001I'd like to call the meeting of the Prince William County School Board to order a motions in order for the approval of the wait hold on actually hold on hold on hold on hold on Wade we vote on the agenda now is this when he would make his motion no first we we approve the agenda this is when you would do it Justin is that is that okay I thought we did it in well what is this that I'm looking at this approval of agenda 102 we do the adoption of consent agenda when we come out we usually approve the agenda I'm going to ask the board by you I'd like consent to move the approval of the agenda to when we come out of closed session does anyone have any objection to the board
002moving the approval of the agenda to when we come out of Clos session okay seeing no opposition we'll do that so we're the first vote we're going to have now is on the Clos session motion uh please give him a motion all right so thank you Mr chairman thank you by the way everybody for that I move that pursuant to sections 2.2 3711 and 2.2 3712 of the code of Virginia the Prince William County School Board entered close session for the following reasons one to discuss with staff the assignment appointment promotion performance demotion salaries disciplining or resignation of specific public officers appointees or employees of any public body pursuant to Virginia code section 2 . 2- 3711 A1 two to review disciplinary matters for a specific student that would involve the disclosure of information contained
003in the Scholastic record for the individual student and to receive legal advice regarding the same as provided by Virginia sections Cod section Virginia code sections 2.2 3711 A2 and 8 three to discuss with division counsel and staff actual or probable litigation and specific legal matters involving staff students and other civil litigation involving the School Division under Virginia code section 2.2 3711 A7 and 8 and four to discuss and receive briefings by staff members related to the security of school facilities the safety of persons using such facilities and actions taken to respond to such matters where discussion in an open meeting would jeopardize the security of such facilities pursuant to Virginia code section 2.2 3711 a19 do have a second Mr um Jesse second any discussion please vote all in favor of the closed session um
004motion uh I any opposed okay no opposition I'm also I I you're an i Lori everyone unanimous okay so um at this time the Prince William County School Board will move into close session and return approximately 1 hour [Music] I'd like the prince I'd like to call the meeting back to order um we are now out of closed session a closed session certification is in order a motion Mrs arore thank you Mr chairman I mve that pursuant to section 2.2 3712 of the code of Virginia the closed session of the princee County school board meeting of October 6 2024 be certified by adopting the following resolution now therefore be it resolved that the Prince William County School Board hereby certifies that to the best of each member's knowledge one only public business matters lawfully Exempted
005from open meetings requirements were discussed in the closed meeting to which this certification resolution applies in two only such public business matters were identif as identified as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard and discussed or considered by the school board do you have a second Mr chairman second M Williams any discussion please vote vote is8 Yes unanimous motion passes moving on to the Clos session action items approval appointments and releases of motion order Miss for Mr chairman I move that the Prince William County School Board approve the appointments and releases of specific employees as presented in close session do you have a second Mr chairman M Williams any discussion Mr wall oh please vote vote is eight yes unanimous motion passes moving on to the second close action item of
006motions in order for 9.02 Miss Zar form hold on I move that for the reason set forth in the student management and alternative programs departments smpd letter of September 18th 2024 the Prince William County school board approved smap PD's decision to reassign student Sr 25-35 to the computer-based instruction program via remote access only based on charges of unlawful acts in the community do I have a second Mr chairman M Williams second any discussion please vote vote is eight yes unanimous motion passes okay next 10.01 of motions in order for the approval of the meeting agenda Miss zapor I move that the Prince William County school board approved the meeting agenda as recommended do I have a second Mr chairman Mr William seconds any discussion Mr wil thank you Mr chairman uh I want to put
007forward a motion I move to amend the agenda by adding a board matters a motion that the Prince William County School Board direct the superintendent to begin the school redistricting process to the address the current student to address the current student population and capacity at Covington Harper Elementary School do I have a second second Mr denck second's a motion discussion Mr wil thank you Mr chairman uh my goal is not to this on the school board this should not come as any surprise um as I've provided fidu advocacy for this community over the last couple of months um you know I didn't want it to come to this point and I was under the assumption which I was wrong uh that somehow the boundaries uh for the redistricting when we opened the new Woodbridge Elementary
008School would include Covington Harper Elementary as a way of addressing what I believe is an exorbitant amount of students and overcrowding that is coming to the school I've been told and I've seen that this is not on the plan and this is the mitigation plan is for the opening of the second pic Shores Elementary School which I am grateful for the board that we moved up one year on the CIP and to bring kind of context to this and and not retiga the past because a lot of this predates this administration of what has happened this School ideally should be open right now as originally planned on the CIP unfortunately due to a lot of circumstances that we did not have control of and I'm not going to get into that everyone is highly intelligent
009and can do some Googling and figuring out what was going on um to uh delay the purchase of this land uh we're at a point uh I think at a thresh now where I'm very concerned where we're at with this building and and just an example and and and the goal here is to provide some context where we're headed with this building because I do not believe that we can wait till the fall of 27 to have the mitigation for this building we currently have eight trailers there right now uh there will be trailers there next year uh More Trailers coming with the growth in that community and I did speak to the manager of the pic Shore and I do not believe he would provide me with dupli information but just to give you
010context right now so there are 2,350 current units in the pic Shores development okay on average anywhere from 20 to 25 units open for sale for occupancy each month okay building currently has eight trailers right now at its current capacity so by the next 12 months they estimate that the total population and units total population of units this could be multi-dwelling stacked housing whatever would be at 2,600 is to 2,650 that's by next year okay so we're adding an additional 300 plus houses to this capacity at Covington Harbor as it stands now there's the apartments being built and the construction of those apartments are about to commence in that Community uh and asking them again so by the summer of 26 okay so once again we're one year off of the opening of the second
011Elementary School which again will have 300 additional seats thank you board with the CIP changes so we'll address it then but in the fall of 26 365 apartment units will be occupied so for me I look at this as any person speaking to the community there during the last election cycle that if I don't address a problem and if I say I'm going to help address a problem but I don't it would be feckless and just pernicious in the attempt of not helping this community so my ultimate goal here is to ensure that we have the capacity to help this building to curtail what will be more trailers I'm not going to do the math and I'm not going to ask for a calculation of formula we can get into more details about how many
012students typically come per housing unit I know it's more it's going to be more classrooms there's no way of denying it and it's going to be quite a bit more so my goal with this motion is to set the motion in place and have the lines reviewed and redone with the options presented for the board for adoption so that's the context of this where I'm at with this we don't control the inexorable amount of growth that's happening back there the school board is not in charge of that the development we only can do what we can do and people have said with the delay in purchasing the land which was beyond our control why didn't you guys go look for other land I would ask anyone to get a map of that area and tell
013me where we were going to build another Elementary School that was not already owned by the same people who had the land that we needed for the S acres to build a multi-story elementary school but we can address the problem now this is what we can do we can't go back to the past but this is where we are now and I'm hoping as a board this is something we can move forward with I appreciate your time in letting me bring this forward um thank you Mr chairman Miss William thank you Mr chairman um Mr Wil i um will not be boing this motion I completely understand your fous advocacy for your constituents and that is our responsibility as board members um I am disagreeing with this motion because I am doing the same for
014my district and my constituents um it was good that you brought up the election last year it it and my community in several ways is much more much different than yours they don't generally turn out in droves and for HOA meetings or things of that nature um but I would ask that instead of uh this being a continuous back and forth that we take advantage of the CIP process and work collaboratively as a board because in addition to the amount of growth that you're having in your District I also have several apartment complexes as well as two new town centers that will be built in a district that is completely tital one and we do not have room even with a new elementary school coming and we have not had a new Elementary School in
015several decades so I think it be to our advantage if we collectively uh put all of our resources together and in and different intelligences and work with the division uh to come up with some ideas that would suit both of our districts um without running into each other's District so that we can ensure that our students have the best learning uh and academic environment that we possibly can do as a board under our Authority and control um and what we cannot do make sure that as a board we are able to communicate to the public where our line of authority ends and where the bo BCS and developers have the authority so that we're clear on this and that neither District feels that they are not being represented or that we are not advocating to
016the best of our ability because we are next to each other and the growth is tremendous um and it's not just our district that's facing growth I know Mr Jesse aquan District they have some new developments but uh we have trailers throughout the division and so I think that would be to our best Advantage so at this time I cannot support your motion thank you Mr Jesse this is a very difficult issue and one of the thing I was going to ask about in my time at the end was that we keep talking about doing boundaries and we need to stop talking about it and get it done uh I agree with Miss Williams that uh even if we do the boundaries I think what we're going to find out is that there is no
017solution because many of the schools are title one they're already at at Max Capacity and even the shifting some to the new school probably is not going to relieve that but I do think and I do support the idea at least looking at it and I think we can say we looked we did all we could even if the results end up with there's not much we can do uh the community is building very quickly we cannot you can put in a new home and new set of homes easily but you can't just get a new school quickly it takes years to get it done get it approved and so forth so we're in a situation but I will support the uh motion to look at it and advice because I think we should do
018that the parents but the parents need to know that the likelihood in my opinion that you're going to get relief when we even do the boundaries the likelihood my opinion is Slim okay I'll just sort of wrap up um Mr wil I appreciate your passion on this issue and I think it's important for the public to know that Mr wil has been working very hard for many months years on the issues of overcrowding in the pic District as has Miss Williams um in the Woodbridge District Prince William County has built 25 schools um over the last 15 years plus or minus there probably more schools have been built in our County than any other place in the country um the growth has been extraordinary um and we are still in a position where we're playing
019catchup uh the ptoy Shores Elementary School will um reduce the overcrowding in those schools any redistricting currently coverting Harper there's nowhere to move the kids all the schools have trailers around there uh they're all over capacity uh it doesn't make sense to move kids from one trailer to another um and this board has set a precedence over the years that the way we've handled this is to either add capacity at schools by building classrooms or building schools we've never in mid-range for the most part districted because of trailers or overcrowding we have 200 plus minus trailers across the division and um you know in a sense we have a process which we abide by that seems to be working and while I recognize um we have overcrowding issues we certainly aren't where we were five
020or six years ago we're much better than that and so I appreciate and I think everyone should know Mr wil's passion on this Miss Williams passion um the concern about overcrowding has been the one of the largest issues this board has dealt with over the last 10 15 years um at this point um I'd ask the board to vote are we doing this electronic okay I'll ask show a hands all in favor of supporting Mr wilk's motion to add this to this evening's agenda uh raise your hand for I I count three all opposed is that one two three four five M Mr chairman I just want to clarify for uh the public that under our rules of the board uh a motion to amend an agenda for an action item requires a unanimous vote
021of the no that that that so for the exercise so for for this to have been added to the agenda it does require unanimous vote that's correct but even in light of that the vote is five in opposition three in support of Mr wil's motion um I'd ask Mr wil to make sure the for the minutes reflect the appropriate motion that you have given them the documents okay moving on to the full motion um that Miss zarap por read which is the motion for tonight's agenda please vote on that and that can go electronic Laura we'll need to do a hand vote on this as well we're okay all all in favor of uh approving tonight's agenda uh raise your hand or I and that looks like unanimous okay okay with the agenda being approved
022we will move on to the Pledge of Allegiance tonight I'd ask uh Alena Lor to um lead us in the pledge she's a senior at CD Hilton High School and our student representative this evening flag United States stand indivisible andice for all thank you Miss Lor Lor sorry about that um we are moving on to thriving Futures Focus so tonight thriving Futures focus is our opportunity to highlight the exemplary work being accomplished in our school to fulfill our vision that every student will graduate with the knowledge skills and habits of mind necessary to create a thriving future for themselves and their Community we dedicate this time during our meetings to recognizing students staff members and schools that have earned an honor and award at the state or national level we appreciate how these honores have
023positively represented Prince William County Public Schools and the School Board is proud to recognize them publicly for their accomplishments tonight the school board will first recognize an amazing achievement accomplished by one of our outstanding schools We Begin our recognition with Miss Erica trenck in the brentville district who will introduce our first award winners Mr trenic thank you Mr chairman I'm honored to share that the US Department of Education has named T claywood Elementary School a 2024 National Blue Ribbon School in the program category exemplary achievement Gap closing schools [Music] yay a National Blue Ribbon School serves as a model of effective and Innovative practices for educators Across the Nation these schools have leaders who articulate a Clear Vision of instructional excellence and uphold high standards Blue Ribbon Schools display effective teaching methods and offer robust
024professional development for their staff datadriven instruction is a Hallmark and there is a concerted effort to ensure every student succeeds collaboration among families communities and Educators is a key component to their success T claywood Elementary School is one of only 356 schools Across the Nation and one of only eight in Virginia to be awarded the Blue Ribbon designation woo tonight we have several Representatives my favorites a lot of my favorites from T claywood Elementary and I would in like like to invite principal Dr Andrew bite to come forward and both introduce his team and share a few words all right well first of all thank you also very much for his recognition and taking a time we are very proud of um earning this award and this um recognition so I'm going to introduce um
025some of the staff members that are with me um next to me Mrs yudit Melissa yuditsky our assistant principal um Mrs Jenny llo one of our first grade teachers Mrs Lisa Alice one of our kindergarten teachers Mrs Andrea Hanover one of our second grade teachers Mrs um Katie Cortes one of our fourth grade teachers um Mrs Lyn Hardwick our financial specialist who I work with for 24 years um m um Carol scarce one of our special education teachers Mrs um Christy um um Abram who I worked with for 21 years um one of our third grade teachers Mrs Amy Cunningham our school counselor and Miss Laura van gelder one of our fifth grade teachers pH in our audience we also have M Stephanie Wiggins one of our first grade teachers and um Mr Duncan beavers
026our our TPC who also was a former student um of ours um I just want to quickly say um a big thank you to our uh amazing and dedicated um caring knowledgeable and skilled um teachers and staff members who put in forth all the effort to make sure all our students were learning to their fullest potential also a a big appreciation to our hardworking um students who never you know who continue to persevere and never give up um you know even when things are a little bit challenging as we know school has been um over the last last few years and of course our supportive and um involve uh parents and family who really um have helped make our school the best it can be um it really takes all of us uh uh to
027to make sure our students are all learning and successful and on the Note just a big thank you to all the Educators out there because you know we're very proud of this award but I know what happens each day and every morning all the teachers administrators staff members get up to go to school work really hard to make sure their um students are are learning are successful are safe are happy and we know the the role has gotten harder and more challenging so a big thank you if you see your teachers tomorrow give them um a big thank you and let's get if we can give all teachers including our great staff a round of [Music] applause thank you well said Dr Buckey congratulations again to the 2024 National Blue Ribbon School T claywood Elementary
028School um tonight we also recognize our individual student accomplishments beginning with Jennifer wall the representative of the Gainesville District Miss wall thank you Dr Latif over 16,000 High School seniors from Across the Nation were selected as semi-finalists for the 70th annual National Merit Scholarship program the National Merit Scholarship Corporation has selected six Prince William County Public School students as 2025 National Merit Scholarship program semi finalists now to become a semi to become a finalist the semi-finalist and a high school official must submit a detailed scholarship application in which they provide information about the semi-finalist academic record participation in school and community activities demonstrated leadership abilities employment and honors and awards received a semi-finalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout High School be endorsed and recommended by a high school official write an essay and
029earn sat or ACT scores that confirm the students earlier performance on the 2023 preliminary SAT National Merit Scholarship qualifying test these students now have the chance to continue in the competition for thousands of National Merit Scholarships which are collectively worth nearly $26 million and will be awarded in the spring of 2025 so on behalf of the Gainesville District it is my pleasure to recognize Battlefield High School's 2 2025 National Merit semi-finalists Daniel Cho and Alan ping unfortunately Daniel and Allan could not make it tonight but we extend our congratulations to our amazing Scholars thank you Miss wall from the Cole's District Vice chair Miss Lisa zapor please introduce our next two recipients thank you Dr Latif the Kohl's District would first like to recognize from Charles J kogan High School Isabella Carter for her selection
030as a 2020 5 National Merit semi-finalists Hogan High School is being represented tonight by assistant principal Chad Cavender Isabella has asked Mr Cavender to speak on her behalf um thank you all for having us here tonight and for recognizing Isabella on this amazing accomplishment um colan High School is very proud to have Isabella as our national mer at semi-finalist um and we wish her the best in her pursuit of attending University of Virginia and possibly studying something in the field of biology or biochemistry so thank you all for for today congratulations the Kohl's District would also like to recognize from Osborne Park High School Alexandra whan for earning her placement as a 2025 National Merit semi-finalist Osborne Park is being represented tonight by principal M Lisa Marie Kaine is Al yes Alexander is here would
031you please provide some thoughts on this amazing accomplishment hi my name is Ali willan and I attend Osborne Park High School I'm greatly appreciative of all the recognition I have received for this accomplishment the support of my family and teachers the past four year past four years has been incredible especially the support of ma my math teacher Mrs Johnson I would also like to thank pdcs for all the opportunities I have been given here from the advanced coursework and Specialty programs to the opportunity to attend the summer residential Governor School for Math Science and Technology this past summer thank you congratulations Alexandra and Isabella excellent thank you Miss araport Mr will pic District thank you Mr chairman uh on behalf of the pic District it is my honor Forest Park is back tonight uh to
032recognize Benjamin Max ikenberry from the Forest Park High School as a 2025 National Merit Scholarship semifinalist Forest Park again is here represented by principal Richard Martinez Max would you like to share a few words with the school board all right uh my name is Max or Benjamin and I go to Forest Park High School and yeah I mean I never been to one of these before so it's kind of cool isn't it magical yeah yeah yeah shout out Forest Park High School woo yes Bruins [Music] thank you Mr wil thank you Max we return to the brentville district with Miss Erica trenic for our final recognition Mr denck the brunville district would like to recognize James Yun for being named a 2025 National Merit Scholarship semi-finalist I know Patriot High School is proud Patriot High
033School is represented by principal Dr Bishop James would you care to speak on behalf of this out standing award thank you I'm happy to be recognized by the school board for my achievement and proud to be representing the county as a National Merit honor scholarship semi finalist I would like to thank my family as well as the teachers and staff of the county who have helped me along the way I would like to give special thanks to miss Julie Kirk my counselor provided me the resources and help I need to achieve this Miss elizth Busan my former computer science teacher who wrote the letter and recommendation to the National Honor scholarship board as well as Dr Bishop the principal of Patriot High School for his leadership this is as much an award for them as
034it is for me and as I go forward into college a career in software engineering and hopefully position in the United States Air Force I'll be constantly appreciating their help thank you excellent thank you Mr enic I would like to take a moment to recognize all the parents and staff here tonight who contribute to the success of the Prince William County schools and these students I ask you to stand in solidarity with me for our outstanding achievers thank you congratulations again to our uh six 2025 National Merit Scholarship semi-finalist winners uh and and I wish you the best to get to the finals before taking a few pictures of superintendent Dr McDade would like to share a few words Dr McDade thank you so much Mr chairman T clay W congratulations you are absolutely amazing
035um I've had several opportunities to visit T clay and I can attest to the fact that it is an incredible learning environment for all students um and this award just shows everyone the work that the incredible work that you're doing and the fact that you won in the category of closing achievement gaps really shows your dedication to ensure that every student can create a thriving future for themselves and their community so thank you so much for all of that you your passion your commitment and even the fact the number of Staff members that you have here just shows what an incredible Community um ex exists at T claywood so congratulations to each and every one of you to the entire School community staff families and students on this honor and to our National Merit semifinalist
