001okay Miss wall can you grab this wall so I'd like to call this meeting of the Prince William County School Board to order um at this time emotions in order for the approval of the meeting agenda Miss Jackson I'm with the Prince William County school board approved them meeting agenda as recommended do you have a second a second Missouri report seconds any discussion please vote foreign okay yeah moving on to the motion and her closed session emotions in order Miss Jackson I'm um move that pursuant Virginia code section 2.2-3711 and 2.2-3712 with Prince William County School Board enter a closed session for the following reasons one to discuss was that the appointment transfer release an assignment of promotion of specific offices employees under Virginia code section 2.2-3711 A 1 2 to discuss and consult with
002legal counsel regarding requests for religious exemptions between each of specific students under Virginia code section 2.2-3711 A 2 and 8. three to discuss with division Council and staff attribal and probable litigation and specific legal matters involving specific staff and students and Virginia code section 2.2-3711 a 7 and 8. four to consult with staff and legal counsel regarding the legally climates and procedures for collective bargaining by School Board employees which requires legal advice and guidance as provided by Virginia code section 2.2-3711 a eight and five to discuss and receive briefings by staff members relating to the security of school facilities the safety of persons use in such facilities and actions taken to respond to such matters where discussion in open meeting will jeopardize the security of such facilities for pursuant Virginia code section 2.2-3711 a19 do
003you have a second Mr chairman Miss Williams second any discussion please vote the vote is seven yes one absent Ralston motion passed at this time the Prince William County School Board will enter closed session return Open session in one hour [Music] foreign [Music] County School Board now re-enter Open session or return Open Session a closed session certification motion is in order Miss Jackson thank you I move the pursuant Virginia code section 2.2-3712 the closed session of the Prince William County school board meeting of November 15 2022 be certified by adopting the following resolution now therefore be it resolved at the Prince William County School Board hereby certifies that to the best of each member's knowledge one only public business matters lawfully Exempted from open meeting requirements were discussed in the cruise meeting to which the
004certification resolution applies and two only such public business matters 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 any discussion please vote the vote is seven yes one absent Ralston motion passed uh moving on to the uh approval of appointments and releases emotions order Miss Jackson thank you Dr Latif I moved the Prince William County school board approved the appointments and releases of specific employees as presented in the closed session do you have a second Mr chairman a second please vote the vote is seven yes one absent Ralston motion passed moving on to 9.02 emotions in order for the approval of request of religious exemptions Miss Jackson thank you Dr Latif I moved at the Prince William
005County school board approved the request for religious exemptions from compulsory School attendance and case numbers re22-14 and re22-15 do you have a second Mr chairman Mrs second please vote or any discussion please vote the vote is seven yes one absent Ralston motion passed okay fantastic all right next we'll move on to the Pledge of Allegiance we have Chance Williams our school board representative from Forest Park High School will lead us in the pledge tonight okay um before we go on to the um the next part of the meeting I would like to I'd like to to have a moment of silence for the um students that died at the University of Virginia Sunday night in that unfortunate um unspeakable tragedy Lavell Davis Jr Devon Devin Chandler and DeSean Perry they are students at the University
006where students at the University of Virginia and members of the football team there if we can have a moment of silence thank you everyone next we'll move on to our thriving Futures focus and this evening tonight during this section our meeting we will get to recognize the accomplishments of eight of our schools Ms Lori Williams the Woodridge magisterial district will start us off tonight Miss Williams thank you chairman Dr Latif eight of our schools were recently named Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources Virginia naturally schools there were 35 schools Statewide who received this recognition the Virginia Board of Education has recognized the Virginia naturally school program as the official Environmental Education School recognition program for the state this program honors the efforts of Virginia schools to increase the environmental awareness and stewardship stewardship of our youngest
007citizens the Virginia naturally school program evaluates schools in several categories including administrative support for conservation and energy education staff development meaningful field experiences library media center equipment and resources instructional settings or outdoor classrooms and Community Partnerships and support first I would like to recognize Freedom High School third principal chevelli Smith is here tonight with Jessica Dorian specialty programs coordinator to share a brief description of their amazing program thank you Freedom High School was honored to be recognized as a Virginia naturally school we are the home of the center for environmental and Natural Sciences and our mission is to promote a sustainable community Through Hands-On Collaborative Learning experiences our mission could not be carried out without the support of our faculty staff administrators and Prince William County's dedicated energy and sustainability team last year Freedom provided
008its students and staff with many opportunities to participate in sustainable activities a sampling includes practices in citizen science from on-campus cleanups on-site energy Audits and an all-day waste characterization that opens students eyes to the incredible amount of wasted food and contaminated recycling those learning opportunities prompted students to encourage change students increased recycling efforts and made posters to educate students and staff about proper recycling techniques Freedom also provides students with many Hands-On outdoor activities the on-site storm water Pond is used to teach students and staff about the importance of water quality to protect our local watersheds we have an on-site greenhouse and vegetable garden to promote local Farm to Table practices and the newest addition a native pollinator Garden that was developed by a student who was awarded a grant from conservation Nation freedom is also
009proud of two students who are recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency in May of 2022 with the presidential environmental youth award for their efforts to reduce the use of single-use plastic beverage bottles most recently Freedom received green mentors International Green School award in recognition of efforts and contributions made to sustainable and responsible education we will continue our school's commitment to sustainability by striving to earn year two recognition as we build on our efforts to increase environmental awareness and stewardship of students and Community thank you thank you so much up next is award-winning Kilby Elementary School assistant principal Amy Tuthill and science lead Annie Angie excuse me caligan are here to say a few words unfortunately Angie couldn't make it but she's here in heart sounds chairman Dr Latif Vice chairwoman Jackson and members of the
010school board and Dr mcday thank you we would like to thank Kilby green students and teachers for helping Kilby to be recognized for this award teachers Angie Callahan and Julie Jones led the Kilby team Garden initiative where students grew vegetables from seeds and then transplanted them into the outdoor Garden students also learned about sustainability efforts from Kilby parents and we would like to thank the Prince William County schools energy and sustainability Department along with Jeannie Jabara for assisting with energy Audits and ideas to incorporate the outdoors into learning opportunities for our students we look forward to our second year well congratulations to both Freedom High School and Kilby Elementary School thank you very much so miss Ralston of the neapsco district is unable to be with us tonight so it will be my privilege to
011introduce the niabsco magistrial district winners and our third award-winning school this evening is the niabsco elementary school principal Chris sang is here to share a little bit about their efforts related to this award principle saying thank you I've also brought Jessica Oswald one of the Green Team coordinators and supervisors along with Angie space and Mary Wong they led the charge at nyamsco our Green Team at niamsco is fairly new but we have a great group we started with 10 kids in grades three through five and that have almost 30 now in K through five these kids are enthusiastic about leaving the world a better place than they found it in the three the three supervisors are inspired by their passion and dedication we are glad to be along for the ride thank you thank you
012principal saying also from the neapsco district Dale City Elementary School earned this designation principal Brian Slater and Keaton Beaumont fifth grade science teacher are here this evening to share more thank you board Dr McDade uh I'm gonna let Mr Beaumont and Keane Beaumont share he's the heart and soul of our science program and drives the instruction so I'm going to let him share the amazing stuff that he's doing in our building school board members thank you for inviting us we appreciate it Del City we're excited about our science program I spent 28 years in the Army and now I'm teaching fifth grade science and so I've always wanted to be a teacher and a coach and now I'm where I where I belong I started the program I wanted to leave something that would would
013be in the school after I went to Florida and retired which won't be long but we started a garden this year it's all natural plants there's over 500 of them in there we put up a fence we put up places for the kids to read that's one of our three Outdoor Learning Centers we have two other ones that we're working on one of them is partly done so when I get my three done then somebody else will take over but we're having fun at uh we're excited at Dale City we're excited about a new principal new vice principal and the things that they offer and let me do the kids are excited we teach science after school four days a week wow to improve our our science scores and we're committed to making our school
014one of the best in Prince William County thank you thank you well thank you and congratulations again to the neapsco and Dale City Elementary Schools it is now my privilege to recognize Mrs Jennifer wall of the Gainesville magisterial District Miss wall thank you Dr Latif ah good evening Battlefield High School is also a Virginia naturally School Ryan principal Ryan Ferreira is a company by Karen Carney science teacher and they we'll share a few words about battlefield's efforts in this area yes I'm just going to introduce Mrs Karen Carney because I'm really just her assistant when it comes to this project so go ahead and this is thank you to this to the school board and Dr McDade for giving a larger voice to sustainability and a platform on which we can build a thriving future
015for our students thank you also to the staff at energy and sustainability office especially Jeannie jabera she has been instrumental in providing ideas and giving resources to our school to get our feet on the ground and get tasks accomplished principal Ferreira the administration and the staff at Battlefield are also critical to Our Success anytime I bring an idea to him his response is the same sounds great Karen how can I help let's do it Librarians set up environmental displays and curate resources for our classes custodians are willing to shift practices and problem solve with us the biggest congratulations goes to the students whose energy and enthusiasm are at the heart of these projects in addition to several environmental science classes Battlefield also offers a class in sustainability and renewable Technologies through our cassette specialty program
016students in these classes and the active environmental Club promote Awareness on topics such as waste reduction regenerative agriculture and sustainable energy sources in fact just today in recognition of America recycles day we engage the entire student body in a lesson on the new rules of recycling three students from last year's class passed an industry recognized exam and were credentials credentialed as lead green Associates they're working to promote Energy Efficiency in the built environment we use the building as a teaching tool we have our Outdoor Classroom guest speakers field experiences these are the many ways that staff engages students and students in Outdoor Learning earlier this year students attended a watershed workshop on the Potomac River through the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and planted trees in honor of Youth climate action day so thank you for the
017opportunity and this award working with our future our future naturalists and future stewards has been a privilege thank you foreign thank you I'm also proud to share that Mullen Elementary School earned this honor as well also one of the great schools in the Gainesville District so our new principal Jennifer hoffauer is joining this joint Lucy are you joined this evening yes okay she yeah okay join this evening by teacher Janice Pfeiffer so I'll turn the time over to you for a second thank you good evening chairman Dr Latif Vice chairwoman Jackson members of the school board and Dr McDade my name is Jennifer Hoffer I'm a proud principal of Mullen elementary school and I am joined tonight by one of our amazing staff members Miss Janice Pfeiffer who's in collaboration with our IB coordinator they
018have spearheaded efforts to create more environmental literacy and stewardship with our staff and students as an as an international Baccalaureate school it is our charge to help create globally minded citizens who see the ability to affect change in our community with the choices that we make Mullen has been very eager to participate the last year in two programs that have challenged us to make better choices and those are recycling and composting we would like to thank Genie Jabara coordinator of the energy education for her support and encouragement of our efforts she was instrumental in helping bring composting program to our school last year our school Community was able to compost roughly 16 000 pounds of food which in turn created nutrient-rich soil we could return to the Earth to help support our healthy environment we're
019incredibly honored and proud to have been selected as Virginia naturally schooled by the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources were encouraged and excited to continue this work in year two and we look for lasting impacts we can make on our community and our environment so thank you so much to everyone for their support and for your recognition of our work this evening we will continue the charge in year two thank you so much thank you Miss wall congratulations to Battlefield high school and Mullen Elementary we now move on to the Brentsville magisterial district with Miss Adele Jackson Vice chairwoman and she will recognize a winning School in her District it is an honor to congratulate Piney Branch Elementary School under the direction of principal Steve Thorne Mr Thorne is here this evening to tell us more
020about the school's environmental programs welcome Prince William County School Board Dr McDade thank you so much for having us we appreciate the recognition for this award this really came authentically for our school out of an effort to revitalize an outdoor classroom that had been neglected and it spawned a whole engagement in authentic Hands-On Outdoor Learning that has been invaluable both for our school and our students but also our community as they've come and Rose up this has really become a labor of collaboration for us our PTO has been unbelievably supportive we've had we've worked hand in hand with Dominion Energy who has been unbelievable in helping us transform what used to be some benches sitting in a lecture style to a full-blown inclusive Outdoor Classroom that extends into the back of our property in the
021woods and is tremendous and then on top of that the work we've done with Genie Jabra from the office of sustainability and the composting program but most importantly what's happened for us through all these efforts that just came about out of needs in our school and things that we wanted to have be more engaging for our kids is that we created a Green Team and under the support of three of our teachers Roxanne Edwards Cherie key and Harmony bisco they created a green team last year that just Rose to the challenge and supported all of these initiatives with our kids and so all these things really became student-led lead and vernette applying for this award and being recognized is really recognition of our kids efforts as we had I think upwards of about 60 Kids
022come out for a green team that was supported through our heels money through the arpa grants and you know we did this because we wanted to give our students a purpose for belonging that extended outside of our school hours and they found a passion for this that has now transcended our curriculum and our instruction and makes it an authentic way for our students to understand science but also have an outdoor space to go and read to go and write to explore and make observations that's getting outside of our standardized curriculum but brings it to life and makes it meaningful and so thank you for your support and efforts in this and we look forward to what more we can do to grow our efforts we have live specimens coming in we have through the support
023of our PTO and right now we have 500 trout that are growing from eggs in our classrooms and it's going to be really exciting at Piney Branch so thanks so much foreign thank you Miss Jackson and congratulations to the Piney Branch Elementary School our final award-winning schools from the Kohl's magisterial District represented by Miss Lisa zargapor thank you Dr Latif it should be no surprise that our 2022 National Blue Ribbon School Coles Elementary has also been named a Virginia naturally School Karen Wolfe and Lisa's story are here to tell us more about their program at Kohl's Elementary hello I'm Karen Wolfe and this is Sonya Green from Coles Elementary and happy America recycles day um so we want to thank chairman at large Dr Latif the Kohl's District School Board representative Mrs Zach uh sagapur
024other distinguished School Board Representatives our school superintendent Dr McDade and our supportive associate superintendent for Central Area Schools Mr Erickson for inviting us to the school board meeting this evening to celebrate schools who earn the Virginia naturally award um we'd also like to thank Genie Jabara and the environmental sustainability program here in Prince William County that has been phenomenally supportive of our programs and Mrs Ramona Richardson who is a retired kindergarten teacher from our school who um for her leadership in environmental Vision um other people that we definitely need to thank would be members of our garden committee and our Garden Club our entire staff for their efforts to teach students the importance of environmental sustainability and also our Cole's PTA and members of our community for supporting the vision that we have at our
025school so we have recently earned our this is our ninth Virginia naturally award um we take environmental sustainability very seriously at our school and we're proud of our efforts to develop environmental stewardship programs such as teaching our students about composting we have an active program in our school for composting in our cafeteria and we recycle and we teach our students about the importance of recycling and the impact it has on our planet and on the oceans we observe and take care of trout in partnership with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources and finally we provide students with hands-on experience such as observing butterflies in our butterfly garden which is beautiful we plant tend to and harvest vegetables and fruits in our many Gardens that we've got on our at our school and we provide students
026the opportunities to observe how fruits grow and we have an orchard in the back of our school as well so thank you so much for this award we appreciate it foreign congratulations to all eight of these amazing schools um I'd like to just add my sort of congratulations to our Prince William County schools energy team here at the office uh Jamie Jabara you know Mr Gorham who's gone now he's left us for bigger and better things um Miss Weimer the whole team there two things I'd ask the public to do is on Twitter if you are on Twitter the pwcs energy team is a great resource for knowing what's happening in our schools and learning about these great schools and the work they're doing and the work we're doing on energy and sustainability and that's
027where I learned they um there's a great book everyone should read that they they recommend and it's um let me pull it up here it's a hundred and one ways to go zero waste by Catherine kellock great book I've read and my kids have read it now recommended by the energy team and a lot of the good work we're doing here comes from the work that the school board did with our sustainability initiative and this is some of the some of the fruits of the labor so we thank you very much Dr McDade thank you Mr chairman congratulations so many schools Freedom calls Dale City Kilby mulliniasco Piney Branch congratulations on your designation as a Virginia naturally school for our energy office I want to thank you for all the work that you've done in
028developing our strategic plan around positive climate and culture which is focused on sustainability environmental literacy and project-based learning and we have a goal by 2025 our goal is for at least five schools to receive the U.S Department of Education green ribbon designation and for all of our schools that are represented here tonight the Virginia naturally recognition is a gateway to becoming a green ribbon school so thank you so much for all of your efforts congratulations to each and every one of you and I look forward to seeing all of the amazing impact that you each will have respectively with our students in our community thank you so much and congratulations so we'll ask all of you to come up to the front and then the school board will come down and take a picture foreign
029[Music] all right Battlefield okay foreign congratulations thank you that's right we're good all right [Applause] thank you [Applause] foreign okay at this point we'll move on to the adoption the consent agenda I moved the um oh Miss Miss Jackson adoption of the consent agenda thank you Dr Steve I moved to Prince William County school board approved the public meeting consent agenda as recommended do you have a second Mr chairman Mrs hi second any discussion please vote the vote is seven yes one absent Ralston motion passed okay thank you moving on to Citizen comment time those citizens who've signed up in advance with the clerk May address the school board this evening when they're called to the podium the citizen comment period for regular school board meetings is one hour citizens may speak on agenda items
030or other topics Germaine to the operations and policies of Prince William County schools please use property quarterman manners while at the podium or you will be asked to step aside we ask that the audience please be respectful of each speaker and refrain from any clapping cheering or cheering to avoid disruption of the meeting if you do not the board will recess and I will ask the room to be cleared to restore public order when I call your name please come up to the podium and state your name and address for the record Tracy Blake foreign good evening Dr McDade chairman Latif and the board my name is Tracy Blake and my address is on file I wear many different hats in this community but today I'm here to speak as the chair of the superintendent's
031advisory Council on equity and how safe has aligned the work of the equity council with the superintendents strategic plan before I start I just want to thank you for hiring Dr Brown says has flourished under her Dr Brown's leadership she's a purpose-driven leader with a proven track record of advancing Dei um so now I'm here specifically to speak about how commitment area number three family and Community engagement in this Chief in this strategic plan have been Advanced through the work of the equity Council equity and inclusion are Paramount in making parents authentic Partners in their Student Success inclusion of all parents and their students education helps make parents Partners in their students education family engagement improves positive student outcomes partnering with parents improves positive student outcomes family engagement is inclusive of all kinds of families
032the concept of it is traditional and nuclear family is no longer the model family can be anyone grandparents parents grandparents brother sister Guardian Etc Equity is not about taking away it's about supporting Equity is not just dealing with race Equity is about impartiality no matter your race gender identity social economical status whether you're an English language learner special needs or gifted Equity is about fairness and every student having access and opportunity in Prince William County schools States has been able to advance parents rights as well as family and Community engagement by by recommending that apparently apparently liaison be required at every school in Prince William County now the parent liaison position has been structured embodied to be a normal and productive position this position now comes from the central office budget allowing every school the
033opportunity to hire apparent liaison unique to their school community no matter the size of the school which usually determines the size of the budget the parent liaison position helps Prince William County schools build trust between uh beyond the classroom with our families this in turn promotes community responsiveness and continuous interaction with families families need to to be talked to not talk that through the work of art Thank You Blake okay thank you thank you Richard Jesse I'm Richard Jesse my address is on file these opinions and statements are mine and not necessarily those of board member Lily Jesse my wife and I hope that she agrees but she might not I am confused by pwa when they claim that the school board who voted for the certification of the Union are now considered Union Busters
034I'm I'm using round numbers an example that I believe are correct but I could be wrong if there are 8 000 School Employees that fits into the the batch for pwa for certification of the Union pwea has to get four thousand or fifty percent of these employees to vote Yes or no to move forward if that occurs then 30 percent of those four thousand or two thousand four hundred who voted has to vote Yes to be represented by pwa if pwa currently has more than 2 000 members you should already have 2 000 yes votes and why would it be so difficult for pwa to get another 2 000 employees to vote Yes or No for the initial certification pwea wants to compare himself to the school board members and I think you should they
035didn't win their election without spending time and money convincing voters to vote for them they went out and worked pwea need to convince your current members and 2 000 others to vote you did it before and why can't you do it now I understand the pwea doesn't want to be to endorse some of the Democrats on the board for the last two elections pwa has not endorsed Lily Jesse I believe you should be represented by a union but if you can't get your members and other non-member Union to vote Yes or to or no to reach the 4 000 needed for certification and then with your current membership to come up with 30 or 2 400 votes in favor of pwa perhaps you haven't convinced others others that they should have the union do you
036think that the board members up there would have won with less than 30 percent of the votes if you can get 2 400 employees out of 8 000 to vote for pwa 5600 are saying they didn't want the Union if you can't get two thousand four hundred five thousand six hundred are saying they didn't want the name I asked all Democrats even if you are a strong union supporter why would you support a union that 70 percent of employees did not want I do believe that Prince William County the Prince William EA can do in former Union and I think it is something that they should do thank you even if they don't like it Jennifer rokowski and then after her will be Jennifer Roberts and um Eileen Devereaux Jennifer Rakowski hi good evening let's
037go wait for my time to go back to green awesome hi good evening chair Latif Vice chair Jackson school board members and Dr mcdain my name is Jennifer rakoski and I reside in the ankaquan district this week is American Education week the National Education Association was one of the creators and original sponsors of American Education week after meeting with the American Legion in 1919 to seek ways to generate public support for about education after noticing the high literacy rate in America here are some of the themes each day Tuesday the 15th is Family Day according to experts students achieve Higher Achievement and have lower absenteeism when their parents take an active role in their children's education we encourage parents to volunteer in their students schools wherever possible and whenever possible or to attend evening family
038events and PTO meetings if available if work schedule prevents you from attending events in person make sure that you read the newsletters and information sent home from your students teachers so that you can engage with your student about what they're learning in class and help them learn organizational skills to complete work and prepare for tests tomorrow November 16th is ESP day ESP stands for Education support professionals esps hold a special place in the hearts of everyone in our school communities if you ask any student about their day they will likely have a story to share about the bus driver who gets them to and from school safely the secretary who greets them every morning with a smile the cafeteria worker who feeds them healthy meals at lunch or the para educator or ta who provides
