November 12, 2020 School Board Meeting

001Thanks. Thanks, Susan. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the virtual school board meeting for November 12, 2020. So I'm calling the meeting to order at 4.03 p.m. And I'm going to start with by calling roll. Cindy Anderson here. Veronica Nolan here. Megan Alterton here. Ramey Gentry here. Jacinta Green. Here. Margaret Lorber. Here. Michelle Reeve. Here. Christopher Suarez. Here. Heather Thornton. Here. Great. So we're all here and accounted for. And we'll start with a moment of silence. Okay. Now could I get a motion to adopt the agenda for today, please? I move that we adopt the agenda. Second. Okay. Ms. Lorber seconds Ms. Green's motion. I will call for a vote on that. Cindy Anderson, yes. Veronica Nolan, yes. Megan Alderton, yes. Rami Gentry, yes. Jacinta Green, yes. Margaret Lorber, yes. Michelle Reif, yes. Christopher Suarez, yes.

002Heather Thornton, yes. Okay, that's 9-0 to adopt the agenda. Now we're on to our communications and we have two public hearing speakers and we have 12 written comments that are attached to this meeting agenda if people want to see those. And so I will call for the speakers. The first one is, and what I should tell you is that each speaker has three minutes, up to three minutes, and the clerk will be setting a timer and we... We'll hear that at the end. You can submit your comments and additional comments to the board if you don't have time to finish. And it's also helpful for us to have them in writing anyway. And before all of our meetings, you can submit written comments up to be posted with the meeting. And you can sign up

003to speak at a meeting up till, is it noon? I keep forgetting, Susan. Is it noon or five o'clock? noon noon the day before the meeting so we will start off with our first speaker also to let you know that the board members we do not respond to comments we're just in listening mode um first up we have uh mr joseph dominic hi everybody i just want you oh wait before you start mr dominic i just want you to know that um sometimes we can't hear my my timer so i won't interrupt you so i apologize ahead of time if i have to do that But you can start. That's okay. I've got one on my phone, too. And I don't believe I'll need the entire time. But thanks, everybody. I appreciate the time. Thank

004you to the board. I'm Joseph Dominick, along with my wife, Katie, and two daughters. We've called Alexandria our home for more than seven years. Our oldest is currently enrolled as a kindergartner at MacArthur. And I'd also like to thank her teachers, Mrs. Kusama and Mrs. Crowell. They've been unbelievable for their perseverance, their effort, their grace that they've shown throughout this fall semester. They've really been great. But the question I have, and understand that this isn't a question and answer period, but a question I'd like the board to think about is that the Virginia Department of Education classifies chronic absenteeism as missing two to three days per month or 10% over 180 days of instruction, which I'm sure the board is aware of. But by the end of this week, we will have been in virtual

005plus for 10 weeks or 50 school days. And the children would have only received 37 days of virtual instruction, which accounts for about 74% of eligible days. That's every Monday being off. November 3rd was off for the election. And we have asynchronous days, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday this week. And I'm just wondering if the school board is comfortable with this lack of instruction. given the state's policy for absenteeism. And I do understand that on asynchronous learning days, we are to work through some of the assignments, but many times they take 10 to 20 minutes total, and it's not a complete and total education. You know, if we continue on this trajectory, our kids will likely miss 36 total days out of 180. So I wonder what's the district going to do to make this time up?

006Will it be treated as snow days where I'm from in Pennsylvania? If you have too many snow days, you have to make them up on the back end. So I'm just curious as to how can we make up this learning with the children missing almost seven weeks of school if this continues through May? Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Dominic. Next up, we have Miss Amy Smith. Hi, Miss Smith. Are you able to talk? Oh, wait. Hold on. Okay, let's try that. Ms. Smith, are you able to talk? Yes, I am here. Okay, great. Thank you very much. You're welcome to start. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I want to start by acknowledging the service of the school board, ACBS staff, and teachers. I know

007these are difficult times for you and your families as well, and I appreciate your service on behalf of our children. My name is Amy Smith, and I'm a parent of two ACPS students, a kindergartner and a third grader at Charles Barrett. Throughout the spring semester, I openly bragged about the quality of the virtual programming our teacher provided to my then second grader. I cannot adequately express my appreciation for the dedication of our teachers. They are working extremely hard to try to provide an education for our children. Despite their efforts, the best place for my two children and our family is in-person schooling. During this time, the school board is making decisions that impact thousands of families, their physical and mental health, their economic security, and the long-term futures of our next generation. These decisions cannot

008be made lightly, and that is why I am absolutely bewildered by the continued reliance of ACPS and the school board on inaccurate and faulty information utilized as baseline facts for the reopening plans. Due to time limitations, I want to speak directly to one faulty assumption, which has a major impact on decision-making. How many desks can fit into a room? The number of problems ACPS is having with this very basic calculation is astounding. First, one slide presented by Dr. Hutchings during the October 15th board meeting noted that six desks could fit into the sample Samuel Tucker classroom. But the school capacity calculations presented one week later on October 21st utilized only five desks in their calculations. Not one school board member questioned this inaccuracy. If you assume three classroom sections of K through five in each

009elementary school using six desks per classroom would have allowed more than 250 additional elementary students to attend in-person classes. Even worse, the measurements showing only six desks fit into the room defied mathematical reason. How is it possible the school district cannot measure six feet? I call on ACPS and the school board to make the floor plan of the Samuel Tucker Samuel sample classroom, its square footage, and dimensions publicly available. Finally, ACPS leadership has failed to explain why they believe it is possible to have more children currently sitting in ACPS classrooms with the Virtual Plus partnerships than they allege would be safe if the school reopened for in-person learning. Ten students are currently safely sitting in ACPS classrooms with staff from the Virtual Plus partners. Why is this model not being used to inform reopening decisions?

010The failure of the school district to measure the rooms correctly or to address the questions I have raised here has bred enormous distrust amongst parents. Reopening our schools is a difficult challenge for sure, but figuring out how many desks fit into a classroom is not. It's basic math, not even new math. Please do your part to ensure the facts you are basing your decisions on are not faulty. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Ms. Smith. And so now we go on. The other part of our communications is hearing from our student representatives. So I will turn it over to them. Can everybody hear me? Okay. Hello, everybody. So my student report is just going to be on an update for the high school survey that I talked about in my last student report. The

011survey was... postponed to and is being postponed to another time and we're going to like push the date back and this will just give me and my peers more time to dig deep and come up with questions and answer choices that will allow every student to give their honest feedback on virtual learning thus far. And on November 7th, the Titans had their fall festival at Chinquapin. And it was a perfect day to host the event because it was really nice and it was sunny out. And with winter right around the corner, it's a great day to just hang out with your friends before it gets really, really, really cold outside. And we played games and we had a live band from our very own Titan students and the classes got to sell their merchandise. And

012it was just a very nice way to stay connected with our school in the time where students could feel disconnected from their school because of the pandemic. And yeah, thank you guys for watching. And now I'm going to turn it to Ashley. Thank you, Lorraine. And my phone can't turn on, unfortunately. going to be focused on an upcoming event and initiative. So this Saturday, November 14th, I plan to participate in an anti-racism seminar called You Can Do More. So it's organized by the Nova District PTA. And this event focuses on understanding racism. discriminatory education practices and providing intentional action steps for dismantling these present systems. So I will be part of the student panel discussion to lend insight into my experiences within education and beyond. So I'm highly looking forward to that and hearing the

013experiences of fellow students. And also as part of the identity project, Larian and I have spoken in the past. about beginning education and engagement, something along the lines of education engagement, excuse me, focused on like social justice resources for students and educators. So our initial idea was creating something, creating a resource page on Canvas so people had access to, you know, resources and things surrounding this topic. So I believe this, you know, would be very beneficial. As it demonstrates, you know, ways we can be culturally responsive and just critically aware of our surroundings. And providing resources through Canvas would highlight, you know, anti-racist, anti-bias practices and just would inform others on how to create those inclusive spaces where a lot of students feel, you know, supported, respected, and valued, which is very important. So knowing

014the mission that our school division has set itself on and centering it around racial equity. this we believe you know this would be very highly valuable so we hope to give another report updating you guys about this thank you thank you to you both and good luck tomorrow um now we move on to the consent calendar do i can i get a motion to adopt the consent calendar please i'm sure i move we adopt the consent calendar I heard Ms. Gentry and Mr. Suarzo. We'll give it to Ms. Gentry. I heard her first. I think Ms. Gentry seconds Ms. Lorber's motion to approve the consent calendar. Is there anything to pull from the consent calendar? Okay. If not, I will call for a vote. Cindy Anderson, yes. Ronna Canolan? Yes. Megan Alderton? Yes. Ramey Gentry?

015Yes. Jacinta Green? Margaret Lerber? Yes. Michelle Reif? Yes. Christopher Suarez? Yes. Heather Thornton? Yes. Okay, that's 9-0. The consent calendar is approved. And now we move on to the first item on old business, which is the area of focus of academic disparities pre-K through to literacy. And I will turn it over to Dr. Hutchings. And thank you, Madam Chair. So today I'm really excited because I know this is a very important topic, not just for the board, but also for the community and also for public education just in general. Literacy is one of the most important components of your educational experience. And the pre-K through 12 literacy focus is one of our areas of focus for this year, but it's also a part. of our ACPS 2025 strategic plan. So a part of just a

016reminder to the board and also to our community that each board meeting we are going to be providing updates not only about our transition into in-person but also updates in regards to our areas of focus and pre-k through second grade literacy happens to be the topic of discussion today so I'm going to turn things over at this time to Dr. Mann to introduce some of our staff members who are here to help present on this very important topic so Dr. Mann Thank you, Dr. Hutchins. Good evening, school board and everyone watching. As Dr. Hutchins said, this is an important topic for us. And just to give the school board a virtual high five, you all were ahead of VDOE. They actually are also focusing on early literacy. And so one of the slides that we're

017going to share with you this evening comes directly from the VDOE on the effects of and the importance of early literacy for our students. And so just a virtual high five to all of you for adopting this and part of our strategic plan and asking Dr. Hutchins to create the K-2 Literacy Task Force, but we're going to be adding on pre-K because we know how important that is. And so we have a team. We have two coaches. We have both of our instructional specialists and also a teacher from Tucker to go through some of our data and how we are trying to tackle. and handle are precated to literacy. And so at this point, I will turn it over to our coordinator for literacy, Kim Schell. Thank you so much, Dr. Mann. Can everybody hear

018me? Great. Good evening or good afternoon. I guess it's still afternoon. Good afternoon, Dr. Hutchings, members of the school board. Thank you so much for having us. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Kimberly Schell, and I am lucky to be the K-12 literacy coordinator in ACPS. We're really excited to share with you a little bit of the world of early literacy and ACPS. The essential questions on this slide are going to help guide us through our pre-K through two literacy story. We're going to start off by providing a little bit of background. background on the importance of early literacy and how pre-K literacy is addressed in our curricula. Then we're going to share the journey of the K2 Task Force and how some of the data inform the goals and

019recommendations of that K2 Task Force. And then finally, we'll look at how we pivoted to our virtual plus model, which is really important at this time. You're also going to hear from some of our fabulous ACPS teachers and specialists about pre-K-2 literacy. We have with us today Ms. Andrea Heckel. She's at FT Day, and she's a former classroom teacher and now literacy specialist. Kathy Harrington, who is at Polk, also a former classroom teacher and now literacy specialist. And then Donna Anthony, who is a kindergarten teacher. teacher at Tucker. But at this time, I'd like to turn it over to our elementary literacy specialist, Dr. Carolyn Wooster. Thank you, Kim. Hi, everybody. I am Carolyn Wooster, and I joined ACPS in May as their elementary literacy specialist. And how lucky am I to have joined a

020school system where this was already your top priority? I didn't even have to convince you. So I feel very fortunate to be on this important journey with you. As Dr. Mann mentioned, the VDOE has made this a top priority as well. Just last month, they hosted an early literacy summit. in which research such as this was presented to help us remember why this is so critical. We know that if a child is struggling at the end of first grade, that struggle will likely impact them in second grade and fourth grade and the rest of their educational career beyond. So it's so important that we impact that literacy in the early grades. So here in ACPS, we strive to base our program on research on how to best do just that. On the left-hand side of

021the screen here, you will see our VDOE framework for our K-12 literacy instruction. where we work so that our children graduate with the strong research skills they need to analyze truth from perhaps less truths as they're lurking for information in the world, where they'll be fluent readers, persuasive writers, and clear communicators who can advocate for themselves and others in their worlds. On the right hand side reflects how we're always looking at the latest research and you've heard a lot perhaps in the media, there's been a lot of brain research coming out lately about this idea. We see here on the right the simple view of reading depicted and which we know we need a number of things to come together in order to read. On the left hand side we see the decoding encoding. I

022don't know if you can see here, right, but I bet you all could decode. letters like N-A-T-S. And with that, we need the linguistic comprehension you see on the right hand side to have a framework of ballparks and hot dogs and meaning to put with the letters we see. So those two things need to come together for our readers as we strive to teach them in our classrooms. So as you, if you, if any of us could visit our pre-K classrooms in person, we would see these two strands of that rope happening through play. In our block center, in our kitchen center, we see students engaging with print through menus, through alphabet work, as well as that linguistic work where their teachers are helping to model the language. develop their vocabularies to play with the

023sounds within that language so that they can eventually attach those sounds to the letters that will help them read. As our students enter our kindergarten classrooms and beyond, we build upon this foundation with our comprehensive literacy instructional model. Language is still so important. You see the red circle here where we're immersing them in read-alouds with accountable talk, getting them to talk within and in response to text. And then pulling out those mini lessons where we're modeling, gathering our children to the carpet or leaning in close to the Zoom. Hey, can I teach you something that's really going to help you as a reader? Watch how I do this to help them approximate and learn from that direct modeling. The goal always is for this to transfer to their independent work, to transfer that to that

024self-directed, goal-directed reading and writing. And to make that happen, we always move from the carpet or from the main Zoom room to the kidney table, to the breakout Zoom rooms, where we're gathering in small groups to give children the direct, differentiated instruction they need based off what our data and our assessments are telling us. All of these pieces that you see before you, we're constantly working to evolve, seeing where we need more of one, where we need to refine another. And Kimberly Shell will now take you on the journey that she began with the team even before I came on board to help explore some of those areas and do just that. Thank you, Dr. Wooster. So we were really lucky that the school board and thankful to the school board and Dr. Hutchings for

025including this emphasis on K2 literacy in our ACPS 2025 strategic plan with that lens of equity for all. So embedded in that was also the goal of forming that K2 task force to really dig into our literacy data and the needs of our students and teachers. So the next couple of slides are going to take you through the data that the K2 task force task force analyzed the members of the data, our process, and some of the goals and recommendations that came out as a result of the K2 task force. So on this next slide, you'll see some data that hopefully looks a little bit familiar. This is from the 2025 Strategic Planning Committee data workbook. On the left hand side, we do not have any state data other than PALS. We do not have

026SOL data until third grade. So the left hand side depicts our pass rates for the third grade SOLs with a goal of 81%. And you can see the last couple of years, we've been a little flat. On the right hand side, we have our data broken down by demographics. And knowing that pre-K through to literacy leads up to the SOLs, looking at this assessment is going to be really important in having us focus in on identifying some research and some strategies that are going to help with that lens of equity and how that's going to drive some of the work that the K2 Task Force does. So that's a third grade SOL. On the next slide is our data for PAL. So this is the statewide data that we have for kindergarteners through second grade.

027And we know that based on this on the left hand side, this is the percent of students that are meeting their kindergarten readiness when they come to us in the fall. And this is their first time taking the PALS assessment. So we know based on the last couple of years of data, about 20 percent of our students are not coming coming into ACPS meeting the readiness standards. So this is what. we were lucky to have this data so it could drive and guide and inform the K2 task force and how other teachers will be addressing these data over the next four years. And it actually highlights the need for this K2 task force and why we are striving to emphasize K2 literacy. So after looking at some of that data we brought together or before

028we looked at this data as a team. These are the members of the K2 task force. And before I forget, I know a bunch of them are joining us tonight. So if any of you are watching, I just want to say hello and thank you and give a shout out to you guys for all of your hard work and amazing input in this process. You can see on the side we had a fabulous mix of teachers, administrators, central office specialists and coach. We had such great people. supporting us in this project and process. So we had a lot of great voices come to the table to help work on this task force project plan. This next slide helps guide a little bit of the process that the task force took. When we first came together,

029the first thing we did, of course, was look at our data that I just shared with you in addition to some other data to help get a sense of where we are and where we need to go. We also looked at our resources and what we have and potentially what we need. Then we combined that with looking at a lot of that current research. As Dr. Wooster mentioned, you know, there's a lot of new research coming out about the early literacy and about decoding and encoding. So we looked to some of those more current research models to see what they say and how we can use their research to influence what we need in ACPS. Then we took an inventory of what we already have, and that included looking at our K-5 ACPS literacy guidelines,

030which outline a lot of what is needed. in a K through five literacy classroom and what our needs are based on the data analysis and the research. And then putting all those three things together, the data, the resource review, the literature, the research, and the needs, we built our ACPS K2 Task Force Project Plan. So on this slide, you'll see what... the four main recommendations were from the K2 Task Force. First and foremost, based on all that research and all that information and data analysis, we never imagined we'd be implementing this in a virtual setting, but we're here and we're looking to implement an explicit and systematic phonemic awareness and phonics resource. That was one of the most important goals and recommendations that came out of the K2 Task Force. In addition to that, we

031want to play that out in concert with professional development, some focused tier one instruction support, and a look at our reading and writing workshop models. The next slides will share some of the incredible steps we've been able to take as a result of this task force. And now I'll turn it over to Miss Andrea Heckel. Hello, my name is Andrea Heckel. I'm currently working as a literacy coach at Ferdinand T. Day Elementary School. I've worked in education for 21 years and I'm a proud Titan graduate. So what you see on the slide is what we never imagined that we'd be implementing a virtual education in a virtual setting, but here we are. Let's focus on our literacy learning where it starts with our preschoolers. I wanted to share some current highlights of what preschool Virtual