036um you are the best of the best we are so incredibly proud of you you embody what it means to be the profile of a pwcs graduate you are critical thinker your digital citizens your innovators and Visionaries Global collaborators most importantly you are resilient and we look forward to the continued impact that you will make and you are making um your families your school community and all of pwcs so incredibly proud job well done congratulations thank you Dr McDade at this time I'd like to request our honores to come forward for a photo with the school board and receive a small token of our appreciation we will start with one photo that includes a t Clay Wood Elementary School folks for their National Blue Ribbon and the second photo will include our 2025 National Merit
037Scholarship semifinalists someone watch e te ready you thank you [Applause] for [Music] Happ okay welcome so that was wonderful thank you it is always the um the highlight of the meeting to recognize these amazing folks in our school division are incredible students and our incredible staff so again that was wonderful we're going to move on now to 13.01 which is the adoption this evening of the consent agenda miss zarab Mr chairman I move that the Prince William County School Board approve the public meeting consent agenda as do you have a second Mr chairman M Williams any discussion please vote the vote is seven yes one not presentent vote motion passed okay moving on to the adoption of um acknowledgements and recommen recognitions miss araport Mr chairman I move that the Prince William County School Board
038approve the acknowledgements and recognitions as recommended have a second Mr chairman M Williams second any discussion please vote the vote is seven yes one abstained trenic motion passed okay moving on to Citizen comment time those citizens who signed up in advance with the clerk May address the school board this evening when they are called to the podium the citizen comment period for regular school board meetings is 1 hour and citizens may speak on the agenda items or other topics gerain to the operations and policies of Prince William County schools please use proper decorum and manners while at the podium or you'll be asked to step aside we ask that the audience please be respectful of each speaker and refrain from any clapping cheering or jering to avoid disruption of the meeting if you do not
039do so the board will recess and I'll ask that the room be cleared to restore public order tonight we have five citizens signed up speak when I call your names please come to the podium and state your name and address for the record I will um tell you the order so you can be ready Dr Shan Spence first uh Khloe fogue second Jacqueline Thurman Robin Norris Jen Donley Dr Shan Spence Sean Spence okay okay uh Khloe fog Khloe frog uh Jacqueline Thurman good evening um thank you for the opportunity to share um my thoughts I wanted to talk about the Virginia literacy act specifically the implementation within Prince William County relative to special education students I applaud all efforts to improve literacy among our children I think we know that covid took a hit for
040pretty much everyone in that area but I do have some concerns about our most academically vulnerable children specifically our sped children especially grades 3 plus um that does represent 14% Prince William County's student population with sped one size does not fit all we cannot group all of these kids together um English is a second language disadv disadvantage and disability are different different disabilities are very different and different combinations of different disabilities are also different it then follows that the interventions that we need to do for these children are different I'm concerned as I look at the new Prince William County um division literacy plan I found on the website about a particular paragraph on page four where it sites Intervention which is typically where sped children will get most of their instruction it says that
041Lexia will be the primary program for intervention at tiers two and three with two being moderate and three being intensive It also says Lexia will be our first intervention in tiers 2 and three different disabilities are different we need to allow IEP teams to determine the best intervention for each child based on their disabilities their temperament what they can tolerate and how they learn I can tell you that if my child could learn from a screen like Lexia Core 5 he would already be fluent but he is not he's in grade five he has a normal IQ he has four different disabilities that get cognitively in the way of him learning to read but he is very capable this would not be the best intervention for him and I would hate to see in the
042future that children my child or children like him are forc to spend two 6 weeks 3 months 6 months demonstrating that this is not a good intervention for them before another one can be chosen I would request that the board seriously consider a revision to the language to give IEP teams the flexibility that they have always had to determine the best interventions for our sped children the second um concern that I have is in the the same section it says additional interventions for the school year 2024 to 25 schools can incorporate other interventions as needed for students I would I would request that we remove for the school year 2024 to 2025 and again allow IEP teams the flexibility they have always had to determine the best intervention based on individual disabilities and capabilities finally
043I recognize that there are a lot of limitations um on the state approved list I would ask that the board advocate for expanding those options particularly for Graves 3 plus tier 3 intervention for Orton Gillingham those children are not represented than you miss Thurman thanks Robin Norris good evening my name is Robin Norris and my address is on file I'm a mom with children in this County School System I've had hold roles as a licensed marriage and family therapist and as a supervisor I also use my doctorate and counselor education to teach graduate students in all three tracks clinical military and School counseling within the school of Ed at College of William and Mary of those of you who met me you know literacy and dyslexia have become my passions in the last year and
044a half in that time I learn I have multiple family members who genetically share this learning difference in my brief moments tonight I would like to honor all of our time with a moment of Silence within my 3 minutes we're also busy with phones emails videos and various other ways to commun communicate for the concepts of care listen and learn into decoding dyslexia PWC to be upheld we must take one minute out of our malstrom of the many spaces in which we all run our day to not do but to Simply Be please let our minute begin for each one of us within that minute most likely had some sort of internal dialogue maybe it was about our breath maybe it was about our laundry list maybe it was about dyslexia a minute can feel
045really long none of us know what each other's inner voices we thinking or feeling I want us all to recognize that each child has a story and each child has an inner conversation what we say to ourselves in a minute is important to heal or to hurt we don't know what a kid says to themselves in a minute when they cannot read the ability to read can be a reason for living or the inability to read can be a life-altering issue we as parents and educators are tasked with keeping children safe which comes with very uncertain paths full of dilemas and hard choices so I ask that you please continue to check in with yourself about the path forward we want to try our our best to ensure that no child gets left behind in
046the Battle of literacy especially not those with dyslexia thank you thank you Miss Jen Donley hi uh my name is Jen Donnelly and my address is on file um it's going to be a little bit of a different talk tonight um first of all I'd like to thank Erica for assigning me to the um safe schools advisory Council it has been a wonderful experience I also wanted to just Rave about what a great system you guys have there at the Security operation system I don't want to uh like like burst anybody's uh uh bubbles or anything about what's coming up later on but the everbridge system is probably one of the best mass notification systems that I've ever seen and I sell them on a daily basis to the military so I am super impressed
047that that's the system that we chose I feel like our kids are going to be much safer with that in place and um I just want to thank you for really doing your due diligence making sure that the physical SA sa of our kids is a priority it's evident in that security operations center I also want to thank Dave Brown who stayed after um our presentation last week to kind of give me a little bit more ins and outs of how that was working so um we can still talk about the code of conduct another time but physical security is is doing really really well so I just wanted to come up and thank you all for that thank you okay thank you so that wraps up citizen comment time for this evening we're going
048to move to 1601 um 20 the 2025 legislative priorities um is that where I'm at yeah um Dr MCD thank you Mr chairman um I would at this time like to invite Mr Matt gilfoil our Chief Information officer along with Mr Jim counsel our lobbyist and they'll be providing a brief overview of our legislative priorities yes good evening um thank you uh for inviting us up to talk about the legislative priorities that'll be upcoming for the 2025 legislative session in Richmond um that will begin in January um tonight they're on for information and they'll be presented for Action at the uh the next meeting um our legislative priorities uh guide our work with the state delegation in Richmond and Mr Jim councel uh our lobbyist um is Guided by those um actions that we take
049with the legislative priorities as he does his work in Richmond each year um following um tonight and following the action um of the board next at the next meeting they will be presented um to our state delegation by the school board chairman in collaboration with the county um who will be presenting theirs as well um to our state delegation on December 2nd um and then as is typical we will take a delegation from the school division down to meet with our uh State delegates sometime in the January time frame so just to give some context around um the work of the general assembly and when um Mr Council um has to hustle a little bit and that is in that January time frame so last year in this session um during the 60-day general assembly
050session this year 1,46 bills actually made it to the governor um of that uh the governor signed 777 of those he amended 116 of those and he vetoed 153 of those obviously not every single one of those has to do specifically with principal County Schools or education specifically but many many do have some influence or some role um when it comes to the school Division and so our ability to have these legislative priorities for Mr Council to move quickly in that situation are important so our legislative Focus for the upcoming year remains consistent with our previous uh uh legislative priorities from last uh year um and they focused really on a couple of key areas one of the first and foremost is around teacher retention and recruitment um we continue to seek flexibility ilities um
051and incentives from the state to allow us to hire uh the best teachers that we can um that would include things like supporting Financial incentives for teaching careers including free or reduced state tuition expanded teacher residency and apprenticeships programs as well as helping us increase the funding for our teacher salaries and benefits and increasing options for Li insure um all these are detailed in the legislative priority packet that is available in board docs um I'm just going to Spotlight some of the highlights here um as well as we continue to focus on of course funding for the school division um for our students and for our staff um as you are likely aware Virginia operates under a two-year banial budget um that was the two-year budget was just passed this past year so we will
052now be in the midye of that uh the midpoint of that two-year cycle this coming uh General Assembly so each year the governor prepares that proposed budget bill for introduction and passage by the general assembly that bill is initially adopted in the even numbered years and then amended um which will be this coming session so with regard to that some of the areas that we continue to focus on are improving funding for school support positions this includes removing the support cap that was actually put in place in 2008 and still is in place um removing that support cap um our best estimate at this point should that support cap be removed completely would be an additional $18 to19 million annually to Prince William County um we also continue to seek providing full funding to implement
053the standards of quality as well as supporting our modern schools and classroom requirements the jlar group which is the nonpartisan group that the general assembly uses to do their studies found that if Virginia was to fully fund schools to the actual need of our schools as uh under the standards of quality that would require an additional $7 billion um that would be Statewide um obviously some percentage of that would come to Prince William County should they do that I don't see the the general assembly funding that fully but it is something we would continue to pursue is the increasing uh funding for our schools um standards of quality um as part of that we also continue to seek enhanced support for our student um academic Advanced academic outcomes and options as well as their needs
054such as their mental health um as well as universal free meals and funding um that would be necessary to sustain that for all of our schools and um sustainability that remains a priority for our it's in our strategic plan it remains a priority for the organization we are aware of some of the challenges that are currently being faced by facilities team when it comes to the interconnection fees that Dominion um energy is charging for us essentially to connect our solar um uh activities to the grid if you will and there are a substantial amount of money that's involved in that and so that may be something that requires a legislative fix so that'll be something that we continue to look at and then of course as I mentioned there were thousands and thousands of bills
055that were introduced last year many of those become unfunded mandates and so we do continue to oppose all unfunded mandates no no matter how well-intentioned because those things become a burden on the schools our teachers and our staff and so those are some of our priorities for the upcoming year I do want to invite up um Mr Jim councel just to say some brief remarks um he is fresh from his honeymoon so he's well rested and ready go so he's going to just give you a quick update on what he expects in the upcoming assembly thank you mat Mr chairman school board members Dr mcade good evening it's nice to be with you again uh with all the attention on the federal election coming up in just a couple weeks I must tell you there's
056not a lot to report from Richmond it's been very quiet but there are a couple things I can mention uh the Commonwealth seems to be be doing very well economically we just got current figures in and it looks like that it's running about 9.9% above the forecast for General revenues so that means if we can stay on this pace there may be another 800 million to a billion dollars that K12 can get in there and fight for in January uh also as Matt mentioned the the infamous J law K12 funding study there has now been a joint subcommittee appointed to study that uh study the study if you will and uh as general assemblies will do and really come up with a new formula for what we're going to do about K12 funding well that
057that joint subcommittee just finally met last week and if there was anything to take out of that initial meeting it was at the chair lady Senator lock told the committee that this would definitely be a 2-year multi- session undertaking that nothing was going to happen in a hurry and it is Major they're looking at uh abandoning S soqs as the basis for funding and trying to get something to a per student funding formul so if they can get there the change will be dramatic in the interim we we've already submitted comments on behalf of Prince William uh to the subcommittee suggesting that if all that's going to take two years if there's any new Revenue when we get there in January then that money should go towards uh getting away with the support cap and
058so there could be a realistic chance not that we'll get that totally repealed but we can chip away on it uh at this time any questions be glad to try and answer answer them Miss Williams thank you Mr Council always a pleasure to see you I'm going to ask you my annual question that i' love to ask um is there any other school divisions that are advocating um for things that we are not or that are we are advocating that we could use the support of other school divisions on I know it's really early in the year um but sometimes uh specifically I remember like the crown act where we had to combine forces so to speak are there any issues or topics like that floating around that um would be beneficial to us in
059the northern Virginia area that we're not aware of at this time should be thinking about well I will tell you that you know the lobbyist group but about 10 of us that we consider the the large scho School Division representatives are in close contact and and leading up to the session and during the session have meetings every Friday morning so just about everything that we talk about down there is a concerted effort uh one of the things that comes to mind that that does not have complete widespread support yet but something to do about the representatives in special AED litigation and Reiko County School division's really been the lead on that one I've already talked to their representative uh they intend to bring that back again this year so U I think they'll have a
060a lot more support from other school divisions than they did the first year thank thank you I appreciate that and as always any updates as we come into session gets ready to start because it becomes very fast-paced for the public who may not know it's it it's like lightening speed appreciate any and um all updates and of course the work that you do representing um us down in the general assembly um very much supportive and the only other question I had is um from Mr gilfoil when we do a vote on the the legislative uh priorities if we could have like maybe a category for sustainability or something that the public can read or you can point out cu I know you just did talking point tonight so we don't have to get into it
061this evening there is a section um in the legislative priorities that does specifically call out supports for sustainability okay I missed that so thank you I appreciate that cuz I was for it and that's all I have thank you very much uh Mr Jesse oh congratulations on your wedding well thank you we actually got married in July and the last I heard we still together so keep up the good work the one thing you mentioned in uh with the PO potential new funding or additional funding you mentioned something about support uh being a focus or something like that can you elaborate what what it was the support cap left support cap oh on the support cap yeah uh well and Matt alluded to this in in his talk just a moment ago but uh in
062the re of 2008 Governor Kaine in order to save money and trim the K12 budget put a cap or a ratio cap on how much of support positions the Commonwealth would fund and at that time it saved the state about $360 million a year that was supposed to be a temporary measure during the recession as I said it was put in in 2008 2009 and here we are in 2024 and it still exists so I don't even know what the figure would look like now uh if if they repealed it but it certainly has really hampered uh School divisions funding support positions and I also heard in the subcommittee meeting last week and this is not just support positions but across the state localities are funding all by themselves 51% more positions than in s
063soq positions than the states willing to fund so that just gives you some idea of of where the state is really coming up short and putting too much of the burden on the localities Jim or Matt tell us what those positions are like give us examples of those kinds of positions that the state considers s soq sure so when you think about uh a school and you think about the positions now that we expect a school to be able to offer and especially among many of the wraparound services that we think about so it could be something as simple as your technical support person your t-spec but when you think about one to one deployed across all of our schools every student having a computer having somebody to support that or having more than one
064person in a large schools it becomes important um that's an example of a support position other support positions are things like social workers counselors of course we talk a lot about the counselor ratio that's a support position um and so when you think about all the services that are in a school that's really anything beyond the teacher is really a support position is defined under the and I'm going to oversimplify it but that's that's essentially how it operates do that includes instructional coaches instructional AIDS yeah all that would not fall those would all be within the um under support positions those are support yeah um okay great and then and then just I think it's important I think Dr McDade you may know this off the top of your head but I think we're still
065not at the 1 to 250 at high school counselors yet I think we're 1 to 300 I think overall the Count's good but we're yeah we and we we and we have some Pockets where um it's not one to 300 so so that's an example counseling is a real example of where we're still not at the the um the goal Target that's considered the ideal number of 250 to one for student um students to counsel ratio that's recommended by the national counsel Association and sort of standard across the country so that's an example of a position that has not been refunded since 2008 correct we're not fully we're not fully funded yeah we're doing that on our own correct Miss wall um thank you good to see you Mr Council um I had a question
066uh we have a a lot of top priorities are these in order of top of priority or is number one our very top priority or or are they just um maybe random so the they're not necessarily sequential in terms of any kind of rank order we did try to put the top priorities you see that are that those are the ones that we will do the heavier focus on and what I mean by heavier Focus Mr Council typically will work with our delegates or delegates around the state to find somebody who is willing to sponsor a bill related to that Andor U Mr Council will work with other as he mentioned he does collaborate with the other big um eight or Big 10 School divisions and so we'll look for opportunities to really pursue those
067the other ones that are mentioned here are things that are more kind of um Evergreen if you will and so we do pursue those or we keep an eye on those things um but they're not necessarily as high a a focus in terms of Mr Council trying to actually get new legislation passed in those areas but all of these remain in flux and sometimes it all depends on kind of like what is of interest to the general assembly at the time and what do we feel like what that's where Mr council's expertise comes in because he has a sense of what's realistic in terms of our ability to achieve something in that in that session or what's of interest in the state that we feel like is of Interest anything else you want to add
068okay thank you that's helpful so the the top 15 are kind of the ones we keep our Target on and then the statement of support opposition are just kind of positions that we take on various things correct and one of the main things that that does is that as I mentioned the general assembly and Miss Williams alluded to this moves very very quickly um and so it's very difficult Mr Council can't call me and ask hey can you do a board poll on what does the board think about this or what does the board think about that and so these essentially give him guidelines to be able to operate within that he can operate and say okay I'm operating consistently with the board's intent on this particular topic as opposed to having to call and
069say well how does the board feel about sustainability would we oppose this he can look at this and say yeah I'm I'm good I kind of have my ability I have my marching orders from the board on this okay thank you that's that's up yeah I just might add last year we probably had at least 160 bills relating to just k12 and that does not include all the budget amendments for education so uh I would be calling Matt a lot of nights very very late as subcommittees wrap up and this really gives me a guideline so that just about everything that's going to be introduced uh knowing how y'all think and with the legislative prorities I can get it in the right pigeon hole and get some guidance from that thank you Mr Jesse uh
070on the student uh support Gap uh I know delegate L torrin is the chair of the finance committee down there and is Big suppor of do you know his position on that particular issue well the general position is they all agree that it was supposed to go away and it shouldn't be there now the problem is the price tag that it would bring so typically what happens each session is we have we have budget amendments in to completely Wipe Out the support cap and in consideration of that what we end up with is they'll take a couple more instruction of support positions and move them into the instruction category so they give us a a little bit but but they're not going to give us or they have not been willing so far to completely
