BOE Regular recurrent meeting

001[Applause] so um i'd like to call this meeting in the castle county board of education door dr carter please pause for a moment of silence thank you please stand for the pledge of [Music] allegiance under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you we have three sets of minutes to be approved the regular april 26 2021 meeting the budget work session may the third and the joint meeting with the capitol county commissioners on may the third do i have a motion so move mr battle has made the motion second miss baker i mean uh ms garland is there any discussion i got one mr battle on the regular minutes april 26 on the last page item number 10. um about policy 605 uh in addition to that my understanding was dr carter made

002the statement that she was going to bring it back to us rather than being in the work session correct we're working on it now okay yes that's what i have okay any other questions or comments if not all in favor raise your hand close the same unanimously but uh let's see dr carter announcements approval of the agenda i have no changes no changes to the agenda i have a motion to approve the agenda this has made the motion is there a second mrs garland makes a second is there any discussion if not all in favor raise your hand oppose the same motion carries unanimously now announcements of dr carter yes i have a few announcements um the first is congratulations to bartley etsy senior high school junior quavione muldrow he received a full tuition scholarship

003to attend governor's school west at high point university this summer in the area of social science ms stark and his counselor shared that quavion post high school plans are to attend college and major in music education and minor in constitutional law he plans to take college transfer courses during his senior year so again congratulations to quite beyond muldrug a junior at bartley nc senior high school the uh another thing i would like to share is that we have our may issue of uh castle county schools update that's been printed and sent out and it's posted on our website so i hope if you have not seen it that you'll take a look at it for several updates also congratulations to the bartley nc senior high school softball team they are the 2021 mid-state 2a conference

004champions with a record of eight to zero we are proud of our lady buck so again congratulations to the softball team and then last uh but certainly not least is the castle county schools student art show in partnership with the castle county arts council is underway and you can stop by the coast square in yanceyville and see the student artwork and it is on display now through may 21st so i hope you'll have a chance to stop in there and see all the talent of our students from casual county schools that's all the updates ms kimmer is there any public comments not anything okay dr carter reports and updates we have a continuation of uh updates and reports from our directors and our beginning print beginning with our principals as well today and so um

005the the last director that has not presented to the board is miss means our director of child nutrition and then following this means we will have three of our six principals presenting today just giving a brief update and then the other three will follow at the next fourth meeting and the three principals today are dr murray ms gant and mr stux so uh with that i'd like to turn it over to miss vims to give a brief update of our child nutrition program thank you good morning everyone good morning morning i have to keep this on thomas yes can you hear me okay she's gonna keep it on i'm okay like this yes okay uh well greetings from child nutrition program it's hard for me to talk through the math i'm so sorry i hope

006you're okay yes okay i've had shots okay um uh my apologies for just now being able to come and be with you and present my program my mother has been under the weather and i appreciate the patience and understanding with that um and so we're back at it and we've been trying to run things from the distance but everything has been running pretty smoothly just to tell you a bit about the program i've been with the program now for almost 18 years it's been a fast 18 years and here in the school system for 27 as of september this coming september our program of course you know focuses on feeding our students as well as going copic we've been feeding the community we operate the national school lunch program the school breakfast program summer feeding

007um as well as seeming summer feeding which helps with feeding the community during regular times during the summer months um and doing breaks and things like that but during kobe we've been doing um summer feeding this whole entire year which is a waiver we were able to have to feed all the students and community children 18 and under free our program employs six managers 22 cn assistants one warehouse person and one central law supports that person we work as a team we have many paths to wear each day we have to focus on many prep but also menu analysis um food safety also following all the dpi and usda regulations and guidelines that determine our budget our decisions in terms of the menu um our day-to-day operations in terms of record keeping which is extensive

008because so many watchful eyes are helping us to run our program because these are federal dollars we are revenue-based which means that we have to generate funds based upon our program participation so the operation of our program is depending upon how many meals we serve per day in terms of reimbursement to actually support different parts of our budget that requires of course majority being food and labor which is about 40 and typical circumstances about 40 to 45 of our budget goes toward um food and labor 40 for food 40 for labor that's ideal um during these times of code that has to be skewed a bit because we have less participation which of course affects revenue our budget also includes repairs for our equipment replacement of our equipment all of our salaries um indirect costs

009and of course direct costs that we see in terms of you know supplies computer equipment anything that supports our program um the program runs based upon a fund balance no more than three months for you know fund valves cannot be beyond three months typically we're at two months no less than one month because that's ideal that you would have at least enough uh and fund balance to operate this program without having to have assistance from the lea this particular year some of the challenges we've had of course has been participation because we have less students who are in school and available to um partake or be a part of our program every day and breakfast and lunch we do do a service at the same time for breakfast and lunch is grab and go curbside

010we're also now in school and serving those students in schools and sending food home for days and night in remote learning uh the program typically uh would be running at a much greater capacity than it is now but with being a rural county there are some difficulties of course of getting people to the meals and the millston students but in the in the spring of last year we were able to use yellow buses and we were able to get food out into the community also some this fall use the yellow buses with the support of that budget but based upon you know conditions being back in as in-person learning mostly doing now feeding from deliveries to the classrooms um our goals for the program always include increasing participation menu development menu analysis special dietary accommodating

011special dietary needs of our students and work with the nurses and with pediatricians and you know student support from other areas to make sure that we are meeting the needs of those students who do have special dietary needs uh we provide menu information analysis information in terms of carb counts calories sodium levels and those things as well um record keeping as i said is a really big part we have another review coming up probably in the next year and a half two years that's every five years but covet has has um affected that schedule for the upcoming year because we're operating differently due to those emergency feeding um situations and so forth but that review that we have every five years it's a complete thorough investigation of how our program performs uh in terms of

012contracts which is what we're working on right now as well because we have to maintain all contracts purchasing which is purchasing for food for milk for special supplies for chemicals um for pest control um you know required for our program to operate in a proficient uh efficient way and to make sure we're safe and what we're doing um those contracts have to be renewed each year or we bid and that comes to you as a board as well so that you can see that as a working process and you will do that as a renewal or as a new this particular year will be a new year because we can only do a renewal of four years so you have the original year plus a renewal of four years but last year because of coving

013we were able to do a fifth year renewal so this year puts us into a new cycle of being on a new bed and that will be coming before you in the next month because tomorrow we open those bids virtually um purchasing contracts again depend upon you know finding the best prices that helps our program to be the most efficient so we do competitive fitting we put it out to have uh multiple different vendors supplies with quotes of as based upon estimated usage in our program so i give them all the numbers that will let them see a year in a glance of how much particular product we would use and then they look at the pricing and give us a estimated cost of that and of course it varies based upon participation how much

014product you will buy but we are part of the procurement alliance with the state uh in terms of dpi and nutrition directors across the state it's about 100 counties that are part of that alliance and that helps us to have a better um purchasing base a larger so we're able to put our numbers together and we get better pricing because we're working together versus individual and when i first came we're doing individual building and pricing is not as great as it is now we really appreciate being able to be a part of that alliance because it gives us you know a bit of a bigger voice as a unit um and we bid out to different vendors for each category so each category will be sent to at least two vendors three vendors to get

015some competition going to see if we get the best prices and the best service and we put special conditions and all the clauses in place so that we can get the best possible contracts to do the work for the school system any questions or anything particular address for you or answer or clear up mr battle will we be doing summer feeding yes sir that's what puzzles me i know we've been doing it but i read this past week that the character of paris is going to be feeding the children too are you aware that different agencies have different parts of funding and it does interfere with participation but yet we all if they're not doing the same program that we're doing it doesn't affect what we're you know it affects participation but yeah we're still

016out there you know uh supplying the meals as well right but that's what i don't understand to me it seems like a lack of coordination because it's easy to say we'll be feeding the children but how are you going to feed the children everybody can't get to every place you know to you know get your meals a kid doesn't need two lunches you know that day but i thought that was interesting because i see some other groups that are feeding too at different times uh how how would our summer feed be because would it be like we did when we were doing virtual as a different spot so the plan would be to do the summer feeding as we've done it okay with the apartment complexes and all those cluster groups okay so um because

017we're not able to go door-to-door where some other agencies can do different types of delivery our budget than the quarters to go like door to delivery so we find areas in the county where there are clusters of children that qualify and it's still based upon the percentage of free and reduced children in the area so the higher need areas based upon income um of course that's another part of our program is eligibility so we have that guideline to always keep in mind as well is that when we go into certain areas we have to have it qualified as being a needy area in order to serve those children those children free in that area so normally typically we do the apartment complexes here in town we do suburban um on 86 which is a trailer

018apartment a trailer complex we do um cemetery street but we we try to find the areas where there are clusters of students for children because at that point they're just children in community they could be from outside the community and stay with a grandparent as long as they're 18 and under okay and so we deliver just lunch because you know you're going out with the bus for that warehouse is our driver to those community locations during the summer time because he's already part of our budget okay one follow-up yes sir aren't we feeding all kids free yes sir okay so the free and reduced doesn't matter doesn't it it does matter uh because of the other benefits that actually tap into our you know criteria of freedom reducing so you have um department of social

019services department health and human services it will realize as well as testing and different people utilize our free review status in different ways okay so um you may have heard of pedt in the news recently which is a pandemic excuse me electronic benefits uh card that they're getting and households get x number of dollars based upon the number of things a student is actually virtual or uh in person so anytime they're virtual they're getting a certain benefit versus when you're in person so for the months of august through march which um well through february it's all virtual that part they'll get a certain benefit based upon if they are in the category of free or reduced and they can be in that category if they are already receiving dss food stamps or snap um and

020they're directly certified to be a part of our free introduced numbers and well free numbers if they're already receiving food assistance from dss and pedt came for the department of health and human services was a different part of money but yet they still we have to upload the information through testing with our department here that information is then compiled or combined with dhhs and then they send our notification to the households to say you're receiving additional benefits if you're already on you know food assistance benefits or you're receiving benefits for the first time we're sending you a brand new card so either that money is added to the car if you're already receiving benefits or you're getting a brand new car and any student who's at a cdp school which you know is out for

021elementary schools um automatically no matter income for that household they automatically get that benefit card and it's issued at different points during the year based upon the hhs and not our school system but yet they use that data so that's why it's important that my household will do a free infused application because it puts them in that pot to receive that information and receive that benefit so we still did applications this school year the waiver that we have in place for um summer feeding program as an emergency assistance program for feeding doing covet automatically feeds any child 18 under free but that's still different than that's not usda reimbursement it comes back to cover the cost of our costs of actually feeding those students uh from our program and then that korean reduce also will

022help students in other ways we see benefits in other pots or areas that are available to them as a household two questions yes um approximately how many students are we serving now compared to pre-covered pre-code okay so to 6-700 a day is how we're doing now um in a normal condition of pre-covert um 7 000 or more a week if you look at it that way so when we were in coven in the spring when we were actually um doing cars and buses and everything out into the community because we had lots of legs to get out into the community thirteen fourteen hundred so it you know it's about availability and access um but normally seven thousand a week we would do um in a non-coding situation but the thing is with doing coping we're

023doing more breakfast and you know than we would normally do because we're automatically giving we were doing grab and go in community those programs we were automatically giving them a breakfast and we gave them a lunch and we had a waiver to do that because normally you can't do that you have to the student has to be in front of you and you don't your parent can't pick up a teacher can't pick up if the student has to consume the food in front of you as well so they have to when we do summer feeding in normal conditions before covet we have to set up a mock little eating site so we take out canopy tarp chairs because the students can't take the food back into the house or the apartment that's just a regulation

024of usda and summer feeding it seems really strict but it's not our rule it's a rule that comes from the powers that be in terms of the funding pot and make sure the food is actually digging into the bellies of the children and not walking some other direction now with this way we're doing emergency feeding we have the freedom or the um the relaxed rule of being able to say here's if you need 10 meals because you know 10 children you're 10 meals and you get them to the children so that's different too than say other programs who won't have the dietary restrictions that we have and we'll have the the feeding stipulations that we have so the rules kind of tie our hands differently and so sometimes the services that one program may have

025is a little bit you know more relaxed than the other not in a bad way just they don't have this list of check boxes that we have to look at when we do feeding so sometimes those restrictions are saying um what is the child's name what school do they attend that we are required to do an accountability um procedure that we have to submit to dpi um that can be a deterrent too in terms of who wants to partake in the meal because they feel like you're asking a lot of questions but we're required to ask those questions because i have to submit an accountability piece to make sure that the food is actually going to children and not adults because we have had adults who do show up of course at science and we

