame

157you were still not have to uh quarantine so now the only numbers that are really on our quarantine reports are students that are symptomatic that we have to send home and they're awaiting testing or to see their doctor or they have a positive household member we still have to quarantine those so as you can see the numbers are improving and i hope that trend continues uh as of today at about four o'clock we already had eight positives this week and eight i mean eight staff positives and eighteen student positives um it's just tuesday and we didn't have school yesterday so um but i'm hoping they will be better um so the test to stay program through the abc collaborative it allows students and staff in school communities who have been exposed to covid to be

158able to be tested at school and if they continue to be negative can stay in school this study will permit students and staff to stay in school provided they remain asymptomatic they wear a mask consistently for 10 days following the following their exposure and have negative rapid antigen tests that are conducted in school participation in this program is optional the school district is responsible for arrangements for the testing to be made and of course parents can opt in or out they can consent to do this or they can quarantine as whatever's currently in practice under our toolkit so so some of the during a mask i just put down some of the guidelines for this program during a mask required setting they also allow you to do household contacts so if you if your mom

159or dad that you're living in the house with is positive you can still come to school but you have to be tested every other day for 15 days so that would be getting eight tests so you know right now while massacre required we're not sending kids home anyway unless it is a household member in a mask optional setting students could be that are close contact at school or extracurricular activity can be tested on days one three and five and as long as they're negative can stay in school but it does say in the guidance they couldn't participate in sports or extracurricular activities and um the household member contact would not apply if we're in a mass optional setting and to clarify donna can i ask not being able to participate in athletics or extracurricular activities

160is that only for the five days that they are being tested days one three and five right okay so that's kind of a test to stay program um so just to be clear it's not um we i'm sure this is a part of their research i'm going to say we don't we will not we'll keep data we'll track but we will not report names of course i'm sure that we'll be reporting numbers and they'll be and they do supply us with the test we will need um if we if the board has to vote my understanding and then also we have to consult with the health department to get their blessing we would be probably looking for two to three non-certified personnel and you can look at this chart based on what our nurses are

161already currently doing on a normal basis i just don't know how that they would test students you know you're looking at 15 days the student will be tested eight times so and also we receive permission you don't have to do this as an entire school system the collaborative said that if we only wanted to do it at our high schools because of course those are where you have more students and that's where we have more exposures i mean you get the chart every week to see the exposures and and when you have more people it's just statistically it makes sense you'll you'll have more uh exposures but we could we if you all decide that this is something we want to try to cut down on quarantines even more then we would only we've talked

162about it and we would only start at the high schools and give it a try the whole idea you know is to keep the students in class so it's like we and parents have to decide you know are we willing to to do this it's just a pr there's a i'm gonna put it on here there's pros and cons just like everything else we're trying to keep them as full they might get pulled out several times they're gonna have to wear a mask but on this you know while they're in this process but they're not going to be at home um it's just a lot of pros and cons but parents can decline parents can decline having them tested and that means that they would go into the typical quarantine setting you said that the

163tests one of the things i've been getting from everybody is tests are hard to get a hold of so tests would be provided yes yes and then second who would be so are you saying nurses have to give the test or can another school personnel give it it could be anybody that's trained it does not have to be a nurse defined trained like do i have to go to school for it or do know just like some online videos through this through this um the abc collaborative okay i perceive that's why we're going to hire at least two to three non-certified personnel and um to to do the testing and to keep tr the tracking that's going to be involved that with the two nurses and mr palmer a lot of his time has been

164consumed i think trying to keep this virus under control keep track of who's coming and going so we would be posting for some additional personnel to help manage this and when you start taking in aec you know that's somebody else going over there also to help mining so so with you hiring and it just happened tonight what what's the time frame starting it depends on the pot the pool of candidates right now personnel is everything we do there's a quote there's um it's a little bit that would be the unknown piece really getting the test from the collaborative probably would not be a i wouldn't think driver to you a big problem um but i think once we have to get personnel lined up and that would be an advertisement for five days you know