032Plus Literacy program looks like. So learning is both synchronous and asynchronous. So for the synchronous learning, teachers are providing live lessons and read-alouds throughout the day and using pre-K GLAD instructional strategies to support language development. For the asynchronous learning, students are engaging with choice boards to enhance the learning time. Active learning takes place during the asynchronous time using the Seesaw app so students can share pictures, writing, and oral stories with their teachers. Teachers are also sharing recorded read-alouds to enhance the asynchronous learning time. We know on the flip side that students need to receive hands-on literacy materials like books to support their learning experiences because we know that our youngest learners need physical supplies to support learning in this Virtual Plus model. To add a little more, I'd like Ms. Anthony, our kindergarten teacher at

033Tucker, to share some of her perspective, please. Hi, good evening, board. Again, my name is Donna Anthony, and I'm a kindergarten teacher at Samuel Tucker. One thing I like to talk about is the bonus of having the choice boards, because it gives the students the autonomy to take ownership of their learning. And these choice boards are created by teachers with deliberate and intentional planning to help support our young learners as they develop their literacy skills. And the learning materials that were sent to the students, it provides them that hands-on learning experience, just like they would have in a regular in-person classroom setting. And as we know, this is vital for our youngest learners, you know, to practice developing their fine motor skills. I know I have another colleague on here, Ruth Connor. I don't know

034if she wants to add something to it. She's a pre-K teacher in our district. Ruth, did you want to add something? Sure. The Learning Choice Boards, the teachers and parents are also engaging in discussions and coaching around that to identify activities that will best support their children's needs. And so we're in regular communication with parents daily and weekly to talk about how things are going and what their child may need and any way that we could extend or scaffold the learning activities to support their learning. Thank you, Ms. Conner. Okay, taking a look at this slide, now we're going to focus on what changes have been made for the K-2 virtual plus setting. We've developed curriculum that's engaging using numerous virtual resources that align with prioritized state standards. and daily lesson plans for reading and

035writing and foundational phonemic awareness and phonics skills. If you look at the image at the top left, it is of a new digital resource called Reading Eggs Fast Phonics. This resource supports phonological awareness instruction, and it can be used asynchronously and synchronously with the classroom teachers. Another resource to the right of it, this is handwriting without tears that has been purchased for K through one. It is something we had in the past in the brick and mortar, and now we have found a way to make it digital. The company has both digital and print forms. So what students will be receiving in kindergarten through first grade are actual print booklets for handwriting practice, because we know that it's important to have gross motors, but also the fine motor skills of writing. If you look at

036the picture at the bottom left, this shows two resources that are going to support the digital in-text reading. MyOn Resources is a virtual library for students that they will be able to in-class synchronously and asynchronously access, as well as Pioneer Valley Literacy Footprints is a resource for leveled text for students and for teachers. So to support the asynchronous learning time, which is the picture on the right, students will be receiving learning packets that are targeted towards state standards and curriculum standards with a variety of text and also have physical books that students will get. We know even our youngest readers from pre-K through two need hands-on materials to learn. With all these great teaching tools that are here, teachers use them asynchronously for whole group teaching as well as small group targeted teaching. Teachers are

037analyzing the PALS data that Michelle had mentioned and running record data to create targeted small group differentiated instruction for all students, which includes the daily English language development time instruction for all our English language learners of all proficiencies. Thank you. My name is Kathy Harrington and I'm a literacy coach at James K. Polk, but I began teaching at William Ramsey in 1995 in kindergarten and then in first grade. And so I'm grateful to be here to share with you some of the things that we are doing. And Mr. Man, Dr. Man, if you would go back one slide. Thank you. I appreciate that. So I want to talk to you today about the materials and resources that we have been providing for our students and teachers, specifically with phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. We talked

038about reading eggs and fast phonics a little bit. Our teachers are going to be using that in a variety of ways this year to help support our students with phonemic awareness and phonics. We've purchased the subscriptions for those. We provided training for teachers both during a professional development day and also ongoing professional development during the teachers can do through webinars. Reading eggs in Fast Phonics is engaging and motivating for our K1 students. They get golden eggs when they accomplish certain tasks and they get to trade those in. It's great for independent work, but teachers also have lots of resources through it to use for instruction as well. We are looking to integrate these resources in our overall curriculum, even when we're back in school. including more resources for teachers, physical manipulatives, and decodable text to

039help apply these skills. We also wholeheartedly believe in professional learning. We know that as instructors we need to be of one shared vision in order to to fully implement and fully support our students. So collaboration, we're collaborating with vendors, especially our new vendors and our new resources to make sure teachers are getting all the support that they need to implement new programs that we have or new resources that we have. We're continuing in-class literacy coaching even in this virtual environment. Ms. Haeckel and I can both attest to attending many Zooms in a day to help support teachers. We are continuing our communities, professional communities within our schools so that teachers can work together through problems of practice and improve their instruction. And we know that professional development starts at the top. So our administrators, we

040want to continue to include them in our professional development. We know that teachers and teacher knowledge has the most important, is the most important impact on student achievement. And so we want to continue all of those things. And Ms. Anthony, if you wanted to add anything about these two slides, please do that now. Yes, absolutely. I definitely think that professional development piece is a huge part, especially as, you know, teachers are trying to navigate this virtual instruction, taking what we know how to do in person and transferring it over to virtual learning. I just want to talk about the resources that are provided by the district, like Reading Eggs. It gives, you know, teachers useful and meaningful data, and we can take that. and create our small target groups. We can also create enrichment groups.

041So it is very meaningful for us to learn how to use these tools so that we can best improve and maximize student learning. So absolutely, I feel that we feel supported because these are new tricks that are trained. So yes, professional development is a huge piece as we navigate virtual learning. Thank you, Ms. Anthony. Moving on to the next slide. Thanks, Dr. Mann. It is truly amazing what our coaches like Ms. Heckle and Ms. Harrington and our teachers like Ms. Anthony are doing every single day. For better or worse, we have been at the edge of our learning curve throughout this pandemic. So it's very exciting to see all that we've learned how to do and to think about how we can implement and integrate these things into our institutionalized practices. How we can take

042what we're learning with phonics through this software. and implement it into our ongoing institutionalized program. So I am so grateful to the coaches who have been doing this professional learning in this virtual environment, to the teachers who have been making it happen, and to all of you for joining us in this journey as we try to continuously refine our practices with our literacy program. Thank you, everyone. And Dr. Hutchins, I will turn it back over to you. Sorry. One, I just want to thank you all for your hard work. I mean, this particular, having all of our staff to shift and pivot into virtual learning, I mean, it's amazing how you all have, like, stepped up to the challenge. And even during a pandemic, kids can still learn how to read. And I think that

043when you have the right teachers who are motivated, who are getting the necessary supports and resources, anything is possible. It truly is. And this is living proof to that. So I just want to thank each and every one of you for that before we go into questions. I also just want to say, I got to say to my fellow Titan, Ms. Heckel, happy birthday, because I know it is your birthday today. And you are on a school board Zoom. So happy birthday, fellow Titan. Thank you. And with that being said, let's open the floor for questions if Madam Chair is ready for that. Okay. Thank you very much for that presentation. Let me see. I have first up, I have Ms. Gentry. Sorry, everyone. Sorry about that. Small technical difficulty. Hi there. So thank you

044very much for this. I want to say, while we've been more explicit in the last two years about, you know, K2 literacy, we've used the new method of... you know making it a board priority uh earlier um you know we've really brought it to the to the floor but it's been something that's been um a concern i think for quite a number of years and when You know, I think back to previous meetings where the board asked about this. You know, it was always acknowledged. But the reality is, is that it's not really true that the results have been flat for the last five years. The results have been going down for the last five years. And I think we really need to acknowledge that. I think what I'd like to hear from you all

045is how is the approach, I mean, we've heard specifically about how, you know, the new methods that you're bringing to the literacy program, which I think is great. But I think equally important is it's really important for me to hear how you will actually react to the metrics. Because I don't think it will be enough for us to essentially say. we're going to try harder because it's certainly not for lack of hours put in or dedication of the teachers and things like that. But we really need to see a shift. I'm anxious for us to see a shift in this because a student is only in first grade for one year or is only in second grade for one year. get this the the trend moving in the right direction um the the the the

046impacts on those students is really lasting so i'd i'd kind of like to hear your you know, the team's thinking on how they will react to the data when they're hearing what's working or what's not working, whether it's, you know, division-wide in terms of, you know, these new methods that we're bringing out, or if there's something maybe particularly that's happening, if there's a particular anomaly that's showing up at a school. Thank you. I can start and others can chime in. Just to say that I think, Ms. Gentry, I came in on the tail end of it, but I think that's why this task force was formed. I think looking at those metrics was what brought this to the forefront of that group and why they took such a deep dive into the very detailed plan

047of kind of what are the key levers for us to impact. So Ms. Haeckel and Ms. Harrington can speak to the hours we've been collecting data through our PALS administration in this remote environment and to really see where our children now after the few months that they were not in our physical schools. And I think we'll be continuing absolutely to do that. And if we're not seeing improvements to see which schools are, right, which schools are outliers and how can we build off what they're doing to generate that throughout the system. That's Ms. Heckle is coming on. And thank you, Dr. Wooster. I think that it's important for us to keep in mind that as a division, as a whole, we are now more in sync in regards to what our expectations are, especially in

048regards to early literacy. It is not happening, which we have been in the past. And I think that is why we saw some of the trending data in the past. Teachers were kind of left out to do what you think is best in regards to literacy, which, you know, yes, it gives you complete autonomy as an instructor. but it also can cause some very significant achievement gaps across school divisions and across our, you know, I mean, across schools and across the school division. So having that commonalities and those expectations across all board, across, you know, all schools and making that non-negotiable is going to get us into that right direction. Because when we're sitting down, even with our literacy task force, they're able to talk about. common language and talk about, you know, common assessments

049and common practices, which really allows us as a school division to determine what is working and what's not working within our school division. But I know Ms. Heckle could probably elaborate a little more on just some of the things that you have been working with staff on. Yes, actually, Dr. Hutchings, you just did a fabulous job. I think you're ready to teach kindergarten. So to address it a little bit, yes, we have been looking at the data and noticed that what we were doing in the past was not working for all kids and it wasn't enough. And so that's where we're really glad this task force was created to say we do need to make a change that some kids are falling behind. And so that is why when the task force sat down to

050really pull. all across the city to make it equitable that everyone was receiving the same type of instruction. I think this is where we'll see the change moving forward once we have the same type of instruction, the same type of language, and the same type of resources for all our students no matter what school that they're in. So that's the focus of the task force. So the moving forward is we know the data, we see the research, and what we were doing in the past wasn't enough so we need to be making some shifts and having a similar product as well as similar language and having systematic professional training around it will help move forward that we have good instruction from it. Next up, we have Ms. Green. Thank you so much, Chair Anderson, and

051thank you to Dr. Mann and the ladies. Such an enthusiastic team and presentation, and as everyone knows, literacy, K-2 literacy, the topic brings me such great joy. Shout out to my Ruby Tucker reading program volunteers and my kids. But I had a question and correct me if I'm wrong, Ms. Heckle, happy birthday. I don't want to forget that. You mentioned. You mentioned as far as writing was concerned, that there was a focus for K through one. And I work with quite a few second graders. And I know that they basically were behind from last school year. What are we doing to catch kids up from, you know, you know, even when we get back, what will we do after the virtual process for kids that are behind? and what is being done for second graders

052from a writing perspective. You had a page up that had a focus on K through one, but I didn't hear you talk about second grade from a writing perspective. I can speak to a number of some of those resources we adopted for just K and one to really see how they work before we're rolling something out division wide, you know, starting with smaller groups and seeing its impact. So fast phonics, for example, was only purchased for grades K and one. And if we're seeing results continue like we're seeing so far, we'll explore moving that into second grade. So things. Like that I would say as far as breaking. However, I'm not totally clear on the question. I believe, you know, we have a strong rating program throughout throughout all of our grades. There. I'm sorry,

053but there was a print digital. I don't know if we can go back to that slide, but it was something print digital for writing and it focused on K through one. Oh, the handwriting. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes Yes. And that again, yes, we purchased workbooks for K and one where they're learning to form those letters and for grades two and three for handwriting we have packed workbooks we've created in house. That

054was at a somewhat lower cost but still give students the practice that they transition to cursive handwriting. So we do have handwriting resources through third grade but we we concentrated our ones from the vendor on grades K and one. So what are we doing for those kids that are behind? When we get back from virtual learning, what are we doing to catch them up? I think that's the heart of the question. Absolutely. Thank you. I think our MTSS system of supports that we always follow is going to be more important than ever. As we look at our data, as we see who is not meeting the benchmarks we expect, we have those systems in place that we're going to really need to use to get students into the appropriate Tier 2 or Tier 3 interventions

055they need as their data determines. And I think one important point, just to answer Ms. Green's question as well, in addition to what Dr. Wooster said, is that we're not waiting until we get back to support our kids. So I think it's very important for the board as well as the community to know a part of the transition when we began to make modifications to our Virtual Plus schedule was to include opportunities for staff now to provide more one-on-one and small group instructional support now. because we're already realizing that some of our kids, they are showing or exhibiting some deficits in regards to academic loss because we haven't been in a school building since March. So I do want to make it very clear that there are. instructional supports, and it's through our MTSS, which

056is a multi-tiered support system that Dr. Wooster was talking about, that are already incorporated, where staff members are able to pivot the moment they're noticing that a student is not on grade level and showing any type of academic deficit. And these are strategies and moves and teacher moves that all of our teachers had prior to the global pandemic. What we've had to do is adjust to how we use use similar strategies in this virtual world. But we are not waiting until the kids come back to provide them with additional supports. We're trying to do that along the way so that we're narrowing the academic loss that we know could happen if we leave that alone. So I just wanted to make that very clear. Great. Thank you. Dr. Reif is up next. Well, thank you

057so much for the presentation. I'm very excited. Like I know my colleagues are about this initiative. And I just want to thank everyone who's been involved in working on this. I thought that was a really excellent presentation. And I really just think this is going to be such a game changer for students in Alexandria. I just really can't emphasize that enough. You know, to Miss Gentry's question, I really think that getting the instruction right is going to be really the key. And I'd kind of like to talk about that by sharing a little bit of my own experience that I've had as a parent. One of my children did struggle with reading, is still struggling with reading. And, you know, in kindergarten, I noticed that my child was guessing at words, unlike my other children.

058And my other children were kind of sounding out, and this particular child was guessing. And I asked her kindergarten teacher about it. And what I was told was, oh, that's just how some kids learn. And in hindsight, like, I think that was a real missed opportunity because I think it was a red flag that she was not decoding properly. So in first grade, we were invited to after school tutoring. You know, she started saying she didn't like school at that time. I know they were working on things like sight words. In second grade, we got in the MTSS. We had that meeting. The intervention at the time was a double dose of guided reading. In third grade, we had a teacher who worked more and did more tailored interventions to her specific needs. And I

059think that we saw a lot of improvement. And now here we are in fourth grade and I've found an online program that's really training her brain to decode. And it's, I know that like, this is like the answer that I've sort of been looking for. And so I say that because, you know, I think every child is certainly unique, but, you know, when I was looking at the slide six that had the instructional model for K-5 literacy, and I was looking at all the different components, like I thought like the research aspects, you know, where the direction we're moving in was great, but I did have some concerns about that, the diagram on there. And some of the, and then later on slide seven, some of the curriculum materials we're using, because I'm concerned about

060the effectiveness, honestly, of some of these strategies for struggling readers. And I'll just go through a couple of what I mean. I think the word study, kids can compensate through like pattern recognition. And so they can kind of work through the word study. The sight words, I was thinking, you know, how interesting sight words are because we tell kids, well, memorize these words, but decode these other words. And for a child who especially is a more visual learner, that just like can really throw them off. And then, you know, with the independent reading, kids can pretend to be reading. And then I was like doing some more research into the leveled readers. Because I know one of the goals is to like increase, you know, what level of reading the child is at with these

061leveled readers, which is something that we certainly were working towards. But what I've seen is some criticism of leveled readers because they're not necessarily phonetically controlled text, which is what struggling readers need. Leveled readers are texts that use things like repetition, sentence patterning, illustrations, predictability, and context. that allows struggling readers to sometimes be successful, even though they're really not doing the decoding. And so that kind of brings me around to my questions here, which is, are some of these materials that we're using like I'm trying to understand is word study what is our current phonics curriculum that we're using and we are going to branch out to get something a little bit more substantive than that. And do all of the, when you look at purchasing like a phonemic awareness program, does that definitely include

062decoding or not necessarily? So I would think that getting the decoding is really critical. And then, you know, just, I think. a last point that just kind of came up for me during this conversation is I'm glad that we have this literacy initiative for K-2, but like, what about like three through fifth grade? Because, you know, I mean, as you said, like this pattern just, it gets even worse. So to the extent that we can, you know, get some of these resources, you know, for our older kids who are struggling, it can really make a difference for them. So if you could just. speak to those resources that'd be great i could chime is it okay madam chair if i chime in for a second and respond to a couple of those questions absolutely okay

063thank you so much Thank you, Dr. Reeve, for bringing those items to the forefront. I wanted to say that one of the things that we learned in the task force learned was one of the biggest gaps was not having enough of a focus in the right resources for direct instruction in finance. And I think that that task force actually recognized that. You will see on one of the slides, they indicated that we will be initiating an RFP. Well, that RFP is to address the needs of phonics for some of our learners. We really, while we have all of those other aspects of the reading program, we know that that's one of the major challenges. And if kids don't learn to decode at an early age. they struggle particularly with comprehension in the upper grade. So

064I wanted to say there's certainly a focus on that. And second, just to mention to you, there was a real commitment to, as they mentioned, was to purchase the handwriting without tears. We actually brought the consultant in to do a lot of training with the staff because there was a real need to focus more on the handwriting without material. So I just wanted to highlight those two areas. I really believe that once we introduce the phonics, that that is going to make a difference for a lot of our pre-K, kindergarten, first and second graders and strengthen their reading skills. That's terrific. And, you know, I just, I will just share as a parent too, I've noticed that, you know, with the introduction of the Chromebooks, while I understand the advantages of the technology, I do

065think our kids are definitely doing a lot less writing. And I really discovered this over the summer because I was cleaning out some things in my basement. And my, one of my students was in her third grade class, they were doing the ancient civilizations and her project. she was doing it all as a PowerPoint, whereas my older daughters, I found her work and it was all handwritten. It was like, you know, and so I do think that that actually could be setting us back a little bit. I'm concerned just with all of the doing all the work online and not really doing as much physical writing too, so. And thank you for that, Dr. Reif. I just know one of the reasons why we're doing the learning packets is important so that kids are able