039them with space to learn and grow every day these esps work alongside other caring adults to help our students get what they need to succeed Thursday November 17th is Educator for a day school board members if you've not already planned to be in school on Thursday I strongly encourage you to reach out to a teacher especially at a level school that you did not work or did not spend much time in I've been asked to encourage you to reach out to our 8th grade civics and 12th grade government teachers so that you can interact with students as they learn about local legislators and our representative government Finally Friday November 18th is substitute Educators day we know that there is a shortage of substitutes in the county we encourage all available community members and parents to
040help fill this shortage which will also get them more involved in their student schools and give a better perspective of the challenges our schools teachers and students are facing school board members especially those of you who are not or were not full-time Educators I'd love for you to experience a full day life a full day in the life of an educator a full day as a high school science teacher I never understood how the elementary day went when I subbed at an elementary school it was an eye-opening experience the number of disruptions to a class for pushing and pull out the lack of planning time the number of preps and required meetings this year the number of Assessments from the state and County have grown as well as pressure about test scores and data I
041suggest spending a full day with a single educator have a conversation with those in the classroom to hear about their day-to-day and see what Solutions everyone can come up with so teachers can teach and students can learn thank you thank you Miss Jennifer Roberts good evening chairman Latif school board members and Dr McDade my name is Jennifer Roberts I reside in the Gainesville District my address is on file thank you for the opportunity to speak about Prince William County's commitment to family and Community engagement as a parent of two Prince William County students I fully support this commitment and would like to see it extended to engaging parents Guardians and community members in creating and sustaining effective and Equitable learning environments for all of our students Prince William County defines Equity as the fair and
042impartial provision of resources access and opportunities to all students based on their individual need regardless of race or ethnicity socioeconomic status area of residence or sexual orientation Equity works we know that it works and that we benefit from it every time we try on multiple pairs of shoes until we get just the right fit that's Equity working every time we visit dozens of homes in search of the right one to meet our family's needs that's Equity working each time that we re-read the label and dosing instructions on pain reliever before administering it to our child to make sure that we have the right medicine and that we don't give too little or too much that's Equity working we know that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't serve communities well in everyday life and it certainly doesn't serve
043our students well in education providing an equitable education that gives students access to what they need is a collaborative effort amongst parents Guardians students Educators and community members I am thankful to Educators and administrators who are already promoting this inclusive culture at their Prince William County schools schools should be a place where all stakeholders work together toward goals that benefit each student our schools should be a place that welcomes parents and Guardians to participate in the process of learning actively and regularly Beyond chaperoning field trips and serving on the ptso this partnership can be achieved in any number of ways including through routine classroom observations small group or individual help to students who need it accountability partners and parents and students providing valuable feedback to staff members about students experiences it is my hope that
044parents and Educators at each of our schools will commit to exploring and implementing authentic result-driven opportunities to invite all stakeholders inside the learning environment to help create and sustain educational Equity that benefits all of our students thank you Eileen Devereaux and then after that will be Christopher funderberg and Gloria Jordan Miss Deborah good evening I'm Eileen Devereaux a PR from the Gainesville District I'd like to speak to you today about parental rights and equity over the past few years there's been a special emphasis on parental rights particularly in public schools as a parent I applaud parental involvement in our schools because I believe that parents have an important and pivotal role in the success of our schools and we should be partners a partnership but partnership is the key word however somehow this partnership in
045some circles disguises advocacy has mutated into something else that seeps of power privilege and political ploise that doesn't seem to be centered on the well-being and academic success of all children as school board members and those affiliated with Prince William County schools your primary focus is very simple students all students have a right to the core values of equity inclusivity Innovation Integrity resiliency and well-being he has somehow there's a subset appearance that willfully mischaracterize equity inclusivity and well-being it's something that our precious bright and Brilliant children do not need nor deserve well I came to tell you as parents we can say and think what we want to say we can admit and ignore whoever we want to we can deny and decry but you can't you have an obligation to reach and teach all
046children including children you will never see parents that you'll never see at a school board meeting PTO meeting parent-teacher conference in any capacity including children parents that may be busy intimidated and different aloof or demand I care however what's great about lunch and thriving Futures is that its commitment to core values such as Equity inclusivity that it does not matter appearing the students have camera ready parents and matching T-shirts because it is a plan to acknowledge and affirm all children and you must stay focused on that for those of you that are teachers cafeteria workers bus drivers counselors and Etc continue to strive to be inclusive and have curriculums even cafeteria food choices that recognize the incredible diversity within our County continue to advocate for each child to have access to resources opportunity supports and
047Innovations to ensure that they maximize their ability and potentials and I know sometimes in this political climate things can see unnecessarily hard and complicated but I came to remind you of something that is the right thing and easy out and simplifies everything what is it imagine that and best of all it is completely liberating just choose children regardless of the noise regardless of the parental participation simply choose all children each and every time thank you Christopher funderburg good evening I'm Chris funderberg and my address is on file and I am the Divergent opinion tonight so what I bring you is an SEL woke glossary this is a listing of words that you've heard a lot tonight already and you'll hear during the die introduction you may think you know what they mean but in the
048context of seld-i-e and CRT they have different meanings you may want to write this down authentic lived experiences of people not in positions of power that does not contradict capital T theory meaning CRT example Larry Elder is the black face of white supremacy because he does not speak with an authentic black voice diversity is more than just acknowledging and tolerating differences it is a set of conscious practices that involve understanding and appreciating interdependence of humanity cultures and natural environment practicing mutual respect for qualities and experiences that are different from our own understanding that diversity includes not only ways of being but also ways of knowing ways other than science recognizing that personal cultural and institutionalized discrimination creates and sustains privileges for some while creating and sustaining disadvantages for others building alliances across differences so that
049we can eradicate all forms of discrimination Equity the notion of being fair and impartial as an individual engages with an organization or system particularly systems of grievance it reflects processes and practices that both acknowledge that we live in a world where everyone has not been afforded the same resources and treatment while also working to remedy this fact inclusion the notion that an organization or system is welcoming to new populations and or identities this new presence is not merely tolerated but expected to contribute meaningfully into the system in a positive mutually beneficial way inclusive processes and practices are one that strive to bring groups together to make decisions in collaborative Mutual Equitable ways you'll hear from the chief diversity officer tonight with lots of Flowery wording including some partial definitions that I've stated what you may
050not realize is that diversity in the woke sense while claiming to tolerate differences requires that one believes that some people have Privileges and others are marginalized based solely on immutable characteristics it requires redressing these inequities by giving privilege to the marginalized and marginalizing the privilege as outlined by critical race Theory Equity is simply a new Definition of marxist from each according to their ability to each according to their need School resources are finite and should be applied equally Equity wants to take resources from the privilege and apply it to the marginalized there's a fun graphic in the presentation that I'm sure many of you have seen with three people looking over a fence and the rocks are redistributed so that everyone can see over the fence it fails to acknowledge finite Resources by producing two
051rocks out of thin air inclusion sounds great but it doesn't mention that it requires thought compliance that being that one must accept other identities or they themselves will be explained included example believing that transgenderism is a mental illness is not inclusive and therefore must be excluded how can you be inclusive and exclusive at the same time only the woke could come up with a system like that enjoy the presentation note that it doesn't address how any of these things has improved anything for students thank you Gloria Jordan and after her will be our last two Justin Kane and Jen Donnelly Gloria Jordan good evening members of the community and School Board Dr Latif and Dr McDade my name is Gloria Jordan I live in the Kohl's district and my address is on file before the
052pandemic I was appointed to the superintendent's advisory Council on Equity since then we have developed our mission statement and made committees to follow Dr mcdade's strategic plan our goal is to use equity as the lens through which we see everything else that relates to the community of Prince William County Public Schools one of the most common questions I get from community members is what is the difference between equality and Equity equality is ensuring something is equally administered across the population for example every student gets a bike to compete in a race Equity is ensuring everyone has access to what they need to be successful in this case every kid gets a particular bike that would then enable them to succeed you would not give a preschool or a 10-speed bike or a high school or
053a tricycle neither would have the opportunity or access to reach their full potential Distributing bikes equally would hindersome and actually cause them to fall further behind Equity gives each person what they need to succeed therefore equality and Equity are symbiotic and on this committee we seek to ensure everyone has the tools and access they need to be successful as a former PW school nurse I had a student who would have a seizure every time they went to a school assembly this was a highly mortifying for them the students stopped attending assemblies and sit with me in the clinic while their classmates were out enjoying the assembly when they expressed their disappointment I asked what might be triggering their seizures we quickly realized that the strobe lights and Loud Noises throughout the assembly would often be
054a trigger so we tried noise canceling headphones and entered the assembly shortly after the initial strobe lights were over and guess what they have not had another seizure in an assembly since this is an example of equity the student was given the necessary tools noise canceling headphones to experience school assembly with their peers equality would have been to give all the students noise canceling headphones but they all did not need them to be successful I have also heard people wrongly assume that Equity means everyone gets first place or that to help one you must take from another this assertion is false it is possible to provide tools and access so that everyone can succeed it is not Us Versus Them Equity gives each person what they need to succeed this committee is working tirelessly to
055give staff and students tools access resources and opportunities to achieve their full potential it is an honor and a privilege to work under the leadership of Dr Brown and Dr McDade and to collaborate with my distinguished fellow board members to make Prince William County Public Schools one of the best places to teach work learn and ultimately Thrive thank you Justin Kane good evening chairman Dr Latif members of the Prince William County School Board Dr McDade Dr Brown parents students and teachers my name is Justin Kane and I have the distinct pleasure of representing the Gainesville District on the superintendent's advisory Council on equity and secondarily I serve as an advisor on the Equitable budgeting task force like many of you I'm also a parent and like many of you I worry that my children will
056face adversity and whether or not they'll be presented with the opportunities necessary to succeed but being on this Council has opened my eyes to several things the Prince William county is one of the most diverse and beautiful counties in this country comprised of a broad swath of peoples hailing from various cultures communities and walks of life for our children equality isn't enough because we aren't all equal our kids to come to the table the academic table that is bearing different strengths different talents different struggles and different needs and they require a specialized approach to ensure their success that no two schools are alike and they too have different strength struggles and needs that the resources necessary to enhance those strengths to mitigate those struggles and to meet those needs are inadequate and inequitably distributed just
057ask the teachers I've heard a nasty rumor that many of them are the lowest paid teachers in Northern Virginia yet they can attest having spent their own money out of their own Pockets to ensure that their students have the supplies and resources necessary to enable their own academic success these past few years our community has had to mitigate the impacts of covid-19 political divisiveness inflation and an influx of refugees taking up residence in Prince William County from war-torn countries and all of these struggles trickle down into the shoulders of our children this Council can't do this alone and we can't just focus on equity in Prince William County schools the success of our children is often dependent on what is happening at home and in our communities parents need to be a part of the
058solution and that means including enriching the relationships between parents and teachers and including parents in the learning and decision processes that also means taking steps to raise Community awareness of student challenges and the programs and resources to address them and this needs to be done in all represented languages and formats what it boils down to is that there is still so much more work to be done and this committee is just one small step in the right direction I hope that we can continue to Garner broader involvement and investment from the rest of our community and ensuring that our children have the tools necessary to be contributing members to our community I want to thank you for your time this evening I want to thank you to member wall for the opportunity to serve on
059this committee thank you to Dr Brown and to my selfless colleagues on the on the council and Mr Tom weed for just joining us so I appreciate your time thank you Jen Donnelly my name is Jen Donnelly and my address is on fire file I'm here to discuss agenda item 17.03 prevailing wage resolution well I commend the effort and idea of paying contractors more for their work there are a few issues that haven't been addressed first and most importantly it will increase the capital Improvement budget by 10 to 20 percent not only is this increase not budgeted for but since the school board cannot raise funds via taxes then it must be made up for by either taking money from other budget items cutting back on Capital Improvement projects or issuing more bonds or a
060combination thereof The Five-Year CIP budget estimates are approximately 1.4 billion for new construction renovation a 20 increase will be 280 million dollars over five years or 56 million dollars per year enough to build almost two new high schools or six elementary schools this increase in waste will compound over time secondly at a time when we aren't paying teachers or school bus drivers enough to hire the needed staff this would likely use up monies that could otherwise go towards increasing pay for bus drivers and teachers at the very least it looks unseemly to senselessly waste resources the 2021-2022 transportation budget had a decrease in full-time employees of 22 and decrease of 4.3 million dollars the 2021-22 regular education budget had a decrease of about 10 full-time teachers with an increase cost of about 10.3 million dollars
061that 56 million dollars a year could increase teacher salaries by about 11 500 per year I understand that the entire 56 million couldn't go towards salary since most of it would come from Bond sales but why would we look to spend any more and gain nothing there's no guarantee that any of the increases would go end up going to Prince William county-based contractors or students that graduate from Prince William County schools besides pwcs does not exist as a jobs program to quote Stephen Moore in regard to one of his regular conversations with Milton Friedman Melton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a work site where a new Canal was being built he asked why there were so few machines the government bureaucrat explained you don't understand this is a jobs
062program to which Milton replied Oh I thought you were trying to build Canal if you want a job built you should have given the workers spoons not shovels are we trying to build schools or create a jobs program okay thank you at this time that will conclude citizen comment time and we will be moving on to where am I here yeah sorry about that 1401 the office of associate superintendent for teaching and learning uh the annual school calendar tonight the 2023-24 annual school calendar is on for Action the calendar was presented for information on the November 2nd meeting to recap a public poll was sent out in September and we had over 9 000 respondents the majority chose option three with the votes coming from 45 percent of parents 53 percent of Staff 44 of
063students at this time we need a motion Miss Jackson thank you Dr Chief I'm with the Prince William County School Board approve option 3 for the 2023-2024 annual school calendar do you have a second Mr chairman uh Miss Williams for a second any discussion okay any discussion we missed um sorry report well I I did talk to some teachers lately and they expressed concern that we don't always align our work days with the end of the quarter um and someone's going to have to address this a little bit real quick did that happen before this particular calendar a little bit better or um um I'm going to call Miss Rita Goss our associate superintendent for teaching and learning to address the questions that you might have based on the presentation that was brought forward on
064the calendar so good evening Mrs argopore you may be referring to the the work day and the conference day that were this year on October 31st on that day at the end of this quarter so we don't have another day like that that would be occurring our work days do occur in the same at the same intervals they've typically occurred at the end of the first quarter and then again we have that those work days and Conference days at the end of the second quarter at the semester break thank you I just want to make sure that our employees have heard that so yes this wall um I don't have a question I just had a couple of comments I know um option three that starts the latest in August for teachers and ends the
065earliest for students so I think a lot of people like that um and that the plurality of residents respondents to the survey chose option three and I I do understand the desire for a full two weeks at winter break um I do like that about our current calendar and I know if we go with option three there's a concern that students will take off before that break and teachers may do that as well I've had a few people reach out to me about that and I know it's always a challenge with travel plans and schedules you know approaching that winter holiday but I do feel that days within the school year are more productive in general than final days at the Year's End so one thing I really do like about this option three is
066that it has the earliest end in June um to that point um to maximize those quality instruction days I would actually be interested in future calendars moving even earlier so they ended closer to the end of May around that Memorial Day weekend or maybe the first few days in June the advantage that I see to that is that we have more of our instructional days in the school year as opposed to after you know quite a bit after the ending of um State Testing and academic testing like AP and IB and other other things like that I also fielded a number of concerns about the number of days off during the year in our calendar we do have a lot of days off I know why we have I know why we have most of
067those days off do we have too many days off that is a question I have um I know for working parents it can be hard to find child care for multiple one-off days and many don't have so many personal days off from their jobs to stay home for those random holidays and it does put pressure on the budget to pay babysitter costs for those additional days but on the flip side those additional days are there some of them for cultural and religious holidays and other reasons um matching up with a wide variety of backgrounds that we have in Prince William County so I guess my point is in all of these decisions they are hard um precisely because a decision to someone's benefit may be a decision to another's detriment and so it is with
068concern and recognition that there's no easy answer so far on our calendar that that I'm voting today but I do appreciate those who have reached out to me to express their viewpoint on the calendar options the number of days we have the number holidays that we have and our start our start time the length of the school year starting you know now further and further into August but kind of still ending um in into June so I'm open to Future considerations and comments on this but I appreciate the work that went into the calendar the work that went into the development of the calendars by the calendar committee and everybody else involved Ms Jackson I also appreciate the work that went into the calendar and um I just have one notation that really doesn't pertain
069so much to the calendar as systemic feedback that I received since then that I just wanted to um it's just flex days and then if we're adding days at the end of the year for planning which is just which is needed that maybe at some point we could revisit Flex space just just Advocate that point thank you thank you okay please vote oh Mr Wolf yeah I'm good I'm going to be succinct um I've addressed a number of concerns with the administration on the premise in which the calendar is made the balance of the days the balance of the number of instructional hours and I I think you know trying to find that right balance is where I struggle with this and so because of that I'm going to vote no on whatever calendar we
070pick Miss Williams thank you that's interesting um I just again for information um I want to remind the public that this is a combination of efforts for the board for approval and our input but also for the division because the calendar the operational side of it is not something that the board makes decisions on but it's collaborative in nature because the planning of the calendar is a collaborative process between all stakeholders and I just want to say thank you for all of those who put forth the time and effort and responded to our survey I would ask for those who are made aware that who are aware this evening this is vote is taking place to take this opportunity if you know someone who's not aware to share that with them because generally we hear
071at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year about people's vacation and travel plans we do our best to thread though the information and news but a calendar as far as planning strategic planning goes anyway from a family aspect I can speak for myself that's something we generally do at the beginning in the end of the year and we approved the calendar in the middle of the year so if once this motion carries through and we move on just try to be mindful and remind a friend that this is the time of year that it's done hopefully we'll get more input in years to come but also people can have time to accommodate their plans for the summer and for next year thank you Miss Jesse uh I I support the
072calendar however I I express my concern that that certain employees will be required during the holidays to either take time or to justify why they need to be off and I I'm not sure how that can be adjusted down the road but I think it's unfair that certain people have to justify taking that day off before I work more days during that holiday period but I support the calendar thank you okay please vote the vote is six yes one no Wilk one absent Ralston motion passed moving on to student representative matters tonight's student representative Chance Williams a senior at Forest Park High School is joining us on the dies Mr Williams thank you good evening as the student representative to the school board I always want to ensure I bring the concerns of the Princeton
073County students to your attention tonight I want to begin by providing the board with an opinion on school safety from the point of view of a student in Princeton County Schools it is unfortunate that as a student when I enter a classroom for the first time one of the first things I think about is an Escape Route violence in schools is becoming unfortunately common and nearly expected as a student in Princeton County I don't worry about my safety because the county is a dangerous place I worry because the country is a dangerous place it is the right of students and staff to feel safe in a place in which they must spend most of their time while I don't believe we are at a point where we need to begin considering metal detectors and heavy
074security for daily School use I do believe something has to change not only to give our students peace of mind but to give their parents in the Princeton County Schools Community peace of mind as well I believe if we could do something to alleviate some of that fear we would have done the county as a whole a great favor a suggestion from students and teachers would be the possible use of metal detectors at games and sporting events which would also Grant students access to some sort of bag again as due to fear in previous events we currently cannot even have clear bags we could also Implement peer support and Community engagement with local law enforcement with the support of the student Senate and student leadership at our schools to increase safety awareness as we've recently
075seen at two universities these past few days we must work towards safer schools we send our love to UVA with hopes of change to bring an end to gun violence along with security and safety I want to speak on its effects on our low income and majority minority schools majority minority is when one or more racial or ethnic minorities relative to the country's population make up a majority of the local population when acts of violence occur these majority minority schools it reflects negatively on the students typically black and brown the rumors echoed throughout the county associated in these schools with the word ghetto my Middle School Potomac Middle School was majority minority before I enrolled and since I've left many students and staff still associate Potomac Middle School with the words ghetto in prison simply
076because the school is majority minority no violent events occurred at the school it was just the precedent Miss Rachel Preston principal of Potomac Middle School has done a phenomenal job of advocating the great students staff and activities at Potomac Middle School I have no doubts the word ghetto and bad school will soon be erased as something associated with Potomac Middle School due to her leadership the board recognizes the importance of diversity as it leads to amazing things in our County but we must also make sure that our majority minority schools are given the same view as any other school in the county it is unfair that when these students attend these schools they are branded with negative cliches I want our board our staff our parents and students to challenge these stereotypes so that people
