Aug 16, 2021 Pitt County Schools Board Work Session

001like to call this board work session to order um i'd like to welcome everybody that's here to listen i do want to before we get started let you know that our meetings are open however we um address have public expression at our monthly meetings on the first month of or first monday of every month and that's when we take public expression today's meetings will not have public expression and so therefore it's your pleasure to sit there and listen but we will not interact with you and i ask you not to comment if there's any interruptions just to let you know that we will ask you to leave the meeting so at this time madam chair personal privilege during the meeting during the part of the meeting that it's going to be the formal meeting i

002am going to move that we suspend the policy to allow individuals to speak because i think it's a hot button issue i think there's people here and uh that want to speak and i think it would be good for us to speak so i just want you to know that i will be making that motion and emma could you um you'll address that at the time okay all right moving forward we will have carol reflect on the minutes that all board members are present so i will not be taking roll and first up we have dr linker who's going to have updates for us this time i think we have dr silverdale on the call we do at this point um dr silvano is going to address the board on issues with the cove dishes

003where we are in pitt county he has some state information as well and where he sees uh the situation the current situation is covered in pitt county doctor are you there dr silverman are you there we had a mute button push somewhere um yeah i'm here i'm here ethan all right thank you sir you're going to share your screen i can do that all right if you all gave me permission yep there we go you ready for me to begin ethan yes sir go ahead make that full size good afternoon everybody nice to be with you today sorry i wish it was under different circumstances um but let's uh let's talk about covet 19 where we are in in pitt county here so october 19 and children i wanted you all to have a picture

004of how many cases there have been both in the state and in pitt county so i pulled these numbers these are based on the updated state data that was in on on friday they don't push out their day-to-day update until around noon time and since your meeting was at noon i couldn't put the today's numbers in but these are from friday in the zero to one age group there have been 11 000 cases in the state zero to two fifteen thousand closing in on sixteen thousand cases in the two to four year old age group in the five to nine year old group across the state thirty one thousand seven so almost thirty two hundred thirty two thousand cases the 10 to 14 year old age group 45 220 cases statewide and in the 15

005to 17 year old age group 38 425 cases statewide in pitt county uh we've fared much better amongst our children we've had 203 cases in the zero to one age range 316 cases in the two to four year old age grange 726 in the five to nine year old age range and um 1032 in the the 10 to 14 year old age group and then in our 15 17 year olds we've only had 816 cases across pitt county um through last friday if we look at covet deaths in children again these are statewide numbers in the zero to one age group there have been no children to die in that age group from covet two to four-year-old age group no children have died from from covet in that age group in the five to nine

006year old age group there have been two pediatric deaths or two children that died 10 to 14 no no children have died in that age group and then the 15 to 17 year old age group there's only been one death so three three pediatric deaths below the age of seven at 17 or below across the state in the 18 to 24 year old age group which takes in our mostly our college graduate age students other than 21 deaths across the state in pitt county depending on which part of the website you look at this morning one part has a set 100 one one part has us at 95. we have a hundred total deaths in pitt county and we have not experienced the death below the age of 50 in pitt county as of friday

007morning moving on i want to show you the covet 19 outbreak or epidemic from from various perspectives this is our epidemic curve as a stack bar graph by age the 0 to 17 year old group is this sort of yellowish or gold color you can see that at the week of june 19th was really our nadir after the spring wave and then we began to grow and had even had growth in the zero to 17 year old age group all over the last two weeks were pretty pretty level we've seen tremendous expansion in our um our 25 to 49 year old age groups or that young adult worker um with some expansion in our 18 to 24 year olds and then some expansion in our our older workers they're more mature workers the 50 to

00864 year old age group interesting that we've seen a little bit of a bump in our 65 to 74 girl group again most of the new cases 85 to 90 percent of new cases depending on which source you look at are in unvaccinated individuals this is testing across pitt county throughout throughout the epidemic and i want to point out to you that we have tremendous testing capacity in the county at the height of the pandemic in january or height of cases in january uh we did the better part of ten thousand tests in one week the black line represents percent positivity and you see how that is has ebbed and flowed with the course of the epidemic and most recently climbing very rapidly also this is maybe not as as good of an indicator as

009it was at the height of the pandemic with smaller sample size day-to-day variation can skew this up but nonetheless it still climbed and climbed very rapidly and would be considered an indicator of increased covet activity in in pitt county this is hospitalizations across the vitant system throughout the epidemic so this is march of 2020 uh this is first wave second wave third wave spring wave would be fourth wave and here we are into the delta wave you see very steeply uh how hospitalizations have climbed this is the weekly report i get so this date is from last tuesday the good news in this graph is that icu admissions have been relatively flat they did rise a little bit through the big fall and winter surge but have remained relatively flat and even with with the

010delta wave are still at relatively low levels across the vitamin system this is a report from the sequencing lab at brody you can see where delta was starting to appear towards the end of may beginning of june clearly had a foothold by the middle of june and then has has significantly grown through the last sequencing report that was available and i will point out that there is delta and then there are two subtypes of delta uh in that mix but but um out of 90 93 out of 98 samples uh were of the delta variant so 95 of our sequencing is showing the circulated predominant circulating strain to be the delta strain and its subtypes the coveted reproductive number while this remains unclear the state meaning dr coleman has suggested that for delta it may

011be as high as one to six this means that one case can generate six new cases if this is correct this is a very steep geometric expansion of cases where one case becomes six six becomes potentially thirty-six become 216 become 1296 and so forth so very very rapid spread rapid growth potentially in a in a non-immune population in pitt county this is kind of the little report card i do and and show from time to time i did not bring one back because it the last time i talked to you was really about a year ago and um a year ago we were in a much different place over the last 14 days pitt county has seen 1208 cases that's case rate of about 6.5 per thousand individuals in the county that is high if

012we went back to that low spot in june we were at about 0.7 cases per per thousand in the county so less than one case per thousand in the county our total cases 22 511 that's about 12 percent of our county population that we know to have been infected with covid of those cases we would estimate that 21 203 are recovered or 94 of them our fatalities at this point stand at 100 again i'll point out that this morning before the state finishes its update in two different places there are two different numbers one being 95 one being 100. if you take those numbers and calculate a case fatality rate using the 100 fatalities you come up with a case fatality rate of 0.4 or 0.44 unrounded so about four times as lethal as flu

013which is reported as 0.1 across all age groups and our percent positivity this morning uh with 16.2 percent uh in returning tests the state has quietly said that they're much more coveted out there than we can count and i think many of us have always suspected that there's been a antibody surveillance program that's been run uh through several of the major universities including ecu to test the seropositivity meaning the antibodies of individuals in the community and when the state was at about 10 percent in what we could count from positive tests the zero prevalence or antibody level was at 25 percent of the state so the state is quietly behind the scenes although i guess dr tilson did report this to county managers and county board chairs recently as well it's saying that we have

014about two and a half times as many cases as we thought we did so where we thought we had 22 500 cases we may have if that 2.5 number holds in pit county as many as 56 278 cases and that would essentially cut our case fatality rate in half to 0.17 or 0.2 with the rounding so only about twice as lethal as influenza is across all age groups i want to move on just briefly report vaccinations to you at this point as of again friday morning new numbers were not out prior to the start of the meeting 86 804 individuals in pitt county are partially vaccinated representing about 48 of the county um 80 120 individuals are fully vaccinated representing 44 percent of the county as a percentage of population so we're not quite where

015we'd like to be but again having almost half of our county vaccinated is a is a far better place than we were last year to mask or not to mask um as you were aware the following entities are all recommending universal masking in the k-12 setting the centers for disease control the american academy of pediatrics the north carolina department of health and human services and governor cooper himself had sent out a letter last week to to school superintendents and school boards regarding masking my recommendation to you is um i guess the one thing that helps shape that recommendation the masking and quarantine with students if the student is exposed and both parties are masked the student is not required to quarantine this will help keep kids in school so my recommendation for you is to

016start the school year with maths required for all students faculty and staff when indoors allow dr lanker and myself to develop guidance for sports individually as the risk varies from sport to sport for the most part outside transmission is reduced then masking would not need to be in place in outside environments when the numbers improve that masking policy can be relaxed and i'm happy to review those numbers for you or with you or with dr lanker every 30 days moving forward and that's the end of my formal remarks happy to take questions perfect go ahead sir dr severnell this is work and um i have a question in regards to the number of um cases of students in the flu deaths compared to the covet deaths in let's say kids 0 to 17. do you

