001okay good evening i would like to call the meeting of the prince william county school board to order um this meeting of the prince william county school board is being conducted electronically under the virginia code 223708.2 and the authority granted by the general assembly on april 22 2020 through amendment 28 to hospital 29 which permits the school board to meet electronically during the dependency of the current state of emergency for the purpose of transacting such business as is statutorily required or necessary to continued operations of the prince william county public schools and the discharge of its lawful purposes duties and responsibilities a motion is in order for the approval of the closed session agenda missing mr chairman i move that the prince william county school board approved the close agenda closed session agenda as recommended
002do we have a second missing wall wall seconds any discussion okay um please vote online or here you have to talk to jason no jason do you have miss ralston oh i do sir okay miss ralston how do you vote yes yes miss ralston votes yes the vote is six yes two absent williams and jesse motion passed moving on to the motion enter closed session emotions in order miss our report mr chairman i move that pursuant to virginia code sections 2.2-3711 and 2.2-3712 that the prince william county school board enter closed session for the following reasons one to discuss with division council and staff the performance appointment transfer release assignment and promotion of specific officers employees and appointees under virginia code section 2.2-3711a 1 and 8 2 to discuss and consult with legal counsel regarding
003requests for religious exemptions pertaining to specific students in virginia code section 2.2-3711a 2 and 8. and 3 to receive information and discuss with division council the staff and staff actual or probable litigation and specific legal matters involving specific staff and students under virginia code sections 2.2-3711a 7 and 8 and dispense with the attendance of the superintendent and staff as necessary as provided by virginia code section 22.1-69 do you have a second a second miss wall seconds any discussion okay please vote i see on my script here b you say i can say all in favor we gonna do that i see okay all right that's fine but no that's okay i'd like i'd rather do that but it's okay all right what's the vote oh miss ralston how do you vote yes miss rosamos yes
004that's why i was just joking by the way okay we need to add something oh did you leave out something oh i was reading the script so the computer you got to read it from the computer okay strike that vote and we're going to redo this a new motion is in order for the approval closed session agenda ms zargapor dr latif i moved that pursuant to virginia code section 2.2-3711 and 2.2-3712 the prince william county school board enter closed session for the following reasons one to discuss with division council and staff the contract's performance evaluation appointment transfer release and assignment and promotion of specific officers employees and appointees under virginia code sections 2.2-3711a 1 and 8 and to dispense with the attendance of the superintendent and staff as necessary as provided by virginia code section
00522.1-69 two to receive information and discuss with division council and staff actual or probable litigation and specific legal matters involving specific staff and students under virginia code sections 2.2-3711a 1 2 7 and 8. three to receive legal advice from division council and information from staff regarding legal issues regarding impending legislative changes to affecting school operations under virginia code section 2.2-3711a8 four to receive information from staff and advice from legal counsel regarding a deed restriction relating to the continued environmental remediation of a portion of the independent hill site under virginia code section 2.2-3711a 8 and 5. to receive advice and information from legal counsel and staff regarding the acquisition of real property for school sites where discussion and open session open meeting would adversely affect the bargaining position or negotiating strategy of the school board and
006to discuss the investment of public funds where the pump where competition or bargaining is involved if where if made public initially the the financial interest of the school board would be adversely affected under virginia code section 2.2-37 3 6 7 and 8. do you have a second a second miss wall seconds of motion any discussion okay please vote miss ralston how do you vote yes ms ralston votes yes so the vote is six yes two absent williams and jesse motion passed at this time the prince william county school board will enter closed session and and uh return in approximately one hour thank you [Music] the prince william county school board is now returning open session from closed session moving on to the closed session certification emotions in order ms zargo mr chairman i move that
007pursuant to virginia code section 2.2-3712 the closed session of the prince william county school board meeting on may 5th 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 in two only such public business matters where as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard and discussed or considered by the school board have a second mr chairman miss williams second any discussion please vote miss ralston how do you vote yes miss ralston votes yes so the vote is eight yes motion passed okay moving on next to the action items
008we have a number of them closed session uh approval of appointments or releases ms sargapoor uh mr chairman i move that the prince william county school board approved the appointments and releases of specific employees as presented by is presented in closed session do we have a second miss wall a second just wall second any discussion okay seeing no discussion please vote oh i'm sorry miss ralston how do you vote yes sorry about that miss ralston votes yes the vote is yes unanimous motion passed next 802 mr zagapoor mr chairman i move that the prince william county school board approve and authorize the chairman at large to execute an agreement on behalf of the school board waiving the superintendent's 2021-2022 annual evaluation and recognition of dr waltz's june 30th 2021 resignation you have a second mr
009chairman miss williams second any discussion please vote miss ralston how do you vote yes mr also votes yes vote is eight yes unanimous motion passed moving on to the last item in mr chairman i move that the prince william county school board approved the proposed deed restriction necessary to continue the environmental remediation efforts for a portion of the independent hill site and authorize the chairman at large to execute the same on behalf of the school board do you have a second second miss ralston seconds any discussion okay please vote miss ralston how do you vote yes mr ralston votes yes the vote is eight yes unanimous motion passed okay next i would like to call the meeting of the prince william county school board to order this meeting in the prince william county school board
010is being conducted electronically under the virginia code 37082 and the authority granted by general assembly on april 22nd 2020 through amendment 28 to house bill 29 which permits the board school board to meet electronically during the dependency of the current state of emergency for the purpose of transacting such business as is statutory required or necessary to continue the operations of the prince william county public schools and the discharge of its lawful purposes duties and responsibilities so we'll do the pledge of allegiance [Music] student tonight miss williams you can lead us thank you okay thank you next we'll move to the approval of the agenda emotions and order ms sargopour mr chairman i move that the prince william county school board approved the public meeting agenda as recommended do you have a second mr chairman ms
011williams second any discussion please vote miss ralston how do you vote yes ms ross votes yes the vote is eight yes unanimous motion passed next we'll move on to the adoption of the consent agenda motions in order mr chairman i move that the prince william county school board approved the public meeting consent agenda as recommended you have a second mr chairman a second miss william seconds any discussion mr chairman miss jesse i'd like to have just have a question on 12-0 120 1206 just a discussion on that and what would you like to see what what's your question miss jessica mr i think we received something in our confidential uh emails that this we will be getting something soon on how this money's going to be disseminated and i think the question my question is
012will the board have an active role dr waltz so yes we are still awaiting uh the state uh to finalize the application process and then once that's done we will communicate back with you that that has been completed and then as i have mentioned in some of the previous meetings we will certainly bring forth some recommendations if we think that there's an urgency around spending some of that money now you may recall that i also stated that this has a two-year window to spend and we want to make sure that we're providing funding for the new superintendent and the board to work with her as well because we don't really know what's around the corner but yes we would see the board's involvement yes and i think you've heard me talk about hazard pay for
013teachers and i'm not sure this is the item that which guys should discuss that but we are still considering that and are we yes ma'am thank you any further questions please vote mrs miss ralston how do you vote yes the vote is eight yes unanimous motion passed okay moving on to the citizen comment time due to the coba 19 state of emergency and legal restrictions on school board on the school board's authority to conduct his meetings through electronic means unlike other public bodies meeting electronically under more expansive legal authority all discussions in this meeting by board member staff citizens must be limited to agenda items citizens may speak on the agenda item for two minutes when the board is able to resume regular meetings without virtual participation permitted during the state emergency expanded citizen comment
014time will be resumed as provided by policy 134 and the interim citizen comment time has been reinstated on a limited basis in order to allow public comment both in person and through electronic means during the state of emergency citizens are encouraged to submit their comments by email to the clerk who will share them with the school board these citizens who have signed up in advance with the school board no later than 4 p.m wednesday may 5th 2021 may address the school board in person or virtually electronically with about matters relating to our agenda item agenda for may 5th tonight uh um i have one speaker i think in person i don't think we have anybody online right so one speaker in person maggie hansford hi thank you chair latif my name is maggie hansford and
015my address is on file happy teacher and staff appreciation week i'm here to speak on the proposed plan for next year as we're looking at the plan we just hope that you're including educators in the process and having us being a part of those decision making efforts when we look to educating our students next year we thank the superintendent for building a plan and we look forward to the school board's thoughts on it and you all including us in that process so thank you thank you next we'll move on to the um 1401 safe schools advisory council annual report miss um dr waltz miss heart please dr hart dr jarcelyn hart recently minted doctor thank you dr waltz good evening this week is teacher appreciation week but i'm certain you will agree that this year
016is teacher appreciation year hats off to our all hands on deck whatever it takes teachers good evening chairman latif members of the school board and dr waltz specifically dr waltz thank you for your vision to initiate a safe schools advisory council also i would like to recognize the participation in support of mr justin wilke of the potomac district and mrs jennifer wall of the gainesville district both serve on the safe schools advisory council i am honored and proud to serve as the facilitator for the safe schools advisory council absolutely we are excited about the important work of school safety this year's virtual communication community information night was on the topic of social media let's welcome our dedicated and knowledgeable chairman mr ron crowe to the podium so he can share the safe school school's advisory
017council's efforts and accomplishments for school year 2020-21 mr crow please thank you good evening next slide please so you can see the purpose of the safe schools advisory council is created 15 years ago by dr waltz in his first year or two with the school division since that time we've been working to support the safety and security of students and staff at schools our initial efforts were you know working through physical security issues and hardware with the schools with a later focus on mental health issues in support of dr waltz's initiative over the last number of years next slide you can see our advisory council is made up of many different members we have school board members we have appointees by the school board as well as superintendent staff and also some of our own
018county friends from the police and fire department and community services next slide please so areas of focus in the past several years again have been on mental health and for students those include bullying prevention mental health awareness and suicide prevention presentations resiliency psas and also social media information nights which we have done most recently next slide so on february 4th that culminated with safe schools advisory council parent information night zoom meeting which was hosted by billy watts who's the itc at colgan high school he did a really nice job at going over social media options usage cautions to parents and some recommendations on usage billy's done this uh presentations to thousands of students and and employees across the school division and in northern virginia so it went on for about an hour and a half
019uh with panelists asking uh or answering questions from the 150 attendees at the end of the night so at the end we the presentation is going to be posted tomorrow on the school board website if anyone wants to watch that or on the school division website if anyone wants to watch the entire uh presentation however tonight we have about a two minute wrap up that billy did at the end of the presentation that covered uh you know some of the topics he talked about that night so if we can have uh have that link one of the resources i really want you to think about that's available is national center for miscellaneous exploited children and this is most recently from their website epoxy and just in 2018 you can see that crazy crazy number of
020images videos and files related to child exploitation and so all of this tonight is to get us to talk about what are those red flag behaviors that we really need to be having conversations with our kids about what standards are we going to put in place for our kids to have friends fans followers and stalkers how are we going to help them have a healthy balance in their online life what settings can we put in place as parents to give them guidance and then how can we meet our kids where they are so that we can keep this conversation going this no matter what happens they need us they need us as teachers they need us as coaches they need us as parents as older brothers and siblings and i tell this all the time
021to i give i give a talk to all ninth graders and i give a talk to all 10th graders because that's required in the lspd curriculum and i come back around for our 11th and 12th graders and i give a talk about leadership and i give a talk about how you need to be the leaders that are standing up for the kids that are in your lives the younger versions of you and so right down here we have the cyber tip line when everything goes terrible and crisis happens yes we come right here and we report it but a lot of the things that are reported on the tip line to national center for missing exploited children and for the suicide hotline and all those things aren't reported necessarily from the user themselves they're reported
022from a friend who's speaking out on behalf and so it's really encouraging not just our kids and our students to be safe but understanding what is just not okay and then when we see it we say something and we report it okay thank you so next slide so our next step is the safe schools advisory council has expressed an interest in continuing this social media safety uh into next year and we can make those decisions and start with that with uh you know the committee make up for uh for next year but um that's going to be or you know where we're going to start and hopefully we'll get approved for moving ahead uh next year and that concludes my presentation tonight again thanks to the school board for all of your support and safety
