over the last two years, we have dealt with ongoing changes, shifts, turns uncertainties, unknowns, fears as we try to live and we tried to work during and in the midst of a pandemic Birmingham city schools has not been an exception to the pandemic. We are frustrated at those things that are beyond our control and the situations that we did not choose. However, I want you to know that we as a school system have taken extraordinary efforts to be proactive to keep our schools open and protect our students, our faculty and our families. As you know in Birmingham city schools, we require masks and we continue to require masks to be worn in our schools and facilities every day. We provide PPE to our employees as well as our students. We have hosted vaccination clinics. We have we have established testing partnerships with U. A. B and continue to offer our employees 10 days of covid leave even as employers are shifting to the five day quarantines. Under the new guidance from the CDC I want this is our board member. Mr Sullivan Mr Sullivan, I recognized all the other board members. I want to make sure I recognize you as well. We continue to take covid seriously as a system and as individuals however, we must balance our covert response against our mission which is to educate our Children and prepare them to succeed in life. The fact is that many of our students had challenges prior to the pandemic and Covid has put them further behind, simply stated our students need to be in school. They cannot afford to be out of school. Everyone understands the importance of this whether from from the president to public health officials across the country and across the state. There's been broad agreement at every level that virtual education is not as effective as in person teaching and learning. Virtual education also provides practical challenges for parents who don't have the luxury to work from home. That's the search. That's the situation with many of the parents that we serve in Birmingham City schools and our teachers know better than most that parents play a critical role in the education of their Children, but our Children need their teachers. COVID-19 numbers are high across the state of Alabama. Many school systems are feeling the effects of the large surge Are in Birmingham City schools are most recent numbers indicate that 468 students Um or 2.2% of our student population tested positive for COVID-19. We have 140 for employees, roughly 5% of our workforce who tested positive for COVID-19. Now these numbers are updated updated weekly and they will be reflected on our dashboard that we share on our website. In comparison, these numbers show our proactive measures are working to prevent or to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. More than 12,000 free COVID-19 tests have been administered in our schools since September. That number includes 9,697 student tests, 2,676 employee tests. And just in January alone, we had more than 3500 tests administered. We had 284 students because of the testing to test positive, 81 adults to test positive. And as you can see, we're able to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by identifying those individuals who may be spreading COVID-19 a symptomatically meaning they didn't know they had covid until they did the free testing that we provide. Now, you know, I can't promise that we won't isolate a classroom Or uh some activity because of COVID-19-related issues. But our goal remains to keep Birmingham city schools open and available for our Children because they need to be in the classroom. We are open to hearing the concerns of our parents and our employees. In fact tonight we have sessions for both parents and employees. I talked to Cheryl, I'm calling it a town hall meeting but Cheryl said it's more of a listening and learning session. However, I don't want to leave any misconceptions and and and let me pause for a second. uh Mr Collins is also a board member. Board member representing District one. I don't want to leave any misconceptions out there about our what our system has done to help mitigate the spread of Covid 19 and will continue to do, we will take every precaution to prevent covid 19 infections on our campus and we will continue to work with our health department officials and listen to their guidance. Mrs Watkins, She's also here one of our board members and we're very proud to have all of them here too. As we do this press conference, we will continue to be proactive by providing additional covid 19 vaccination clinics. We will continue to work with our wonderful partners, the Jefferson County Health Department, the Alabama Regional Medical Services U. A. B. And others to identify those individuals who are asymptomatic and spreading covid and to prevent the spread and fight the covid 19 virus. You know, um I want to close by by reminding everyone of our most important stakeholders and our greatest asset, our scholars in Birmingham City Schools. We are as a superintendent, as a teacher, as a member of this, this this district, we are blessed to have the opportunity to support to educate and to care for young people. We know that these individuals will be the leaders of our community in Birmingham. We are thankful even during the midst of this crisis crisis because every problem and every challenge that we've seen, we've seen our employees, our students and our parents rise to the occasion and do their very best in a very difficult situation. So much is happening now to ensure that our students have a bright future. Educating our Children is a critical part of that future. So we stand ready as a system and individually to meet the challenges that this virus has for our school system, and any other challenge that that that offsets are students in Birmingham city schools.