BOE Regular recurrent meeting

001so i just moved it just a little bit yeah okay yeah absolutely one baby would like to call this meeting the casual county board of education to order dr carter please pause for a moment of silence thank you please stand for the pledge of the allegiance states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all i need a motion to approve the minutes of october 25th 2021. don't move the battle that made the motion is there a second one let's go in seconds of motion is there any discussion on their comments is not all in favor indicate by raising your hand oppose the same motion carry unanimously dr carter announced [Music] any discussion comments all in favor indicate by raising your hand oppose

002the same motion carries unanimously announcements dr clark yes um we are very fortunate that we have with us today the uh the lady bartlett senior high school volleyball team and i just want to say congratulations to the ladies uh [Applause] uh conference record 14-0 which is amazing regular season conference chats mid carolina 182a conference tournament champs and the north carolina high school athletic association 2a east region runner-up the best finish in program history congratulations congratulations all right so i told the girls after we won the conference championship that i couldn't there was no way i could ever forgive them they were my first team first conference championship and then they decided to keep going and keep going and keep going so now i definitely have no chance as they made it to the final four

003it was a very special year i want to congratulate my coaches coach coach miller and coach moore um you did a great job an outstanding group of young ladies i appreciate all of your hard work and dedication this year i'll turn it over to the coach as if you want to say anything about uh not really anything about players other than the fact that i'm extremely proud of them and the job in which they've done this year from uh the six they were on the court to the rest of the group i mean it was amazing um we have some jv players that you know stuck with us the whole time matter of fact our whole jd program stuck with us the whole time as well um and so you definitely can feel the support

004and love from them as a whole um you know as far as the the whole thing in general it was amazing to feel the love and support from the community i mean that was probably the most meaningful thing that i think that these girls can take away from you know just having that group of people in the stands cheering us on um unfortunately they couldn't they couldn't get us through that final four group but i'll tell you what they were they were surely there and i'm grateful for that and for all of you guys i know we had some of you guys coming to the games and we're so appreciative of that and i know that um you know it was it was truly a blessing that you guys were able to fight for us

005to be able to ride in comfort and to have that support um that means that means the world to us and and um it definitely takes a load off my shoulders as far as that responsibility with the buses and um the late nights but i'm so proud of them i'm so proud of all of the community support and the coming together and uh and showing our about their pride and so i appreciate all that and um in turn we've got a little token of appreciation for you guys for the school board and for uh dr carter and for all the help and support you've given us and i appreciate you guys thank you and uh and hope that you can remember us as well like mr coleman said we're definitely his first group um hopefully

006we won't be his last group maybe next year we'll be able to do a little bit more than what he expected this year so that's that's my challenge to y'all for this next season but i'm proud of my seniors and congratulations to you guys and i look forward to all of you along and having me still part thank you uh mr stokes and mr coleman we have a little token of appreciation for you as well it's just we don't have it with us here today could you get the girls to introduce themselves and uh it's hard to sort of tell with the math sometimes and tell us what year they are so we can see what we got going for next year yes ma'am if i could get let's see let's see all my seniors

007down here and that'll be good yeah and then we'll just bounce off from there so these are these are my seniors i'm gonna let them see but these these right here are my cactus for this year so they'll lead us off so go ahead hey i'm caitlin oakley i'm a captain and i'm a senior this year i'm lizzie proctor i'm a captain i'm a senior i'm facebook church i'm captain i'm steven i'm faith johnson and i'm a singer elena crumpton and i'm a senior kayden miller i'm an insult emma thornton and i'm a freshman doesn't understand [Laughter] [Music] thank you [Applause] and they didn't follow my instructions because they were all supposed to wear the same shirt but it's okay i'm proud all right well thank you so much [Applause] hmm rules for the public

008comments total time allotted to public comments not to receive 15 minutes those wishing to speak must sign up before the meeting giving full name address and topic each person will be allowed no more than three minutes spoke to persons representing a group of eight or more people president will be given five minutes the board will hear comments but no action will be taken today unless the item is already on the agenda concerns of sufficient interest may be placed on the agenda of future meetings concerns covered by the law requiring confidentiality may not be addressed in opening me the board will be allowed to ask questions of clarification and we have miss laura picada okay [Applause] hello good morning board of education thank you for allowing me to be here please state your name my name

009is laura piccardo i'm from pelham north carolina i'm a graduate of barley anti high school class of 2010. i then went off to uncg and obtained my undergraduate degree in economics in and i obtained my mba at western salem state in 2018. the reason that i'm here is because i wanted to provide more feedback after graduation so that we can help our students excel i'm i don't want people to think of caswell county residents or graduates as just low part they have the full potential to meet their goals they can do anything they want but i need to provide more feedback so that we can help them excel and make sure that they don't have to meet the same obstacles that i've had so i also wanted to let you know i also work in

010corporate america so sometimes there is there there is a gap but it's not rural versus urban it's more communicative purposes we need to allow our students or teach them to be more outspoken because the people i work with they they are very outspoken they're very quick to speak they're not thinking about waiting their turn or waiting um more of a traditional format like you're meeting so that is an area that i teach my students at my catholic church in regional to be more outspoken and that would really help the young girls especially when they're trying to enter their career fields as a lady i felt that sometimes i was overlooked because i was more questionative of what i was going to say and we need to teach our young girls to be more outspoken i

011also wanted to provide more feedback as to regards when we go away to college it's a gap regarding time management we have so many great teachers here in caswell county that we're so used to them having us review the material going over the math questions in class but when we go into a big hall like at uncg we are more like oh my god is it cool to ask questions because there are so many people from charlotte raleigh and they all of course act like they're the cool kids in class and we need to teach our students ask the questions right away don't don't second-guess yourself it's better to ask these questions now before you have a test and then you don't know what to do i then wanted to talk about the scholarship aubry

012lee brooks scholarship which i've gotten to know connie over the years we only have like one to two applicants per year it says here on the website that it opens january 4th and then it's the submission date is february 14. is there any opportunity that we can get the principal at barley ante to um announce it regularly on the announcements so that more people apply i i think we're missing a lot of people and i don't know if it's just laziness or what's going on there so the aubrey lee brook scholarship grants um the winner up to 12 000 and that's that's a lot of money even if if it just helps them just a little bit that's better than nothing and it says here is for students wanting to seek a degree at nc

013state chapel hill or unc greensboro and then i wanted to talk more about the co-square if anybody has gone have gotten the opportunity to visit that here downtown um it's fifty dollars per month and students can just spend fifty dollars a month and do their online homework there instead of having to live on campus thank you for this opportunity thank you dot card we have with us today um adam he is our auditor and you have in front of you uh the auditor's report he um provided each of you a copy of course he's with anderson and you have a copy of this in your package and with that i'm going to turn it over to adam thank you good morning it's uh it's that time of year again it doesn't seem like you've been

014a whole year since i was here last but uh nonetheless in front of you again like dr park said it should be a bound 70-some page set of financial statements uh you were also provided a three-page letter addressed directly to the board part of our audit involves a contract between the lgc the local government commission the board of education and our firm it's a three-party contract that requires the lgc approval of financial statements and also then a letter to you to let you know how the audit went so that three-page letter just lets you know that there was no unusual timing or differences noted in the audit there were no new accounting standards implemented all those have been delayed because of covid and the audit just went overall as planned so that's the the gist

