Prince William County School Board Meeting - October 20, 2021

001i would like to call the meeting of the prince william county school board to order uh first up is an approved um an approval of the closed session agenda emotions owner ms zargapor i move that the prince william county school board approved the closed session agenda is recommended you have a second mr chairman mrs williams second any discussion seeing no discussion please vote i mean you have quorum so we can go yeah just we haven't the motion is five yes one not president vote mrs jesse one not president vote mrs wall and one absent miss ralston okay motion passes moving on enter close session emotions in order mr chairman i move the pursuit to virginia code section 2.2-3711 and 2.2-3 7-1-2 the prince william county school board enter closed session for the following reasons one

002to discuss with the superintendent and staff the appointment transfer release assignment promotion and contracts of specific employees and to receive advice on legal related legal issues as provided by virginia code section 2.2-3711a one and eight two to discuss with staff and consult with legal counsel regarding requests for religious exemption pertaining to a specific student under as provided by virginia code section 2.2-3711a two and eight three to discuss with legal counsel and staff actual or probable litigation and specific legal matters involving staff and students as provided by section 2.2-371 one a one two seven and eight four that the prince william county school board received information and advice from legal counsel relating to the pandemic under virginia code section 2.2-3711a eight five to consult with legal counsel and receive legal advice regarding pwcs nondiscrimination policies and

003regulations under virginia code section 8 2.2-3711a8 to consult with the superintendent legal counsel regarding the legal procedures relating to the conduct of board meetings under virginia's code section 2.2-3711a 8 and 7 to receive information and to discuss with staff plans for the security of the kelly leadership center and the safety of persons using that facility under virginia code section 2.2-3711a 19. you have a second mr chairman mrs williams any discussion please vote the vote is seven yes one absent ralston motion passed prince william county school will now enter closed session and return um to open session approximately one hour thank you [Music] okay good evening the prince william county school board will now end re-enter open session um from closed session we must move on to the closed session certification ms argenport emotions in order

004i move that pursuant to virginia code section 2.2-3712 the closed session of the prince william county school board meeting of october 20 2021 be certified by adopting the following resolution now therefore be it resolved that the prince william county school board hereby certifies that to the best of each member's knowledge one only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements were discussed in the closed meeting to which this certification 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 mr williams second any discussion please vote the vote is seven yes one absent ralston motion passed moving on to the um closed session action item a motion is in

005order mr reporter mr chairman i move that the prince william county school board approved the appointment transfer release assignment promotion and contracts of specific employees as presented in closed session have a second mr chairman miss jesse miss jesse seconds of motion any discussion please vote the vote is seven yes one absent ralston motion passed moving on to 9.02 approval of requests for religious exemption from compulsory school attendance ms argoport emotions in order i mean that the prince william county school board approved the request for religious exemption from compulsory school attendance in case number re21-20 a second please second miss jen wall seconds motion any discussion please vote the vote is seven yes one absent ralston motion passed okay excellent so at this point i'll call them meeting the prince william county school board order we

006have the pledge of allegiance miss donya if you'd like to lead us in the pledge and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty thank you next moving on to 12.01 and approval of the public meeting agenda motions in order ms zargaport i move that the prince william county school board approved the public meeting agenda as recommended do you have a second mr chairman mrs williams second any discussion please vote the vote is seven yes one absent ralston motion passed moving on to adoption of the consent agenda emotions in order i move that the prince william county school board approved the public meeting consent agenda as recommended do i have a second mr chairman mrs williams second miss williams seconds of motion any discussion please vote the vote is

0077 yes 1 absent ralston motion passed moving on to citizen comment time those citizens who have signed up in advance with the clerk may address the school board this evening when they are called to the podium the citizens comment period for regular school board meetings is limited to one hour with the first half hour reserve for comments on agenda items only second half hour for comments on agenda items or other topics germaine to the operations and policies of prince william county schools citizens signed up to speak on agenda items must speak on the agenda item they have identified or they will be asked to step down we have five speakers on agenda items and ten on non-agenda items this evening speakers will have three minutes to speak please use proper decorum and manners while at

008the podium if you do not do so you will be asked to step aside when you are called to the podium please state your name and address for the record i will call the first um first so the five speakers who are um or four five who will be speaking can come to the front if they'd like to grab a seat close to mike gina um chiarcia ovetta scott jennifer roccaski heather mccann and jeff fuller so miss um chiarcia gina ciarcia okay overa scott okay good evening ladies and gentlemen of the board mr chairman dr mcdade my name is ovetta scott and my address is on file with the clerk tonight i know that madame superintendent is going to speak on the state of prince william county schools however i would like to supplement that

009with the front line edition of the state of our schools first bus drivers continue to have multiple runs and must combine routes which leads to students packed on the bus the effects students are late to school daily late returns and nowhere no way to contact trace with the shortage of custodians it has limited the ability to properly clean buildings to hinder the spread of covet 19 if it's present now let's shift to the classroom again the shortest of subs has led to teachers losing their planning time to cover classes libraries are closed esau services are limited as well as fed accommodations because staff are pulled to assist in covering classes whether teachers are elementary middle or high school how are they properly to stay on track with grading prepping lessons and maintaining canvas pages another

010concern are teachers who agree to instruct an additional class to address the recovery of learning for low performance students there are some who have not start receiving payment for the service also there's a lack of transparency when it comes to notifying teachers of our students who must quarantine or whether they have contracted covert 19. lastly let's bring into light site-based management as you know every school operates on a different agenda staff must be mindful of our students mental health but are we not human beings too with all the challenges we face at this moment some principles are very strict on having clt meetings grade level meetings department meetings faculty meetings and special event planning meetings with ongoing meetings duties addressing academic concerns and tick-tock challenges how do we breathe this school year teachers were given

011five personal days to use but there is a school admin who stated that any day taken before or after a holiday will be leave without pay how is this appropriate there is no going back to normal but how can we work together to address these important concerns right now before there is a greater shortage of staff members thank you jennifer rokoski sorry good evening school board members and dr mcdade my name is jennifer berkowski and i reside in the akkaquan district i looked over the state of the school's report presentation and there's an item i wanted to really press on under next step there is an ice i'm an item to support social emotional and mental well-being of staff and staff needs of uh being of needs of staff and students focusing on the staff

012portion there are several staff members they're stressed out they're looking for different career options one teacher shared with me that she and others have not received extra pay for teaching concurrently or taking on a six class that is virtual teachers are not getting their planning time because they are covering other classes or it's being taken up by extra meetings teachers are working past contract time either coming in early or staying later because of meetings duties needing to stay with students until the buses arrive if they are a special education teacher their caseloads are very high same for ell teachers some of our teaching assistants are working like or as a teacher but they are not paid a teacher's salary a few comments to share from some friends of mine planning time for teachers has not

013has to be honored we're spending too much of our own time working morale is low and many have expressed an interest in leaving the profession due to low pay heavy workloads and unrealistic expectations expectations are unattainable and unrealistic there's too much to do and not enough time teachers are burned out and more tasks expectations continue to increase more ell dedicated classrooms are needed mainstreaming to save money is disservice to students i have a student in my government class who doesn't speak english why because it's not an sol class i feel like i fail her every day because this is the first normal year back students are relearning what it means to be a student teachers are having to re-teach proper behaviors needed in class staff bring up concerns to administrators but some staff feel ignored

014my friends here still are still in the classroom again they're exhausted they're mentally struggling and are seriously considering other careers please listen to your staff i know there are shortages but teachers are covering each other's classes because of lack of staff and stubs staff are coming in earlier and staying later because of lack of bus drivers please talk to site-based school administrators to let their teachers know and staff to have their planning time and unencumbered lunches please find ways to possibly compensate staff who are coming in earlier or staying later for covering buses or covering each other's classes perhaps look at doing half days or having an asynchronous day so staff can plan and catch up thank you for your time heather mccann hello my name is heather mccann my address is on file it

015is no secret to anyone what was just released in loudoun county public schools with respect to a young man that entered the girls bathroom wearing a skirt and sexually violating a young girl what is also not a secret is how the school chose to sweep that crime under the rug and simply transfer that student to another school where he again violated another girl our schools have gone to great lengths protecting our lgbtq community with regard to using the school facilities such as bathrooms and locker rooms while also ignoring the concerns of other students that maybe don't feel safe sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with other children of the opposite sex prince william county schools has said in policy 738-5 that all students have access to facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their

016gender identity while also stating that alternatives shall be made for those students who request additional privacy the vdoe also published a q a under transgender students in school bathrooms informing every one of the new policies regarding the school's promises to keep our children safe and treated equally the policy states in part that every child needs to be safe in the bathroom too many students avoid using bathrooms out of fear that another student will mistreat or hurt them physically or emotionally the consequences can be severe impacting a child's health well-being and their ability to concentrate on learning by creating a positive climate supervising it appropriately and making behavioral expectations clear schools can reduce all students fears about a safety in these spaces for for a variety of reasons however there will remain a percentage of students

017who would prefer a more private space than many than many school bathrooms allow whether for cultural or religious region reasons a particular health issue concerns related to gender or simple modesty schools should work actively to identify private options that are available to any student who request them regardle regardless of the students underlying reason for using it such options should be free of stigma and a student who uses a private space should be not be ridiculed or singled out by staff or students the parents are now requesting that the school board make good on this promise that children should be allowed to use private bathrooms where they can feel safe and enjoy privacy by publishing a well-marked floor plan of each school on each floor of each school identifying the location of these private bathrooms for

018their use the school needs to inform the parents how they will escort young elementary school children to these private facilities and how it will be non-stigmatizing and will minimize the loss of instruction time as promised in the policy we look forward to your compliance thank you jeff fuller hello board dr mcdade i'm jeff fuller i'm from gainesville district um i'm wearing these glasses and masks and so forth because i want to keep the fbi off my back but i'm 75 so i really don't give a damn i'd like to give you some kudos dr mcdade your staff has responded to my email request for information quickly now they haven't answered any of my questions but at least they acknowledge my existence for which i'm grateful um i'm glad that we're going to have a little

019public discourse on the uh topic of uh what i think is a bit of a contentious topic that is the transgender policy coming out of virginia department of education now we still haven't gotten an answer to the question is why is this room restricted to 48 seats for the public that's not would someone please answer that publicly for us at some point um the other problem i have is you have a some kind of a resistance to transparency and dialogue now i've been asking for some time now for a town hall meeting to discuss the equity policy or statement and i also ask that you consider doing that for the transgender policy they're both contentious issues your policy on dialogue with the public allows for it and i i respectfully ask you you do that

020and dr mcdade before you came here the deputy and uh i believe it might have been miss williams i can't remember who on the board said yes we need to have a dialogue about this i don't mean one-way street where we talk to you and we don't get an answer so the i guess we've got something like six gender identity identities in the transgender policy i don't want to imply here that i have anything but great hope that every child of every identity feels safe in school and by the way for you teachers i respect so much what you do i can't imagine being a teacher especially with the layers of bureaucracy and instructions and guidance and meetings that you must have to do but teach your kids uh teach our kids you must and

021we're grateful for it i am at least um you got this thing in the policy that says school shall now allow students to use a name and gender pronoun that reflect their gender identity without any substance substitution substituting evidence and that school staff shall at the request of a student or a parent when using a name or pronoun to address a student use the name and pronoun that correspond to their gender identity thank you mr fuller thank you for listening i'll make one more call gina ciarcia i don't know if you heard mine okay well it seems the recent events in loudoun county happen to be the topic of this meeting so oftentimes ideas that are developed in high academia and toyed with by scholars in their ivory towers do not stay there those ideas

022trickle down to us ordinary everyday people and those ideas always carry with them consequences many consequences that were unforeseen or unintended it is dangerous when we adopt ideas that disregard self-evident facts and i want to begin by saying students who are suffering with gender dysphoria deserve love respect understanding and care by their teachers administrators parents and fellow students however we must acknowledge that they are dealing with a mental health issue since the ideas in their minds are not in line with the realities of their body we have unfortunately adopted language that is unhelpful when it comes to dealing with these students we have adopted the idea that gender is assigned but in fact gender is not assigned at birth by a doctor it is reported in fact halfway through a pregnancy an ultrasound technician can

023clearly and definitively report the gender of a baby when we use language such as assigned we deny reality and we are an open rebellion to the created order gender is firmly rooted in sex despite whatever surgeries one may have every single cell is programmed for instance in my case as female no matter what i do i cannot change that america is a practical and a pragmatic people and our success is rooted in large part to a correct assessment of reality and human nature and i urge you to consider this when you are trying to develop policy for students who are dealing with gender transphobia dysphoria we need to make sure that our policy is rooted in a correct assessment of reality and human nature for that indeed shows the greatest love and respect toward these

024students and their families thank you next we'll have the non-agenda items mr richard jesse after him will be jessica newton kristen gladhill and kimberly stewart my name is richard jesse my address is on file i want to talk about two items tonight one is it's a simple one and a suggestion to the board i have set through a lot of boundary meetings and they are very difficult and challenging for everyone what i'd like the board to consider is not waiting until a year before the school opened or two years but as soon as you find out that this school is going to be built in that area have a boundary meeting give the parents time to understand what's going to happen people buy homes rent homes based on schools and when you have a movement

025in the area the more time you can get parents to adjust to that movement the better it is so my suggestion is as soon as it's legally fixed and the school is ready to go and start building that's the time to have a boundary meeting the second item i'd like to discuss is the security and if you have a rule enforce the rule if you're not going to enforce the rule why have it the policy statement is full of may do this and may do that and if you would you know if you don't do this this is possibly what's going to happen i would suggest that we have a stronger wording and that when people are disobeying the rules and refuse to do what they are asked to do then action be taken i

026do believe in de-escalation of things however at some point it needs to be enforced and one of the suggestion i wrote in the email to everyone on the board and and to the superintendent was that perhaps you should meet with the commonwealth attorney and find out what you can do when people are disrupted can you file a charge of disorderly contact or at least at the school division you can say this person is no longer allowed to be on the school property because you do that for students all the time you do that for parents and i think you should do it for people who are disrupted it is nice to have a meeting like the last two where we can disagree with you or agree with you and it's done in a civil manner

027but three or four meetings ago when it was not civil it was something that i think we should take in account thank you jessica newton hello i'm jessica newton from gainesville virginia i want to address the oft-repeated response that pwcs does not teach crt that is disingenuous as no one has claimed the theory is taught in k-12. many have been here to protest against the fact that the ideology of crt will be implemented through culturally responsive teacher training which as you know is now state law we can't go before the general assembly or the virginia department of education so we have to come before you we object that this board embraced the tenets of crt with the equity statement some of you still don't understand they are one in the same we object that apparently

028no one on the superintendent's equity council nor this board did any due diligence in respect to investigating cited sources otherwise they and you would know the direct connection of equity and culturally responsive pedagogy training to critical race theory or are you being disingenuous when still with prince william county maria burgos created an instructional slide for the pwcs office of professional learning called continuum of school equity one of her own cited sources for this slide is critical race theory today did you know this if not why not if so why the repeated disingenuous denials that what you are embracing is not crt come clean and let's have a town hall we know that the national education association with a local chapter representing pwcs teachers in pwea voted in june to expand the implementation of crt in

029k-12 in all 50 states if they can be honest why can't you do you support the nea's vote on crt do you believe that disparate outcomes in education are due solely to racism do you believe all americans are either oppressed or oppressors do you believe that teachers should have to quote mediate power imbalances in the classroom based on race gender sexual identity culture and class and then be evaluated on that to retain their license did you know that is required in virginia's new law for culturally responsive pedagogy mr wilkes in may you stated you do not support critical race theory i don't doubt your sincerity so it is proof this board does not understand that equity is inextricable from critical race theory and intersectionality and critical theory the sources cited by the equity committee and

030vdoe are career critical race theorists bettina love gloria ladson billings and ibram kindy to name a few did anyone on this committee or this board bother to research them these sources do not hide their motives agenda or philosophy all are openly anti-capitalist do you support capitalism or do you agree with your sources that it is a systemically racist system that needs to be dismantled these same sources cited by the equity committee are also advocate advocate for abolish abolishing the police in prisons did you know that and do you agree from the creator of culturally responsive pedagogy and pwcs vdoe equity source gloria ladson billings on crt and education marxist and neo-marxist formulations about class continued to merit consideration as theoretical models for understanding social inequity from bettina love pwcs vdoe cited source for an inventor

031of abolitionist teaching quote our schools and our teaching practices do not need to be reimagined they need to be torn down and replaced with our freedomed dreams rooted in participatory democracy and intersectionality justice thank you newton thank you kristen gladhill [Applause] good evening everyone i'm kristen gladhill my address is on file so i'm a local mom of two and i'm deeply concerned about what's happening in our schools i honestly never thought i'd actually have to come to one of these and say anything so what's happening i feel is very wrong and me and many others do not agree with the culture that is being shoved down our throats us parents have lost faith in the school board's ability to make basic morally correct choices tonight you may be voting on a policy that will essentially

032remove girls rights privacy and safety this policy and i'm summarizing will allow for housing of people based on whichever sex they choose to claim our daughters who are aware on sports tournaments might be subject to spending the night in a hotel room with someone of the opposite chromosome i grew up playing soccer my whole life and things that i'm hearing right now are honestly just personally terrifying bad things happen all the time in schools we're not naive to that and we know this but the policies being put in place are threatening the safety and rights of young girls it would be naive of us all to think that the recent rape insisted from loudoun county would not continue to happen or possibly increase beyond that what's even more concerning is how those in charge the