165we are legally required to do that before we would even establish any interviews um the last line additionally if masks are optional and the student staff is a close contact to a household member that not be able to participate in the test to stay okay what would be the protocol for them at this point if a household member okay so if we're under a mask optional and your family member's positive i have to go back and think what you know i understand they would have to stay out for five days if they were able to isolate from that family member if you couldn't isolate it would be 10 days you stay out five days you don't have any symptoms you can come back on the sixth day so for clarity's sake this is uh allowing

166us to move outside of the dpi rules department of health rules over quarantining and have a little bit different quarantine so the student is staying in school if they've been exposed is that what i'm understanding for clarity's sake that we don't have to follow the quantum toolkit the toolkit we reference and we can move to a different sort of thing and that's been approved at the state level yes and there are some other districts close to us that are doing it and there's some other in the districts close to us that are not doing it sorry i'm sorry one other question is you know we've we've kind of got to the point where we we think that the health department is the one calling the shots on the way that we quarantine so are they

167on board with this or i'm i'm curious how you know because i was kind of led to believe that at some point that that was a legislative action to quarantine i know the toolkit itself is not a legislative document but that the quarantine process was so how how have we suddenly moved into this exemption i probably can't answer that as i can black and white maybe what the answer you're looking for i am on and uh we are both on the coveted task force for the county okay and every friday um well it's very we were not on it for the first year we they invited us to come on the second year okay so um we are in collaboration with them almost every friday not everybody but so after we meet as a group

168we usually stay and meet again then with the health department personnel alone and so i just mentioned it i know that i did mention it to leanne wisnit and said that dr heffner might be reaching out to her i do know that they have been involved with some videos that they are aware um there was never a mention of allowable not allowable that kind of thing so um i just kind of told them that just to be aware that we would be reaching out to to see where how they felt about it and would they agree you know to us so they they're in agreement and they're but they're not going to supersede us with another i can't say i mean i think that if i feel that if it's something that we want to

169try and they will help us to the best of their ability so i think dr pepper doesn't it needs it if the board so chooses it would require action as far as board approval to become part of the study with the test to stay okay and and if if we were optional you still see it this as an asset if we were in mass optional i know that your primary choice would be mask required and this but if we were mask optional you still see it as as a step forward yes because if we go back to mask optional all those students at lunch that have their mask off will be have they'll be considered close contacts and we would be quarantining those folks again mm-hmm so with this we would not if they're testing

170they would be testing okay if their parents agree to that okay but if they don't agree to the testing then they would be quarantined at the current correct whatever the guidelines are at that time yes okay board members you have this proposal to test to stay protocol any other questions regarding it i make the motion that we adopted motion by board member cooksy is there a second one second any discussion one other feather question and i hate to keep beating and beating and beating but um you say at this point it's just the high school right okay what is there a timeline and you probably have already said it and i didn't catch it but the is there a timeline or a staff quantity that you think that moving forward if we move forward with

171middle schools and elementary schools no we we didn't really talk about timeline i guess we we have to see there's a difference between having 25 kids that you're tracking at the high school then 125. so um we talked about bringing on the middle schools next and then bringing on the elementary school so honestly we'll just have to we we never discussed the timeline with that we just wanted to tackle the biggest one first because we just know that the numbers are higher there and the tests are provided at no cost correct to us correct correct they are we have a motion and a second any further discussion on the matter okay all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed say no no okay but director of state uh the sending vote um board member

172robertson but the motion carries thank you thank you okay thank you we have our head start program and school readiness goals um mr frazelle our head start director i'm so excited because i'm last and mine's short so chairman odom members of the board dr heaven thank you so much the good thing is the grant that we have in head start is a is a five-year grant and we're on year three so the goals that you have been presented are the goals that continue to be there and a lot of them do to the pandemic we haven't been able to complete and so we have we're on year three if you're five therefore we have several more years to complete these goals so i would like for you to approve the goals that we still continue

173to have one thing that i would like to say though a big difference in the grant and we talked about this with policy council but i want to make you aware as well we did hire a nurse this year there was a behavior therapist and that position was she left and so what we are doing is contracting with a private facility so that we still get all the support that we need but we did see the need with the nurse because as you know and as all your you're all well aware with all the office of the head start mandates and the vaccines required and the testing required for our federal mandates we needed a nurse also there's more severe medical needs and so we did need a nurse so one program change that we

