2025-09-16 Work Session

001like to come here and work on my Interesting. >> It actually is better. The board will only receive information in the meantime. They will not act on anything. Got it. >> Correct. >> All right. So, we will call our work session to order. Um, our September work session. I will note that we do not have a quorum. Um, so we will take the information but we cannot make any official pact until we have a quorum and once we have a quorum we'll make that announcement. So I'll turn it over to you chief so you can get us started. >> All right. Good afternoon uh vice chair Mrs. Swanson board members and Dr. Taylor. I am really excited for today's session. Um fundamentally as you see there's a lot happening in the world of AI. So

002we wanted to bring to you a series of sessions. So this is the first session in those series to really kind of ground us and provide a overall understanding about what an artificial intelligence is. What is machine learning is because there's lots going there's already a lot happened in the world of AI and lots going to happen. So I think really understanding the fundamentals and how the AI is impacting not just the business operations but also the education and really uh understanding the whole scope of where it is headed while you work on the policies while you work on the upcoming strategic uh initiatives while you look at the ethical implementation of AI we thought it's absolutely critical to have this conversation so you know when you're looking at the um policies, you know, what

003to look for and everything. So, I'm going to start probably asking a question. Well, let's talk about AI, right? So, even though there's a question, I'm going to say um there are three reasons, right? Number one is that data, right? So, if you go back about 10 years, a lot of these things did not exist, right? Whether you talk about internet of things, right? If you look at our house, there's so many things connected to the internet, right? uh whether you look at your social media, the number of emails you generated, whether you're talking about structured databases like your your SIS systems, your ERP, there's a lot of data. Um just I was reading an article, it was estimated that on a given day globally, we generate about million terabytes of data. Think about that

004for a second, right? Just within Wake County. Also there's a lot of information we generate on a daily basis. Now that 328 million terabytes of data you can correlate to every person on this earth writing five novels every day. That's the amount of data. It's it's literally uh you know we are flooded with data right so that's number one reason. Number two reason is you know what the big thing about AI is there are tools and technologies which are available right now to actually process that data right so that's the power to make sure and what happened in the past to really look at the data it used to cost millions of dollars and resources and everything but now you have tools like your chat GBTS and a lot of freely available tools where they

005can process the information right the third reason is when you have take data when you have the tools when you talk about technologies and all these all these things and when you put these two things together you can actually look at meaningful information that's the power of AI where are the three reasons why AI all of a sudden it's ballooned up to really talk about what is happening in the world of AI and technology it is impacting every walk of our life right now right so we want to make sure uh we are we make AI a thought partner as we navigate through this process but also with any powerful solution right there are some you know guard rails we have to be aware of right even if you look at AI AI is not

006perfect AI has its own issues if it is especially if it's trained with based on some biased data information that is also going to be bad so we have to put those guard rails to really make sure how we implement ethically and make sure those privacies are looked into and Right. The last thing I'm going to say is AI uh isn't another technical technology gadget. It is much more foundational, much more basic. You can correlate to startup internet when we had internet for the first time, when we had electricity for the first time. So it is much more foundational, much more basic, right? Um, so it is going to start impacting organizations the way they operate. Right? I know we have a loaded session today. I'm not going to take too much time, but we

007do have the Amazon Web Services team with us. They were gracious enough to come in today to really provide that um information today so that you you can ask the right questions and make sure you have all the information you need. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Miss Leonard who is here from AWS team and I'll step back and All right. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you all for being here with us today. >> Thank you. Thank you for having us. Um the team is really excited to be here today. Um really looking forward to to this session and the next sessions that we're going to have following this. Um and we want to make this as interactive as possible. So, uh, just want to make sure that you,

008you know, stop us at any point along the way because we want to make sure that you're getting out of this what you need. Um, so thought I would start with just um a intro and I'll intro the team so I don't take up too much time and then I'll turn it over and we can dive right into into the session. So, u my name is Amber Laner and I'm from Amazon Web Services and I'm the K12 strategy leader at AWS. Um, and what does that mean? Well, uh AWS head has invested in um leaders from the various areas of industry, business, education, uh to bring those folks onto very onto teams so that we can be there to really help to drive the strategy so that we know at AWS what is important to

009our customers. So my whole background is in K12 public education which is where I know Dr. Ken Thompson and and Sashi. Um I worked uh for over 30 years at the Rochester City School District um midsize urban district in upstate New York. Um and I was the CTO for about 11 years there which is where I have met with um these folks and been on teams with these folks along the years. So um when I left um the my former district when I retired after my 30 years um I was actually going to start consulting and then AWS came calling and say hey we really think it's important to start um bringing on a K12 team would you come to AWS and start uh to develop the strategy around how we support K12 customers so

010um now today with my with my team we essentially support the sales teams that are across the country who support our customers customers and we support our customers directly. So, um, you know, it's really important to us to make sure that we are here to support what our customers priorities are. So, that's why when Ken reached out and said, "Hey, we would like to bring on, you know, um, bring you folks on, would you be able to deliver some educational sessions to the to our board of education?" That's why we're here. So, anyway, u, introduce the team. So, we have Kevin McCandless and you're going to hear from Kevin in a moment. Kevin is the technical arm of our K12 team and Pereine I'm not sure Pine is Pine Kada um Pine is also on

011our K12 team and he supports um primarily a IML um for K12 education and we have Brit Britney Britney is actually local so she is your AWS account manager so she is has been working with uh the Wake County team for for several months now and last but definitely not not least we have Mary Strain so Mary is our um a IML education specialist. So she works with um education uh customers not just K12 but higher ed institutions and edtech companies and travels really throughout the US and actually Europe now I'm hearing um and and talks about um a IML in in education. So Mary is here today to deliver a lot of information to you. But as I said, um we want to make this interactive. So please feel free to stop us along

012the way. So before we I turn it over to Mary. I'm going to hand it over to Kevin. He's going to just do a really fun um little activity, a little AI trivia with you guys. >> All right. Thank you. So again, thank you all for having us. Um so to start off the session, we thought we would do a little trivia. So if anyone has ever done Cahoot, this is very similar to Cahoot. kind of Amazon's own version of it. So, anyone in the room who wants to join, go ahead, take out your phone, scan the QR code, and then it's just going to be I think it's eight total kind of just AI trivia questions to get us started, get your minds thinking a little bit um for the session today. >> And

013be mindful, we may have some folks from the public may scan. So, if we see more than the number of folks in here, we know that our folks online are watching. All right. So, we'll give everyone a minute or two to join. And so, it should just ask you for a username. There are no prizes other than bragging rights. All right. Cool. Anyone trying to get in still or should we go ahead and get started? >> All right, we're going to go ahead and get started. All right, so the way this is going to work, if you haven't done Cahoot before, essentially a question is going to pop up on the screen as well as on your phone. Um, there will be a question and then four answers. Uh, you pick the answer you think

014is right. Um, you get points based on if it's the right answer and based on how quickly you answer it as well. Um, like I said, these are just going to be kind of fun AI trivia questions. All right, first question. What does AI stand for? We've already said AI a ton of times today. Let's double check uh what it actually means. So, automated intelligence, advanced intellect, augmented intelligence, artificial intelligence and we hope so. AI is artificial intelligence. Again, we throw around AI all the time. Uh we like to be very clear about the terms that we're using whenever we talk about AI. These days, people often use AI when they're really talking specifically about generative AI. And people when they talk about generative AI, really what they're talking about is chat GBT. >> Right?

015So, we like to be very clear about the terminology and the words that we use when we have these discussions. And again, when we talk about artificial intelligence, we're really just talking about the whole idea of trying to make computers act like humans or act intelligently, right? Chat GPT and generative AI are subsets of AI. >> All right, next question. Um, originally proposed in 1950, what tests a machine's ability to imitate human behavior? So the imitation test, the touring test, the human replicant test or the computer intelligent test. >> Correct. Yeah, this one is the Turing test. So this was a test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950. Um, have anyone seen the movie The Imitation Game? Right. So again, that's a movie about Alan Turing. Now again this is a test like I said

016proposed all the way back in 1950 right so you can trace AI and the idea of AI all the way back to the 1900s even before 1950 but again the idea of this test was that if essentially an independent observer can't tell the difference between a human response and a computer response then that you know computer passes the touring test and can pass off as as human intelligence right now who first coined the term term artificial intelligence in 1956. Was it Alan Turing? Was it Isaac Asimov, John McCarthy, or Albert Einstein? >> All right. There it was John McCarthy. So, who the two that selected John McCarthy, right? >> Yeah. So John McCarthy he actually he proposed this term I believe he was giving a symposium at it was Dartmouth College I believe where that

017was the first kind of documented use of the term artificial intelligence. So again the idea of computer intelligence can be traced back further than this but 1956 was the first actual use of the term artificial intelligence. So again, the ideas of AI and the concepts of AI have been around for decades, right? All right. Now coming forward, what year was chat GPT released to consumers? >> 2024, 2022, 2019, or 2015. Again, we're talking about the consumer version of Chat GPT. Correct. So it was 2022 before this. Um they did release some of their GPT models were available before 2022 but 2022 was when they actually released like the chatbot the classic chat GPT user interface. So again while AI has been around for decades generative AI really spurred by the this release of chat GPT

018has is what has really brought it to the forefront and is now making it explode and grow at a much faster rate. Now >> I do a quick leaderboard check. We're halfway. >> I think we can keep that >> right. >> All right. We won't call We won't call any names. Don't call any. >> That's why you give yourself a >> just All right. Which of the following is not an example of AI? uh facial recognition, voice assistance, calculators, or fraud detection. >> No, don't say that. >> Don't say that. >> So, again, like I said, AI, it's it's pretty much embedded in almost everything these days. Exactly. Sashi was just saying it's it's a foundational technology now that it's used in facial recognition. If you use your face to unlock your phone, if you

019use uh Siri or Alexa or any of those voice assistants, those are all powered by artificial intelligence. Uh fraud detection in healthcare in banks and financial services. If you ever get an alert that you know you might have a fraudulent transaction on your credit card, chances are that was detected by AI. So again, this is a foundational technology these days, just like the internet, just like electricity. Again, what's new is generative AI specifically and how that is now adding into all these technologies. But not everything needs to or should be AI, right? Calculators are an example. Those follow ma magical mathematical rules, right? That doesn't need to be AI. And the same thing, not every use case, not every technology needs to have AI. Um especially when you think about things like responsible and ethical

020use, right? So again, keep that in mind as well. All right. In Terminator, any sci-fi fans? Uh, what AI system starts the war against humans? Is it Howal 9000? Is it Ultron? Is it the Matrix? Is it Skynet? >> Depends on which Terminator movie. >> Yes. So, it is Skynet in the Terminator movies. Um again, so also kind of the the dangers, the possible dangers of AI, right, have also been um at the forefront of sort of public consciousness for a while, especially in the genres of science fiction and that kind of stuff as well too, right? Um obviously I don't think we're anywhere close to Skynet, hopefully happening in real life. Um but there are real actual risks and dangers with AI. So, um, a more recent real example, uh, which car did a