015of the three-page letter the financial statements have been submitted to the lgc and have been approved so at this time we're fully done with the obligations again to the lgc and also submitted um your schedule of federal and state awards to the federal government the federal clearinghouse is a website where anybody that receives federal funds has to upload uh the audit to that system so all that's been completed as a as of today so um i'm here today just to kind of go over some of the important pages within this financial statement um these statements are can be kind of a puzzle unfortunately i did not create the standards that these adhere to and it can make it difficult to read through and kind of understand just how the uh caswell county school system stacks

016up financially whether it be to previous years or even to other districts um so and we've gone over this before but just to reiterate there there's kind of two tales within these statements there's the fund balance which i think for management for the board is the most important aspects of the statement so you have your governmental funds and your business type funds that operate and record fund balance there's also and unfortunately the majority statements deal with what's called net position where we take that fund balance we add all the value of your assets including your buildings we all add all the value of your liabilities including compensated absences and even your proportionate share of the pension liability and the post-retirement benefit liability they're really liabilities of the state but again accounting standards require that we

017have to show your portion directly within these statements so if you're reading through like the first 10 pages of the statements which is kind of a discussion and analysis just keep in mind whether you're reading about net position or fund balance and so i think that's a real big takeaway in understanding just you know the tale of the two stories in these statements is again that net position number which for the school system is a net position of 3.7 million dollars and your fund balance is 4.3 million dollars now your net position in previous years has been uh has been negative but with new construction going on that adds value to the school system so uh that that value has actually put you in a positive net position that more closely matches your fund balance

018just so happens than it has in the past but again you still got to consider that net position has again the value of buildings which you can't borrow against you're not going to sell it's it's it's a it's a value but it's not really as important as again cash in the bank or fund balance so again um like i said the the statements here uh have been provided to the lgc page one if you would turn is our opinion letter on these statements um and the bottom of page one is the opinion paragraph and it basically states that we believe these financial statements accurately reflect the position of caswell county schools as of june 30 2021 and the activity for the year that ended so this is what's called a considered a clean unmodified opinion

019letter after that we've got about 10 pages of discussion analysis and then page is the balance sheet for the governmental and business type activities again this is uh the page that reflects net position the balance sheet of the entire entity and all of its assets and all of its liabilities uh and you can see on that first column your net position almost 3.8 million dollars most of which is in the form of investment in capital assets so that that tells you there your your buildings there are worth 38 million dollars but again you can't budget that 38 million dollars that is just the value of your assets offset by giant liabilities for the pension pension plan and oped plan uh which stands for other post-employment benefits again those liabilities are really liabilities of the state

020but these statements reflect your tiny tiny percentage of that giant liability all 115 school districts charter schools and other organizations are part of these various plans and your your percentage is is less than uh two-tenths of a percent of that plan but it's still a giant number and it causes these liabilities of 10 million for the pension plan and 21 million dollars for the retirement health plan so for me the most important pages of the statements really start on page 13 exhibit three these are the statements that provide the fund balance numbers so exhibit three page 13 is the balance sheet for all of your governmental funds your general fund state public school fund federal grants other special revenue capital outlay and the individual school funds the money at the schools your biggest source of

021revenue is the state public school fund but it does not carry fund balance those dollars are used or lose it uh very little carryover and no ability to save up money and create fund balance to use in future years same goes with the federal grants fund that is a user to lose it um type funding source federal grants carry over a little bit better than state but you don't collect them ahead of time you receive them as you spend them so again no fund balance in those funds your general fund which is the first column it shows that your fund balance which is at the bottom of that first column is 2 million hundred and twenty seven thousand dollars that's an increase of fifty six thousand dollars from the previous year of that fund balance

022forty thousand dollars of it is represented as prepaids basically you have some 21 22 expenditures that you had to pay before june 30th that's money that's cash already out the door so that fund balance can't be reused because it's already been spent so you have to take that asset and separate it as non-spendable fund balance you also have restricted fund balance of two thousand nine hundred dollars for uh restricted by state statute that is essentially the receivables you're not allowed to budget receivables in the next year you have to wait till you actually collect it as cash the state laws are just written to prevent you from budgeting funds that you have not yet collected so that gets uh restricted you also have a hundred and fifty thousand dollars assigned for next year's budget as

023of 21 for the 21 22 year as of right now management believes that there's a chance of spending about 150 000 dollars of fund balance there is no uh restrictions or no uh requirements to hold you to that estimate is just an estimate as of the date of these financial statements so that's non-binding but again as of the date of the statements um management felt that 150 000 would potentially be used next year and so we budgeted for that or not budget for that but separated that fund balance in the assigned category leaving you with 2.4 million dollars of unassigned fund balance that's fund balance again available to be used in future years um unrestricted unassigned uh and totaling 2.4 million you also have fund balance in the other special revenue fund this fund used

024to be combined with the general fund 10 years ago these funds were separated with some state law changes that allowed for the creation of another special revenue fund really to separate anything that wasn't county funds your fund date i think was started uh just a couple years ago a little later in the game but still it represents funds for state and federal programs and other funding sources that used to be included in funds2 [Music] the ubuntu or the general fund was left with just really money from the county it makes it easier for calculating her requirements for charter school payments and so the local fund is really at this point mostly county money and other programs like nurses rotc nc pre-k those types of programs are now housed in this other special revenue fund and

025it has fund balance of 578 000 which is 160 000 increase from last year the capital outlay has a fund has eight hundred and eighty five thousand dollars which is a hundred and thirty one thousand dollar increase for the previous year and the individual school funds have a hundred and seventy seven thousand dollars on hand an increase of twenty two thousand dollars from the previous year there any questions about any of the fund balance numbers or anything on these uh balance sheets again to me this is this these are your governmental funds most important numbers i think in this booklet is found on this page any questions if you turn it over two pages actually just turn one page page fourteen i'm just gonna show you real quick how we get from fund balance to

026net position that's what this schedule here the uh the second half of exhibit three it shows you all the components that affect fund balance and turn fund balance into net position you can see we've got a bunch of positives for the assets and a bunch of negatives for the liabilities and that 4.2 million dollars again becomes 3.7 million dollars but that's after 40 50 million dollars of plus and minuses for the various assets and liabilities that go into net position page 15 exhibit four this is the income statement for those governmental funds the bottom of each of these columns show you that change in fund balance that number that i was um that mentioned with each gun balance from the balance sheet again you can see the general fund balance change in fund balance was

02755 other special revenue 159 000 capital outlay 131 000. at the top of this schedule you can see the total revenues by funding source and like i said your state public school fund provides nearly 19 million dollars of your funding the county provides 2 million 655 000 of your general revenues they also are providing capital outlay funds for construction those uh those revenues are found in the capital outlay fund your federal grant funds for 2.4 million dollars and other special revenue 706 000 after this schedule our uh several schedules of comparing budget versus actual the same governmental funds this basically just shows you that you had no budget violations within your governmental funds after those are uh exhibit seven page 21 so uh before those uh the balance sheet income statement those were your governmental

028funds you also have two business type funds uh these funds are considered business type funds because they're in the business of providing a service or selling a product they are the school food service fund and the after school care program so these two funds have to record their assets their capitalized assets directly within the fund they also have to record their portion of the pension and post-employment benefits directly into the fund so here for the school food service fund you actually have 970 000 negative fund balance but you do not have negative cash or uh and you're not in really a negative financial condition you just have a negative net position you can't again because of these giant liabilities so to really look at the financial health of the these funds i prefer to look

