Alright. Are you ready? Calling to order the study session for 12/02/2025. First thing on the agenda is the school calendar, third year out, first read. There we go. Alright. If you don't mind, miss Bryant, I will combine items one through three since they kind of go together, if that works for you. Right. Alright. So 'tis the season. We haven't even celebrated New Year's for 2026 yet, and we're already here talking about 2028. But as you all know, one of the school board's executive limitations is that we do plan a calendar three years out.
And so what you have in your packet, are three items, and I'll go in the order that's on here. The first one is the school calendar the third year out, and that's gonna be the one that is titled twenty twenty seven twenty twenty eight proposed. Without kind of boring with the details because I know we go through this every year, but we do have a calendar committee, and doctor Dowdy with, curriculum instruction and myself, we kind of co lead that. We've got, teachers, administrators, classified people from different departments, and we come together and and
develop a calendar to propose to you. As you all know, there's a lot of criteria in state law, around the calendar. We have to have a certain number of student days. We have to have a certain number of days in the teacher calendar. So what that really means is there's not a ton of flexibility with our calendar. However, there are opportunities that we can change things. As you all remember, you voted to move spring break a little bit forward, which was a huge success and a lot of positive feedback on that. And so the one thing for the most part, this calendar looks very similar to
past years, but the one thing I wanna point out was something that was mentioned, and I cannot recall who. It was a board member last year who inquired about Thanksgiving break. And so we did a little bit of research. We looked at other districts that had a full, week for Thanksgiving break, and we found that many do. Metro Nashville, Williamson County, Rutherford County had moved to that model. And we collected feedback, and I will tell you having served on that calendar committee for ten plus years, I haven't seen unanimous feedback that quickly in excitement for having a full week off for Thanksgiving.
So that is the big change in this calendar is that we are proposing to have that full week off for Thanksgiving. Just a little bit of data. Our student absence rate last Tuesday, about a eighth of our students were out. We also have higher, staff absences that week. Obviously, being a military community, a transit community, a lot of people are traveling, and so we understand that. So we do think that this would be a positive change for us moving forward. The other thing that I will mention, and and I discussed this last year, is that in our calendars, we are trying to increase our number of stockpile days for
inclement weather. This calendar would allow for us to have seven stockpile days, so that would be more than we've had in many, many years. So that is the 2728 proposed calendar that you have in front of you. The next item, I'm trying to go in order here, is adjustments. So as I mentioned, there was a lot of enthusiasm about the Thanksgiving break being a full week. We also discovered that there was one mistake in the calendar that we had approved previously, which we could have solved with with adding, a day for professional learning to
make sure we got to that two hundred day teacher calendar. We were one day short on that. But with that said, we took this opportunity to revisit that calendar and to go ahead and propose that for next year. We also have a full week off for Thanksgiving. So what you see with the twenty twenty six twenty twenty seven amended calendar is our proposal to essentially do exactly what we are proposing to do in 2728 for next year for that full week off for Thanksgiving. This calendar also gives us seven inclement weather days. And so the last item is the inclement weather makeup plan.
This, of course, is contingent upon you all approving the proposed amendment to next year's calendar. But if you do approve that, again, we will have seven days. So the first seven days missed will be forgiven. We won't have to make that up. After that, we follow our typical formula for selecting the dates that will be made up. And then if we miss those dates or or, you know, the snow comes after those dates, then we have to look at things like the thirty minutes added unless there's a waiver from the state, which as you might remember, between the tornado or
when we had, I believe just last year, severe winter weather that was across the state, when they declare a a state of emergency, we'll often get those days waived as well. So those are all three items, and let me know if you have any questions. Thank you. On to number four on the agenda. Questions? Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned the Thanksgiving week being out, but, yeah, I'm looking at the twenty fourth. It's green in the the, says parent teacher conference day on your legends.
