2025-06-03 Work Session

001You paid 25,000 that it wasn't it didn't look like she got it because of Someone dead. That's where came out of sorry. Um, so that was what happened yesterday. I hate that nobody. Yeah. All right. Bye. Happy birthday. Oh, thank you. Just watermelon. Okay. Is it going down in the back room? What are we looking for? We looking for cell phone. I don't know where policy and get things started. Welcome everyone. Today is Tuesday, June the 3rd, and we will convene our work session of the Wake County Board of Education. We do have a forum, and we do have a full agenda today. So, we will start with uh Mr. Drew Cook and his team, Dr. Chenikica Moore Brown, Su Roberts, and we will um hear about uh the AIG plan, bringing it back from

002our presentation at our last meeting. Thank you, Mr. Hag. Good afternoon, everyone. Uh we do appreciate the opportunity again today to uh come back to the board. I think this will be the third installment the 30 minutes that we have today kind of in a process that we began back at the March uh student achievement committee meeting. Uh we do appreciate the questions and the feedback um that board members provided during and after the May 22nd meeting. Uh our focus during this 30 minutes today is really to zero in on some of the specific updates and revisions that have been made based on board and other stakeholder feedback since that last meeting. Um our intent again is to bring to the the board a final draft plan uh for board approval at the June 24th

003meeting to meet the DPI required submission timeline by June 30th. Um I will note um unfortunately Miss Fur Roberts is not with us today. She's unable to be here, but in her absence, I am joined as Mr. Hagerty referenced by Dr. Shenica Morram and also Andrea Hall, a member of our AI AIG district team who will help provide some specific insight. Makes me a little nervous not having Miss Roberts here. We got an app team here and we brushed up um a little more than maybe we would otherwise. So, you're you're in good hands. Um, if it's good with the board, we'll go through the relevant updates uh in each applicable program standard section uh before opening up for questions as a human being. By the way, you've got hard copies in front of you.

004Uh these are updated hard copies since our last meeting two weeks ago. I will say we are happy to recycle any of the old versions that you have recognizing the amount of paper that we're putting in front of you knowing that sometimes it's easier to kind of manipulate and see firsthand uh and hard copy that identical though to the digital version you also have uploaded and sent. Uh so if we start if we look at program standard one and I'm going to start I'll turn it over to Miss Hall and also Dr. Mo Brown to kind of highlight some of the revisions and input uh that we have worked to incorporate. Uh I do want to draw your attention first to the language that's been added to page five uh under standard one student identification.

005Um, we do want to mention that, and by the way, the revised updated language that you'll find in blue print, the specific language from NCDPI under standard one has been incorporated to more concretely call out the district's commitment uh to serving the needs of under reppresented gifted population, which includes culturally and ethnically diverse students, economically disadvantaged, multilingual learners, twice exceptional, and also highly gifted learners. You'll note that there on page five. Uh while the language is broad and does not necessarily refer to specific new actions or practices, it is an effort uh to respond to some stakeholder feedback uh by committing to researching and evaluating practices of other eleas across North Carolina in this particular area. Uh in other words, we want to continue to pursue what's possible, what's feasible. And by the way, that

006effort already includes collaboration with our friends at NCBPI. We convened a meeting last week um with some staff members actually from our former colleague and my boss uh uh Stacy Wilson Norman and her team. Uh we also want to ensure that we're concretely calling out here the need to refine school level practices and utilization of differentiated educational plans. Um, which by the way, we do want those plans to be functional and effective without unintentionally creating additional burdensome time consuming uh, bureaucratic work that teachers and staff have to engage in. I think that's what we just want to call out that's always a balancing act that we seek systemic consistency and implementation, accountability, data, and oversight. We also want to be sensitive to the fact that all of these efforts do require work both at the

007district, but maybe most significantly the school and the classroom level. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Miss Hall to talk a little bit more about standard one and some of the additions that have been made. Thank you. So, um, I wanted to specifically address some of the questions that you had from standard one that were shared with us. and standard one starts on page five of your AIG plan if you wanted to check that out. Um, some of the questions you were asking were, are we striking the right balance in our identification process? Specifically thinking about overesting, um, possibly missing students who are smart kids but they're not so great test takers as well as the human element that sometimes can be missed within identification. So some of the things that we

008have um wanted to share with you today is that for the over testing aspect of it, the portfolio process is what we always would like for our teachers to start with. And so in that process, there is a possibility for a student to actually qualify for gifted identification without having to test. So that's one way. The other thing is when it comes to our second grade KOGAT and Iowa testing, the 85th percentile is what starts that data conversation. So if a student does get a 85th percentile or if the student is doing really well in their core classroom, they could still use the portfolio process, which does not require additional testing. It's using the authentic data that's already available in the school building that the teachers should have access to in order to see if

009the students will be able to qualify. The other part about that is if a student doesn't qualify using the portfolio, they will be able to be talent developed and that means they'll still receive AIG services while the teacher grows and enhances the strengths within that student in hopes to get them identified in the future. Um, also we were um we wanted to share that the portfolio is a sample of what can be used. Every item on that portfolio is not mandated. So there's a opportunity for students to get between 21 to 24 points overall and they they need 17 to qualify. And the way that we've looked at some of the work is they could get two points using Kagat and Iowa testing together and still qualify for AIG services. So that was our attempt

010to make sure that we're not missing out on students who aren't the best test takers, but they're doing a great job in their core classroom. And finally, the human element. We actually have our SBCG committee in every school. That's basically your AIG team. And they are to review the data as a team as a collective and have conversations around the students, their strengths and areas of need so that the best placement for those students can take place. Excellent. Thank you so much. I'm going to move on to standard two. And there were some questions about comprehensive programming and also um the multiple accelerative opportunities. Um, so we know that students are able to access multiple acceleration opportunities uh during their careers here in WCPSS as long as participation adheres to those guidelines. And our comprehensive

011program and also the multiple accelerative opportunities are on pages 26 and 37. Um, so we know we have SFA which is single subject acceleration and you're able to um take a course higher than their grades span in either ELA or math. Um and so there was a question about you know taking ELA and math and that will be more so aligned with whole grade um advancement and so when we talk about the um SSA we know that that test the student on all the standards in that particular grade level and we have to note that remember the student is trying to accelerate to pass course content that they have not been taught by a classroom teacher. Okay. Um then also with single subject acceleration, all of our WCPSS students have opportunities to take that to

012skip the next grade in a single subject. Um parents and guardians must submit a request to do so um for that in math or ELA. Um and those tests are based on what the end ofear mastery should be in that particular subject area. So for example, a third grader who wants to skip fourth grade math would be taking the fourth grade SSA test. Um and it would be a compilation of all of the standards. um for the end of the year mastery for fourth grade. Um and so we do have uh two separate testing windows. Um so newly enrolled and current first through 7th graders, they have two weeks from their date of enrollment to take that test. Um but it has to be before the end of the first quarter um whichever comes first.

013And then to take the assessment um outside of the spring testing window. And that spring testing window is for all WCPSS students in kindergarten through 7th grade. and we are continuously evaluating the processes that we have with things such as single subject acceleration um and also whole grade advancement so that we can make sure that we maximize those accelerative opportunities for our students. Um then of course you know we also have other um accelerative opportunities such as early kindergarten entry um and then also I believe I've already spoken about Yes. So I've spoken about that as well. So I'm going to speak back to um Andrea who's going to talk to us about um one more particular question before I do that is the alternative setting collaboration and support. So that was a specific question

014that was asked and if you reference page 33 um alternative schools are collaborating with our advanced learning services team um when they have an AIG identified student enrolled and we're very proud of that collaboration because we want to make sure those students get the appropriate academic supports as well. And so a representative from that school and a member of our team review that student's data. We update the student's differentiated education plan, also known as the DP, to make sure that that student's needs for academic acceleration and challenge and rigor um will be addressed. So that is on page 33 and I'll turn it back over to Andrea for standard 4. Thank you. And on page 68, that's where standard 4 begins. Um, our question was, how can we proactively equipped our AIG teachers with the

015knowledge and skills to effectively use AI? And we recognize that AI is not just a passing trend. It's something that's going to be here to stay and be around for a very long time. And we are going to um look into how we can work with the district and using the mandates and guidance from the district to determine the role of AI for our ARG teachers. and we plan to in the immediate future investigate professional development for them. Also with that standard, just to let you know, we have included a glossery in our AIG plan. And one of the reasons we wanted to make sure we included a glossery is to make sure that we have um that everyone's on the same page and that we also foster clear communication across the district so that

016way that everyone can use the same terminology, the same language. One thing to note about the glossery is that some of them are based on state and federal um definitions. So they are they should align with things that you'll see in other places. Excellent. So here we are again in June um with the AIG planning timeline. And so again, we appreciate the feedback that we received not only here at this table, but also from other essential partners and know that we are on track to be back for the June 24th uh full board approval. So with that, Mr. Hody, we're happy to answer any questions, provide any additional clarifications that we can. Um we certainly welcome the opportunity to make any final revisions between now uh and the 24th. All right. Great. Thank you, Mr.

017Cook. Um, I did have a couple quick uh quick questions based on the presentation or things that I emailed before that I told you they wouldn't really fall under a standard that I wanted to wanted to ask about. Um, first for AIG services for students that might um be enrolled in an alternative learning center. Do we have anything in the plan that we can point you to show our services? Yes, sir. That is specifically on page 33. Um and that is where I was speaking of a collaboration between our team and a member of that alternative education um schools team um because we want to make sure that their differentiated education plan is met even in the alternative setting. So we have started establishing um a robust uh collaboration um and are very excited about

018the things to come in 2526. So that's specifically in blue on page 33. Perfect. And just so you'll know, Mr. that your inquiry on that subject about the county legislation and potential implications has already sparked some email communication between our team and also um Ken Jorgensson and Michelle Woodson's team and alternative learning uh services as well. So we expect um beyond the concrete language that we've incorporated in the plan that partnership will continue moving forward to make sure obviously it shouldn't matter what school you're assigned to when it comes to receiving the services that you should be receiving. All right. Uh then quickly one of the big changes this year is moving from uh 312 to 2 through12. and we just gone through a heavy budget season and know we're still waiting to see what

019the state budget looks like, but we know the amount of state funding we get for AIG students is capped. So, if we're going to start providing AIG services to an additional grade, how are we doing that without additional budget funding? Could you enlighten us a bit? Yeah, I'm looking at me. So, Mr. Hag, that that's a critical question. And by the way, um, you know, part of the work of this team has been involved, uh, classroom level conversations with AIG teachers, myself included, just in the last few weeks. Um, I I think the the long and the short of it is, Mr. Hagerty, is that anytime we expand a service, in this case, when we're expanding and pushing downward in grade span identification of students, there are ripple effects in terms of implications on capacity.

020Um, you know, it it would um not be fair for us not to call out exactly what you just did. I think it's fair to say that as we hear from our teachers and our schools, there is strength. Um, you know, I think, you know, ultimately we feel like it's still the right thing to do. We're identifying in a much more formal way. Students who for years maybe have been qualifying through talent development, other mechanisms. So there's to some degree some of that work has already been happening in grade 2. Now it's happening though on a larger scale in a more formal way. Um and so I think the response right now is Mr. Hagerty, you know, it there is a strain on capacity anytime. We're expanding services. Um our teachers and our schools and

021our districts staff do an amazing job of providing supports um as their capacity allows. But certainly I think and by the way even going back to that original language that I started with where we use words like research best practices and commit to reviewing district policies in certain areas. One of the reasons we put that in there is because we are a little bit reluctant to commit to additional expanded programming options because we know capacity is a factor right and so it may very well be part of that research for example Mr. would involve we we hear periodically from families who feel like students maybe are more than one or two grades accelerated and need additional supports. Part of that research doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, national level quantifiable research. It could be

022as simple and as powerful as talking with specific families who maybe are considering other options or have already left for another option to learn more about what their individual circumstances are, right? And sometimes that does happen at the earlier grade level. So I think you know it it it's not fair for us to indicate that we can just kind of continue to do more more without also acknowledging you know the the limitations that we currently have. That said we do believe that expansion to grade two and that assessment um is feasible. Um it always is a delicate balance between asking for more with the same resources that we currently have in place. Well, and you understand why this is so topical because we just had the conversation about our title one schools, sir. And the

023idea that with limited funds, do you want to have a greater impact on a more vulnerable student base or do you want to try to spread that to more students but not be able to reach as deeply? So, I was sort of wondering about the calculus here with this equation. Yes, sir. And one thing I'll expand with um Mr. Cook's response is that although we're testing them in second grade and they may qualify, they do not start receiving services until third grade. And so we will provide the teachers with professional learning to help them of course nurture that giftedness and talent, but it will not start officially receiving those AIG services until third grade. Thank you. And then just my last question on it um for Dr. more Brown. You're talking about SSA and we

024hear this from parents sometimes that would like to test a student in two different subjects and the district response I think it's appropriate that if you can qualify for both then maybe you should consider whole grade advancement but when it comes to the actual testing is there any prohibition against a family testing in both subjects and then choosing based on the results or do they have to commit to one or the other? Um, one of the things that we encourage our families to do is choose the student's area of strength. If they feel like the student is strong in both areas, they definitely should inquire about whole grade advancement. And with whole gra advancement, you do not have to have testing in order to be whole grade advanced. It is a data collection process in

025which the school's um, SPCG team, their AIG committee, they get together and they review the students data to make a determin determination. testing can be a part of it but is not required. So if parents are interested in possibly looking at both subject areas, it would be best to look at whole grade advancement because it takes the testing out. It looks to see what data is already available at the school level because if the student is already performing fairly high in star math or on mclass and NC check-ins, we could use that data to go ahead and advance them as opposed to waiting until um spring testing to see if they're going to do which one or the other. So give me a great justification but I want to make sure I understand the answer

026was that they cannot test for both. They have to pick one. They cannot test for both subject areas for single subject acceleration is only one. Okay. And I understand why based on their pigment. All right. Thank you so much especially coming into pinch today. Are there other questions around the table? Miss Rice. Um thank you. This is I remember when single subject acceleration was implemented uh years ago. Um my son participated in single subject acceleration. But I do have a question around SSA and that is how are we supporting students that may not pass the SSA um testing but um educators can observe and identify that students would actually grasp the material quickly if it's taught because what I found out with SSA is that if they if they take the test and they do

027it, it requires for a student to already know certain termin terminology. Um, but the truth of the matter is you don't know terminology unless you're taught. So, how are how are we helping students whom teachers know that if they're taught this, they're going to catch it faster than what they're doing in the regular education. So, are we doing any forms of pullins or pull outs or allowing students to still kind of be a part of the SSA group or and then the the final piece to that is this how are we um training staff to identify those particular students. Um, so for uh your question, I think one of the things that we would do is we strongly encourage our AIG teachers to make sure that if they have students that were fairly close with

028SSA assessment but did not qualify that they act they still find time to work with those students, it could be um participation PLC's and making sure those um accelerative opportunities based on standards needs all of those things are happening in the core classroom and if their schedule allows and they can definitely pull small groups. um for students who who might not have qualified, but they're still exhibiting those um higher level characteristics. Um and I would also say the power of the PLC is that the AIG teacher should not be working in that building in isolation. The AIG teacher should be a part of the professional learning communities and providing um educators with support on how to differentiate instruction. So even though I may not qualify, I'm still getting my gifts and talents nurtured. Um and

029so that is definitely something that we um encourage our principles to allow our AIG teachers to provide professional learning to the school to participate in PLC meetings so that they can help them provide those um level four opportunities and and with and with that piece that you just said about the encouragement of our school base to do so um do you do you think that that um can include or does or should include um what am I trying to say? To allow um opportunities, showing regular education teachers how to provide more level four opportunities. Because what I found over the years of me being in the system and as an advocate is that when you see that you have a student that is highly intelligent and then you ask and they and they test and

030their scores in class is all well above but you still give them a three as proficient. But that makes no sense if I'm already midyear. How am I at a level three and I'm midyear in my MC class and I outperform on all of my testing? Um, so are we are these a part of the conversations that we're helping PLT to help teachers understand how to actually give level four opportunities more in the classroom just as an overall practice with students so that if they choose to do a portfolio, they actually have something to pull from from class. because if you never get the opportunity then you don't have it and I've just had those experiences um of teachers to say well I haven't given any will yeah so and that's the beauty of the