033adults of this of these situations how they were handled after the fact did we see school resource officers the school administrator the school board or superintendent proactively jump to do the right thing protect this little girl in any of the instances after it happened shockingly no instead the entire country just witnessed more lies more deceit more cover-ups and crimes against humanity with the policies that you continue to be in support of and your lack of belief in public transparency we just do not trust you anymore and we won't stop advocating for our children two questions i want to leave you with what are you doing to protect our students from everything that i just shared and last a thought and then a question as a society we have to stand for something or we're going

034to quickly fall for the next fad of relative truth that allows a trojan horse into our moral compass loudoun county and many other school any many others in our great nation are struggling to find their moral compass that clearly delineates right from wrong and right from wrong is not my reality it's not yours and it's not the students but it's an absolute truth given to us by god like the challenge loudoun county school board are you also going to be willing to manipulate the school's moral compass to protect a wave of culture that seems to be without one thank you [Applause] kimberly stewart good evening my name is kimberly stewart my address is on file with the clerk i'm a mother of two boys in prince william county and a veteran educator of 16 years

035i am here to tell you today that what you are doing to our children and the harm you are causing them by preventing them by preventing the parental choice when it comes to their medical health is criminal as an educator in and out of the classroom for the past two years i have personally seen the emotional physical mental and educational harm that universal masking social distancing plastic barriers and other intrusive measures have done to our children you are not following the science you are following the political leanings and blatant disregard for the real health and well-being of our children you are not listening to parents and you are not involving them in the decision-making for their own children's health please return the parental choice of health of every child in this district immediately to the

036parents and their professional medic medical care doctors schools are not and have never been meant to be places of medical care medical treatment and medical tyranny you are not my child's doctor or anyone else's stop forcing medical mandates on our children i'm also here to demand an immediate public statement by this board condemning the recent statements of the gubernatorial candidate terry mcauliffe regarding parent involvement in schools this board must recognize and appreciate the critical role that parents play in the educational system of pwcs as an educator i could only wish for more parental involvement increased parent presence in our schools and encouragement of our communities to be a critical and vital part of our system's success parents are the ones who volunteer to make up for shortcomings and classroom assistance they donate money and time

037to the schools through pto ptsa and pta organizations to support the financial shortcomings of our systems they run many of our clubs and activities they provide student transportation when we don't have enough bus drivers they sub in our buildings they coach our sports teams they own local businesses that support our schools and our children and they absolutely should have a say in our educational system and what is being taught to our children this school board should be finding more ways to involve parents hear parents and work with parents not limiting silencing and shaming their voices and involvement involved caring passionate engaged parents are not domestic terrorists they are parents who care when parents are involved in schools our schools are more successful our students are more successful and our teachers and staff have the support

038that they need i want to commend mr scott baldwin publicly of haymarket elementary school for knowing and understanding this and always finding ways to encourage and involve the community and the parents maybe the sport should stop playing politics and start listening to the time is up please that support this system and its success i am a mother and an educator and i will continue to fight for what i know is best for kids thank you martha cutsinger and after martha will be melanie de chateau dale marie walton michelle baldwin all right good evening i'm martha cutsinger i'm from hold on one sec can i get the timer up i don't need to see the screen the um we don't need to see the the squares on the screens here thank you uh i'm sorry miss

039cutsinger okay thank you i'm i'm martha cutzinger from haymarket i'm reading an excerpt from an article called we got here because of cowardice a lot of people want to convince you that you need a phd or law degree to understand the crt intersectionality movement you do not you simply need to believe your own eyes and ears in this ideology speech is violence and education is not about teaching people how to think it's about re-educating them in what to think in this ideology the past cannot be understood in its own terms but must be judged through the morals and wars of the present in this ideology the equality of opportunity is replaced with a quality of outcome as a measure of fairness thus the argument to get rid of the admissions test for public schools like

040thomas jefferson in virginia in this year in this ideology you are guilty of the sins of your fathers that is why third graders in california were asked to rate themselves in terms of their power and privilege in third grade in this system we are placed neatly on the spectrum of privileged to oppressed in different categories such as race gender sexual orientation and class most important in this revolution skeptics of this radical ideology are tarnished as bigots the woke revolution has been exceptionally effective at our and our schools are increasingly the recruiting grounds for this ideological army at a mandatory training center training earlier this year in san diego vdoe source bettina love accused whites teachers of spirit murdering black and brown children and urged them to undergo anti-racist therapy for white educators did you know

041that your source had those opinions a recent educational program for sixth and eighth grader teachers called a pathway to equitable equitable math instruction informs teachers that white supremacy shows up in math instruction how did we get here the word is cowardice the refusal of the adults the adults in the room to tell the truth if cowardice is the thing that is allowed for all of this the force that stops this cultural revolution is courage and courage often comes from people you would not expect courage looks like paul rossi the math teacher at grace church high school in new york who raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory whites-only zoom meeting unwilling to disavow his beliefs rossi blew the whistle that takes courage courage is g van fleet a virginia mom who endured mao's cultural

042revolution as a child and spoke up to the loudoun county school board you are training our children to low their country and our history she said in front of the school board growing up in mouse china all of this feels very familiar the only difference is that they use class instead of race george orwell said that the further a society drifts from the truth the more it will hate those that speak it so let's start with a little courage when you're told that the valued traits such as industriousness and punctuality are the legacy of white supremacy don't hesitate to reject it and when you're told that america was founded to perpetuate slavery don't take part in rewriting the country's history america is imperfect but america and we americans are far from irredeemable and when you

043are told that we are that you are implementing critical race theory through culturally responsive pedagogy come clean tell the truth let's have a town hall and talk about it you are implementing critical race theory and some of you on this board know it thank you melanie duchato [Applause] melanie do chateau in the kohl's district excerpts from an article called culturally relevant pedagogy limits minority students it should be great news graduation rates for minnesota's black and hispanic students which have long lagged the rate for white students are on the rise but how much do these new graduates actually know what skills have they mastered in other words what is their high school diploma really worth mnpost.com recently profiled a new spanish heritage program at roosevelt high school that principal michael bradley credits with helping to boost

044the school's hispanic graduation rate the program features culturally relevant pedagogy and focuses on developing hispanic students self of sensitive cultural identity the article explained that students see themselves in the curriculum find their voice and become their own advocates but it says little about whether they acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to become well-informed productive citizens though the graduation rate increased to almost 75 percent only six percent of the school's hispanic students were proficient in reading and only 10 percent in math culturally relevant pedagogy is the brainchild of gloria lads and billings she coined the term in 1992 and says that it describes a pedagogy sorry a pedagogy of opposition a primary a primary goal of her approach she says is that students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of

045their current social order lads and billings singles out paulo free area as an author whose vision of education ungerds undergirds culturally relevant pedagogy freire was a brazilian marxist and educator in his 1968 book pedagogy of the oppressed he taught that all societies are divided between oppressors and oppressed and called for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist hegemony hegemony sorry freyri dismissed academic learning as mere knowledge that oppressors used to rationalize inequality in capitalist societies how does a pedagogical approach grounded in such a perspective prepare american students for success today many educators assume that black and hispanic students cannot succeed in school unless they see themselves in the curriculum culturally relevant pedagogy may be well-intentioned but its multicultural vision prevents minority students from utilizing the existing culture of the larger society around them for their own advancement

046in the words of thomas sowell multiculturalism like the caste system he points out tends to freeze people where the accident of birth has placed them i wish the students of roosevelt's spanish heritage program well but i can't help wishing they had the opportunity to attend a school that instead of locking them in the box of culturally relevant pedagogy equip them with the knowledge and skills they need to seize the opportunities that wait at their doorstep in america thank you dale marie walton good evening my name is dale marie walton from haymarket virginia and i'm privileged to be on the board of payton's project we are a small private organization and taking actions to assist all prince william county students to increase their psychological well-being i am thankful that our school board has focused on the

047emotional well-being of all students for this 20 20 20 21 22 school year one outstanding resource that schools have support have to support is mental health is having a wellness room our young teens can go into the wellness room accompanied of course by a counselor to take a chill break there they can release their stresses their anxieties by using sensory materials and gross motor items some examples of these are like mini trampolines breathing balls calming music and weighted blankets the goal of these rooms is to have the student return to their classroom calm and ready to learn wellness rooms teach all kids how to self-regulate and promote resiliency we all know that these skills are essential for us to function successfully in our adult lives to support this endeavor for the 2022-2023 school year peyton's

048project is offering six thousand dollar grants to middle schools in prince william county just for supplies to start a wellness room for their schools here the focus is on helping all young adolescents contribute to increase their mental resiliency in 2021 2022 school year this school year unity braxton middle school ripon middle school woodbridge middle school potomac shores middle school and fredon middle schools each were awarded five thousand dollars from us to set up their wellness rooms also these schools will receive an additional two thousand dollars next school year to replace materials and or purchase additional supplies for these rooms our goal is to have a wellness room in all princeton prince william county's middle schools please go to paytonsproject.org backslash programs to find further information on our wellness rooms in closing i wish to emphasize

049that each child's emotional well-being is just as important as learning payton's project is focused on all kids possessing good mental health wellness and teaching young people to be kind to everyone for this is what our beloved peyton rose freeze would do thank you for your time michelle baldwin and then after her will be um brent freeze and jason van valen michelle baldwin good evening my name is michelle baldwin my address is on file i am a kindergarten teacher in this amazing division i love my students i love my school and my job but kindergarten is a heavy lift i would like to explain some of the difficulties of large kindergarten classes and explain the testing demands placed on these young students as they begin school our kindergarten class max has 29 students these young students

050need help with so many things as they start school behaviors letters numbers learning to write learning to read oral language regulating emotions using tools like scissors and computers right they uh these new new students need so much help to learn how to be at school kindergarten is foundational large class sizes make teaching these skills very difficult because they all need so much help i have a small table in the back of my classroom it's supposed to be a small group teaching table but it's really just been a testing table for the entire first quarter did you know that almost all kindergarten testing is given one-on-one i call my students back one at a time to ask them testing questions i can't pass out a test for everybody to complete simultaneously large class sizes make one-on-one

051testing extremely time consuming first quarter testing for kindergartners included 184 questions for each of my up to 29 students we have lost almost two months of small group teaching time to testing should a five-year-old be asked 184 questions when they just start school i've been testing at every free moment for eight weeks and i'm still not finished for report cards i know i'm a professional educator and i know i have to give assessments but 184 questions to students who are just entering school when i'm back testing students try to do centers but they need me on the floor guiding them and helping them here's a true story for you from a kindergarten classroom i have a fun literacy center where kids dig through a large container of rice to find magnet letters and then they

052match them on their alphabet chart so i'm back in the back table testing and i look up to see a child throwing the rice like confetti they're five years old right they they need help and guidance to learn to be successful at school they don't come to us independent and successful pulling classroom teachers to sit at back tables to test for a solid two months is detrimental to students learning the routines of the classroom in closing i encourage the board respectfully to lower the max class size for kindergarten and decrease testing demands on these very young students can we find some middle ground between the preschool max size of 20 and the first grade max size of 30. i know title 1 is maxed at 22. i would love to see the district cap all

053kindergarten classrooms at 22 students lower class sizes and less testing will lead to stronger students for years to come thank you brent freeze uh sorry this is this is going to be hard um good evening my name is brent freeze and uh my my address is on file with clerk i want to thank the entire board and dr mccade for the opportunity to speak it's unfortunately been a few years since i've been able to speak to you all um but for those last few years we've been kind of busy in 2016 i lost my daughter peyton rose freeze to suicide she was being bullied severely at school she was a senior at battlefield high school and she couldn't take it anymore after my loss i came to this board and i asked how can we

054do better for our children how can we work together to find new ways how can we prevent another father another parent another community another school from having to do what i'm doing right now which is stand here and know that last week she'd been 23 years old don't never get to celebrate that with her over the last five and a half years the charity that peyton's family and community started peyton's project his works were tireless and tyler tirelessly on that objective we've partnered with spark we've given 35 thousand dollars in scholarships to date to those who've been bullied or have made their community better and eliminated bullying we've created payton's peers which is a peer group that allows our children to become more self aware more self-worth and have more self-value i've had the opportunity

055to to speak to thousands of children and parents over the last five and a half years on bullying and cyberbullying and how the impacts all of us and the very negative mental health and wellness outcomes of ignoring this problem a statistic for you according to stopbullying.gov 28 of the students between the ages of 6th grade and 12th grade report being bullied or cyberbullied and a number has increased 3 percent since my daughter took her life that's insane that it's gone up not gotten better thank you to dale marie and and sharing the fact that we've provided twenty five thousand dollars in grant money to prince william county schools for the wellness rooms i wanted to share that progress with you because i wanted to also say that payton's project is dedicated to every student every

056child every administrator every teacher we are here to help we will always help we will be here until i cannot breathe anymore we will continue to fight for our youth i ask this board i ask everyone involved please find a moment of kindness in the anarchy find a moment of calm in the darkness we can do this together as long as we listen to each other thank you so much and i look forward to the partnership carrying forward thank you jason van valen good evening my name is uh jason van valen i'm the parent of a pwcs student i have a daughter goes to school here so i got four main things that i wanted to bring up provide recommendations and see if you guys could think about it maybe interact some of it first

057off i'd like to see is get rid of the mask mandates i don't like them secondly i know it's coming down the pipe but i don't want to see a vaccine mandate for the children or the mrna therapy i don't want to see a mandate for that here in pwcs also i know other people have talked about it tonight but get rid of crt in schools regardless of what you call it and lastly i kind of think this would be an interesting proposal i'd like to see cameras in classrooms okay so just to elaborate a little bit on each of those items masked mandates i think it's a political theater tool to be honest more than anything else it dehumanizes our children my daughter was a very very good student and she is suffering because

058of the mass mandate it makes it hard for her to interact with the other kids and she's suffering i think a lot of other students are suffering and i think when we look back with history we'll probably realize that it was all a big mistake if you look at some other countries in the world sweden norway denmark they've gotten rid of the mass mandates some of them got rid of them early on and they're not having any problems kids don't really get the disease they don't really spread it early when this first thing kicked off the the covid uh pandemic we had 15 days to stop the insanity i'd like to see 15 days excuse me we had 15 days to slow the spread and i'd like to see 15 days to stop the insanity

059could we do that here in pwcs hire some statisticians and you know do a case study see if it makes any difference at all i'd like to see if that's something we could try as far as the vaccine mandates i believe a total of 442 children between the ages of 5 and 18 according to the cdc today have died because of covid and i'm suspect of their data but having said that that's like 225 a year way less than drowning way way less than automobile accidents the risk return that you guys are using to make your judgment seems way off i mean automobile accidents is massive ten times the kids in kovit should we make the speed limit five miles an hour i mean that would save lives are y'all science deniers doesn't that sound

060a little ludicrous so i just think that the vaccine mandate should be a a parent's decision moving on crt a bunch of people have already summed this up earlier tonight but i'm of the mind that the content of your character determines more than the color of your skin and i'll leave it as simply as that finally the cameras in the classrooms i think that would help you as well as the parents so that we could go back and look at maybe what happened in a situation and also would provide some transparency so that we could make sure that you guys and the teachers are doing your jobs effectively thank you for your time thank you okay next we'll move on to and that concludes citizencon time thank you all next we'll go on to the

061student representative joining us this evening is donya sharifi who attends gainesville high school ms dania sharifi please take it away i'm mike on oh okay thank you good evening to the school board and to the prince william county community my name is donnie schrieffe and i'm one of the student representatives for prince william county during this school year thank you for allowing me to speak with you guys about my goals and intentions for this year as a student rep one of my personal goals for this year is to address the recent change to the dress code although the new code of behavior includes changes to the dress code there is still room for improvement the new code of behavior states it is understood that student dress may reflect outdoor weather conditions throughout the school year

062this is one thing i believe has been a positive change to the dress code along with the dress code being more accepting of cultural and religious headwear one of the areas of potential improvement might be the section that discusses how clothing may be considered a distraction to students and staff this might be an area we intend on revising with more student input after speaking with some students across the division i've heard that some schools have chosen to keep the previous regulations in place this might be an additional error that we may need to revisit to ensure consistency throughout the school division as there may be some some concerns that certain genders ethnic backgrounds and body shapes may be more impacted by these regulations according to the dress code it combines with the virginia code 22.1-276.01

063and 222.1-279.6 the dress code and grooming guidelines were created to maintain junior gender neutrality to address this issue and to see the root of the concern i'll be sending out a survey for the students to fill out and get feedback on their personal experience with the dress code both in the past years and this year with the new dress code i will combine the data to see if there's a correlation from students getting dress code in the past to now and the amount of those who identify as the female gender being dress coded more than those who identify as the male from there i would like to get input from students on what specific guidelines should be included in the dress code and work with groups of students at each school to implement those changes