026have to remind them that this food is you can purchase a meal but we can't give you meals for for for people who are over 18. so that others let me just say too in the spring the numbers were um higher as well because there was not an accountability piece being forced as much as it is now it was because it was such an emergency situation and how will the uh summer feeding program deal with the fact that we've got two summer sessions of school we'll operate a summer program this summer we operate this versus summer feeding i know these just different types of people are selling here there's the different funding heights of funding sources uh a bit of difference in rules as well but we'll operate a program a feeding program at each

027school site that's operating a summer program and then we'll branch out from with your permission of course um from that feeding site and try to find clusters in the community as well okay so if we are able to just to afford um we know right here in town because i say i already have a person who's a 12 month employee who does the driving here in town but if we have you know the availability to afford that there'll be somebody go out into another cluster area we'll look at that but no no less than what we've been doing to do we always see the school sites that actually have summer programs and then um we try to find those clusters in the communities for the most part until covert came along we did right here

028in town because that's where the cluster of students were but you know before it was with cobra we started go to fire departments and places like that because the community could find to get there easier than having to go all the way to a school site so we try to find ways with with your approval and with the approval of usda and api to be able to be out to the community as much as we can and funding is always of course a limitation with that because we have to have a driver in the fall we utilized dual employees in the spring to utilize bus drivers so they gave us another whole crew of people who could help us we'll get it and you know they get cars they did buses in the fall of

029this year what we ended up doing people who were duly employed with cn and bus we picked up the bus hours that they would have had on bus to give them time to like the community and prep in the kitchen and they were operating in a dual capacity that way with us to get built into the community but again it comes down to that budget decision of being able to balance out if you're not uh having uh expenses that exceed the revenue so that's a real delicate title title there with because we're not profit we're non-profits so we hope to make the ends just balance each day and you've you know in terms of the rules of the game you may be looking at maybe that you set profit on you know if you think

030about every dollar maybe two set because all the expenses are so allocated so we have to make decisions on how we do things in the community and based upon what can we afford when you talk about more wages for a driver community how much participation is enough participation support the cost of the food the all the other expenses and besides the uh participation what has been one of your biggest challenges with the culvert and right now right going forward i would say i i guess you want to say challenge has been just looking at safety of our employees okay you know um we we try to be very proactive in the spring uh and all we started then when things were more relaxed we were already stepping it up because we had our own guidelines

031coming down to us in terms of how to operate in the most efficient and safe way and you know spacing out people because we were not doing um cafeteria dining we had to set up more workstations and spread people out moving people around because you know you've got to put you know more people in place where they need to be based upon what feeding site is doing the most so we know samoa was a big feeding area so we had to look at how we have the most support for that school who's feeding some more some of you are reallocating employees just temporarily to where they need to be um [Music] another one came back into uh in phase and in person has been getting that delivery schedule to the classrooms because you know now

032my students come to us unless the principal seems fit to put one class at a time like younger students we're actually taking the food to the classroom so we had uh we got a grant from uh no kid hungry a 15 000 grand dollar grant back in october back in the fall that helped with some purchasing even though we had done some prior purchasing it helped to kind of put something back into our budget for purchasing special equipment to get us to where we need to go so we have a whole fleet of coolers and carts and um you know devices hit us around you know to look at computers and things like that right now we're not getting any hashtags but if we get into cash now when we have to step it up

033in terms of being able to be able to do money you know remotely and things like that so it's looking is the changing i guess a um an obstacle or an uh adjustment we had to make was to be able to keep up with the pace of emergency feeding okay which we've been very fortunate to be able to you know do our deliveries and without many glitches and things like that to be able to get what we need to be based on that principles um the schedule not our schedule because we're there to support so we're just trying to make sure we have the right people at the door of the classroom at the right time with the food in place and they order if i didn't say this i'm sorry they order their food

034through google doc which is an online ordering system that we created to where the teacher can go in each day we upload a document the menu is sitting there and the teacher or whoever's you know overseeing those students will go in each day and order one or two menu items or one of three actually which is a chef salad a cold meal and a hot meal and a vegetable fruit and milk and then the breakfast is a grab and go each day uh which gravity would have been doing cep schools or elementary schools anyway in the past but with covet now because everything is wrapped even if it's milk it's wrapped in a ziploc bag so that whoever helps to hand out that food never touches the actual food with the person who's gonna consume

035it condiments everything's you know that's an additional expense though because you have to put more packaging into everything uh you happen to do uh package sports napkin spoons because you know you might actually you know to actually journalize and um you know those are things you have to be more considerate of that we didn't in the past because it was you know that's pre-code it was a whole different a whole different thing did you have to uh increase staff no because of lower participation how our staffing works is that based upon the number of meals you serve okay every lunch is counted as like if you want to think of one unit and two breakfasts there's one unit and three snacks is when you hit so to set up a new labor hour so every

036school is allocated staff based on the number of meals they're going it's it's in our cart sales and adult meals so it's a phone you use to look at how many hours of labor do you need at that school based upon how much how many people are actually how many customers you have if you want to think of it that way so the number of customers will dictate you think about a restaurant you know on a busy day if you're in a restaurant world you have more staff right but on a slow day you have less staff but in for the sake of um consistency and normal employment for the school system you take the average you get them saying i'm averaging high and low yeah and that's how you staff that school so participation

037is a driving factor on on that and with lower participation it equals lower staff okay but you never you know our goal is not to displace people but we've had people take jobs elsewhere and we haven't replaced them yet until we're back into a normal operating um you know scenario um with how we look at the fall you know we won't actually get the revenue for the first month of school until october so you know we won't um you have to kind of carefully balance when you're going to have the revenue coming back in on a norm compared to colbit so the the revenue is much lower during this year because of cobit participation being lower we won't if we go back into a regular programming uh regular attendance and next school year it would

038be the end of october before we see the benefits of a september month if you unders you know so august you know you'll get just a small reimbursement the the claim is due by the 10th of each month the previous month and you don't get it into the you know so you're getting like whatever you do in august you're not going to get interception reading so you gotta you know carefully balance when you bring in additional expenses so we'll look at where we are in terms of your decisions for the fall and how we look at when we start you who need to bring in more staff to replace the ones who've actually gone into jobs doing covet uh or if we are okay based upon because the goal is not to downsize existing employees

039but when they retire resign that's how we're dpi helps us to know how to actually reduce our staff it's not to by displacing people but looking at when you have to replace a person do you actually need to replace or are you okay label wise based on those for labor hours good information good information any other questions or comments yeah dr carter um i'd just like to take this time to publicly thank ms mims for her strong leadership in the child nutrition program she has uh as you can tell exceptional and has uh has far exceeded what many districts try to do and keep us afloat and many districts call her for advice so we are very fortunate and i just would like to publicly thank her i appreciate that thank you thank you for

040your support thank you thank you next week start with the principles and our first principle to give an update is uh dr murray from north elementary and i believe she has the handout that you have on your on your table [Applause] good morning dr murray good morning lauren chairman owen vice chairman um you all do have a presentation that i have prepared i think uh miss cameron made copies of it for you um i'm gonna start out a little bit telling you about myself because some of you have never really met me in person i am the principal of north elementary um some good news is i just graduated this past weekend with my doctor in education from gardner-webb university so that's the most recent thing that's happened i was the principal of the year

041for tiger county schools in 2019 also um we were the ptech signature school for 2019 and 2020. and we also um were the school of distinction for beta which means we had 10 increase a little bit more about myself i grew up in greenville i was a graduate of gold washington high school please don't put that against me um i was a spanish teacher before because before going into administration i was an assistant principal at lexington senior high school in lexington northern north carolina for four years then i was an assistant principal at harvard high school in winston-salem for three years and then i landed in parkland schools in transport north elementary um for the next slide our student enrollment we currently have 334 students enrolled at north elementary 212 of those students are in

042person 122 students their parents chose to keep them virtual and on the slides you can see the breakdown our virtual students most of them are connected to the internet and has google classrooms we have one that is a flash drive student in fifth grade she calls in daily um the teacher provides work on a flash drive if there's any kind of paperwork that needed to provide paperwork so that way we are trying our best to get her through fifth grade as easily as possible with her getting as much instruction as possible our staff on the next page we could not have a sad picture this year due to covet and so we created bitmojis and our media coordinator put us all together in front of north elementary school and so that was our creative picture

043for this year the breakdown we have 19 classroom teachers three enhancement teachers which are media and then we split art and music with oakwood and then we have a pe teacher two ec teachers one school counselor five teacher assistant one instructional coach one full-time school nurse three custodians two office staff five cafeteria staff and five programs our mission and vision our mission falls right along in the country county schools total mission and just empowering the sale and then our vision for north elementary school is to have our students develop and deprive by demonstrating perseverance respect for yourself and others integrity determination and excellence in one's work the next slide if you come to anything at north elementary or if you listen to the announcements at work elementary we are all about the pride and so

044you know i i start out by saying at north elementary we just can't hide that fan of pride and then i said what is hand of heart and you hear it all throughout the school with the students and respectful responsible and safe you can ask that pre-k through fifth grade what is respectful responsible or safe meaning and they can tell you exactly what it is we center everything we do around you respectful responsibility the next slide is an idea of things that we do during a regular school year and to be quite honest when i was making this slide i was working on a calendar from a previous year and i was i was quite overwhelmed in looking at the things that we do starting from august all the way through the end of the

045year so we have several things that we invite our public to um and our parents we have our grandparents luncheon we have thanksgiving luncheon and those luncheons have grown to be so big that we now split those into two days each so those are the big events for us we have opened up for literacy night mac night and science night to give our parents a taste of our curriculum so that way they are familiar with what we are doing in school and science night is typically um a partnership with duke energy and so we have our students their siblings they come in and they do different science experiments provided by duke energy and it gets the kids really excited about stem and science we did start not this year because we couldn't but last year

046we started a student portfolio night which was a huge success for us uh the students were able to prepare and talk about their their progress in class and they prepared a presentation for their parents to come and they would talk about i mean they had samples of work and they could talk to their parents about things that they have been doing in class and their goals that they accept for themselves and how close they were to reaching their goals and it was totally a student-led conference with keep with the teachers there as a facilitator if the student couldn't think of words to say the teacher would step in and help you move along so that was great uh we have our fall festival every year our music program we have our dare program for fifth

047grade which also includes our dare graduation and that's a big event for us we have a county wide art show we have our amazing ptsr that does great things for our school uh every year they provide up to ten dollar admission to every student for one field trip per year so for all of our students they can have one field trip paid for up to ten dollars and so that is extremely helpful with our students when we are taking field trips they have also built a shelter on our playground in order to provide shade we use our classroom just last week we provided our teachers for teacher appreciation week so we were especially grateful for that uh we have multiplication magnets we have battle so this is my fourth year at north elementary and for

048four years i know we've been battled the books champions and uh we put we put a lot of pride in that our students work very hard on reading this book we have the spelling bee junior beta club our enrichment club for students our student counselor does the yoga club she also does red ribbon week for our anti-bullying program we have read across america week career day towards the end of the year we're really busy with our eog pep rally to get our students pumped up and talked about their study skills for eog we had our block party to celebrate after we have completed our eods we have field day um last year we started a polar express night to invite students in to watch polar express we would have santa claus there he would be

049able to um meet with the students they would be able to go take pictures with them it gave parents a night out to be able to go do a little bit of christmas shopping while we watch their students we have our third grade wax museum which our third graders look forward to every year last year they did it virtually they work on it for a long time and they dress up as their characters and they can tell you every little bit about who they have research if you ask them a question they know exactly how to answer it's amazing to see the work that they put into that we have our black and white ball which is our formal dance for our fifth grade excuse before going off to dillard we have two book fairs

050per year we also have our fire safety program for our pre-k for second grade students and we have smoky bears stop by to visit with us and then we have sophisticated ladies and distinguished gentlemen which defined by our student council by our student counselor she takes students that are borderline students that we need to just help them along a little bit in order to be able to to better themselves as a student and those are those students that are right on the edge that you got to watch to see how they're going to end up and so she helps with students and brings in guest speakers to give them motivation on the next page you can see pictures from previous years we have um pictures from our block party with mr rex in the dunk