023and security for our schools if you have any questions or comments i can take those are there any questions mr will i just want to thank dr hart mr crow and the entire group on the safe schools advisory including my member and all of our board member representatives for the service in the year um you know it was not an easy year with coven 19 i missed the gathering of dinners and talking and being able to converse with one another but i think under um your facilitation dr hart and your leadership mr crowe i think it was a very good and successful year so thank you so much for your involvement engagement and everyone who served this year on the safe schools advisory council okay thank you miss wall did you have okay anybody else
024uh miss ralston are you good yeah okay just want to make sure i didn't miss anybody all right so moving oh i'm sorry dr waltz yes thank you i just wanted to again thank dr hart mr crow and all the committee members in including our school board members and i also want to make sure i'm giving credit where credit is due when we put this into action back in the 2005-2006 school year i also want to give credit to the school board at the time they unanimously supported creating this as well and there was actually a lot of community interest in this and so uh it was it was a great effort with a tremendous amount of support and you can tell that something is important when it's still operational 16 years later so again
025thank you to the committee and the leadership hi miss jesse hi i just wanted to know if i know the committee is thinking about students who've been home during the covet crisis and suicide prevention i received a note from a parent today and she indicated that there's been about four suicides i'm not sure the number but are we looking at i know your committee will be looking at approach to look at those kids who've been at home for long periods of time and not only just the isolation but uh seeing certain situations in their homes and uh or have you thought about that as a committee i'm sure you have but i just want to have your comments on that yeah in the past year or two we have done uh uh information nights and
026gotten information out of the community on suicide awareness and what we have available to students so we have we've done that recently you know usually each year we choose a focus to move forward with and we can certainly consider that when the committee reconvenes in the fall miss wall i wanted to thank dr hart and mr crow and all of the others who have served on the committee i echo mr wilkes comments about the gratitude for the time and effort that's spent serving on this committee um it's it is a very important work we started we've we've kind of gotten into this we started getting into the social media topic i know we're going to continue conversations on that because um you know as has been pointed out kids are home and yet the world
027is still in their in their hands in their palms and so the risks that um children face are different yet we um we can continue this conversation so i appreciate the good work of the of the committee and and the important work that they're doing um and i just wanted to say thank you for the time commitment and mr watts for his presentation i would encourage the public watching to go find that video and take a look at it it was very informative it was an introductory talk on the topic obviously if you really want to know you know a lot more or you feel that you know students in danger i would reach out to authorities nick mech has a lot of resources internet crimes against children has a lot of resources as well
028but the produce this production was a good introductory video i really encourage everybody to take a look if we can alright thank you moving on we have a proposed equity statement that will be presented to the board dr waltz yes thank you very much and we will lead off with deputy iman good evening vice chairwoman zagapoor and latif when he returns members of the school board dr waltz i'm pleased to bring to the school board a presentation tonight by members of the superintendent's advisory council on equity for your consideration of the council's unanimously recommended prince william county public schools equity statement while it is on the agenda tonight for your information it will also be on may 19 agenda for the school board to consider for approval first i thank the members of the advisory
029council who are either here in person tonight or joining us virtually i'm certain that you will see their passion for the work they are doing on the advisory council and for the statement they are presenting tonight as every word was carefully chosen to convey the consensus of the members it is now my pleasure to turn the presentation over to mrs carolyn custard who serves as the council's facilitator she will introduce you to the members of the advisory council presenting tonight as representatives of the entire council and as a reminder the members of the superintendent's advisory council on equity were selected by each of you to represent you and their appointments approved by the board as a whole in addition to the members appointed by the superintendent and with that mrs custer the floor is yours
030thank you carolyn good evening thank you mr iman good evening chairman latin vice chairman zach report members of the school board and dr walt it is my pleasure to serve as the facilitator of this year's superintendent advisory council on equity we are excited and very proud to share with you this evening our prince william county schools equity statement next slide please this slide shows the members of the superintendent's advisory council on equity this amazing committed and very dedicated persons have worked very hard this year to guide our work as a school division on equity for all representing stays this evening for this presentation our three members who also served on the equity statement subcommittee and they are dr kate olsen flan miss india daniels and miss gloria jordan and at this time i turned the
031presentation over to miss india daniels good evening chairman latif vice chair zargapur members of the school board and dr waltz my name is india daniels and i represent the woodbridge district thank you for having me first as part of the key milestones of development and as part of this process to develop equity the council reviewed the equity scorecard data conducted comprehensive review of existing equity statements and policies gathered group input and a draft statement was presented to the entire council revisited priorities after the onset of the pandemic completed training on adverse childhood experiences and cultural competency gathered feedback on the draft and generated a final statement approved the statement at the march 26 meeting and the statement was then approved by the superintendent staff on april 14th and is now being presented to the school
032board for approval just a few words just let me say this this moment is historic we have come a long way in this county we are truly a diverse community and i'm proud to be a part of that diversity it is not often that folks from all walks of life come together and create a policy that is inclusive of everyone this is the work our ancestors would be proud of now i'll admit it was yeoman's work and it's still ongoing i thank denise and her staff for moving us along and keeping us focused but i'm truly pleased and thankful that we have reached this point in history we did this work in the midst of a worldwide pandemic protests and national frustration we did it knowing that it will make a difference going forward and
033with that being said i'd like to hand this over to council member gloria jordan who will present the first ever equity statement for prince william county public schools next slide please thank you chairman latif at vice chairman zargapor members of the school board and dr waltz for having me my name is gloria jordan i reside in kohl's district and was appointed by vice chairman zargapor it is an honor to be here as a representative for our distinguished equity council i have four kids within prince william county schools ranging from elementary school through high school i have also had the great privilege of being a school nurse under teresa polk and gina bellamy's leadership in a school that is predominantly children of color from a variety of social economic and cultural backgrounds as a nurse and
034as a parent i have personally seen the great value in providing equitable care to the community of prince william county schools before i go on i do want to make sure you understand that when we say equity that is a very broad umbrella under equity we are being inclusive of race gender identity expression sexual preference ethnicity language learning and physical disabilities religion culture immigration status medical conditions economic status and gifted learners equity is inclusive of all members of prince william county schools next slide please here is our equity statement prince william county schools are committed to inclusive practices and equity to promote excellence for all as a school community our commitment to equity will be achieved by providing all students and staff with access to resources opportunities supports and interventions to ensure that they maximize
035their abilities and potential giving students and staff what they need not necessarily equally to meet their learning health and safety requirements next slide please raising the achievement of all students while working to eliminate learning disparities assuring that all pwcs staff members with deliberate effort continue to examine and eliminate institutional beliefs implicit and explicit biases policies and or practices that perpetuate systemic racism and discrimination and engaging parents guardians and the community and division and school programs to build connections provide support and foster relationships with the goal of making our institutional curricular and instructional practices more transparent and inclusive relevant meaningful and supportive in the academic and social development of all learners next slide please training examining and revising our curricular and teaching practices to ensure that they are culturally relevant and representative of the achievements of
036our diverse community to meet the social and academic needs and expectations of each student recruiting and retaining staff members who reflect the rich diversity of our community and who work to achieve equity and excellence for all students and preparing all students to succeed in a multicultural global society by teaching the contributions and viewpoints of all people in culturally relevant curricula this is prince william county school's equity statement and now i present to you dr kate olsen flynn to discuss the overarching goals of this all-inclusive equity statement thank you it's hard to get that next slide thank you miss jordan good evening chairman latif vice chair zagapore school board members and dr waltz and our wonderful prince william county community my name is dr kate olson flynn you've seen me here many times at the podium
037and i am the chairman at large representative on the council it is exciting to be able to stand here with my insightful and knowledgeable colleagues to present the goal of our council's important work as you were able to see in this presentation this document is a comprehensive list of bullet statements that are actionable we purposefully designed the statement in this way to meet two overarching goals one to make a comprehensive declaration of the intention of our school division's work toward the goal of equity inclusion and excellence in all areas of education and two to create a vision statement that can both frame and guide the work in all areas of our school division and in our board such as funding allocation achievement recruitment training parent engagement communication professional development and of course pedagogy it is
038our hope as a council that designing this equity statement in this way we will enable our division to make measurable strides towards equity inclusion and of course excellence for all we would like to thank each of you for your support in our important work thank dr walt and mr iman and of course miss heevner and we look forward to meeting many more milestones in the future for all of our students thank you thank you any questions board members oh it's miss jesse i'm i'm very impressed it's a very comprehensive list and you talked about actionable items what's the next step how do you how do you guys make this an actionable working document i'm happy to have others join in this answer but to give you a brief thing obviously the next step is would
039be making it official as a statement voted on by the board and we've already been in the process as you all know of doing equity across our school division for years this puts it out in a formalized statement we have had all kinds of actionable things that we have been working on as a school division in regards to equity but this puts it in the forefront so that as we go forward beginning with the development of our new strategic plan which is also on the agenda before the end of this school year for the board to consider and it is embedded into the things that we are doing um i don't know if we have others who would like to address okay would you repeat the question please how is it actionable actionable for example
040the scorecard i've seen the scorecard and i've seen references to the scorecard but the question is what's what practices will be changing based on that scorecard so i don't want to detail item discussion like smart goals and things of nature i just want to know the next steps because it's a very comprehensive plan and it's very involved as you can see and thank you for serving well thank you for having me um the the the goal of the committee we looked at many action and we looked at many equities equity statements in our during our um year of working together to form this statement and what we saw was many statements that had a general overview of equity but we wanted to make sure that there was a statement that could that each division in
041our schools could take with them and they could look at them and they could create documents they could create policies or procedures at the school level and at the administrative level that could affect change in the school division so that's why they're actionable research the bullet statements so that each for hiring practices you could develop a hiring procedures around the statement that talks about hiring for achievement that you could develop statements to see if how we're meeting not that goal of achievement so that each it was laid out in a specific way so that we could meet those goals well for example the uh scorecard but when you look at the disparities in hiring practices that's a big goal and i just want to know how you guys are going to do this i i'm
042sure dr mcdate is going to be an integral part of this but i just want to know when you will get back with the board with some actionable plans for these bullets well the first step was creating the statement and once and if it is approved by you then we could probably move forward into how we could use it to um meet the needs of the scorecard thank you sorry no that's all right that was actually what i was going to say the first step is is first presenting to you all and then to have approval to use it um ms hebner if you'd like to also share some information i want to ask a question one sec miss uh miss hebner will go and then i'll have you next miss ralston thank you i
043promise i'll be brief um so one of the things that you're asking is what are our next steps and so as you're all aware you've been presented um the different initiatives from the state of virginia and one of the things we're very excited about as a council is the navigating the roadmap to equity and as part of that the work from virginia department of education there is an equity audit so what we envision is working with our council and our incoming superintendent to conduct that audit and then from the information that we glean from that audit is making our next steps and actionable items that would guide our work thank you thank you miss ralston question yes please thank you um i'd like to know how do you get your information out and i understand
044we have a committee but what about the parents that either don't not real good in speaking english or any other language so when do we get that out for them also even our own parents who are around constantly they're not quite sure either so how do you kind of get down in the weeds as they would say to in order to bring up the information that they first got to understand what does what does this committee do and what does equity mean so i mean very clearly and i also want to say thank you to those who have already spoken because it was really the right thing for us to do but we got to be able to do it in a manner that our parents our friends are anybody else's we have to make