077know all schools in Princeton County schools are launching thriving futures to zoom in on what a diverse student may experience in the classroom I would like to address the presentation of learning Concepts and objectives in the classroom in a previous history course on a test I was asked to justify the institution of slavery this is during the height of the pandemic when many were debating the Voting Rights Act protesting police brutality and whether the history of various cultures should be taught in classrooms at all in English courses I've heard teachers use racial slurries when Reading literature there is no reason for these words to show up in our classroom even if they are in our required reading further when said by our Educators it can create a very uncomfortable environment these words may have their
078place on the pages of books but there is no academically essential reason teachers should ever utter these words in our classrooms whilst while slavery the Holocaust and the history of our indigenous Americans are absolutely necessary we have to be mindful of what we're teaching why we're teaching into whom we're teaching many topics are uncomfortable but often delivery is just as important as content I am pleased to have learned that Princeton County Schools is aware in addressing this in our classrooms one of the goals outlined by the student Representatives at the beginning of the year was sensitivity training for our teachers to give them the ability to know what words phrases and questions could possibly could possible excuse me could possible be best used or avoided in the classroom by of providing teachers with this skill
079we save them from a possible misunderstanding or offense that could occur that would make any of our students uncomfortable the overall goal should be to create classrooms that create a clear path for Learning and dialogue even when it is uncomfortable the hard history cohorts a program devoted to training our history teachers on how to teach sensitive subjects and cultural competency training which helps our teachers learn about different cultures our amazing resources the county has provided with these trainings and continued lessons we are creating a more inclusive classroom that promotes Learning Without harsh words and phrases the effects of diversity on the county are incredibly positive and it's clear the board is trying to develop the presence of diversity more at the high school level the presence of different diverse clubs such as our black student
080unions and our Muslim student associations provide safe spaces for minority students at schools many schools host a multicultural night to highlight the different cultures and countries represented there are so many different ways the county is highlighting diversity amongst the students I would like to encourage the board to view it themselves there are many different forms that diversity in the county takes I'm really certain that there is something the board can stop by and view such as the Forest Park black City Union which meets Thursday to close I would like to highlight a point from my previous remarks during my last speech I spoke about the robotics program and the issue it's facing I would like to thank the board for truly listening in that moment as it has been a struggle not just for our
081high school robotics teams but our middle and elementary school teams levels at middle school elementary school level teams as well I encourage our board to revisit a robotics practice speak to the coaches and check in during competition season robotics practice and competitions may not seem as interesting as football but I promise it's just as much work and just as much fun that concludes my remarks thank you thank you Mr Chance Williams very good moving on to superintendent's Time Dr McDade thank you Mr chairman good evening I want to open this evening expressing our support for the University of Virginia we are devastated by the senseless tragedy that occurred Sunday night cutting short the promising futures of three student athletes our hearts go out to their families friends and the entire UVA Community tragic incidents like
082this are heart-wrenching and our families and Community continue to be concerned about safety later this evening you will receive a presentation on Safety and Security efforts for the school division in honor of today America recycles day I wish to again congratulate our Virginia naturally schools since the school board adopted a sustainability resolution in 2020 we have earned several accolades we've saved over 65 million dollars and reduced greenhouse gases by 260 000 metric tons of carbon dioxide these Awards recognize the vital work of the energy management and sustainability team and the environmentally conscious direction of Prince William County Public Schools we are dedicated and committed to reducing our carbon footprint now so that we may ensure our students inherit a clean and sustainable environment for years to come as a reminder schools and offices will be
083closed November 23rd through the 25th in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday I would like to celebrate two Prince William County state champions Princeville District High School cheer earned the vhsl 2022 class 3 state championship Colgan High School cheer earned the vhsl 2022 class 6 state championship we look forward to celebrating their success at a future school board meeting I wish the rest of our student athletes and their respective schools the best of luck in the playoffs represent pwcs well in competition and sportsmanship both on and off the field during the season of Thanksgiving many of our local schools devote their time to collecting clothes food toys books and more for our community please reach out to your local schools Parent liaison and find out how you can donate your support resources or how you can
084support through financial charity I would now like to transition to our presentation on diversity equity and inclusion as Educators we must use our talents and focus our resources to lead with Equity as a moral imperative so that every child succeeds and functions as an informed engaged and productive citizen of our community Success is Not when some most or a majority of students achieve success is when every student realizes their full potential Equity is for all students and we must consider their unique strengths and needs to accomplish our goal of launching thriving futures for every student in Prince William County Public Schools we are looking closely at our performance data and implementing strategies to ensure we are addressing the needs of each student Prince William County schools is committed to academic success and Equitable access to
085high quality instruction at every school before I introduce our presenter on pwcs's efforts to strengthen diversity equity and inclusion I would like to personally thank every single member of the superintendent's advisory Council on equity which is a representative group of the pwcs community thank you for your for collaboratively engaging in this important work and for bringing your voice your talent your expertise and your time to ensure that every single student has a fair shot to succeed at this time I wish to welcome Dr Lucretia Brown Chief Equity officer to provide the board with a presentation on the pwcs diversity equity and inclusion framework the superintendent's advisory Council on equity and Dr Brown's entire office has have been hard at work the entire year to build out a framework for the School Division in alignment with
086our strategic plan Dr Brown will also be joined by principal Ferreira of Battlefield High School Dr Brown thank you good evening chairman Latif Vice chairwoman Jackson school board members and Dr McDade it is absolutely my pleasure to be here presenting One calendar year after I started in the division and launched this very important work joining me tonight in the presentation as you heard from Dr McDade are members of our department of diversity equity and inclusion members of our space Council and other members from our community principal Ferreira we'll start our presentation by giving you an overview of some highlight highlighted discussion points that we'll touch upon tonight we'll highlight a number of key milestones in the time historical timeline understanding that Equity started in Prince William County uh some years back and I definitely want
087to extend gratitude to my colleague Denise hubner who led this effort prior to my joining the Prince William County schools family we'll anchor this conversation in our strategic plan Vision 2025 launching thriving Futures introduce some language to level set and have begin to establish a shared understanding of what we're talking about when we use the terms diversity equity and inclusion will give our Opera an opportunity to some of our space officers to say another word if they'd like to again uh their leadership as Dr McDade highlighted being instrumental in advancing this work as well and we will then move into introducing our Dei strategy which is anchored in four domains that you'll see later in the presentation we'll close with giving and implementation update and highlighting our next steps with regard to historical milestones we
088want to extend gratitude to our Equity Council that was officially memorialized back in 2019 members of which are here this evening that group collaborated to develop the division's first Equity statement which was unanimously adopted I believe back in Spring 2021 our new superintendent joined the County school system July or summer 2021 following with the implementation of the chief Equity office in Fall of 2021 one year ago today um then significant to this work was the launching of the Strategic plan where diversity equity and inclusion are prominently placed and well positioned throughout all of the commitment areas our budget for FY 23 which included strategic Investments to advance this work across the division as well and for the moment that we're here this evening launching our framework again fall 2022. we always begin with highlighting the
089presence of diversity equity and inclusion in our vision our mission and our core values and also in our strategic commitment areas learning and achievement for all positive climate and culture family and Community engagement and organizational coherence in addition to anchoring this work in our strategic plan there are aspects of this work that we anchor in external drivers which speak to our federal laws and regulations which support parts of the work that we are responsible for and you'll hear about later in our presentation from other team members beginning here with level setting we have some working definitions that are included in our strategic plans cross glossary of terms uh definition for diversity equity and inclusion but beyond that no Dei effort is is worth its its weight if it doesn't include student voice so we'll pause
090at this time to hear a moment or a little bit from our students and what they um how they Define and experience and expect us to lead Dei on their behalf I think diversity means that I have I represented in any field that's important to me I think if everybody wants to learn in a successful space and be successful in their environment I think it's important to feel represented diversity to me is representation that means to include various different social ethnic and cultural groups it's giving opportunities necessary for people of different backgrounds and accommodating them in a way specific to them so everyone would have the chance to have an equal opportunity Equity means I have the resources opportunities and support that I need to succeed inclusion is the appreciation of diversity in action inclusion
091to me is an effort to include different social groups or ethnic groups in a certain space this can be socioeconomic status racial or ethnic groups being open to anyone in any personality is inclusion and I think those go hand in hand with diversity and Equity the most precious customer is the students so you just want to make sure that everybody's having a good experience that allows them to be successful it establishes a greater cultural interconnectivity Consciousness and awareness as long as I feel included and I feel as if I belong and the teachers are there for me me specifically I'll achieve more academically and it impacts me socially too foreign the perspective of our students and we've heard the charge they need us to advance this work in a strategic and intentional way to support
092not only their sense of belonging but their achievement and their pathway toward excellence so when we think and we talk about equity and equality it's important that we understand the terms that we're talking about we understand as we've heard from Dr McDade and from many of our leaders who've been before you prior to me equity and equality are not the same but more importantly Equity is not about reducing qualifications it is not about a handout it is about providing a fair shot for each and every student regardless of how they present it's about valuing who they are how they show up whatever their cultural capital is and giving that academic validation that they need to actually thrive in our schools the graphic that's depicted here for you is a visualization of how when we work
093together to advance equity and equality and adequacy and inclusion and diversity we level the playing field and give all of our students our access and opportunity to teaching and learning in Prince William County schools so a little bit of context around this work a few weeks prior you all were given a presentation on the state of schools and to give you an example of what this means in practical application or for our schools we're sharing here tonight a snapshot of data that was shared that reflects our student representation in academically um rigorous courses so this is a depiction of our students and their representation in AP IB and other Advanced courses you can see on the left hand side of the screen if you're facing this way what the level or standard of Excellence has
094been how it has been set for a particular student group so the black line represents the target but you see there are groups that have set the bar of Excellence high that doesn't mean that our other students shouldn't get the same opportunities to strive for that standard of Excellence and so we have some groups that haven't realized that standard of Excellence through underrepresentation we have other groups that are approaching parity but again we want to provide resources and supports to level the floor and thereby Elevate the ceiling for all that means not taking away supporting the Excellence that's there but making it the standard for all to achieve another example of this work and what it means in practical application will be shared with you tonight with my colleague and teammate principal Ferreira we are
095launching and many of you have heard about equal opportunity schools we also wanted to give him an opportunity to share some anecdotal information and and context on how this initiative that we are launching at the division level is helping at his school level and we also want to highlight that the opportunity gaps that we're able to address are significant in reducing achievement gaps we cannot have a standard of Excellence if we have not given a fair shot and a fair opportunity for all of our students so I'll ask Mr Ferreira to join me thank you Dr Brown good evening Dr Latif Dr McDade school board members Happy Thanksgiving to you all um I was I was really honored to to be asked to come and share a little bit about my school anytime I get
096a chance to talk about Battlefield high school I'm happy to do so um so Battlefield High School we're really fortunate we have a very high achieving school and a long history of very high academic success the that said the Strategic plan from the board and Dr mcday's leadership has challenged us to go deeper than the surface level and as we can make our continuous Improvement plan look at areas of growth and opportunities where we can grow and access to Advanced coursework in our school is one of those areas that we are focusing on this year we've identified the gaps in accessing Advanced courses among our student groups which includes race special education English Learners associate economic status and those are things we are addressing in our CIP and one of those things is the Equal
097Opportunity schools program that I believe most Prince William County high schools are participating in Research indicates that students who take at least one AP course in high school have a significantly significantly lower dropout rate when they're in college and knowing that we should see more students accessing this coursework at our school when we factor in that at Battlefield High School a very large percentage of students attend college so we would like to see access to Advanced coursework increase across the board so that students are fully prepared for the rigor of college work working with equal opportunity schools will allow us to identify students who should be taking Advanced course courses but for whatever reason are not taking advantage of those programs and it will also provide our school with feedback to the barriers that may
098exist that prevent students from taking those those options ultimately the goal is we want to make sure students and families are connected with resources and empowered by information to choose courses that align with the students post-secondary goals and once students are surveyed the first step is going to be a survey that really will give us a broad look but also on an individual level what every student in our school needs and once we do that our leadership and instructional teams will be able to take actionable next steps to make sure that this is all happening so I'm really excited to do this work with our school and our community and make sure that our students who are College Bound are fully prepared by having access to the to the skills and the instruction that they
099learn in these Advanced courses so thank you for letting me come speak to you thank you thank you appreciate it thank you we also highlighted at the top of this presentation the instrumental work of the superintendent's advisory Council on Equity we do have officers that were newly elected for this school year and at this time if there are any one of them that want to come and give a quick quick little snapshot of their time that they've been working in this Council I reserved some space here with the slide but if you don't that's fine because I know y'all signed up for citizen comment time so if you'd like to we can but is there anything that you guys would like to add we have our chair and vice chair here along with our secretary
100uh Mr Justin Kane so I think we're a thumbs up here but uh the slide before you just commemorates and extends uh gratitude to this uh Council which is comprised of 20 members that include board-appointed uh representation pwcs employees and other community members we meet monthly and we collaborate and engage in meaningful working sessions so that we align the mission and vision of this council with the mission and vision of the division and the Strategic plan uh one of the uh focuses of our of our work last year was to really sit and talk about what do we mean in Prince William County schools when we say diversity equity and inclusion uh we sat down with a lot of the research and we came up with some common themes and those themes emerged as four
101areas access and opportunity resource Equity communication and engagement as well as Intercultural competence and inclusion as you can see reflected on the screen we use some of those guiding questions that are identified there for you to prompt the discussion and have continued sustainable discussions over the entire year last year and once we decided that these were our areas and what we met when we're talking about diversity equity and inclusion then we had to talk about how do we know when we see it what should we be looking at and so what's reflected on for you on this slide are data elements that we will be using to be able to gauge our progress and advancing this work through the different strategies that we will be implementing as uh educational leaders in the division so we'll
102be looking at student achievement data state of schools report we won't be looking at other data Dei must be embedded in the core organizational processes that are already happening in the division and we allow the themes to emerge for us to triage based on what's happening in the school not on what we think should happen but what's actually data proven to be happening in the division and then lastly as we move through those conversations we began to talk about key performance indicators in anticipation of the launch of the Strategic plan again how do we know what we're doing is working so we want to identify and we have identified collaboratively and collectively what data elements when it comes to numbers and percents we'll be looking at to be able to gauge how well the division
103is doing and we'll have a continuous Improvement cycle that will inform our conversations and make sure that there's vertical and horizontal alignment in this work as we move forward so here is our framework thanks to our comms department for taking our conceptual ideas and Design Elements and comprising them if you will into this framework that you'll see is our sub brand as we advance this work so when we're talking about Dei in Prince William County schools we know that there are four components access and opportunity resource Equity communication and engagement that's strategic and targeted directly to our populations that may not be as involved or informed as we would expect them to be and then Intercultural competence and inclusion uh one slide just to level set on this role in the position that I serve
104in the title of the position is Chief Equity officer it is informed from the research we want to highlight what the work uh that uh this role is responsible for uh is comprised of so first and foremost a chief Equity officer is an organizational change management specialist this work doesn't survive if it not if it is not embedded in the organizational processes as I've said previously so therefore it's not the loan diversity trainer Dei is still a capability and a responsibility of every leader in Prince William County schools but we are here to support at all levels in all priority areas the chief Equity officer advises the superintendent and works laterally with my executive colleagues and peers but also has Staffing to support out in our school sites and out in our within our departments
105as well within the Opera operation side but again more importantly what you see depicted for you are those prioritized organizational areas and processes continuous Improvement so we push in and we support at all levels and ensuring that we are including Dei in that work our budget development process you've heard about the Equitable budgeting task force that we've launched that is work where we're being strategic and intentional about advancing this work from a financial perspective policy and administrative regulations revisions maintenance and elimination making sure that our policies align with our strategic plan and align with where we're going our North Star and more importantly within teaching and learning instructional leadership so you'll hear from members of my team later of exactly what that looks like in practical application and operational operationalizing this work for our community
106and here I'd like to introduce um our brand new director of diversity and Equity who will be one of the tools and re who will serve as a tool and resource for our schools and our teaching and learning staff as we embed and Advance this work on the academic side of the house good evening I'm very very excited to serve the PWS pwcs Community as the Director of diversity equity and inclusion I am a pwcs graduate from a few years back I'm proud to say that I am a parent of a pwcs graduate as well as three current pwcs students as you view our presentation here and you look at at our framework you'll notice that there are currently five bands we're in the process of adding a sixth band that we will be focusing
107our our work in in particular this framework was developed to address the achievement gaps that that exist within Prince William County Public Schools by intentionally embedding the Dei framework into academics we will Target the gaps that exist there are six main bands as I mentioned previously that we will focus our work on in our school communities to improve the outcomes for all students these six bands are instructional leadership classroom evaluation social emotional Learning Resource Management chronic absenteeism which is being added as well as family academic and Community engagement we're collaborating with school district leaders to offer our support through an equity lens we are teaming with school leaders to strengthen the instructional core by joining their instructional rounds we've launched our equal opportunities schools partnership in 11 high schools to date and this is again
108to improve access and opportunity to advance courses for all students in Prince William County Public Schools working with the restorative practices planning team on training developing and implementing we will have a focus on academic and social emotional learning collaborating with school and District leaders on how we manage our Resources by utilizing an equitable funding model we'll pay dividend dividends across all areas that our framework is embedded in chronic absenteeism has become a prevalent issue in Prince William County Public Schools and we'll be a major focus of our department accordingly I'm very excited to say that we have hired a supervisor of family and Community engagement Dr CJ Atkins and she is with us this evening to give an overview of her role within the Dei Department good evening the purpose of the role that has
109been afforded to our office which I'm extremely excited about is to centralize and coordinate our family academic engagement and that's seen of course in commitment area three but also in one two and four of our division strategic plan and I will collaborate with our family and Community academic engagement Specialists and school administrators to do a few things we want to elevate family and academic Community engagement through instructional knowledge collaboration and strategic School level initiatives we want to embed family academic and Community practices and our Core Business and key organizational practices and we want to build all families capacity to navigate the educational process successfully for their students and we also want to collaborate with schools to elevate the work that they're already doing for family knowledge on the positive effects of daily School attendance and
110student academic success and also enhancing resource Equity it's not about taking away or saying what they're not doing but it's elevating what they have in place to make sure that there is access for all families so that all students can be successful thank you good evening it is my pleasure to speak with you on behalf of the Department of diversity equity and inclusion I am Tanisha Holland equity and employee relations administrator and this evening I am also representing our Department's equity and student relations administrator Equity investigators Dei Specialists and administrative assistant on the current slide posted is our discrimination and harassment compliance framework graphic beginning with prevention to reporting investigation decision making final disposition and appeals this represents the full scale of our discrimination and harassment complaint process all stages in our process are grounded
111in federal and state laws and regulations executive orders our school divisions policies and regulations and strategic plan dei's primary objectives are twofold first to proactively raise awareness in the pwcs community to prevent discrimination and harassment allegations under title VI 7 and 9 and Foster a climate and culture where everyone feels like they belong and second to ensure that all reports of discrimination and harassment are investigated and resolved in a timely fashion and unbiased manner collaboratively our team has been laser focused in developing and implementing the following prevention materials and trainings for students staff and other community other pwcs community members streamlined reporting process and provide additional resources that are accessible on the pwcs launch pad and public website partnered with a third party vendor to ensure more seamless and efficient process to managing all discrimination
112and harassment cases develop standard operating procedures to ensure consistent practices are followed and hiring three new investigators who specialize in Dei investigations thank you Tanisha now we'll move forward with an implementation update uh what we have depicted for you on the screen is a set of action steps and tasks that have been completed during year one of implementation we've arranged these action steps in four five areas First beginning with office design and development with this being a new role to the organization making sure that any uh corresponding roles that were implemented have the appropriate direct reporting lines uh positional structures so that we could keep workflows moving and not interfere with the Org the routine organizational operations so in other words making sure the organization could absorb the roles that we are introducing here to
113support this work within access and opportunity we've launched as you've heard the Equal Opportunity schools initiative we have a cohort or year one cohort of 11 schools with a cohort our second cohort launching next school year with the remaining high schools three of them we've worked to develop and identify the key components of a Dei consultancy protocol which we'll use with our leaders at all the levels to ensure that we're building capacity for leading Dei work and extending the Dei arm if you will throughout the other departments and offices in the division we facilitated initial conversations with our School parent Liaisons we've repurposed the former cares leads to support family academic engagement and embed the responsive needs of our families into that role uh We've also held some or held um a Latino business Community