051tank we have pictures from luncheons the parent night we also have our law enforcement appreciation luncheon in the bottom left corner um darren reed across america we do have our soup cafe and you can see a steven in the bottom that has on a dr seuss hat and they provide refreshment for our younger students and they also get to read a doctor she's footprint we have our career day with mr terrell on the bottom right he was talking about the great things about being an assistant superintendent for tiger county schools and there is a picture right here with the american flag in the middle that really means a lot to us um we are our family and we support our students and our staff and their families and we had a student that his father

052had to go away um for military service and so every wednesday our students and our staff got together to wear red because the student said he was going to wear bread until every day that his father or every wednesday until his father came home so that particular year his mother contacted me and said father is coming home and he wants to surprise him in the cafeteria so you know we we set it up the father was able to come into the cafeteria here in lunch and i'm sure people saw it on facebook it was it was heartwarming with the student jumping up and running across the cafeteria and hurting dad and you can see that on that particular day we still had numerous students that were wearing red because they didn't know he was coming

053home that day and he is in the back underneath the american flag picture and so to me that is the epitome of what we do to support our students and our staff and their families um focus areas and professional development of course you know we are focused on reading and math um this year we tried to focus on how to do all of that with technology so a lot of our professional development has fallen into that category you know using google classroom as a matter of fact um just last week and our plc or week before i was talking to teachers about what next year was going to look like and they have actually become so accustomed to using google classroom that they were saying you know when we talked about it i i mentioned

054to them you know your curriculum needs to live on google classroom you know it is a way for students to log in you keep everything there and if i would have said that last year at this time i would have gotten we can't do this that's a lot but this year they were just like okay that's what we're used to anyway we they like google classroom um they've become very comfortable with it and so uh that's how we are going to live for next year as well and they are okay with it so technology has been a big piece of our professional development this year one professional development that i think is noteworthy that we did last year um we did a book study for our staff and our staff that each choose what we

055had five books for them to choose from and a staff member chose a book to lead a book studies we had five staff members that were leading once we had the five staff members to lead it and they volunteered then teachers could sign up for which book that they wanted to read and which book that they wanted to study with the group and they didn't know who was leading the book study so it wasn't like i like that person so i want to be with that person it was i really want to read this book and it started out great we were in school you know they were meeting twice a month to discuss the book well then cody didn't we had to go home and so they continue their book study virtually and one

056of the comments that was made to me was we really appreciate the fact that we did this book study this year because in a time where we were so unconnected with our staff it brought us together with a small group of staff um so you know timing to me is everything there is a greater plan in this world and i feel like that that was part of a plan and it just it just worked out that thing uh we do have other professional development going on for uh pegary's anemic awareness we have professional development for students and their social emotional needs some of the interventions that we have done to help students that are struggling uh we have corrective reading we have two tutors this year that are coming into the building typically we have

057four um but you know of course due to code we had less than than normal and that's okay um we do a lot with them we do a lot with eureka math um we also have our lli or level literacy intervention program and typically during a regular school year we have morning interventions and that's all hands on deck from 8 15 until 9 o'clock in the morning and each teacher has a list of students that need an extra push some extra intervention and they will go to different people in the building whether it be an enhancement teacher a teacher assistant you know whoever our counselor they leave those intervention groups from 8 15 9 o'clock every morning so hopefully next year we will get back to that this year due to having our phone calls

058split um and you to contact tracing we couldn't mix students a lot in order for that particular program to work you have to be able to gather those students according to their abilities so we are hoping to get back into that next year um the next page you see our pbis and we earlier in our presentation i talked about piano prize and in the middle top picture it shows responsible respectful and faith and this was a an activity that a teacher did at the beginning of the year where the students knew what unified was and then they listed what each of those meant and you see the teachers decorating christmas attire and we have monthly incentives for our students that do well with pbis and they earn tokens in order to be able to go

059and they have to spend their tokens to go to these different activities and in talking to fifth graders last year and students this year this was probably one of their most memorable moments of a pbis incentive was when they got to decorate their teachers with christmas stuff and it was a fun activity it was the relay you know each child would go up and just add a different one or whatever in addition uh we have our panda hub club that goes along with pbis and that is one student that is nominated that shows um being respectful responsible or safe and they are nominated by their teacher and we have one that is each day we do a different grade level and they have their picture taken and they get a pencil and you know that

060we have a bulletin board where they are showcased uh we have hallmark which is just little trinkets in a car and students can spend their tokens on getting duties from hallmark and that's pbis and then on the very back page we have linguine we always have to have ringling in our in our presentations and lingling was dressed up for um during uh our remote learning time last year and he was taking pictures every day we were posting on facebook and so that's why when we use green and while lingling has a dog and a picture because you know everybody was at home but we still wanted our students to see an accomplishment and that's north elementary in a nutshell questions ms blackwell could you give us an overview of your student achievement um you know

061basis with covet and present how things going there as far as what's happening with the student achievement well prior to covid we were every year we were increasing our eog force and increasing our achievement and we had met growth that that year that last year that we took eogs we were on a trajectory to meet growth again according to our benchmarks that we had prior to covet um and we were really disappointed that we weren't able to take eogs last year because we know that it was going to be a great year for that um obviously this year there have been some struggles getting used to the remote learning um we are very hopeful that our students are going to perform well on the eogs this year um every district in the united states especially

062i mean you know i hear a lot about north carolina you know we're all struggling making sure that that our students are going to get where they need to be because of so many outside factors i can tell you i can guarantee you that the teachers are teaching the standards that are required but sometimes the outside stuff might get in the way a little bit right now and that's understandable i mean you know they have family members that are getting sick they don't understand why but i can guarantee you that us as a staff are doing what we need to do in order to provide the curriculum that we need and we also continue to reach out to those students that you know if they're there every day and they they might not show up

063today we reach out and say hey what's going on um you know or students that don't show up for a while hey what's going on we one thing that i told my staff and plc a couple weeks ago is we can't control the recent control we can control everything that we do as educators but we can't always control the outside factors and so that us as educators we get very upset if we don't feel like our students are performing at the capacity that we know that they can't but we have to also step back and say this is a global pandemic and everybody says so we are hopeful that our students are going to do well this year um and we will make sure that next year we get back in that trajectory of meeting

064that growth i have full faith in my staff for this year and next year we already have planned started planning interventions that we will be doing for next year to meet those students that might have fallen off a little bit mr burglary 122 kids is virtual does every kid participate regularly how do you handle that out of 122 students of virtual does every kid participate regularly if not what's the guideline for that the majority of the students do um i must say you know like i said we can't control we can't control and so we do have some students that have not been participating as they should and um you know we follow the process the teacher reaches out the school counselor reaches out i reach out our final step is sending an sro to

065the home um with a letter saying you know these are this is what's going to happen if we don't hear from your students we don't see your student unfortunately sometimes the sro can't even you know that doesn't face um what's going on outside of school so we do have many many students that are joining every day we have an entire virtual first grade class the numbers that you see for first grade at 24 students they join almost every day um because because of the situation we had to have one class that was entirely virtual and those students are very regular about joining um you know we we keep accurate records of the students that aren't participating and of course at the end of the year we'll have to look at you know what are the

066options for that student um you know it's very hard we can't really push truancy right now because if they go to court then you know they can stay covered so you know it's one of those things where we're i'm here to fight and all we can do is ask them to come back i can demand for them to come back or try to but that you know thank you the majority of them are participating it's apparent that there are a lot of great things happening in north um could you tell us a little bit about the book club maybe what are the titles of the books and you spoke about the benefits so as a best practice is this information shared with other culinary schools so one of the books that they read there were

067several um i know one that really meant a lot to the staff was the energy buff and it talks about keeping a positive mindset uh there were several books about growth mindset in the classroom and how to keep that growth mindset you know sometimes we get just stuck in what we're doing and we need to remember as educators just like we want our students to grow we needed them um so those those were the focus of the books it was really about us as professionals and how we can continue to grow or be positive for our students um you know i got a lot of positive feedback from the staff about the things that they learned and how it really opened their eyes to some of the things that some of our students might be

068facing at home that sometimes you just forget about it you know and so they they really you know they talked about things that they were going to include in their practice in order to help their students um and then like i said just the collaboration among each of them they really value that it wasn't the principal leading a professional development or an instructional coach leading a professional development they really felt that they were a part of the professional development and then as far as my colleagues um that was actually a part of my school improvement plan that year for us to have that book study and i know that oakwood did it miss o'brien did it um and mr evans and i can't i don't want to say for sure but i believe mr evans

069and this building had a different part of their plan for a book study so but miss o'brien i both did this book study like that so it really gave them a leadership opportunity you know teachers really want to do well in their evaluation and sometimes you know we have to intentionally look for leadership opportunities for them because you always have the same people stepping up to need different things and so some people their wheelhouse is leading a book study and so i have people that have never stepped up for anything volunteer to leave a book study because it was a small group and so you know and i hold it as this is a leadership opportunity you can use this towards your evaluation it gives you a chance to meet with colleagues and i mean

070i have a lot more than just five signs to leave and so i took the first five and it was just it was it was a great opportunity for them [Music] four percentage of the 334 students do you think may need summer school if all of them can't go what percentage of your 334 at this point right now that you think may qualify for summer school needs that's a that's a tricky question and i will explain why we have students that parents have the best of intentions they really really do and when those students were at home they wanted to be their healthy um and so some of our data from them being at home is a little skewed because we have what the parents know and not the students so we are starting to

071see the discrepancy with our students coming back in march and so we are really digging down into our ass station data to see um how the students are doing and then of course our eog we're going to be telling because the students will be there in person taking them without mom or dad telling them the answers um i i am fairly certain that we it's a good percentage that needs summer camp i don't know how many will attend if invited um because we are all tired the students are tired um so it's really hard to say right now what the percentage is because we're trying to dig through all that data and throw out what was spewed from parent health so we do have you know of course we have some lower grades that you

072know we know that they need to come to summer and so we really need to push some of them [Music] any other questions or comments i just i wanted to follow up and uh i publicly say to dr murray i appreciate her leadership and i think it was clear to see that how important it is in elementary school to build that intrinsic love of learning and i think that is such a strong focus uh with everything else but i think that intrinsic love of learning in students is certainly in everything they do and i just appreciate the leadership from staff leadership to professional development to student learning that murray oversees congratulations on your doctorate thank you and i would like that i was prepared from this lifeless question about what what were the positives that

073you saw from this year um and and what were some of the struggles and of course you know everybody would probably agree the struggle is just the uncertainty of everything you know one week you think you're coming back and then the next week or not and that's nobody's fault you know it it is what it is um this stream and i'm really proud of this i had a teacher talking about it uh the relationships that the teachers have dealt with families because they're not just calling home they're in their living rooms and so parents are seeing them every day and parents can talk about number bonds and they can talk about the different words that they're learning for reading and you know just for parents to see what exactly happened in an elementary school day

074was amazing and so those relationships were built and bonds and i'm hoping that that is something that the teachers remember and will continue to strive next we have ms gantt principal at in el dillard middle school you might not want that one okay [Music] good morning everyone i am manchester united principal dillard middle school um ms blackwell very nice to meet you for the first time everyone else my friends have pretty much met um i'm gonna go ahead and get started i've given you a presentation on email at middle school for this year um just some brief points um and i'm more than um interested in your questions you may have at the end um but just to start out um this year is a year like no other for nl dylan middle school just

075like any other school in america uh you know we face challenges just like any other school um and i think that we have risen to the challenge and we are still rising to the challenge as we speak i don't know if you have risen but we are still rising um if you look um i think the picture on the front tells you a little bit about this year uh we just did not we're regular school for the teacher this year i mean it just tells the whole story of this year um that we have a digital faculty photo for this year uh but when you get into the powerpoint um the first one talks about first week's lemonade so you know how did dillard middle school take a year full of lemons and turn it

076into lemonade so what are our celebrations what are the things that we're proud of what things have we uh accomplished this year that we can say hey these are great notches on our belt for success um so recognize the school of merit from beta um um we have we applied to be a school of engineering for amazon um we entered and we we actually got accepted so this is the first year coming up of amazon's engineering program uh fully funded by amazon they offer training and everything we're going to offer it as an elective to our students for next year so we started the planning this year to make sure that that class can be well organized and promote student success and align with pathways here um at the high school as well um so