045sure that we are correct in what we say thank you very much and thanks very much for your panel mr iman hello again he's going to talk miss ralston and members of the board once again that this becomes an official statement of the school division as you all know we when we communicate with our community we have a number of communication vehicles we translate into multiple languages we provide information in that format and once we embed this throughout the school division the statement you'll see it come back to life in the work that's presented out as we normally do with our community but i agree with you it's very important and it's important to do it in a way that people understand thank you any miss williams um i just first want to start by
046saying thank you to this council for all of the hard work that was put in during a pandemic i think we've reached a point in society where we're glossing over pandemic like it's just you know it was a thing this is really challenging and i think with the number of people serving on this committee for everyone to come to one accord to produce this document is simply amazing because there are so many individuals with different diverse backgrounds which is an asset to this type of a committee but can i've served on so many that i know sometimes that can also be a hindrance when it comes to drafting a singular document um i'm just almost speechless because i i never thought i would sit and see the day where prince william county schools would have
047such a powerful statement such a concise statement things that speak to specifics and that can be turned into actionable items policies later on ways that we can implement a better school division for all right here in front of us i can't i think ms daniels said it best when she said this is a very historic moment um it most divisions organizations companies you get two lines at best that should left up to your interpretation to really decipher i think that's sort of what miss ralston was saying like what does it mean and even when we talk about our strategic plan i know you've heard me say okay what does the lens of equity really mean and with this statement i think it's um there's still a lot of room to to ask the question of
048what it means so there's still more work to be done but i think it's very appropriate when you said this is a framework um i personally am very proud and thankful for all of your time and dedication and work on this um i think this is once again an opportunity that prince william county schools has taken to sort of to not sort of but to lead the way on defining equity what that looks like for not only our students but our staff all of our employees which i think a lot of times gets left out we've we singularly focus on the students and and that is tremendously important but often it's the staff that get left out of the conversation and they're so integral because they're the ones responsible for our students and if they're
049not included in this statement if we aren't providing them the tools and resources and the proper training then it almost doesn't matter what we say for the students and and that has been historically part of the problem and so i am very thankful at this i'm very pleased with what the the council has come up with um i hope that this board can come to an agreement and vote on this with an 8-0 vote that would be very exciting to me and that we're able to put this on all of our documents this would be included in our strategic plan it would be right up there when you flip open a document that says prince william county schools this would be the first or second thing you see up there so everybody is well aware
050of our intentions so again thank you to everyone on this council thank you dr waltz for agreeing to take the lead and set this up i think this once again demonstrates not only for our staff and students but to the rest of the county our serious commitment to equity and i'm just very overwhelmed thank you very much for all of your work and it'd be an honor for me to vote on this next week our next meeting ms wall thank you um mr chair i have a couple of questions actually um my first question is if uh you could give us an update on a division council's opportunity to look over the statement um maybe for i mean i know we had a little bit of a conversation but for the benefit of everybody listening
051maybe give an update on where we are with that um yes ms wall as you know we spoke this afternoon and i've had a brief conversation with division council but before this statement comes back to the board for approval she'll i'll be working with division house counsel on the r on that review so for this evening this is where we are tonight for information and we'll have that done prior to coming back at the on may 19th thank you for that update i think it's always important when we craft a statement that is very broad and is meant to govern everything that we do that we always have legal eyes look at it and also knowing that the topic is sensitive in nature to the larger community it's very familiar to us as educators but
052to the larger community there is some need for nuance and understanding and so i think that's a good idea my second question is well i knew we all knew that this was the committee was formed and it was under development that the statement was under development the first time that i saw or any of us saw this language was when it was released to the public on board docs and so um i know i would have appreciated the chance to have seen the specific actual language ahead of time ahead of the public seeing the language um because it's always a good idea to just not get kind of hit by it with the public commenting or you know emailing or wondering what's going on um but my question then became if dr mcdade has had
053an opportunity to review this or weigh in on this i know she's coming on board but she's not here yet you know we're in this kind of in-between stage but i do feel that it would be important to gain her insight on this statement this is i know an area that she's done a lot of work on and in and has lived it and breathed it so do you know if dr mcdade has had an opportunity to review this statement or the work of this committee in any way or weigh in on this in any way well what i can tell you is i shared the statement with dr mcdade we have not had the opportunity to discuss it to this point in time however i'll be meeting with dr mc mcdade next week and
054so i'll have a further opportunity to do that but she she she has the statement all right thank you and thank you to everybody who served on the committee thank you miss jackson i just want to say thank you again for the um the amount of work that went into this statement it sounds like it was vetted in great degree and i'm just very grateful for the time i know that it's the advisory committee is made up of volunteers so i'm just very thankful it's it's for the time that went into this also thank you to ms daniels dr olsen flynn and miss jordan for your presentation today and for your general dedication and volunteering for this um i just want to make sure i understand what the next step is so that i didn't
055like misunderstand anything the next step is to make after we approve it is to make sure that this strategic plan and the equity statement have a symbiotic relationship that that's the next step the answer is yes but also to be aware equity has been a big focus of the new strategic plan even prior to the development of the statement but yes okay all right thank you for everybody for taking the time to make sure that um for drafting this statement to make sure that all students can have access to world-class education thank you okay um as seeing no other um hands up i will just make some comments first of all i want to thank miss daniels miss jordan dr katelson flynn for all your work you guys have done over the course of the
056year i've been getting regular updates uh from from dr flynn and and i appreciate it um you know i i have to say thank you to denise hebner and her entire student services staff i mean you have sort of carried the school system you know in the sense that students went back with special ed in the fall vaccinated teachers now we're vaccinating students and in all this time you found the time to you know your staff and and your team to to work on this equity step statement which is a very very good document very strong document and and i think the board here all appreciates the work here and i can't thank you enough ms hebner for all the work you guys have done your staff student services office of student services i see
057your tweets you guys do terrific work fantastic and keep up all the great work and we are lucky to have all of you and miss custard um uh they are out in the in the virtual world um if you see me yes thank you as well in the whole team so so wonderful i think the board will look at this over the next couple weeks um you know we'll come back here and and i think hopefully pass this i think it's a very strong statement i think this embodies i i think as ms daniels put out there in this in a sense historic it does embody i think who we are here in prince william county i think the document from every line of it and everything you said it if you were to talk
058to anybody on the street here they're going to say you know this sounds like who we are this is what we want this is our aspiration and i think this fits with who we as prince william county folks are and and i think you guys really nailed it so i want to thank you for your great work and and thank you all and mr iman again thank you this is just outstanding work so um i think with that we will move on to the next item thank you all very much this evening for coming and coming in person fantastic thank you okay next we'll move on to student representative caroline silvera our hilton high school student rep this evening we'll be participating via virtual ms silvera thank you so much and i'd like to say
059thank you to the last presenters i'm a student member of this council and i'm very proud of all the work they've done and they definitely have a passion for equity every every single member does so it's been great working with them this year all right so i'd like to take this opportunity to say happy teacher appreciation week i am so lucky to have some of the best teachers in prince william county who have shaped and made my high school experience thank you to all the teachers across the county and country who have made differences in their students lives we appreciate you so much as the school year comes to an end i would also like to thank take a moment to thank everyone who has listened to student voice this school year from a senior
060perspective a majority of us are so happy that we're able to hold graduation ceremonies in person this year and that our family members will also be able to share this moment with us either in person or virtually many students have also been grateful for the flexibility of final exams and ap examinations this year which has relieved a lot of our stress overall changes is these such as these show that listening to student voice is valuable and can have a large impact on our well-being and experiences as students secondly i want to give a few student senate updates two weeks ago we held the last meeting of our cultural clubs coalition we had cultural club panelists from many different colleges in the area including howard university university of virginia virginia tech and old dominion university our
061panel our panelists are so insightful and gave students great advice also through the cultural clubs coalition i have been able to meet and work with the pwcs black student union coalition they are in their first year of membership and have members from hilton and battlefield high schools they created a presentation with recommendations and issues that are important to their members and it will be live streamed sometime this year they understand that the pandemic prohibits them from presenting at a school board meeting this year but would love to work with the school board members in the future to present at a meeting finally i understand that we are undergoing the process of finding student representatives and senators for next year so good luck to every applicant to end my time i'd like to announce my post
062high school plans i'm happy to say i'll be attending the university of virginia as an echo scholar to major and political science this will be a new journey for me but i'm so excited to continue my education congratulations to all the seniors who have made their decisions for their futures thank you guys so much thank you and congratulations carolyn we are so thrilled for you and very excited and very proud very proud to have worked with you this year and thank you for all your work this um this evening as well next we'll move on to dr walt superintendent time dr waltz thank you congratulations again carolyn we appreciate your contributions and all your fine work thank you so much good evening chairman latif members of the board even during a pandemic our school division
063continues to earn accolades i would like to congratulate our school board and the amazing staff in the office of energy and sustainability for the school division's u.s department of education green ribbon district sustainability award this is a big deal folks prince william county is one of only five school districts in the entire nation to earn this award which is based on high achievement in reduced environmental impact and costs improved health and wellness and effective environmental and sustainability education the u.s department of education will formally present the award at a ceremony later this year as you know during the pandemic pwcs remains committed to offering hands-on learning so critical to students pursuing careers in in career and technical education students at brentfield district high school recently showed off the school's amazing new greenhouse check out this
064video [Music] the best thing i can say about the greenhouse is that it's a game changer it's a phenomenal facility it's an a-frame structure with glass glazing we have automated shade screens automated fans temperature control weather station it's just it is a great place for these kids to learn the updated technology and you know not only learn how to you know grow plants in a greenhouse but also feed their families and feed their communities program's a great way for a lot of young people to get introduced into the industry and find a passion for it it really goes over different aspects whether it's you know groundskeeping on turf fields or if it's landscaping and you can go into different fields within the industry the program has taught me to always try new things i never
065would have imagined myself being here in this school doing this program but i think it opened a new opportunity for me to try out and i've loved it ever since back when we started this in 2016 we want to develop a program around the different jobs in the northern virginia area turf management with all the golf courses in the area landscape management with all the different companies and then horticulture because with all these landscape companies there's so many components that go into the landscape industry that horticulturalists provide at greenhouses and nurseries different places like that so we wanted to develop a program that really focused and honed in on those jobs to better prepare students who are in the northern virginia area for jobs that are going to be readily available for them when they
066graduate from this program all right thank you so next exciting thing vaccines they're currently available for anyone 16 and older and it's expected that the pfizer vaccine will receive emergency youth authorization by the cdc and fda for those 12 and older as soon as this coming week pwcs has been in communication and collaboration with the prince william health district to explore ways to support expedited vaccinations for our students who are 12 years and older the president announced yesterday that once approved the vaccine is expected to be available to those 12 and older via pharmacies and pediatricians additionally the prince william county health department has secured the use of gander mountain or veterans park to provide vaccines for our students who are 12 years and older pwcs will support vaccination efforts through assisting with communication of