031collaboration that our advanced learning services team has with our regional team especially elementary um and just developing the curriculum maps and working with our um curriculum instruction assessment team and making sure those extensions are there but also that educators know how to use those extensions effectively. All right. Thank you. Yes. Um, thank you. Um, can you talk more about the talent development process and what that transition looks like from, let's say, elementary to middle or middle to high school? Um, like where does it take place? Um, what happens when a child is in talent develop the the talent development process in fifth grade and then moves on to middle school? Absolutely. So if a student is talent develops, they are served alongside their identified peers and it could be either in math or ELA or

032both. And so what happens is the AIG teacher is to take the students data to the SVCGE at least three times a year to review the student's data using the portfolio to see if they could qualify. If needed, they could use um testing, but we're we don't really um encourage them to test the student every year because they should have data sets already that could be implemented on the portfolio for the student to qualify. So, that'll be the process for the student as long as they're in talent development. When they're transitioning from elementary to middle school, it's the AIG teacher's job to make sure that that the portfolio is most recent and up to date before the student goes to the middle school setting. And the expectation in middle school is that they still serve

033the student and they have different um they have multiple ways of what the service delivery could look like in middle school. Once they're in middle school from middle school to high school, that's where our AIG high school coordinator Brad comes in and he can support students that may be talent developed if they're not identified by the time they get to high school. So he'll be able to review some of the data sets for those students in hopes to identify them so that they could have access to some of the accelerative opportunities in the high school setting. Okay. Okay. Um and then uh you spoke about how families like sometimes explore other options. What benefits are being shared with with parents and families around um well the benefits of being in AIG? What does this look

034like on you know possibly a career path or acceleration in um different courses? That is something that we've definitely ramped up this year is the family community engagement component of our programming. Um, you know, we've done a lot of focus on the student, a lot of focus on the educators. Um, but we do have a a sub part of our work where we have a committee that's led by the external contractor that we have who is helping to develop specific family and community engagement opportunities so that we can make sure that families know this is out here especially in our title one schools with our resilient learners, our multilingual learners, our students who are um in the special education program. Um, so there is intentional work being done in that area and that we will

035continue to cultivate that as well. Okay. And that's on page 71. Okay. Thank you. And that is a common theme, Miss Gordon. I think it multiple topics, right? It's incumbent upon us to make sure that families are aware of the opportunities are there. So whether we're talking about SSA testing windows or the CDM process for high school credit, um, NCBPS, online learning, accelerator opportunities, that's a constant state of work to make sure that families are aware, um, which then we see increases correspondingly to kids taking advantage of those opportunities. Thank you for the question. Dr. Uh thank you. Um I was just going to ask you about that SSA testing timeline things and and um who for the parents who can they reach out to in terms of like getting some guidance on the process

036because it seems like nobody's going to be reading this whole package. We will I mean you know um how how can how can it be simplified to the to the layman or the the parents? Yeah. So I I think going back to Morgan's question I think this is really extending that is how do we take the information but really by the way believe it or not that 100 plus 100 plus pages is just a framework. It does not cover every detail of every program. Right? So I think that goes back to making sure we are accessible. Obviously that usually starts ming at the classroom and the school level, right? So clearly our AIG teachers at the elementary and middle school in particular are the often the first point of contact. In addition to the regular

037ed classroom teachers and then in addition to that, we want to make sure we've got district staff like Miss Hall and others that are able to be responsive and provide information and clarification. Um we work hard to do that. We we periodically hear that sometimes we fall short whether it's at the district or the school level. um even you know little things or seemingly little things. Um, we've even learned in the last couple of months about when the end time of a window is, right? Often common practice might be 5:00 p.m. on a business day, right? Um, we've had several reminders recently that, you know, extending that window if it's up against a weekend all the way through the weekend to a Monday morning feasibly really doesn't impact our work in moving forward with testing

038kids, etc., but it can make a huge difference in terms of accessibility for working families. So, I think Mr. A, we we work hard to make sure we're being responsive and a lot of that often means we're providing relevant real-time information to schools so they can be as responsive as they can to families. And we've already started a partnership with the communications team as well so that we can create byite-size videos, cliffnotes per se, um, related to the different segments of the plan and making sure that they're in different languages and that they're accessible um, readability wise for um, different stakeholders and central partners. Thank you. Thank you. Questions. Miss Cfield, you said they're testing now two times a year. Do they accept the testing if they come from another school? If they so it

039auto they don't have to retest once they come to your school. Okay. Just wanted to ask that. I didn't ask you about that. Um, and what, and forgive me if it's in this longer doc, I highlighted all the emails and everything. Um, what opportunities do we have if cuz it sounded like if they have um the SSA, if they have more than one, they can they have to pick and choose. But what do we do for those students that are highly gifted and they need single cell acceleration but they don't necessarily need to skip a grade because sometimes that could be more detrimental to the kids well-being and they just need to accelerate in the subject. So we really love that. Um, we have the NCBPS that we have really done a great deal of

040work in really to expand that. Um, and that is a wonderful opportunity for students to get access to many different courses um that they may need to um have. And then also we do confer with school-based teams when it's necessary to create a new differentiated program within the D of the student to make sure that they get um accumulative opportunities that may be beyond what as Drew said the framework of this plan is. Okay, Miss Miss Coffin, sometimes you know we want to be responsive to the needs of every individual student, even that once a generation potential student who has a 150 plus IQ that could potentially graduate from college by the time they're 16 years old, right? We we periodically do hear from families and we want to learn more about what their individual

041needs and circumstances are. And so in that page five, that first section, when we're talking about reviewing additional opportunities, what are other eleas across the state doing? I think that's that's one of those subsets of gifted students that we want to be sure we're being responsive to, even if it is a one in a thousand or one in 10,000 gifted student that has really really high levels. Thank you. And I did um actually have a question about the it used to be an ID, correct? And now it's D. So why what is the reason for that change because isn't one more like the individual which is exactly what you were just talking about. And so um I think we are having conversations in our team about individualizing our differentiated educational plans. And so um as

042it stands right now in our glossery that make sure it's not back there. As it stands right now in our glossery, we are saying D, but we are working on making sure our student teachers understand how we can individualize the DPS for our students needs. Okay, Mr. half of the interceptions. I have a very niche question and I don't need an answer today, but um because it it has to do with our math 2 students who are in eighth grade at a multi-track or a track 4 year round school. NCVPS operates on the traditional calendar and so our year- round students are either having to take math at NCVPS during trackout and they have some wait time even if they're track 4 and it is just while you are here and ask that we look

043at what we can do for those students so that they can have a more consistent academic calendar for that year. Um and if we're already doing it great I just know that that is something that comes up from time to time and We'll get back to you shortly. Thank you. Thank you. And then to close us out, Miss Evans, um you mentioned um in response to Miss Cfield that you take um testing from other schools. How does that look when you're accepting a student from private or charter? Are we talking about a standardized thing that you look at or can you say more about that if it's private or charter? um we have to look at multiple data sets as it relates sorry as it relates to charter schools and private schools because their standards

044and the way their criteria may look different. So that would have to be a more individualized basis but mostly for the public leas that we you know have students moving from school to school is pretty standard but you're correct we do have to do a little bit more um finessing when it comes to private charter. Thank you. You're welcome. All right. Thank you. I appreciate this. whether you've been working on this for 3 weeks or just coming into it now for the board. She works on it all the time. Um there's there was a lot in this. We really appreciate it. I see that some of the the version that the draft that's assembly doesn't have all of the hot off the press changes. So, can you just make sure that we do get a

045PDF copy once a draft is approved for us? Okay. Yes, sir. Great. Thank you so much. All right. Next we will have the uh sequel the second part of assignment planning and capacity management. You know this was a uh contentheavy presentation going through all the things that impact student assignments. We got 2/3 3/4 of the way through um we got to the peak and we had we had to stop. So, we're going to be rejoined by Miss Pull and we'll come in and we will pick up the presentation uh where we left off. Chair Hagy, thank you for this opportunity to return to you. We went ahead for the convenience of the viewing public because we know they don't always follow every single work session to include the original document. So, you'll see little review

046stickers on the top right corner of all the slides we've already covered. So, if you wanted to go back and discuss those, you can. Um, I'm not going to make you dizzy scrolling through those. Yeah. But it's I think page 27 on your slide deck. We'll be uh picking up post review. And again, as a reminder for the continuation, we came to you in May with our initial sort of our protocol process, talked to you about our plans for the 2526 enrollment plan. Sort of kicking that conversation with you officially, uh, saying that we know we have a new elementary school coming online. We have some continuations from a previous enrollment plan for our finger pattern alignment and such that need to be addressed. And as always, constantly looking at your goals within the pillars

047of the student assignment policy for crowding, underutilized schools, transportation, efficiency, academic achievement, and so forth. Um, and so we went through those. This is a policy that we draw your attention to regularly during the annual enrollment process. However, we went ahead and put a little bit more extended excerpt in here specific to the question at hand, which is why do we have base assignments based on an individual address? As always, the complete policy is available on the district website. In addition, in the assignment planning portion of the website, you can find a video that talks through this portion of the policy as well. Um, for anybody who finds that to be a little bit more helpful way to get through the material. The condensed version of the policy basically lets us know that these are

048the things that we look at when developing annual enrollment plans. And again, as a reminder, this is something you see multiple times and you see from our department regularly as we present. These are your the essential definitions in brief of each of those four pillars as outlined. Um, but if we get beyond policy, right? So, I could sort of quickly say we have base assignments because your policy directs us to do so. Um, but why beyond policy do we have base assignments? Um, step one is just to ensure that every student has a guaranteed seat at a school that's aligned with their address. So, that makes sure that as a family moves into the area, they can look up their address in our system and identify which school they're assigned to. We do know that

049in some areas, we're growing so rapidly that in addition to having a base school assignment, there might be an overflow that's at play because their current base is so crowded. But in general, the reason for the base assignments beyond just because policy says so, which would be a very sad answer, um it's it's to make sure that families have a guaranteed seat in a school. Um in addition, as a district of our size and with our growth rate that we've experienced over the years, it also allows us to plan and balance that school capacity that we do have available across the district along with staffing and transportation resources. In addition, it aligns with your policy specifically looking at things like stability, right? It provides a stable school assignment where possible, particularly um in areas that

050aren't experiencing high rates of growth. They can have that base assigned school based on their address and it can be relatively predictable year-over-year. And then of course it helps to ensure that we have equitable access to educational opportunities across the district by having a known population of students assigned to each school. that allows us to allocate our resources in a much more efficient and predictable way to make sure all students needs are being met. Similar to some of the conversations you were just having about the AIG resources that will be needed to serve students, we know where the students are going to be assigned. We can make sure that the services show up at the schools where they're attending. Um, in addition that we have a long history of having controlled choice within those base

051assignments. So beyond guaranteeing a family that this school could be your assignment based on your address, you move to this community. You look it up. This is your set of schools at the elementary, middle, and high school level. As a reminder, you do direct us to align our schools as K5 68 912. And so we do operationalize that. Uh this also allows us to balance the predictability of those base assignments with the family choice. So by having control choice things like your magnet lottery that you have us run um to make sure that where there are available seats in those types of schools, we use a prioritized lottery to fill them so that we can more efficiently use those facilities while also offering great academic programming to families through those processes. It also gives families

052meaningful opportunities to pursue those specialized themes. Sometimes it's something as simple as the calendar of choice. You know, we some families prefer different calendars of operation. We've seen that particular voice since we started adding in multitrack year around 20ish 20, 30 years ago. Um, it also allows families to express interest in something that might meet their needs from a family circumstance perspective. Perhaps their child care is located closer to a different school. Perhaps they work across town and having their students in a school closer to where they work might be of benefit. While we can't always promise and guarantee that those types of assignments can be made, we certainly want to give options to at least request that and try to take advantage of space where available to support those needs of families. Um, and

053then of course it supports your core values. Again, the c your core values for control choice talk not only about stability and proximity, but student achievement and operational efficiency. So by having control choice, it really fits into those last two pillars really well by making sure that there's academic opportunities for students across the district through programs and themes as well as more efficiently using our facilities by filling any vacant seats with those who might want to go to those programs. However, that's all balanced against those four pillars, right? So so control choice allows for something where it's and I say control choice because some families might have heard of choice in different terms or it's simply based on available capacity. Ours is more nuanced. We've always as a district because of those four pillars in

054the assignment policy have prioritized or guidance through our transfer policies even that tell us to look not only at what is helping the family, but what meets the needs of the district to support. And so that's a brief way to describe it, but I'm sure you're going to have a more extended conversation. But with that, we would ask if you have any questions or would like to go back to previous parts of the presentation, I'll turn it over to you, sir. I appreciate it, Miss P. And you know what's important, we've had the conversation. and we looked at all the individual parts and then sort of today I know it's just review but she's pulled it all together. So when we apply this we have student assignment areas and we know every board member on

055this table knows there are parents that frequently want to go to a school that's not an assigned school. Sometimes we can accommodate these, sometimes we can't. But could you talk a little bit more about I guess the pillars and the impacts on schools? So for example, we'll get certain schools that seem to be very popular. You'll get two schools that are near each other and we'll see a lot more requests to transfer from school A to school B than B to A. Um, we'll see folks that want to go from Wake Forest to Heritage or West Kerry to Mills Park, anywhere to Mills Park, it seems. Um, or we'll have a reassignment where parents resist going to a new school, then after a couple years all of the parents want to go to the new

056school, right? So, so what is the impact in terms of what it means to the schools if you know why can't we just or why don't we just let everyone who wants to go to a school pick the school of their choice. So, we've got a lot of data that says that that doesn't help your district as a whole. Um back in 2015 16 I think it was um when we were coming out of the choice plan we were noticing we had open choice where we were allowing families if there were seats available you can go to year round if there were not seats available um you had to stay at your traditional calendar school and we were seeing um self-segregation amongst families. you were seeing families higher affluence um predominantly white families um going

057towards multi-track year round schools and then you were seeing schools that actually share a same campus one was year- round one was traditional looking starkly different and so we didn't want that because that doesn't help the district in our initiatives um glo um nationally you see that happen as well when you offer open choice families self-segregate you're mostly seeing it in socio economic IC in this particular area because we have a lot of affluence in Wake County. And so when we offer a controlled choice, this allows us to make sure that all of our schools are balanced, not just the ones that parents want to go to. And speaking just to the balance with that the benefit of that benefit the balance. So that kind of aligns with your student achievement objective which was developed

058years ago based on lots of research that shows that if you can have a balanced population particularly middle- inome students it benefits both students equally well. Both sets of students on either end of the spectrum would perform better when they're in that type of a balanced or if you would call it a socioeconomically integrated school. um it has nothing to do with race or anything else, but just looking strictly at that income status. And so based on that research, our district has historically um continued to try to strive toward that through your student achievement pillar. In addition, there was that recent research about the calendar um that showed that multitrack and traditional really don't seem to have a positive or negative impact on student achievement. they have a similar outcome regardless of which calendar, which

059again continues to align with the district's long-standing goals of trying to provide equitable access to academic opportunities for all students. And that work is done to try to prevent high concentrations of poverty. And that's why you see your magnet programming. Historically, your downtown schools had high concentration of poverty. So, you're incentivizing families from going to a areas to come in. um because when you see schools with high concentrations of poverty, you see um teacher retention rates uh start to deteriorate and you start to see issues and concerns with equity specifically when it comes to um ETA engagement. And so those are the things that provide uh gaps between students throughout the district. And I guess I just want to get back to some of the the like the economic impacts on the school like when

060a school is underenrolled when people leave a school or the economic impacts of a school is overenrolled or crowded. Do we have like data to support? So I'll kind of kick it off. So to just talk strictly operational efficiency, whenever you have a school that's open as a district, you provide a set of core staff regardless of the headcount of the school, if you will, and then some of the staff is earned through the total enrollment at the school. Well, those whole positions that come with or without a full population then become from a ratio perspective a little bit more costly at a school that is underutilized because you're funding that position fully even though it's not fully filled with students. Um, on the other side of the scale, if we get too overcrowded, not

061only are you taxing the resources that are available in the building and it's just uncomfortable, it also starts to have negative impacts on student achievement outcomes. And budgetarily, there's also those I I can look at our facilities department, right? The more you overuse a facility, the more you have to maintain and upkeep it and repair it. So there are some costs financial as well as academic associated with both underutilized and overutilized schools for different reasons. And the data we showed with uh Dr. Katie Rouse generally shows between 95 and 105 percentage or sweet spot where you're not seeing any negative impact for the academic achievement part. Thank you. Questions from board members presentation. Dr. Thank you. Um, so you mentioned about nuance, um, and how to communicate that. Um, and I I'm still trying to

062grapple with, you know, what is what is the purpose of having or mentioning a calendar option um, when that may not be a true option to our our our families. Excellent nuance. Um, at some point in time as a board, this district declared that it was an option that if you were assigned to either a multitrack year round or a traditional, particularly at the elementary and then I think it started to grow towards the middle school that families would have the option of requesting the other calendar identified for their address and that would come with district provided transportation and as long as there were seats available, we would be able to approve those types of requests. So in an area where there were more requests than seats, there might be a wait list created, but

063otherwise um we were to accommodate those. Since that time of that origination of that idea, it has emed and flowed and transitioned more into an application. Right? So it's and we have less and less of them throughout the district. You'll recall over the last I want to say seven probably years, seven, eight years. I might be wrong on that range, but over the last several years as a board, you've been asking us to continue to look at operational efficiency, think about where transportation resources maybe aren't needed to support those types of application options, and we've been reducing that year over year over year. So, at this stage, there are still a handful of areas that might have one listed, and it's listed kind of within that same group of magnet choices to say this is

064a choice solely for calendar that might come with district transportation. However, the majority of those are in areas where it's helping us with some of our crowding issues. So, by offering that choice, it's helping us to relieve crowding at that particular base school or it's helping us to take advantage of seats at a nearby underutilized school. Over time, looking at the resources that we have available as a district, we've been working really hard to try to shift all transport available transportation resources to those base assignments and those magnet choices and really reduce the pressure on the transportation system created by those. So, in today's world, it's not an option. It's an application. If there's seats, if we can make it happen, we try to do it, but it's not a guarantee like back in history.