077we also had the nl dillard middle school board masters team placed fourth nationally which is huge out of all of the states and all the people all the students that competed uh mapley um had students take uh five students placed in the top 39 um and then we our eighth grade team placed fourth nationally and then we had five ml middle school she just completed the cc the casual county schools local aig certification which is huge so i've really been trying to work with my teachers and especially in math and language arts to become aig certified if not state certified but locally certified and right now i have enough that they will all be certified as a next year everybody speaks for states um but we know how that can change but right now we

078are fully certified in math and language arts for aig certification um moving on to looking at hiring and openings for international middle school for this year um we had a total of six openings and that is throughout the year um so that is not that is to say for this year in totalities but we didn't start with six we're not ending with six but if you look throughout the year we've had at least six openings this year um the total instructional openings that were four so two of those openings that were the six were our front office and a custodial opening that is still open for right now and then the total that we built this year um we filled three of the openings and two of those were the were the front office um

079another one was a an ela teacher um and the third one um ela custodial well why do i not have that on here i can't think of it on the top of my head but we have three remaining openings and that is one math class one ela in a custodial opening i can tell you that none of those classes are being uh being taught by a different sub every single day um the the english language arts class is being taught by a full-time sub um she has been with us for quite some time uh we have had difficulty in hiring them for that position uh just due to the either the low number of candidates or the caliber of candidates so i'll just tell you this i'm a firm believer that no hire is better

080than a bad hire um and i'm not looking to put someone in a position under contract that i would not want to leave in that position under contract or if i thought that person was not did not have the capacity to grow into the teaching that i would need for my students um so right now that ela position has been subbed out miss kawana bird is ourselves she's been doing an outstanding job she's been there every single day probably since um december um the math vacancy though that i currently have was one that due to code that she was not able to come back after we returned to school so she was here until march one uh but at march one when the students were were guaranteed to come back to school um she was

081just someone that could not do that um for health concerns and so that math teacher that math opening that i have is being taught by um it was being taught originally by my man coach and now we have mr walters who was my math interventionist he's also my band teacher but he's been very flexible in that position so we've had mr walters who used to be my math interventionist he used to do uh my bull block when i had bull worked very closely with ms flores our math coach uh currently mr walters is the male teacher in that room um and i can i can flex him that way due to how we're doing our elections and everything and it does not diminish the capacity of any department as we speak right now uh mr

082walters is doing a wonderful job in that class um to the point that the students have asked they could he do their math teacher next year um you know i've had several students to say you know i get it now i finally you know it's the light bulb um so we've seen lots of light bulbs since mr walters has been in that position um and so like i said the current remaining openings are for one bath one ela and one custodial um currently i don't anticipate any other um vacancies at this time which would be great because i'm really working very hard on teacher retention and decreasing turnover so that we can make sure that our students are sustained with high quality educators within the building um my student enrollment so right now i have

083559 students involved uh 281 of those students are face-to-face 254 of them are virtual and as you can see we have some flash ground students that are pretty much half virtual and have face-to-face so i will say that many of those those flash drive students are face-to-face students so they attend school on their hybrid days of either monday tuesday or thursday friday or if they're at bc student and they opted to come back to four days out of the week then they're attending those four days out of the week um those students don't receive their work and they go home and do their work and they bring it back and um we carry on so um i know that one thing that we're gonna i've talked a lot about our successes for this year um

084and things that we've done well um but you know what probably the biggest challenge that i've had this year is providing an equitable experience to all students um that is something that i think that you would see anyone struggling nationwide but with think rural education probably has a more difficult time than any other setting because you run into things such as access to internet access to um wi-fi just access to the information um so i think that the equitable experience for all students is something that i've really worked on this year as a principal um and tweaking that along the way we did not start out with the best you know we started out before we started um and i think we've come a long way as far as making sure that experience can be

085very equitable for all students um and we've constantly urged students to come back to school um if they you know if there's a capacity at the home for the student to return back to school for the other actors outside of school that really determine that if you're looking at our focus areas for 20 21 and 22 so i'll listen down things i'm giving you three different slides of areas in which we're going to focus over the summer and areas we're going to focus on looking at spiraling into for next year so we think about um math expressions and equations is the biggest thing that you will probably see as far as middle school math that permeates all levels so it's in sixth grade it builds the first six to build the seventh and it builds

086more than eight uh that is something so last year when cody hit my sixth grade students for my current seventh grade students did not get an opportunity to um have their face-to-face unit of equations and expressions um so then that set back that seventh grade group that is my current group of working with equations and expressions so we've done a lot of work in reteaching and remediating and spiraling down into uh equations and expressions uh but that's the that's a biggie across the board for math um and i've given you some other areas in which sixth grade seventh grade and eighth grade are going to work on these things within either our summer programming or looking at once again spiraling down into next year um science is a little different when we get to that

087slide only because it only impacts eight but we're gonna work on uh we've aligned last year we did alignment project of looking at where the standards failed um for science in sixth seventh and eighth grade and looking where we could build strength uh building up until eighth grade proficiency on that uh in the end of grade exam and so we really looked at where we need to hit those things next year in sixth grade and seventh grade to help strengthen what will be our eighth grade uh testing at the end of the year next year so i'm not gonna read all those to you but there's a couple of them her uh grade level um and this data was all produced by looking at assessments we had this year looking at our i ready assessments

088that we've used all year and looking at teacher-made assessments that we had this year so um we've had assessments that our coaches make then we have teacher creative assessments and then we have already data those are main sources of data that we have used this year to help predict where we're going where we're strong where we need to re-teach what our tutoring efforts need to help support um so those are our major sources of data for this year if you look at ela um overall um six through eight but the biggest one is reading for information i think that in any middle school i've ever worked i've ever worked if you look at english language arts reading for information is the hardest standard in ela um so this year what we've devised is a plan

089for next year so you see this in many schools and i don't know i'm not going to give any excuses to why we haven't done it yet but we're going to do it now um but we are going to make sure that we are pushing informational text in all areas so looking at science and social studies they already use an abundance of informational text and primary source documents if you really think about social studies um curriculum and then really working with math literacy is what we really want to work with next year and thinking about um how do we annotate how do we break down word problems how do we define the operation that will be used in a problem uh based on the words and the context clues we can find within the word

090problems so this year we're going to do a whole lot of work on looking at literacy we did a lot of work of building of building up math we have really built our math department i'm telling you this i think that i don't think this i know this if we had tested last year even at the point of march um we would have made growth um my students were doing so well um i had a i have a really good group of math teachers too um that have really stuck it out and i've got it to where finally we have a basis for someone that has been in that math department this is only in my years of being there so i can't speak two years prior um to someone being in that math department

091that actually knows the curriculum and thinking about working with engaged new york curriculum being different than any curriculum we've worked with in the past but they know that curriculum they feel successful with the curriculum and it's not going to be their first year next year with that curriculum um that's huge in building some type of growth and sustainability of growth within the school um having people with familiarity of the curriculum and the standards um is huge um so that is something we really work on in establishing that at every grade level um even with some potential people that may move about um and i always say they do the licensure constraints might they move about elsewhere in the district i still will have someone in those departments in the math department six seven eight that

092have taught that curriculum more than a year um which makes a big difference i can i can only speak morals as to the difference that that makes as to how to re-teach a teacher every year have to train somebody every year how to do this and you know you think about uh wanting to grow a school and it's very hard to sustain any type of growth when you have a revolving door of people so having those people there consistently and having them with the skills that they need um has been something that i really am proud of my team for really working hard on in the last couple of years and i think that ela has worked just as hard but reading for information is permeated every year as something that has been standard that

093we've fallen short on and that's something that we can improve upon it's an opportunity that's what i see that the challenges and opportunities so it's an opportunity for us to be better so we're going to push that across the board next year um we've also come up with the bulls annotation protocol that we will also use within our school next year um so that everyone so that is the standard method of annotating text within my building which means the sixth grader that comes in does not have to worry about when i go to seventh grade that my teacher is going to teach me how to annotate differently if we can provide streamlined processes for students that mimic across the grade levels it only provides an ease and a less of a barrier for learning um

094so that's what we're looking at doing in very specific ways um so with the other things that we're working on are using sexual evidence um i see that every day um developing the developmental central ibm thing i don't think that there's any language teacher that won't tell you that that is something that we always work on um essential essential ideas um word phrases and we've worked a lot on vocabulary within the past year or two um thanks to um some pd opportunities with um either the district with dr vicki or thinking about the opportunity that has been provided by the ec department and also a different opportunity that i've provided my teachers to attend a training with max thompson um who is the guru of everything um if you look at our last name which

095is science eight um science eight i'm gonna tell you this besides science don't worry on this i had a good feeling my son said he's gonna come in probably the highest that he's ever come in since i've been there um when she was there brought in 90 something percent proficient 94 proficient in science eight uh every year probably her last two years my combined teachers are probably gonna do better than the combined teachers that did science eight in the past um i've got two wonderful teachers in science eight they're going to return they are absolutely amazing um and one of them already has their students at about 83 proficient um and then the other one has their students at about 78 proficient and that isn't a year of covert so let me just say that

096that is that is dynamic data for a year like we've had this year uh but that only speaks to the work that those two outstanding young ladies that could have put in in the classroom um and i can give them all the praise and props because they did all the work they just they've been phenomenal um professional development opportunities we have really worked at inaudible at middle school to provide professional development opportunities in-house to our staff um i like to think of the you know we've got a lot of great best practices that are going on in our building a lot of research best practices that are going on in that building so we have come up with almost like a nl dillard uh micro credential academy um that teachers are gaining ceus so i've

097given you a couple of them that we offered this year i think we offered actually eight of them i didn't have all eight of them in my emails to find um but i'm pretty sure we offered eight of them this year because our goal was to give teachers one dlc this year so digital learning competency they're the hardest ceo to gain as a teacher uh because they're very limited as to what you must learn within that competency in order for the account at the dlc teachers have to have three docs um every time now you know this modern era of education they have to have free dlcs in order for a licensed recent medal um so we are working to try to provide that in-house even if they can't get that out of house um

098so my itf miss miner has done an outstanding job um she's taking on multiple roles this year she's been like our i.t person our instructional technology facilitator media specialist the my chromebook doesn't work can you come and help me right now lady uh but she's done an outstanding job this year um we've had two teachers to attend the north carolina uh nc north carolina middle level education mini conferences uh five teachers i'm sorry but it was too many conferences um we've had um an easy tv if i could say that one area where we're working probably the hardest right now we could we could probably see the largest gains um or our special populations it will probably be doing some some more easy professional development um when i think about standard four on the teacher

099evaluation tool talks a lot about uh differentiating and providing a personalized learning experience for students when i think about differentiation um i think that wherever i have worked and this is not indicative of caswell county schools this is everywhere i think differentiation and providing personalization is something that many teachers struggle with what does that look like what does that mean how do i do that how do i know that how do i do this um so we have worked a lot this year on offering some training and differentiation and co-teaching we will work again on that next year you're going to see that as a focus down at the bottom um this is something that we're working on again um for next year but i see that personalized learning is for every student it's not

100for our exceptional children only is for every single student and so if you think about the world of education and where it's going um with the ability to create playlists which will be us a list of activities that an individual student would do we're not at playlist level yet but we're building the capacity to be somewhere around playlist level to where we can provide each student with such an individualized experience still within the standards of course we don't teach north carolina standards but how can we individualize it toward your data um takes a lot of work to do that and i won't say that it takes a whole lot of work to do that um and so teachers um dipped into the pool of that this year they put their foot in the pool this

101year um and make sure we're gonna give them about halfway down um and hopefully they'll be swimming in another year and be doing really well i think they do well with it now but i think that the needs are going to be so diverse after coated that they're going to have to be better with it and they know that and i don't think that they are um unaware and they want to be better um and that's one thing that i'm very fortunate that really wants to be better um and then there's some other professional development that we've attended as well such as word mapping and instant ties but for next year our biggest our offerings are going to be mtss critical thinking and personalized learning so personalized learning is that differentiation piece uh critical thinking

102could go across the board for any classroom um we've really got a packet we've got a book study that we're going to do next year i've already ordered the books um we also have some materials that go along with the book study that that are some you remember back in the day they had the easy grader it was a slide too if you want to grade somebody you just lead it over to how many they missed out of so many and they told you to break um so when you think about critical thinking how can we make it more um attainable for teachers and how can we make it so that they understand it a little better so we're going to do a book study on critical thinking but some of the tools that i've

