Board of Education · Regular Meeting · January 26, 2023

A moment of silence we're now going to turn it over to our Chief Communications officer for celebrations Mr Sutter.

Evening it is a pleasure to be with you tonight to celebrate our students and employees in Durham Public Schools tonight's spark recognitions have been rescheduled to the next board meeting due to some travel difficulties however we're excited to bring to you our students of the month for December and for January as well as for also for January for December and January our DPS teacher of the month and the DPS employee of the month to start things off we're going to meet our student of the month from this a typo on the pracy not city of medicine Academy but ignite Online Academy and I bring to you Umberto orianna tercios and the principle of ignite Online Academy.

Thank you so much we are very proud to present Umberto we're proud to have him at ignite he's he's a model student he's fully engaged in every class that we see him that we see him in every day and he's he's what we wish for all of our night students to exemplify engagement commitment to online learning he's very dedicated and and great independent learner he's taking two synchronous classes this semester into asynchronous so he can do the self-pacing but also have the connection with his two great ignite teachers that he's he's just started for second semester so we're very proud of them and and all of the challenges that he's had through his career as a DPS student but we feel fortunate that he landed with us that ignite thank you.

Umberto I have a few things for you.

January 2023 student of the month we are honored to present this certificate to ignite Online Academy Junior Umberto orianna for consistently demonstrating character integrity and academic Excellence as a DPS student I want to give you this certificate and then we're going to start moving up from there we have we have this certificate we have a spark pin for you the spark pin is a symbol of Excellence among DPS students teachers Educators Community supporters indicating leadership qualities the student of the month program is all about academic Excellence but also character leadership and perseverance this spark pin signifies that for you and I hope you'll find the opportunities to wear it with pride from our friends at triangle e-cycling I'm excited to bring you to prevent present you with this laptop computer and it's a good.

And then I am pleased to introduce and he'll be back again for our next student of the month as well former board member and representative of the Raven Family Foundation Mr Frederick Raven with a special presentation.

On board chair superintendent Dr mubanga on board I would just like to say thank you first of all to your parent here present I may not say I my family and the Raven Family Foundation are proud to give you a check to show you that we are proud of what you've accomplished here at Durham public schools and I'm also going to say that I'm gonna I'm gonna say that I'm gonna put in an ounce of jealousy because I wish I was doing what you're doing now back when I would say PPS so thank you and I I mean that every month we tune in and we watch you all and we see the accomplishments that you all have been able to do while pursuing your education and most of you all aren't even 18 yet so I'm I'm amazed so I'll just be fruitful and honest when I say that so one thing that we always like to make sure that we do is we like to provide you with a scholarship award because we.

Really true are we're truly humbled by the work that you've done because you represent us well and we'd like to also present you with a check which is a small token of appreciation for what you're doing for DPS so thank you. But I'm going to ask principal Madeleine to hold your stuff if we could get a picture of you with your. And an opportunity to shake hands with the school's work.

Thank you.

But wait there's more I now call to the podium Danny Guilford from Northern High School so he can introduce Northern student of the month Isabella Peters.

Good evening everyone Madam chair members of the school board Dr mabinga members of the cabinet and all of Durham Public Schools it is an honor for me as principal of Northern High School to be before you this evening to recognize our student of the month 12th grader Elizabeth Isabel Isabella Peters she's been before this board before about seven years ago as a as an 11 year old to address issues regarding standardized testing and which also feature on NPR in addition to her advocacy for her peers and herself she's a Powerhouse in all aspects of student life she's a straight A student she's a three sport Varsity athlete in volleyball basketball and soccer she Volunteers in the community conducting numerous talks with various Service Groups she's applied and been accepted into various colleges and universities but plans to attend UNC Charlotte in the fall when I asked my staff who should be our representative she was the only student to receive multiple recommendations for her courteousness respectful nature and driven driven desire to be the best.

And she does all this after being born completely deaf she was one of the first children in North Carolina to be double implanted a cochlear implant in each year at the age of five she was working with the developers of the implant to improve the functionality of the implants escorted by tonight by her parents Ernest and Melody Peters I present to you Isabella Peters of Northern High School for student of the month for January.

Miss Peters if you were paying attention this part is probably not going to come as much of a surprise we have a certificate for you the spark pin indicating your success as a DPS student leader a laptop from our friends at triangle e-cycling and once more your very own Frederick Raven.

I will say what I said before but I'll just say it this time to let you know again that you have our admiration my entire family watches we all watch this every single month my mom just told me she just heard me talk and I sound a little nervous I don't know how to tell her I was just running late so I was short on breath but but again we want to show you our admiration for you with the certificate we also want to present you with a check for 500 it's not much but what our goal was to do this year was to continue to highlight the the achievement that is is being done month after month when we're able to see these students a month and we would love for our corporate Community to start to donate so this is this is a push I want to be here to say that and we want to be able to use you and all the other students of the month to be.

Able to show what DPS is really putting out there so again thank you I'm just.

Like to speak.

I would like to say thank you to all of my teachers and all of my principals all the people that spend there for me my therapist my the professionals just worked for me to help me be able to even speak to you guys and I also I'll also like to say a big thank you to my parents they have fought for me every single step of the way in my journey and they have raised me to be the person that I am today people.

Board members we continue our recognitions with our DPS teachers of the month and employees of the month for December and January and for that I bring you our executive director for talent acquisition and employee recognition Michelle Hayes.

Good evening. Good evening chairman Olmstead members of the board Dr mobinga and cabinet members I am pleased to bring two recognitions to you tonight our teacher of the month sponsored by North Carolina Central University's tennis team the tasa chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Incorporated DCL Consulting LLC and the veil cares foundation and our employee Employee of the Month spot sponsored by the office of Human Resources both recognitions will be brought to you monthly and we will continue to congratulate these high performers since we did not have our regularly scheduled school board meeting in December as stated before we're going to recognize our teacher of the month first teachers of the month at December teacher of the month is Jahara Davis English teacher from Hillside High School.

Miss Davis is deserving of this honor because she works diligently to ensure her students academic needs are met while also attending to their social and emotional learning needs in fact she was recognized by a National Organization for her efforts she was recognized by a National Organization for her efforts to infuse social and emotional learning and to her regular instruction she has truly built a learning community into her classroom where students recite daily affirmations before the class gets started I would be remiss if I didn't mention how she rallied resources in the community to support a learning Excursion to see black panther wakanda forever in addition to the movie 96 students received t-shirts and a rich lesson on the characteristics of the epic hero Jahara Davis a December teacher of the month.

Our January teacher of the month is Sophie Pruden fifth grade teacher from Glenn Elementary School. Miss Pruden exemplifies the best in teaching and her commitment to her students families colleagues is unparalleled last year alone Miss pruden's student succeeded growth in reading math and science and almost 80 percent of her Scholars passed one or more EOG tests for the first time in addition she took on all right all right all right in addition she took on several students mid-year who was struggling academically and behaviorally in a colleague's room all three students passed at least two eogs and one even exited the EC Services Miss pruden's relationship with her students is phenomenal and she expects her students to reach her high expectations every day and they do her students are focused determined and understand how they how their work can lead to lifelong success Miss Prudence success is so impactful not only because this was her first year teaching fifth grade but because all of these incredible accomplishments came the year after covet have forced virtual.

Instruction Miss Pruden planned every day after school to truly understand fifth grade standards power standards the EOG and a new curriculum this year after the first Benchmark Miss Prudence data is exceptional and exceeds district and team averages she uses our talking points communication app to share pictures and progress with families on a consistent basis Miss prudent is unquestionably one of the greatest Educators I have ever had the privilege to work with her dedication to her craft and commitment to teaching are difficult to describe and truly something someone and truly something special to observe so congratulations to Jahara Davis and Sophia Pruden for being named Durham Public Schools December and January teachers of the month at this time coach Lawson will come and present.

Good evening everyone it gives me a distinct pleasure to present to miss prudent and Miss Davis a check for 100 each from the CL Consulting We Salute You for all of the good work that you do We Salute You for Your Excellence your professionalism and we're very proud of you as we have partnered with this program we try to do this in a in a two-phase approach one in surprising the teachers and the classroom so that the their students have an opportunity to also salute them and then also in this setting so again thank you so very much for your service and your dedication and again foreign.

Congratulations once again to johara and Sophie a December employee of the month is Natalie Jones front desk receptionist at Carrington Middle School the warm cougar country welcome you receive is normally given by Miss Natalie Jones Miss Jones is the master of multitasking with Grace and professionalism there is no job too small or a task she considers outside of her job duties Mrs Jones will cover classes in emergency situations she arrives 45 minutes early to prepare for the day and she will often skip her lunch break to ensure the front office matters are taken care of to the fullest Mrs Jones is the face of cougar country congratulations to miss Natalie Jones for in December employee of the month.

A January employee of the month goes to Veronica Oriana Lee custodian at Mangum Elementary School unfortunately she could not be here tonight but her principal Miss Dorman will receive on her behalf Miss orleana takes pride in every detail of her job ensuring that our school looks its best at all times our students and staff are lucky that their that our day begins and ends with Miss orleana looking after things thank you for the example you set and the high expectations you hold us to once again congratulations to Natalie Jones and Veronica orleana for being named Durham Public Schools December and January employees of the month.

Comes with a plaque and a spark pen.

Board members that concludes celebrations for the evening thank you thank you thank you very much a wonderful celebration it's a great time for us to continue to highlight not only the amazing work of our students but also our Educators and I use Educators because we include our teachers as well as our custodial staff the front desk staff everyone that makes our schools run so really appreciate those celebrations the next item on our agenda is the superintendent's update now pass it to Dr mobinga thank you sure Armstead members of the board good evening I want to begin my remarks with some prayers for our students and our teachers who support them last night hundred of our students walk across the stage in our winter graduation event every student we graduate in winner has a story to tell about perseverance and determination I was so proud of them graduation is a ceremony that walks the passage into adulthood and it's also recognizes the outstanding work of our teachers counselors School administrators and District support.

Congratulations to the latest graduates of Durham Public Schools looking ahead I'm so excited about our annual showcase at the Durham Performing Arts Center in evening to shine what we used to call an evening of entertainment it will be at 7 pm on Tuesday February 21st and it will feature amazing performances by our students at every grid level when people ask me why should I enroll my students in a DPS school when there is so much competition there is one of my answers look at the district support of the Arts and look at the talents we are able to develop in our students no one else can match that thanks to the DPS foundation for making an evening and evening to Sean possible and also for the first time generously enabling our principles to attend for free and of course thanks to our Arts teachers led by our own Jeremy Tucker board members I want to talk tonight about next steps for growing together but first I want to acknowledge and thank you for.

The historic step you took last week thanks to your foresight and the steps the school board has taken in December 2021 June 2022 and January 2023 we now have a full Elementary Student Assignment plan for 2024 almost 18 months in advance it took years of work to get to this place and there is much more work ahead to ensure that our families understand and supported and are heard starting next month we are making comprehensive frequently asked questions document available in English and Spanish online by email and in print for every Elementary School we are not going to make families search through a document covering all 31 schools for the answers that are important to them I want to thank all of all of the staff that burn the Midnight Oil to individualize that information that has been really customized for every school next week we are also beginning a new wave of meetings with our school communities I and my staff will be attending meetings with teachers and staff and then with parents and Guardians.

Prioritizing schools with significant program changes prior to the Lottery application deadline on February 6th our entire growing together team is working together to ensure that our principles have the supports they need whether it's an information toolkit and personal assistant or both to lead family engagement at the schools in the way that they both charge me to accomplish we know that relationships and trusts we found this are best fostered at the school level it's my role to ensure that school leaders are supported by for strengthening those relationships also on Saturday February 4th from 9 00 a.m to noon we are going to host families families will have remaining questions about the application process for magnet schools we are offering special assistance in English and Spanish at the minute M Fort Branch Staff Development Center the mini Center is a convenient to public transportation interpreters will be eager to help so this is another opportunity that we will share with our families to increase access to our academic programs finally I want to share a few words.

About the many concerns that have been shared with us about classroom appliances fire safety and our response to our teachers and staff we have depended on these conveniences over the years I hear you and I understand your frustration working with the fire marshal division of Durham County we have come to a mutual understanding that we must do a better job of seeing to the health and safety of our students and staff it requires significant attention to meeting the building's safety standards as articulated by the fire marshal division significance capital investment in meeting those standards and taking other steps to ensure compliance today I want to share that I am authorizing finance department to work with our schools in acquiring commercial grades microwaves and refrigerators that comply with the fire marshal division standards upon board approval tonight this has been hard for our teachers and staff I am sorry and we are working to remedy this while staying consistent with our requirements to keep our schools and buildings safe Madam chair that's completes my remarks.

Thank you Dr marvinga we appreciate those remarks covering so many topics that we've discussed I think you've mentioned you said that there'll be a FAQ available can you just remind us when that will be available for families it will be available starting on Monday on our websites but for the prints we really wanted them to be ready on Monday we had little glitches but by Tuesday everybody will have it all right so Tuesday the frequently asked questions will be available and I just want to also Note February 4th is that correct not can you repeat that date and the opportunity February 4th 9 A.M till noon at mini Center all right awesome thank you so much for that information I know that'll be helpful for families as they're making decisions the next item on our agenda is agenda review and approval I'm sure I have two items I like to say about adding to the agenda one is the title safer School resolution and the other one is Appliance budgetary items.

If we could add both of those items after the consent items from before operation services.

Move approval of the agenda as amended second it's been moved and properly second any other discussion all those in favor say aye aye aye any opposed please use the same sign passes unanimously the next item in our agenda is our consent excuse all right I went way too far the next item on our agenda is the Board of Education monthly meeting minutes. Move approval of the minutes second it's been moved by Mr sear second about Miss Chavez is there any other discussion all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign minutes pass unanimously the next item in our agenda is our.

General public comment and I have a statement that I'm going to read before we get started a quick review of our rules we're going to ask you to first as your speaker please state your name is speaking for organization please state your name and the name of the organization second speakers are asked to present their comments in three minutes when the yellow light comes on on the podium you will have one minute left to start winding up your remarks when the red light comes on it will be beep which indicates your time is up complaints about name staff students or parents should not be voiced in open session however we are very interested in hearing your concerns with regard to public education safety of students or to the operation of the school system finally the board members will listen carefully and consider your comments but we do not engage in a discussion with speakers all right our first speaker is Nancy Cortez and they'll be they will be followed by Roberto Trejo noches.

To make sure your microphone. There we go okay buenas noches Administration scholar good evening members of the Board of Education Dr mubenga and members of the Board of Education is momentos.

Then attendidas as parents we need to make sure that all the needs not only academic but emotional about children will be attended.

We need staff that can give our students this specific instruction in small groups so then they can reach the level academic level that they need to be in.

Additional capacity for this reason it is our recommendation that a great amount of the donation to be used to hire personal staff whose trained to attack to assist in our students needs easy.

Intervention is. Assistance academic mentors interventionists ESL teachers easy teachers to be able to satisfy the needs of our students and then demos que nodes Permanente is.

We understand that maybe you would not want to use all the the money to hire new staff because doing that we will require that the money will be renewed however we ask you that you hire people for two or three years so with to see if we can renew this monies and then we can use the money from the Leandro de Duran muchas foreign. In the Duran Community there are many adults who work with limited contracts that's why we think that it wouldn't be a barrier another function is.

Nothing works without human Talent without teachers assistants bus drivers who are trained X. Para.

I would like to leave you with the thought of Malcolm X the education is our passport for the future because tomorrow belongs to the people who prepares themselves today is.

We are compromised to continue working together with you so then supporting the equitative system so they sustainable for our students to receive an education that they deserve so that tomorrow will be full of successes.

Thank you for your time and consideration thank you next we have Umberto Trejo followed by Sue guptill.

As. Good night members of the board thank you for another opportunity that you're providing okay.

I am here because they're growing together program had been approved and I like it I know I support what you are doing I know that Durham is growing a lot foreign.

I would like to let you know that many people of the community latinx Community don't know what it means growing together.

However I am here I am a member of the community and I'm leader of the latinx community to inform people what is happening in the Durham Public Schools system foreign.

At the same time we would like to know if you need any kind of help we are here to support you there are other institutions and organizations of latinx who are interested in support the community please let us know foreign.

I know that now everything goes online and we need to get to you to get together and you need to be close to us so then we can have all this information not only online but also flyers and some tangible things excellent.

ISO. I have been in different meetings where other institutions had explained clearly about growing together but I think that DPS should help us do this too escuchando tambian minutes.

Is.

Thank you for giving us the time to listen to me and I also would like to know what is happening with the 18 million dollars I haven't heard anything about it I as the other person said we could hire I know that we cannot hire people permanently but temporarily and this money could be used to hire more staff to help our students ESL. Is. Situation Islam is.

We would like to Focus ourselves to focus ourselves in providing help to our students to our children especially in ESL I am a father and I have a child we have been having some difficulties however we are going ahead and we need help to these students foreign termina. Thank you so much I know that these meetings are very long and extensive and I applaud you for that I know it's very difficult to be a leader I want to thank you for that thank you so much thank you and if you all had seen for our speakers that need interpretation we do give double the time to make sure we have time for that all right next up we have Sue and Lou Myers you all signed up together but would you like joint time okay I think we'll pick that we expected three minutes sorry yeah okay.

Good evening my name is Sue gato and I'm a member of St Phillips Episcopal Church on East Main Street here with me is Lou Myers who is a member of Saint Titus Episcopal Church on Moline Street three of the five mission priorities for the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina are care for creation collaboration and racial Reckoning Justice and healing we have been involved in an activity that encompasses these three a partnership effort with with Fayetteville Street Elementary School that gives students who are primarily students of color an opportunity to spend time and learn Outdoors we Lou just handed you copies of our diocese magazine so that you can see the details now I'd like to turn this over to Lou Who will tell you more thank you sue good evening as Sue said the emphasis of the church's priorities really drove us to want to do something I mean you just can't sit back and not do anything the questions were how can we help and what do we have to contribute Deacon Jill.