071repeal the support cap ratio like I said I don't even know what the figure would be now but at the time it was implemented uh it was about $750 million bium savings to the Commonwealth Mr Council always a pleasure to have you here I have a couple questions we have um the new accreditation system that the Virginia Board of Education has asked School divisions to implement has two portions the accountability portion which has metrics that are still being calculated on how they're going to implement it but the second one which after they give schools their rating or their grading says um you know one of the ratings will say needs support do you know if the governor's office or the governor has a bill that will talk about the kind of money they're going to
072use to support School divisions when the Board of Education may come to uh an accreditation conclusion that a school needs support what does that mean do you have any idea if the governor is going to push any more money towards schools this year Mr chairman I'm not aware at this point of of any initiative on the part of the governor uh usually the second week in December he presents his budget to the general assembly even in the off year like this even in the off Year and that would be the time we we really get to see all the details second week of December yeah I think it was around the 17th of December last year second or third week so outside of that issue it's the governor's last year you know typically they're known
073for sort of Legacy related issues in this time he's been committed to a program he defines is called the right help right now which is you know immediate supports for special ed for mental health do you know if there's any more funding coming behind those efforts have you heard anything or do you know anything about that no I was at a senate uh health and Education meeting last week yeah but they did not discuss any new funding initiatives yet okay I'm sure there will be some however okay so just last two points so the the you know we we have listed I think it's important for the public to know one of our you know priorities is mental health supports um the school division is spending its own money on um hazel Health which is
074a program that supports uh student mental health across a division tellah Health Service which I think is great I know it was in last year's budget it got killed uh for the governor wanted to support this for all schools uh from six grade 6 to 12 I think that money might be out there and and I would urge us to try to do what we can to do that and then second I think as Mr guil points out I I you know I I think some noise ought to be made about um the solar connectivity charges that um the utility companies are um charging to school divisions um it makes our efforts for energy and sustainability um almost negligent you know or negligible based on the amount of cost we would have to pay to
075connect the solar panels we lose all the savings and I think you know any any effort in finding out how that we we know in Northern Virginia that's a major problem but if you can help us with you know getting the other districts around the state to look at that and see what we can do about getting getting that effort that's critical Mr chairman uh just tonight Matt has filled me in on both of those issues on the health one I don't think that needs to wait for the general assembly session I can work on that right away be great uh on the Dominion issue that might take a little more digging before we can make any progress on it so if you can help us with so the SEC the State Corporation Commission is
076supposed to issue new guidance on connectivity fees and other issues in their December meeting I understand there'll be citizen comment time at that if you can look into whether it makes sense for the school divisions to go there to that meeting or to present our case on that issue I would appreciate any any information you can gather on that for we'll certainly do that and also talk to the uh K12 uh associations that represent various enors yeah yeah yeah no that's so I appreciate it um thank you very much uh there being no further questions Mr Council always a pleasure Mr gooy thank you Dr mcdad anything further nothing further Mr okay thank you guys very good thank you very much so for the board members sake if there's any and for the Public's sake
077if they have any concerns we will be looking at this for the next two weeks we'll come back and vote on a final draft of our legislative agendas um over the next couple weeks um thank you moving on to where we at now student student representative time we have ala Lor who will be um Al Al say it say it for me almudena Alena Lor our senior attending CD Hilton High School our student representative for this evening please take it away Miss Lor thank you uh so good evening to everyone who took the time to be here today and for the people watching my name is almud Lor and I'm honored to be here as one of the student representative to the board thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts and voice the
078opinions of fellow students in Prince William County as of today we're halfway through the ninth week of the school year and we're getting closer to the end of the first marking period this can be a stressful time for students in fact many students have shared concerns about school spirit decreasing in these times this is a recurring problem that repeats itself at the end of every mark working period and it needs to be addressed currently many students organizations are trying to find solutions for this issue and I urge every student to speak up if they have any ideas on how to solve it at the same time I thank the teachers and administrators that support these students building a school spirit helps create a stronger Community which is why it is essential to do so now
079I will move on to discuss some information about the student boys committees thankfully most have received a warm welcome across the high schools in Prince County many of them have already had their first meeting and those who have not already have a date set for it the sbcs are in the process of recruiting new members and I encourage students to join they're also open to feedback on school launches to share with food and nutrition services in one of the last meetings an issue that was brought up to an SBC was the lack of after school buses with some students having to walk long distances from the stops closest to their homes students have reported that this disc riches done from participating in after school activities so it is an issue that requires attention moving on
080once svcs are fully stablish across high schools this year something that we will work on expanding the program to include elementary schools this year sbcs were introduced to the Middle School level but we're still in the process of finding ways to gather feedback from students in elementary schools as well as their parents one of our goals is ensuring the students across all grade levels are represented and we look forward to fulfilling it on a different note Virginia college application week is fast approaching that that means this means that for many seniors stress levels are high believe me as a senior I understand too however I'm happy to say that I have heard from multiple students that school have plenty of resources to support them as they search for colleges and scholarships similarly schools also have
081information regarding other Pathways such as TR school and the military yet some students feel like there's not much support in the actual process of applying to college this is why if anyone is struggling I encourage them to reach out to their College and Career counselors since they're there to help the Prince William County website also has good resources for both students and parents so if you're unsure about what your next step will be that is a good place to start to research career Pathways finally I want to discuss the cell phone policy as time goes by more and more feedback from students is being gathered as of now I can confidence ly report that an overwhelming majority of students do not believe in a belto Bel policy at the high school level would be effective
082many believe that this policy would be an excessive measure that ignores the students the issues the students could face due to being inaccessible during the school day in high school students have extra responsibilities such as work and taking care of siblings a Bel to Bel celf phone policy would prevent them us from fulfilling these responsibilities our modern world is one based on interconnectivity this is why I urge people and the board to focus on helping high school students build a healthy relationship with cell phones and technology rather than Banning them from using it the current policy that is in place for example is a perfect example on how to do this it restricts cell phone usage during instructional periods while allowing students to access their phones in between periods and during launch this policy has
083received mostly positive feedback so far with students commenting on how it has encouraged students to put their phones Away by having reasonable consequences for breaking the policy I feel confident to say I speak for most of the student body when I say we like the current policy and we hope our feedback will be kept in mind as a decision is made on whether or not to implement the bell-to-bell policy in Spring William County schools that will be the end of my remarks for this evening but I would love to discuss this issues further if anyone has any questions thank you for your time and thank you for being here today to work on improving our community thank you very much Miss Lor I appreciate that we will now move on to superintendent Time Dr McDade
084the floor is yours thank you Mr chairman uh pwcs is proud to have over 35 specialty programs from elementary to middle school and through high school we even boast a grade 1 through eight specialty program and our specialy programs focus on Career exploration subject area concentration and postsecondary PR preparation pwcs provides excellent opportunities that give students the chance to investigate careers ranging from the Fine Arts to Building Trades to advanc computer science the application process can be found on our website at pwcs.edu under academic programs going to Advanced academic and Specialty programs and then linking to Specialty programs applications for our specialty programs open Friday November 1st please note that the Center for fine and Performing Arts application is due on December 14th while other applications become due on February 1st for further inquiries you
085may email or call our Advanced academics and Specialty programs Department their contact information is available on our website at pwcs.edu pwcs is also hosting three family engagement series webinars for students and families to learn more about our specialty programs in preparation for application season for information on specialty programs for elementary school students please attend our webinar which is scheduled for tomorrow October 17th at 6:30 p.m. we also will host a webinar on specialty programs for high school students which will take place on October 24th at 6: pm and the webinar for specialty programs for middle school students will take place on October 29th at 6:30 p.m. this information and more can be found on our pwcs website if you go to academic programs find the link for advanced academics and specialty programs and then select
086specialty programs moving on to our presentation for this evening each year we present the state of the schools and this is an opportunity for us to take stock and reflect on the work that we've done um the progress that we've made as well as acknowledging the challenges that still exist as well as our future goals for the upcoming year and so at this time I would like to bring forward and welcome our director of research assessment and data services Dr Tim Neil who will present the data for the state of the schools for the 23 24 school year um he will also be joined uh by our associate superintendent of teaching and learning Dr Stephanie Sullivan and um Miss Denise heer for student services support and postsecondary success um we also have some other representatives
087from our high school team um our chief Equity officer and Human Resources as well as Dr Joselyn lockheart who oversees is the director of continuous Improvement we'll present data uh from the 23 24 school year we will also share key takeaways from that data as well as next steps and some of the key priorities that we're working on in the Strategic plan to address those areas of needed continuous Improvement so at this time I'll ask uh Dr Neil if you can please begin the state of the school's presentation and share the data from 2324 thank you um good evening Dr te Schoolboard members and Dr McDade it's my pleasure to be here tonight to present this um state of schools to you uh this is an updated and revised presentation that is academically and act
088oriented and action focused I also want to point out that this uh presentation exemplifies the progress we've been making towards organizational coherence by bringing together a a wide array of individuals in collaboration and development of this presentation so this is a slide uh setting a little bit of a context uh we've seen this before it positions us nationally uh and you can see that Across the Nation uh we are 32nd so we are are quite large even when compared nationally and we are very diverse again compared nationally when we look at Regional data this is based off of last uh last year's fall report you can see our demographic breakdown compared to those uh localities around us and again you can see we are diverse and we also have a relatively low level of per
089people spending uh compared to our our neighbors and so we recognize that we have little control over this but it does uh put every uh piece of data that I'm about to share with you into greater context uh the other thing that I want to share with you is the demographic data is based um is broken down based on our national categories we recog recn though that um one category might encapsulate um multiple students so a student might have be a student with the disability they may also be a Hispanic student so they cut across multiple categories and we recognize that even though we're presenting this with the federal breakdowns so in thinking about our school accreditation uh under the current system so how schools are currently accredited you can receive one of three ratings
090accredited accredited with conditions or accreditation denied these um ratings are based on different indicators broadly those indicators can be grouped into um performance uh academic performance achievement gaps uh absenteeism and then graduation and dropouts so when we look at how our schools fared uh 3% of our schools are currently accredited with conditions and 97% are accredited uh this means that uh we had a change uh last year we were at 7% credited with conditions so we had an improvement and our and of four schools that are now accredited where they were not last year now as was alluded to earlier um in this meeting the uh system is changing so next year there will be a new performance and accreditation system in place I don't want to go into a lot of details in part
091because we don't have them uh but you can see that it's going to be based on Mastery which is our and academic performance our growth which is already a component we're just extracting it a little bit and then Readiness which there uh is really absenteeism at the current moment and then at the high school level we also be including uh graduation it is important to know that my team is um keeping track of this we are frequently in contact with the state we're collecting this information as we gather more details we will be sharing those the last piece of context that is really important for this presentation is a focus on our wildly important goals these are our FOC driving focuses so you can see uh the target is that 95% ontime graduation rate and
092leading into that is decreasing our chronic absenteeism rate decreasing our Dropout rates and improving our academic performance to 85% pass rate across all of our content areas in the so scores the remainder of this presentation is organized uh by our strategic plan and we'll begin uh with commitment area one which is learning and achievement for all so when we look uh at at the data some of the things that are going to come out uh we have made gains um in our so Pass rates and we generally outperform the state but we recognize that um we didn't get the accelerated performance that we wanted across all of our student groups content areas uh early literacy is remaining an area for growth our our on-time graduation rate did increase significantly over the prior year our English
093Learners demonstrated significant growth in language acquisition our SAT and PSA participation rates increased substantially and when I get to that I'll provide a few more details and we are still seeing performance gaps for our English Learners and our students with disabilities so when we look at grades 3 through 8 we had a 74.5% pass rate on the reading so and but we did see a 2% increase for certain groups so English Learners our black students and our economically disadvantaged students did have increases when you look at the uh reading Pass rates by groups you can see uh there was a slight Improvement across groups uh but we still see that performance Gap with our students with disabilities and our English Learners in mathematics in grades 3 through 8 we had a 71.5% pass rate and
094we did see an increase in 3% for the pass rate for students with disabilities again when we look at this across all of our groups you can see uh that that upward Trend and again we see the performance gaps with our students with disabilities and our English learners for science we had a 68.9% pass rate in grades 3 through eight similarly you see an increase across our groups um you will notice that our uh we had a 4% increase for black students in their Pass rates uh but as with the other content areas we do see performance gaps for English Learners and our economically disadvantaged students when we look at literacy there are multiple ways that we can measure that one way is our phonological awareness and literacy screening or Pal tests this looks at
095our phonological skills at the end of grade two 78.9% of uh second graders had met the Benchmark and when we look at a a trend over two years we see a 12% increase in the uh percentage of L students that have met those benchmarks again when we break this down by subgroup you can see uh we did have that upward Trend across uh all groups so these are substantive increases another measure that we can look at for reading is reading comprehension uh so for this we use the hmh um reading measure and we had 67.8% of our second graders reading on or above grade level uh this is a decrease increase over the prior year and when we look at this across all of our groups we do see that that downward movement across all
096of them so this is new information we haven't shared this in Prior state of the schools uh we do measure uh English Learners demonstrating growth and meeting their progress Targets on the access test and what we saw last year was an increase of 5.4% of the uh number of students that met their progress Targets this is a sub a substantive and meaningful increase in uh L growth and that equates to roughly 800 students beyond what was expected uh there's also been a concerted effort to identify students who would benefit from um gifted services and so when we track uh the gifted placement we have seen increases uh in the provision of gifted services to uh multiple student groups most significantly you can see we had a 60% increase in uh English Learners that were identified
097for gifted services at this point I'm going to turn it over to Dr solivan thank you Dr Neil thank you as of course everybody in this room knows that the Virginia literacy Act is in its first year of implementation this year across the Commonwealth call for every student to receive core literacy instruction based in scientifically based reading research and evidence-based literacy instruction students are also supported through evidence-based supplemental instruction and intervention that should be targeted to their specific needs um as an individual learner I I pointed out this graphic because there's been much discussion about the importance of explicit and systematic instruction in phonics and pH awareness but equally important are the skills that build language comprehension as students increase their fluency in word recognition the development of vocabulary and the growth in re in
098reasoning skills Scar's reading rope demonstrates the importance of that interconnectivity of reading skills and language and word recognition skills coming together and as you can see it requires each one of those components to be tightly woven for a student to develop successful reading skills some of the things that we have done this year to prepare for full implementation our teachers participated in training this summer in curriculum implementation and throughout the school year every one of our teachers are working through comprehensive modules developed by the Virginia literacy partnership at the University of Virginia the modules contain specific content on Specialized instruction in addition to strategies for all Learners in order to ensure that all students in all classrooms were supported we also resourced all schools aligned with the division-wide expectation that all of our teachers are
099fully equipped we expanded contracts to include all schools and provided materials to include manipulatives magnetic letters and other Hands-On tools that support learner engagement to help teachers manage the new expect the student learning team developed clear and concise curriculum guides that integrate our instructional materials a significant portion of the vaa was the adoption of the new standards of learning our new curriculum guides align learning experiences with the standards and provide a road map for our teachers additionally our reading coaches are participating in a year-long professional learning not only in the content of reading instruction but in research and best practices in coaching teachers and modeling lessons that being said monitoring and feedback is critical we are constantly monitoring what's working and what might need Improvement through numerous classroom visits we've already identified process improvements and
100we certainly welcome feedback from our parents we recently launched our public vaa page and encourage our families to review the information there and on our state site thank you so one of the measures uh I mentioned is our wildly important goals a 95% ontime graduation rate ontime graduation is in a nutshell defined as graduating uh within four years of your nth grade entry year for the prior two years we've had an ontime graduate Val ation rate of 91.7% last year we saw an ogr of 94.3% this is a substantial increase and when you look at how at the increase across student groups you can see we had almost a 10-point increase in our L graduation rate and a Sixpoint increase in our Hispanic L graduation rate at this point I'm going to turn it over
101to Mr hood and Mr Wolf good evening while these results are worth celebrating we know we have work remaining to meet our wildly important goal of 95% ontime graduation rate this past school year an on-time graduation task force was developed the goal of this task force was to dive into our student data and identify potential barriers that may get in the way of our students graduating albeit this could be from school home work or anything else you will notice in this uh in this first bullet that tools were created and or enhanced to monitor student progress to ensure our students remained On Target towards graduation these tools include our early warning system and two dashboards for graduation monitoring and focused student support these tools essentially provide us with a comprehensive information on our students relating
102to their current grades attendance and remaining academic elective and non uh academic requirements we as a team then took this information and in the spirit of collaboration with our schools developed plans to support identified students regarding cross departmental collaboration this work takes a coordinated effort from the many departments involved with our ontime graduation task force to provide the needed resources and support for our high schools from increasing our focus on credit support or unit recovery to providing opportunities for our students to recover full credits when they were not successful in their first goar around this time I'd like i' to ask Mr Hood to speak about the remaining points on this slide thank you Mr Wolf uh knowing that some of our students need more encouragement and support to to work towards their goal of
103crossing the stage at graduation pwcs hired three graduation coaches last school year their primary focus was on re-engaging students who had dropped out or were at risk for for not finishing High School by providing individualized support based on each student's individual need we saw great results uh by with the schools that had graduation coaches and we were looking to expand these positions and practices across the division this year we have also expanded participation in our ontime graduation task force that Mr Wolf talked about to include representatives from elementary school middle school Human Resources Transportation among other offices really to make that a collaboration commitment that is truly kindergarten to 12 and cross- departmental and finally we're providing additional learning opportunities as we did last year and in continuing to next year uh for our principles
104on various topics relating to ontime graduations such as um School scheduling transition to ninth grade uh credit support and Credit Recovery among other topics and really also focusing on this year is what practices worked last year and then how do we all bridge the gap and move them across our schools for this coming school year so with those uh continued efforts and new efforts um our goal is to achieve the 90 95% ontime graduation rate so in looking at um the AC academic performance of our students how we create challenging learning environments for them and prepare them for postsecondary Success um that relies on Advanced course participation and when we look at Advanced course participation for the last year we saw that 53.8% of our high school students participated in one or more advanced courses