065I think that's the the issue that I'm facing is trying to communicate that that difference in the understanding of what that that that calendar option is. You know, for for many people, you know, especially the ones who have been had their kids in the school for a number of years and they have a younger, you know, child going into it expecting the same kind of um um, you know, setup when now it's not. So how do we communicate that to our families to make sure that they understand that? So we have information posted on the web. Every time we come to talk about reassignments or changes like this, we try to present that information. Uh we do have a good archive system. I know Susan's student assignment page has got a lot of archived information.

066Um that's the best way we can do it. We uh notify principles, try to get to BAC meetings to just get that information out to the public. Um, anything else, you know, would be helpful if there's any other opportunities you think we can utilize. And our office obviously feels those questions day after day. So, my staff is well versed and is able to answer them uniquely for family by family. I do that all the time. He's just doing it today. Miss Gordon, um, yes, I first of all, I want to say I have a profound amount of respect for the office. I know that your job is is extremely hard. Um, but I did want to I have a couple of questions that I I'm still trying to like wrap my head around. Um, you

067know, in a in the landscape that we're in right now and and that we are probably going to be faced with a lot of families, you know, choosing charter and private over us over over public schools. So, um you talk about eliminating high concentrations of poverty. Um and then you also talk about uh making sure that we have equitable access to make sure resources and supports are concentrated um and targeted into into a particular school. What do what do I say to a family who does not and speaking about magnet schools, what do I say to a family who does not fall in any of those priority areas? Um it's a it's a situation that deeply affected my family and now knowing on this side of things knowing what you all um what you all

068do day in and day out. I think I I need some like clarity and some guidance on on what to say to a family that does not fall in those top five priorities but feel and they they see things like you know we want to make sure that there's equitable access. We want to make sure, you know, our magnet schools are so that we can, you know, um, provide, you know, diverse populations of families and students. So, I'll start by saying every single school in Wake County is a great school. No matter where your child goes, you're going to get a highlevel education for your child. Okay? Now, every school has nuances, right? Whether it's magnet programming, whether it's the calendar type that they're operating under, whether it's the certain electives that they may offer

069at the particular school, those are the different nuances which make each school unique. Now, can we can we actively give every person their first choice school? No, we obviously can't and we don't want to too because what we're tending to see with the data says that parents will self-segregate. So if we can try to find more opportunities, more curriculum enhancements for schools in certain areas where they may not be a priority, we're certainly looking at that. With that though comes funding. So how do you fund those particular programs when you don't it it falls outside the normal curriculum. And so we're exploring some of those opportunities. Um we're also looking at opportunities for families to um or just making them aware of other choices. So we do have some magnets that may have an affluent

070base that they're looking to attract. um lower income families to them. The problem is we don't have transportation for all those families. So, we're looking at opportunities to try to increase transportation for those those particular families as opposed to some others. And so, we're just continuing to look at the data trying to find ways to increase the um attractiveness for certain families to certain schools. Um but again, we're always in contact with the principles, um the staff to make sure that they're aware of, hey, these are the concerns that some of the families may have if there's a concentrations of families at a particular school. I know schools have taken um work to do after school programs or before school programs to meet certain needs um that they may not be getting at their school

071that they would like to get somewhere else. And so those are some things that they can continue to do. One more question and this is probably getting into the previous um uh presentation that we had a couple weeks ago. Um but on the topic of overflow schools, how are overflow schools um selected and the time frame for which they are selected? How is that decided? I'll get started and then um let kick in. So, usually what happens from a process and flow, we'll go with timeline first. Once the assignment plan is approved, usually in November, then we now have a clear indication of which reassignments were approved and which maybe weren't or which couldn't accomplish anything that we needed to for a specific cap school or an area with crowding. So, shortly after that, usually

072in December, we try to get you a first look at the recommendations to say because there's concurrent planning that's happening in the background that says, okay, well, if the board is able to approve this, then we're going to do this. If they're not able to approve that, then we need this. So, we try to be as timely as we can so that come December, we can come to you and say, "Hey, these are some areas that still just need some support because they're so overenrolled and the high growth is still coming. You know, high rates of growth are still coming because of municipally approved residential developments, etc., etc. At that time, we're also looking for our overflow schools." And we kind of tried to hint at it here during our last to identify an overflow

073school. We work thinking similarly about those long range planning pieces. What's the closest school to this cap school or the school that might need a cap? Can that school accommodate the overflow students? Cuz that becomes I don't want to say a win-win because none of this is great, but it's a better outcome because the school's a little bit closer to where the families live. The transportation routes will be a little bit shorter, so it might be easier to accommodate. Well, when that school's also in the same boat and perhaps capped, then we have to sort kind of keep looking and keep looking for that next closest school that has available seats that could accommodate whatever that rate of overflow might be. For some of our schools, they're what we call pre preemptive or uh proactive

074caps where they haven't hit that enrollment number yet. So, we're maybe looking for a handful of seats. Maybe if you can absorb 50 students across the year in addition to your base population. In other areas, they've been overflowing for a while and we're accommodating as many as 250 students on an annual basis. So, we need a school that has that kind of available space to accommodate that number of students. So, it's a lot of looking at the proximity where we can, secondarily calendar alignment where we can. If your base school is traditional, we try really hard to make your overflow school traditional, but that's not always possible. Um, and then can that school absorb these students over time? And you see all the impacts. It's not like it's a, you know, a super easy job

075to absorb that. Um, do we foresee any relief in current I don't want to speak at kind of take that. So that's something staff has been working on. We got a directive from the board that said we want to reduce the number of cap schools because they're understanding the um strain on resources and on families, right? And so what that means though is you're looking at calendar conversions which is never a popular solution, right? Both staff and parents, and you'll see that in the next presentation, don't really support a calendar change for a particular school because when they sign up to go to that school, they think that that's what they're getting and that's what they they're accustomed to. Um, so calendar changes is one option we can we can use reassignments. Well, families, you

076know, will ask us, well, where's our stability when you're looking at reassigning us? We thought we were at this school or we're at this school. Why don't you make anybody who's not here yet go somewhere else? And so that's the capping piece. So, it's just this vicious cycle of not having available seats in a particular area because we don't control building uh permits and resonings in an area. So, we're constantly trying to play catch-up. Um, and then funding for new schools and land for new schools also becomes a major factor in some of this because we can't just continue to build schools and then not renovate and take care of the ones that we have existing. And so that just continues to be that cycle for us and how we solve this problem in certain

077areas. Some areas it's easier than others, but in where you predominantly see your cap schools, this is your area where you're seeing your highest growth uh dense growth in uh the district. And just to add on specific to the list that's currently active today, we absolutely feel like we're getting closer to being able to make some recommendations to reduce that list because of recently approved reassignments and because of recently approved changes. So we do believe that some of those are just peruncter caps that are in place right now just in case that we might be able to actually come to you this December with a reduced list. And we're working really hard not to identify any new ones. I'm thinking about the question that you asked at the last work session, Mr. Hershey. How do

078we communicate with families if we feel like we need to cap? We're working really hard to make other decisions so that we can avoid having to bring to youth recommendations for additional caps. So, it's not to say it won't ever happen, but that's that's the goal from our long-range planning standpoint is to try to use the facilities that we have and give families more stable long-term assignments to reduce that impact also for our overflow school because we know that for the overflow schools, it's also provides a lot of instability for them and for their populations that they're sort of having to take the brunt of, right? So, this is going to flow naturally into our calendar conversion conversation next. Before we transition, Miss Evans, I just felt it was important to say that um I

079feel like a lot of the options that we used to offer families were greatly negatively impacted by our transportation challenges. I mean, we just could no longer we no longer had the staff um for the in the transportation, our bus drivers to support granting so many calendar options or um you know moves to other schools. Um and that I mean has really hurt us. I think we would if we could. Um, and I'm thrilled that our transportation services have improved um, from where we were what 18 months ago. Um, but it but not so much so that we can go back to the time where we really offered people lots and lots of options. We just and and I just thought it was important to make that note. It wasn't so much a policy decision

080as I think the the transportation challenges really really hurt our ability to continue to do that. All right. Well, if we're ready, we'll let's go on to calendar conversion with the same team. Um, I will be back with you on June 24th to give you an update on what we've heard so far from this round of public feedback. Um, in addition to what we've heard, you leading up to this year because as you recall, we've been doing a multi-year approach to engaging the community. Um, but now you'll hear from Mr. Prosa about uh calendar. All right. Thank you, Susan. And also, Susan You're welcome. So, staff is here to discuss with you the calendar conversions for 2026 2027. Uh there's one school that we're here to discuss, Lake Meyer Elementary. If you remember, we came

081to you on April 8th during the board work session and we shared with you all of the data that we used to come to this conclusion and then um you asked us to have a public engagement session. So we did a virtual public engagement session on May 15th with families. We had about 30 participants and now we are here to share that feedback with you and then make our final recommendation to you. Um we will be attending the board meeting tonight seeking your approval at the board meeting. So, just a couple things. This is the calendar conversion web page that parents can go to to get all of the resources. We have copies of the uh materials that we've used. I've also uploaded for your um viewing today the April 8th presentation, the slide deck

082we used for the virtual public engagement as well as this one. And we also have recordings from the virtual public uh hearing in that uh on that link as well. So, just to recap again, you can see in the top right corner, I stole these from Susan. The review tag, I think it's really good because parents can see that we've talked about this before, so they can see that it's a review. I won't spend a lot of time going through these, but again, we step one in the process is the 10-year projections. And so, we use that information to then kickstart all of the work that we'll do that leads us up to the decision we're coming to you uh today with. This is a really good map. Um, this is the projected growth for

083the next 10 years. And I did a side by side so you can see last year's forecast as a on the left and this year's forecast on the right. You can see that it's very similar. It's just a little bit more spread out because we have a little bit more information about where we think those um developments will come. And so again, you know, looking into the east, you've got a lot of growth that's projected to be coming. and Lake Myra is one of those schools. Step two is our um projected crowding for the next school year. And this helps us identify where do we have seats available for the transfer windows for the magnet selection process and how do we prioritize student movement to help us deal with this over um overcrowding in certain

084areas. And again, these are our crowding maps, projected crowding maps. Just to review, um, yellow is your ideal state, white is underutilized, and orange and red are overcrowded. The top left map is elementary base attendance areas. Uh, the bottom middle is middle schools, and top right is high schools. And then as part of this consideration, we look at the capital improvement plan. Where do we have new schools coming in an area that can help us deal with uh overcrowding? And as you can see, there's three schools, well, two schools on the CIP and a third school site in the east there that can help us deal with the growth that's coming to this particular area. And then this is just a chart format of the previous slide. And you can see here, Marshburn Road is

085going to serve as a swing space for two years for Wendell Elementary. So, not only are we getting additional capacity to the area, but we're getting a renovation of an existing school as well. And here's a list of the renovation projects that are included in the current CIP. And then again the chart that just shows where the renovations are. And then the next step is we go through the annual enrollment plan. And so this is where can we open new schools? Can we reassign students to deal with crowding in a particular area? After that we go to CAP schools which we just spoke about. And then that leaves us here for the 2627 school year. What are we looking at with regards to dealing with overcrowding that continues after the capital improvement plan, after the

086assignment plan? What else can we do? So here's the projected crowding for uh the eastern area. And so this is elementary. I've circled Lockheart uh Lake Myra Elementary. You can see it's over 110% uh crowding projected for next year. And when you look at the schools around it, you can see they are white. And so that means they're underutilized at this time. But I want to make a um a point that many people seem to overlook. The white schools to the north, you have uh Carver Elementary, Nightale Elementary, and Lockheart Elementary. All of those schools, they're they're showing their utilization with trailers. If you took the trailer uh capacity away, each of those schools would be 100% crowded or more. And so when you look at the next slide and you look at the growth

087in the particular area, you can see a solution that staff wanted to consider was a reassignment, right? You've got approximate schools that may have available seats. We can just reassign schools so we don't have to change a school calendar. However, when you look at the projections in this particular area and the trailers that are being utilized already, you would just be moving students today to move someone else later. So, you know, you've got a track for school already. The next natural progression would be to make it multitrack. That's why we've kept a lot of schools on track 4. So, we had that flexibility. it's not as uh impactful to families because when you're already on track four going to multitrack um yes 75% of the population will be impacted but you're already in that habit

088of being tracked in and tracked out um as opposed to a family going from traditional calendar to multitrack. So new schools in the CIP. So where else can we get additional help? Uh you do have Marshburn Road that will come on but it's not coming on till 203132 which is quite some ways away. And then I had also showed a landbank site that we have in Zebulun. Again that's not even on here. So the earliest it could even come on here assuming it makes you know the next CIP would be 3233. So you've got significant amount of time and growth coming and not enough seats in this particular area. So these are new slides. I just want to go through them in just a second. This is based on the thought exchange that we did.

