Work Session 1-19-21

001all right say good afternoon welcome everyone to our wake county board of education work session it's january 19th uh it's about 2 35 and so we will get started we are here in the board conference room at crossroads we have everyone with us except mr hegarty and i'm soon he will be joining with us shortly so i'm here with our now eight board members and superintendent moore uh we'll get started with our agenda we've got several items on the agenda for today the first item is an overview of the 2020 2021 magnet recruitment uh effort and that's being brought to us by wade martin kimberly lane and tamani anderson powell so i will turn it over at this point to uh first superintendent moore any comments or do you want to dive right in with

002mr martin um for the magnet recruitment just we are in the middle of our magnet recruitment period we do still have a couple of weeks for the application period and thought it would be helpful for the board to understand how that's going go ahead and turn it over to wade all right thank you so much good afternoon chair sutton superintendent moore and members of the board we are excited to be here this afternoon to share an update with you about the important work happening to support our 2021-22 magnet school recruitment efforts with me today is kimberly lane our new senior director of magnet and curriculum enhancement programs and temani andersen powell director in our magnet and prison enhancement programs following a review of some relevant data and an overview of our district and school efforts

003since october we will be happy to answer any questions that the board may have i'm miss lane at this time i will turn it over to you thank you mr martin and um hello to the board i think this is the first time i've had the privilege of being in front of you in wake county i did want to just briefly introduce myself since this was my first time um i'm an educator 20 plus years and i've been paid 20 plus years i jokingly say that my mother was a teacher and that was the time when we spent all snow days all work days in the school with with the teachers so i was there with my mother a lot started substituting when i was a high school senior because i was in a different

004district that was long before substitute certification days during college i decided that journalism was a better path for me and did some work for 15 years in business and industry and then had my children in school and the principal said something to me in the hallway about it was time for me to join their ranks because there's something about education it just pulls to you and so i went back through the nc teach program taught middle school was a high school magnet principal before joining the district office in two urban districts as the advanced academics and magnet director and then i have been in wake for six months and very honored to be here with a steamed group of colleagues most important thing to know about me is i'm a new grandmother i have a

005one-year-old granddaughter and another one on the way to the end of march so i love children that's why we do what we do so thank you massage for going ahead and advancing the slide i think it's always important as we talk about our magnet programs that we revisit the principles that the board has approved so that we recognize that our programs are important as we work to reduce high concentrations of poverty that we promote diversity particularly through school integration maximizing the use of school facilities as well as providing innovative and or expanding educational opportunities next slide please just a quick visit with our magnet application and selection objectives and there is a link included there if anyone wants to visit that we do consider two key factors when we're considering magnet applications and the first

006is the projected overall socioeconomic status of the school to which the student is assigned for next year as well as the socioeconomic status of the area where the applying student resides so as we look at these numbers it's important to keep in mind that the entry grade siblings our kindergarten sixth and ninth grade students of returning magnet students are guaranteed selection and i'll pull that out in the data when you see that in just a moment we do provide priority for our students with magnet status and to base students following their program pathway we mentioned the priority for students assigned to schools living in areas considered high or medium socioeconomic status and we reserve 5 to ten percent of seats at each magnet school above and beyond the priorities and that selection is based on

007a lottery number so as mr martin said and and superintendent moore we did want to bring you information and i think it's important that we are looking at comparative data so because we are still in the midst of banknote recruitment we wanted to take a look at where we stood as we finished the year so we are comparing numbers from october through december of to our current numbers through december the 31st of 20. so year to day magnet year-round schools are down a little 319 number of applications from and our early colleges are down about 512 applications from 2019. we did want to note that we had in mind that because our enrollment is down throughout the district that we wanted to allow as much time as possible for our families to learn more about

008the virtual environment and planning for next year and in doing so we extended the early college deadline and i think it's important to know that we did add almost applications during that expenses the next slide actually breaks down for you again the comparisons are the same time frame october to december 2019 versus october to december 2020 and it is broken out by grade span so you see elementary middle high and then our early colleges separately we'll also see the numbers um we because we do add the siblings automatically that second column are those automatic editions at the middle and high school levels so you see that we're slightly down in elementary um about 14 percent down from middle school we are up almost 3 percent for high school with an overall total of being down

009about seven percent that's the 319 count our early colleges were off a little bit more and that's the 20 almost 29 percent one of the things that we wanted to bring to you is not only how we support our magnet programs in terms of recruitment that's always a continuous improvement process tamani and tasha our marketing team working with the magnet coordinators do a great job every year of making sure we are reassessing our recruitment efforts what's working what's not where it's working and really trying to improve upon that process but the virtual environment has been even more of a challenge this year so tamani's going to share on with the board several things that we've done um that we normally would do but also in addition to that it's monty i'll turn it over to

010you hi everybody good afternoon thanks for allowing us to share thank you for this time to continue to promote our magnet schools we are always excited to share information about these amazing schools and programs so you'll see on this slide that this year of course all of the things that we had done in person last year we had to pivot quickly and host in a virtual setting so it took us some time we were able to find a platform that worked beautifully for our purpose um we are used of course having far more people attend um but we're excited for the people that did get a chance to attend our events that were held virtually so at these events that are listed i just want to share with you that um each school have their

011own virtual booth so when you access the site um the platform then parents could scroll down and click on a virtual booth to get information from directly from the school from the principal from the magna coordinator from teachers about the program um and our schools got really innovative with ways to share information so they created a virtual google classrooms with links inside or other opportunities and other meets where parents could learn a little bit more about their program the early colleges um set up a room just for students to share with other students or for parents to share with other parents or for specific teachers to share information with parents who are interested in maybe that particular program at vernon malone or northway so i'm really excited about this platform tasha and i've already talked

012about next year even when we do things in person we're going to continue to host some virtual events it was wonderful because parents who didn't even live in wake county didn't even live in north carolina were able to attend those events in anticipation of moving here so um that was we felt like that was a win for us uh we will continue of course to work with our schools um each school is hosting their own a virtual event they're doing lots of um different ways to share with families we will continue to work with schools to host those beth you can go to the next slide again we've we've pivoted and so where parents would come to the building at crossroads and maybe schedule a time to meet with me um i created a calendar

013where parents can now schedule a google meet with me so um thursdays and fridays and now i've added mondays i set aside um 20 minutes for each meeting where parents can just join me and they can talk virtually face to face but i think it's been really helpful to be able to see the parents while i'm talking to them i continue to monitor our um email we have an email address that's just magnet center so they don't have to send it to t anderson powell they can just send it to magnus center and i watch that daily and of course as we get closer to the end of the application period those emails go up so i just want to let you know that i'm up late at night helping those parents because often they're

014emailing me a question that i can quickly help them with and they can go ahead and complete their application typically we host um in-person virtual in-person parent info sessions we've been doing those virtually as well but now we've scheduled some during the day and some in the evening so that's another thing that we will continue next year we'll still host some in person but we'll do some evening virtual sessions that will help parents who work during the day it will give them an opportunity to learn and ask questions i started two years ago doing facebook lives at first i was just doing them in my office now we're taking the show on the road and this year especially it was great to get into the schools and give parents a chance to see at least

015inside some of the classrooms some of the things were staged we had children who could come in and maybe talk about some of the activities that they might do at their school so you can see we've gotten lots of views from those especially because parents can't get in the building but we've tried to provide an opportunity for them to see inside the building see the classroom see the program in action so that was a great pivot for us you can go to the next slide we always kind of have district based recruitment those are things that tasha and i do to either reach out ourselves to day cares preschools moms groups or how we support magnet coordinators with doing that so we've done several virtual plts to help magnet coordinators make that transition to virtual

016a lot of it was just letting the magnet coordinators share amongst themselves there are some super creative magnet coordinators and they would do things i was like oh my god tasha look at this and then we would ask them if they would share that information with other coordinators um we did have to move to a different platform booth central um it's been amazing to work with in the first couple of times it takes a little bit so once i learned it we did lots of training to support students to support schools on creating these virtual booths that were really engaging for parents we continue to do outreach to daycares and preschools and i've done several virtual preschool events i have another one tomorrow evening at 2 30. and then this year i created a how

017to apply video so i did screenshots of step by step how to apply to a magnet school how to apply to early college school we've shared those with school counselors i've sent information to charter schools to be sure that those families are aware of the application period and help them with trying to be sure that they are able to complete the magnet application again you'll see here the facebook live and google meets and of course we increased or tried to increase our target outreach for our first generation college going families so we hosted an early college fair that was on a saturday but we also hosted another early college fair that was during the week in the evening and we really tried to reach out to schools in eastern and southern wake county to increase