105and we did see substantial increases both in the English learner participation at about 5% and an increase in our Hispanic student participation of about 6 and a half% in those classes when we look at this by student group uh we do see that there's an upward Trend in advanced course participation across all groups although we do see a participation Gap with our English Learners our students with disabilities and our Hispanic students when we drill down a little bit deeper and look just at our advanced placement courses only uh you can see that uh this this table shows five years of data of the counts of students that took a tests uh and their performance on those tests and you can see that in 2024 we exceeded the preco rates and of of all of the
106tests T AP tests taken approximately 61% of them uh had a passing score of three or better uh continuing with postsecondary preparation uh this table shows the participant patient rates in our two uh sat administrations and PSAT administrations that took place during the school day uh last year you can see that 66% of 11th and 12th grade students uh took the SAT during the school year and 78% of students in grades 9 through 11 participated in the PSAT test I said at the outset uh that sat uh had an increase participation rate I want to call out specifically call out uh this here because this is quite an accomplishment uh in the prior year around 2600 students uh in the graduating cohort took the SAT last year we hit almost 5,000 students in the graduating
107cohort taking the the SAT test when you look at their performance uh the College Board sets uh benchmarks that they say are indicators of success in college that Benchmark is a score of 480 for reading and writing and a 530 for mathematics 35% of the graduating cohort who took the SAT uh met both the math and the reading benchmark 36% met the math benchmark and 66% met just the reading benchmark when we look at PSAT performance uh we have two years of data on this slide uh you can see that we had an increase in the percentage of students meeting both the reading and the math benchmark from 21% to 24% an increase in the percent of students meeting the mathematics Benchmark from 23 to 26% and then those meeting the reading and writing benchmarks
108uh stayed stable at 50% 100% of the graduates had a post-secondary plan in place prior to graduation and when we looked at that those plans we found that 74% of those students plan to attend a two or a four-year college and there were $123 million worth of scholarships offered to pwcs graduates uh this table shows that breakdown by school it is important to note when interpreting these results that this is self-reported data for cohort 24 and this data these reports have to be verified so there has to be documentation provided as well uh demonstrating that these awards were offered and at this point I would like to invite uh Dr solivan and Dr Atkins to talk good evening so with our equal opportunity schools initiative we seen uh some significant gains in access to Advanced
109coursework specific callouts for our economically disadvantaged students with a 4% increase a 3.1% in increase uh with our English Learners and a 2.6% increase with our students with disabilities taking their first uh a AP IB or dual enrollment course last school year um and with this program we have students taking a survey with targeted questions to uncover barriers to access and how we can assist them through those we assign them trusted adults to help them with academic success and progress throughout the year and we have concerted efforts with our AP government and AP US History courses with EOS through a new grant that has come out and then we are monitoring the targeted supports that students are receiving throughout the year when they are taking the courses for the first time and then I'll turn
110it over to Dr Sullivan thank you Dr Atkins before I go on I just have to restate that we not only had increased participation in advanced placement courses we had increased success in advanced placement and to realize both of those things so significantly in the same year is extremely rare and a tremendous credit to our incredible Fleet of teachers and it is all about targeting both access to courses and success in those courses our Advanced academic programs include AP IB Cambridge and dual enrollment each are valuable ways for students to engage with college level coursework and possibly earn college credit even before starting College the opportunity we provide our students in taking the PSAT is an important First Step based on that day we receive AP potential information that targets specific strengths and weaknesses in
111students and identifies the courses that they are statistically likely to have success in that data is not only useful in helping encourage students into AP it also provides information in supporting student enrollment in IP in IB Cambridge or dual enrollment you heard a little bit earlier tonight about the success that several of our students had in taking the PSAT in 11th grade towards the National Merit semi-finalist our PSAT and sat data also provides skills insights it is a comprehensive overview of the strengths and weaknesses of our students for the benefit of teachers counselors and administrators teachers can analyze patterns of performance and gain insight into areas that they may want to enhance in their instruction I spoke to a principal just today about his data and he was sharing how they were using it in
112their clts to identify supplemental instruction based on the patterns they saw in skills Insight I'm also pleased to share that we are launching our part partnership with KH Academy for all 10th through 12th graders you may remember that last year it was only available to 11th graders in the spring KH Academy is the official sat partner to college board the coolest part is students can link their PSAT and SAT scores for customized practice students will receive guided support in question based on their own individual strengths and weaknesses teachers can also use the tools to help students prepare for the assessment ultimately strengthening a student's Readiness for college students will have the opportunity to sign up for after school tutoring and preparation if they prefer to have one of our teachers help them utilize KH Academy
113and additional resources so in-person support is also available interestingly enough information about KH Academy will be in tomorrow's scoop so look for it another incredibly valuable tool is AP classroom it is a resource for teachers and students to focus in on the significant standards and expectations for the course College Board guarantees that if it is not covered in AP classroom it will not be on the assessment considering that a single assessment can give a student three or more college credits we want our students in Prince William County to have have every possible tool available to them I'm also excited to share that Nova is as motivated as I am to expand opportunities for our students in dual enrollment in addition to Collegiate High School at Freedom we recently aligned a significant number of courses available
114to students at Nova to serve as dual enrollment credit this means many of those courses available through early online college an independent dual enrollment will now also reflect on their High School transcript as dual enrollment our high school teachers counselers and administrators have been active participants in professional learning around all the available opportunities for students and are fiercely committed to the success of our students in advanced academics thank you so moving on to Commitment two positive climate and culture uh in this section you will see that our overall Dropout rates have decreased with significant decreases at our English learner uh population our Hispanic students and our students with dis disabilities we had an over 5% reduction in our chronic absenteeism rate and our employee and teacher attention rates uh are above 90% so when we
115look at Chronic absenteeism um chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of the school days so if you are enrolled for the entire school year and and we do not miss any uh days due to closings that would be 180 which would mean 18 days uh so you can see uh the prior year our chronic absenteeism rate was uh 21.7% uh we reduced that uh by 5 a half% to 16.2% last year uh it is important to note that uh 55 out of 95 of our schools uh had decreases of 5 percentage points or more and seven uh schools had decreases of 10% or more when we break this down by student group again you can see that we had that reduction across all of our groups overall Prince County had a 2.9%
116decrease in their dropout rate from 6.9 % to 4% uh we saw a 99.8% uh change in our English learner dropout rate from 28.7% to 18.9% and a 6.2% decrease in our uh Hispanic dropout rate from 14.6% to 88.4% and so when we we plot this again you can see we had that downward Trend across groups uh when we look at employee retention so the two groups here are all princ County employees and then just teachers you can see uh we had an employee retention rate of 90.4% and a teacher retention rate of 90.5% uh which remains consistent with what we have seen in Prior years and at this point I would uh invite doc uh Miss hubner to address this slide thank you so under our um thriving future strategic plan you can see
117in the data that we have increased organizational coherence and so this is represented by our school leaders our level Associates our central office teams all working together to implement those strategies that are effective in creating a sense of belonging for our students and positive strategies towards attendance we've had creative very creative incentive programs um support plans and mentoring by our school social workers and other caring adults the sense of belonging is so important important for our children wanting them to come to school paired with really rigorous creative lessons that make kids excited about learning we've seen the increase um in attendance and as noted by the decrease in chronic absenteeism 5% it's not good enough we're going to do better in the future but we're going to continue to use all of those strategies that
118have worked well for us this year most importantly um we're helping our kids feel a sense of Hope in their learning in particular our secondary students as we use their um Vision profiles as we plan for their postsecondary options so we're using those in hopes of them not only seeing the chance for diploma but actually achieving that diploma when we partner that with our on-time graduation task force great things are happening we're creating different opportunities for our students that have never existed alternative Pathways for achieving that diploma through increased efforts in Credit Recovery um Support options and continuing to ensure that the schools are actually utilizing these options with our evening school it's being refined to be more tailored to individual student needs and our high school team continues great work with our ontime graduation
119task force and we're looking at revising on how we provide that support monthly meetings with attendance officers and our registar have been reformatted not just to talk about the work but to talk about the why behind the work um our kids are important to us the kids the the data that you see they're just not numbers they represent children and so we remind our staff members that our actions are important because they make a difference for kids so these there continues to be a focus on engaging students and creating that positive um School environment and the continuous Improvement plans from each of our schools and our offices include specific strategies and implementation of those plans we've enhanced our current tracking systems and notification to school leaders for re-engagement and with the implementation of a new
120notification for those students who drop after 15 days of seconded absence it's allowing us greater more timely followup and the tracking system in case management will help us stay on top of re-engaging our students we've expanded Our Community Partnership so you'll see that our additional resources for our students are helping their health and wellness we've had great success in partnering um for immunizations allowing more children to actually come to school and remain in school so we've had great Partnerships with Canta principal health district our map clinic and our students are alive and and well here with us in in the buildings Wellness strategies have been embedded into our instructional practices including internal and external supports such as support core who will be focusing on our students who are returning from hospitalization or require additional supports
121to remove barriers and our hazal health services are available to families to provide mental health support through teleah Health Therapy um this is an interim provider until families are able to secure their own Services through their own provider or through Community Resources and we continue to work with our tier three students at our students who are most significantly impacted with dropouts Freedom Garfield Unity Reed Woodbridge um other other schools in need of support through our success coaches which is a caring mentoring adult and we will continue to use um our notification letters our attend to remind parents of the importance of attending school and at this time I'd like to invite Dr Colbert to come up and talk about our staff thank you miss hner you belong here is a comprehensive diversity equity and inclusion
122organizational initiative developed in partnership with human resources professional learning and the office of the chief Equity officer this this initiative consists of division wide professional development other systems of support and a redesign of our selection processes through implementation of you belong here pwcs ensures that our leaders are creating inclusive cultures within their school buildings that will positively impact climate and employee morale it is also our aim to equip employees with the skills to work and communicate more effectively across differences align behaviors with beliefs and address unconscious bias to build more Equitable diverse and inclusive cultures on the slide is a brief summary of the you belong here initiatives critical actions and some next steps through engaging with staff and focus groups we created the you belong here statement of understanding and established the pwcs five
123pillars of belonging those pillars include value included engaged welcomed and supported upbeat teacher engagement survey this initiative administered a fall survey about research-based factors that have been shown to improve teacher retention and engagement a coach that works worked alongside our school administrators on a plan to improve teacher engagement and climate and culture and then it will be was followed by a spring service survey Administration last year we had 27 schools participate in our pilot and most of them saw an increase in teacher retention this school year we are expanding the initiative to include a total of 53 schools the HR team has implemented for the past few years our administrative selection protocols at this point in the process we continue to monitor for compliance division wide selection protocols and a selection guide have been developed
124and shared with our school and site based leaders across the division currently professional learning is being facilitated to launch the protocols for the upcoming hiring season additionally candidate care professional development is being presented and professional development on the pillars of belonging is being provided for all staff HR in partnership with the Communications team has created a robust you belong here media campaign to include media outreach you belong here official branding and strategic brand engagement targets and recently we launched our pwcs proud employee recognition program our first nomination window is open right now and we are taking the nominations from staff students families and the community at this time I will turn it back over to Dr Neil So the last two commitments uh commitment three family and Community engagement and commitment for uh organizational coherence
125I'll be addressing both these commitments in the next few slides uh so the key ideas uh family engagement um remains a consist consistent with prior years as measured by our survey and our continuous improvement process remains a critical lever for realizing organizational changes uh so when we look at our climate and culture survey we see consistent levels of family engagement and Trust uh as measured by that domain uh over the last three years so you can see uh it was hovering around 88% uh each of those years uh to help Foster Community engagement uh we did offer 44 family engagement series sessions over the 2324 school year they were distributed across the school year uh 39% of the families who registered uh for a session did attend a session and over 2,000 downloads um have
126been uh or 2,000 views I'm sorry uh of these recorded sessions have been accessed uh for the second year in a row 100% of schools and central office departments have continuous Improvement plans that are aligned with our strategic uh plan uh these plans are validated uh all leaders have been trained in the process and there is a systematic and robust progress monitoring plan in place and at this point I would invite Dr Atkins and Dr lockart to address the slide pwcs maintains strong cycles of improvement through systematic progress monitoring all schools and departments receive direct support and coaching for all aspects of the continuous improvement process we are dedicated to providing ongoing support to our leaders in developing progress monitoring tools and systems that will track progress throughout the year additionally collaborative efforts with various
127departments are underway to ensure that our support aligns with the Strategies employed by schools to achieve their objectives and our Pur of continuous Improvement we are actively seeking additional opportunities for training and research to bolster the capabilities of our school and central office leaders I will now pass the discussion to Dr Atkins so to continue with our collaborative efforts the level office and the office of the chief Equity officer work together with implementing standards of excellence for school advisory councils which will be uh increasing our engagement with with families specifically leveraging the support of our School parent liaison to not only serve as members of The Advisory Council but also to recruit families to be members active members of the council to voice their needs um and to advocate for their students we are also
128working collaboratively with various departments to have targeted family engagement series sessions for our specific populations that need supports to remove barriers and we are working collaboratively with community and business Partnerships to align resources for critical needs for our schools based upon the supports uh that they need for successful ontime graduation throughout the year so those are just some of the things that we are doing to increase family engagement across the board so we recognize that over the the last uh 45 minutes or so we have shared a lot of information with you we also realize that there is a lot of information out there that we haven't shared uh due to time constraints so we want to offer two resources uh that you can utilize to uh explore additional data points one of them is
129the pwcs interactive dashboard which is accessible through the pwcs website it's also linked here uh you can drill and look down at specific Civic schools on a whole variety of information from enrollment to Performance uh the other tool that is extremely useful is the vdoe school quality profile Pages uh these get updated annually uh with performance data and again uh there are a lot of different metrics in here some of which we've covered tonight others which um we have not when you look at the state of our schools in totality except accelerating academic growth and closing the achievement Gap is a priority for the school year 2425 uh you can see that reflected in the Strategic uh initiatives from central office and our continuous Improvement plans uh VA implementation across all grades is a driving
130Focus for the year uh the ontime graduation task force will maintain a concerted effort to improve graduation rates and reduce Dropout rates for all students uh engaging families in positive and proactive ways to support their growth uh continues to be a priority and our continuous Improvement plans and our enhanced progress monitoring uh remains a Lynch pin in linking the actions we take to our data and our outcomes that concludes the overview of our state of schools be welcome to address any questions that may be asked Miss arport thank you Dr Latif so earlier tonight we had a parent who came and talked about um the Virginia literacy act and yes you see you getting up um because it was in part of your presentation you were talking about the the supports and things like that
131and she mentioned the tiered levels of supports could you speak a little bit to that because I think that's probably got a lot of information inside of it and um I know VA had some very specific ific things that we have to do so you nor I'm headed with this I I I am thank you I'm actually delighted to have an opportunity to speak to it um so yeah that parent did a pretty incredible job of outlining the key information um where uh a lot of really like Target and specific support is going to be given in intervention spaces we typically will use the terminology of tier two and tier three where tier one are Universal strategies for all students tier two two or when we start um providing unique strategies for students and those
132that need intents um we would typically call that area tier three it is part of um mtss uh progression of providing supports for students fortunately um I was sitting right next to my sped counterpart um when the parent was speaking and we had an opportunity to um double check our internal documents um because we were Whispering we wrote that part about IEPs into the plan and so we uh agree with a parent wholeheartedly um that students in a tier 2 and tier three situation our standard response um we identify Lexia but we also recognize that through IEP teams and through other um customized supports there are potentially other supports that may benefit a student more to include some of the ones that our parent mentioned our internal documents include all of that same information we
133need to make an adjustment to our formal public facing document to include that same information that the parent referenced um so all the points that she identified we wholeheartedly agree with um we want our teachers uh utilizing um and implementing IEPs first and foremost um and particularly in the space of tier 2 and tier three intervention um so it highlighted uh something that was missing on our plan which I love which is why ironically I also includeed my part we need to hear this feedback from parents we are just a couple of months into implementation um real easy shift because uh we completely agree that we want to see that custom level of support in those intervention blocks Dr solivan just a quick followup to miss araport question on that I think it's important um
134to that same point an IEP supersedes anything else it wins all day long let's keep that crystal clear 100% the School Division has always on always in we should and and we not we will be but always honoring the IEP as the first and foremost thing now another question though you know sometimes it's difficult to get the IEP the negotiation that goes back and forth with the parent and the teacher and so I think it's important to also say that you know if if a parent comes and says you know kid doesn't do well with Computer Learning Lexia that we don't maybe you know try it out I I know this is the difficult aspects of of working on I APS but I think that's um I it's important that we we tonight leave here
135knowing that the IP as Dr McDade I think said yes supersedes absolutely I would say that that is not a difficult tension Point um a parents knowledge of their child be the fact that our students have diverse needs and we have a panoply of options available for that and we certainly want our schools utilizing that it is um commensurate with the information we have provided internally to teachers and staff we just realize the disconnect on our internal Guidance with our public facing we're going to fix that and uh again we're just a couple minuts into implementation love that feedback we want to hear it um and this is this is in the spirit of all things um continuous Improvement at its finest thank you I ask a followup I just want to make sure I
136just want to make sure it's Crystal Clear that when you say um that you know we're going back and making adjustments you're talking about the language in the document correct expectation has always been that the schools follow the IEP okay um I I do want to preface that that too we will we have an opportunity at intervals to submit for revisions to the state and this is a revision to our external docu to our official document where we recommend those changes our internal guidance to teachers and staff we double checked everything and it all has the same language and what we expect um and working with families with IPS not just IEPs 504s and and students with just diversely learning needs in general um so we I we quickly identified that parents feedback was spoton
137and we will certainly make that adjustment and submit to the state Mr TR Den just to follow up on that too can that go to um the schools as well again like I know you just said that they've gotten it but maybe just a reminder and re benal is also in there so that yes when the parents go to meet they don't have to self- advocate for that too they know it's already been Rec commmunication possibly absolutely Mr that is always uh a a necessary extra step especially when a division of this size is trying to roll out some consistency and implementation and it's something we can uh very specifically address we can do that sooner because our internal documents point to that now we'll wait on the state approval for the official change yeah