029at cash so if you look at the top of these two columns you have twenty two thousand seven hundred and seventy dollars of cash on hand and two hundred and eighty six thousand dollars of investments those two numbers actually went down by a combined 220 000 from the year before so uh your school food service fund is utilizing cash uh part of that is because of the significant decline in operations during the year it's difficult to provide meals to kids when you have to deliver them they're not in school or only in school part of the part of the the week so um revenues uh in those spot in that fund went down uh 150 000 of sales decline and then 600 000 of decreased federal reimbursement so that fund is mostly reimbursed by a

030federal grant to the summer school feeding program that's the program that was that that program operated the whole year so you serve the meals under what was considered a summer feeding program um those reimbursement rates are higher per meal but the participation level was down again just because of the difficulty of providing meals to students uh in during a pandemic in these um uh partial in-person partial virtual um settings so um that decline in revenue resulted in declines in expenditures as well but also uh a usage of cash so um 220 000 uh decline in cash this year um luckily uh the the summer feeding program is still in existence the reimbursement rates are still high but the key to profitability there again is participation page 22 is the income statement for those two funds

031showing you uh those revenues um and expenditures for those two funds um the the school food or the uh the after school program it just didn't run at all so there's very little activity uh in the current year um and it actually um uh has only three thousand dollars of cash on hand and forty three thousand dollars of investments but again no activity any questions about either of those two funds page 23 is the uh cash flow statement for both those funds again cash being the uh i think the best indicator of financial um financial health for those funds now this is a cash flow statement it's not an investment flow so what is missing here is a decline of a hundred thousand dollars of investments as well so you used 120 000 of cash

032and a hundred thousand dollars of investments after those statements are about 30 pages of footnotes going over all of your accounting policies detail of all of your assets liabilities roll forwards of your fixed assets about 10 pages of information about the actuarial studies used to calculate the pension plan for post retirement plan benefit liabilities um also more schedules about those pension and opec plans and also uh more detailed schedules of your general fund and your school food service fund and your capital outlay fund but again the same numbers as in the previous schedule just broken out with more detail and also uh some budget versus actual comparisons there as well again no budget violations um on any of those funds or any of those categories page 62 starts the other part of the audit basically

033not only do we audit the financial statements to provide an opinion on the financials we also provide opinions on your adherence to state and federal compliance requirements every year we have to audit at least 20 percent of your federal dollars for compliance and every major federal program has to be audited once every three years we also have to provide compliance testing on uh your state major programs once every three years except for the state public school fund it gets out of this major every year just because again it'd be in your largest source 19 million dollars of activity so that state public school fund again for compliance standard gets audited every year page 62 begins three letters one is on internal controls one is on state compliance and one is on federal compliance all these

034letters basically state that uh in our opinion we feel that you adhere to compliance requirements for each of the major programs we also know that we did not recognize any significant deficiencies in internal controls over financial reporting or over compliance so again three clean unmodified opinion letters attesting to your compliance and your internal controls so for this year the federal program is that we audited a major as major were basically your two new programs related to code your uh education stabilization funds and your coronavirus relief funds uh again new funding sources both those audited as major and actually both of them required to be audited um every year just again because of uh the amount of dollars received and because they're new programs and then for state we audit for the state public school fund

035and the career technical education statements of employment basically your your cte funds received to pay teacher salaries for the cte those were your two major state programs that's that's all i have to go over um again all in all very smooth audit um even though uh during the audit you were you're operating under an interim finance officer the foreign finance officer was able to get most of the information ready for us before before they left so again the audit went as planned and very smooth and all the staff here was very helpful uh in in letting us conduct the audit and not miss a beat so i greatly appreciate all that again a very good audit report i can answer any questions now or my number is at the bottom of all of these letters

036feel free to call anytime i can answer any questions on financial statements and because again these aren't the easiest thing to read from the back so dr carter um again thank you for the report and again just to stress it was we had no findings on the audit report which was absolutely wonderful um 2.4 million unrestricted fundamentals in your opinion is that a healthy amount or is it average amount are we not where we need to be with unrestricted fund balance as a smaller district that fund balance um that is i think a a healthy where you should be i wouldn't want to go lower than i know we've had discussions over the past few years because of the amount of fund balance you were using would have deteriorated that amount i think quickly so

037this year we are finding every district is adding fund balance those federal funds although not supplanting funds they do offset some of the costs of coving and some of those costs are costs that um are new costs that are in place of old costs so there's there's basically covet savings less transportation costs less utility costs so between the savings and then receiving federal funds across the board districts are adding fund balance and you did this the same thing which i think you need to do because at some point those federal funds will end there will be a sustained cost to whether it's mediate kids through summer school or provide the same level of technology there are future unknown costs that i think every district is saving for at this point um so you were in

038a position where you were using fund balance and now because of those cost savings you basically broke even fifty five thousand dollars added in local and then a hundred and some thousand added in uh in the other general other restricted funds that's fund balance that's really available too even though there are restricted grants in that fund there are also non-restrictive funds like indirect cost is received there sales tax there are funding sources that are not restricted in that fund but you can only have one general fund so that means you can only have one unrestricted fund balance number which is the 2.4 million but the fund balance in that other fund is still available to utilize for just about anything so you can have expenditures moving over into that fund so when you look at

039combined you added about two hundred thousand dollars of fund balance which is good i think again every other district is doing that um and i think at 2.4 million dollars under this model this you know this uh level of funding um i think you'll be good again until those federal funds run out you know which again who knows whether there'll be another wave of that but um i would definitely rather be in a position of adding 200 000 and still having 2.4 million dollars in the bank at this point thank you any questions for members mrs blackburn so you're saying we've added 200 000 more dollars to our fund balance yes by getting the extra funds in that's right a combination of receiving those funds and a combination of just having less costs especially again

040around transportation uh the cost of operating facilities that those declined because again of the environment of providing education services remotely so kind of like a one-time service dude that's not gonna happen over here that's right it's not gonna happen um we are finding though there are other savings a lot of it um un unfulfilled or unfilled positions uh that that are going to be sustained um uh projections of the future graduates coming into the education all of that i think is going to create districts all over the state whether it's rural caswell county or my next meeting later on today is in wilson every district is having trouble filling positions which again causes you to have to do more with less and and save dollars so the utility cost transportation those are not um sustained

041reoccurring savings but i think there's going to be other savings uh in the form of of positions just across the board um that will be longer felt um so yeah again being in a position now of adding the fund balance um i think is critical to help allow for funds to fill those vacancies and provide those uh other services like like i said the summer mediation services i mean um i think there's a significant cost um and that is covered by some of these federal funds too some of the the cost of providing education online the the kids that are falling behind getting them caught up so um the the those federal funds i think they're set to expire uh in 2023 again a lot of those are for those remediation type services and also

042for some construction type services air quality um uh updates and various things to uh to again provides facilities uh or update facilities to for a covered requirement so thank you so um dr carter i just recommend that the board accept the auditor's report mr carter recommended that we approve the auditor's report do i have a motion i'll make the ms garland is made in motion is there a second ms black will second promotion is there any discussion or comments all in favor in your hands thank you sir thank you that's part of consent agenda yes uh there's three items on the consent agenda one is the temporary face mask policy and i just wanted to share that when we uh prepared the agenda the uh according to the cdc the rate for castle county was