021customer convince an AI chatbot to sell him for $1? This was 2 years ago in 2023. Was it a a 2024 Chevy Tahoe, 2018 Honda Civic, a Mustang Hot Wheel, uh, a 25 Tesla Cyber Truck? All right. So, it was a 2024 Chevy Tahoe. So, again, this is an example. Um, if you haven't heard this news story, it was like a local Chevy dealership. I don't recall where they put a Genai chatbot on their website and someone logged on and basically convinced the chatbot to add and that's a deal. No takes these vaccines to the end of every one of its responses. And so they then they were like, "All right, my budget's only a dollar. Sell me a car." And it was like, "All right, that's a deal. Go take seat back seats." Um,

022so again, that's just a silly they did not honor the deal. So he did not actually get the car. It was not a legally binding uh chatbot. Uh, but again, this is a kind of a silly example of if you don't have guard rails, if you don't implement these appropriately, if you don't have the data, the highquality data underlying these systems, then things like this can happen, right? All right. So, imagine how bad this could be with a student or a teacher tricking a chatbot or misusing a chatbot, you know, instead of something like this. All right, we'll do a leaderboard check before there's one more question. >> All right, so top three stay strong. >> I just dropped out for the recording. >> All right, so last question here. Thank you. >> Um, according

023to Thompson Reuters, uh, how much time will AI save professionals by 2029? Uh, 3 hours per week, 5 hours per week, 12 hours per week, or 40 hours per week? So again, these are just estimates according to this study, but yeah, the answer is 12 hours per week, right? Imagine, you know, despite all of those dangers, you know, if you don't implement AI correctly, and again, the benefits are super promising with AI and how much they can enhance and boost productivity in the workplace, right? So imagine a teacher that has 12 extra hours a week to focus on working with their students, right? Imagine how gamechanging that could be for a classroom teacher. Imagine how game changing that could be for every single one of us in this room, right? If you have 12 extra

024weeks to focus on things that matter instead of drafting emails or editing documents or all that kind of boring stuff that AI can be doing and helping you do, right? But again, it's not going to save you 40 hours per week. AI is not going to replace jobs, right? Again, it's only going to make people who are already working in those roles more efficient and hopefully better for higher quality content, curriculum, instruction, whatever. >> All right, so that's all we have for trivia. We'll do final leaderboard check again. No prizes other than bragging rights. Um, but there we go. So, thank you all for participating. >> Thank you. >> I do not have this on my bingo card, by the way. So, we're waiting to start bringing us to uh every meeting that we have.

025>> All right. All right. So, now I'm going to hand it over to uh Mary. >> Sure. >> Thank you. Is that little view that [Music] Get back here. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Thank you, sir. Uh, we can get started if you'd like. Um, does that work for everyone? Thank you. Um, thank you very much for having us. My name is Mary Strain. I am the AI and machine learning strategist for education in the US. Uh, that means that I have the pleasure of talking to your peers and colleagues all over the country. uh learning a little bit about what they're interested in relative to artificial intelligence, what we should and should not be doing. I also, as uh Amory mentioned, have the ability to the purview of talking to higher education. So, I'm able to

026see sort of that pathway for students uh through uh K12, community colleges, higher education, and uh beyond. So, it's a pleasure to be here today and talk. And uh as Emory, uh I also have a background. I was a middle school teacher in the Bronx for 10 years prior to moving into educational technology. So that um has framed how I think about supporting students uh across the country and using technology in a way that I think is thoughtful and responsible. Um so you know we have a lot to talk about. Uh I I was given a list of sort of objectives that said you know we want to sort of soup to nuts. So I'm going to talk very quickly. I'm from Philadelphia. Go birds. I'll say it. It sounds I'll say it on the

027record. Um so I speak very very quickly but I it's not a large group. I welcome conversation. I welcome uh questions uh you know feedback throughout the presentation so that we can make this a conversation. Um but I will try to go fairly quickly to provide an overview. I know that you have subsequent um sessions with our team and so this is really trying to frame that out at a 30,000 foot view. You know, one of the things they asked us to talk about was how we got here. But Kevin's done a terrific job already doing this in an interactive way and just talking about how artificial intelligence and machine learning is certainly not new. But what we're going to focus on today is generative AI uh and sort of how that has taken our

028students, our teachers, our our staff, and sort of the whole world by storm. And so that will be the focus of the conversation today. Um again just to review the AI basics, artificial intelligence has been around for a long time. It's a technique that allows machines to be able to mimic human intelligence. There's also a subset of that which is machine learning which is sort of the mathematic algorithms behind that uh using things like predictive artificial intelligence. So predictive machine learning, you know, if you bought five pairs of sneakers, you might buy another pair of sneakers kind of thing. Um, and then there's generative AI, which is a subset of machine learning that really uses huge volumes of data to allow us to have natural language conversations with huge amounts of data and that is

029transformational. Um, so a couple of just sort of market framing pieces here. This is moving at an unprecedented pace and I'm sure you all very much feel that both personally and professionally. And so I think it's important just to put at the speed at which this is moving into context. Um so a couple of quick sort of facts the a pace of adoption. Um it took 78 months for Google Translate to get to 100 million users. It took 70 months for 100 million users of Uber. It took 95 months for 100 million users of Spotify. 30 months for 100 million users of Instagram. It took two months for Chat GPT to get to 100 million users. And so just the scale at which people were adopting this technology is absolutely staggering even compared to other

030solutions that are we consider advanced and fairly recent. Uh as we mentioned or we'll talk a little bit more about this the generative AI is primarily powered by foundation models which are huge huge corpuses of data. um we know about chat GPP JP chatgpt that's sort of become the Kleenex of generative AI capabilities but it is one of thousands and thousands of foundation models there are 131 new foundation models released every month and so what we're seeing is huge models like chat GPT we're seeing smaller models that are built by individual organizations we're seeing models that actually can be built for individual people we're seeing models that are very good at math and models that are very good at biochemical engineering. So all of that sort of pace of innovation continues a pace and has

031a big impact on public sector organizations when you think about where you're making investments um and how you're supporting students with the most capable and most cost-effective models. Um there's been a billion hundred billion dollars uh in US investment alone in 2025. So we know that the market's going crazy that people are very in investing in this. this is transforming our economy and how we work. And then this is sort of the last sort of quick framing slide, but I wanted to highlight uh where it's making an impact. And so the light blue section is industries where we're seeing cost savings from the use of AI and the pink and darker blue section is where they're actually generating revenue from AI. So this is a big deal. And so in every single industry, we're seeing

032and these early uses of AI having a big impact on saving money and increasing revenue. So clearly this is not going away. The toothpaste is out of the tube. uh as public sector organizations, as school districts who have a mission to support students and to support your communities, we need to be thinking about how we tackle this and how we approach this in a way that empowers students to uh be productive members of the of a society where this is happening and where we can adopt it to improve how we impact students and teachers. So, how am I seeing a IML and K12 education and what am I seeing around the country? So I wanted to just highlight again what is generative AI. Generative AI is found powered by foundation models which are pre-trained on

033vast amounts of unstructured data meaning it's read every book, it's looked at every blog, it's watched every movie, you know, all of it um in ways that we really could never have done that before. So it uses that information. It creates uh mathematical equations that allow you to have context and connections to various types of information and to be able to have a natural language conversation with huge huge amounts of data. Uh so you can ask it a question, it'll give you a question back. Most of you have at least experimented with this. Um but what could possibly go wrong with huge amounts of data gotten from the internet? And this is where I think is we have to be really attentive as uh stewards of um public sector funds and teach as as educators.

034And so some of the big challenges with artificial intelligence are hallucinations, inaccuracies. It is wrong and can be wrong often and convincingly wrong. So we deal with things like misinformation and disinformation or and more importantly giving the artificial intelligence too much credence, right? where students are relying on it or educators are relying on it without having a discerning eye towards looking for disinformation. Uh artificial intelligence has reflected terrible bias. So please show me a picture of doctors and it's a bunch of male doctors. Right now I want to sort of dig into that because it absolutely is true. Uh but guess what? Artificial intelligence was trained on what we taught it. So it reflects the the sort of distributed bias of the global community. Um I shouldn't say that it reflects a distributed bias of

035people who have contributed to the information. Um it also is biased in the sense that even with the large numbers of large language models that exist now 95% of them are primarily focused on only five language groups, right? So they're really only representing those five language groups. And with the technology that's sort of taking over, we have to be attentive to the fact that there are at least 2,000 language groups. So there's large numbers of people and communities and experiences that are not part of this uh sort of knowledge base so to speak. Uh so there's also copyright and IP. We hear a lot about uh newspaper, the New York Times or artists and creatives who are suing large language model companies because their content is appearing without proper attestation. And that again is a

036significant significant challenge. And then of course security and privacy. 131 foundation models a week uh are being made because we are giving them an awful lot of information. So every time students or your teachers or whomever is using some of these commercial applications without appropriate security guard rails, you are giving them the information. Right? So you know we hear this a lot. Um if the solution is free, you are the product. Correct? Um so we need to be attentive to all of these major concerns and one of the things that I think is incredibly important to talk about here is um these major concerns have a disproportionate effect on I think educational institutions. People come to school expecting accurate information, equity, equitable and unbiased approaches to be secure and safe with their data and to

037be secure and safe with the interactions that they have with the capabilities that you provide. So this is uniquely challenging. I think in the public sector and particularly in education. Um so what I want to talk today is about sort of a combination of a technical infrastructure that are aligned to your mission and values. So Kevin mentioned things like guard rails. We mentioned things like using your data to support the capabilities. So all of those challenges can be mitigated technically not solved entirely mitigated technically. There are guard rails to prevent toxic content. There are ways to assess bias and and output. There are ways certainly uh ways to prevent uh models from using your your information with security protocols. All of that is possible but we need to put that into play that is aligned

038to institutional mission and values. How are we thinking about what you should and want to accomplish using artificial intelligence and then the technical infrastructure to be able to execute on that? So I do think of it as a virtuous circle. So a a solid generative AI strategy when we think about the technical infrastructure relies on having flexibility. We are very much at the infancy of this technology and when making investments and thinking about this we don't want to go all in on a single model or a single approach because in 6 days or 6 weeks or 6 months that technology will have changed. So the flexibility of your technical infrastructure matters a great deal. the ability to adapt and adopt new capabilities as they become available both from a cost-saving perspective but also uh as

039the capabilities improve. You want to ensure secure customization. We'll talk a little bit more about data and I know you're going to have a whole session on it but uh asking uh questions or engaging with large language models without using your data safely and securely results in a lot of hallucination. So we want to use that customization to improve the accuracy. If a parent were to go onto a chatbot, Wake County schools, how do I register my student for kindergarten? You don't want them to get information about how to register for kindergarten in Charlotte. Okay. Um, so you need to sort of have that approach. Uh, thinking about cost effective infrastructure. Very large foundation models are very performant. They work very well. They are very expensive. Uh, when we think about scale, so thinking about