103provided for them that i purchased this year are many quick finder tools that offer like uh question steps i don't know where my questions for higher thinking um you know the question is the big piece when we think about higher order thinking what am i asking you to do um what is the task at hand um what level is my task have i elevated it are we still on just remembering are we going back are we up here with evaluating and creating where are we on bloom's revised revised rules taxonomy so if i think about that um that is something that we're really working on focusing on next year regardless of what level that's suited on there's a level of critical thinking for every single student um and so for my students that have the

104most challenges to my students that seemingly have the most successes um where are we ranking critical thinking for those students and what opportunities are we provided for them uh one thing we're looking at doing for nation is providing an advanced academics elective that will be offered virtually for some students um that's something that we're trying to come up with and trying to think of how we can do that and get that's possible um but i wanted a school where we did an advanced elected advanced academics elective and it was for aig students and for your really high kids that just don't fall into the aig category that sometimes get a little miss yes but i think we do a lot of work on one hand that sometimes we leave these babies hanging um and i

105think that we're trying to work on balancing and making sure that we're hitting everyone and the kids in the middle the kids in the middle most teachers try to teach to the middle and everything growing up both both ends um but that's where that personalization you've got to come in and knowing your kids and really knowing how to reach those kids where they are to get them to where you want them to be um when you think about supports for this year for academic supports we've offered after school tutoring in ela and math um my science teachers actually offered tutoring as well they just they didn't get paid for it they just didn't got the goodness of their heart they worked on they worked with kids uh after school hours i think they had office

106hours from five to seven uh five to six maybe five to six i think because it was an hour um each of them offered office hours for students to receive tutoring um teacher and i put down their teacher office hours um and ntss interventions um mtss interventions could be anything from a student um you know we had a student with a tracker that was lacking motivation we're doing work so you know we provide a tracker for that student and they work towards some incentives that that student selected um other mtss interventions have been such as the time of day for students class um so thinking about switching them around when we had that opportunity virtually to do that when they come back we are kind of limited in the time of day um as to

107where that student receives that class but we're still working on making sure that we can meet that as close as possible um with sel supports um so in betty block so we have a black at the beginning of the day called bulls i targeted intervention um it's our intervention block at the beginning of the day so in betty block we did seo lessons um those seo lessons were twice a week when we were all when we were all virtual those lessons now occur once a week because we do already one day and then we do seo supports in dating the second day so we still we still we're working with our already already is really our best source of data um for individual student data it gives us wonderful data um you know david's a

108little cloudy this year you know i don't think you're i think you know this data gets a little cloudy in the midst of coding not knowing when you know students are virtual you know is we would love to think all students do all of their work and nobody is assisting them okay i'm gonna put that disclaimer out there all right but when they're at home you don't know where the data is coming from that data gets real sketchy when you start thinking about the outside influences that are impacting your data and how true that data really may be what does it yield as far as what the teacher then needs to work on um thinking about that data so um we've done a lot of work with trying to this is probably the best year

109to determine true data and true where where are we really getting our best data and you know what i think it comes in the form of face-to-face education uh because there are some factors that we can control and face the place that we cannot control when they're at home you know this year we've allowed for a lot of grace because students have been in very dynamic families not only students parents have been in very dynamic situations um and i think that grace is the word that has been just used in abundance this year but now we're trying to still gracefully get back to normal um and that's been a bridge itself trying to ease grace into there's always been accountability with that grace but in some people's heads a lot of grace equals lower accountability

110and that's not true and so now we're having to make sure that we under that everyone is in the understanding that we're still giving grace we still you know not to the extent that we used to but that accountability has to be there and we've got to make sure that we're measuring and holding people accountable and that we have high expectations for all of our learners um so some of those other betty um or seo supports for counseling groups and counseling sessions so both of my teachers operate small groups in which they work with students that have seen similar challenges we pass out of inventory every year so this is something we've always done but it was a little more difficult than covet but we've conquered that and moved on so to get an inventory

111um groups were created um we've had pbis implementation we had to re-implement pdis because if you think about um having a year or so away from school um it's almost like you didn't have to reboot it but you had to reset it a little bit um you know we no longer do tokens as far as uh exchangeable little pieces of paper that were called bull books we now do class dojo that a lot of elementary schools use and we track our points that way um so that has been something that has given students something positive to look for you also have betty blast i didn't put those up here and i should have that is probably the biggest thing that students have asked for is betty glass so very blessed so we have betty block

112betty blast is where we take one betty block out of the month and we allow fun and we play games so they're all educational games or clubs um but the students have asked for a social opportunity to interact with one another that is not surrounded by mass science language social studies um so once a month um and it has been overwhelmingly we've we've done three student surveys this year by the pack so the last thing i had down there was the pack that's the principal's advisory committee i have an outstanding group of students that are in my pack and when i say outstanding uh my path is come come come out i don't care if you're the worst behaved the best paid the best student in the class student facing the most challenges i want

113them all because i want to know how our school can serve you student that has a lot of challenges that has seemingly no challenges the athletes the academic child the child is very social how do we meet all of your needs or how can we do a better job of meeting all of your needs and the pac has really done an outstanding job of being at sdl support for students because they've allowed students to voice their comments on several surveys this year that have been shared with the staff um and the students know that they didn't share with the staff because then the staff then talks with the students about the things that they're hearing from from the students uh so it has been a very beneficial group of students to work with this year

114like i said i can't say enough about those kids they're absolutely amazing and i want them to do outstanding things in the future for parent supports we've had parent nights we pass out a middle school uh little middle gears newsletter um it's on our website it's also um something that is handed that is sent home some of the report cards and progress reports and then we have parent-teacher conferences that i think that we've had more this year than we've ever had before um we probably needed more than we even had but some parents were a little you know they didn't know what you got going on you might have to work in your kids when you come home and you gotta make sure they're doing their work and um as a parent it's gonna work

115for your parents as well we like to think that because they're grown that they have less of a time adjusting but um i think everyone has a a challenging year this year but like i said we continue to rise to the challenge or we're still rising to the challenge uh building better bulls summer opportunities so i'm i'm real corny and i like real catchy names so that's what my summer learning opportunity is going to be about is building better rules so we're doing a steamy summer learning opportunity um the first session will focus on math science visual arts coding and robotics so we um if you know about stem the science technology engineering and mathematics we're adding the arts to it so it's going to be steam and we went to the district provided us

116a wonderful opportunity when we went on our retreat a couple of years ago we got to see the school with alexandria virginia and how they ran into a summer learning opportunity um and we've really tried to mimic a lot of what we're doing on the hard focus on the academics but also balancing that with enrichment opportunities that fool students into learning um so that they're tricked by the phone and they don't realize oh i'll just learn all this stuff oh yeah you sure did and i'm so glad that you attended today and we just had a great crackling um so we've really worked on providing some coming we're still we're still um in the building stages but i mean we got a really solid framework thus far um of what we'll be doing but we'll

117also incorporate physical education and i ready intervention uh students will have irate time twice a day um to work on a little bit of math and a little bit of language arts um during our building better vocal summer learning opportunity um the second session like i said will focus on english language arts visual arts and cross-curricular projects and they my teachers have really come up with some outstanding ideas of how to bridge the camp with projects and if you know anything about pbl or project based learning it is the wave of the future in education it is an amazing concept of taking a unit of learning that you would normally take with various tasks and then some kind of assessment of some assessments along the way then some end of some summative assessment that you

118have whether it be a test or whatever um you know i'm trying to bridge my teachers baby steps into pbl uh but pbl has an amazing capacity to take a project and you do that for the whole unit of learning and it's once again fooling you into learning is standards-based standard of line all the tasks go along with the whole unit and at the end they have some type of real-world product such as a podcast or it could be a blog but it could be anything but there's a real audience to what the students will receive um and so that's an opportunity for students to have more merit and value in their work their own merit and their own value to their work because they're getting feedback outside of the school from both projects um

119so we're really pushing forward with that as well um and it's been a great year at nl dillard middle school like i said it hasn't been a year without its challenges um i would say that compared to years in the past um we're not doing as well as years in the past but it's not that big of a when we look at the numbers so this is what i looked at i looked at the numbers from school last year when we thought about how many students were passing and how many students were by the district standards how many students were passing and how many students were failing we compared that we compared apples to apples as a matter of fact we compared a cohort of seventh graders the sixth graders the seventh graders and then

120the seventh graders to the current eighth graders so you know they're the same cohort of kids but they're just in two different years so we looked to see how many students we had really i don't want to say loss because we haven't lost them but you know the gap somehow there's been a widened gap and i want to say in seventh grade okay the sixth graders that are now seventh graders we've got about 24 kids that we can see a difference in their performance um there's about a hundred and uh let's say there's 170 kids in there so it's about 24 kids that we've seen the difference in their performance in eighth grade though i think that the number was about 32 kids it was slightly larger that we've seen a difference in their performance

121meaning that they're not performing as well as they have performed in the past so there's this misnomer on this this misconstrued thing that you know i think that when we think about where students are performing we're thinking that oh well in the past everybody passed and they all made straight days and the world was perfect and everything was fine well it wasn't you know that was not the case um so i think that when we look at kobe some people get alarmed at the covet numbers being so different but if you really look at what had gone on in the past they're different but they're not drastically different it's not like we jumped off a ship of um a poor performance you know it's it's not that so do we think that we can close

122the gaps with time yes i think that that's definitely possible um and i said we can close those gaps or shorten those steps um but you know i think that it would take you know i know that the district is looking at different ways of using our extra funds and things of that nature when we think about opportunities to grow our kids but i think the summer learning opportunities definitely offer us that advantage to provide an intercession to reduce that summer learning loss um and also to increase gains that we that we have banked on this year and for them to not permeate as further gaps um so i am open thank you very much for your time today um whatever questions you have i would be more than willing to answer all of them

123and your 254 virtual how many acts that are showing up and doing the work and have you reached out to contacted all the parents and the ones that not oh yeah um so out of the 200 and 254 students that are virtual i would say that there's probably about nine to ten kids that still struggle with coming to school coming to hangouts showing up where are you are you doing your work um and i'm gonna tell you we've sent the officer we've done everything we called a billion times we sent the officer we have when this tinker was here we sent his team um we have really reached out we have started to employ parent emails student emails um everything that we can to try to reach those students that is why i told you

124that one of the biggest things that we have really faced as a challenge this year is providing the little experience because if i can't find you if i can't get you then i have no idea what your experience seems to look like now it's very interesting it was apparent that we had been looking for a family we had been looking for this whole school leader and they showed up the other day because the chromebook stopped working and we said well we don't have you as working on the chromebook for school work what are we doing on the chromebook um but we had a very nice talk with that parent uh and they had been facing a lot of challenges but you know i said here we are at the end of the year we've been

125trying to get you we've had the we've had uh our sro to go deputy jones one as well um to the same parent um so you know we have used the we have used our resources mr very well uh trying to make sure that we get in contact with all those parents um i will tell you this it is i commend my teachers and i think any teacher in any system right now or making the contacts that they make on a daily basis uh whether it's emails calls whatever i mean uh if you think teachers didn't have time before they definitely don't have time now um but they're really been trying to make those contacts um our front office hasn't made a lot of those contacts um we've utilized front office to make contacts for

126teachers though sometimes because we can find that sometimes it is the time of day in which you call that makes the largest difference um and so front office column during the day so the teacher has made five attempts and can't find someone we then refer to the front office and front office starts making calls to see if we can find that person um so that's been difficult respectfully but we've been working on it ms hudson um hello miss gabe the amazon engineering school for 2021 is that gonna be a face-to-face teacher is it going to be online is it going to be one of our cte teachers that conducts that so ms miner my instructional technology facilitator slash media specialist will be our teacher for the amazon class for the amazon engineering class and so

127she is going to use so right now we're going to introduce it with sixth grade um starting out our first year we're thinking about trying we're trying to see if we can get it for sixth grade and seventh grade um because we also have another elective that we have in-house that a lot of students like as well for especially for face-to-face against our music production course um so i'm trying to balance the two of those but miss miner will be serving in that capacity we're looking at serving about 60 students at a minimum to start this year um with our pilot year and then bridging that up but we have miss jones has been working along with us um along with we're working more with mr stokes to make sure that we are aligning that

128course to where it can feed into the pathways at the high school thank you i don't know if i answered everything mr that's good okay thank you yes ma'am mrs blackwell how many uh eighth grade students uh will be going to the ninth grade potentially i know you know inside uh so teachers leave so in my head i want to say well it's my largest group right about now so 189 somewhere around there don't quote me on that but right around 180 students do you know how many of those that are that are virtual and and not on the top of my head i'm not going to even try to say that i would know that off the top of my head the reason i was asking i'm i'm leading to what percentage do you