017have any data on that because you know i have read where the the flu affects the kids more detrimentally than this covet in those younger age groups i did not pull flu death data for this morning in pitt county in what's the last year i had data for probably 19 i believe we had had one flu death and i believe there was one flu death early in and with covet we've seen no no deaths in pitt county below the age of of um in pitt county okay that's what i wanted caroline hey dr silver thank you so much for your presentation especially for highlighting the data i just had one question um my record you talked about the reproductive number could be as high as six could be um but that's what dr cohen is

018saying um in terms of the number of people each person infected with covid passes it to basically transmits it to um if i recall the previous variants um alpha and i'm not sure of the others um they had numbers uh originally before they got names was that around two the average was around the reproductive number was around two people were were uh infected with covid for every one person i'd uh identified or diagnosed with it is that right was it two yeah carolyn the early estimates in this ranged from two to four many of us thought that the the reproductive number with the original strain was actually less than that um hard to calculate sometimes especially in an ongoing epidemic with a new a new infection but the original estimates did say two to four

019so um so yeah that would be correct so you would say this one is likely to be uh more transmissible in orders of magnitude yes yeah definitely definitely more transmissible than the original strain thank you go ahead benji dr silvernell this is benji forrest how you doing i'm good how are you sir doing good appreciate everything that you're doing and being a part of this workshop today i i just got some questions i want clarified a little bit uh is it fair to say that kids under age of 10 are far less likely to spread the covet disease yes we believe that that the children pre-pubescent children children say under the age of 10 are less efficient at transmitting it it doesn't mean that they can't but on average they are less able to spread

020it than more adult children are you know adolescents and young adult children dr sylvia is it fair to say that um there's a fair amount of natural immunity from prior infections say in the school system currently and and and would you talk a little bit more about his antibodies level because it sounds like it could be a lot of antibodies a higher percentage than what maybe the data is showing yeah officially and and this is one of the great you know rubs of covid if you will nobody is talking much about natural immunity and it's likely that natural immunity is at least as good as vaccine-produced immunity there was a study in at ecu it was called the compact study but that was part of a um larger study across the state involving both duke

021and unc and there might have been another partner in that as well where they recruited a cohort of individuals in their service area so ecu obviously recruited a cohort across pitt county in eastern north carolina and they did ongoing testing for active covet and they did antibody testing for prior covet infection and the findings coming out of that study suggest that about 25 percent of the community has had a covet infection already um the state epidemiologist um zach moore dr zach moore revealed that on a statewide call a few weeks ago forgive me in kobe time that the time is all a blur and then a couple of weeks ago on another state call dr betsy tilson told us and and recently told the county managers on a call she jumped in on with the

022county managers that for every case that we've counted there are actually probably two and a half cases out there which would so our numbers are are probably two and a half times what they are in terms of individuals infected in pitt county right dr silvernell would you say it's and i don't you know you you you tell us is it fair to say that children 17 years and younger are at a lower risk oh absolutely covet in terms of the probably the single biggest risk factor for a severe outcome with covet is age and then throw on medical comorbidities and the younger you are the more likely that covet is going to be a mild illness for you as an individual low risk does not imply no risk there are some younger individuals who become

023quite ill with this um so it's not a guarantee right dr silva now i'll just ask one more question because i know there's others on the board that like to speak is it fair to say that there's proper ways wearing masks and improper ways of wearing masks where some things could be more effective than others yes sir at the mask well well every let me say everything that we do is imperfect whether it's testing contact tracing masking the vaccination is imperfect there certainly when it comes to masking a properly worn mask is more effective at reducing an individual's ability to transmit the virus than an improperly worn face mask thank you madam chair okay any other questions around the table for dr silvernell i have one more act wait but actually caroline raised her okay

024that's fine thank you melinda dr silverman was caroline again did you review the abc study in which pitt county's uh employee epic county schools student and staff data was included from last year which i believe showed less than one percent chance of transmission of cases by children by students in our schools with masks required i haven't seen that carolyn but i do know the transmission was very very low in pitt county schools last year and the other thing i wanted to follow up on is um i have do you know if the um antibodies generated from the previous variants protect uh people from the delta variant the and about the variance and and the sequencing is interesting because you know we don't do this much sequencing with other viruses so from a generation to generation

025standpoint with viruses we don't know how much they change for most of them um at from an evolutionary standpoint viruses will evolve to become more transmissible and less harmful they're they're designed to make copies of themselves and that facilitates them making copies of themselves so there's a pressure to become less less harmful but more transmissible as far as we know that even with the delta variant even though the genetic sequence of the virus virus is different enough to recognize it as a a variant of the original strain as far as how it looks to our immune system it still looks about the same to our immune system and antibodies from natural infection or vaccination are at least partially protective and folks who are re-infected if they've had prior infection or those who have been vaccinated

026and get infected or both and i'm aware of some cases in in pitt county where we've had individuals who had the disease had a vaccination and got infected with likely the delta variant had very very mild illness so yes vaccination and natural disease appear to have some degree of protection even against the delta variant at this time but not a hundred percent nope nothing's a hundred percent yep and uh she caroline asked the question that i was gonna ask in regards to the effectiveness and the immunity of uh the children let me i i can ask is dr silvera do you think there's going to be any long-term impact in regards to students and you know wearing masks um continuously putting um perel or whatever on their hands is it is there going to be

027a long-term impact in regards to their immune system being suppressed and not being as strong as it usually is when students are you know exposed to all different kinds of viruses and colds do we see a long-term impact in regards to our students once we get through these uh variants of covit i don't know if there's any data to support that one way or the other i think it's unlikely that that frequent hand sanitizing and wearing a mask now is going to have long-term consequences for the individual while students when when we're small our immune system does need to learn the difference between friend and foe and there could be some delay in that there's just not data to support a conclusion as to how good how likely unlikely or severe that is at this

028time i just know like when kids for example don't go to preschool or whatever and you send them to school their immune system seems to be kind of suppressed because they many of those students come home with all kinds of colds viruses and so forth whereas the students have may have been in preschool at a young age or daycare seems as though they are not affected as much with these variants of different viruses but i understand what you're saying but are you aware of a study in regards to mass related to the delta var of variant how how effective masks are in regards to the delta barrier i have not seen anything specific in print regarding that sir no thanks i just want clarification on something that caroline asked the study that she referred to

029is that the study that duke university participated in who are you asking because he didn't he won because he didn't he said he didn't read it he wasn't aware of it well how about the duke the abc collaborative uh was actually 11 school districts including pitt were part of it i think dr silvanera has seen our data they might not have understood the questions being part of the abc their findings but i know dr soberner has seen our numbers was there a controlled group in that study okay i think i'm sorry doc still now i thought you might be familiar with that don doc similar don rhodes here just a question on the flu versus covert uh long-term effects of flu long-term effects of covert on our young people can you ever elaborate on that

030any potential i guess potential long-term effects on eva well we generally don't see long-term effects of influenza there are the so-called called coveted long haulers with a virus that's been around for two years again i don't think anybody can give you a realistic answer as to what that means for anybody down the road we do see a subset of of individuals who with with many infections develop protracted symptoms uh and those occurred with viruses before covent and will probably occur with viruses after covid but i don't think there's data to give you a hard answer right now as to how many children who get coveted today will have symptoms in 20 years the virus hasn't existed for 20 years so nobody knows the answer to that question any other questions okay thank you very much

031dr silvener we appreciate you zooming in with us and giving us wonderful information all right you're very welcome have a nice day now you too thank you brief presentation okay mr mr mr doctor dr biden i want to thank everybody for for having me here and taking this opportunity to just share my thoughts i wanted to give you a brief introduction of who i am and i'm my name is dr matt ladue i'm a pediatric icu doctor by trade i'm also the chair of the department of pediatrics here at brody school of medicine i represent the 80 plus faculty members in our department i also am the pediatrician in chief for manor children's hospital here at vidant medical center and really my thought today when i was asked to come and give my perspective was