089So, we reached out to families and asked them what are some of the information, some of the things we need to consider as we look at changing the school from track 4 to multitrack. Uh it closed on May 23rd and we had 148 participants that generated 121 thoughts. They rated 2,50 uh thoughts was about 17 ratings per thought and there was medium alignment. Okay. And so medium alignment means um more people kind of felt the same way. There was some opposition to some of the the general thinking, but for the most part the thought that they were giving you they were pretty much aligned on. And this is just the AI um print out that just talks about like what is what are the comments saying? It summarizes it for us. And I just highlighted

090some of the the important points for you because I think they're they're really good. You'll see them in other slides as well, but traffic, student schedules, increased costs, child care. Um some of the other things, siblings, you know, matching siblings to tracks was really important. um track out care concerns was really important for families. Um and something that's not really on here but did come out in some of our other discussions, when are families notified of their track placements because that was also something that they want to plan for and we did share with them during the virtual public meeting that um we will share the track assignments as early as possible, but you can't do it too early because you don't know who's assigned to the school. We're also talking about a school year

091that's 2627. So, we don't know who's enrolled in the younger grades. We don't know who's going to have siblings. So, you've got to try to find ways to balance your tracks. So, you can't do that too soon. So, these were just some of the um the groupings of thoughts you had. Family scheduling was a theme. Uh special education often came up. Special education came up during the staff um presentation as well. They were concerns about uh how do you service the special ed needs of students across four tracks. Child care concerns the community feel of a school was really important for families. And as you look at this ratings that are generally a four or higher have good alignment. And so I wanted to show that because there were a lot of topics here where

092you had good alignment from both the staff and uh families as they participated in the bone exchange. And here I captured the high the four highest comments that were rated. And so I'll just go through each of them. So the facilities cannot handle more uptime at the school. So there were concerns about the HVAC system at the school. And we've since found out that their um HVAC system has already been replaced and the unit that was temporary um is either been removed or it's on its being scheduled to be removed off site. So the HVAC has been replaced at the school. Um, however, you know, being in a school, you know, 12 months does have its effects on the HVAC system, right? And all of your other utilities. However, I I'm not sure people know

093we run our AC units at all our schools 12 months out of the year. It's just, yes, you would have more strain with kids opening and closing the doors in those summer months when they would normally be uh shut. Siblings need to be kept together on the same track. Now, this is something as a practice we share with principles when they're doing track assignments. This is one of their highest priorities. Now, it may not always be the track that the parents want, but we will always try to accommodate siblings to be on the same track. And I know this was a really high um feedback point that we got from families throughout this process. Um, they really like track 4 and they would not want to change. I I'm going to be very honest, both

094staff and families, this is this is how they feel. Not many people want this change, right? And and staff doesn't really want to come to you and make this change unless we absolutely have to. We just don't see any other um options that we can utilize that will help us move forward without impacting more families over time. Um and then there was a question or concern about uh too little notice for families. Um they booked vacations like cruises and they would like to have a little bit more time as part of this decision-m process. And so I'm sharing that with you now. Um, next steps. So, we've met with area superintendents and principles. We've met with the school staff. We've done a public uh virtual public engagement session. And now we're presenting this feedback to

095you today. And we'll bring be bringing it to the board uh later today for your vote. And so with that, again, this is where all the resources are. And then this is the final staff recommendation that we convert Lake Myer Elementary to multitrack with the 2026 2027 school year. And I'll open up to questions. All right. Thank you. Other questions for Mr. Carza. Um 30 participants and who showed up at the virtual public. Yes. So, I apologize. I stepped out for a minute, but how else have you engaged people? So, we've we've done a thought exchange and we've done a virtual public engagement session. Um, I think we've emailed families. I don't have the communications. We have emailed impacted families to invite them to participate in both, right? Um, that's really what we've done to

096this point. And you work with staff? We Yeah, we've worked with staff. Okay. It just doesn't seem like many families know about it. But I might be uh I'll say it doesn't seem like many families engaged. I'm not sure if they were made aware of it because we did reach out and send um communication through the school to the existing families, right? And so I I mean I I can't speak for how or why they didn't engage in the public engagement session or we don't have a lot of engagement on the thought exchange. Okay, Mr. H. Well, I would think that maybe because it's already on track four and it's not a switch from traditional to multi-track year round that they're kind of used to it already to some degree of what the calendar would

097be, but I can assume. Do you do you find that there's less push back on this kind of conversion when it's not straight from traditional to multitrack? I I think it's easier than going from traditional to multittrack or multittrack to traditional certainly. I'm not going to downplay that. Families don't um aren't opposed to this move. I think they are and I think staff are as well. Um I think our staff has done a good job though of showing the data that we've used to come to this decision. Um I mean we can't reassign students to neighboring schools. They're going to have their own crowded concerns according to the projections. um capping is not an option that many of you want to continue to use. Um we don't we do have new schools coming in the

098area. It's just not fast enough and so we just don't have the means to be able to provide another option for families other than to change the school calendar. Yeah, I I will be supporting this this uh evening at the board meeting. I just wanted to Dr. Miss Cfield. Um yes, I'm just wondering um who and how will um students be converted from a track 4 calendar to be assigned to other tracks uh in that school. So generally what we do is we'll work with the principal because the principal makes the track assignments at a school and so they'll have a process that they'll go through with balancing their tracks, making track placements and then they notify parents. Um, generally this happens in the spring before the school year that the track placements will take

099place. So, generally you're looking anywhere between February, March, April before that July start. So, so do the parents um provide feedback to them for this determination. So, generally what we've done, we we do a um a survey to parents and asking what their track preferences are and we'll try to accommodate their track preferences. I can tell you how it's going to turn out right now. everyone's going to have track four as their number one preference, which is understandable. Um, but staff will look at, you know, their the different um components of the track um the track placements in order to have balanced tracks across all four tracks because you have um services that need to be provided to students on particular tracks. Um you're balancing um you know, gender so you don't have gender heavy

100tracks. And so they they'll look at all of those things. Thank you. Miss Caulfield and Miss Rice. Um that was kind of half of my question. Um I was going to ask if we prioritize um for families that might actually be interested in track 1, two, and three and then lot direct. Certainly if they if their prefer if their first choice is tracks one, two or three and we have the available seats, we would certainly accommodate those first. Yes. So then the next part of the question would be could we start now with advertising what those calendars look like so that families because they're all going to pick track for they've already made their vacation plans and family travel and all that other stuff. So if we start now they might actually prefer that plan

101once they see what those dates are and say well actually that might work better for our family and that might minimize some of the displacement. If you vote to approve this evening, do we have a message scheduled that will include a link to the track for uh to the multitrack your own calendar so parents can become familiar with what it looks like? No. For the 26 27 school year too, right? Okay. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Miss Rice. Um same I'm in the same question phase that I had for that Dr. asked. Um, but I guess mine leans toward more of Superintendent Taylor and um the school base. Uh now that we we know based off the data that we see even though it's limited that these parents prefer track 4, how can [Music]

102we connect with schoolbased to ensure as much as possible these families that are already there that are on track 4 students still receive track 4 for next year. Because while it sounds great at the table, um you know, when when when the work is actually moving forward, um there can be some glitches. How can we support school base to meet that need? That may be a little more tricky for them if it's not something they're accustomed to. They're accustomed to track four. That's just what they're used to doing. Not saying that they're not capable of doing it, but how can we assist them to avoid as many hiccups as possible so that our email is not geared to explode on August 28th of what they asked for versus being proactive about it partially in what

103Miss Colefield um suggested in doing so. And so because my concern, the majority is that we we have great implementation at a high overview level where we're sitting at, but when it's time for it to actually be implemented at the base level, um it gets lost in translation. And I just want to make sure that our school is supported to get what they need or with families so that there's minimal backlash um of frustration because of the change because it's just not an easy change and um con especially considering Miss um Edmond's point of the minimal response. Not that sometimes sometimes people just don't see or or grasp it and then when it takes place it's a huge uproar and we want to minimize the uproar. So I got a couple things. So I just

104got information there were 972 views of the virtual public session. So when you've got about 800 so kids assigned to the school. We're hoping that those are individual views individual families. You can say that the majority of families were at least made aware of the virtual public session. So they're right. Great. So I think I thank you for sharing that. So that means they made aware and they probably most likely agree with the comments that are already made. So let's show you how we can make it happen to keep those families so that we don't have a 956 people up. Yep. So two things. I think they've got a really great principal and she's done a great job of building a community at the school which you can see in the comments from the families.

105they want to keep that community and so she's very tuned into um communicating well with her families and her staff and so I think just tapping into that u will help because she'll continue to build those relationships with her existing families to help them with that transition. Um, also, you know, we've got uh meetings that we're going to be scheduling with the town of Lake for uh Wendell staff and the town of Zebulun staff so that we can start to make sure that there are multi-track trackout um opportunities for the families in this particular area. Wendell would be the shorter term fix because most of these families are in the Wendell area. So, we'll be working with them to try to set up uh multitrack options for families that are affordable as well. Great. I

106understand. I live down the street when the school was built. Um, Dr. Taylor, help me relay my message. What I'm saying? I think I hear what you're saying. Okay. Yeah. I need to make sure that you hear what I'm saying. Will be handinand with the school staff as they're developing their plans to to work with the families, right? Cuz all of our school staff is amazing. But we don't want them out there alone at at the right. We want them addressing all of these questions because if I get emails in two years, I'm going say you didn't hear me. And I will not forget. So what we'll do is we'll coordinate not only with like our communications department, we'll coordinate with the school to develop a very specific plan to help them navigate this with

107their families on site. Right. And out that is supportive and communicates. We do, but let's be preventive. Yes. And we and I think that to to that point, I think that's part of why Chair Heard asked us to advance this schedule, right? Because if you'll recall, we brought some of these recommendations to you in August, right, for a 25 26 school year. So now you would be giving families a much longer run. We will have an entire school year to work with them and their staff. But to your point, yes, we absolutely want to work handinhand with the school staff and not have them manage this process longer. Okay. And it's not emails and it's not virtual sessions. It's coming to the school. It's having sessions with families. It's figuring out how to help. It's

108already there. stay on this track. We're ready to move on. Miss Buffalo, you have one last question. I just have a followup in reference to the session that you had because you said you got 972 views of 800 kids at the lot of people who actually saw it. Um, and we know with the whole lizard lick, there was plenty of feedback for that. So, this is in that area. Um, is it possible that they're just not sure what it means because they don't know what those changes are? Uh I I mean I can't speak for other people. I I think I think we've done a good job of explaining the how and the why and and what it means for families. We provided copies of the calendar of you know not everyone's going to get

109to stay on track 4. There will be families on tracks 1 2 and three by providing them copies of the 26 27 calendar so they can see what their schedule would look like. I'm not sure what else we can do um to So I was going to ask what time the session was it was 6 6 to 7:30. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I also appreciate the number of views. So thank you for pointing that out. I appreciate that. All right, Mr. Cros, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Um we'll now move on with our agenda. Uh meal price review. Um we have uh you know Mark Strickland, our chief facilities and operations. We also have and this might be an introduction for some of you uh Tiffany Lawrence who is our new senior

110director of child nutrition services. So I hope some of you have uh been able to take Miss Lawrence up on her invitation to uh meet and sit down and have a conversation with her. Um but for those of you who aren't meeting for the first time, welcome Miss Lawrence. Thank you. I appreciate it. Nice to meet you all. Um, chair, superintendent Taylor. Um, I'm Tiffany Lawrence, senior director of school nutrition. Um, did you want to introduce? I'll let you do that. So, I also brought my leadership team with me today. So, I introduce them briefly. Um, Jody, I'm going to let them introduce themselves. I'm nervous. I'm more administrator for business operations. I'm Melanie Dera, director of school support services. I'm Mary Katherine Town. I'm the director of innovations and program development. And I'm Becky

111Bryan. I'm the HR staffing and operations. So, I have a great team um here. Um today, I want to talk to you about the possibility of um increasing meal prices. And so I'm going to start by just kind of talking a little bit about the program itself. Um we have 199 schools and we serve approximately a little bit over 160,000 students on a daily basis. Um our free and reduced rate is 36% give or take. Um on a day on a given day we serve about 20,000 breakfast in the in and if you look at all of our schools and we serve a little over 50,000 lunches on a daily basis throughout the school district. Um before I move forward I did want to talk a little bit about how we work because I think

112sometimes people don't understand how school nutrition um runs and operates. So we are what you call an enterprise fund which really means that we are a baby business inside of a school district. often times um food nutrition program is the largest budget outside of title one in a school district typically. Um what that means for us is that we are charged to operate in a way where we manage our own finances which means that we should make enough revenue to actually cover all of our expenses. And so that's the ultimate goal for us is to be self-sufficient when we make enough money to fund our labor, our food costs, and other things that we might need, which might be pest control, um, accounting, cutting our paper on checks, HR helping us, you know, documents going,

113all things, providing training and development to our staff. And so that's how our program actually works. So the challenge that we have in fa in front of us right now is that our budget is looking in a way where it's not able to sustain our program long term. And so some of the things that have impacted this are increases to food and supply costs. Um changes in salary and benefit costs and then also participation levels for our meals with within our schools decreasing over the last several years. some background information related to our program. Um, so food supply and labor costs when I say they're increasing. So an example would be right now we're in the middle of reviewing our bids that are returning to us and some things that are affecting us are increasing

114food cost in general, but also just getting the food to our door. So when we get a a item delivered, we have a case charge that's charged to us. So, our previous bid, it was running about $2.70 something. The bid that just came in to us in the last couple of days will increase to $3. It goes up about 80 cents. And so, when you think about that and how many boxes we have delivered to a building on a given day, that's one way that we're impacted on the food side. Then we have other supplies that have increased in cost as well. And then labor. Although we are we actually upped our staff salary over the last couple years, that impact overall um is changing how what it cost to actually run our program. Um

115another thing to know is that we actually get a reimbursement for students when we serve a meal to them from the federal government. If a child is identified as free, then that reimbursement is a little over $4. If a child is paid, that reimbursement is only 50%. And so what that means is that we have to figure out how to cover the gap. Um, additionally, when they do give us reimbursement, if you look year to date this year, for instance, because I did speak to someone, they want to know about our federal money. What are we getting? So year to date this year, we've received about $35 million in federal funding. That that's reimbursement dollars, which is how we fund our program. Um, also school food meals perception is a issue for us sometimes because

116sometimes when people see the things that we serve, they think, "Oh, that's not quality food." Well, we actually serve meals that meet nutrition guidelines. Um, we also provide farm fresh food from local farmers. We also we serve the same types and chicken in our kitchens that you see in other restaurants on the street. So those are the kind of things that we want to make sure people understand and that we put those kind of efforts into what we put on our plates for our students. Additionally, I want to remind people that we don't determine who qualifies for free and reduce. The USDA gives us guidelines each year that base income levels about families and identifies tells us who we can identify as someone we can provide free meals to or reduce meals to. And so

117sometimes that's not necessarily um something we always agree with, but we don't get to decide. But what we do get to do is identify students that maybe we can pull in in other ways, like whether it's somebody living in a a household with another student, so we can extend eligibility and try to capture as many kids as we possibly can under that umbrella of friendships. Um, and then also I want to talk about the angel fund because that was something that has been really big in our district this school year. To date this school year, we've received $126,000 in angel fund donations. And the angel fund donations is basically how we're trying to capture kids who maybe have a negative charge balance and try to catch some of those dollars and it not impact the

118district because we aren't allowed to cover negative debt. And so we've had generous community members provide those funds to us. To date, we spent $115,000 covering student meals that have gone into the negative, but that also means that the money is running out. And so when we look at that, we look at that funding just for this school year to probably be depleted by the end of the summer. And so those are some of the things that are kind of in play with the conversation today. So just want to go over the next two slides. We're going to talk about some historical data that's related to this um performance indicators from industry standard and discuss what's feasible for weight county schools. So the first thing is the trial balance and the SC1A. And so when

119we talk about this I I really am looking at the net cash reserve which when you think about school nutrition is really our emergency fund. Um the federal government doesn't allow us to have more than three months of emergency funds, but right now we have almost $9 million. But if you look at the next line below that is 7,800,000. That's what it takes to operate our program on a um yearly basis. I mean a monthly basis, sorry. And so when you say that, it means I only have one month of emergency fund. And then that balance if if we were to have an issue like a co again, right? I could go on for one month and then I would need help. And so that's just a overview picture of like where we stand right

120now. That also ties into the recent decision for us no longer paying um in the rate cost because if we're under two months of our emergency fund or our fund balance, then then we have to pull back us giving addition that additional revenue to you all for the um $3 million in the um direct cost that we normally would provide. So wages and benefits um earlier I mentioned about um labor costs have increased. So since fiscal year 22 till now we've given our staff you know generous raises which they needed because the cost of living has increased. We all know this. But in order to do that the cost to cover our staff benefits and wages have really increased. Um, if you were just looking at a manager, because I wasn't able to pull everybody

121yet, but if I just look at a manager from fiscal year 21 to a manager for fiscal year 26 expected, we went from it costing just for benefits for us to pay $13,000, little $13,000 a manager to now it cost me $19,000 to provide benefits for a manager. And so when you look at that and the fact that the hourly wage minimum went from 15,000 an hour to 17, you can see where that impact may have impacted food nutrition program. And just reminding you that remember that the school district does not pay labor for food nutrition. We actually have to earn the revenue to cover those costs. Also want to point out some key industry standards that we try to use to make decisions within our department. the data on the on the wait on