066to demonstrate their work, you know, in regards to writing and not always virtually or through a computer. Another point that you made, Dr. Reif, this is one of the reasons why it was so important for us to focus on K-2 literacy. You know, when your child was in kindergarten, I mean, a grant, I was an elementary teacher, I would have said not only was it decoding, but also phonemic awareness, because phonics and decoding go hand in hand, honestly. And, but if we haven't trained our staff to be able to identify and to know. what tools to use when students are kind of manifesting these certain behaviors at early ages, then we get into a situation where we miss, you know, we miss some things with kids and it just makes it more difficult. Kids can

067catch up. They're resilient. You know, so I always say, you know, second and third grade teachers, they're the ones who catch the kids up with things that they missed in kindergarten and first grade. So it's always possible. But we don't want to always constantly have to do the catch up. We want to catch it early. So we're providing those necessary. supports at an earlier age. And this is why this focus is truly so, so important. And I'm glad that we have it not only in the strategic plan, but also as our areas of focus, because then it becomes a part of what we do in Alexandria City Public Schools. And not just for, you know, staff members who've gone to professional learning to, you know, to learn these different teaching strategies. It is an expectation,

068really, really for all. Okay, next up, we have Miss Alderton. Thank you, Madam Chair. So I guess I'm coming at this from a completely different angle than thus far. I think, you know, I think first off, I want to say that this problem is not just an ACPS problem. This is a systemic problem in education. And so I think it's good to come to it from that perspective. One of the things that I'm doing, you know, by day is actually implementing the programs to catch up all of the kids who got lost along the way. You know, right now I'm working with about 12 different schools, getting about 400 kids in D.C. to get now as third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh through 12th graders get now what they missed. in grades K through two. And,

069and I just say that to say, like, this is a general problem. And it really came from a shift in thinking and education that occurred a while ago. We, at one point we shifted to, you know, the shift was to what we called whole language instruction. And that's where this thing of, you know, well, kids sort of guessing words and, you know, looking at text and sort of just somehow students were supposed to get it via osmosis, I like to say, simply from exposure. And I think over time, what's been revealed is that this is a huge problem because, and I think it becomes a key problem for school systems like ours because of the population that we serve. We all know that when you add disadvantages, on to sort of a lackluster or really

070non-scientific based approach to reading instruction, then the kids who are going to be amplified as having the biggest issue are the ones that we're seeing right now. You know, I think the positive for me is that, you know, what has happened is, you know, school divisions have started to have to say like, okay, what's going on? And I think I'm very proud that, you know, ACPS has taken a moment to stop and say, this is what we've been doing and it's not working. This is where we need to go. And, you know, so I really appreciate the... committee that was formed, and just the thought of the teachers and the practitioners coming together to talk about what they know wasn't working, what we're starting to see now and now more and more that we've gotten

071away from that needs to come back, the handwriting, the phonics, the decoding skills. These are the things that keep, you know, that have allowed me to now see 12th graders who are beginning readers. You know, that is the reality of a lot of what is happening for our kids now. So I just wanted to, you know, throw that out there as, you know, as we're addressing this as ACPS, you know, it is a big national problem. And so I'm proud that we're sort of taking an initiative to make some changes in this direction. The other thing was in regard to data, I think we should be excited about is that this data is going to be reviewed because one, we have an MTSS process and we also now have, you know, I'm really excited about

072Dr. Sims. And a lot of the things that he's talking about bringing to the table in terms of, you know, the quarterly meetings at the schools, that is where the data conversations can happen. That is where they are going to happen. So that, you know, everybody has a glimpse and is really seeing what's working and what's not working. And I don't know if there was, you know, I was in a meeting the other day, Dr. Sims and his team shared a really powerful sort of. framework and maybe that can be shared later about how we're going to start to look at data to make some of the decisions that I think Ms. Gentry was talking about. So I think it would be good. I don't know if you can do it here, but if you

073can share a little bit about that, Dr. Sims, I think that would be good. And lastly, I think it was the last slide. I don't know if we can bring that up on the presentation. But it really showed me, you know, those key, I think there were four key components involved in this. Yeah. You know, these steps here are super duper important. And I think, you know, the implementation, the RFP to deal with phonemic awareness, you know, I, all of this. brings me hope. It brings me excitement because this presentation shows me that we know exactly what we need to do. And I have, you know, faith in the ability and our ability to actually implement these things. Having programs that actually can quickly spit out data for us. Awesome. So I guess I'm just

074saying like, you know, really kudos to the team. This presentation gives me confidence. It really does. I don't get excited about much, but when I saw what was put in here, I got excited because I, and I could be completely wrong, but I have not seen anything like this in ACPS until now. And it's a big deal. So just really appreciate you guys for doing that. And, you know, I don't know if, again, if Dr. Sims would like to sort of share about data in how this fits in with you imagine needs to happen at schools. Thank you, Ms. Alderton. Just very quickly, what we are really looking at, and as many of you know, the schools are involved, actively involved in the school improvement planning process now. But one of the things that we

075want to focus on is schools beginning to use the data in a more cyclical fashion. Look at data cycles where we are looking at interventions that we put in place and then coming back. This is really what we mean by continuous systemic improvement. that we look at the data, come back. The actual, this is the first time I've worked with a district where you have so many district leaders involved in quarterly chats, right? So I was very excited to hear about that coming to ACPS, but in the quarterly chats, what is your data telling you about where you need to sort of make your adjustments? Because we know that those adjustments have to link to adult practices that in turn impact students. So the data cycles are a way for us to look at what

076are we doing and where do we need to make the adjustments. So using that as a structure for our continuous improvement process and look at how. we look at the interventions based on how they impact our core. And our core, I think that's what you were referencing, our instructional core at schools is really how does our work impact teachers? How does our work impact students? And what we've heard a lot about. is what are our content interventions that are really helping us to as the active lever to raise student achievement. So the framework for continuous improvement in the district really looks at how our work as a central office supports the work of schools around that instructional core. I hope that's helpful. Thank you. Next up, we have Mr. Suarez with a question. Thank you,

077Chair Anderson, and thanks to everyone for the discussion. I just echo my colleagues that this has been a really powerful presentation and one that really is vital to the future trajectory of the division. And I'm particularly excited about the slide that Ms. Alderton just pointed to regarding the sort of pivot in this virtual world towards this more systemic approach. I also appreciated the acknowledgment at the front of the presentation that if students are not a good reader by the end of first grade, that that can pretend a lot of problems down the line. It's something I've said at many board meetings, something that many of our colleagues have said repeatedly. So I really appreciate that. I think that what I'd like to understand is just kind of thinking about the systemic improvement. I think we

078would all want to get to a place that when a student gets in kindergarten and we can see that there are signs that they may not be a good reader by the end of the first grade. what are we doing to sort of make sure that they aren't a poor reader by the end of the first grade so that we don't have, so that, you know, the challenges don't compound throughout that child's time in the division. And so I'm really excited about this presentation and, you know, and throughout the pandemic, you know, I've tried to emphasize, you know, how could we make the most of a terrible situation or, you know, really challenging situation. And so I'm just kind of curious. how we're planning on taking some of these strategies that we're learning now, you

079know, these best practices that we're learning, you know, hopefully that are moving the needle during these asynchronous sort of efforts we're doing, these virtual efforts that we're doing that can happen perhaps outside of the course of a school day. And then how can we figure out how to use those learnings, both now as Dr. Hutchings emphasized, but also when we're out of the pandemic so that we can have really comprehensive sort of wraparound program that's not just in person, but is also harnessing and leveraging all of these new techniques we're learning about how we can do supplementation asynchronously and how we can use additional tools to really, you know, make sure that no child at the end of first grade. is the poor reader such that they will have all these challenges that were mentioned

080in the slide. So just going back to this notion of systemic improvement and continuous improvement, I'd like to understand just how we're going to be collecting the best practices and the data to really know right now what is moving the needle in terms of K-2 literacy during these challenging times. And then how are we going to catalog that so we can use that going forward when we do return to a more in-person, comprehensive sort of instructional situation. Dr. Wooster, did you want to start? I'll start. Okay. kind of go from a central office down onto how the schools are doing it. Thank you, Ms. Alderton and Mr. Soros for your comments this evening. Ms. Gentry, your first question when you talked about our data, when we were preparing for this presentation, we talked about how

081our data are dropping, but the last two years were flat. But also if you look across the state, they also, and I think that's why they also pivoted to say, wait a second, we have a Houston, we have a problem. And so, like Dr. Sims just indicated in piggybacking off of Ms. Allerton's questions, starting with our quarterly chats, but also how our coaches and instructional specialists are collecting data through walkthroughs and also conversations with our principals. Mr. Suarez, as you indicated, how are we finding best practices? The quarterly chats will help us to figure out where we've seen increases in PALS data, running records. And then also we have Ms. Richardson here who's been educating me in my new role on what's happening in pre-K and some of the success that they're seeing. So how

082do we leverage all of those data points from a central office standpoint? And then as we continue to reflect on our quarterly chat information to then dovetail that information out to our schools so that they can make changes and tweaks. And then, so those are important parts from the... central office level. But then as we think about the work that Dr. Wooster and Ms. Richardson are doing in their respective programs, then we'd also like Ms. Heckle and even Ms. Anthony and Ms. Harrington to talk about at the school level how they're using their data coaches, their reading coaches to also make impacts into what you just described, Mr. Swartz. So Ms. Wooster, if you'd like to add on there. A lot of us. I'll just go ahead and jump in first. Thank you for the

083questions about data. I think one of my most important priorities this summer was figuring out how are we going to assess our students when they're so far away. And I think that's critical. With our readers, usually we can crouch down next to them and hear what they're doing and how can we do that over the screen. So the Pioneer Valley literacy footprints has been one of our most important purchases in terms of providing a digital way to do reading assessments from across the Zoom divide, where we have these assessments to see where the child is, what their strengths and needs are. In addition to our video, we require PALS administration, which has been one-on-one with each individual child. And I think your point also raises to what we've learned and how we can institutionalize that.

084You know, there are inequities and literacy growth that come from far beyond the school day as well. And look at all we've learned to overcome that. You know, the fact that we have internet connectivity, that we have these digital texts and print texts and we're... inspiring readers and writers in their homes. As you were speaking, it just made me really think of all we have learned that we do need to continue to be reaching our children beyond the school day. And I'll jump in on the pre-K part. I'm excited to say that we have a great curriculum called Creative Curriculum that focuses on the whole child but embeds literacy throughout the day. So that could be through environmental print. So if they're in the dramatic play area, there are menus there, there's recipes, they're creating.

085foods that may be from different cultures so that the boxes of rice or beans may be from their own home so that they're representing all cultures and children are learning from each other. We do use handwriting without tears in pre-K as well, and it's a multi-sensory approach. So we're doing a lot of songs and movement, looking at big lines, little lines, big curves, little curves, singing about how to hold a crayon. And then the workbooks come in later down, you know, in the spring. As part of creative curriculum too, we have instructional learning sections of the day where children are in small groups. And so they are getting direct instruction and pre-literacy goals. We monitor our children through teaching strategies gold, which is a online system that we are collecting data on their progress. And

086so we are able to monitor that quarterly. And if a child is we're seeing a lag, then we can address that earlier just because of the small groups that we do throughout the day, as well as our read allows that our teachers are doing not only live during zooms, but they also have pre-recorded read allows that the families can access on their asynchronous time. And we are so fortunate to have Pre-K GLAD strategies. So thank you to the board for supporting us in getting the Pre-K GLAD because that Pre-K GLAD is really helping us address all learners, not just EL learners, but really looking at how to teach children in a multisensory way that brings their background experience to the forefront so that they can relate to what they're learning. So as we look at

087big books and chants and pictorial dictionaries and songs and graphs, all of these things are happening throughout our pre-K day. So I'm really proud of the work our teachers are doing in early childhood. And we're going to continue the work. We're doing our pre-K PALS virtually this right now. So we will have that data too to share. So thank you. If we take it to the level of the school with the data, one of the roles of the coaches that have been in the building, along with data coaches and instructional specialists that are acting as coaches as well, we help the teachers sift through their classroom data and identify kids that are not making growth. And then we help target small differentiated group instruction to meet the needs of those students. And I'm fortunate to

088be working at Ferdinand T. Day where the principal there supports. quarterly meetings. So we meet with an entire team. We get together and we look at all the kids across the grade and make sure that no kid is falling through the cracks. And I think that is super helpful in all the schools so that we don't miss any children. And I think it is just, it will be challenging the virtual world to make sure that we're meeting every kid's needs because I think there are a lot, but that's our goal is that we won't let children fall through the cracks. So we're using the data from reading eggs, fast phonics, and pals to help drive what needs to happen with our MTSS process of don't let kids fall through the cracks. So we identify them,

089find targeted interventions that they need, and we create lesson plans, and then we provide services so that it's systematic and structured so that no kid will be left behind and we monitor them throughout the time that we're with them and working and come back and cycle out and say did it work did it not work do we need to readjust so one of my roles is to make sure I help the teachers look at the data set up a good intervention program go in and model how to use the intervention if they don't know how to use it or to help with their students and then release it to the teachers to teach the kids. I'd like to piggyback on that. And we love our coaches for being able to provide this tool for us.

090I know at Samuel Tucker, we work intensely with our coaches to make sure we're meeting the mark and making those interventions and creating, being able to take that data and just actually look at it and comb through it across the grade level and seeing where our most needs are and being able to develop these groups that will target those set skills. And one of the beautiful things about Samuel Tucker is that we have intercession that also can hone in. And not only do we do enrichment, but we do those intense focus groups to create just some upward mobility in terms of their learning and where the gaps are in trying to close those gaps. And I wanted to share that we have really increased and improved our supports for teachers with our curriculum this year.

091We have created more, we have created a virtual curriculum. So we've taken the curriculum that we used in the past and we have really honed in on the skills and strategies that we feel are most important in each and every unit. And we've increased the amount of resources we've given teachers. to include extra supports for small group instruction, especially in cave one and two. And so I feel like we really are pushing them forward. They're pushing us forward to increase, to give them more support and to help them with that. And Dr. Wooster has been the head. cheerleader for that and getting all of us to work really hard to provide those supports. And I've heard from the teachers at my school about how much they appreciate that support and how much it helps them,

092especially in this learning environment. And what I hope to happen is that even when we get back into the classroom, that we continue with that kind of support. It helps to level the playing field for all of our students because then our teachers are very clear on what we are teaching and what the expectations are. I just want to thank you all for all of your comments. And I do just want to say that, as I reiterated earlier, our teachers are doing a remarkable job in regards to literacy right now. Yes, we still have room to grow. And I think that was the purpose in us having a task force and having this included in our strategic plan, as well as our area of focus. Our data is showing that. So we have to own

093that data. And we're going to have to just keep pressing forward and making sure that we're making whatever pivot moves that we have to adjust in this global pandemic, because things change. You know, it's so ever-changing. in our world right now, but you all are just doing a remarkable job with that. So thank you for your hard work and your dedication. Thank you, everyone. I look forward to seeing more about the results in the future. Good luck with everything. Now we will move on to the next item, which is the enhanced continuity of learning, and I'll turn it over to Dr. Hutchings. Thank you, Madam Chair. And I know that this is the time that everybody's been waiting for to talk about, you know, some updates in regards to our work. And I first, I

094just, and I was sharing this with the senior leadership team earlier today and with the division team recently, that You know, I hate to remind everybody, but we are in a global pandemic, right? And sometimes I feel like I have to start off by saying that because the way we react, the way we respond, the way we do our work, if we were in a normal time or prior to March 13th, a lot of things would be very different. However, we are in a global pandemic. I just think of the fact that We had to watch a presidential debate with masks and shields and no audience. Many people had to walk around now, as you all are seeing, with masks on. You can't walk into a grocery store, any store, without a mask. This is

095not normal times for us. And I want to make sure that I'm sharing, not only with the board, but with our community, that we're going to continue. doing what we believe is best in regards to the health and safety of not only our students, but also our staff members. And we cannot take that lightly. I'm so glad that today we're going to be able to hear from Dr. Herring, who is our health director. We work very closely with Dr. Herring. You know, I will take all of the heat in regards to sticking to the six feet distancing and things of that nature. Those are CDC guidelines. Dr. Hutchings didn't make those up. I will tell you that we are a school division that is going to follow the CDC guidelines. There's no wiggle room. I

096think the Virginia Department of Education has made wiggle room for people to take that risk. But why risk when you don't have to? And I think it's so important for us to make sure that when we are... Even, you know, I know there were some comments earlier about just the distancing with desk. I'm trying to understand where we said that the example we used for Samuel Tucker was for all schools. We were using an example to give the school board in our community a tangible kind of visual of what a classroom looks like when you're following six foot distancing. Regardless if we can get five, seven, nine students into a classroom, we have 24 students that we're serving and we still cannot get 24 kids in our buildings. So we can overcome some of these

097building capacity, you know, issues and moving things around and taking up, you know, other spaces. we still have our staffing constraints. And the biggest thing is our health mitigations, as we're seeing right now, as we'll hear earlier, as this spike is increasing, not only in the city of Alexandria, but across this country. We've seen it in Europe as we follow Europe. Now we see Europe is closing again. So just note it. Eventually, I'm assuming that's going to happen here in the United States as well. But this is a global pandemic. And I just feel that, you know, my job is to keep reminding everybody about that. I'm going to, you know, stand my ground when it comes to trying to follow what our federal government is telling us about the health and safety of our

098children, because that is one thing we are responsible for, our students and our staff, period. Regardless of what people think we should and, you know, should be doing today and right now and for the future. we're going to continue to follow those guidelines. So I wanted to start off with that. I also just wanted to share with the board that as we go into this next phase of transitioning, there are a couple of points that I wanted to make sure that I covered. And one is that the November 5th and November 17th of our citywide program, as you all know, we are working with our staffing model in regards to that. to try to ensure that we have the staff to be able to accommodate all of the families who would like to transition into

099in-person learning. And Ms. Werner is going to talk a little bit more about that later on today. We are also now gathering and looking at some of our intent to return forms that 100% of our staff are required to complete. As of this morning, I know we were at 97%. I think we have about 65 staff members who have not completed as of this morning. morning but we were going to be calling them so I'm hoping by now they have completed those so that we can have all of our data so we can begin to to finalize our planning but a lot of that information we're going to be able to help us with the November 30th planning of the transition of other citywide students and other self-contained special education students to transition but we

100are working as quickly as possible. We are continuing to try to be methodical and strategic with our approach. You know, if we just jump into everything that everybody else does, we would keep backpedaling like everybody else. And we're trying not to do that. We're trying to make sure that we're working with our transition team. It's recorded. every single week. It's posted on our website. We give tidbits in our ACPS Express. Our communications team is working 24-7 to make sure that we are getting real-time information out as soon as possible to our community. We serve a very diverse community. Things have to be translated. Things have to be put into... different forms of communications to go out. So we can't just type something up and send it out to folks right away. It does take time

101for us to get things out into our community. And we want to make sure we're trying to get it right. We've been talked about, you know, with our communications over the past several years, and we're trying to make sure that we get the right information out. We will make mistakes every once in a while, don't get me wrong, but we're trying to get our words out. So give us the time to do that so we can get the right information. I also want to point out that we are going to have some community meetings on December 1st and December 2nd. And the purpose in this is to really be able to share out specifics about this transition because we're getting closer to the time to have a majority of our students transition into our schools.