067vaccinations options and organization for prioritized registration this will include assistance with transportation for families if needed vaccination in schools has been discussed but is not something the health department can immediately implement the use of the current community options will be the most effective avenue due to the large number of students 12 years and older the health department will continue to work with us to determine the needs of our students and work to provide vaccination support as needed i'm so happy to share that the community use groups will now be allowed to begin scheduling and use of pwcs buildings beginning today subject to compliance with all governor and cdc mandates and protocols during the pandemic we continue our important efforts to ensure that equity is embedded in all the work that we do a recent report
068from the virginia department of ed indicates that pwcs has the second most diverse certified workforce in region 4. as a reminder region 4 includes all of northern virginia school divisions as well as divisions to the west including shenandoah and frederick and to the south to orange county while we will always continue to aspire and work to be number one in this area i commend dr donna eagle and the staff and the department of human resources for their targeted efforts to recruit and retain diverse staff members i'm excited to share that pwcs is committed to holding in-person graduations for our 2021 graduating seniors because the pandemic our high schools will limit tickets and adhere to social distancing requirements and other requirements based on governor northrum's executive order more information on our graduations can be found at
069www.pwcs.edu i plan to attend as many of these ceremonies as i can to celebrate our students before i retire in june as a reminder we have increased our on-time graduation rate every year for the past 13 years to an all-time high of 93 percent for the 19 20 20 school year i have had the pleasure of visiting a few schools in the past few weeks including reagan and marsteller middle schools as well as piney branch victory westridge chris young and t clay wood schools i'm continually amazed by our teachers and their innovative practices that they're using to ensure our students are receiving a world-class education even during a pandemic may is mental health awareness month and i recognize especially in the middle of a pandemic the importance of taking care of our own mental health
070as well as the mental health of our students and our staff our professional counseling staff has worked so hard this year providing additional supports for our students i am proud to share that six of our schools have earned the american school counselor association recognition for model counseling programs for our supportive students this recognized ask a model program referred to as ramp award is given to less than one percent of all public and private k-12 schools in the united states since its inception in two thousand three congratulations to marshall elementary school and forest park high school both earning the designation for the second time and rockledge and kyle wilson elementary schools kyle wilson is a national school of distinction and only one in five in the nation freedom high school has earned the designation for the
071first time this year and independence non-traditional school has earned the designation for the third time congratulations to these schools for their outstanding honor last week i had the honor to participate in the spark superintendent's business breakfast which was held virtually due to the pandemic spark education foundation for pwcs honored amazon web services food lions store 1249 and i-66 express mobility partners as partnerships of the year winners additionally spark recognized novant uva health systems with the sharon henry community partner of the year for their coordination of the covid19 vaccinations for our staff members and others in our county congratulations due to the gathering limitations established by governor northrum pwcs held the outstanding educator ceremony virtually last week congratulations to our teacher of the year jamie juba from fred lynn middle school and principal of the year
072amy schott from rockledge elementary school congratulations to all of our nominees as well as our national board certified teachers and speaking of teachers this week is teacher appreciation week i know our school division is recognizing teachers with shoutouts on social media and individual schools are celebrating our teachers and their own way but i want to take this opportunity to share how sincerely impressed i am with the efforts are of our teachers especially this year there is no doubt that this has probably been the most difficult year in education in recent history our teachers have learned and implemented the use of new technologies and different instructional delivery strategies in a very short period of time they are truly rock stars and i cannot thank them enough for their outstanding efforts during this pandemic this is also
073nutrition employee recognition week our school and food service nutrition staff have been working since the pandemic closed schools last march serving millions of meals to our students and their families they have truly been life savers during this difficult time and speaking of lifesavers may 12th is national school nurse day when the pandemic began many of our school nurses volunteered to help our county government to staff a covet 19 hotline but that's not all our school nurses served as critical staff during the vaccination clinics held for our staff members and our community they continue to serve as important sources of information during this difficult time you are appreciated because of the pandemic virginia code and authority granted by the general assembly has permitted our school board agenda topics to be limited because of this limitation we
074have temporarily suspended board recognition and approval of many proclamations honoring various observances that being said i do think it's important to mention these additional observances may is asian american and pacific islander heritage month better hearing and speech month brain injury awareness month national physical fitness and sports month and national tourette syndrome awareness month today is national bike to school day and this week is also the exceptional children's week thank you and stay safe and healthy thank you dr waltz next we'll move on to um well it's back to you dr waltz this is on the reopening paul reopening thank you very much all right so if we could go to the next slide please so our work in planning for next fall is guided by two major things one is virginia state law and the
075key points you can see are listed here basically requiring the school board to offer full-time in-person instruction follow mitigation strategies to the extent possible and as long as covid19 pandemic is in effect to provide fully remote virtual instruction as an option to families number two the directive given to me by the school board on march 17th quote the division superintendent and staff to prepare and present to the school board on may 5th 2021 a reopening plan for the 2021-22 school year which provides for five days a week of full-time in-person instruction for all students in all grade levels and further that the plan provide for an option for 100 virtual instruction for all students in all grade levels and you may recall the night that you voted on that we had a thorough discussion of
076that and there were some other creative options that uh i thought you would be interested in and many of our students and their families and our staff would be interested in so you're going to hear a little about some of those tonight as well next slide please so the virginia department of education takes the governor's rules essentially the cdc the virginia department of health and they put together essentially the direction to school superintendents and these are called soups emails and they come again from the virginia department of education so the guiding directives for this fall i quote in addition to the in-person option full or part-time virtual programs may be offered at the discretion of the division and students and parents and guardians may opt-in to such offerings however the division should be prepared for
077and allow any virtual students to transition seamlessly to an in-person setting at any point during this next school year the request for the transition may be due to personal preference or out of academic necessity and to ensure successful school outcomes next slide please so immediately we we've had a task force we've had several task forces that have worked through the pandemic and we re-mobilized and expanded our fall learning 2021 task force the task force is comprised of 78 members they include teachers counselors principals central office staff pwe representatives it was facilitated by linmara colon the director of the office of english learner programs and services there were subgroups that worked on elementary middle and high school they met weekly with all members together and the sub groups met additional times they presented their recommendations and
078considerations to me and the superintendent's staff and additionally we did a survey since that directive was voted on by the school board and in the division wide survey results as of today 85 percent uh are recommending or saying that they would choose in-person instruction of those saying they would be virtual 45 of that remaining 15 percent said that having a vaccine for their student would change their preference this would lead to 92 percent potentially in person and again i said as of today but it's actually a couple of days ago and we've received about 10 000 responses today so that is statistically significant but we will continue to monitor those results and share them with you next slide please so these are the key principles for our fall learning plan ensuring academic success and social
079emotional support for all of our students serving students through their local community school and the independence non-traditional school is what we prefer and was what the task force is recommending also they're recommending in-person as the best option for the majority of our students elimination of concurrent teaching to the greatest extent possible reducing the complexity and creating ability to easily pivot to changing health guidance and allow virtual students to return in person during the year per the state requirement enhancing the virtual attendance requirements such as live on camera presence next slide please so what is the plan first of all we are and the task force and the superintendent staff is in agreement and in person five days a week default for all students in other words we'll plan for all students to be in person
080but we will provide number two a virtual option at all schools for all grade levels as per the board directive number three this data that i just shared with you on the previous slide they as parents and guardians will continue to have the opportunity to opt into virtual for the fall semester via the hub from may 24th to may 28th so uh what is the difference between what we're doing now and that new set of dates what we need to make sure everybody understands is these things are changing with covid constantly the directives are changing social distancing is changing masking rules are changing and furthermore we need to help principals and the staffs at buildings counselors those that were scheduling students and setting up classes to have specific recommendations from every family so even though
081it won't be set in stone we're going to open this window in the hub for the week of may 24th to may 28th to let every family say what they what they would choose if in fact they want to opt into virtual so again the default is five days a week in person for all students but if specific families and students by student by grade level wish to opt for the virtual that's the week they'll be able to do that we'll pull that information together and as soon as we do we will immediately share it with you virtual students will be grouped together into virtual only sections this will help us eliminate the majority of the concurrent high schools may supplement the school-based program and their schedules if needed with courses from virtual prince william
082which is our long-standing and successful program that we have most recently been offering free to our students it used to be quite expensive as well as the state program virtual virginia counselors and schools will advise parents and guardians and students if choosing the virtual selection that may be better served in person in other words you know we we feel like some students who may be on virtual might be better served if they were in person so if if counselors feel strongly about that we want them to give that encouragement on in person school-aged child care is planned for normal in other words pre-covered conditions with 62 elementary locations which is what we previously had and select middle school locations before and after school so again it depends on what our enrollment is but we're hoping
083for a return to pre-covered operations with our school-aged child care and again we're delighted that the federal government and through the state and our efforts here locally and some of our elected officials at the local and state level meals will be available during the pandemic at no cost for all students next slide please schools will follow modified bell schedules to accommodate extra runs for elementary school buses to ensure no more than two students are to a seat now you may you may have picked up the fact that we're we're bringing students a little closer together again the cdc virginia health department seem to feel that if mitigation is going well which overall i think we've done very well that we can have the students wearing masks and get two kids to a seat belt times
084will vary by school but approximately the high schools will go from 7 30 in the morning to 1 40 in the afternoon middle schools 8 10 a.m 2 25 p.m for elementary students the first run will be 9 a.m to 3 10. second run will be 9 30 to 3 40 p.m virtual sections and classes will be embedded in the daily bell schedules there will be two exceptions to that the exceptions will be virtual prince william and again this is not something new what is new is we have ex we continue to expand virtual prince william and some of the course offerings but virtual prince william has been offered to our students for some time for students who may want to take a required course ahead of time or supplement their coursework so they can
085have an elective in person at school and virtual virginia next slide please our virtual students will be grouped together into virtual only sections and classes they may be slightly larger than typical classes depending upon how the overall numbers fall all class size guidelines and virginia standards of quality that apply to in-person classes will apply to the virtual and or hybrid classes so again i don't need to read all this detail but you can see we actually broke down what our class size limits are and we will adhere to those whether in person or virtual limited number of classes may not be available virtually so for example we know we have some complex cte classes and some of our specialty programs that have tremendous hands-on work and as you know we brought those students in on
086mondays to deal with their needs so i just want to be clear that there may be some classes that it would be impossible to do a hundred percent virtual we will however make absolutely sure that the course is required to move to the next grade and courses required for graduation that both options are possible next slide please virtual virginia offers limited course selection primarily in the core academics again what you would need for promotion and what you would need for graduation this is a an expanded program this will be one of the options available and again i'm proud to say that this amazing team of teachers and administrators who worked on this task force are giving more options than you hear in some of our other local school divisions a second option base school will
087still be responsible for well this is not another option this is just something important to say at this point the base school is still responsible for all the related and support services so for making sure that ieps are attended to appropriately that you have the appropriate equipment that counseling services are available regardless of the program that you choose the base school is responsible for performance and accountability so you know if you're if you're taking a virtual virginia program we would still have counselors monitor the performance of those students or our own prince william county virtual program so what does all this cost and in number four we broke it down by elementary middle and high school and again i'm not going to go through all of this it's pretty simple math but the fact of