122the far side behind me too. That is from the Council of Great City Schools and that's basically where they take several school districts different sizes where they provide data of like what everybody else is doing that's similar to me, right? They're small and large districts. So food cost per plate in Wake County, we're running 145 cent to $189 a plate. And that will range because like grade level might be different. Like a lower level kid might not get the same type of plate. In high school, we actually have to offer larger portion sizes. So that might be something that impacts that. On the industry side, that's running $1.97 to $2.60. Mills per labor hour is how we decide our staffing. So everything we do related to labor is driven by how many students we actually

123serve. So we actually pull each individual school. We say, "Okay, are you feeding 200 kids? What does that look like? We want to be mills per labor out a certain range and we do a calculation and we figure out how many people it takes to get the product out. Everything from how many cashiers we need, how many people we need to back up the food and even right now to if we have the satellite programs, how many people I need to drive to drop the food off, how does that relate? Um, we're running 17.4 mills per labor hour. Our goal in Wake County is to run between 16 and 18. The industry standard is 16.8. Um, I've run 21 before, which is higher, which means that you're it it kind of from my experience, it

124made my staff feel overwhelmed and overworked. And then I've seen it run at 10, and that made us lose money. So that 16 to 18 is kind of like that sweet spot that I found that allows us to function and the staff be able to survive the workload that will be in front of us. Um, breakfast ADP. So ADP is the average daily meal participation and that is on average how many kids are we feeding. That is our district number. It will vary by school. If you were in a a school like we were at Barwell last week, that's a high participation school. So you it's different there, but you might have another school, but if you look at everybody on average, breakfast ADP is 13% and lunch is 34%. Um the industry standard for

125breakfast is 25 to 43 and lunch 49 to 59. And so we definitely have room for growth there. But these are just the numbers that help us make decisions moving forward. So meal pricing historically in Wake County, if you look at fiscal year 23 and go to where we are now, we've increased meal prices about $2 give or take depending on grade level. Elementary plate is a little bit less in price like we mentioned before, but that's the range. Um, just kind of showing you how we progress over the years. I also want to mention that Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which changed the regulation for school nutrition has asked school districts across the nation to actually have the goal of raising your price to meet the reimbursement rate. It's actually part of the expectation. It's

126just that they gave everybody time to get there. And so how they've done that is they've said every year you can raise the price a little bit to get a little bit closer to closing the gap. Different districts do it different ways. Um some things that have been given us um are waiverss. So if you are in the positive financially typically by the end of December you sometimes can wave that price increase which is why you see some districts not getting there faster. But it's definitely something we've been charged to take care of. Meal price comparison. So when you look at different counties within North Carolina, these are some of the ones that we pulled. You can see that Johnston, Nash, Chadam, Dorm, they all provide breakfast and lunch at no cost and then Charlotte

127is giving breakfast um at no cost. And so one of the questions that got asked that I think is important to address is well why do some districts in North Carolina get breakfast at no cost and lunch at no cost and we don't. And so the key is that we have a different poverty level. So when I started I said that we're about 36% free and reduced which means that when you look at 100% of our population only 30 36% of our students qualify for low income and so that's a gap. But a district that would do breakfast and lunch, typically they're going to be all C, which we have 44 C schools right now. But in order to get a 100% reimbursement from USDA, which means you get the full $450 plus for a

128student for C, you have to be almost 60% free and reduced, which is almost double what we are. And so just want to draw attention that it does sound great, right? But then we have to say how do we do that when we don't have that that income those low income students. And so that I just wanted to kind of point that out so you see how we come about how they make those choices. All right. So potential revenue impact from price increases. So today, what I really need is for us to think about where do we want to go, what's feasible for our families, and what impact we want to have on their side, but also for the budget for school nutrition. Um, we've given a range of possible ways to increase prices. Um,

12925 will give us a half a million dollars in revenue. If we go up a dollar, that's $1.8 million in revenue. There's no 100% this is how we're going to fix it. It's just finding the best route and the best decision that you all see fit for for weight county nutrition in general. And so this is just a a overview range. Some things that we look at what everybody what I'm asking from everybody. I'm not just asking the board to do things but also my team. So on the board side provide direction on where we want to go with Neil Price. um assist us in making sure that the community, stakeholders, teachers, principles understand what our budget challenges are and also how we come about it and how it functions because sometimes people ask questions

130and they don't understand how we work. Um and then also educating stakeholders on smart tax. And I say that because I get emails from parents like you guys do and they say, "Well, why are we selling this? Where's the money going? How is that applying to our program?" You know, all those kind of things. Why are you selling? They call it junk to our students. I get it. But everything we serve from the smart snack to the thing that goes on our plates meets nutritional guidelines. Smart snacks are typically low fat, low sugar, um low calorie. Um they normally have to have a first ingredient of a fruit, a vegetable, a protein. Um so even if you see a cookie, it's a whole grain chocolate cookie, which is actually pretty good. If you see our

131ice cream is lowfat ice cream. So it is not the same thing that you can get at a Walmart or you know it's food line. I'm from Atlanta say Kroger. But you get my point. So what you see what you think is not healthy is a different version. We don't sell the same thing. Even a chip for school nutrition is a baked chip. It is not the same. So just want to put that in perspective. Make sure that people understand that. But it is definitely a positive source of revenue for school nutrition. This year alone, we've made almost $8 million in smart. And so in that and extra sales is not just smart, but it's also did they get an extra slice of pizza? Did they get a extra PB&J? Like those kind of things.

132So it is definitely a a source of revenue for us that is meaningful. Um, for the central office, for me, training is very important and because I feel like as we train our staff and pour into them, that will play into what ends up on the plate because now I'm teaching my staff how to provide a better quality, whether it's taste, presentation, more appealing to the students. Um, creating innovative menu ideas and so challenging my um team to like think outside of the box and say, "Okay, you know, how do we improve participation? I want to see something different." um improving the value perception. You know, um one of the things that people don't realize is that majority of my team has true culinary background, went to culinary school through all the things. And so

133it's not just a random person planning our menus is somebody who really believes and loves food. Um monitoring of food cost and inventory and teaching and training managers and team how to monitor inventory because inventory on shelves are dollars. Um, and then also training our staff on how do we look for other kids that we can qualify? Um, are there kids that we haven't identified that we need to identify as free because that's a tool that we have at our disposal. And then at the school level, taking that training and that information from central office and seeing it in action, maintaining, monitoring inventory, um making sure they know how to put the recipe on the plate in a way where students want to pick it up, and then also ensuring that we have our labor

134in check. you know, everything from monitoring overtime and and when we plan meals for labor hours, we've looked at how long does it take to produce a recipe, how many people does it take, and then how do we make sure that people are working with those guidelines so that we don't lose dollars in ways like paying time and a half. Um the impact of our current situation is a depleted fund balance like our emergency fund like we discussed. um perception and making making sure that we see value in what we put in the plate for our students and then the potential negative impact for the district because in many ways whether it's a negative charge balance or if we aren't able to sustain ourselves then we impact the district budget in a negative way where

135they have to basically cover our back. So solutions, as I mentioned before, we are technically a a baby business in a school district. And so when you run a business, it's about increasing revenue and decreasing expenses. And so increasing revenue for us is meal participation, getting more kids to eat, um increasing efforts to extend free and use eligibility, um adjusting meal prices as you all see fit, and increasing our sales and revenue options. and Smartex is one of those ways that we're planning to do that. Um, one thing that we're looking at for that is in our high schools, we are going to pilot some credit card, debit card machines because I have a 17-year-old. She walks around with her debit card on her cell phone. It It scares me to death, but that's how

136she operates and she pays for everything that she does not even know what cash. I sent her to the bank and she was like, "Well, what do I do?" I was like, "Oh my god, I have dropped the ball." So, Okay. Um decrease expenses. Um food cost changes are being made to streamline our untrains. Um we're also we have a warehouse, but um trying to see how much can we actually bring directly into our warehouse to kind of cut that case cost to see if we can bring in more directly to us. And then also monitoring our inventory and efficiency and ways, training our staff on how to make sure that we are saving cases where we really need to be saving them. So support opportunities. So, like I said, educating our parents, our school

137administrators, and other stakeholders on smart snack nutritional guidelines so they don't think it's junk. Um, explaining the overall CNS budget and how it impacts the district. Um, advocating for our legislative representatives to maintain and increase state funding. Um, I did want to mention like we have some SNAP guidelines that have been challenged and that it will change eligibility for our students and if that happens it will decrease how many students in our district actually qualify for free and reduce. So talking to our stakeholders about, you know, making a phone call to your representative and explain to them how this will impact you because that's the only way that they'll hear us. And then deciding on a financial sustainability plan moving forward based off the decisions that we made for the district as a whole. Any

138questions? Yes. All right, we do have several. Thank you so much. It was good, but not a good questions. Oh, I got you. We got a few more coming around. I'll start. Um, I shall start with Mr. Swanson and I come around. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, uh, Miss Lawrence, for the presentation. I know that a lot of this predates you. Um, and this is nothing new. Um, I know that it reminded us of conversation last year when several of us had the opportunity to sit down with Director Long, who was the former USDA um, in the previous administration, to talk about our concerns and what we could do to close these gaps. And so one thing that I just want to make sure that the public is aware and that they

139know is that with an enterprise we can't be in the red. Um and if we are in the red, we lose to the point that you made some of those benefits that we we operate from. Um, and I would be remiss if I didn't echo something Miss Johnson Hustler, now Representative Johnson Hustler said when we talked about ensuring that folks who are eligible for certain benefits, how do we remove those barriers to ensure that folks are able to complete the necessary paperwork without the stigmas being associated with it? So therefore, we are not losing, you know, potential revenue and um it doesn't we don't have to increase the prices of lunch. But I also do know, and Chair Hery reminded me this a couple weeks ago, um that whenever we do increase our compensation for

140CNS staff, which we should, um we have to then increase the price of lunch to go along with that. And so we know that the angel fund came out of some votes that we took that none of us really wanted to take, but grateful to see that the community has um taken that up. And so is there a way? Those were all my statements. Um, so my question is how can we publicize the angel fund even more to let the community know that, you know, by the end of this year the funds may be depleted and also grateful for the folks that have, you know, stepped up and donated to ensure that no child is left behind and goes without food. So, um, Miss Lou, she stepped out for a moment, but we have been

141talking about doing some community outreach to kind of draw attention to that we need more donations to the angel fund. Um, we're also trying to research what kind of fundraisers we're able to do. And then we have some donors right now who we meet with that provide support that are um, willing to provide a little bit more support than they have been in the past. And so, we're trying to reach out to resources that can support us in that way. And I do know that, you know, with the economy where it is now, increasing lunch prices may impact families. And so having this angel fund and understanding that if a kid has a negative balance, they will not be able to uh they will still be able to have food is going to be key.

142Um so I'll reserve all of I have some other statements, but I'll reserve those. Yes. Hey, I just want to add that we do regularly add information to our newsletter and also we have a new like newsletter that we're going to start sending out. That's going to be a part of that too that will reach all of our community. And what about social media? I know that's where a lot of folks are. if there's graphics that we could push on social media. Yeah, we post on our Facebook page. So, we post all of our community on Facebook, too. And I we usually once I I do CNS outreach posts, I usually also tag the CNS Facebook page. They also have their own Facebook page and they regularly update it as well. Thank you. Thank you.

143Thank you, Vice Chair Swanson. Matt. Yes. Thank you. Great presentation. Um my question is echoing um vice chair but I'm asking how can we survey families to determine who is really purchasing lunch and if we t and if uh and if we can target those um who actually have to pay how are we going to engage them in the process. So, what what we all know is that that a lot of families um still students still bring their lunch to school. And I know that we account for that when we're looking at our numbers and our data. Um but my I guess my concern is how are we really looking at who re who actually is purchasing lunch? Um and and then if so, how can we change even though the federal has its guidelines,

144how can we improve what we provide our students to eat at a quality space um that families do we want more families to bring bring lunch to school? Right. Exactly. So, how do we improve um what we are providing them um to get the families who are actually bringing their children's lunch to school to actually want to purchase school lunches? How do we improve around those lines? I hear that a lot from families. Um I don't, like you said, you're trying to help us change the negative perceptions. Um I've been in Wake County schools my entire life. my children now my grandchildren and so I think one of the things how you're saying how can we help you all change that perspective how can CNS literally change how they do things whether it's presentation whether

145it's the type of food how do we change that even within the boundaries of the funding that we do have to make parents really want to buy food at school absolutely no some so some of the things we we really are um working to revamp to look at our menu choices to see how we can be more innovative. Um also some of the things that we're trying to do is make sure that we're thinking about our demographics. So like recently we had the international week and part of that is those menu items that you saw that week will be in place on our menu next school year and that is so that we can draw in because we have such a diverse community we can be serving meals that our students actually want to eat

146that relate to their background and experiences. Um and so that is kind of where we're going with this. So trying to just relook at our our recipes and say okay how do we make this better? How do we feature things that are going to be more appealing? Um, I really do think training is a big part of it. Um, I want to see consistency throughout our kitchens. And so that means that I have to teach our staff how to elevate what they're presenting to our students in a way that our community will say, "Oh, wow. I want to try that. That looks exciting." Like even with the international day, like we hand made empanadas that week and we start we made like 10,000 empanadas and the kids in the community really loved it. And so

147we can see when we put that kind of effort and energy into it, then they will respond. So that's the hope that we had. That sounds good. I think that's it. Thank you. Um and I appreciate this presentation and um the work that you and your team do. I know your team is much bigger than the five people that are in this room and um just very grateful for the work that they do every day. Um I'm curious as we look at the other districts and that comparison. I think that's really helpful in the C um explanation on why we aren't able to do a full um you know lunch and breakfast at no cost for families. Are we seeing different hourly wages through those other communities? And if you don't know yet, I don't

148know any other We we will pull the data for you and I can get that before the next board meeting. Um but as far as I know, we do pay higher than the majority of them. Okay. And then um I appreciate your pathways and your opportunities and asking for how we can support you. And so each of us has what's called a board advisory council, which is an administrator and a parent representative from every school in our district. And so I would like to invite you to do a presentation next year on school meals so that we can get that message out to our communities. Oh, absolutely. Come back around, Miss Coffin. Um, yes, thank you very much for all this information. I know, um, we had spoken before. Um, and I think it would

149be helpful for the public to understand the numbers if we were able to get the numbers that would reflect back not only the vendors, but per student and what we had to pay for everything like what we're doing now, what we had to do 5 years ago and 10 years. so they could see the progression of how much the costs have increased for us and where we stand. Um cuz we get we get these numbers right now, but it might not mean as much to people unless they see the comparison. Yeah. Um and then the other thing I wanted to ask and thank you Mr. Tyson for bringing that up because I I could hear Monica speaking about you know the taxpayers and making those comments. Um the angel funds when we spoke about it

150last year like um Mr. Swanson said it increased a lot. What can we do in other aspects outside the angel funds? Like I know Wegman, for example, if we are an employee who produces scholarships, there's like grants and stuff like that. What could we do outside of just advertising on Facebook where those partners may not see it that we can actually seek them? Um well, one of the things that we're going to actually start doing is doing some more outreach related to our program in general. Um and so just building relationships and and going out and making um connections with community members. And then one of our donors right now, she actually does go out and try to build relationships to get more donors for us to work. So, she's kind of doing that work

151for us because she's really passionate about um supporting us and in particular the angel fund because she wants to make sure there are no kids that come to school and can't be and actually have the negative debt. So, we're already working in that way. Okay. I was just wondering if we had any like bigger entities that would be able to sponsor us so to speak. Is that something that we would be able to We technically we could. It's just about having the relationship and the connections, you know, to get in front of the people who make those decisions. And so I would say if our community members know someone and then they reach out to us, then we can go from there. Absolutely. Okay. And then my last little point is um I appreciate that