102January, February is when big, or not big, but big numbers, but large numbers of our students. may be returning into our building. So December 1st, we will have a staff community meeting at noon. We're going to have a community meeting with our secondary students at four o'clock on December 1st, and then a community meeting with our families at 6 p.m. on December 1st. On December 2nd, we're going to have elementary students. We're going to have a session with them at 8 and 9 o'clock. We're going to have a 12 p.m. session for families. And then we're going to have a 4 p.m. session for staff on that Tuesday. And we're trying to give different time slots because we know, just like our families, our staff and our students are also in this global pandemic. And

103everyone's at home just like I am right now and all of you. I mean, if this was a normal world, we would not be on the Zoom having this conversation and doing board meetings. from our living rooms and from our dining rooms and from whatever room you're in in your home. But a part of these community meetings will include, one, some remarks from me. We're going to have a COVID-19 update by Dr. Herring, who is the Alexandria Health Director for the city of Alexandria. We're going to have a health and safety update that talks about our building capacity and some of the work that has been done in regards to PPE and HVAC systems throughout our school buildings. And that's going to be done by Dr. Alicia Hart. We're going to have a staffing update

104to share out all of our intent to return forms by Dr. Wilkins. And we're also going to have an introduction to the family preference form that's going to be in PowerSchool. And we're going to need to know, the same way we did this week with our staff, we're going to need to know from our families as well what their intent to return is definitively in PowerSchool. So now it's attached to students and not general. not a general number for a school, not a general number for the school division, but specific students and who will be able to return and who will not be able to return. So we want to be able to give that information to our families. So on December 2nd, when we're done with our community meetings, instantly those family preference forms

105are available to our families and they can understand specifically what things will look like as returning to school. as well as how we're planning to mitigate some of the fears that we're seeing, not only from our families, but also from our staff members. And in regards to our plan, I just want to mention this. Enhanced Continuity of Learning Plan 5.0 was presented to the board last month. Yes, it was a plan that only... you know, awarded or allowed us to have one day of learning per week. But what we're doing now is working with our division team and working with our teaching leader, learning and leadership team to try to have some additional options to be able to accommodate more than one day. But that process might look a little differently in regards to the

106days. But in regards to the transition, the facilities work is in transition. It's going to remain the same. The PPE that's in the plant, it's going to remain the same. to figure out how students is going to remain the same. The transportation to and from school, it's going to remain the same. So I want people to really take a look at that plan that was posted because a lot of information and details are there. They are in there and yes, they will change, meaning some additional options that may come to the board if possible. But the planning in regards to what we're doing to transition, that plan is complete. So I just wanted to kind of get that out before we started with the specifics in our presentations, because I know a lot of people

107are watching to get these updates. And I really want to make sure when we're updating that we're giving factual information, tangible information that families can go back. to share with other people in the community so that we have facts, you know, and that's the main thing that's important to be out there. So with that said, I'm going to turn things over to Dr. Mozingo, who will begin our presentation. And I know we have several staff members who are going to be supporting the presentation information for today. Yes, thank you so much, Dr. Hutchins, for that overview and introduction and good evening, everyone. What I'd like to just briefly do is just to highlight the essential questions and identify to you those individuals that will be providing an update. In terms of the first essential question,

108what guidance and inputs will inform the decision-making process for phasing students back to in-person learning? That will be Dr. Stephen Herring is the director of the Alexandria Health Department. In terms of what is the staff and students ability to return, the intent to return form update will be presented by Dr. Stephen Wilkins and Mr. Timothy. I call him T. Michael. So Mr. T. Michael Carlson. And then the citywide program update will be provided by Ms. Terry Werner. As we are also delighted tonight to be able to provide some information to you regarding MAP, our Measures of Academic Progress, which is an assessment to help determine students' instructional needs. That will be presented by Ms. Farrah Nichols-Peterson. And then there are some guidelines from the Virginia High School League regarding participation in athletics. And we've invited

109Mr. Pete Ballas and Mr. James Parker to provide that update. And also we want to share with you, lastly, some of the work that will occur. A lot of work has already occurred, but we want to give you a preview of some of the focus of the work teams next week. A lot of that work is addressing those prioritized groups to bring back. So we want to highlight. that for you, the school board members, as well as the public. On the next slide, we just quickly want to emphasize, as the superintendent has already indicated, but all of the work and all of the what's guiding our work is always guided by the public health experts. And you will hear from Dr. Herring. Dr. Herring also has provided updates to the division team, which is quite

110helpful. In addition to that, Our schools, our principals, our teachers, the division team, many of our teachers are constantly enhancing the virtual instructional model. You are aware that one of the most recent changes was to redesign and revise the K-2 schedule that has actually occurred, but we're still collecting feedback and trying to make updates in that area. This week and some of next week, we actually, schools received the K-2 learning packets that were developed by Dr. Mann and his team. And I heard from a parent just yesterday just how excited her child was to go over to one of our schools and to be able to pick up the K-2 packets. Next, we will be sending to the schools the 3-5 packets. In addition to that, we're also working with schools on how to continue

111to make the breakouts a little bit more valuable for some of our students and families. So there's a group working on the breakouts that are occurring, particularly at the elementary level. And lastly, we just wanted to highlight that there are efforts underway, and you'll hear some of that tonight, but efforts underway, a lot of planning, a lot of work behind the scenes to bring in different groups of students, but still contingent upon staffing and building capacity. But there are some other data points that will inform those decisions. On the next slide, we just wanted to highlight just for the public again and to really be able to say and thank you to the board for this motion, for the division and our principals and others to be able to develop a phased in reentry plan.

112And you'll see the dates that are listed here. And I really want to be able to say, as Dr. Hutchins has indicated. facts behind what is occurring. There are a lot of groups working behind the scenes for the different groups to return. A part of that is collecting data from our staff, as he indicated. A part of that is collecting data from our families and our students. We even have a meeting tomorrow looking at English learners and what would that mean in terms of our facility. But what I'm basically indicating is that every Every time we meet with you, our goal is to provide an update in these particular areas and to keep you informed and to also say that the division team, the teacher groups are focusing on all of these different areas. And

113now at this time, we'd like to invite Dr. Herring to provide an update. We will need to, Sahar, allow him to be able to share his slides. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can hear you, Dr. Heron. Yes. Okay, good evening. Dr. Stephen Heron, Director of Alexandria Health Department. Thanks for having me here. I very much appreciate this. What I'm going to do is walk you through. I also appreciate being able to show my screen because this makes it a little easier for me than making a slide set that actually would change. And I'm going to show people different. different websites that are actually public. Everything I'm showing you is on the public website. This is the most important page, the vdh.virginia.gov slash coronavirus. Everything I'm going to is derived from here, but I've

114already pre-populated these so that way I can go through this a little bit quicker. One of the operating principles we're using is the dynamic school decision-making and the indicators that have been established by the CDC. And these indicators, there's a set of core indicators and then there's a set of secondary indicators. The core indicators are ranked as lowest risk of transmission in schools all the way up to highest risk of transmission in schools. And I'm showing you this slide, this set, excuse me, this webpage here, because it's important to look at this higher risk of transmission and seeing that it's 52 equal to or less than 200. greater than 200 is going to be highest when we're looking at the number of new cases in the past 14 days and then the percent positivity a

115lot of people know about that then the next five metrics under the core indicators are things that the school a school system can actually control And these metrics include consistent correct use of face masks, social distancing to the largest extent possible. Further down on this webpage, it actually talks about using six feet, hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette, cleaning and disinfection, and then contact tracing in collaboration with the local health department. And I can say in my communications and review with the schools that I would put them in the lowest risk of transmission in the schools. when I look at what they're planning to do and what they have done. So I can see that we're doing really well here. Then there's the secondary indicators that I won't go into in great depth. But also from

116that original coronavirus page, what one can do is navigate to the COVID-19 pandemic metrics and you can pull up Alexandria City. And this is the most recent date just today. So again, it repeats the lowest, lower, moderate, high, and highest risk. And it shows where Alexandria is at as of today. So the total number of new cases, we're at 182. And I made a mention of the threshold before. I hope that didn't take me to the threshold. that we're actually at 182. I don't know why that switched over, but that's a 14-day case count. And if you'll recall, what we're really looking at is a number that is very close to the 200. So that puts us at a higher risk. And not long ago, we were at a moderate risk. Our percent positivity is

117just above 5%. I know why that switched over, because for some reason that jumped over from Alexandria to Acomac. Our percent positivity is at 4.6%. So we're at green. We're in the lower risk. And this talks about how VDH doesn't have the ability, but again, I as the health director would say from everything I'm seeing in terms of the planning that ACPS is at the lowest risk from their plans that they've written and are in the process of implementing. Going on to the secondary indicators, you can see that we're at a very substantial risk. the highest risk when we look at the percentage of change over the past seven days. This is less than green, the percent of hospital beds and the percent of hospital and patients that are occupied by COVID-19. So that gives

118you an idea of where we're at when we look at the CDC metrics for Alexandria. But without... Just considering Alexandria, we want to look at things over time. At the recommendation, it's something that we've wanted at the health department, but also at the recommendation and request of ACPS and Mr. Pfister, we have requested that VDH also prevent a graphic like this of these indicators. similar to this so that we could actually see this over time. But the significance of this slide is to show that Alexandria has been increasing for some time. We haven't had a seven-day moving average of over 23 since the end of August. And this has been, it's been bouncing around through here, but now it's been increasing. We want to look regionally. And when we look regionally, again, it comes from

119that same page previously, but the northern Virginia region is at a moderate burden. Our trend is increasing, and we're approaching substantial community transmission. All of these data are summary data of individual metrics. from another page. And so it's really easier to talk about, just to show you that there are a lot of different metrics, I think it's seven or eight, that feed into saying whether we're at a moderate, excuse me for this updating, whether we are at a low, a moderate. to be showing your screen right now because I don't think I know I can't see it. I don't know if anybody. Yeah, we can't see it. Okay, got it. I didn't know. Oh, my screen disappeared. Screen disappeared. Yes. Oh, let me go to here and see if I can share again. I thought

120it was just me. I just like let it go. And then I was like, maybe. Oh, yeah. Trying to figure out if everybody had the problem. Yeah. Can you see this now? Yes, we can see it. Okay. So what I'm saying is Northern Virginia is at moderate burden, an increasing trend, and we're approaching substantial community transmission. All this is to say is we have the indicators saying the same thing that Dr. Hutchings said at his introductory comments at the beginning of this section of the agenda. You know, if we look nationally, there's about 1,000 deaths a day. And from a death standpoint, that's equivalent to a 9-11 every three or four days. And we're in the middle of a pandemic. And I would like to say, you know, I'm really proud of Alexandria and the

121number of measures that we're taking, because when we look at our death rate, we're substantially lower than what the death rate, the fatality rate from COVID-19 is compared to the rest of the U.S., compared to the world. And I believe a big part of that is we're taking this seriously. And the more we can reduce the transmission in the community. the less chance it gets to our elderly, the less chance it gets to people that are at high risk for severe disease. And we have recent positive news about a vaccine with a 90% positivity rate. And I'll say that's really good. We're months away, many months away from that actually being effective for us. So until that time, we really have to stay focused on the mitigation strategies that are available to us. These mitigation

122strategies that we've been hammering, hammering, hammering, and that I have seen in the... Alexander City Public Schools plans. So that's my presentation unless there's any questions. Okay sorry I'm trying to find my now I'm in full screen and seeing everyone. Dr. Reeve. Yeah thank you so much Dr. Herring for giving us that update and I was wondering You know, with all those, the indicators for dynamic school decision making that the CDC has outlined, is there a particular threshold, you know, at which we would reach that you think we would need to pivot, say, you know, if we were, if we, if we. when it's safe to go to a hybrid model or when we need to pull back into 100% virtual model. Because I know it's a question of what level of risk, right? And

123so I'm wondering if there's a threshold. And then if you could speak to this concern that we hear a lot from members of our community, which is that schools are not places that the virus spreads. is one thing that I think there's been, you know, there was some data that was out. And so that's that we have people sending that information to us frequently on the school board here. And then also this question of balancing, you know, the risk. of exposing kids to COVID versus the kind of mental health, social and emotional risks of sort of keeping them out of school, the psychological tool. So if you could touch on those things, that would be terrific. Sure, absolutely. You know, and as you know, Ms. Ruth, as the health director, I don't have the authority

124to say close, do a hybrid, don't close, things like that. I can make recommendations. I can provide the guidelines. And we actually know from a public health standpoint that kids are, you know, I've seen some argument. You can actually go to the Washington Post op-ed, and I think it's today there's a Harvard professor. who's saying three feet is enough. And he puts out a lot of his credentials and talks about how he's an industrial hygienist. I know that the CDC process is that it takes more than one expert. They take a lot of information and gather it all. They debate it all and decide, hey, what is the best data that we have? And why don't we make recommendations off the best data we have? And like a good scientist. We're going to change as

125we get more information, because if you'll remember, back before April, the Centers for Disease Control was actually saying, do not wear a face mask. That's what they were saying back in April. And they changed. And originally they were saying, yeah, no face mask. Then they changed and said it's good source control, that my wearing my mask protects you. And just on November 10th, now they have data and they're saying my mask not only protects you, but it protects me as well. Just a simple cloth face mask. So the Centers for Disease Control actually takes information as it comes in, like a good science organization will do. and not put themselves out there like this one particular professor who I think he should have a voice at Centers for Disease Control, but I wouldn't be swayed

126by one voice in one op-ed. So that being said. A lot of the decisions have to be made by a community in terms of what their risk and tolerance for risk is versus the benefits. We at the health department, we use the WHO definition of health, and that is it's complete. physical, mental, and social well-being. And so it's not just the physical slash infectious disease aspect, it's also these other things. But what do you do with a community where there's a lot of transmission and potentially kids are catching it within an environment and they take it home where there are people in the household who are at high risk? that might be high risk for just losing work for a while, that certain jobs could be endangered if they're not showing up to work, or

127at high risk for severe disease from, you know, because of their underlying conditions or elder age, and they need a hospital, they need an ICU bed, or they need a ventilator. So those are the sorts of things that the community has to weigh in. But I can say with looking at how we have such regional, national, and even global travel, and looking at the numbers going up everywhere, there's a lot of places that are dealing with... dealing with the pandemic in a way that we were back in April, May, and in June. And so, you know, I don't want to see us go back there because that could mean phase two, phase one, phase zero. And I know the governor doesn't want to impose restrictions as well. So I'm not sure that I answered your

128question fully. And if I didn't, will you let me know? Sure. I think the one part of it that I totally understand that it is up to the school board to make the decision about when to go to the pivot or pull back. But my question is, do you think there's a specific threshold at which we should make that decision? Or are we just looking at the data on a kind of day-to-day, week-to-week basis to make those decisions? Yes, we're looking at this on a week. Actually, I look at it on a day to day. And then the Northern Virginia health directors look at this together. Actually, we formulate a printout and we have it sent by way of the Northern Virginia Regional Commission to the chief administrator officers and the superintendents. every week to

129make recommendations. The recommendations I'm making right now is to really be strict with those mitigation strategies that we have in hand. You know, the six-foot distancing, the face masking, the respiratory etiquette, the hand sanitation and sanitizing everywhere. So those are the things I'm emphasizing to the schools that they need to control what they can control. Don't be lax about that, especially when we're at substantial community transmission, because that's where we would see a situation where we might need to revert immediately back. from a hybrid to virtual only. And I don't think anybody wants to go yo-yoing around. And, you know, again, when we have a case at a school or we have even three cases at a school, that doesn't necessarily mean that we'll need to quarantine everybody. It's really going to depend on the

130situation. But when we have one or three cases at a school, And if there was adequate social distancing and face masking, then it's likely that we'll be able to continue the in-person schooling without putting others at risk. And thank you for mentioning that, Dr. Herring. And Dr. Reif, thank you for asking because what Dr. Herring, he does come and provide updates to the entire division team on a weekly basis. And this is why we have really stayed true to the six foot distancing and why we're staying true to the CDC guidelines. I can't speak for any other school division. I'm responsible for Alexandria City Public Schools. And what I can tell you is that when we open our doors. when students are in and staff are in our buildings, we want to make sure that

131we are honestly saying that we're taking every precaution. in keeping your health and safety at the forefront. And we can only do that through this particular guidance. It is not my job, and I do not have the area of expertise to go against the health professionals. I have a doctorate in education. I'm not a medical doctor, and I am fine with saying that. And that's why we do rely on Dr. Herring and the Virginia Department of Health when we are making our decisions. Great. Thank you. Ms. Nolan is next with a question. Thank you so much. And thanks so much, Dr. Reeve, for your question. I think it outlined a lot of really important information that Dr. Herring allowed you the opportunity to respond to. So we are so exceptionally fortunate to have your guidance

