School Board Meeting   2/1/2024

Richardson, to participate remotely.

Richardson to participate remotely this evening.

And may I have a second?

Second.

And Madam Clerk, if you would now have roll call for board members.

Mr. Morse?

Here.

Mr. Meyer?

Here.

Torres?

Yes.

Heapie?

Here.

Thank you so much.

And now I would entertain a motion for approval of our agenda, please.

I move that we approve our proposed agenda.

All in favor, please say yes.

Yes.

So first on our list, we have Mr. Hartline.

Thank you.

Smith.

The posts are ready and waiting, and I thank you for your time.

Mr. Andy Orbin?

Purchasing metal detectors and paying to staff them is not the best use of our limited funding.

Gupta.

Hello, my name is Callan Smith, C-A-L-L-A-N-S-M-I-T-H.

And my name is Sahana Gupta, S-A-H-A-N-A-G-U-P-T-A.

And I live at 810 Fendal Terrace.

Last year we had seven state champs come out of the track team alone.

It kind of just sets us behind.

So yeah and even though we are seniors and we won't be here next year we really would like to see the track team continue to thrive because we have come such a far way and have had many great accomplishments.

And even outside of that, a lot of the community of Charlottesville uses the track and not having lights and it being dark past five o'clock creates a dangerous and unusable environment for people in the broader Charlottesville community.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Please do.

Thank you very much for your work.

Next, anybody else here in the media center?

Thank you.

Please come forward, state your name and address, and you have three minutes.

Thank you.

Mr. Koenig?

Thank you.

Thank you.

that has their hand raised who would like to make public comment currently.

I'll just ask anybody in the attendees gallery if they do wish to make public comment to please raise their hands so that we can promote you to speaking and have three minutes for comments.

And now we do have our opportunity for our student rep to provide a report or any comments or updates that you have.

Thank you guys.

Dr. Gurley, do you want to announce these?

All right, first up, 8.1, we will have Dr. Odey come before us to recognize our principals for Principal Appreciation Week.

Thank you so much.

Raznik with our National School Counseling Week.

So tonight I ask that you join me in recognizing our school counselors and national school counseling.

And next we will have Beth Chuck for our school board recognition and our school board clerk recognition.

Thank you very much and please join me in appreciation.

Next, we have 8.5, the Teacher of the Year Recognition, Dr. Odey.

We have boxes.

All right, next up we will have Dr. Cardell Patillo from the Virginia School Boards Association to bring greetings to our school board.

Thank you.

Can we get a picture with the chair and the vice chair?

I would like to move that we adopt the consent agenda.

All in favor, say yes.

Yes.

We're now moving on to 10.0 items for discussion, please.

All right, first up, we have Miss Powell with the school safety model.

And so we will, we look forward to continuing the process with the community.

So go ahead, Mr. Meyer.

Because I think when people see that, they're probably just thinking SRO.

You know, I don't know that we have all the answers either that we would want, but.

But even front loading the answers are the bullets, many of the bullets from this slide to give people a sense of it, to help them get informed about how they were to answer the question.

So that's a loaded question, but

The system, I believe, would definitely be the best one for us.

Maybe, obviously, I don't think this is where we should be going, but second... Hold on, Mr. Meyer.

Burns.

Lewis is doing to hire and to fill the openings to make sure that we continue with providing that resource to our students.

and I'm very glad that you mentioned openings because there are multiple openings and they people may think that something was posted but we had one of our CSAs actually move into a different role in the school division and so different things have caused openings to occur and unfortunately we have quite a few right now we're working to fill.

So I appreciate this as an entryway to build those relationships.

Yeah, that is some great stuff, too.

A question on will all staff, visitors, students, everyone who enters the building or enters an event, will they be required to go through the weapons detector system?

We estimate we would need to be operating two gates for our sporting events, football, basketball, things like that.

Okay, but to be clear on a school day we would expect teachers and staff and students to enter through one point and go through the same process?

A staff park all around the campus, I don't, you know, that would be something that would need to be determined if it is decided to move forward with using this type of technology for general building entry.

without a commitment?

I'm not sure if we could get a trial on site, but we certainly can see this exact system in operation nearby and other places.

Great, thank you.

Mr. Morse.

I have no questions or comments regarding weapons detection.

Thank you, Miss Cooper.

So Emily.

I think it would be great, you know, if we had transparency around, you know, where we are in that process.

and but so we've been kind of just sitting on this we did the homework because we didn't want to be in a position where if there is a decision that we needed that we're scrambling to figure out what to do what it looks like etc but absolutely no purchase orders have been made we did in the context of the reset we've had the vendor on site once just to confirm what we were thinking from what we'd seen elsewhere about how many it would take and what it would look like here so there's been one vendor site visit no purchase orders

And I know that's not fully a question, but I just wanted to, I guess, bring that to your attention and just I mean, I know you guys are the experts, but ask if that's in consideration at all.