040how you might select smaller foundation models to build on or how you work with partners that do that. Um and then sort of looking at generative AI powered solutions, things like agents, uh and more capabilities as they become available. These are some key trends that I'm seeing. You know, we're a little beyond the how do we stop using this? How do we how do we police students to uh what I see as key educational trends. One, AI is becoming institutionalized. We are seeing it in the educational technology products that you are consuming. We are seeing your students use it. We are seeing your faculty members use it. it's becoming institutionalized. Uh, and that really begs that we think about a platform and an approach that is flexible enough to take advantage of what's next. Um,

041and so we're making investments where we know we can be nimble. Um, there's increasingly a demand for measurable return on investment and business value. Imagine that. Um there uh about according to Goldman Sachs last summer issued a report less than 30% of all AI projects that people pursue sort of in the private and public sector actually go to production. It's millions and millions and millions of dollars of wasted resources because they have not decided to solve problems that people cared about solving. uh you know moving from experimentation but saying not how do I use AI in my school district or with my students but what do I want to accomplish and can AI help us get there in a more equitable thoughtful better way. So putting the needs of the system before the the technology

042is critically important. uh so a disciplined approach to use cases that really target uh return on investment in a way that we measure both whether that's student achievement, faculty retention or cost savings. Um we have seen that 2025 has become the year of agents and I think there's a slide to describe it but agents are essentially a small software service that can execute tasks on your behalf. For those of you who've used generative AI capabilities, asked a question, summarize a report, send an email, uh we're we're doing that with text that is realizing less than 25% of the overall value of what generative AI can actually realize. Agents allow you to actually do the workflow. So, think of the student who's registering to go to school here. Uh we can have a chatbot interact with

043the parent about what documents are needed. When the parent then uploads their proof of address or their birth certificate, uh now we can have an agent then extract the information from that document and then send that to uh you know the appropriate school. They can check the immunization record. They can do a background check on a new teacher. It can uh you know send the parent an email confirming it. It can then register that child in the classroom. Send a confirmation email to the principal. So that entire workflow can actually be automated and executed using Agentic workflows. And so that's where I think we're going to start to see really transforming processes. To date, I've seen a lot of chat bots on terrible processes. You know, things that are are just not a good process.

044We'll put a chatbot to help people figure out this terrible process. Agents give you the opportunity to transform the process, reduce points of friction for your community. Um and then lastly, I think what's really happened is that the demand for artificial intelligence has exposed a real problem with data. Uh access to data, uh clean access to modernized data, data that is available and accessible. Uh often in school systems, we have a student information system, we have a learning management system, we have an ERP system, we have a transportation system, and none of it talks to each other. And in many cases uh in this system it's last name first first name last. In this system it's first name first last name last. They can't talk to each other. The absolute value of generative AI is

045its ability to look at massive massive quantities of data. And so if we we are under utilizing its capabilities if we are not bringing that data together in a way where we can actually see more holistically what's happening with students with a facility with a faculty member uh with an institution. So, I just wanted to highlight sort of what we're thinking about in terms of how does Wake County Public Schools become an AI ready organization? How do we set up the framework to be nimble enough and thoughtful enough in making decisions about how we embrace this technology? Um, and this is primarily from a technical perspective, but the first layer here is a foundational layer of data. Where is your data? Can you access it? Is it available to the people who have the right

046permissions to see it? Uh how are you governing it? How are you storing it so that it is available? You cannot have any thoughtful AI application without appropriate data, without good quality data. You will have a terrible outcome if the data is is poor, right? Uh the middle layer talks about your tooling, right? how you might choose foundation models, what knowledge bases, what agents you might use, how you're implementing guard rails, what the data AI prep and enrichment might be. So this is technical tooling that you can access. And then the top layer is a disciplined approach to use cases. Selecting use cases that are actually going to drive your strategic objectives for the district uh student success really kind of move the needle in those places. So we're going to talk a little bit

047about the data foundation first. Um as I said the generative AI applications are really powered by data and so there is a huge amount of information necessary to have good outcomes and that data differentiates uh the Wake County AI applications from Charlotte from Miami Dade from New York City. And so using that data in a safe and thoughtful way to enhance the outcome of foundation models and that output is critically important to get uh accurate and thoughtful responses. This is how you all typically see a dashboard, right? You see student achievement, you see budgets, you see growth, you see population trajectory. Uh in that middle piece, you see sort of a structured database. This is how we consume data. This is how AI can see data and I think this is a transformational shift in

048understanding how we can un think differently about a particular entity whether that's a student, a school, a teacher, a principal, uh a transportation hub. Uh this is a knowledge graph that was developed by the University of Delaware. This is all of their course content for 10 years in their psychology program. And what they've uncovered is a link and a relationship between data that they were never able to see before. I'm working with uh educational technology companies now that are putting a student at the center of this and saying what is their course load? What interventions are they getting? What are the teachers that they've been connected to? And you're able to glean insights that as human beings we simply could not see. It's transformational. I am very excited about this. This is the same knowledge

049graph that as Kevin mentioned is used to detect fraud at the uh New York Stock Exchange, right? This is the same kind of knowledge graph that we use to detect uh national security incidences. But if we think about uh a bus route in Wake County, and I know that must be a challenge. um how do we look and see uh connections and places that we didn't know we could make changes to how we're approaching uh students, faculty, teachers uh and facilities. And so this is uh again I think the underlying capability of generative AI is to look at such huge amounts of data and make connections that we would normally not see. I'm going to pause there and just uh ask you a little bit about the knowledge graph. Any thoughts? any thoughts you want

050for you? >> Okay. Uh again, I just wanted to highlight I think that if you were to think about a teacher in the classroom who wanted to understand more about a student that they had, how challenging is that? How challenging is it for them? I mean, I was a middle school teacher and I would get state test score reports and there were several bar graphs and there were a couple line graphs and some scatter plots that showed me, but I wasn't able to look back and say, "Yes, but has this student moved from five schools in 3 years?" I wasn't able to look back and say, "Hey, this student was recommended for an IEP that nobody ever followed up on. uh hey this student had these five teachers and they're showing growth in this area.

051What can we do with these teachers to scale those best practices to improve student achievement? And so for me it is that transformational understanding of huge huge huge amounts of data. This sits underneath the chatbot. I'm not I'm not suggesting we all dissect that. But we could ask questions of this complex data map and get different answers. I was in Alabama and one of the uh folks who uh works with the internal affairs with the police said, you know, we have comstat reports that come to the state every week and those comstat reports are pie charts, line graphs, scatter plots and they are the same data every single time. It never changes. The needle moves us. Not at all. And he said, "You know why? because I know the questions that are going to be

052asked, the sheriffs know the questions that are going to be asked, and we just are sitting on the same data forever. In in school systems, we ask the same information, zip code, uh where the student was previously, you know, all the same information as the, you know, and we get the same answers for a 100red years because we're not asking different questions because we don't have the technical ability to look across those huge quantities of data. And for me, that's where I get very passionate about this work. It is the transformational insights, the 360 degree view of a school, of a principal, of an entity, anything on campus. And so to me, this is super exciting. >> And I'll just stop right there to let the public know that we now have a quorum. So

053we can add that to the minutes. >> Thank you. uh talk a little bit about the the tooling and the infrastructure that's necessary and just to highlight many of you have consumerf facing AI applications on your phone and you use them for your personal productivity. There are many AI applications that appear on your desktop whether it's copilot or others and you use them for your personal productivity. Um and so they are very powerful tools that market is becoming very crowded. Students are accessing lots and lots and lots of different AI capabilities as well as other individuals. So those are consumerf facing applications that are incredibly powerful. I also work with our educational technology providers and they are embedding AI in almost every single capability and capacity that I see. So if you have an LMS

054system, a student information system, a curriculum, a publishing a textbook publisher, an online learning system, they are all adding artificial intelligence capability and they will be embedded into the uh tools that your students and faculty are engaging with. on a day-to-day basis as well as your administrators because a lot of it's going into um some of that administrative systems. And then I also want to talk a little bit about custom and proprietary solutions. So it may seem like well hey I have these consumerf facing applications available to me. A lot of the capabilities that we're purchasing will have AI. Wake County Public Schools doesn't need to do anything around artificial intelligence. And I would just challenge you to think back to my knowledge graph. You are the only entity that has all the data. all

055of it and nor nor should uh you know your tech vendors have all of it. So your ability to look at a high level at the interaction between all of those different capabilities the interaction between students and faculty and the journey of a student or a community member is is transformationally different. And so to think about is there a desire or a need to have custom tools that you build that you manage because you have access to all the data and because you want to have those insights across those different domains. um those custom and proprietary solutions. If we think about something that automates IEPs or automates the special education process or automates the transformation uh transportation processes cannot be accomplished by using the consumerf facing applications. They require a a deeper technical build, more

056complexity. They require specific knowledge bases and they require certainly uh greater security protocols. So that's just a little sort of a lay of the land of of the different things I mentioned. AI agents and I just wanted to remind myself to sort of describe what they are again autonomous and or semi-autonomous software systems that reason, plan, act and accomplish goals. I think that the thing that we hear a lot about is having the agent plan a trip for you, right? So I want to go to Paris. I want to go October 31st to November 7th, plan my trip and then coming back with an itiner itinerary and everything booked. So those are the kinds of things that we can think about but we can extrapolate that to uh you know IEPs we can extrapolate that

057to compliance and uh you know accreditation reporting and blue ribbon school uh reporting etc. So this is what most people care about which is sort of let's talk about use cases. What are we seeing around the country? Um and really what I think and my team has reflected on is that there really are three major buckets. Uh teaching and learning where we're seeing things like tutor bots or uh personal personalized learning, personalized professional learning. um very interesting use case that is in pilot and I can't mention the district but they're actually filming uh teachers for their evaluations and then having AI do a evaluation of the classroom instruction according to a national teacher standards to supplement the the observation of the principal or the assistant principal the administrator and I think uh we often say

058well AI is so biased right I'm not sure that it's more biased than an individual, >> right? And as a enhancement or add-on to some of those high stakes assessments, I think it could be an incredibly powerful norming mechanism. Uh, you know, I was in a school and a a principal is doing an evaluation and they're taking notes on the iPad, but then sometimes they get a phone call or a student comes in or they're not, you know, they're distracted. They're they're human beings. But having that side assessment, I think, is an incredibly powerful tool. In fact, we had a project at the University of Pittsburgh, which doesn't seem related, but I think it's interesting. They uh were looking for some quarterbacks on their football team. Uh so they were going to go to the

059transfer portal. There are thousands and thousands of athletes in the transfer portal. And so the uh athletic director said, you know, we're a small team. We would say, hey, these 10 12 schools are like PIT, right? We know the coaches. we know the academic rigor, we know the teams. So, we'll we're just going to look at those schools and they would work from there. But using artificial intelligence, they were able to use agents to scrape the entire transfer portal and align to a rubric that matched the academic criteria and the athletic criteria that they were looking for. And they came up with 100 one-page summaries of students. But what I thought was most interesting is they had students from junior colleges, >> right? students from schools they would never ever have looked at simply because

