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November 14, 2024 Work Session

The board met for their September Work Session on Thursday. All board members were present except Dan Cash and Drason Beasley.

Gallup

The Gallup management consulting firm provided metrics that they gathered about WCS's employee engagement. The short of the story is that our faculty and staff are very engaged, when compared against other schools, and even other corporate entities.

You can see the presentation starting at 12:25

Budget

There was a good educational session about the district's budget, specifically focusing on where the revenue comes from and how property taxes fit into that conversation.

You can see that presentation starting at 38:21

New Business

There was a lively discussion of the Five Year Capital Plan (starting at 1:37:50)

The board was presented with calendars that they will be voting to approve for the two upcoming school years. Notably, Halloween will be a "professional development" day in 2025. You can see the discussion at 2:25:03

They also talked about the proposed change to the Head Lice policy. Basically, to align more closely with CDC guidelines and the TN Department of Health, the proposed policy change would end the requirement to remove students from the classroom if lice are found. 2:43:58

There is a proposed change to the Equal Opportunity Employment policy to move "sexual orientation," "gender identity," and "pregnancy" into a parenthetical phrase following the word "sex." This is to align more closely with the EEOC's guidelines.

Donna Clements took this as an opportunity to propose the removal of the words "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" from the policy. She noted that there are only 8 county districts in TN that have these words in their EO policy out of the 95 counties. Dana Ausbrooks again explained why this would be a bad idea and could invite legal ramifications, as she did in the October 17, 2024 Work Session. You can see this discussion starting at 3:29:53

Unfortunately, the video lost its audio feed as the board was discussing this possibility. However, the board will not be voting on the removal of those terms this month. So we will have plenty of opportunity to hear from our representatives on this topic before this kind of change is voted on.

Monday Meeting

The board will convene for their last regular meeting of the calendar year this Monday, November 18 at 6:30pm. If you're able to join, come say hi.