174have is we switched the behavior therapist person for our nurse but we are still providing those behavior therapists through private therapy okay so other than that that's the only thing that i had okay yeah any questions for uh mr fraziel from the board well thank you very much i got i got threatened up there they said you better keep this to 30 seconds so i think i probably did pretty good i think we're going to start a new collaborative that every presenter has to go before your class okay i do have to have a vote though because it has to be noted in the minutes and so when we present it to the head start enterprise system and i upload everything we need to make sure that we have a vote on it i'll make

175a motion to accept the goals as presented second okay we have a motion and second any discussion regarding the red in the schools all in favor say aye aye any opposed say no motion carries thank you thank you very much as required by the north carolina general assembly we've reached that monthly status of the mask mandate and so we're we're currently up to this point um masks are mandated so what's the inclination of the board going forward for the next month david i apologize for doing this but i made a promise and i got to keep it because nobody has any time or tolerance for me to state my position but i made a promise so okay i will do it um and i wrote a long one and so everybody's going to shoot me

176and kill me uh i wanted to share something first while i was working on this i got an email and i think a lot of times people don't understand what we are facing as a board and i'm not going to name who sent it but i will read quickly just what the message was came in as i was thinking about how to write my position and and i'm quoting now obviously you socialistic communist clowns haven't been paying attention to the news your mass mandate is illegal and unconstitutional as i've said from the onset do you and i can't repeat the next word you have to fill it in yourself idiots it comes before the word idiots really want a lawsuit over this a lot of them think the public often realizes a lot of what

177we receive and what we are being said to us and one of the comments that was made earlier i do want to respond to is that i also do get a lot of the opposite stuff i get people writing on the opposite so i'm going to explain to you my position as i wrote it um the policy we're getting ready to discuss and talk about just for clarity's sake is we are talking about mask in a three-week average and we use the number that everybody seems to find very controversial but it was a number that as she already presented and her data miss mayberry was designed to keep the number of quarantine kids down in schools open so we are technically voting on a flexible policy that responds to the level of illness in the

178schools and why am i voting for this policy and there's two key things i wanted to point out first last year we went to remote learning and into abbreviated days and we tried to learn how to live with covet and i personally felt that a lot of students lost a year of typical education that it really hurt them and that at least if they didn't get they got some benefit but there was a fraction of that and i think uh dr curry's presentation brought that out we could see it in the data really what i'm talking about there and so i was determined personally to try and find a way to keep students in school in in person school not in remote learning if they wanted it but to be an in-person school literally seated

179in the school and for me that required two things one we had to keep a school open and we had to make it so that kids could actually attend and quarantine is school might be open but kids aren't attending and so in july i've made the argument at that time that quarantining when i looked at the statistics and the things that were sent to us in the toolkit was going to be a problem that quarantining in the masking issues was going to make it so that the department of human health and human services data that they weren't i mean outlined things that they wanted us to do was going to make it so the kids weren't going to be in school and that quickly actually started to prove out within the first two weeks of

180school and the second is that as i stated in july i believe that everybody talks in here about us being elected and representing people but it's my responsibility to care about the students the teachers and the families and i have to worry about the community that we call the school system or the school population however you want to think of it here in alexander county and that none of this is about what i personally want or what i need to do to keep kids in school and keep teachers in school so what i have done personally is try to look at the science and go to reliable sources check sources out read as much as i can how do i keep the kids in school how do i keep the teachers in school i read

181a lot of the articles that are sent to me and i do my own searches two things always emerge in the reliable scientific research that i'm calling reliable like i said i'm sure people can argue this it's that you can get vaccinated and you can try wearing a mask and i in july pointed out that our low numbers of vaccinated adults and students we were only going to be left with one and that was masking our numbers for vaccination have not greatly increased since that time they've almost barely ticked upwards in this county i dislike wearing a mask i stated it in july and i guess nobody believes me but i dislike wearing a mask but if it keeps the doors open of the schools and the teachers and the students are healthy then it