060they didn't have the time to look at all of the candidates. And so I think about things when we look at like teacher assessment, when we think about even student assessment, can we use artificial intelligence as a norming mechanism in the classroom? Um, so that was a little bit of a tangent, but I think it's interesting. Um, so then there's sort of operations and community engagement. Thinking about how we record board meetings or PTA meetings and get them out to parents in a language they can consume. Simply access and engagement. Uh, having the same kind of translation and summary of a meeting with your IEP team and a parent. Okay. And then there's action items that everyone can agree on that the parent is given and not have to remember in writing. Uh even administrative

061hearings uh again transparency assessment. And then there's the middle place which uh is called administration. I like to call it boring AI but it's where we're seeing the greatest transformation. And those of you who do not work in education, maybe you're you have a private sector role, you can think about, hey, how are we using this in finance, in insurance, in human resources, in publishing, in science. And those same uh use cases can be applied to higher education. So again, using artificial intelligence to enhance the onboarding process for your teachers. So, new teachers coming into the system that get automated e automated emails or we've done a project where you can watch your application go through a process like an Amazon package so you don't lose those teachers in that process uh while they're waiting

062for uh feedback. Um is there a way to do automated background checks, right? Uh is there a way to use agents to sort of access all of that, bring it together and make better and faster hiring decisions? So, uh, simple process. We have a a a regional information center in Connecticut that said, "We just need an HR chatbot. We want to stop answering the same question in HR 45 times. How do I do automatic uh, deposit?" Right? And so now they have a chatbot based on their HR policies and rules, and it frees up the HR folks to work on things that matter more, right? Rather than answering those same questions. I also have a university one state south from here that had unfortunately had a staff member pass away and the only person who

063knew how to sort of handle their final paychecks and dispersements and things like that was on a one-mon leave and no one else knew how to handle this right so these are places where we can gather that uh knowledge that's stuck in people's heads stuck in Google Drive stuck in SharePoint stuck in files all over bring it together and be more responsive Um, couple other things when I think about uh virtual agents. So, call centers again uh we saw uh a couple of our customers using call center agents that allow people to get the information they need very quickly. And then certainly document processing which uh again when we talk about boring AI I often think when we think about use cases for artificial intelligence, we don't want to say what do we want to

064do with AI? The best thing to do is ask your staff what they want to stop doing. Because what you want to stop doing is really what AI is good at, right? It's not good at having deep, thoughtful conversations with with students, but it's it's very good at processing paper, you know, and so all of the things that we don't want to do anymore can be really valuable and powerful. Uh so again, some common uh Genai use cases we're seeing. So, IT developer productivity, teacher assistance, self-service, dashboards, employee chat bots, special education, IEP development, uh, document review and processing. And I want to talk a little bit about intelligent document processing. Anybody here ever take a picture of a check to have it end up in your bank account? Okay, that's intelligent document processing. Uh,

065I won't name the district, but there is a large school system in this country that has 19 PDF forms required to apply for kindergarten. In 2022, they had 63,000 students apply. Uh, PWC did a report that said each of those documents typically costs $2.50 to process. So that's 19 * 63,000* $2.50 50 cents that could be saved by using artificial intelligence to automatically extract the information necessary and allow people to simply take a picture and submit it and have it handled and that's millions of dollars and that's one process and I'm sure there are similar processes here whether that's onboarding applications for HR whether that's you know student uh transportation applications whether that's IEP information whether that's uh HR information so intelligent document processing is one of those boring AI use cases that can have

066massive ROI. And I don't just mean to save money. I mean it's easier for people. It reduces points of friction rather than having a parent walk in here with some of their documentation, right? They work, they you know, so it's again reducing points of friction, saving money, improving processes. Uh we had uh the Higgley Unified School District that was trying to do enrollment prediction. So, we're using artificial intelligence to help them make enrollment predictions. Uh, and that actually uh provided uh a much lower cost than a service that they had used to help them do that. So, again, they were paying $20,000 a year to have this done. We were able to use artificial intelligence to do it at a 90% less. Uh, we have a teacher assistant operating in Texas in region 3, which

067is the area around Houston. Uh this teaching assistant really is providing them access to administrative information, administrative processes. How do I, when do I, who is, all of that information in real time on their phone quickly and easily. This is not changing the pedigogy in the classroom. This is again alleviating the time it takes individuals to find act to find and access information. Uh amplify geni was a open source tool developed by uh Vanderbilt University. It's an AI sandbox, an environment that your uh district staff could use to experiment, assess cost, uh to build out new prototypes. And then I wanted to highlight that AWS uh has a project at Arizona State University where we uh have built out other use cases and these again are open- source. So they're cap are available for you

068to take for free. Those include an ECISO. So if you have a new project and it needs to have a security review, you do a quick review of it uh using artificial intelligence and the CISO doesn't have to spend all of that time uh you know generative AI business intelligence which is asking natural language questions of your data. Uh PDF accessibility so making your PDFs accessible according to new WCAG standards uh chat bots IEP assistance which I think Kevin will speak to um employee assistance and enrollment prediction. So again, these are all in production use cases uh both in the US and abroad for K12 systems that I think are super interesting because they are about creating uh not just operational efficiencies but access for families, access for students, agency for people who are really

069just engaged in, no offense, often opaque and uh arcane processes, right? That are not transparent to your families. But all of those use cases require appropriate governance. And I just wanted to highlight a couple of frameworks. This is from the EU. It talks about sort of thinking about what's legal and what is uh you know what your stakeholder pressures are, what you want to accomplish, what's aligned to your mission and values. And then sort of a data layer. And then the pillars of responsible AI. These are from AWS. These are aligned to the UN Commission on Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence as well as guidance from the US Department of Education on artificial intelligence. This is how we think about building our own capabilities, but more importantly about how we interact with customers. I wanted

070to highlight that this can become the foundational pillars potentially for your own approach to responsible AI. How do we think about the use cases aligning to our values? How are we ensuring privacy and security? How are we ensuring fairness so that everyone has access to the tools and capabilities that are being built? How are we ensuring transparency and explanability meaning uh letting families, communities, students, teachers know when they're interacting with artificial intelligence? Okay. Um accountability, training, and inclusion. So, uh, lastly, uh, Ann Marie and her colleagues worked with the Council of Great City Schools to come up with a assessment, uh, that allows you to reflect yourselves on where your district is in terms of training, education, governance patterns, data security. We would recommend that you take a look at that, um, and use it

071as a freely available assessment. And I will end by saying the use cases that we are seeing do not portend a robot overlord. they truly are around providing greater access and agency and transparency and personalization of learning and so we're very excited about that. That is all um questions, thoughts? I hope that was helpful. >> Well, thank you for bringing this to us and to sharing it. I look forward to the discussion and the formation of our policy as we really take a deeper dive. I mean AI is here to stay and so we have a duty to ensure that we are educating our students on how to use it responsibly and to work in collaborations with parents to help them understand the dangers that are all out there. Um so I'll open up for

072questions if any of my colleagues have any questions or comments. >> M rice. >> So in in li of everything that we heard I I I'm I'm for AI. Um, but the whole point about for me AI is with all that you shared and I guess maybe it's a district question, how do we support students with using it responsibly? Because I really while AI is fantastic, I do believe AI is only as good as the human that's putting the information in it. Um, so while we think about and most people think about community, um, oh, they're not learning, they're not doing, but to me, the truth of the matter is only your brain can be the creative piece that tells the AI what you want it to create. um because you can just tell it

073to do something and create something very simple, but you can still tell if a student really has comprehended an assignment or something, but when you tell AI to do a thing, um it really generates what's really inside of their um thought process of what they've learned. So, what are we doing as a district um to show students how to use it responsibly um and show them how to use it as 21st century learners um because this is this is what it is regardless and we don't want to leave them behind just because of our nostalgic ways. >> So, so if you're add you all can't answer that question but what are we doing? uh this is something that uh continues to develop and evolve. Uh you know we know that teachers uh have access to

074Gemini and other EI2s. Uh but there's still a lot of debate in terms of uh what it should or shouldn't be used for and and you know that is where the real question comes in. Uh most of what teachers can use it for now is really productivity. One of the things that you talked about I said this to the media earlier. let's determine what things AI does well and let AI do it and then the things that humans do let them do that. Uh one of the ways that I know um we can best use AI right now is really for certain kinds of student assessments. Uh and so when we think about uh the K2 assessment when a teacher has to go in and assess kids on reading passages and see how well they

075are. Well, that's something that they know how to do but it takes a very long time to do. Well, there's AI technology and software that can actually do that and reduce the amount of time that teachers have. Right now, the biggest concern that uh I know teachers had was academic integrity, meaning that uh we have AI that we expose kids to, but we have zero control over what you let your kids have at home in that AI and how we uh really focus on that academic integrity. So this is no different than what we've been been doing for decades is talking with kids about what is academic integrity and how you need to deploy that and use that regardless if we able to discover that or not. um I'll say you know 10 years ago

076we could drop information into a website and determine if kids plagiarize with AI that's really difficult to do and so it is about maintaining academic integrity helping students to understand the responsiveness >> um sorry um Dr. Uh thank you. Um I was listening to the presentation when I was driving in. Uh thank you so much for the presentation. Um I actually um yesterday I had a personal experience with an agent calling for an appointment for HVAC and and maybe for 30 seconds I was full. I was talking to this lovely woman. She was just echoing everything I said. >> Um up to a point where I I I had some specification I I request that I wanted to to uh ask for and and and ultimately you know I felt dismissed. Um and so I

077I do have you know productivity is one of the things that you know I think it's a great uh tool for AI. I just just worry about the customer service part of it um and being able you know because we are more and more focused on the customer service with our parents with our um um the people that we serve. And so I I just want to make sure that we are aware of that potential for um losing touch with our um our the customers that we serve, the students, the staff, the everybody that we that we encounter. So um that's um um fortunately somebody actually called me back. >> A real person called me back and made it right. >> So uh yeah. So just an experience for you guys to think about. Thank

078you. >> Thank you for this presentation was amazing. Um I definitely the classroom teacher and me can appreciate the gamification at the beginning. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Um I did I also wanted to say how I appreciate to uh Dr. Ing's point um how several times throughout the presentation you did u make note of how this is an added piece. This is not to replace educators in the classroom that have that human um educator to student touch. Um so I did want to want to raise that um two things. The first thing is um you said um this could be used as a norming mechanism um as an approach to instruction. And I think we've had this conversation before um I can't remember if it was at a it probably was at

079the policy committee meeting um around us as a district really changing the way in which we think about instruction and having it more as a flipped approach um as it relates to AI. Um and so that it just made me think of when you said a norming mechanism. But then the la my last question is the um I'm assuming this is a needs and assets assessment um on slide 40. How do we get access to that? >> It's available through the council of great city schools website cgscs.org um generative AI assessment. >> Okay, >> we'll get it to you. >> Okay, thank you. >> So I have just one question. um you know as you all have worked with other districts uh what are some lessons that you would share that we should consider as