Stanton and Sue of St Phillips along with Reverend Yancey Deacon Sarah Woodard and I at Saint Titus we met over Zoom meetings trying to answer those questions we thought working with an elementary school would be best and same Titus has had a long relationship we adopted a cc Spalding but they were not ready but then we got what we call the AHA experience we said someone remembered that Linda turgian a former prisoner at Saint Phillips worked at DPS we met with her and asked her how we could help as they say the rest is history we were sort of wandering around in the wilderness and she gave us the direction she understood what we wanted to do she understood what our resources were she arranged the meeting with several principals close to our schools as a result of that meeting ebony Bailey expressed an interest we went and met with her and that was a really amazing meeting because she had she was speaking as to how Outdoor Learning helped her.

So she was interested she turned us over then to Nancy Lambert who is the art teacher but she had a pollinator garden and you can read about the results of what we did there and I will say we were surprised but pleased that we made the cover and we were happy and we want you to be able to brag and with all the good things that went on here there's a lot to brag about we know that we can scale this program because we have a template on how to do it we have parishioners who are serious gardeners and enjoy sharing their experiences with the students we were able to involve additional resources including Creekside cares they help rebuild the beds the Audubon Society they helped identify optimal locations for bird houses and baths and the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science they helped develop ideas around outdoor education and there were no cost to DPS with any of this program we appreciate this time one we want to let you know.

About our partnership and thank you for the opportunity to work with some really talented and dedicated staff we were fortunate to have a successful first launch that doesn't happen often but we're eager to get some additional schools and Linda said that she'll get with us again thank you thank you all. Amazing celebration of the great work happening in our schools next we have Owen Ambrose followed by Beth Rutter Myers.

Hello everybody I'm a student at DSA and I'm here to talk about the high school final exam exemption rules in policy 3410 I'm in a honor roll student and usually that would mean I'd be exempt from non-mandatory final exams however earlier this year I was out of school for eight days while sick and according to the policy I'm only allowed to have six absences which means I cannot be exempt from the exams at the end of the year I don't believe that I should be penalized for something that's out of my control and this also encourages people to return to school while sick to avoid going over the six day limit I request that the policy does not apply to excused absences thank you for your time thank you following Beth we'll have Hannah Mo girl and I apologize if I am mispronouncing your names thank you Beth hi my name is Beth red Myers and I'm the parent of a fourth and a first grader at Club Boulevard Elementary I'm here.

Tonight to ask you to clarify the policies for schools such as club that are losing their Arts Magnet status our new DLI program will phase in over several years starting with kindergarten but I don't understand whether students from the central zone in grades that won't yet have a DLI option can apply to stay at the school and receive priority after the boundary seats are filled last week the administration stated that students at a year-round school would be prioritized for another year-round school the same for Montessori but that students at an art and Humanities magnet won't get this level of priority because every school has art I think that shows a lack of understanding and appreciation for the magnet program the club has built it includes not only art but dance music cultural studies for every student not just a small group it also offers chorus a dance team Friday clubs and Open Access Library time I know that voting last week was a step you needed to take in this process but.

I'm asking you to look at each school and see what options you have within the growing together framework to minimize disruptions to families teachers and school communities during this transition please understand that in the absence of clear information people are making choices right now to change schools to volunteer or not to stay at their job or not because they don't know what the future holds thank you thank you the Hannah Merkel I apologize Hannah and Kim I should know how to pronounce it no worries hi Madame chair and board and superintendent benga my name is Hannah murky so it's murky like dirty water and I am a high school English teacher and creative writing teacher in the writing pathway chair at DSA I am here tonight with my co-coach for battle of the books Kim Gugino and I see the rest of my time to her with my support good evening Madam chair members of the school board and Dr mabenga I promise I'm not going to take all.

Of that time but I do tend to be a little bit long-winded and wanted to make sure that I did not run out of time this time my name is Kim Gugino and I am the librarian at Durham School of the Arts and the District High School media lead we are here this evening to request that refrigerators and microwaves are not removed from our classrooms and workspaces for many of us we spend more hours a day in our schools than we do in our homes throughout the school year and for most of us hot lunch and a cold drink are much of what keeps us going throughout the day removal of these appliances is guaranteed to not move forward strategic priority three which is on your agenda this evening we understand that an agenda item to address budgeting for commercial appliances has been added however the removal of these appliances is not aligned with the fire code per communication with the fire marshal and there is no reason to spend this additional money on purchasing.

Commercial grade microwaves and refrigerators when that money can be better spent to support teaching and learning in our schools Miss murky and I had previously planned to participate in a professional development webinar this evening through the University of California at Irvine online titled chat GPT and the future of writing instruction however we felt called to speak this evening and so we thought we would share our thoughts in the form of a shakespearean-esque sonnet written by chat g p Dean by gracious King we plead for clemency for we who serve your kingdom Faithfully are but teachers in a state of fear lest we should lose the items we hold dear our Market our microwave and refrigerator 2 are treasured things that we must pursue for without them our life will be undone our grip on reality our career all gone I thought that was pretty good the evil Sheriff has plans to take away our appliances have caused so much dismay leading to stress eating and sleepless nights that is true and strain.

Amongst family and friends alike our King we beg you please hear our plea and grant us mercy so that we can be free from this crisis of choice tests all sanity if nothing else grant us this one charity thank you for your time and consideration thank you our next speaker will be Jordan Parker followed by Chloe Daniel.

Hello and good evening to you all my name is Jordan Parker I am a senior at Durham School of the Arts and I'm here with my student council I'm here to speak to you all today about the exam exemption policy it is a policy that I would encourage all of you to change the policy states that students are allowed six absences excused and unexcused if they have an A and said class and four are absences excuse and unexcused if they have a b and said class I feel this policy is very rigid in the midst of a time where sickness is running rampant I work in the front office during the fifth period at my school and get to witness firsthand the sheer amount of students getting signed out early each day because of headaches head colds covid flu Etc it's sad to know that just from being out for a few days from a head cold that you would have to take an exam in a class that you may be already proficient in.

If you understand the course and I've proved yourself I feel that you shouldn't have to take the exam policy the exam for the class I feel it should be based on unexcused Hardee's to class or mirroring the state policy for 10 unexcused absences per semester with an A or B average I feel if either of these would be a better option be better options for DPS students as a whole thank you for your time thank you next we'll have Chloe Daniel followed by Elizabeth Thompson.

Hi my name is Chloe I am a senior at Durham School of the Arts I am also the student body president and I have seen a few good spaces because I'm also in a steering committee so I'm also here today to talk about the exam exception policy so for me I actually was flown out by two colleges this year to have interviews and also experience the campus and so now I have to take my exams for classes that I have A's in and I am not somebody who likes to miss school in my freshman year I famously came to school very very sick because I was very scared of getting that six absence and then I did end up sweeping through my whole third period and not learning anything because I was honestly just too sick to come to school and I went home immediately after that and just from these personal experiences as a student who does have a lot of anxiety about missing school but still ending up with that six offices it's.

Just not it's not I don't think it's fair all of my students work very hard DSA is a very rigorous school and not to mention all the other schools in the district all these students are putting in all their work to get these A and B's but yet they're still being punished for choosing to stay home and sick mental health is a very real thing and I have taken a mental health Day this year because I was very overwhelmed with things and I just feel like if we want to really make DPS a safe place for students and also increase our academic engagement we need to also understand that students miss school for very valid reasons and that's why I also urge you to move the exam exemption policy district-wide to only include unexcused absences for 10 days instead of the full six days with excused or unexcused absences thank you thank you next we have Elizabeth Thompson Paul Thompson followed by Glenn Thompson.

Hello everyone thank you for hearing us tonight I am a DPS parent and I am here to support my son Glenn come on up Gwen and Paul I need to pass my time to him he tells me so yeah if you could just come over to the mic we have people that are screaming and watching online so this will help us keep track of the meeting my name is Paul Thompson I'm Glenn's dad and I'm seeding my time to him as well Glenn the floor is yours right all right thank you board members of Durham Public Schools my name is Glenn Thompson and I'm a senior at Durham School of the Arts which a lot of my peers here are today but I'm here to talk about the implementation of the new Gaggle AI surveillance system that Durham public schools has implemented because I think that the Gaggle AI system is an abuse of student privacy rights the student policy code that I have right here states that students employees visitors.

And other users of Durham Public Schools devices and networks have no right or expectation to privacy and I understand why this is a measure that's in place and why it is necessary because there are things that our schools have to make sure that our students are saying or doing that will not cause harm to themselves or other students but I believe that Gaggle AI is something that crosses the line it has already within a week of its implementation caused problems at my school that I have noticed there is essentially no more student-teacher confidentiality because every word that any student or teacher says is being watched and recorded and can be flagged and we do not know what the Gaggle AI will do with this information because it is proprietary company this is also a concern for many types of students particularly lgbtq students lgbtq related words are flagged and listed and students may not wish to have that information sent to their Administration or cataloged in a database somewhere but it is.

Furthermore we also must consider what the Gaggle Corporation is and what it does inside so a lot of this information is not sent directly to administrators but is sent to people that work for the Gaggle Corporation the Gaggle Corporation analyzes student data and funnels its conclusions to a Safety Management dashboard School administrators with access can see rule violations alongside numeric IDs of the students who have committed them the dashboard includes a top concerned list which displays a scoreboard of students who have violated gaggle's rules over a particular time period and administrators can expand the graph into a rank that lists the students within their districts based on how often gaggle's rules are violated furthermore if a student who has said common profanity three times school officials will be alerted according to Gaggle students who commit three strikes can have their account privileges limited until a school official gives those privileges back and it's unclear if a student would lose email privileges in these situations since it can be necessary for communicating with.

Teachers and completing assignments I am citing an article that was written by BuzzFeed news about four years ago in 2019 but it seems that this is still in gaggle's terms of services and it's important to note that the gecko Corporation we don't exactly know how their AI fully works because it is a proprietary corporation that is private according to two job descriptions from the same article listed level one safety Representatives these positions are the people who get the information directly from flagged content and these are contracted employees paid about ten dollars an hour so these safety Representatives do not need experience in Consulting counseling or adolescent health or even working with children teens or young adults through familiarity with Kermit although familiarity with Kermit slang and social media is preferred a job description posted to indeed notes that these are typically capped at 38 hours per week which is just shy of what an employee would need to be considered full-time so they do not have any benefits that they are legally entitled.

To and Gaggle declines to answer to BuzzFeed news whether this level one safety representative receives benefits or insurance I think that the another part that's important to talk about though is the fact that this was implemented without the knowledge of any students or most teachers in the Durham Public Schools Network no students that I've talked to nor myself before a few days ago after it was implemented even know of its existence where the extent at which it would monitor all of my communications or content it's also important to note that according to the document here which is the section 4000 of the policy manual code.

4302-3225-7320 technology responsible use that it states under was B 0.5 that the use of anonymous proxies to circumvent content filtering or to protect one's anonymity is prohibited by Durham Public School regulations so even if a student wished to hide their Identity or contents they are forbidden to it's also important to note from the same article that if students opt out of Gaggle which they in some places have the right to do if they know about its existence they would not be able to use their school provided technology and would have to use their private email address for their schoolwork it's essentially you don't have a choice you have to use Gaggle if you want to turn in your work to school if you want to succeed at school you have to let yourself be monitored 24 7 at all times and that is policy it is 24 7 365 days a year and I think that this is an egregious and orwellian approach to school security as I understand it this cost.

Five hundred thousand dollars for Durham Public Schools to implement we can't even have nurses more than two days a week at our schools how are we supposed to stop students hurting themselves or others by non-human means if we don't even have humans to help on-site physical injuries and it concerns me as a student though I am leaving soon that this is the school system I am leaving behind because I don't think any student deserves to be having their self spied on I don't think students should let themselves be subject to that I think every student and faculty has the right to privacy and I just want to thank you all for listening for 10 minutes Timmy talk about that thank you thank you next we have Brian Callaway followed by Ryan Wayne Baum.

Good evening board I'm Brian Callaway I love the air time that contract details are getting tonight I'm going to keep that train going I wanted to discuss the first expenditure of the big new bonds that just happened at the last work session on January 12th the board by consent without any discussion authorized 8.5 million dollars to go towards privatizing construction project management now we've discussed quite a bit about the dangers of privatization I've heard add out of many of your mouths in the past when we view other Arenas of privatization but just reading the scope of work from the contractor they they are they are expecting to to have at most seven project managers during the course of a three-year contract that means that they're that we are paying over four hundred thousand dollars per year per project manager for that contract just so you know so we can talk about that another time what I did want to talk about is kind of peel back the onion a bit and talk about the process.

That we got to to to arrive at that contract in early June a request for qualifications was was issued this is a professional service so you don't have a bid you you issue out to designers Engineers to to view interview them rank how they how how the staff believes that they could accomplish the job there were three firms that that participated one is a nationally for nationally present firm another one is a a firm that has Decades of experience working in Guilford County both of which scored some minority woman business Enterprise points and then there's a third firm that third firm was one eventually selected it actually scored lowest in capacity experiences and qualifications so the request for qualifications was given to the firm scoring lowest in qualifications it did score highest in in the mwbe category but if we look a little deeper find out who who who owns this firm the only person that this firm is registered to at the state Secretary of state is is an old white man in.

Mecklenburg County and if you go to the website you can't even see who is associated with this firm it's very opaque it it's more concerning with me because if you look at your December.

8th consent agenda during the work session a firm reported in a 1.29 million dollar contract that 14 would be going to a woman-owned Enterprise that form was filled out in November 2022 in November 2021 a year before that that woman on Enterprise had their status revoked because they were sold to a publicly traded company there's a lot a lot going on in the details folks I really I really hope that we relax the extreme faith that we've had and well I'll have to come back later and talk to you another time I guess all right thanks thank you next we have Ryan Wayne Baum I apologize again if I mispronouncing names and Anna bersack followed by Crystal dressbox.

Good evening my name is Ryan weinbaum I Know It's tricky to pronounce but it's all good my bad I'm also here to speak on the policy 3410 the exemption policy a student from DSA why I think it's unfair is I'm a national level gymnast and I don't get much recognition from my school during school the Arts provides the basic common sports that every school has track basketball baseball and soccer because of this absent policy when I need to go to a competition because of my sport that is an unexcused absence when other students leave for a school sport their absence is excluded because of policy 3410 I think it's unfair for people who do Sports outside of school for those to be counted as unexcused absences because my school can't provide them another reason I'm here today is because of the rise of covid-19 and influenza on the DPS board Education website the policy for isolation of cygnus states that if a student or staff must be isolated for five days if we get.

Covid or influenza if I'm basing this on the five days that I need to be gone from school before I have to take another kova test to be cleared I only have one absence left if I have all A's I think that's unfair because sometimes I go to school sick and I worry about having to come back to take a fine art school even though I have all A's in my class and I've I've earned the right to not take a final even though I'm taking AP finals at the end of the year to sum this all up policy 3410 either needs to be changed or updated in order to benefit students and the teachers needs by having an A or a B average students should be able to be Exempted from exams without being based on absences if we continue on with this policy teachers would have more work to create and give and grade our finals thank you for having my time today thank you next up Anna bursa.

Hello my name is Anna bersack and I'm a junior at Durham School of the Arts this year has been a hard year for me and I've had a lot of absences due to that in September I got into a car crash and I was in the hospital for 10 days in October I got mononucleosis and I was sick for weeks causing me to have several absences then again in October one of my friends passed away and that affected not only me but many others all that happened to me is only an example of situations that could inhibit someone from going to school even after all of this I was able to maintain all A's and B's yet I still have to take the teacher made exam at the end of the year what if someone had covid or other physical health issues or mental health issues why does it even matter by enforcing students to have to take exams if they have an excess amount of absences you were telling them we don't.

Care what's going on in your life even if you have valid reasons and good grades you have to take this exam you were telling people that they should come to school even if they have covid even if they are sick or injured even if they are not doing well mentally or if someone passed away students will come to school sick so they can avoid absences negatively affecting themselves and others around them you are telling students to not put themselves first you were forcing unhealthy habits upon students thank you for your time thank you next we have Crystal Dreisbach and followed by Teresa blackington.

Good evening school board members thanks for the opportunity to give some good news I want to tell you about a positive new pilot program starting next month at four DPS schools I'm from don't waste Durham which is a did I even say my name I'm Crystal Dreisbach from don't waste Durham which is a local non-profit that creates solutions to prevent trash and we are big fans of Durham public school and always looking for ways to work together with our Solutions and we are very lucky because this past fall don't we stir them forged an official partnership with Durham public schools for the first time like really contract where we get to support Durham Public Schools specifically Mr Clifton Williams over at maintenance and environmental services has been absolutely amazing he is in our history of working with Durham Public Schools one of the best champions for this recycling pilot that we're bringing to Durham's Public Schools we know that aside from a few amazing schools that are implementing some sort of teacher.

Student-led programs the the history of recycling at Durham Public Schools has been Apache and unclear and not fully standardized so what we've been wanting to do for a long time and now we're able to we designed the DPS recycling success project and this is the way we're supporting is looking at what are the best practice is from all over the country we can design a program so we don't have to reinvent the wheel and we don't have to do things in a way that might fizzle out and die and continue to bring down people's confidence of whether recycling works and so we've got four really excited schools that's Pearson Town lion Farms Neil middle and southern high school and aside from Mr Clifton Williams we've loved loved working with Mr Jose who is of course in charge of all the custodians and Mr Williams and Mr robeo are they are just really open to finding Solutions and we so appreciate that because sometimes things are hard and you come up against barriers and then.