018the number of first-gen families that are aware and that applied for early colleges beth you can advance this slide there we go um so this year we also we always do mailings but we've increased our mailing this year to families um we've really tried to increase our our ad placement in places where we know families are looking wral carolina parent carey magazine we've done e-blast we've had we've recently last week had a social media training on how can we better utilize our social media and be sure that it's being seen in the right places by the right people for applying we have created our event flyers and made sure that elementary and middle school counselors have those to share those with their fifth and eighth grade parents as they're looking to move to middle and

019high school again last year we actually tasha i'm not going to take credit tasha worked with the office of student assignment to create a digital district map that shows preschools in the target area so you heard kim mentioned earlier about the selection process and how we are looking to select families whose base school and home address are considered medium and high that's how we create that economic diversity that is the purpose of magnet schools and so we now have a map where we can identify daycares and preschools in those target areas and really try to engender relationships with them to help those families that would that have a better chance of being selected to encourage them to apply um we also supported them by creating new marketing materials new outreach efforts um we've just tried

020to we meaning tasha really about the marketing materials have really tried to up our game as we look to try to engage parents in a very different environment you can advance to the next slide and schools of course are doing the same thing so on our website on the magnet website there is one page kind of a one-stop page where you can access every school's link for their recruitment information schools have created virtual tours and videos to highlight their themes um again those schools have used that digital map to reach out to daycares and preschools that in the area that they serve they've done direct mail to people they've engaged with parents of course on social media they're also doing facebook live and google meets and the early colleges are continuing to outreach to reach

021out to those first-gen families we really want to get those students involved and we understand that we're gonna pivot a little bit next year and start trying to work with maybe fourth graders and seventh graders to engender that relationship early so that eighth grade or fifth grade is not the first time they've ever heard of an early college that we really want to help those families begin thinking earlier about being a part of an early college and what that really means you can advance to the next slide and so this is just an example go ahead kim i just wanted to give a shout out for our principals our magnet principals and those magnet coordinators because tamani and tasha have done amazing work at the district in terms of that pivot but our schools have

022just really met the challenge of all the work that's been required as we pivoted to this virtual environment tamani mentioned earlier about the different media advertising we just wanted to spell that out so you could see that in print and um as superintendent moore said we do have a couple more weeks in our magnet recruitment season so we will be back with you um in february to really analyze the data at the end in terms of the end results again thank you for having us today and for sharing um we appreciate the opportunity and excited about all the things that we've been able to accomplish this year and look forward to the the next two weeks of recruitment as we go heavy toward the end so we will open it up for questions um if

023the board has any that they'd like to to ask so thank you for that uh update uh mr martin mrs lane uh mrs anderson powell uh i also want to say welcome to you uh mrs lane uh we are grateful to have you and congratulations on your status as a new grandmother thank you board members just wanted to make you aware that although just as a point of reference miss lane is served in a position that was previously served by dr beth cochran um so for those that may not i think she retired right she so um so with that any any questions uh board members at this time mr scott thank you mr chairman thank you so much for this presentation i know that uh we've all been curious about the efforts and understanding

024just how much covet has impacted recruiting for our magnet schools and i was just just wanted to ask because in my district in particular there are some of our magnet schools that exist to try to retain um students and we understand right now this has been you know this is this is a challenge for for all of our schools right now with um with market share and i was just curious if if there are any other efforts that have been that you could share with us that have been taking place at some of these schools that that are our equity magnets so i'd like to share ms scott one thing that we looked at this year we know that the equity magnets in their location sometimes hinders their ability to attract the target market that

025we're that we're looking for with other magnet schools so this year we worked with student assignment to look at the number of available seats at those schools and then look at considering students along the entire selection priority so you heard ms lane talk about you know high socioeconomic but for zebulun zebulun windell smith and hodge elementary east garner middle and garner high school this year we decided to look at the number of seats and then consider all of the selection priorities all the way down to low low to help them better fill some of those magnet seats that they have i appreciate that so much i know that our magnet coordinators at those schools do an excellent job balancing needs that look very different from from some other magnet schools in the county and they

026do a great job and as a the parent of a rising sixth grade student we've enjoyed the magnet tours and i do just want to give a shout out to uh to our magnet schools and all the work that you've done because the the fairs the virtual affairs have been uh outstanding i really appreciate the the outreach from the schools and the follow-up that they offer it's it's what we've experienced just as a family in the mix of that has been great so thank you so much and i appreciate the answer to that question thank you we also worked with student assignment to look at students who were who live in that area but not attending and to do some outreach with those families to maybe try to draw them back to the school so

027we are did work some this year and we'll continue to work with student assignment to identify those families and try to do some direct marketing to them and attract them back to those schools i appreciate that that feedback so much and um with a lot of the new neighborhoods coming in too i mean it's always a great time to to be able to introduce ourselves to their where we have the the little you know this is where you whatever that's called we're in a new neighborhood when you you go into to pick out your house so i appreciate all of that thank you so much mrs kushner thank you chair sutton and to piggyback off of that question that's probably more for mr martin um if we are expanding um because sometimes the base school

028that is not a magnet parents are looking at all these virtual tours for magnet schools but their base school remains certainly in and especially now in a pandemic where they can't go visit their base school is an unknown so have we thought about expanding also marketing and just information online for our um other schools that aren't magnets but that parents need information so that they can make the best um educated decision for their student whether or not to apply to a magnet or to remain at their base school because i don't want us to and to miss scott's point we you know thinking of market share across the entire county i think we need to look at that as a school choice um model and priority for your officer miss christian that's a great question

029and one of the things i would share with you is we did not expand the current platform that we used for the magnet fair to all schools our the magnet team in conjunction with kelly creach's office did actually establish some protocols for us to be able to host some on-site very small guided tours and that information was shared with with our i know our magnet principles um moving forward as we continue to transition forward that could we could certainly continue to expand that to all schools but we were able to identify and create some very easy to follow guidelines and protocols for us to be able to host and obviously that was this was pretty free christmas break holiday but we were able to actually facilitate some on-site small guided tours for families that um

030didn't have an option for that virtual connection uh to our schools and that was for any school or just the magnet selection we it began with our with our magnet schools but now that we have that protocols and practice in place we could certainly expand that to all schools okay thank you um that's good to know and i again just want to underscore the need for us to just promote every single one of our 192 schools and i was glad to see the uptick in the in the high school level um that was intriguing to see um at the magnet so congratulations for all the great work thank you thank you mrs hegarty thank you mr chairman just uh quickly i'm not surprised to see some of the applications dip a bit in the environment

031but i was curious if those declines were across the board if you saw them to be more unbalanced you know some schools continue to receive applications other schools might have dropped more than others and why you thought that the early college applications were what seemed to be a lot lower than they've been in the past well i'll start and then i'll let certainly miss lane finish up because i know that she worked closely with mr dominico really analyzing the early college data um one of one of the first things that we talked about as a team as we looked at that dip in early college and we really that surprised us honestly because that smaller more close-knit learning environment we thought might be even more appealing at this time one of the things that we

032kind of came to a conclusion around is while we have really done a phenomenal job as a district in identifying protocols and practices to keep students safe we kind of lose control of that that process as as some of our students transition onto the college campuses and i think there's a lot of unknown as early in the school year um college has transitioned from everyone being on campus to off campus to virtual i think there's still some unknowns in terms of what next year may look like for some of our college partners we are encouraged in that once we once they have kind of a standard platform that we're hoping that they'll be able to share with the community that potentially through uh similar to what we do this year with some second chance opportunity

033that we'd love to be able to open that back up for families that were interested but just weren't ready to commit with the unknowns with some of our college and university partners and i will speak to the question about looking across we have worked closely with student assignment to look at that school by school data and we don't see a particular dip at any one school it just seems to reflect the district's enrollment in in terms of that but we'll continue to look at that at and we'll again come back to you in february with those final numbers i do think um mr martin's our talking with the early college principals and asking that very question about what they're seeing are a number of things part of it was the timeline for the early colleges

034so keeping in mind if we hadn't extended the deadline it would have ended before the christmas break and at that point families were still trying to assess kind of where we were finishing out this year and thinking about next year so we are very hopeful that january is going to bring much more in terms of volumes of applications as families have moved past the holidays and are starting to think about next year so we saw that reflected in extending the deadline for early colleges by the increase of the 500 applications and we're again hopeful during that second chance that we can make another strong push that sounds great i appreciate those answers thank you uh i wanted to ask a question and and this question is for all of you all and probably superintendent moore