That is a great question, and I'm glad you brought that up. I know the color coding. So this we base our our calendar off what is considered the teacher calendar, so we get those 200. There are days in here that might be marked as, like, parent teacher conference day or an in service day. It does not mean the teachers report that day. It's when, from a payroll perspective, they are paid in exchange for their day. So, for example, parent teacher conference, they're paid to stay after for those two afternoons. And so it might seem a little arbitrary, but from a payroll perspective, it works
out with the number of days in the calendar so that they are paid appropriately. So it does say parent teacher conference day, but that's when teachers are being compensated for the two afternoons that they they stay after. I'm certainly not, I guess, today, not school. But do you think that may be confusing to parents when that color coding is on the calendar? Yes, sir. And teacher conference? Yes, sir. Absolutely. I will say this calendar for the general public is a little confusing, but that's why we produce the parent facing calendar that takes out all these colors and basically
just states when kids come to school or don't come to school. So, yes, sir. That we we definitely do that. And I I understand exactly. That's why I wanted to explain that this is based on the teacher calendar. So teachers will get this, but we go back and we, you know, add in the holidays and half days, that sort of thing, on the parent facing calendar. Yes, sir. K. Thank you. Any other questions? Alright. Number four. Goal number five, improve employee morale and retention and increase transparency in district communications and employee feedback cycles.
Policy reference, e l three. Good evening. My name is Stacy Rush, and I'm the employee relations specialist for the district. Tonight, we will look at our work around improving employee morale and retention. Here you can see that last year we had a very slight dip of 0.4% in our certified and we improved our classified retention by one point. We're excited to note that we have fully bounced back from the hit we took after COVID in spite of the shortage in certified teacher applicants and having a high number of teachers on a permit. Here you can see our current resignation and retirements to date for this school year
compared to last year at this time And I also wanna take a brief moment to give a shout out to our amazing transportation department on their work around improving morale, training, and support for our bus drivers. In twenty two-twenty three, our driver retention rate was 35%. However, at the end of twenty four-twenty five, we had retained 74% of our drivers and this school year in August, we only had seven open bus routes compared to 41 open routes in August '22, so a big kudos to that team.
Here's a recap of updates we've made during our partnership with UpBeat. We piloted with just schools in 2022, then added department staff surveys in 2023. In 2024, we shifted from using supports from upbeat coaches to embedding that support internally from our level directors who are in the buildings frequently and are more aware of the unique strengths and challenges in each school. In 2025, HR and instructional leader team leadership team began meetings to collaborate on goals
and next steps to improve survey participation and workplace climate. Then in the fall of this year, we added these same focus meetings with our department supervisors as well to ensure district wide collaboration and support for improving morale and retention in all groups. We know that in order for feedback to be an accurate reflection of what employees think and feel about their work climate, we have to hear from everyone in the group. This year our focus from the HR lens has been to increase the survey participation
with a goal of 90% completion across all groups. You can see here our participation over time and we're excited to see that our teacher group exceeded the goal with 94% participation and while we didn't hit the mark for classified staff, we can certainly be proud of those gains we see since the initial deployment, excuse me, since the initial deployment of the upbeat survey. These graphs show where schools fall regarding to their survey participation by level, by teacher,
and classified groups. So for example, if you look at the upper left corner at the elementary graph, you see that 22 of the schools had 90% or higher participation for teachers, and 11 schools had 90% or higher participation among their classified staff. Ultimately, our goal is to see all these bars on the graph move to the far right column for all of our schools. Here, the overall positivity and satisfaction scores for each group over time can be seen. It's very encouraging to see the 10 increase in teacher scores since 2022.
While we don't see huge gains in our classified group, we realize that initially the participation rates were much lower for these groups. So as we see our survey participation rates increase, we know we have a more accurate read on the workplace climate for that group, and then we can focus our improvement efforts accordingly. For a broader comparison I also wanted to share Upbeat's global average score for these groups which you can see at the bottom of this slide. Here we can see the highest scoring categories for school employees.
The equal opportunity category includes questions about how well leaders respect and value the perspectives of employees regardless of the differences in race, ethnicity, culture, or other acts aspects of personal identity. Inclusive practices inquires about the extent to which leaders work to create an inclusive culture. And school safety speaks to how employees feel regarding the physical safety of themselves and the students in their school. Prior to this most recent deployment, this category included questions about behavior management as well,
which brought the overall category score down. We felt this was misleading when we were analyzing the data, so we asked upbeat to separate those categories of physical school safety from the behavior management questions, and now we have a more accurate representation of staff's feelings about each of these categories. This allows us to better focus our improvement efforts where needed. Conversely, let's take a look at our lowest categories. Compensation and career path has continued to be in our lowest categories for all groups.