People sort of give up and they're like well that's just how it is but they are with us and trying to figure out okay well what if we did this way and that's been really wonderful and we've also got to work with Dr Lyndon Thayer in nutrition planning and she's been amazing as well so I don't know I have a little more time okay so this is like a we're also playing the long game here because we're all about reducing waste and there's ways to prevent it recycling is kind of like mitigation right you've already got recycling but what can we do to prevent things Upstream so oh boy not enough time dang it I'll just email you guys thanks for having me bye-bye thank you Crystal next we have Teresa blackington followed by Paige Holt.

Hi my name is Teresa Dowell blackington and I'm a Club Boulevard parent and the PTA president thank you to the growing together staff for scheduling a community conversation with club for next Wednesday we look forward to hearing from you about what growing together means for our school and our community during the town hall we hosted a club last week and in countless conversations with families and staff over the past year I've heard many questions and concerns while some have been clarified through the various presentations and proposals many remain so that our conversation next week can be as productive as possible I want to share with you today some of the questions that seem most pressing for our community we hope you will be able to answer these and additional questions our community will bring on Wednesday what do the numbers look like for Club what percentage of our current kindergarten and first grade students live outside of the new club attendance Zone what percentage of these students live outside of the new central region.

How many current kindergarten and first grade students have an older sibling currently in second or third grade who will thus be granted Legacy status what is projected in terms of seats filled at club by students living in the new attendance Zone that is not transfers and not those entering via the DLI Lottery just those in the attendance Zone what is the district doing to make sure the club is able to fill all seats during the orphan year of 23-24 when we maintain our very small walk Zone those in what will be our new Zone must still Lottery end to get a seat those outside our new Zone have no incentive to apply and some families are making preemptive changes to get ahead of the forced transition of 2425. how can we protect our funding and staff as we navigate this orphan year what options are there for maintaining clubs Humanities programming especially for those students not in the DLI program is anyone knowledgeable about our magnet nose it is so much more than.

Just dance or just art or just history it is a comprehensive program that affects all aspects of the school so what can be done to protect this program so that we continue to be a school where all students benefit from programming and not just one class of students per grade what can be done to link Legacy younger siblings with their legacy fourth fifth grade siblings so that families are guaranteed seats at the same school without having to apply for transfers for one or more of their children will Club outside of the DLI program be considered a traditional or neighborhood school would Club be considered a potential placement for students in the central region who are assigned to a program they do not want and thus choose to opt out what Outreach is being done to Club teachers specifically to inform them of upcoming changes answer their questions listen to their concerns provide them with incentives to stay at Club through these Transitions and ensure good jobs for those teachers whose positions may.

Be eliminated through the change in programming thank you for your attention to these concerns I look forward to hearing from you on Wednesday thank you miss blackington you gave a great list of questions can you email those to the staff as well so we can make sure or I have emoted okay thank you or if you can yeah thank you and last but not least Paige Holt. Hello everyone good evening Dr mabenga members of the board thanks for hearing and comment I'm here tonight to speak about the new Appliance policy and with all due respect the appliances that we're talking about are refrigerators and microwaves are not merely conveniences for DPS staff or students having these appliances on campus and close by literally allows staff especially teachers instructional assistants front office staff and EC teachers to be able to have you know the opportunity to eat during their long work days with our students mini DPS staff especially those in elementary schools and EC staff have like extremely limited time to eat like.

15 minutes 20 minutes and having to travel to get their food in a common area and especially if they want to heat up food would essentially mean that they cannot eat during the day when they are with our students most of us are not able to go off campus or take more than 30 minutes even in the best of cases and furthermore nursing parents Stephanie to refrigerate medication and those who follow religious diets will need access to these appliances we've heard that there will be exceptions but we have no idea how to get those exceptions this new policy is untenable and not the sort of working conditions that we want for rdps staff furthermore students rely on having places to store their food from home and heat it during the day and this policy will also affect student ability to get nutritious safe home-cooked and culturally appropriate food as well OSHA rulings state that having appliances for household use and staff break rooms increa present no increased risk because they are used in.

A manner consistent with household use so I don't understand why staff and students must suffer under this pretense of improving safety when no increased Hazard is present we need these appliances I know that this policy is a joint decision between DPS and the fire department but at the very least it would be extremely helpful to move the start date back of any new policy so that we have the summer to make changes and schedule these different changes thank you for your time thank you I think we have a couple other additional public comment speakers.

They can come on in. Oh. If you can come up to the podium right here state your name if you're speaking for organization State the name that you're speaking the organization that you're speaking for and then you'll have three minutes thank you my name is Joe Stapleton I am a teacher here at DPS and I'm here to talk about the new Appliance policy as well I'm really glad that DPS and the fire marshal have resolved their differences and DPS is apparently about to Fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund commercial grade appliances and I trust that every workspace in Durham will be held to the same rigorous safety standard as our schools the new Fire Marshal is sure to be as beloved in Durham as he is at all his other stops however I am doubtful that DPS can by February 1st make the sweeping changes in our daily work routines that make it not hard but impossible for teachers to reliably take the time away from students and other.

Responsibilities necessary for this new policy to be workable especially for elementary school teachers who I encourage you to think about in this or architectural changes for that matter at Jordan we don't have a common area we have a closet I'm co-chair of my department we've lost three teachers this year alone I'm providing assignments and Grading for two English classes that have a long-term sub I know roughly one in three first and second year teachers leave the profession after one to two years in DPS we are already near the number of vacancies at this point in the year as we have had all of last year for many people it hasn't been the best year ever and with this policy it's not looking to get much better I know the fire marshal doesn't care what we think fine frankly I don't care what he thinks either but I do know this I haven't seen Educators that's agitated in a long time so while I'm glad the district and the fire marshal have reached an agreement.

The teachers and staff who make the schools run haven't agreed to anything thank you thank you and with that it concludes our public comment we'll move to the next item on our oh one more excuse me come on in if you can start by saying your name if you're speaking for organization say the name of the organization you're speaking on behalf of you got three minutes hi I'm Riley Finnegan I'm speaking for myself tonight also about the appliance policy I'm another teacher in DPS and I share the sentiments of the other teachers who have spoken I've talked to a lot of co-workers over the last couple weeks who are really stressed out about this pretty sudden and pretty drastic overhaul to our lunches right which are pretty crucial and essential so yeah Joe said some of what I wanted to say this February 1st deadline really has to be pushed back kind of ASAP people are really starting to stress make arrangements wonder what's going to happen next week.

What they have to bring for lunch really not stuff that stress that needs to be added to the plates of our staff right in high school we just started a new semester we're trying to build relationships with new students and people are stressed about this instead or it's adding to it which I think is really unnecessary it's as Paige said it's affecting our ability to effectively do our jobs a lot of people myself included work through lunch few days a week because we need to let a student make up a test that's what I was doing today we need to work with a kid who missed some days early in the year or early in the semester I do that not because I'm like trying to be super teacher or something but because I just have to do that students can't come after school they can't come in the morning it's it's what I have to do to do my job and so I just get 10 minutes.

For lunch we don't have enough staff to give people lunch breaks I don't think we're going to be able to figure out how to guarantee lunch breaks until fall at the earliest so next Wednesday or whatever day it is is way too soon to be rushing through this thing and the last thing I'll say this plan I was excited to hear that there's some resources available so staff aren't expected to buy restaurant grade appliances themselves but I'm really concerned about the number we're going to be able to afford we've got hundreds of people using microwaves every Lunch Period that staff and students included so we would need dozens in just my building which is feels really unreasonable and overly expensive so I wanted to add that thanks for y'all's time and yeah hopefully we can push this back until next year when we can think it through a little better thanks thank you the next item on our agenda is the safer School resolution I'm not I think I'm.

Passing that over to you Mr Giovanni. I believe the board members and the agenda Review Committee did authorize staff to present it to the board for its consideration one of the purposes of presenting it at this time is that the due date for the grant precedes your next board meeting so on behalf of the staff that are requesting it I do want to apologize for the short notice and at this point what we would ask is if Mr Palmer is here I believe if he wanted to shed any additional light he did present to the agenda review group kind of a little bit about that Grant if the board is interesting in hearing that otherwise we would ask Administration would ask the board to review it and adopt it or sign it today so that we can submit it with the Grant application got it thank you Miss Giovanni let me pause on that because I skipped our consent items on the agenda so I apologize I got.

Too much writing on my sheet up here so we'll go first to our consent items and then I think Mr Palmer if you could give a brief overview that would be great our consent items we have a contract with Jeff Hargett mechanical for Carrington Middle School chillers and then we also have a monthly change order report consent items are sent to the board and reviewed in advance of our meeting move approval of consent and the item second it's been a move by Miss Rogers talking about Miss buyer any other discussion all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign passes unanimously now we'll move over to this supporting safe routes to schools if you can give a just a brief overview of the grant and that would be awesome we'll get started.

Good evening board members chair Umstead very briefly in respect to the resolution that is before you this evening Durham Public Schools has a unique opportunity to continue the work that we've started with the city and county of Durham the state of North Carolina has historically been opening grant funding opportunities to promote safe access to school for children that would include not only the physical campus but getting to the bus stop many of our bus riders for example are pedestrians before they get on the bus so the state of North Carolina has a Grant application that is open we were awarded the Durham Community was awarded the Grant in 2019 as a first funding phase the lead applicant at that time was the city of Durham in conjunction with bike Durham we've been doing bicycle and pedestrian workshops and education events throughout Durham over these past three years with me this evening is Miss Kristen Berkshire Our Community Transportation planner this new funding opportunity presents a new chapter in that relationship around promoting safe.

Access to school for our children again focusing on all children in Durham not only Elementary but Midland High School as well some of our recent events are a reminder that promoting safe access to campus is a skill set that we need to be thinking about for all children in Durham and so with that the new funding round will be led by Durham Public Schools as the first applicant to ncdot for grant funding historically it has been led by a city and we are taking a leadership role in the state to suggest again that this is an opportunity to align our values with our efforts we've been working with the administration this past month to align what it would take to submit the Grant application and there are some core components required for submitting the grant that would include a resolution or a draft resolution from the board as well as a letter of commitment from Administration working with our leaders in human resources and finance to review what that would entail.

The resolution before you tonight is a statement and a proclamation on behalf of the board to say again the values reflecting much of what is existing in board policy as it relates to walking and bicycling to school if you have additional questions about what we're thinking of in regards to Partnerships or the program Ms Brookshire is able to answer any additional questions this is a preliminary step to apply if we are awarded we then of course be able to provide more information on the specifics of the program thank you Mr Palmer Miss Chavez any questions on the board before we read thank you so much for presenting this test I think it's an exciting opportunity I was wondering when grantees would be notified evening we've heard this summer so July.

Yes ma'am thank you all so much I'm so grateful that you mentioned you know our collaboration with bike Durham they're definitely you know helping us year after year and so I was really excited to support this bike racks are part of our part of that too and I appreciate the work that is happening to ensure that our schools do are equipped for students who bike to be able to you know bike to school thank you so much Mr Sears yeah just remind everyone that this is pretty timely with our conversation last week and what we may want to change about how we get students to school as the challenge has come so thank you for being open to this all right any other comments or questions all right we'll start with you miss Rogers and each board member will get a paragraph there's a copy in our packets I don't know board members you've seen that.

It's also in the email at 11 A.M if you're in your email resolution of the Durham Public Schools Board of Education supporting safe routes to school whereas walking and bicycling to school gives school children time for physical activity a sense of responsibility and Independence an opportunity to be outdoors time to connect with parents friends and neighbors and communities with less traffic congestion and whereas safe walking and bicycling are important life skills that are learned through repeated practice and offer the chance to build physical activity into daily life while reducing oil consumption and carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change and whereas olod Durham's children irrespective of family and neighborhood resources deserve the opportunity to actively travel to youth-oriented destination such as schools and parks and were a safe routes to school efforts can remove barriers to walking and biking to school through education encouragement and evaluation efforts that Empower families to choose walking and bicycling by fostering a community culture for active travel and whereas even short periods of skilled.

Based training can significantly help students number one navigate the built environment safely by learning and practicing safe travel behaviors number two encourage Outdoor Learning and number three provide opportunities to build self-efficacy and independent mobility and whereas the ability and confidence to safely walk and ride a bicycle benefit school children for the entire span of their life regardless of whether other barriers prevent them from walking or bicycling to their current school and whereas by Fall 2022 two-thirds 20 of DPS elementary schools have celebrated National walk bike and roll to school day with events starting off campus or traveling together on campus and since fall 2021 10 elementary schools have received a bicycle safety education programming and physical education classes for third graders with some schools receiving programming twice and whereas the Staffing Resources for school bus transportation service are limited and school car queue lines can be stressful for families and School staff Durham Public Schools should support and encourage active travel for school children who currently have safe routes and continue coordination with.

Local Regional and state Partners to expand the potential for active travel through infrastructure improvements and whereas Durham Public Schools is committed to being a state and national leader on safe and active travel to school now therefore be it resolved that Durham Public Schools will prioritize the safety well-being and transportation options for school children in Durham city and county by applying for three years of funding 2023 through 2026 for the North Carolina Department of transportation's safe routes to school non-infastructure cost reimbursement program the Durham Public Schools Board of Education affirms the value of safe and healthy Transportation options and the Investments required to plan an operationalize support for active School travel be it further resolved that the Durham Public Schools Board of Education encourages School administrators to participate in safe routes to school activities with the purpose of improving student safety Health academic achievement and school Community relationships.

Emergency signs or yes so the last part is signed this day January 26 2023 with a mo I'll take a motion to approve the resolution I make a motion to approve the resolution of the Durham Public Schools Board of Education supporting safe routes to schools to school seconded by Ms Lewis any other discussion just really appreciate the foresight with this grant that's going through I hear people talking about how to can we have alternatives for our students to get to school that'd be sidewalks biking bus transportation so thank you all for the foresight with that all those in favor say aye aye any opposed please do the same time passes unanimously thank you all the next item on our agenda we have the appliance budgetary item I'm gonna pass this over to you Dr movinga.

Board members as I said in my remarks that's we all been dealing with these issue with fire marshal for the past probably a couple months so I was able to have a good conversation today with a fire marshal and two of our board members were invited as well tonight we decided to bring a recommendation to you based on our conversation with our principals they were able to submit the list of appliances that they think is going to be appropriate for the building so that our teachers and the staff will be able to navigate the building and be able to use those appliances properly so without further Ado I'm gonna pass this to Mr lasurer who has a brief presentation and the course of what is going to cause for us to be able to acquire those appliances I think the way we're gonna proceed if you approve this tonight instead of having an order centrally we're going to push this to the school level they're going to have the code.

And with that I think based on our talk with our school leaders that's been able to buy some of those appliances with Amazon may take three days to be able to acquire those microwaves but refrigerators may take a little bit longer so we're gonna try to expect at this process as quickly as possible so without further Ado Mr lesour I'll let you present good evening board members we took on this process because of the the need to provide the schools the funding because it's not fair for them to implement something that is was given to them handed to them handed To Us by the fire marshal to make sure that we could be compliant we felt the need to give them additional funding so we did the poll and as we went through the process we have a a document that breaks down by Elementary School Middle and High the number of microwaves and a number of refrigerators that they needed here you'll see a table that just a summary of what we have.

The First Column that we have 147 in total are going to be the number of refrigerators that schools are in need of we have 208 microwaves that are needed in the schools and coming up to a total cost of 366 800 dollars based on these numbers if they get revised it could go up a little bit more but at this time we pulled all the schools and this is the number that we have it at this point in time again the refrigerators are the bigger costs we were looking at two thousand dollars for refrigerator to make sure that they get quality grade refrigerators that they needed and 350 dollars per microwave so that gives you an idea of the cost that we're going to be putting into this allocation to the school so that they can if they've already purchased them then they can move the money around and utilize it for supplies materials wherever else they need.

I also wanted to add if it's the pleasure of the board if this is approved tonight would like to move the date of February 1st for compliance to April 1st when we come back after spring break that will be my recommendation tonight just to give our schools couple months to be able to order those and be able to have them in place so that will be my recommendation tonight so we're here to get your approval thank you Dr McGregor bringing Mr lesore for that presentation are there any questions from board members or motion Miss buyer I'm so appreciative of you all continuing these conversations I'm happy to approve this just as a stop Gap but I fundamentally understand the frustrations of our professionals our staff and our Educators about why they feel that this will not be enough and this will not satisfy their concerns so I'm glad y'all had conversations but I mean as I looked up dorm room policies for Central Duke School of Science and Math those young teenagers and young people.

Can have refrigerators in their dorm rooms currently per fire code in Durham and so when you try to explain to professional adults that they're not trusted in that same way I understand why they feel disrespected and so I'm glad y'all had conversation today I don't think it can be the end of the conversation because I don't it it's not logical to professional people and so you know I'm happy to support this this expenditure as long as every school has something and and I have concerns about schools that didn't ask for anything do you all have answers on Neil and like some of the schools that have zeros in their columns like it doesn't seem that also troubles me so we're able to reach out to all the schools and as Mr lesue said this number can change the fact that we're bringing this also it's Beyond three hundred thousand dollars so if they're gonna be any additional items that's make us a good twenty thirty thousand dollars we'll be able to take care of those.

And Mr sore where is this money coming from because we don't have a piggy bank like the county has a piggy bank but really where what where are we getting 366 000 so like we do every year we usually have money that is unspent at the end of the school year we're using those lap salaries because of the the number of teaching positions that are vacant in all other positions that are vacant as well we're utilizing those dollars to offset this expense for the schools and then.

Why was this okay last year and why has a new employee working in Durham decided this is not okay this year that's that I think fundamentally the other thing that makes no sense to our people do you all have any Mr Sears yeah so I'm thankful to the the fire marshal and a member of his team for coming and speaking with us today and I do want to for for those listening share the that I I brought to the conversation my work at Hillside for seven years and what had been okay and what would get trick flagged and what would be told to us and power strips and all these things and I and we discussed that the tension that some of the staff share with us tonight are very real in fact I think nearly verbatim we shared one of one of our public commenters assessments of the stress level and this perhaps being a straw that can that can break our staffs back so we are getting to know one another.