138okay thank you um Mr wil yeah just following that and what the parents said you know I think it's important to know with that at the the Vie as the parent mentioned about being vaa approved literacy science reading curriculum it's very restrictive and in an environment where I mean I know this CU I'm in the edtech world where there's thousands of companies that potentially has resources I think the vdoe is doing a disservice where they only have a window open for a very slight amount of time to have programs evaluated where then they put their posted list of what a school system can and cannot use what I hope we could do as a division is maybe leverage and say this should be on a continual B basis if a teacher has a program that
139maybe they want to leverage but it's not on the list maybe the principal can subit submit it to the VOE for a review or a principal has something vice versa it it shouldn't be based off of closed windows and periods of time when certain things can be evaluated and then two years later for example the current curriculum was evaluated by the vooe in 2023 only recently refreshed with the intervention and supplemental Ela supports I know that's not our fault but it would be great if you know we could implore the state to have a rolling basis of evaluation of resources and materials yeah we we can certainly share that feedback um I will say that um they must have heard you um because they have open supplemental approval windows I think they're on their fourth
140cycle now um so I think that feedback was probably heard already um so we are seeing that change in the videoe but the providers themselves do submit not Schools teachers um or divisions so that would be the one thing I would caution yeah thank you um Jen Wall I I really appreciate this presentation I love the state of the schools I love the data I just love talking about this topic um I think it is awesome and I'm I really commend the the parts where we are doing really well and I'm encouraging everybody to keep on going um I wanted to ask a question about um some we've had parents come in and talk about dyslexia in particular um and I wanted to know if um how um dyslexia and other disabilities that directly impact
141reading are incorporated into the efforts that we are moving forward with if there's anything in particular with um that's on the Forefront that we're going to be doing differently or uh in a greater manner um to address some of those concerns with our students who have the divers learning needs Dr Sullivan I do want um because I know specifically Dr ryer is working on some of the um some of the things that we're trying to tackle with dyslexia so I if we could address that first Dr ryer from your department yep absolutely so first and foremost I just want to make the connection we're really excited we feel like the virginal literacy act and some of the information that Dr suin presented specifically if you think back to that image of the reading rope that's
142really changing the way that all kids are instructed to read in a way that's going to naturally address students that might have characteristics of Dyslexia through the way that core instruction is focusing on that systematic approach to teaching phonics but then beyond that that's when those tier 2 and tier three interventions as well as any decisions that are made by a student's IEP team would come into play where there are a plethora of resources that specifically tar Target whatever a student's profiled is determined to be um as they've been assessed for those characteristics so a couple that come to mind um are some of the programmatic approaches that we sometimes utilize um multi-sensory reading instruction and trying to get students to work tactile and using manipulatives as they learn sounds um those are a couple
143of things that are critical and are embedded into those interventions and IEP team decisions about specially designed reading instruction that specifically Target dyslexia I can offer a couple that are commonly used in the school division one of them is Spire um that might be a reading program that's familiar to many of our families that's great thank you and um kind of an ancillary question is I know because of the way we taught reading when my kids were in school and now they're recent graduates um we have some older students in our high schools maybe in our later middle schools who maybe are I think the VA is kind of targeting K through 8 right so we I know we have high schoolers who are in need of um not remediation but they're still struggling to
144read um and if you if there's anything we have planned for I know this is to help those students I know it's a little bit beyond you know kind of our over comprehensive efforts but if there's any hope or any plan or anything you can say to um give some encouragement or insight into families who may be in those categories with you know bright students who are in high school now who are still struggling sure so if those reading difficulties are documented through a child being eligible for special education services one of the things that we would encourage IEP teams that include parents and family members to really think about is might there be an elective course um that is offered in addition to the English coursework that the students going to get so that
145their access saying the same curriculum that they are assessed on but then could potentially get direct instruction on reading skills that's not as prevalent in the ELA curriculum at the secondary level um through instruction that be can be targeted and tailored um in a course it's oftentimes taught either co-taught or taught by a special educator who has training and background in teaching reading skills to older students the the only parts that I would add um to my colleague those k eight vaa modules that I mentioned earlier through the Virginia literacy partnership in the University of Virginia there is substantial content in their on dyslexia and um specific uh strategies and working with students with varying disabilities as um related to reading instruction and all of our teachers K8 are completing those modules and um it
146is is very highquality comprehensive information that I think all of our teachers having that Baseline of knowledge is going to be critically important um for our high school students we are this year um for the first time having Universal literacy screening as well just to you uh not formal screening from the state but internally um all of our students will begin the year with a star assessment that is more high school focus on assessing those comprehension skills right our high school students might have fluency word recognition not necessarily A need in phonics but struggle with comprehension um this will allow us to have data and support support those meetings support the mtss process to make sure students are getting intervention at a tier 2 and tier three level as appropriate even in high school thank
147you so if a parents have particular concerns they should really continue to reach out because there's there are more options than we've had in the past as kind of what I'm hearing y absolutely and just to follow with one final comment that might be helpful to any parents who are listening in or watching um this is a topic that we've gotten a lot of questions about and so there's actually an upcoming presentation um that will be put on by our special education parent Resource Center that specifically talks about dyslexia its relationship with the Virginia literacy act and I think that would be a really informative way um for parents to get a deeper dive into the conversation we're having this evening um all of those presentations are posted um and so more information can be
148found on the public facing parent Resource Center we site thank you let me just go to miss William oh are you done no I'm done okay Miss Williams thank you Mr chairman it's on the same track and path um but my question relates to uh English Learners English language Learners um what sort of resources or plans are in place for students who test out of English language learner classes and they now in more um traditional English classes how are we servicing or catching the gap for those students um because often they're just put in an English class I'm not as familiar either so that's okay we don't often talk we actually monitor students after they exit and so students are still case managed supported and monitored after they exit L services and programming um for
149at least six years afterwards obviously depending on when they exit out and so they still have a case manager at the school and we monitor their success in their programming so students uh are progress monitored after their success on the assessment so there's I guess I that's great information I don't think I formatted my question specifically it's in relation to the learn literacy learning plan okay got it so is that like something the case manager does I'm asking for parents who would like actually I wouldn't I didn't know or think about it but because this literacy plan is so important yes I'm thinking specifically of like our transition years like maybe you have a student that tests out now eighth grade they're going in ninth grade where the same plan is not in effect but
150they could fall through a gap or a crack because they are transitioning and I'm just using them as an example how are we uh what is our plan or do we have a plan to kind of catch or service those students um I same answer I think um that we continue to monitor those students um that exit our students in K through 8 through the vaa are obviously receiving Universal Services but we've also aligned our English language development classes and programs to the vaa um a lot of good work being done on how those same uh systematic and explicit strategies will benefit our L students and so for the first time we actually have completely aligned curriculum and so those teachers are working together with core teachers on the same curriculum and our L students
151are getting pre- supports prior to covering content in their English classrooms um students who have exited out of L instruction continue to be monitored to make sure their SU succeeding as we would hope they succeed After exiting the program thank you just don't we don't spend a lot of time talking about that so that's good there's a really good questions and if there are um parents watching where would they go to get more information or who should they direct their questions well it's it's always to best to have the question closest to the solution provider so certainly at the school level but if they are not um comfortable with that or for whatever reason we can certainly help up here in our multi-lingual services office thank you I appreciate it I think that's another example
152of how we're um implementing things with Fidelity across our division and I know that takes a lot of work so thank you no thank you Mr Jesse on the very last slide there was a it said acceleration academic growth which is what I want to talk about uh I I'm very impressed with everything that we're doing I think we are on the uh we are doing many things that needs to be done but I still think we're in minor leagues and the reason I say that is not because we're not working to get out of the minor leagues but we are are in some respect I think our focus is not totally on acceleration of academic growth most of the slides today we talked about things and some of this is brought down by the
153Commonwealth uh education the department uh High School graduation absentee rates and so forth those are important but the most important thing to me is our education I rather look at Harvard and Yale for their education I don't look at them for their academic performance I'm not interested so much how well we have how many sports teams and so forth to me our number one job is performing and having kids learn high levels of learning and the only real measure the main measure of that is the S Sol's and when we have S so's where the standard learning s Sol's measure our minimum stand standards and we need our kids to meet the minimum but we want them to achieve and so the focus for me is on the minimum standard and S sols and in
154a way I don't think we look at that enough when I was campaigning I told my schools I told my people listening to me that I'm interested in the acquin schools being the number one academic schools in the county I don't care about the sport I do care about the sports and stuff but the academic is what's important to me I had this discussion somewhat with Dr McDade and what I'm saying is simple to me on slide number seven it says a Wally important gold and it was 95% ontime graduation weight and then it talked about the things that enhanced that one of which was the 85% so scores to me that's backwards the 85% academic so scores should be in my opinion the most important thing that we are looking at from our schools
155when we hire principles when we look at teachers when we give Awards what what I want to know is how successful were you with your kids on the S Sol's are they achieving are they just barely passing the s sols or are they doing it at an advanced rate and we when you look at 95 or 95% graduation rate as I asked Dr McDade I think how many of those kids are doing it just barely able to read That's is important to us I and I think that we need to look at that you know uh when I look at the so score the four charts you had a reading at 74 uh 74.5% or 1.7 increase science was added 69.9% a one 1.3 increase the pal score was 78.9 out a 4.1 increase and
156hmh uh 67.8 3 minus 3.5 decrease those are the scores that I think are very important and we need to to put more emphasis that then the question is why we are saying we are a good school system and I believe that but why in the heck are those are our scores in the 70s we would not accept a student coming into us and saying I'm doing great I got a 70 on my exam would you accept that or would you look for a kids doing it 80 or 85% 90 we are accept I'm saying we need to accept more than we are accepting now we need to expect more than we are expecting now you know but there is good news and we are not pointing out the good news what is the good
157news we have schools that are in the 80s high 80s in so scores if you take the four scores and you add them together and then average them we have schools that are 80 and above we have 21 Schools elementary schools those are the most important to me the Elementary School and 21 of our schools are there 13 of them are already at the 85% goals but we do not emphasize that we are not recognizing those schools we are not inviting those schools into thriving Futures and we're saying now the counter argument to that excuse me the counter argument to that is that we don't want to embarrass the school schol that are doing poorly we have 21 Schools elementary schools that have less than 70% uh average 21 that's why our our scores for
158all students are low because we have to focus and we're everything you guys are doing is doing that but the focus I think if people say we don't want to embarrass them well if they're not performing well they need to be embarrassed and we need to look at principles who've been there for a long time and have not been able to improve after a while why because they're dragging down the rest of them but again I say we need to recognize the 21 schools the 13 schools we need to do something special for them because we can have the best attendance rate we can have the best absentee uh decrease and so forth but the most important thing is how are we doing academic and I think we can do better I know we can
159do and I know we are going to be doing that but we need to do it faster and we in my opinion we need to concentrate why do we have 21 schools that are not performing and and I know we have things and parents need to know a lot of people say well we don't want the parents to know some of they should know because we should be transparent but we also can tell them this is what we're doing to make that school improve so and we have eight schools that has no s so score above 70 that's the problem thank you let me just make clarification real quick um when when you're putting the scores up here and it says 70% 70% of the students have achieved the score it's not their score on
160the exam so I understand that yeah okay I just want to be sure you understood that I said 70% pass but within the so you have the barely passing then you have the middle and then you have the Advan and right now you know when you're really focused at high levels you then stop focusing you got 80 90 95% of the student passing then you start looking at how many are passing at Advanced rates okay just want to be clear on that Mr wil yeah uh thank you uh Dr Latif um a couple recognitions I things that I pointed out and I I found um uh something that stood out to me first on slide 16 um the science Pass rates you know I know in the past because those are cumulative with you know
161kids taking those fourth grade being the previous years are all you know my my sun is in fourth grade so they're starting to do the review already uh every day incorporating that into warmup and stuff like that um and I know that's a new strategy I watched um I walked around one day with Dr Walker um at gr Park and she was walking in the rooms and making sure that they had that type of thing going on so it was great to see that process and so in fourth and eth grade when they take those uh scho scores it was nice to see the Improvement at least going in the direction cuz I know a couple years back when the state shifted things it did impact a couple schools with that um with those ratings
162there um a couple other things I wanted to mention uh with the AP scores which I think are great and those Pass rates are improving just out of for my own kind of uh exploration I'd be interested to seeing those kind of disaggregated those by those subject areas so like you know AP psych AP US History you know that would be just kind of nice to see like which ones we're seeing uh more success in than others I know some are probably harder or at least you know have the reputation nationally as being some of the tougher exams and stuff as opposed to others uh but that would be good to know and lastly um uh Erica I was thinking of our meeting uh on slide 42 the Hazel tellah Health thing uh she and
163I both s on the health and wellness committee um and there was a presentation bless you given to us um uh about a month or so ago and I think that is a phenomenal program um because you know all too often we're hearing from families I'm even hearing from friends and family you know adults that therapists are filled you know you can't get meetings or you have to drive an hour for an in-person one in Fairfax or Arlington and stuff like that I think this is a phenomenal resource you know provided the parents opt in of course and have their kids take this and take advantage of this type of Health Service that we've subscribed to for all of our students so I think that's a great program and those are my comments thank you
164and Mr will we do have the college board does give us like all of the um you know the different courses in the past so we have that information that we can get very easily Mr Blake thank you Mr chairman I just want to say thank you for this presentation and taking the time to put this together all these numbers and data and uh and I also just really want to just uh highlight the the graduation coaches and the graduation task force and I I know personally because of Garfield at Garfield High School we had a graduation coach and she really uh Miss Frasier and she really been helping push people through get people through the door so I think that's just a great idea and U just giving more support to the kids and
165helping them out so um yeah that's it thanks Mr Williams thank you Mr chairman um first I want to step back and say thank you everyone for all the work um that you have put in on this presentation last time I jumped in Piggy backy on the literacy plan questions um I also want to take a moment to really just thank and appreciate all of our staff at all the other at all the levels um what we have here tonight is represent representation of staff that speaks really to as a testament to everyone's work on boots on the ground and um I know for a fact um and speaking from my district and um Freedom High School comes to mind pretty much encompasses just about every aspect of what we're talking about here tonight I
166think they had the largest growth in um was it uh literacy or reading on SOS forgive me I don't remember it was like 11% growth it was the largest of any High School um in our division Miss Huer did you know because you or you can't see me because I'm so short I can barely see you um and I also know that the graduation coaches the graduation coach there um was effective and instrumental in raising the graduation rate there um freedoms numbers I don't think i' I've ever seen in my decade of service on this board I'm not even sure if they were if they've ever been like that since the school is opened so I can see specifically all of the um the new systems and um protocols that we have put into place
167to improve students uh graduating and for services for our families I mean the school is a walking Testament to that uh last year my district was Featherstone with a on time reducing chronic absenteeism so I know that these things work and I also do want to speak to the so scores but in the sense that one of the things that I'm most proud as of even if my one of my schools had a 70 is the amount of growth that our students demonstrated because I I particularly not a good test taker and being able to know that my student maybe he didn't get the most the highest score or the 500 score but his comprehension of the material material is there all the time maybe not on a standardized test but in the classroom when
168he's teaching me what he learns at home so that's something that we just don't talk about and numbers don't fully encapsulate all of the work and effort put in by families and students and staff in our buildings and parent Liaisons and some of our Community Partners that come in to assist with our students and I just wanted to give a an overall congratulations to everyone involved because this state of the schools presentation really shows the amount of growth that's been put in and school divisions have not had a chance to rest since the pandemic we don't talk about it anymore as as if it Happ as if it has not happened but the amount of changes that the vooe has implemented specifically after the pandemic even now the new Virginia literacy plan there's been no
169break and for the the people who were here and the people who are still standing that contribute to our students academic progress It's not always going to be perfect but absolute Kudos and Round of Applause nobody is saying we don't have work to do but we can't continue to do the work if we don't recognize what has been done and applaud those who are still continuing to do it because I look around in schools often times and especially as we head into November and getting ready to the end the quarter and start rounding the corner for the so preparations and all those things people are legitimately full of excitement and desire to learn but people are tired and it and BR brings to mind my former Cobo Schoolboard member Miss Jesse who would say oh
170you have to talk about the bad too and I and I don't want to be remiss or say that there's any shortage of that going on but I think it's also time to celebrate the good and the absolute hard work that has been done because many of our teachers especially at my schools stay above and beyond contract hours the counselors the social workers even the custodians then we have the family engagement series nights where we have maybe a KLC building administ that come in and talk about specific events and parents and all of those things are important and they don't necessarily get all the attention to in a state of the schools report but they contribute to this report and and the the data that's in there so I just wanted to make sure I
171took time out to say that and again kudos to to my district because they're all tied to one and they Rock and they do amazing things little bias but um my question is for gifted I noticed that our student populations went up do you know or could you answer to me gifting students who are in gov school and those other specialized pro pro what I should say is gov school and other specialized programs are those students considered gifted students or is the material gifted and you may have a non-gifted programmatic student in that class is there a difference um I think I'm going to get this right um but students are generally um individually classified as gifted based on our traditional screening process those students can receive enrichment in a variety of different ways like
172classes at gov school or classes in different levels of acceleration and an exception to that is our uh F and performing arts program at colan at colan the audition process serves as the qualifier for gifted Services if a student is not already identified and those students would be considered gifted in the Arts um so that is the one exception to a program specifically having that um synonymous relationship with the students that it serves um because the criteria for enrollment serves as the um screening process since it's an Arts process thank you I just wanted to to be clear because yeah I don't know if that was clear but hopefully I got there to me because I sometimes I get it confused I don't think U parents would know and we have increased our gifted population
173so I just wanted to check that it was an overlap there yeah because there's a lot of hard work and effort into um the number increase and I appreciate that and um something was said earlier about dual enrolled transcripts could you speak to that again if for some reason I couldn't capture what you were saying it does it have to do just yes so um our our students will often take a class at Nova that I would consider unaffiliated with the school meaning the student is doing the online program for juniors and seniors where our students can take a course for free or the sometimes our parents will actually pay for a student through independent dual enrollment we did not have a process in place in the past for those courses to that count as
174dual enrollment on the students High School transcript the student had a college course and they had High School courses um that was not really the intent of dual enrollment it should have counted on their transcript and so we've been through a process over the last six months working with Nova to match courses and create a course list where if a child does potentially one of those classes as a junior if there's a course match it now is also on their transcript as a dual enrollment course thank you for clarifying that I appreciate that and then I just want to say um for this family engagement series I'm looking forward to some specialized ones when it comes to uh special programs and things of that nature I really appreciate the the expansion of that um and