080we are developing policy around this important topic. Yeah, certainly. I think the number one is to think about the use case by starting with what do you want to accomplish, not looking for ways to use AI. You know, we have a challenge around faculty attrition. We have a challenge around student achievement in this area. We want to do something different with transportation. Start with that challenge and work backwards, right? What is the process? Are there ways that AI can assist? and to center the value of the human experience and think about what humans don't want to do anymore. And that may be a place for artificial intelligence. But the uh undisiplined approach to putting a chatbot on everything or running full steam ahead with artificial intelligence has proven to be not helpful. Uh so I

081would really focus on disciplined approach to use case. And then the other component which I know we're going to have a subsequent session on is data. It matters a lot. uh you will not have thoughtful productive outputs from any AI capability whether they are your own or from uh cons uh ed techch vendors etc if your data is not available and accessible uh in a way that can be consumed and thoughtfully used probably a lot of lessons those are you and then certainly education and training I think um to the point earlier around academic integrity uh and I think about how we support teachers and thinking about moving up Bloom's taxonomy levels. I think AI can actually enhance that or rather than sort of uh regurgitate what we did in a lecture, we're having to

082discern between misinformation and accurate information, compare outputs. Those are the kinds of skills that I think will be incredibly important for uh 21st century learners. Um I am on the California State University AI and workforce board and we have really come down on this idea of durable skills as actually the superpowers for students. Things like critical thinking, problem solving, decision-m uh they will be increasingly important in a world where information is ubiquitously available. The only thing I would add to what Mary said is, you know, when we're working with school districts, the the first question that whether we're there even to be talking about something that is completely separate from AI and it's cyber security, the conversation always shifts to AI, the customer always shifts to AI and the question they ask is what is

083everyone else doing? You know, what should we know? And and we're we always flip it and say that's not the question to ask. It's it's just as Mary said, what is a what is a problem that you currently have in your district? What is a challenge that you have? What is a a priority that you have? And then, you know, we'll help you think through how AI could help you solve that problem or or achieve that that mission or not, right? Or not, right? So, um I think it's um that that whole working backwards approach is really important to start with your challenge, your mission um and then work backwards. And I think the the the last um session that we're going to be doing, we're actually going to bring a team, someone from um

084our digital innovation team who's going to actually help walk through this. So there'll be some homework in advance and we'll, you know, have you bring some challenges or some thoughts um and then we'll actually be leading you through that kind of working backward session as well. >> All right, this is all exciting and we're looking forward to the next phase of the work and as we ch tackle a challenging problem that's facing us. So, thank you all so much. Is there anything that you need to add, Dr. >> No, that is it. I'll just be better ready for the next QR code and >> Well, thank you all so much. >> Thank you. Thank you so much. >> I guess Dr. Matillo, your team will be having joining us next after a very interesting topic

085of following AI. So, our staffing updates, we'll welcome you all to the table. Thank you all so much. Heat. Heat. You're afraid of the mix. w.wcpss.net 1225 to 26 staffing update. Aimalo, assistant superintendent for human resources, Christy Dyron, senior director for talent acquisition, Crystal Gregory. Director for talent acquisition board of education work session, September 16th, 2025. Um www.wcpss.net to desired outcomes board members will gain an understanding of vacancy and higher data as of September 2025. Expanded targeted recruitment support provided to schools. Updates regarding international teachers, future teachers, student teachers and job fairs. Additional ongoing recruitment programs www.wcpss.net3 NET 3 strategic plan alignment strategic priority essential pillar and aim www.wcpss.net4 vacancy reporting September 2025 position type vacant positions fill rate change in vacant positions since September 2024 teachers 148.98.75%-22 general education 829.2%-27 2%-27 special education 6695.75%

0865 instruction. >> So by the end of this session we do want to be able to um have you have a better understanding of our current vacancy and hiring data um as well as the ways we've expanded our recruitment support. Um also an update on some of our pipelines like international teachers uh future teachers student teachers and also having a look at um future initiatives um and efforts that we have. I think we're getting there. But again, I I do want to sort of turn this over both um Dr. Christy Dyron, our senior director for talent acquisition, and Crystal Greater, our director of recruitment. They are I think Christiey's finishing up sort of her first cycle in her role and Crystal we um started right before. >> All right, we're good. Thank you, Christie. Um

087so yeah, so Christiey's finishing up her sort of first hiring season and Crystal, we started I think the week of the job fair this spring. Um, so sort of right into the frying pan. Um, but she has done a great job of leading us through this recruitment season, learning some of the the tools that we have and really challenging us to look at ways to use them better. So, I'm thankful for both of their efforts and really want to while we do have some work to do, want to turn it over to them to to really celebrate some of the um continued progress that we've made. >> Good afternoon. Um before we begin sharing some work that we as a team have um accomplished this year with recruitment and hiring, I think it would be

088wise to try to connect um the strategic plan alignment to the work that we do. Um as you all are aware um the strategic plan states under the operational effectiveness under A15 that um we recruit, we hire, we develop and retain diverse instructional and non-instructional staff. Along with that, what I would be remiss if I did not share with you is that we also share with our HR team that everything that we do, whether it's about placing a teacher in a classroom or placing a bus driver behind the wheel, it impacts students. So, we try to make sure that we're putting the right people in front of students so that they can have successful outcomes. In just a few minutes, you'll hear from Kristen Gregory. She is our director of recruitment. She's going to share

089all of our accomplishments um as of September 25th, September 2025 of this year, as well as share with you our goals moving forward as an HRT. So, good afternoon. In a time where headlines for us are often filled with challenges, some of the stories about Wake County in recent weeks have been refreshingly positive. So, we've heard things like thinking outside the box, how Wake schools hired an educator for nearly every classroom this fall. Wake schools show fewer vacant teacher positions this year. And Wake County Public School Systems worked to fill its pipeline of bus driver candidates. These headlines not only show the hard work of our school staff, our human resources, and our communications and community stakeholders, but it also represents the support of this board. So, I want to take a closer look at

090how these numbers really support these claims that so many of the our media partners have made for us. As of September, our teacher fill rate is 98.75%. That represents 148 in school vacancies across more than 11,700 teaching positions. Compared to last year, that's about 22 fewer vacancies, which are a strong sign of continued progress. In general education, we we have vacancies decreased by 27. Special education remains our challenge area with 66 vacancies, which are five more than last year. However, we have seen a significant increase in the number of state teachers. So, while this number does look like it's a negative number, we have actually increased the number of positions that we were able to fill this school year. For instructional assistance, we currently have about 116 vacancies with 93 of those in special education.

091It is clear to our team and now you that sped teachers and sped instructional assistants have to be a priority for both recruitment and retention. And finally, in transportation, we continue to see an improvement. Bus driver vacancies are down by 30 as compared to last September, though we're still operating with a fill rate of about 65% of our desired or ideal field number. We have also seen incredible progress this year, but transportation still remains a priority concern. And not shown in this slide, but also absolutely worth celebrating is the progress that our recruitment team has helped to make in maintenance and operations. Since joining us in December, our M recruiter has already hired 50 external candidates and 19 internal candidates in 2025 to fill muchneeded positions. This level of impact in such a short time

092is remarkable and it demonstrates the value of having a dedicated recruiter focused on this area. He continues to push towards a 100% fill rate and this work is making an incredible difference in our schools and our facilities running smoothly. This is an incredible accomplishment given the scale and scope of our district's operational needs. So since July 1st, we have welcomed more than 3,200 new employees WCPSS. This includes over 2,000 teachers with a mix of new hires, rehires, return hires, and promotions. One encouraging data point is our return hires, staff who have left our district for a time and then chose to come back. Not that I have any bias, but this tells us that WCPSS is seen as a place that people want to return to, and this begins to speak to our culture and

093our opportunities. We also had about 149 promotions. Many of these were instructional assistants that moved to teaching positions, and this reflects our intentional work to create pipelines for growth and career advancement inside of our system. This I talk talks about our recruitment efforts. So our recruitment efforts this year have expanded in both scope and I would say sophistication. We refreshed our career site last year to make it more userfriendly and searchable with landing pages for specific job categories and interest forms that allow candidates to signal their intent quickly. However, we are now seeing the fruits of all of this labor. Candidates are telling us they can easily find our postings. They are also telling us they're attempting to complete our application on their cell phone. Our next iteration of changes will be ensuring that all

094of our processes are seamless no matter what device our candidates are using. We have also expanded our recruitment team. So now not only are they able to provide candidate care, but they also serve as liaons for our hiring managers and our school staff. This dual support strengthens the entire hiring cycle. Importantly, we have also broadened our outreach channels. We are intentionally building connections with H.B.CU, diverse community groups, and non-traditional organizations. In addition to attending so many job fairs through our advertising partners, we are running targeted advertising campaigns for hard to fill roles and guiding candidates from their first application through to placement. Recruiters are proactively reaching out, checking in, and matching applicants to schools that fit their skills. Beyond advertising, we continue to leverage resume drives, collegiate classroom visits, district job fairs, and our future

095teachers program to ensure that we are consistently attracting the strongest candidates. Our career site data confirms that this work is paying off. Between April and June of 2025, we saw strong growth in the traffic to our site and engagement with job postings. More importantly, we are converting all of those clicks into completed applications and hires. This is exactly the kind of return that we want to see in our recruitment advertising. We also know that candidates are spending a lot of time on our website. We are analyzing what we post, how we post, and most importantly, the ease of use of the information that we share. We know that many of our candidates again are coming to us on their cell phone. So, we want our application process to be easy for them to access and

096complete. We want our postings to be sharable so that you can tell a friend that Wake County is the absolute most perfect fit for them. Equally important is the experience of our candidates. This slide shows you a little bit of our ISIMS platform. Our recruiters now have tools that allow them to access role fit, discover hidden talent, and provide regular status updates to candidates. In addition to improved communication and customer service, I want to highlight three amazing tools that do depend a little bit on AI that are changing how we approach recruitment. They are talent match, talent discovery, and role fit. These tools allow our recruiters to not only source candidates, but to truly match them to the right positions. With talent match, we can see which applicants align best with specific roles. Talent discovery

097lets us help uncover candidates that we might have otherwise missed, like those who bring valuable skills, but aren't always actively applying. and role fit ensures that candidates are guided towards schools and positions where they are most likely to succeed and to stay together. These tools are helping us move from simply filling vacancies to strategically placing talent in ways that strengthen schools long term. For candidates, that means better communication. It means a smoother process and a stronger sense that WCPSS cares about them as individuals. This not only helps us to close these vacancies, but it also strengthens our reputation as a choice in a very competitive job market. This year, we welcome 61 new teachers that are international that are representing over 20 different countries. In total, we now have about 240 international teachers working across