I see progress coming in the future and there's also an education piece so now I'm finally getting to answer your question there is an education piece here for all of us including the fire marshal but certainly for us as operators of buildings and I I'll also say that we were reminded that this doesn't simply operate at a county level there are state requirements and state interpretations Insurance interpretations into this work but I came out of the meeting confident that the two staffs are going to work productively in that education and perhaps a re-education as codes continue to evolve and we started and ended the meeting with the the absolute fact that everybody wants our schools to be as safe as possible just add a little bit that was a great summary Mr Sears of the meeting today I think one distinction that was drawn to between some of those dorm rooms and our school buildings that they are wired differently so many of those dorm spaces.

Are wired for and no I will not get into electrical but are wired for multiple refrigerators multiple microwaves because that's how the building is built and our schools are not built in that same capacity so I think that to get really plainly to that question was another concern that was brought up today so you though see this as as one step in an ongoing discussion then that fair is that I would like to get our staff in a good place I don't want to give them a false promise then get back to where we are again Define Marshall was very explicit it was able to bring up all the law state law as well we need to be in compliance I think this was really a good compromise to be able to move two months forward so we can get our building in code I don't want to scare anybody while we're meeting with the fire marshal one of our buildings was about to catch fire too one of their high school so because of.

The same incident as well we wanted to.

Bring that to the closed session so we gotta be careful we're going to make sure that we complying with the code I don't wanna or say anything drastic happening here where we have to start moving thousands of students to another building so the guys willing to work with us an extension of two months will help us really expect that the process starting by Monday start having those appliances we're gonna work with our principals I heard some of the concerns from our staff that's our Kelvin classes and all that kind of stuff we're gonna see and work for our principle to be mindful of that so that our staff will be able to have at least a 30-minute launch and I think I want to highlight too on this list that we have here that schools have asked for multiple refrigerators and multiple microwaves that will be provided because we recognize that school every building is different and if you are on a different building and that's away from the break room you.

Might not have the opportunity to get there for your lunch period so we asked and I remember when this first came out so Dr Marvin we got to provide this for our schools there's we should not put this on them in the opportunity for schools to request multiple I think is a way that we're trying to show good faith that we want to make sure that we our Educators have what they need I recognize there's a lot of convenience that comes with having your device or having your appliances close with you but we have to also realize that we need safe school buildings for our students and for our Educators we don't want buildings that are damaging the electrical systems there and that could cause harm to folks Miss Rogers thank you for this so appreciative that we're making efforts for our staff to have this access I have a question around process we said we're pushing this to the principles to let the principals make the purchases are we ensuring that.

What they've requested is what they will actually have in the school is there a process to that I know there are some schools and even some ptas that have already made purchases for commercial devices and while I don't expect the parent organizations to be reimbursed I hope somebody from central office is ensuring that you know the I don't know the two refrigerators and two microwaves that y.e Smith has requested will be available at White Smith at the deadline. And that they won't like short you know what I'm saying not particularly Whitey Smith but just in general that they'll have what matches this they said they can move the money correct in regards to moving the money Ms Rogers this is if they've already if they've already purchased on they a lot of the schools are purchasing through Amazon and getting them in three days three to five days so we know that they're getting them in some schools have already ordered them gotten them in already and we're just making sure that we give.

Them the funding that supports the request that they had from us so for instance you said y Smith with two refrigerators two microwaves if they have already purchased those things the microwaves is probably what they're getting first because the refrigerators take a little longer but they are they are available and and can be shipped from that standpoint but but the key is is that if they've ordered them already and they've spent 250 dollars it one didn't come up 350 they have a hundred dollars left over they can move that money out of that line item to use it for other things to just support their overall program because we don't want them to be shorted in any way shape or formed but we want to be able to provide them the needed money to get going or get reimbursed basically thank you I think I understood that part it's the making sure that they have the number of devices that they sought approval for and that we are does that make sense so.

Yeah yes it makes sense I think the process has been reached out to all the principal supervisors reach out to your principles they were able to submit a spreadsheet that came to my office my person was able to organize it and send it to Mr lesour then Mr lasso was able to tabulate the whole thing and then came up with the price so it's based on what the school have requested so if we get to the point where there's a school that's if they are short one or two we are going to work with them so we are really committed here to make sure that they have those appliances in place and I think the next step probably tomorrow we're gonna have to call it quick 15 minutes meeting with our principals and make sure we explain to them the process so they can get started.

Miss Chavez and Miss buyer thank you all for working on this I know this has been it's it's just been a lot of work for everybody who's been involved and I'm glad to hear about the conversation that was had with the fire marshal and his staff member and I hope that there can continue to be those conversations I have one question that's coming up for me is you know knowing that we we've all become more electronic dependent now we have you know whatever they're called with you know multiple things the plot we have like six things to plug into one outlet and all of that I have a question thinking toward the future with our new schools and our renovations if they will include any changes in electrical wiring that may allow for these type of appliances I don't know very much about Electronics myself but is is there I was just wondering if that was any that was in consideration at all the short answer is no because the schools are commercial buildings okay.

Thank you for that and then my another question that's coming up and thinking about this and I and I want to say too with I mean I think what we're hearing from from teachers is how this will change their routines how they support students and and I and I you know understand the concerns about the interruption to the lunch time that they often use for other purposes as well I'm thinking about the space of our schools and I'm just wondering if in consultation with these principles if there will need to be new spaces created if the break rooms if there's a centralized break room for a school like Hillside it's very you know a lot of our school is very long will there need to be other spaces created to to hold those appliances particularly the refrigerators since they're larger and is there anything that we need that you know you're working with them on in terms of that space and also the you know both the space to house the.

Appliances and also so the teachers can access them if they're if they're at one end of the building or another. I'll give an example probably Roger's hair where the prince were pretty much based on her submission she really wanted to make sure that every level they have a microwave and they have a refrigerators as well so this principles they know they're building really well and based on the needs of the building how teachers different grade level different department they can navigate through the building that's how they were able to submit those lists.

Miss Barr did you have additional questions I I don't want to belabor any of these points but I do want to be clear that this board this Administration are committed to safety as a first priority on everything safety is is foundational to to going to school but we also have aging buildings we have infrastructure that is older typically it is legacied in to a prior fire codes and not had to be brought up to current fire codes I looked at some of the reports and and I hate hate hate that some of this has played out in the Press when it should be Durham people coming together like you all did today to try to act as responsible adults and and make a solution I hate how much money we're spending on this when we want to spend our funds on services for children while we keep them safe and that's what we will continue to to prioritize but a man looked at some of the the citations and things and they included.

We didn't have fire extinguishers at outdoor tents okay we put up tents for covet and they didn't have a fire extinguisher I looked at we could only have we couldn't decorate doors in elementary school with paper that's what elementary school teachers live for like that is all about reaching children and making them feel welcome as they walk in the door of their classroom so it feels like we're still speaking separate languages and if we can continue to bring some educators to the conversation gently they can convey how they are doing this work of keeping children safe and also feeling respected I think whoever's making these decisions at the city county level needs to understand how tenuous our staff are and we'll get to that on an agenda item soon and if we lose one teacher over this this was the wrong Direction or Durham to to be forced into so I look forward to kind of continuing to have really thoughtful conversations because we are all on the same team.

So I'm happy to buy these things and I will move that we approve this expenditure tonight I didn't Miss buyer seconded by Miss valiadaris I just want to also add the conversation today was around how do we educate our students and keep them safe and I think I want to just keep reminding us that while this policy may feel like a attack it is around how to keep our Educators and families and everyone in our school building safe and following the fire codes and safety regulations is a way to make sure that happens especially in our aging building so I think as much as we'll continue to have these conversations the role of the fire marshal is to make sure that we're following the the expectations to keep folks safe in our buildings it's about preventing anything from happening so I appreciate y'all for this conversation but just want to remind us that while that is at the Forefront of why we're doing this and why some of the expectations are coming out.

So it's been moved from properly second any other discussion all those in favor please say yeah aye any opposed please use the same sign passes unanimously thank you Dr my bingo and your team for the quick work on this item but as I said do we also need to approve the pushback date to April 1st or no okay sounds good yeah I think we are good all right so that will be communicated to staff though more than just the meeting tonight tomorrow tomorrow.

And the next item on our agenda will go to operation Services we'll start with the Strategic plan priority three update that's it to you soon yes good evening Dr mubinga chair Umstead members of the board it is our pleasure tonight to share with you some updates for strategic priority three attracting and retaining outstanding educators as we go two slides forward we want to recognize the outstanding team members that we have that make up strategic priority three we have three goals three a b and c and you can see those outline here and we have our goal team leaders who are here tonight to help share information with you around strategic party three so we have Miss Kimberly Hager who will share for 3A Michelle Hayes who will share for 3B and Jeffrey code week who will share for 3C we have done some struct restructuring within HR as well as in other areas across the district so that we can have an intense focus on Staffing Recruitment and recognition as well as employee.

Relations so we will begin going to the next slide with our year four overview of our Five-Year Plan and on the next slide you will see that with our three goals teacher turnover Hispanic and Latino Recruitment and employee satisfaction that we have key Focus strategies for each of those first when we are looking at teacher turnover our strategies include a focus on compensation how we are onboarding and our other support on processes for our employees strategic Recruitment and Retention strategies Based on data as well as an intense focus on working conditions for Hispanic and Latino recruitment we are focused on our Partnerships to ensure access to employees who reflect the students who are in Durham Public Schools at all levels I will say that again at all levels classified certified and the administrative levels fine-tuning and expanding our grow our own programs we need to start younger we don't want to wait till folks are in college we want to look at our students that are committed right here in the Durham.

Community as well as identifying and collaborating with more Hispanic serving institutions are hsis and then you can see Compass compensation comes up again under goal 3C employee satisfaction as well as that intense focus on working conditions the next slide actually out outlines our current progress now one thing you will quickly see when you look at this slide are where we are with our metrics and so four goal 3A our teacher turnover we did not meet our goal as well as 3B and 3C but I do want to highlight some key things for you for goal a our current performance this year is at for 2021-22 is at 19.8 percent that is projected we will talk a little more about this but teacher turnover is calculated march to March and we are still waiting on the final official results from the state as far as our percentage of DPS Educators and staff who identify as Hispanic or Latino you can see for 2122 we ended up at six percent which was below our eight percent goal.

And for goal 3C when we are looking at employee satisfaction our goal for 2122 was 89 and we took a slight dip to 86.8 percent so now we will dig a little deeper into what is going on with each of the goals and we will start with teacher turnover so if we go to the next slide you will see here again the individual strategies that are captured but on the next slide I want to point to you a detail of our teacher turnover rate over time so you can see that prior to covid and even during covet we were experiencing consistent increases or deep decreases in our turnover rate with 2020 2021 being an all-time low at 11.1 percent however last year we jumped to 19.8 percent and currently this year as we even heard in some of the public comment we were at 19.8 percent turnover the end of December so that it's truly a call to action and a sense of urgency around having mid-course correction to be able to.

Address where we are right now in January with that metric being at 19.8 percent in December so related to that if we go to the next slide you can also see some Trends over time I know there are a lot of numbers on this slide but if you go back to the 1718 school year as well as 1819 and you look at how the turnover rate changes during the course of the year so you can see there's march to August and then how does it adjust for September October November December just showing you Trends what you're going to find as as you advance to the 2122 and the 2223 school years that those increases are getting greater every month and so we have to be able to get to the root cause of where that is coming in we know where that is coming from we know what some things are but we have to engage in deeper conversation with our employees and listen to what they are telling us and come up with strategies.

To be able to address the things that are impacting three key areas okay if we go to the next slide. I know there is a lot of information on this slide but this is some key facts that were requested regarding the reasons for separation I would like to highlight here that you will see you will not see percentages that calculate to 100 that add up to 100 at the bottom because we focused in on some of the key reasons and there are some that are not included on this slide I want you to note the ones that are highlighted as the greatest reasons that are provided for exiting Durham Public Schools it is interesting that the greatest reason is other reasons and so if you will see as of December of this year 23.8 percent of the reasons that are given by exiting employees are simply to say other reasons and so we have a responsibility to dig deeper into what are the other reasons we want them to tell us what those.

Reasons are and you can see the trends for this even over time the next reason is one that we do see some promise in because we think that we we have the ability to impact this and so if you look at resign to teach in another Public School unit you will see that as of December 18.72 percent of our exiting DPS employees went to another Public School unit I would like to add a note here to say that my team is working on digging in the to this even deeper because we want to go into that 18.72 percent and find out what public what trends do we see and which Public School units those individuals are going to I would also add notice the trend over time when you're seeing resign to teach in another North Carolina Public School unit in 1819 that was at 15.57 percent took a dip during the covid years and then last year the overall percentage for 2122 was again at 15.75 percent the next greatest area is a career.

Change now if you look across time it is clear that from 2018-19 only 7.72 of our staff were leaving to actually change careers right now that is sitting at 13.37 percent we do see more stabilized numbers around those who choose to retire but one thing that we have had intense discussion about in Human Resources is if you look at reasons that are provided related to health and disability you can see a significant increase from prior years in our year where we stand right now with 5.61 leaving related to health and disability I do think that that speaks volumes about the working conditions that educators are experiencing not just in Durham Public Schools when I speak with my colleagues this is a trend across the state of North Carolina I would even add it's not a metric that we like to talk about it's not highlighted here because of the percentage but if you will notice to date this year when we did this presentation the number of deceased employees and service was for and we.

Have had four more in the month of July increasing that number to eight and so we are working diligently with our employee assistance provider as well as our other connections to make sure that we not only have supports we have some wonderful supports for employees but we have to make sure that they are readily accessible and that they know what they are how to access them and find a clear pathway to ensure that we are increasing our our support in that area you will hear about some of those other supports in that for mental and physical well-being under 3C on the next slide it is important for us to talk about the State of Affairs for teacher turnover based on years of experience I am sharing all of these key data points not to just throw numbers at you but to capture the reality we we meet with legislators we have one of the best boards to advocate for our employees and Durham public schools and so I do want us to be.

Aware of the numbers behind what we often hear our employees expressing there is something in research that is called the life cycle of a teacher and in the life cycle of a teacher it basically says if you can get a teacher to year seven you can begin to stabilize the likelihood of them leaving this the profession and so what you will see here on this slide is you see the same trend line but the trend line has gone up as far as the percentages that are turning over so what this actually says to give you an example is if you look at the teachers and the first two years for example we have about 400 teachers in the district within their first two years and 32 percent of them as of December have left okay so the numbers do not add up to 100 across all of the bars you're looking at the percentage within each bar if we were to go years three through five we would see that 28 percent.

Are leaving within the first five years one of the contributions to the rising trend line that we're discussing here is related to the alternative Pathways to licensure so I'm going to give you an example of one of those Pathways which is the residency license and so as far if we were to go in and look at our statistics regarding our teachers with the residency license I want to explain a little bit that The Residency license replaced what we traditionally know as lateral entry that license initiated in 1920 in 2019 to 2020 school year that was year one of residency license we had 12 individuals with a residency license just those what four short years ago as it stands right now in 2023 we have this year thus far 133 residency teachers and we are likely to have 150 by the end of this school year we project so I want you to think about three key things we talk a lot about compensation but when we're looking at recruitment retention working conditions and all of.

This it is built on three pillars you have to have your compensation you have to have your human capital and you have to have your culture and so if we just think about the aspects of our residency teachers I want us to think about those pieces and the experiences that they are having when we talk about compensation we've invested a lot in return in Recruitment and Retention bonuses and those sorts of things but if we have our continued High number of vacancies a recruitment bonus will not pay enough for that if we can't balance it with the human capital that we need as well as the culture when you think about the support during those beginning school years we are fortunate and Durham to have a full release Mentor program we have not increased mentors to address moving from 12 residency candidates to 133.

And so the experiences that they're having when they're onboarded and they're learning the DPS way that is a tremendous impact on this metric and so to share some of the things we've implement it as well as our mid-course corrections I would like to invite Miss Kimberly Hager to the microphone to be able to share some more positive news than what I've shared with you as well as some other strategies.

Good evening we continue to review our current practices for improvement which includes diving into the data by schools at a whole new level. Thank you marketing the benefits of our beginning teacher Support Program which is currently at 90.2 percent we're focusing on the evaluation process that provides quality feedback to our employees we're supporting those with identified licensure needs with programs such as the Central Carolina teaching initiative Miss Hager I'm going to ask them to advance the slide please okay thank you there you go we're supporting those with identified licensure needs with programs such as the Central Carolina teaching initiative we're encouraging our instructional assistance in becoming teachers through our theater teacher program in collaboration with North Carolina Central University and we're continuing to offer incentives such as bonuses for our identified hard to staff areas we have adjusted our strategies in this area to include continuing our collaborative meetings with HR and the BT mentors program in an effort to move our beginning teacher support to a hundred percent we're exploring more ways of drawing.

Individuals to engage in the mentoring and coaching support of our beginning teachers while still honoring the Brilliance of those who tirelessly Provide support across our school district each and every day we are providing more targeted assistance to our alternatively licensed candidates and we're celebrating our teachers and staff each month through the teacher of the month and employee recognition programs for next steps we are taking a deeper dive into the data as Dr lesane has already talked about from our exit surveys as well as creating a plan for conducting State interviews next slide please.