064however i will focus on much more than the dress code this year one of the other major topics i brought up when i was being interviewed and applying for student representative was creating a more interconnected prince william county community for the students because of this i'm hoping to see some gathering this year with students from each school i hope to have two to three students per each school of varying backgrounds in prince william county to be nominated entered it to attend at the gathering will be a student-led event hopefully by the other student representatives and the student senate this will be a four students by students event which will make the environment more open friendly and comfortable for the students each of the students that attend will have a topic or issue to present and

065we will work on how we can bring those issues to light and see if there's any overarching themes that slip through the eyes of staff or faculty the purpose is to see the different experiences students of all grade levels and varying backgrounds at prince william county schools have this is important because there's only so much that charlotte meekley and i can as super as student representatives can think of as the student voice there are things we might not see just because of our own backgrounds that those of different backgrounds deal with on a daily basis there's so much that goes to notice and as soon representatives it is important for us to be the voice for those students and in order to do so we need to talk directly with the students and expose ourselves

066to the different issues through prince william county this is why i'm planning on holding that gathering of students as soon as possible additionally we are hoping to set up a social media account and website for the student representatives in order for the prince william county students to have direct access to reaching out to us and learning about the different ideas we have so that we can get their input there are many more topics i will be working on and the other student representatives are hoping to work on such as school start times or a mandatory study block offering more variety in school lunch menus and equity in school funding thank you for your time and for the opportunity to be the student voice for prince william county again as we mentioned from time to time

067we encourage all students to reach out to us we are always here to hear your concerns and questions thank you excellent ms sharifi thank you that was dania sharifi at gainesville our student rep excellent report moving on to superintendent's time dr mcdade thank you mr chairman good evening i'd like to begin the superintendent's report by providing a brief update on covert 19 as we are still feeling its impact on october 8th we paused in-person learning at bennett elementary school in manassas transitioning more than 700 students to remote instruction as of monday october 18th all students are back in classrooms also last week pennington traditional school community received a communication notifying them that because of a recent rise in cases and quarantines there was a possibility that certain mitigation strategies may be necessary such as minimizing

068activities during the school day limiting after school and extracurricular activities or even a temporary pause of in-person instruction fortunately in collaboration with local health officials we moved quickly to manage the situation and minimize spread as a result no additional steps were necessary and students continued in-person learning without disruption however in these complex times i want the entire pwcs community to know that we are working closely with experts and following the science we will continue to approach the covet situation with transparency honesty and integrity because nothing is more important than the safety of our students and staff and we ask everyone families educators and our entire community to continue to be vigilant and be safe there are so many dedicated individuals who helped make our complex school system of nearly 90 000 students move in sync

069especially as the pandemic continues tonight i'd like to recognize members of our prince william county school family our bus drivers during school bus transportation employees appreciation day and for the bus safety week for school bus safety week our bus drivers are often the first and last interaction our students and families have with our division each day and we are incredibly grateful to have dedicated drivers who transport our students safely and with so much care every day we could not function without their dedication to students to our bus drivers across our school division thank you for all that you do for children as many of us know nationwide bus driver shortages have arisen during and because of the covet 19 pandemic that has also affected us here at pwcs right now we have teachers and staff

070who are remaining at school past their contractually obligated time to supervise students who are waiting for buses to come back after their routes for pickup and drop off those staff are going above and beyond to adapt to the needs of this moment and their dedication is a testament to the caliber of people we have in our district to that end we will moving forward we will be paying certified and classified staff members who are remaining beyond contract hours to supervise children that are waiting for buses using arpa funds that will be distributed to schools again we want to thank all of our employees for their hard work and commitment please know that we are working diligently to fill bus driver positions as quickly as possible as covet 19 continues to affect the operations of our

071division tonight we will be sharing the educational impacts of the pandemic we will be delivering a full presentation of the state of the school's report this report outlines student learning and achievement numbers from the 2020-21 school year and the effects of the pandemic on academic progress over the last 18 months unfinished learning has proven to be a nationwide education crisis it's affecting every corner of our country for us here at pwcs it is important to regularly review our data and acknowledges and knowledge the challenges before us while taking appropriate action to ensure continuous improvement make no mistake the impacts of the pandemic have been felt across all of our school communities as we work to recover it will be important to provide every learner with the appropriate support needed to ensure academic progress additionally as

072the most diverse county in the state of virginia and 10th most diverse in the united states we are not immune to the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on our most vulnerable learners this especially includes our english language learners and our economically disadvantaged students the data show clearly that learning gaps that existed pre-pandemic have only been further exacerbated while we have benefited from a short-term infusion of federal support to address unfinished learning as a school division we remain concerned about the lack of parity in per-pupil funding in pwcs when compared to other school divisions regionally as this impacts our ability to sustain the work of the unfinished learning plan this year's state of the school's report includes additional data points and more desegregation of data as well as our response to the impact on academic progress

073we honor the hard work of our teachers and leaders as they have put forth a herculean effort to continue providing quality instruction during these challenging and unprecedented times it is important to note that we should not make comparisons between pre-pandemic data and the data that is our current reality however we must use the available student data to identify our opportunities for growth acknowledge that pervasive gaps continue and take appropriate strategic actions to ensure that we prioritize continuous improvement with the implementation of our comprehensive unfinished learning plan in place we have identified key commitments that will be covered in the state of the school report academic recovery and learning acceleration will be targeted approaches for all students and hinges on all of us coming together recovery will not happen overnight and we will be implementing our

074unfinished learning plan over multiple school years at this time i would like to introduce dr jennifer quesada director of research accountability and strategic planning who will present the available data to demonstrate the current state of our school division she will be followed by ms rita goss the associate superintendent of teaching and learning who will provide our strategic next steps in response to opportunities for growth related to our current state dr quesada thank you dr mcdade good evening chairman latif school board members and dr mcdade as dr mcdade mentioned this report is different from previous annual reports on the strategic plan it looks similar in terms of structure but this year it includes additional data points more disaggregation of data plus some key takeaways and next steps all new slides are indicated with a yellow star

075and i'll call them to your attention this first chart is new and provides context to show how prince william county schools compares in terms of size demographics and cost per pupil to our surrounding jurisdictions this slide was added at the beginning of the presentation to provide context for understanding performance and needs you can see on this slide that pwcs is the second largest division in virginia and the most diverse among our northern virginia neighbors you can also see a difference of up to seven thousand dollars between prince william county and our neighbors in terms of cost per pupil translated into actual funding this can be up to six hundred million dollars by way of reminder the virginia department of education waived accreditation for all schools in the state for 2020 the 2020 2021 and 2021

07622 school years due to the pandemic so there's no new information to report here vdoe accreditation ratings are based on performance in the following areas proficiency in english mathematics and science plus achievement gaps in english and mathematics and chronic absenteeism high schools are also rated on graduation and dropout rates just to go back in time before the pandemic 100 of schools in prince william county were accredited without any conditions ratings will start again for 2022-23 which include data from this current school year the first section of the presentation will look at performance on the standard of learning tests but before we start that discussion there's some critical context that's necessary about those tests last spring this slide provides that important background for considering performance in spring 2021 sol participation was significantly lower than in 2019

077and it's important to note that the tests were not administered in the spring of 2020 due to the statewide closure rates were down over 40 percent in reading and 50 in mathematics in terms of who was taking the test it's also important to note that the sol test must be administered in person under secure conditions as such a major contributing factor was the number of students who were learning virtually who then did not come into the schools to take those tests also recall as i mentioned that those tests did not exist in 2020. it's important to note that the virginia department of education highlights these same contextual factors for any overall any on any reports of sol scores and these participation drops were seen statewide in addition no expedited retakes were given to students in

078grades three through eight in 2021. this was the case in most places in virginia also and finally in terms of context at high school students needing tests to meet graduation requirements were given the opportunity to do retakes as necessary so they were not harmed by that we begin now by looking at reading and math performance for both prince william county schools and virginia in both 2019 and 2021. on each chart prince william county is on the left and virginia performances on the right for color coding the lighter blue is prince william county and the lighter color is 2019 and darker is 2021. you can see that performance dipped slightly in reading for both prince william county and virginia as a whole and that it dropped significantly in mathematics for both prince william county and virginia

079and as in virginia as a state with our next several slides we're going to examine that performance more closely this first slide allows us to look at reading performance disaggregated by race ethnicity for both prince william county schools and virginia from left to right you see performance of black students hispanic students white students and asian students again before i go any further just to let the public know this slide presentation is available um in in board docs and will be posted um to the prince william county website slight decreases were seen in prince william county and virginia across groups from comparison to 2019. this is another look at reading performance for both prince william county and virginia but it's disaggregated by different student groups based on from left to right economic status english learners and

080students with disabilities you can see that those pass rates drop both in prince william county and virginia for all of these groups our next two slides show us the same information as the previous two but for mathematics here we see again prince william county performance in mathematics disaggregated by race and ethnicity again same direction left to right across the board from prince william county and virgin you see significant drops in performance from 2019 to 2021 and this slide disaggregates that same mathematics performance by student group for both prince william county and virginia again we see significant drops in performance across all of these groups both locally and statewide this slide examines prince william county performance slightly differently the purpose here is to allow us to examine the gaps between the performance of our students in

081identified priority groups again our economically disadvantaged students our english learners and our students with disabilities to the performance of students not in those groups it's important to note these charts only examine prince william county students performance as a visual aid the yellow outline box shows the gaps between the groups being compared the chart on the left shows reading performance and the one on the right shows math performance both charts show some persistent gaps in performance and in many cases as dr mcdade indicated existing gaps were exacerbated during the pandemic remaining on sol performance but looking at things slightly differently this slide looks at the percentage of our students who scored at the pass advance level by subject area both for prince william county schools and virginia in reading past advance rates stayed level from 2019

082to 2021. however in math just with as with overall performance there were significant drops it's very important to note here that the number of tests taken in science and social studies were reduced due to changes in the number of sol tests required for graduation as well as the use of local assessments and social studies in 2020 2021. this slide is a new slide for this year and it shows us the past advanced performance by gifted status you can see that the students identified for gifted services score at the past advanced level at a significantly higher rate than students not identified as gifted the highest pass advance rates for both groups were in writing with the lowest in mathematics speaking of mathematics you can see that in mathematics as well as social studies and science there

083were significant drops in past advanced rates for our gifted students in 2021 as compared to 2019. our next two slides look at the percent of our graduates who have earned at least one qualifying score on an advanced placement international baccalaureate or cambridge exam which is one way for students to earn college credit while they're in high school as with the sols the participation on these advanced exams was impacted in the past two years by the pandemic in fact the ib and cambridge exams did not occur at all in the spring of 2020. the latest published data from the college board indicate that 20 24 percent of high school graduates nationwide it learned earned at least one of these qualifying scores the virginia average was 29 percent in prince william county that average this past year

084was 31 percent given the trend before the pandemic we do expect that this number to rebound this next slide which is new breaks the performance from the previous slide down by student group and allows us to disaggregate the data the chart on the left disaggregates by race ethnicity and the chart on the right shows those student group comparisons as we've done before by economic status english learner status disability disability status and also on the far right by gifted status again that yellow outline box is a visual representation of the gaps between groups you can see there are significant gaps between groups in terms of the attainment of these qualifying scores which is again one way for students to earn college credit speaking of college the next three slides look at sat and act data for

085our graduating seniors the inclusion of college readiness benchmarks identified by both sat and act is new for this year's presentation the first slide looks at the 2020 2021 sat scores overall and by ethnicity it's important to note that the performance is shared by for prince william county schools virginia and global comparisons this is a change from the past when the college board reported national performance now they report global performance sat participation globally as well as locally was impacted by the by the pandemic the sat scores for 2021 seniors in prince william county represent scores from 2756 students which represents 41 percent of the senior class which is down from 3 618 students in 2020 so prince william county performance overall tends to exceed global performance but is below the state averages for our black students

086prince william county performance exceeds both state and global performance as mentioned on the last slide the sat scores for 2021 seniors represent a smaller number of seniors than in the previous years this slide includes some of that context on the number of students taking the sat by student group as well as the percent of students meeting college readiness benchmark scores overall prince william county had 52 percent of our test takers meet the benchmarks in both reading and writing that's one section of the test and mathematics when added when those two scores are added together the benchmark score set by the college board total 1010 so 1010 average scores from the previous slide for all racial and ethnic groups in prince william county do exceed that benchmark this slide includes a ct performance for graduating seniors

087in 2021 this information was just published and released by the act just last week prince william county average composite scores increased in 2021 that's what's on the left and it is higher than national averages but below state averages however it's very important to note that only 320 of the graduating seniors in 2021 in pwcs took the act that's only five percent of the graduating class this does continue a downward trend over the past few years in terms of a.c.t participation the second chart shows performance relative to the a.c.t college readiness benchmark for each subject area which are listed below the chart overall 50 percent of students in prince william county who took the act met those benchmarks in all four of the subject areas moving on prince william county has always looked at average daily

088attendance and continues to meet this target which captures the average percent of students present in school on a given day over the course of the year later in the presentation information is included about chronic absenteeism which is a different way to examine student attendance patterns our next few slides look at graduation and dropout rates this first slide shows the on-time graduation rate for prince william county for the past five years in 2021 that rate was 92.8 percent this graduation rate takes a cohort approach meaning it looks at the percent of students who graduate within four years of starting high school this formula does make adjustments for those students our english learners and our students with disabilities who are allowed by federal law to take longer to graduate and those students are still counted as on

089time this slide shows the on-time graduation rates by student group for prince william county the state as a whole and surrounding jurisdictions the total cohort side is included for context the 2021 on-time graduation rate for prince william county was just below the state average as well as below several neighboring jurisdictions and on-time graduation rates for our hispanic students our english learners our disadvantaged students and our students with disabilities fall below our division average this new this slide isn't is new to this year's presentation also and it looks at the percent of a given cohort who dropped out before graduation so overall prince william county had a five percent dropout rate in 2021 but that rate was above 10 percent for our hispanic students english learners and students with disabilities dropout prevention is part of the

090focus on student and family re-engagement component of the unfinished learning plan this slide looks at the percent of our graduates who earn dual enrollment credit which is a second way our students can earn college credit while in high school that percentage actually continues to increase and it was up to 22 percent of our seniors in 2021. the next two slides look at this information income in combination with some other data about early college credentials first we look at how we take a look at the data for those students earning early college credentials in the two different ways dual enrollment and apib cambridge exams and those combined so overall 41 of our graduates in 2021 earned dual enrollment credit or ap ib or cambridge credit while in high school many of these students earn both and

091that's important to note again the numbers for ap ib and cambridge decrease during the pandemic but we expect them to rebound this slide is a new one for this presentation and is a look at that early college credentials by student group the slide shows that there are wide ranges in the percent of graduates from different groups earning these early college credentials in all cases there were drops from 2019 to 2020 with some slight rebounds in 2021. sticking with college the next two slides look at college readiness in terms of how the virginia community college system looks at it there are many different ways to be measuring college readiness this metric is included as a stop gap until the virginia department of education accreditation system includes their new college career and civic readiness indicator that will

092be included beginning with the graduating class of 2023. the virginia community college system has a number of measures that can be met to show college readiness many of them are test based like the t psat a t ap etc in 2021 70 percent of our seniors met those benchmarks the next slide breaks this information down by student group again this slide is new for the presentation it includes the full 2021 12th grade cohort in terms of total numbers as well as the numbers that met the college readiness benchmarks overall there were uh 6720 20 i'm sorry 6722 seniors in 2021 and of those 4733 met these college readiness benchmarks the charts disaggregate the data by race ethnicity on the left and by student group with those gap comparisons on the right again that yellow outline

093box serves as a visual representation of the gaps between groups this next slide provides information about students earning advanced diplomas overall 52 percent of the graduates in prince william county in 2021 earn advanced diplomas a number that's been pretty stable over recent years the chart on the right shows the breakdown by student group and race ethnicity you can see the variations that exist across groups this next slide is a new one for this presentation and it looks at post-secondary enrollment of our graduates the virginia department of education publishes this information every january it's important to understand that it looks at the percentage of graduates who enroll in post-secondary education within 16 months think of it as a year and a summer after their graduation that's why there's a delay in reporting so this chart shows

094the enrollment for the graduating classes of 2017 2018 and 2019. for 2019 graduates 72 percent had enrolled in two or four-year institutions of higher education by the fall of 2020. the table includes this information for student groups as well as the proportion by the type of institution for your public for your private and two-year this 72 total is down from 75 percent for the class of 2017. we also anticipate a post pandemic rebound future data presentations will include information about the multiple pathways for our students after graduation including higher education military and the workforce which will allow us to have a fuller picture of our students once they leave us so the next several slides examine access by looking at the participation of our traditionally under represent uppers underrepresented student groups in gifted programs advanced

095courses and cte career and technical education this first slide looks at elementary and middle school gifted participation elementary school on the left and middle school on the right overall at both elementary and middle school 18 percent of the students in prince william county schools were identified for gifted students these the slide shows the participation rates for our disadvantaged students minority students students with disabilities and english learners and that they're all below the division average showing some disparate rates of access it is really important also to note though that the gifted identification processes could not be fully completed in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic this next slide shows the same similar information for high school but it looks at it by gaps and it shows the gaps for student group based on economic status