132through all this. So thank you for all you're doing to support us as a school division. I really appreciate also, Dr. Hutchings, that you were crystal clear in that what are the guidelines that we're going to be following and the six feet is going to be one of them. I do think part of the challenge that we're all facing from the emails we're receiving from the community is that there's just people are going to different sources as to where they're getting their information. And so some people are adamant that kids can never get COVID. What's the big deal with the six feet? And there's just a lot of different sources of information that people are utilizing to inform their decision making. So I'm wondering, I think ACBS, while being super communicative and sending out information,

133would it be helpful, Dr. Hutchins, in your opinion, to just if we were to create even just like a visual one pager of like here are the non-negotiables that ACPS is using to make this decision and like the six feet being one of them you know the cases are down a certain percentage like I mean I just think that you know even if it's information that would you know people wouldn't perhaps be excited to hear at least there could be some trends you know there'd be transparency and then what are the non-negotiables that we are as a school division are using to make our decision and again I think the information's out there. But I'm just, you know, it's a lot to get through, especially as a parent who's, you know, trying to handle like

134juggling their kids during the day, as well as job most likely and life and all of that. I'm just curious if you're thinking that, would that be helpful? Again, just a one pager visual that regardless of a parent's literacy level, they could look at it at a glance and understand these are the non-negotiables and these is how the division's making their decision on whether students can return in person. Yes, Ms. Nolan. And thank you. Thank you for asking that. That is definitely possible to do like a primer for, you know, for how we're operating and what are our kind of like non-negotiables, what are our metrics in a sense to determine when we pivot into in-person or not. So yes, we can use that information. And thank you, Ms. Nolan, for pointing out that that

135information is available, but you're right. It's a lot of information that's available. So it's hard to get to some of the core. or like values of our plan and putting it into some form of graphic. So it doesn't matter what your reading level is that you can actually see, you know, where we are focused on. So yes, that is something we can definitely deliver. And I'll take this back to our team to work on that. Thank you. Next up we have Mr. Suarez. Thank you, Chair Anderson. Yeah, and... Thank you for those questions. I'd like to piggyback off my colleagues on that. Those are very elucidating and helpful for me. I would like to just ask about, you know, another thing we've heard from the community, because I think it's important going back to the

136transparency and understanding sort of where decision making is coming from, especially since we have Dr. Herring here. You know, one of the things we're hearing from the community and we just heard today, again, is that, look, you know, Number one, we have community partners in ACPS schools right now with students, you know, who are receiving the instruction, not in the traditional way, but they're being, you know, there's child care being provided. And number two, we have several at this point, private schools in the area that are providing hybrid type of instruction, you know, and that's kind of the 500 pound elephant in the room and why we're receiving a lot of. concerned emails and pushback and so forth. And so, Dr. Herring, I guess I'd like to understand, given that your office does contact tracing

137and, you know, really sort of peels back the onion of what's going on in the community, you know, some of the comments we're receiving, I think, are premised on this notion that spread is not coming from those particular situations. So I'd like to understand, do we have an understanding or data around, you know, Is there spread from those types of situations that it's occurring right now? Is there a colloquy between your office and these other schools that are doing hybrid instruction? Are you admonishing them? Are there problems with that? You know, I'd like to just have a better understanding of, you know, what the health department's position is there and what kind of data we're collecting. Because, you know, we can't escape the fact that, you know, there is this feeling of sort of two

138Alexandrias, you know, in terms of the school's delivery of service that's being provided in the city. So I'd like to understand, you know, a little more about that and what data you're collecting, you know, and is there a distinction from a health perspective between those environments and ACPS? Sure. Thanks for that. And I'm going to actually go back and share my screen. Hopefully I'm successful this time. And what I'm going to show first is, sorry, I had a little bit of an interruption. What I want to show is a couple of slides here. The first is to show, and this is part of the AlexandriaVA.gov. slash coronavirus page, you can get to this performance info dashboard page. But this actually shows the number of people by demographics. And here we can see there's been from

139a zero to nine, 322 cases in Alexandria and 300 in... excuse me, and the age 10 to 19 has been 319. And this latter category actually very closely mirrors the demographic of the total population. And then secondly, one of the things that we are watching is, and this is something unique to Alexandria Health Department, we have a really good epidemiology staff. They have worked on this. to poll people to find out where are people having potential exposures. Now these are associations. This is when somebody is a positive case, we ask them, hey, where have you been the past 14 days? What sorts of environments have you been in? And what we're finding is that most commonly people are naming a household contact, work, and then a public event or social gathering. related to directly to

140your question. One of the things that, back to that BDH page, is that it actually shows the number of outbreaks in every jurisdiction and shows it by school. And you can go there and you can see that there has been a private school in Alexandria that has had an outbreak, which is defined as two or more cases. And those cases, those two cases, we were not able to identify. where one of them got it outside of the school setting. I can tell you there's been a number of outbreaks related to sports activities. And again, it's close contacts and we're not able to identify where the second, third and more cases have gotten it other than the sporting event. So I have reviewed the plans of I think it's 11 or 12 different schools in Alexandria,

141and they are almost all are doing, all but one, are doing every one of the measures, at least from what I know of in their plans. You know, we certainly don't have a role to go out and check and see if people are doing what they said they were going to do. But when I've reviewed their plans, all but one said that they were going to do all the measures. in terms of the correct and consistent use of face mask, social distancing, and the other three measures. Okay, thanks. I think I don't see anything else. Anybody else? So I guess carry on. Is there more? Yes, we have more to our presentation. Dr. Herring was our guest, so I knew we were going to have some comments and we needed him. We may still need

142him too during the athletic slide. So Dr. Herring, if you can stay, please stay with us because I'm sure there are going to be questions about that. So I'm going to turn things back over to Dr. Wilkins, I believe, at this point. Thank you, Dr. Hutchings, and good evening, board members. I'm Dr. Stephen Wilkins, chief of staff, and joining me on this presentation is Michael Carson, who is our director of employee engagement and relations and our statistician for the intent to return form. I'll briefly go over the timeline and then let Michael give you some preliminary statistics of the results so far. We started off this intent to return form, as was mentioned, trying to better understand the impact of the pandemic situation on our employee workforce. And as Dr. Hutchings and our public health

143expert, Dr. Herring mentioned, this impacts everything, right? The workplace as well as home. And so what we wanted to do was measure our employees' ability to return to work given the impact of the public health situation. And Dr. Husting hosted two staff webinars to explain the intent of the form and that all employees are required to complete this form. Over 2,250 employees attended those webinars. And to date, Over 2,500 forms have been completed. And as was mentioned for the non-completed form, those supervisors are in contact or will be in contact with those employees so that we achieve 100% completion of this form. We'll take the next couple of weeks to analyze that data and we'll give you some preliminary statistics tonight, but we do need some time to go through and drill down and understand

144what our workforce is telling us down to the specific office or department thereof. Once we complete the staff intent to return form, we plan to do an intent to return form for students and families. That form will be issued the first week of December, and we'll use that information to plan our in-person instruction. I'll stop there and transition to Michael, who will talk about, again, some preliminary statistics from the intent to return form. Michael? Thank you, Dr. Wilkins. Good evening, members of the Board of Community. The Office of Employee Engagement and Relations was charged with distributing the Attempt to Return form to all employees of ACPS. Today, I will be sharing most of those initial results. As Dr. Wilkins mentioned, approximately 97% of our employees responded to the form, which is a little over 2,500

145employees. Of the responses received, 12% of our staff members, or 316, are currently reporting in person to an ACPS work location. This includes our essential workers and those reporting as needed. Of the remaining 88% or approximately 2,200 staff members that are virtual, 59%, or roughly 1,500, are unable to return for various reasons. 41% of those who responded, they indicated that they could return to work in person. This is a little over 1,000 staff members. I want to remind you that these results are preliminary, but for those instructional staff who did indicate that they could return to in-person instruction and support. 4% are administrators or 41 people, 59% are licensed staff or 639 individuals, and 17% are from our support workforce or 184 staff members. Next steps for the Office of Employee Engagement and Relations is

146to first achieve 100% completion rate, then validate the data, and finally analyze and report the data. Board members, this concludes my comments. We will be sharing this more detailed presentation that's scheduled for November 23rd's board meeting. So you will see not only the statistics, but also we will share the questions that we asked for the staff employment survey. We do have to keep in mind that medical conditions and things of an age and things of that nation are not. public information, but we will use percentages of staff members and not use any specific names or employee IDs or anything like that. I just wanted to make that very clear because we are going to follow all of our HIPAA and FERPA laws. Good evening, Madam Chair, members of the board. I'm Terry Werner, the Executive

147Director of Specialized Instruction. And I am happy to be here with you this evening and share the updates about our return to school for our students with disabilities. As you all know, we began to phase in students with disabilities beginning on November 5th. And I'd like to share with you tonight a little bit about how that process. started and where we are right now. In order to phase the students back, we first carried out school-based simulations. We brought together staff members from the Department of Operations, which included custodial staff, transportation staff, school and nutrition staff. We also had staff back from the Office of Specialized Instruction, as well as the Office of Student Services. We had about 30 members of those teams in the building that day. And we. Walked right through and we completely

148modeled a school day for student return. Bus drivers drove the routes. We had bus drivers who acted as students. We walked through the entry protocol, the student screening protocol. We walked through distribution of food. We transitioned students to class. Teachers engaged in activities and we then went through the exit procedures as well as clinic procedures. It was spectacular. It was a really wonderful day and it was really empowering to be back seeing so many people committed to the outcomes for students. And I am so happy to report we have students back in the building. It is, granted, a small group, and we are looking to be able to expand that as situations allow, but we do have students back in the building, and we have a very, very successful return to school. Students are highly

149engaged. Teachers are working with those students. What I really want to share with you is some of the things that we thought were really important and that staff were able to practice. And that was the student arrival and departure procedures. We wanted to ensure that we were able to follow the bus loading and unloading procedures. Students are transported to school in a cohort. We are working very hard. to maintain a complete bubble for students so that we don't have any of this cross-contamination and that we can mitigate any possible aspects of students being exposed to multiple individuals and staff being exposed to multiple individuals. So students have a seating chart. They get on and off the bus in a certain protocol. We practice that. We also looked at instructional activities. We had two very detailed

150conversations, and this is something I really want to be able to share prior to showing this video. The Office of Specialized Instruction, as well as the Office of Student Services, had very detailed conversations with Dr. Herring and his epidemiological team. We met twice with him to discuss the needs for our staff PPE. Right before we opened this class and began returning students to school, the new CDC guidelines came out about six feet of distance. And if you can't maintain six feet of distance, the concern with more than 15 minutes without masks. So we had lots of conversations because the students with disabilities that were targeted to return in this program are students with some significant needs who do not have the ability to necessarily maintain masks. And we recognize that. And we wanted to. received

151feedback from the public health department to ascertain how we should handle that and how we should support our staff. Dr. Herring raised the issue that the staff should be considered in the same, given their levels of exposure, should be considered in the same category as health professionals. And so we came to the conclusion that the PPE that staff should be wearing were the face mask, the shields, the gowns, and the gloves. So that is how we started the program. And we began with that level of PPE. At this time, the staff in class are wearing face masks and they are wearing the gowns and gloves for total. We've gone through the meal distribution process. Students have breakfast. The morning session has breakfast, snack. They take home lunch and dinner. The afternoon group, when they arrive,

152get lunch, snack, and they take home dinner as well. We have very extensive health protocols that we are following. We've had parents fill out forms. They do a health screening every day. They've shared contact information so that we can do any kind of contact tracing that we need to. So we have been able to return a class of students to school. We have two teachers and a paraprofessional and six students who are attending three in the morning and three in the afternoon. It had been our plan to expand that program starting the 17th. And as you know, that was on our schedule contingent upon staffing constraints. And at this time, we do not have enough staff to fully. open the classrooms on the 17th. And we have some very specific concerns with staff who have

153some health issues and some age issues and some other things that are precluding them from being able to return. We are still very much in the planning process for returning students on November 30th. I held extensive meetings with staff this week. I met with over 150 staff members from our elementary instructional program and our early childhood special ed program. And we were able to provide them extensive and detailed information about all of the protocols, all of the protections that are in place for them, as well as what instructional programming and scheduling might look like for them. They all had the opportunity to ask any question that they needed, and we wanted to make sure that they had that information in order to complete their intent to return form that was due the next day. I

154have been in contact with Michael Carson, and they are going to disaggregate data regarding the special education staff so that we can take that planning forward. So we are still very much in the planning phase. We are still very much working towards implementing our return to school for students on November 30th. And then we are beginning to move into the next phase of returning middle school students as well. So we are moving forward. We are absolutely committed to returning students to school and we are doing everything to make that happen. But what I'd like to be able to share with you at this time is the video and you can see on that incredibly rainy day, just so happened, it was pouring, but everybody were troopers and I'd like you to see the simulation and

155our practice run. I want to thank our communications team as well for putting that together. And I think it's important. I know Ms. Werner, she mentioned that the... PPE that you see in the video, this was for our citywide students. Some of our students who have, you know, in some cases, severe special needs and need additional supports, it doesn't allow for them to be six feet apart or maybe not to wear a mask. So we had to take those additional precautions. But this is not the way it will look when students who do not have citywide program needs return back to school. There will be another video that goes out to show all of different groups and I think that is that is a key and it's very important for our community to understand that

156and actually I'm actually glad it was raining because guess what it does rain in America folks so it was good to see rainy days those are the worst days and anybody who's been a principal teacher or had bus duty understands there's no fun being out in the rain so it was a huge advantage that it was on a rainy day because that's a worst case scenario I think the only you know more worse situation would be a snowy day. which that would have been a fun thing to watch. But I do want us to pivot into our measuring of academic progress assessments. So I'm going to turn things over to Farrah, I believe, or is it Dr. Sims? It's me. Hello, everybody. I was like, is it Farrah or Dr. Sims? Thank you. We're a

157dream team, so I appreciate you connecting us together. I want to say good evening to everyone at the board and hello, fellow colleagues. My name is Farrah Nichols-Peterson, and I'm the coordinator of school improvement. And as such, I work in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Leadership, and I serve. as the division administrator of MAP testing. So I want to talk to you about this new initiative that we've started this year. It's an essential part of our enhanced continuity of learning plan. And as such, ACPS teachers are using assessments to support rigorous instruction during the pandemic. And so... I lead a team called the MAP Task Force, and one of our first tasks was to create a vision for how we use assessments in ACPS. And so I want to really draw your focus to

158our fourth point here, which is that we will create, use assessments to create data-informed student groupings aligned with appropriate pacing for teaching and learning. And I think that's key because what we want to do is make sure that we are using assessments to make sure that our instruction is perfectly aligned with what our students need to know next. Sahar, can you go on to the next slide? Thank you. So this year, we have used measures of academic progress or MAP assessments. to do just that, to give one more data point to help teachers understand what students know and can do. Map growth is a very different type of test. It is different than the test that we've given in the past in that this is a computer adaptive test that allows us to see what

159the students know and are ready to learn next, but they're not really bound by grade level or quarter in a school year. It has a low floor. and a high ceiling, which means that students really have the opportunity to show, you know, what they can do, even if they're performing below grade level expectations or if they're performing beyond grade level expectations. It allows us to track their growth over time. So as students matriculate through elementary to middle and to high school, we can see how their performance is changing and growing. as they learn more information. This approach allows us to personalize their instruction. That means that we are able to meet students' needs if they're performing at grade level expectations, below or above grade level expectations. And it's a true embodiment of our 2025 strategic

160goal, which is equity for all. Now let's give a little bit of information about the MAP screening test. This year, rather than the MAP growth test for this first administration, we decided to give the MAP screening test. It's almost identical in that it's a computer adaptive test that is given in reading and in math, but it's significantly shorter. At 19 or 20 questions, it allows teachers to get, you know, kind of a general understanding of how students are doing. It's a snapshot. This test was given to students in grades 2 through 12, and we just finished the testing window on Monday. This test allows us to provide overall RIT scores, and that's the kind of measure that comes from the MAP test, and we get to see Lexiles for reading. This approach allows us to

161set baseline for goal setting and for instructional planning. So, MAP tests give us a variety of reports so that teachers can see information in different ways. The three main reports that we can use from MAP screening are the grade reports, class reports, and student progress reports. These reports allow us to do different things depending on the purpose for which we are looking at data. We're looking at grade level flexible grouping, or we want to do class level differentiation, or if we want to look at individual student progress so that we can have conversations with families. We can use these different reports to help us understand how students are performing. And it also allows us to determine COVID-19 learning loss and establish baseline data as we are, as we are, you know, working to understand what

162our students are doing. This test was a very big lift for our families. and for our students and for our teachers because it was completely new in this remote setting. We had to understand that there were new competencies that teachers and students had to learn to do a standardized test virtually. Teachers will be learning how to interpret the scores next week at some trainings that we have planned. And if you look on the right side of this chart, you'll see that we have provided different training or we will be providing different training based on the different kinds of groups that we have in ACPS. So we have a data cohort. that is composed of administrators, instructional coaches, and interventionists. And they're learning how to use the data reports for grouping, for their MTSS process, and

163for understanding instructional pacing expectations and instructional planning supports. But then we also have the class report that does a very similar thing, and it allows our specialists like our L teachers and our SPED teachers and our case managers to understand how students are doing in a class. But then we have a student progress report that we really can use with parents, teachers, and students so that we can have comprehensive conversations about this. But again, with any new initiative, training is key. In order for students and teachers to get the most out of these data, we have to train all of them to make sure that they understand what they're seeing and how they can explain it. Those trainings will be occurring next week. Go ahead. Yes. And so. One thing that is very, very important

164for us in ACPS is the idea of data triangulation. It is not a best practice to use one single data point to make, you know, big instructional decisions for students. So what we do as a best practice and what we are teaching our teachers to consistently do is look at a variety. of different data sources. So we want to ask the question always, is this performance typical for the child? So we're asking teachers to consider map data alongside their classroom observation, their common assessments that they have given, some of the other universal screeners. I think Dr. Wooster mentioned some of these assessments, including the Pioneer Valley. We're thinking about the off-target L learner, L list, and to understand how are students performing. We're looking at student WIDA levels and we're thinking about the testing environment

165and whether or not our students have an IEP. All of these data are contextualizing features that help us understand whether or not MAP data is confirming or refuting. what we understand about the child holistically before we make important instructional decisions about, you know, placing children in certain interventions or providing them enrichment. And so we are providing guidance to our teachers on how to use MAP data in concert with a variety of other data to make decisions about what we will do. We are looking at trends, and we want to make sure that we are providing a rigorous and robust instruction in spite of the pandemic, because that's what we do here in ACPS. I want to thank everybody for your time and attention, and that's the totality of my comments. And as we transition into