129think of the eighth graders that will need to go into the summer take the summer school so we're basing summer school off of scoring on the eog this year so we're going to be looking at our two bands so it's going to be a late so i've i've messaged the parents and i don't know if i could message this enough but i'll further message it but the messaging is apparent so we've had a ton of parents call and say i want my child in summer school can my kid be in summer school i want to put my kid in summer school and i said well that is wonderful i'm glad that everybody wants to be in summer school but we have a limited amount that we can of capacity that we can have based on

130staffing for summer school um so right now i'm looking at if if i were to house 13 students in every single class i could have 189 students serve in the summer learning opportunity uh more of those students will be in the math and science one than it would be in the english language arts just do the staffing i have an overwhelming amount of staff that are willing to do june but when it comes to july my numbers start to decrease a little bit um if i had to say out of i'm not going to speculate as to how many eighth graders fall into that band but what we're looking at is for science eight we're looking at the top we're looking at so we're looking at what used to be called a two a two

131is there's no longer one under two you're either not needing mastery or you're a three four or five so we're looking at the highest uh the highest scale scores um in science we're looking at the top four scale scores and math we're looking at the top five skill scores of not met of a student that didn't master okay that's science math and ela i think we chose the top either five or four scores but in other words i'm willing to dip a little further into that pool of students to meet my numbers of students that i'll serve i will tell you this though i've reserved 31 spots for students that i have as potential failures for this year okay so i have a group i have 31 students so by district standards and by teacher

132recommendation um i take both of those into account when we look at students for potential retention when i say failure i meant to say retention so there's a difference so potential retention students that i would potentially retain i have about 31 students that fall into that category so you say listen well how did you determine those 31 students well those 31 students were students that did absolutely little work this year so those are across the board 6th six seven eight there's about 31 students that were sitting there saying uh you know what have you done you know they participated but they haven't participated um and even calling the home you know calling the calling grandma calling all the contacts you can get has not increased the um outcome for that student i'm not gonna say

133that they're not attending but that student has little work that they've shown they work they haven't worked and so based on some criteria with a district aligned with district promotion and retention standards i have about 31 kids those students will all have the opportunity so what i'm looking at doing currently is for those 31 students if you attend the summer learning opportunity you will potentially be failed but placed so you will not be retained i'm just going to tell you i don't think uh middle when we look at middle school retention there's a lot of ways you can look at it and the impacts that it has on students and i really would like to keep these students with their cohort if they are willing to come and try to close those gaps over the

134summer with the summer learning opportunity um and i'm deserving 31 spots for those students and hoping that um they're gonna actually show up um i think that's the enticing thing of being able to move on with your group will get a lot of them i will incentivize a lot of them to show up and that's what we're hoping and so that would leave 158 students or something around there that we could serve that would be those high tunes that you know you're looking at bringing in it's barely oh i got two things on that i think it's great to give them that opportunity to pass but then i see the bad side you're not working hard through the year but i know i can go this little few weeks it's kind of like you know

135not fair to your kids and working every day and i understand that but i think my duty as a principal is to make sure that i give every student an opportunity to succeed at the in a way in which they can succeed um and i don't know if every student had the opportunity during the school year to succeed so i want to offer them an extra opportunity during the summer i don't want to give my students any reason not to be successful and i just feel so here with those students um i can give you a case study of a student that i work with very very diligently a young man and he was detained once in elementary school he then came he was at dylan when i first got there and he was retained

136the year i got there so now he's already two years behind the rest of them you know the teachers were like well he still needs to do yadda yadda i said but look he's going to be 16 in the eighth grade uh entering into the eighth grade he would leave almost 17 years old um i said there are a lot of things socially that are very concerning about retaining a student at that rate and so what we did is we worked on a stair-step program with him and he had to have certain grades in order to move up to the next grade level halfway through the year and then he pressed through for that second half of the year but that worked with him i'm not saying that works with every one of them uh

137but i find to be if you know anything about middle school middle school is a very tumultuous time in children's lives it is probably the hardest part of any child's career is middle school high school is hard because you're trying to get into college middle school is like i don't even know who i am who are my friends i don't know what these hormones are doing i don't even know if i like school do i have a voice is my mama here no my mama's not here you know parents kind of fall back in middle school because they were very involved in elementary in middle school they kind of okay you're on your own you know let's see how this works um just trying to figure it out as a parent trying to figure out

138how do i support my child but give them some independence so it can be very tricky so i don't want to give them any opportunity to not succeed and the other thing on your flash drive you got half and half what is the difference between that face to face and your other face to face so those students so when those students go home they lack the technology or the access to the internet so then we provide them with some form of paper or either we load their lessons onto their chromebook as much as we can the chromebook does not have a lot of capacity to load like videos and things of that nature so then we come up with ways that's why those make it an equitable experience for all students uh the flash drive

139students provide a um we tried a low i'm telling we got it lower because we started out about 50 something flash drive kids and we started out this year um and they're just some kids that we they you know they had the hot spot so it's not like we've used the district provided hot spots they had two different ones one from the media's the building memorial library and from the district and either one of them beginning of the internet service so those students take uh work home in the form of either paper or upload documents and videos onto their chromebook mrs garland going back to the number of potential uh students for attention this year how does this number compare to last year or a non-public year so this number is higher this is higher

140it's definitely higher so i'm going to say this you know in full transparency we can get students that don't meet promotion at promotion standards uh for nl dylan middle school there's probably about there's there's more than 31 let me say that there's more than 31. 31 of the kids that if we we're looking at we're saying you really we know the gap is so large with you and to work with so little with you there's no way that i can say with assurance that you're willing that you're able to move on and do well in the next school year or survive the next school year uh it's definitely more traditionally um i've probably looked at about five kids for retention um but this year we're up at about 31 and i took advan you know

141i take my teachers word very seriously i mean when the teachers were like you know we whittled it down to these seven kids and these seven kids on this team just because they submitted students to me did not mean that i approved them for retention or that i'm looking at them for for retention um but i take into effect i looked at all those students grades i followed them throughout the year we started building this year we started building this list in quarter one because we started to notice there was big difference as far as what people were doing and so we said we're in quarter one and you know quarter one is the easiest quarter i tell everybody quarter one is easiest quarter two is the second easiest quarter three is the hardest quarter

142four is i don't know it's somewhere in here but it's not the hardest nor the easiest um and we saw some problems coming up in quarter one and so we were like this is the easiest quarter then we should probably start looking at what's going on in these classes and how many children and where we are with mtss and where we're intervening so it's definitely more of a stalling um than we have seen in years past any other questions or comments dr carter um miss as you can see miss stanley uh cannot be here today she for medical reasons but she did send me a text and wanted to to share uh what you said about the strength of your math teacher mr walters interventionist and that she knows firsthand as a parent how strong

143he is that's true and very supportive in that comment but i also wanted to say how again how fortunate we are to have the leadership of mrs at the middle school she models um by example and she has high expectations data driven as you can certainly tell and i know she's not going to brag on herself but she is a graduate of the uh north carolina principal fellows distinguished the fellows program and brings that leadership into the school and i just can't thank her enough for for all that she brings to dylan's middle school and and it is certainly when you hear principles say we were so sad not to have the eogs last year to me that sums it up because that's a rare comment you've heard from both principals so far that you

144know have presented this morning so thank you yes ma'am thank you all thank you thank you and the last principle to present today is mr stroke from the high school [Music] hey thank you good morning i'm finding yourself the brain breaks research states that when someone hands you something you begin to read it on the representative immediately i will try my best today to do my due diligence in presenting an overview of baltimore city high school it is indeed my pleasure to be in front of you once again this morning and today i just want to first talk about bot lane's school mission our mission is to work with students parents and members of the community to make a difference in the lives of our students while the institute has committed to providing learning opportunities

145and challenging educational programs enabling our students to achieve their maximum potential and being globally competitive our school vision is to provide the most effective education possible but all stakeholders are responsible for a safe environment for all students but before i start talking about barley and st high school i want to take this opportunity also let my community know more about principles who is the principal students well i'm a proud product of caswell county schools graduated from the class of 1995 baltimore city high school i received my bachelor of science in elementary education north carolina agriculture and tech state university with a minor in sociology i taught elementary school for five years prior to becoming a school administrator in 2004 i have my matches of school administration from unc greensboro and my education specialist from union

146as well i'm licensed to be a k12 principal as well as superintendent i've served as an administrator at elementary millennium high school and of course i was elementary teacher one thing i would like to let people know that being from capitol county i like for my work to speak for um i'm not one to brag that's just not my nature that's not who i am so these type of presentations a little difficult for me at times to talk about the great things happening that balkans are saying hi because i want my students to shine not me so let's talk about our students in baltimore i want to give you a little overview of our demographics um i've talked so many people in the community and they've asked about how big is the high school or

147so what's the breakdown so i decided to give a good opportunity to share our current enrollment as of today is 657 students uh breakdown by demographics we have point three percent american indian fifty percent white three point seven percent multi-racial um thirty-six percent african-american and 10 percent hispanic latino we have a total of 338 males 319 females on my great level totals as of today 9th grade 175 students 10th grade 183 11th grade 157 and uh senior class cupcake is 142. for mrs stokes you're graduating hopefully 174 students but we also have 32 students who've already graduated so don't make sure those numbers add up on the baltimore senior high school staff we have four office staff members student services i don't call them guidance i i call it student services because we serve students

148multiple capacity our student services has two councils and nurse support staff one medium coordinator one curriculum coach environment technicians some people call themselves they're more technicians for me than anything else we have six of those the alternative program has three positions i have four to five classroom teachers two assistant principals five instruction assistants there are total numbers if you look at all the total years of teaching experience we see over 500 years but being the principal of the school for that diverse of a level of staff it's very difficult to come in on a normal year well i had the opportunity to come in on the first day of code and so all i know is coconut so if you ask me anything about covert i can tell you about that if you have anything

149before the code but i can't tell you much about it however i did have some operational office oil files for me are what i call opportunities for improvement i don't call them challenges i call them opportunities for movement so one of the initial things i realized about bald lansing high school is that we need to establish a systematic process of communication for students in our school community um there's a lot of word of mouth and with word of mouth you have that cousin or that individual that adds something to it or subtracts something from it so it's a lot of gray area i don't do well with the gray area i like it to be in black and white so we're going to reference document as these birthdays keep coming i find it a little

150harder to remember and so i also realized that we did not have a strong social media presence and i know a lot of people have their own opinions and experience with social media but social media is only as good as so if you want to be used for good it can be if you want to be used for character assassination or falsehoods it can be used for that so i felt that we needed to improve our social media please also i also saw within the school we need to improve communications within the department you know the english department may not know where the art department's going home the science department will go on history but think that improved communication within the building also improves our student performance as well enhancement of our school web page

151for action information if you took a snapshot of our web page in march of last month and take a snapshot of the day it has had a massive massive um of as we try to keep it relevant um still not perfect they're not perfect but we try to do everything in our weekly messages to post on the web page so that everyone has a source to come to and the final thing was prompt feedback to concern one of the things i heard over and over again as i was investigating volunteering how was you get a call you never get a call back or you send the email it takes a long time to get a response now we're still imperfect people but one of my questions within 24 to 48 hours you get a response

152to your correspondence this is either voicemail or otherwise and our instructional effort opportunities grading to reflect mastery and growth versus completion of assignments um i've been in school a long time and i've always seen some people get a hundred and we're looking at a class rate we can see all these 100 and then at the end of the year you see the 100 and that's just not a true indication of what the mastery is so that gives our students a false sense of um accomplishment as well as some students who work very hard to make the 100 may not gotten the feedback they deserve to say good job only hard work while another student just may have filled things out and it wasn't checked for conviction i'm not saying this is happening at widespread but

153that's one of the concerns that we'll share with new friends enhancing enhancement of teaching and learning opportunities um corporate allowed us to step outside the box coconut allowed us to break the box um as far as how we approach instruction so i really felt that it was the best time for me to come to uncover because it didn't give me any pre-existing um grammar i started from the ground i started from the foundation we got to build the plan while we flew it um enhancement i wanted to realign the schedule to provide support for all students at the high school level it is particularly difficult when you have advanced and honest classes most times classes may be smaller than your classes of students who are not in advanced placement or honor classes therefore you have