096english learner status disability status and minority status again those pesky yellow boxes show our visual representation of the gap these gaps have remained stable over the past three years and again as noted on the previous slide the gifted identification processes were not able to be fully completed during the pandemic the next piece of access is looking at participation in advanced courses apib and cambridge by student group this is participation in the courses themselves across all of high school again the yellow boxes show the gap between underrepresented groups and the comparison groups and these gaps have remained stable over the past three years here's another new slide for this presentation and it's looking at the performance of students enrolled in apib cambridge courses during a given year on the exams disaggregated by both race and ethnicity

097which is on the left and by student group on the right as has been noted before participation in these tests was down in the past two years overall counts were down close to three thousand from 2019 to 2021 in prince william county schools in 2021 51 percent of our students who took tests earned qualifying scores again remember that in 2020 ib and cambridge exams did not occur so data from this current school year the 2021-22 school year when we have this will provide us with a fuller story of performance in this area this next slide is also new to the presentation it looks at participation in cte courses by student group it's important to note that the requirements for standard and advanced diplomas have required students to take some cte courses new graduation requirements started

098with the current senior class those class those students beginning ninth grade in 2018 and 19. so prince william county has traditionally looked at the identification of students for special education is part of this in 2020 2021 11 percent of students division-wide were identified for special education most student groups were close to that percentage with the highest proportion for black students at 14 percent and lowest for asian students at six percent so each year we present data on discipline referrals by student group in 2020 2021 discipline referrals in general are infrequent due to the unusual nature of that school year with so many students participating virtually as a result it makes interpretation challenging and we cannot rely on the data from last year to draw conclusions about any decreases before the pandemic counts of discipline referrals

099were trending down however those patterns as well as exclusionary discipline patterns across student groups will be studied again this year now that over 97 of our students are attending in person earlier in the presentation you heard me say when we looked at average daily attendance that we'd look at attendance another way another metric related to attendance is chronic absenteeism this is one of the measures included in the video accreditation system vdoe defines chronic absenteeism as a student missing 10 percent or more of that student's membership days so for an average year of 180 days if a student's enrolled all year if they miss 18 days they meet the threshold the percent of students meeting this threshold was higher in 1920 than in chronic absenteeism rates were decreasing over the three years before the pandemic as

100with the previous slide the data for 2020-21 are incomplete due to the unique nature of last year this year will provide us with more reliable data since again 97 plus percent of our students are attending school in person this next slide is new to the presentation while chronic absenteeism has been included before this slide disaggregates the data by race ethnicity the chart on the left and by student group the chart on the right again the yellow box is a visual representation of the gaps moving forward these data disaggregations provide important information as to where to target resources to combat absenteeism as again part of that focus on re-engagement with students and families we are nearing the end of the data portion of the presentation this slide looks at overall satisfaction rates by student group i'm

101sorry by stakeholder group in 2020 2021. the satisfaction rates for parents were level with the previous two years those surveys were typically administered in january and february satisfaction rates were above 90 percent for parents central office staff and school-based staff and at 8 percent for students updated surveys are in development for this year to help get a better understanding into the root causes limiting satisfaction for students and other stakeholder groups in order for our students to be successful it is critical that they have highly qualified teachers meaning teachers who are trained and endorsed in the content they are teaching this graphic shows that the percent of students taught by highly qualified teachers in every one of their classes was at 97 percent in 2020-21 as it was in the previous two years it is important

102to note however that it remains quite challenging to fill some positions and hot off the presses as of today we have 90 general education school-based instructional vacancies and 45 special education instructional vacancies as of today this next slide looks at the number of national board certified teachers in prince william county this number decreased in 2020 2021 after remaining stable over the previous three years and includes everyone in prince william county who's a nationally board certified teacher the teacher turnover rate in prince william county schools continues to slightly decrease with the flip side meaning the teacher retention increases slightly this information is at the division level further analyses into teacher mobility and turnover at the school level or planning will be communicated publicly these analyses would allow for the targeting of resources to support schools with

103higher levels of teacher mobility this concludes the data portion of the presentation just as a reminder the public can access data in many areas of the on the equity scorecard website which can be reached from the main prince william county public schools homepage the equity scorecard includes data disaggregations in a variety of areas to examine access and performance through an equity lens the scorecard provides a tool to use to monitor progress in providing equitable operating equitable opportunities for students more comparisons are added each year currently the equity scorecard includes data in the following areas student and staff demographics which will soon be updated with the official fall 2021 membership data assessment that's the sol performance in all subject areas college and career readiness to include also advanced exams s.a.t a-c-t graduate graduation dropout rates and

104et cetera and then program participation again that's those are the access measures we discussed tonight and learning climate this is a variety of measures ranging from discipline to teacher data to even some facilities data the equity scorecard is currently being finalized with the new data and fall 2021 membership data it is now my privilege to turn the presentation over to mrs goss who will discuss key takeaways from the data as well as some of the next steps in response thank you very much good evening chairman latif vice chairwoman zargaport and school board members tonight we have reviewed the divisions data and we have shared the current reality for our school division these areas that we pr there are areas that we proudly celebrate and as you have seen in the spirit of transparency we have

105identified areas where we are not hitting the mark that we need to hit for all students our division had the opportunity had opportunity and achievement gaps before the pandemic and like school divisions across the nation those gaps have been worsened by the pandemic it is important to be careful not to make blanket comparisons between the pre-pandemic data and the pandemic data given that there are a number of unique qualities of the data sets including that during the pandemic we had a number of students who did not take assessments like the sols however it is also important to note that the pandemic data highlights the specific areas we need to be intentional about addressing our achievement and opportunity gaps focusing on continuous improvement some takeaways from the data are that our achievement in reading while comparable

106with other years still dropped seven percentage points and the gaps for some student groups are widening while we expected and saw impacts in reading the data for mathematics was significantly impacted with our division seeing a drop of almost 30 percentage points while we celebrate our overall graduation rate of 92.8 percent we also acknowledge that there are significant gaps in the graduation rates for english learners and hispanic students we acknowledge that the dropout rates for english learners hispanic students and students with disabilities is over 10 percent for each group simply put that is at least 10 out of every 100 students in each of these groups is leaving school without reaching the finish line of graduation we cannot ignore this we have access and performance gaps that remain for priority groups of students in the areas

107of gifted identification and advanced courses for advanced placement international baccalaureate and cambridge overall unfinished learning exists for all students including our advanced and gifted learners so you may be asking what is our plan to address these key takeaways the next slides will focus on some of the specific levers and strategies we will be using to address some of our most concerning gaps in the data as you are aware we developed and are beginning to implement the unfinished learning plan which seeks to address unfinished learning through research-based academic and social emotional learning strategies we are focusing on the instructional core by ensuring that the tasks students are doing are lined to the standards and are at the appropriate cognitive level of demand continuous improvement is paramount so we will be conducting division-wide school instructional rounds at

108all levels which will provide us a consistent way of monitoring and determining the next level of work at our schools additionally all instructional staff will be participating in professional development on key foundations of the unfinished learning plan like learning acceleration high dosage tutoring strategies the instructional core and rigor we want all of our students to be engaged in authentic tasks that actually ask them to do the work as mathematicians scientists readers writers historians we all know that what students practice they get better at continuing with other unfinished learning plan commitments the division is ensuring equitable access to rigorous high quality culturally relevant curriculum through consistent use of the division created content units on canvas and the implementation of our newly adopted english language arts textbooks and core materials it's important to note that this is

109the first time we've done a division-wide purchase and distribution of these english language arts materials to ensure that every student in prince william county has access to the same core materials for english language arts class to class school to school we are also using lexia core5 and powerup these adaptive learning programs specifically address early literacy and foundational literacy skills for elementary and secondary students respectively and we know from our data that these are two important areas given the amount of unfinished learning we must be focused on accelerating student learning one of the ways we are doing this is through high dosage tutoring during the school day and in extended expanded learning opportunities different from remedial tutoring high dosage tutoring is consistent at least three times per week for 30 to 45 minutes intensive targeted instruction

110based on student needs which involve the teaching of priority power standards or enduring understandings in the curriculum and the prerequisite essential knowledge and skills needed for the student to successfully access grade level material that is forthcoming in future curriculum learning given all the demands of the pandemic on teachers and school leaders we are supporting teachers and leaders with this strategy through self-paced remotely accessed professional learning in canvas a diff additionally as a part of the arp funding for the unfinished learning plan 4.6 million dollars have been allocated directly to all 96 schools to support the hiring of tutors another important aspect of this plan is our re-engagement of families through transparent communication dedicated outreach education and opportunities for authentic partnerships an example of this being actualized is the 1.2 million dollars that has been allocated

111to 20 schools to hire parent liaisons these 20 schools had the highest losses in enrollment in chronic absenteeism during the pandemic and the liaisons will help schools directly address both of these issues as we all know this pandemic has taken a toll on social emotional health and well-being of staff and students as such part of the unfinished learning plan is focused on addressing these needs for both students and staff we have 315 current employees who will serve as social emotional learning coaches in schools to support staff beginning this year and beginning next year there will be a division-wide implementation of virginia's social emotional learning standards using arp funding six hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars have been directly provided to schools in support of positive school climate and staff and student wellness initiatives 1.2 million

112dollars has been disbursed to schools to cover the cost of teacher training and time spent learning social emotional concepts the ultimate goal is to change the manner in which teachers and other school-based staff respond to a variety of student behaviors in schools additionally 1.6 million has been allocated towards school-based mental health professionals to address unfinished social emotional learning for some students including a focus on unfinished post-secondary planning and school connectedness students with the most needs who are experiencing academic difficulties will also receive individual support one of the key takeaways from our data tonight was the significant drop of almost 30 percentage points in math as a result here are some of the intentional strategies we are implementing to address this 21 schools that have been prioritized through the unfinished learning plan index are receiving intensive

113of needing intensive academic supports will each receive a math coach we are strengthening classroom instruction by focusing professional learning on areas of need seen in the data such as numbers and number sense we are investing in common assessments and regular progress monitoring of learning mastery so we can modify instructional strategies supports and interventions in real time based on student needs the curriculum pacing guides and units have been redesigned or updated to focus on supports for high dosage tutoring and acceleration those supports can be seen in the curriculum in canvas and they include clear identification of essential prerequisite skills and enduring understandings as i said earlier these are key to learning acceleration and the high dosage tutoring we will be doing with students we are also utilizing programs that supplement learning or enhance instructional focus and

114delivery and math you see a few of those on the slide dream box math navigator assessing math concepts as you saw in our data our english learners are one of our priority student groups that we must strategically focus our continuous improvement efforts on in order to close the gaps and address unfinished learning in support of consistent implementation of research-based best practices we are focusing on professional learning and on-site coaching in support for teachers of english learners on language development specifically academic and social language development as you know the pandemic has impacted the development of both of these we are focusing on lesson planning that includes alignment between the content and language objectives another essential area is ensuring that our english learners are getting daily opportunities to use academic vocabulary and texts that reflect the diversity

115of our students students need to see themselves in the learning another priority group that we saw in the academic and opportunity gaps is our st our students with disabilities so we need to be intentional with our response to this data we all understand that reading is essential to learning success in all subject areas teachers and support staff are receiving orton gillingham training orton gillingham is a highly structured approach that breaks reading and spelling down into smaller skills involving letters and sounds and then builds on these skills over time it is an explicit direct sequential systematic multi-century instructional approach to teaching reading and this approach directly addresses the needs of our dyslexic learners and other struggling readers the division is working with teachers and leaders to increase the frequency of progress monitoring for the academic social

116emotional and behavioral areas of need that are noted in student ieps and 504 plans we are also working to assess the research-based intervention programs being utilized in schools to ensure that those being used are the best intervention to actually address each student's identified needs the division data clearly demonstrates pandemic impacts and those impacts as we have said have affected all students including our gifted and advanced learners the unfinished learning plan includes research-based practices to address this group of students and we are implementing strategies to address the learning and opportunity gaps for these students as well refocusing on consistent collaborative planning between gifted teachers and classroom or content teachers is one of those strategies using unit pre-assessments informative data to determine the needs of students and purposefully respond to the accelerated needs of these advanced or

117gifted learners is also important ensuring that gifted education teachers lead enrichment as well as acceleration groups and push into classrooms and consistently provide classroom teachers with those resources that need to be differentiated and strategies differentiated for the success of these students is another important strategy designing and implementing curricular units to emphasize that student collaboration and communication skills the pandemic impacted the ability for our students to develop these skills and we know that they are vital to our students being successful post-secondary as global citizens an important part of this work to address the needs of gifted students is also our work to increase the identification of underrepresented priority groups of students through target professional learning and doubling down on our early talent development which exposes all our youngest learners to advanced learning opportunities including critical thinking

118and problem solving in summary our division has areas to be proud of but we also openly recognize that we have a lot of work to do to close the learning and opportunity gaps which is the only way we will realize our vision of every student not a few not some but all students having a thriving future i want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all our teachers leaders instructional staff and support staff in schools and across the division for their dedication hard work perseverance and the as dr mcdade said their herculean efforts especially during this pandemic recovery from the pandemic will take multiple years and all of us working together but under dr mcdade's amazing leadership and with the implementation of our unfinished learning plan over the next two years and the next steps

119outlined tonight in direct response to our data with the dedication of our outstanding employees and the partnership of our families and community i am confident we are on the road to begin addressing unfinished learning closing the achievement and opportunity gaps in realizing the vision of a thriving future for all our students thank you ms goss at this time myself ms goss and dr quesada will take any questions related to the data presentation i also just want to re-emphasize that many of the strategies and initiatives that have been outlined for for addressing the data is over multiple years so this is not an expectation that all of these strategies will be employed in a single year because that is not possible and all of the research is showing that the results of the the impact of

120the pandemic will require multiple years of recovery much of what you heard around core instruction so many of our schools are doing a tremendous job addressing much of this already so this is in alignment with what many continuous improvement plans have in place and shouldn't be an add-on but should enhance the work that's happening but it is important to recognize that a lot's happening in our schools today and it is no expectation that everything that was outlined uh is going to happen immediately in a single year questions okay well i'll start with one um just uh miss quesada maybe you can help me answer this and it might just be that this is how these slides are set up but slide 27 on college readiness and slide 30 on post-secondary enrollment it seems like i

121don't know if it's by accident or this happens just normally but in 18 or you know 18 and 20 74 and 69 percent of our students met college readiness um or 19 let's say 19 71 meant college readiness and then you look at the post-secondary enrollment for 2019 cohort 72 went to college i guess is is is this set up so that it's supposed to look like that or you know can you explain these two slides so we say okay 72 percent me meet college readiness benchmarks by the state and then we just happen to have 72 percent of our students go to college so that's a great question dr latif i can tell you that for um the college readiness benchmark you site on slide 27 um is metrics from the virginia community college

122system when they are determining you know placement out of particular courses um so that you can see it's not surprising to me that it's a correlation with the post-secondary enrollment but those numbers are computed independently right so the the the 72 percent of enrollment that's actual enrollment and so some of those you know so we haven't done and they're not all community colleges they're not all community college no so that 72 percent includes community college includes four-year public for your private that includes all of those and that's a remarkable relationship because it's pretty consistent when when on the college readiness it's only the community college testing the students well so they're not come there no we use we apply their benchmark to all of our seniors i see so um that's a good clarification so

123we apply that benchmark to all of our seniors using what they use so that's not just for that's a great question not just for their students who enroll but we applied that and did the analysis so it's really not surprising that those numbers are very similar does that answer your question yes so it would be fair for me to conclude that if we improve our college of readiness that post-secondary number goes up that would seem like it could be a correlation okay all right great um mrs thank you dr latif um i want to talk about math for just a second as the daughter of a math teacher i had the unique privilege of having workbooks all the time because my dad would just bring that stuff home so i wasn't allowed to be bad

124at math or anything like that i always had practice even if it was just basic skills and i'm looking at these math scores and and i know the pandemic was really hard on everybody it's hard to teach on well some things may not be as easy to teach online i just what accounts do do we know what it accounts for that big drop in math um or it does it have something to do with kind of like i mean is it is it consistent k to 12 are there are there grade levels or areas that we're looking at that are more critical than others and i tell you have a 16 year old i'm worried about what's going to happen to her her unfinished learning is going to run out and she's got to go

125so i know there's parents like me who've got kids in high school who are worried and i have constituents who brought up math a lot they're very worried about this especially the high school kids so um and it's kind of a broad question but could you is there something you could talk about a little bit that would help us get some insight as to maybe what's going on and maybe maybe some more specifics about what we can do i think dr quesada you can address the piece about what we can extrapolate from the data and not and then we'll follow up with um some of the response to what we do especially with our learners that are on their way out of prince william county so what i can say ms zargapor is it's um

126it's not unique to prince william county and it's not unique to a particular grade level while the level before the pandemic was different at elementary middle and high school you saw significant drops across the board in terms of those and that was seen statewide also so um i can't extrapolate as to the causes for that but you you can see that it was not a unique phenomenon to one one level or one test or one student group for that matter and then i think the other piece to note is that we we're going to have to you know take a hard look at the fact that we have multiple years of unfinished learning in terms of addressing um and covering uh standards for mastery and and math there's prerequisite skills that have to occur and

127so when those are missed um you know even now this year with students coming back in there are a lot of skills that teachers would have had to revisit you know over the course of the last two years depending on what level of instruction some students may have received and so that's one thing i don't think we have an a concrete answer for why the data looks that way outside of the fact that we know the significant impact came from unfinished learning but i will say for those students who for all students across the board the high dosage tutoring is one of the research based best practices that we are going to be using as well as extended learning opportunities and the beauty of the high dosage tutoring is that you know it gives an