175I will also say I do believe that there is a a disconnect now in some of our groups of parents who are new to the area or um maybe haven't been through a similar education system and I think that that would be um instrumental family engagement series to have them understand where they fit in and that all programs are available for them as well y definitely thank you just thank you everyone for your hard work thank you Miss Lor so I basically had one question and it goes with like the EOS equal opportunity schools and dual enrollment so basically um I know some schools have more dual enrollment classes to offer than others for example I come from Hilton High School we only have one dual enrollment class offered and I know for example there's
176a lot of schools who have like over 10 uh dual enrollment classes offered is there anything that we can do to work on that better so excuse me specific to expansion of course opportunities we are work working collaboratively with Dr Sullivan's office to expand opportunities for students where the course may not be located directly in the building but students would still have access we do know some buildings have more of a concerted e effort to expand AP or Ace because that's the program that they have in the building but we still want to make sure students don't have barriers to access dual enrollment courses and Dr Sullivan can speak to some of the opportunities we have coming up and then Dr Sullivan also I think it be important for families to know to um you
177know some of the challenges with dual enrollment in terms of teacher certification Etc so if you can explain that as well yeah dual enrollment can be offered in a variety of different ways one of the most predominant ways in Prince William County schools is at their High School of enrollment with a current teacher and it serves as dual credit um what is particularly challenging about that is the certification so if let's say it's an English course a teacher cert that may may be certified in English by the state of Virginia and well credentialed may not meet the very specific requirements of Nova because they're actually employed by both and so um as teachers have to have advanced degrees and specific requirements to meet their criteria for dual enrollment it's not always a perfect match um
178which is why we are looking at expanding opportunities to your point where we are no longer crutched by that um we're working a pilot program with Freedom High School right now where students are actually taking courses at Nova campus um students now realizing that things like Nova online can also serve as a high school class and that's literally hot off the press today actually the information went to the principles today and to counselors last week so this is brand brand new information um and also uh we are in the process of working with some other external partners that have some really interesting creative opport ities for dual enrollment just not ready for prime time yet on that um but yes we we see that we track carefully those discrepancies and looking for more opportunities I'll
179go to miss AR um thank you I'm gonna piggyback because I've specifically heard from Hilton High School parents um in the past couple years their frustration over not having access to dual enrollment English classes so I I know that's come up a couple times and then they and they did did ask me why couldn't they go to Forest Park which is right down the road to take the course and um so I'm throwing that out there to you the other question I have is is uh Freedom going to be a specialty program that people can apply to go to or is it only is this opportunity to be at Nova only for Freedom students um so in its early stages yes we are working specifically just with freedom um because we need a few years
180to get our system in place and to have the capacity of both Nova it is indeed Our intention to expand opportunities potentially as a specialty program and to other high schools so we are looking at those same opportunities potentially in place across the division over the next few years um the state legislation did passed some excellent legislation last year in regards to expanding opportunities for dual enrollment and potentially funding the cost of dual enrollment so we're eagerly awaiting additional guidance we just have the original language from the bill that was passed and so we are expecting some information uh forthcoming on those aggressive changes so we're doing parallel play of setting ourselves up kind of ahead of some of that state language to make sure our students are first in line essentially for all those
181additional opportunities so um this is next year is actually the first implementation year at Freedom High School for incoming ninth grade students our current students we've called them early opportunity kids um they're helping us also test the system right the structures in place the the um agreements between them being a Nova student and following following the Nova calendar like there was a lot that we had to work out for our students and so the freedom kids um because you can't beat the geography are are students that are having that immediate access but yes we are V very motivated to learn from this process and expand to students throughout the division oh good well this brings me to my next question you alluded to with expectations for the course um I know somebody who teaches dual
182enrollment and um she runs it like a college class which means no late assignments no redos things like that what are the expectations when kids go to these dual enrollment courses yeah I can say Nova's been an incredible partner on our kickoff night their faculty and staff came out um so we built a pretty strong structure with an adviser there that is specific adviser for dual enrollment kids um they very much believe in Opportunities and support and so what's nice about dual enrollment on the college campus is you get that experience plus you're undergirded by the support at your school and through those extra resources so Nova has identified specific staff to support the dual enrollment kids on their campus and so again this is kind of a subpilot year um for us to um
183identify those spaces where the students are going to be successful but what supports they need um they've been provided uh tutoring opportunities um and additional supports to help be successful we are tracking them very closely and they're doing really well that sounds excellent um my last little point is um I'm sure you're aware of the vdoe is looking at new accreditation and accountability standards yep and for high schools there was something about um employment opportunities um um college and then military and under the uh one for college it talked about high schools being accredited based on um how many kids are getting uh taking AP IB uh Cambridge was not mentioned um but also dual enrollment and that uh high schools can get extra credit for getting um kids to take enough credits to have
184an associates degree before they graduate high school which is awesome I know we've had some K done that um but and so now that does that does kind of um make me want to make sure that Hilton is able to be able to do these things um so I know they already have AP um so if we if we can hopefully get some more um dual enrollment um I think that would be yeah good for all of our schools but I'm going to have I know it's been a concern there it's great for kids and we are definitely in support of all options for and a variety of different options for our students to excel but dual enrollment is college class yes ma'am okay because I I feel like people sort of poo poo it
185a little bit they're like oh but there's all these other things but if you're taking a class that's actually run exactly how you would expect a college class you're you're really prepared for that experience when you get there yeah that so and you're getting the credit which saves you money so thank you yep thank you we'll go to miss trenic sorry don't don't go anywhere it's me again sorry so you're talking about Nova online yes um again as a parent we get a lot of information coming our way I did receive a text from Prince way County Schools today while I was in the school board meeting so whoever's doing the texting does not know where we all are no um I'm wondering is the dual enrollment date to enroll the same for every kid
186across the county to date to enroll in the Virginia online to enroll in a dual enrollment course is the end date the same for every it typically is um I I don't want to speak for Nova um but they have a very specific timeline on when the application has to be complete when the enrollment cycle and the confirmation of schedules has to be done and it's typically unwavering um so we are honoring their timelines um for student participation um and again I'm not saying that I did not get this information the Nova online that you're referring to that's available to all students as well correct that that is correct correct and and it is brand new that our schools now have um essentially a grid of complimentary courses for them to be able to apply
187it as a dual enrollment course on their schedule today literally today so we couldn't have done it for the fall yeah you certainly can we can't apply it for the fall I they schools just got the information today okay absolutely so yes so my ask is although I know the scoop is hot off the presses and people get really excited about it and read every single word of it I'm wondering because we're pushing dual enrollment because we know how important it is as a parent is that something that can go out via the text that we get so we know it hits their phones can we say hey Nova online is available and possibly like a week and a half before the dual enrollment deadline rolls around can we hit up people's phones with that
188because one of the things I did hear from parents this year of Juniors we a lot of us missed that deadline to enroll for the next school year in our dual enrollment so I will certainly collaborate with our Communications Department and um we can discuss it for sure okay yeah thank you you and then miss wall will follow up with another question it's also a dual enrollment question since we're on the topic um uh there's a there's a Nova campus an nvcc campus in Manasses that's not too far from Battlefield and I we are we are looking at it okay okay and unity read it's right there the street it is it is all mapped out on the calendar of my office okay great um my I just wanted to make a couple of comments
189I I asked a bunch of questions earlier but I wanted to highlight first of all the on-time graduation rate efforts um I think this is tremendous I know um sometimes people worry that you know we're making it easier to graduate we're somehow like putting kids through but I know that's not the case I know we're having kids meet all the standards of graduation and we're just supporting them through that process so I want to highlight that it's not that we're lowering the standards to get kids across the finish line is that we're giving them all the opportunities they need to really engage and complete so I want to highlight that because that I think those trend lines are really going in the right direction um I also wanted to highlight um and you emphasized it
190Dr Sullivan The increased participation Advanced courses that slide 27 and slide 28 and the increased success I think that is awesome because a lot of times you know you worry off if we get a whole bunch of kids in here firsttime takers you know are they going to be able to really pull it off you know and maybe you have to you you may think oh our our success rate might go down because we got a bunch of new kids but no that didn't happen we had kids we had an increased rate of success and an increased number of students so I I agree I think that that was one of my favorite slides and that that data is is really awesome so anybody who is involved in that I want to commend them for
191that effort because I know when kids take those advanced classes they they gain confidence and then they feel more uh ready to go on to higher coursework at the college level so it's really important for our thriving Futures Focus um I also wanted to highlight the expansion of the Con Academy resources um and also the option to work on those resources at school because I had student my students would did access KH Academy to help them prepare for AP and for sat as well um but they you know they were highly motivated to do it on their own but some kids need that extra support and just kind of that time and place to focus so I really think that's great and I hope we have kids take advantage of that um and the last
192thing I wanted to highlight um I think it's slide 29 um this sat the number of SATs because I remember when the SAT was just up to parents like to figure it out and sign up and take it and the fact that we offer kids the opportunity to take it in school and that we have this high of a participation rate is awesome and I wanted to also commend the effort to use that data to help identify kids who would be successful in some of our advanced classes I think all of these little efforts are helping us achieve our goals our overall strategic goals of um you know launching thriving Futures so um I just wanted to highlight those things and commend people who are working hard on all of these things I know there's
193I know there's always we're we're we're in to getting better getting better and I think the data helps us know where we can do that and it also highlights where our efforts have been successful and where we can keep we can keep going so thank you and I just wanted to make those comments Miss Lor sorry I just have one more question about the freedom program with Nova um so I wanted to ask is this limited to a few students like is there a set amount of students that are able to apply to this program or can any anybody apply uh that's that's an excellent question so the first true application um for students would be the current 8th grade class applying for it into 9th grade next year however we are also working with
194current students in what we're calling early opportunity and for next year we'll be extending that to Juniors as well so for this year for the students that enrolled we reached out to all the students that had qualifying data um we looked at their existing advanced placement courses and how they can combine to actually get what is a ucgs which is kind of a mini diploma for halfway through an AA and then worked with those families to apply we certainly could have taken more students and so we will continue to cast a wide net for the students at the school um to continue to do those early opportunity slices next year while we welcome in the incoming class of n9th graders to begin their particip ation as a cohort their first dual enrollment class won't actually
195be to the end of their 10th grade year okay thank you so much uh one last dual enrollment question uh for me um maybe not a question maybe maybe a question and a comment um so we don't do study halls in high school anymore I I don't know why um our libraries are the emptiest rooms in the building sometimes um you know in the schools that don't have the dual enrollment capability don't have the AP classes as much I recognize we're trying to build those up but but time goes on right and so I know students who take from from experience my own children that that take a online course because they may not fit in their schedule because of sports or Etc yep the School Division doesn't allow them to take it in school
196so you you you know if you wanted to take sort of um a dual enroll class online at Nova you don't have time in school to take that class currently can we as we you know address um you know some of the schools that may not have these opportunities to have dedicated time for that student whether it's in a library or a place to do that course or that work while they're in school yeah um and and and I don't know why we couldn't do that but currently that that that would be something that I think would increase enroll moment rather than them having to do it at home um especially for the students who are busy yeah um whether it's sports or other activities um and I think then you know you can also
197expand languages you know right now it's very difficult to find language teachers it's really hard I mean and and you know and I'd like to see US expand languages Hilton used to have the sizzle program they still have it but but it was more robust um you know one of the things to think about is you know there's so many online programs for learning languages that are are capable for curricular credit um whether it's at the University because universities are also getting rid of teachers and going to online courses for languages you know could we have dedicated times in their schedule during the day that would allow them to sign up for say Arabic or Udu or courses that we don't offer but we could give credit for if it's through an approved provider Y
198and and on that note we used to have the schools having their dependence during the pandemic and soon after the the state gave us a list of you know online providers that we would say is okay I know that's moved to the central office now and and and there's some requirements that allow you to be provider and and I think um you know I I would encourage the school division to expand that list as far and as wide as possible and if students ask for programs that might not be on that list as long as they meet the state requirement which there's it's it's on the like on the University's obligation to go to you Virginia and say we want to be on your list but but but there's a number so basically what I'm
199getting at is can we find dedicated time in the class day I don't know if that's possible to do these things um I think that would drive enrollment and create creative opportunities to take far different things yeah I think flexible opportunities is flexible opportunities are really important um and as we continue to identify the strengths um and areas of opportunity for growth for our Improvement everything you mentioned is definitely on our radar um it will take of course collaboration across the division with my high school colleagues um but we are certainly not at a stopping point on looking at flexible options for our students um I am super familiar with the regulations around the online courses and how that set up it is something we're already working on and is under modification for the year
200um so as we're tackling some of these areas where um we have not necessarily allowed our students to pursue all available opportunities we're looking at them because it expands essentially our course catalog um and so all of that is uh top of mind and we're looking at really closely on ways um you know as evidenced by some of the things you've heard about today no I would truly appreciate it thank you so I'm going to wrap up yeah sure M trenic with what he just sorry with what he just said I know I'm getting a love um with what he said about taking that online course in school um adding to a child's credits that may only need the two classes yep I guess my question would be is that a possibility to explore alongside
201like the vhsl requirements because would that count as a yeah those are all factors which is why um we're you know I'm saying we're looking at all those things I would collaborate with my colleagues um some of the online uh the vhsl will typically as well NCAA require that there are designated teachers with certain amount of instructional time and so all of those things are part of the story which is why it's not an easy answer because we want to make sure we have really cleared guard rails when we move forward with any of those changes yeah okay no that that'd be great and and I and I do think if we can find dedicated time during the day I I think we we could do some really neat things um it's just hard and
202there's limiting limiting factors for for after school well I appreciate it so um on on you know just my comments that you know I I think we should all be very proud of our students our staff our teachers our superintendent our leaders our leaders at all level for the tremendous success we're seeing um in the state of the school report uh We've made Improvement in the most difficult categories to move a School Division if if you're going to a conference and you're among education leaders they're going to tell you it's difficult to move the graduation rate it's difficult to move Math and Science scores it is difficult to move reading scores these are not easy things it's difficult to reduce chronic absenteeism yet we have increased our graduation rate we've increased our so scores burdened
203by the way of the Damage Done from the pandemic we have come back we're continuing to come back and and and so that is improving we've increased um you know family engagement we've reduced chronic absenteeism we've reduced AB um dropout rate and and these are the most difficult things if you know and um you know not to to remind you all but I'm I am taking U education courses at UVA and Ed and they tell me these are all the difficult things and the research shows that these these areas are challenging to move on they're very very difficult yet we have moved insignificantly and this is by the way what we're looking at today is a year over-year you know I think what what really is the remarkable story is the three-year Trend the we're
204in our fourth year here on the Strategic plan so I think this is really important and this is not easy work this work can only be done when you make these movements um done by collaboration and cooperation at all levels at every level whether it's our teachers our facility folks our our staff our custodians our leaders in the building our instructional coaches our cons you know um outside Consultants inside Consultants our folks here at the Kelly building our curricular folks these are really challenging things and and I think we should all be very proud of this and I think the external validation for the work as Miss wall points out number one know we've increased the graduation rate but we've done this in the other metric that's extremely difficult and Dr solivan point out we've
205increased AP scores and AP participation that is not easy to do we have increased advanced placement level courses that our students are taking and one should remember on the scholarship dollars as a whole division we've nearly tripled the scholarship dollars one over the last four years three years and and I think that is all of those things are external validators of the success the work the Strategic plan has um put us on um and the the last thing is you know the outside validators whether it's niche who says we were 26 best School Division in 2018 to now the 14th best in the Commonwealth we are nearly in the top 10% of all School divisions in in in in the Commonwealth now I don't live and die by these things but it these are data
206points that address the success of our state of schools that are not just by what internal folks are telling you or what the board is presenting or what the superintendent is presenting but it's what outside folks are looking at for swam County Schools is a talk of the work we're doing let's go and I want to point out out the Hazel Health as Mr WL points out it is a phenomenal program we have committed to make efforts on Safety and Security which you're going to hear next we've made efforts on Mental Health um all the most difficult issues that school divisions are burdened with because Society continues to fail at we are I think doing really remarkably well and so I want to applaud superintendent your staff the entire division every teacher every instructional coach
207every leader every custodian in every cafeteria worker every bus driver in this division this just these metrics are the most difficult and and I think you know if you were to ask any superintendent around the nation if they'd like to have this number these numbers and these improvements they would they would run to Prince William County um Mr chairman this well first is that the conclusion of St sure sure I think I'm done thank um just just as a wrap up one I I really want to thank my team I think you all are absolutely incredible I want to thank you for all of your hard work in supporting schools um more importantly I do want to close this segment really just sharing my personal appreciation and and um appreciation on behalf of the entire
208School Division to our school leaders who are working incredibly hard under immense pressure um our teachers and support Personnel within our schools who are showing up um every single Le day giv their absolute best and bringing their full heart to this work for our kids um and all of the tremendous work that they're doing is making a difference I think that today what you saw is the best of what's been happening in Prince William County as well as the areas that that are most concerning and most challenging for us um we we brought that all to you today and so you know I do want to acknowledge the fact that one all schools and we heard the parent earlier today who was talking about bla which I really appreciated her comments in that no one
209student or one school Community starts in the same place they're all different they're all unique they all start in different places um and so we have to celebrate both uh proficiency and meeting proficiency and we also have to celebrate growth because students in schools do not begin and end at the same place um and there's so many of our schools that have not yet met our goal threshold goal of 85% in our strategic plan but they are doubling down on growth and showing tremendous progress um at a time where you'll recall in 2021 I shared with the board all of the research um coming out of the pandemic on how many years it would take for students to recover um from the damage that was done and in many instances it was 5 to six
210years so we're still within that window of time but I am proud of the work that our teachers are doing in the classroom and the support that our kids are getting and I'm proud of our leaders in this school system because we're seeing schools who again may not be at the 85% or the 80% but the amount of growth that students are making um is double what the the expected growth is year overy year one that comes to mind is Featherstone um which is a title one school and and looking at their growth I mean it is a school to actually watch and study so just thank you to um all of our school communities for their hard work um to our students and our families as we continue to um improve in Prince William