088the matter is all these options cost money the point i want to make here if you go drop down to number five is it's cost comparable if all virtual students placed into virtual prince william due to the increased in staffing needs so if you were to offer all those same courses on our own virtual prince william you're going to have about the same cost because you would have to increase the staffing so a couple other clarifications that i would like to make and on the money piece so as it stands now like for example if people would be interested in a virtual prince william uh approach that money that would go into the per pupil for that school would follow that student so that's very important to note so you know there's principals that are
089looking at that and and concerned about that so that's one of the reason why we're doing this early identification again it is not set in stone for a parent or a student but it helps us with our planning and it gives us options next slide please so again i want to say that the task force and the staff and myself are recommending the elimination of the concurrent teaching to the greatest extent possible and i want to talk about what might some of those exceptions be because i think it's very important you know i've learned a lot over the past year and one of the things that i think is really helpful to the school board and the community is to look at the good and the bad up front so you know what what we
090tried to do in the beginning of all of this was be optimistic be hopeful we're going to be able to do everything and as time went you know we had some struggles and the board had more of an interest in tell us the whole picture and let us hear from some other people with boots on the ground so in presenting the fall plan i want to put some of these things and lay them before you tonight so when might concurrent teaching still be needed if there's a quarantine that occurs requiring impacted students to have concurrent teaching during that period of time scheduling of virtual only sections will be maximized within schools and may include students across schools and additionally may require limited use of concurrent teaching in some cases okay what does that mean excuse
091me one second jason i think someone texted and said the feed is down can you guys check at home see if we're still online or on cable or whatever we're supposed to be doing go ahead dr walt sorry about that testing okay we're good yeah all right so again i'm on 2 b and since the feed went down let me let me go through 2b again scheduling of virtual only sections will be maximized within schools and may include students across schools additionally may require limited use of concurrent teaching in some cases all right what does that mean so i'm going to walk you briefly through a couple of examples let's say you have a particular school and they only have five first graders that want to be virtual and the school 10 minutes up the
092road has 20 kids signed up virtual and can take those five kids from that same classroom it's basically a bureaucratic transfer online to be able to accommodate a full section because again we don't have unlimited amounts of money so that might be one example so here's another one you've got a a classroom let's take fifth grade and let's say you have five sections of fifth grade and it just so happens to fall out that you've got one all virtual three all in person and about 12 and 12 left over virtual and in person and you've got a teacher that says i don't mind doing concurrent i kind of took this as a challenge i love technology i'm more than willing to do it if a situation like that were to occur that would help us
093out we would work with that principle to make absolutely sure that you know that delivery method from that particular teacher at that school and that grade level were successful this year so we'd have every reason to believe it would be successful next year and then if they're teaching concurrently we would provide an additional stipend and as you can see um well let me let me uh i'll drop down to number four since i'm on that topic we are talking to right now all the hr people in the other school divisions about what they might be offering for a stipend with concurrent because several of us are talking about that as a limited option so their next meeting is still a two weeks away something like that so i will come back to you and let
094you know uh kind of what the recommendation would be on a stipend for someone who's doing concurrent now i'll back up to number three teachers will be asked to volunteer to teach concurrence sections or during quarantine we may ask them you know we may need them to do it for seven days or ten days these quarantines have come down some of them so they used to be absolutely 14 days then i think they dropped to 10 now so you know if we really need somebody to do this but they don't particularly want to do it we'll still pay them a partial stipend to do it during that quarantine period and we think that will will help a lot next slide please so schools will follow the mitigation strategies in effect at the time now what
095does that mean at the time whatever the governor's executive order states for that point in time we will follow those mitigation strategies to the greatest extent possible well what does that mean just like we have made adjustments to the number of kids on the bus just as we have tried to make accommodations for some parents who feel very very strongly their kids need to be in four days if we have the mitigation if we have the face mass if we can control the mitigation again we're going to do what's in the governor's order to the greatest extent possible so let's talk about what might be subject to change classrooms physical distance to the greatest extent possible with a minimum of three feet with face coverings we can't make a plan to bring in what what
096the data is telling us is going to be 85 percent of the kids and say you're going to be six feet apart but our mitigation has shown us that in classrooms where it's closer with the students wearing masks and other mitigation that we've been very successful so again um that's where we're shooting for the classrooms what about buses again i mentioned this students will share seats with face coverings so instead of wanting us in a row there are more than likely going to be two in a row cafeteria students will be separated six feet to the greatest extent possible again you may be saying well what does that mean i went to you know i keep doing these school visits and i shared some of those with you and i watch the creativity of folks
097and while i'm not saying well we just need to do this in every school but there was a school i visited this week they had the dividers they had such such enthusiasm around getting the kids back in person that they put them up in the cafeteria and they actually got a little closer than the six feet got some more kids in there their mass are off but they have like a three foot divider just like you you see there miss jesse's got it and it goes around each child and you can get a few more kids in there are also a number of schools that are using alternating uh spaces like uh i'll give you another example of a school i went to they said the music teacher if these kids can't sing she she
098told me she's got to have them singing so they turned the story room into the into the general music class in that elementary and they were able to space the kids out with the governor's order 10 feet in the story room and it worked so we've got people really working hard to make this possible and again to follow the mitigation as as much as we possibly can but i have confidence that we will be able to meet the needs uh in the fall obviously i'm not going to be here for that but i'm going to try to set a plan in place or at least show you what we hope to be able to do and is there one more slide up there i think we yes because this is this is really important so
099obviously this plan would be subject to change there may be something in there that five or more members of the board don't like well then we need to look at what that is dr mcdade she may want to make some changes she's in a big school division uh she's been very interested in what we're doing i'm in constant contact with her we're sharing all we're sharing the drafts of things with her i am meeting with her uh on the phone facetime and in person and we're just getting ready for our second in person all of these things are under her control in terms of her meeting with me she has initiated all of them and i have told her that i would be available to her at all times whenever she wanted to talk so
100she asked me could the staff send her as the task force was moving along could they send her some of the drafts absolutely was the answer so she is very much in tune with this plan and i also told her specifically on sunday we had a facetime conversation i said listen dr mcdade if you know every so often we find somebody's got a fantastic idea that nobody else thought of so if there's something that you think we've missed and in the chicago public schools you put this into place and it's worked well let me know or let us know and she has complete freedom to talk to deputy iman and any member of the superintendent's staff she does not need to go through me and i do not need to be on those calls i
101want her to have access so that's number two uh so you know every time you have a plan there's a bunch of questions and we've spent nights where we've been here until two in the morning on those questions but what we finally started doing was the q and a's which you could look at a plan think about your questions submit them we would give you the answers and post all of those to the website and i think actually that's worked quite well uh especially the last couple of months so again we are prepared and we're asking you if you could submit your questions through that q a process we will answer them in a timely fashion we will post them to our website for the entire community to see and then uh our this this
102plan the the beginning of this plan is not set in stone again it's not set in stone and i'm not asking you to vote on it i'm just saying we will begin sharing that to our families this week so that they have a sense of what's coming we want to make sure they know that we're going to ask them if if your kid wants to be in person you don't have to do anything but if you think you want them virtual then you're you'll go into the hub they've they're used to this they've had three opportunities to do it this year so they know how to do it but we want to make sure that they're starting to get in the loop this week on where we're going for next year and we're very excited
103about this i want to add one final thing and that is we have in the past had some situations i and again i mentioned this one other time but it's a great example brentsville district high school was so overcrowded one year that with one-way halls alternative lunchrooms and everything else it was determined and i think it might have been battlefield we did this as well we offered a couple of online courses at the beginning of the day and at the i think at the end of the day we paid for those so the kids didn't have to pay for them it was optional to do it but we were able to reduce the number of kids in the school because of dramatic overcrowding okay well the only overcrowding we have right now is because the
104social distance so this may be something that some principals are interested in doing that we've had practice with this it has worked effectively and we're going to give those opportunities uh again and then thankfully we're opening two huge schools so this you know our newest high school our newest middle school that is going to help tremendously with these issues so that concludes the the basically unveiling so to speak of our fall plan i want to thank all the task force members because i'll tell you what all of these teachers and the administrators as well doing their full-time job and then meeting every week and then the subgroups also meeting every week has been a huge task and responsibility for which i think i speak for you as well we are eternally grateful for their input
105chairman latif i'll turn it back to you wonderful dr waltz thank you very much for that and thank you for bringing that to the board so um so quickly and and uh and thank you as as i'd like to echo dr walt's statement for all the folks that helped prepare this and work on all the groups i guess i'll start with mr wilk has a question and remember the questions we did also that's what i was going to ask you sir so just your prerogative on this because honestly if one board member starts asking questions we're all probably going to jump in just because we're all going to want our questions so how do you want to handle this like at this point if dr waltz is suggesting we do the q a through sure
106and i think that's that's fine i think tonight would be if you wanted to ask a question if they had the answer they could answer really quickly if not just assume it's part of the q a i wouldn't spend a lot of time on a lot of statements tonight would be more just questions if you had any okay so i do have a i'll be minim you brought up a couple scenarios about the concurrent you gave two good elementary examples can you elaborate uh i guess i'll too could this will be my first thing can you elaborate a little bit more about what it would look like at a high school why there may be a need for concurrent at a high school level you gave some elementary examples given the course complexity and the
107number of courses and the variety and electives and things like that at a high school level and scheduling i'm curious if you could elaborate for the board in the community scenarios where high school might need to have concurrent absolutely so mr wilk as you as you know in high school there are many unique courses for which you may only have one teacher uh who's able to teach that so if the course schedule were to fall out where maybe an ap physics teacher was able to teach two classes in person and then right from their same classroom teach two classes virtually in a week but there may be a crossover in which case there's another ap physics class that's hanging out there with both virtual and in person that's an example of where we might go
108to that teacher and say look would you be willing to do one concurrent or we know they've been highly successful doing it and and we're hoping that incentivizing it with a stipend would also help but that would be one example at the high school level okay and my last thing to respect the timeline and everything else will go through q a i'm already getting asked why people why if you could explain to the community a little bit more elaboration on why we need to have these decisions or at least the initial selections early as opposed to waiting all the way till july and august what is the complexity that goes into the staffing determining who's going to do what the course is offered can you explain that a little bit more because i've already people
109saying this is too short of a window we want to know more about how the fall is going to look before we make a determination on if our child is going to be virtual or not so can you elaborate or explain a little bit more in detail all the complexity and the work that goes behind the scenes to make this happen and unfold for the next school year absolutely so we got our budget passed thankfully and we were able to you know mitigation is like one of my favorite words now we were able to mitigate the reduction in a way that we didn't have to make cuts so what happens now with the budget so every budget holder in the school division so every school is a budget holder and then within that school there
110are various departments so for example in high school you got your fine and performing arts department your english department science and so forth the same thing in middle school in elementary you're organizing kids by grade level so there's a per pupil amount of money that goes to those budget holders same with central office the second thing that happens and i love this opportunity because i love the fact that several people stated in the equity presentation we've been doing a lot of equity work but it's sort of been not necessarily in full view we have equity dollars for free and reduced lunch students where every one of those students gets additional money doesn't matter what school you go to special needs students there's additional funding our el students for every one of those children there's additional
111funding so if you're miss jesse who used to be principal of vaughn elementary you're going to get your budget in just a couple of weeks now that the budget's approved and you're going to have to sit there and figure out how many kindergarten teachers how many first grade teachers if you're in middle school you're going to have to figure out you know how many family and consumer life teachers am i going to need and how many are going to need to be virtual and how many are in person and then you have to look at your staffing who's retiring who's transferring to another building and you're faced with hiring needs okay hiring is extremely competitive in this region when when students graduate from college and they want to teach they shop if they're going to