Richardson tapped in?

whether it be SROs or phones.

No, no, no.

So you needed to be flexible.

I didn't get new hearing aids, so I'm hearing better.

Cell phones.

I guess, why are we even, to me, and this is maybe a comment, but why are we not considering all those things?

But it is it, we will be taking a lot more phones.

And so our students, generally speaking, are a little bit more divided where they're like, we're demonstrating and can you allow us a little bit more freedom in this area?

Thanks.

Mr. Morse.

I'll leave it there for now.

Miss Cooper.

And so teaching those healthy habits and providing those spaces for flexibility, I think you would yield more results.

Thank you, Miss Dooley.

So I think we just all need to be prepared for that on each of these three topics.

Thank you.

So I know that was a lot, but I hope that made sense.

Next, Mr. Meyer.

Thanks.

Go ahead.

Thank you.

I think it's important to know the best way to solve the divide socially is to make sure that we have relationships early.

Cooper?

I know we talked about the Cambridge model and I was kind of looking at their school board website and stuff like that, but I would like to learn more and if it's possible to have a meeting with them or even visit to kind of see what that looks like.

Am I wrong?

Ms.

And was there one more question down here?

And I guess my question to everybody else is, do you have a reminder we made or do you already need more information?

That would be my sons and I'm certainly not ready to make any decision.

Okay.

So I just want to clarify that we did not do that.

Yeah.

Lewis to bring us an update on the principal search.

Heapie, Ms.

Cooper, Mr. Morse.

Is that okay?

Burns.

And just if you could help me understand how we make sure that our students are heard and just if they could be a part of that process.

All right.

And then whoever the principal is, that we support them as they try to make those changes holistically.

All right, so Dr. Gurley will now come to the podium and present the proposed 2024-2025 budget.

And so we do, that's something that we have to prioritize for our upcoming, for our upcoming budget.

When you said we made it work, could you give a little bit of description of what that meant?

But in this case, there was vacancy savings.

If I could just talk about your English language learner enrollment change slide for a moment.

Slide nine.

One more.

No, you're going the wrong way.

Slide eight.

Keep going.

So thank you.

Yes?

Dr. Gurley, related to this, when the city has a surplus and brings in more real property and personal property taxes than it budgeted at the start of the year, does that, is that counted in our allocation or is, or do we get any of that?

Hoover, but I'm sure the answer is no.

So we're not going to see 40% of that extra $6.6 million.

So along the lines, and I agree with you that this slide is so, so important and yeah, we're not the only division who employs more than what the state says we need.

So thank you.

We are going to use other funds in order to make this happen.

I mean, was that staffing?

And we will.

If we add all of these things together that we're going to be creative and work really hard to find funding for some of these things, that's basically what we're doing.

Our staff members, we don't freeze them on a step, so we want to make sure that they get their step and we want to make sure that we are addressing the compression so that we can remain the employer of choice for our support positions.

We could go through all of these, I'm sure, and just be really concerned, more than really concerned.

Burns?

And when we ask the city to do their part, this is what we're asking for.

And then you see the revenues, you see the revenues at the bottom.

So to be clear, the FT that's there, those are both English language learner positions or is one the elementary position for the second grade or fourth grade classroom that only has two teachers?

It's either or.

So again, making it clear for folks, we're either going to have larger elementary class sizes or larger ratios of teachers to English language learners.

Oh, did you have a question?

And we can't make it happen.

And so, I mean, you know, unfortunately, we have six, basically $3 million to work with.

We need basically an additional 3 million.

That would be fine with me.

Thanks.

What we can do is we can take the yellow, and we can create scenarios that if we're given $3 billion additional, these are some scenarios that we could take back.

Absolutely.

I'm going to need you all in next week.

Can you just clarify was that money because we didn't spend the money or had you gotten creative in how you basically worked with the city staff to

I'll give Miss Powell, she can do a much better job than me, she and Miss Hoover.

Also, they have a narrative in their FY24 budget book online that does a beautiful job of describing the intentional work that was done together collaboratively to help ensure that we would have those surpluses to try to keep that middle school project on track.

The track lighting project that we've heard about this evening, would that be a CIP project or could that be a line item on our budget?

Again, the CIP list is very long but that is a very important project that we've had our eyes on for some time.

So the city is getting some more money.

And I think to our point earlier about when we talk about the cities asking where we are landing, you know, it's about 7%, 7.82%.

and us now getting revenue in from all the other districts, right?

Yes.

Anyways, thanks.