211County and prioritize learning for every single student and meeting the needs of every single student I'm excited about the future of this school system the work that we're doing and the opportunities that exist for us to continue to grow thank you Dr McD so that will wrap up the um state of the schools um truly appreciate and I as we get ready for the Safety and Security update I also want to emphasize what Dr MCD just said on I also and I forgot to thank our families our parents and and their commitment their support for their children and their engagement has dramatically improved over the last few years with all the different work we're trying to do and the work they're trying to do and the attention given to all of this post-pandemic so I
212really appreciate that um Mr Bach you got 10 minutes 12 minutes to get through your slides and then you'll have questions so let's not dilly dally on each slide you teased us up or te us up nicely um you know I I did have some prepared comments tonight I'm going to deviate for those for a second and part because I can't find my bifocals but um but it's a good thing because I really think Dr Latif you were alluding to Best in Class and so I just want to share with the board uh kind of an example uh that highlights this morning uh the we are best in class and this is becoming a common occurrence for us um we had a district travel several several hundred miles to visit us and Ron and I
213uh joined them at about 6:30 this morning at Gainesville and it was a delegation from one of the larger districts in the nation at top 15 uh District uh in size came to visit and they wanted to discuss and see some of our layered Safety and Security measures in the district this is becoming a pretty common occurrence for us word is out about Prince William and I do think we're a best inclass and and leading district with the layered approach that we've put in place uh I can't be more proud of the work that Ron and his team have done in the past two years and I reflect on just the amount of initiatives that have been put in place to keep students and staff at the Forefront and of safety uh and it is
214our top priority and we take it seriously um we've got a great team that's focused on that I will tell you that uh you know when you hopefully you'll and I'm trying to get everybody charged up at 10:15 about Safety and Security I know it's hard to do that at 10:15 but I'm charged up we're charged up about it and it really is a testament to the Schoolboard support and Dr mcdade's Forward Thinking and you all being very vocal about this vision of pursuing state-of-the-art technology being at the Forefront of the resources that are out there keeping uh our students and staff safe one one thing I want to add um you know it's unfortunate we that we see school safety issues um and violence occurring in schools across the country um but when those
215things happen Ron and the team Circle up immediately and we have a great partnership with an organization that goes into a school within a 24hour to 48 hour period of an act of violence occurring in a school and they complete an after action review We Circle up almost immediately when we get that after action review and we're looking at what what what are the key takeaways from that incident that occurred at that school and what lessons can we learn and what can we Implement immediately to enhance even further our layers of Safety and Security one final thought I'm going to turn it over to Ron it really is you know we can't guarantee anybody's safety in our schools but what we can do is Implement a layered approach and layer those things upon top of
216each other to really if you think about that block of Swiss cheese the more layers you have in there the less holes you have in the cheese right so that's kind of how we view Safety and Security of putting all these layers on top of each other to really uh minimize risk as much as possible so thank you all for your support and with that I'm going to turn it over to Ron thanks for for the introduction I'll be presenting the cheese this evening so we'll uh go from there so our goals fall under strategic initiative uh uh Comm number two which is positive climate culture and our overarching goal is for 90% of our uh secondary students to report their feeling safe at school in the climate survey in April uh we started off
217this process is about 79% uh We've increased it uh last year to 84.5 for our secondary schools and really we took a nice uh jump last year in high schools from 81 to 87% uh in middle schools and 72 to 76% I I think a good portion of that was with the implementation of our weapons detection system at those schools and uh just for reference our happy elementary school kids are typically floating around 88 89% on a on a regular basis uh just for context there um I think uh with the implementation of our new cell phone policy I think that's also going to have a positive effect um on those numbers at the end of the year we are supported by our safe School advisory Council and that's a lot of text so I'm
218going to break it down a little bit um it's a stakeholder uh group that we put together uh consisting of our parents our school board members uh Miss wall and uh Mr wil our Public Safety uh Partners uh as well as our central office staff and our goal is to uh review our policies and procedures look at our initiatives and make recommendations on how we improve School uh Safety and Security there's more of that okay let's review some of our physical security measures we've uh put in place we have completed our secure vesu project um I'll have to give the School Division a lot of credit we started this in 2007 and 8 with a goal of completing all of our schools and uh we really stuck to that and uh this year we opened
219with all of our schools having secure vestibules there's some school divisions that are just starting that project now and I'm glad to say that we have completed that uh we've completed our knoxbox installation which are access to master keys and uh small safes on the outside of the buildings for our Public Safety officials uh should they come up on our schools and need to get in that provides them uh with access to master keys to our building uh We've also provided lockdown Shades to all of our schools um uh for uh lockdown and crisis and we've also uh uh installed over $7 million in equipment in about a 20-month period so Mary H in our office ran on that and I give her a tremendous amount of credit for all the work to done working
220with all the schools our vendors um and also providing training and technical support for all of our schools so that was uh that was quite a lift uh over the last uh over the last two years and moving into next year we'll be completing an upgrade of our 800 megahertz Radio Systems uh that was required for a couple reasons infrastructure updates at the uh county level whose system we ride and also uh Motorola phasing out technical support of our radios that we had which are about 12 years old so uh what does that look like it's all the handheld radios uh at our schools it's all the radios on our buses that our security patrol staff use um and we'll finish that up next year with about 240 buses left to left to do so
221we'll get that completed and uh we'll be good to go there for hopefully another 10 years or so uh I want to give a shout out to uh Ali Kem and in the uh uh facilities department and their locksmiths uh they are moving at high speed they've completed 50 schools with Access Control upgrades those are also with fata so that gives us a a management tool under one umbrella to manage those with and Central and also Seven Central offices uh that is a webbased system so that also gives us central office control and control of our lock systems through our security operations center uh we completed uh uh residences at Unity Braxton and Ripon Middle School uh both of those were older older systems where we had trailers in place that were removed uh during
222Renovations and we're able to replace that with modern architecture and and buildings there for our security residents so let's talk about our security operations center a little bit uh that was able to open this year the week before school started uh thanks to our facilities department on a major month renovation over at that uh building over on the independent Hill Complex uh we are fortunate to live in an area where we can hire highly qualified people for these positions Dave Brown retired as the executive director of the uh tsa's Freedom Center which is their main Operation Center for the TSA to come and run our operations center he was able to hire uh five additional staff they have over 150 years of experience between them and managing law enforcements uh crisis incidents as well as
223security operations centers uh we are currently operating Monday through Friday between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. and I want to focus on the fact that these are incident managers they are not call takers uh when when uh schools call in with a incident that occurs uh they are developing a course of action working collaboratively with School administration communicating with all of our stakeholders centrally and developing Operational Support to those schools which means security uh any of our our facilities operations um as well as Communications or Support Services uh to those schools um so how does that support um our our principles they're able to make one call into the security operations center and then refocus their efforts on what's Happening to them in front of them at the schools while we manage all the back
224end to make sure supports are on the way to the schools we have received a lot of positive feedback from our school administrators um on the ability to do that and and provide that support to them so we can look at a couple numbers um events managed uh through the end of September 194 events managed uh lots of alerts uh sent out a lot of calls received uh providing information to schools and the top three events by frequency or medical emergencies 911 calls uh fire response at schools uh School threats typically social media and uh after that police activity in the area of schools uh where we can manage uh getting those schools in Secure uh postures until that uh that event has ceased and we can put them back to regular operations so two
225years ago we implemented what we called security Basics this is starting our third year there's about 17 to 25 things that we focus on every time one of our staff walks on the school property and that's our security posture at the school we want to make sure those things are in place every single time every single day uh we generate a tremendous amount of data on that um from our we've got 17 to 20 people from my staff on the road every day supporting school security posture and we measure what we find um moving into our third year for the first month of school uh we've actually improved upon where we ended out uh last year by a couple percentage points the schools are really doing a great job they m ministrators and school security
226staff are focused on our security posture and they're hitting 98 99% now um on focus on those issues and just to give you an idea about Improvement I'll talk about one issue which uh is probably our most important issue was making sure our schools are buttoned up and all of our doors are locked so when we started this a couple years ago about 12% of the time we'd find one or more doors that were unsecured at our schools uh I can tell you last month we made 411 rounds of school we found less than uh uh we found one door open less than 2% of the time and if you factor in mechanical issues that doors we found that needed to be repaired uh that that averages less than 1% of the time we're finding
227a unsecured door that's a uh another uh really focused effort at our schools to make sure we're buttoned up and secure all right let's talk about our weapons detection system a little bit uh implemented last year we had full imple implementation by the the mid end of October um and so let's look at our discipline codes we had one focus and one Focus was to get the Firearms out of our schools uh over the previous two years before that we had eight loaded weapons that were removed from our schools uh that's just not good enough uh any goal that's not zero is is not an effective goal we made it through last year with zero firearms and our schools reported um and for other weapons reported in schools whether they be you know uh knives
228tasers uh brass knuckles whatever pneumatic weapons um our uh discipline codes for last year during that same time frame were down 72% uh a really amazing effect on that uh for this year uh still zero Firearms reported to date we've had six other weapons reported three knives uh two box cutters and a Pneumatic uh uh gun found in uh in a vehicle in a parking lot so that would be paintball guns uh airsoft guns things like that uh we are clearing at a 92% rate so 92% of the kids that walk through our uh evolve uh no problem they move on no search conducted um the average National rates are in the mid 80s at best um and the schools are really doing a good job focusing on getting kids in school on time uh
229for this year we implemented evolve at our home football games we've had no disruptions we've had people going through with no problems um we had a couple connect connectivity and maintenance issues that we cleared up um and our schools uh central office staff does do go out every year and provide evaluations um of our football security uh processes at the schools and they're doing a great job with that we'll follow up um with the basketball varsity basketball season coming up and we'll be running uh running evolve at at those basketball games uh this year also we do have the ability if we have intelligence or other reasons to believe to run uh evolve at other events uh as needed oh so let's talk about some of our programs and training we put in place so
230we implemented the say something tipline in 2021 uh through the Sandy Hook promise Foundation that's provided to the school division at no cost we hit about a th tips a year uh the most of those are of the mental health variety or of the um uh uh threats against uh schools or students or self harm uh we are able to provide uh 247 365 support for any life safety issues that occur uh one of our focuses this year uh through say something are save clubs those are students against violence everywhere and uh Jake uh Edwards and his team is going to focus on working with schools uh to make sure their clubs are effective at communicating what our tip line process are and uh what are those uh things that you look for um uh
231in their fellow students that might indicate they may be subject to violence so that's what the save clubs are there for uh that's a focus for us this year bark was implemented in uh 2023 bark overlays our uh our uh Prince County School's email system and does keyword searches um it uh provides a 247 call Center also that looks at those and advises us of incidents that are critical in nature and we also provide a 247 365 response to those uh incidents uh to support schools last year we implemented a uh contracted security officers at schools that helps out when schools have vacancies we do uh provide um support that we uh make sure they are school security officers certified prior to them stepping a foot in any of our schools and they're there really
232to provide physical security checking doors making sure our inside and outside of our schools are buttoned up while uh schools are hiring additional staff to come in for vacancy so that's been a a huge help at our schools um I'm excited to say that we kicked off our aspiring leader school security officer cohort this Monday during our inservice we have 23 school security officers that are in that so we've hired um overd doubled our number of school security officers over the last two years and uh we're looking to um provide leadership training to them so they can move up and aspire to a higher level and and have them be prepared for that so uh that's a year-long cohort and uh maybe when we graduate we'll bring them back to the school board in uh
233May and and run them through here see what we can do there um we are running a vape detector pilot that's uh going to kick off for getting those things in place at seven schools uh three middle schools three high schools our non-traditional School uh numbers of those schools already had some processes in place but uh what we're looking to do is Implement uh common strategies across all those schools so we can really look at the uh data and see if it supports schools moving forward at division wide um and I'll be honest with you you know my main effect of this and we're looking at this is is kids don't want to go in bathrooms because of what's going on in there and we're looking to improve that so you know we need to
234get people out of there so people can use those for what they're needed for right and and and feel good about being able to go there and do that so that's really what we're trying to AFF uh reunification software with Synergy uh we're working with our uh it and Communications Department uh we have a central office uh trained team to go out and assist any schools in uh reunification um there's a software package that we actually currently have uh that we're spending up to make that a little easier and make that it based process so we can account for all of our kids during uh reunification um on Monday uh we were out running a functional exercise to run through those processes at colan high school with our central office team uh so we continue
235the the training on that particular program so another one of our goals for this year uh to complete uh the cycle is to have 100% of our schools receive crisis Management training Jake Edwards in his group are all uh hired and trained up and already as of to date they've already been out in over uh almost half our schools so uh they're going to make that uh goal without any problem make some return visits to lots of schools um his team is also doing 18 other trainings whether that's at inservice central office trainings they they go out and work with students during lunch breaks uh so that's that's a a great opportunity for us to work with students um and they're also responsible for training and certification of our 200 ssos uh that are in
236the school division so that is a lot of training um we provide six inperson trainings annually over 30 hours of training to our school security staff and our new hires get no three days of training and a four-day Menor training program before they go into their school so they're aware what's going on so if you're a first year school security officer in Prince Willam County Schools you're going to get 80 hours of training in your first year and 30 hours following up every other year I know that's the best in the state and I'm not so sure it's not the best in the country so we have a really robust training off uh training program for our security staff and Jake and his team uh really really manage that at a high level okay that's
237all I have for you this evening I want to add if you can't be fired up about that something's wrong I mean we we really have put a lot of layers in place um and I and I do I I just want to say um just out of the gate too obviously there are security measures that we put in place that we keep close to the best that we don't share uh for the overall Community but these are the layers that we do feel comfortable sharing and putting in front of our community and there's a lot so I want to thank Ron and his team they're always very forward thinking and and Dr L you stepped out when I was mentioning this uh but it's really you thank me I did um and I thank
238Dr McDade because really you guys have given us the resources and the charge to stay Best in Class here and look at the latest and greatest technology that's out there in that in our school division to keep people safe so thank you no listen we we appreciate it I I think this board is generally in we're very grateful for the leadership for you all you know when the board makes you know you guys have when we went on toward Loudon County's Command Center you guys have had an open mind about all the different things that we should maybe consider or not consider and and really been very good about it you know when we talked about Vape detectors 3 four years ago I remember it was like those things were put and they would go
239off like Non-Stop and they became something that everyone ignored Lowden did it you know I I think they may have evolved maybe maybe it's better but I I appreciate the fact that you're continuing to look at all these different things you're continuing to look at the evolution of the different Technologies we really appreciate it and I think what's also very important and the public should remember what Vern just said Mr Bach just said about there are many things we don't tell the public that are very important for the security obviously that that are um that the board is regularly briefed on division council's briefed on and that the school division does employ that's very important so we have multiple layers of security some you see some you don't some you know about some you don't
240and I think it's very important for the public to realize that we we take this very seriously I know you all don't sleep um and this is very serious stuff and and we do appreciate the board is very grateful this has been a uh it is so important that it is a standing item in our closed session it is you know it is it wasn't like that a few years ago but it is a standing item that this board takes very seriously from a closed session standpoint from an open session we appreciate this um I just one quick note question and I'll let the others um jump in but I heard bark alerts are up since we stop phones usage is that true I'd have to look at the data on that to see where
241that's at so I I can't comment on that I don't have those numbers okay very good U we'll start um let me start uh with Miss Williams she had her hand up thank you Mr chairman um I am always excited about security because I'm little and I can't run so it's really important in case to me um I want to also piggyback the Chairman's comments it the amount of security and attention to detail that has been done in the past several years but mostly and most recently is phenomenal it's a tremendous amount of work at every level from in the building to the to the Kelly Leadership Center and I just want to applaud you for having a full View on security and and not peac mealing it because it's very important and Ron uh
242Mr Crow I think what you acknowledged about the bathrooms is is what most of us feel about bathrooms in schools and we hear often and I and I just want to um thank you for stating that because a lot of times we hear about security things but the public doesn't hear it from us um that we've received the message and we're acknowledging it so thank you very much for that one of the things I did not see in this presentation which annually I ask but at a different time is how are we with our mru and our relationship with the County Police I don't need a thousand updates cuz it's late but it's just not on there so if you could um just speak to that for a second and then I have one more
243question sure we've always had a fantastic relationship with our Police Department that dates back to the 70s so that's been around forever there's people who built that a long time ago and that's continued to go on uh uh up until these days um we just got two more SRO in our in our unit so that's really uh a positive part for for us so you know less less uh SRO sharing at the ele uh Middle School level and we expect we're going to get two more come January so that's the best Staffing level we've had in seven eight years uh so you know I know the police department is always struggling you know with Staffing and they're getting staffed up and uh they know that schools are important so they're pushing those our way so
244so that's great and I want to add too with that Chief Nim is a great supporter of ours uh we have Kim Lieutenant Kim Mercer who's a Lea on Lieutenant with Prince William County PD that actually sits in Ron's office and is a liaison for us between our office in PD so she's a great resource and chief Nim has offered that support to us and it's been great that's what I was going to say um Chief Nim and the entire force they have been so responsive to Prince William County schools uh every time we call for anything um they are there quickly and so I can't say enough how much we appreciate their support thank you for that I mean I know but I wanted to make sure that we acknowledge the uh reciprocal relationship
245that we have with them because it is very important and um I also had a chance to meet one of our new SRO who's at Woodbridge Middle um and so I I know that that is a fantastic program that continues to grow and we have much more diverse officers all across uh the county which also makes a difference and just on that note um the amount of diversity that we have with our school security officers um you spoke to how ingal they are to being on site during the day but I also want to mention that they develop relationship with students and they're an intergal part of the mental health of our schools as well um I know from my experience cuz I can't talk enough about my schools Featherstone the security officer there was
246integral into just acclimating my son back into the pandemic they happened to bond over anime and it was just not just he's he's there to protect the building but this is a bond and a personal relationship that made my child feel more comfort able and less anxious to be in a building who wasn't worried about outside threats but just internal so I just want to speak to um the the multiple layers of service that they offer um that's similar to our SRO but it's a little bit more personable and much appreciated too um it makes at elementary level security less scary and it helps develop those relationships for good communication in the future so I think that's important and the last thing I want to say is um I'm a big fan of Mr Edwards