We are working diligently to hit our ultimate goal of a two-week hiring process timeline by training our staff strengthening our processes troubleshooting areas for improvement and extending collaboration across teams some of our key accomplishments this year include conducting the classified salary study estimated to impact approximately 2200 DPS employees the payment of Recruitment and Retention bonuses including the two 1500 bonus dollar bonuses DPS employees received in March and again in October of this past year DPS in partnership with North Carolina Central University is celebrating that we are the first school district in the state to have our fourth cohort of the theater teacher program and we have the largest of all of the TA to teacher cohorts in collaboration with North Carolina Central across the state we currently have 25 instructional assistants in the program and there are currently seven teachers who have completed the theater teacher program and are now teaching in DPS classrooms across the district so that's okay we're very excited and one final key accomplishment that.

We'd like to highlight for this year includes the establishment of the teacher and employee of the month recognition programs in partnership with the veil cares Foundation tasai chapter of Omega sci-fi and the nccu men's and women's tennis teams thank you. And so on the next slide well before we go to the next slide I would like to also highlight you'll hear a little more about this later we also have a trailblazing partnership with UNC Chapel Hill for our Dream program and I do want to highlight that bullet that you see there we don't want to read everything on the slide but the bullet that you see there that we do have dream for Dream residents and just a little Point I've actually been talking to principals over the past few weeks as people are actively recruiting and wanting to make sure that they have access to our Dream residents and so if we could go to our next slide we're going to slide into discussing goal three B which addresses the percentage of our.

Employees who identify as Hispanic or Latino on the next slide you can see our Trends over time even though we have a no as far as meeting The Benchmark goal of eight percent last year this is a metric that you see a steady increase over time with us approaching six percent last year but I am happy to say that when I calculated our demographics for December I want you to look at that jump from six percent to 7.2 percent as of December and so I am anxious to see that even if the 10 goal is not met we will see significant progress over this year towards meeting that goal and so while we celebrate the increases and you'll hear more about what all has gone into helping get those increases helping achieve those increases I want to invite Michelle Hayes our executive director of talent acquisition and employee recognition to talk a little more about our efforts and I would add that our efforts have truly focused on balancing representation instead of just increasing numbers.

Hello again so Durham Public Schools will continue to build Partnerships with Atlantics communities I am super excited we are scheduled to attend the North Carolina annual Hispanic Latino professional educator Summit February the 11th on the campus of North Carolina State and Dr mamingo will speak there we will also continue to visit local stores and Banks to talk to our latinx consumers about opportunities in Durham Public Schools I am super duper excited on February the 8th me along with one of my colleagues we're going to Florida International University FIU for the recruitment Fair which they yield the highest number of latinx Educators and we will continue to work with members from our strategic team from Priority 3B to recruit from the University of Puerto Rico of course we will continue working with our public relations marketing latinx recruitment effort efforts and regarding our next steps looking at the employment trends for our Hispanic and latinx employees analyzing all schools and departments to ensure that we are recruiting and interviewing Hispanic and latinx applicants we will.

Plan an in-person recruitment fair in partnership with El Centro which is our Hispanic organization in Durham who helps connect Hispanic and latinx to Community Resources and our team will work with Middle School and High School Scholars like Dr lasange has stated we can't just start in the colleges we have to start early so our team will continue we'll work with middle and high school counselors identifying latinx Scholars who are interested in early childhood and K-12 education I know from the middle schools they use Naviance I'm sure in the high schools they have other career Preparatory programs we have an abundance of latinx Scholars in our school system so we need to focus on building our teacher capacity from within as a former principal it was always important for my Scholars to see my teachers and staff who look like them we will continue to work with North Carolina universities to recruit more of our latinx Educators next slide so for our key accomplishments by June of 2023 engagement with North Carolina Central.

University and Durham Technical Community College and Educators pipeline to launch our Bull City teacher Scholars as well as identifying Pathways to teaching we're going to reiterate of course going to FIU and to the annual Hispanic Latino Educators Summit we will continue to build additional support for our Dream program when recruiting pull non-education Majors to discuss alternative licensure track you don't know what you don't know so a lot of times when you're talking to current Educators who did not go through the educational track they had no idea that there were even options available through the alternative licensure track some of the best teachers are from lateral entry and from our residency license licensure program we will continue to build or we will build a comprehensive recruitment package that assists candidates with actually living in Durham we understand the Durham the cost of living is expensive and we will build a comprehensive recruitment package that assists candidates with actually living here and we'll we will engage with our identified Hispanic serving institutions.

In focused areas such as Florida Texas Puerto Rico and Honduras okay I would like to add right here just a moment prior to coming to the board meeting today we talk about the balance between compensation capital and culture and sitting right there in the background is affordable housing so just prior to coming to the board meeting today we had a session for employees about home ownership at the mini fort Brown Staff Development Center and so I do want to take an opportunity to say there are two more sessions tomorrow they are virtual one is in the morning at 7 30 and one is at 12 30. we appreciate our partnership with truest that is coming to not only help educate our employees on home ownership but specifically to talk to them about grant opportunities that may help make home ownership more affordable and so that is just an example of one of the many efforts but please there is still time for so for our employees that are interested in that level of support we.

Want to encourage them to join one of the sessions tomorrow if they were not in a session today we can go on to the next slide I'm sorry we employee satisfaction is our next area you can see here that with this metric we had a steady increase for a number of years until this past year with an all-time high in 2020 2021 of 88.1 of our employees expressing their employee satisfaction they're in satisfaction with Durham Public Schools for the 21-22 school year we took a dip to almost 87 percent and our goal for 2223 is 91 and so that survey has not been administered it it will be administered later in the year and so we want to do our best to work especially in the wake of microwaves and refrigerators to make sure that it does not have a negative impact on our employee satisfaction especially when it's something beyond our control Dr Wilson can I ask a quick question yes what exactly is this like I understand it's a measuring employee satisfaction.

But where does the data come from for this chart right here the data comes from It's a combination of our own questioning in the off years in the teacher working conditions survey that is where this information comes from and actually there's some upcoming slides that Mr co-week will be talking about that that detailed the questions that inform this metric very good question and is this like a because I know the survey has many questions is this just in one particular question it's that specifically asked on the for this grapher yes okay sorry that's on that next slide that overall my school is a good place to work and grow professionally is that the question yes okay I was just trying to I was trying to match him absolutely and so actually that is a perfect segue chair Umstead to Mr co-week senior executive director of employee relations he's going to come he's going to talk about those questions as well as our strategies so if we can go to the next slide.

Good evening everyone actually can we shoot back two slides just for just for us before we get started. We can go back two slides please oh we seem to be missing aside okay we can we can we can bump forward first if we can move to the next slide please so first of all this specific question just to make this is the last question on the employee engagement survey which asks the question DPS is a good place to work and grow that's the thrust of that question that's where this data comes from the slide that I was looking that I was looking for when we originally set up the Strategic plan the goal was to be 85 percent okay so when we did this the first year for that last question you'll see the Baseline is 83 like we were all we I don't think we knew at that time and that was the year before I got here too but that was we didn't know where we're going to start from and the goal.

Was to get over 85. and each as you see with these benchmarks in the original plan it would say it needs to increase by two percent each year that's where those benchmarks that was set in the original plan so even though we have not met for example 2122 we didn't keep up with the plus two plus four plus six percent we should have been at 89. we were still over the 85 percent too so all right next slide please so the last two questions on the employee engagement survey are exactly what's written on this Slide the second to last one is overall my school and department is a good place to work and grow professionally and the and the last question which I've already explained next slide this is a little bit more of a breakdown all right so on the left column of here it's breaking up where the our classified employees who participated in the survey were they in academics administer in on the administrative team operations are School based and you can.

See the progression for that second to last question on the left where it's overall my school department is a good place to work and grow professionally the clearest thing there is you can see an administrative and operations there were big jumps over the course the right hand column the the title should act that's actually the last question it should read overall DPS is a good place to work and grow so those are the last two questions and it follows a similar pattern it's just explaining the data a little bit more detail from the previous slide next slide please this is straightforward participation we are happy to say that in 2122 we had our highest participation rate ever we we squeaked by our 1920 participation rate but it was the highest participation rate we did have more employees before the pandemic started though so it wasn't our greatest number but we're looking The Next Step as we roll out the last Employee Engagement survey in March we we're already planning and we meet.

With the classified department heads to set up strategies to make this more effective for example last year was the first year we had full QR codes a lot of our classes I want to say a lot there are a number of our classified employees who don't have the same kind of access to laptops and computers in their daily work so we want to make sure that it's accessible by phone we do have paper copies if need but I don't that's but we were trying to get everyone to with those QR codes those were set last year now we're in the last year we can just roll that out again hopefully our numbers will go up next slide please so some of the one of the this slide I do want to talk about one of the additions that overall was made and that's the addition of Terry Phillips who's with us today our director of classified professional development many of the pieces in here that are being developed and started are because of her actions.

Working with the classified employees with the kite learning getting that set up meeting with the transportation School nutrition and instructional assistance to provide professional development one of the things that we added last year in the survey was what type of professional development would our classified employees be interested in doing and so from that now in this final year in addition to how to Terry's work HR has also set up classify classified professional development where at the end of two or three sessions there's a little homework assignment at the end as well that these employees coming through will actually get a certificate that they have been trained in in DPS policies and procedures employee rights and responsibilities to sort of help our employees hopefully to be promoted within we all know Dr mcbank is very big throughout the District of promoting from within but if we can get our employees more skilled and how to maybe step from a custodian position to a lead custodian position where now they have to.

Supervise people and the more they're aware of our policies and procedures we'll give them a strength so that's in operation for the first time the next slide please and again the compensation survey you've all done had plenty of time to talk about that at the last meeting so we're not going to dive into that they're one of the things that we are in terms of strategies and this is something that Dr lesane mentioned as well as other things support things we're doing to our for our employees to increase satisfaction so in the next month or so we'll be rolling out a couple of exciting opportunities through our benefits packages there's going to be a pre-diabetes Wellness Plan that we're going to be able to offer out to employees there'll be all there'll be communication to the entire District about that we've partnered with truest Financial to set up some more financial literacy programs as well those are going to be rolling out our employee assistance program has a crisis response team for example.

We've heard about unfortunately the increase in the rate of deceased employees we you know and our team our student support services do a great job supporting everyone in DPS but our employee assistance program has a rapid crisis response team if there's any sort of tragedy that happens at a school they can be out there the next day and that's specifically for employees where it's not necessarily for individual counseling but it could be depending on depending on the needs and they can come out for multiple days that's built into our contract with our employee assistance program and we've also set up other online trainings we had our first one back in November it's set up for employee like compassion fatigue sessions we have a lot of employees in our district who care for others especially in student Support Services some people in HR teachers a lot of our businesses to take care of students take care of others caretakers need support too so we've offered we had one training that was.

Offered what's not a training it's it's a session that was offered and we've got a couple more hours that we'll be able to provide for our employees over the course of the year so these are all things we're doing to keep this going there's one metric at the bottom there that did just want to talk about some data that was pulled regarding retention of employees with bonuses and if you look at the notes at the bottom you can see that when when data was pulled for every employee who received either a recruitment and or a retention bonus 83 percent of those employees have remained with DPS and then the last line which says that the employee is just receiving a recruitment bonus 58 of them are still with us so we're looking at all the numbers we're trying to do as much as we can to support our employees both professionally and social emotionally and next slide or the last slide thank you thank you Mr Co week.

And so for the last portion I want to pause right here to check and see if there are any questions before we go into the last piece where we're just going to share some additional information regarding recruitment and retention and while we're checking for questions I do want to take an opportunity to reiterate especially since she's still here in the room Miss Phillips has done an outstanding job in getting in and providing support for our classified Personnel so we just want to extend Kudos and thanks to her as well as her supervisor Dr Bullock on the efforts that are are going on there Miss Hayes oh yes special review oh I'm sorry a question question first yeah we can make this quick because I want to make sure you can have time to do your full presentation so you can respond to that Miss Rogers and if you want to email the answers that's fine okay Mr Crow week you said that we didn't meet the metrics and other part other.

Years for the Strategic plan as far as the employee satisfaction process what did we do to mitigate that did we do anything to Pivot to help support Educators and retention when we didn't meet those metrics and I asked this before Dr lesame are there surveys available in other languages other than English thanks thank you I do think we should answer those I'm sorry yeah I just don't want us to get too far into the discussion without the rest of the presentation but if we can get those answers quickly we'll go to Ms Hayes that way we can get the full presentation and then get more into discussion Mr co-week you want to come back and answer question number one regarding the prior years we may need a little Clarity on the question.

I'm not sure I said did I say we didn't meet the Patrick in other years I thought I was just talking about the one year where we did I think it'll help if we go back to the slide if we could go we could bring up the presentation go back. Prior slide foreign keep going do you know where it is slide eight it's not 18. yeah or just say then you can tell the number I don't know that they can tell the number I'm not sure if they can see I can add it correctly that one yes right so the Baseline was set at 83 in the first year so the next year the metric was was met where we were supposed to be at 85 okay by the two percent increase in 2021 if we're adding the four percent we needed to hit 87 which is marked by the blue column we met that as well but we were always over 85 percent so when I said we weren't.

Meeting the metric it was just for 2021 2022 we didn't hit the step increase the plus six percent because it's plus two percent each year but we're still tracking over 85. Okay thank you and I think I understood Miss Rogers questions yes our Benchmark since we did not meet a benchmark what are the strategies or the remedy that we're able to put in place so that's We Will made it next time since our next one is 91 what are the things we're able to put in place okay so I'm I misunderstood the question too because I thought there was a reference to not meeting the metric in Prior years so what we all of the things that we've outlined you will see the Strategic focus in 3C first of all on touching our classified Personnel whether it's getting the responses here the professional development all of that is part of what our strategy is we have heard from if we can go forward to slides one more well maybe two more right here.

You can see that when we're talk all of the conversations that we're having around compensation for classified and certified roles alike that's part of one of those three pillars that we're really focusing on how do we make sure that our compensation is competitive we also have to be mindful of that in the wake of the Recruitment and the retention bonuses so that's why you see that because that's part of what makes us competitive particularly in our area one of the big things that I think is going to make a key difference is what we're setting up to do state interviews so the balance of not only looking at why employees are exiting and getting that feedback and digging in and making sure we're not getting things just like other reasons but we also need to flip that so when you think about that life cycle slide that I talked about and reference we need to figure out the folks that are making it our teachers that are making it past the seven years.

What is it about Durham that is keeping them in Durham and we need to make sure that we are capitalizing on that to draw the commitment that we need from individuals State interviews are key in understanding your working conditions which is the foundation of this goal so those are some example of some of the strategies and yes it's available in Spanish perfect thank you thank you Emma y'all see me giving you books but I'm trying to make sure I'm processing what would keep me employed at a particular location and I'm I'm glad you said that I would like to add one other point to that when you see on slides discussions about processes and all of that we ought to know what the experience looks like for someone who enters Durham Public Schools it should not be subjected to a particular site right and so when we're looking at Trends and digging in Miss Hayes has done some fabulous work at looking at our data as it's coming in and calling the school and.

Speaking with principals and say wait a minute what's going on here I see this in the data let's talk let's let's pull that out we have to make those experiences more predictable so that we know what the branding of the experience is looking like for people as they enter our our organization as they exit our organization and those different transitions in between. Let's continue on with the presentation then we'll go okay I'll offer the opportunity for more questions all right regarding our special review of Recruitment and Retention next slide So currently as you can see our vacancies we have 128 teacher vacancies and 42 instructional assistants which give us a total of 170 but there but that is a one percent decrease from 12 22 so we're at five percent vacancy rate which is a one percent decrease from December of 2022.

Schools are provided with targeted support based on the number of vacancies so we are working between you know getting substitutes volunteers reaching out multiple ways through Apple track and just reaching out to principals directly with people's resumes and transcripts so they can get those interviews as quickly as possible okay next slide so how do we compare with other districts as you can see we have Durham Public Schools with 24 roughly 2400 teachers we have Wake County Public Schools with 10 000 roughly almost 11 000 teachers Guilford County with almost 5 000 teachers in Chapel Hill with roughly 1200. so if we look across the board Durham Public Schools has a total of 128 vacancies Wake County has 543 Guilford County has a total of 109 and Chapel Hill has a total of 41. so Durham is not the only school who District of course who is still trying to get teachers in as quickly as possible regarding and that includes EC teachers and our regular General teachers as far as instructional assistance if you look.

At Durham Public Schools we're 42 Wake County is at 229. Guilford counties at 33 and Chapel Hill is at 29 instructional assistant vacancies so when we look at the comparison we're not that far off from schools with schools that school districts excuse me that are close to us real quick though the Guilford is doing significantly better that so I that's just a rhetorical question is why that's not rhetorical that's one of the things that we're looking at. Next slide as far as our DPS recruitment fairs we have signed up for over 27 career fair opportunities so we will be busy we will be real busy as you can see from January to April I'm looking at Major North Carolina universities we're going to the eastern North Carolina Career Alliance where they have about 25 29 universities there that will take place in Raleigh the Fayetteville job fair for military veterans Pittsburgh education recruitment Consortium that is a large recruitment fair that will take place in Pittsburgh Winthrop University Howard University.

Dr mabinga and I went to for the international recruitment fair to Jamaica we were able to pick up 22 wonderful teachers from Jamaica going to Florida International University noted is a huge Career Fair in Ohio Miami University is also in Ohio University University of Alabama Hampton University Virginia State University Honduras Dr lasane will be going to Honduras in April focusing on idli teachers coming of course we would try to do our very best at virtual career fairs a couple of couple of days ago we were able to pick up two teachers from the Philippines and one teacher from South Africa so we have a lot of opportunities and I did not list all of the career fairs I only listed some of the career fairs but we will have between 25 and 28 Career Fairs and then our career fair will take place on April the 15th at Hillside High School and I met with the I had the opportunity to talk to the assistant principals the other day and I call this the snatching.