128opportunity to accelerate learning while teach in collaboration with teachers covering the core content and i'll let uh rita if you have anything to add there in terms of how we're addressing math well i think i think mrs argport one of the beauties about us being back in school relative to math instruction is the ability for our students especially at our lower grades but really at the middle school also to utilize math manipulatives that are very helpful in building that understanding you saw some of those adaptive programs that we're also utilizing in order to supplement instruction it's it's clear that there's probably a number of reasons why the data is what it is but each of our schools is working to really examine their baseline data as students enter to determine those unique needs of every

129student you heard dr mcdade say about the high dosage tutoring as one of those strategies so really that is where we're focusing is each student by name and by need and every student has a different level of of unfinished learning going forward in mathematics but we we are doing a full court press on professional learning and on-site coaching and in a number of strategies including the ones that we put here um shared with you tonight so we'll we'll stick to math questions since the presentation was extraordinarily comprehensive let's wrap up the math concerns and then we'll move on to another topic so if anyone has any math questions mistake report just one other quick thing so so um i i i understand like a spiral curriculum you know math you got to have number sense

130and you just keep building on these skills we all understand that um can can we also speak a little bit to the kids who are in these higher math classes we've got middle school kids who are in advanced math that's those places where they're starting to get algebra some are getting geometry um or maybe even algebra two there's a couple kids here and there right and then when they get into uh high school since this is a concern where some of my constituents specifically have asked um so so we're on this continuum um and i think it would be really hard to be like yay i'm in calculus calculus a b um but then i'm struggling and what are we doing for for kids who are like they need that little extra support but they're

131still capable of those higher higher levels are and where are we getting um these high quality tutors or yeah i know that's a great question i mean how are how are we finding folks and and things like that so there there were a lot of questions in there so i want to try to make sure i respond to each one of those you ask the question about our learners who may be more advanced at middle or high school and what are we doing about those students so for one thing let's let's be honest we are not going to be able to re-teach every concept that was missed over the last two years so what we're focused on when you heard us talk about acceleration in the research base around that if you kind of look

132at it like a roadway that may have because of the pandemic lots of potholes and we want kids to cross that roadway we are not filling all of those rather we're building a bridge by for students to cross over that roadway to the grade level curriculum that they're working on by really focusing in on those priority standards or that ascent those essential skills that they have to have and we're utilizing a lot of resources that were put forward by the the virginia department of education and they they have put out what we're calling quick checks or pre-assessments so we make sure that we're targeting our tutoring or our or our supports of students even those highest learners with with the instruction that is tailored to what their needs are so that they can access that

133that learning and you're right to be be concerned about it we are all concerned about the math progress of our students i believe the second question that you asked was about uh i want to say will you repeat your second question i think the other part was about you know this idea that we are going to offer high dosage tutoring yet there is a dirt of talent available to you know human capital to address this um and i'll let rita weigh in a little bit more on this but we are we are recognizing that some of this will not be able to be implemented immediately but we are using creative solutions that go beyond expecting that the teachers can't do it all right the teachers are still teaching core and so we they have to

134have support around this so looking at how the universities can support us with pre-service teachers that need hours with college students because there's going to be training for the tutors in addition to the fact that we can use tas to service tutors as well and now we also are looking at capability of vendors to provide services to to schools so those are just some of the creative solutions but not to ignore the fact that this is going to be a challenge to get the kind of support that's needed and that it won't happen immediately but over time some schools have already found ways to implement this through using small group approaches and the way that they schedule their the teacher's time but i do know that rita has given some model guidance to schools just

135this week we started with middle and high school where we provided some specific models of how they can schedule during the day for high dosage tutoring while not taking students away from core instruction where they need to be with their with their teacher so do you want to describe some of those models sure absolutely and um some of those models would be that we we may um pay teachers for a sixth section so they're teaching an extra section and we might have them pushing in to classes to pull small groups of students teachers two teachers could even share a 90-minute block pushing in for 45 minutes each again to pull aside those students and work with them during a time in which has already been developed in the in the lesson plan around small group

136or independent work and so that's that's one way you heard us talk about uh extended expanded learning after school so that's also another way but other ways that we can look at doing this is through our co-teachers you've heard us talk before about our co-teachers pushing in and so some of this work around acceleration can be implemented by them as well as they are pushing in into the classroom you also have kids who may be assigned to as as a skills class or another class as a part of their schedule especially at secondary we have teachers who are already assigned some students to work with and so they might be working with those i i don't want to leave out i'm looking at you miss miss williams that um this also includes virtual students right

137so we have virtual students who have unfinished learning that are being included in these tutoring groups during the day and that could be an in-person teacher or like dr mcdade said an outside vendor that we're looking at trying to find third party vendors to provide us high quality tutors who may be virtual or maybe in person ms wall thank you mr chairman um so i also had some questions um ms zargopro answered or asked most of my questions but going um back to the uh the idea of the math coach um what could you speak a little bit more to what we have in mind for the math coach to do i guess some schools will have a will have a math coach and the math coach will that math coach be directing high dosage

138tutoring and math or um if you could speak a little bit more to that like how that fits in with our recovery plan sure absolutely so the math coach actually is not a person that's working with students their work is to work with teachers to support teachers and enhancing their skills and teaching the subject matter and so we may utilize as you've already heard we have some staffing challenges to so to be honest we don't have a line of math coaches waiting at the door because we have this you know national teacher shortage but we do have some educators in each school right now who may again have us be able to teach or work during a sixth section of the day um during uh and another time and be compensated for that and they

139would then go into into classrooms they would be you know teachers that are getting good results have excellent skills and would go in and model lessons support the teachers in planning for instruction including that high dosage tutoring right selecting the most appropriate uh prerequisite skills to focus on when they are doing that tutoring with students so that's some of the ways a math coach would be used okay thanks and i i suppose we could also harness some of those other resources like universities college professors math education professors etc maybe somebody absolutely take on a charity project of prince william county schools or something like that we've been in communication with our partners i'm trying to yeah okay um and i i had another question again kind of back to that high dosage tutoring i know

140we talked about who and the challenges of who and the when and and the how i guess how um the sub subsidies for this is this is coming out of our arp funds right and remind me is that something that is for not just this school year but the school year after that and is that kind of the extent it's a two-year yeah so so schools will receive uh monies for high dosage tutoring um this year and then again next year okay so we have we have some cover on that for a little bit right and and i you know we talked about what the ideal state is and the hope is that you know of course we'll have to put some stop gaps in for this year for where we can't to what uh

141ms goss just stated the ideal state would be able to have a math coach that that is their job right and they're not cut they're not carrying a load that's not what we want to happen um and what we've communicated to schools is that they should look at this as a two-year plan so they should be planning now for going into next year and our hr team is working on trying to recruit talent to fill these positions going into next year and we've given some you know model guidance for what can happen you know this year keeping in mind not to add on or overburden educators that are already dealing with a lot of challenges within the school which is why i continue to emphasize that it is a two-year plan and is not an

142expectation for schools to go and implement all of this right away today because it's just simply not possible but we do have to have a plan for recovery and that's what this lays out all right thanks deserve money miss jesse i want to start out by complimenting dr mcdade and her staff for this very very comprehensive report you know many of us have been on this board for quite some time and we've gotten data but we've never gotten an after what the plan next steps and i also wanted to compliment you on uh i know that we've talked about having these briefings where i have lots of questions but most of my questions to be honest with you were handled during those briefings so i really want to thank you for that because uh i

143was able to look at all the slides and ask the questions and i'm not going to ask a lot of questions tonight i have a couple of thoughts and a couple of questions but i they're always every year i ask the same i talk about high performing schools and the four questions are are children learning and you've shown us that and how do you know you've given us the data but the two categories what are you going to do for those who are not who do not master skills and more importantly what are you going to do for those kids who already know and i see that there is an emphasis on giftedness and access i am concerned about access when i look at some of the access data middle and high school kids in

144gifted ed and in cambridge this is not a pre-debt pre this is not a pandemic situation it was something that was already here and it's been here african-americans kids are not in some of these programs i'm very very concerned and i'm just making some statements about the ell population hispanic because therefore their access their performance is something that i think you've targeted in your next steps and you've talked about it the other concern i have is how will we know if it's working will you come back to the board and say high dosage tutoring it's working it's not working will there be a time where we can reconvene and see if this is working and and thank you for saying well we're not sure about this because i think this board they're very professional people

145we don't want you to walk on water well we do dr mcdade i did say that sorry but uh we just want to know what what are we going to do about kids who are not learning what are we going to do about access and it's a lot i'm saying a lot but the other concern i have is you look at these graduation numbers and you've got this high graduation rate but i've been studying the research for quite some time and i know that kids are graduating they're going to college but certain groups of kids african-american kids are in five-year college courses they're taking remediation the dropout rate is high and the question i want to ask is are we going to do anything to look at our students after enrollment because they're in role

146but some of them are dropping out and then others are in five-year courses so i hope you got some of those questions so and that's a that's a great uh question and one that is critically important to me i've i've stated several times the importance of all students being able to have a strong concrete post-secondary plan which goes beyond college to include students going into the workforce having cte credentialing to go into the industry students going into the military et cetera but i think it's important what you just called out we could not of course identify all of the strategies that we want to employ over the course of not just two years but in the four-year strategic plan one of the goals what the data that you did not see here tonight is persistence

147data which shows us whether or not our students are persisting towards a college degree meaning that we gave you enrollment data which is a lagging indicator and persistence data is also a lagging indicator and the goal is to be able to bring forward persistence data to show once our students enroll are they persisting and remaining towards achieving a degree whether that be in four or five years so that is data that we are looking to capture within the school division that we have not um you know been able to to share tonight that's one thing once we take a look at that and identify what is happening with our students and whether or not persistence is there or not then identifying strategies to support so that students are not going into remedial courses because we

148know the outcome of that students who take remedial courses in college within their first year are 70 percent more likely to not persist towards obtaining a degree and so there are things that we can put in place within the school division like transitional math and transitional english in collaboration with our community college so there's a lot of different strategies that of course would address some of the concerns with what happens to our students on post-secondary we simply could not you know put codify all of that in tonight's presentation but what you should expect to things that you asked will we come back yes we will be evaluating not just implementation with fidelity but effectiveness of the of the uh you know some of the approaches that we're putting in place over the course of the

149next two years we also beyond you know just coming back and saying whether or not some of those strategies are working you should also expect that within the release of the um four-year strategic plan some of the strategies that you're asking about will be codified within that plan that even goes beyond whether or not students go to college but looking at how we're ensuring that whatever pathway our students choose in post-secondary whether they're getting internships and apprenticeships um and how we're preparing them for the workforce so it'll be multiple approaches but that's that would be codified within the four years to treat the plan and not an immediate two-year plan like the unfinished learning plan again i want to thank you for all that you've done and and for teachers out there and the principals

150i'm at the principals and teachers you know i've been talking with them and i've heard teachers and i say that they're overwhelmed and i'm pleased to to know that you realize that they're taking on a lot you know this pandemic that's new uh the the the language arts program that's new then the high-dose tutoring that's new you're new and i think that your accessibility and letting people know that you're aware of what's going on because some of the schools are really having problems i think someone asked a question about high dosage tutoring how do you get the tutors some are getting tutors and some or not but i just want to thank you guys for a very very comprehensive report and for giving us the good the bad and the ugly thank you miss jesse

151so i'll just wrap up the math discussion with um thank you dr mcdade um i think the you know it shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody in this room when say about january of last year you know upon asking how our grades were in math so you know i've been criticized for looking at test scores school divisions have been criticized at looking at test scores so you know we looked at grades last year first quarter second quarter grades during virtual school and in math they were awful they were beyond they were terrible and so you know that really predicted where we where we ended up it shouldn't be a surprise and so in the sense that as you look at the real time things you're talking about miss cause you know when we look

152at real time for this year's first quarter grades you know that should give us some indication i hope of you know what's working what's not working who needs work where the work needs to go and um and i think and i i do appreciate your honesty you know and and i talked about this the other day you know i'm getting you know if anyone were asking me what is the number one complaint as a school board member i'm getting right now it's math from parents and students that's what i'm getting and and and and when you said you know there are some things we might not be able to go back and teach if you look at your ninth graders who took algebra two with trig and we making maybe the greatest mistake in american

153history and not teaching the end of fourth quarter in that year new material students in algebra and algebra two trig didn't get their trig didn't get their last bid and then they didn't have that to build on last year last year's grade suffered the pandemic couldn't you know was challenging nationwide understood but we are now faced with those students arriving in the school and expected to know that material and it is tough on those kids so one thing i'd like to ask as you guys look at first quarter i'd like to know how many students are dropping out of the current math class they're in 9th 10th and 11th 12th and drop back one level and that i would like to be monitored very closely and and and ask that you know our counselors and

154teachers and everyone recognize the challenges the students went through um as as these students are making these decisions to to to drop out or to move around or you know to deal with c's d's f's that they're they're having challenges and these are all every one of our students is struggling on this so so i i can't thank you enough for being honest with us this evening and showing us this material and and having a plan and um as we look forward to addressing the plan that will be really critical so non-math-related questions i'll go to mrs williams she's had her hand up thank you miss williams thank you mr chairman i i um appreciate the discussion we just had on math because i have not received the same level of math uh questions from

155my constituents but i do understand the importance because it is one of those subjects that if you don't get the right foundation it's very hard to move on um what i do want to say is uh echo my board members and saying thank you for this presentation um it is refreshing to not only see where we were where we stand and where we plan to go um i do want to say just for a moment to our watching public that one of the things i do get a lot of commentary on is at my job in corporate america we just do and i think that it's important that we take a moment to just address the fact that we are a very large school division and i don't say that as an excuse but i

156i do say that because it is important for the public to understand that it does take time for once a strategy is developed then it is explained to a principal or administrator then it has to be explained to a teacher or whoever's in charge of the classroom ta who whoever is in that room and then it has to be implemented and those things don't happen overnight i'm a school elementary school parent all over again i feel the same way sometimes i have moments or i'm like well we should just we're the manipulatives well how come we're not doing this we should just do it and then i have to remind myself that it's not that easy as we are overburdened we are suffering strap shortages our kids are relearning as uh the kindergarten teacher so

157eloquently put it and i believe another teacher said just relearning how to be in school our teachers and our staff are relearning how to be in school and and doing that based upon previous pandemic expectations which is not the same reality as to where we are now so i just wanted to take this opportunity to say you know it's worth taking a pause sometimes even when we are frustrated everybody gets that way i do as i do as a parent sometimes and wish that things were moving faster pace or just in a better predicament for my child and i just try to take a moment to realize that my son's teacher may have you know 29 other kids and someone may be having a bad day maybe the teacher is having a bad day there's

158much more of a human factor and component when it comes to educating our children than you find in other areas of business in corporate america or other industries and i just don't think that that can be said enough because especially now that we're coming out of the pandemic we are urgent and in our need and our desire to continue to educate our children and to do it at a pace that we each deem acceptable and that varies for everyone um so i i just wanted to say that because as dr mcdayden we've heard tonight this is a not anything that can be implemented immediately and i think sometimes we hear about a plan and then go well i haven't seen it yet when is it going to happen what do you mean it's going to

159take two years and i and i think that just a moment to really give a second and state that i think it's really important and um should not be lost on this conversation because i'm guilty of getting impatient myself um so i know if i'm feeling it other people probably are as well um i did miss goss you read my mind when i was thinking of virtual students um i wasn't thinking so much in particular for math but just in general um if we could not at this time but maybe when the update comes just delve a little bit deeper into or even maybe um you know have a small presentation for our our four percent five percent of virtual families that specifically addresses their concerns or what it looks like for a virtual student

160with these remediation strategies i'm not picky either way but i think it's important that we don't forget them and and what that looks like because it is different for someone in a classroom versus a virtual student and that's specifically for elementary middle and high school because all three are different right our high school is virtual virginia a lot of our middle schools are concurrent our elementary is proximity and i think that all of those things make a difference um and then uh one of the things that we talked about this evening was absenteeism with students and one of the things that i would like to know and then when we come back and revisit this is what are we doing for our absentee student her students who are chronically absent to welcome them back and

161i say that because i deal with a lot of students who come you know i encourage them come on you need to go back to school you need to graduate you need to get back in class and oftentimes those students feel very stigmatized when they do return into a building and we don't talk about how it is that we are addressing that to make those students feel like they should be there when they do return and i think that that's a major indicator of why we're seeing some of these repeated absentee rates and we've never addressed that conversation at least to my knowledge while i've been on the board and that's something i probably should have thought of earlier but it just dawned on me especially during this last year having seen personally so many

162students return decide not to return to school and sort of given up hope and then a few who did and still felt very stigmatized by the fact that they were absent and the administration at a particular school didn't welcome them back when they did make the decision to come in um and then was and then my last question also doesn't need to be answered now what are we doing to support our students who are heavily burdened maybe having to support their families in addition to going to school if we could just give some highlights to our public on what that looks like from a school division perspective and how we support those students i think would be very helpful because i'm not sure a lot of parents know that we do have programs and we