166the Virginia High School League and athletics, I know Dr. Herring, he was able to touch on some of this earlier. And just one thing I just wanted to put on the record, I really am a little disheartened by the Virginia High School League and a little disappointed because of the fact that they recently released their guidelines that is encouraging school divisions to have athletes perform and be in. be a part of competitions without face coverings and not practicing the six foot distancing. But then these are the same students who are in our schools on a day to day. And it's very contradictory. I know that Mr. Parker, James Parker, who is our athletic director for ACPS is going to be able to go through some of these guidelines, but I just wanted to stress. how

167I think it is extremely disappointing that we would have requirements released like that that are not aligned with CDC guidelines in regards to athletics or the Virginia Department of Health. But I'm going to turn things over to Mr. Parker. We also have Mr. Pete Ballas, who is our high school principal, who will be sharing some remarks as well. So, Mr. Parker. Thank you. Good evening. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with the board about the state of our Titan Athletics program and the forthcoming decisions we need to make on resuming sporting activities. Quickly, I'll give an overview of what we have been doing while in what I call athletic quarantine. We've had guest speakers talk to our athletes via Zoom, such as Olympian and WNBA legend, Shemeika Holeslaw, to New England Patriots Super Bowl winner

168and ESPN analyst, Damian Woody, to two-time NCAA champion and lacrosse legend, Rick Beardsley. We've also done exercise contests via social media, as well as utilizing some home exercise routine apps for our athletes to follow. Many of our coaches have volunteered their time to do film study and team bonding exercises via Zoom. And then we as an athletic department have continued to push forward to be that gold standard that I want to create here in Alexandria City. So we've created some new programs that will be ready to launch once we get back into school. Some of those programs include our athletic department student internship program. the revitalization of our athletic department fundraising board, a new Titan Athletics app, the creation of a Titan All-Academic Team program, and the launch of two different live skill programs that

169will focus on assisting our most at-risk athletes, as well as a program that incentivizes athletes who participate in multiple sports. We want to be able to reward kids that are doing multiple things in our department. We've also been continuously putting together plans to bring our athletes back safely and soundly in this COVID era that we're currently living in. Now I'll give a little bit of information about the Virginia High School League start dates for sporting activities. The VHSL has decided at this moment to allow school athletic programs to resume the sports season starting December 7th, with the winter season going first, and then fall season will follow that. So all of the sports seasons this year have been adjusted to accommodate only 60% of their schedule. So, for example, if we have 10 football games

170scheduled, we'd only play six of them this coming season. So as I stated before, the winter sports season would start December 7th with tryouts. Fall sports would start February 15th with tryouts. And then the spring sports season would start April 12th with tryouts. Just recently, which what Dr. Hutchinson was referring to, the VHSL released their second set of guidelines to return to participate after their meeting with the governor's office. So as we sit right now, the athletic department in recent months submitted a plan to the senior leadership team to start our out-of-season workouts based on the VHSL's phase three return to play guidelines, which was the first thing they actually released a few months ago. Those plans actually allow for... our athletes to practice in a safe manner and follow CDC guidelines. And they're more

171in sync with ACPS safety plans. This would give our athletes that opportunity to practice but not compete against each other. Just for background information, we've had roughly three different training exercises and seminars with our coaches to kind of go over all the various different protocols they would need in order to resume sporting activities once we get approval for that. So now I'll kind of give you a high level overview of what the VHSL guidelines would be if we decided to resume sporting activities and have our athletes and coaches compete in their prospective sports seasons. First off, mask. All athletes and coaches would be required to wear a mask on the benches and on the sidelines, but not while playing games or during practice. This requirement would also be for any staff working the event, the

172referees and officials would have to wear them as well. Currently, sideline cheer is the only sport that the guidelines would require the participants to wear their mask at all times, even while cheering. And they would also have to stay in the stands and could not be on the floor cheering during the games. As it relates to social distancing. When they are not participating in the activity, they would need to be social distance. So on the bench area, on the sidelines, we have to have all the athletes six feet apart. If anybody watched the NBA bubble, you might have saw how the benches were kind of spread out. We would have all of our, if we decided to have fans, all the fans would be on one side of the. facility. There will be no fist

173bumps. There's no after game handshakes. There's a limitation on locker room use where it's just realistically just to store your stuff, get it out the locker and leave. There's no hanging out or having meetings in the locker rooms. As it relates to fans and capacity, if we as a school system decided to have fans, then all the fans would have to wear masks. The guidelines state that the capacity is 50% of the facility capacity or a maximum of 250 people. So here at ACPS we would only be hosting for winter sports, basketball and wrestling events if we allowed those sports to be played and that would be 250 people if we so chose to do that. As far as the gameplay Every single sport has specific safety protocols. So, for example, basketball, one of the

174things that they took away, there's no jump ball. In wrestling, they've limited the amounts of minutes you can actually wrestle. There's no handshakes. You know, after the wrestling match, they usually hold their hands up together. None of that would happen. In a sport like lacrosse, they took out checking. There's no opening ball drop. Swimming and diving will require the athletes competing in their event to come to the pool deck only when they're competing. And other than that, they'd have to stay outside. So each sport has very specific things that you can and cannot do. Some things, you know, more egregious than others, if you will. As it relates to cleaning equipment and facilities. Part of it is even sanitizing the equipment. Like during the game for basketball, you have to sanitize the basketball in between

175each quarter and at the halftimes, any mats that you have, helmets, pads, all those things would have to be, you know, sanitized after they've been used. As a school system, we have the ability to cancel certain sports. Like there's some school systems that are not even doing wrestling, for example, and doing some other sports or not doing JV and freshman, but just doing varsity. So you can add more restrictions. You just can't take things away from these guidelines. Every child would have to have their own water bottle. We'd have to obviously have hand sanitizer in our facilities at the practices. And I plan for cleaning our equipment, washing uniforms. We were able to host events, how we would clean the facility afterwards, and ultimately just follow the current cleaning guidelines that the ACPS has provided

176so far. Now I'll have Mr. Pete Ballas talk about our area school systems and how and if the VHSL guidelines are in lock and step with what we're doing with ACPS Virtual Plan Plus. Mr. Ballas. Thank you, James. Thank you, Mr. Parker. Good evening, school board members and Superintendent Hutchings. We are closely monitoring what area school systems are doing with their athletic programs. As you may know, Arlington Public Schools initially canceled their winter sports season, but have recently decided to host some of their winter sports. The city of Richmond has canceled their winter sports season. Fairfax, Prince William, and Loudoun counties are still slated to move forward. DC Public Schools have pushed their seasons to start in 2021. And in Southern Maryland, our neighbors are all weighing their decisions and should be making them soon.

177When reviewing the Virginia High School League guidelines, we see areas that simply do not align with the ACPS Virtual Plus model. For example, essential features and behaviors in dealing with this pandemic, such as adhering to social distancing and wearing masks when in close proximity at all times, cannot be achieved if we were to follow the VHSL guidelines that Mr. Parker just reviewed. As principal, I'm obviously a major supporter and advocate for students participating in athletics, extracurricular activities, and day-to-day schooling. But we definitely need to have our athletics plan aligned with our Virtual Plus model for schooling, especially in ensuring everyone's safety during this global pandemic. Mr. Parker recently submitted the VHSL Return to Play Guidelines to the Alexandria Health Department for their review and feedback. I'll read you a quick excerpt of what they sent

178back to us about whether or not we should have our athletes return to sports at this point in time. The health department understands the importance of athletics for physical and mental health and the importance of practicing life skills such as teamwork and sportsmanship. However, with Northern Virginia at moderate community transmission of COVID-19 and increasing numbers of regional In increasing numbers regionally, statewide, and nationally, and with schools progressively reopening, the Alexandria Health Department does not recommend conducting sporting activities in which there is close proximity of athletes. I want to emphasize what a truly difficult decision this is to make, just like most decisions involving students, staff, safety, and social responsibility. I believe that several things need to be weighed when deciding whether or not to return our athletes. Above all else has to be the safety

179of our students, staff, and our community. Those must be priority number one. We must remember that we are still in a global pandemic where the numbers of cases are moving in the wrong direction. In addition, we must ensure alignment in the plans for returning to school and the returning of athletics. And these plans must be crosswalked with the ever-changing nature of the COVID-19 global pandemic. As principal, I know my students would have a hard time reconciling why athletes were allowed to return to play with why they cannot be in their classrooms. In closing, Dr. Hutchings and members of the school board, Based on the current health data, recommendation of the Alexandria Health Department, and the fact that the VHSL guidelines do not align with Virtual Plus, I cannot recommend winter sports moving forward at this

180time, as this would compromise the safety of our students, staff, families, and overall community. Thank you. Okay, good evening again, everyone. And this brings us to the end of our presentation, but I did want to highlight for you some of the work that is underway to support the phase entry of certain different groups of students. Group one is a team that has been working and really actually really started working this past week under the leadership of Dr. Bethany Nickerson. They will work even more over the next few weeks. And they are basically... looking and identifying the key actions that are essential for in-person learning for English learners. As of tomorrow, for example, I mentioned earlier, we actually have a meeting with Dr. Hart and her team to begin to look at some of those areas

181that would affect that particular group of students. For groups two and three. This is a these are two groups that are being led by Dr. Gerald Mann. You see on this slide, we have a couple of major questions that they are focusing on. If we were to implement a hybrid model, what kinds of professional learning support would we need to put in place? Or if we were to remain virtual, what are the different levels of supports that students would need? In addition, it's not listed here. Dr. Hutchins actually alluded to it earlier in his intro comments. This group also is working on, because they'll have to begin to identify the potential type of a schedule should we return. a group of students in person. So this group will also be working on that design. Some

182of you may remember when we first started, even with 1.0 and 2.0, the team started looking at different schedules. So we'll be able to build upon that existing work. Group four, you heard a little bit tonight about the staff intent to return form. That group will continue to begin to identify the trends and implications for phasing in. I mean, our staff members based on the results and that will be that those results will be presented later. And lastly, you did hear from Miss Warner around the number of teachers that she has met with this week and will continue to work on the next design for reading and math for students in grades three through five. Just want to illustrate to you that the groups are working and we will begin to continue to report out

183on the work. that is resulting in occurring with these groups. And Dr. Hutchinson, yes. As we transition, before we transition to the Madam Chair to open the floor for questions, I did want to ask for Dr. Hart just to elaborate, not that I want to keep talking about the... the social distancing in our classrooms and this Samuel Tucker photo, but I do think it's important for us to take this moment to really explain how we came up with those measurements and how that five desk is not a division-wide number and how we look at our building capacity. So if Dr. Hart, if you can just provide just some more insight on our measurements, please. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Dr. Hutchings, and good evening, board members. And so to Dr. Hutchings' point, I just hope

184to be able to clarify some of the questions that have been circling around regarding our capacity example provided at Samuel Tucker. The first thing that I want to really stress is that we go into our field verifications understanding that we have to look at our rooms in a holistic approach to include not just the distancing from student to student, but also how those students and how the teachers will move throughout that classroom. And then how do we make sure that we are maintaining the appropriate social distancing based off of that movement? So I wanted to start off with the discrete points that people are not discrete points and that our students and our instructional staff will move throughout the room throughout the day. And so we're wanting to make sure that as we are social

185distancing our desk that we're also considering our walkways because people, our students have to get to their desk, our students will have to. You know, they're not going to necessarily just sit in the center of the desk. They may move, you know, directly around their immediate desk. And we want to make sure that we are providing space for those considerations that do not approach upon the six social distancing. The next piece that I wanted to specify, because I don't often hear it mentioned when we are having questions about capacity, is the fact that we still have to accommodate furniture for our teaching and our instructional staff. And so, for instance, in the Samuel Tucker photo, we show the five student desk, but there was also a teacher desk that was actually fairly large because it

186was a kidney shape, what we call a kidney bean shape table. And that particular type of furniture takes up quite a bit of space. So we are having to also not only. socially distance our rooms based off of students, but also making sure that we are accommodating teacher furniture as well. Another great example of that is the photos that were shown for the citywide simulation at Jefferson Houston. And one of the rooms, there are actually three teacher and or instructional desks that we have to make room for in that space. So just wanting to keep that in mind. Also, and we spoke about this earlier in some earlier presentations, is that some of our rooms do have built-in cabinetry and millwork that we cannot remove, we cannot change, and so that does usurp some of

187the space that is available in our rooms to be able to accommodate additional desks. We have also illustrated in the front of our rooms where we are taping off an area of what we are considering our instructor safe space, and this is the space that we are allowing that is six foot a social distance from the front row of our student classrooms. So again, we're trying to think of the total classroom experience and making sure that our staff have a level of not only safety, but comfort in knowing that they are also provided markers to be socially distanced from that front row of students. We've spoken about it before, but I want to remind about the excess furniture piece because that is still a piece that we are working on and that we are going

188to have to eventually just kind of come to a place of how we are going to store this furniture. So essentially the choices we have is that we can store the furniture in our classrooms, which does, you know, in some cases eliminate space for an additional and or additional desk to be placed, or we can store them in our larger spaces, such as our cafeterias or our gyms. If we choose the latter, we would be unable to program those spaces for a return to school, especially in the case that we need those spaces to utilize for indoor mass breaks, if that's the decision, and or any other type of programming, that space would then no longer be available if we use that for storage. So that is another consideration I just hope everyone keeps in

189mind. You know, as we continue to stress, we are strictly adhering to our CDC and AHD guidance of the six foot social distancing. Just to, you know, to share, I do have and have had conversations with some of my colleagues and other divisions, as well as some of my team members, and a lot have stressed that. They definitely try to maintain the six foot distancing where possible, but that's not necessarily consistent amongst other divisions. And so, you know, we are strictly adhering to that. And so I just want to make sure that I'm reiterating that sometimes those comparisons aren't necessarily apples to apples, that there are some differences in how the various divisions are interpreting social distancing guidance. And then, you know, lastly, I wanted to speak to, again, the misperception that five student desks

190is all we can fit throughout the division. That was never the intent. And I'm truly sorry if the visual came across that way, because that was not the intent of the visual. We understood that trying to explain the concept of social distancing can be very difficult, especially for those that are visual people that need to actually see the space. Our intent in doing that one example was to start providing some of that visual experience so everyone would understand that they would be coming back to a much different layout in terms of classroom space and just school space in general. And I noted that there was an earlier comment about a discrepancy between five and six desk. And I think I can definitely explain that. At the time we presented that photo, we stressed that there

191were five desks that were illustrated. However, if we had removed the excess furniture that we had piled up against the wall, we would have been able to fit a six desk. So that's, you know, I wanted to be able to explain that difference for Samuel Tucker. With that said, my team and I have continued to do field verification exercises. And one thing that is important to note is as we are measuring some of our larger schools, I'll use Jeff Houston and FT Day as an example. On average, we are able to fit roughly seven desks in those student classrooms. So five is definitely not a moving average for the entire division. That was one case in point with Samuel Tucker. And as my team and I continue to do field verifications where, yes, we are

192literally measuring every single desk. At times, it has taken us two and a half to three hours, not necessarily to just complete the measurements, but to make sure that we are doing so in a very thoughtful and transparent way. And then also documenting that. through pictures as we are doing our field verification. So again, I just wanted to hopefully be able to provide some additional context regarding our capacity, our capacity pictures that we've been showing and the examples that we've been giving. And just let everyone know that my team and I are definitely working through every single nuance that we are discovering at our individual schools. And we'll continue to do so as we move forward in our hybrid, hopefully return to school plan. So thank you so much. And thank you so much, Dr.