032you know we all know that there's recommendations from the american academy of pediatrics the cdc um but i'm not sure uh you all are familiar with what's been going on in our children's hospital where we are what we've experienced what we've seen in children and so i'd like to kind of give us just a little bit of history so that you know what's happened here in the children's hospital so you know where have we been i think there's some there's a lot of uh information out there um i think there's some belief that potentially we didn't see covid and i noticed that dr silvernell had five different waves but i'll talk about the one previous wave we'll put that as one and then when we get into talking about what we see coming um i

033think that's the delta wave so what i wanted to talk about was where have we been that it is absolutely true in the children's hospital so i'm going to speak about children who were ill there's a vast array of children who were tested positive they had cold like symptoms they were out in our community and those are not the kids that i'm going to talk about but i'm going to talk about the children that we saw in the children's hospital in the pediatric emergency department so the truth is is that we did not see acute covid in the first wave i think that was all of us as we got nervous as this came we were preparing for the worst thinking that we were gonna see all this acute covet and when i talk about

034cucumber what i mean is pulmonary disease lung disease um that you see in the adult patients and and so you know looking back i think um we we were we did not see those acute covet cases but what we did see in the first wave is something called miss c and it's multi-inflammatory cyst uh uh multi-inflammatory system in children and what that is is an inflammatory process that occurs weeks to months after the acute covet infection and we saw dozens of children with what we call miss c in the hospital many of our kids required oxygen many of our kids required transfer to the icu some of our children required medication to keep their blood pressure up a handful of our children ended up on ventilators with miss c in addition to the lung disease

035that we saw in miss c they had renal failure they had coagulation problems and then a few of our kids here in our community ended up with tracheostomy tubes with feeding tubes and a long weeks-long stay in our pediatric rehab facility and so i just want to emphasize that although the numbers aren't huge there are children our children in our community that have suffered from these from these coveted infections move forward i think what we need to talk about is where we are now and so this information comes from the data that we've been living and breathing for though for the last uh year or more um i think there's a couple priorities that at least i have as a as a parent myself one is getting our kids back in school the second one

036is keeping our kids safe what makes it different what makes us pediatricians worry is the delta the initial data that's coming out of the delta variant is it's a different disease than what we saw in that first weight so in the first wave we saw the missee very few covent infections or acute covet infections that's not the case anymore so if you look at some of the hot spots i spoke to one of my colleagues in florida his icu is full of acute covet infections just two weekends ago they had a death of a child with pulmonary hemorrhage from acute covet here locally just in the last two or three weeks when we were not seeing you know months ago we were not seeing acute covenant infections we are starting to see them and i

037want to tell you of two children without violating kind of their privacy one was a teenager someone that would probably attend one of our high schools that got acute covet she developed got very sick very fast she was in the icu she was on a breathing machine and she had very severe pulmonary hemorrhage for those who don't know who what pulmonary hemorrhage is it's scary scary for the patient if they're at all awake it's basically when they bleed from their lungs and it's very difficult to control she survived she remains in the children's hospital we have another patient an infant that came in mother mother was positive and was born and suffered acute covet infection there's something that we do in the most severe kids in the intensive care unit when they're sick we put

038them on heart lung bypass it's a machine called ecmo it's about a 50 50 percent chance of survival on average it depends on why you're going on but about that um we came as close i think i was driving in to put the patient in on on ecmo so um our fear is that things are different with the delta variant we're starting to see it here here now the other thing that i wanted to point out was capacity and there was a lot of i've gotten a lot of questions about why are we at capacity is it because of cobit the answer is no it's not because of cobit it's coveted is contributing to it but what we're seeing is as as the graph i wanted to point out this graph i think it emphasizes

039a few things so what this graph is is data about all the different viruses so each color represents a different type of virus um this is not coping okay so this is just multiple viruses human meta pneumovirus enzo respiratory sensational virus rsv that we see a lot of so what you can see here is i think it answers one question the big question is do masks work and the answer is yes look at the graph so you can see all the viruses going along at a very high rate the start of social distancing it's about april time and you can see our viruses drop way down and they're they're they're present but they're much lower than they they are so you know not just mass but what we did in total right so masking social

040distancing quarantining ourselves doing all those things and then as we start easing restrictions in late spring you can see all those viruses come back and so i think there's a couple things so one is part of our capacity problem here in the hospital is like we're in winter in winter we're usually at capacity because we have a lot of those viruses around and our kids get sick from those viruses and um and then if you add on top of that kovid and in those things we're seeing that as well and so um what we see coming so you know i i hope that we dodge a bullet like we did last time i think that a lot of the data is showing us that um it may be worse than last time and we need

041to prepare for that and like i said the trends in some of the hot spots are showing that the kids are sicker and they're being more affected than we saw in the first phase so you know i think what what me as a representative of brody and the hospital you know i think my recommendation is truly what dr silvernell said is we should go into the school year when children are indoors and they're in close confined spaces to wear masks and be as safe as possible well my also my recommendation is it should be re it should be looked at periodically looking at the numbers and looking at what's going on in our community so um hopefully that gave everybody some background about what we're seeing in the hospital i'm more than open to answering

042any questions about what we've seen anybody have questions he answered my question he answered your question okay all right thank you very much and brian floyd good afternoon i'm brian floyd i serve as the president of aidan medical center and the operations officer for viton health system of hospitals and on behalf of the team members i want to thank you for allowing us to come today i'm not going to reiterate the data and stats that more experienced and knowledgeable people such as dr ledoux have shared about covet and its impact on children but i just want to represent also the bigger picture associated with this that's real for us as a health care concern i would not be doing my job if i didn't come and share with you some of the other implications that

043we're dealing with vitamin health exists in eastern north carolina to provide life-saving care almost a thousand patients a day right here in greenville north carolina as the most comprehensive resource for critical care in this region we all have heard the statistics about the incredible size of biden medical center as it being one of the nation's largest hospitals it is in fact in the top 20 in its size in the united states but that tells us something about our region the hospital is large because we have a large disease burden in eastern north carolina which i think we all understand over the past few months though that burden is manifesting without covet an increasing number of patients who are arriving in our hospitals and our emergency departments with an increasing acuity level meaning their illness is

044is worse might be a patient who has heart failure who hasn't seen doctors during covet who now has decompensated i hear that from our physicians a lot the patients were just sicker than they were before and we're starting to see a wave of them over the last few months that's increasing strain on the system from the capacity perspective it shows up in terms of weights in the emergency department as the ed is full every afternoon with patients that are complex and require time to work through their disease process it shows up in decreasing beds available for not only pitt county but also the region that we serve as patients are waiting to come into this comprehensive tertiary level facility and that's without really the delta or the covet issue then enter the story that you've

045heard from dr silvernell and dr delu lecter ledoux on delta itself a more transmissible virus and a higher spread rate that our data and as you've heard from the professionals today is real for us right here in pitt county and what does that do on top of an increasing acuity level it simply strains that system more as we're now taking in patients who are being treated for covet we see it in the number of admissions that are going up we see it in our emergency department visits of both delta and covet patients in addition to those i mentioned earlier which strains the system significantly as we try to separate and deal with the complexity of dealing with this transmittable virus in the emergency department environments it shows up in testing and if you have driven

046by our testing site which i drove by on the way over here the last few days an increase significant increase in testing that's not actually showing up in all of our numbers yet because it's fresh it's just happening over the weekend lines were as long as two in three hours just to get to the covet test today looks like it's going to be the same story again when you look at the line of cars driving up for those testing it also shows up in its impact on staffing our team members physicians and staff are all part of the community as well so with increasing spread they're not immune to that it spreads to them as well and that leads to call outs that leads to people who are in quarantine for themselves simply because the

047virus has exposed them as well and that reduces our capacity so it's the cumulative impact of both delta covid the pre-existing acuity levels of these increasing numbers of patients that raises our concerns and has to it causes us to have to take action when we've overwhelmed the environment so the the life risk or the health care risk that we are concerned about is not just covet it's what this phenomenon is doing to other disease process and other needs of patients who are brittle or in high need of health care long waits could equate to lives lost or risk not just from covert i'm worried about the patient who's having a mini stroke or stroke-like symptoms in the region that needs to be here but the delays of getting in in an overwhelmed system could cost

048in their life and it's not about covet it's not going to be in those mortality statistics necessarily it could lead us to have to cap our beds or not have our beds fully available for the region which has been happening we've been on deferral for certain disease process for some time now and if you are aware other hospitals in the state are experiencing the same issue which just means there's less capacity in north carolina for certain life-saving care that patients need it could and is leading us now to the state where we're having to have the conversation again about reducing non-emergent procedures and testing or elective surgeries and things as you might remember happen in the fall and that happens simply because we don't have the capacity to handle putting more patients in there that