Season so when I go to the recruitment fairs if they look snatchable I'm snatching them so we won't have to worry about Guilford County anymore we're going to focus on DPS and making sure our numbers are lower than Guilford County can I interject here one minute I want to make a clear distinction going to Career Fairs this year there's a high number and we have to go because our the pool is not what we need it to be to meet the needs across North Carolina but I want to make it clear going to Career Fairs and standing behind a table business as usual is not what we're talking about here every single place that is on this list has been vetted researched for the number of candidates the type of candidates they have we're looking for the schools with High EC graduates we're looking for places Based on data that meet our goal the expectation is the team of candidates that go to each of these sites will number one.

We're going to have a tracking of how many people are talked to what is the follow-up and how many of them actually sign up with DPS so I just want to make it clear that these have to be data-driven decision making times in order to identify who's snatchable and to snatch them back okay Miss Hayes and so I want to know that I want everyone to know that it has to look different even when you're going to a traditional venue like a career fair just quick question I mean a comments regarding our International efforts I think for Jamaica there were about 24 candidates yes it was 24 and then we picked up three as far as two two teachers from the Philippines and one from South Africa so right now we have 27 International teachers for Honduras we have authority that has been screened for DLI and those candidates they're also qualified to be able to teach elementary then we can transition them to DLR 24 25 and the kudos to our Global.

Partners they've done a great job screening those candidates and if you check with our teachers they are very pleased of the outcome of those teachers that we're bringing next one so I know there has been a lot of questions in the past about substitute teachers and why are schools not feeling substitute vacancies so I'm a data person and so when I looked at the numbers we have currently 1 351 substitutes available to serve so as I've told I've talked to stack and assistant principals and principals it's not a substitute problem it's an attendance problem so once we get the attendance problem taken care of and that we won't have a substitute problem so we have plenty of substitutes in the building the question is why are substitutes not picking up at at certain schools so that is an onboarding that is what we have to do and work with some of our schools who are having trouble feeling those substitute positions we have an average of 90 unfulfilled absences per day across the district.

Approximately 50 percent of those are on unfilled absences or vacancies we've hired over 150 substitutes for full-time positions with Durham Public Schools out of the 1 351 active substitutes 1200 of them have worked at least one day during the 2022-2023 school year so once again we don't have a substitute problem if there is a school that doesn't have sub coverage then that's an attendance problem that we would need to help that school work with how they're going to onboard their subs to stay and keep and retain them some of our key improvements of course increase compensation certified is 130 and non-certified 130 and 935 is a hundred and twenty dollars and we have improved our onboarding process with substitutes at schools and we're going to continue to work with our schools to improve their onboarding process if they're struggling I would like to highlight Eno Valley he was at I think one percent unfulfillment rate for December and Rogers her Rogers her Middle School excuse me has consistently been at about 90 percent.

Fulfillment rate since we started school so we have to look at substitutes and the Fulfillment rates and when you have a school that that went from a low fulfillment rate to a low low fulfillment rate to one percent unfulfillment rate that is phenomenal so we have to lean on principles and figure out what they're doing to get subs in their abilities and keep subs and substitute excuse me in their buildings as well before we go to the next slide I would add one thing about substitute teachers we appreciate the support in getting increased compensation for substitute teachers but since then guess what's happened other districts have raised their compensation and so one of the things that was one of the points that came through in the salary study as well as our own research are the competition that we have around that so we are looking I've already spoken with Mr lesour and we are looking at our sub rates to ensure that we remain competitive in that area also next slide.

Thank you so much I just wanted to give you a few quick points regarding the compensation study in the next steps as a matter of fact we'll we'll see how late we are here tonight because I have a first thing in the morning meeting on the compensation study and looking at employee classifications and making sure that we are aligning those to the proposed pay schedules that were part of the presentation a few weeks ago we are communicating with groups of employees once we get those alignments complete we are in the stages now of working on what the communication plan is and having layered communication so there's the overall group in communication all the way down to the individual what will they receive regarding their proposed compensation I would like to say that it is very important when you're talking about impacting 2200 people it cannot just be a piece of paper and so it has to involve sessions virtual in person going out and making sure that you have those touches where individuals.

We make sure they understand the information as well as there's that opportunity for dialogue feedback back and forth for our administrative ranks the meeting in the morning also deals with those job descriptions so that we can dive deeper into that and be able to bring back recommendations to you in April for the about 65 central office administrators for those levels also as part of this compensation study on the next slide Miss Hayes has already covered this but please please please be aware that our own DPS recruitment fair is on April 15th it'll be from 9 to 12 30 at Hillside High School and I know public relations will start advertising we do have a save the date it will be posted on our website tomorrow as far as signing up for the job fair just so we can have an idea a recruitment fair so we'll have an idea of how many people we want to attend of course my goal is to have the biggest job fair and on the east coast and I.

Hope that we can meet that meet that goal thank you very much we are here to answer any questions regarding the information that has been shared thank you Dr Wilson and your team for that presentation board member for their questions. Wow wow this chocolate okay all right I have a bunch of questions thank you so much that was very thorough so yeah I'm excited about what is to come and and look forward to the what just all the efforts I think that I've seen a lot in your Outreach especially internationally that seems to have yielded a lot of solid teachers and I know that we're also in the process of providing visas for some of our exceptional candidates as well so where to begin I want to ask just some logistical questions like with Puerto Rico Texas and Florida you talked about recruiting from from those that territory of those States is there a licensure reciprocity with each of those areas or is there a process so reciprocity with days of old.

Really there's no reciprocity in North Carolina anymore period so regardless of the state that we're talking about we have to be able to look at the comparisons now what I would say particularly for Texas and Florida when you look at their testing structures and all of that it's an easier transition than it is from some some other places but when we're looking at credentials there's basic things that we talk to candidates about regarding their GPA the types of degrees that they're able to have so say for instance when we talk about Jamaica we've done a lot of recruitment in Jamaica but one of the things we have to be careful with is the translation of a Jamaican diploma to a United States degree there are some things that we have to navigate there we don't have those same issues when we're talking about Puerto Rico Florida Texas that's just one example thank you thanks for explaining that that I know that takes a lot of paperwork to move through that whole process and.

Okay one question that I have had is can we hire undocumented individuals with DACA here since there are a lot of latinx people who have DACA is that possible and do we have any in the in DPS I would have to research before I would say do we have any in DPS because that's not something that's just been on the Forefront I think that if we were looking can we yes what the processes would look like when you're thinking of licensure and all of those things that you can sometimes run into barriers that make it extremely difficult and so it's difficult to answer that across the board you would really have to look at what the individual is bringing to the table and make your determination based on that information okay yeah I'd just be interested to see about that I know that there was an article a few years ago about teachers with DACA and how they would have be affected when there were when Trump was contesting DACA but I'm just wondering.

If there's any way to bring people in that way and I also wanted to ask one of the things was you were talking about the all the fears and just and all the efforts that you're making this year to go out and recruit and I was wondering if we might be able to see the data in the future you're talking about tracking the numbers that you would talk to at the career fair you're going to track number applied the number yielded as actual DPS employees will that be data that you can share with us in the future absolutely okay awesome I think that'll be really helpful I'm sure right your department but also for us to just see what is where are we able to pull people from and another question I had was about the working conditions survey and thinking about that I know that there are those specific strategies to improve satisfaction rates in the working condition survey I was wondering what what specifically if you could.

Like hone in on like two or three of like our greatest areas for improvement in terms of working conditions are there particular areas where we know that they we need maybe more focus is it materials relationships space other thing you know logistical things I would say my answer to that would be relationships relationships relationships one of the things that we often look at in the area of employee relations is what trends do we see that end up coming to the office and can you see patterns by any particular Department school or different things like that I think that digging into those pieces and being able to get outside of looking at individual incidents and being able to talk overall to shift culture I think you will find a lot in just relationships communication those sorts of things I think what could be one of the greatest areas of impact on working conditions here you know people care about refrigerators and microwaves right but if they feel the advocacy of a.

Principal a school district and all of that in the boat with them trying to resolve an issue that's a very different working condition and so I do think that those types of things and I just use that as a very real example that we're dealing with with because every single principle every single you know head of a department is facing that issue right now and you can handle it a number of different ways and so these are the things that we have to get in and be able to make ourselves available discuss have the hard discussions and be able to work through them and so a lot of those types of things end up in employee relations and you can see patterns within our district yeah I really appreciate that I think you know relationships are a theme that's been coming up in general and as we think about our work and I just I wonder are there any are there then with that in mind like are there any training.

Opportunities or things that ways that you work with with principles or other individuals in the schools to support stronger relationships or like around conflict management or various things a lot of times there are conflicts that don't get resolved and then they kind of fester or you know things like that just wondering are there any any kind of interventions along those lines I would say we have a number of interventions along those lines we have we have principal coaches we have our administrative meetings our principals meetings that happen every month you will find professional learning through those mechanisms I would say also again to commend some of the new work in the classified ranks we have a whole line of training that is focused on supervisors you know the person who becomes the head of the custodians didn't necessarily get the job because of their HR skills they got the job probably because of another skill set they're an electrician or or something like that and so being able to work with those supervisors in a.

Classified rank such as transportation we have whole training modules that are being developed for them some of them have already occurred some of them are in the future and so I think you can see that in numerous areas across our district that's great I really applaud that work and I and that was reminding me about Dr Stewart's presentation also about the principal coaches and I think I think that's so important to support our people our everyone at every level in building those strong communities and relationships I do think you know you can see where when people feel a strong sense of community they have a strong sense of belonging and that keeps people I guess along those lines another question I have is I was wondering if you saw any Trends where satisfaction was the highest if there were any Trends across like region magnet schools versus not Elementary School Middle High or or demographics like racial demographics or other demographics Mr code could you do you remember that.

Because this survey is from last year and so it's not it's fresh and so I'm just checking to see if Mr code week happens to remember.

So the the short answer to the question is that the we have been dug is this song okay the short answer is we haven't dug into the trends that much part of what I learned when I came to DPS about the survey too is that there is some reluctance from employees if there's too much they feel can be tracked from taking a survey so we have to balance that we do have it by depart you know the divisions that were shown in the slides but I mean I can double check with research and accountability because they they're the ones who actually produce the survey and and get the data and then they give the data back to us but I don't think we track that way and we're also very cautious about we can't let out that like oh we'll know it's you who filled a survey out because people are because employees are nervous about that yeah I understand that not wanting to be you know the the Privacy issue or you.

Know the confidentiality I would be interested to know maybe just in the future about that because of oh go oh sorry good evening if you do recall when we did the presentation as it relates to the school Improvement planning process and conducting a comprehensive needs assessment every principal had to dive into their school Improvement into the teacher working condition survey and use that data to guide their actionable steps so that is an expectation of all our schools as they plan for school Improvement planning oops thank you thanks Dr Stewart for adding that that's that's a great use of data I think the data's so I mean there's a lot that can be told with that and and I'm I'm just wondering especially going forward if we see Trends as we're trying to recruit and retain more latinx staff as well like if there are Trends and how or beginning teachers also as you know as the data points out we we lose teachers that way you know are there Trends in in who is.

More more or less satisfied or who has particular so from the HRC we probably had a Keener focus on those Trends but what I would say along the lines of what Dr Stewart is sharing about school Improvement we use what is called the HR report card and so it's actually a metric on the HR report card and so we have the tracking of those percentages all right I'm gonna ask one more thing I think which is well I wanted to say one having having worked with dream last year of course I have a particular investment also not to make a Shameless plug I have my water bottle still and and you know I saw personally how you know some of the structural difficulties and also recruiting latinx individuals to to teach and I'm so excited about the four who are in the schools now I'm doing their student teaching I just wanted to point out you know teaching fellows is another recruitmental tool that we that I.

Used with dream and that you know we can use in general and and that's a you know a great way to as we think about growing our own to just promote that with students who are thinking about going into teaching so they can get that funding in their undergraduate or graduate graduate education beyond that I was thinking about the Partnerships I I love the the you know the TA to teacher program that we're doing that there's the program at nccu I'm blanking on the name but that recruits black male Educators and who is which has several seven or so I think graduates is here I was wondering if there are other Partnerships with the with the business community that might be fruitful in this in these Endeavors and I was just wondering if there I mean we have the Partnerships for the employee and teacher of the month but I was just wondering if there are other kind of Partnerships that you were thinking about as we move forward and we we are.

Definitely looking at other Partnerships and I'll give you an example of one we were even working on today we are working on building a larger network with HR administrators and other fields whether it's it's business so say for instance where we have individuals who are being laid off from major corporations right in our backyard we want to be able to connect with the HR Executives there and be able to build a plan and see if we can get access because some of some in of those individuals probably have the passion and the talent of exactly what we're looking for and so we want to be able to build those Partnerships and have that level of access so that we can work together and meet common goals awesome thank you so much.

Additional questions yeah so I I just come with deep appreciation for all the work done this is you say that all the goals are important this there's a reason we sat in this room however long ago Mr Sears had put that goal there like it is is the core of our academic work and so there's a reason the DPS foundation not this iteration of it but the one many many many years ago set this as their key goal was retention and and understanding that there's extra mobility in Durham because of the triangle area people coming for Education leaving Australian spouses I mean it's always been important and so y'all are throwing all kinds of things at it but we are so far Downstream for from where I'm sorry the compensation is the key factor here and it was deliberately and and methodically underfunded in North Carolina and study after study says we're at 48th 49th in the nation that's not the North Carolina that that we all grew up in.

That's not where we want to be and and that's and we're in a desperate desperate sad times to be at nearly 20 percent halfway through a school year so you know I I want us to to focus on these stay interviews and really connect with our our folks and and appreciate them the work they're doing and and ask them you know what we can learn from them about about staying and if they need to have y'all leave the room and just tell us like they if they need to be heard and it's not just the refrigerators but gosh darn it we can't handle another hit our children can't keep waiting for us to get adults so how does Guilford have more people they've got 20 and 30 and 40 000 signing bonuses with a two-year you know contract you sign they're throwing their coveted money which is temporary at these staffing issues so we haven't gotten help from the feds we haven't gotten help from the state the state has a ridiculous Compensation Plan that.

They've rolled out which would which which would bring some novice people that barely know what to do with children into front-facing classrooms and we have children of color and children of struggling through poverty that need the highest qualified teachers available and and I mean shame on North Carolina so when the governor's budget comes out I'd like us to all go over there and and at least say yes and and go to the general assembly take some teachers with us take some superintendents with us because these children cannot wait it's not just Leandro it's not just piecemeal little things anymore gosh I'm ashamed of North Carolina that built the first Public University system in the First Community College system like we have to have to do better so I don't have answers I mean yes we have to increase sub pay I want to look at Exit interviews can you pull some of those for us to just come and look at someday in our boardroom like in can we.

Go see what people are saying really frankly to us I want our our folks to know that we're watching to look for Trends if if your school culture is it needs some support that you both know who to reach out to in the in the organizational chart so that we are listening to our people and creating healthy cultures but a principal's job is horribly difficult too so you know let's go to the Chamber of Commerce let's have them like these local restaurants feed our feed our teachers one day a month to to lift their Spirits I mean I'm just sick of North Carolina right now and the choices that we've made that have done this to our children dang it this is what I lose sleep over it's not will the fire burn down the school it's it's who's going to teach and so you know some reporter needs to pull the the numbers of undergrads that are in teaching and they're not in UNC there's 16 of them at.

Central graduating this year that's not going to touch the needs of these children across the state so shame on North Carolina and and we're gonna have to fix this locally but we need our parents to consider like can you pause your career you've got a lot of credentials and come teach for a couple years or five while your children are in school like we're at that point of like come join us in this glorious work because this is where we need people in front of children that are caring qualified loving adults I don't know I'm just ah thank you thank you Miss bar that was heartfelt and since we all sense your frustration it's a complex challenge that that is it can't just be solved locally.

I'm not sure miss Rogers I think okay thank you so much for the presentation thank you Miss buyer we are all frustrated I do want to ask a little bit more about the HR report card is it by location what are you doing with that information our principles getting the support they need based on the HR report card and if we are doing it by location are we seeing Administration in those locations having a better how does the administration feel about their location versus how everybody else in the building feels at this point in time those are very good questions board member Rogers I think that we have utilized the HR report card more as a way for principals to look at their entire picture of human capital support in their building so it's been used more as a tool in that way your question is very interesting but that's that's how we've used it at this point in time because usually people tend to look at or leaders principals tend to look at.

ISO they look at their teacher working conditions data and isolation they look at their number of national board teachers in isolation they look at maybe the attendance of their employees in isolation and the HR report card is designed to look at that whole picture and see what's going on and develop your strategy from that Miss validaris I have a couple of comments and I have questions but but I mostly comments number one thank you for the work that you're doing to recruit to think about our needs especially as we were growing programs we're going to need you know bilingual professional like staff that can help us and I think dual language is setting us on the right foot for the future I'm looking at some of the stats around the demographics the number of children born in the United States who are bilingual who as their Heritage language which counts and I will always stand by that I'm a Heritage well I'm an immigrant so I have that but I came at the age of.

Five and the fact that my home spoke Spanish and we have kids who are born here whose parents speak Spanish to them every day and you know they have the language strong French you know we have other languages Arabic et cetera we have we have a strong pool of our of our own students and so I definitely want us to continue to build the growing grow grow your own right those initiatives there are programs that I haven't really heard much updates about that are about students that are currently in DPS having opportunities and I know that we started something along the lines of a teacher who was like working with students for volunteer hours if they wanted to order some kind of a and sign up student ambassador program those kind of things and there's a program off of South Carolina and it's the the school over there that is doing that is St John's so they're not only offering getting high school students to you know to volunteer I mean they're actually.

Giving course credit these are creative ways that the school is handling the incentivizing students to get their hands on experience and then also like followed with you know just the the kind of mentorship that allows them to kind of that we have we currently have mentorship that pass out careers right so those opportunities to continue to incentivize our students but also that that is you know I don't know the percentage of our students who come to DPS who graduate and decide to work in DPS from the get-go some of them go off I'd love for us to track those numbers to see you know how many of how our grow your own program is working the other thing is I went to South Texas College recently and this was about recruitment but it was recruitment with an organization that is interested in bilingual Professionals in South Texas College you know meeting with their Early Childhood is that's what I'm focused on like early childhood and and mou is being signed.