112be coming to this part of the country you better believe they're going to be looking at prince william and loudoun and fairfax and montgomery county maryland they're going to shop and we have to be ready to hire the best people if we want to continue our good progress and our efforts so there's really no time to waste on this that being said we will have to have some discretion on changes that happen after this next window is open with the hub because there are going to be some families that through various circumstances they feel it's very important and part of what the state is saying and part of what i believe this board has said is if somebody wants to go from virtual to in person we've got to make it seamless as hard as
113it may be as challenging as it may be the thing is the numbers are going to be less so it's not like converting thousands of people from virtual to in person on a dime but we have to give the principals and the budget holders the ability to get moving with all of this and then look at what the high school counselors are doing they're scheduling all the students now so for those folks who say i need more time i think it's really important for i mean i'm glad you asked the question it's really important for us to help them understand some of those reasons because once you sit down and explain that to somebody it's it's not hard to understand that was outstanding i'm going to i can't wait till we post this so i
114can share that clip because you can do it way better than i can in that explanation thank you miss williams oh miss jesse uh hi i don't think this question i i have several questions and i'll do the q a but i do have one question i think that's important in your plan for when students return some are virtual some were hybrid and some are now four days a week is there are you is there any way to any universal assessment of where these kids are and where their learning will start and will you look at the difference between those students who are virtual versus those students had in school learning that's one question i have another one okay sure so um and i hope you didn't mind me using you as an example of
115a principle because i knew you would know exactly what i was talking about thank you as a principal i'm going yeah you're glad you're retired right another question did you have principles on that task force yes thank you i i just okay thank you it's going to be rough yeah you know but could you answer that question yes so let me let me clarify again we would be planning for five days in person and five days virtual and then there may be some other iterations like for example there's any number of seniors that may uh only need two or three courses to finish up or they may they may have two required courses but they want to take them online so those things would go on in a normal year so in terms of figuring
116out where they are obviously you know we we expect people to be doing ongoing formative assessment on a daily basis and obviously we have the summative assessments with the grading problem with grading is it doesn't necessarily tell you a lot you're we're using rubrics we're standards based we hope that everybody's doing that but the bottom line is there was a part of one of those slides where i talked about counselors being able and administrators to talk to families and students because if their performance has not been if they've not done well under virtual we need to be counseling those kids to come in person and if they insist on being virtual we need to say look we're going to set you up with a counselor to talk through why you don't want to be on
117the screen but your teacher by and large with a few exceptions needs to be able to see you to talk with you to see that you're engaged it's hard enough doing it online but if the screen is black then that's really difficult so those are some of the options that address the performance because i don't see the or do you see the sol data providing any uh diagnostic or pre pre-pre-test kind of information well you know that's the state has actually said that's why we are insisting on doing it so that you can use that as a precursor to determine where a student's growth has been over the past year so you know when they we have these superintendents calls that's one of the things that they were like well why didn't you give us
118a pass on those again this year and it's for the very reason you spoke up we've got to have some ability to look at where the kids ended this year and so people have a place to start and i guess my other question is uh thinking through the lens of principle uh the lunch schedule and the bell schedule i'm looking at the two layers of you know you've got two groups of kids coming in for elementary so the bus is not going to get there until 3 40 or something of this nature have we looked does that align with the teachers contract time because i can remember buses coming in at five o'clock sometimes just regular so that's one of the concerns that i have so the answer to that the short answer is yes
119and because when we brought more kids back we had to start some of those second runs we were able to work through those contractual issues so yes we we were able to address that 25 kids in a class how do you medi you guys have measured can you mitigate three distant three seats three desks apart and because i noticed you had 25 kids in a classroom so if you have 25 how do you mitigate that and then i won't ask any more questions i'll say my other 10 questions to send you miss jesse so so uh again you know to the extent we possibly can we'll spread them out but again that example i use of the of the school that i was in where they had the dividers up i mean they were actually
120able to get the kids closer together because they obviously have to take their mask off to eat but i was like oh my gosh i've been to i think it's 40 schools in person and i had not seen that and i was like okay because you know i heard from uh one board member who said that the kid couldn't come four days a week because they didn't have any more room in the lunchroom bingo okay send them to keith iman spelled with an odd pwcs.edu mr williams thank you first i want to start by saying thank you to uh dr waltz and uh mr iman an entire team that was able to put this plan together um i think it was really important for our parents to be able to have this conversation with the
121school division and get this information i know that the state made a law right but still it doesn't get down to some of the nuances of what each individual division is or isn't going to do and then having said that i i i have a little issue with the q a um i know it works in the advantage of time and there's been plenty of constituents out there who are like you know we don't want to have marathon board meetings and i'm not advocating for that by any means i i we've had a couple now lately where i've gotten home pretty early shocked my kids they were no chores were done because they were like mom's not coming home but the reason why i have an issue with that is because there are a lot
122of members of our public who really rely on getting the information from watching a school board meeting and i don't think it takes into consideration i'm not saying that we should all have limitless q a but i do think that there is a tremendous amount of value and having board members even if it's limited two to three questions or one round of five minutes each or something to really ask some of the high priority questions for those constituents or members of the public that may be watching it on tv with closed caption or um maybe they're not literate or maybe whatever reason they have there's there's a tremendous amount of value in that right especially now in a culture where the majority of us are our snippet 30 second minute 40 second 140 character people
123so i would ask that the division sort of re-evaluate that moving forward and maybe give us a you know if it's helpful for for the division staff to be able to answer questions if we could sort of reevaluate how that looks for us so that we are able to have that communicative time for those individuals that really rely on it because one of the things i think mr ralston has been saying a lot lately too is if you go to the website it's it's intuitive to us and and those who are really truly everyday they're digging around and they know our website where to go find this information but for a lot of folks it's not it's it's they know the q a is posted there but then they have to go through and read
124and find the answer to their question and then they have to understand it and that can be very intimidating especially to people who are not natural readers or looking for just summaries or aren't very good at navigating a website or maybe don't even have access to a website um you know on in in a certain amount of time right some of our families maybe only utilize the computer for their student school work or for their class time and they're not as familiar with going in and looking for where this information may be so i think that that's something to consider and then when we do post the q a if there is a way to make it easier to digest or even if it's something on our main website that says click here and they
125go to another site because i think what we've done is miraculous is not a critique on it i think it's great but that has definitely been some of the commentary i've heard from members of my constituents in the general public is it's too much information to dig through we can't find the answer to this question um and you know i'm good for saying we've done everything except just physically go up to someone's door and read it to them but i think in these circumstances during a pandemic it's overwhelming sometimes just as you mentioned earlier how many staff have done their meetings and they're also on this council and that council in this council i think everybody on this board can identify with that we're all working jobs and we're doing school board and then we're
126also participating on other things sometimes you just don't have the energy to figure out where it is even though it may be important um so i just wanted to throw that out there for consideration um not only for you to hear dr waltz but also because i know dr mcgade watches and that's something to be thinking of you don't have to repeat it twice um so so miss williams let me just say first of all i'm taking all your points at heart to heart let me say this we've had a lot of practice because of all the changing dynamics and as we start rolling this out this year uh i'm sorry this week um i think it would be great for you to take a look because i think you're going to be pleased with
127how easy it is to understand and and the use of what has now become pretty common which is scoop especially and then uh the twitter and facebook and then the translations that we do but give us feedback if there's something that we can improve on and then there there's another huge change that's happened that i think really speaks to to your concerns and that is on march 13th everything came to a grinding halt and i would say most people i knew were had a very high level of concern and i know when i went the first time to the grocery store there was like almost nobody out there and all of that has changed as vaccines have gotten on the rates have gotten better we've pulled our faculties and staff back into the building this
128is the one thing i would say when when you talk to a parent that can't find an answer to something tell them to call the school because the teachers are now answering their phones everybody in central office the administration but we have people on duty full time five days a week minimum and that's something else that you know if and you know i mean i'm a parent too so i've i've once in a while had that but tell them to call the school call the teacher call an administrator call the counselor and uh and then give us feedback but if you've got some questions you want to hit me right now well thank you i appreciate that because i think that's also something we've forgotten to do too it's not exactly not something i would
129know i used to easily pick up the phone but it's gotten out of practice right so i i think that that's um i think that's helpful but again and then we'll ask our advisory councils to assist with this as well because they're a great source of connection with parents and families oh thank you and i do want to say i i am very appreciative of the uptick in use of text messages because it's something i advocated before in the past and it's easy sometimes to ignore a robocall and it's hard to sometimes get on a website but everybody checks their phone for a text message and it's a good reminder i don't not a fan of getting bombarded by them but i i've gotten i think three or four about take the division survey yes
130i don't find it intrusive and i think it's very helpful um but yes i'd still like to have some type of q a because there are just some parents who not gonna call or maybe aren't as literate or whatever the case may be and you know it's our job to sort of service everyone so for our high profile questions um i i would just like to ask that we have some time even if it's structured to be able to have that conversation like you and i are having now i think it has a lot of value to it and then the only other thing that i have to ask and i'll submit questions there's a lot of conversation about students having to opt in for virtual now and you just explained why will there be
131options um god forbid or whatever forbid um if the the need increases in the the pandemic worsens for example like everyone's planning the majority of us are planning to send their children in person it looks the future looks bright now but say late july something happens and some crazy variant with two heads pops out of nowhere and parents are concerned again and maybe they want their student that they were planning to send in person to now be at home it will we have not that's not really addressed in this plan and i just want to make sure that that's being thought of or there'll be some sort of way that parents can then because we can opt them in person seamlessly according to this plan but it doesn't really address what happens if you're an
132in person and something happens and you want to go virtual and i think that that's important too because we're excited about students who are vaccines for 12 and up but there's really not a lot of chatter for elementary school students and i think that that's often forgotten is that you know if you're a person you can transmit the disease if you get it so we're not having that conversation and i just want to make sure that that gets addressed you don't have to answer that now i i can't but i wanted to make sure that that question was asked publicly sure because i can't i can and i will okay go ahead dr watts so um maybe it would have been better for me to say when i talked about pivoting uh that we have
133to be able to pivot the other way as well so the good news in all of this you know i'm always you know me i'm i'm an optimist so i'm always looking for the silver lining when march 13th hit and we discovered we had tens of thousands of kids that didn't have a computer or even if they had a computer in their house if they had four kids you know this was this was difficult then we had people without connectivity we addressed all of that we have a computer for every kid now we will have a computer for every kid next year we will have connectivity to every household if they can't afford it we'll pay for just like we are now using our our federal funds and our teachers have taught virtually as painful
134as that has been to some and as successful as it has been to others the expectation will be that they could revert to that and it would go much better than last time simply because so many of those obstacles have been relieved so absolutely yes that expectation would be both directions thank you very much i appreciate that because if you're having parents who are opting in for virtual you know just like mr wilk was saying it's so early in the year there's going to be that concern what if i didn't pick virtual and then something happens can i get my kid in for can i get my student in virtual just like i could get them in person so i appreciate that all the other questions i have i'll submit and i appreciate you taking