114leader uh Roundtable to basically hear from the representatives and Community leads of one of our most vulnerable populations what do their students need and how can we partner on support to bring this group up to that standard of Excellence that we are striving for with regard to communication and engagement we continuously work with Community organizations uh particularly the naac CP the Prince William County student human relations Council and other National and Regional partners that support our work particularly in the area of Title IX as we build awareness and prevention for our students and employees we've also worked to begin to establish a baseline of where do our leaders measure on their leadership for Dei and so that work was really um uh well supported and we'll be using that work to support how we build
115capacity for our leaders in advancing this work as well so for next steps moving into year two we'll begin to conduct School Equity visits but again we will make sure that those visits are not invasive but rather able to be absorbed into another organizational process we will begin to revamp and have conversations about our Equity scorecard and aligning that with our strategic plan and the Dei work that we've presented to you here this evening we will establish a pwcs Dei social media presence beginning with our website our intranet and other social media Platforms in collaboration with our comms department and again we'll move into launching and embedding this Dei framework into the routine operations of the division we'll also co-lead and support divisional policy review to determine what policies do we need to revise to
116support our strategic plan and all of the good work that's happening across the division and all of our departments centering Equitable and inclusive language and practices within the core of all of those policies and administrative regulations we'll continue to advance Community engagement but adding a layer of Outreach meeting people where they are and understanding that there are barriers to engagement traditional engagement for our families and communities so how do we remove those and revamp and reclaim the narrative for this work as we seek to bring our families closer to Center and then lastly taking the pwcs organizational Dei Baseline work as I said earlier and beginning to operationalize that and use that to support our leaders on the teaching and learning side and the operational side that concludes our presentation for this evening Mr chairman
117will open it up to any questions that the board or comments that the board might have for the team Miss Williams thank you Mr chairman um let me first say how much um I appreciate this presentation for this board member I went from advocating trying to convince people what equity and equality and Dei work was and why it was important to sitting here in this moment I am extremely proud of our School Division I am extremely proud to have been integral in that advocacy to get this uh rocket launched now that we're in thriving futures it is so impactful to see this work no longer siled in our division or held through book clubs or the brunt of it born on certain leaders in certain schools and certain central office staff to now being in
118a responsibility for all of us throughout the division and then extending that invitation into the community to come back and work with us to get this work done for the understanding and good of all I think that prior to this presentation that the primary chatter about Dei work is um not reflected in our academic or our operational not reflected in academics or operation when we talk about it and having received this presentation um being able to explain to the public and and our school family and community that it's not a matter of just simply providing um like the bike example earlier someone said at 10 speed versus a train bike with training wheels it's an integrative Approach at all levels we all have to be on the same page providing our community with what the
119the definition of what it is we mean when we say a term how that's going to be applicable throughout our entire system what how this approach is at every single layer and everybody is responsible I cannot say that enough because it matters integration matters when it comes to Dei work being on the same page and having the same level of understanding matters and I think that this presentation really was able to visually demonstrate and you were able to articulate with through yourself and your team the fact that it's not just simply about race it's not simply about social economic status it's about all of it it's about the way that we think it's about the way that we interact and deal with each other the materials that we use all of it matters and all
120of it has to fit together in order for all of us to succeed together because that's the goal for all of us to come aboard um this is particularly important to me because that's something I say all the time public school is for all and we it's our duty to ensure that all of our students have the capability to learn and grow and progress for me personally being a Prince William County schools grad and a different era and a different time not having a lot of this work represented in my academic career was impactful not being able to go take an AP test because my family didn't necessarily have the funds even though I took the AP course to be able to take the test or having to come up with additional funds to go
121take the PSAT multiple times where now that's something we do standard for everyone seeing individuals in the workplace who look similar to myself which I did not see growing up very often all of these things fit it's not just one single lens to which to view we view our academic or our school community and I appreciate the fact that so much time was spent explaining that you've come a long way in one year in my mind when I looked at this presentation and said oh we started this in 2019 I have been advocating for so long I forgot that that this is a newly approved budget position you've laid the groundwork and the foundation to get us where we are in your role leaning on what was already in our existing School Division because I
122think that's also important there was an existing foundation and the work was being done just was not integrated at all levels right we're in a space in our society and culture where we're shifting from each in its own box to recognizing that every box touches so it makes a difference what I do makes a difference what you do to all of us it's impactful so I appreciate you highlighting that I um love the fact that there's so much student focus and in this from multiple angles not just how the students want to see themselves represented but their voice is present in this work and it's noticeable that is also impactful um because I know that when we give students ownership of their academic progress they succeed as well and they participate more and that makes
123us a better school Division I could go on and on forever so I'm going to stop and just say I greatly appreciate this I look forward to regular updates on our progress which I know you will provide to us not only us at the board but to our school Community I want to thank my representative to the council I want to also thank Dr McDade for continuing this work in her Administration and really making it a seamless integration into how we operate as a as a division and how it aligns with our strategic plan it all matters and greatly appreciate it so thank you very much Miss Jesse I I really this is very emotional for me because I've lived this and I've been in this school system I've been in Chicago at a hospital
124for Disturbed and emotionally disturbed children I've worked with what we're called children and I live that life myself personally so when people say why are you on this board I came on this board primarily to affect student learning that's why I came on this board and to see this committee where you are right now it's been worth the wait and I think I said during the two by two to Dr mcdavia what was she doing when did she go to present and now I know because it has been worth the wait you have given a present a presentation that covers everything today I was on a webinar with future kings and the title of the net the webinar was changing the narrative about Black and Latino boys and chance here tonight talked about various student
125groups and I have worked with those kinds of kids all my life I was one of those kids and so when you start talk about changes in narrative belief that all kids can learn at high levels it's very difficult to change how people see people it's not about books it's not really about instructional strategies it's whether or not you think that child has the ability to learn at high levels and I know that Dr McDade has lived that same life I wanted to go back to slide nine if you don't mind because it was mentioned earlier I think it was slide eight sorry slide eight this one you know I've seen this in various forms and someone tonight talked about giving up what you had to give up in order to to achieve Equity I
126went to South Carolina State College and I'm giving away my age because I was involved in the marches and we marched at South Carolina state to integrate a bowling alley now keep in mind none of us bowled because we weren't allowed in bowling alleys and we really didn't want to just integrate the bowling alley we want to stay to make a statement and when I look at this I thought about the the difference the equity the equality we were searching for equality we wanted access to that bowling alley but it haven't gotten access to that bowling alley in this third slide uh the third part of this presentation where you talk about equity what if we had been allowed in the bowling alley we would not be able to bowl at the same level at
127the students the white students had been in that bowling alley all their lives but we had the ability to bold all we needed was practice and an opportunity and a belief that we could really achieve that I've been on this board for 10 years and Rita Gods will tell you that every time I asked the four same four questions which are are the children learning how do you know what are you going to do about the ones that are not and what are you going to do about those who already know she can repeat it and it's really it's a very simple concept it's not about whether or not they were taught is whether or not they learned and how what are the results of that how do you know and what are you going
128to do about the kids who are below grade level but more importantly what are you going to do about the ones that don't have access and the the fact that you brought in a principal and he shared one of the things about high levels of learning that I've learned over my life and my experience is that you have to share The Good the Bad and the Ugly and I am so appreciative to this board and to Dr mcday and to you Mr Lucretia Brown she is a Sorrow by the way but that's not why she's great she's great because of who she is but I just want to thank you for helping at the end of 10 years she says she's been waiting working on this I've been working on this all my life because
129I've seen kids start living learn at high levels and Dr King he talked about the biotechnical careers in gaming and drones today these kids these African-American kids have the ability to learn not just African-American kids the Hispanic kids and the kids who don't speak English and I will end with this one story because it happened very frequently recently uh B Simpson said she ran into a student of mine and this young lady said oh I remember Mrs Jesse because she helped me she brought me at her office and I said who was this child and I as a principal I had gotten all these kids who didn't speak English and so Betsy came into my office because her writing prompt was not up to par and I said what's wrong and she broke down and
130started to cry and I said what's going on Beth and she said because they want me to take my writing prop home and have my parents help me with my writing prompt but no one in my house speaks English Mrs Jesse no one can help me and when I look I think one that was slide 17 I'm not sure where you look at the the gap you have to put yourself in these kids place that I'm just very pleased and I will stop talking because it means so much to me this is a great presentation and Dr McDade and to you and your Equity Council I'm just very excited and pleased to see the work that you're going to do and you're just beginning down the road you're going to do some great things with
131this County thank you okay um Miss wall okay hi thank you for the information I've been wondering as well what um what your office has been up to and so this was really comprehensive and I have a much better idea now um I had a couple of questions if you don't mind on slide 11 I'm I'm usually pretty good at figuring out data and just charts and things like that but I'm a I wondered if it could take just a minute to talk me through a little bit more about this slide it's the one about equity and access about it's Battlefield slide so I I'm a little I'm unsure and maybe I just say what part I'm struggling to understand um it says targeted students do ad it says 128 and then it says targeted
132students in AP 252 which is more so I'm not sure are we trying to add 128 more students to is that all I'm not sure why I would think that the ad number would be bigger because maybe it would include dual enrollment or something like that but I'm not really sure about those and then the graph at the bottom I know the end numbers are the number of students that are in that category correct and then it has it's a little fuzzy but the percentage and like the raw number is in parentheses I'm not really sure like how many are in that group would be like let's say let's look at the blue columns so the N equals 142 that's how many students are in that group and then 108 is the raw number of
133how many we've identified that are taking an AP class I think and then 70 that's the percentage and then the light gray bar that's above like the 56 that that it has a number five is that how many targeted students are in that no okay um that's why I need some help no problem so I'm not really sure how to interpret this if you would just tell me thank you so what this is is an opportunity chart this is the first step in EO in the Eos partnership where they take the numbers for our data so these data that are reflected here represent uh school year probably school year 2021 because it was something that was done before we ever launched so we could give a glimpse to our leaders of what we're missing out
134and missing out on in terms of students and who those students are so a reason for sharing it was one to show that hey this is something where we're missing students across the board regardless of race ethnicity and things of that nature but also here's what we could be doing if we did some targeted intervention to expand access and opportunity so these numbers are really they're they're I won't say anecdotal but they were to begin to start the conversation of what the gaps look like in our school division last year when we were tossing around uh engaging in a partnership with EOS and I don't know if you wanted to add anything so as you as you come up let me just jump on that just explain this line the 11th and 12th grade targeted
135to add in 11th and 12th grade targeted students AP what does that mean those are students that we should be targeting those numbers and I can't I can't really even I I don't understand so so we're going to Target 128 11th and 12th graders add to what and then 11 and then we're going to Target 252 in AP so so explain to me what this is about we have 252 students currently enrolled in the AP you have 252 enrolled in AP at Battlefield in 11th and 12th grade in 11th and 12th grade and 11th and 12th got it so then when we look at the chart about the 128 the 128 students that are identified there and you can look at the subgroup so you want to add 128 to the 250 correct and that's
136what you want to do yes and those 128 students are students who have demonstrated success whether it be via Sol right um GPA right right the teacher recommendation and so on so those are students who are missing out on and you can see that that crosses over every group every student group okay thank you that is much more clearer much clearer to me and and so I um that's great I think we shouldn't be targeting students who maybe they did really well in the SAT but they're not in any advanced classes that's correct maybe they have a 4.0 and they don't have any advanced classes this is the kind of thing we're doing right we're trying or maybe not a 4.0 but like a higher you know good a b a b or above maybe
137or even a just to help um board members to understand can you explain the profile that we get from the student survey that gives us the data we need to be able to say why this number is 128. sure a lot of what we get back from the survey relates to student sense of belonging and we're able to identify students from what they self-report you know we have their gpas we have their their prior academic history but students will often report that one they've never been told that they can they've never been able to never been um told by teachers counselors or others that they can access this level of coursework advanced coursework whether it be because of a language barrier um it does not matter students will report across the board students will report
138that the teachers Who I Really identify with or the teachers who really do support me might not be the teachers that are teaching these these courses we get a ton of data back on these student student code cards they'll talk about peer support s that they would need to have in place they talk about their aspirations for their future you know I can give you a personal example real quick my daughter who just graduated from pwcs had a fantastic experience during covet here at pwcs high school transferred in as a senior on paper she is Hispanic in person she presents very shy anxiety-ridden prior to coming she was not a student who was identified for advanced courses probably because regardless she had a 4.0 but in spite of that she was not someone who was
139assertive who did not self-advocate who was not out there and and so she was not identified I as a principal across the district in that former District knew how to advocate for her and started that process we're talking about doing what I did for my own daughter for all kids in this District who have yet to be identified and that's what this process is going to get us I put a final understands what's happening here this isn't about just putting kids in situations and they aren't set up for Success right this is looking at a student's profile their GPA their test scores you know teacher input on students potential as well as the survey that shows their personal interests and aspirations that then is used as a profile of the student a profile card that
140shows that this is a student that could and should be able to thrive in an AP course but for whatever reason they are not enrolling in the course or not accessing the course and so now for example Battlefield has a Target to look at these 128 students to make sure that they are maximizing their full potential and taking advantage of these courses and then also putting in the necessary supports that students will need to not just enroll in the course but to successfully pass the course and even take the exam and potentially receive Early College credentialing so that's really what the profile is about this is very intentional work so for you know I want people to understand because I've heard comments about you know we're not setting students up for success that's not what
141this is equal opportunity schools has been doing this across the country and experienced success in school divisions across this country where students who should be taking Advanced coursework are not taking Advanced coursework and are underrepresented in those courses for reasons that do not have anything to do with academic ability and so we're trying to remove the barriers for them to access these uh these courses because as you heard the data earlier we know that the student who is enrolled in advanced courses have a higher graduation rate not just from high school we're talking about post-secondary persisting towards a four-year degree so that's where the 128 is really intentional targeted work that looks at the entire student's profile including their interests to make sure that they're properly placed and supported okay yeah that that's that's great
142that's very helpful information um I know when you know I remember getting a letter that said hey your student has been identified as potentially able to succeed in an AP class but I'm assuming we're going to do more than just send a letter home right because that's kind of kind of what I think my experience has been in the past so I'm excited to hear actually that we are targeting we we're being intentional about this and and seeking to bring kids in who we think can be successful but also supporting them once they're there because there are going to be some challenges I mean I look at this and I see uh you know common denominators that children who are coming from a lower income situation that seems to be regardless of your race is
143going to be a disadvantage for whatever reason and so that's going to be something that we need to also I mean it looks like that we're going to take a look at that like what do these children need to feel confident and succeed in this kind of an academic environment well if we succeed it's going to be amazing and we can share um at a later date following the board meeting we can share with board members the sample student profile card that comes from the survey so that you can see what that looks like and the information that's gathered and collected to make informed decisions about placement and one other point to add um where this work is also about building a pipeline so we're not just surveying 10th and 11th and 12th graders we're
144starting at ninth grade it is a whole school initiative so that we begin to identify students early so that speaks to the systems change that we're um supporting at the school level getting those identification behaviors in place addressing any policy revisions and those items like teacher recommendation how do we begin to shift our teacher mindset to see students who are at promise in different ways than the traditional GPA gatekeeper courses but I where students identify uh examples of how they would persevere in a course where it might not be reflected numerically and I know Mr Ferrer you wanted to add something sure yeah just uh going off your point Mrs wall that that's an excellent point about the letter where that comes from right now is using AP potential data where there's a correlation between
145performance on the PSATs and we're able to identify uh students this does go a little deeper than that and the reason I know that is through the continuous Improvement planning process our CIP team did a root cause analysis for all of our areas that we wanted to focus on on all of our strategic priorities and that root cause analysis on this issue one of the root causes we discovered is as great as it would be for the counselor and this every teacher every student's teacher and counselor for 2300 students to sit down and have an in-depth conversation about the individual student and make sure they're in the right course that's just not practical so using this program this is going to allow us to have some data to instantly look at the student on an
146individual level and find students who should be taking Advanced courses that are not the bottom line for me is that if students are even considering going to college they should not graduate high school without having had taken an advanced course so this isn't about pressuring students or you know the 128 students I hope that we have an outcome that exceeds that but it's not necessarily about taking I don't think anyone here is thinking you're going to pressure 120 Yeah we actually agree with that number yeah no one's quibbling about that number I don't want anyone to think that the board thinks that that number's too high no I don't think I don't I don't think you know in your comments you're making it sound like we think that's too high it's not too high no
147no no no I I actually I think it can go beyond that what I'm what I'm saying is I think with the interventions that we're able to address a byproduct of that will be to to hit the 120 EA and Beyond it's not necessarily about looking at that number so I didn't take it that way so don't worry but thanks for clarity so since we're since we're on the slide I'm going to pound a little bit more here I you know the the 252 seems low to me so is that how many students are taking AP classes in 11th and 12th grade at Battlefield right now or last year it just seems like a low number to me aren't there more than that like you have 700 graduates it just seems like there's so many
148AP classes we really have only 252 taking AP at Battlefield in 11th and 12th grade I mean that's 125 in each year is that accurate are you sure of that number I I have to look at the number I didn't prepare that slide personally so yeah I'd have to look at it it did seem low when it popped up yeah I mean um EOS produced the slide so it may be some additional contacts that's missing here and I think it'll be important for us to just go back and do a a check to make sure we're not misinterpreting the numbers I do know for sure the 128 is a target um the 252 there may be some uncertainty there so I think we should check and be sure and this could be a follow-up that
149we can provide the board so that there's accuracy fine thank you and then and I know and I know Battlefield does a lot of dual enrollment as well um and and and and I I guess I would take this moment to to just it's important for our counselors and I want to remind people dual enrollment is great if you're staying in state for college you'll get college credit but if you're leaving the state ap's probably something you may want to consider so that's something you have to have a conversation with with your counselor on this Slide the last thing I think it's really important to know that our county is diverse and our problems are diverse so if you take a look at the low income students in every category that is a major challenge
150for us and I I want everyone to remind you know and it's low income I don't care what color what religion whatever you know it's a problem so Thomas Jefferson with all the issues we've had over the last few years on admissions the group who gets the lowest admission admission rate so if you look at the free and reduced lunch free and reduced lunch rate at Thomas Jefferson it's less than two percent it's less than two percent um so so the low income families are the ones who are getting slammed when we talk about you know taking advantage of opportunities accessing um you know potential to to grow and and so I think that's important for everyone to understand that this this is this is diversity Equity inclusion but it it goes more than just
151race you know and I think that's very important for everyone to understand because our county is extremely diverse but it's also diverse in socioeconomic status and there are low incomes are in every color every religion and we have to do better for those and I think this is um it's good that we're pointing this out and I think it's important that we all remember that that whatever work we can do to do that and I appreciate you know in slide 10 that you guys have said that you know here's the the bar we all need to be achieving I would like to remind everyone that you know Dr McDade in the Strategic plan has committed also that that everyone move up right it's not just about one group catching up it's about everyone moving up
152so just in the re-engagement plan coming out of the mess from the pandemic it was recovery re-engagement and acceleration and so that was for everybody not just a certain targeted group and I want everyone to remember that as we look forward to the work that you all continue to do I'm going to go to Miss Jackson I I just have a quick question just to piggyback on the same line of information at looking at slide 11 is it possible to get um included in the targeted groups the students with disabilities yes and in fact we are one of the first partners for Eos to focus this effort on our students with disabilities first in the nation so again when you talk about expanding access and opportunity we're setting uh some Pace being a Pacesetter in
153this work so we will do that and that is one of the nuanced pieces of our partnership including students with disabilities as well in this work Mr Williams thank you um typically the student representative doesn't speak after student representative matters but I felt the need to personally say thank you I have heard from numerous students about the work you do at our schools and I've talked to students who I've talked to you and it's kind of disappointing that this is the first time I'm seeing you but I've seen you this is amazing um as a black student in the county it is incredible to see how far the county is moving with you and your council's help um I have no questions I have no comments other than thank you thank you and I hope
154I see you in one of those courses okay so I I went and looked up because it was bugging me about that chart so I went and looked up the Equal Opportunity schools how to read the chart and what is saying that total that you're seeing um is combined it's saying the 128 plus the 252 is a targeted group that that have the potential all right and then it's setting that goal to add so they're not saying we're going to add all of them they're saying that you have the potential to have uh that total group in there but they're targeting an ad of to I'm looking at this one that says 304. so actually you would you actually are adding the two numbers together so for example I'm looking at a different school where
155it's saying here um 11th and 12th grade targeted students to add 344 11th and 12th grade targeted students in AP um 304 and so if you look at the 128 that I guess that's the goal yeah of having at least 128 at least but it's actually um 252 potential right okay great that makes more so it's not representative of the total students that are already this that that chart is only looking at EOS looking at the number of students that have the potential to be able to access the coursework and then it's giving the school a targeted number that they should focus on trying to obtain excellent okay thank you Miss sargopore uh thank you um so I I know we're looking just at AP on this slide but we also have other kinds of