035as well um when you when we think about we've often prided ourselves on offering choices to families and we were even at one point sort of using the term pretty often choice with a purpose um so as we think about that and increase the offerings particularly in our non-magnet schools that sometimes even puts pressure on our magnet schools to to to uh you know embrace some of the goals and the work that we're doing around keeping our schools balanced healthy and integrated what are the policy or fiscal if any considerations for the board uh and what are we doing in terms of thinking about emerging magnet themes or that sort of thing and i appreciate the part here and focused on the marketing and promotion of what sort of proactive things are we thinking about

036to stay ahead of the game as we continue to keep both our magnet and non-magnet schools and programs strong so what what are the what are the i guess my question is around the policy and any fiscal implications or considerations for the board that we need to be thinking about uh as you all continue to do the fine work that you're doing around strengthening our magnet programs i'll mention a few things i think first of all understanding and how our community understands that school magnet schools and application schools are open to different parts of the community based on what families may have an interest in and what their children may have an interest in schools that schools may offer programs that are not magnet schools or application schools and those programs serve the base community

037they're not open to other families to apply to and so i think understanding where those are and how that happens so that we've got good language when we're talking to our families about what their options are is important i also think that there's been some conversation that the board has had here and there some of it is part of what we work with that we've done with rti as well around whether or not how we offer choice to families might need to be more strategic in the sense of right now all calendar application families who receive a calendar application that is listed for their address receive neighborhood bus service is that something that facilitates or does not facilitate the larger goals of the district so and and those become individual sort of school by school

038type decisions can get very very complicated to to deal with but those but that's one place um just in in levels of transportation so i think that um as you move forward what you've got to look at is the data of who's in our schools and what is by choice what is by assignment what is by transfer those are all different application transfer base right all of those calendar you know that's a piece of it and we've done some of that work in the past um and generally what we have found is that it's families who choose magnets to have very specific reasons and background or history around why they choose those calendars is a little fuzzier um and uh and then of course our um early college schools have specific criteria that we try

039to shoot for in a percentage of the folks that are accepted there so i think it's it's really looking at slicing all of the choices and the pieces that go with each choice around in particular things like transportation or calendar and determining whether or not you want to slice any thinner based on the overall goals and objectives of the district so i appreciate that so with that being said then how not sure how to ask this but what what then is the appropriate balance in terms of marketing if you will when you look at this presentation and that we do the the heavy push on magnets but as you talked about the calendar schools the application schools how do we market that sort of comprehensive effort so that there is an understanding in the community

040and then parents of all the pieces that you mentioned and how all these sort of work together or in a sort of an interconnected sort of way does that make sense yeah i think to just i think we have to align on clarity around the purpose of application magnet programs in schools and be able to specifically market with that vision and mission in mind so that there's not a lack of understanding you know this you know we run into this when i said earlier about school-based programs like cte academies those are occasionally we will get requests from families who want their child to participate in a cte academy that's at a school but they're based at another school and and there's not a lack there's a lack of understanding that those academies belong to the

041school and serve the popular the base population of that school they're not open for application but you know we run into issues where you as a high school you don't always know which kids are coming to you so you'll receive an application from a family that you thought was coming to you and you review it but they're not actually in your attendance area so that can cause some complications so there's work that we would have to do internally to ensure that as we communicate externally folks are clear but it's also very helpful for the the full board and staff and everyone to be aligned and on the same page with the mission and the vision and be able to to communicate that thank you for that because i know you know we often hear our

042parents talk about as they come but particularly new parents to the system there's so many schools so many offerings uh it's hard to figure out how it all works uh and then they see so many uh options on the menu if you will but often they don't have access to all of them and so we've talked a lot about here as a board those being real choices for families and they're being able to access those choices so all right again thank you staff for that presentation we'll move on to the next item on our agenda and that is an overview and presentation on a better wake uh and so i'm gonna turn it over to superintendent moore and we've got some special guests i think from outside the district that'll come and share with us

043this afternoon thank you chair sutton um and sometime in the last couple of weeks i had an opportunity to um meet with virtually adrian cole the ceo of the greater raleigh chamber of commerce and dania perry who works in their office and um on the initiative of a better wake which has been messaged some in the community in the last few days quite a bit so their request was as they look at a better wake as a community initiative the role and potential of partnership with the school district in this work moving forward it is you'll see you'll see why they're asking that as as donya goes through the presentation i'm not sure that adrian cole was able to join us today she had a conflict so she may not be on it may just

044be donya who's presenting but i'll go ahead and turn it over to him because i do believe he's on good afternoon how's everybody doing doing well sir how are you doing good doing good i apologize that adrian will not be able to join us but uh so you're kind of stuck with me unfortunately um but uh thank you um kathy for the introduction really excited to share with you the work about a better way just to kind of give you some context my name is donya perry i serve as the director of equitable economic development with wake county economic development which is a division of the raleigh chamber and at the chamber also serve and lead their diversity equity and inclusivity work after the you know the tragic events the murder of george floyd uh

045brianna taylor there's been this this renewed energy in this spirit of our collective community to really focus on what can we do to help support our anti-racist work and to look at structural and infrastructure racism and in around may i would say that initiated by mayor mayor baldwin by our county commissioners other leaders within the community folks coalescing around what are our next steps how do we collectively create an opportunity to really dissect some of the disparities that we have within our county and community and so that along with the leadership of the naacp gerald gibbons jr we we coalesced around this a better weight movement and ultimately it became a space where we can actually design and pull together a collective commitment in which we will all galvanize under uh if you can go

046to the next slide so our charging our commitment and go to the next slide please you can read it but i'll i'll i'll go ahead and state it just not only because i think it's a great statement but a statement of commitment but i think it's rather powerful we acknowledge there is a high quality of life in the review for many but for those who have been historically underserved underrepresented and marginalized there is a different reality altogether that reality is rooted in systemic racism it has permeated the justice system created monumental education health and wealth disparities between black and brown uh and white americans and resulted in discriminatory practices this moment is the culmination of such injustice and this statement that we are that we are seeking to gain some momentum and support uh we

047are really going to dive deep into if you can move uh forward a couple our vision is focusing in on four primary pillars looking at addressing education economic mobility and inclusive prosperity health equity and criminal justice reform so when we talk about structural and infrastructure racism we're talking about really understanding where uh we see disparities in these four areas um it's interesting because most people uh ask the question about this movement being led by the raleigh chamber and uh but again this being sort of a collection of a community of a community uh we are serving as a convener uh but we also want to make sure that we help drive this momentum and really create an awareness around why it's important uh build our fluency in this faith so when we talk about structural

048racism understand the systems that we've identified you can move forward please so our ask of uh not only the board but our community at large we had a formal launch yesterday on mlk day during the mlk interfaith breakfast uh we have been pushing the website and we're asking for your commitment as a community member to commit to this statement we're asking for you to share this information within your own networks uh within your colleagues within your uh your in your personal lives social media and then as a school board asking you to endorse uh the commitment statement and your endorsement all that we ask for is to you provide your logo to sign up to pledge that this is important and it lines it aligns with the value proposition of the school board so far

049we have and if you don't mind please moving the slide forward we have these companies that have already signed up we have i would say at this point triple this amount these companies were part of our initial collective in coming up with the statement along with a couple other entities but we're collecting right now organizations and businesses from around the county that are committing to this advance this slide please now in our website this is our linchpin so what in on the website we've uh created a clearinghouse of information for an action guide if you will of practices that you can um that you can solicit to help support in our races movements as an individual community member but also as an organizational and or company we are also asking for you to share this

050information on your social medias that means sharing the toolkit as well if you don't mind advancing the slide and this is just a picture of our cup which is live now so you can definitely check it out at a betterweight.com move forward please and our toolkit this toolkit that we're asking for you all to use in your promotions if you decide to align with the work we have a one-pager sample press release some email templates and also some social media towels we've also released a video that you can also use to share just i think it's around a minute a minute and 15 seconds just talking about the initiative our goal at the end of the day is and what we're soliciting now is to work with rti uh which is to endeavor upon a

051nine-month study that will dissect those four systems and really provide us some recommendations and some guide rails on what needs to change in regards to practices policies and programs that can help us dismantle systemic racism at the end of the at the end of the process we hope to have a forward community facing dashboard that will give us the metrics needed so that we can ensure that we're actually moving the needle again we recognize that there are there are a lot of detractors in this movement there's a lot of individuals that do not necessarily think structural racism is a thing i think it's important for us to be able to justify it empirically to also be able to show that the opportunities to be able to make change uh based upon like i said like