152you mentioned the healthier versions of the smart snacks. Um I know just myself included um some of the parents do actually question if their kid is eating the ice cream. You know, I've spent plenty of time sitting at the lunch table with my kids and they're eating ice cream over their green beans. For sure. Um, so I appreciate you pointing that out. Um, and I did have a question. Do we still serve soda and soft drinks as part of those vending machine options? So, if I understand there because there's a company that does the vending machine. Oh, I think in the high schools typically they can have the diet sodas, but I think next year they're not going to have vending machines in the high schools. Um because we are the Pepsi. Oh, that's the

153we have that. We have snack machine. Oh, with Oh, we have a Pepsi contract. I do not control that. Okay. And we can talk more about that at another meeting, too. All right. Well, we're going to do it. We're going around in order. Miss Gordon deferred, but now wants to come back. So, we're going to jump back, but this is not a second chance. This is your first first bite of the apple. Yeah. Okay. First of all, thank you for this great presentation. Um, I can say sitting on the board as a parent with students in the district, this makes sense to me and I I understand it and I can understand where the challenges are. Um, and I also want to say, um, I appreciate that you that not only you laid out how

154the board can support you, um, but how you are taking efforts with your staff and how you specifically lay out or or bring out um, the creation of innovation menu ideas. I was able to participate um, on the uh, the international. Yes. Yes. The kids were excited. They some of them were a little hesitant to try it, but they they were they were super excited to see something new, something different. Although I went on a Friday and that messed up their pizza day. But um my question my question is when we're talking about um making parents more aware and um as it relates to um trying to identify those families who are um who qualify for that free and reduced lunch. Is is it act or I guess is it true that those families that

155are identified as free and reduced lunch families that also um determines like their eligibility for like sunbucks um for the summer. That's sort of typically some of those same kids qualify but that's not a program that school nutrition actually run. is to the state. Yeah. But do does the state talk to Okay. Okay. Typically the data that we have is shared with the state but the state influence that program. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thank you. So we'll come back around. Dr. did you have a question? Yes. Um actually uh thank you again um for the presentation. I really enjoyed it. Um, and I just want to echo um, Miss Gordon's um, point about you got emphasizing what uh, everybody could do um, to try to help uh, this uh, situation and and then the

156um, the aspect of moni monitoring for food costs and inventory and waste. just brought back a memory I had recently of in the Uber uh an Uber driver who who was a used to work with Costco and asked I asked about the pizza that they that they have they used to have the pizza with the vegetables on top and now they don't sell it anymore and I asked why and he said that because the vegetables a lot of times were spoiled by the time they got to them and they had to throw away a whole bunch vegetables. So, they decided that they're not going to sell the combo the combination pizza anymore. So, the point is that you know you know there's a there's things that we can we can look at you know in

157in terms of inventory in terms of the potential uh cost savings from the the the waste reducing waste and um and you know do you guys like are the inventory held centrally or is it in individual schools? How does that work? Um, so we have a central warehouse and we have of course inventory at the end at the school level. So it depends on it is where it is in the process. So they the managers make the orders and then they we have drivers that work for us and they deliver out what they need based off whatever the menu was planned for that time period. Okay. Okay. We do the same thing. So we look at menu items and we say, well, is this popular? Should this still be on the menu anymore? You know,

158should we change something? those kind of pizza day is super popular. Um so we won't touch that. Yeah. Um, second question. Um, uh, have you thought has anyone looked into the impact of like the the USDA and the the kind of emphasis on health and health like standards changing the standards? Um, and how is how would that impact food cost and and then is are there opportunities to tap into the movement to try to get everybody to eat healthier? Um so so there are some rules that are changing this school year. So um the sodium requirements are getting stricter. Some sugar requirements are getting stricter. So um right now we don't know how it's going to impact us. We're hoping that it doesn't have a negative impact on us because often times if like when

159kids eat at home and then you send them to school and you want them to eat completely different, that's really hard, right? And so we're trying to make sure that we still provide quality, tasty meals within those guidelines. And so we're always shooting for our students to eat healthy. And that's why we try to provide them options and choices and educate them on what's a good choice. But basically, we're trying to make sure that they still like what they eat. That's that's a big that's probably our biggest challenge is like we have all of these rules and then but we also want to make sure that what we sering is something that they get excited about because they're not going to eat if they don't like it. Thank you. Thank you, Miss Evans. Um so

160this is actually a request of the board. um I think or none of us want to raise meal prices, but um you have articulated very well the challenges that we're faced with and in years past since I've been on the board um we've had a split vote on this on raising the meal prices and that to me um feels like the good guys and the bad guys. You know, it it can it seems to me to send a message that, you know, there are some board members that are willing to put that burden on families that don't need it, that don't need an extra burden. And then there's board members who absolutely will not do that. You know, we're not going to do that to families. And that's not an accurate description of what's actually

161happening. We have a business case scenario that we have to deal with. And I just would like to ask us to be more unified if possible. and when this comes up and if that's too much to ask that we at least um work together to improve our messaging that there are no there is no board member at this table that wants to put that burden on families and increase these prices. So that's my request. Thank you and thank you Mr. Hers. A few questions real quick and please correct me or help inform me. I I thought I heard you say something about meal prices to raise them to match reimbursement rates. Can you explain that? Yeah. So, when they pass Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, they wanted um they the goal was for all school nutrition

162programs to eventually have a meal price that matched the USDA reimbursement that the government provides to us when they So, every child who eats, we literally get $4 per child, give or take, if they're free. And so that was that is the way the law was written. Um what currently happened though is everybody well first off if it's if a goal post is always moving because when that was passed the reimbursement rate was like $3 for something. And so but as meal prices have increased even the federal government has decided okay well it takes more for us to provide meals. because they've increased the reimbursement rate, but it also means that it gives us a further place to get to in order to equal what they're what they're contributing for us. And so that's what

163that's what that statement was about. So we don't necessarily have to jump there. You don't have to jump there. Every year they evaluate school districts and that's when I talked about the waiver. It's called pay lunch equity. And so there's like a calculation and then you can prove to the state who kind of runs us if we have to move how much we have to move each each year. So this might be a bit of an unfair question for you. So maybe Mr. Strickland or Dr. Taylor is in on this, but I a few of us came in at the same time. I don't know how long um Chair Hagerty has had to raise rates or how many times Miss Matthew has had to raise rates, but we some of us five of us have

164been here for 3 years and in 3 years every year we raise. Is this a do we have any kind of long-term planning? know I know what's coming next year or 2 years from now or potentially over the next 5 years cuz I feel like we're having the same conversation every year and I would love Yeah. And I know that um this is what the board has had to deal with in terms of raising prices and what that does for families and so you want to try your best not to put that uh on families. We also recognize that the longer you delay in raising prices, the bigger that uh amount is going to be when you actually have to do it. So what we talked about Mark and I is about uh making sure

165that we can level set on what we see as reasonable increases to make sure there's not a sticker shock that we can keep up with changes in prices because as you clearly heard this enterprise program and we have to make a conscious decision about keeping up with market price and affordability uh to make this program uh functional. uh and so we don't want to be in a position where we don't raise prices and then come to you in three to four or five years and there's this big increase. It is about knowing that uh prices are changing constantly. We see that um in the market uh we don't know what all this tariff stuff is going to do. That's still unpredictable. But we want to be in a position where we can um have the

166board reasonably expect what uh an annual step increase would be and not having all these other things that come up unexpected and put board members in different positions about where they are on it. Uh the the last part that I would add and and I think you all understand this that um ultimately what we have to decide as a district is that if the program uh is not going to function in the black at the level that it needs to be then we have to say as a district that we're willing uh to pay whatever that cost is going to be. uh because that is the obligation that we have when we have a school nutrition program that if they operate in the red, we're on the hook either way. Uh and so it is

167about how do we make sure that doesn't happen so it falls back on the district and my respectively. Uh but I appreciate that question. That's what Mark and I have talked about and Mark I will um allow you to add any comments if you would like. So I echo what Dr. Taylor shared. Um today was about sharing information with you all about the status of the program, bringing you the problem statement of where we are and what's going on. Um it is worthwhile to note that uh we do pay well here in Wake County. You all have done an excellent job in raising salaries particularly of our hourly staff of which most child nutrition staff are. And so there's good in that but there's also challenges in that with the enterprise fund. And um as

168I talked with Chair Hagerty, this was a problem statement information item today and we'd like to bring it back to you all uh June 24th uh as an agenda item sticking and reaching out to each of board members to glean information from you all and we would bring this back on the 24th for either some further discussion or action or not that we would bring this back to you all um on the 24th. Thank you. Um, did you Oh, I thought you had Well, we were we were negotiating doing those things. I can wait. What what what we do have is, you know, we know we could take a whole work session and talk to you about this in detail. I did want to announce a couple things. Mark had announced one that we will

169be bringing this back, but we also need to bring it back for action. So, I know there's a couple questions before we finish that we need to ask, but I want to present this to you that we have like an immediate need that we need to look at going into this school year, but we also know, we've talked about this, this long-term sustainability of the program. And so, we're going to need some real indepth conversation about it. So for that in-depth conversation, we're going to have some budget committee discussion about that. And so we'd ask you to come back and really we can ask some questions to really get into some things like if we have this declining meal sales, why why is that and where is that going? If we've talked about some of

170the revenue options like the sale of snacks and catering, you know, every year we sort of explore things like could we do more with sales to PTAs or athletic boosters or more school connected funds to really boost stuff there? Someone had even mentioned even with our school culinary programs, is there any kind at our high schools, is there any sort of synergy we could get somehow? So, we'll save those questions for kind of a long-term discussion. Um, but coming back to kind of the immediate needs, I really appreciate how you shared a range of options for if we have to look at meal increases, what they might mean looking ahead of what we need to go for this school year. Are you ready to make a recommendation to us about you know a particular um

171you know what a rate might look what a rate change might look like either by grade level or schools or is that something you want to wait to bring back to us at the next meeting? I want to wait till Okay. Okay. So we can get some input from board members and board members if you need to know before then maybe let's talk to um Tiffany now and then sort of get some ideas and we can provide some initial feedback too. Does that sound like a plan? Okay. Okay. All right. Um any final thoughts? This has been a very good discussion and I want to have more on this. Uh but we also have an important item coming up too for action tonight as well. Um Miss Rice. Yeah. The only thing that I would

172just like to to add is that when when they come back on the 24th um that you know a dollar amount you would like for to suggest for us to increase as well as the thoughts around um the families uh for that do receive free and reduced lunch. What does your process look like or your thoughts around how you're going to engage different than what we've done in the past? And and I think part of that I think helps with identification and assistance for eligibility because we've got some federal issues that some of us talked about that we'll need to address too. Okay. All righty. So for your first presentation, thank you. We hope we hope we hope you'll come back. All right. Thank you. All right. We will transition to the last item on

173our work session agenda. Passes up. Um this is polic board policy 4318 student use of wireless communications. Now we have some additional information for you. We talked about some survey results. Um Dr. Robinson has broken these down for us. Mister Swanson will get these passed out to everyone. Heat. Heat. It took me a second to place you cuz I haven't seen you in so long. Like I know her. I'm going to go hang out with All right, you guys can come on. All right. So, Dr. Robinson, I see you have some esteemed guests with us today. Do you want to go ahead and make some introductions? Absolutely. Absolutely. Um so today we have some esteemed guests who are going to be able to join us be able to share their insight and their perspective of

174policies that they have within their building. As we wanted to talk about our primary focus today during this work session is to review our proposed edits to the current draft and come to alignment around two key areas. The two key areas that we really wanted to focus on was compensation confiscation protocols and when students should have access to their devices during uh the school day. Over the past couple of weeks um we additionally um reached out to teachers to ask additional questions with regards to what it is that they would like to see. We also reviewed existing policies that all schools have and we pulled those in and looked at as well. and then we seek the uh additional guidance from Darington and Smith with regards to the focus and direction of the board. So

175to ground us in our conversation in the realities of school implementation, I've asked these three principles to join us so that they will be able to share their insights and their perspectives on what that impact looks like in schools. And so we have the principal of the year, none other than the one and only Sana Jacobs who's joining us. We have Dr. Savage from middle school and then we have Vicky Woods from elementary school as well. And so after they do their presentation, I'm going to ask Brad to share a little bit of information with regards to the data that was collected and just give you the perspective of what it looks like and what he was able to glean from it so that we can be grounded in that work as well. And then

176we're going to turn it over to uh Dr. Crane and Dr. Crane then was going to review all the edits and we want to make sure that we look at this draft proposal in preparation for board approval this afternoon. And so at this time, I would ask uh Miss Jacobs to please share her cell phone policy and what it's like within her building. And um it's all in the main topic for confiscation. Confiscation access. Okay. I just want to make sure that well um good afternoon, good evening. um our cell phone policy, we just uh implemented that this year actually. And so um essentially I wanted to make sure that it was something that we can manage. I just want to give some context. We have 2400 kids. Um and so we we needed to

177make sure that we could manage and monitor and create a system that that we can do it at at scale at 2400 kids. That's the first thing. Um and then the second thing I wanted to make sure that I had teacher buyin. So when I brought the proposal forward to my leadership team initially I wanted no sale bell to bail. Um so in every classroom once you entered into that classroom I wanted the phone or any device to go away. Um the teachers found that to be very limiting. So they were like, "Well, we've got some different apps and things with within some very specific content areas cuz we're a comprehensive high school. We offer a lot of different things. There's some things out there that they wanted their kids to have access to. And

178they also mentioned that during like project time and things like that, kids like to listen to music, so they wanted to be able to give them that opportunity to do so. So I decided to kind of merge the former BOD plan. You remember when you had the green and the red? I got rid of the yellow but so the first thing we did was we made cards that every single um teacher so we had the same thing. So if the teacher posted this at the top means no you cannot have your device at this time and my expectation is that when a teacher is providing direct instruction that this card is up so the kids know. Uh, and I explained to them biology and Tik Tok, you know, those things don't necessarily go together and

179they agree. And then when they had the green up, the teacher would would be able to tell them to what degree they can have the phone. Um, specific example, let's say it's a music, the teacher gave the child 2 minutes, um, get your playlist together, turn your phone down, and they were not allowed to touch the phone again, but they were allowed to have it on. So those types of very specific structures have been put in place. So the policy itself is um that really is it. It's just that simple. And so if a child violates the red card, that's the compensation part. So if a child has the phone out, but they're not supposed to have the phone out, the first step we're going to do a warning. So the teacher is going to

180say, "I need the phone." So when they say, "I need the phone." That could look differently in different places. Um, for some teachers, they have a file cabinet with the key in it. It goes in the file cabinet. But others, they had a plastic box. They put in a plastic box as long as the box could be secure. Because I was really clear with my teachers when I said, you know, once you take it, you are then responsible for that phone. And if something happens, they're going to they're going to hold you responsible. So, the best system that we've come up with because we're in high school, we do not do lockers. And so, there's a book bag on a child every single day. Put it in your book bag and put the book bag

181either in the front of the room or in a specific place in the room. I've got a a wonderful teacher who has shelves. She just bought some IKEA shelves. And so, the kids know when they walk in, first two or three minutes, she has a really clean system. take everything out. The the earbuds, the headphones, the phone goes in the um in the book bag. She has a list of everything the kid needs out of that book bag that goes on the desk and every one of those book bags go on the shelf and they have to ask for permission to go. That's what we that's what I think is the cleanest system because we're not it's not really in our possession. It is, but it's not. But we can kind of watch if all

182the book bags are in a in a place. So that that's that. So access, we're only managing the phones in the classroom. So kids have access beginning of the day. They have access between every class change. They have access at lunch obviously after school. So we are only managing the phone when um the kids are in a classroom. So I think I That's good. That's great. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, so at this time we're going to hear from a middle school principal with regards to what it looks like in this particular building. So similarly, but but different as well. We're we're middle school. We have about 850 students and our policy stemmed it started two years ago. It stem from discussions at our S retreat um staff being frustrated with just how our

183approach electronics were were not working really. Um so we worked with our sister schools around us. I have to give a shout out to Dillard Drive Middle School. They've really helped and um I would say with our staff, but also most importantly our school community to develop a policy. I will say um and it was surprising to me initially when we put our no cell phone or cell phones don't look back policy in place. Um twothirds of families were all on board. I usually would get emails when parents are angry. I got many many emails saying thank you finally. something along those lines. We did have onethird of families I would say that that had questions, concerns. We walked them through that. Our policy is that cell phones or electronics in general have to remain