0435.13 which is considered substantial um as of november the 7th though the rate of positivity for casual county has increased and is now backed up to a red high percentage at 6.74 and again that was as of november the 7th according to the cdc and the recommendation uh that is certainly in the nc strong tool kit is that the north carolina department of health and human services recommends that schools continue to implement a universal face covering requirement if they are located in a county with high or substantial community transit transmission levels so um with that i would have included in the consent agenda that the current uh mass policy continued so with that being said i'd like to recommend approval of the consent agenda as presented you've heard the recommendation of the superintendent to approve

044the consent agenda as stated do i have a motion he's had to make some motion is there a second miss black for seconds of motion is there any discussion or comments i'd just like to say too that with the the mass requirement is we're trying to avoid remote education and if we if we loosen the mask requirement and somebody in that classroom contracts covet 19 in that entire class plus the teacher have to be quarantined agenda any other comments discussion all in favor indicate by raising your hand opposed the same motion carries six to one school improvement plans yes um i'd like to misspose you have uh two elementary schools good morning good morning um i know we talked about the last session the new um nc star and the way the indicators action plans

045are laid out so we have two principles here this morning they have both worked really hard to create action steps to produce improvement in their schools and worked hard with their school improvement team to talk about what is really going on in the schools i know at the last meeting we talked briefly about even with the void of valid eog data they have looked at multiple data sources um to come up with their plan and their action steps so with that being said i'm going to ask miss murray if she will come present firstly morning chairman owen board members and dr carter uh journey for a week because i saw south first on the agenda so mr evans is laughing at me so i'm here to present the north elementary school school improvement plan um

046if you look at our testing data back from 2016 up until the school year 2018-19 we were definitely on an upward trend and we were very proud of that we were working very hard and unfortunately um march of 2020 it drew us for a loop and so we are continuing to work hard we are continuing to make strides but unfortunately the school performance grades and things like that were not calculated for this past school year so this school year we are hoping to continue to be on that upward track that we were on before going from a c-school to hopefully a b-school by the end of this school year so teachers are working hard students are working hard support staff are working hard to try to put things in place for the success of our

047students for our school improvement team i do have teachers um from each grade level as well as an ec teacher our media coordinator a teacher assistant our instructional coach the school counselor and then we have two parents that are on our school improvement team this year we did our vote a little bit different because open house was different um i put a google form on facebook as well as announced it on the sunday phone calls for people that did not have internet they could call the school and um place their votes the first part of the process was to get nominations for people that would like to serve on the school improvement team the second part was i put those people that had volunteered or people volunteered them um we put them up for a

048vote and there was i think it was about a week's time when people could vote and if they didn't have access to the internet they could call in and give us their votes and so we have that weiler and joel willard on our sponsor while there are many things that we are working on this school year um we choose three top priority indicators the first one all teachers use assessment data and match instruction and supports to individual student needs so we are constantly in the business of analyzing data and so our teachers and our instructional coach work together individually a lot of times to analyze data but i also work with each grade level once once per week to analyze common assessments um most recently we are looking at benchmark data that was um they

049took the benchmarks last week and so we have received all of that data so we are actually discussing that this week our benchmark data to see where our students are what we need to refocus on um and how we need to remediate the use of istation provides valuable data to us um so we can provide differentiating instruction and determine interventions uh the students take their isip once per month and that's in reading and math and we can see how the students are performing and then teachers can also assign interventions through i station based solely on student needs so it's differentiated and the the teachers just push it out to them and the students can participate in doing it on eye stations during their technology time or they have guided reading groups and there's an eye

050station time when they can work on that through the mtss process teachers will analyze the effectiveness of instruction our kindergarten through third grade teachers are using hegerty this year for phonemic awareness to fill the gaps and they're doing that daily and then we have a new program equipped through eureka mac that gives us unit pre-assessments before they start the unit and teachers can use that information to guide their lessons as well as to provide remediation to students our second priority indicator as many districts across the state of north carolina we are looking at our mtss system which is a tiered instructional system that allows teachers to deliver evidence-based instruction aligned with individual needs of students across all tiers so our mtss support team needs monthly to identify and create plans for students with individual needs

051currently on my mtss support team i have an ec teacher myself my instructional coach my school counselor as well as a classroom teacher the school counselor will monitor attendance to determine the effect on poor instruction if a student does not attend school regularly we can't say that they aren't getting their needs met due to a lack of poor instruction so we have to monitor the attendance to get students in school so they can receive that for instruction once they receive quality core instruction and they're still not successful we know what interventions that we can provide to them our mtss team is receiving professional development from a regional consultant this year to assist in understanding the implementation of ntss at the school level and we have had two meetings so far there are several more scheduled

052throughout the school year and each school in the district has a team that participates remotely from their school and the school the teams actually get together in the school to participate together so there are times when we can discuss individually and make plans for our school and those meetings normally last around three hours the district has employed a school psychologist to help guide teams through the mtss process at the school level she's available to attend ntss meetings to help with suggestions throughout the process it is important to get some baseline information from students and so we use i station for the universal screening process for reading and math for all students and k5 and then in addition to getting that baseline data we have to see how students are improving or unfortunately regressing and so

053we use amplify and eye station for progress monitoring of students our third priority indicator due to situations that have occurred with students being at home there is a focus on students emotional states guiding students and managing their emotions and arranging for supports and interventions when necessary so we had a pbis program before going out for covid and then tdi kind of fell to the side because you know we were just focused on instruction and how to um handle the the students that were remote all remote and then half remote in half at school and so pbis kind of you know got pushed to the side unfortunately so we have actually brought that back this year we started with a monster bash which was based on student conduct for the first nine weeks students that received

054a good grade in conduct conduct got to um participate in a monster bash and it was just simple it was a dance party per grade level they got together in our cafeteria it was still socially distanced but the students had a blast we had a blast um it was it was a sense of normalcy for the entire school to be able to do something like that and so it was a really good um morale history so we have gone back to doing our tokens for our students being respectful responsible and safe and our teachers are able to choose which kind of tokens that they would like to use whether it be dojo points or something that students can physically touch and we have our palmart that will happen at the end of the second nine

055weeks and our school improvement team suggested doing an amazon wish list to be able to get things for palmart because homework can be very costly um and so that has worked out very well our parents have donated we have received so many packages from amazon and we have students that are arranging palmer and pricing the items and the students are really looking forward to that students have the opportunity to request to meet with the counselor with vip card for social emotional support if the student raises a vip card to show the classroom teacher the teacher will then alert the counselor that the student needs to see them and she will get to them as soon as she can all staff are participating in the introduction to mental health course provided by the state and then

056once everybody has completed that our school improvement team will meet to discuss how to incorporate the strategies learned in the training and so we have until january something to complete the training and so after that we will discuss it all staff are incorporating the casel signature practices of welcoming inclusion activities engaging pedagogy and optimism optimist closure in their daily routines so our inclusion activities include morning meetings and our students greetings i mean teachers grieving students with smiles um our engaging pedagogy is meant to be reflective and interactive uh students taking brain breaks and doing turning talks to be able to have to be able to reflect and interact with other students about what is going on in the classroom and an optimistic closure is providing a sense of accomplishment to students and to support forward