154a teacher that may have a class of 15 students and then they have another class of 32 where it's very difficult for that class of 32 students to receive the support that they need because the need may be greater and so i want to work on relying on schedule to provide opportunity i firmly believe our immediate students need the best learning problems um again i would say they can immediate students need the best learning problems because now in high school the clock is sticky um in k through 8 they have some time but the clock is ticking because they are soon hitting a certain number of ages while they can make some decisions from other choices that really have long-term lasting effects so um enhancement of the core teaching strategies more than just stand and

155talk more than they meant verbal how to make our classrooms more engaging and active and then consistent writing opportunities a lot of our students struggle with writing um a lot of some of our adults are struggling with writing and that's as a result of my publication system and so i want to incorporate consistent right opportunities through all content not just it's not just the english department's responsibility plan it is the health health business education department every teacher has the opportunity to improve writing opportunities and then a wideness equipment options but i find a secretary being an elementary teacher in the secondary opportunity everyone's a clinical expert um at the second level and that's not necessarily the best thing for students because they're getting advised many guidance from various people and therefore as a teenager they

156already know everything and then whenever all these different people tell them things it really may be misguided um opportunities for other options so we don't want to try to make pathways so so i still understand their options and how to get there and finally data-driven instruction using common asset common informal assessments and e-boss data um coming from previous places i worked on data was the backbone of the new year um it doesn't mean that we don't we don't put everything in testing or we're on the gaming test but our data gives us opportunity to show growth so if lance comes to your classroom in the beginning of lance could not do a b and c but by the end of sweden he's not in the abc even l he still may not be what we

157want him to be but he's better off i firmly believe that after a semester of instruction our students should be smart and so ongoing professional government is where i wanted to begin um we decided to make each faculty meeting our plc with a very specific construction outcome and therefore a staff member could earn ce participation so every faculty was a staff development every plc was opportunity for staff development by hs staff they had the opportunity to earn 14.5 ceus this school year to put that in layman's term that's almost a total 19 day professional level although south americans during the day meetings plc's those are opportunities while they're growing um ranges meant our topic ranges were from managing lecture instruction um inclusive classroom i'm engaging in instructional practices for virtual and non-virtual students we had

158to do some serious work on social emotional learning um then we had to learn to learn some new technology such as gamble using nearby and the all the complexities that canvas allows us to do um for my teachers canvas allows students opportunities to receive feedback and reopen assignments so therefore it gave quicker feedback and a lot of teachers weren't aware of that and so now we're going to have a lot of new teachers this year so it's not because they're returning they just didn't know what and then that analysis lets us know how our students are predicted to do and what they actually do so that we can measure the growth just as the state does item writing and common assessment and of course problem-based objectives um at baltimore next school year i'm very excited

159of the opportunity all i'll rise in ninth grade all of my kids will be completing a pathway i'm so um very thankful for the staff here in that builder that's working with us to help us find a pathway where each student cannot break you may say what's different than that in the four-year plan glad you asked the four-year plan talks about courses i want to take but this pathway that's the student takes an interest in the choice so therefore he or she is able to find out things they like they don't like so therefore it gives them a guide pathway of various careers they may want to pursue it doesn't mean they have a stake on this pathway but research that says that cte completed students that are on a pathway have a higher position

160of graduating one time or even earlier because it's it's focused so we would have an arts pathway we got students with games music um visual arts as well as performing arts we have the associates pathway which was formerly known as the fast track and then we have our career cluster so they may want to be a medical careers pathway and they want to be in a business with animal science faculty education pathways we now know what they kind of want to do we know about the english is the map sound but those electives are really where our students get very passionate because it aligns with what they want to do um one time i feel the great things at valencia high school did you know that in addition to the sports there's a lot of

161opportunities to become a part of something great fccla which is family career communities of america we have a ffa skills usa art club marching conflict main course in yemen and who knows what else donald trump um my next last slide i want to talk about is the impact i believe in rigor and relationships um i work hard and i believe in modeling that with each number one of anyone know what time i come in what time i leave each other i put in probably too many hours um if i did wasn't losing my hair before i probably stopped losing there but some of our um highlights is our graduation rate increased from 79.1 to 85. 85.4 um i'm really excited about our fall english efficiency rate for all proficiency rate in english 2 last um

162fall of the year 2019-20 was at 38 this current fall we were at 50 45 percent which the increase is 12 now somebody's going to say well how many students will they glad you asked that question in the fall of 2019 there was approximately 125 students and this previous problem is 101 students so that gives you some comparable numbers different kids that we've had some opportunities for our students to demonstrate growth as well as proficiency we've also had an increase of student graduating doing enrollment diplomas from piedmont community college iii and i'm very excited about the old mac foundation grant of twenty five thousand dollars it's gonna help us provide equitable access to students and athletics and of course our welcoming football team like secretary conference and our lady about the softball team ring number

163one very excited about those things um my core values are very simple i strongly believe that we should be the best by all students regardless of who they are where they come from but we also want to make sure that they have equal access to it um you'll see my sociology minor come into place when i start talking about equity because i wasn't i didn't come from a very rich family they come from a very prominent family come from home they worked very hard and trusted the school to guide students through well that trust is not part of my responsibility so we must advise them properly because we have a large number of parents who still trust our decisions for their child's well-being we also have parents who may have had negative experiences from a

164good school so they have a fish trust of the school system because they did not feel they got their best opportunities so we haven't impacted that hence why we have that systematic communication and opportunities for improvement that concludes my presentation this morning um uh now open myself up for questions mrs begley um i like you report but on here you did not have like your number of how many virtual how many face-to-face and with that have you had a lot of teachers complain about um kids not showing up to class well face to face and what have we done have you contacted all the parents and how are we gonna handle that so you asked about four questions first our numbers are we have 352 students taking place this week um we're probably approximately 150

165and 125 100.7 between the month two three thursday we have 12 students on flash drive i was saying we have 12 students on flashlight i'm so thankful for that and then we have 293 that are full of them um so that's the answer to the first question the second question is are teachers having one of your questions was how we tried to contact them yes ma'am we've tried to do everything um to shake every tree to find some of our students uh we we've had staff to go out i've sent custodians outside everybody who was driving was maybe reaching out i'm not going a couple doors myself although i might not want to focus but i've done that because i'm just that passionate about surprise students that i know casserole county better than some people

166applauded [Music] um in class the next day because it really allows us to keep a closer not closer keep a more responsive opportunity for our students to be in class high school students of the different beasts um specifically they started to work and they have a choice to make money and they're still impacted by their own state they can multitask and do well as far as teachers um it has been very difficult i'm very proud of my faculty and staff involving senior how with how they um stepped up to some of my expectations that i didn't know what the previous ones were as well it has been difficult for them to do both and yes we've had some frustrating moments i've had some teachers coming off and looking and saying i can't take it one

167more time i say well don't take a break just sit here and just talk about month of may and resurrection i know april was um easter but we would not have students resurrect that we could not qualify for they'll realize at the end of the year and they're trying to finish and we've had some of those parents say what can we do to get our child off the finish line i said well i'm just going to be very very straightforward it's very difficult to win races but um graduation time in time but we may not get all those forces this mess um and also i think he had one question that answered these questions i think i was dead okay last this is a piggyback on ms begley at the beginning of the school year

168when it was roughly 85 kids that we didn't know where they were now either they dropped out or they transferred to another school what is that number now so the number nine is approximately about 42. we've had some students withdraw um i would just be very clear i am not going to drop a kid if i don't know where they are oh they they have an infinitive they have not participated they may still be on my roster because when i started when i looked at trying to drop a student um i'm almost guaranteeing dropout okay so i want to ensure that i am exhausting every auction before i drop the student okay now that's my point the guidelines that you have to drop after a certain period of time send the notifications out and see

169that number of 85 bothers me and uh either they are or they don't and there's only a certain time that you can keep them you can't keep them the whole year if they don't show up so you you said the numbers in the 40s now it's in the fourth now we have recently started to see i called around this local school district trying to figure out what has happened with the withdrawal process we look at it you're getting student withdrawals now that the kids started in school back in january okay and so they all said this didn't start with january 19th well as they're going across the line our power school our information system won't catch it right so we have students that have gone other places that i suspect a lot of boring call

170from north carolina that's very difficult for us to account for but legally i understand that we have to drop students and i will be prepared to share what that number is once that day happens but again we're still getting requests we're getting that victim homeschool requests got a good number of um other other districts outside north carolina because in north carolina we can track them they try to enroll in the power school we'll see that so it's in the 40s all right it's black one with the new summer school that's going to be available uh what students how are you setting that up for how will it affect the students at the high school so in high school we have a very very different approach at times you're gonna hear me talk about cohorts is

171the student on our core that means are they at risk of graduating and 40 years or not because that timeline starts at ninth grade year so we will be focusing on students who are off cohort meaning they may not have a proper number of credits to be considered a freshman sophomore saying et cetera we'll also be looking at students who may need additional opportunities to show massive and we're also looking to hopefully provide some opportunities for kids that have made it known to us that they'll that they decide to they've done well and we've got some students who really want to i said can we keep some online things so that we can finish early because i don't like the end school thing which allows us to also while i'm excited about the capital online

172piece coming on because that gives us an opportunity other than north carolina virtual public schools to make sure we keep that student engaging in school so copa has allowed us to do things differently but also accept that change has to come and with that change give us new opportunities to do things better mr garland uh mr stokes thank you for taking the leadership role the principal involved i know you came in at a time when you hit the ground running yes i like the piece where you have your opportunities for improvement or you talk about communication because of all the great things that you have going on if this is not communicated to the staff the students the community then everything just kind of falls down and so with communication we know that people be

173respected and valued and they will have that value so thank you for what you have done and be well thus far thank you ms blackwell could you give us if you have that information any update information about uh graduation so graduation is going to be on june 5th we are still following the same plan of two to serve two programs hopefully you should have received something in the mail if not never um i'll send something to you to let you know some things prepare for our ceremony um i have a senior parent meeting this thursday i've been holding one every week since um we made the announcement graduation to take on questions and concerns that is currently the biggest concern for every one of the students want to see each other graduate has been the

174constant concern and so i did charge my student council to get a get a poll of the students who are interested in that because it's their graduation i know mama's and grandmother granddad uh when aunties and uncles love graduation but there's also their graduation and so they should have some input on that there's some additional input on that as well as they already had input so um i should hear back from our student council by thursday and we will kind of see if it's feasible because some people want that and there's others who won't i'm not trying to please everybody but i like to give people options we're going to have two circles um that's that is not changing just for logistical purposes and safety um it'll be we'll recognize abl at one time in

175the end of the other the question the kids actually can they all stay on the field the whole time um in which we're having to maneuver through that because it's been a long time since we had outside ceremony and so um most of the veterans around um i'll have to call on them to kind of help me out i understand what that was but we didn't have to worry about social business anything so now we worry i was at a football game a couple weeks ago there was about 1500 people there and they were shoulder to shoulder i went to a softball game and by playing the other day it was show look to the show and believe it or not i'm about to have mass on so when i got in there i took

176it out because i didn't want to be by myself but i'm telling you people have looked at it different ways and just because it's done over this way don't mean it's got to be done over this way but uh it's just getting covert has caused a lot of problems and you learn from it and you're not like you said you're not gonna satisfy everybody you gotta do what you think best for us appreciate that do you know who you're speaking will be uh about this year we will not have an invited outside speaker um this is the student's graduation and so therefore it's gonna have very intense student focus while we have students being part of the conversation i promise you it'll be top-notch um if you read your that you understand i'm stepping up

177some things um but we are definitely i think that is they've had a tough year since they've been virtual so much um they may not be open i mean they'll be open to outside speaker if i want them but i just i think they'll be more happy to hear from their their classmates about certain things to do so they collected i mean it's their graduation and so we'll have some special presentations and affirmation but there will not be an outside speaker invited in this year um i just wanted to just uh end by saying i cannot tell you how proud i am of mr stokes and everything that he is doing at partly into senior high school and the when he says he puts in a lot of work that's even an understatement uh there's

178any given day uh we're talking at nine o'clock at night or earlier in the morning it's just because there's always something going on any any on top of everything about the data and the communication and the focus on rigor and high expectations didn't mention all the work about building a new high school in between and i don't want to talk about themselves so there's so many great things happening and all i can see is the the future of how it's going to grow at berlin hospital so thank you thank you mr scott um next we have our quarterly report of our finance from chris chandler and again i would just like to say how appreciative i am of her work and the department's work and how we've had uh such good standing and uh good