156coursework that we can be looking at some class some schools have IB so that will be a different consideration for different schools correct right so these opportunity charts were produced based on the focus of the school so the example tonight is AP but there are schools with IB schools with Cambridge right where they're focusing on one or more of those Advanced course offering so I think it's really important to to talk about um you know we've already said that that kids who take one of these classes um are set up for success for uh College work um what we haven't I don't think it's said very loudly here but I think would be of interest with two things we pay for those tests correct all of them we don't we know our parents don't pay
157for any of these things correct we pay ibap Cambridge okay so that that right there you have nothing to lose right you we're paying for it so right there if you are identified interested whatever sign up right well yeah okay okay he's muttering over here so so we have that as an advantage you also um these are going to give you a um a habit of Mind a framework to work from these are these are skills you need to be successful in college so if you take one AP class you're getting your toes wet just a little bit if you've got support from people who want to see you be successful it might take one or two classes but you got nothing to lose that's the thing and when you get the credit like when
158you get those um like a four or five you can get college credit right so that pay that could be paying for some of your college you plan this out enough you may have a few things taken care of before you even get to college so this is a really huge advantage so thank you equal opportunity schools at Prince William County Dr McDade I love this thank you I just um want to kind of reframe again that opportunity gaps I'm I'm enjoying how they're displayed here um but it's it's everywhere because it depends on what the the the achievement is that we're trying to produce it could be in sports it could be in um especially program participation what chance mentioned earlier about Robotics and every student being able to participate um I don't want
159us to get so caught up in the which I love because I didn't have as a student the ability to take an AP course and take the test um these things matter I also want to bring bring it back in to say that this is why I value the integrated approach that we're taking because a lot of the narrative that's missing it's great that we want to put students in these courses but you also have to have the student understand why it's important you have to have a counselor recognize the value you have to have family members or other outside resources to first to support the student when they enter that class it has to be of value to them as a student I just said like I took an AP course but couldn't take
160the test because I couldn't afford all the materials that you needed to get your final and get there and just the host of bang right that's decades ago as a parent I had my own older my eldest son drop from an advanced course because nobody in the class looked like him and it was taught by an advanced uh the same teacher who taught him an advanced course in a particular subject but not at the AP version of it and in his case it was in a Cambridge level got to the class and saw no one who looked like him saw the same teacher who taught Who provided him with a syllabus that looked very similar to just a standard Advanced course so all of it matters um and not just getting the students in the
161class but how we get them there how we support them how we change counselors Minds on what that student looks like several years ago we did a presentation to our community about what a gifted student looked like because the stereotype was the straight A student the good test taker The organized student and someone who automatically once you're gifted you go on to college and what the information that came out was no 50 of those kids drop out because they don't have any common bonds with their peers they they aren't enjoying their academic rigor or coursework most of them are not super organized or excellent test takers and proficient at writing papers it's about changing um how we View how to get students to their goals and bringing the supports needed within and with outside of
162the division to meet the needs of our students who are the ones who will end up leading us several years down the road so I just didn't want to miss that because we look at Opportunity gaps and a lot of times you see a slide like this but it's not just getting them in the class it's the counselors It's the language at home the resources it's all of it that contributes to making an opportunity Gap and again I just want to say how much I appreciate you providing this framework for all of us so that we can now begin this journey and back up the work that you've already started in the background to get us all on the same page to move all of us forward to having our students succeed no matter what
163it is AP CTE program sports program Club whatever it is so I'm very thankful and appreciative thank you I I left the room and I I don't know if anyone addressed this but the parent piece I I think that's so critical I I don't I you know I've been in this thing a long time I cannot tell you how many times I've heard people say they had better parents it's the parents fault and like the situation I had where the students I had lots of students who didn't have parents at home who could help them I didn't have a parent at home who could help me either and so I had a slide that said don't compare don't confuse parents attendance with Carrie and I think that's critical and educating parents when they know what
164to do what I was entitled one is the teacher said well the parents are not doing what we the parents are not doing what they need to do at home I said what does he want him to do and so they developed something and I don't know what your parent education and I know my friend is back there she's a new parent liaison I don't know what your new title is but it's it's it's a very needed uh element because once parents know what to do they will do it they will and some parents you know and the other thing is that I think for me and for many people in high performing schools not not comparing my school because my school was in Prince William County but their schools are all over the United
165States and Dr mcday schools are in that in that work in that research and in that research it shows that when parents know what to do they will do it and that is not Mike Meadows came here and he's a national consultant years ago and he said something that I think is is very true and that is it's not the job of parents to teach their kids it's our job to teach the kids and we can't blame parents for not teaching their kids at home because that's not their job their job is to support kids and then you have parents like Dr Latif and me and all these people up here we can help our kids at home but if you could do as much as you can to educate parents and let them know
166that their kids are bright I I think you become a superstar here tonight because everybody's just giving you so many uh accolades but I think this is something that this board not just me but this board has been talking about I know Dr Latif has been talking about it for years so we're very excited about this presentation tonight thank you very much I'll go to miss walnuts Jackson thank you I was that what Miss Jesse said was actually also what was on my mind is the parent piece because um and I think you may have addressed it in one of the slides but um I think we're going to need some education for parents as well like this is what these classes are this is what kind of support your student will need um and
167this is why we are encouraging them to do it and if you can you know when it gets hard like these are some tools to help your student you know stick with it um and and other things like that so I'm assuming that we have plans to help our parents help their students be successful in these classes um I'm assuming that we will and I'm sure we will actually and I think you did talk about it a little bit yes there's a family academic engagement component to all that we do specifically with EOS they'll be strategic and intentional communication to families also uh building their capacity on where to go to find resources and supports but not just for 11th and 12th graders how do we support them with supporting the pipeline also because the
168pipeline starts before 11 12 10th grade all of that we want to start educating our families from the beginning as early as we can so that they're able to support in a meaningful way as well thank you that is great I know in my experience it started early at elementary school and sometimes you know the gifted and talented resources that we provide and the county can dovetail with this but it's not always the gifted intelligence talented students like can we can students who aren't necessarily get identified as gift and talented who also can achieve at High academic levels with the right supports and encouragement and for instance you know how children are what what math rigor they are exposed to in fourth and fifth grade influences what placement they receive in sixth grade and that
169key placement in sixth grade math is is crucial for whether they're ready for calculus you know as a junior yeah right and so that would be you know one of their advanced classes so I really um you know I really do care about this topic um the achievement gaps the opportunity gaps the Excellence for every student finding a way to maximize their achievement help them believe in themselves and um and helping their families believe in their students ability to to achieve and to create Bright Futures for themselves so I do look forward to some great data and statistics coming forward through everybody's hard work I understand it's not just data it's the hard work that fundamentally is the hard work of our students our families and our teachers and everybody all of our professionals who
170are counselors you know all of our staff and everybody else thank you thank you Miss Jackson um I just want to take a few moments just to say thank you for the presentation tonight it was very informative in the introduction of the role of the Dei and the framework and the next steps as a board member and I think like a few of the other board members talked about their experience as a parent or a student we use our experiences to like guide our questions and make decisions so I use my experience as a student with an IEP or a special educator and a parent to try to advocate for recognizing barriers which is kind of like what you talked about tonight and I appreciate the collaboration that we often have the School Division and
171to address and move those barriers um I when I was a student I with an IEP I tried to take an AP class and I wasn't allowed to because I had an IEP in spite of my teachers trying to get me into AP Chemistry and I just would I know that was a while ago because I'm old um but I just want to use my experience to try to make sure that it you know I advocate for students that come behind me um I've appreciated the transparency tonight and in the previous data discussions um and then back to school nights and um and I just want to just Advocate as we move forward that we continue to break down the data which I know that we're going to and that um we are explicit in
172the connection between what we talked about tonight and student achievement as an educator I'm aware that consistent access and engagement is connected to student achievement and I just want to encourage that continued dialogue just so that we are you know very clear the relationship between what you talked about tonight and the Strategic plan and just thank you again I'm going to just wrap up just one comment on Dr Brown thank you for talking about the pipeline I I know you know I harp on math all the time I know that there's a lot of studies that show if you take algebra by eighth grade you're significantly um highly more likely to take advanced coursework in high school so not just the 10th and 11th and Ninth Grade just the seventh and eighth grade in sixth
173grade and as Miss wall points out the you know access to all of that just getting them into that and sort of discouraging or encouraging our students to take higher math in sixth grade and seventh grade and challenging them more will have dividends and payoffs um in in in in certainly in high school I know you all know that um as Miss Jesse points out she's correct I mean when we had this discussion on Dei a few months ago you know um and I don't want to put words in your mouth Ms Jesse but you've been around a long time and you said every 10 years we have new language to talk to talk about this stuff but ultimately it's the same thing we're trying to solve right it's the same thing we're trying to
174solve and so um thank you for this good work this is a solid plan Dr McDade thank you for this effort I think this aligns nicely with our desires to improve the Strategic plan and this is a a great um great beginning to the work we need to do to get those numbers up for everyone Dr McDade yep um I just want to extend my gratitude to the entire team for the presentation tonight I also want to thank Mr Ferreira it's very rare that we have a principal common co-present with us and so this especially with this being a new Initiative for you to step up and lead the charge and be able to share what's happening at your school as an example I'm really proud of that that level of leadership I'm here tonight
175in the boardroom so thank you so much for all of your efforts to advance this work excellent okay um moving on to the vsba Academy Awards um we're going to go quickly through this because I know the meeting's going along tonight's meeting is taking place on a Tuesday in order for board members to attend the Virginia school board association's annual conference which is attended by school boards across the state this time each year we award board members who have taken courses offered by the vsba to extend their knowledge and stay current with best practices tonight on behalf of the Virginia school board associations I'm pleased to announce Awards earned by our board members and superintendent to the vsba academy for their commitment to effective School Board governance the Virginia school boards Association is recognizing the
176following who have received and they have the clerk has the certificates award for distinctions Miss Adele Jackson Vice chair of the Prince William County School Board and School Board member of the Brunsville District Miss Jennifer wall School Board member of the Gainesville District Miss Lori Williams a school board member of the Woodbridge District next we have one board members receive the Award of Excellence and that is Miss Lily Jesse of the Occoquan district and we also now have the award for recognition Going to Miss Lisa zargapore the Kohl's district and uh I guess myself and we have our superintendent Dr McDade who is receiving the award of achievement congratulations to all thank you very much and Round of Applause Dr McKay good work uh moving on update on Safety and Security we do have um
177it's this item's on for information with a presentation this evening is requested to be added to the agenda by Miss Lori Williams along with some of the other board members um Miss wall and and Miss Jackson and zargapore and pretty much everybody Ms Williams let's turn it over to Dr McDade Dr McDade thank you Mr chairman um at this time I would now like to introduce um Peter newsham our chief of police Mr Vern Bach Chief Operating Officer and Mr Ron Crowe our director of risk management and security services and collaboratively they will be providing our presentation on Safety and Security in the school division good evening chair Latif members of the school board Dr McDade uh thank you very much for having me here I will start by saying that I do have a
178little bit of insight into the work that you do with the school board I have a sister who's an elected School Board member down in Florida and I have the Insight because she constantly tells me about how difficult it can be be to do the work that you all do I can tell you as a resident of Prince William County that work is very much appreciated because I know you're working on behalf of our public school students and so thank you for doing that Dr McDade we have quickly developed a very good strong professional relationship by necessity my personal opinions of her other than the fact that she's hard-working and committed to this work is that she really cares that has been my impression of her and I think Prince William county is very very
179lucky to have her uh the um I'm going to talk about and I have a presentation here about five topics but we can open it up for Q a at the end to talk about anything or answer any questions that you might have and really what I'm going to talk about is how the work we do at the Prince William County Police Department dovetails with the work that risk management does to ensure that our schools are safe our school communities are safe here in Prince William County we're going to talk quickly about the memorandum of agreement that was recently signed between the police department uh and the schools I'll give you a little bit of the 22 23 school year statistics talk about our current deployment of our school resource officers handling threats at our
180schools how we do that on the law enforcement side and then I want to talk at the end about it and I think this is probably extremely important on a lot of folks Minds is our training and responding to God forbid we have an act of violence situation here at one of our schools so the the memorandum of understanding uh I came from a a philosophy with regards to our school resource officers that we do not want to unnecessarily introduce children into the criminal justice system when I had came here to Prince William County I did not see that memorialized in an agreement between the police department and the schools I discussed this topic with the superintendent and very quickly we will be able we were able to get this memorandum of understanding in order
181more importantly I had to when I initially came here to Prince William County I had to meet obviously with our school resource officers and get some sense as to what was going on and and their philosophy and their approach towards the schools there had been some criticism and you know that because you were here in Prince William County about disorderly conduct arrests particularly at our schools and the fact that the Prince William County Police Department was at a very high rate introducing young people into our criminal justice system and I wanted to ensure that that philosophy changed kids should not be first in my opinion if a child has already shown up for school a student has shown up for school they've already done something good and we don't want to take them out of
182that environment in handcuffs unless it's absolutely necessary that's my philosophy on it we were able to memorialize that thought into a memorandum of understanding and I think that's critical to have that philosophy in our school system here in Prince William County uh here's a little bit of the school data and this is actually pretty impressive if you look at the number of arrests that we have had in our schools to only have five arrests three of them involving juveniles or people under the age of 18 and two of them involving adults for the Scott size of the school system we have that is a very very low number the things though that are a little bit more concerning if you look at the number of threats that we've had at our schools 46 that's a
183significant number and the threats I got to tell you and I don't have well actually I don't have to tell you very disruptive for children to have those threats can be traumatic to kids to have to experience those threats or to see those threat threats and I think we have to take the threats very very seriously and we do and I'll talk a little bit about that on the next slide you look at the weapon recoveries we've had five guns recovered from our schools so far this school year that is five too many we've also had other weapons recovered from the schools and if I want if you want to have some comparison to last year last year for the entire school year we had a total of 14 arrests four of those were adults
184and 10 were juveniles we had a 124 reported thefts I mean I'm sorry threats at our schools and we had 24 weapon recoveries and nine of those weapons were guns so I know that's very concerning for everyone to hear uh I am a firm believer and I know there are people who disagree with me and I have said this since I've came to Prince William County uh in the school resource officer program I believe that the school resource officer program is valuable in a lot of respects but in particular everyone always points to the security that the police officers can provide particularly at our high schools and I agree with that more importantly I look at our school resource officers as a way that the police department can build positive relationships with our young people
185and that's one of the things that is missing with some of our young people today because some of the things that have happened in policing have turned our young people off to policing the people who do this job at the Prince William County Police Department spend their entire day bending over backwards to develop those positive relationships and in my opinion they're being very effective at doing it and I will continue to say that and the reason that I say that because when I first came to Prince William County there were some Community leaders here and there certainly were Community leaders in other jurisdictions and some elected officials who decided that having school resource officers in the schools was detrimental to to our children I have to fundamentally disagree with that particularly and I understand the
186reasoning behind it and the reasoning behind it is that it you could have a classroom to prison Pipeline and that's a valid concern but I think there's some things that have happened here in the Commonwealth and here in Prince William County to prevent that from occurring and so I would hate to see us lose that relationship building over over that concern when I don't believe it exists right now here in the county the thing that I point to with regards to the state is as you all know the state has actually doesn't you cannot arrest young people for disorderly conduct on school property school buses at school events that's been eliminated so that concern that we had in Prince William County no longer exist I think this memorandum of understanding I talked about earlier memorializes
187our approach to arresting young people in our schools so I'll continue to say that and we can look to just a little bit further north of here we can look at the experience in Alexandria Virginia there were elected leaders that legislated that they didn't want to have school resource officers in the school shortly thereafter there was a major incident one of their schools and next thing you know the elected leaders had to reverse that decision so there's a lot of value in my opinion and having our school resource officers if the program is run appropriately uh the with regards to deployment we have a school resource officer was assigned to each of our 13 high schools we have two at independent school and we have three that are assigned to our middle schools three of
188our middle schools Fred Lynn Parkside and Ripon Middle School all have a school resource officer that's designated to the schools with the remaining remaining 18 schools we have six school resource officers each of those six officers has three of those schools and they're supposed to stop at each of those schools during the course of the day they're supposed to develop relationships with the principals and to ensure that those places are safe the other tool that we have in our toolbox to ensure that our schools are safe if we receive specific information that there could potentially be something going on at one of our schools we have everybody in our Patrol Division and we give can give special attention to our schools so our total number of sros right now is 20 24 I believe that's
189a couple more than we had last year you probably already know this as well like many other professions the policing profession is struggling right now and our staffing is low that right now is a probably the most officers that I can dedicate to this program as we increase our staffing which I know we will that will probably increase what I would like to see and I think the superintendent agrees with me on this is had to have a school resource officer assigned to all of our high schools and to all of our middle schools the key to the relationship to the to the school resource officer program is really the relationship between the officer and the administration at the individual schools I have not heard concerns from either side from the superintendent or from our
190school resource officers that those relationships are not working in a positive way so I feel very good right now about our school resource officer program talk about the talking about the threats at the school we have a very comprehensive threat Assessment program where we collaborate with the Prince William County schools risk management the administration and the families of the involved children uh we receive receive threats from multiple sources we can get them people contacting the police we got it from Prince William County uh staff and students and to say something tip line which all of you are familiar with a Virginia state code requires that Public School Employees report threats to law enforcement which is good because we need to know about it so they can be addressed they can be assessed and I can
191tell you of the 126 uh threats that we received last year and the 46 that we received this year in the large majority of those cases we're able to determine exactly where the threat came from and in the majority of those cases those threats come from students that are attending the schools and what we do in those cases is we will speak with the student uh obviously with a with a parent present uh in in the majority of those cases cases the parents are very Cooperative uh oftentimes the parents will give us if if a weapon was mentioned during the course of the threat parents will give us consent uh to search the the student's room uh and what we find out oftentimes is it was a young person doing something that young people do
192not thinking and acting oftentimes it's it's something and it's not something where a child should be charged I say that but I also caution that because these threats can be so disruptive one of the things that I would recommend is that the legislature make the charge of conducting a threat at a school as a felony right currently it is a misdemeanor and the reason I say that is because we are really restricted in our ability to investigate threats that occur outside of the Commonwealth of Virginia because we can only enforce the misdemeanors within the Commonwealth so we had a threat and I remember it from last year that originated out of New Jersey and if we were able to get a warrant in that case a misdemeanor warrant we wouldn't be able to extradite that
193person back here to be held accountable for it I know earlier today and some of you may know this as well in Maine they had multiple uh you know calls for active Shooters occurring in the state of Maine all over the state of Maine a very disruptive very scary to our kids and I think when people are involved in that behavior to ensure that it doesn't happen again we need to have some pretty significant repercussions and law enforcement needs to have the ability to cross state lines in those cases to hold folks accountable oh the act of violence training and our response I'll talk about this as quickly as I can to get through it I have been very impressed with the level of training that our police officers receive here in Prince William County
194with regards to responding to active shooting we have what's called tactical emergency care training and what that is is for our officers in the event they come into an active violence situation where people are being injured a mass casualty event that they have the ability to stop people who are significantly injured they actually practice this in our community on a pretty regular basis where they save lives the high threat response training is in collaboration with fire and rescue and what that is in the event of an active shooter situation an act of violence situation that the police and the fire department can go in there together and get people to safety get people to emergency rooms we are lot team we have a SWAT team that conducts regular training throughout the year the little box
195on the right there which talks about our active shooter response that is uh that is a philosophy that is good for everybody in every situation and I don't know if you've heard of it before you probably have it's the Run hide or fight and that applies just to about any situation where it could happen anywhere in the community certainly it applies in our schools our community engagement team gives that presentation if you haven't had it I would recommend that you do uh then there's some examples of recent trainings that we we uh gave the one at the uh annual conference that the school has was very well attended from what I understand um the officers who uh who gave the presentation said that the administration people who were in the class were actively involved in
196participating in the training so I think that was extremely helpful now this is the part of the presentation I think that scares us the most uh and now when I talk about this I will refer to the one I think that's most recent in our memories and that's the shooting that we had in Uvalde Texas where 19 children were killed and two teachers were killed and I think that anybody who's taken a look at that can say that that was an abject failure on the part of a lot of people the school administration has some blame in that they did not properly secure the facility the person that was involved in that event was an evil person and they went in there with a desire to harm children uh and that sometime is unavoidable but