057thinking so things like something i learned today was or something i still question is and so we those are proven to provide better academic performance improved attitudes and behaviors and less negative behaviors as well as reduce emotional stress additional information we are in the process of planning our parent nights for the year for math reading and science we are planning a special holiday parent night like we had last year we had several teachers that volunteered to read holiday stories as well as santa claus at the end read a story uh we had great attendance for that of course it was virtual and we will plan our parent nights according to the code of protocols our media specialist is creating a maker space for students we've had several bright ideas and donors choose grants funded this

058year so i know that at the last war meeting dr carter talked about our bright ideas grant but just miss smith alone she got the middle border forward grant for a thousand dollars and that's for card stock and the students are going to be making cards to send to nursing home residents uh her bright idea grants total two thousand dollars and her donors choose two thousand seventy two dollars for her donor shoes grant she tags businesses such as aquafina um and several other businesses because once they see they are tagged they will start donating money so she's become very creative with that um so she is really looking forward to setting up our makerspace she just ordered i think five selling machines we began our student and ambassador program for fifth grade students this year

059so our students are doing anything from morning announcements to raising the flag they're helping us with the car rider line to announce some bus dismissal um the one student is arranging palmart and setting the prices for everything so we have several students based on behavior at school that are participating in our student ambassador program once again we've re-established pbis procedures with a focus on positive behavior and self-regulation our school counselor has implemented a character trait program with a focus on a different positive character trait each month this month it is the kindness challenge and so we have manners monday students should use their manners tell them tuesday students should give a compliment to someone what can i do wednesday students should find a way to be helpful to someone thankful thursday let someone know they

060are grateful for them friendship friday be friendly to others there are 17 student days in november we have challenged the students to do 10 out of 17 days with one of these each student has a calendar and they can write on there what they did for that day or if they can't write it they can draw a picture of what they did for that day and at the end of the month we are hoping to have a show s'more kindness event where students will be making s'mores um for the ones that did the 10 out of 17 and then once again teachers have been gathering data to refer students to tutoring that will begin soon using ice station and five benchmarks etc thank you uh any questions for members ms blackwell thank you for that

061uh good presentation what percentage of your students is using the vip cards i don't know an exact percentage um i can say that we normally have maybe four students per week that are using it some or some have moved beyond vip status once they use it a certain business i don't know exact percentage okay once they use their vip card a certain amount of time they become a permanent fixture on the counselor's calendar um for her to be able to check in with them so that way they don't have to keep flashing the cards that's why i don't know an exact percentage and do you have a social worker at the school we have a district-wide social worker right that's it she comes to your school she does she comes to our school well she

062comes to our school at least once per week but she's also available whenever we call okay so is that implemented in your school improvement plan i didn't see where it mentions social worker yes ma'am it's i know what so these are just we have a large school improvement plan and these are just the three top priorities ms hudson just wanted to comment i'm so happy sometimes things come back around to see the positive character traits each month things like that uh reinforcing pbis i'm glad to see such things as that it's not all abc 123 in schools and i appreciate you focusing on other things the total child i told a parent um recently that we are not only in the business of teaching the academics we are also in the business of teaching them

063to be good students and good human beings any other questions thank you so much for your presentation dr carter i just want to say thank you to dr murray for your leadership good morning board members dr carter um i'm grateful for the opportunity to be up here to present south my school improvement plan to you um just like every other school our teachers are working really hard for our kids and in tough times they're doing a lot of amazing things and hopefully the things that we've addressed here on our school improvement plan are going to be things that help us to continue to grow as a school um if you'll look at the an analysis of the data um one thing that you will see is that you know prior to coding we were on

064only an improvement trajectory and um we really felt like that going into the 2020 year that we were on the verge of really doing some really good things with our data um coming from the state our benchmarks were looking really good we were really pleased with that and then um and then covet hit and you know the rest is where we're at now um in looking at if you look at the plan um a little bit more as we go through you'll notice the school improvement team members um i do have um a k2 rep a three five rep a ec rep my teacher assistant an enhancement teacher representative and two parents along with my school counselor and instructional coach and um you know we meet uh consistently to discuss items on the school improvement

065plan to um and this is these are the things that we met with if you'll look at our next slide which is our on priority indicators we begin the priority indicators the things that we determined were our top three goals that we were going to really really focus on for student achievement and if you'll look at the first one all teachers will use assessment data and match instruction and supports the individual student needs one of the things we realize coming into the um into the school year is that we knew that especially coming back from covet that we were going to have students spread out more on the spectrum of academic and um achievement and personal and emotional achievement than they ever had been before simply because of when we were um when we were

066remote some students had access some students didn't have access some students participated more some students participated less so we knew that coming into it that we wanted to have some um some deficiencies and some things we needed to look at so we really decided to continue to focus on data um and while we didn't have the state of that state data available from the from 2020 and 21 we have a lot of student data that's available our teachers do a good job of creating um of creating data charts and using in-house data from their own assessments uh we also have status sources we have eye station as ms murray mentioned in her report um you know we've got the i've got the benchmarks that we're now beginning to discuss the data on the check-ins all

067of those things and and looking at that along with our data trackers and our other assessment data we have one tool this year that is from equip where we can give pre-assessments and what that's going to do is going to help us identify any unfinished learning or gaps that students might have so for example if you're in a fourth grade class reading class and or math class and they take the uh math pre-assessment it will help identify deficiencies that they have coming into that particular skill and then the teachers can go back and work in their small groups in one-on-one settings or in small group settings to help meet those needs or we can provide other supports as neat as as appropriate to the kid so that allows us to differentiate and meet kids where

068they're at because one of the things that we focus on is is growth we want to grow the child and we realize that we've got to work hard to do that and encourage our children to do that so like i said information from data analysis is used to modify and plan instruction to develop future assessments to discuss instructional strategies and assign interventions to meet their needs another strategy that we have um and all of this comes from meeting in our plc's our plc's our plc's meet once a week with myself and instructional coach and in these meetings we discuss instructional data we describe we discuss data we discuss what we're going to do to intervene on the behalf of the kids what interventions are appropriate um and we also talk about their social and emotional

069needs as well and and we try to reach out to the whole child and and determine you know the needs there and and act on them appropriately if you flip over to the next page um our second indicator the school implements a peer instructional system that allows teachers to deliver evidence-based instruction aligned with the individual needs of students again if you'll see the common focus on these goals is individual needs of the students because all students are different and because all students have their own needs so some of the things that we're doing the strategies for youth and are we're using fundations as a core instructional strategy because phonics is the key to learning and reading um and we're also using hegerty to help with phonemic awareness um the teachers again meet with the instructional

070coach and i to analyze assessment data and i've mentioned that before and then we determine what research-based strategies are going to be used um we're doing our monthly progress monitoring of students on ice station and with dibbles so again um the way we have it set up at south is on the the first day of the month um we give our our reading assessment and dibbles the second day of the month the teachers are expected to do the math component the third day of the month is the um is the time for any makeups that need to be and now we've got that data and the kids can take off and we can use that data and plan an instruction and meeting um we do um a lot of small a lot of small group

071instruction um in terms of moving kids around putting kids together based on what they need um you know um instructionally and working in small groups we do that through guided reading groups and we do it through guided math um when necessary um students are identified and um and referred to the mtss team following the guidelines that we have set of trying core interventions first and then small you know modifying instruction and then if that's not working we're referring them to the team um and our mtss group as well has met with the regional consultant um for uh two times for the three hour sessions if you look at the next page um 4.06 that's where we're looking at students emotional states um we are focusing on morning meetings and we're focusing on the um on