193Harden. Just to our entire facilities and operations team, I just have to thank you all for the hard work that you're doing. I mean, I know that some people may insult your intelligence, but I know for sure that we are not going to go in giving information that's false out to our community for what reason. And I just feel like I don't want our team to take that personally. Understand that some people, maybe they just don't have the facts. Maybe they don't want to understand, you know, the processes that we're putting in place. But we're doing a thorough, very thorough job. every single day to try to ensure that our students and our staff that they have a healthy and safe environment. I'm still trying to understand why that is a problem. Why is that

194an issue for us to try to do what is right in regards to the health and safety? That is one of the number one priorities that we have as a school division. And I just wanted to tell you, Dr. Hart and our team, thank you every single day for the work that you all are doing and you should not have to come. out here to speak on behalf of your staff to inform the community that we are not giving false information. I just think that to me is unacceptable, but I wanted us to do it today so we can say it and move on, but we will not be talking about this again. So I'm going to turn things over to Madam Chair and thank you so much Dr. Hart and all of our team

195today for all of the input that you all have given. I know you all are ready for questions so don't go too far because the board may have some questions for you that you may need to answer. Thank you. Well, that was a pretty robust presentation, so I'm not sure. And we did stop part of the way through for questions. So I don't see anything right now, but board members are okay. I have Ms. Green. And I just had a couple of questions about the VHSL and the sports seasons. And I was wondering, are we looking at each season as it comes up? It's not recommended that we play for winter, but then when the fall season comes up, I think it said in February, we would then re-examine. Is that how that's going to

196work? That's question number one. Question number two, either Mr. Ballas or Mr. Parker, with Arlington changing course and now playing the winter season, sports season, will they be playing while they're... students are not, their high school students are not in the building, in the school buildings? Yeah, so to answer the, I guess the first question, we're taking each season, you know, one at a time. So if we decide, deciding not to do winter sports, that doesn't affect fall or spring at this current time. In regards to Arlington, I don't know if they're going back to school or not. I don't believe so. I mean, Dr. Hutchins may have more of an insight on that. I do know that they're not doing wrestling in Arlington, for example, and they have some other limitations that they're doing

197in some of their sports. So they're not going to have any fans. And I believe in basketball, they may not be doing JV and freshman just varsity, but that may be changing. They still haven't put out exactly what that plan is going to be. We just know that they've. reverted back to saying they are going to be competing in winter sports. Okay. I have Dr. E. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you for that thorough presentation, Dr. Hutchings and everyone on the team. And thank you, Dr. Hart, for going through the explanation about the social distancing and the building capacity. I mean, I'd like to speak a little bit to that as well. This is a really challenging time that we're in, as we've heard, I think, you know, throughout this presentation. And I know

198that as a school division, there are things that we can do better with our communications. And we're going to be talking about our communications audit right after this. That said, I know our communications team is working very, very hard. The issue with the Tucker classroom, you know, we have received very many emails about that. And I've responded to some. I haven't been able to respond to all the many hundreds of emails that I've gotten recently. But I know that Dr. Hutchings has responded to some as well. And I guess what I want to say, I really want to ask the community here to kind of work with us because. I think that misinformation is really, it can really spread rapidly and it's just not helpful for our ultimate goal of getting kids back in the

199classroom as soon as possible. So after we received an email after the presentation on October 21st, I emailed Dr. Hutchings and I just asked him to clarify this issue about the, you know, that five desks per classroom was not, what we were using. And I asked him to please, you know, put that on the facts page on the phased reentry website. And that's been up there for some time now. And so thank you, Dr. Hutchings, for doing that. And thank you for continuing to, you know, Dr. Hart, to continue to repeat this message that that's a misconception that's gotten a lot of traction in our community. And I'm still hearing, you know, even Tonight I'm getting a message about why were the chairs zigzagged, you know, and the way that they were set up and

200not in straight rows. And I mean, it's not a diagram, it's a classroom. And I mean, at some point we have to have some faith here and our leaders that, to Dr. Heshing's point, you know, we, this is not an attempt to not bring kids back to the class. We understand that. You know, we understand that it's very challenging that some kids are really having a challenging time I've talked about my own children's experience. And so I just want the public to know that as a board, you know, we are really considering, we are very supportive of the idea of getting our kids back in the classroom we just really want to do it the right way and the safe way. And so I just asked for, you know, some understanding, I guess, to that

201point. And for people to maybe just do a little bit of fact checking too. And if you can't find the answer you're looking for, then please just ask us and we will try to clarify that. Let's see. I wanted to make another point, I guess, too. And that is about the citywide program that reopened. I know that that's been, that was a big undertaking to get the students, the six students back into the classroom and all that went into the planning and all of the steps that had to be taken and all of the staff members that were involved in making that work. And so I really appreciate everyone who's been working hard on that. That said, I know that, you know, for some of our families in the citywide program who we weren't able

202to bring back on the timeline that we were projecting, it was very disappointing. And so I know when we, I understand why we call that successful, and I think it was, but I also want to be mindful of those families who were feeling a little bit disappointed. And I think that, you know, it has been kind of a pilot project. And so we've really been having some lessons learned and we're going to move forward. forward with that. I just wanted to really acknowledge that. And then I guess my question is, on the intent to return form, it sounds like, Dr. Hutchings, that we have, we are planning to collect that information from families in the coming... at the end of November, beginning of December. And I guess I was interested if you could talk a

203little bit more about that. And I think, you know, some of the questions that I know parents are wanting to know is, you know, will my child be able to stay with their teacher? Or, you know, if we decide to stay virtual, you know, if we indicate that we want to stay virtual, are we going to be able to opt into in-person later? So those are my questions, but before you answer, I wanted to just mention something else that I've been thinking about. When we look at the data that you all presented on the building capacity with the social distancing. You know, we have about 15,500 students right now. And according to like the whole school division data point was that we can accommodate about 5,100 students if we socially distance. And I've heard from,

204I've even started hearing from people who are telling us, you know, just pivot to next year already, because they want to make sure like everyone can sort of come back next year. And, you know, my initial response to that was like, well, we're like, we're like, our planning now is like the planning for next year, essentially. But as I've thought it through, I think by starting in the you know, the fully virtual model and now having to pivot to a hybrid model, it does create these kinds of challenges, I think. And some members of our, some community members have said, well, just give families a choice whether or not they want to come back. And maybe if some people want to stay home. then you can, you're going to be able to do two days

205a week of a concurrent model instead of the one day. And I guess what I'm, I guess what I'm getting around to do is I've been thinking about, you know, do we need to create a model that's going to be sustainable, meaning that it can scale up to accommodate all of our students? Because again, the virus is very unpredictable and, you know, we know there's the news about the vaccine, but who knows how long it will take, you know, for the community to be vaccinated or whatnot. And so, and so I'm just, that's just something that I've been thinking through is, you know, is the model that we're looking to develop something that's sustainable and that can accommodate every single person who wants to come back, you know. So any of those things that you

206could speak to would be great. So it was about the intent to return form for families and how that will be used. And then maybe any insight into your planning, given our capacity constraints. Yes. And thank you, Dr. Reif. I'm glad you've repeated those questions because I was still thinking about all your comments, which were right spot on. So thank you for that. So in regards to the intent to return form for families, so we are going to have a community meeting on December 1st and December 2nd. And then right after or following the December 2nd community meeting, there will be communications that will go out to our families to complete an intent to return form. And this will happen in PowerSchool. And the purpose in that is because now it's attached to every student.

207So we can ensure every single student has some kind of intent to either return or to remain virtual. It is very challenging for us to be in a situation where we have or, you know, allow families to switch back and forth because look how much it was to get six kids in a building. And I mean, this is serious. We're not I'm not making this up. I'm not saying it to make it a challenge, you know, of returning back to school. But it was a lot of effort to get. even just six students into our building. So once we, you know, solidify our plans and we have a fluid approach, that will mean that every other week we'll be changing those plans. And it may not guarantee that our families can remain with their teachers.

208And we're going to have to be upfront about that. We're going to try to do that as much as possible. but there is no guarantee that students can remain with their teachers. So those are the types of things that we're going to be talking through at the December 1st and December 2nd, so that parents then have some tangible information. So when it's time to do your intent form, you have something to go by. So, you know, our target is to have... more data to share out like we're doing today. Every time we come together, there's more information to give, right? We could probably talk all day long about the information, honestly, because this is such an ever-changing situation. that it is like unlimited information and we have to like pivot for every decision that's made

209because when we make one decision it does have an impact on either another group or another decision so it's like an ongoing kind of like problem solving situation that is not as simple as hey let's just let everybody come back and we can just do it in five minutes and solve the problem like If we could, trust me, we have some very strong and talented people on our team. We would have already figured that out. And I don't think anybody around the country has yet. So I just say that, yes, we will provide those intent forms. December 2nd is when they will actually be released. But December 1st and 2nd, we'll be going through all of the logistics for our families. In regards to future planning, as you asked, we are going to, you know,

210be looking at how can we try, you know, because the board made the motion to look at pre-K through 12th grade returning in February of 2021. So what we are striving to do is to have pre-K through 12th grade able. to return in 2021. So that is the planning that we're working through. The key factor that we do need, which I'm, you know, finally we do have that this week, is the intent to return for staff because the staffing component is probably one of the most important components. That's before we get to even what the student, you know, needs are. We have to determine how many staff members we're able to bring back. so that we can determine how many students we can actually accommodate and then what types of models we're going to need

211to pivot to, which we have looked at all the models. It's just a matter of these numbers will let us know which one to pivot to. We've looked at One day a week. We've looked at two days a week. We've looked at three days a week. We've looked at week after week or biweekly. You go one week and you come back and you go another week. So we already have all the different types of models. Once we get these solidified numbers and accurate numbers and not kind of general numbers, we'll be able to determine which one we need to pivot to. Okay, thank you. Next up, we have Ms. Alderton. Thank you. I just have a question. I'm wondering if it's worth sharing and regarding, because right now the one example that most people have

212that's tangible is the citywide classroom. And I'm wondering if it's worth sharing how staffing implications are even different based on the students being served. So right now, you know, given this, the example that we have for citywide, essentially we have what about a two to one ratio for students versus, you know, adults in the classroom, but there is a reason for that. Right. So I'm just wondering, like, is it, is that something we're sharing with the community to understand? you know, even how every situation is different based on the students being served in their needs. The staffing also is adjusted in that way. I'm sorry, Ms. Werner. Do you want me to speak to that? Thank you, Ms. Alderson. The staffing ratios for students with disabilities vary across a continuum. But the staffing ratios that

213we have in place for our students in the citywide classrooms, for students in kindergarten all the way up through high school, especially through our middle school program, but our elementary program that we were dealing with right now, we staff one teacher and two paraprofessionals. for every six students. And so there are various, and those are very specific ratios based on the significant needs that those students manifest. And that is why when we talked about the PPE issues and some of those other. things that you saw in the videos, those students' needs require such close proximity and interaction from the teachers, and those students are not mask capable in all cases. And so, you know, that's really the impact there. Some of our other classes for students with disabilities expand the staffing when we look at

214bringing back the students in the early childhood special education program, those teachers are staffed, one teacher, those classes are staffed, one teacher, one paraprofessional for eight students. So when we look at bringing back the early childhood special ed program, we are looking at the potential to bring back eight students per teacher team, teacher and instructional assistant team. So we would have four in the morning and four in the afternoon. when we're looking at bringing back our k-5 students for the reading and math services um those we can staff we've looked at depending on class size um bringing back somewhere around the neighborhood of six students for every teacher and if we bring a paraprofessional back we would bring eight students back so those class Those class sizes will change and they will ebb and flow

215depending on the class configuration that we're putting together. And then the, you know, then there's the other non-special ed classes, which Dr. Hutchings, that's, but thank you for that opportunity to clarify. Yeah. And I just bring that up because again, those are like, you know, the little details that, you know, a community looking in may not fully understand that could be helpful. if we were able to somehow, you know, share that out. Okay, it doesn't look like we have any more questions. So we are going to hear about this again at our next regular meeting on the 23rd, what the updates are then. And so we'll move ahead to our next item, which is our communications audit update. Dr. Hutchings. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I would like to have for our chief, I want

216to say new, but you know, Julia Burgos is not new anymore. It feels like it's been a million years since the time she started on July 1, but she is our new chief of school and community relations, and a part of our reorganization last year was to bring our communications team and our community partnerships. departments together under one roof. And I just have to say that just over the past few months since July, I have seen a tremendous amount of additional supports, synergy, efficiency, effectiveness that has happened with combining those two departments under Ms. Burgos' leadership. So without further ado, I would like to introduce Julia Burgos to go over. our communications update. Thank you. Thank you so much for the warm welcome. And yeah, it's already been a little over four months. So time

217is moving fast as we know. And so thank you for allowing me to join the team. I'll be joined by Helen Lloyd today. We'll be presenting together, giving you a snapshot of our communications update. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen so we can get started. Oops, I have a little bit of technical difficulty. Uh-oh. I don't know where it went. Okay, sorry about that. I have too many windows open. So good evening, Madam Chair and Vice Chair and board members and Dr. Hutchings. I'm excited to be here this evening. I'm going to present the patient audit that we received on January 9th. which was before my time. So I'm going to be sharing some information with you to start and then I'll hand it over to Helen to give some more

218specifics. We're specifically talking about the communications audit that was shared with the school board on January 9th, 2020 by Betsy Overkamp-Smith who was enlisted to help with this particular communications audit and presented the findings of the Office of Communications Audit at that time. Since then, the Office of Communications has drafted an action plan to implement the recommendations that came out of the audit. But before I start, I would like to remind you that my presence and role, as Dr. Hutchings alluded to, is a direct result of this audit. When considering this role, I was most interested in joining a school division that was willing to look inward and better understand needs in the realm of communications. Oftentimes, communications is the last thing that many organizations think about, and it can be the first thing on

219the chopping block. I was excited to join a team that understood the importance of a strong communications and engagement plan and was willing to make the necessary investments to enhance very important aspects of any organization, particularly in schools where two-way communication and engagement is critical and key to our partnership with parents. So I want to thank you, school board and Dr. Hutchings, for recognizing this need and creating the space for this work. But before I move forward, let me remind you of the talented members of our Office of Communications team. We are a small but mighty team that is highly skilled, professional, committed, and passionate about the work that we do. Helen Lloyd is our Executive Director of Communications, who leads the Office of Communications team. website, video, TV production, and strategic communications planning. In

220the short time that I've worked with Helen, she has illustrated her skills as a strategist, storyteller, writer, and a planner to keep the fast-paced work of our communications team fresh, innovative, and interesting, which has become even more difficult during these challenging times. Helen has helped me make my transition smooth here to ACPS as we have worked as a team to bring our communications to the next level, which has already resulted in some successes that you'll hear about tonight. Delaina McCormick specializes in electronic media. She's our graphic designer and is responsible for large annual projects such as the Welcome Packets, Kindergarten, Registration Packets, the Program of Studies, and she also oversees the School PR Liaisons Program. Julie Moult is our writer for ACPS Express and Insider and manages our media, which is very important. You'll hear

221a lot about her role in this presentation. Julie was just part-time until August, and we worked really hard to make her position full-time with some adjustments and reorganizations that I felt was really important to make, especially during these times when positive stories are really critical. Susan Thomas is our videographer and photographer. You saw some of her work tonight with the simulation video, which was fantastic. And she posed as a sort of as an airline stewardess this week in our health and safety video, which was great for staff. I really enjoyed it and was very creative. Nathan Goldstein managed as AB and the technical side of the TV station. And since March 16, Aaron Anson. has been our webmaster and all the work that you see online from the ACPS at home website to now the

222Virtual Plus website and all the other microsites that we've had to create for this ever-changing work. Aaron has been working around the clock around that. So you see his work every day. And then lastly, we welcomed Alexandra Berdwan to our team as a part-time administrative assistant just over a month ago. And so we've been working hard as a team. and I'm going to pass it over to Helen and I'll come back later to talk a little bit about our next steps. So thank you, Ms. Burgos. Good evening, Madam Chair, Vice Chair, Board members. I'm Helen Lloyd, Executive Director of Communications. Today's presentation is an overview of the action plan and the audit recommendations that have been completed since January. Many of the recommendations that have been implemented to date were implemented prior to the school

223closures, and the remaining recommendations are either in progress or under development. The essential questions that we're going to be answering tonight are what progress has been made so far to implement the audit recommendations, what areas are still under development due to COVID-19, and what are the next steps. So there are four audit areas with recommendations. Area 1, staffing and organization with five recommendations. Area 2, emergency communications with six recommendations. Area 3, collaboration and opportunity with seven recommendations. And Area 4, processes and tools with 11 recommendations. And this makes 29 recommendations in total. There are five priority recommendations. Two of these, the time study and the implementation of a project management system have already been implemented. Sorry, Helen, for one second. Is this supposed to move with, because I don't see the slides moving, advancing forward.

224I'm sorry. Yes, Julia was actually advancing the slides. And we're on slide four. You're not seeing the five priority recommendations? No, we're on the fourth. Okay. Not sure why. I'm definitely moving forward. Sometimes we have to like share and then share again. I know that worked earlier for some people. Okay, let me do that. Can everyone see that now, slide four? Yes, five priority recommendations. Okay, thanks. No, thank you for letting us know. Yes, thank you. And please let us know again. Please stop me if that happens again. So there are five priority recommendations. Two of these, the time study and the implementation of a project management system have already been implemented. Two of them, the customer service response system and a website relaunch, both very large projects, are still under development, while one, professional

225learning, is in progress. So out of the 29 recommendations, and we should be at the next slide, yeah, out of the 29 recommendations, 13 have been completed, six are in progress or ongoing. 10 are under development due to COVID-19, and we do admit that the pandemic has definitely created some delays in the implementation of these. So you can see how this breaks down on this slide. I'm not going to read out the list of numbers, but you can see how this breaks down by area here. So on slide 7, under the staffing and organization recommendation, the team completed a time study. over the course of a three-week period, not just one, but three, because we wanted to make sure we were capturing this accurately, in late January and early February this year. The study reveals

226that between a third and a half of all employee time is spent reacting to issues or crises, mostly division-driven. Media content creation and outreach takes double the amount of time that's actually allocated to it or was allocated to it at the time of the audit. We only had a 0.5 FTE at that time of the audit. And yet it has more than doubled its success rate and impact in the six months prior to the audit. 43 hours of work within one position was spent editing content that was not created to the division standard in the first place and serves as an indicator of where staff professional development and, to a lesser degree, better processes are required. And just one hour over the course of three weeks was spent on professional development across the entire team.