With South Texas College and the professors were just overjoyed and just saying we have talent like we are robust with talent and you know it's it's just incredible to kind of see these kind of connections where the professors can actually mentor and and Mentor these students and letting them know that the possibilities to work now I will say we offer and we have to take my hat off and put another hat on but a transfer package that is pretty generous I don't know that DPS is thinking in this way about transfer packages they get also if they're in that journey of getting their career tuition reimbursements you know the the kind of full package including housing package I mean it is a whole deal right will DPS think strategically about recruiting you know talent and thinking about you know whether we have students with associate's degree why do we shun a population that experiences barriers out-of-state tuition I currently pay out of state tuition because I'm paying in.

Vermont right as a student but there are so many folks who are here who live here who go to our schools here and have to pay out of state tuition and their budget allows them to get an associate's degree that's what they can afford because they are not treated equally based on a memo written years ago that has never been challenged in the state and that is something that a lot of Latino activists are saying this needs to be reverted because it was a memo that changed that for our students who are DACA and are part of of our communities and are so bright and ready to work and they are legally able to work and yet they have to pay out of state tuition and the best they can do is an associate's degree for some of the roles that are not teaching if it's interpretation we should not be having issues about we need these kind of degrees if it's about a skill set that even I with a PhD I'm working on.

I'm not an interpreter even though some people thought I was an interpreter and I was interviewing for even the seat they thought I was an interpreter and I've never been a professional interpreter and my degrees will not say the level of interpretation that I can do and so we have to think about these things because we shoot ourselves in the foot by requiring and if we don't have that analysis of what is a skill set and what is the minimum requirement in terms of academics we have to understand the community needs and especially the out-of-state tuition is a big piece of what is keeping a lot of our families including a lot of our youth from coming back and feeling that they can be paid a decent salary for their skill sets which are bilingualism by culturalism and the experience is really working with our families some of them are our families their parents our DPS parents and they will stay because they have a home base here they have parents here this is.

Their Community they care about this but we will go to Puerto Rico and I say yes let's go to Puerto Rico let's go don't do that I'm from Honduras but at the end of the day we also have to start thinking about the ways that you know we make it accessible and we grow them if they don't have a bachelor's done no problem come on in this is the level at which we can take you in and have a plan for them maybe a five maybe within I don't know four years or three years that they have to get their bachelor's if that's a thing grow them into their positions as well so that is definitely something I'd like for us to consider and I guess the last thing that I'll say is going back on what some of my colleagues have said our branding is not just you know the bonus that we put out and it is not just the title it's literally how we're treating our families right now our families are.

Connected some of them have siblings that have graduated and can come back and work for us some of them have friends who are in positions who say how long have you been your position have you ever been grown up we have very few assistant principals we actually have a persistent principal that left because you said the only way she could become a principal in DPS is if she left and we're gonna have to pay a high price and high dollar to bring this principle back you know so so these are the kind of things that we need to continue to to work on if an assistant principal is there for a long time and he's Latino he's not going to encourage other people into in terms of saying this is a place you can grow and and actually acquire positions of leadership so we have to continue to work on these things and I know there's so many Dynamics with recruitment but I really want us to to think about the ways that we are.

Thinking ahead for the next few years and the good thing is that demographically we will have a very diverse pool but we also have to start thinking now you know how to make the access happen today thank you okay I would like to give just one quick point Miss Mario Jrs many of the things that you were talking about are in the structure of what we're outlying for both City teaching Scholars and there's actually a connection you mentioned teaching fellows and so part of what the educator pipeline I just want to make this very clear is how we can take our very own DPS students who already have that commitment and be able to say here's 10 different Pipelines that can get you to be an educator and everybody's does not have to look the same it doesn't have to all be in a traditional you go to a four-year college and you come into teaching and so wherever if someone decides you know in in Middle School exploration that's.

What they were that pathway may look one way when you may have someone who is in middle college and they're not sure what they want to do and then they decide they want to be a teacher there's a pathway for them and some coin to be able to support some of the very things that you've mentioned so I just want to say that there's a lot of details in there even if it's a teaching fellows and they commit to darn public schools there are some additional pieces there so the educator pipeline piece is huge with identification of those Pathways and being able to lay them out for the students in Durham Public Schools Dr moving did you have additional comments on that as well I just want to Echo what that's listen said I think when we're gonna bring to you our recommendation for 18 million dollars that listen we'll be able to elaborate more and attach some dollars there with that I wanted to make one more comment regarding our conversation I think we.

Came a long way in the last five years at one point when you're comparing our beginner teachers to wake with about two thousand dollars difference yeah yeah nice about 200. but if you look at a graph that that lesson was able to share with you when you get to 20 years all right so I don't want to do any publicity for anybody and I think when you're gonna see the graph that Mr is going to show you that's where we're losing teachers because there are other places where you hit 20 they go with the up so I don't want to comment too much on that but we still have a lot of work to do we're closing the Gap but we still have a lot of work to do with our teachers that's in 20 up to 30.

Thank you Dr mabenga Miss Lewis I just want to thank you for this presentation Dr losain thank you and your team for all your hard work and pulling together this this this presentation and the work that's that goes into it that shows the accomplishments congratulations on those key accomplishments that you shared with us this evening I remember Dr when you came on and you talked about inheriting the metrics that you're working towards in that strategic plan and what is realistic and although these were very large stretch goals I see you have been stretched in that and continue to make steady progress towards those I just want to commend you for that work in your team for that I also appreciate the strategy that you share around the career fairs and being intentional about where you're going and those tackles so I really didn't see anything here regarding policy support needs aside from the appliances and the date that we talked about moving that out not even policy but just you know extended that for an.

Additional month I would like to see continued stress goals and the upcoming strategic plan that these goes and then also to my point of Miss valladers as we're increasing our numbers of our latinx staff as well employees that there's advancement happening we want the best and we want to make sure we're doing what we can do to attain that and then last thing I'll say is again I appreciate the forethought the vision for the salary and compensation State I look forward to hearing what Mr sewer has to say about that thank you thank you Miss Lewis Miss Chavez super brief comment I just wanted to say that I remembered the nccu's program is called MTI and give them a shout out minority teaching and Institute comes to me eventually all right I'm sorry did you do you did you say anything about job sharing if people would could you know come in part time and pair with another retired educator or something did you talk to that explicitly in any of these that I missed.

Because I think we're creative but I don't know if we let people know that thank you for that opportunity because I did not mention it as part of the presentation but there are options for job sharing there have been times that we've worked with individual schools with trying to identify individuals who maybe can't work full-time that they can work half time particularly if you have two retirees there are opportunities for job sharing absolutely thank you Dr lissane and your team for this presentation really appreciate it and I think I like hearing the data drivenness of how we're approaching this looking at our substitute numbers and it's like wait a minute this is a different issue than what we might have thought before and I think the stay interviews I'm so excited to hear about that I well I recognize the turnover number and the people of leaving is the number that we spend a lot of time on that also means that 80 percent of our folks are.

Still here and how do we what do we need to do to keep and maintain and support them because I think too often we hear people who are here and then they're like you know what I'm ready to go and on the way out the door we're having a conversation where could there have been something intervention two years earlier that would have kept them in their position and I think about the culture piece of what you spoke so much to and I would love the hour is is getting long on this so I don't want to dive too deeply but really having themes around culture that we need to work on what are we hearing in our state interviews what are we hearing in our exit interviews because I really do believe people who are in this education field at this time do it because they have a love for teaching and they have a love for children and how do we make sure the culture is.

There for them to be able to do their job really well and I think that if we even look through data and comb through and saw at certain schools where people don't leave for 30 years what is it about this school building and about that place that is keeping folks there and how do we take that and try to learn from that in other places and I know every school is different every school Community is different but I just know the culture piece is what really it sends people in a different direction right money is good but the culture my health my well-being I think are what people are starting to see and put first nowadays as our our world is Shifting and changing so I can't wait to hear some kind of themes from that around culture I also think we talk about our latinx Educators and I know that was an explicit goal in our strategic plan but I think there's a different conversation about bilingual Educators too and how do.

We so I don't we don't need to get more into that today but how do we kind of track that within our system some of those folks are going to be all different types of races and ethnicities but I think increasing bilingual Educators is also should be another focus of the goal which I think is different I also think you know thinking about your appointments valuedar is around folks who are credentialed in other places and we know the state of North Carolina puts puts up what it takes to be licensed and it requires different types of degrees and this type of coursework to get that license and there's lots of conversation right now about changing that in ways that I don't think will be beneficial to our Educators so I really hope that people who are listening for this board also to make sure we're tracking that really well because I think the state is what who is telling us you know sorry that credential from your home country may.

Not work here so we really need to see advocacy around that yeah so thank y'all for the presentation and the work and I'm listen I'm excited to hear more about what we're doing next so thank you as it is almost 10 it is 10 15. I would propose an amendment to an agenda that we would move the SR funding update to our February work session and then that will keep items 9B and items nine D on our agenda we need a vote for that Mr Malone yeah move it to our February work session second it's been moved and properly second is there any other discussion so my only discussion was is there Gaggle in that presentation and if there is could we have some more information either at that work session or at another time in the future on on that issue and that concern I thought that was in that one I am not sure if it's in that presentation or not but we can also include that in the February third work.

Session we can work with Administration to see if a presentation so as we moved and probably second any other discussion all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign it passes unanimously all right we've got one item so we're moving to our February work session we're going to go to our next item which is a bond update I think Dr Monk thank you and good evening board I'm joined today with Mr Frederick Davis and he's going to provide us an update on our 10-year Capital Improvement plan thank you Dr Monk good evening cheer Vice chair board members started with Bingo Administration I'm going to quickly swiftly due to the sake of time because it is in your packet have a conversation on our 10 years job plan plan as well as the proposed and approved 2022 Bond next slide please so to reiterate our strategic plan is our roadmap for success and in the 2020 18 through 2023 strategic plan a goal.

Sea of priority five was to make sure that every Elementary School had adequate space and therefore making sure that we had suitable classroom sizes due to the Future State mandate next slide please so how do you measure that through benchmarks so a part of that goal is to make sure that we had two new elementary schools that we happened to open one in here in August and we opened another one in the summer of 2024 as well as six comprehensive Renovations and additions and then we talked about educational suitability and so majority of the phase one Renovations and the elementary school level most of them have mobiles and students have to walk into the elements and so you could imagine the type of learning environments that they experience on a day-to-day to be not within the classroom with their fellow students and so we wanted to make sure that we benchmarked that and Achieve that as one of our goals and then we looked at some of our systems and their outdated inefficient and sustainable.

Measures that will be included in our goals for the 2023 strategic plan next slide please so if you remember back in January of 2021 we presented to you a kind of the 10-year plan with those Associated budgets based on the 2019 facility assessment that facility assessment looked at the life of these buildings and the systems and proposed these project budgets in priority order again based on the ranking of those facilities and and where they were next slide please and so in working with our County Partners on the budget and finance side we agreed to fund what we call our Discovery conceptual plan where we really looked at some of those first priority schools in those orders making sure that the building envelope the system upgrades as well as we looked at suitable spaces for the early childhood education as well as additional capacities were also met in that early design and conceptual phase as you remember when we came to you in October we wanted to make sure that the.

Proposed Bond at that time will be shovel ready so that we could hit the ground running to make sure that we met some of those goals that we mentioned earlier next slide please and so we came back to you in October of 2021 with those new proposed budgets based on the additional capacity as as well as the additional program space due to the Discovery and the early Design Concepts as you see some of those numbers did go up again to the increased program as well as we mentioned at that time what we were seeing due to the pandemic and other Global things the increases in those numbers and again if I'm moving too swiftly please pause me and ask me any questions that you may have so the first priorities as you see here the original budgets again were based on that 2019 study that really had a tabletop we then went under the hood and really made sure that we were capturing everything in those buildings and so you.

See the adjustments in the original project budgets to what we had proposed at that time again in October of 2021 next slide please next slide please again this is our priority order again the new schools that we plan to do in the 10-year or lions Farm Elementary Northern High School Murray massenburg and Durham School of the Arts we start with our phase one comprehensive as listed here a new school in Jordan high schools proposed later on and then we follow up with another phase of Elementary School Renovations and then at our high schools and middle schools some comprehensive system Renovations and then some much needed to some of our administrative buildings next slide please so we get our funding in various ways the county has given us limited obligation bonds we have state lottery funds and then we have gold bonds and as of course as you know in November of last year we were approved for a bond of 423 million and so now we're going to.

Give you a couple of slides on where we are to date in our program and our schedule regarding the 2022 Bond next slide please so a part of that bond is Mary massenburg in the fall of last year we did our groundbreaking some of the images here show much progress as we started clearing out the site majority of the street trees and and grading is is pretty much on its way as you see in the left column there we're starting foundation wall so we're excited we're on schedule and we make sure we have anticipated opening date of August of 2024.

Next slide please a part of our comprehensive Renovations as you see here again addressing capacity issues as well as system upgrades as well as the sustainable and educational suitability the majority of these schools had Mobiles on those sites we will address that through the additions of those campuses as well as Safety and Security will also be addressed next slide please and then we've started our initial pre-design and site planning as you remember in the fall of last year this board approved us to move forward in providing the Durham schools of arts with a new school on a Greenfield site this is just for illustrative purposes not what we will see but this is really showing the initial concept of laying out on the site of Duke Homestead next slide please and so again this is our proposed Bond schedule based on where we are to date of course Murray massenburg is well underway and it will be finished June of 2024 ready for students to arrive Durham School of Arts.

Is in our redesign phase right now we're looking at a mid-year December 2025 completion followed by Glenn and Holt and propriety order based on that facility assessment next slide please and then Bethesda Club Morehead and Mangum again or in priority order next slide please as you are aware we did hire a project program Bond management firm a part of him overseeing our bond projects is also ensuring that we have participation excuse me it's late participation from my minority women in business enterprises and so working to make sure we have access on our website LinkedIn Facebook to make sure that we provide opportunities for those disenfranchised businesses next slide please and so Bond projects of course we're talking about money and so we're going to give you a little bit about what we're dealing with when the terms project costs and those implications next slide please so as you're aware we came to you again last year talking about what we're facing in the market due to materials shortages labor shortages of course covet and other.

Global impacts on our society people may not understand construction but if you go into the grocery stores you'll see the prices of eggs and Breads and some of those things that we have taken for granted have also increased thus we're seeing those same impacts through the construction Market next slide please generally over the course of a life of a project you will see a gradual increase when it comes to inflation we do budget for that however these times are unique and what we're seeing recently of six months we're seeing a one percent increase over the month of projects so the longer that we wait to construct and design things the prices don't get any cheaper this slide illustrates the range that we anticipate as we go through this Bond project next slide please other factors as well as cost is competition we live in a great state of North Carolina and this is a hotbed for research development the Piedmont and triad and these other commercial companies are also building and so we're.

Dealing with that competition that also drives up our prices the next slide please and so we want to make sure that we Benchmark and see what other similar school districts are doing as you see Charlotte Mecklenburg their original construction budget was at 385 dollars a square foot they recently did some bids and they came in at 562 000 square foot again that is an increase over the last three years that we generally do not see in this market Wake County just did a bid this year originally was at 395 and now they saw it at four 55 and then there's some office complex here in the trying regions there's also seeing some increases so this is just not lip service this is actually happening in the marketplace next slide please and so with that we've taken into consideration where we are today the money that we received through our partnership with the county budget and finance department and what we anticipate we would need for the duration of these projects.

And with that I'll take any questions and go back to any slides that I may have missed thank you Mr Davis for that presentation Boardman was there any questions comments sir so deep appreciation to Dr Monk Mr Davis y'all are doing an incredible number of projects that are completely aligned with the vision that we've set for growing together and getting these elementary schools ready so exciting to have Lions farm so exciting to have Northern falling right behind and then Murray massenburg with which will be state of the art and it just occurred to me and I said to Dr mavenga if we could get you all the money not from a bond but from the Commissioners in some other way to start working on new old Northern and that conversion to vocational Ed could we start dreaming that sooner we can't leave a facility empty and vacant and that that new Northern is coming August that's correct this year on time on track if we have those conversations with.

Them and they're able to find some of that are we are could we accelerate that project even though it's kind of down the list because we're going to get to the same issue with old Durham schools of the Arts as we in and then a couple years later too so I want to reorient us a little bit and I know that Mr Davis had to kind of go through that pretty quickly I want to remember that back in it was all the way back in 2019 that the board actually put these projects in priority order and said that we was going to go in this order as we moved through funding why this is critical as Mr Davis shared with the cost per square foot right now we're looking at with the 423 million that we received from the bond and the previous about 25 million that we received through either 2016 leftover bond funds or lob funding we're still going to be about 70 million dollars short of the projects.

That we've already contracted for design for okay there so our first order of business that we're working on and Mr Davis actually has a meeting with the county tomorrow as we prep for the joint meeting next week are there other funding mechanisms that we can have right now to make up for the 70 plus million dollars so that we can get those projects that are done that are under design we agree we certainly don't like to leave any type of facility vacant for any extended period of time because they go down really quickly when they're not occupied and our CTE program as we've heard continuously is very important for the success of our students and so one of the things that we would ask the board to do in that light if they so choose is to move an authorized staff to move that project up in priority to write around where the Mangum is and then we can certainly have that conversation with the county is about how we're going to fund these different.