182is a preventative that i do support personally many of us don't wear it correctly my wife walks along and she's always pulling it up and putting it back on my nose because that always slips down or does this as i'm moving and walking and i have all the complaints that i hear everybody else have personally however that is a preventative measure when used correctly as we already learned tonight they talked about how university hospitals still do it and everything and have always done it so when you look at scientific data wearing a mask correctly does seem to work and it does make a difference and i do appreciate dr benjamin sharing the data that he brought today so i believe my role as a board member once again it's as a board member is to

183make a decision that is good for the school system community over my own individual preferences or desires in other words the well-being of the community does need to supersede in this particular case individual wants and so this is one of those times when we just have to accept that some people write emails and they seem to believe that if they put f-bombs and loud language and yell a lot at us through the emails or in public that they can drown out the other voices but i do still get the other voices it is still not as one-sided as we perceive there are many teachers that when we go and say no mass then all of a sudden i get emails from them why are you doing that please put the mass back on and so

184i do hear from families and teachers and i believe very sincerely that if you look at our record this year our policy has been working that we went with a flexible policy that is responding to this in the community it is not ideologically driven it is a flexible policy that's responding to the level of illness in the community and that while it is inconvenient to some even disliked by me at times but it keeps the doors open and it keeps the kids in the classroom and i just summarize i want to see children seated in school and that is why i vote the way i vote but thank you for asking and i'm sure it didn't clarify things for anyone but that is the thoughts and how i got there okay i'll add that i

185voted against the policy because i didn't feel like it's a one size fits all and i think some of the weeks we've looked at that and we've seen certain schools when we get our update that you know there's little to none sometimes you know i know it's been a real hot uh issue lately but uh i just hadn't felt like it's been one size fits all and i'll also say this uh you know not to get in debate where the mask works you know now the state's pushing to offer our staff in 95 mass to me that kind of sends a message you know about the cloth versus the n95 but i personally think that it's uh it's starting to hinder our students on communication i mean you you go get around a lot of

186young people now i personally have seen a a difference in two years uh in the expression the communication and you know it kind of goes back to we've talked about social emotional kind of goes back some of that it we got we got to get we got to get our kids back to normal any other comments from the board members regarding regarding the status of the mass mandate well i mean i've always been for optional masking and i think you all know that i voted for and i'll help create the policy that we're voting on now to try to come up with a happy medium sometimes when you've got seven people you can't get everybody on board so i thought it was a happy medium i of course would still go for optional masking because

187that's just where i'm at uh but if we can't have that then i'm okay with with a happy medium and going by our numbers and i'll say since we've been asked to share our thoughts you know before before each meeting since we've started with covid where we've had board decisions that we've had to make based on on science or medical information i've always reached out and and y'all are aware that i've reached out to people that i trust and and that includes people that have provided health care for my family even my parents beforehand and that's where my trust has to be at and i had an unusual conversation today someone that i trust uh in all aspects of of decision-making regarding medical and then and then when we have brought to us an option

188of how we can uh you know and we didn't know that was an option that that's the odd thing to me we we didn't know there's an option i thought the toolkit was the toolkit and so uh long story not quite as long my the one person that i put 100 trust in said you know at uh we're on the downhill side of this unless there's another variant that comes and it explodes on us the way it has in the past he said we're on the downhill side he said if so if you're if you're considering it um i think you're within a few weeks of that happening and so i'm going to drop the bombshell that i'm going to make a motion that february the 28th that we go mask optional and then the

189reason i chose that time period and that's also the time period that they had talked about and they'd put thought into it and the time period gives us time before the next board meeting to where if we see that we're wrong then we don't have a large a long time frame to uh to correct it but you know i'm more confused tonight than i have been at any point after seeing the the information and the other opportunities and uh i'm to the point where i'm i'm officially making a motion that we end um go to mask optional on february the 28th and uh no hard feelings if it goes if it doesn't go then i understand that too so that's where that's where my motion's at mr adam i'll speak briefly um of course like

190all of us we want to get through this and we're all praying that it's on the on the downhill slide i also have seeked professional advice from some friends that are our doctors chief medical officers at two very good hospitals in this area and they they agree that they feel like we are on that slide but they do feel like we've got a few weeks to go i'm a little hesitant for a two or three week period to get this under control with the numbers our nurse just showed one day at school and we've got pretty good numbers in one day so i'm willing to flex some but ain't for sure that quickly maybe by next board meeting if the numbers are going down you know but that's up to the board that's just my