09841 Wake County schools. These educators are certified in areas where we have our greatest needs. They are in elementary education, world languages, ESL, dual language, and secondary math and science. They not only bring critical skills, but they also bring diverse cultural experiences that enrich our students classrooms and our students learning. Our future teachers program continues to be one of our greatest success stories. Since 2019, we have hired 95 future teachers with 17 beginning their careers this fall. During the last school year, we selected 45 new participants for the program and today 100 stu 130 students are actively engaged in that pipeline. These students are receiving professional development, mentorship, and a guaranteed job with Wake County schools once they complete their teacher ed programs. And looking ahead, the application for the 2025 2026 cohort will open

099on February 1st. This ensures that we will continue to grow our own talent. We also expanded our use of student teachers in the recruitment pipeline. This year, 136 student teachers were hired into permanent roles. That is 50 more than last year. In addition, we participated in 35 university and college fairs. We held three district job fairs this past year. We've done resume drives. We've made new connections with universities about next steps. Things like how can we strengthen the pipeline of movement from a say a fed IA to a teacher in ways that remove things such as barriers of time and cost. Most importantly, we have been highly intentional not only with our budget but with our time. These events not only allow us to connect with candidates but also keep Lake County schools visible and

100competitive in the broader job market. Candidates are telling us they want a place where they can belong. Our recruitment team is aimed to not let just that be a want, but to be the basis behind every single thing that we do. So, what's next for what's next for us? As we look ahead, our focus is on deepening the pipelines that we know work best. We will continue to strengthen the instructional assistant to teacher pathway, particularly in special education where the need is most pressing. We will increase our university classroom visits to match candidates earlier in the teacher prep journey. We will maintain targeted recruitment strategies for our hardest to fill roles. And all of these steps have to be proactive. We are we are designed to anticipate future needs and ensure that our classroom staff

101with highly qualified and committed educators. I know that we are just about out of time for our aotted amount of time for today's work sessions, but are there any questions that we can answer about our current staffing needs? >> Sure. Um, so thank you all for bringing these updates and I'm sure there's questions around. We'll just go around the table. I'll start with Miss Gordon and make our way around. >> Thank you. This was amazing. It is so promising to see um the gains that that we have made um with staffing um particularly around like the future teachers of it. Um but I had two questions um on slide four where we are talking about um where we're talking about those gains. What what are we what have we done differently from last year or

102in the past um as um you know in different what have we done differently that are causing these gains? >> Crystal can't speak differently because she just started this great but um I mean I think it is about being more intentional. We have been able to expand our recruitment team and you can see you first saw with our bus driver recruiter right how we were able to make gains we had a person focused on bus driver recruitment walking folks through the process you saw it with M as we described where we've been able to really increase um our hires there and now we have also a couple folks who can focus on teachers and IAS and we're so I think it's some of it is expanding that recruitment team a lot of it is also

103our advertising in our recruitment. You know, we used to be um our former director would say sort of a post and hope district where we would just post our positions and hope that people would come, but we're not doing that anymore. And even when we do post, you know, our isims platform and our um recruitment agency, those postings get out there more. They're more searchable. But then we're also exploring different um you know, recruitment efforts, paid advertising, those kinds of things to really get our positions out there. So I think that is also helpful. Um so I think it's been a number of things. You know, future teachers, like you said, continues to grow. We're much more intentional now about um our student teachers and making sure that we keep the best ones so they

104don't jump to other districts before we can we can get them to stay with us. So I think it's just being intentional in all those areas. And it was exciting to see today as we were sort of doing the final prep for the presentation, Crystal and Christy wanted to talk more about next steps than what we've already done. So they're really continuing to look at how can we be intentional about these positions. >> I think another thing that's really unique is we have these standing meetings. No one wants another standing meeting, right? But we are meeting on a weekly or bi-weekly basis with communications. We're meeting bi-weekly or weekly basis with transportation, with maintenance and operations. We have a standing meeting. And so that level of support and saying this is not just an HR

105function, but this is a function of our district. that wraparound support that we're providing for candidates has been in my opinion gamechanging because it keeps our eye really on the prize and to know that hey we're all in this together and so we put our hands in a little bit here and a little bit there and borrow some money from here and get some money from there we can all push in the same direction. >> Thank you. Well, in in the um the same respect, you know, speaking about how we move forward, can you talk about can you talk a little bit more about what our supports will be? um in increasing the pipeline for um um IIA to teacher. >> We've been in conversations with um several people in the universities and we also

106want to talk together with um other teachers and leaders within the district. Talk about what will benefit the most. We learned that the barriers it's about money um and also the time. So if we know that for sure in our next conversations with our partners, we're going to have to bring that at the top as yes, we would like to take you into consideration, but how is this going to benefit our employees as it relates to money and talent? I >> think one one thing we're finding to add on to that, we we knew M's pay, you know, the board approved local masters pay. We knew that would be popular and helpful for employees, but we're now finding universities like that too, right? They want to partner with us with their masters programs and those

107kinds of things. So, we're now starting to engage in, you know, how can how can that be a good partnership moving forward. So, that's been interesting in the last kind of couple couple months to experience that. Thank you. >> Um, excellent presentation um and sharing data and information that makes sense um to see our growth, our gains, where we are and how we are one day going to fill those 330 bus driver positions that are remaining. But great job out of 940 of them be um that need to be filled overall. But anyway, um I do have one question that I I wanted to have and I I don't know if AJ thought that I might ask this question um considering I haven't gotten an answer yet since last year. What about uh the recruitment

108processes that we do with our colleges and the collegic places and spaces? I asked um about data that was shown before of the uh students that are pulled that are recruited within um our collegiate systems um and the different disparities that I'm seeing um of the recruitment process within those collegic systems. How are we doing on making sure that the failable states of the world have equal access to the NC State students of the world um with being informed and invited and wanting to see their faces within our great system that we just talked about right now? How is that looking for us? >> I think we're doing some really unique things that have really been fun to do um as our recruitment team. So, the big fairs are great and we love going to

109those, but we've most recently started doing what we call resume drives. So, we're sitting down with students and looking at their resumes and getting them ready so that when they get in front of folks, they are highly qualified. We know that they're they have on their resume exactly what we're looking for as a district. So, that's one of the things that we're doing and we're doing that earlier and sooner so that our 11th or not our 11th graders, but our junior students are ready by the time they get to their senior year. We're also looking at ways to do internships that aren't just student teaching, right? Because we all could use an intern. And so, how can we do micro projects with students so that um you know, they're seeing themselves in our spaces and

110seeing the work that we do. We're also attending those H.B.CU fairs. We're going to places where, you know, we traditionally have not gone but are, you know, high priority for me as an alum of some of those places. >> Very good. Thank you. I think it just goes back to some of the things that um board member Hershey talks about us being prepared to have secession plans and and spaces. I think that if we can train these folks coming in to do other um intern positions other than just the teaching, we can prepare our own robust uh team that's going to come in and they'll know exactly what to do and with their new modern way of doing things can make us run even more proficiently. So, thank you all for this fantastic job with

111HR AJ. I'm going to leave you alone. This was beautiful. This was amazing. Very proud of what I saw today. Thank you, >> Mr. H. Um, thank you. I I was listening when I was driving um but not watching, promise. Uh, let me see. So, I I'm bringing this up. It's something I brought up to Dr. Taylor recently and I brought up to um AJ recently, which is I'd like to see this kind of report on our upper level central services, senior level positions. And it's for a few things. that, you know, I've been here for 2 years and 9 months and we've seen some positions open up and sometimes they get filled quickly. I think we've had uh two uh chief academic um officers or whatever. I'm not sure the exact title. >> Yes.

112And that that filled quickly both times, but we've had other positions. The special education position stayed open for a long time. Um facilities. We've worked some stuff out, but we couldn't find somebody bus driver or the head of transportation. And and I've heard conversations with my colleagues, too, about what kind of training we're doing when we hire new area superintendents. What training do they have prior to becoming? And so what I'm getting at is is how do we create a grow your own program because I don't know how many people in here could retire tomorrow and we've seen a district recently that went through some issues because they lost a lot of people and if we lose a lot of people quickly I want us to be in a position to say hey we've got

113this second level, five people, three people, whatever it is, they're ready to step up and, you know, be in charge of finances or HR or technology or security. And so I feel like we are that's that's not a current strength of ours. So, I'd love to see that kind of report and building a program out at that level and not just this level. And I did reason I brought it up too is because I want my colleagues to know that I a couple of them knew but I didn't I wanted to share it that I had those conversations. >> So, so I'll be able to share more about that later tonight when I update the board. Uh but you're absolutely right that uh it is a retirement factor that have that has been impacting public

114education for I would say the last 20 years um and it's just been cyclical and we can absolutely see that certain positions are going to have an even greater need. You think about uh a chief chief academic officer or positions in the academic field. Well, that's kind of what we are. We're in the business of education. you've got a lot of people with experience. Uh and so uh we're going to be um a lot faster in finding someone. But those skill specific positions that may be outside of education um uh is going to be hard to find. And what we now recognize, been recognizing this for a long time, is that other districts that have those positions that have those people with the with the qualifications, they're going to do things above and beyond to

115try to retain those people. And so that makes it really difficult that we can identify a person and they could come to wake and make $150,000, but that district may match that and that person says, "Live where I am and make the same thing versus going there." Uh that makes it a struggle. We talk about retirement. I just happen to look I think >> don't look at me. >> Maybe two people that that aren't there but that's the problem that we have. It it is uh we can look at teachers. We can look at administrators principles in school senior staff. Uh every district is is struggling with that. It has been that way for 20 years for me. Uh but think Mr. Leader has >> Yeah, I just wanted to make a a point. I

116mean, your points, Mr. Hershey, are spot on in my opinion and critical to the ongoing nature of any organization, but in this case, the Wake County Public School System. But as a bright spot, some of what perhaps even much of what you're talking about is taking place. And while we have not been able to fill the senior director of transportation position yet, I will note that we've opened a new year without that position in place and everything is in a steady state which does speak to what's underneath that layer. >> Yeah. both structurally, process-wise, and staff and leadership. Just not been able to find the right candidate for the role, but not trying to take away good points. >> Yeah, that is a good point. >> Both of them. >> Thank you. Um, thank you.

117I was excited to hear you present it, but when I looked at it earlier today, um, the slide deck was exciting just to see. So, thank you. and um congratulations and you know for all your hard work and you know we appreciate your team. I do think it's important to acknowledge my understanding with specked is that fewer um college kids are going into that field um fewer kids in general are going into the teaching profession but with the specked piece it's much worse. That's a national trend. I don't think it's any different in North Carolina. Um, so I just think it's important to acknowledge that and I know y'all are working hard. We all know how critical those roles are. Um, but it is something I think we should just recognize that it's a real

118challenge. And then anecdotally, can you talk about how we compare with other districts with our I mean, I'm not asking you to give me numbers, but do you feel like Wake is in a better position because of, you know, we get great support from our county commissioners with our supplements and that doesn't necessarily impact every single staff member, but um do you feel like as the district as a whole that as far as recruiting and retaining we're in a in a good >> better than almost everybody? Say that again. >> We were better than almost everyone. >> Okay, that's some of the tiny, you know, some of the tinier districts, um, they had very few positions to fill. Then they didn't report their vacancy rate. They reported that they only had three positions to fill.