197if doors were locked and they had a proper security protocols at that particular School some children may still be alive today and then when you talk about the law enforcement response I think uh that again abject failure you had uh 77 minutes I think it was that children were waiting inside when this person in some instances was still shooting you had some children in there that were injured and they didn't get proper medical care I can tell you I am very confident that that would not happen God forbid we had an incident like that here in Prince William County the training that our officers received first of all we are always in preparation mode when incidents like that happen in Uvalde Texas we take very very close look at it to any any lessons that
198are learned from that to improve our training to improve our potential response we not only train our recruits in active violence scenarios but we do on ongoing training with all of our police officers we have we are very fortunate in Prince William County to have our own Police Academy so we can adjust training very quickly for these types of things we have what we what is called scenario Based training and we run all of our police officers through a number of different scenarios and it's been my experience in my policing career that the best way to be able to approach these incidents not only with your law enforcement Personnel but anybody students staff anybody that's involved in these situations you have to be thinking about it before it happens and I know this is not
199a topic that we want to think about but unfortunately in society today this can happen and we saw it happen in Uvalde Texas and that's not the only police shooting I mean that's not the only school shooting that we have seen just like was mentioned earlier just this past Sunday we had three young people that were killed at a school down at UVA so this happens this is real what I tell people all the time as the chief of police doing policing for 32 years don't ever underestimate the evil of man and that is not a jaded approach that's an unfortunate reality of the world we live in so you have to think about these things before they're happening and those are the things that we tell our police officers the approach to these situations
200changed dramatically after the Columbine incident that was in 1999 I was a police captain at the time and what happened at Columbine Columbine and this is the way that police were trained to approach active violent situations was you wait you contain and you wait to your special teams arrive on the scene that was the approach that changed in 1999 and it actually hasn't evolved since then the approach then what since then is that you get when something like this has happened it's an active situation quickly get officers to this scene you establish incident command that was the major one of the major criticisms that we had in Uvalde is they did not establish incident command some of you may be saying well what's the chief talk about talking about what is incident command what that
201means is the first police officer that arrives on the scene is in command and they are in command until somebody of of a higher rank comes and relieves them they are in command that's the first rule the second rule is that if there's an act of violence situation and one of our police officers arrived they don't wait for help we are trained we have equipment we have vests you go in there and you stop the threat and that's the way that our officers are trained here in Prince William County some of these other things are going to happen a lot of these things are going to be happening during the same time you safely evacuate or shelter in place and people will ask well which one do we do it depends on the circumstances I
202can't tell you right now in every single situation what you do but you go back to that mentality of run hide or fight you run if you can safely you hide if you can safely in your last resort if neither of those options are available is that you fight and you fight in the hardest and the in the most extreme way that you can uh medical care we have to coordinate Medical Care with fire and rescue we have to have to establish reunification because something happens at any large event uh particularly at our schools guess what's going to happen all of the parents associated with that school will come in we have to set up a reunification point and notifying the public that's that's one of the things that we have to do we have
203to let people know Uh something's going on these things will all be happening at the same time our police department is very well equipped we have breaching tools you heard a lot of uh when you talk about the Uvalde situation you heard a lot about police officers trying to get through doors and having difficulty and not having keys and those kinds of things that is not a concern here in Prince William County we have breaching tools if we need to get through a door or a window we're going through that door or their window we're going to get in there we're going to stop the threat um we have great Partnerships with our and you know we have the FBI located right here in Prince William County we have great relationships with our federal Partners
204it brings additional resources if we need them great relationship with our Virginia State Police if we need them uh our response times are going to be very quick in in the event God forbid like I said if something like this happens uh and the other thing and this is one of another one of the Grim realities is that the reason that I'm confident with the way that the police department will respond if something like this were to happen is that we have shooting incidents like this that have happened you guys all remember that we had a shooting on a Sunday at Benton Illinois elementary school I'm sorry that was a bent middle school during a flag football game a lot of people are out there Prince William County Police responded to that incident they were
205quickly able to get medical care to the two people that were shot both of those people survived they were able to get the the to coordinate reunification with the families and the children um and then the good news is is that the person that was responsible for that was eventually arrested and held accountable the other incident is last year uh in August of 21 we had a shooting during a football game at Freedom High School for those of you who are familiar with that situation it was during a driving rainstorm and there was that we had that same situation whenever you have gunshots at an event like that there's Panic people panic people and that's natural it's normal police were able to respond they were able to get medical attention to the person that was
206involved they were able to establish a reunification Center and they were able to get that scene resolved pretty quickly the person that was responsible for that shooting was also arrested and held accountable that's why I'm confident I can't tell you I don't lose sleep thinking about these things because I do but that's why I'm confident that you have a police department here in Prince William County that has the ability to effectively respond if something like this has happened that is the end of my presentation I don't know if we want to ask Ron to come up and give his and then we can collect it or if you'd like to make comments or ask questions now and chief thank you so much for that presentation let's have Ron do his presentation and the con then
207all right the questions may be better with context from both uh thank you Chief newsham and I want to thank chief personally for his continued support of our schools and for the strong relationship that we enjoy with the Prince William County Police Department and our relationship with our school resource officers in the district before I start tonight too I want to extend just my heartfelt condolences to the UVA and Charlottesville Community that's a community I lived in for 17 years and my thoughts and prayers go out to that Community but that also highlights the importance for us of Safety and Security within our schools so through our close relationship and partnership with Prince William County Department of fire and rescue and the office of emergency management we collectively take steps every day to make our
208schools safer and reduce the probability of an incident that can harm students staff or visitors Prince William County schools implements required safety training in schools every year and it is only through practicing lockdowns defend options like run hide fight fire drills weather drills shelter in place procedures and other scenarios that students and staff can be prepared for an emergency Additionally the school system has established a Safety Committee that meets regularly to discuss safety in our schools and I personally want to thank extend and extend my gratitude to members of that committee through that ongoing dialogue and focus on school safety we're continuing continually evaluating our safety procedures across every level throughout each school year tonight you'll receive a high level update on security and safety initiatives and programs in our schools that are occurring across
209the division I want to emphasize that this is high level a high level update and there are many safety protocols and procedures that we will not share tonight as we keep them close to the vest and they're not for public consumption we keep these items close to the vest to keep our students faculty and staff safe finally it's important to recognize that everyone plays a critical role in school safety students staff in the community are encouraged to be observant and let an adult know if they see or hear something that makes them feel uncomfortable nervous or frightened and especially if they hear threats or dangerous Behavior if you have any doubt contact law enforcement immediately at this time I want to turn the rest of the presentation over to Mr Ron Crowe our director of
210risk management and Safety and Security Ron thank you good evening uh chairman Latif Dr McDade and school board members I appreciate the opportunity tonight to share this information with you I do want to thank uh chief newsham for being here this evening we have a decades-long partnership with the Prince William County Police Department and specifically the SRO unit that unit works with our schools and my department literally around the clock on school safety issues and I can't tell you how much we appreciate their uh their partnership in that thank you so we want to talk about uh things that we're doing in Safety and Security and I think we want to catch that with what's in our strategic plan so our Safety and Security initiatives live under commitment number two of positive climate and culture
211uh we want to have Prince William County's facilities be welcoming safe and sustainable with 90 percent of our students and staff reporting feeling safe at school right now our middle and high school students that never number number hovers around 80 percent and we have area for improvement there I'm confident that we have a plan in place to be able to move those numbers significantly and uh impact student achievement so what are our initiatives and Investments uh our initiatives which I'll talk about individually are implementing the say something an honest Reporting System uh annual school safety assessments updating uh some of our systems the more current Technologies providing for a consistent visible and well-trained security staff and increasing crisis management Readiness Division wide some of our investments we've made just this year are the addition of
212three senior school security officers a security systems specialist an operational system specialist an additional elementary school safety officer and additional day shift security patrol officer and 97 security assistants we provided support to every level of schools and for those of you all counting at home that is 104 ftes dedicated to School Safety and Security just this year or say something initiative was launched in December of 2021 and has been fully implemented we've trained more than 40 000 Secondary School students more than thirteen hundred staff have been trained uh in October there's an annual refresher uh video and training provided to these students so we can keep the say something initiative on the Forefront and just to give you an update of where we're at since December 6 till the end of October we've managed and
213responded to 447 tips at the top of that list are concerns with students mental health I can tell you that it's it's nice to be able to say that we've had students in need and we've been able to provide assistance to them other things that come in behind that are threats to schools regarding typically social media issues and all of those received 24 7 365 day support we're conducting annual school safety assessments the state requires that you do them every three years we're doing them every year to try to identify areas of improvement across our School Division and we revive view those findings with the safe School advisory Council so they can provide input force on that and and provide some guidance and focus our efforts improving our Technologies in the school division we are
214updating all of our schools to a more current CCTV platforms called vercata that's a 6.8 million dollar investment that's a significant investment in upgrading all of our school security systems for cameras we have hired a security system specialist to manage that process uh recently you approved in the last score school board meeting an addition of two vendors to make three vendors that can provide installations at our school so we're going to kick this thing into overdrive but prior to that we've currently completed installations of 23 schools we have 10 schools that have partial implementation five underway and 12 purchase orders out for approval with cameras ordered so we're moving forward pretty quickly um we also have requested funding through the annual safe schools uh State security grant for additional funding uh at a high school
215we want to provide for a consistent visible and well-trained security staff for this year and starting this year we provided security uniforms to all of our school security officers we want them to be visible and recognized by our staff students and Community when they show up and also our law enforcement Partners if they have to respond that includes shirts we've got winner uh jackets for them they're all branded with pwcs security as well as hats and stocking hats we want them to be highly visible in addition to that we want our staff to be visible so whenever they're outside they're wearing high visibility vests and they're carrying radios I was at two elementary schools recently one during dismissal and when it pulled up I saw half a dozen staff outside wearing vests you knew exactly
216where they were and that people were outside and paying attention so I think that's vitally important uh let's talk about professional development a minute for our school security officers the state requires that we do eight hours of training annually to complete and update their school security officer training our school division is fortunate enough to provide 36 hours of training annually to our school security officer staff to provide for a more coherent Safety and Security processes at all of our schools we have security uh information and our regulations we have in our crisis management plan our security guidelines it became apparent that we needed to condense that information so as more easily used by the end users so we came back to with a document a one-page document called Back to Basics that we launched back
217in the spring and re-emphasized at the beginning of school and on that document is 20 things that every school should have in place every time we walk up to a school so we go up we look and we see hey here's your 20 things that's our security posture that's where we want to live every single day at every single School we expanded that with our Prince William County School's guide to best practices and School Safety and Security and added to that one-page document additional information that's easy to find and easy to understand with the links to other information for schools so if you look between those two documents it's readily apparent and clear what our security posture and training is for for our entire School Division we want to increase our division-wide crisis management Readiness
218as we spoke a little bit earlier there are 15 required crisis drills each year last year we purchased the Raptor crisis drill manager module we're able to track all school crisis strolls every year so at any given time we can look and help Focus schools and help remind them of drills that need to be completed on a regular basis they can go and plan drills ahead of time so that's a good tool for us to use to make sure we're completing all of our drills as required by the code of Virginia um my staff reviews all crisis plans during the summer that's also state code requirements so every page they turn in uh that's required to turn and review every single one of those to make sure they're up to date and current we are
219completing starting last year after action assessments for significant security events in schools the the goal of that is to look at things and help schools understand and celebrate the things that went well and things they did well as well as areas that we could look for improvement moving forward and that includes central office staff my staff our law enforcement partners and any of the school staff that were involved in that process and decision making process we share that with other schools to make sure everyone's learning and we're in a process of continuous Improvement uh we provide to the cabinet on a monthly basis data-driven reports on school security and safety and what our posture is it became apparent that we need to start treating school safety like we do in structure we have measured goals
220and we have to have defined data to determine where we're at and measure that so we can again celebrate our our the things that are going well and look to improve things that need um need Improvement also in our uh strategic plan by 2025 we'll have annual crisis training and evaluation of all schools so we're looking at how we're going to support that and move forward and grow our training staff so we can be out at schools on a more regular basis I do want to talk about our senior school security officers for a minute because they fulfill a role that has been and been badly needed in the school division so we added three positions they all support our high and middle schools they provide a value of data on our school security posture
221every time they walk on site so they're working with schools on that Back to Basics when they're on site and providing feedback and training to schools security staff and administration on where we're at they assist with crisis response on School site and they also will be working with schools when we receive after hours threats to make sure that we have a proper response communication is in place and the morning after that we have support at the schools for those events and one of the other things we heard loud and clear from our high and Middle School administrators is you know we don't have our lead school security person here we need support for that we need to fill that leadership void at the school because it's vitally important so these three positions when we have
222a lead school security officer out at the school will fill that position until a new officer comes in then they'll train that person on best practices and our guide and Back to Basics to make sure we're coherent across our School Division at those schools and also Mentor our new school security officer so you know I think that goes a long way to make sure that we're all doing the same thing and we have a well-trained staff at our schools and you know on and just to make mention of our elementary school Community safety officers a couple of them are here with us tonight they'll be providing those same services at our elementary schools so what are some of our school security initiatives we have senior school security officers Community safety officers security patrol officers and
223security residents supporting our school security posture they're out every day walking Rounds Around schools around the outside because most importantly we want to make sure our schools are secure from the outside in through October they've done more than 900 exterior rounds of schools during the school day in our security residents and security patrol staff have done thousands of rounds of our stereo of our of the school exteriors during after hours and overnight shifts so we're out there constantly supporting our school security posture we've standardized our security protocols for Varsity full School football games as well as other after school events I think if you've been to a football game you'll see a very visible presence where we're stationed at areas in the school we always have a police officer in the parking lot with lights
224on riding around during the game so it's very evident that we have a security posture in place at our schools we have pre-shift meetings we have radio communications for all of our school and administrative staff with the police department and communication with the other schools that are traveling to games to make sure we're on the same page we've trained all of our security staff on the use of Narcan we will continue that with our new security ftes added this year and and do annual trainings to make sure all of our security staff are trained in that and and have that Narcan available they carry uh carry themselves and then excuse me as far as signage we posted weapons and gun free school zone signs uh that also have the legal and code of con consequences
225we are also reviewing you know what the total signage package is for school so we can have that be consistent across the school division last year we provided the school's high visibility lanyards you've seen those they're uh conference space lanyards so they're always forward-facing they have the visitor badge in them it's clear who your visitors are at schools we have provided for uh QR code security round system so essentially every time our security staff whether they be school staff security residents or our security patrol staff does rounds of schools we're capturing that data so what's get what gets measured gets done so on a regular basis we can show you exactly what our security efforts are at schools um we implemented that over the summer with our Patrol and residents and with our school security
226officers in October again I talked about our crisis drill reporting module that's another way where we've upgraded our technology and we were recently awarding a state digital school mapping Grant to have a company come in and go to every single one of our schools and provide extremely detailed maps that will be used by law enforcement on emergency responses needed so there's a lot of information on those Maps we can also use them in our school division for certain things but we're looking forward to getting that done for FY 24 to 26 we're going to be replacing all of our 800 megahertz radios so those radios are used by all of our school buses security patrol staff and my office all schools have an 800 megahertz radio they can make direct contact with the public safety
2279-1-1 call center and every so often we have to upgrade that technology every year you hear Mr Wallingford talk about putting hundreds of thousand dollars into a sinking fund for this so we have money in our budget to uh we've been that we've been working on for about 10 years to fund this project so we'll be working on that over the next couple years But ultimately I just want to talk about a few things on what we're doing to keep schools safe clearly we need to keep all of our interior and exterior doors locked exterior doors all time and interior doors and wherever we're involved in student instruction we don't have time when there's an event to get into a secure posture we need to already be in a secure posture we've had this requirement
228for numbers of years we're out with our staff making sure that we're being coherent and training our our staff and school security staff to look for these and make sure we are in a secure posture at all times all schools have controlled access so we have the access control system where we can evaluate people before they come into the building and that's called the a phone system we do training on how to talk and question to people while they're outside before they come into the building all school have schools have crisis plans that we talked about and all schools have to watch our crisis management terminology and response video annually that's a state code requirement that will review crisis procedures with all staff and students every year at the beginning of school so we also
229do that as far as continuous Improvement we're always seeking that we're currently reviewing our central office crisis response protocols to increase our support to schools during crisis we're looking at our incident command structure and communication protocols our crisis intervention teams are always there to help with mental health support to schools after crisis we're looking at up implementing a division-wide reunification support team so if we do have to move a number of students from one school to another we have a trained staff team that we can go out and assist schools with that we want to provide more supports to schools during crisis um we are reviewing our crisis management plan uh to make it more easily consumed by our end users um so while a lot of the content will remain the same how we
230present it we think will be easier for uh staff and students to understand and consume so we're looking at that and of course as usual we always attend National Level Training so we can always you know be aware of what the newest things are out there and keep our staffing or response actions up today so that concludes my presentation thank you very much Mr Crow thank you Mr Bach Chief news and we really appreciate it questions uh we'll start with Miss uh Williams and then Mr welcome thank you um chairman Latif thank you gentlemen for coming and presenting information this evening for me I asked for this to be on the agenda because I started thinking about School Safety and Security specifically from a parent perspective last year after the incident in my end of
231town and how information was disseminated and then the changes that ensue for for the good for our School Division um and then as a board member specifically I thought I started thinking how do we present this information to our school families because we do spend a considerable amount of time throughout our school year every year updating our students our staff and our families of those students and staff on what it is that we do to ensure a safe School environment but I think or I know for me it was how do we consolidate that information because the public outcry was what about this what about this what about this every time we have an incident it got me to really thinking we do this all the time but we don't do it in a manner
232that's concise and we don't do it often enough in a manner that's concise for the good of our whole Community right when we start our school year we go over the code of behavior love that we've updated it it's so much easier to understand and comprehend throughout the school year thank you Miss hubner throughout the school year we address these topics but we don't just have one opportunity to share multiple sides of this story for our school Community to understand and digest so I want to say thank you first off because I understand and know the amount of work that it takes to consolidate this information the amount of schedule coordination it takes to get Chief newsham here everything involved in this presentation so I really do um from the bottom of my heart appreciate
233all of you coming tonight and for the all the hard work that went into having both of these presentations made available for our public I think that's something our public also doesn't understand is you can have an idea in July it may not manifest here in this room sometime for several months because of the amount of moving pieces um I'm going to start with Chief newsham star if since you started with the prison open us up this evening I very much appreciate you attending I have the opportunity unlike some of my other board members to work with you monthly on the racial and Social Justice Commission I bring that up because I admire all of your hard work and effort I think that the racial and Social Justice Commission was a very important tool used
234to bring more public attention to the memorial of understanding and what that exactly means to our community I appreciate that we were able to look at it from an administrative and operational side at the school division but also to be able to provide the public the same sort of opportunity to delve into that and what it means to our schools and how our schools work collaboratively with the police department I want to thank you as a long-serving school board member because I think I was maybe Mr Crow you could probably attest to this one of the primary school board members that hounded every year that we looked at it and our former Administration and of course you Mr crow about what's in there and how are we going to change it and how does this
235what does this mean how does it how do we take it from a document and implement it and I think that starting with that Foundation Building on it with our new Administration and our new chief of police and his administration I think we have something that I feel comfortable and for my lens is a quality document that really ensures collaboration and the ability to work for the good of our entire School Division and the community at large from both sides I noticed that in your presentation you changed it to a memorandum of agreement which I thought was great because it's more than just an understanding and I think it's important if you have not had a chance for a public to read that agreement I I highly encourage you to do so um I um