072the sale strategies um to look at um trying to define developmentally appropriate social emotional learning strategies for our students we want to apply attitudes to develop skills as empathy for others maintaining healthy relationships and making responsible and caring decisions and that's been a challenge for us i'm just going to be honest that's been a challenge for us because when the kids came back to school and we had them all in the building we are finding that there are so many children that have missed out on the social interaction piece and they have to be retrained and and we have to model appropriate expectations and so we spend time in the mornings talking about those expectations our morning meetings are really good avenues for communication and working on social skills and we and our teachers collaborate

073with our school counselor ms lee to um develop lessons and strategies for those morning meetings to have those discussions um again we are participating in district and school-based seo professional development and so that we can apply the things that we learn in the morning meetings our teachers and staff make referrals to the school counselor and mtss team as appropriate for academic behavior and social emotional needs and students receive supplemental support from the school counselor in addition to her whole group classroom activities uh she has structured time during the day that she can meet with certain identified children to have certain social emotional needs and um and as well she has a time where she students have access to her where they can they can ask to see the counselor or you know make an appointment

074and have those needs shared too um our pbis program um we're starting ours back up as well trying to get things rolling with that again because we've seen that um that we have noticed that positive behaviors um doing that program is really effective and successful uh and we're also um starting our student of the week program as well looking at additional information um our targeted remediation and acceleration which is our next time as part of the master schedule and utilize every day so our day starts off with our morning meeting and then we go into nest time and nest time is where we do our before we do our small group pull outs for um for um our interventions for our lli groups and our corrective reading groups um we're going to have curriculum nights

075that we're scheduling we're we've we have not set a specific deadline for our november nights but we're still in the planning stages of getting those planned and we're definitely going to have um a science night in um april 2022 um we were very fortunate enough to um receive a duke science night again so we're going to have that activity in the spring when that is ready and that's something that our students and our families really enjoy and and we're hoping that our math our reading and math groups will be interactive and hands-on you know depending on how we are able to function and format it because of covid we're going to make sure we're doing the right thing there um our corrective reading and ll groups are in place for fourth and fifth grade students

076um you know um using lli um for additional tutoring we get our enhancement teachers to come in we have a volunteer that's getting ready to start to get that taken care of and then our staff is participating in um our dpi um supported mtss training our teachers have done the eureka quip pre-assessment training which was a big important piece because it allowed them to is allowing them to use the um the system [Music] more efficiently and effectively and then at the bottom our teachers do have access to p-tech hegerty fontes and finale literacy and other training supports at their request so we're trying to make things available for them um that's provided by the district and do it in a way that they can get what they need when they need it any questions yes

077ma'am uh could you explain to me a little bit more um first thank you for all that you did uh about your morning meetings what time does that start does that involve all the teachers or who's involved okay that takes place in homerooms okay in the home rooms and each teacher does the morning meeting with their homeroom class and that involves them that's that involves them and that's where they have their social emotional piece that they're talking about and our teachers do different grade levels do different activities based on the developmental needs of the children and you know um and i i can go into a third grade class and they may be socially distanced but maybe you know maybe sitting non-traditionally at an appropriate distance and um talking about you know on monday they'll

078eventually they'll talk about the things that they did over the weekend um and and what it does it allows the teacher to get to know the child better and then when they're talking about lessons and instruction in class she can pull the things that they've talked about which gives the kids a connection to instruction and and our staff members really do a good job of that morning was mine thomas grant that slow for kobe everyone was working so hard and actually in the district we talked about looking forward to the end of school results for now uh the year that covent struck because we were we were right there and uh it certainly has put a damper on what we had thank you again for your leadership as well and just a reminder that uh

079you do not approve school improvement plans until after you've reviewed the closed session school safety plans in closed session and you'll do that today and then at the end of november when you have the last two schools that present to you then you'll vote policy transition dr carter yes um as we continue with the um the updates of school uh current policies and and amending them based upon the uh north carolina school board association you can see that you have several of the 2000 policies that deal a lot with boards member and board operations that you have before you and i would as you have the correlation tables as well you can see that i have notes on several of these but i would like to recommend that these policies go into first read you've

080heard the superintendent's recommendation do i have a motion as black will make some motion is there a second battle second promotion is there any discussion or comments yeah it's inappropriate uh since we come back for the second reading that's when we adopt but i have some comments about the correlation table on a few pages okay is that appropriate in there yeah okay the first comment i'll make is on page three down at uh where it's 205 with elections of offices etc at the bottom portion down there where it says this policy may be modified to establish limits for successive terms we'll discuss that in the past but we've never ever done that so i just wanted to point that out that you do have the option to do that if you're so too the second

081comment i make is on page five uh let me get to it about emergency meetings i'm a little confused about this because the way it reads now the current process allows two members to force the chair or vice chair if the kid refuses to call the emergency meetings and the school board says association said we do not recommend that but what bothers me about that is down in the bottom it says that the school board policy does not authorize your positive our policy now does not authorize the superintendent to call in the emergency meeting so my question is who can call an emergency meeting if two people can't call it on the void who can maybe somebody can help me with that and i'm on page five and the reason i bring that up there

082may be a concern that i the way i look at it is if board member a has a concern for a need for emergency me to me the board should decide whether it's emergency not one or two people i just need a little help with that so they're not very definitive in this one is that confusing yes it is uh dr carter and i agree because i had these highlighted in here as well for that purpose um but from my understanding in reading this and the reason i did highlight those is because it's basically saying that you're doing the opposite of what this says and so it just needs to determine which you want do you want to have it both ways or would you rather keep it the way it is or would you

083rather would you rather currently i can call an emergency meeting and their policy does not have that in it is my understanding um but it doesn't have that you can have two members call emergency meeting so it really just depends on the board what you would prefer and something to discuss because it is the reason i bring it up what is an emergency uh it might be an emergency on your part it might not be one whole minor and that's the thing i'm looking at we as a board [Music] i think we should not necessarily keep it as it is but we need to refine what we're doing because it's a little vague right now now we've had emergency meetings in the past and they were legitimate reasons for the emergency meeting and i think

084we need to be on the same path when we you know have an emergency here is that something you would want to discuss maybe in a work session yeah because i don't want us to come back next month at second rate or the next meeting second reading to say you know this is what we want you know that goal right i agree with needing more detail but i also believe that if dr carter i think we need to include that i mean she will have information that comes down the pipe that we may not be aware of um so i think that the superintendent if she finds that it's an emergency to run this system into i haven't been in but one emergency meeting and i think that was definitely needed so i think we

085need to keep that about the superintendent to pause and i agree with mr battle needs to be more defined dr carter if if he can turn to policy just so you'll know after after this you'll know exactly the section that it's looking at it's just one small little paragraph right page two an emergency meeting may be called this is the draft that can be altered in any way an emergency meeting may be called in order to address generally unexpected circumstances that require immediate consideration of the board the chairperson or the vice chair if the chairperson is unable to act or the superintendent should call an emergency meeting when it's determined that the meeting is necessary and cannot be delayed until 48 hours notice is provided for special meetings uh described below so basically the way

086the draft policy is is the chair or the vice chair the chair cannot call it or myself that's the way it's currently the draft reads and you can alter that to add the two people um i don't think it's something we need to take a look at all right the last one i had is on page seven it talks about uh public comments this is something i brought up before right we need to uh refine what we do uh it's 15 minutes enough [Music] this talks about where they don't have to give their address where they live i don't know how important that is but um as i told you before like i've seen people go over the time limit i've seen school boards that have a clock when the clock ticks down they tell