119Well, they're only filling 33. And so, you know, in comparison, that's not apples to apples. >> But the news media basically celebrated us as being the exemplar. And so, we'll take that. >> All right. Thank you >> Dr. >> Thank you. Um yeah, thank you for a good presentation. Um and and you had mentioned about um um uh in you know IAS um becoming teachers um and and and I'm sure that there you know there's an incentive into to doing so um so I see that kind of the flip side of it is you know we we are losing IAS to become teachers and so and how do we replenish that supply, you know, and how do we do that? And that and I I know that that's a a big part of what you

120guys are working uh on. And um just just curious, you know, kind of what strategies you guys have in terms of of tapping into um resources, communities, and things like that. >> Yeah. So, I'll use the job fair that we had this weekend as an example. So, we held a job there for CNS um with our staff and CNS staff over the weekend. I think at last count we hadund and some odd um RSVPs for that fair. Over 96 of those folks showed up. Um there are currently like 40 positions that CNS needs to fill. So, one of our strategies is taking that clientele that applied for those positions and say give it a week or so. CNS has filled the positions that they need to fill. And then those other people that have RSVPd,

121we're going to advertise our IIA positions, we're going to advertise our bus driver positions because often the um education level starting is about the same. And so if we can continue to do things like that where we can get people in in large bulks and then move them from one train to the next, it only helps feed that next part of the pipeline. >> Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I have personal experience of, you know, people applying for a part-time job, not knowing that they really needed a full-time job, you know, so maybe that you, you know, when you look at some of these, uh, I think the applicant pool said, I think you can go into this area just as well. I think that that adds to um the work of the recruiter

122to be able to have those conversations and to know where that candidate is coming from and be able to place them successfully and um with our recruitment team we're able to do that more than we were before. >> Good. Great. Thank you. Um, yeah, I just I wanted to say this great presentation. I have to go back and I was doing a little bit of transitioning. Um, so I did not get to hear all of it. So, I apologize. And if it is already been said, I'll go back and listen. Just tell me. Um, with the bus drivers, um, it showed that we were down um, 30 from 2024. And I think we had talked about this before, but um do they do an exit um interview with the bus drivers that do leave to

123see where we can improve or what we can do to help recruit some more? There is an exit survey um that our recruiters are working with, our recruiter is working with. Um I think that you know one of our areas of growth will be utilizing that data to its fullest potential. Um that's a new survey for us. That's a new process for us, but that is something that we're looking at doing a better job of understanding what is it, why did you leave, right? >> Um, we do know that that industry in itself is transient, right? Because there are so many different driving opportunities that people now have >> and so we have to really work hard to maintain that culture and that space where people see that as this is where I belong and

124this is my space. otherwise they're going to move to the Amazon or the Ubers or whatever that are now new driving opportunities that maybe we didn't have five or 10 years ago. And and just to add to that, we have as a district over the last, I don't know, 5 years invested in some research studies. We've done a couple of different surveys. We've hired a firm to go out and talk to bus drivers who have left. So, we have a we have a good idea of what the opportunities are in terms of retention. >> Okay, great. I have a couple a lot of my colleagues raised some of mine so I just went through and scratched those off. But I will say this is amazing. I was able to actually watch the article that came

125out on or which one that really talked about the great things in the pieces. Um so I am curious to know as you're going out and doing these recruitments what is some of the feedback that you're hearing from uh potential candidates and you know what changes you know if there are any that we should consider through policy to help make it a little bit easier for you all to recruit great applicants. >> Yeah. I think number one people want to belong somewhere. They want to they want to be at a place where they see themselves they see their work as being valued and worth the investment. The other thing is customer service is huge. Um people often tell us, well it's hard to get in wake or you know I need someone to call me

126back or I need someone to acknowledge my application. And so that's part of the work that our team is doing but also part of the message that we're passing on the school staff that when we ask people apply we have to follow up with those candidates. Um otherwise we are going to lose them to our neighboring districts. The other thing is money matters. Um, if we're talking about policy, if we're talking about changes that we can make, having M's pay is huge for us. You know, having that additional supplement, it matters to our candidates. It's often the choice between them going to us or to a neighboring district. And so, we can't lose the headway that we've made. Um, I think the last piece is that advertising matters. If people don't know that we exist,

127then they will disappear from the radar. And so, we're not even a blip on their in their thought. And so we have to continue the advertising work that we're doing um in order to stay relevant and current for those candidates. >> Thank you. And I I know it was mentioned that we do um exit interviews for bus drivers, but I'm curious to know, do we also do exit interviews with teachers um as they're leaving? Um I know when I resigned um I had request one, which was not the norm, but to really like set out the tone and display that expectation so teachers well principles can hear what they can control in their buildings to make that culture a little bit better. So is that a standard across the district? I can. So, we do

128have an exit survey that's written and sometimes it's a challenge to get folks to take it, but we do have a team that's working on trying to get um sort of folks to take it more and analyze that data. Anytime somebody does ask, we certainly will do like an in-person exit survey, but I don't think it's something we've systemically kind of put in place. It's something we can certainly >> I would love for us to kind of go that route to see besides a survey, what are some other pieces that folks are hearing? I know money is going to be a a big factor, but are there culture things in buildings that we can address through the you know working with the superintendent to address those pieces because often time to the point you raised

129folks do want to be a part of something that they see themselves in and belong and if that's not necessarily in a culture of a school then we need to fix that ASAP. Um, and I do know our future teacher program is a success and I always look forward to to that launching, but are we using those students to be ambassadors and to recruit fellow colleagues or peers of theirs about this opportunity to, you know, is is that happening? are we how are we getting more students who may not necessarily be at the high school level but at the middle school level you know gearing getting them excited about this opportunity. So I guess if you could speak a little more. >> Absolutely. I think indirectly and directly. Right. So Sherry does an amazing job

130with that program. Hands down. But last week, I think it was last week, all the days run together. Um I was at Win Salem State and a student proudly came up to me um as a member of one of our future teachers. And she said, "Why don't you have a line?" And I said, "I don't know. I'm here by myself." But she said, "Let hold on. Let me go get you some students." And so she went and got four or five students that were ed majors and was like, "You need to come to Wake County and here are the reasons why." And so while that is indirectly using her, I think that she has the wherewithal, she has had the um experiences, she understands the value of her program and all of that speaks to

131the work of that was done indirectly to influence her, right? Because if she didn't have that information, she wouldn't have shared it with those students. And so we can do some things probably in a more strategic way, but I think providing students with the this is the why of this program. This is why you matter, it allows them to have those conversations. And sometimes that's more valuable than us standing in front and being saved on stage. >> And you know when Salem State is up the street from that great school that I attended all day. Um so we got to get our Aggies in. >> We were also at Auntie last week. So Auntie had a fair that had over 6,000 in attendance and we attended that and it was great. We got great feedback.

132Um again that those type of fairs talked to us getting in front of students earlier because it was open to freshman through seniors. And so we were able to get in front of those students early to say we're an option and we're going to continue to do that. >> And I often go out as much as I can and tell folks, hey we have masters pay in Wake County. I know another county may be great, but we have we can offer more. Um, I'm very curious. I know that we have a partnership with Shaw University. Are we leveraging that to really get into their education students to let them know, hey, we are right down the street. We offer masters pay, you know, just really branding this a little bit better than we can. So,

133students who may not have attended Wake County or know about Wake County may be interested in in teaching here. So, just curious about that. And I had one more thought or question. I'm trying to make sure I uh I know typically it's hard to, you know, get teachers engaged in low performing schools or or high need schools. Have we considered as a district of doing a hiring freeze just to to prioritize those high need schools that are hard to fill to make it a all hands-on deck approach? talk about TSL, >> you know, we had this wonderful TSL grant that was that was focused on that and starting to incentivize people to go and to stay. Um, so I think we've got to pivot now that that's been terminated and determined, you know, what are

134some other strategies. I personally always struggle with a hiring increase because then it it's we have so many positions. But I think to your point, we've got to continue to look at now how do we how do we really look at, you know, incentivize people to go and stay in those lower lower performing schools. >> Are there any other questions or comments? >> One one last if I could ask. I just had a quick note here about um the onboarding processes a little bit um around when HR when when they do come in. Um, is there anything that we do specifically about helping the staff understand all the resources we have and how we actually do things um around like um where CAP besides where CAP is because I just remember there was a time

135where all of it wasn't shared. So, I was just wondering cuz you guys like y'all so on it. I just want to hear um do that on boarding process. What does that look like about sharing all the resources within Wake because Wake had Wake is amazing and we have a lot of great resources and I was just curious is it only broken down based upon the type of um hire that you are or is it shared just openly like all the amazing resources we have or where educators need to go to connect with certain things to know because I know at one point at a BAC meeting um princip we we alerted principles about um uh a 800 number they they not 800 but a phone number they can call um for IEP so I

136just wondered for people who are princ who for who are principles that are being hired or even educators that are being hired do they know these little nooks they can't know everything is so much but is there some type of binder or something they get where it's just like boom all these great resources because you can't share it in a a half day session when you have other things to share. Just wondering is that something we do or looking to do or might want to put a bug in the ear to do. So what I can share with you is um we are in the process of revamping our onboarding process. Right now um when a new person is um processed into our district, we have a virtual onboarding process through our platform license. Um

137what we did kind of pilot this um summer that was phenomenal and amazing and so now we need to go to the next level was we hadformational sess sessions. So, we invited our new hires to participate in a virtual session um on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2 o'clock or 6:30 and it was all voluntary and someone from the HR department came on and answered questions about anything and about everything um about being in a new system. And what we learned was it was beneficial. So we talked as an HR team on how can we now um strategically approach that so that it can now become a process. So we are in discussion. We're going to change some things um with the onboarding and um I think you in the near future you'll see better things

138that comes with onboarding new hires in our district. >> Thank you. I already see it today. Appreciate that. Well, thank you all so much for the work that you're doing and the process that you all are laying out. So, we appreciate it and looking forward to, you know, bringing as many folks to Wake County as we possibly can. So, thank you all so much. >> Thank you. >> All right. So, this final work session topic is our district 8 vacancy. And I believe Miss Allison will be joining us for this one. Right on queue as always. Um, Miss Allen, let me know when you're ready. You want me to start? >> I'll go wherever you go. >> So, the chair, Miss Allen, and I worked to put together a timeline that's very similar to a

139timeline that we've utilized in the past uh to replace this. I will say that um we felt best not to bring on the new district 8 person in the middle of the reassignment. So therefore they would not be at a disadvantage. And so as you all know and hopefully the public knows that she and I have split up Miss Mafy's district. So he has the northern part of her district. I have the southern half. And so the district is district 8 is still being taken care of. We have the district 8 website. um but we're goes to Miss Allen and she disseminates the information to the chair and I and the superintendent to ensure that those constituents are still have an avenue to voice their concerns. So, Miss Allen, I will kick it over to