247videos that he plays in in school for students that make security not scary and um they're able to have a little bit of fun and learn at the same time so my request is could he make one for parents to tell parents how we should react or guardians or people adults if a if a if an emergency does OCC occur at our school because um I know as a parent there's my mom bear response would be charge up there go right now get my kid but might not always be an appropriate thing to do which is hard to rationalize um but but I would love to see something like that not that it's my ability to make that charge but I know his videos are fantastic cuz I have an sixth grader who's still talking
248about them um so might be food for thought like a title one camp or something like that because I think as a board member that's also the question that we get when there's an emergency I want to do this how come I can't why does a school respond like this what's the difference between the police response and the school response and I know that there's a lot of groups out there supporting our mission but I think that's the missing link that we have not really um talk to other than this is what we do as a division um so thank you very much for all you do great Mr trenck I just wanted to say thank you for that presentation it was short sweet into the point which I like um I'm excited about the
249Vape detectors um I would love them everywhere and that's just my opinion you know Bell to Bell take the phones Vape detectors everywhere Let's Do It um no secret what I'm in for in favor of um I really enjoyed hearing about the aspiring leaders school security if I can ever be invited to see something I would love that um the SSO training you're talking about um us being the best in the Commonwealth oh I think there's no doubt about that yes yeah or the United States that's great I'll take it um the less sharing of the Middle School SRO too that's great I've I've noticed the presence um I've also appreciate when there's security concerns and things like that that you guys address them so quickly um lately I I just think there's such an
250improvement um you know being on the other side and then on this side now you could see the evolvement of it no pun okay it's late but anyways um I just wanted to say thank you for that and um I appreciate all that you guys do so thank you and and I want to add one additional comment you know we didn't put that discipline codes up but there are a lot of discipline codes that are down vaping overall is actually down significantly because we think the the evolved system and there there you know there have been some students who have come through and it has detected so word travels pretty fast so vaping has is significantly down as well out outstanding gent oh miss wall all right uh thank you for the presentation I sit
251on the safe schools committee so I know a lot of this already but um I I think it's really important for the public to know and so I really appreciate that we have a presentation that can be shared out with the community and that they can they could watch this presentation if they want to and and learn more about it great job on the secured doors that's awesome um and um wow down weapons down 72% % that's a pretty good Roi on those evolved scanners I know there was some concern in the community about whether that was going to be a good investment it seems like we are gathering some data to show that it is so I appreciate that um and I do actually like the 92% clearance rate on getting through the scanners
252that was also a concern with the community like it's not going to work and it's going to take forever to get through um but I think you know we're working through those and it's helping our students feel safe and I think those the data showing that that was a pretty big jump for high school students saying they they felt safer um and I've heard anecdotally students tell me that that they're like it's kind of a hassle but I appreciate it it makes me feel more safe so um I think that's great um I agree with the Vape detectors in the bathrooms I I have heard for a number of years that kids feel uncomfortable um going into the bathrooms because they know kids are in there vaping they're doing things that they know are illegal
253and shouldn't be done on school campuses and you know the IR of saying like we're a drug-free zone you know and then they walk in and there's obviously you know some stuff going on um so I I'm glad that evolve is helping with that and I also am glad that we're piloting um Vape detectors in schools I know it's not a complete like um like what is the word I'm looking for solution 100% solution you know for the problem there are many reasons why kids might be doing these this in school one is the addictive nature of of the drugs that are out there nowadays um but I would be interested at a later time knowing a little bit more about how that pilot is going and what we've learned from it I hope it's
254um enough of a pilot that we have different methods that we're testing or or different devices or or something so that we can get some some data from that if we're looking at kind of rolling that out I know some of the our schools have had them for a while and have did that on their own initiative um and so I'm I think that's that's helpful it just lets kids know that we we're we're looking um so I I appreciate that and I had one question about the contracted school security officers are those does the contract the company that we contract the officers from do the vetting or do we do the vetting for those officers and then um do or or do we both vet those folks and if you could speak a little
255bit more to that thank you yeah so uh the company we use does do the vetting for those they are required to do certain things contractually to make sure that they can come and work on our schools um and then after that point then we take them on and we do the school security officer training certification with them prior to them going to our schools and then uh teach them about the various things that are part of our school program that we want them to accomplish they are uh solely focused on physical security okay so they're not necessarily working with our kids but they are making sure our our schools are buttoned up that when we're walk around inside that all of ouro doors are closed during instruction uh that they're outside being visible when
256kids are outside during arrivals and departures and and that's the focus of what they're there for okay thanks very much um anyway great job thanks for the presentation and I think it's very valuable information for the public out standing just uh at one point we talked Ron about putting cameras in front of the bathrooms like just to see who's going in and out of them as as one of the deterrent to um that we know who's going in and out at a time maybe something bad goes down I mean is have we did we do that are we doing it have we thought yeah we did when we were uh put in all these new cameras we make sure they're around the bathrooms the uh ver we're uh doing our pilot with verata um Vape
257detectors that integrates with the camera system so when it pops on that pops pulls the camera together and you can look on your phone and go Oh there's uh who's coming out of our bathroom and when they alerted we can we can uh deal with that situation okay great all right Mr Jesse just one quick uh I listen to a lot of mystery books and so forth but one thing the other day I heard was not only a lot of people doing something wrong know that the camera is up and if you put a camera where you can get it from a lower level you can often times prevent the people with hoodies and stuff not being identified and I think you're doing a great job thank you okay thank you guys this is excellent
258appreciate the presentation and I assume this will be up on the website for anyone to look at and board docs if anybody if the public wants to take a look at the presentation on security thank you we're moving on to uh revision of policy um 1901 standing committees advisory boards this is on for um uh just information this week this is something that the board will um be addressing in in two weeks um and uh if anybody in the public or any of the board members have any questions concerns staff will be available to answer this over the next couple weeks and we'll bring this back for a final vote and this basically is just essentially how we operate the um different advisory task force and committees for the school board and um you know
259looking at and how those are run to help improve their um efforts I'm happy to address it CH just brief if division Council Mr Wade Anderson is here to answer any questions or concerns if anyone has essentially it's the the policy revisions will bring some uniformity to how the all the board's advisory committees operate standardizing bylaws making sure that there's Foya compliance with the meeting requirements of Foya um and also clarifying uh one issue is is the terms of appointees so that clarifying that board member appointees uh will serve and their terms will be up even if they haven't served their full year will be up if their appointing board member does not return to the board uh and that the new board member will be appointing uh the the the members so any questions
260okay as seeing there's no questions we will move on to um board matters and last week we started with Mr wil this week we'll start Mr Blake thank you Mr chair good evening everyone I just want to talk about some of my recent uh activities these past couple weeks and I I actually got to visit the sock uh where uh David Brown and uh Mr Bach provided an insightful tour and I got to meet the the dedicated team that was working tigerly inside that sock to ensure our safety and it's just a um you know it's a it's really an amazing thing to see and it it really as a parent and as a school board member it made me gave me a real level of uh comfort and you know just safe feeling safe
261like I know my kids are safe and I know your kids are safe so that was a great A great experience and um then I I was able to attend the eighth annual suicide awareness walk at Forest Park High School where I was joined by my fellow board members Mr wil and Mrs zapor and Dr McDade was there as well where we got to hear some powerful for testimonies from both our peers and the students that were deeply moving and underscored the importance of mental health awareness in our community then I was also honored to I attended a ib celebration at Beville Middle School uh I want thank you to Dr Thomas for the in invitation it was inspiring to see the characteristics of the IB students knowledgeable and caring being celebrated as well as
262the word of the week at bevel was established which I thought was a fitting theme uh I also uh I also got to go to the literacy night in book fair at King Elementary this event was a wonderful mix of uh learning with with pizza popcorn and breakout sessions there was a great F there was great family engagement and Miss po is really starting her new tenure off on the right foot there at King Elementary uh one session that really stood out U was the educating the families about the VA and then they had another one another breakout session where they had like a Jeopardy game that was really fun I wish I wish I could have did that when I was in school and then um on Tuesday I had the privilege of Hosting
263congresswoman spamburger in the neapco district as uh we visited Dale City Elementary and we got to learn about the RTR program uh teacher Residency program and deepen our understanding on the residencies and apprenticeships within the future teachers and school leader Workforce and it just emphasized the uh that this was a sustainable solution to teacher retention and um not a temporary fix so it just this this just highlighted the importance of recruiting preparing and retaining extraordinary teachers and I think this is a great opportunity and a a great program and I'm glad that our county is um I guess you know participating or really not participate we're leading we're leading away in this so um thank you and have a good evening everyone thank you Mr Blake Miss Wood thank you Mr chairman um I just
264want to again reiterate um how thankful I I am an appreciative of all the staff at all levels um especially my district cuz I'm bias of course but not just my district all the way around um my students the students that live in my district don't necessarily just go to my schools um and you know it's just worth the time and effort to just again say thank you and and to Express gratitude for all the hard work that gets done because it really is a collaborative team effort and the more um collaboration that we are doing as a division it it really shows in all areas and all levels um and then uh I'm not going to take my full time but I just want to say thank you to all um the parents and
265staff who spent a very long day if you um were not prepared for it at robotics uh Vex Funday that was at uh bomic Middle School um this was my first time as a board member and as a parent coach um the parent coach part was a lot harder then the board memb show up and be excited it ran out of steam before 12 o'clock and who to thk um but I bring this up because there's a a robotics Vex day at forbs Park on October 26th um but I'm I mentioned this because a lot of individuals think that robotics is a club robotics is not a club robotics is a sport and our robotics uh coaches in the schools um my commitment to them is to advocate for a greater stipend it is all
266year long and in my case just as the parent who shows up I'm showing up twice a week for 2 hours plus however many Vex events which are all day events um and I really think that it's important that we take time um to pay them with their worth if possible with our budget provided because they are providing our students the number one in demand soft skills that will get them employed period hands down and it's teaching them how to fail and fail gracefully and learn and failing is part of learning so I'm going to keep to my commitment if not using all two minutes really close but not there so thank you and have a good evening and Robotics Miss wall all right thank you so I want to start out by congratulating a
267student named Kyra tiller a 2024 Battlefield high school graduate as a girl leading change she was honored last week at the White House for her work as a dis disability rights activist and she was one of only 10 students to be honored in that fashion um she's a freshman at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and a 2024 graduate of Battlefield High School in hey market so um as a student with epilepsy she began advocating for legislation to ensure students with disabilities are fully accommodated and protected during emergency situations at school and in time she went on to found and became the executive director of a national student-led disability rights organization called disabled disruptors to help students across the country take action and Lead their own change so I thought that was a
268really um NE thing and I wanted to highlight her efforts and congratulations to her um and it's it's really great to hear of our graduates and their accomplishments when they leave pwcs and like great things that they do um uh this week I've been to a lot of or this last two weeks I've been to a lot of events but I wanted to highlight a PTO event I went to at Tyler and Reagan had an eighth grade info night where they highlighted specialty programs uh kind of a time for parents to ask questions about Battlefield and Gainesville and they also had somebody come out from TJ um and talk to the kids about what is you know let them ask questions and talk to them about the application process and get a head start on
269that so that was really great um I want to take a minute to thank parents who serve on pto's and and the um parent advisory councils or principal advisor canc I'm not sure what we're calling them now actually maybe we're calling them both but I really want to take time to thank parents who um put a lot of time and effort into serving at their schools their talents are very much appreciated and very much uh a part of the school climate and culture and they provide such a valuable service for our teachers and our staff and our students and for the community in general um I've seen I've been to a lot of events where the pto's are sponsoring the event and it creates a very Community atmosphere and brings everybody in so just wanted
270to highlight um all of the great people that we have who serve in those capacities um I really appreciated the security update tonight um there are a lot of important things that we're working on um and I know in addition to security we are either working on or will be working on things like grading and retake policies cell phone usage in schools that's coming up um college career counseling support um I hope we can continue to improve on getting transcripts ready to go within weeks of a student completing their school year so that Rising seniors can take um opportunities to apply get a jump on Admissions and apply um es especially to colleges where they have rolling admissions I am wow I'm fast running out of time so I will not say the other things
271that I was going to say um I just wish you all a great evening enjoy the beautiful fall weather and everybody keep up the great work Mr Jess yeah I haven't been to a lot of events this uh this period but uh one thing I want to say for back to school nights uh I think it would be useful for I I the school back to school night are not really conducive to meeting folks as far as the school board members are concerned so I found that the video that uh Dr MCD did and Dr Latif was good because they were always shown what I would recommend is consider for each district the school board member also be part of that video when they do that on a positive note I just want to highlight
272something uh and tell you a little bit why I'm so passionate on subject you know my wife took over titer one School uh and it was a low performing school and when she got uh a word that in the newspaper it said her school was one of the lowest math scores in the county the game was on and after that she turned that school into a high performance school I think on all four tests most of her scores were in the nine 9s so you can't tell me a title one school can't perform they can one of the things I want to say is uh uh just because the kids are in a title one school doesn't mean that they can't achieve good scores uh of the 21 schools that I talked about I just
273like to say there were eight schools from brinville that were in had 80 or above in the scores there were three schools from from Gainesville one school from KL neapco you had one School uh and it was a title one school that was in the 80s and above and aaan had three schools in pomac Covington Harper you you talk talk about the fact that you're overcrowded and so forth but that school also were was in the 80s uh and then one school from Woodbridge another Title One School uh Stone was uh one of the schools so it can be done and uh I think again it's something that uh I think we we need to focus on so thank you Mr thank you um thank you to the parents who spoke tonight regarding the VA
274and dyslexia I appreciate you bringing awareness to both of those things I also appreciate that you stayed for the longest meeting ever um also okay well that I've had maybe um I also am thankful to um my appointee who spoke regarding safe schools um once again I'm truly thankful to my appointees for your involvement and your activism and the fact that you pay attention and that you attend to all your meetings I appreciate it um I wanted to also talk about farm field days uh the first time I've ever experienced it I went to the fairgrounds uh Innovation Elementary School was one of my schools that was there um and I got to walk around and see the kids learning about farm animals and Soil and Water and uh Virginia studies because they take that
275so it was fourth grade um it was really cool to see the kids and how excited they were uh but my favorite part was running into Unity read teachers and students there um the students were there volunteering uh out of the kindness of their heart I asked you know what do you get for this of course they got lunch they did say they got lunch which they were really excited about but I just wanted to shout out my Unity read kiddos um especially the ones that I've seen in multiple clubs I I see you guys doing big things and trying to uh be in different places so kudos to you kiddos um All County Middle School choir is this Saturday and one of my favorite kids is going to be performing so I'm very excited
276to go to that for the first time um football in the brunville district is no joke uh Patriot and Gainesville are making huge huge huge strides they um I can't open social media without seeing something about those gentlemen um not only are they fine athletes but they are fabulous in the classroom a lot of them can't wait to see what they do at the Collegiate level um Unity Reed small But Mighty still is winning some of their games as well and of course brunville um is always showing out a little bit as well so I'm very excited to go and watch all the fall games please um make sure you invite me to the other Sports too that I may not be aware of I know I'm headed to volleyball and field hockey I think
277um so thank you again and that's it Mr will thank you uh given I kind of kicked off this night about four hours ago I'll be short um with um quickly um since the last meeting I did have the pleasure of attending Patty Elementary School had a movie night run by their amazing ptco on the fifth force park as Mr Blake mentioned uh had their suicide awareness walk um uh last year they weren't able to do it in the spring so they brought it back this fall um so thank you Dr McDade for continuing to come and support the event and um Lisa and Tracy for also being there as well um on the 7eventh I did go to a forest park girls uh field hockey game uh on the 11th Triangle Elementary School had
278a movie night as well then on the 12th Miss zapor and I came uh to another event together at the County chess tournament uh that was conducted at Forest Park and then last night I was able to attend the Forest Park Fall concert so thank you have a good night Mr AR thank you Dr Latif well as Mr wil um and Mr Blake said I I was at the walk for suicide awareness at Forest Park and um you know just because I you know I did have a family member who struggled with uh suicidal ideation and some attempts uh every year that I go it's a little bit different getting some space from that time in our lives um is um it's it's good to see that that person is doing much better so uh
279every time I go I I remember the first time I went I I just couldn't not cry and now I um get to participate a little bit differently so it's very personal to me and um if you are struggling please reach out for for help um went to a chess tournament with Mr wil we did our annual fake game where we I don't know who won that one but um I still don't know what the pieces are called uh got to go to Osborne Park string concert it was amazing it was so so good and um also got to see the JV volleyball game a little bit while I was there and it was really exciting to watch I um I I always think I could do that and then I know if I got
280out there I couldn't but they were so much fun to watch uh I got to go to muli elementary for their um Miss wall I don't know what we call it uh principal or parent advisory committee and their PT I think it's a PTA there they have um and they were talking about the activities they have planned for the year and the Community Partnerships so I encourage everybody to join the pack at your school so that you can hear about what's going on I got to hear a little bit about uh some of the um the continuous Improvement plan that they in their school and just listening to the activities they have planned for the kids was really exciting um I'm going to log off now because uh it's late and I know everyone wants
281to get out of here all right outstanding great work this evening um couple things want to mention just um since M trenic brought it up uh football the top 20 for 6A division in the state came out in six Prince William County schools made the top 20 with number two being Battlefield um it's um pretty pretty darn good um and so congratulations as we get towards playoff time for all our fall Sports uh we're doing well with field hockey soccer uh cross country um all of our athletes are working hard robotics is kicked off for the season um debate has a massive tournament um at colan this weekend actually um and so very exciting stuff I want to um thank all of our parents and families who participate on our safe schools um committee uh
282Jen Donley thank you for being here tonight and and for being here in in the comments earlier I appreciate our folks who are interested in dyslexia and educate and educating this board on it and for being um um available for questions and and you know addressing some of the concerns um in in the county schools regarding what more we can do for dyslexia um I truly appreciate congresswoman um Abigail spanberger for coming to visit um as Mr Blake pointed out on um Tuesday to Dale City Elementary School to take a look at our teacher residency program which by the way VCU um has across the state but the largest site now will be Prince William County schools um I appreciate um Dale City Elementary Dr MCD the entire team and staff working with VCU on
283um research-based practices that really make a difference um in in and not being afraid to try things very excited about that um that same day I spoke at the princip Chamber of Commerce event on affordable housing I shared the stage with Chief um Nim um and you know just to add on Safety and Security we have a great partnership I really enjoy working with him um I I think the the work that the police do in Prince William County and the schools together has been tremendous at keeping our um students and families safe uh but it was a it was a it was a really good program um and and we had a lot of Community Partners there I want to shout out to Canta Hospital they're work working with us to help build community
284clinics within a couple schools we're piloting a number of programs with them they are committed to um really working in the community they were there at the affordable housing event and I really appreciate all their efforts and all of our Community Partners who continue to support our School Division we truly are grateful uh with that I'd like to close tonight's meeting and the meeting is adjourned here