Projects because we need to have that conversation with them anyway for the the the 70 million dollar shortfall foreign yeah that's that's helpful to for sure to as you all help us prioritize and when we talked about this in our small group we also talked about the Cummings report was so far so long ago that you do anticipate starting this fall on version 2.0 whatever it is so whatever the whole comprehensive look at the whole system because middle schools need help like everybody needs help so yeah but I will also make this comment to you Dr Monk as we're looking at those priorities there was some good rationale behind that and when a citizen also voted for that I would like for us to go by two by two have really deep conversations before we can reverse whatever orders so I'd like for us really to take our time we will get deeper before we can make that decision yeah and I was not trying to on the Fly.

Late at night make a change I just I think the amount of unmet need we have in the price of construction is just going to continue to stress how far we can stretch the dollar and and I'm glad that the county has been able to look at alternative funding sources and and look to some of their other vehicles thank you Mr any additional questions or comments from the board members Miss Travis and a couple questions and thank you for this presentation this is a lot of a lot of projects and it was nice to see the images also to be able to visualize what the schools will look like and all right so one of my questions was just about the minority women-owned business peace I was wondering what if you could explain what the I know you said continued Outreach efforts are being made to those vendors what are our regulations or expectations around that a percentage that we are aiming to meet could you talk a little bit just.

About that first so we we don't have a DPS goal because we would need to have a disparity study but so right now we're currently operating on the state gold which is 10 percent. Okay thanks for that and then I also have a question about as we're building this seemed like a good time to ask it because we're building these new schools and doing the renovations and and thinking about the lgbtq plus IA plus and gender supports policy are we incorporating more gender-neutral bathrooms or is that a consideration in some of the building construction I know some schools have like one where the student has to you know go between classes all the way up to the counselor's office or something like that so is that was that a consideration in some of the construction of these new of the new buildings or the renovations excellent question currently we'll be working with office Chief of Staff I know that's come up for the facility currently existing facilities but we.

Definitely as we're still in the design phase of majorities projects I look at ways to address those concerns that's great to hear I think obviously like our you know our spaces create they they create so much the environment obviously this is this is your work they create the spaces for learning and they create spaces for community and for opportunity and all of that so to consider that and keep that in mind for our non-binary and trans students I think would be great thanks any other questions or comments from board members thank you Mr Davis thank you our next item on our agenda I think we're passing it over to miss Mr lesour for the budget.

Thank you good evening board members it is getting late we have some slides that we want to go through to get you started in the budget process for this year we'll have some discussions as we go along in the next few next meeting at least to to get some ideas where we're headed but for tonight we just have a couple things that we want to talk to you about if we go to the next slide please as we look at the next slide these are some of the things that we've done over the past few years right compensation we've increased minimum wage to 16 an hour this year the state's at fifteen dollars an hour when the state passed their budget for going to Fifteen dollars an hour they certainly didn't give us all the funding that was necessary to get our people to even fifteen dollars an hour that's just the way it rolls because they're not looking in each individual they're looking at a dollar allotment based on allotment formula so.

For the most part we don't ever get what we what we need to make our increases work one of the key things that we've talked about already tonight is the salary supplements for teachers I mean you all have done a fabulous job since 1718 when Dr mabenga came in committing to pushing forward with that the county has come through being only 200 250 dollars behind basically or 240 behind Wake County after being two thousand dollars behind is incredible we've gone from the force 4375 and 18 to 64.50 and 23. so with that said we've we've raised it over two thousand seventy five dollars for the purpose of getting us where we need to be to retain our teachers Wake County does do a lot on the top end which we've always done a linear increase trying to give everybody Equitable increases along the way from that standpoint and if we think about it we've just on a with a bachelor's degree a teacher with zero years comes in at six.

Thousand four hundred fifty dollars and with 31 plus years they're making eleven thousand one hundred dollars in salary supplement so I mean it's it's something that we're going to continue to work on over the years because it's only going to continue to change as we go forward so operational Services quickly some of the things is brought in custodial Services we're currently doing a lot of Contracting with that right now because we don't have enough people to fill the slots that we have for our custodial services so we're having to do some deeper contract costing to to get some of those operational services in place you know academic Services we've been putting things into the schools making sure we've increased our multilingual Resource Center those are all important things expanding our Equity office to make sure we get there next slide please and address all the needs of our students so as we look here at this next slide what we're talking about is the commitment that we made last year.

Last year you committed to 4 million trying to get four million dollars from the county for increasing the salary supplement we didn't quite get to where we wanted to be but we got to 64.50 we made the commitment that we would move towards the classified salary study to ensure that we would be able to have competitive salaries in in these ranges as well to do that we always have to start off with what do we think we're going to have in salary increases coming up in the next year Well we continue to go with the 4.2 percent for the certified salaries and increasing another four percent for the classified salary increase retirement benefits just killing us and we'll continue to kill us over the next few years when we talk about retirement going from 24.5 this year to at least 25.75 next year you know they're talking in a few more years we're going to be at 30 percent we're getting there pretty quickly so all these costs that that are just.

Here to sustain are incredible costs in themselves health insurance three seven three seven three seventy nine to eight three eight three fifty it could be higher than that we just don't know what the final number is going to come out of Raleigh those costs alone are 4.9 million dollars so we're already starting off just to keep our salary levels at what we think the general assembly might do is a big is a big ask from the county classified salary study they came across and said that it'd be about 10.8 million dollars for the classified salary study we're going to ask for another 4 million almost 4.1 million dollars needed funding to implement that salary study when we again increase our salaries for all employees we're including the state employees which the state employees again dollar allotments there's not enough there to cover already we're going to get a fall back from that right so we're going to end up having to absorb some of that cost as well.

Total of those two are going to come out to nine million dollars we're going to need 20 for Charter Schools we don't want it to be taken off of the nine million dollars so we're asking for another 1.8 for that bringing our a total ask up to 10.8 million dollars for the just the salary increases in the classified salary study so with that said we're we're already asking for as much as we had last year pretty much right next slide please yes I'm sorry Mr before you move to the next one with the nine million dollars because when you're looking at 10.8 within nine million dollars is that's going to meet what we're looking for or we have to go up to our fund balance to make it work so any reduction to that because again this the state salaries aren't going to be able to cover all this jump in this study so we're going to need the full 9 million plus the 1.8 to get to this the the amount that's necessary if.

If when the general assembly passes the budget we'll have a better understanding and we might have to use some of fund balance to to cover it from that standpoint so we're already preparing for that type of thing to ensure that we have some funds available to ensure that we can try to meet the our intent of getting us up to the the salary study Marketplace. We came up short from what we asked for for teachers last year amazing a million yeah so if we put that in there too yeah okay oh next slide please so this is the ever important slide of where you where we were and where we where we are today the great gains that we have as we look at the as we look at Wake County again I go back to they have the economy of scales all right they have the ability to to reach into their fund balance quite a bit more than we do for the purpose of ensuring they.

Can stay ahead of us but we've done a remarkable job here in Durham County Commissioners and yourselves have pushed for this and I think that that you know after we get through the classified salary study we'll get right back on the salary supplement right because we want to keep our teachers we're going to be out of extra money we've got to make sure that we keep people so that's going to be you know as we look into the next year that'll be another thing to look at to push for next slide please so we're here with a budget we've done a lot of things so far you know we've been meeting we analyze our first second month enrollment we've been having meetings as a group across the board with school assignment with the planning area working on the projections and all the other CTE areas and every area that you can think of we're we're all talking trying to get to where we need to be with our projections we'll hopefully we'll have them very.

Shortly and sometime in early February so that we can begin working with those numbers to see where they are they're not going to be as as probably as much as we want to but with a declining enrollment we need to ensure that we have a a good number for the schools the best number we can have with the understanding that we cannot continue to over a lot anymore because the whole harmless is gone this year and when we got our second month adjustment we lost 24 positions teaching positions and dollar allotments as well it would have been over a 48 positions had they just taken the whole amount but they only take half of your decline when you're when you have a declining enrollment so we're fortunate with that so here we are starting off works at the I would have been at the work session but I was having cataract surgery so I can see clearly now and I hope not to make big number errors going down the road but yeah it's.

We're just there it's this time of the year we want to get the superintendent's budget to you in March we'll be talking with the county next Tuesday we'll be going over Esser so you'll have your presentation then and we can bring you more information that you want to talk about at that time as well from that standpoint so I'd like to hear some of the things you'd like to to hear from us about in regards to the budget but again we have to have the budget to the county by May 15th they want something in March we give them a number to work with which right now is a 10.8 million dollars and then we'll be working with them on setting up the meetings in June May late May early June to go over the the count the the request with the county commissioner so at the end of the presentation there are a lot of budget highlights which are the salary salary and benefit increases in regards to where we are today.

And I can speak more to that but this has been a a good long meeting I'd rather take questions that you would rather speak to in in that regard I just do want to Circle back to Ms byer's question about Gaggle we spent 221 thousand dollars this year on gaggle out of Esser and we also have a hundred and fourteen thousand dollars left that needs to be spent next year and also we have 104 000 that is is sitting there for casual as well so yes we are working and spending the money as we go and I just want to assure you that we have plans to spend all these extra dollars as we move down the road so thank you Mr lisar for your presentation and welcome back we missed you at our work session board members do you have any questions for Mr lasur or any feedback I would also say this would be the time to give feedback on the budget proposal that the superintendent has proposed we want to.

Give this feedback now so the staff have an opportunity to go back cost it out and it can be added to the superintendent's budget I think from our previous experience in working with our Board of County Commissioners the sooner they know a full number the better and that we don't wait till the last minute to want to increase our ass so we can do that as early give the direction to the administration as early as possible that'll be really helpful any questions or comments concerns Miss buyer so y'all have done an incredibly thorough job and I appreciate you working with all the Departments the the growing together Staffing would be a piece that I feel like might need some boosting of personnel as we support families in very intentional ways I mean we've got a lot of schools to go out to we've got a lot maybe a call center to staff I don't know like however y'all think it needs to be done I think having the support so we.

Don't burn out the people that are doing that really difficult work I think is important came to mind for me we're going to have some Personnel recommendation and then there's probably a few weeks again at this point we probably balancing esoph funds and other sources as we'll be bringing those requests Ms Rogers yeah thank you for the presentation particularly the calendar around the budget and all those things we've heard many things from the community about the 18 million dollars and I don't I do expect our commissioners to ask the same things do we have a timeline about when and how this will fit into our budget calendar thank you Mr Rogers for the question board if you remember I really wanted us to go through the process I think the process the way we started we had a board wish list then I took you to the cabinet we worked with the cabinet and cabinet we had a directors different departments they were able to give us the inputs as well.

This week we're able to involve our superintendent teacher Advisory Group they gave the feedback we got student feedback as well on Monday we have a standard cabinet meeting and we're going to try to finalize this next time when we come in February we're going to bring you the plan for the 18 million dollars along with the SR fund as well so oh we are very mindful we really want to make sure that the accounting Commissioners and our community know how we're spend it but we really want it to have a input from everybody thank you and I would ask if we've had conversations about the Community Schools coordinators and if there's an appetite to make sure that that can be used to stay in our budget or expansion so when it comes to Airsoft funds as we made with superintendent teacher Advisory Group we did not get any inputs as far Community Schools concerned out of all those groups nobody brought it up.

Any other questions from board members or requests on the budget I I'm curious that that folks didn't bring up Community Schools because I hear such excitement about it within the community so I'd be interested in I know there's a cohort of eight principles that that have talked about that I hope that's still in your ongoing Communications about how we might expand that initiative thank you again for the next step for the 18 million dollars and so I'm gonna finalize this with our cabinet on Monday we are planning to have two by two very soon I'll have a Miss Mayfield by next week to be able to send those calendar dates so that's how we can get your funnel feedback as we're gonna move forward with that this writers were you speaking about that for the 18 million were you thinking about our normal operating budget that's okay normal operating budget so is there a response to that my response is I had a conversation with Mr kaison we're able to increase I think by one.

School and I think we have agreed to have to reset to be able to to see how well we are working with that particular initiative I think the last school was Fayetteville or Elementary that we're able to analyze last last year even though there was a code about four other principles that they were really interested but I think the conversation was pretty much let's see how it's working let's have some data before we can proceed.

I love looking at these numbers especially you know when it includes additional funding needed to implement the proposed salary study I'm excited about the classified staff getting you know their adjustments and you know definitely I continue to I continue to grieve the cops on our funding but imposed by the state and that's something you know we have to continue to to you know to make that push at the state level but when it comes to you know some of the the other ways that we can continue to to drive support like you know you talk about expanding the multilingual Resource Center office of school relations like you know there's there's definitely the office of equity Affairs and I I might add I mean we need support digital Equity is a big big need you know for a lot of our families who actually go to the MRC sometimes with those needs and and so I'm just I continue to celebrate some of the things that we're doing but I do think we need to continue.

To think about how we are growing these these departments commensurate with the need commensurate with and it's not commensurate yet there's there's it's disproportionate right now because we don't have enough stop in the MRC to cover all our schools and they're doing multiple schools each interpreter and so I just want to continue to see those that communication vehicle and almost like triaging and all the bridging that is happening to all the different departments the other thing that that I also just wanted to say is that we have a really good supplement you know it's not the best but it's not bad at all so the local salary supplements in the years that we have seen this I mean it's it's gone it's been it's a different number every single time and it's do you think do you anticipate any Trends showing that this might get lower or higher I mean I'm I'm anticipating it's going to be higher based on inflation competitive rates and all that but any trends that you can.

Tell us in terms of anticipating recruitment because I'm still thinking recruitment wouldn't continue to stay competitive Trends are you know flavor of the month right I mean for salary supplements it's going to be something that's been going to be around for years to come especially in this area with White Chapel Hill so I mean like I said you take a year off to do one thing you're going to be right back on it the next year to continue looking at being competitive in the area I mean so the trends I mean what we have to look at next probably is is looking at changing our linear increase to trying to get more like wake is in that regard because for their EC teachers you know they also have some supplements for that too that are bigger than than ours from that standpoint so they're they're really looking we we were trying to get the bottom up to try to keep our teachers new teachers now we have to start looking at the mid and.

Top of the scale people is my opinion and you know we grew significantly they grew more that's the problem is as they were looking at what we're doing we have discussions we have meetings together what are you doing what are you doing yeah well they're always going to be looking at what we're doing and and trying to keep ahead of us because they want to keep the teachers in their school districts but as you saw today I mean they're still having situations with getting teachers so it's not like teachers are running over there in Mass they're still what I think it was 529 teachers that they're still out that's a lot so it's never ending game malware study did have an increase for ecias did it not the recommendation so I'd be curious to know what that also would look like in our classroom folks and whether that's a strategy we need to consider sooner rather than later I don't know how y'all are thinking about that but.

You you said that wake is doing that currently I mean I'm sure it's a high price tag but it's also a little bit more which means by the salary compensation study for classified staff that we are recommending if I'm remembering it right has ecias being paid a different step higher than regular classroom IAS that was really recommended by heard in Lopez and the other one right so is it time at the same time or to actually look at what that would mean for a class easy classroom teachers as well to do something similar it's a yeah Mr Chavez thank you for all of this I just wanted to offer one element that I think would be useful as we think about the budget going forward I the most one of the most helpful things here is the comparison with wake and I was I would just say I was trying to remember I was asking Ms Rogers if we had that kind of context data for the salary study so I need.

To look back at that but any context that you that you can provide about you know comparatively what we're looking at compared to other districts or other similar roles within Durham County whatever you think would be most useful like to where we can where we're losing people oh goodness it's late I'm losing but I just want to be able to look at you know where are we losing people what what you know wages or salaries are we losing them to where are those that kind of thing so even like looking at the teacher you know supplements compared to you know Chapel Hill Carrboro orange whatever and and then within ec2 I was thinking about that but but thank you for all this all this info looking forward to budget season.

Any other comments or questions from board members I do missile a store in past years we've had a list of deferred requests and I'm sure there's a list that you have and I know that it wasn't up there tonight I think in the past on that list has also been leave parental leave and what level we could just cost that out I don't know that if this ask is the right time this year but I think if we could put a dollar amount with that it would be helpful to help understand so some of the things that will bring you next month is is that I can read the Deferred list was an updated cost on that when we did it about four years ago it was like 700 000 sure it's grown I'm sure but we're also going to bring you a departmental budget requests that we're going to look to do to fund internally and not ask the county for the money we're gonna try to make some moves to.

Make that happen if we have to use some money that would go into fund balance we would do that as well to ensure that some of the critical programs that that people are asking for get funded we're going to fund as many as we can Esser and then we're going to ensure that we're using our money wisely and making sure we have a road map for ensuring the salary study gets put in place as quickly as possible from that perspective thank you I appreciate that no no I think this needs to be a February presentation but it's something that's in the back of my mind is the time when the Esther funds will expire it feels like it's getting closer and closer quicker and quicker what's our plan and our budget for that transition and whatever that might look like absorbing what costs or what kind of cost things need to Sunset so just want to put that out there that we have that on our radar as we're moving forward I.

Know you all are thinking about it but would love for us to also have those conversations right with that that concludes our agenda almost concludes our agenda for this evening I'll take a motion to go in a closed session so Lord I'd like to amend actually I'd like to make a motion that we go into closed session for the reason stated on the agenda but add that pursuant to General statute 143-318.11 A5 to instruct the board's agents concerning negotiations involving the acquisition of real property it's been moving probably a second any other discussion all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed please use the same sign it passes unanimously we're now in closed session.

We're now back in Open Session Dr mabinga but I'm here to seek your approval for the Personnel report as discussed at a closed session.

I'll accept a motion to move the Personnel report dated January 26 2022. I moved 2023 excuse me it's been moved by Miss Roger seconded by a second thank you second about Miss Lewis all those in favor please say aye aye opposed please use the same sign passes unanimously we have an additional motion motion to approve the resolution for dismissal of an employee second the move by Mr Rogers talking about Miss buyer any other discussion all those in favor please Sarah any opposed please use the same sign it passes unanimously with that we are adjourned.