179reports from our auditors and so thank you miss camera good morning i did want to make a note on page two that um i accidentally did not update the federal revenues and expenditures paragraph and i'll touch on that when i get to that fund it should have been increased 50 000 instead of decreased 50 000 and i apologize for that error um if you i'll start with the bank balances on page three there's pretty much no difference in the bank balances that i presented to you in december for the december quarter the school accounts are still showing a decrease again related to no fundraising activities i'm being held at the schools um and pretty much all the rest of the accounts are in line with are there any questions about the bank balances yeah for

180as long as i can remember aiming this report has always been this way yes sir but i want to ask this down in the investment funds yes sir when when i see investments i mean i look at you putting money in a place to drop some interest that's right but look at the first four current experience down to before and after school should that be there um you mean should we have investments for those accounts yeah so what happened i think a few years it happened before i was here but those investments were taken from our fund balance and put into an investment account for each of those funds okay so that like before and after school has a fund balance of that amount and it's in investments okay second question what is the uh

181amount of return what what percent is that right now it's it's not this is pretty minimal because of the fees are not outweighing the interest that we're earning right because of the stock stock market decline um and it's also being hard for them to find investments that we're legally allowed to invest in because we can only legally per statute invest in um state bonds so right now there's not been a lot of bonds being issued up through north carolina um localities and municipalities so we're having a hard time finding investments to invest in so right now a lot of our cash isn't just a community checking account um earning very minimal interest right because the way i looked my math calculation north gained 60 dollars over a year yes sir 114 for dillard correct oakwood

182got 41. yes and south had 98 correct so that is from the prior year from march of last year to march of this year so um as of march of last year we had allocated interest for six months um july through december because that's how we were doing interest allocations on the investment funds this year july through december again the interest did not outweigh the fees so i did not um allocate any interest the only interest that's being received is um on our bank accounts like child nutrition capital outlays and before and after school they get a little bit of interest on their checking accounts and that's the only interest we've accrued this year all right good are there any other questions so you're saying with the state funds you look at the where you

183can invest for the market for the state funds and so we haven't been able to do that in previous years because it's so low or it's not really state funded um these are our local imbalance cash right um and we are able to invest those in different mechanisms but according to statute we can only invest in municipality bonds we can't go outside of north carolina likes to virginia and invest in any bonds issued in virginia it has to be solely in north carolina so we haven't been able to invest in any bonds so the ones that are common dues um i think it's and they have to be less than a five-year maturity as well so the bonds that we invested in a few years ago are coming to maturity um now or have come

184in the past few months and we're not able to find bonds to reinvest in currently so it's sitting in a community checking account uh if there's no more questions on beta balances i'll move to the state fund on page four um the state funds show a decrease in revenue and of expenditures about 950 000 um some of that is related to a decrease in our state allotments that we received um especially related to classroom teachers and instruction um so if you notice the 5100 regular instruction line has a decrease of 700 000 from the prior year and that's primarily related to a decrease in the teacher allotment and also a decrease in substitutes being utilized the other big um section that saw decrease was operational support services and that's related to the buses not being

185utilized until march um when school went back to in person are there any questions about escape songs page 5 is local funds again we saw a decrease in revenue of about sixteen thousand dollars and also a decrease in expenditures about a hundred thousand dollars the revenue is related to the civic center we did not budget any revenue for the civic center unless we haven't had any revenue because we haven't rented the civic center out we also saw decreases as we just saw interest we did not allocate any interest this year so far an activity bus you know athletics did not begin until the third quarter i think the end of february so the activity bus rental is down because of that on the expenditure side um i just wanted to point out a couple of

186items of 5500 co-curricular services athletics the decrease in expenditures there is related to athletics not beginning we did send half the supply funds to bartlett united see for in february which is reflected here but none of none of the coaching supplements have been paid which is not reflected in this number here the other item was legal services it's sitting at 34 of budget right now and um just so you know the legal services are paid behind so the third quarter was not paid until april so the third quarter number is not reflected in this number but we also did have seen a decrease in legal service experience this fiscal year are there any questions about local oh yes say that again what you said about the legal services so we pay legal on a quarterly

187basis so july through september is paid in october and then october through december is paid in january so this is as of march so we had the next monday in april yeah so we did it in april so when i report to you in june we actually journal enter it back to june okay because it's really not paid till july all right so i want you to think that this is only 30 it's really only 50 reflected okay um page six is the federal funds this is the one i mentioned i misspoke in the letter um and i apologize again it's it actually increased about fifty thousand dollars and that's primarily related to the cares act funding that we received um there were a lot of categories that did show a decrease in the expenditures

188but they were offset by the increase in the 5800 school-based support services line item that was the funding for the two nurses um for this fiscal year i would also like to point out that 5800 line is only showing about 13 percent um expended to budget that line item has the majority of our care that money budgeted in there and that's going to be for chromebooks and we're not going to spend that till next fiscal year we budgeted for it but it won't be spent until next fiscal year because it does carry over and we are going to replace the ones that are expiring in september of 2021. so we were trying to wait closer to september to purchase those chromebooks so that the license would go for another five years are there any questions

189about federal 17 cte only 23 percent yes ma'am um ms stone and has been working on spending that money asking for supply lists um you know with the virtual they weren't utilizing a lot of supplies virtually so when they came back in march they are requesting supplies and she has been working with the cte teachers to um to purchase its supplies that doesn't carry over does it oh 17 it does not any other questions on federal um the next page is capital outlay um again as i've said in the past the capital outlay is looking a little different than the past years that i've presented um because i'm trying to reflect the high school so it's not big one big number that you see at the end of the year even though the county is

190paying for the high school no cash is flowing through through us we still have to reflect those numbers on our financial statements so i've i've tried to capture it quarterly this year so you won't have one big number at the end of the year the other things i wanted to mention um in the expenditures were there are several projects that are in line to be completed by june one of them is the chiller that you have a proposal for on the agendas today for dillard another one was the hvac at the civic center and then roof repairs at east wing which was approved at the april meeting so it's not reflected in these figures either are there any questions about capital outlet on page eight is child nutrition the child nutrition fund has shown um

191a decrease in revenue of about six hundred and twenty thousand dollars presented to you this morning talking about the decrease in participation which is directly affected the revenue of that account um with with the decrease in participation the usda reimbursement isn't as high so the revenue has decreased the expenditures also show a decrease of about 523 000 which is again directly related to participation because with lower participation your food costs are going down so the decrease in expense can be related to the food costs as well and then as of march the 31st the fund showed a net loss of a hundred and sixty six thousand nine hundred and sixty dollars are there any questions about higher nutrition and the last time the restricted fund is pretty comparable to last year there was a decrease

192in revenue of about 87 000 and that's primarily related to our golden leaf stem lab grant that we received last year of about 69 000 we did we don't have that revenue for this year and then our expenditures show a decrease of about 125 000 and that is again related to the danville regional foundation grant that expire this was the final year of that and the expenditures only covered um one technician this year so those expenses have decreased in this fiscal year are there any questions about the restricted moment any questions in general thank you new business i'd like to recommend approval of the consent agenda presented that court has made a recommendation to approve the consent agenda as listed do i have a motion ms garland makes the motion is there a second as

193black will second see emotion is there any discussion any questions if not all in favor raise your hand motion carries unanimously the resolution in memorial and appreciation of the life of ralph aaron ward whereas ralph aaron ward was born on july the 11th and resided in lexington north carolina at the time of his death on april 2nd 2021 and whereas ralph ward was a faithful and loving son husband father brother and friend and his family's welfare was his major and constant concern and whereas ralph ward was and whereas ralph ward graduated from north carolina state university with a bs degree in african education and his master's degree from purdue university and whereas ralph ward enjoyed farming and working in his garden he also enjoys spending time fixing up his 1962 car traveling and spending time

194with his grandson and whereas ralph ward began his 42-year career in public education as the agricultural teacher at prospect hill school in caswell county he continued work for the cancer county board of education by working at the central office for 11 years and later went to work for the brunswick county school system as the vocational director on chair retiring as the personnel director in 1998 and whereas ralph ward touched the lives of the many throughout his career and will be remembered by his community and board of education for his leadership and his commitment to education and being known for his benevolence and service heart to children and now therefore be resolved that the casper county board of education wishes to honor the member of ralph ward and expresses its sympathy to his family by causing

195a copy of this resolution to be spread upon the official menace on the board of education and incompetent forwarder to the family this is the 10th day of may do i have a motion to that this resolution be spread upon the official minutes mrs beverly makes a motion as a second let's go seconds of motion into discussion all in favor indicate by raising your hand but it's the same emotion carries unanimously yes i wanted to give you just a very quick update on the high school project and you have a copy of a presentation in front of you and i'd like to thank mr powell for providing this update but i know there's a lot of um well every day there's something occurring at the high school and i think now that the glass is

196going up it's even more exciting so that was one of the reasons to give this quick update to you but the first sheet you can see where you know just a reminder of the entire project and then of course the construction of the high school itself was 23 million and it's about 64 complete at this time uh with that being said within those construction days we've had 23 weber days uh because of inclement weather and part of the contract you know does prolong uh the project when we have uh documented weather days so with that being said uh the move-in date as of right now for the students is september 26th now that can change depending on inclement weather but because of working closely with the contractor uh they've made them adjust so that even

197though the moving network the first wave of students is september there's still no change in the final day of the entire project which is continues to be august 2nd 2022 and um and i'll get to the reason of that in just a minute but um a lot of things are happening and i think you know on the next page you know it says you know the glass is being installed and it looks from the outside that there's so many things occurring and that it could be any day but we all know the house before once the outside is completely all these things that take time to be inside and uh you know with electrical the fire alarms uh you know the foreign heating air and all those things have to occur and so those um

198those things will be occurring over the next four months uh we do have a committee that we meet um every two weeks with mr powell mrs stokes uh and some of the key players to make sure that we are on target and some of the things that need to occur and aligning it up with the responsibilities of that as well um a lot of things going to happen over the summer and i know that mr sex is talking about those you know different things you know they're doing at the high school and talking about summer program and we think we will be able to have by the way a summer program at the middle school and at the high school uh but even with that being said the summer school will be in the east

199wing far away from where the construction will occur and i'm saying that because of one of the reasons that we're able to keep that end date of the final project construction is because the contractor has moved up the demolition time frame policy and so that's going to occur this summer with that being said we have a very aggressive uh schedule for packing up and boxing up and that's why that transition coordinator is so so important that's coming before you today of making sure that we have everything lined up for preparing pause two and three four demolition and then packing up over the summer because of all these things that will occur and then when uh school starts at the beginning of the school year it needs to be already completed as far as organizing the

200boxing and such you can see on the page it says when the students like they have first everything's going to happen over the next couple of weeks demolition court yard demolition and excavation underground sewer storm water gas power all those things are occurring and then we start with the technicalities of intercom replacement firearm replacement and all those things will be up and running when summer school is is taking place and then if you look at moving forward and the move plan you can see the different things that will be occurring as part of that transition over the summer we have storage containers that are being delivered to the school to store the materials that will be you know can be used and reused in the new school um we have um people going through staff

201going through what is uh has been there for 30 40 years and is no longer relevant not even good but just no longer relevant uh anything that is not repairable because we're keeping everything we can um you know and again the in our moving committee for like a better name is meeting on an ongoing basis to monitor and make sure that we are at the milestones that we need to be at the last couple of pages are detectors and on may 7th the roofing is 90 complete you can see from the a drone picture of what and then you can see the inside and i said you know from the outside it looks like so many things are finalized but the inside is still shed and you know that's what's going to be occurring aggressively

202over the next four months and then of course uh the page of the high school as it is right now the front curtain wall in glass as it was last week and you know if you compare that what it looked like a couple months ago you can see the hard work that has gone into making this uh uh this construction occurred and again i cannot uh express our thanks to the uh construction company and all the things that they are doing to make sure that it is completed as quickly as possible with the quality of course that goes along with it so that our students can get into this school as quickly as possible and so that is a very big update any questions about the uh construction update if not we need a motion

203to casual county board of 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 statutes 143-318-1186 and for the purpose of discussing information that is privileged confidential or not public record nc general statute 143-318-1181 and to confer with the attorney to have a motion the person has made the motion is there a second okay battle seconds of motion any discussion all in favor indicate by raising your hand