191personal opinion so that's i'm seeking advice from somebody that's a lot smarter and that's what they do for a living so that's all i know to do and make the best decision for children well thank you for your comments thank the board for all their comments we have a motion on the floor is there a second i'll second the motion i have a motion by board member shrum second by board member ryan uh any further discussion just one question this is no way shape form tied to the matrix it's completely optional february the 28th for students and staff that's that's my motion and everyone needs to remember that has nothing to do with buses that's federally mandated we can't affect that it has nothing to do with head start correct dr hefner that would be

192still federally mandated well the head start mandate is vaccines that's just vaccine so it follows it that's the program follows but so only the bus driver is a good start but they do have to follow the same busing guidelines any further discussion i guess i'd just like to point out that if we voted for our flexible and the numbers allowed it we would be back to not wearing masks because that's basically what we had done and so we went through the whole fall not wearing masks until this happened and so to me having a flexible policy makes so much more sense than saying i hope that by a certain date things will be under control and that's what we're getting ready to vote on any other comments i i will say we just surpassed a

193hundred days so we've got 80 more days of instruction um we've heard from doctors we've we've received emails threats you know people have had ample opportunity to get vaccines whether you're an adult whether you're a child you you've had ample opportunity and if you made the decision to not do that you've exercised your freedom and nobody's infringed on your freedom i thought the matrix was the best compromise really to me personally it didn't matter if it was 20 students 30 40 50. you know that number could move at the inclination of the board but you know what has really bum-fuzzled me is that you have folks that have no medical credentials whatsoever and they'll send emails to the entire board telling us what works what doesn't work what they're going to do they're going to

194sue you know folks don't talk me to death show me something if if you're going to file suit do it just do it just do it people file suits every day but f bombing board members and saying we're communists or nazis and stuff like that it's easy for you to hide behind that keyboard because you won't say that stuff to our face and furthermore you won't file for office you won't seek office i hope no future board ever has to deal with a pandemic wouldn't wish it on anybody in any form but uh you know there's not going to be hard feelings among board members because we've we've we've been in this same boat for two years and we've had mixed votes but i thought the primary overreaching goal was and because the the issues

195that folks complain about changes by the month and i think i'd be better off to watch a catawba county board education meeting because if i watch it then i know what's coming to our meeting you know it's all just it's just all noise noise noise noise there's a hundred other things that school systems have to do and the main one is educate kids but uh you know i'm i'm not going to be disheartened however the vote goes i don't want anybody to get covered but if you don't take the vaccine chances are you're going to get it and chances are the majority of the sick folks that are crowding up the hospitals aren't vaccinated i can't change that you can't change that this board can't change that so i guess our primary goal still is

196to keep our schools open as best we know how but you know folks these threats and these emails you know there's consequences like lindsey graham said all elections have consequences well you know your threats and your words they're not going to change a damn thing for the next 12 months i can promise you that and you know folks discounting we have varying opinions we don't always see things the same but we always have respect for each other and i can tell you between now and december there'll be no disruptions from the audience like happened tonight that won't happen again it will not these folks earned these seats they were elected by their peers and until such time that that changes then they're going to be respected and they're going to be respected by everybody now

197we'll continue to wear a mask at our meetings whether it's here or whether it's over there doesn't have anything to do with coping it has everything to do with keeping our superintendent at work while she battles cancer so don't think mask optional is going gonna apply to school board meetings between now and next december because it's not i have a motion on the floor to go optional february 28th 28th in a second so all in favor of that say i i mean bridget harry [Music] any opposed say no no no no okay so that's the way it works i make the motion we continue our flex policy have a motion on the floor regarding maintaining our current current policy is there a second scott second second second by mr bowman all in favor of this

198motion say i i i any opposed say no no just motions we can't leave a hung board we have to make a decision so it was it was four okay because the other was three three right there yeah the other was three three and this was okay so this is 500 i mean five one i'm sorry this is five one and we will revisit this at our next we'll do it again okay at this time i would entertain a motion to go into closed session in accordance with north korea general statute 143 318 11 a6 need a motion of that effect second motion of the second i'm in favor say yeah we were moved to closed session thank you very much you