052i said earlier the policies practices and programs our lead partners again with the city of raleigh county raleigh chamber triangle dei alliance and also our our local naacp so we're really excited about the presenting to you but also excited about the opportunity that that this holds for our future so are there any questions i'm more than happy to answer them kanye i thank you for the presentation good to see you good to hear from you uh and certainly appreciate the work and all that you have put in as well as chamber uh to move this effort to this point are there any questions from any board members at this time that's mahathi hi thank you for sharing this i'm curious what is your outreach to the other chambers of commerce across wake county i love

053that well and to be completely honest uh that is why adrian's not on this call right now we had to schedule uh we we scheduled two accompanying meetings and so we're meeting with all the chambers to talk about their commitment we've met with them individually but we're doing a formal meeting to talk about their engagement and we have not received any pushback today so really excited about them using it to also promote within their business communities thank you but don't tell her i told you that no one's recording this mr scott thank you i very much appreciate this information and i was trying to think of a a way to share this last week my husband had had shared just sort of anecdotally some of the information that his company which is a major company

054that has over 160 000 employees around the world and part of their anti-racism and their their equity work uh he was reading to me the slide which of course um or no he wasn't no he was just giving me the general idea he was certainly not reading it to me um but he he was sharing that with me and and he said something and it made me realize that you know this this work is important not just to dismantle these systems for the for the sake because that is the right thing to do that is something that that we need to do but this is also i mean this is the work um that our children that our students will um will be expected to also understand in their in their studies at major universities

055and and you know also with major corporations that they go on to work for and i think that um i mean i i know we certainly have not i'm very supportive of this this collaboration that i see in wake county especially with chambers and i think this work the wake county public school system is already committed to doing we see that in our office of equity affairs and how much we respect the work that they do so i just wanted to to share that thank you thank you mr scott mrs kushner thank you chair sutton and mr perry for being here today because i think the 10 months in this pandemic this global camp pandemic both um globally and in our nation has exposed all four of the focus areas that that you highlighted the

056gaps in inequities in education and economic mobility and health equity as well as a criminal justice system so this work is incredibly important and i appreciate the chamber taking the leadership as a convener so for our community thank you mrs cash um thank you miss mahaffey for also mentioning other chambers i think it'll be really good for this board since we are a county board to hear from all the different chambers in our county and then when it comes to what our school's role in this is that it's one thing to take a viewpoint but if we don't take actions such as integrating our schools and taking the magnet program very seriously it's all words and not action so i just want to emphasize that as we're talking about magnet recruitment and our schools being

057closed that there's a lot to be done by the county school system in order to take action rather than do words that's my point of view but i'll be listening to what other chambers how they feel about this and then we as a county can look at that thank you mrs cash ms johnson osler thank you thank you i certainly echo the sentiments and thank um the chamber and um the ceo ms kohl's for leading this effort and certainly um glad to see that we've seen several leading businesses in our community already sign on to this and very similarly i guess that really is ultimately my question um no doubt about it i think this very much aligns many of these companies had people serve on our strategic planning task force and we talked exactly

058about the impact of all of these things to globalization and what our young people will have to look forward to in their careers and continuing education efforts so i guess my ultimate question is in terms of actions and doing other than signatories how else do you anticipate the schools and or the entire district engaging as a partner in action and not just signatories i love that question the you know our goal is once we start to like this our our rti project will start in its first three months in identifying sort of an advisory committee in any of those particular pillars and so what we like to do is be able to bring the school system into some of those conversations to talk about you know and as they're building the recommendations and also pulling

059on national data experts we're pulling together brookings institute opportunity insights at harvard and also policy link along with a couple other entities to help us support building together an actual set of recommendations so we need some local input not just from the school school system but also also from the other pillars to help create again those recommendations that we're going to ask of each entity now you know the chamber you know we are not um you know we don't have the capacity to hold anybody account accountable but what we're asking is for this to be a collection of the willing uh to take this information to take this report uh to take the recommendations and to and then to act upon those so we're hoping that this can have a really great intersection for the

060work that you're already doing but maybe you can uncover some gaps as well to help support and justify the work that you'd like to see in the future for the improvements that you would like to see in the future does that make sense it does thank you um so one clarifier when you say school engagement is that at the onset with rti as they developed the recommendations or on the back end of reviewing or both um this is both but more importantly at the beginning um you know the first three months we call it where it's our phase one which is just collecting data and collecting input um and so once we pull together both local and national experts then that'll you know that'll really help provide us a really strong baseline okay thank you

061dr martin thank you and thank you dania for the presentation i'm really excited to see this work uh getting kicked off it reminds me of our own work that we started a couple years ago with rti and that in that work i think we recognize that the school system can't work alone likewise the county and the chamber can't work alone so this really needs to be partnership and i think it's it points to you know if we become a little bit of students of history you know the the the work uh integrating the raleigh city schools and the wake county schools back in the mid to late 70s had such a major impact on on making our community what it is today both from an educational standpoint and an economic development standpoint and a quality

062of life standpoint and i really sincerely believe that we're at a time that if the business community and the education community and the greater community come together we can have that same kind of impact um going forward in the future so i look forward to the partnership we all need to roll up our sleeves i think people have said it's got to be more than just signatures and statements but but real hard work but i'm excited about the work so thank you for um coming and being part of that effort thank you my pleasure i i want to again thank you for the work and i just want to share a quick little story as dr martin touched on some some history back in about i think 1995 in rocky mount and this was a

063time in rocky mount where hardee's was still headquartered in rocky mount at that time what is now uh pnc was rbc century bank it was also headquartered in rocky mount and at that time you had the oldest and most prestigious country club in rocky mount that in 1995 still did not allow blacks as members of that country club and so the business community and several ceos thought that that was a tremendous economic development barrier when you had companies like rbc centur hardy's consolidated diesel company which at that time and i think still does made the only diesel engines for dodge ram pickup trucks and that sort of thing so you have premier employers in rocky mount that stood up and said we needed to make a change in rocky mount and so they approached the

064chamber and some of the folks and names that you you all might remember names like angela bryant carol landis who just passed away uh here were part of this effort to start a program called common ground and at that time in 95 it was believed to be one of the first if not the first efforts by a chamber of commerce to address and improve race and community relations and they chose a young man who hadn't been long out of college to be the first executive director of that program and help get it off the ground uh and that young man was me and so i spent about two years uh working in rocky mountain my hometown uh working to in a similar effort is this uh that the chamber thought was important enough to address

065our race and community relations had some success there and then that was in i think about 1997 when i left there and went to become the executive director for the state naacp and so i'm excited about this effort and the role that the chamber is playing to address this important effort excited about the partnership with the chamber and the naacp and other partners that that i recognize and i'm excited about and so i certainly would like to commit [Music] my effort enthusiasm and that of this board as we express our interest uh to help support this effort and make it be as strong as it can be and be a strong partner uh in the way that we can so i would ask the board to consider at at this point we will uh think

066about uh donya the this request uh and the best way that we can uh signal our interest and commitment um so let us get back to you uh and board members i'm thinking about anything from a uh formal resolution um or other things that we can do to certainly sign on uh as a partner lead partner if that is an opportunity dania uh to to again uh signal the interest of the wake county school system so people allow us to think about this a little bit uh talk with our superintendent uh more and and figure out a way that we can best uh uh be a meaningful partner uh because again with education being one of the the key focus areas uh we certainly want to be a part of uh and i think uh

067figure out how we might play uh a lead and significant and i think to miss johnson hodgson's point an actionable role uh and that this is not just a report or set of recommendations that that sits on the shelf uh or that becomes something just in uh you know a piece of rhetoric but that we are engaged in some meaningful uh and actionable ways to close the despairs and the gaps that we see in our community oh awesome thank you i truly appreciate the time do you want me to call y'all back in 10 minutes or i'm not gonna want you to send me a text at about 15. okay all right you know we will uh we'll we'll certainly we'll like say we'll we'll work with our superintendent and i'm sure that she and

068adrian uh uh will will connect and perhaps sit down with you and uh and adrian and again figure out the most appropriate way uh for us to move forward in this endeavor so thank you for the information and uh good luck on the work absolutely thank you you all take care thank you sir all right the next item uh is an update on the vaccine for culver 19. wake county human services is with us and so again i'll turn over to superintendent moore and she will introduce our guests as well from the public health team with wake county to bring us an update on vaccinations thank you chair sutton we as chair sutton has mentioned we have guests with us this afternoon from wake county government who are going to be able to provide an