140you. >> Okay. Everybody has seen the information that's located in assembly. We have a vacancy timeline and process. Um we're discussing the item today. We can release the vacancy ad both digitally and in print. Um the district website will have the ad like we have done before and several other vacancies that we've had. So it will run on our website. Um I did finally get back from the news and observer. Um they do not have a western wake edition anymore >> and they only do the print part of the NN O on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. So those are the only three days that the newspaper is printed, but we can run the ad for a whole month. This time the price has changed a little bit. It's uh gone up by about $300 or

141$400, which is not bad, but we could only run it for 3 days in print because we would run it on Friday, Sunday, Wednesday versus tomorrow, Wednesday because you guys have to approve. if you approve this timeline. And so I don't want to assume that this is going to be done and that you can do this by tomorrow. So we would have it for a release to print Friday would run Friday, it would run Sunday. We would do the following Wednesday. That would be the last time it would run in print, but it would be digital for a full month in an O for newbserver.com. So it would run for a full 30 days and we would have it on our district website. Okay. We would compile all applications October 31st, which means however they

142get the information from bringing it here to the office to submitting it electronically through district >> district vacancy >> vacancy at wcpss.net um which is what we have done previously as well. We would share applicant information at the October 7th work session, the October 21st work session, and the 114 work session if needed. At all three of those, you would get the number of applicants that have applied. You would get if there were any issues, and you would get to confirm the timing of the candidate interviews and candidate questions at the 114 work session. We will get those candidate interview questions to you between 10:31 and 11:4 so that you guys can review them, make any changes. And Dr. Ing and Vice Chair Swanson are going to help with the application questions. Applicant questions. I'm

143getting nods, so I'm going to keep going. >> Yes, sir. Just wait till they do questions. >> Okay. Candidate interviews. These are possible dates. We're trying to get this done prior to the Thanksgiving holiday so we're not messing with holiday plans. So we're looking at uh Monday, November the 17th between a time frame of 8 to 2. And then if needed, we will do November 24th, which is a Monday from 9 to 12. Again, only as needed. We would actually swear in the district 8 candidate at the December 2nd board meeting. The reason why we looked at December and this longer period of time is because in between now and December, the board has quite a nice lengthy calendar of events including your enrollment plan draft two and voting on your enrollment plan. It would

144be kind of hard for somebody to come in and vote on a plan they haven't really had uh information on and was able to do so. So, that is your timeline and your process. If you looked at your vacancy ad, we use the same information we have used previously. However, the number four for proof of doicile, we're going to give a date this time of um if you are un if you're doiciled in the district but you are not able to provide a utility bill. They need to email that district 8 vacancy email address by 4:59, no later than 5, I'll give you a minute on October 17th. That way we still have they have time to get their information to us. We can get it to you guys and still be able to have

145everything ready for you guys by October 31st. The deadline though for all documents 459 October the 30th. I'll give you a minute. 5:00 that would be the grace time. Um right now the district 8 vacancy at wcpss.net net email address is up as long as well as a district 8 email address for any questions that come in about district 8. But there are two distinct different emails for the reason of making sure that we get the information about the vacancy and the vacancy email. I'm happy to answer questions. >> Well, thank you Miss Allen for putting this together and um I did work with Miss Allen and I have already sent some edits to the questions. So, we'll get those at the 31st. So it'll be in everyone's board mail um and go from there.

146So I'll just open up if board members have any questions or comments. Miss Edmonds, >> I'm sorry. Can you clarif Can you say that again? So we won't see the questions until October 31st. Is that what you just said? >> Right. It'll be in your board mail um the week of October 31st and then we'll have a discussion on the questions. Um but we're hoping at this time that we will not give the questions to the candidates until they until they're at the table. make it fair for all of the candidates that are there. >> Okay. >> Any other questions, comments? Mrs. Cfield, >> I just have a conflict um with the with the 17th. So, that's the date that we pick. I had emailed you the details, but >> Okay. >> recently, but I

147don't know if I could change. >> So, we can Oh. Um, so the 24th, I just saw your email. But we can do the 24th if that works for everyone's schedule. Um >> 24th for >> the interviews cuz Miss Cfield has a conflict >> for November. Okay. >> Is that fine for >> I'm trying I'm trying to go back. I'm trying to well if it's as long as it's Tuesdays that work for me cuz that's a scheduled day for me for me that I know that I can't do anything on because we're at a board meeting but if we schedule anything outside of a Tuesday then that affects people's work life schedule. So I need everything to remain on the >> So hearing that >> October >> it would be November the 17th and or

14824th if I'm not mistaken. Miss Allen is there a board meeting on the 18th? >> That's the board meeting where you vote on the enrollment plan and you have student achievement and a work session on the 18th. >> Right. So the 24th is part the 25th would be cutting it close to the 31st >> 31st and the Thanksgiving um >> okay >> uh holiday >> and the week before you have the NCA NCBA annual conference and the holiday that's how we ended up the 17th and the 24th >> right the 24th again is if needed So, we we said no to the 10th because it kind of is like a holiday holiday. >> Well, it's the week of the NCSB um conference, North Carolina School Board Association conference >> and that Tuesday is a holiday.

149>> So, the only other option could be the 25th, which is a Tuesday. >> And you have a policy committee meeting at 1. to start on Wednesday. >> You have a holiday for us on Tuesday, so we're closed. >> No, I thought you were looking at the 10th. >> I know that there's some conflicts on the 10th. >> I understand that as discussion. >> Yeah. >> Um, Mr. Hershey had a >> I didn't hear anything. >> I was whispering. So, >> okay. Um, right now we don't appear to have a um facilities meeting on November 5th. I think that's when it's supposed to be. We were going to instead go to uh Capitol Boulevard site. But if we so if we need to move policy to that instead and we can >> you know you

150have a safety and security committee committee meeting at 1. Just letting you know. >> Yeah. So, but I'm saying like that that opens up the 25th >> for staff to move for policy committee meeting up. That's fine with me as well. >> Point of clarity, please. >> Sure. >> Um, did you say November 5th? >> No, I I was saying that we have a slot on November 5th if we needed to move a meeting. >> So, policy from November, not on Wednesday. Exactly. >> November 4th. November the fourth. Yeah, maybe >> Tuesday, November 4th. >> They may have sent me the wrong date on the email. >> What they were on November 5th, don't we have safety at one facilities at three? So, >> Mr. I gota Okay. >> So, he was sort of back

151to back policy, but >> So, that's to move the committee meetings to that date if we want to free up the 25th for interviews. That's if that's what I'm >> You know that's a lot of policy back toback weeks but then we got to do it. So >> yeah if it's November 5th for me I can't do that. >> So it's not we're not having the the interviews on the 5th. He's bringing up a meeting committee meeting for policy on that date. So the 25th could be an option to have the interviews >> already set up for Wednesday. >> Right. Is it um community engagement? I think that's October, not November. So I can say I do the same community. >> So just cuz we'll be voting on this at 5:30. So I want to

152make sure we got all the details. Everybody's on somewhat of a want a p one page here. So the 17th is not feasible. Um so the 25th is the next option that we have. Um, I'll defer to Miss Evans if uh who's our policy chair about are you fine with moving your comments? >> I am. And I think it gives me enough time to um have uh Dr. Robinson. Can we can we pull those off two weeks apart? >> Yes, we can do whatever you want us to do. We'll make it happen. >> Yeah, >> it's okay. >> That's fine with me. >> We can use We'll scratch the uh 17. So, we're going to have the 25th as the main day and so the 24th is off the table cuz 24th was as needed

153and that was a 9 to 12 start time. So, your 25th is 8:00 in the morning to 2:00 on a Tuesday. That's what I'm hearing that you guys want to do. And so, you will not have a as day, >> right? That's what I'm hearing. Okay. >> Just one day. Okay. We're just going to have that one day only >> no matter how many candidates we have. >> That is correct. >> The week of Thanksgiving, >> right? The week of >> Yeah, that's the only >> the Tuesday >> and we'll need to move to the virtual executive committee meeting. >> Yeah, we have to shift. So, I think we're okay. >> Okay. I got two. >> So, is there a thumbs up about this? Let's see. One, two, three. Are >> you Well, I don't

154necessarily like the week of Thanksgiving. I think that's why she had it as a as needed date. Um, I'm being realistic. Um, I mean I mean I'm able to to do what we can do, but if if I mean, if I'm not here, I don't think we'll I don't think I think the boards can still do what they need to do. If one person's not here, I think that we're still we'll still be corn. We still can do what we need. >> Those meetings. I mean, I'm just being honest, >> right? I mean, >> I mean, if we have the dates that we have, I mean, you know, >> so >> yeah, >> I'm hearing it'll be the 25th. I I >> I'm also good with the 17th. >> That's just so close to the

155holiday. >> Were you good with the 17th? Cfield? >> Yeah, I'm I'm okay. I can I can arrange what I need to arrange on the 17th. I just can't do Wednesdays. Yeah, Miss Cfield has >> Miss Cfield has the challenge on 17. >> Trust me, it's not funny. >> No, no, no, no. I'm not. >> Yeah. I mean, I mean, no, we all have work things for me. Turn >> just as something to ponder. You don't have to come up with the whole schedule now. I mean, you you could, >> but we wanted to so we didn't have to come back and >> retouch it. So everything is out in the public so it's clear and and concise. I I mean I understand but I mean you you could just pick the deadline for applications

156that part now that's the end of October anyway >> right >> and then you could work with you know Melissa to try to find the interview dates you know I think that because you've got you got you know a good month to play with some possible dates >> not necessarily >> and not for me >> November is already tight and if we're trying to swear the person in December 2nd um to participate in that annual meeting and whatnot. So we look through all the possibilities with that when we put together the draft. >> Is it too close to do if nobody wants to do it that weekend that week of Thanksgiving? Is it too close to do it on December 1st and then just have the meeting the following day at the board meeting to

157welcome them? >> They would get scored in the next day. next day. That's what I'm saying. Like they'll get the job and then >> that's not fair to as a person who's gone through that experience. I don't know. I can't speak for Miss Gordon, but to to to have me in and then you tell me and then you want your folks family and people whoever to participate to tell that's a short turn >> and and I'm okay with with certain dates um if we're going out, but >> I have a firm that I run and people book dates with me well in advance and they pay quite a bit of money for me to come train them. And so for me to shift their dates just like that is a little bit challenging, >> right?

158I mean all majority of us on the board do juggle multiple jobs or have a day job in this. So I think it's part of the job which is what we're born to do and it's actually a question that we have. How do you juggle all of this? So I think I saw a majority with the 25th. Are we still good with that? Was the 8:00 start time work for everybody? >> Thanks. We will make it work. >> So I think you said that >> because you have to have in order to get that started. So >> So we'll have it on the 25th 8th start maybe having the first one come start at 8:15 to give some wiggle room and go through the process. Does that work? >> All right. >> Absolutely. All right,

159that'll be on our action item for the 5:30 meeting. So, with all of that being said, we will adjourn our work session.