163do have supports in place just simply because we don't talk about them often so thank you um just and like you said this one this is uh requires a much more in-depth conversation but just to call out and i'm sure i won't speak to this as eloquently as um becca or even uh denise heber hebner probably would because they're over social emotional learning in the pwcs heels initiative that we have but there are a lot of um a lot of the training and social emotional and mental health well-being supports that are being put in place in schools is to address just that welcoming environments for all students and we also currently have a partnership with kaiser permanente where they have a network of providers to you know support families that goes beyond what the school

164division can do so we're working with them too to tap into their network to address the the latter part of of your comment in terms of how are we helping families that have burdens that go beyond academic needs and go beyond the social services that school based personnel can provide so more we can definitely um provide more information about the pws cs heals initiative and how that would address some of the questions that you have thank you i appreciate it i just think when we're talking about these things and people are listening and we do have their attention that we include that in the conversation and it's not necessary now but i i do think it's worth the acknowledgement so thank you very much because i think schools are expected to do so much and

165it's not often that we talk about the fact that as a school division we can only handle so much and then in turn we partner with others to ensure that we continue to be able to support those students so thank you miss jackson thank you dr latif um thank you for the presentation today i went into a lot of detail both during the powerpoint and then further conversation with dr mcdade i just want to also thank you very much for answering my questions ahead of time and including some of that information on the powerpoint i know that as we discuss data it's not going to tell us the whole picture it's not going to tell us the story behind every child nor does it detail the efforts that the staff are putting forth and it

166does sound like the division is aware that um and i can't think of a better word besides bowdoin that some of these steps would take on finding stuff and the time of stuff i um because this is a continued conversation it sounds like we're going to be continuing revisiting this and because um i am i embrace that dialogue i just have two follow-up questions one that for clarification because the presentation was so long and very informative thank you and the other is to help me understand some data um just for clarification so for the first one am i correct to understand that we will receive follow-up data to include um statistics or on mobility of staff from one school to another yes yes okay and um the second question is when we talk about el

167status when it's on their powerpoint um el is you know status is such a broad spectrum like you can be you know different weeda scores for when we're looking at that status and i think you've answered this in the past but i just want to just quick is it all weirder scores or is it just some or like what is the definition of an el student thank you that's a fantastic question miss jackson because from the state perspective they changed how they what they included in terms of um when they report performance so for many of the disaggregations particularly around the sol scores that um el designation only includes um active students so levels up to level five for you know and not former students and so if you recall folks on the board several

168years ago all of a sudden you saw precipitous drops in data but because some of that was because it was not apples to apples anymore so former l students are not included um there are points um at which the former ls are included and i'll make sure we can get a breakdown for which pieces are there because i don't want to say something and say it wrong but for all of the sol data um in particular um the l students mean active english learners which is levels up to level five so i just have one follow-up so then that would include if we were to get such a up to level five that would include no matter what type of error service you receive would be in included in that as long as they're receiving

169they're receiving services and it covers those levels yes that's what following the state definition for that category so that's what we tend to use but i want to make sure for all the comparisons that there's not something else in there okay thank you so much okay um miss wall miss wilk mr will uh thank you dr mcdade thank you staff for that presentation it's very comprehensive and i really appreciate it i think like millie just lily jesse uh said to reiterate that it's good to see all the data the good the bad the ugly and i think that's really important for this community to see um i'll be brief i'm just gonna ask one question to follow up with the other ones with you um but with the increased demand for skilled labor right now

170in this country um i was you know looking and seeing right now there's a 360 increase for carpenters 244 increase for electricians 205 increase for welders i've been looking at the slide about the cte and understanding the sequences of courses leads to an actual credential and potentially industry certification can we get some data on the uh the success of those programs how many students are actually earning the credential before graduating from high school um i think it was said in the presentation during the post-secondary enrollments correct me if i'm wrong i think you said this dr quesada that the state of virginia would be providing information about not just post-secondary institutions but uh trades workforce military uh participation is that what you said like an alumni tracker type of thing so we said and dr

171mcdade spoke also to this that that's something that we're going to be looking into so we can get through we can't get all of that from the virginia department of education but that's that's um even through the department of labor and there's other places we can get that information and then in terms of your question about cte piece there will be follow-up around cte credentials and certifications we're working with the ct fantastic cte folks to make sure you get the right information for that we were calling that out as uh data that we recognize we need to have and explore especially as we look to increase access um as well as identify the different pathways that our students are taking for post-secondary so um that's that was the purpose for calling that out is to

172let you know that those are areas that we currently do not have data for but that we are exploring how to capture that data and then you know report that out in short order perfect okay thank you so much okay um so i think that's should wrap it up i i did have one question one last question and it was what's slide number 17 slide 17 oh no maybe yeah is that right s8 oh see yeah slide 17. um and i know we've talked about this year after year and i and i just bring this up because this is a board priority and i know dr bring dave's priority but you know the largest percentage of our student population is the latino latinx population hispanic and you know the number of hispanic students taking the

173is is half less than half of everybody else and you know it's been a issue year after year and i know it's one of our priorities and i know dr mcdade wanted yours to to to address and um and you don't have to answer it now but you know strategies to address this are are are important to the board i know and to the community um and and we you know that's just just a priority i'd like the public to know that that is something this board is highly concerned over and that includes our also lagging graduation rate um in that same population so dr latif that's a great call out because that is an important piece of data that we see and a huge gap um one of the ways that we're working this

174this year to really address that is is monthly parent engagement sessions where we are really working hard to educate the parents of our english learners ensuring that we have appropriate interpreters there so that they truly understand the opportunities including the impacts or the doors that this this type of testing like the sat can open for their students and so um you know there are a number of pieces but one of those is really trying to re-engage families in that way especially the families of our english learners there are certainly other ways that i think you you will be seeing more about in this strategic plan where we are addressing really closing those those opportunity gaps and those gaps of students um testing uh taking the sat or the act and i would just add that

175we honestly don't really know the why and so we have to conduct a thorough root cause analysis to determine why you know are some of our students with higher dropout rates why is that happening and what we can do both within the school division but as i stated earlier i'm looking at what's happening that requires social services beyond what we can offer and then connecting families to those services so it's going to be a process for us to look at not just data but qualitative data in terms of surveying our families talking to our families engaging with them using our parent liaisons to help get at the why this is happening and then once we can you know say with confidence we have identified some problems of practice then align strategies to that but we

176really cannot tell you with full confidence that we we know exactly why this phenomenon is happening well i think that's great because i think that'll help us maybe improve this right obviously um i had well i had i had miss zargo poor then i had wall and then i'll go okay do you have one you did oh i'm sorry who was it miss williams um i just wanted to piggyback on on that and and say that um i think it also may be helpful too if we could look at the breakdown in that population of uh in specifics to specifically to which portion of those students who identify or families identify as hispanic who are also students who are el learners and who are not because i think that a lot of times we make

177assumptions that the majority of those students are el learners because of being hispanic now i know at my high school at freedom a lot we have like one of the largest population of el students who also happen to be hispanic but i think it would be helpful for our public watching to know if that's um county-wide or is it pockets or you know really what that looks like in a bigger picture um so that we can also try to break down some of those assumptions from the general public coming in too and i think that'd be helpful too like when we look at graduation data if you could also speak to that because i know like my high school does impact on time graduation rate because we have so many el students it often looks

178negatively when you look at the data and it says the graduation rate for this particular school is 88 and a high school right next to it is 99 i'm making up numbers right but it may be because that particular school has a significant more amount of el learners or special education students who take longer to graduate or whatever the reason but i think that as we um continue the school year and we continue our growth in the ways that we look at data those type of points i think would be very helpful too because i do get a lot of comments not necessarily here but in like racial and social justice who say well your high school isn't graduating students on time look at the number but there's nothing in that number there's nothing in

179that data point that would say well this high school also has the most english as a second language learner student and that impacts the graduation rate because maybe they're all level ones or maybe all level four we don't know so i think as we come back and revisit these subjects that type of extra definitions to those numbers are very helpful um so thank you that's all i wanted to say miss wall and then miss jessie okay i'll try to be brief but i just want to say first of all thank you um for this report because i know it represents hours and hours of work to put all this data together and all these you know slides alone but besides all the work that went into getting the slides in the first place really appreciate

180it thank you so much and i appreciate the chance to look through the slides beforehand and really kind of digest the numbers um and and that helped answer a lot of my questions um of course raised some others but you know we've talked about those my my question is simple um we have um three percent or so of our student body learning uh in kind of a totally different method you know with proximity or you know online virtual not totally different but you know quite different going forward um i would just ask are we going to be tracking those cohorts separately and just kind of see like you know this because the this data is how this is what we're getting from this group or in this stage is what we're getting from this group

181are we going to kind of be combining it or how are we going to use those use use the best practices and the results of what we've found to to guide future decisions in the virtual and the in-person space so in order to address your question about the data we absolutely have flags for the students who are learning virtually and as was the case last year tracking some things in terms of performance and things along the way can be done that way the numbers of course per school and everything are much smaller this year but that certainly can be done in addition for schools as a resource in an on track report that they have access to the information that's that's available there also not that it's a risk factor but it's something for folks

182to be aware of in terms of um differentiated responses but we definitely in terms of from a data analysis perspective we'll be looking at that for all the reasons you mentioned miss jesse thank you you know we talk about the gap being the performance and opportunity gap during my years of work and and doing some traveling throughout the united states and looking at the research there is a gap between performance and potential and i i think that as we're talking about the potential of these kids and high expectations we know that there are school systems throughout the united states chicago school systems being one where people have closed the gap so i'm wondering are we looking at traveling to some of those sites and looking at sites where there has been a close in the

183gap and then the second item is sat reduction in sat nact that have we looked at the impact of test optional because a lot of universities are not requiring s.a.t information um requirements and i've had parents call me because they the child wanted to go the student wanted to be test optional but the school insisted on putting his his uh actual s.a.t scores on the application and that's just a rule in the school so i guess it's just two questions it's the other one is more of a thought uh for me it's always been about potential that these kids have potential uh special ed i'm still very concerned about special ed because it was a pre-act pre before the pandemic we had problems there so if you could address a couple of those items i

184would appreciate it thank you so mrs jesse i i can speak to the s.a.t participation a little bit that you asked a good question about the impact of test optional i think it's going to be a little while before we can really see the full impact of that and it was definitely confounded with the pandemic but more and more schools have that in terms of test optional a lot of the students are still still take the sat whether they submit them to the schools is another question but i think we'll be looking at that that's a that's a big question you can see trends going down i think that's one of the reasons why a.c.t in particular those numbers are dropping nationwide because of test optional but in terms of the impacts here the data

185we have so far probably don't show a full impact of that because those decisions have been on you know coming in the last few years and there's a lag with that as well because many of our students take those tests as as juniors and so that's the question i can i feel like i can address i think some of my concerns are that some parents are and students are indicating that they don't know about test optional i guess just making the high schools make students more aware of what tests optional really means and the ramifications thank you okay um i think that wraps up just as a reminder because miss jesse brought up and we are in college admission season students have to and i think this the county we should send out a reminder

186if we could that the students have to opt out of having their act and sat on the transcript it's an opt out because it's automatically on and and i think it's important to remind our counselors and our principals and our students because it's an easy thing to forget and then if they don't opt out it's on there and if they're applying to a test optional school and they don't want to submit it they don't they might not submit the scores but it shows up on the transcript and once you see it it's like opening pandora's box and so i would really encourage the school division to remind the students you got to opt out on that if you um because it's automatic on the transcript and i'm not sure if that's the right thing we

187ought to be doing and i don't know i think it's a state law that they're they've told us to put that on there but something you may want to look into dr mcdavid just as a reminder to everybody that goes on there automatically all right folks i think um i think the board's been here we'll recess for 15 and come back to finish up the rest of the meeting thanks okay folks everyone can grab their seats we're going to restart and we'll move on to 1701 the 911 commission update um this is on for a presentation or information and i'm not sure who's presenting this dr mcdade yeah um ms goss are you prepared yes good evening again uh tonight we are we were asked uh by mrs wall and mr wilk to present about

188the work of our 9 11 commemoration committee mr girvin the supervisor for history and social science was the facilitator of this committee and the work so at this time i'm going to ask mr girvin to come forward and present the outcomes of this committee's efforts thank you ms goss good evening dr latif board members dr mcdade so um the 911 commission just want to make sure uh commitment of committee what consisted of 29 individuals majority of those were prince william county school teachers and then there was several that were recommended board appointees you can see those names on there um we had you know teachers from you know high schools middle schools and elementary schools and a teaching as a teacher assistant and also uh laura shaw who is the teacher in residence at the

189marine corps museum was on that commission on that committee as well and worked uh very good you know very well with with all all the grade level bands that we set that into so quickly just going on the timeline um basically last september you know mr wilk had had put forward that you know that you know he had requested that we formed this uh committee to create some resources and student learning experiences that commemorate the what was you know just you know a few weeks ago the 20th anniversary of the 9 11 attacks and we basically decided really to wait till springtime to get them together because of you know it was as you all know last year was an interesting school year in the in the schools were just coming back teachers were just

190coming back um and so we found that to be an ideal time to get volunteers and so forth and we had as you can see we had an overwhelming response of teachers who were really excited about joining the committee and working on those resources and same with the board appointees they were excited they brought a wealth of knowledge to that to the committee work as well and we basically had them set up uh in the grade level bands that that worked in these different areas so the k2 basically we tried to have that focus basically be on everyday heroes and uh third through fifth grade worked on patriot day was sort of their overall theme that was not something that we told the uh committee that they had had to do basically they had a

191right to to have some freedom to come up with their own ideas and things but those were the sort of the areas that we wanted them to focus on and then six middle school sixth through eighth grade really was looking at you know how do tragic events affect communities that was their main focus and then high school level was really looking at that lessons learned from the post 911 generation which they all are right because every one of the students you know in our schools right now were born after those events and you know it was just interesting trying to you know meeting with with these individuals first talking about you know their experiences themselves unfortunately uh you know in in the 20th century and in beginning the 21st century for americans we all have

192those sort of remember where you were moments 9 11 was for for my generation my parents uh would have been the kennedy assassination and my grandparents the attack on pearl harbor so it's like those moments that you can remember exactly where you were when you found out the kids obviously right do not have that memory and so it was you know that was basically you know something you know emphasis behind you know a lot of the excitement with the teachers getting to work and make sure that the students really had a good understanding of the past events so um the committee the uh the commemoration committee got together and you know after several meetings that i that i spearheaded but really i was trying to let the teachers and the committee members be you know

193the emphasis of the of the work and that they were able to to go off their own they they formed their groups by grade levels and then they they did the work that you know they periodically would meet they would check in with me they let me know where they were they you know let me know if they had questions and things and got their work done by the uh by june 30th is when we were looking at the trying to have that that be done and we got those things uh we collected from all the individuals and we had to add you know just do some editing so it would fit well with the modules and we put them and posted them on in the prince william county canvas commons so that all teachers

194could access those modules so these are just in and you have in the slide presentation obviously not going to read everything but these are the some just some of the examples of some of the resources and student learning experiences that the teachers and committee members worked on and in the back of the of the report that i sent as well in the slide deck it is you know i'm just going to go to it earlier but you know the feedback we got especially from elementary schools was that the the teachers and the community members that created these resources you know gathered these resources and created these student learning experiences really focused on creating you know letting the kids be creative and really letting them collaborate together and as you can see some of the examples

195up there the students really got into that they were excited about the work they were doing and it's a solemn occasion to remember and so obviously the teachers talked about that but you know you obviously have to work with the cognitive level of the student um you're not very well going to show you know a kindergarten student some of the the footage on that day it's not probably you know definitely not appropriate so but getting them to understand what everyday heroes are the front-line workers and who they felt were heroes and a lot of students you know their mom mother and father are heroes local policemen firemen and so forth so they did a wonderful job and again the teachers that use these resources we're excited again because the students really got engaged in creating

196these things so for middle school basically they you know this this went over a few days now they did the same basically the the same reason um student learning experiences were set for sixth seventh and eighth grade but they they ratcheted up basically in sophistication depending on the grade level and they really got into you know how the community reacts to these tragic events even though we are you know here in virginia many of you know we had we lost individuals in prince william county because we had um first responders that uh you know you know rushed to the scenes and so forth and so were involved in in the tragedy you know sadly so you know i know when i when i first started teaching the in the uh in the school district i

197we had i had several students in my class who had lost parents um at 9 11. so it was something that touched this community as well and so the middle so the middle school that was their focus and again the feedback there was was that the students even though they've had some of this information it's in some of our standards they they were not really aware of the overall events and so doing these doing these exercises really helped them understand it a lot better and get get more engaged again some more of the middle school experiences so for civics for 8th grade now they got more into the government in the government's response to the 911 tragedy and you know how did our government change after that date and you know are we still having

198some of those you know some of those effects even today so that was their focus really there and then high school looked at a little differently um they they had several different ways of doing it they they the teachers created uh student learning experiences that got right into the historical part of 9 11 and you know again you can see some of the anecdotal feedback you know some of the teachers that did some of the video uh the video student learning experiences we had getting to see it happen you know that was really some of the main thing was you know ticking it over time to see you know videos of brian gumbel for instance you know trying to figure out what's going on here in new york to tony blair talking and then george