184in students book bags and turned off for the entire day. We do have in first offense we we collect them. Students may pick them up at the end of the day. Second offense then a parent has to come pick it up and that continues on forward. We never have consequences beyond that that suspension. There's ne no other consequences beyond the parents having to come pick them up. We have an exemption. I'm I'm type 1 diabetic. I you know I need my phone with me and there we have medical exemptions uh for students. And then uh we do allow access if students having a crisis of some kind. They need to go to the guidance office call you know their family member. We allow that. We also allow them at the end of the day to

185make transportation arrangements. You know, a bus is late, something like that so they can communicate with their students that way. We had all our staff on board mentioned we all, you know, had to be consistency across all classrooms for this to work. We got that. We also did some serious training with staff and students, especially staff at the beginning of the year that we're not we're not getting in a power struggle over a cell phone with a student. If a student is not going to give it up, then we can call an admin member and if they're not going to give it up to us, we'll call the parent. But we're not taking cell phones out of students hands, etc. We're not doing that. Um I I How's it going? I I remember our first

186week at the lunch in the lunch at lunch duty and our teacher uh sending me a a cell phone picture of the kids playing Uno and she said, "I haven't seen this in years." Uh, so we've definitely seen more social interactions. We've had some It's certainly not perfect. You know, we do have students sneaking in the pockets, sneaking into the bathroom, but overall it's been it's gone really well. Surprisingly to me, it has been a selling point for teacher candidates. It is a frequent question I get as a principal saying, "What is your cell phone policy?" When I share, they're like, "Oh, this is this is what I've been looking for." So, we have used it as recruiting tool in some way. Great. Thank you for sharing. And now we go to elementary school. Miss

187Vicky Woods. All right. So, I'm Vicki Wood. I um am the proud principal at Vance Elementary. We have about 425 kiddos. Um we don't our our policy was really simple. It was in the handbook. It just in the beginning had cell phone. We asked that it's usually typically fourth and fifth graders. Um K2, K3 don't typically have any type of um cell phone devices. So we would ask them do they have to have it on airplane mode and in their book bag or off and in their book bag. Um first offense the teacher speaks to them and typically they don't have it out. What happens is it dings or somebody calls them in the middle of class. So then we know that they so we you know but if they have it out we typically

188the teacher will say I'll get the student at the end of the day um and they'll take the phone and give it to them at the end of the day. um if that happens again, same student, um at that time, um I take the cell phone from them, um or I have them hand it over. I said, "We're going to call your parent." We come to the office, we call the parent, um and I let them know they have a cell phone at school out during instructional time. And then, um I send it home with student kind of the second warning. The third warning is I have the cell phone and the parent has to come and retrieve the cell phone. And I haven't had that happen very often. Um, that was our basic policy,

189but we have had to add smartwatches to our policy because a lot of our K2 babies are wearing the smartwatch devices. Um, and so those as well have that technology feature where they can text or call. Um, and we added that. We had a a little baby that had gone to the bathroom, didn't feel good, and instead of calling going to the office, they call mom from their watch, and then the mom shows up, and everybody in the office is completely clueless of to what's going on. So, um, we had to add that. So, we said it has to be on airplane mode. Um, I can't really control, you know, but it doesn't go off. We don't really have a whole lot of problems, but um, for the most part, they've they've followed the guidelines.

190Um, I think they like their Chromebooks and we don't have them out at recess or anything like that. It's the end of the day. Um, cute story. Had a group of um, fifth graders that missed the bus and they came up to the office. It was about seven of them. And they were all sitting there. My secretary is like, "Let me get names. Let me call the parents." So I said, "How many of you have a cell phone in your backpack?" They were like, "Me?" And I said, "Okay, take it out. You're going to call your mom and tell them that you missed the bus." So they did. They were they were like, "You want me to take my phone out right now and call my mom?" So um you know, at that point, you're

191like, "Yes." You know, so for fifth grade, I think it's great to see how it transitions to middle school and then high school. So I'm lucky in the elementary it's not we don't have a big problem with it. So and thank you for sharing as well. So before we open it up for Q&A, I just wanted to just quickly touch upon the variance that you hear from high school, middle school to elementary school. So at this time, I would love for Dr. McMillan just to go over the data and give you the perspective of what you have in your green packets. And so he will just do a brief uh narrative of that information that you have so we can continue to move forward with the conversation. All right. Uh good afternoon everyone. Um, I'm

192going to start with the document that has the at the top that says schoolbased procedure input for principles. Uh, and then secondarily after that, I'll transition to the one that says teacher survey report. This was from a survey that was sent out to principles and teacher policy asking specifically about elements of their policy. Is it behind the coverage? We you have the cover go to the cover pages for the teacher survey. So you have two aspects of the teacher survey and so the aspect that you have of the teacher survey is one where it's holistic and then one where it's broken down into um high school, elementary and middle and middle school. So speak to that document. Okay. And then we'll come back to this and I will be able to share with you what

193this information is because I think it's important for you to have as well. And so I'll make sure you get a copy of your password. So which one are you referring to? Service. Teacher service. The other one. They're both the same. They're just broken down. started doing so up the top right you should see respondent [Music] 2617 all right so um you're going to hear some parallels in here to some of the things you just heard from the principles by each level and also some things I think that are going to dovtail pretty closely policy you are considering tonight so some of these lines of thought are starting to come together a little bit uh so the first question that got asked of the teacher survey that went out last week to which we had

194about 2500 or so teachers respond uh was that asking teachers to confiscate devices may cause classroom disruptions and about 75 to 80% of all teachers said that yeah that could be a little bit of disruption in the classroom. Didn't really vary much by grade level. Uh so elementary, middle, and high all kind of felt the same about that. But there's another interesting question I'll circle back to later in this that actually um corresponds to this a little bit too. The last question actually in the packet that I think helps explain this a little bit more. Flipping over to page two, uh teachers were asked whether they felt the students should be required to turn off their devices during instructional time. And you can see again uh 85 to 91% depending on the grade span of

195all teachers said the students should be required to turn off those devices during instructional time. So a lot of consistency and unity there. Next question. Are there there are appropriate times during the school day when supervised use should be encouraged? For example, for instructional purposes. Now, here you're starting to see a little bit of a variation, I think, by level. At elementary, middle school, only about a third of teachers said, "Yeah, there are times when kids need or should have their cell phones for instruction, but the high school level, it was the majority was 55%." So, that's probably just reflective of current use and sort of current practices where high school kids, it's a little bit more integrated into their instructions for elementary school. So that's probably a function of just current practice that's out

196there right now that it's less common in elementary time. Miss Roger's comment spoke to that a little bit over the green light green red uh format of how we allow that. Flipping over to page three again here we're going to see some more variation by level in terms of how it goes from being tighter at the early grades to looser in the upper grades to some degree. Uh teachers were asked should students be allowed to use their devices during arrival and dismissal? uh only 32% of elementary uh teachers agreed with that. But up to middle school now you're at 55% and at high school it's 83% of teachers agreed that arrival and dismissal appropriate time for kids to have those devices. So again uh that's that sort of articulation from you know tight to loose

197as you go up that you see in some elements of your policy and also from some of the anecdote comments from reference today. Device confiscation should only be used as a last resort after other strategies have failed. teachers by and large agreed with that. The majority of them didn't. The level of agreement was much stronger again at elementary school, but about twothirds of elementary teachers agree with that. And then between 52 and 57% of them, but again, the majority of teachers, yes, felt that that should be a last resort. Now the last question which I'm going to tie back to the first one. You may recall the first teacher survey question. Uh we had 75 to 80% of teachers saying that asking teachers to confiscate devices would be disruptive. But on the final question on

198the survey it says teachers support device confiscation in classrooms. And again the majority of them do support it. They acknowledge that it is disruptive but they also say by and large it should be an option. 57% at elementary, 70% at middle, and even 60% at high school where perhaps it's probably, you know, the most controversial place for for doing this sort of thing. So even though they say disruptive in classrooms, they're also acknowledging that it's probably necessary. And so now we transition to the second one that I think is very important. This is schoolbased procedure input from principles. And now you'll get the information with regards to what principles you're saying about cell phone policies and what it looks like in those schools. So, so these results here that uh that I almost started with

199here the first time are from a parallel survey of principles from last week. We had about half of our schools just under half of our schools actually respond to this basically asking them about what is in their current policies regardless. So, um, some of the same information we just heard from from our principles here today, but from a larger sample of, uh, ADA principles. So, the first question asked of them was whether they actually have a written policy. And that's at the bottom of page one here. And you can see that between 73 to 90% of principles um, had a written cell phone policy. A little more common in Dylan High School and elementary in our sample. Um, but the vast majority of schools do have a written policy. And then there was also a

200few who said that they had sort of some agreed upon practices, but they were not necessarily written down and codified in the policy. Looking over to page two, then you start to get into some of these elements of what is actually in some of these policies. And one of the things I'll point out before we get into some of these results is one of the things you're going to notice is that the answer choice of our policy does not specify this is very common to many of these questions. Uh so there are some things about the level of detail that we remember asking here that are not necessarily regular. Starting with the first question about when cell phones are prohibited. Again here this is going to echo the comments you just heard from individuals here.

201Some of these options as you can see bell to bell on campus are more or less restricted than others. At elementary the most common response from respondents was that they are prohibited on campus entirely. And then when you look at middle school, you see that the most common response with about half of middle schools saying that it's restricted from bell to bell, but not necessarily on campus. And then in high school, the most common response is that they are prohibited during instruction. So here again, you start to see some of that tight at the elementary level, loosens up a little at the middle, and then loosens up a little more at the high school level. And that was something that was pretty consistently articulated in their policies. when kids could have phones was definitely part

202of it, but some of the other details we'll get into are less commonly written down in some of the policies. So, the next question about how does uh the policy address the use of phones in terms of when they're off, do they need to be off? Airplane mode. Uh here you can see the devices being turned off is the most common response. um for for schools that have articulated that in their policy, but about half of them said that their policy does not specify exactly how the devices are supposed to be disabled, whether it's turned off or in airplane mode or just so that's something that's not necessarily a lot of schools written policies, but for those who did have it written down, having them be completely turned off was the most popular. Flipping over

203to page three, um, where cell phones are to be stored. Again, here you'll see a little bit of a reflection differentiation among levels. Uh, at the elementary level, 61% of the respondents said they had to be in a backpack. Uh, as you heard, uh, from principal today, but then when you got up to the high school level, you started to see a mixture of it might have to be in the backpack, but now we're getting into more schools that are saying they have a designated classroom storage space. So again, that's probably reflective of kids moving between classrooms a little bit more transport devices with them and that means that they're in class as opposed to in a backpack where it's in one place all day long as kids are in school. So again, a little

204bit of variable there uh by level and about a third of uh schoolbased policies did not necessarily specify how uh confiscation is addressed. That's the next question here down at the bottom of page three. And again, here we're going to see some variation by level. Um, however, I'll point off right off the bat that about half of the schools said that their policy did not necessarily say how compensation was. But for those who did say, uh, elementary, it was most commonly uh, the teacher who was going to be confiscating that device. And then as you moved up to middle and high school, you can see it's a little bit of a mix between some say the teacher and some then go say the administrator should be the person responsible. So again you see some variation

205between elementary and secondary but again many of the policies for silent because of that. And then the last question we asked administrator has specific smartwatches. You heard Mr. Will mention that a minute ago those are very common for our very young kids who parents feel like need to have something but they don't want them carrying around you tablet in their pocket all day that has all the functionality of a cell phone. Um, so there were some art uh some details about that from elementary about having it in airplane mode or having it correspond to whatever rules were applied to the cell phone as well. Uh, but the vast majority of schools about 2/3 didn't really have any specific smart watches in their policy. So I think what you're starting to see here is that some

206of the details that the policy is trying to address are not necessarily all this policy. Some of the individuals here today did address some of that directly. uh but in the sample that we are from a lot of their policies were not all that specific. Thank you. And so board chair I know we are in time constraints and I know how important this is. So there was an opportunity I wanted to provide for Q&A with principles and with Dr. McMillan but we also have time that we need to go over revised edits and revision so that there can be discussion. So at your will I would love for them to remain at the table to be able to answer any questions as we go through divide the revised edits simultaneously or would you like to

207keep it separate? So let me ask board members how many board members have questions specifically for any of the principles at the table at this point. Okay. So I thought I thought it was very Oh did you? Yeah. Yeah then. Okay. Let's go ahead and ask that. I'm I'm I'm more inclined with our high school. Um first of all, I love the initiative that you took, which would be why you are being esteemed principal of the year, right? Um but I I'm curious to how are your students responding to um the structure that you provided for them and what's their their take on and the expectation? Can they meet it? Do they think it's fair? So yes, they actually think it's fair. When I, you know, just kind of randomly talk to some kids and

208say, "What do you think? Can can you do Tik Tok and US history? Can that can that go together?" And they're like, "Well, no." I said, "You really can't." I said, "I'm asking you to pay attention to your teacher when your teacher's talking to you. Is that fair? That's fair, Miss Jacobs." So they understood that that was fair. They also appreciated, you know, because I went into great detail as exactly what happens. Like I told them, life is nothing but a series of choices. So the choice is very simple. You had it out when you weren't supposed to. She's going to ask you for it. Give it up because she's going to give it back to you at the end of the class period. If you don't, an administrator is coming to get you and

209phone. Then we're going to call parent. We're going to take the phone for the day. And then if you don't give the phone up, we do have next steps for ISS for us. There's no phones in ISS. And then if you don't give it up, then of course your parents gonna have to come up you as a consequence. So they just understood that I'm trying to put you in a position where you can focus and learn when you are supposed to. And let's just be honest, you cannot focus on that phone and focus on that teacher at the same time. So they were really receptive because it wasn't it just wasn't restrictive in such a way that they couldn't have it. And I and that's and that's what I really wanted to hear because I

210mean I I had a teenager and so they'll comply when things make sense. Absolutely. Um but just to take something as a whole in this age, I just feel like you're going to have a lot more challenges than you are um anything else that versus putting boundaries. Right. We we actually went so far as to say we're we're not interested in taking your phone because we're not we don't want to be responsible for your phone. So do the right thing and put your phone away so that we don't have to have don't even make this become an issue. Right. So we do have a hard limit. I know we have some other questions. I know you you did good. Um what we're going to do though is we're going to have um five more minutes

211up to 520. We might go a little we might be delayed in starting our work session because this is important work and we want to make sure we're ready before we go. So I know Miss Gordon I know Mr. have you and some questions for the principles. I will cut us off at 520 and then we'll get the rest of the presentation. Okay. Okay. My question is directed to high school and middle. Um so this has been an interesting topic at my dinner table with my middle schooler, my high schooler, but also amongst um my educator friends and parents. And one of the things that um that was really brought up with a lot of the educators around this around this topic was the um when they had the cell phone policy in place from

212bail to bail, no cell phone, they saw a decrease in student conference. Is that something that you all can speak to or have, you know, have recognized um that there has been a significant decrease in um student altercation, student conflict? I don't have hard data to give you. Okay. Anecdotally, absolutely. Okay. We are chasing far fewer incidents on social media, conflict between uh kids, pictures taken of each other circulated that other kids are angry about. And I think especially I mean middle and high is different. Our middle schoolers are still learning to socialize human beings and um I think we have given them more of an opportunity to do that. Um so I we definitely seen a big difference. Yeah, I would I would say the same. So when the policy is implemented by a

213teacher with fidelity, you know, you have your tight system. What do you do when you walk in the door? That's that's the key to get it get it powered off and get it where it needs to be. Um of Yes. So the less time kids have on the phone, the the fewer uh decisions, good or bad, that that are made. And we definitely see that in our school data and in our day-to-day things. That was very interesting. Oh, yeah. Because you know when you can you can play it. Mhm. Yes, I have. So the I've gotten some feedback from parents concerned about when they reach out to the school, they're worried that someone won't answer the phone. How have you uh worked with your parents in order to get that change in communication so that

214they're not um texting their kid and you know like with the school illness? I know I've been guilty of that as a parent as well when I get that. So, how how has that partnership worked with parents and getting them to follow communication plan? I feel like our policy is successful because we we never said you're not allowed to communicate with kids. You're not allowed to bring your phone. You know, it's here are the ways you can get in touch with your student. We're always going to answer the phone and if you need to hear from them, we're going to go get them and you can talk to them. It was that kind of reassurance from us that brought that one third over to our side of where we're going to be with our policy.