236you talked a lot about Chief notion about the ratio offices ratio of sros in our schools and I just want to thank you for also bringing up the fact that along with school divisions the police are also having Employment Staffing issues and that does affect us one of the things that's not included in your presentation but I don't want to leave out is that the police department is also responsible for crossing guards I'm not mistaken they're also an important tool and are ensuring the Safety and Security of our students and I think I bring that up because a lot of our public doesn't understand that crossing guards fall under your auspices and not ours if you don't mind me commenting real quickly on that we have a very committed uh really remarkably committed group of
237folks who go out and ensure that our children get to and from school on a daily basis and a great group of folks and they are part of our security plan so thank you for raising that absolutely I bring it up because I I know that my um School Board member who sat here before me ended up retiring and becoming a school crossing guard officer so that was a fun fact about the Woodbridge District um I know that you spoke about response time in the past we had Chief Bernard here who spoke it's about how depending on what school you're at correct it's usually uh very quick I don't want to get down to the nitty-gritty minutes because of course our community has changed and then um and I appreciate that um one of the
238things I I'd like for you to address but at a high level is how we work together during an emergency I bring this up because earlier this year there was an incident at my high school and there was I think a lot of misunderstanding from the public and some of our own staff and and students on how it is that you work collaboratively with our school security teams meaning um there is a protocol that the police department has to follow and then there's also a set of protocols that our School Division follows as well and I don't need the specifics right because we don't want to jeopardize anybody's um safety but I know that they're for example there was a I got a call from a parent who was on site and said well I
239heard the police gave the all clear how come everyone's still in the building and if you could speak to that maybe Mr Crow I don't know who else from our side would jump in but I think it's important for the public to understand that we work together but there are still separate procedures for each entity to ensure safety and who's responsible sort of along those lines during an emergency yeah it's a really good question and I will tell you if you do after action reports on any critical incident one of the reoccurring concerns is communication and everybody you know Communications comes from a bunch of different sources so we spend a lot of time collaboratively talking about better Communications when we have an incident that occurs at the school and we feel like communication was
240flawed we try to improve that the best way for communication to occur is and I go back to what I spoke about earlier is the relationship with the SRO and the administrator who's in charge of the school which is usually the principal in the event of of a situation at the school they should be communicating and then we allow the schools to make the communication either to the parents or the students on what is needed to be said ultimately that decision lies with the principle unless it's an immediate emergency and we tell them you can't do things ultimately it's going to be the principle that's going to make those decisions and those Communications thank you I appreciate that because I think there's a in a fall time in Muslims one of the things that you've
241heard both gentlemen talk about was an incident command structure and so typically that's established jointly with police on scene at fire in EMS come on scene it's a joint collaboration which would include our staff in there and and I will tell you that Mr Crowe and I both attended the debris for the after action of the incident that you're referring to and chief Newsom is is is is totally accurate it always comes down to communication and then working through that to recognize where those breakdowns occurred take away that learning and not only do we share that with amongst the team members there but our plan moving forward we've implemented this is to share that learning across the district kind of like a case study approach so that our principals across the district can learn from
242what went well and where we needed to improve that way if they encounter a similar situation they'll know how to better respond at their site thank you I appreciate it I'm only picking on this incident because it's my district um and and I think it's a a very recent thing for for most people to be able to identify with um the the last thing I'm going to ask um I think is for chief newsham is what from your perspective as a law enforcement officer advice because you look through it through a different length than we do as a School Division for our our school families when it comes to responding to incidences or how to best communicate with law enforcement what advice would you impart for us so what I would say that our worst
243enemy enemy insecurity generally is complacency uh we talked and Ron talked about it I talked about it as well because of the situation in Uvaldi but the the Locking of the doors to ensuring that the doors people don't get access to the doors if you have a bad actor and that bad actor actually attends the school they're going to be watching those things complacency occurs when uh the adults who have responsibility sees those things and they don't do anything about it because they they look at it and they say well the the kids were just getting Chick-fil-A for lunch you know I mean and they they downplay the significance of not having the building be secure so that complacency is is the type of thing that we're struggling all the time with our adults to
244say you can't be complacent about that I'm not saying that a kid has to be punished or you know be suspended or anything like that but there there needs to be a conversation with the students that this can be very very serious if you leave those doors open it gives somebody who's watching an opportunity to enter our schools and once they get in the schools and if they have bad intent bad things are going to happen thank you I appreciate that I understand that as a former facility security officer I think I spent it felt like Anyway half of my job going don't let the next person in let the door lock let them hit the buzzer I know you know them but it doesn't matter because someone could be coming right after them so
245I I do appreciate that and it is a different lens than we look through as from a School Division perspective or an average person I would just add to that I I wish we didn't live in a world where we needed to do that but we do right and that's what I think that we do on a regular basis just reminding folks during the summer time we spend a lot of time with risk a lot of time with staff trying to re-emphasize that these things are real they can happen and we gotta ensure that it doesn't happen here in Prince William County that's wonderful thank you I appreciate that I'm gonna switch gears a little bit and turn to our school um staff for Mr Crow Mr Bach thank you for your presentation this evening
246um I I was wondering if you could um speak a little bit I'm just gonna piggyback on that question since we're already there from your lens um on the School Division side what recommendations would you have for our school families students and staff um for school safety or things that you think that are good to just generally remind our public about yeah I mean I think a couple things um you know we have some of the staff we talked about today we have 10 to 14 staff on the road every single day visiting schools making sure that we're in a security posture we want to be in and again complacency is that uh we need to have people have some patience sometimes so when you're at the door trying to come in understand we're going
247through a process to let people into the school it may take a few minutes on occasion and I think the other thing too is to understand what we're going through a crisis Communications we can't compete with social media so people are immediately on their phones and texting things and putting things out and wondering why we're a little bit behind that curve because we have an obligation uh to work with the schools to work with the police department to make sure the information we're putting out is correct and accurate and to make sure information we're putting out isn't going to undermine any information or efforts that the police have uh to manage that process so just from a couple of those standpoints I think those are important things to to remember and Miss Williams I'll add
248you know one of the things that I mentioned in my opening comments really parents having conversations at home and encouraging their kids if you see something say something that's really important we get a lot of tips from students that enable us to follow up uh and and you know ensure safety within the building and the other thing I always go back to is safety is never convenient you know and you just heard Brian talk about that a little bit sometimes it's not convenient but we do those things with purpose and we do those things to keep our students safe one of the things I think it was the incident that occurred in St Louis we took that opportunity there was a they handled it really well there wasn't a significant loss of life because there
249were locked doors in the school interior doors were locked so we took that opportunity to remind our school community and our principals and teachers that it is important to keep our interior doors locked and remain in that security posture thank you could you speak a little bit um because something I learned at parent Title One camp and I'm not sure that the word is really spread out there mostly because it would be dependent on your student to come home and tell you and depending on their age and how much they want to share you get what you get sometimes but I I wonder if you could speak to a little bit about how we've modified our approach to be age appropriate and easily comprehendable by our students and relevant because I as the chief was
250saying you know before we didn't have like what is it a run uh hide fight right most of us I think at least speaking for my generation is sort of hide right wait for backup and then you just don't do anything so we continue to modify and evolve those procedures but I was very impressed with what I thought the parent one Title One family camps excuse me and I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how we're doing that division wide and and how it's being modified I don't know that we're modifying I do know that you know when they review I spoke about our crisis management video there's one that we showed in middle and high school students and staff and there's another video that doesn't include some information that Elementary School
251students watch so we provide information on crisis management and response but I really think the teachers and the staff at the school are the ones who know how to take that information and provide communicate that in an age-appropriate manner to their students they're with them every day they know what students in their classroom can manage and handle so we're going to provide them information we're going to rely on them to provide that in an age-appropriate Manner and Miss Williams I think what you might be referring to is when Mr Edwards goes out to our schools and provides training for our students he does adapt it so that that training is age-appropriate I've been in elementary middle and high school principal and there is a significant difference in how you do go about presenting that in
252information I will tell you that we receive overwhelmingly positive feedback from our students our students appreciate Mr Edwards going out and and they express they're very open with him when he goes out to train and safety is is first and foremost on their mind they have concerns and they're always very appreciative and the comments that we get about his training are always very positive from the students they're appreciative and they want to have it but yes we do adapt that according to the level of students we're training okay I'm going to wrap this up because I know other people have to talk have questions I just want to say I appreciate that because I think that marries very nicely with dealing with our students mental health while they're learning these subjects these trainings and and
253learning why security and safety is important and how to respond and not just being put through go to the hallway sit down it can be traumatizing especially for our younger ones and so I appreciate that's sort of what I was referencing with the modernization the last thing that I'm gonna say is I I again want to thank you for being here in person I think there's a tremendous amount of value to being able to see the people who are responsible for at a high level for our Safety and Security this is what you do for your job day to day for our students how it is impactful in other areas of our student and our staffs lives on a day-to-day basis and to you Chief Newsom I think that again there's so much value in
254seeing our local chief of police here in our boardroom communicating with our school families and our school Community I think that shows such a high level of respect for our school community and how well we work together to ensure the safety of our school family so thank you very much I appreciate all of your time okay Mr Wilk thank you all for being here Chief newsham everyone I appreciate your time the good thing of following Miss Williams there's a lot of stuff gets answered um so I will go through and just a couple noticeable things and and and reiterate some points that she made um you know that SRO deployment slide slide five I think that's very important um Mr Crowe would know being on the safe schools with me for five years I think
255Ad nauseam I kept on saying like why can't we have more sros why isn't this made you know why why isn't anyone explaining this because you know citizen a citizen B whatever want to know why we can't put more sros in our school and you know the perception might be that the school board doesn't want more sros in the school and I appreciate you detailing exactly kind of where we're at in that situation right now um and and I see you guys everywhere at hiring fairs community events so it's not a matter of not trying to hire new officers because I don't think there's ever been an event I've never you know a senior group at trying to recruit new officers but I just wanted to add that and I appreciate you know you being
256forward with that because if we follow then Mr Crow's presentation and put everything in context the fact that this board hired 104 ftes uh to 100 how many I said 104. okay we'll say 140 140 or 104 or whatever there's a difference but anyways so that number of ftes um just last year and those Investments I think are crucial especially adding those security Specialists to uh the elementary schools as we phase those in and look at other precautionary measures just other comments the visible uniforms I know I think I heard from some security site-based people at first that they weren't extremely happy with those but as I've seen it and the application of it I think it's great it gives that presence to the students the staff and I think from a parent or an
257outsider's standpoint it gives that level of assurance like oh these are people who are actually like in the school or Specialist or people helping protect the kids so I like that um you kind of answered slide nine of what percentage uh you know those uh three um experts are on site versus at central office it seems like they're at schools a lot yeah the idea okay um other noticeable things to add you know I've gone to probably football football games 75 of my Fridays this fall and I've noticed some major differences even over the last you know year um the safety security the presence of police you know just even how the students interact with them or the behaviors which have completely changed and been tempered and stuff like that and I think again that's
258a testament to the protocols and the implementation of making sure that there's protection at these events such as you know a football game or now we'll be hitting varsity basketball season and you know those Friday night or Thursday night games so just you know a major recognition to that I wanted to recognize that I wanted to add with the say something thing um from just from uh back inside so if a submission comes in and I imagine the answer to this is you know yes but if a student says or someone puts in that you know they're going to harm themselves or they're going to harm Pharma school like a threat that I'm assuming there's an IP like what is the process that goes into something like that when that type of incident occurs so
259if they come in uh After Hours the first thing that occurs is there's a call to the police department uh to the 911 dispatch Center we're getting people moving the next call R2 they make positive contact with the central Office Team and the school based team to provide an immediate response so it's a it's literally a 24 7 365 process no matter when it comes in if there's kids that need help in the middle of the night we're up you know 1 2 A.M providing addresses to wherever they need to go to chase that information so until until we go to completion whether it's a student in need or or a threat that comes in excellent and then the last thing I think it was briefly touched on but you know when we're talking about
260the tragedies of Uvalde or Sandy Hook and all those events where our teachers were on the front lines and horribly sometimes the shields to protecting those children what role has teacher feedback or collaboration gone into all these protocols and the site-based you know this different uh procedures and stuff like that when you guys are factoring in you know these security drills or what occurs in these scenarios you know to make the teachers feel more comfortable uh with what we're trying to implement yeah I mean that's a difficult situation when you're training people to respond to the incidents that we're talking about um I think the Comfort comes into making sure they're trained and well prepared I mean these are nationally recognized by Express practices that we're going through and making sure we're aware and not
261be complacent is the chief it's uh those are the major uh components that we we you know try to keep in control and manage so we do listen to the principles we've got numbers these you know the of additional security assistance uh for response to them uh our hiring processes have been uh changed due to input from principles uh at every level for some of our security staff and so we do seek input and we try to update and change our processes to uh to be responsive to those excellent thank you all for being here and Miss Williams thank you for adding this to the agenda appreciate all of you for being here this wall I know it's really late so I will be brief but I just wanted to say um next to student
262achievement this topic of school safety and student safety is just like right up there for me personally and I wanted to thank you for this great information detailed presentation both from the chief and from our schools um and I you know you write what gets measured gets done I really like that quote um and I know as I've advocated for additional security measures um at individual schools in my district that I'm aware of had issues or needed additional security coverage those requests were well received and then all of these all of these security initiatives are just amazing they're so we've done so much and I'm really impressed um and I also really value the partnership that we have with the police department the SRO program is fantastic I hear really good things from the community
263about how valuable the community sees that relationship and how well it's working I only have one high school so I can speak for the high school that I keep tabs on so they're just really pleased so I just wanted to thank all of you who have worked on this your staff police officers everybody for prioritizing student safety and I know you know this is one of the most important things that we do is providing an environment where people especially children but our employees as well feel safe coming and learning and if they feel safe they'll be able to they'll be able to learn and grow so I know it's vitally important I just wanted to thank you Miss Jesse I I too will be briefed uh Mr Crow I want to thank you guys because
264you know I've been here for a long time and I want to thank you for keeping us safe the table talks the Intruder in the building all those things I want to thank you and to the chief of police I want to thank you for bringing up what happened in Texas because as a former principal I sat there that day thinking what's happening with these babies and why is no one doing anything and thank you I think this helps the parents to know that there is what you call an incident command and all the back and forth people's talking and I can remain relate my first thought was this principle should be in trouble in fact my principal friends called me and said why was that door open I don't know if the door was
265open or the infamous rocking the door which you always have at schools I just want to thank you guys for coming tonight and sharing everything with us thank you very much Miss Jack and I'll be with you too because it's getting late um just thank you Chief Nissan for coming tonight um I I agree that SOS are valuable and um both from building relationships to security I have a really quick question because I say someone's driving by a school and they see a door open what would be the best steps like because the tip line would that wouldn't be that like what would what would you advise the best steps would be yeah I mean we can respond to things we know about or someone sees a door open I'd you know have them call
266School administration and report that we're going to be responsive to that we're going to figure out uh why that's the case and move forward with fixing the problem um obviously that should not be the case at any uh school that we have and we're looking to you know be hyper focused on that to make sure that that's not the case so if you do see those things reported to the school or Administration or my office we'll reach out and and manage that situation so call the school okay thank you Miss Williams thank you Mr chairman I know that you're I know I'm taking a long time I don't have anything that you need to answer right now I just want to throw these out there in the atmosphere and hopefully we'll um pick it back
267up at a later time I'd be interested on some more information on how much of the students are reporting incidences in school versus other sources um which we don't have to get into tonight because it's late I'd also be interested in how we're using our Dei Focus to deal with student safety how we're addressing that with different particular groups because every group has a different idea of perceived safety and of course culture and climate depending on where you come from that means something different to you as well and then um for a later date maybe you know the next time we reconvene or have this opportunity to really hear about what we should be doing or focused on for next steps for continuing to build a relationship specifically with students and and law enforcement from
268where the students sit in their purview and then also what options um we may be thinking about as a division in the future and that's it thank you outstanding Chief newsham thank you for coming this evening we really appreciate it I appreciate your close relationship with Dr McDade and the work you do to keep us secure and um and Ron and and and and Spock the um I thank you you know the the um looking at security as a continuous improvement work and it's the work that you know we really appreciate you all doing and and to reassure the public that we are always reassessing always looking at our procedures protocols Safety and Security as we um see um needs so I thank you very much and thank you for coming this evening okay uh
269with that we'll move next to 1703 prevailing wage resolution this item's on for Action uh you need emotions in order Miss um excuse me I moved to the Princeton County school board approved the prevailing wage resolution do I have a second chairman Mrs Ms jar of four seconds motion and discussion okay anybody miss miss wall yes okay you want to start all right Mr Wilk uh you okay all right so I'm gonna go oh no here we go you ready go go okay keep it quick fella Okay Lori gets 40 minutes hey now school safety um okay uh so just want to recognize tonight that I'm excited that we're voting on this resolution uh and taking this step to include prevailing wages in our future construction contracts as a son of a 40-year UAW worker
270a member of the UFCW throughout college and finally the former vice president of the Prince William Federation of teachers I believe this resolution will do more to set our kids up for Success this to me is a fundamental component of building our profile of a Virginia graduate this resolution will ensure that new schools we build offer opportunities for good wages benefits and apprenticeship programs or additional Workforce Development a prevailing wage policy will make sure that contractors who build our projects pay Prince William County residents what they are worth uh in my opinion this is good for the taxpayer because we get a better project than our end it's good for the workers we keep them in our County we don't need people going to apprenticeships for electrical programs having to go to Maryland we don't
271need welders having to go down to Norfolk we can keep our people in our County and provide them local jobs with local contractors who will not get under bid by out of town competition it's time to do right by these kids who are pursuing these career Pathways providing job opportunities to our future welders HVAC workers electricians plumbers pipefitters and the many other careers in our trades we need this resolution and I will be proud to support this resolution tonight by setting a prevailing wage we are supporting a competitive business environment for our contractors while doing right by our workers we always say now that not every kid needs to go to college or college is not for everyone well now it's time to help create those opportunities for those students pursuing those career pathways I
272do want to say again in closing I do want to thank the DC Metro Building Trades and the 17 construction unions in Northern Virginia for their active and ongoing support I look forward to continuing to work with our trade unions to supply Pathways for our students and graduates to get good middle-class jobs and live where they work right here in Prince William County thank you Miss anybody who's next who wants to raise your hand I'm going to move folks this wall sure the dissenting opinion so I um I I offer an alternative Viewpoint of the resolution before us and so as I see it first of all this resolution is here not because it aligns to our key commitments under the Strategic plan but because it aligns with the priorities of political forces in Prince
273William County and Beyond that being said I wish to speak to my concerns about the merits of the prevailing wage provision before us tonight first of all I fear that this resolution will have a negative effect on our budget we have a set pot of money uh it's a big pot of money but we do not raise revenue we have a lot of needs and we've also hired a lot of people um we just heard tonight that we've hired an additional 104 security people which I think is great but it's still people that we need to pay and it all goes into the pot of money um we allocate funds based on priority as we should passing this resolution commits us to spend a significant amount of money on an action that is not a
274strategic priority when a new or different priority is identified such as this the money must come from somewhere it is my opinion that the dollars we receive from taxpayers for schools from the 57.23 percent Revenue share agreement with the board of County Supervisors should go toward educational purposes and I believe should be invested as often as possible into the classroom second if we are going to be spending a pot of increased money on wages I would like it to go first and foremost to our own employees especially teachers and those who work directly with our children if I were to approve an increase in wages for any group of workers I would use this money to give to our very own educators of four arrays they are the ones who work for us day in
275day out to guide our students to Excellence I have no doubt that I don't actually know how much this is going to cost us but I when I asked last week or two weeks ago it was 10 to 20 increase it's going to be a really big pot of money third our U.S economic situation currently is volatile and potentially Grim inflationary pressures mean the dollars do not go as far as they used to and economic forecasts are warning of recession I do not think it prudent in such an in certain economic environment as this that we would adopt a measure that we know will add 10 to 20 percent caught costs to our construction costs right off the bat if the economy continues to struggle or heads into recession we will be faced with even
276harder choices to make for instance we have many more employees as I said before on our payroll now than we did three years ago I don't see that it's fiscally prudent to agree to this resolution as proposed and lastly if one studies the origins of the prevailing wage movement and its effects on construction labor markets historically and importantly the effects on those markets when prevailing wage Provisions are repealed one would see that prevailing wage laws are not all they would appear on their face historically prevailing wage laws were enacted to make it harder from for minority and non-union workers to obtain work this is because prevailing wage policies insulated employers from the competitive bidding process on public work projects it is a historical fact that the Davis bacon act the federal prevailing wage provision that