069overview of what's going on with the covet 19 vaccination process and structures in our community we know that this is an item of interest for our board and our educational community so i thought it was helpful to invite them and ask them to provide that overview joining us this afternoon are jonna sharp who is well known to the members of this board she's the chief operating officer for wake county government and she has a couple of folks who are possibly with her jason whittis who is the pharmacy director for wake county public health and or dr king mcdonald who is the deputy human services director and medical director and i will turn it over to john how to get started thank you superintendent moore uh yes it's good to be with you this afternoon board

070members and we're just gonna get right to it and dr jason witus is going to walk you through a brief presentation about where we are with the vaccine and then we'll be happy to address any questions that you have for us thank you johna morning everyone good morning everyone so today i'm going to go over some of our basic mass vaccination campaign that we've been underway with so we started the week of december 22nd and this document that you see here was provided to us early on in the planning phase from the cdc from their playbook and this was the intended course of the vaccine rollout so we are still all the way to the left in limited doses available column we are right where the the line starts to go up on the graph

071and where you will see the red line vertically around 660 million cumulative doses available that's where you'll see doses of the vaccine or vaccine products widely available into the market right so not only in local health departments or hospital systems but also at pharmacies your local primary care doctor urgent cares similar to the flu shot right where it is just broadly available but we are not there yet and we have very limited doses available to us which i'll demonstrate in the later slide next slide please so what is the state and north carolina department of health and human services doing to help us at this time so they are in charge of all the phasing and priority groups so they're using the latest cdc guidance and knowledge of statewide conditions to establish priority groups for

072vaccine providers to which us the county are following these guidelines and phasing so i know we've seen a lot of pivoting and changes but on the next slide when we get there i'll show you what our current and the latest phases and priority groups are for the state and which groups have actually been activated to come get their vaccine so they've also been in charge of vaccine distribution so they licensed vaccine providers they're currently four in wake county with broad distribution so that is us here at the health department unc rex duke raleigh and wake med they also determine distribution quantities and allocations and they the state gets their distribution and allocation quantities from the federal level and it also has a lot to do with and you might have heard this a lot in

073the news of how many doses are currently on hand at the facilities as well as how many doses have been administered and as a state as a whole we're being looked at to determine what our state's allocation is as well and this is a weekly basis a weekly process so we find out on thursday or friday the week prior of what our week of the next week's doses will be they've also provided us with the state's cova vaccine management system or cvms which is a statewide electronic registration system that's in place but it's not yet live to the public so the public cannot log on and self register and figure out what group or phase they might be in lastly and that's still a manual process that the local health departments or hospital systems or

074vaccine providers have to manually upload everyone into the cvms system lastly they've helped us with public information so establishing avenues for access in terms of location so that's the year shot your spot nc website as well as education about the vaccine availability safety and efficacy of the vaccine next slide please so these are the groups so we are currently as of today at 8 30 this morning we moved into group 2 which is older adults prior to last week we had been planning to move into older adults but only 75 plus and now we are moving into group two which is 65 plus also all health care workers that are public and patient-facing were moved up from what was formerly known as group 1b2 and 1v3 up to group one and one also includes long-term

075care staff and residents and all people in hospital settings who are or deceding care medical examiner's office who have a high risk of coming in contact with someone who's coveted positive home health workers as well so in wake county we have a disproportionate share of health care workers so the number of people who fall into group one we also have a very large population of group two so we have around 180 000 people who would qualify in groups one and group two um and that is the current um groups that are active we were we were admitted instructed by the state that the state will move forward and activate groups as they deem appropriate based on allocations and population and and the rate of vaccination so group three is frontline essential workers which was being

076followed under the acip recommendations of those defined war health uh for line essential workers um but there's no definitive answer at this point so we're not sure if they're going to remain as those same acip defined frontline essential workers so grocery store workers us postal service teachers things like that or if that might expand then group four is adults at high risk for exposure and an increased risk of severe severe illness so that's where you're gonna see people with comorbidities included 16 to 64. and then group 5 is everyone else next slide please so why these priority groups so group 1 was selected because we need to protect healthcare workers who are critical workforce during the covet 19 pandemic and at risk for exposure to coven 19 and long-term care residents and workers who are

077at highest risk of being hospitalized or dying and group two is to save lives by protecting those at high risk of being hospitalized or dying from cova 19 next slide so why start with people 65 and older this was a key change that happened last week that came down from the federal level and we've adopted here in north carolina so the core principle is that we're protecting people who are at the highest risk of being hospitalized or dying so if you look here to the left it's people in north carolina 675 or older 65 and older and then the us as a whole and it shows you the percent of cases that they make up in that state or the federal level and the percentage of deaths so if you see 65 and older makes

078up 83 percent of deaths and 75 and older 60 of deaths nationwide it's around 81 percent so as of december 20th 2020 the cumulative cobin 19 associated hospitalization rate was 1211 per 100 000 people age 75 and older and 642 per uh per 100 000 for those age 65 to 74. so these people in these groups are disproportionately affected at higher rates of morbidity and mortality next slide please and this shows a weekly trend to what i spoke to before so the number of deaths in wake county specifically as we move down so the bottom of the chart is showing march through january 3rd this speaks to our second our first real peak um and the good thing is that more people are being treated earlier on we have better um medical outcomes and medical

079interventions by our hospital systems to ensure better health outcomes however people who are 65 and older are still disproportionately dying from cover 19 than those who are younger next slide please there we go so what happened today so today wake county um we began our wait list registration for 65 plus that started at 8 30 this morning not every plan goes as smoothly as we wanted our we our call and our call center and website were pinged um a lot so our website specifically was pinged hundreds of thousands of times and our call center was called thousands of times in a matter of minutes so the way the process will work those things are back up is that we are going to direct people to our website or call center they will then fill out

080a questionnaire whether it's on the phone with a call center aid or directly on a website using a form they'll then join our wait list they'll receive a notification and this is some points in some confusion so you won't immediately get an application to sign up and come on and get an invitation that's really why it's a matter of semantics but why we called it a waitlist versus a reservation if i make a reservation at a restaurant i know i will have my table ready at 7 00 pm on tuesday whereas if it's a waitlist system i will find out when it's appropriate for me to come in and schedule my appointment but when you make your appointment with us we will have a guaranteed dose for you or a guaranteed quote unquote table you'll

081receive your notification you'll get registered in cbms and you'll also get registered on through our sign up genius through our our appointment portal and you'll come in and get vaccinated at the end of your first vaccination vaccine we here at the county have only received pfizer's product around 19 days later you'll get a notification to remind you to schedule your second appointment if you haven't done so already so the same ems system will also remind you so you'll get multiple notifications it's also important to point out in the notification field you have an option of one or two or three different ways so you can get a text an email or phone call and you can also schedule your appointment immediately after you're receiving your first dose so you can get your vaccine dose while

082you're waiting the 15 minutes to make sure there's no adverse events you can scan a qr code right here and gets do your appointment or you can call the call center and they'll be able to set you up with that secondary appointment next slide please so the demand far exceeds the supply so as i mentioned we had 180 000 people who are eligible to come in and get their vaccine in the first two groups as of 11 30 this morning we've had over 8 000 people request to be on the waiting the waitlist for the vaccine and i can report that as of now maybe 15 minutes ago we've had over 23 000 people reach out to us of all the wake vaccinators that i mentioned earlier through last week we've received thirty three thousand

083four hundred fifty vaccines as a system so including health our health system partners our hospital systems partners and us alone in wake county public health we've received five thousand eight hundred fifty first doses so we are also getting people's second doses coming through and we have administered over 4 000 vaccines as of this saturday night so we are moving right along getting doses and arms as quickly as possible our hope week over week is to exhaust our complete inventory um but knowing that we have scheduled appointments for everyone so if you have an appointment scheduled you're coming in you're getting your dose it's earmarked for you at that point next slide please key thing to remember until we reach herd immunity though after your first dose of vaccine you're around 55 to 60 percent efficacy

084after your second dose seven days after that you're around 95 percent so even though you can still transmit and get that uh get covered after your first dose it's still important to to remember to wear your mask wait six feet apart and wash your hands another key part here is that we want doses out as quickly as possible because even a 55 to 60 percent reduction is a huge improvement over zero percent without any vaccine protection um so we're doing everything in our power to make sure that we have doses in arms as quickly as possible while following the state's guidance of phasing and making sure that we have the most appointments available and working with our hospital partners so it's it's it's day to day it's week to week we're managing and we for