087them your time is running out uh i think we need to kind of refine that because when it says about if you're speaking for eight people what's different between seven people or six people or eight people or nine people we need to so it won't be redundant in what they're saying if they have a spokesman so uh i ask that we look at that in the work session hopefully that we can kind of refine our public comments so people will know what is expected of them when they come to speaking and the other piece is i would not like to see us just have public comments for just one meet very much should be open to both uh because don't penalize the person have to wait till the next month to speak so that's the

088part that i had about this one [Applause] other than that that's all i have for these uh this correlation right here don't don't we need to define these things before uh we vote them into policy that's what you don't bring in we need to have a work session if we're getting ready to adopt these you know i think it needs to be the reason i'm saying it is to get the exact wording that's going to satisfy everybody i don't know whether we can do it that quickly that's why i'm bringing this up now because our policy has been in the past we get these policies first reading and then the second that's the second reason and then boom you adopt it and then you got it you see so you don't have a whole lot

089of time in between that's not gonna hurt can we pull those two yes and can i share a little bit too sure kind of add to what mr battle said uh just so that everybody's looking at the same thing if you'll turn to page on coffee 2310 on page two and see it uh it's where it's been underlined and starred that um that again the three minutes but the very first under public comments the very first um sentence says this draft still says that the first part of each so they kept the each but they were just saying in the correlation table that some districts have just one but i agree that is very important to keep you know my suggestion would be certainly keep it as every uh meeting and then you've got the

090three minutes so it goes in detail so it's it's really correlated to what you currently have so it's really if you want to change it but then again um what mr bowell said to make sure that their clarification on how long they you know a person speaks it would be something to definitely uh hone in on and raise that very good you can't have some latitude i understand that but uh i've seen people go less than three minutes i've seen people go more than three minutes you know we haven't said hey you gotta set shut up you know but we just need to be consistent in what we do right so we can pull these two policies out and then discuss them in our january work session uh you can do that or if you

091want to keep them i mean i either waste whatever the voice of chooses but we can keep them as first draft to get more feedback and to discuss it at the next meeting for your final vote okay let's let's plan on doing that then those are the ones i had okay and that was policy 2 000 and 20 i mean uh 2300 and 23 10. okay any other questions or comments [Applause] if not do i have a motion to place these on the table except for 23 123 10. oh yeah they need to be taken they're still taken care of they're still coming for first rate second promotion any comments or discussion all in favor indicate by raising your hand supposedly motion carries unanimously [Applause] [Music] dr carter number four as for funds um yes

092um that is on the agenda um i know that uh you know there's been a lot of discussion regarding escrow funds and the use and so many districts are doing it so differently because there are different needs within the district and um it's on the agenda we had a request for mr bowell i'm just going to uh to put it on the agenda so if i may uh reverse this to to mri thank you the reason i brought this up like dr carlos said a lot of school systems are doing a lot of different things in terms of sf and how they're being used and what prompted me was alamance burlington they uh they looked at their extra funds for air quality and they made an appropriation of 10 million dollars out of that pot

093of money and uh what they are planning is to give christmas bonuses to their employees now uh the different ways that you can use that money so that was the reason i asked dr carla the number of employees that we have currently we have 301 full time 61 part time and uh in talking with mr terrell it's roughly 950 or 60 000 that has not been used uh for the air quality you remember back when we had braden to do uh in the process of doing the study to see what we need well that has not been completed yet but that's the reason i came up with the proposal if it's not going to be used that way then i made a proposal to do christmas bonus money for staff and here's what i came

094up with you can jot this down uh the proposal i made was for 301 full-time employees to receive bonus pay of two thousand dollars uh 61 part-time i made a proposal for 1 000 so if you add all that together to come to 663 000 which would still leave you roughly 300 000 in air quality funds from sf funds now who exactly how you can get use that money may not all be eligible from essa funds remember back in the past we've always well it's not always so several years reviews local funds for christmas bonus so it could be a combination of but i'm just putting it out on the table and talking with dr carter uh i wanted to get it out there because it would be next month if we approve it so

095we still have another meeting which is uh november 22nd and that will give us time to make sure how the funds can be used who qualifies for it etc that was my rationale for getting those figures together um a question was about yes did alamance use any of the money to increase their supplements or that was for christmas bonus they just used it for christmas months 10 million and it's based upon your school system how large you are number students you've got etc that's the amount of money you got and we got close to a million dollars the air quality um money so be that would be enough left over i can't say yeah exactly what we're supposed to do with that for they're saying air quality i'll be very thank you visitor okay now

096sir yes when we got the esser funds uh we did the budget for those and we brought it to the board that we thought it was be wise at the time to do a needs assessment which meant that we signed a contract and uh kevin lynn from brady came and answered questions and presented and those types of things with brady to go into each of our schools and do a complete needs assessment on every bid and every part of the hbac and then we make recommendations whether we need to replace upgrade or repair now when that contract was signed it said it should be completed by december 1. okay now all the physical part of being on campus that has been completed and they're in the process of generating the reports we've seen one report

097uh as an overview template of mr hatchet and myself and they are completing the other so i don't know what it looks like as far as what their recommendations were so i think in the contract we put a statement that couldn't exceed 48 000 somewhere in that ballpark figure it was less than 50 that this needs assessment could not uh exceed that and then going through the budget of esser funds we allocated 950 000 just for hbac now there's all all other categories like the chromebooks that we're gonna purchase this supplements for teachers that are in there uh summer schools in there we did fund several positions but we did currently in there allocate uh that money for that purpose right now so what will have to happen is that we can amend the budget

098at any time we do need to do some additional work within there from the budget side but we can amend it to see if that is an allowable uh expenditure because part of it is that you have to say what you're going to do where you're going to spend it from you can move it in all those different categories and then the bottom line is how you're going to measure what you did with it so i don't mind reaching out you know the alamance and seeing what what they did with that process but that's kind of the process where we are with the esser funds as far as hdac we don't have any idea how much cost is going to be incurred or recommended no sorry and it was going to be in the contract

099it was going to be like a priority list that we would say you know what we could afford but long term even after the extra monies ran out it would give us a platform to say this is our needs assessment as we do capital projects as we move forward outside of the escrow funds right because we have no clue what the outcome will be from the needs assessment but we did know that that would help create our 10-year long-range plan and priority would be the first and then go from that but anytime there's a facility needs assessment you know that's part of long-range plans or so that's that's what will happen and i just want to say i think it's good that anytime we can do something for our staff and our uh teachers is

100good but i would hope that would be cautious when we think about uh giving this out in a lump sum or have now and have been or since we don't know what the cost would be you said we've done the first part of brady coming in is that what you said yes ma'am uh the yes the uh board signed a contract but we presented a contract about them coming in and doing a needs assessment on all six of the schools so they have done that they have completed the physical part where they went through every all the systems took pictures and now they're writing the reports that then will be presented to the school board about this is what their findings are for each of the individual schools they started off with and gave a

101simple report just as an overview as they moved through some other schools that are a little bit more complex than some so they're getting that information together uh and again the deadline in the contract was by december one that they would have all the reports i know you said that it needed to be some work on that can any of the actual funds be used for that was that included when they did the long-range plan i'll have to see about that particular i know we did partly nancy other than the new two-story structure was included but i can follow up on that gym specifically in summary i'm aware of all that i'm just giving you my opinion too if the funds are all available that we can do it can't do it we can't do