049aren't emergent on top of an environment that's that's already close to being overwhelmed so we're here today advocating for children and advocating that the children are protected as best they can be but i'm telling you i'm also advocating for you and your loved ones and families beyond covet who need the system to work for them and not be so overwhelmed or not have team members who can't do this work because of spread rates that are in our community which could harm us because we simply can't be as available as this region needs us to be so masking is not the be-all end-all of everything but it is a tool at our disposal that might make a life-saving difference in a non-coveted situation as well and i just wanted to share that perspective with you today

050thank you anybody have any questions i did have i have a question i just i'd like to ask a question you want mr floyd i mean both of us i would like i'd like to know about the when you say the delta uh variant how is that is that being identified in the kids or in in the individuals that are coming forward and with uh severe cases do you know whether it's the delta variant or do you know whether it's the previous you know yeah so i think there was a graph that dr silvernail showed about the different variants and they were color-coded and i think the delta variant was a greenish color and if you could see 99 i think it's 95 of uh what they're sequencing so it goes through another test so

051we test for the virus and then they take that sample and they run it through another sequencing to determine what the variant is so they can't do that on every sample but they're doing it on a large amount large amount so i just know people who are testing there is positive they don't know whether it's the delta variant they just know that they have it i think if you asked us weeks ago we probably would say we're not sure right because it was probably 50 50. now we can say we're pretty confident 95 percent of those are going to be dealt okay sure carolyn yeah thank you both so much for your informative presentations your expertise and your dedication to our community's health it is um it's a big job and i appreciate it as

052a beneficiary of your efforts um i work at a community health center and we are seeing much frailer patients than we have seen in the past i'm the compliance officer i get calls all the time about patients basically standing getting out of their car and not being strong enough where ambulatory care ambulate means to walk but they're it is really different than it has been prior to this pandemic so i completely understand it's all that is right backed up our our longtime patients are are much worse off but my question to you both is pitt county is home to three large educational institutions ecu has tens of thousands of students pitt county pitt community college has 20 000 tens of thousands of students as well something like that both of those educational systems have chosen

053to impose a mask requirement um and as you know that's one of the things we're here to decide on today do you think that the mask requirement for those two educational institutions will help pitt county um beat back this variant and the impact it has on of course their students but also our health care system i i mean i think we're taking every effort to try to minimize the effect on the community i don't know that i articulated this one point masks are important for two reasons the first reason that a mask is important is to try to protect myself from somebody else that has it um and and you know the data out there we know they're effective to what degree we don't we don't know like there's still studies that need to be

054done to be able to say that but the other benefit is if i happen to not know i have covet and i'm walking around and we all have masks on um then it's not considered an exposure and that's really important for you guys to understand when it comes to keeping children in school and i'll give you the example if a kid comes in and like you all know a lot of our kids are asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms but they come into the classroom and no one wears masks and then a day later it's found out that they had mass and they were indoors the whole time there will be a quarantine who for anybody who's exposed to that child so teacher students whoever was in that classroom an unmasked child with private is

055what that's right so say the whole classroom is unmasked uh and we face this in the hospital all the time right trying to keep our workforce up and running we all wear masks and it and it's for those two reasons because if i'm working with a bunch of nurses and one comes down positive i'm not considered exposed to that to that person because we were all wearing masks and so that individual so if you're wearing masks and one child becomes positive that one child will quarantine and be home and the rest of the kids can continue to go to school but if everybody's not wearing mass or a vast majority of the of the um students are not wearing masks anybody who's not wearing masks would have to would have to quarantine so i think

056keeping the focus on kids in school i i know we all have our own experiences but we all know that in school is better than virtual for sure so so master there's two reasons to wear anything else i just want to say thank you for um what you've done as far as violent with providing nurses because i'm going to tell you if we didn't have those nurses last year we could not have stayed open those nurses not only are they taking care of the well-being of our our students on a daily basis that have diabetes and other kind of medical issues asthma what have you um they also require to be the the contact tracing and that's a really really difficult job so you know thank you very much for for doing that as well

057as when we needed vaccines when they became available you were willing to set up the clinics so those who wanted to get vaccinated could so i just applaud biden for partnering with the schools in providing you know the necessary needs that we have so thank you again we're grateful to do it and again thank you all for just allowing us to come we're only here to be a resource to help you have information necessary to make complex decisions i hope we've been helpful in giving you something to think about today that might help okay thank you okay is karen here oh that's right we do have the curriculum sorry okay so next on our agenda is the curriculum resolution policy discussion absolutely okay um just at our last board meeting it was asked that we

058have a discussion on on critical race theory and resolution i've collected some information for the board to look at um uh different policies from different school districts that already have a policy a couple resolutions from a couple uh from cabarrus county as you see uh plus a potential draft resolution that was just to start at least to get the conversation started i'm not sure where the board wants to go with this at this point i think it may make some sense if the board wants to go with the policy committee start taking these policies as where to start the conversation um but go from there but maybe start with the policy committee and bring that back to this board at least then it would be in your policies as opposed to resolution madam chair okay

059go ahead ben um first of all i appreciate the board today bringing this onto the agenda because i do think that it's a very important agenda item and a concern in the community the thing that concerns a lot of individuals at least in my section of the county is that um critical race theory those social theories like that especially that and the 1619 project is not somehow developed or incorporated into the teaching of the curriculum of pitt county schools we have done our best to assure the community that we don't have that in our curriculum currently and that is true the thing that our community continues to be concerned with however is that there will be some teachers that whether it's in the curriculum or whether it's not in the curriculum they will still use

060components of it to uh to teach students um we've tried putting a statement out assuring the community that we don't teach critical race during the 1619 project that did not work if it did i certainly would not have suggested that we bring it back up today and i've toured with the idea what would be the most effective means a resolution in and of itself would be would be stronger than a statement because it would provide that this board would go on record in a voting capacity to approve something that would discourage that teaching in the school system okay however i also know that a policy if written properly would even have more effect because once somebody on staff or teacher would decide that they would on their own use some components of the theory to

061use as illustrations or whatever or or put in their own ideological spin on some lessons then you would have a policy to back you up to say no you're breaking school policy so i like the idea of a policy what i what i'm concerned about is that we write a policy that would be so watered down or so general that you really couldn't do anything much with it so that that would be i guess the concern i would have with with a policy makeup of it especially when you've got and we've got teachers that are employed by pitt county schools that are members of the ncae that is affiliated with the nea and that they're using resources money to develop curriculum and resources to provide full critical race theory and that that's that to me

062is uh something that even though we don't offer it and even though it's not in the curriculum it it could provide that some teachers that are really politically slanted toward the tour affiliated organizations that are promoting it would try to slip in in some kind of ideological classroom setting teaching method so i guess my my situation would be dr linker that i like the idea of a policy i just like the idea of a policy that spells out what we're talking about and not just a generalized statement i couldn't agree with you more i mean i i appreciate this being brought to our attention it certainly is a concern in the community um but to your point a resolution is helpful but it's not enforceable and so where a policy is comes closer to being

063something that we can enforce and i did in response to knowing this was going to be on the agenda this weekend i did it or this today i did a lot of research this weekend or fact-finding i should say um and you know critical race theory in 1619 are broad i mean expansive topics and so i would welcome the opportunity as a board member to learn more about what is included because what what some people consider components of crt other people don't and so i need some some additional help i couldn't even begin to get my arms around it just over the weekend i would love to hear um you know differing sides on what constitutes critical race theory what specific issues parents and stakeholders are taking issue with i would very much like the

064opportunity to do that and then to look at if it's the pleasure of the board of policy determining what what parameters we want to have if any around controversial teachings and where how materials are used i think also i could use a little bit of a refresher course i don't know about any other board members on what exactly we have jurisdiction over in terms of curriculum and standards and things like that i think that would be helpful i think i understand where we have jurisdiction but i want to make sure so all that to say i concur with what you're saying that that i would appreciate an extensive amount of education for us as board members on the various theories on sierra on the critical race theory and on what what it includes you know