085me right now it's a numbers game and uh i hope to have more doses allocated to us through evidence that we are you know vaccinating people as quickly as possible um and with that unless janna or dr mcdonald have anything else they would like to add um we'd open that up took some questions all right thank you for that update board members any questions mrs cash so just a couple quick questions um so our abilities so we get the number of doses based on how we distribute them so the more we distribute the faster we get more doses into the county that's what i understand i think i think yes mrs cash but you must consider that there are still extremely limited doses so we would not necessarily receive 10 000 doses next week if

086we could show that we have that because nationally the supply is still limited which limits it to the state which limits it's been to each of the counties do you know that the state would not get enough doses from the federal the state will get more doses if they're administered more quickly and right now the state's guidance is to which is i believe one of the reasons why they opened it up to those individuals 65 and older because you have some smaller counties who don't have a large number of health care workers and so this enables them to use their allocations as well to the high-risk community okay so as of now considering your feedback aren't i not getting feedback um one and two so healthcare providers now have already started to administer their second

087doses in their hospitals to their employees and so mixed in with 180 000 over 65 that we have we still haven't taken into consideration that within 17 to 24 days i think those will have to get their second doses so now we got to mix all of that in the mix of all that that's an awful lot of doses that will be administered by wake county prior to reaching our level three are teachers in level three at this time by the governor jason i believe they are aren't they correct as of now they still remain in the front line so what is your estimate of when those teachers could begin considering the numbers that you have in front of you considering the second doses that will be given what is your estimate of when we

088get to level three in wake county it's hard to predict an exact date but i would say weeks to months it all depends on how many doses the county as a whole receives so if our hospital partners get allocated you know let's say we each get 4 000 doses a week that went from going from 4 000 total to you know 16 to 20 000 doses that's that makes a bigger impact on um on that population and being able to actually vaccinate them so it all and it's hard to answer that because we don't know our allocation just like the state doesn't know their allocation until the week prior so weeks to months is the answer is there's a comfortable answer which is not definitive which is unfortunate thank you dr martin to follow up

089on this caches can you help us just a little bit if i understand correctly the 180 000 is the eligible people in groups one and two is that correct correct and do we have any estimate of the size of um group three uh we estimate it to be an additional 140 000 people based on the prior definitions of frontline essential workers okay thank you that that helps particularly i mean we don't know whether we're going to keep getting this five to nine thousand vaccines a week or more right but just to get a framework of the size that helps thank you isn't happy thank you um and thank you for being here and updating us on this i i can't imagine how this uh coordinating goes is uh is difficult um my question is the

090website that wake county just launched is that website specifically for the doses that you're getting at wake county public health or is that being done in coordination with hospital partners so yes yes and no so most of the people who are vex who are submitting their form through our website or call center coming to us however in the event that wake med or duke or unc rex say we have the ability to take on a thousand extra people this week we got an increase in dose allocation we will send people the sign we'll activate them from the waitlist and send them the sign up link to instead of our site but to wake med site or unc rex's site or duke site so it is we're sort of the central collecting point and then moving

091people to the appropriate sign up based on availability okay so that was my question i wasn't sure because i went on the the site you would reference the my shop my spot nc website and it i just looked in you know four different numbers to call and a different website um for especially for our older population who may not use the internet i appreciate you guys working and coordinating with them to make distribution a little more smooth for folks looking to get vaccinated thank you thank you mr hagerty thank you mr chairman um i want to thank mr ms sharpen staff and everyone with the county for all of their work to help expedite the vaccine distribution and the availability of the vaccine in wake county i have some questions and unfortunately you all may

092not be the right ones to answer but i'm trying to get as much accurate information as i can so i have a couple questions if you can't answer them that's fantastic but if you can't just let me know i want to follow up again on something miss cash had talked about i just want to be clear do you think that approval of additional licensed providers in wake county would increase dosage available in wake county or do you think we would have the same dosage just spread among multiple providers i think if the state is allowed is allotted more at the from the federal level i think that would increase access and not only different locations but to your point an additional subset of population who is getting vaccinated actively if they increase the providers but

093in some counties or some locations there's there's excess of doses so let's say we i don't have the ability to vaccinate a thousand people this week can i transfer to a my doses to a primary care provider who can vaccinate quickly i think that's another option um for us here in the county we're not we don't have that problem it would be more about increasing the number of providers as well as increasing the number of doses allocated to us great thank you and and related to the doses that are apportioned by county wake county public health only gets like like a i think i heard under 20 percent 16 percent maybe the vex of the vaccination doses that are available in the county that's correct sir okay so with our counties regional hospitals you we

094obviously serve many more citizens many citizens from outside of wake county are you aware of anything in the funding formula that takes account these greater needs i know that you said we had more licensed health care workers we had a larger older population do you have any insight into how that distribution formula calculates that or is it yeah i don't know i think the state has been we're not privy to the state's algorithm um but um yeah i i'm not sure and i don't know if anyone else on the call has john or kim has seen more detailed information but i have not i ever know yes um this is um janna the state has just instituted a new questionnaire that asks us not only what our current availability of doses is on hand but

095what we what we have capacity to handle in the upcoming weeks so they're asking that of all the providers so they will take that information and determine how best to allocate those still given their extremely limited doses so that might it might help give you some context that this week the state for their allocation that they're distributing around the state this week is only has a hundred and forty thousand doses last week counties in general asked for twice that amount so we have our plan to be able to vaccinate by the end of this month hopefully at a minimum 6000 people a week that would be first and second doses and while we have that capacity in order to do so we've got to have the vaccine and for the state to give us more

096they have to get more from the feds and we continue to make pleas to the feds and vice president-elect biden has rolled out his vaccine plan with a large part of that commitment to be getting more doses more quickly which will help everyone this is dr mcdonald i just want to add on to what ms sharp was saying and that is to say that wake county is making a hard push to increase capacity that's wake county public health partnering with the hospitals as jason was saying as dr whittis was saying in terms of being able to give them people when they have extra doses but also us reaching out to providers in the community that may have significant size populations in the current group or potentially vendors in the community that can assist in also

097getting out vaccines so we're trying to multiply our capacity by partnering with others and telling the state we want these folks to get vaccine too thank you all i i appreciate that just my last questions are there are you all aware because i've i've heard from people but i have not been able to confirm that there may be vaccine available to some residents through other sources who that wouldn't necessarily be taking the doses that come through wake county public health for example do you know if veterans are available to get vaccinated through um like the us va or has the state made the vaccine available to any other target populations in wake county or the federal government made it available to anybody else in wake county who might be able to acquire it from some

098of those other sources i'm not sure off the top of my head but i can look into that and see we do get an allocation list that shows what sites have received what vaccine for that week but i have not seen specifically for a va hospital or va partner but i could definitely look into that thank you and then justin and just default and just to follow up on that um one one thing that we have been learning as we've gone through this process um right now for the most part federal agencies are expecting peop their employees to get their vaccine locally so for example we've already learned from the airport that their tsa agents who are federal employees are expected to get their vaccine here locally they would not come into play until the

099essential workers in group three but so and in reviewing the allocation list for the past couple of weeks the the predominance is just the local hospital systems and the local public health departments great thank you and so finally i'll just say if there's anything that we can do to aid and assist you know we want to help not hinder uh your advocacy and getting everyone vaccinated as expeditiously as possible please let us know thank you all right any other questions miss johnson hospital i just have one follow-up given i had it before but definitely now that you've spoken into federal employees which certainly does make a huge difference uh for a county the size of a week to also be inclusive of federal employees um do do does the cmvs actually track so that you

100all can see where people are where they actually live so uh to one of my colleagues who mentioned you know our hospital served people outside of our county can are you all tracking are our doses going to wake county citizens or as we all know citizens cross county lines all the time for physicians and other things are we tracking that and is that then being reported to dhhs to kind of show how many citizens perhaps outside of wake county were serving in addition to the wake county need so we can track that in cvms however sea of ems has not been updated yet for us to generate our own reports uh to your to your point we have requested that same report from uh the cvms state system over a week ago and we have

101not gotten the report back as of yet that is something that we'd be interested in knowing when you sign up for a provider as a provider here with the system you you can't turn someone away because they work or or live in a different county as well so that's an important caveat um as well that's that's exactly why i asked because i knew you couldn't so i was just curious if we had a way to manage that kind of data thank you yeah this is cash yeah just to add another layer on that as miss johnson hossler talked about so my understanding is that um and i know you haven't been able to track this but you might want to see how this works out for wake county if you if you are on my

102my chart duke my chart or wake med my chart and you you um you're patient and those no matter what county in the state that you come from if you register through that you can get your vaccination at wake med or duke raleigh here in raleigh so that would be quite a few people that are patients across the state that go to physicians here and at this time greater than 65 those those patients are actually going to wake med most of them to get their shots all right seeing no further questions again thank you all for that update and uh i'm sure that we will continue to receive information and working through some intent more that will be brought to the board and we certainly look forward to our teachers getting in there very soon