135the time to answer them because absolutely it's important for our public to hear and be able to get it right now uh miss jackson all right thank you very much for the presentation today and i think you added a lot of the information from what was on board dax before so you've answered some of my questions i just want to i've had some concerns from some constituents in the brentfield district about making a decision by may 24th it's kind of piggybacking to what mr wilkes and a little bit and what miss williams said um they they kind of want to they want to know what the virtual program is going to look like and how it compares to virtual virginia or like maybe homes home school and i don't want to lose these parents you
136know um because they are going to have to make a quick decision so when you that was something i would advocate for is a clear definition of what um you know virtual instruction looks like and how equity between one school and another but if you don't mind could you please explain what preferred means on slide five which number was that it's on slide five i think yeah i'm sorry okay number two serving students through their local community school and independence non-traditional school is preferred okay again this is the this is one of the key principles from the work of the task force that because we're getting kids vaccinated because our mitigation is no longer an experiment it's shown to be effective that the task force believes that in school or serving students through their local
137community school is preferred so i'll give you another actual example of a principal who had a conversation with me last week out in your neck of the woods they said well dr waltz you know what if i you know i don't know what your plan is going to say but what if you just say what one school division did and said virtual virginia is your only option and i have um a hundred and fifty of my kids that wanted that are to do virtual virginia that money follows my kid to virtual virginia they see all these other kids successfully coming back and they change their mind five weeks into the year i'm not going to get any money back from virtual virginia because they had to hire their teachers so we're giving people choices but
138we're also saying it's preferred to have these options through your local school so we have principals who are prepared to set up the virtual option as they have this year if they have a classroom you know a third grade that needs it or you know a particular set of required courses where the money stays at the in the local school community so it says serving students to their local community school and the independence non-traditional school is preferred they're just saying that was a recommendation over having just the virtual option be virtual virginia for example does that help yes sir thank you so um in addition to advocating you know a clear definition of what virtual instruction looks like so parents can make a um informed decision but it sounds like the 24th is like not
139you not set in stone so there's a week for them to give their preference to start this huge complex process of staffing every one of our hundred schools but it i i will continue to say it is not set in stone and you know it sounds to me we'll see what the data shows and i'll i'll definitely be reporting it straight back to all of you but my hunch is that if the vaccinations continue the numbers in our region get continue to get better our mitigation is proving to work um pretty successfully that those numbers are going to stick and that the majority of people i think we've already seen the ten thousand are going to want to be in person but if that changes after that date and there are five percent and i
140realize five percent is still several thousand kids but if there's five percent of the parents in june and july that want to change i think it's i think we're obligated to try to accommodate that that our parents and their students are our customers and because of that there's a lot of reasons why people make the choices they do and i think we are a school division that provides parents more choices than any other place i know and i think we should be proud of that and i think we should continue to do that and so if we have some folks that change their mind after that preference i feel we should make every effort to accommodate them eight thank you dr waltz that's helpful i just have one more question and it has to do
141with the q and a process so i can submit my other questions um i'd like to consider maybe amending the q a process because it's great it was great because i know that kelly's staff are very overwhelmed in the beginning with the pandemic and they needed two weeks to get back to us but right now with everybody having to make quick decisions especially if you want accurate numbers by the 24th is it possible to consider not waiting two weeks again to get our answers because we submit it by friday and then we don't get answers until the following board meeting that's and and if we're going to publicize it in a more apparent location it might be helpful for the public to get more rapid responses is it possible to address that so so what
142that involves essentially from the deadline to the next meeting is a week and a half that was i'm speaking my opinion not the writers but anyone who's answering those questions is stopping something that they're doing in order to help which is important because people need those answers or at least you know a lot of those answers are important what has happened recently the q and a's have dialed down so there's fewer of them if you could try to limit the numbers of questions say like to three people each i mean or three each we could we could get those out as soon as we get them answered you know we could try to move that up um to say maybe a week and see how that works okay great and it could be a continued
143dialogue of what absolutely yeah all right thank you for your time miss wall um just going along i i agree with ms jackson if we could we'll ask fewer questions more maybe better questions and a quicker turnaround and maybe a little more obvious location the other day i looked for the board q and a's on the website it took me a long time to find them i know i should be able to know exactly where they are but um i don't i'm not sure about that anyway we we will we will redouble our efforts and try to make something that when the website appears q and a's about the fall plan comes up and my guess is knowing mr guilfoyle he's probably already done that but we'll we'll make sure that's awesome thank you so
144i have a couple of quick questions how many students um do we have that are 12 years old and older approximately do we know i mean what what are we looking at for 12 and older in our division like 30 000 40 000 that's a random question yeah you would have to ha i would have to do my own math problem which i can probably do but so we have about 90 000 kids and we have pre-k to 12 so that's 13 grade levels so roughly 7 000 kids a grade level if my math is correct but that was a speedy map so quite quite a lot of kids actually yes a good maybe half i don't know 12 no it wouldn't quite be half okay all right um that's great um so i have
145a question for it's on slide two okay um it's maybe it's a legal question um but this is kind of the way my brain works um so in point one as as long as covet 19 pandemic is in effect school board may provide fully remote virtual instruction options so the question then becomes if the pandemic were declared over would we still be offering a virtual option or is the remote option and put another way is the remote option contingent upon the existence of a declaration of a pandemic or are we going to continue the virtual option regardless let's say governor northam says guys pandemic is over we're just you know this is sort of endemic now you know it's going to circulate at very low level i mean i'm optimistic too right but so do
146you understand yes i do i understand the question so uh one thing i learned a few years back uh division council ms mcgowan who's expert on all these things likes to make sure she has the appropriate time to give an absolutely correct legal answer so we we will ask her to consider that not answer it now but i will i will give you my understanding of it or or my thoughts about it and that is [Music] that what i heard from this board over the last year or so is that the board's interested in looking at expanded virtual options and so for example in the budget process you looked as part of our cip this virtual high school concept and then as more discussion happened in our work sessions and i remember miss williams talking
147about you know she's one of the people that as a mom she felt things went really well for her child and in fact maybe better than if he would have been in person and so why can't we be looking at those options for elementary and so that has sort of morphed and what i sense from the board is the board was interested in exploring some of those kinds of options as we move further so although if the pandemic is legally over i don't think there's that obligation just to provide a carte blanche i think the board has expressed an interest in for example more courses at the high school level is one that i've heard and a couple years back it was you know if we're really talking equity why do these kids have to
148pay 400 and we managed to we managed to get that change before covet uh thankfully so i think again it's part of the great choices that prince william county public schools under the leadership of this board and previous boards has really fostered where i see i'm just going to add one more thing where i think there's some concern that i would have as an instructional leader of the school division is you know you you take i'll give you one example of a recent visit i'm out at mars stellar marsteller is a school that had they have a a couple of vocal teachers there that are just off the chart uh those kids lobbied me so hard two years ago even after i'd visited their school and listened to class after class sing they started this
149lobbying campaign to come to their concert so even though i told them i spent i spent six hours at marsteller that year that in one day listening to them i came to the concert so when i was out there this past week i said to one of those vocal teachers i said what have you been you know how have you been doing so it's been very difficult but we've made some strong growth i said well what did you do and she said i've been teaching the advanced groups almost like master classes and she said the the enthusiasm picked up i can tell the growth that they're making in music but you go to a battlefield and you think of the kinds of productions that mr bernie did over there and you think well if you're
150if you're trying to separate a bunch of these kids into all virtual and he's trying to produce the program he did pre-covered that's going to be pretty hard to do i'm not saying impossible but i think we want to protect our options but to the extent possible i think we need to try to get the majority of our kids in person and in-person programs not all yeah i i agree with you um you know i'm a huge fan of the music um programs that we have in prince william county it's one of the things we do really really well um i agree and i'm worried about what at the high school level what might happen because at each high school we only have usually of one choir teacher one band teacher one orchestra teacher and
151so if you have students who want to be virtual and they want to take band for instance what what do we do um do we create a virtual band section because i know concurrent i mean those teachers you know god bless them they've been trying but it is not not ideal it's actually been really hard i i couldn't agree with you more and i applaud all their efforts and i mean you know they because i i have a music background myself you know when they do these recordings where they have each kid sing to a sing track and they put the whole thing together they love sending that stuff to me because they know i'm going to respond but i think the good news is on this preliminary data it looks like 85 percent want
152their kids back and of the 15 percent almost half of those if their kids are vaccinated are going to change to in person plus we're vaccinating all the high school or you know it's open to all high school kids now so i'm i'm pretty optimistic that the vast majority are going to want to in person but um you know might we have to creatively think of some things like that in order to protect what we had before yes i think that's something we we need to have on the radar i appreciate that answer a lot and just one quick follow-up question on that data do we have any specificity that you could share about of those 90 or 85 percent and possibly 92 percent are we talking mostly high school students that want to come
153back are we looking at mostly elementary school because right now you know as we all know like elementary school parents are knocking down the doors to get their kids in but our high schools like my the battlefield high school in my district is 25 back in person i mean there's 75 25 you know so is there anything you could say about that data at this point like is it looking like i'm sorry go ahead yeah is it looking like we're getting more high school students that are willing to come back as opposed to elementary does it correlate with the availability of vaccines or is it still correlated with age young children versus older we don't have that right now but we will have it in the next round we will know by grade level we
154will know by school and we will share all of that with you okay thank you thank you very much uh miss zagapar um i will just send the questions just no um i've had several um music art pe type people so i'll send those questions i need them to know that i will ask on their behalf uh thank you for doing all of this um and explaining how you wanna it was a concern of mine to um think about doing a virtual program and i kept thinking why can't we just do the stand-alone program but you did talk about if you've got five kids from one school and 20 from another you could maybe work so that that that makes me feel a lot better um i will just save the rest for for the
155on the paper and we'll do it that way okay thank you hey miss ralston did you have anything to add no i think i'll just pass okay thank you so with that dr waltz i i don't have any questions to add thank you for the presentation really appreciate all the work you and your team have done and um we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel absolutely thankfully yes thankfully very much so next we'll move on to um board matters folks um where would we start uh on mr wilkside he's got thumbs up and things like that i'm gonna be happy with this um i feel like i'm gonna um pass some good tonight so thank you okay great miss jackson um thank you um this week is teacher appreciation week i i
156know this hard this year was hard on both staff and students and that many teachers are teaching concurrently which means they're teaching two different ways of learning while trying to create a classroom that meets in person and virtual needs so i just want to take a moment and say thank you to all educators my family and i watched the presentation put on by the school system for the educators who earned the national board certification of teaching and then those who were nominated for teacher or administrator of the year congratulations to all those nominated and i also had the pleasure of watching um the sparks presentation and i'm thankful for all business partnerships and the um the legacy of dr waltz and mr iman and and everybody who works for the school system thank you to
157the wonderful work of our nutrition employees they've been on the ground working since march and i am so thankful and i also want to thank the advisory council members who volunteer to serve the district of princeville and then lastly it was wonderful to see the greenhouse today and the amazing staff that represents the spectacular brunsville district high school i'm so proud to represent them and again happy teacher frustration week wonderful miss wall all right my one of my favorite quotes about teachers is teachers have three loves love of learning love of learners and the love of bringing the first two loves together and so i just want to say to teachers for teacher appreciation week you are doing amazing work in bringing love of learning and love of learners together and i know this has
158probably been the hardest year of your career as many of you have told me that and i just want to thank you for all that you do the scene and the unseen work that you do i want to highlight some extraordinary teachers in the gainesville district at mr ferreira and battlefield at battlefield organized over 70 staff they did a massive stealth operation they hand delivered personalized yard signs to almost every like almost 700 seniors and no parents were involved in this at all usually the pto gets really involved in you know things like this and after grad parties and everything but it was completely pulled off as a stealth operation as far as i know as far as i've been told and it to the surprise and the happy tears of many uh seniors so