065i agree i i think a policy is the way to go but now the policy will not be any good if it doesn't have any meat to it i know as a principal i always felt like that i was felt good when we had strong policies and i could always let my policy do the talking for me and you know it's it's time that we no longer pat teachers on the back and say don't do it again we need to have something some meat to it to make sure that hey there's a consequence if you move into this realm you know i did submit to the board um kind of a definition so to speak of what critical race theory is and what the 1619 project and i i got some of this information from

066the michigan legislature but you know i with the critical race theory i said it means anti-american and racist theories reading guides lesson plans activities guided discussions and other resources that promote that the united states is a fundamentally racist nation that the united states constitution is a fundamentally racist document and that certain races are fundamentally oppressed or oppressive and then with the 1619 project it means an initiative of new york times that attempts to reframe american history by regarding 1619 as america's birth year and this includes curriculum reading guides lesson plans activity guide discussions and other resources that promote 1619 project and you know we may it may be put in the state curriculum in our curriculum one day that it needs to be taught based on funding based on certain uh groups that are you

067know pushing this initiative but i think we as a pitt county school board still needs to take a stand and say we don't agree with this type of curriculum being within our school system teachers need to know as you said they need to know exactly what we're talking about when we say we do not want critical race theory talk and we do not want the 1619 project talk i think the policy will be worthless if we just say we don't want critical race theory talk and we don't want the 16-19 project tall without any type of guidelines that go along with it and you know it it is something that many of our parents are concerned about they're also concerned that even though we don't mention 1619 pro or that we mentioned 1619 project in

068the critical race theory that it will be integrated somehow i mean this is a fear of the parents and we've got to help them understand that we're doing all we can to prevent it being uh put in and taught in a manner where it's disguised and i think we as a board we've got to take a tough stand and we got to take a tough stand and we got to stand up to this being taught to our children because i don't believe our children needs to hear any of this i know i don't want my grandkids taught that and i'm sure there are many many parents that don't want their kids to come home with a project that tries to belittle their race or promote another race because we're all equal and we're all made

069by god and i just think that that's very important but i do believe that a policy would be stronger than a resolution if it is strong okay carolyn um i believe our teachers um have been trained to use their professional judgment to choose how they teach the north carolina standards the north korean standards are put out by the board of education department of public instruction um it is we have been reassured that neither 1619 or crc um are a part of the north carolina standards right now i actually trust those entities to take a good hard look at what part of our history needs to be uh taught at different grade levels you teach a five-year-old something different than you teach it 18 year old and those are the educational professionals um who the state

070has put in place in a democracy we are still a democracy um we're with lots of opinions being discussed at the state board of education level at least so i feel very comfortable in supporting all of our teachers regardless of what political party they belong to regardless of what association they belong to i mean i'm not hearing anything about associations forcing their members to teach a certain way there is a lot of material out there on a lot of different subjects and that's one of the things our teachers go to school for is to pick and choose using their professional judgment and training what types of curriculum and materials they are going to use for the those kids in their classroom so i've not heard any instances of any teacher in pitt county moving lock

071step in with some professional association and saying i'm going to do everything you tell me to do i've not heard of anything like that again i it's not in our not in the standards not in our curriculum we have a board of education who at the state level who with the dpi manages what our standards are and it's our professional teachers jobs to use their professional independent judgment along with their peers in their groups and their grade levels to determine what are what is the best way to teach these standards in pitt county schools i i don't want to undermine teachers professional judgment for that i think it's really important i mean they went we went to school for a reason and this is one of the key things that they learned was to be

072able to tailor the standards and how they're taught so that their students actually understand them and they actually get evaluated on how well their students learn the state standards they get tested on that and it reflects back on the teacher's performance so i think we have a good accountability system in place including in july when we talked about or i think it was our july meeting june june meeting where we were presented um our policy i forgot the name of it um about non-political activity 77-20 i'm looking at go right ahead but i'm just looking at it let you know thank you um and it seemed to me like it was a good policy in place that um provided prescriptives about political one way or the other any kind of politics type of activities um

073you know we didn't hear anybody say that wasn't strong enough everybody at that time felt like that was appropriate um at least i didn't hear anybody say that that was not strong enough so i feel like we have a good system in place um you know i don't want to undercut and make any teacher's job harder frankly i don't want to tell them how to teach the standards that they've been trained to know how to implement in their classrooms madam chair i i went back and pulled that up the study was called what we got done in june was engaging in a partial study by preston bowels and a group of team there policy 7720 not to kind of be redone it basically it says the political activities must not take place during school time

074involved school monies on materials are number three and that's one got circled on our presentation make use of official school position to encourage or to convert students or ever employ the system to support in any way a political party candidate or issue so i i believe we already have that policy there but now i agree with it we may need to put a little more teeth in it so the policy is there uh i don't know reading into it and i hadn't read it then that the consequences i'm not sure are really there but we all should know the consequences if you're not filing a policy so i i don't know where we want to go on that i think we already have a policy we might want to build on that policy i would

075suggest mr tripp thank you chair i agree that we we have a policy in place and i know it's being talked about in areas of the community but in my district i don't hear it talked about and then as uh ms smith was saying a lot of people don't even understand or know what these theories are but i want to uh defend our teachers dr linker and all we have not had an issue with any of these theories being taught or tried or attempted to be taught in pitt county schools and i think we're going ahead of ourselves if we look at what he called a resolution for something that we haven't even had an issue with and because i think our teachers are more professional than what i'm hearing we give them credit for

076as far as predicting what might be taught or what somebody might try to do but as of now i have not heard of anyone saying that any teacher has attempted to try to teach any of these theories in pitt county schools and we said before in other meetings we trust dr lincoln and we should trust those who working on our policies to put together a good policy that will represent the board and represent all of pitt county i think we should have more trust in our teachers and what they're doing and i believe they've been professional if it has been an issue brought up being that this was being done then i think we should do some things that the board can vote on but by not being an issue i think it's more of

077a political issue than it is an issue in our schools because you've said that we have not had any attempts of this even being done in our schools so i don't see giving all people a chance to put a policy in place and make sure that policy is carried out and more important to me than it being discussed because i think most people hear about it in the news they hear about it from the politicians but here in pitt county schools i haven't heard dr lincoln say anything about it being taught or any teacher has been reprimanded for trying to teach it and so i think we should leave it up to those who are making all policies thank you madam chair i move we move forward with developing a policy to prohibit the teaching

078of um critical race period 16 19 project and those social projects associated with it if i may we normally do not take up business in a work session however if it is the consensus of the board to do so okay that's good i think that and it sounds like it is at least there there's concern i think there's consensus i could be mistaken that dr linker and i go ahead and take up the business at hand and work on a draft of the policy to follow up with the policy committee madam chair yes she is exactly right that's why i trusted her i was out of place thank you i'm so used to sitting in a board meeting and and uh working through working through issues through paula bender's procedure it's okay it's work session

079that's why i was like she's exactly right that's what we pay her the big bucks for amen right okay so you want to repeat that for us i think the consensus is for for the policy committee uh to review policy i guess 7720 and see if it should be updated in any manner to add some additional language regarding the 1619 projects critical race theory okay and just so everyone knows even though it's a policy committee every member on the board has access to input for those policies so well if it's a policy it's got to be read twice anyway it sure does and i'd just like to add too we had two additional policies that day that will discuss policy 5210 and policy 3210 that it cannot kind of be if we made some kind

080of statement or whatever they were there already okay all right thank you can i say we'll add one more point to that or has it got to be seconded or whatever no we don't we're not voting well i do think it's very important that we that uh policy that you're talking about don doesn't mention critical race theory in 1619 broadcasting and that's why we say but i'm saying does that you can you can add to that policy we already got right but does it say it now it says political viewpoints political view and that covers that in my opinion i'm no lawyer but doesn't cover it in my opinion it needs to be we need to have a definition of critical race theory and what it is in a concise manner that i think you

081know the policy committee can come up with as well as it needs to include the 1619 project and a definition in regards to it a broad statement so that i you know the best way to keep teachers out of trouble is to have guidelines that they can understand and it's written and that they will follow and we don't want a situation we want to be proactive as a board not reactive and wait till something begins or assignments are written and then there we have parents in here very upset it's best that we go ahead and take care of it right so that there's no room for error make it very clear that i'm not interested in telling teachers how to choose the curriculum that supports the standards that we require them to teach okay i