103and i'd like to just take a moment to thank our colleagues from the county for joining us today this being the first day of the vaccination roll out in the community and asking them for some time is no small feat i know they have a lot on their plate today and every day but today in particular so thank you absolutely thank you it was our pleasure to be with you this afternoon all right the last item on our agenda uh is an update from the abc science collaborative so uh again we'll turn it back to uh superintendent moore good afternoon again um i believe that it's dr benjamin who is joining us today and he's got a shorter briefer presentation today not sure if he's already logged in or not checking to see yeah tim

104says he doesn't see him yet so just some context for the prior conversation that we're having about vaccine according to the department of health and human services dashboard at north carolina the state has received about a million doses at this time and about 400 000 have been administered so who do who can we talk to about that gap and do some advocacy that's it and i've heard nationally that you know there's um vaccines that are just going dormant and not and that's but who can we read you know we've got enough on our plate that we can't that we really need some help on getting vaccines to our staff and our frontline workers and our i do think we need to explore a little further this idea of how of the capacity of the requesting

105agency for the number of doses in particular seeing that if she said that this past week there were 140 000 doses distributed and 5 000 of those came to wake county that would seem far less than the per capita that we represent and i don't know if that reflects what we what we requested in terms of capacity or some other variable and so i it down think i thought with cash today i had a better foreigner i said although dhhs actually presented this and they're very clear the way they have to start listening to a presentation on another board i said i'm from dhhs dr wong they were very clear at the process in which they initially started which was around per capita distribution but once they look into the cm cvms and see how

106you're actually administering the doses that determines the flow of dosage and so i mean i think all of us have talked to more than half the wake county folks so we know what some of the backup was for them last week because last thursday when they looked at their dosage we still had our 1 000 still sitting in the system no other the other counties had already administered theirs so it was it was a process perspective in the way from what i understand from wake county of how they were making their appointments which was very different than other counties who is they were coming in they were just executing the and so i assume we now know that in wake county so we'll change our process i assume but that certainly was very clear i

107mean the word she used is if you're not using them then you're they ding you the reduce the amount you get we need to ask for help from other providers because they're out there just waiting she did say that those providers can sign up on the state website because they are even if they are physicians or pharmacists according to dhhs dr wong they have to go through their mini training to actually administer it and so yeah the board of pharmacy signed all of them up through that site because they're all certified immunizers so they had to be that way but as of now none of them only i think two pharmacists of the 300 have been reached out to by the state and just as a additional i guess that's my point is i mean

108for us that state advocacy not anything wake county can do because the state has to approve that right and just as an additional point we have we are messaging to our employees directly who are in the categories that are eligible about how to access and get on if they are interested in getting the vaccine so we're doing that messaging and then you'll send them to the pharmacist let's see wherever they can go okay got it okay i do believe dr benjamin has joined us thank you dr benjamin for joining us this afternoon i know that your presentation is a little briefer today go ahead and turn it over to you to get started great thanks a lot so uh thank you all for having me today this is uh again the abc science uh collaborative

109go ahead um area so um as um as usual the uh the information here is uh to help uh to be of service to school districts um but we're not here to make specific decisions nor advise a specific action and this slide does not have but should have on it the nc toolkit so as a reminder to all folks who are on the call which is a really good resource not only for for schools but elsewhere go ahead next slide please so just a few uh reminders so the abc is interacts with districts on a on a voluntary basis with with the districts um we do have um funding from uh pilot funding from the national institute of health um the faculty involved are all volunteering our time um to the effort the funding that

110that is provided goes to pay for the staff time we are not paid by the state we're not paid by the county we're not paid by the school district and for the faculty we're not paid for the effort at all the data that we provide and data that comes from other studies are one part of the decision around remote versus face-to-face instruction decision and i as as i've said before uh i think uh several times harkening back to august not only do i not have any knowledge of staffing or the 10 000 other uh items that go into a school board or superintendent's decision around a remoter face-to-face um it's not um it's it's not something that we touch on we're here about the data i was asked to touch on emerging science for this

111particular meeting because it has been presented in the press go ahead next slide please about bronze of irish variants so several have been recently described uh 117 which first started being described related to the united kingdom one 1.351 uh uh originally um thought to be originally from around south africa but this you'll also hear sometimes referred to as 501 um and then uh one from brazil now as these variants have come out there have been a number of questions around them and it's these are of course unknown for certain but uh we'll get into them transmission we've got some data here um and it's unknown for certain but it's thought that they're uh more easily transmitted um or they have emerged to be the predominant strain in several counties early estimates on the increased transmission

112are around 35 to 59 percent and because of how rapidly especially the 117 and 501 emerged to be the predominant strain it's very solid early data that transmission with these are greater it is unknown if transmission is more efficient despite mitigation measures specifically we don't have evidence that um this can come off as sounding a little bit facetious but we don't have evidence for example that they pass through mass any easier um the virulence so this is unknown but is hoped to be no different and there's not data that the virulence itself uh is different between the vari the variance now uh because transmission is likely to be a bit more efficient up to considerably more efficient the virulence can stay the same and we can as a community unfortunately suffer more deaths but the

113virulence for any one person infected hoped to be no different and no data suggesting otherwise just yet vaccine efficacy is unknown but potentially no uh change this has to do with a couple of reasons one has to do with immunology when we when we our immune system is a complex environment and immunity consists of not only antibodies but it is also consists of cd4 t cells think of t cells as kind of the quarterbacks of the immune system and other components that a balance of those factors is really important and when we design vaccines especially around this particular organism or this particular virus rather we look specifically for something called neutralizing antibodies now the neutralizing antibodies are something that you if you've got the spike protein you can uh and as a reminder the virus

114proteins cause for um a binding or uh connecting to uh the human cell that gets locked into place you get entering into the cells antibodies disrupt that lock in place and so when we get vaccinated under the mrna technology we those vaccines are designed to for the body to develop antibodies when the protein of the virus that is responsible for docking with the cell that protein is in pre-fusion configuration and we then develop antibodies that block this relationship uh between the virus and the cell but there's other components of immunity that are important to the equation as well and that's why ultimately it's hard to know but preliminary data suggests and this is based on an early study of 20 patients that's why we're talking preliminary preliminary data suggests that when we take uh antibodies

115that folks have made against the older variants those antibodies on the petri dish if you will uh in the viral media if you will outside the body uh those antibodies are effective um and are likely to be effective in within the human um so unknown for certain but we think probably uh no impact on vaccine efficacy now why do we get variants um uh and uh what impact might they be on um school any kind of the school decisions on any kind of policies around schools well the european union is struggling quite a bit uh around um some of the new uh variants and as a reminder of the policies in western europe for the most part have been to open and to open without strict adherence to public health mitigation strategies within schools and

116so uh i anticipate that there'll be a considerable problem uh in western uh europe because they don't have uh the mitigation strategies in place um whether or not there's differences for schools in the united states where some districts are outside of north carolina are not doing much in the way of mitigation strategies um i speculate that they're going to have considerable problems with these new variants it's unknown as it relates to districts that don't have excuse me that are putting in place mitigation strategies much more hopeful however for districts that put in place mitigation strategies and regardless these these new variants are going to make strict adherence to mitigation strategies much more important in 2021 than they were in 2020 for schools that do make the decision to do face-to-face instruction now why do we

117get variants and are these going to continue popping up and the answer to that is that viral genetic material is much more simple than say mammalian genetic material human genetic material and so there are and in any one human and some viral infections you can have 10 to the 8th and 10 to the 9th levels of virus so you have a combination of lots and lots and lots of virion and not a lot of fidelity in how the genetic material is replicated and the theory of evolution coming together in a difficult intersection and so we're going to see uh quite likely variants become a recurring recurring story throughout 2021 and 2022 and we see it's not quite the same story with influenza but i think a good way for late folks to think about it

118is just like you need to adapt um with uh flu vaccine every year eventually we will we may be in a situation where we may need to adapt vaccines downstream but that's not today thankfully go ahead and explain please good so the good news on the variants um probably not impacting as it relates to vaccine advocacy unfortunately transition transmission is probably more efficient thanks thank you dr benjamin um for the brief update are there any questions from board members at this time mr kushner um thank you chair sutton um and thank you dr benjamin for um being with us today you've had two associated pepper papers being published in the last few weeks so we've been receiving those from members in the so congratulations on on that getting all that published um but but it's

