Summary of 7/19/22 School Board Meeting

At the July 19 School Board meeting:

• Board Adopts consent agenda

  • Appoints new members and chairs of BAC, FAC, ACTL

  • Appointed Ms. Paige Tucker as Director of Talent Acquisition and Management; Appointed Dr. Sampson as Exec. Director of Student Services;

• Announcements: Summer school discussed. There are 3152 students; 761 staff. Summer school classes were smaller; and focused at elementary only on reading and math.

• Monitoring Item on Counseling services: Ms. Graves Presented

  • Discussed objectives for program, including establishing culture of physical, social emotional and mental health wellness, providing evidence-based curriculum based on student SEL needs, and ensuring all students have at least one school-based adult who supports and encourages their academic and personal growth

  • Little data available to measure if initiatives are succeeding; student services working on developing metrics.

  • Risk assessments regarding signs of suicide and self-harm low in 2020-21 (due to not seeing students); much higher than normal in 21-22.

  • Staffing includes 39.6 Psychologists, 36.5 social workers, 134 School Counselors

  • Discussion of whether to separate functions for college and career readiness counseling from mental health counseling; Other than that, there was no discussion regarding how counseling helps students in college admission process

• Internal Audit Report

  • Discussed resource deployment: Comparing enrollment and staffing

    • At Pre-K: Actual staffing (182), exceeded budgeted staffing (161.5), which exceeded needed staffing based on 7.5 FTE/Student (123). Board discussed whether that could be corrected or if small size of Pre-K classes precluded.

    • K-12: Many schools maintained staffing even with decline in students; Question how to manage going forward as student projections flatten out.

  • Discussed VLP After action report.

    • Auditor concludes there was NO project management; VLP was not treated like opening a new school; VLP plan was dramatically understaffed; viewed by management as unfunded mandate.

    • Ms. Kadera notes VLP should not have been unfunded mandate because federal funds were used; initial budget did not allocate those funds to VLP

    • Ms. Kadera notes problems would have been much worse if initial projections of students had actually attended.

    • Ms. Diaz-Torres suggests that hard to project students in May due to COVID issues; but this does not explain lack of preparation because initial projections called for even more students than actually enrolled.

    • Mr. Priddy asks if there is a blueprint for project management at APS; he receives a non-answer

See our Scorecard for this meeting.