082got this month madam chair just to follow up the word if i do not disagree and but once we start listing items that list is going to expand i think we can take this up to the public and during the policy committee meeting but i still want to agree make a statement and the statement that i want to make is in regards to the reason why we're even talking about this is because the critical race theory has come to the front in regards to parents as well as the 1619 project the political aspects that you have talked about parents would haven't said a thing about that they've talked about these two issues and as parents we're listening to everyone else other than the parents and their and what how their feelings regard their kids we

083need to hear and i've heard from numerous parents regarding these topics really it's been out there and i've gotten uh you know i just heard a lot about it and i think that we just need to take care of it take care of it at the beginning so that we're not constant it's not constantly being brought up over and over again okay brought up in here all right are we good yes all right good good conversations uh and emma will be at some point sending out when the policy committee will meet because what they need to be meeting soon okay up next is karen harrington correct where is she next door good morning afternoon i think we're getting into afternoon now afternoon sorry the morning went quickly um i am just here to review maybe

084a follow-up of some of the things that dr silvernail and others have mentioned already in terms of quarantine and again just referring back to the toolkit for the guidance i will say that we already have a meeting scheduled with dr silvernail and dr mosley williams for tomorrow to just get clarifications as we always do as the toolkit gets updated to follow up on making sure that we are all consistent across the county with our procedures so again um in terms of the toolkit one of the differences this year is that last year there was a whole separate booklet for handling cases and now that's all been incorporated in the toolkit and it was always in the toolkit but there was a much more extensive booklet and again this is what we used to guide us

085there was an update even since the last time i spoke to you on august 10th and the only thing that they added in was some updated guidance for sports and outdoor activities as well as they did expand slightly right here on the exposure definition so if your tool kit does not have on the outside an update of august 10th sometimes they will let they will do that and not let you know that they updated it but one of our school nurses caught that as soon as we got back so i will just start with saying the the importance again this year of staying home if you're symptomatic and that is gonna that has been a struggle for all of us including myself when your kid has something that you are pretty sure is their allergies

086with the way we are you know now if you have any symptoms our staff or our students it's very important that they stay home and so that that is the very first thing regardless of what components of here we're following is that symptomatic individuals need to have follow-up with their healthcare provider and or get a cova test to determine their the presence of their symptoms and so again it talks here about the symptoms that would warrant exclusion from school and again in children we have seen last year and you know with this new variant as well is that their symptoms are generally milder things like a sore throat or a headache or the fever so again those those can look like other things and your pediatrician may be able to rule out covid by saying

087that they you know finding strep or other things and then anyone that is diagnosed obviously must stay home once they have that positive diagnosis and then it talks in here also about the exposure definition and again we we learned that last year is that um it is essential for those who are not fully vaccinated which is a large portion of our children particularly those under age 12 to quarantine if they're in close contact with an exposed person and the close contact definition would be or exposure definition is close contact within six feet for 15 minutes cumulatively within a 24 hour period but as i emphasized the last meeting the exception to that would be students who were masked if both students in that exposure were amassed consistently wearing their masks regardless of that contact they

088would no longer need to quarantine unless they became symptomatic and you do see that that exception does not apply to teachers or stafford adults so those were the again the main changes the other changes are that we do not have to do the screenings we're not doing the temperature checks or the daily screenings but it will be important and i shared this with our principals last week that we continue to remind everyone if you have symptoms stay home and again that's hard especially our educators we're used to coming into work with not feeling well and being at our best but we need to stay home we need to keep our children home until we get those things ruled out we do still have to you know if we have a individual that is symptomatic make

089sure that we're able to isolate them from other individuals in the building those restrictions are not quite as tight but we still do have to have an isolation space that can be utilized until an individual is able to go home or is picked up and then again some of these other things on page 15 we will continue to do as last year we will have through matt's department plenty of ppe gear wipes and sanitizer so that we can continue those and then towards the bottom again is just talking about when we have those can any confirmed positive case we will first isolate try to get people home and then quarantine close contacts with the exceptions that i've already spoken about so again any vaccinated students or staff if they are not symptomatic would even if

090they were exposed be able to remain in school but what i have been stressing with individuals is if and you have any symptoms even if you're vaccinated then you need to again quarantine until you can get tested or get a note from your doctor saying it's something else that also those exemptions would also apply to anyone that has tested positive for covid within three months or 90 days because again we know that those individuals are considered to have antibodies for those 90 days and again we had some of that last spring um and then if students were masked even if they were not vaccinated we would be able to keep those students in school as long as they were not symptomatic and again we will continue to refer people out to either their doctor's office

091or the clint you know over at biden as they mentioned still has the drive-through that is operational and then it goes into specifics for each scenario i don't want to go through those with you specifically but i'm glad to ask questions in regards to any of those times when individuals would need to quarantine and again i hope i'm going if if i don't have enough detail let me know it's kind of become routine for me so i if i haven't answered all your questions i'm glad to go through that a little bit more okay so for those of us who've taken this information and it's overwhelming and it is let's do an example here so for example if we have a second grade classroom for example then there are 18 kids something like that in

092there and they're there's a mix match of who's wearing a mask who's not and a child gets covered then what's the quarantine procedure for that scenario versus the same scenario where all the kids are masked so i'll start with if they're all masked then the only questions we would be asking about their masks we would ask if their masks consistently and then we would ask about lunch and we would also maybe ask about outside where again you don't have to wear masks outdoors was there any child that they were in close contact with you know so if they're running through the playground typically then we would not need to but if there were two kids that were huddled up together talking then maybe one child is math you know is quarantined in the scenario where

093they are not masked we would again be it would be dependent on each situation however certainly anyone that was in six feet of that child throughout the day for more than 15 minutes cumulatively throughout the day so if they are assigned seats and we know exactly it's these children right in the radius then we would might be quarantining you know three to five children and we'd also have to ask about lunch and how long lunch is and whether they are eating in the classroom or the cafeteria and what is the seating like and then again at second grade where we found we probably we quarantined more children at the elementary level because they go in groups they go in a small group to read they might go out for services and then how much are

094they mixing throughout the day last year they really recommended everyone's seat face forward three to six feet away we are still saying you know assigned seats but if we don't have all of that data about an assigned seat and who the child is with throughout the day it could be that we would quarantine the entire class so i don't mean to be ambivalent but it really is a case by case you know if they if the if they don't have seating charts and they can't talk talk about small group and all of those things then it may lean towards more quarantines but definitely a larger number than if they were massed where it would only be if there were scenarios during lunch or outside where they were really close did you have something you wanted

095to ask she pretty much answered the question benji ms harrington thank you for your presentation all are you familiar with lincoln county schools masking policy or their change in quarantine policy i think they uh developed some amended policies so that because they're they're they're having mask optional so that these quarantines would not be as restrictive as what you're talking about here so that is possible to do um so for my so any got any changes to this toolkit that we would do would have to come through consultation with dr silvernail um again throughout last year we did have some things that were not directly in the quarantine such as household exposure we were doing that much before that based on his recommendation but i guess what i'm saying is there is that option to be

096able to look at a county like lincoln county i suppose so if if dr silvernell felt comfortable with those guidelines i do know that last year there were differences in what health directors across the state were doing in different counties i see dr sivanel might not even be familiar with lincoln county correct correct you know again i know that he was talking to other state health directors throughout last year right caroline just a couple of well one question and and just one concern on page 14 when it talks about maintain a dedicated space to isolate symptomatic individuals who become ill because they're likely to be children can't drive and obviously this is we've done this forever when a kid is sick they go into a room and then there's an adult in there supervising them

097while somebody's trying to reach a caregiver a parent to come pick them up um i did hear last year from a couple of um employees that it felt it was frightening this is prior to the vaccine it was frightening for them to be in there and so i would hope that we would have enough um of the full range it talks on the next page about ppe the full range of ppe available to our adults who are supervising all the way up to n95s whatever they're comfortable wearing and they can tolerate and again that is one difference last year they wanted the individual in the room this year i believe it's again more flexible and it just says where they can monitor them so as long as the room had you know something they could

098potentially be monitoring from outside of the room but again we have stressed all throughout last year if you need other gear if you're running out we have that please order it and we will continue to reiterate that with our principals and our nurses yes and now it's a lot more available than it was right i know we've spoken about this so i imagine y'all have stocked up on the full range of ppe because if you have more than one child in there who happen if you're in a big school it's possible to have more than one symptomatic child in a room at a time and there's certainly a possibility of an adult needing to go in there and certainly those two children like one could have asthma and one could have covered they both look