199bush and so on and in some of the from several teachers the anecdotal feedback was when they saw the actual footage of the plane saying that hitting the uh twin towers it was you know very impactful for the students um even though they knew they even told their teachers like we knew what had happened but it was just seeing it again in that context and especially being you know 20 years you know 20 years later it was very impactful for those teachers so and then we also had some of the teachers also and some of the committee members also created lessons and learning experiences that looked at you know east-west relations over time over history so some of the things that they created and and we have in the canvas they have not yet got

200to because they they come later on during their curriculum where it fits in so they will have access obviously to those but that's when they'll prob most likely that's when teachers are telling us that's when they would implement those when they fit into the standards of learning sorry those are the high school experiences continued and then last parts wanted to mention we have a great partnership with the national museum of the marine corps and they really worked uh the teacher in residence position is is really one of the outstanding position that we have that we can have a full-time teacher paid by the by the marine corps museum to really help engage our students and our teachers um with with our past and so they got involved um their whole education staff was involved in

201this and they created several of the student resources student learning experiences and they they offered on that day itself they offered some live chatting and then we also put in those in the canvas modules the the 911 memorial itself did things on that day that we made sure our teachers were aware of there was live streaming going on there was a 35 minute video that they could watch and it lasted all day so school teachers could have their kids join at any time during the day to to engage in the chat in the live sessions that were going on uh with the memorial yeah it's right there and again there's the feedback that i was mentioning and that's the end of the presentation wonderful presentation mr girvin thank you so much for doing this um

202comments mr wilk miss wall mr wilk thank you mr girvin thank you uh collective team uh yeah i mean when i first conceived this i think everything kind of came into place exactly and i know dr mcdade's team kind of inherited this uh from decisions that were made from the previous and that were kind of put on the previous administration but i appreciate mr girvin your team's collective follow-through from my discussion with the gentleman i appointed in my district who actually was on his way to the pentagon the day of the attacks i thought he was a natural fit for it who had lost colleagues in the horrific attacks that killed three thousand people you know his feedback was this is a great opportunity a great learning experience and i think you hit hit it

203up on the head right at the start there mr girvin about you know memory and the importance of you know remembering events that have occurred you know you brought up you know pearl harbor's the famous example and i read a couple good articles one was in like the pittsburgh gazette about the importance of memory in it how that memory becomes kind of part of the distant past and it becomes an event and a date and something you know is a little excerpt and a book that kids and other generations forward and so as we go from pearl harbor we go to civil rights then we go to vietnam and all these different events keep on piling up and so for my generation millennials and being a senior in high school when this event occurred it

204was definitely something and i think the whole board will attest to that it definitely had an impact on everyone's lives everyone remembers and where we were on 9 11 what we were doing and what occurred uh even while i was in michigan not as close you know where the pentagon was attacked right down the road here um so i'm really appreciative of the work uh that has been done the committee uh engagement um you know i i will say as the timeline shows we were way ahead of anyone else we started this implementation a year in advance uh well before the vdoe had someone speak a month before the event about what they think the you know should be taught and stuff like that we were set our modules were up and we were ready

205to go um and and i'm proud of the work the team did to get that up and running and be prepared for this my ask i think would be in the future is i mean we keep those modules you know potentially refreshed 911 can always be taught of course in you know and 20 years is commander commemorative anniversary of course but as we 21 22 and so on i think just again given the impact that it's had on everyone's lives i think it's still something to be addressed and i love the fact that we have those modules there and teachers and anyone who still wants to go in and potentially update those and make more or put more resources just like on television every year there's some new interesting documentary about 911 that's you know

206released and as we learn more and more information so again thank you to your team thank you to all the members who served the teachers the appointees thank you dr mcdade for carrying it through in the collective group i'm very i'm very happy and supportive of what was completed so thank you miss wall i also want to thank you mr griffin and the committee members all those teachers and professionals and volunteers who we nominated from the community who spent a lot of time i know it represents a lot of hours of work and extra extra work and you know you serve as a volunteer on these kinds of committees so it is it is a sacrifice but it's very important and i really want to thank everybody i'm glad that we have this and the

207great thing about having canvas is that we have a way to um memorialize it and kind of preserve it and and use it in years to come and so i i echo mr wilkes um comments about you know hopefully we'll be we will we will use it and that we will refresh it as needed but that it's there now and that's really exciting i think that's that's really great and it looks like we had a lot of thoughtful approach for the different um developmentally appropriate activities from the very small small children all the way up to the sea you know the high school seniors who could obviously handle it in a very different way um i i wanted to come just praise the idea of the live streaming into the classrooms and collaborating with the

208marine corps museum that's a great resource that we have here in this community where we live we have so many resources like that i love to see that kind of partnership between the schools and our in our community and the in this case the museum so i really hope that we continue to look for opportunities like that i think that's fantastic it's brilliant i was able to attend a discussion at the marine corps museum with people who survived who were there eyewitness accounts and it was powerful it's so powerful you know i i mean i remember 9 11 i remember where i was everybody you know we all do but it was powerful to listen to somebody reflect upon a life-changing experience of their own and it created a lot of empathy in the room

209among everybody who was listening who didn't have that same experience but who who could empathize and and it brought the level of compassion and understanding to a very human level and i think allowing you know our students to have those kinds of experiences when they're ready you know our older students can really help bring us together and understand you know understand each other so i just want to say thank you one more time to the committee for all of your work if anybody's listening or watching this we really do appreciate it when we made that call and asked you to volunteer and you said yes that means a lot so thank you okay i i will just echo their comments mr girvin um getting 20-plus people on a committee to work together and the end

210product is this is fantastic this is um as ms wall says exists for perpetuity now and that's fantastic and it's a great resource for our students i want to specifically thank my appointee dr ernie porta he said that the committee members all worked very well together put together this effort really in a quick short time frame and this is high quality really high quality curriculum and it's it's really good stuff i want to thank justin justin wilke member from the potomac district for district for recommending that we do this and the administration for supporting this effort and your department always does a terrific job with social studies and in history we really appreciate it thank you moving on next 1702 revision of policy 738 a motion is in order miss zargaport i move that the

211prince william county school board approved the proposed revision of policy 738 non-discrimination and harassment of students do you have a second for that motion miss williams like a second mrs williams seconds of motion the floor is open for discussion any discussion anybody have any comments ms wall um i have a couple of questions my my first question is i'm in looking over our other non-discrimination policy which is 060 which is overarching covers is very broad and it covers much of the same territory as the proposed changes in 738 so i was wondering if we could have somebody speak to why um this is a separate non-discrimination provision why we need this provision or what was the rationale for having a separate one and as opposed to having the zero six zero which is broad and

212fundamental i think yeah i'll just wait carol you you might want to expound on this but ideally is to bring us in compliance with the law but carol do you have anything that you want to add to that it is to bring us into compliance with state law specifically the virginia human rights act but more specifically to your question about having the foundational non-discrimination policy zero six zero is that the way that our regulations and policies are set up is that although we have an overall just non-discrimination policy we translate that into a policy as it pertains to employees and then we have a parallel policy for students and then those policies are are are those the starting point for us to implement regulations to carry out those those practices for those particular populations miss

213wall um so thank you um i know that the typical order of things um is is that policy usually comes first and and then over time regulations are formulated and implemented and so i have received the question from the community a number of times asking about the timing of the regulations that that go along with this policy and it seems that here we had um some regulations first and then policy second and the public was asking can can we speak to that why that was was there some particular circumstances why it needed to be that way i'm going to have ms hebner speak to what was in place prior and then the regulations that we're revising now are in alignment with the policy that may be adopted this evening so if you could speak to

214ms huebner what was in place before as it relates to regulation certainly so policy 738 has regulations that fall underneath it policy 738-5 was added and that was done to be in compliance the 738 regulation also speaks to our title ix processes which are you're all familiar with the changes that have come about recently under the devos guidance that we've received and we went over through a comprehensive review of revising all of our regulations so in order to do so in a timely way to be in compliance with the um coming school year allowing for registration under the changes that have occurred protections for certain classes including our transgender students we did develop a new policy 738-5 in order to make sure that as we registered students in in preparation for the coming year that

215we had that in place but the policy itself was not ready to be updated yet because we were bringing forward an entire series that had all of our title ix discrimination students with disability sexual harassment and all that's captured in that policy and regulations yeah so a follow-up question then would be um since um you know because of this unique circumstance with title ix and you know the whole package of updates that needed to happen regulations kind of kind of came first so can you speak then to how parents could inform that regulatory process because usually you know it would work out that parents would and citizens would weigh in on the policy but here we maybe they would be interested in informing the regulatory process maybe there's something that we could share with parents

216for how that might go look going forward um you know an effort for you know improved transparency and communication with engagement community engagement certainly go ahead i'm sorry i was just gonna you know speak to the fact that regulation is designed to carry out policy once it's adopted and so when we have um you know feedback and weigh in on policy we parents of course can and we have gotten feedback via the superintendent's account where families have weighed in teachers have weighed in around our regulations but keeping in mind that the regulations do have to fulfill the execution of the policy if you want to expand on that denise doctrine data is exactly right and um so we do often receive feedback from parents and you know through multiple avenues we do have we're always

217welcome and open to input from constituents if they'd like to give feedback we do meet with our schools our stakeholders and we and the process of developing our policies we did have a comprehensive focus group which our school personnel did contribute and they did provide us feedback from their school communities including their parent advisory councils and um parents and and staff members as well sorry i have one more question that builds upon that so um so looking forward um can you tell me what we're going to do to evaluate our own processes within the division you know as we seek to ensure the safety of every student can you speak to maybe what that looks like i i guess it would be the regulatory review process like how often would a regulation be reviewed and

218is a committee formed um those kinds of questions i i've also received some questions along those lines of how that process works i think i guess the question would be too let's say we have a set of policies and then we have a set of fact patterns in the community that occur and then we may realize like wait a second this this policy or this regulation doesn't seem to really be meeting the right or hitting all the right notes you know we need we maybe need to adjust this so is there a regulatory review process and how can um parents or i guess the public have any insight into that regulatory review process so you'll see on the top of all of our policies and our regulations they are up for regular review usually a

219five-year period there are certain times when regulations need to be updated just to be in alignment with state code and expectations i would encourage parents you know to use a number of different avenues to provide feedback and input if so for example there i mentioned your school advisory councils the parent advisory councils at your school level we always have a division survey which is an option we do look and look at that information and make changes accordingly we do track data and we have a lot of focus groups with our schools where we see feedback but as far as the schedule it's a set schedule but it is also it varies by need just based on the requirements from code and in response to things that we'd see in data in our schools when there's

220a need for change all right thank you anybody miss williams i'm sorry justin next yeah thank you mr chairman um i i think a lot of stuff is being kind of alluded to about title ix and state law federal law so and this actually is interesting because when inside nova posted something that i thought was originally click bait and noticed it was casually buried in the article the ruling that came from the grin decision which impacts everything and the law of what we are doing here and after speaking to the reporters like you know i should move that up because it is kind of a critical piece of this whole thing that's happening here so i want to bring everyone to light and just for the public's understanding of kind of what we're talking about

221in regards to the federal law here we talked about the state right so we've mentioned title ix and that is the education amendment of 1972 which prohibits discrimination based on sex and educational programs and activities that receive financial assistance from the federal government congress left this enforcement of this to the executive branch which by 1980 fund fell under the office for civil rights within the department of education so gavin grimm sued his school board for excluding him from the restrooms that other male students were allowed to do in gloucester county a rural county in virginia so this case goes and begins in 2015. now there's a lot of case law with this there's a lot of appeals process and when i taught eighth grade civics we learned about the appeals process at a baseline level

222for both the state and federal but i'll say it like this and summarize this other than the initial ruling in the federal district court every other higher court supported grim in this decision and this ruling of his protection under title ix and the equal protection of law in fact when this case appeared all the way was appealed all the way to the u.s supreme court in 2017. the court ruled under the guidance from the department of ed that the case would be returned to the lower court and be retried with the new interpretation of the title ix protection so if you jump forward back to that district court now to 2019 the federal district court's judge arenda m wright allen ruled in favor of grimm saying there is no question that the board's policy discriminates

223against transgender students based on their gender non-conformity the court concludes that the board has discriminated against gavin grimm based on his transgender status in the violation of title ix in june of this past year the supreme court declined to review the lower court's decision which was an appeal by gloucester that the board's discriminatory restroom policy for transgender students violated title ix and the constitution the board informed the community back in june that it would pay the entire amount requested in the fee for petition so the entire court fees for graham 1.3 million dollars out of a school system of five thousand students of an operating budget of 129 million dollars and that's just one transgender case of a school system of that size in summary a conservative majority on the u.s supreme court allowed the

224appeals court in support of transgender students to stand the u.s district court for the eastern district of virginia the u.s court of appeals for the 4th circuit have both ruled that the school board and gloucester violated title ix and the equal protection clause by prohibiting grimm from using the same restrooms as other boys and forcing him to use separate restrooms what we are doing is alignment with the law failure to adopt these policies and regulations put our school system in peril should we not protect our transgender students in summary gloucester county schools denied the basic dignity and support of one of its students and ultimately did not follow the law in protecting their students every student matters i will not follow the illegal steps of gloucester and deny students their legal protections under both the

225u.s and the commonwealth of virginia constitution we are simply following the law thank you mr chairman um first i'd like to just say i i appreciate that we are having this discussion and we are taking this vote tonight simply as a board member who has knew these policies and and and focus the state was taking for over two years now and as a long-term board member who was here and proudly voted in favor of the update we did in 2017 for our staff and the adults in our school division and how warmly and welcome um that update was received in 2017 from our employees i want to say that you know when i joined the board i used to often say that i was here to be a voice for the voiceless and what i

226have learned is that there is not a voiceless community there are those who are unheard and unseen and that's really what it comes down to with the adoption of the model guidance policies included in this nondiscrimination policy because i think there's been a lot of emphasis on just transgender students and not recognition that there's more to this policy than just our transgender students although it doesn't make them any less and it is extremely important to this group of individuals who have the highest suicide rate amongst almost all of our student body and i want to be perfectly clear that every individual has a right to their own belief but that doesn't mean it gets you get to cancel out someone else's belief or someone else's reality and i think that that has been a point

227of contention when we talk about transgender students in schools and i just want to be very clear in saying that i particularly am very proud and i want to take a moment and just pause and say for those who don't know we'd have we had a prince william county student serve at the state level to help develop these model guidelines and policies because of the experience that she had in schools in our own school system and has continued to grow and serve our community and i want to make a special point to acknowledge masoli campa for all of the work that she has done and all the work that her family has done on these pup model policies and for educating not only myself but anyone willing to listen to them on their experience because

228we don't often take the time to learn about someone else's experience before we criticize it or pass judgment everyone is guilty of that myself included i just happened to be a person who was exposed and had the time and thank goodness the allowance to be included in those discussions years and years ago where a lot of people this is just a new topic and it's very scary to a lot of individuals but what we do here in prince william county schools is ensure the safety of all of our students and that means all of them um having transgender students in our school division is not new um it's not going to suddenly go away and i personally am never going to shy for being an advocate in the alley ally for these students because it

229is my belief that we should provide a safe and learning environment for all of our students and it saddens me sometimes when i hear transgender students being related to acts of violence because acts of violence go across any demographic group doesn't matter whether you're transgender straight gay black white purple green handicapped not if you're going to commit a crime individuals are not concerned about what policies what laws because that's what makes it a crime right we have these policies in existence and you go against them or you go against laws it's not specific to any one group i also want to make a point to say that there is a difference right between it's been brought up several times loudoun counties and prince william county schools and how we handle issues of violence and how

230we treat our students and what we have in our disciplinary policies our alternative schools the way that we deal with students i think that this is something that is not lost on those of us here in prince william county schools and i think it's important to bring attention because often when you talk about transgender students you hear about that and there's no message to counter there's no statement that says that we're different and that's really important because we have a lot of parents who've only heard that and don't hear about what we do and i think it's important to um as parents and any individual care for our student to go back and really reread through our code of behavior ask those questions to staff and administrators if you have concerns i think that's really

231important and the last thing i just want to say is that you know justin brought up the federal portion of it but in case anyone would like for reference the department of education has an entire web page dedicated to this but it is a virginia code 22.1-23.3 that speaks specifically to our uh transgen our alignment with the treat model policies for the treatment of transgender students in public and secondary schools but again i want to remind everyone that this policy is not just about that there are many updates that deserve just as much as time and attention as those for our transgender students so thank you and miss jesse i'm not sure i want to talk that much about the law but i want to talk about the uh voice of the voiceless when i

232came on this board uh i had this little phrase a voice for the voiceless not realizing that i would be put in a position where i really did have to address that uh i am from south carolina i grew up in a school system that brown versus brown was 1954 but by it was a non-story in my community because nothing changed i still went to the same school that was across the street from a white school i could not i could have walked across the street i still was not allowed to ride the bus that came by my house but as i was being discriminated against i grew up in an environment where we made fun of people who did not we thought were different and so it's been a growth process for me and