215So, it's just consistency, answering that phone, putting kids in parents in touch with with each other, delivering messages to kids if they have them, and allowing a kid who's having a crisis to talk to their parents in that moment. I would agree. I would agree with you on on what you were just saying. We haven't had a whole lot of parents that said they couldn't get a hold of anybody. And anytime I always say, you know, between talking points and anywhere that you you can communicate with someone, we and I always say if you call and leave a message and someone has not called you back within 5 minutes, call back again. I mean, it does happen a lot, but you know, I mean, it does happen sometimes when the office gets dizzy. Um, but

216just really wanting the for elementary students, I want them to learn to be an adult or to learn to go find an adult, tell them that they're sick, let us problem solve before you contact mom, right? Because as a mom, you automatically are like, "Well, let me pick my child up. They don't feel good." But sometimes there's other factors that we can kind of manipulate a little bit before we call a parent to, you know, come get them. So, and that brings us exactly to 520. Excellent. All right. So, um, what I'd like to do is have staff walk us through the edits that they've incorporated and then if you we might we might start our general meeting a few minutes late, but I want to give you a chance to respond, ask any question

217or if there's anything else to announce to the board members before we start that meeting. We'll do that, Dr. Robinson. Absolutely. Thank you. So, I would like to thank the principles for taking time out of their busy day to join us and [Applause] share. Thank you guys. really appreciate it. So, at this time, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Green, and Dr. Green is going to walk us through all the revisions and the edits. And I would also like to say thank you to Dr. McMillan as well. I really appreciate him giving us insight on the data. And so, Julie, it's all yours. Thank you. So, the version that's up on the screen right now is the version um that incorporates the changes that were agreed upon at last week's policy committee meeting.

218That difference from what's in it is the same as what is in Simb. Do we have any questions about that? Um Dr. Alfred keep is running down um it's going to we've put the policy on the screen for you. You also have access um in in assembly. So for example, we as Mr. Haggedy recommended said we had Board of Education there at the top. Moving down, we added um talking about personal devices and striking um personal wireless communication devices in every in every instance that it was mentioned. Um further down, um we incorporated the section a new section a communication expectations there. um cleaned up a little uh language um incorporating an an Oxford comma and some parentheses there. Sorry, teach yourself. Um in section B, authorized use um again you'll see striking wireless communication

219devices everywhere. And then moving down in elementary and middle school, we struck the middle section that allowed teachers to um for elementary schools provide that uh classroom by classroom ability to say kids could use their phone. Um we left that in for high school. Um we added in both sections schools may add may develop additional restrictions. We added the phrase as permitted by law. Um, in buses, uh, we included, uh, language about listening so as not to disturb other students or distract the driver. Under consequences for authorized use, we've left the section um on consequences confiscation up top and then down at the bottom we reinccorporated discipline um and the reference to 4309 student behavior student code conduct. We reinccorporated the search section, the responsibility and security section and then in the review section. No

220changes there. Those were the that's where we landed at the end of last policy committee meeting. Since then, um Neil Remy, our attorney who was there that day has had a chance to review the policy and sent some additional revisions for our consideration. How would you like for me to move through those? I have a document that shows them all. So, we can take a look at that document. But I see Mr. Swanson may have a question. So yeah, I'm just I'm I'm looking at the time and I do have a document that was that was shared with me. I didn't I don't know that we have time to go through that whole document based on the the content in it. I mean I think unless you have questions about what was presented you know

221let me show you um we have prepared a version. This is not on assembly but this does incorporate the revisions that um Mr. Ramy recommended based on the agreement at the end of policy committee meeting last week and those revisions include um at the top taking wireless out of the second paragraph because we've said wired devices might apply as well. So just taking that there incorporating the hereafter personal devices in that paragraph rather than the second in the next paragraph. Um again we clean up the wireless communication taking that out everywhere. Instead of listing devices and then device accessories he recommended that we incorporate that all in one place. They're they're electronic personal devices. Okay. That's all kind of all together there. And so that's what you see um I think it was connected to

222to mine. So that's what you see highlighted there that change. And then he recommended that we go ahead and hyperlink to a policy that does govern district issued managed devices and that is policy 3225 technology responsible use and we can strike the insert policy hyperlink there. Moving down, he recommended that we strike talking points because that's a branded um service that we may no longer use at some time in the future. And so we can say phone, email, or otherwise. um and authorized use. He recommended instead of saying that schools may create some other uh parameters, he suggested some additional language for specificity that says schools may develop additional restrictions in schoolwide policies made available to students and parents. Um he recommended that we reinsert the language here for elementary schools that a teacher um

223classroom teacher has the ability to uh say that kids can have a personal device displayed used or made visible because that is consistent with all of the bills that are currently incorporated with both the state uh House and the Senate budgets, both bills give that leeway to teachers and do not delineate by grade level. That's not law yet, but that is in both sections. So, it is still the board's decision to say, "Nope, we're not putting it in there until the law says we have to." And so, that is a decision point. I can finish this and come back. Okay. in the high school section. This is the same language um parallel as above imposed restrictions at other times through a schoolwide policy made available. Um this language here is just going to be is

224just struck. It's repetitive language. It should have been um struck the first time. What number is that? It's we're in uh numbered item two high schools on this one in letter A. It's just a um a language that should have been struck. Yeah. Here. It's just a repeat. It's a typo. It's a typo and he caught it. In letter B, he um used the language that he used above as a more succinct way to describe that teachers have that uh ability. Um in section D, he um suggested that we strike smart or star lunchon breaks because again those are kind of branded uh programs if you will and not all schools have them. So we can say and other times designated for activities other than classroom instruction. Under the buses section, he recommended that we

225um say rather than devices should be listened to, we could say audio should be played only with headphones or earbuds and at a reasonable volume. out and then this part [Music] here would be struck through. Basically just moving that under consequences. He suggested that we add back in in addition to imposing disciplinary consequences when authorized by the code of student conduct as the intro to that section. um he did not recall uh the recommendation to strike that and so his recommendation was to put it back in um here because it is in addition to those things um down under the regarding confiscation he recommended moving sort of before the afternoon bell rings to a different part in the sentence and add for the remainder of the school day and it's going to be confiscated for

226the remainder of the school Okay. And then adding the word additionally in the section on policy student behavior code. The only other change he recommended was that we consider striking the review section because we're going to review it anyway as part of normal practice and if should there be change in statute we would review change. So he wasn't sure that we needed that section and recommended that we did strike that. If you like those, we can incorporate those. Um I understand when I and reading body language as I was reviewing the the biggest um question was around whether or not you wanted to reinsert under elementary and middle school that a teacher could have could allow a student to be dis to display use or make visible for instructional purposes um in the classroom section

227here. All right. So, thank you, Dr. Crane. Um, board members, you've seen Mr. Rainey's version of it. Um, I apologize for any confusion about which version we were actually considering. Um, are there Dr. Crane's judgment based on body language, you know, out there? Are there any any other sections other than this one section that board members had a question or are we fine incorporating those other changes as recommended? I know there's some discussion here. I want to reserve time for that, but I wanted to check to see if there were any others that stood out to you. All right. Well, then let's talk about this one. Vice Chair Swans. Thank you, Chair. Yeah. Thank you, Dr. Craig. Um I that piece under the elementary and middle school gives me pause because what we just heard

228from our elementary and middle school principles. This policy circumvents what they're doing and what's working in their buildings. So I would recommend and well I I would recommend not doing that under most schools and elementary school. Um and if the law says it, you know, I think based on what I've heard, I would prefer that that would be a little bit more. you have those restrictions for those two grade levels. High school, I have no problem with the language that was there. I I've stated that the policy should look different at all three grade levels based on what we've heard from the principles. It supports and the data supports that such as well, but that's the only piece that as is currently written, I can agree with um and yeah, thank you, Vice Chair Swanson.

229Thoughts or reaction from the rest of the board? What are your thoughts on that? M. Mhm. I actually asked Mr. Malone that same question of are we allowed to be more restrictive than the law? And so I'm going to leave it to you, Rod. So I mean, if this if one version passes as it is currently drafted, you will need some version of that language in your policy at some point. Um, but until it passes, you're free to to take that out. that you will need language similar to that language if either version of some compromise version passes because that language or votes and that's why he's including it. Now it does say consistent with the schoolwide policy but let let's focus in on that. Say what you said again with the consistent with a

230schoolwide policy regarding instructional use. Is that in the state legislation as opposed to a district-wide policy? Because that was the issue about consistency board members raised. Yeah, that's I got both versions there. And the language is pretty much identical in both both versions. Okay. So, it it would seem to me that if the language requires us to have a schoolwide policy, the district could as a district-wide policy have a district-wide policy saying what the schoolwide policy could be. Um yes, but the districtwide policy would have to provide that the schoolwide policy um would comply with the statute. That's what I'm saying though, that it says you have everything before consistent with a schoolwide policy regarding such instructional use. If I hear you right, you're saying everything prior to consistent with a schoolwide policy regarding instructional

231use is, you know, likely going to be in state law and required under any state policy. Is that correct? Say that again. [Music] You're saying this is required by state law in the pending legislation. And I'm trying and my question was about consistent with a schoolwide policy regarding such instructional use. Schools can have schoolwide policies. School districts can determine schoolwide policies for the entire district for purposes of consistency. We do this all of the time. I'm trying to find out what is actually required by state law in this pending legislation. If if we have to have this exact legislation, this exact wording, which is what I heard you say, could then we also have a district-wide policy regarding what consistent what what that use is. If I'm following, I think the answer is yes. So

232we could address Vice Chair Swanson's issues about consistency from school to school while also con complying with state wi with the proposed state law. That's what I'm trying to determine because that would influence whether we need I think we need would need to change this or not. And then after this we'll go to Miss Mafian and then Miss Cfield. I just have a friendly suggestion. Since there is no budget pass and they're still in conference, would it be appropriate for us to keep the struck in this section as we had passed this policy and work with our lobbyists and work with our weight delegation to share that we would appreciate if a K8 exemption would come that would better reflect our policy. and then we can always put it back in when needed and have

233this conversation so that we're not trying to interpret on the fly. I know that's not ideal. Ideally, we would be solid and consistent, but um I know that we have a vote in an hour on this. I I I I appreciate the suggestion and I appreciate the spirit that's offered. I need to think about it. Other board members might agree. I'm just giving my my No, no, no. I know it's all very quick. Okay. All right, Miss Cfield. So, um, if they do change something in the law and the way that they word it, doesn't that give us the minimum and the baseline and we can take it further? That's what I So, I would prefer to keep that in there because it's specifically saying what we expect as a school district, which is basically

234above and beyond what their minimum is, right? Well, no, no, no, no. I mean, I I I I guess what I'm saying is that we could keep that language, which is the minimum, but then as a district, we have a district-wide policy that applies as the schoolwide policy. So, you don't have a difference like in each of your elementary schools. So, they could each have different elements from school to school, right? that we would in Wake County, we would be consistent from school to school, which is one of the things we all talked about and it seemed like we all agre agreed on. And I think we can do that without violating, you know, what they're saying the the the legislation would say. I just need to validate that in case in case I'm wrong.

235I don't want to give you bad advice. Yeah. If things seem like then you're really kind of counterproductive toward your policy if that's what you're trying to get everybody to do and you're leading it back to the schools which is more that's what I'm saying. I mean I certainly think that this is not the law today. So to the extent you want to adopt it without that language today that's perfectly fine. And if the statute passes and this language is still in it, then then you can address it at that point. Um, you know, that's easier for you to do. I mean, that may be simplest, I guess. But I but but I guess are it sounds like you're not prepared to answer the question that I have and it's completely okay because I understand

236the time limit is the first time that we're asking. So, I I completely get it if you can, but the question I'm asking is that can we use that language that says consistent with a schoolwide policy regarding such instructional use and then come back and have district-wide policy, a districtwide R&B that sets out the standards for what such instructional use should look like. Here there here's the Yeah, I think the language the language in the statute that I am assuming Neil was referring but Neil was referring to says a wireless communication policy shall allow student use of a wireless communication device during instructional time as follows. They both start the exact same way. And then it says if authorized by a teacher for educational purposes or for using or for use in the event of

237an emergency is in one. The other one just says if authorized by a teacher for educational purposes and then the second sentence in both says the governing body which would be the board of education may establish parameters to be followed by a teacher in granting the authorizations. Well, then that sounds like it absolutely does grant the district the ability to have a district-wide policy. I I I that's how I read this. Yeah. Okay. Mr. Vice Swanson, how how does does that sound like we could amend that to say districtwide policy? Would that address your concern or do you still object to the rest of the language and be as ready? I'm just hearing what the principles are sharing and how their policies is working right now. for those grade levels. Okay. So I mean how's

238the policy? So we're we're at So are we prepared to adopt all of the other changes other than B and then we can consider B as an amendment as a vote. We'll just take a vote on in the boardroom. M does I I mean I have one just one thing and we've already passed it. Um, what is the additional one that we're I see that you guys added schools may develop additional restrictions. To me, that language just seems like we're getting ready to create another 199 islands again versus let this let the districtwide policy be the districtwide policy. Let's So, let's let's find that. It's under It's an A. I'm sorry. Well, no, because what they have it might be different than what you have because there was some additional changes that were recommended by

239the attorney. Okay. So, I want to make sure that you're seeing what they have. Dr. Crane, can you Yep. It's in the front part on city introduction of item number one spot right there. So originally um the original document recommended adding um schools may develop additional restrictions and the the Neil recommended schools may develop additional restrictions in schoolwide policies made available to students. Okay. I'm hearing from more members than just Miss Rice that there are questions about that section, too. So, let's take that out for now and we can consider it as an amendment. Um, then are there any other sections that board members object to or can we incorporate the other recommended amendments into the draft that we'll have tonight? And that way we'll have give staff a chance to incorporate those. That same

240line is also under high school. Yes, correct. All right. So, Miss Gordon has identified that as well that we also need to consider um as part as part of amendments to it. Now, I also want to be clear with board members just by accepting the lawyer amendments the the the the draft those that were drafted and then considering these others that were identified that's that also does not preclude the all the rest of us from offering our own amendments. if there are additional things that haven't been addressed or that were brought up but were not included maybe that wasn't clear that there was an amen that there was agreement um there were things that I'd identified in the last draft that we don't have time to address here now that we've exceeded our work session

241time but that I'll bring as a floor amendment and if you also have additional items that should be considered there we we'll consider those as well so I don't want anyone to think it's all or nothing that what we're what we have here tonight is you No, this is the final version and we're only going to hear those other amendments. We will vote tonight, but if you have other concerns, we will we will be here till we get this right. Okay. Okay. All right. Dr. Robinson, uh board chair, just so you're aware, I'm getting ready to share this document so everybody has it. So, I'm going to send it to you right now so you have the opportunity to look over it as you continue to do the work and the conversation moving forward. All

242right. Thank you. I have highlighted in yellow both of the statements about impose additional restrictions and I have highlighted in orange the letter B in the elementary school section. Um is this the version that you would like for me to upload ask Jim if he would kindly upload that to be considered in the material. There won't be a clean copy because sure clearly these are the time constraints being considered. Well actually I have a clean copy ready. Um so I can do that and just highlight these two sections. Is it more clear to everyone if we just keep it in the same format that we've looked at. Okay let's do that. Thank you Dr. Keep it in this format. Okay. All right. All right. So we are at 5:45. We have delayed the start of

243our general meeting. I would like to end the work session at this time and then have us go into our full meeting unless there is any other issue for work session regarding a policy we need to talk about now knowing we still will have the opportunity to amend the policy in our general meeting. Okay. All right. Excellent. All right. Then I will call this session of our work session adjourned. Thanks. I'm very happy.