277was enacted during the Great Depression year of the 1930s protected unionized white workers from competition from non-union unionized black workers on federal Public Works projects insulating unions and their members from competition so prevailing wage laws lead to less Fair less inclusive and less flexible construction labor markets in contrast to Conventional wisdom it is the repeal a prevailing wage loss that leads to growth in not only wages but the number of jobs available in construction sector employment and small local businesses often minority owned are better able to compete in states that have repealed prevailing wage laws they have seen a reduction in the wage gap between black and white workers and an increase in available jobs and contrary to what people might think when prevailing wage laws are repealed construction markets experience more jobs and fewer
278barriers to entry into the market and the construction sector experience employment sector grows so to conclude because I see this as a political move because of its effect on our budget and its disconnect with our strategic priorities because of the uncertain economic forecasts and volatile construction markets and because of historical and practical impacts of prevailing wage laws I cannot support this resolution and urge against his Passage okay so I'll be lasting um Miss wall thank you for that I always appreciate the dissenting opinion um so let me let me let me start by saying that um my five years here on the school board has been committed to paying everyone more we have a we have a incredible record over the last five years of increasing teacher salaries all staff salaries um and uh in
279really in a record fashion um the the posture of this board and the current Board of County Supervisors has been to do so prior boards prior Board of County Supervisors did not commit to paying teachers staff or anyone which is why we're in the predicament we're in as the lowest paid of the large school systems in Northern Virginia we continue to be there because it's difficult to catch up that being said I believe that um you know to be consistent with the work I've done I firmly believe paying folks prevailing wage Fair wages is important um that's why I'm supporting this resolution it is consistent with my um posture for the last five years I've been criticized for giving teachers raises as well um you know I've I've heard from folks who say look if
280you give teachers more money there's less money that goes into you know buying books and and and curriculum and computers for kids so that were the argue that was the argument before I got on this board we didn't give there was never a time that they were getting both a step and a cola in the same year for many years since prior to the recession and so you know when I came on the board I said we're going to do a step in a call every year we possibly can we have to we got to do the most we can and I was committed to doing that and that meant taking money from other things um so the money that goes to prevailing wage um is pointed out by what by one of our speakers
281and by Miss wall it will come from um bonding and over the last three years we have borrowed less each year than we ever have we've saved significant money this year on average we were borrowing about 120 million a year this year I think was 48 million uh last year was in the 84 million which means we have we will have savings so this board is acted in a with fiscal responsibility with due diligence so much so that we maintain AAA Bond rating one of 53 districts in the nation that has a triple a bond rating which allows us to borrow at much cheaper cost AAA Bond ratings are also given out based on um Municipal governments um commitment to ESG ESG is environment social and governance prevailing wage tends to be something looked upon
282fairly it's what the federal government does as well and so that adds to our ability to keep AAA Bond ratings I've done prevailing wage you know supported it at the university-wide level and in wage theft programs there I am committed to making sure um and I have done that the University of Virginia that I'm committed to making sure that our workers whether they be contracted whether they work in our buildings that we're doing the best we can we are the largest employer in the county I do believe that our students will end up many of them can end up working this trade and to address the idea that you know um contractors are given you know so you could do many times prevailing wage goes hand in hand with project labor agreements so plas are
283very good ways to ensure that okay we want this work to go to local companies we want this work to go maybe to minority veteran-owned women companies so project labor Agreements are actually good ways to sort out the um sort of the the negative side effects one could say of of as Miss wall point out some of the prevailing wage history in the past and so that's part of the reason plas have have developed and so I I fully support this motion I think it's you know we're already paying in many ways prevailing wage because of inflation already some of that cost increases already baked into the cost of the work we're doing I've looked at studies from Loudoun County who's also looking at this who did not think it would be 10 15 they
284have come in lower than that and so I believe that um and and by the way Prince William County Board of County Supervisors has already adopted this for all their procurement the Prince William Service Authority has also either has or will be adopting it as well um Fairfax County I think Loudoun County will be following shortly but they're all you know at this point and so you know I have a record of spending responsibly here better than pass boards giving raises at rates far more and making sure the money goes to the students I've you know there it would be very hard to criticize anything this board has done in keeping money out of the classroom if anything we've done the exact opposite of whatever any other board prior to 2018 had ever done or
285the board of County Supervisors would chair Wheeler's commitment to schools we have a friend in a good place who's making sure that we're getting funding at a much higher rate than we ever had before so with that I I I will be supporting this motion and um I do appreciate the discussion please vote thank you guys the vote is six yes one no wall one absent Ralston motion passed okay we'll move on to board matters Mr Wilk oh what oh yes revisions to policy 1704. okay I have emotions in order Miss Jackson um thank you Dr Teeth um I believe that the Prince William County school board approved the revisions to policy 795 parental access information and notice for certain materials do you have a second Mr chairman Mr Kapoor second okay discussion Mr Wilk
286you have a motion you and Miss wall have an addendum or yeah I mean Amendment yes sir make the motion I moved to amend the proposed revisions to the school board policy 795 by requiring that a notice to be given five days in advance of any school-wide presentation instead of three do you have a second for that motion is Jesse seconds of motion we have a discussion on the amended motion any discussion Miss wall um this this uh change from three to five days is is um a good one I support that change as proposed um it's something that Ms Jesse's proposed our last meeting she felt like a few more days lead time would be doable and and desirable and so I agree with her I think that's fine it seems like our staff
287can manage that so I have no objections to making that change doable and desirable I like it any other discussion please vote this is the vote on the amended motion so this will amend the original motion so please vote on this did you vote Miss Jesse yes for Miss Jesse the vote is seven yes one absent motion passed okay now we'll move to discuss the broader motion any further discussion on that Mr chairman Mr will uh thank you so just to Briefly summarize where we're at with this proposed policy change since our last meeting I do want to thank the teachers who reached out to me to discuss their concerns and many of these issues are now addressed in the proposed updates number one through collaboration with division Council the superintendent's office and my other
288colleagues we have updated the language to include parents as well as Guardians with the language number two based on educator concerns we have updated the language to make clear that the policy does not pertain the presentations and performances by students or to events occurring outside of the normal school day uh number three again I do want to reiterate um that I'm not aware of any administrator in the school division who does not already follow this practice um between newsletters more updates calendar posting websites uh my understanding is most leaders already adopt a practice like this my sons attend two separate schools and the communications in both of these schools is superb between the two buildings my wife and I receive weekly newsletters text alerts voicemails and regular updates on the school websites again these are
289just some of the common practices throughout the school division uh number four although there was some confusion last week about the policy change the self uh there is no existing policy like this um already in the books uh the goal of this policy change is to put practice into formal policy parents should not have to rely on having an extremely communicative administration at their child's building the proposed policy change formalizes best practices for organizational coherence in closing I'm happy to co-sponsor with Miss wall uh this measure so we're not dissenting on this one no because I believe uh definitely that we need transparency and formalizing best practices in the policy this proposed change will further promote parental engagement protected division by further promoting transparency and online our communication to the Strategic plan Miss Williams thank
290you um I I still I appreciate the update of adding Guardians I still feel like this policy is duplicative in nature and adds more additional work um on our current staff I believe that we have protocols and other policies that address this um or if this is absolutely necessary uh me that it should be its own separate policy the original policy dealt with specifically the protection of pupil Rights Amendment which dealt with surveys and collections of information and marketing purposes and things of that nature I don't think that the two should be married together into one joint policy because there are two separate issues this has not been an issue of concern outside of uh I believe last year's incident or however you would like to Define it where a library book was read over
291the intercom I have been having been a former student as a parent have never been surprised by what presentation or material that was going on school-wide for where my student attended and I think even more so now in the days of technology I know not only what my student is experience in their day-to-day the classroom while it's being taught but also what's going on in the school from multiple viewpoints and lenses and I also think this is covered under our regulations I don't support this in this current format and I just wanted to make that clear thank you okay please vote oh miss wall thank you um so this provision um as I see it meets our strategic commitments of family and Community engagement and organizational coherence I think it is the right place to
292put it with the the protection of people rights amendmental access to information as board members one of our key responsibilities um is besides Hiring Our superintendent is to enact policy and policy and governance are at the heart of what we do and this language formalizes in policy what is or should be occurring with our engagement and interactions with parents and Guardians and also formalizes a procedure that we are already doing and so I believe what policy should reflect what we're as accurately as accurately as possible it's late what we are doing and that what we are doing should be reflected in our policy and our regulations it's just better for all of us if we do that it Shields us from accusations of lack of transparency it Shields us from conflict with parents and the
293larger community in so many areas it is just really good board governance and so I think that this provision does that meets the goals of transparency communication gives parents notice I also believe that it will Foster parent-child communication if parents know about something that's coming up they can have that conversation I think I used the example last time um you know I my student came home talking about drugs lots of lots of questions about drugs and I was taken aback a little bit and I thought what why are you talking to me about drugs who are your friends but it turns out it was a presentation that had occurred at school and they had talked about all kinds of things that I hadn't yet really talked about in great detail with my child so this
294I think will help with those kinds of things it was a thing a school-wide thing you know and I and I just missed it I didn't realize that's what was going on um so I think that is good we should imp we should foster communication between parents and children parents and parents parents and community members parents in the school and we do that so our policy and regulation should reflect that and and in that sense it strengthens organizational coherence which means are all our schools are on the same page and it and it Mr Wolf addressed this but you know some schools may need to try a little bit harder to meet this goal and that's fine that means that all of our schools are are functioning at a really high level and that is
295a desirable goal and that fits with our strategic commitment as well so for those reasons I think that this is although it is a simple policy and not very long or anything like that I think it's an important one and so I will be approving it Ms Jackson um please vote I support the motion by the way I like it it's good if if it matters the vote is six yes one no Williams one absent Ralston motion passed okay board matters Miss Wilk it's 11 19. thank you Mr chairman and where's the clock so I don't make sure I run over oh here we go I want to thank everyone uh so since the last meeting um I have the pleasure to attend um on 11-4 Forest Park High School Football was Victorious over Hilton
296High School Forest Park didn't make it into the playoffs Unfortunately they came up short but they had a great season want to recognize them and all of our athletes Forest Park volleyball girls went to Regionals felt a little short but again want to recognize them for that great work as well on 11-6 Ashland PTO had their movie night I reprised my role of running the glow stick station again so I'm getting pretty good at that with movie nights um I do want to say we had a really neat thing um on 11 7 um you know best practice and stuff um I had an interaction with the superintendent down in King William County and I mentioned um Potomac Shores Middle School and I said about the best practices in the state-of-the-art building that we have
297and I just offhandly invited him to come up you know why not right and he accepted that offer and he ventured up here with his entire cabinet and I was able to join the entire team of our central office team who took the time out of that day to venture around and not only show obviously the facility itself but actually look at some of the project-based learning that was going on in the building and best practices that were evidenced by the amazing staff and team at Potomac Shores Middle School so that was a great experience I love having visitors come see things and then following that we did have our vet Veterans Day events I do want to thank our veterans again for their service Potomac district has I think the largest percentage of veterans
298out of any District probably largely because of proximity to Quantico which technically the base is in the Potomac District um I did attend the Potomac Shores veterans breakfast on 11 9 on 11 10 I attended Patty's veterans breakfast Veterans Day breakfast and then you know it's two bad chances in here he mentioned that he would like to see school board members go and sit in classes during instructional time so I had an update for him so last week I went to Swans Creek Elementary School and although I visit the schools and I jump in and out of classrooms I really wanted to be hyper focused on a particular grade level and my goal was to see the cross collaboration and the unique kind of differentiation from you know one teacher in second grade and another
299in second grade who if you go in the room they have the same learning objective on the board because it's all aligned with the pacing guide but they're all teaching in their own way but it's the same objective and the standard but you had their own unique contribution to it and it was great to see the students engage you can definitely tell there's professional learning communities collaboration and so and thank you Pastor will Archer Potomac Valley Church for having me this Sunday also thank you the second boy uh good evening Prince William County I'll make this fairly short um I want to I'm not announced but uh now inside it yet I'm very tired right now uh Hilton High School's automated Automotive team did win their national competition they took five students to Las Vegas
300uh it's uh two girls on the team three boys and they uh basically I got to watch them take an engine apart and put it back together uh it was amazing I watched this at Hilton before they went they were practicing and it took like 17 minutes I think so congratulations to them um I just heard tonight that colgan's volleyball team made the state championship so they will be there Saturday I want to remind people that specialty programs are open now so you need to take a look at if you're in um uh interested in science or art or technology or or ROTC whatever your interests are go ahead and take a look and see what our offerings are we because those applications are going to be coming up soon um there's a lot of
301discussion tonight about family engagement I want to also make sure you know that on the vdoe site there's a whole section for parents and family links and information just this week I posted some information about a special education survey that the state is interested in so you can go look for that I am thankful for the transparency that was offered tonight in our discussion about Safety and Security in our schools and I'm greatly appreciative that the police chief newsham got to come and talk to us um we will many of us are going to vsba tomorrow a few hours from now really um and I am happy to say that I am going to be the district 10 representative so I'm looking forward to talking with our elected officials in Washington D.C about how they
302can support public education thank you all have a great night this one thank you lots of events around Gainesville just a few highlights I attended touch base at Ronald Reagan Middle School on October 31st Halloween it was great to see so many parents there I love that event at the high school level and I'd never seen it at the middle school level so I think it was awesome I went to Gravely Elementary School at the invitation of the PTO and read a really hilarious book to Ms Saldana's fifth grade class and it was so much fun so I am officially open for invitations to come read the kids because I love books and I love kids so it was awesome also on November 4th I wanted a battlefield was Victorious against Patriot and across County
303rivalry game it was tons of fun congratulations to the team on that Victory and condolences for their tough loss on November 10th against Colonial Forge and good luck to Patriot and freedom who are numbers two and one in the rankings may you all be victorious um Monday the 7th I attended safe schools advisory Council where I served in the zargarpro we have been doing a lot of great stuff on that board as you saw tonight a lot of great ideas about Safety and Security I look forward to serving I appreciate being able to serve on that capacity in that capacity on the 10th Mountain View Elementary held a Veterans Day celebration which was very awesome both of my grandfathers were World War II vets so it's always been a favorite holiday of mine the kids
304at Mountain View saying patriotic songs to the veterans and currently serving members of the Armed Forces and it was a special treat to meet Mrs Harrison's family members who are veterans are currently serving last Saturday um was the viboda's um Regional Orchestra event and pwcs had a great showing um it was we were well represented by both the Junior and senior um in both the Junior and senior Regional orchestras and I just want to say I'm just so proud of the students their musicianship was amazing I just kept saying like I can't believe these are high school students I'm so impressed by how well they've recovered from the crazy and Incredibly insane year that was Orchestra on Zoom so well done if anybody's out there listening you were fabulous and I loved my favorite part
305was how the audience mostly parents grandparents friends cousins sisters and brothers stood up at the end and gave them a standing ovation that just went on and on and on and it was just it was awesome so I'm looking forward to professional development at the SBA conference that starts in less than eight hours for me and I I believe in being a lifelong learner and in developing myself as a board member and a public servant so I'm really pleased to be participating and I also wanted to say Happy Thanksgiving to all and I hope you have a the blessing of gratitude in your lives one of my favorite thoughts about gratitude is this gratitude is said to be the memory of the heart so may the memories of your heart find expression to those around
306you at this holiday time and to all a good night sweets thank you um I just want to start by again thanking chief newsham for taking time out of his busy schedule to come and speak to us this evening um just very quickly the Governor's School Innovation Park held a meeting this evening clearly I was not able to participate or attend but we'll be happy to provide updates once I receive that information to our viewing public Mrs Docker board mentioned most of us are going to be SBA tomorrow which is a Virginia School Board Association conference that's held every year in November also the racial and Social Justice Commission is get was scheduled to meet this Thursday that meeting has been canceled for this month so there'll be no update following that I want to
307wish all those who are participating in robotics competitions coming up this weekend the most success I know it's a long day I personally have now rejoined the ring things of Robotics mom which I'm so super excited about and look forward to attending many robotics competitions and hopefully entertaining more robotics discussions here from the dice I have as the Woodbridge District representative and opening for safe schools advisory Council so if you're interested please reach out I know there are many things happening at the state level with regard to education there's a lot of revisions of standards and policies I encourage all of those watching to pay attention to what goes on not only here locally but at the state level and provide comments when comments are appropriate volunteer or ask to be appointed to boards and
308and just generally participate to the best of your ability I want to send a special shout out to Kilby Elementary School I was able to attend their Title One family mystery night I'm sorry I was not able to stay longer earlier in the week I did as I always do which is volunteer all day long for election day I usually bring a bunch of students with me most of them that I know have aged out they're now in their 20s so I only had a few along with my youngest son I believe in participating in our democracy and bringing the Next Generation along so that they can learn how to participate too the last thing I want to say is it is Native American History Month and this is a native an acknowledgment of that
309I would like to acknowledge the traditional ancestral unseated territories of the dog and moeg tribes for which we are learning working and organizing today I thought it was very interesting I have a SORA who's an educator and she shared this website with me which is native-lan.ca it's a great website you can go on there and it gives you a map of every place that Native American tribes existed prior to the current division which is the United States it's really cool if you're interested in learning about that in the land that you live on or where you've traveled to it's a really cool site and I thought it was very appropriate considering it is Native American History Month hope everyone enjoys their Thanksgiving break Jesse thank you my cup gratitude tour continues and I went to
310kerrydale and Eileen trishelle a title one teacher received the the cup I want to thank Eileen for sending a special note to me a personal note of Cardiff saying thank you and Chris Chrisco yes special ed teacher at West Ridge Elementary received her cup I have three more schools who attend our Juan Marshall and Antietam I'm looking forward to that I also attended the Woodbridge high school ROTC recognition of fish veterans and it was quite an affair with the room with the auditorium was full the Navy Band was off the hook uh Dr McDade is not here but the lady has some moves and she can dance so we all had a good time there I also attended the Multicultural night at aquana has I don't know probably at least 50 countries and they serve
311food I I realized people from different countries want you to eat their food and I tried to get out without eating the food but I got to the door and this lady had rice and goat meat and I said no I don't want it and she put some in my pan and I had to eat but it and I've been in those situation because they they they're the love for their country and their food is really important I will bring photos next week I attended the uh changing the narrative by Dr uh King Of Future King he formed his organization of African-American boys and they had three speakers who talked about um becoming Advocates advocates for black boys and realizing that there's such low expectations and that they are training these kids in biomedical uh
312they have three kids who've graduated God to to high ranking schools and biomedical uh biomedical field gaming and drones and so I say this in closing to Dr Brown you know we belong to all these organizations the divine nine the African-American church these groups and they are tutoring our kids because they know that they need the help so my I would like for you to put these people out of business and I think that should be the job of the school system because it should not be that every black church I know every organization I know we're always trying to train our kids I when my kids at sixth grade I said mouth them out but I could afford a tutor and most people cannot afford a tutor so just put them out of business
313and you did a great job tonight thank you Miss Jackson this year Prince William County schools recognized 10 new schools as Purple Heart schools including two in the Brunsville District Piney Branch and T claywood this brings the total to 28 schools in Springfield County Schools the purple star designation is awarded to military friendly schools who have demonstrated a major commitment to students and families connected to our nation's military as this week was Veterans Day I'm going to focus on two of the events that I attended I was able to attend two of the many events in bentsville District honoring veterans in a community one at Sea Clay Wood and one at Victory Elementary the students at both schools did a wonderful job performing it was also great to see Patriot High School students help with
314the parade and the ceremony at Sea claywood I'm very thankful for the veterans in our community including the students and and family members because time is spent about is also a service thank you to those who came to speak tonight including Chief Newsom um congrats citibanksville district cheer good luck to Burnsville district and Patriot in the upcoming games and I just want to Echo my sport in revisiting flex days that's thank you Miss Jackson okay Miss Lilly had the line of the night I'm going to read it um Dr Brown you should be putting those places out of business you know thank you Miss Jesse I I think that was the best line so um I think that's I think that's very important um Miss Jesse you're out of the room I think earlier when
315we were having the discussion when I spoke on the equity stuff but you know I always appreciate Miss Jesse's commitment to academic excellence her work over the four you know five years I've worked with her on this board her commitment to this and I had said earlier that uh you know you'd been in education long enough that every 10 years they changed the language whether it's achievement Gap opportunity Gap or Dei we're always doing but it's always the same thing we're trying to address it's the same thing your gap's still there and we're still trying to work on it and and but I but I really appreciate the work Dr Brown's office doing Dr mcday is doing the the whole team here on on this effort it is organized it's coherent it is a strong
316commitment division wide I like the fact that we're doing it for everyone and I love the fact that we're committed to also accelerating um everybody and and I think that's really critical so I I appreciate the work um just reminding uh congratulating colgan's volleyball team made it to the state championship they're playing Saturday on the tier leading teams from Colgan in Brownsville they've done well we have great teams still in playoffs coming up we have Brentsville still in the playoffs for football Patriots still in the playoffs and freedom still in the playoffs um if I miss anybody I apologize we'll get to could get to that next time for our seniors um you know get your work in get your stuff in for college applications get your reference letters keep working on that when you
317see an application looks hard to do just start on a Saturday morning and work all day I mean it is they can be they can be tough to get through when you see all the essays you have to write but it'll be worth it I promise you um you know keep pushing along ask your teachers for help and your counselors uh with that everyone have a great night and Happy Thanksgiving