233the thing that happened when we put this item on the agenda the last time something happened that i hadn't anticipated and that was for some reason employees in this school system came to me and told me their stories and one was a horrendous story and i said to the individual do you want me to use your name the person said yes because terrible things happen to him and i've also had the opportunity to work with a a teacher in my school that had some situations just trying to find a position in the county and i hired this individual and turned out one of the best teachers i've ever taught had in my school so i come to this saying yes i support the policy and uh for those who have different opinions i understand because

234i was there i had different opinions i didn't just walk and say oh i just you know and so i just want people to know that i support it and why i support it but i also understand that this is a growth issue for many people thank you miss wall so i think here in prince william county schools we have had a broad foundational non-discrimination stance and policy already in place and i think it's working well for our schools and we're already in compliance and you know we do a lot of good work here in promoting belonging and fairness and kindness for all and we make sure every student single student is treated fairly and that we're meeting their individual educational and safety needs i think we've done a good job at striking that balance

235as best as can be made with you know a completely big school division like this my constituents however have expressed concerns to me about how the process unfolded they felt shut out of the process to some extent felt their ability to speak to the changes because we have done a lot of this by regulation rather than policy there's been little insight or or oversight by the public into how the changes have been implemented and um you know i bring to the board a unique perspective because of my legal training i understand um a lot of the legal things that have been happening and i see where the law is headed i also see that a number of people and segments of society are uncomfortable with that direction understandably um and in that context as with

236any policy i think it is an action like what we're doing tonight warrants further refinement um especially with regard to implementation and so you know on that basis i am i'm not supporting this motion but i do wish to say that i think we do a good job in prince william county schools in welcoming all of our students into our school environment and finding a way for everybody to feel comfortable and able to access our educational programs and i do hope that we we continue to promote fairness for all okay miss oh miss jackson sorry thank you dr latif um i just want to just briefly say that the role of a board member is to create policy and policy is where we show our commitment to a world-class education but also you know it

237does safeguard us legally it does align us to state and federal laws that the previous board members detailed including the virginia code and the virginia human rights act so i um i support this resolution as it aligns our policies with practices already in place and it's best practice miss williams thank you mr chairman i just want to make sure that we're the public is clear that this is also is bringing us into alignment with existing laws um that we should comply with and that we just didn't by not agreeing not approving this that would bring us out of compliance so thank you dr mcdave and i just want to add on the implementation piece with the regulation we also have to make sure that once we have policy once it's in alignment with the law

238that the way that we implement it we don't get a choice to choose not to implement certain aspects of the policy we have to make sure that we implement the full policy and totality and respect what's in the policy and the way that uh it's executed within the school division okay um well i guess i'll do this the um getting on this board i found it remarkable what board members do and it is one of the one of the surprising things school board members have to do is they get constantly informed of situations that happen in school whether they're violent whether they're accidents whether they're title ix violations in an organization as large as ours with 91 000 institute 90 000 students 15 000 employees um you know it's it's it's a regular occurrence of

239concerns and issues that come up that that seem to require the attention of the board constantly in the administration and legal counsel and you know it's it's a lot of the work that we do involves protecting people protecting employees protecting students and you know as you as you see the emails that come across the confidential updates the concerns that we see and you know this year has been a rough year we've seen accidents we've seen student debts we've seen um administer you know faculty uh coaches and and concerns and and sicknesses and so many different things i i have always found it remarkable the amount of um work we have to do just constantly to make sure we're doing the best we can for our employees and our students protecting everyone the other thing that

240i find remarkable being on the school board and sort of in public life and especially over the last year or two the idea that things are mutually exclusive in in in you know the idea we pick one side and that means we're against the other side and and i've you know and i and i i support this motion partly because you know the idea is that our job here and as a board and i think this carries the same spirit is that we're protecting everybody and we're just re-emphasizing that and we're coming into compliance with laws you've heard already i'm not going to go over all that but but it's not mutually exclusive meaning you know miss jesse brought up this point during the discussion on grades you know you know we we we're seeing

241the slides on gifted students we're seeing the slides on special ed students we're seeing slides on english learners but we we are caring about every single learner it's every single learner on all those slides and and so you know miss jesse has always pointed out year after year before meeting after meeting we care about everyone and she reiterated that tonight very eloquently and in the idea that you know this comes into compliance with our desire to just you know uh comply with the law and so i can tell that you everyone in the public and you see these cases that happen and people get worried you know our job here is to protect everyone and that's that's what we do and that's the what dr mcdade does what this administration does our principles on a

242daily basis are faced with some incredible challenges and and they're not mutually exclusive we are not protecting one group and not protecting another we're not ensuring learning for one group and not ensuring learning for another our goals are to do everything we can is it easy no is it a perfect world that you saw the good bad and ugly on our statistics on our on our academics and we have a long way to go but we always we always knew that we're working on that and we're you know but it's the same way so the idea that you know things are mutually exclusive i think it's important for the public to understand is you know we can do everything and we're trying to do everything and um the goal is to protect everyone and so

243for that reason i'll be supporting the motion and um it's also to come in compliance with law so this point i'll ask the board members to please vote miss simpson you're awake so the vote is six yes latif jackson jesse wilke williams zargapur one no wall one absent ralston motion passed moving on to board matters we will start i think on miss jesse's side tonight yeah okay uh good evening i don't have a great deal i want to i think i have a slide and to put up tonight isn't this the cutest little girl you've ever seen you know i always felt that all the cute kids came to my school but it looks like all the cute kids come to my district now so this this little girl is adriana porridge and she attends

244uh john jenkins elementary and she was featured in the washington post and she's a first grader believe it or not and she wanted to talk about climate change and she says she wants to be a scientist and then a robot that sucks pollution out of the air her advice to adults she said her statement about a doses adults you just don't listen they keep doing it and keeping making the earth hotter when she was concerned about the what the wildfires in california she added everything will keep getting worse and worse until i grow up somebody has to do something so thank you for sharing this with us tonight and then i'd like to congratulate uh we can take that slide down now thank you i'd like to congratulate angela lolo lilo who uh joined our

245special ed advisory council for the akporn district thank you so much she has a love for special ed and a passion really so i welcome her to the board i finished most of my visits my last visit was at aquaquan elementary you know how occupant is it's called the big o and everything is big there there were parents galore and i had the awesome experience of riding in the homecoming parade with the queen dr mcdade and the homecoming game and it was a tribute to mr moore who was a coach who passed away there his family was there his mother eight people from alabama came to that game we had a moment of silence and a candlelight vigil but i want to thank dr mcdade for participating in that parent parade and she knows how

246to throw candy you did a good job thank you miss williams thank you mr chairman uh i just want to start off by saying again i i am especially grateful and thankful that we did have one of our our very own pwsc students um serve at the state level that's an opportunity that most students don't um have and and then to actually do that and undertake such a task i think is uh monumentous and and i'm extremely proud of this board for passing that and for all of ms campos hard work at the state level um and thank you for for um being a representative from prince william county schools it's an honor um just to have you in our school division um next up i think there's a picture that i yep look at

247me so um unfortunately look at me but um our my fellow school board member mr wilke was out of town during dumfries um annual mayor's ball and i had the pleasure of attending and i just want to give a special shout out to um miss bowles who was recognized as teacher of the year at the event and that is her in the middle with her principal from dumfries elementary miss star granberry granby sorry excuse me and she was just so overjoyed and it was wonderful to see her get her recognition at the ball and publicly congratulated for all the work that she does and true to her teacher form she had a teacher speech written out for her thank yous and um it was just a wonderful it was wonderful occasion to see her receive

248her recognition publicly and you can take that down because i'm wearing a dress i don't that makes me uncomfortable so um i also wanted to give a special shout out to i attended the family engagement series virtually that was held virtually as families as literary partners on october 12th i want to thank all of our staff who put that together who all of the many translators because it was translated in more languages than i think i could count um through all of that the engagement seemed to be non-stop throughout the evening and that was just amazing and i look forward to attending more then i want to just note that there will be a racial and social justice commission full commission meeting tomorrow at 6 30 at the mccourt building for anyone who is interested

249and last but not least i just want to say that i know picture day is coming up and i want to give special thanks to all of the elementary schools who are making accommodations for virtual students to come in get their pictures keeping all of our families especially mine feeling connected to the base school and for making accommodations for those virtual students like i know my elementary school is it is very much appreciated and i know that's extra work for everybody so thank you so much and look forward to our next meeting miss wall thank you so in the last week um two middle school boys have been hit by cars in the gainesville district i'm glad to report that the first student is expected to make a full recovery however to the family of

250a young student and to his teachers and friends and those who were there helping him in in yesterday who was fatally injured on route 15 near graduation drive i offer my most sincere condolences at this most difficult time it reminds me to be more watchful especially in traffic as i drive near our schools and to be on the lookout for students especially near crosswalks buses and parking lots it's been a really busy time in the gainesville district as far as happenings we have wrapped up all of our back to school nights and i was able to visit each of the remaining elementary schools including tyler mountain view gravely sinclair and mullen and these schools are off to a great start i was also able to attend some sporting events as well including with miss jackson

251a tough tough contest between battlefield and patriot field hockey teams last friday battlefield played unity read in a pink out football game and the whole community came aided by scores of tiny pink dancers and cheerleaders the dance team the marching band the jrotc and and a new bobcat mass bobcat mascot wow i can't say that it was an 8th grade band night as well so middle schoolers from bull run and reagan were there with the high schoolers in the stands and they even got to take over while the band was preparing for halftime which was really really fun for them speaking of band battlefield marching bobcats competed at jmu and i want to congratulate drum major katie railsback band director mr michael butcher and color guard captain katie stevenson and the entire group for their

252first place overall win there at jmu in their division congratulations bull run held an outdoor pto hosted fall festival and a football game against unity braxton another gainesville district school the events were incredibly fun and well attended and even involved a rivalry kickball game between staff and students and it was close students prevailed 19 to 18 with plenty of hilarity on the staff side of things with costumes some corny school spirit cheers and really rusty kickball skills i also want to highlight the return of the concert i attended my first high school concert orchestra concert since february of 2020 and it was amazing mr scully is working magic at battlefield and i'm looking forward to attending more concerts in the future hopefully with my concert buddy ms zargeper i want to thank everyone who is

253working so diligently on our recovery efforts and re-engaging our students i want to end by sharing my commitment to family and community engagement your voices matter your opinions matter our parents are not domestic terrorists but they are valuable partners you have a fundamental right to direct the upbringing of your children to teach to guide to protect them and to work with us as partners you are an important part of this team and we're here to help you and to serve you and to serve your students um and i'm out of time so thank you all and have a good night miss jackson thank you dr thief um deepest condolences to the gainesville district tonight we discuss many factors that help students learn we discuss creating a safe environment research-based instructional practices the difficulty of doing

254research-based instructional practices during a pandemic and using data to learn and grow another important factor to student success is the student parent partnership so i'm very thankful for the new parent liaison positions that i saw in the slideshow also this month is dyslexia awareness month we use this month to reflect on our practices and opportunities for inclusion as some statistics label the frequency of dyslexia as around 13 another factor in student success is student leadership school leadership is linked to student success and teacher morale this month is principal's month appreciation month and i'm very grateful to all fluency and counties administrators including brunsville's principals i'm thankful for the time that principals have taken to show me around back to school nights speaking to me at sporting events and meeting with me during the last few

255weeks thank you principals for your unwavering leadership dedication and commitment to your community i greatly appreciate everything you do i was fortunate to attend many back to school nights and also thank you to the grant cook cedar point t clay wood brooklyn mills and chris young for taking time to meet with me in addition to letting me attend back to school night since the last meeting i was fortunate to attend the homecoming game with miss um zagapoor at unity read and the field hockey game with ms wall it is my absolute privilege to visit the wonderful 19 schools in the brunsville district thank you to those who came and spoke with us tonight or those who emailed us thank you to the 911 committee for your time and as always thank you huge thank you

256to all pennsylvania county staff have a good night mr wilk thank you mr chairman uh thank you board members and colleagues thank you again mr girvin and the team for presenting about the 911 committee tonight uh just briefly i was able like some of my other colleagues to wrap up and attend a few more of the final back to school nights dumfries elementary ashland triangle and mary williams uh so that wraps up back to school night season it's crazy it like stretched from like september to like mid-october but it was good i like how in a sense that we were able to make more of them because they were in a sense spread out a little bit um also was able uh unfortunately i did miss the merrell ball i was uh officiating my brother's

257wedding so you know whatever but uh congratulations to uh mrs bowles uh and uh thank you miss williams for being there to congratulate her also was able to attend last friday forest park football where they had an upset victory over the garfield red wolves to keep themselves playing off contentions alive the following morning i ran and i did not die in the falcon bruin fun runs this was the first time i actually ran in it um and uh thanks to some good coaching from my running mate of the virtual school principal brett hellman i was able to get a trophy for third place for my age group to which later to which later my 60 year old mother calls and she's like honey i'm so proud of how athletic you are i said i said

258mom it was a light group of people but um so i'm very excited for that um good thanks there were three people in that group right um and then later that day um major shout out the annual autism walk which did not occur last year because of cover started back off again at unity read later that day um a major shout out to uh andy and chris jacks um andy's former principal of ashland uh he and his wife put this on this year and it was a great event i was able to walk with the swans creek team uh and do that event uh chairman wheeler attended that was great to see her as well um and then later that day although this is not a prince william county sponsored event but it does have

259a lot of prince william kids in residence i did attend uh the performance of the pied piper fiddler on the roof with a budding star the young latif performing in the ensemble there so that was a fun event and good performance so thank you everyone i look forward to checking in in two weeks mrs argo thank you mr chairman um got to finish up the the past couple weeks with some back to school nights of note i want to talk just a moment about what's going on at kyle wilson elementary they decided to do a make and take kind of back to school night and so what the principal was explaining to me is that they actually looked at the data of what was going on during the pandemic which connects with what we were

260talking about tonight and they looked at what they know they needed to work on with the kids and when the parents came in the teachers worked with the parents to show them games that would support learning in math and language arts and that were grade level age appropriate and i thought that was just a really cool idea it gave the the kids something to do that was a little bit you know practice but a little bit more fun gave parents information about what their kids were looking for and this is the kind of partnership we actually really have to have now with this pandemic we're still a little bit in it right we still need to wear our mask wash our hands get vaccinated keep a little bit of distance right we still need to

261do these things but as we move forward we want to take care of our kids and look they're our children i mean our professionals in education go into this because they really care about how kids learn and what their futures look like and so we do like miss wall said we want to partner with the parents and make sure that everybody is working for our you know making sure our kids have this amazing future and to that uh to that point i went to the college fair at colgan yesterday and got to see that there were some fabulously long lines for the all these different colleges that came by there was also a representation from community college of military we also had nova and we also had our grow our own from prince william county

262so they were looking at how they can get kids who are currently in our system to look at becoming teachers in the future so that was a great conversation they believe it's the 30th we're having a a recruitment fair for teachers so if you are a an adult who's got a degree you can come on in and and have people here take a look at it and see what you could possibly be licensed for because yes we are still hiring um colgan's girls field hockey won their semi-final game and they will be at the regional finals on thursday at 6 p.m so go sharks looking forward to that um and oh yeah i went to went to uh homecoming with um miss jackson at unity read got to go to homecoming at hilton and got

263to see them win and i'm looking forward to seeing colgan's homecoming this friday so i will see you all in two weeks we already covered the masks you're correct we're good we're good dr latif you have 20 seconds i am good i'm ready to repeat it okay i repeat it look at me look at me wash your hands or sanitize wear the mask sparkles are great uh keep your distance and if you can get vaccinated wonderful thank you all it's great to hear all these wonderful updates um things that keep me up at night staff shortages worry me bus driver shortages teacher shortage ta shortages these are real concerns moving forward and have an impact on how we address the second worry i have is recovery re-engagement and acceleration and so these are concerns that

264i i'm confident dr mcdade and her team are working on uh but these these are real worries for the community and and so if you have folks you know who want to work in our school system please let them know i worry about math i worry about recovery and math for our students it's extremely concerning to me i worry about funding our schools for the next budget season and making sure we get the dollars we need to do the things we need to do so that's very important and i hope the community starts thinking about that as we move into our budget season and the kinds of support we're going to need i worry about quarantines and loss of days of schools for our students because of them so please follow ms sargopour's advice and

265help us limit limit covid positives so many sports stories across our wonderful county of great students doing great jobs wonderful to see our students going to homecoming dances and homecoming games and students and families are just thrilled to be back i thank i i thank every family pto principal who's invited me to attend an event there's too many for me to say here but i really appreciate coming out to the schools to see things happening in in just the excitement on the the parents faces the students faces just to be back they are all very happy and it's fantastic to see that um you know i i so i continue to be grateful for that um a number of great events back to school events touch base events book fairs these are all great things

266to see on facebook and twitter and everyone posting the great stuff of everyone being back this is just so critical so again i really appreciate all of our teachers all of our administrators working exceptionally hard to to do the um recovery re-engagement and acceleration this is going to be hard work and it's hard work for our faculty it's hard work for our students and it's really hard work for our families and so you know i i thank everyone um it's college admission season students remember to reach out to your counselors remember to opt out or opt in you know opt out on your transcripts for the sat scores very important if you're not going to want to submit them you got to know that every year we have students complaining to me that they didn't

267know they had to do that and um i'm here to tell you let's just make sure we do that so everyone have a wonderful night and thank you and meeting adjourned [Music] i