099the same right we don't want this you know we don't want being in a room together to transmit so just making sure there are enough enough masks on hand to make sure we reduce the transmission if that's the route we choose to go i wanted to ask you a follow-up on the question about this toolkit so i know that the decision about whether or not to require a mask or not is strongly recommended in the toolkit but it's not um required like it was last year in the toolkit are there we basically still have to follow the toolkit when it says required right um well i don't know that there's any places that it says required it's all should should should except warrants oh i'm sorry i'm sorry yes yes now we do have to

100certainly requ you know follow again each time we talk with we talk with dr silver now or his staff his communicable disease nurse we we kind of have the scenarios she and i had talked about outlining the basic scenarios most schools between the nurses covert contacts and administrators are pretty familiar with the basic scenarios but um to to anna barrett's question earlier sometimes there's some little thing that's different even though we we get it down and then we're calling anytime that we're in question we call um and talk to them through that but yes these are required until he gives us any kind of leeway to to change that all right i think we're pretty pleased with how that went last year in terms of um our work with dr silvernail and his team in

101terms of suppressing the level of transmission within our schools that's why we were able to stay open the whole year unlike many other districts in our state correct and we have very few cases where we even there was even possible transmission and even those cases often had an outside factor that we believed was more likely than in school transmission so that system has worked well and there's no reason to think it won't continue to work well correct thank madam chair i think i've got the student down pat pretty much we got more lenient on the quarantine go back to the explained adults to staff etc where are we going to do that so make sure i get a clear understanding of it so adult for adults if you're vaccinated and you're not symptomatic then you

102would not need to quarantine however our adults that have not chosen to be vaccinated for whatever reason again many might have good reasons for that if they were in that six feet it's still in the toolkit recommends that adults try to maintain that six feet of distance with children particularly if unvaccinated so it's just the va the vaccination if you're vaccinated you will not have to quarantine as frequently unless you would have symptoms so what i am think i am hearing and i want to make sure as we progress if we choose to go with the mass route we're more likely to keep more students in school because they won't be likely to be quarantined correct correct on that thank you and we've already seen that in just having two schools open right i have

103a question for you about how many uh of our staff do we have that have taken the vaccine you're percentage-wise we think we're in the neighborhood of 70-80 we are actually collecting information on how many staff members are vaccinated either yes no or not to tell we're collecting that information just so we do know because that assumed at some point we may be able to use that information if we want to at some point get rid of these masks hopefully shortly so we're looking at roughly between 75 and 80 percent or 70 and 80. when we had the original signups we were at 70 yes that's what we don't know the exact number or even a fair estimate we think again so we're going to try to collect that information but that's good i think

104i think as a whole teachers and staff members school people yeah have gotten vaccinated much higher rate than the rest of the community right any other questions okay all right thank you thank you karen can we change the order yes we absolutely can we actually go down mr johnson if you're next door would you come over please let me start at the facilities update and work our way back up two or three things you need to hear before uh uh if we can get back to seo at the end of this meeting or at the board meeting itself or would you hear the facilities update and have jeff smith do a clever data data security update as well [Laughter] oh aaron oh aaron there he is oh we'll start with you matt and we'll go

105back up you and erin very bottom facilities update thank you for being flexible all right good afternoon um in your package was a list of all those projects that we completed this summer um but i'm just going to highlight three of them one would be a.g cox the classrooms the sixth classroom wing adjacent to the gymnasium was renovated this summer the classrooms are complete and ready for staff and students the contractor is ongoing on the two-story wing a mason should start either today or tomorrow whether depending on the corridor hallways on the second floor so that's a pretty big step starting block on the second floor as far as cmx goes the fire marshal is doing his inspection right now on the 1955 two-story wing from the storm damage section and all the other as

106far as the building inspections go building plumbing electrical mechanical they're all complete so it's just depending on the fire marshal inspection which is happening right now and then wall coats the fire marshal inspection is scheduled for wednesday all the building inspections are complete that are supposed to be by now i say that because the gas piping for the heat will be done before october 10th on which the contract allows for but that project is pretty much cleaned up and staff are back in the building so any questions on those three items as always amazing amount of work is getting done in facilities over the summer i don't think you all sleep i've seen y'all on roofs on sundays so anyway during the summer this is not a great place to be but uh thank you

107for all thank your whole team working so hard to get this done in the summer okay matt's got something to add to it i believe yes no do you have no he's good we're good anything else all right so we'll go to justice all right thank you well good afternoon um today i just want to give you a little bit of a update of some of the things we're doing in technology to strengthen our defense against cyber attacks last couple of years we've been have we've had several network security audits done where they analyze our security of our network and that's several steps it's people trying to get through our firewall to get into our network and also they look at our policies and procedures inside of our network so far as user accounts and

108things of this nature that where we could have vulnerabilities so based on those analysis we've done some things the first thing would be firewall strengthening the firewall is that device that keeps outside people from getting into our data but there are certain things that we have to have available to the outside world so we've done analysis taken the analysis that were given to us and made the holes in the firewall smaller if you will so if only dpi needed to get to a certain server then that's the only ones that even get to a login prompt for that server the rest of the people can't even get to it so just sort of tightened up the holes in the firewall second thing we've done recently is we now have a third backup of our data

109that is in the cloud you know several years ago we set up a dr site we had two backups of our data and that was great but now the hackers have gotten better and they can actually find those backups in our network and infect those as well so now we have a third backup that is off-site in the cloud and not directly accessible from our network so if we do get hit with ransomware that third backup is protected so we have that to fall back on excuse me another thing we've done recently is google two-factor authentication most of you probably are familiar with that but if you're not two-factor authentication just requires a user to not only know their past their user id and password but also have a physical device on their person to

110identify them and that device normally is your cell phone so a user logs into their email and they put in their user id and password and it says now enter the six digit code that i just sent to your phone and that really makes a very strong authentication method in fact it's so good that we're using google authentication for other applications in the district because it gives that that two-factor with the device makes it very secure um another thing we've been doing recently is training and this is big i mean how do you get infected with ransomware human error somebody clicks on something they shouldn't so we now are doing monthly uh things are going out to our staff members saying hey take this training and they get little tests they have to to take

111after they watch the videos and it's just to help get them to recognize those things they should not click on or an email from dr linker that says from superintendent 551 gmail.com that's not dr linker okay so that you know training is very important um and one of the last things that we've done recently we're doing this summer and this one actually for staff is a little bit painful and we're de-privileging accounts let me explain what that means in the past when a teacher logged into a computer she was given access to certain network resources that she was allowed to get to but they were given total access to that computer like an administrator and they could install an application or a driver or something of that nature the problem is if those that person's

112credentials get compromised then somebody from the outside world could install program a bad program on computer that program can find other computers and install itself and those could find other computers and as you can see within minutes something gets spread across our entire network so now no user pretty much in the in the district has the right to install something directly on the computer if they need something installed they're going to have to ask technology to do it and my technicians their accounts are deep privileged as well so we purchased some an application to track all of our passwords for every one of our computers in the district and it uses google two-factor authentication to allow access to those passwords and those passwords change every 24 hours so it really gets and they're not the

113same every computer has a totally different password so it gives us a really strong way of preventing that spread of a bad program in our district now that's just a few things we've been doing but every day i've got one engineer probably spends 50 percent of his time working on just security so it's a subject that we keep in the forefront and we're working on continuously but these are just a few of the highlights of things we've done recently uh to strengthen our defense and everyone take any questions anyone has any caroline i just want to say thank you um i've certainly had um a couple of folks in our school system express you know concerns about what it is that we're doing to protect our students and staff's identifiable information and i really appreciate

114getting this update on that and um i will pass that on to them in case they're not listening today i do think it's really important and you know it's more we're in a we're in a cyber world you know and it's we're going to probably need to invest more and more resources um human capital as well as technological inputs and i'll also say to protect our student data and our in our employee data i will also say i really actually enjoy the trainings i don't know what the other people on the board think but i have to do the same sort of trainings for work and the product that you got you all have chosen for as our training vehicles a lot better um it's at least more fun and entertaining than what we do