102it but i did not want to see the funds not being used and by that before coming in this early december we still have time to do that to make priorities on what we had to do and uh because if school agent system can do it school b can do it uh and uh i think more or less that would be a reward for our staff but that will be dictated by the report that it comes back i just want to give you something to think about so we won't know until december 1st because i think it's an excellent plan to reward our staff um retention because some districts are going as high as four and five thousand dollars so uh it does you know right now yeah able to right yeah [Music] they will

103they will give us a report on each school now i don't know if that's going to include an extensive list of this is what we're recommending by school and how much money it's going to cost you know us to fix all the schools but they're giving us you know an extensive view on our hvac equipment currently and then i think that that list of what we can do that's going to come you know to the school board about you know uh what money we have allocating what we're going to fix based on their their priority versus them giving us a list and saying you know here's a list of let's go throw out a number you know 10 million dollars that we needed to fix it uh i think it's going to be a more

104of a descriptive report about this is what we saw when we went into your schools this is uh some commonalities this is some things that we think you might be able to do you know right now these are some things that might be long term but the whole goal was to get a good base on the needs assistance assessment as we move forward that we could use that when we start prioritizing other funds as well i just wanted to hear the time frame because this will be ready the 1st of december your board meeting is on december the 13th payroll works on especially since december paid role is early because of the holidays they're working on december payroll the end of november and miss underwood's shaking their head you may know the date without me

105asking miss gaspin is the deadline for december do you know i'm telling you so the december payroll is going to process we're processing it the payroll is the 18th we have to order money by that monday which is the meeting for december but it has to be prepared before then so um i it for the achs to go out home waiting till that first december it's it's very difficult to process it just want to put that out there so we'll be able to get the report before december the first or before our next board meeting so that we could have that information if we could if they have the report ready and they can do that so that we could be able to make decisions um because it's always nice to give a bonus i

106could check that okay because i noticed that it's november 22nd that's your next meeting and again i don't know if they're going to you know going back to what dr carter alluded to i don't know if they're going to have a list and say here's how much total versus this is what we saw and this is where we think we need to go and maybe not have placed out that to do all this is going to cost whatever x amount of dollars who would price it out then if they just give you a listing then who would go back and price it out yeah when you bid it out okay let's go but even so if we cannot do it by december if we can still do it it would be nice for the spring

107break or whatever just to know that we'll be able to do it so we're going to wait until the next meeting to further discuss this you couldn't do nothing until then based on what he can receive okay and if you can't do it then you can't do it then but we'll see what happens all right mr trail we'll check on that poison and uh we can bring it back uh the next item is the centrist center census redistricting information dr carter yes um we have um two two packets in front of you one has um has voc at the top that what you just requested about commissioners that stay together and then what you have in the paperclip packet came from the piedmont triad regional consultants for our council that has um that met with

108you at the last meeting last friday and um it has four charts on it one is the current districts um and the second one is uh just a little bit more defined but what you really need to be honest is version one and version two version one and version two are the uh proposals version one is the proposal that was brought to you by the piedmont triad regional council at the last special called meeting and then you requested that could you look at districts three and four and increase the percentage of minorities and so they went back in and worked on that and uh created version two and you can see that they did increase it and there was a uh 52.8 percent and a in increase in uh district three and then district four

109went from 51 to 51.8 so um they are um on standby that we can call and they can join us if you say choose so dr carter even even with version one and version two um it's still a very little bit of difference in version two from what they proposed from version one right it just increases the minority percentage uh by about one percent and uh right in um district three and then by eight tenths of a percent in uh district four but it does increase them so the version two may speak the version two has 52.8 percent and in version one it had fifty point one percent so it does give a version two does show an increasing right and three and four right in three and four but now with that being said

110it you know the numbers were taken from some place meant uh may i speak yes uh you can see that district two had uh four percent taken away with minority and then uh district four had eight tenths taken away so so with version two is that four point one percentage they're still in the variance that we are um if you look at one and two you lose in one gain and another more or less between three and four uh for example the biggest jump i see is in district three right right right but in district four you only gain in what eight tenths eighty-tenths that's it and i don't see that it's one of the other in terms of how you look at it uh i mean and in district two you're losing oh yeah

111you know the way it's drawn four percent and i guess if they move the lines another place it's going to shift that right either way [Music] well at least conversion two it does show that they did do the increase in them um with the minority population there so they did go back and increase their variation uh getting it closer to the five percent as opposed to version one only had 3.7 variation so they did try to get it closer to that so i like the version too because it did increase it did get closer to the five percent variation carter and just a reminder um as they mentioned last time uh they did not need to make a lot of changes just for the public not a lot of changes uh from the current lines

112so there's not a drastic change either way but it does increase the minority in version two and version one is in compliance so i think whichever route you go with i think would be definitely supported with meeting the guidelines of the law that's one of the reasons that version one is just it's not a lot of changes and you think about your voters you know i've worked in polls before and they've come to the wrong place because lines were changed and stuff that's why carter gonna i'm gonna divert it to board discussion because i think they're so very similar it just depends on [Applause] well this is not that much change in the version two does get you close with the variation there so as he said it wasn't it's not a bit drastic so

113but it does get closer to the five percent so do we recommend or or what do we do you know i i hate to see the percentage of minorities cut as as it is and some of the others especially you know in district 2. so i mean that [Music] there's a different way to look at numbers the 3.7 and the 4.1 that's only four tenths and we're still within the five but the one that jumps out of me is district 3 when you have a difference of 50.1 and then 52.8 and of course the numbers have to affect district one two and five there's no way around that that's how you got the number increased when you took them out i'm saying that but i'm i'm just saying i i know what you're saying my

114concern like i said was that the effect it had on district two dropping the minority uh percent minorities four percent that's true but it's not going to make a difference in the voting uh for example uh the minorities are not going to change the vote in district 2. they're not going to change the vote in district 1. they're not going to change the vote in district 5. the difference is in 3 and 4. uh and looking at one and two i would uh let's see i would have to go to two [Music] based on majority proposal if not all in favor of version one diversion one district president opposed the same motion carries five to two okay thank you let me ask a question uh when we first started talking about november 15th was the

115deadline is that correct ah it was a date in november i'm not sure what it was or something for whatever 15. someone said the 17th to get all this dr carter updates i just wanted to say thank you to those who came out to the open house of phase one of the bartlett high school yesterday and it was attended by over community members and i just wanted to thank everyone the central office staff and everyone and the board members and everyone that came out and helped guide tours check people in planned uh put out open house funds it was just a lot of planning went into it a lot of staff came in and helped out as well and i just wanted to thank thank you to the community that came out too lots of

116positive um lots of positive comments were heard throughout the day with um with the community and a lot and it was really nice to see a lot of our retiree teachers that came out and this was saying things like i wish we had this when i called here and it's about time and you know this is well needed retired teachers who came and said oh i wish i could have had this win that's all i have okay i need a motion this is casual account for public education go into closed session for the purpose of considering a personnel action that involves an officer or employee of this board nc general statute 143-318-1186 and for the purpose of discussing information that is privileged confidential or not a public record nc general statute 143 318-1181 and to

117confer with the attorney do i have a motion has barely made the motion is there a second okay just about a second all in favor raise your hand we will go in we'll take a ten minute break and then we'll go