159thank you and they did this on the first day of teacher appreciation week so that's a really great example of the kinds of teachers we have here in prince william county and i wanted to make take a minute to acknowledge their efforts and it really did make a big difference thank you to all of our staff for your hard work everybody who is on this giant committee for returning to learn for the fall thank you meeting every single week and then as subcommittees i know it's taken up a lot of your time so thank you very much students i want to say if any of students are watching hang in there and do your best work and make every moment count graduates of 2021 looking forward to i'm looking forward to cheering you in person
160for graduation i can't tell you how excited i am i've got my my my gown ready i can't wait um athletes good luck to all the spring athletes you're the last cohort of athletes to compete we're all cheering for you families appreciate your tireless advocacy for your children i appreciate those who have reached out for assistance in trying to get kids back in school i know you want what's best for your children and you are our valued partners and last of all please to the larger community consider vaccinations for yourself and your children it is it is effective it's working it's helping us get through the pandemic um and to all good night thank you miss wall miss william thank you mr chairman um i first want to say uh happy teacher appreciation week uh
161it's always one of the hardest weeks for me as a board member because i just want to give all teachers stuff but my my board pockets don't reach that deep so um i just i i don't think there really is truly enough things that we can give as individuals who are not teachers to teachers this year um especially prince william county teachers having to relearn your jobs multiple times in a year and then continue to show up to work to teach our children um to love on our kids it it really is a thankless job i'm i cannot say enough thanks for everything that you do um and people still say well teachers haven't done anything and i and i encourage everyone who believes that please go talk to a teacher because i i don't
162believe that at all i think our teachers have just really shown the value of the teaching profession how important it is um and and how undervalued they really are in our society at large so thank you and happy teacher appreciation week um graduations i'm excited about although i can't say with um without a little bit of tinge of sadness that last year's were really really fun um there there was some value add i think mostly for the students not so much for the parents and and all the car parades and all of those fun activities that went by um i didn't hear uh too many seniors complain about not having to sit for three hours and some change and so it was a really unique opportunity um but i am looking forward to seeing some
163of my um my adopted kids graduate and walk across the stage so it'll be an exciting event as well um i want to thank again to the superintendent give a lot of thanks again to the superintendent's advisory council on equity um i i really truly think that it was a historic presentation that they gave us to us this evening i am so very grateful that they are in existence and i think that others who aren't involved in prince william county schools should really take an opportunity to look at our equity advisory council and see the great work that we're doing because i do believe that we are a lighthouse and a shining light on equity and what it looks like and what it can look like in a school division of our size and in
164our county thank you again to all the food staff and nutrition as dr waltz mentioned they've been working since schools buildings were closed so i remember in the early march in the early parts of the pandemic the food and nutritional officers out there family driving up handing out food and again that goes back to the teachers because often you'd also see a teacher out there or a bus driver also helping so thank you so much i'm rushing a little bit because we're running out of time um i want to say to the teachers and all the people who are going in for their sol students who are taking their sols just do your best um that we know it's not going to be perfect it's hard to take a test in an environment you haven't
165been in all year so take a couple deep breaths that's what i told my little guy and just go in there and do your best and that's all that we're really looking for um at this point in time we know that you've worked hard and your teachers have worked hard so try not to be so anxious and the last thing i want to say is that for this board as we select student representatives of this board i've said it before but i'd like this board to consider lowering the gpa to a 2.0 from a 2.5 or 2.3 where it currently is so that we can capture more students because everybody's not a 2.5 student but they could have tremendous capability and impact on this board so i'd like you to consider that and thank you
166miss jesse you may have noticed that mrs williams and i were exchanging notes and she and i have the same feeling about these students i mean we've had some phenomenal students on this board but i remember when i was an elementary principal and i was trying to form a discipline committee and a teacher in the school says you want a discipline committee i'll give you a real discipline committee and she gave me the kids who had discipline problems on the committee so the the students that we've had on this board have been tremendous i do think that we need to look at some students who are perhaps you know not that they're not bright but there are bright students who don't show with gpas and they they do offer so i'd like to so she
167and i both kind of supported that i was i did a wellness check um with my principals uh i went i had you know i passed out those cups and i went from school to school and when i was at west ridge the principal was doing what he called a wellness check he had coffee and donuts and he went from place to place and said how are you doing how are you doing so i did a wellness check this weekend i think the principles are doing well but i have to tell you that the teachers are are really tired so i say to the associates you need to talk to these principals because when i look at this list i i think of me and i think of all the kids who came late and
168i'm trying to figure out the money now i've got to figure out how many kids going to be in the cafeteria i've got mitigation you need to do wellness checks with these principals and with the teachers teach appreciation uh it's you know i i i do a little bit of writing and i wrote something about um the blue wave and nurses everybody talked about the nurses and the blue ways and teachers were not a part of that blue wave and so this week i've noticed on fallon and on today's show that we're really doing something for teachers so i'm not passing out a cup but i will put my gratitude cup uh tribute back on the page to say that i appreciate and understand what a year has been for you teachers have always given
169when i was a principal they gave me everything they had and that simple little cup which i didn't think meant much that much meant a lot to them so i just wanted to say thank you and i appreciate you and i also would like to congratulate principal of the year miss amy shot from the aquacon district at rockledge she's a phenomenal principal i think she's had some some back surgery and i i'm saying this because i said uh is she coming back in those high heels if you know amy's shot she wears those spikes but anyway congratulations amy thank you very much uh miss um ralston yes i i just really want to thank the teachers um they've had a tough year and they stayed strong and i want to say be blessed and try
170to have a really good year thank you thank you miss ralston mr thank you dr latif um yes we have heard multiple times about teacher appreciation week um honestly i i think i said this last time i believe that education is um the best profession to go into teachers are my heroes uh you do god's work it's it's an everyday appreciation thing i am always in awe of the things that people come up with to reach students who are just sort of um maybe not quite there yet i'm in awe of the teachers who are creative and and create a whole new world inside their classroom um open doors to other pathways for for our students so i'm grateful but i'm grateful every day um and i want to keep this short i'm just uh
171it's been a long year so um let's continue to wear our mask right dr latif wash our hands it's been working it's been working and if you have the opportunity to take the vaccine please please consider it um it's it's going to save lives um keep your distance you can you can keep a little less distance with that vaccine slightly and if you're not feeling well please stay home but everybody please take care of each other we'll see you next week thank you miss argopor all right folks well i missed the last meeting and so i have a couple things to add here number one first of all if you are a student out there and things aren't going well for you if you find that you don't have anyone to talk to or if
172you don't have anywhere to turn to you can always turn to your teacher or your counselor for help i i want you to always remember if you're sitting at home and it's virtual it doesn't mean there's nobody on the other side of that screen there isn't anybody on there's there are people on the other side of the screen there are people on the phones there are folks your counselors are ready to hear from you you can email them contact them don't ever feel like there's nowhere to turn and i think it's really important for all of our students to know that we have incredible teachers and it is teacher appreciation week they do incredible things and they've done incredible things and one of the things they do that you don't hear a whole lot about
173is talk to their students about their their mental health and where they are and so if you are a student in need please you know before you do anything you know you always have somewhere to turn to and and there are there are places to turn to so i you know and we have a website that has information about seeking mental health so please please look at our websites and if there are any issues um so so i think that's important um moving on to a couple things i want to thank the board of county supervisors for passing the budget last week and ensuring that we were near fully funding all of our well we've really fully funded our highest priorities for this budget which included a five percent raise for our teachers i can't
174think of you know there are a lot of ways to thank our teachers but in the four years i've served on this board of the four budget cycles i've served we've done a four point eight percent raise three years ago four point eight percent raised two years ago a 2.4 percent raise that should have been a 4.8 but was knocked down because of the pandemic last year and a 5 this year those are the highest sets of raises consistently in a four-year pattern since prior to the recession and i think that's something this board our board of county supervisors dr walt should be very proud of in the work that the hr has done in our budget and finance department i cannot thank them enough you know it is one of the most important things
175we can do for our staff and and and i think that has been one of my highest priorities i'm very proud of that and i want to thank chair wheeler the board of county supervisors for really coming up and fully fully funding our highest priorities next i think it's important to dr walter mentioned this we were designated as one of five green designated schools from the u.s federal department of education this is a huge deal this was some work we did last summer our facilities folks our superintendent everyone put together some amazing work our school board put together a really uh broad aggressive uh initiative to start moving to carbon neutrality this is really um cutting edge work and i think we were recognized for that and i think we should all you know take
176take a moment to to to be grateful for that so i'm very excited about that one of our governor's schools which we do participate in is thomas jefferson school for science and technology which is in fairfax but we share it with a number of other jurisdictions was ranked again as the number one high school in the united states of america i think that's great for our school division our own governor's school has done extremely well we just had a meeting last week our students have been selected to some of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the united states of america and as well as our students across the school division i'll have more to say than that here in a few minutes but um we we have some really great opportunities for our families
177to to take advantage of um you know teacher appreciation week what a great great great time to thank your teachers um my wife and i have you know set up our you know we we try to work with our all of our schools and where kids are in four different schools in in the county and um and we work on all the teacher appreciation weeks and i can't thank you all enough for everything you do it's been an incredible year uh we've asked you to do more than you can ever imagine many of you aren't happy with me particularly and i understand that and uh but but you have stepped up to do amazing things for our children and our students and and we can't thank you enough to our counselors we have incredible counselors
178in this year of the pandemic you know my son is graduating dr walt's daughter's graduating jen wall's daughter's graduating we have not only been sort of witness to the the devastation that the pandemic has done to to our students but to our own children but to our transition students our students who are going to be graduating going to college joining the military going into unemployment i have watched on on social media the high school is announcing the decision day for the students the the military sign signings that our students are doing are athletes getting selected to colleges are students going for employment my goodness thank you to our counselors who are doing an incredible work this year the numbers of students getting into some of the most competitive places and getting it into their dream
179colleges wherever it may be and how excited they are when you look at these you know get on social media see what our high schools are putting out you should be very proud of the work our counselors our teachers in our high schools have done and and to dr walt's credit this is the probably third year since full day kindergarten was implemented on that year this would be the third class graduating with full day kindergarten and it continues to get better and better and that's a true testament to the work you have done and your staff has done over the course of these many years and i i just i think it's so important to say that we've had some great things happening across the school division you know great things you know we've done
180well in the science fair i can't remember i think dr waltz and i talked about that our science fair students competed at the virginia state fair and won a record number of places across the divi i think historically i want to congratulate julia renberg the whole science team that department for the work they've done over the years and just just building up that program congratulations to our high school teams who are doing things like colgan debate team who's done well at states all of our state champions all of our folks doing well all of our students participating and doing the best they can in the midst of this crazy pandemic our robotics teams participated in virtual state events i think one of our teams placed second at the state fair of state robotics so amazing
181things happening across this division even though there's a pandemic amazing accolades that continue to happen amazing work by our teachers we are in the best school system in the united states of america i do believe that and i think it's really important that we just recognize that and and thank all of our teachers on this week it is because of all of you and all of our great counselors and our staff and administrators that our students are are getting to where they're going we have work to do we've had a year where there's been quite a bit of loss for all of us there's students who are not where we want them to be or need them to be so the work that we're going to start now this summer and the work we're continuing
182to do now i think will get us there so i'm sorry i've gone on too long but this is teacher appreciation week and it is we can do it with all without all of you so have a wonderful evening the meeting is adjourned thank you