115in healthcare so thank you for that we aiming to please very effective another thing to go along with this just so two days two things actually we have doubled our um cyber security insurance this year so that that would help us out a lot if we do get into the situation to have the insurance company help us there we have also been working with um our risk manager who helped us create our um our crisis man and we have created a page which will be going out this fall to what do you do if you got a suspected ransomware come up so there's this will be in our crisis manual flip charts you can go right to it here's the steps you need to do for you know first do this second do this make

116sure these guys know so it'll be at everybody's hands where they can go straight to it it won't be any uh concern about not doing the right thing as it would be spelled out for them so there's some other things that we're continuing to do to help cyber security throughout the district thank you so much it's so important that both our staff and our families trust our ability to keep their data especially that of their students private and only available to those who must see it absolutely thank you all right any questions any other questions okay i would say that on your assembly account if you if you look under other supporting documents you'll see a list of about 20 other major products that matt johnson and his team have handled over the summer from

117fire alarms to additional roofs to i can read them all their whole bunch right there for you but there's a whole bunch that they're finishing up now okay we're going to jump to dr lasseter thank you guys i know okay good morning to it afternoon feels like morning good afternoon to everyone and just want to take a moment and share what we did for four days with our principals assistant principals and us instructional coaches preparing for our students and our teachers to return about three years ago we began having two sessions for summer leadership conference for our principals in june we had the 23rd and 24th and um those days in june always focus uh traditionally on curriculum and then on in august the fourth and fifth uh those days focus on leadership and so

118i'll just briefly share with you how we took a very different approach this year and if we could click on where it says sessions just to share real quick that first session in june the 23rd and 24th we had an actual conference where we had principals and district staff present and principals were able to register for the sessions that they felt that they needed most in nine inch non-focused areas that i will share with you at the end if we pause right there for just a moment you will see that our digital learning department did a session on blended learning so how do you blend in face-to-face instruction and the technology so we had a session there high-quality classroom walk-throughs by dr paul brauni and daryl thomas who is our principal of the year and

119then we had a number of other sessions that principals could register for they could sign up and attend uh those sessions and embedded in these sessions were things that were aligned with our strategic plan and areas of focus that would help students and teachers uh strengthen areas when they return uh today actually last friday all right so the 23rd and 24th those were the agendas there and then on the fourth and fifth we had an agenda so if you'll click on the fourth and fifth on the 23rd and 24th it was two days of those sessions we did have um clinton todd speak on june the 23rd who is our current teacher of the year and then we had dr john alma rhode who is a professor at james madison university speak on the 24th

120he was phenomenal both of them were great and then this is our focus on leadership which was about two weeks ago focusing on engaged elevating and power and coach mike houston was one of our guest speakers to sort of energize us and get us going and karen harrington emma and a few others on the team did some phenomenal presentations um and then dr rohn she came in with her team and provided some human resources support in terms of sometimes having to make sure that we're following processes and procedures and policies and then on day two daryl thomas who was our current principal of the year he spoke with us and um gave us some encouraging words and the focus there was our traditional uh principles meeting our principals were there our assistant principals were there

121and our instructional coaches were there so you can see from that agenda all the sessions that took place which was it was a full day so we did four days two in june two in august of just it was just completely full of activities to get everyone focused on the year so we'll go back to our presentation thank you ms rankin so next year our tentative dates that we share with our principals was june 22nd and 23rd and august the second and third we asked them to save those dates fairly early so that we can all be on deck and we can be on the same page in preparing for the school year for our students and our teachers the next thing that we talked with our principals and teachers our principals and assistant principals

122about was our strategic plan and our profile of a learner ms johnson had some folders that were qr codes that were inside where the teachers can scan the strategic plan and profile of a learner and the principals actually have packets a number of them have them today where they went back to their school and the objectives that i share with you and dr linker has shared with you they are sharing those same objectives dr ronan and i before we came here stopped to see allison covington and she went through and said this is what we're doing this is how it aligns with our strategic plan and this is how it aligned with the non-focused areas that you'll see shortly and we were just excited and beaming that we have that alignment in such a huge

123district than our principals took it to heart so the schools have this our teachers will know what our strategic plan is they will know how it integrates with our profile of a learner and all of this will be done hopefully in our schools this week with trainings at our at our school sites and then i share with you our non-focus areas and this is to really help us reset and refocus reset and recover focus areas which is what we called it in june with our principals is how do we get everyone coming back to school reset refocus reenergized and ready to go this school year and so we came up with in actually this room nine focus areas that we believe would really help one with job embedded professional development for our teachers and building

124teacher capacity we know the research supports that when teachers capacity and teachers work collaboratively and they work together that is what improves teacher student data and performance so one of the things is as i share with you blended learning so we're integrating the technology into instruction that's one area that we're focusing on school improvement how do you take your school and make it better i believe miss ford did a presentation on that equity and excellence and let me clarify we are while we're saying equity we are not talking about taking something from someone else and giving it to someone else we are talking about in terms of equity looking at all of our areas in this school system to make sure that every child regardless of race gender whatever else that they get what they

125need to be the best that they can be in our system all right so also looking at instructional rounds going around and going to classrooms and looking at peers and supporting peers professional learning communities that is where we're looking at teacher collaboration capacity building of our teachers that's where teachers are working together in groups multi-tier systems of support which is what ms carrington i think we'll talk about a little later in positive behavior interventions our principles getting in classrooms and walking in classrooms learning focus with how we plan instruction how do you plan high quality instruction and what is our common way that we expect our staff and our teachers to plan instruction across the district so that it's streamlined so that when john comes from this side of town and he comes to this

126teacher they're not in two different places that they have a uniform way of providing that quality instruction and then lastly sort of what you've kind of alluded to earlier in our meeting is our human resources leadership how do we support our teachers with following through with policy how do we follow through with processes how do we follow through with systems and dr rohn and her team did a three and a half hours she probably could have used a bit more time in that area with our principles reinforcing what expectations are when it comes to following policy and procedures in the district and to make sure that we're ready for our students when they come back next week and to make sure that we were ready for our teachers returning friday and today so we have

127a very strong solid root some solid roots and getting ready for our students to come back and some roots to make sure we're supporting our teachers in the best way we can to make sure that we continue to raise achievement and close academic gaps so questions all right i think we're good great thank you for your hard work i really appreciate all that you do for us preston good afternoon to the board i'll bring you an easy one promise we can get behind this one easily my future nc if you've seen any of the commercials or billboards they've been around for a couple of years began as a commission in 2017 but then formed transition to a non-profit in and really is seeking to align and if you've ever had a car that's been out

128of alignment you know what what good alignment means align our efforts in the state from pre-k up through post-secondary education to get our workforce where it needs to be to support north carolina's economy and i do believe that's something we can easily get behind in this draft resolution you'll see the basics of what my future nc stands for as a non-profit in that alignment but also the goal very aggressive goal they've set i believe in 2019 they estimated there were 1.3 million north carolinians who had either a credential or a post-secondary degree and by 2030 they want to see us able to supply north carolina's workforce with two million workers okay again this aligns with everything we're doing in our strategic plan from pre-k to preparing kids for college through their reading levels reading abilities

129to those credentials earned through their career technical education courses really the whole picture and getting our business community and our universities our community colleges and our school systems working together toward that goal so that's all i have for you so you're asking for this to be put on consent agenda for september is that correct yes please okay any issues with that no the only thing that i would say madam chair is since we do have an audience today we don't usually have an audience in our workshops uh this is a tremendous tremendous opportunity for us to continue to express our support for our young people to be equipped and prepared for the jobs of tomorrow and part of that all a part of that is the career technical education that we continue to stress here

130in pitt county i've been so proud of this board and i've been very very very proud of dr linker and everybody involved with it president including you and others that have promoted how important it is yeah we have that that's right that we have that we have a strong career technical education component to our school system yes sir yes and i'd also like to echo that that marketable credential something that's really meaningful should be a pathway available to every single one of our students and um i think we need to recognize our business and industry um in our communities for partnering with us and the work of all of that team because we can't do that without them a lot of that is hands-on learning and being a part of um learning a trade or

131a skill and very appreciative of that leadership and what it means to our students because a lot of students whether they're going to college or not they have all of them need something that they can use upon graduation as a leg up for whatever it is they choose to do and that marketable credential that is really important piece of that thank you okay at this time i'm going to adjourn this meeting and our