119oftentimes the some of the qualifiers some of the context of your work um is not being as broadly um the community doesn't seem as broadly aware of some of the the fine points some of which you've gone over i just feel like i was in a biology lecture just now but can you give us some ideas of the information sharing and ways that we we can place your work in context for the everyday um you know high school student family community member because they're we've had your papers quoted on both sides of some of these issues right so there's uh string some weaknesses to any manuscript and that's especially true when you don't have a randomized trial so any kind of epidemiologic work is going to have substantial strengths and weaknesses and open to um

120open to flaws i would say taking maybe a group of flaws together and then a couple of strengths i would say number one is some of the kind of the most concerning which would be that these data show that we should simply reopen um you see this sometimes quoted in other states in north carolina where there is not a mask mandate and there's not some of the mitigation strategies that are done here in north carolina and as we have said multiple multiple times that is a recipe for disaster i would say number two would be [Music] it's important to note that there was extraordinarily strict adherence to the mitigation strategies we had superintendents school leaders and school staff doing walk throughs to document the fraction of people masking we had districts set up ways for

121folks at the school level to report their concerns we had superintendents and other school staff reviewing video um to ensure uh adherence we had um [Music] we had uh uh lessons learned where superintendents would based on whenever they had clusters and secondary transmission would engage in the lessons learned process if those things aren't in place it's you're asking for trouble i would say number three is that the uh the data were collected when these districts predominantly were in hybrid model um i was asked this um by this particular board i know you all know this well because i seem like i got asked this a number of times you ask those districts have continued to collect data and yes uh some of them are in plan a and yes they are having some success but

122fundamentally these data were collected in the hybrid model and these data really apply to the hybrid model um the uh and i think you all experienced this in december where you know the data are not about the data are fundamentally about within school transmission so that if you don't have enough people if your community transmission is so high that you don't have enough people for staffing and backup and things like that um that can be a real problem i would say that the and again we don't have we don't have knowledge or line of sight onto that as i've said in this board meeting many times that there's uh the you know kind of the medicine of are you having secondary transmission and then there's the human resources part around uh staffing uh i would

123say uh another item again we outlined this in the paper i've outlined this to this board before has been around [Music] the testing was uh voluntary and so testing's not a hundred percent we're we've gotten permission to go back and assess um those numbers um and so we will be getting more detail on that i'm we're going back and forth uh negotiating right now with the irb as to what we can do uh along those lines but uh in the current um uh in the current iteration um the data don't have a standardized testing and so it's certainly the case that just like in the community not everyone is tested in the schools not everyone is tested it is pretty clear based on both clinical experience and how kind of the robust nature of her

124or the greater emphasis on contact tracing that's done in schools than in other parts of the community testing if anything is more frequent for folks in the school environment than in the community probably less frequent than those of us in healthcare experience but again an uh unknown um some of the strengths of the work have also been discussed here uh before that includes the fact that it's a substantial sample size it's got uh you know 11 different school districts they are from the state of uh north carolina so for north carolinian counties north carolina counties there's a fair amount of applicability in the sense that the guidance from dhhs is a similar county to county or the same county to county in contrast with some other states other strengths include uh even if uh you

125know only uh half of the participants who were considered exposed or were tested you're still if you have a rate of infectivity similar to the source population you're looking at still an extremely small number of within school transmission so the job done by the districts at hand is really really they're to be commended they did an outstanding job um you know this is by no means a zero risk environment but it is a environment i would say to be proud of to a much much much lower risk environment than traditional thinking was in july and august of uh 2020. um the uh other strengths are there was a fair amount of variation in the community transmission between the counties especially as we got into october with some of those counties at 800 or or 100

126000 population for 14 days unfortunately wake is now at a higher transmission and even that according to the dhhs website yes we've been trying hard to follow that as well and i appreciate you underscoring the need for mitigation efforts to continue and to be vigilant along those those swiss cheese layers that that y'all lay out so well and i also appreciate that the commentary that um came out in the north carolina medical journal focused on the need for schools to have the resources to do those mitigation practices as well as other resources so we can serve our children thank you yes ma'am so again dr benjamin thank you for being with us we appreciate the information and the uh update and we will certainly take uh what you have shared into uh consideration great thank

127you thank you we certainly um look forward to uh continued uh partnership with you all um we um you know the the mitigation policies that uh wake county um had put together i know i told you this all this earlier we have put put together as a program expands is expanding nationally right now you know multiple wake county documents are in that national playbook and that national package that's now going out to about 10 different states across the country so we're moving the north carolina program into a number of different uh states where maybe the baseline mitigation strategies are not as or not as strong so i appreciate the work that wake's done in our partnership we thank you for promoting our work and uh you know we are real pleased with our effort and

128we continue to work on it and try to improve uh each week chris hegar you gotta yes sir mr chairman i know that you know we have a limited time in these meetings but that i know several myself and several colleagues may have additional questions for dr benjamin is there a process for submitting these questions or is there a recommendation you would have that where we could pass on some specific questions perhaps either for addressing at a future meeting or just addressing us directly let me let me punt that question to superintendent moore she is pretty much a liaison between the board and dr benjamin i think it would be helpful um when there are questions and they and some they have trickled in here and there different times from board members if you if

129you will if you can send questions that you have to me and copy all board members so that they're aware so in you know in case that so everybody knows what's being asked then i can work with the folks from abc science collaborative on how to best respond great thank you and mr haggerty thank you for that um question you know part of this now is just simply a question of hours in the day right and it you know we were at kind of wake was one of 50 school districts now like an important important partner for us but one of 50 school districts in one state of 10 states and so the program's now expanded by essentially one log and on a student population basis um the largest school district we think we're going

130to be working with starting in about two weeks is about 450 000 students just for one school one one of the school districts that we'll be working with so you know we we want to be able to batch those up as efficiently as we possibly can and yet provide outstanding service and a a partner that picked us up as an early adopter be a team between the superintendent and the board that had a lot of foresight that this would really be a good partnership and c has done really so well in the mitigation strategies we want to be extremely mindful of the you know essentially the debt that the program owes to uh you know to miss moore and to the to the to the board thank you thank you mr carter um so i

131just had one other question are we is floor still open for that i'm sorry can i go ahead and ask a question now or are we being asked to wait until later to ask questions dr benjamin uh sure okay all right thank you i wasn't sure it sounded like it was wrapping up um i just i guess i just wanted some clarification i know we've heard from several um folks who question if your study findings how we should use them how we should consider them or view them if the community spread is higher than when you collected the data and so i guess i'd like to hear directly from you as what your recommendation would be for that because i know we've received quite a bit of feedback about that thank you sure so um

132let's see so some strengths so so um i think that you want to um think in two terms one is what is risk of transmission within schools and the other is um managing everything else around that decision right so that's the first kind of um fork in the road and i think that you even if everything goes perfectly around within school transmission rates in the communities can impact schools in ways that have nothing to do with secondary transmission okay and you guys have talked through those before you know schools the primary metrics for schools should be how much transmission do we have how much secondary transmission do we have in our schools and uh that's really what you're trying to prevent that's the key metric and you guys you all as a team had some

133hopeful early data in october november and early december that your mitigation strategies were very strong and working well um you know as community transmission goes up those mitigation strategies and adherence to those and strictness of adherence only go up uh it's clear from if you're a resident of you know alexander county right now where the cases are more than wake county or yadkin or ardell or gaston that those schools are are having success or had success up through um uh i got data from ardell uh last night um as of last night they were still having success in plan b in their in their school district and so it's clearly clearly can be done it's a very different question than what should be done is that is that helpful yes thank you sorry all right

134so again thank you for that uh those questions board thank you again dr benjamin for uh that information again for taking the time out to be with us we know your schedule is quite quite tight and busy these days great thanks you all thank you so that wraps up our close i mean i'm sorry our work session agenda for this afternoon uh we've got a little bit of time here so we will try to maybe tackle a few closed session uh agenda items so at this point if i can entertain a motion to go into closed session chair sutton i'd like to make motion that the board go into closed session to consider confidential personnel information protected under gs 143-318-118183 and a6 to consult with the board of education attorney and preserve the attorney-client privilege

135as provided in gs 143-318-1183 and to consider confidential student information protected under c 402 and the family educational and privacy rights act you 20 usc one two three two g got a motion from miss mahaffey second about ms kushner uh to go into closed session uh for the items just stated and they're listed on the agenda concerning the discussion hearing none others in favor show about sign of eye aye imposed nay as haven't we now stand in closed session thank you all for joining us today for uh today's work session and we'll see you at our public meeting at 5 30. thank you so much you