However, since our first survey deployment in '22, certified teacher scores have increased 14 points, and classified scores have increased eight points in this area. Additionally, I would like to add that the current research on educator retention indicates that while pay does play a big part in teacher retention, the category that impacts retention the most is belonging and well-being. While behavior management is also a concern for both groups, since spring of this year,
we have seen significant improvements in teacher perception of how behavior is being addressed by administrators and their feelings regarding the fair application of discipline in their school. We've looked at the overall data, but I'd like to take a moment to brag and share a few specific key points of improvement. From fall twenty two to fall twenty five, looking at teacher responses, we see a 15 increase in agreement about supports for teachers' mental well-being, an 11 increase regarding the
ability to successfully manage the stress of the job, a 19 increase regarding reasonable workloads, and a 16 increase in satisfaction with compensation. For our classified staff, we see a nine point increase around leaders recognizing the great work of their employees and a 12 increase in satisfaction around how much salary will increase over time. Here you can see the improvement cycle for this entire process using these upbeat surveys, but ultimately, our goal is that every employee be knowledgeable of the survey results and
they work together collaboratively to improve. Here you can see many of the ways that we gather feedback from stakeholders. In addition to the upbeat surveys, we also send every employee who leaves the district an exit survey. We also offer exit interviews for every employee who indicated on their resignation form that they were dissatisfied or if they were leaving to teach in another Tennessee district. Sometimes we have employees who request an exit interview, depending on their situation and we may also reach out to request an exit interview depending on the context of their
separation with us. In CMCSS we work hard to provide support for employees and ensure they are being recognized for their hard work. As we know, this plays a significant role in feeling valued. These are just some of the ways that we do this, and I will speak more to a few of these in just a moment. This year, we revamped our HR outreach program to expand the number of representatives who go to schools for support. In the past, one person spent an entire day at each school two days a week, and it would take us from August to April to visit all the schools.
Under our new format, we're able to provide more timely support completing all school visits by the January, and we will have provided more direct expertise for employees based on that particular topic that they have questions about, such as benefits, retirement, licensing, or our on-site clinic. Prior to 2024, human resources hosted an annual benefits fair for employees where where CMCSS business partners would be available to hand out brochures and answer any questions about their services. Over the years, attendance declined and the employee feedback noted that employees preferred more interactive
encounters with vendors, and they would like to see more discounts offered, understandably so. So in 2024, we revamped the benefits fair and created the Living Well Employee Wellness event, where we partnered with 62 community vendors to come actively showcase their health services and provide sizable gifts and discounts for our employees. We received very positive feedback about the changes in the event. This year, we are moving the event to a Saturday in May, May 2, in partnership with our education foundation dash to benefit five k.
Our next steps for HR include continuing our market analysis process to ensure competitive pay, focusing on reaching our 90% upbeat survey completion goal for all groups in the district, exploring the discrepancies between teacher and classified staff participation in the survey, establishing expectations for supervisors to share workplace climate feedback with all their employees, supporting school and departments as they work on their own specific upbeat goals, and continuing to provide supervisor support for
retention. Do you all have any questions for me? Mister Mayberry? I just wanna probably comment about, for Norman and his team, and that's incredible retention, especially over all the years. I do wanna say that this is definitely the least I've ever, since being on the board in four years, had feedback about buses. So, great job. Appreciate you, man. And then you also opened up a whole new complex in the midst of all that. So please express that to your team. Any other questions? Thank you. Alright. Thank you.
Alright. Item number five is county commissioner's comments. No comments? And comments from the board? I just would like to welcome our new board member, miss Teresa. Thank you so much. We had an opportunity to meet her before her first board meeting with at the TSBA conference, and we spent a lot of time getting to know her. And we're really excited about serving with her. Doctor Luna Penner? Good evening, board members. As we're approaching the end of the calendar year, we're already making plans for next school year. If you have driven near Outlaw Field lately, you may have noticed Freedom Elementary is
really beginning to look like a school building. We're still on track to open August 2026. We're also beginning to talk with students and families about school choice and all of the available options for the 2627 school year to include high school academies, Spanish immersion elementary, middle college at Austin Peay, early technical college, a new post secondary option at Nashville State Community College, and, of course, Founders Inc at Burt Innovation Center. Early in the new year, we will also be sharing all open seats that are
available for open enrollment. Our goal is always to find the best school choice for your student. Miss Bryant, this concludes my report for this evening. Alright. Thank you. I believe we are finished.