22750% of the community outreach role, a position that was within our office at the time of the audit, but it no longer is, it's actually moved over to the Office of School Community Partnerships, was spent directly supporting the superintendent. So the time studies showed that considerable time is actually also spent delivering equipment to schools to support basic AV needs, many of which could actually be managed on site with relatively minor support. A follow-up time study will be conducted in January 2021 to measure changes that the implementation of many of the audit recommendations might have seen. So continuing with completed recommendations, the writer communication specialist position was increased by a 0.5 FTE in mid-August this year. This was funded through reallocation of funds from the administrative assistant position. The admin assistant position has been reduced to

228a 0.5 to cover this cost. However, this adjustment has resulted in an increase in media outreach by at least 100% through relationship building and also increased pitching. An increase in Washington Post coverage, for example. So prior to... July 2019, we really barely had any positive stories on the front page of the Washington Post at all. Most of the stories that we had in the Washington Post, in fact, were negative. And in the past year, we've now had an average of two stories that are on the front page of the positive earned media stories every single month since then. And that is honestly a true success. I'm going to hand over to Ms. Burgos. Thank you so much, Helen. So as I mentioned earlier, my existence is because we combined the offices and created this chief

229physician, and I'm excited about that. So now we have the Office of Communications and the Office of Community Partnerships and Engagement, formerly known as the Office of School Business and Community Partnerships. It was established and combined under one umbrella starting on July 1st with the superintendent's reorganization. And this is something that we fully support. The whole team works together. We have been meeting, and I'll talk a little bit about this later, but we have been working really hard to bring those teams together. As well as even with the administrative assistant that we hired, that supports both sides of the team, mostly on the communication side, but as well as for myself. The community outreach position that Helen just spoke about, that's actually, we reorganized that as well. So that position is under community outreach. So

230Tanika Toucan is supervising that position, creating a team that bridges across both of the departments. So a lot of the work that was sort of separate. before that team will now be supporting both sides, bringing our work together, really helping us to do more of the gelling that we need to do. We held the department retreat earlier this year in September, and we've been meeting regularly. We have quarterly meetings, and we even started something fun, sort of in a self-care realm of having brown bag lunches with our team so that we can get to know each other better in a much more informal format. And we've been recruiting some of the members of our team to actually do that. And we had our first one last week, which was really fun, and it really helped

231the team to get together. So sort of asking people to take lunch and take care of themselves while also getting to know each other. So really trying to find ways to make our team work better. and get to know each other, even though they were working in the same school division. Some of them didn't even know the skill sets and the talents that each other had. And we've really been able to leverage that. One of the ways that we were able to really see that was when we did our reopening chats and even through the identity projects. Both of those projects have really brought the teams together and have really helped to tap into the expertise on both ends. And that's been a real positive for us because we have tangible things to work on

232together. So with that, I'm going to hand it back over to Helen and I'll kind of come back and tell you our next steps as we move through this process. That's right. Thank you, Julia. So since January and the audit recommendations came out, all members of the Office of Communications have now completed cross-tech training on all emergency communication platforms. We're constantly needing to cross-train on these platforms because they keep updating and we have, you know, if you're not using them all the time, which not all the members of the staff do, we want to make sure that they're keeping their skills up to date. We've also introduced a formal emergency debriefing system, which we had used a couple of times actually in the couple of months before we actually had the larger crisis of the

233pandemic. A cross-departmental event planning process has been established, and you'll hear a little bit more about that later in our project management system. And we've also introduced a weekend holiday on-call calendar system, which our team actually really appreciates. And it means that every team member is on duty from Friday evening through to 6 a.m. Monday morning a little over once a month. They appreciate that because they feel like they're freer on the weekends when they're not actually on call. So we presented to 80 plus realtors in the spring. Most of these were actually in person before we closed. And then one or two of them were virtual once we had closed as well. We continued that process and that engagement. We also have a realtor resource page now that's accessible via the homepage of the

234website. And you can see that presentation posted there as well. In February, we launched a project management tool with SLT, principals and staff through ACPS Insider. We built our own tool for project management in-house after finding that actually not one tool did all the jobs that we needed. And we're lucky to have such a skill set, honestly, in-house to be able to do that with Delaina. We integrated this with a standard project management platform that we were already using, which was Asana. Staff communication requests are now meant to be made through an online form that feeds them directly into our incoming projects section in Asana. These are then triaged, assigned a priority according to urgency, availability of the assignee and timing, and also, most importantly, according to ACPS 2020 and 2021 focus areas. So this

235was introduced in early, reintroduced actually in early October this year, once we started to climb out of the immediate crisis presented by that pandemic. There was a bit of a hiatus during the pandemic as we were operating in crisis mode. So some key differences are that all requests will come in through the same channels. You can sit in the same way. There's no longer a quick roundabout route of, can you just turn this around for me in the next like 30 minutes? I need it now. Events require the collaboration of the requester. They can no longer be assigned to communications. They need to be delivered as a partnership to ensure the requester's needs are fulfilled, the event is supported financially, and the event is part of a larger plan to change our reputation or improve

236our image. Basic AV requests will be self-service, and we have definitely moved to that plan. And they're going to be supported by clear visual instructions for staff to easily follow. Complex multi-mic setups, of course, will still be fully staffed by the Office of Communications staff and also contractors. So in terms of communication surveys, COVID-19 has presented the opportunity for four check-ins regarding communications, and these have been replaced. These have actually replaced the need for that single annual communication survey this year that the audit recommended. So by way of a quick summary, I just want to kind of highlight some of those aspects of the surveys or results of the surveys. May 2020, we had 11,000 responses to the survey. That's a pretty high return rate. We had a high percentage of parents, that was 86%,

237and 82% of staff who said they felt well informed about decisions made by ACPS. In the next two surveys, we didn't ask about how well people felt informed, but we did have really high return rates, and we count that as part of our success too, being able to make sure that we are reaching the families that we really need to reach, all of them. And you can see from June 2020 that... we had an increase in non-English language responses by 700 for that survey. In October 2020, we had 15,451 responses to the survey. 93% of families and 90% of staff said that communications were clear and timely. That is a pretty good endorsement, honestly, particularly in these times and particularly in comparison to others. So moving on to the recommendations that are still ongoing or

238in progress. We collaborate closely with the city in emergency planning as the pandemic has obviously shown. On January the 30th this year, just six weeks before we closed schools, I attended the city's first citywide biohazard emergency training session, which is actually run by Dr. Herring of the Alexandria Health Department. I think there were around 60 people probably in attendance from across the city at that emergency planning session and it was really, it proved very valuable obviously given what happened just six weeks afterwards. So we're also working with the RPCA to ensure they've shared their policies around school closings with us and updated them so that we can eliminate that confusion, the event of unexpected weather and COVID-19 planning as I said has really strengthened cross-departmental and city-wide communication collaboration. As regards attendance at citywide meetings,

239you know, as well as that participation, we also attend or participate in the citywide unified planning committee. And honestly, I'm always in touch with the city communications officer, director. Craig and I, you know, are on text or on call, you know, we dial all the time. So regarding the bite, snack, meal format for messaging, the format for Express Insider was adjusted for COVID to better meet this message formula. We realized that in a crisis, we really did need that formula more than we'd ever needed it before. And then we moved it and utilized it. It's been utilized since for other forms of communication, such as board memos, presentations, and reports. So also ongoing or in progress. The expansion of closed captioning, now COVID-19 saw a tenfold increase for us of closed captioning and the need

240to reallocate funding to be able to pay for that as well. You know, any video, any content that goes up online has to be closed captioned per ADA compliance. And we take that very seriously because otherwise we will face lawsuits. Many of the divisions around us have already faced lawsuits. And we're actually proud that we've avoided them through very, very careful management of our website and its ADA compliance. Expansion of closed captioning will eventually include student videos but right now this needs to wait for specific budget allocations because obviously this is an additional expense on top of the additional ones we're already incurring. In terms of celebration of staff, in the news page was created on the website the COVID-19 stories involving principal selected staff. ACPS Express and CIDR continue to include staff success stories.

241Our positive staff stories have been on the front page of the Washington Post more than any other school division in this region during this crisis. You know, we say that's really on average like twice a month. And we really have been shouting about their successes. And that's not just us pitching, that's also them potentially sometimes coming to us and say, do you have a staff member who could? And then we're always willing to find that staff member and go above and beyond. Sometimes it's, you know, it's a tall order to go and find exactly what they need, but we always make sure we do because we want to put our staff on the front page of the Washington Post when it's a positive story. So media training at principals is always ongoing and is always

242as needed. Whenever we have a principal who is required to be in front of the media, we just make sure they have the talking points, make sure they have the prep and the practice. And we were honestly truly grateful to the Jefferson Houston PTA who helped train the principal recently via a professional parent volunteer who actually works for a professional PR agency. Thank you. Thanks, Helen. I was just unmuting myself. Thank you. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about the recommendations that are under development due to COVID, but I realized that I would be missed by not also. recognizing our other partner, Kurt Huffman, who leads the Community Partnerships and Engagement team. A lot of the successes that we will talk about tonight are definitely results of that team as well working

243with us. I know we mentioned about the combination of the team, but I also would not have been able to transition as smoothly without Kurt's help as well. So I want to acknowledge him and the work that we're doing and the way that we've been able to really create synergies across teams. So speaking of that, one of the things that we have consideration of is to hire an assistant director. I think, as I said before, we're a small but mighty team, but we definitely have a lot of work to do. And I think if we had an additional assistant director to help with some of these functions, it would definitely alleviate some of the pressure for the team. We removed the removal of receptionist duties from the admin assistant. So that's something that I know.

244was being spoken about early on in this process. The shift of AV to the purview of TC Williams and then assigning school locations across the team. So we're in the process of identifying a budget for additional staffing needed to implement and operate a customer complaint system. This is the system the city already uses. And we're also in the process of developing professional external media training for school board, SLT, and principals. This requires additional unbudgeted funding. While I have spoken with Helen about the possibility of doing in-house training for our team, I think we will be doing some of that anyway. But we definitely need a deeper dive into some of the training because it's a little different. You know, we're trained in that. We're communications professionals. That's what we do for a living. But sometimes

245it's a different format when that's not what you typically do. And sometimes it's easier to actually have an external party to help have some of those tough conversations, especially when training on media. Then, our new website, we had an RFI request of procurement in January 2020. The process to identify funding started but was not completed due to COVID-19. However, in the meantime, as I mentioned before, our new website specialist overhauled the current website, maximizing use of the current platform. I want to give him credit for creating two microsites over the course of the weekend. First, to house the ACPS at home. as a central portal for information around the pandemic. This means that once we are over, we can hide this information in one click and go back to the usual format. This is essential

246to make sure families, students, and staff have a one-stop shop for all their online learning needs. He also created a second one for Virtual Plus, again, over a weekend. So he's able to switch that so that people could find our new information when we introduce the Virtual Plus brand. The development of an intranet is on hold pending budget allocation. This is something that I'm definitely in favor of. I can tell you that I practically harassed the superintendent of my previous school division about this. It's such an important tool for our employees to have a place that they feel is their home where we can have information that is specific to them. Right now, the information lives on our website. We need for people to feel like it's a home for them. And I feel like

247we were able to implement that in my previous school division. And people really enjoyed having information that pertained to them, everything in one place, not difficult to find. Because right now you have to sort of go to different departments for your different needs. But an employee-based site is really critical, especially when we're talking about internal communications. So that's something that we'll be talking about more and figuring out a way to make that happen sooner than later. So now to the fun part. So I want to share some of the data from the first six months of the pandemic. This gives you a clear idea of how from our small and like I said, mighty team was able to pivot in this challenging time. So between March 13th and September 8th, and we put this report

248together so that we could put our briefing on report and share it with the board. So since September 8th, of course, we've had many more successes and wins in the media department and some of our other publications, but I'm going to just touch on these. So we had 5,000 individual questions answered via FAQs in four languages. And I will tell you that's not an easy feat because we have to corral all of our team members to help us answer those questions. So it's not just us sitting at a desk putting these questions together. We had 122 editions of ACPS Express and ACPS Insider. 183 translated copies of ACPS Express were sent in languages other than English. We had 941 pages that were requested to be translated into Spanish, Amharic, and Arabic. 80,000 multilingual print mailings

249were sent to homes. 325,144 visits to the two microsites that I mentioned earlier. We fulfilled 289 closed captioning requests in line with ADA requirements, which were 10 times more than the average that we typically do. And we responded to 300 media requests, up to 30 plus requests per week. And then I want to remind you about the high level of positive earned media, as Helen mentioned before. So that is incredible analytics from our team in such a short time and such a small, small team. So I want to talk about this one recommendation that's under review, assigning responsibility for media training of schools and media interview supervision to principals. This is one that we're looking at. We believe that principals already have an enormous amount of responsibility, and we do not think it would be

250appropriate to ask them to be responsible for ensuring their staff are prepped for media interviews or be held responsible for positive media outcomes. Our team is trained in these skills and will always provide tremendous support. This will require principals to be trained to a similar degree. We consider this to be an undue burden on our principals. So we'll continue to look at that and see if that's feasible. But I honestly think that it's, I would truly believe that communications, the communications team should be responsible for all communications and then provide support as needed and bring in the subject matter experts as needed, like as pretty much the system that we have at this point. This winter, some next steps. This winter, we'll be conducting media training, as we mentioned before. In spring 2021, we hope

251to be able to start up the professional learning for our team again. Both Helen and I are members of CHESPRA, which is the Chesapeake School Public Relations Association, where I'm actually the president-elect, and Helen is the chair of the APR program. I will very entrenched with that with that group and we do a lot of professional learning. So we hope we are bringing in some of our staff for that and also the National School Public Relations Association. We're also members of that and we get a lot of training through that. That's what that's our membership organization. So we'll be using a lot of that their tools and webinars and information for online learning. In June 2021, we will conduct a cross-departmental review of all platforms, including the website, and come up with a plan to

252align them and hopefully save some dollars in the process. And so this is where we are up to right now. As I mentioned earlier, I was really excited to come here and have actually a plan that had already been done and an opportunity to see the recommendations and be able to be a part of implementing them. And I think I mentioned earlier, but I will reiterate again that our team is actually in the throes of putting together the... ACPS Strategic Communications and Community Engagement Plan that will align with our strategic plan. We're in the process of that. Both teams are working together. That was a big focus for our retreat and making sure that every strategy that we put in there speaks to the work of the team. And so we've been building that together

253and we hope to have that in February 2021. So I will open it up for questions. Okay. I see Ms. Alderton. Yep, I just have a very quick question. In one of the slides and in the discussion, you shared that we're looking into sort of securing a budget for the customer relations management system. And my flat out question is, is that something that's going to come to us or that needs to come to the board, you know, as we're working through this budget season? because I think a lot of us have talked about how like super that important, super important that is to us. So just want to know if that's something we should be looking for, flagging, et cetera. We already flagged last year, so it's on our radar. Like it's already there. It's

254also in my evaluation too. So it will definitely be in the budget. Great. Thank you. Next up, Ms. Thornton. Thank you. And Ms. Alderton took the words right out of my mouth. That was actually my main question as well. But just to add on to that, I did notice that there was a recommendation that we might need additional staff to help manage that program. And I was a little bit like wondering why that might be because to me, the purpose of it is to kind of be more efficient and free up staff time. So I was curious as to the need to add an additional person or persons to that. And going off of that as well, and this is a little bit nitpicky, but I just figured I'd comment on it. I see that

255we have called the customer response system a customer complaint system. And to me, I think we want to make sure that we keep the umbrella wide on that and stay with the, I think we initially called it a customer service response system. because it should be kind of a filter for emails and concerns and complaints, but we don't want that to be the exclusive source of giving complaints to the school system. But just something small to point out. Thank you. And I think typically it's called, this was written in the recommendation. I wouldn't call it that for sure. But I think typically it's called the customer relationship management system. And so a CRM. So that's, that's what we would call it. But knowing us, we'll probably come up with something jazzy, you know, to make

256it, make it easy, easy to remember system. For your first question, I'm not a hundred percent. If I, you could just clarify what you're pointing to about the position. Are you talking specifically about? the customer relationship management system or something else when you talk about the position? Sure. I think it's on slide 15. If we could pull that up really quickly. Sure. Okay. Yes. And so where it says customer complaint system. Oops. Yes. Yes. So it says identifying budget for additional staffing to implement and operate. And I was just curious as to what additional staffing would be necessary for that. Well, I will tell you. Again, you know, I always pull on my experiences and we had instituted something similar to this in my previous school division. We definitely had to have a person that

257was on this full time. This is an ever growing, once people know that it exists, especially with, you know, we sort of created a... particular email for that and every we used it for a lot of our campaigns so right now for instance if um i'll give you an example if we wanted people to send us questions about the identity project um it would go to that particular website and then it would go to the particular person that could answer that but you have to have a person that's monitoring that so that we don't have a problem with customer service after we've you know, said to the community, oh, we have this wonderful system. And then no, you don't have one person that's monitoring and ensuring that those questions are actually being answered and that

258people and they're following up with people that they're closing those questions out. I know for myself, I used to get all of the questions previously when I worked in the superintendent's office and I had to make sure they were closed out in the system. But that person, you would hound you and say, you haven't answered this question. But it really helped to make sure that people didn't feel that their questions went unanswered after you. gone out and said you have this particular ability, oops, I don't know how that's happening. If you have somebody else's screen is showing up, that's weird. Okay, I'm going to stop sharing because I don't know why I'm seeing somebody else's screen show up. That's very strange. It said Ryan. Yeah, and that's not me. Well, yeah, I know. I'm sorry.

259We took over because you were only showing the last slide and referring to the different slides. I thought I was getting Zoom bombed. Thank you. So to just wrap up the answer, I think it's critical that when we institute this kind of system, that it goes along with having the right staff in place to be able to monitor because then you create a customer service problem, a bigger customer service problem for yourself. So that's what we're talking about. Okay. And I think it would, because I think what it would do is really free up Dr. Hutchings' time from doing it and also allow board members to know that things are being addressed in a timely manner without having Dr. Hutchings have to spend a lot of time doing that every day, would be my guess.

260Dr. Reeve? Yeah, thank you for the update from the team, Ms. Burgos. And I just want to say kudos to the communications team because I think, agreed that it's a small team and you all are working very hard. And I, for one, have seen a lot of improvements to the website that I think have been really terrific. I think the ACPS at-home microsite is very user-friendly. I think the videos that I've seen have been really excellent. the ACPS Express is full of information. And, you know, it's kind of funny because one of the pieces of feedback that I've heard is that there's actually too much, almost like too much information on the ACPS Express, which I think is a testament to how far like the communications have come. That's a really good thing. But with

261regards to the bite snack meal, I think Ms. Lloyd was talking about how the ACPS... express has tried to incorporate that concept, but I'm not really, I'm not sure how that's happening. So I would like some clarity about that. Because I was thinking maybe we need like a too, you know, too long, didn't read summary points or something with the ACPS express. Because I think we've seen like with this. the capacity in the building. You know, it's like the information's there, but people are just not finding it because there's so much information there, which is great. And then... I also wanted to make a comment about branding, just like for like the future. You know, I think branding, it can be helpful or it can be distracting. And I think that Alexandria is a very

262smart and savvy community. And sometimes branding can come across like smoke and mirrors to people. You know, we also talk about how we're a diverse community and we have many non-English speaking families. And so I think about that too, like. I think that when we use branding, it has to be simple and direct and a message to its essence. And so I'm going to give you all one example because it's kind of fun. It is kind of funny if you it's one of the topics on our board agenda tonight, which is the enhanced continuity of learning 5.0 reimagining schools update. folks, like it's just the reopening schools update. I just, I'm just like saying like the branding, I think that's something to think about. Like, how can we like simplify that in the future so

263that people can, can find the information. But, but if you could talk about the, the bite snack meal, and then also I think you touched on this, but just how we're sharing that information with our families who don't subscribe to the express or who don't speak English. If you could just expand on that a little bit, that'd be great. Sure. So I'll take the branding one first. I think that's one of the reasons we came up with Virtual Plus. When I came here, I will be honest, I was like, what is this 2.0, 3.0, 4.0? I was just, it's hard to, I get it from, it's like inside baseball. Like we need that for ourselves, like all the iterations of the different plans that we do. But for the community, they needed something different. we

264created the Virtual Plus brand so that we could basically say, well, we have this and then there's more coming, right? So it was like, and we've sort of kept that going throughout this time. I think even when we had the 5.0, one of the things that we, even with the survey, we put the Virtual Plus there because Virtual Plus hasn't gone away. It's still in existence, but now we've created another. piece of that, which is, you know, the phase reentry. So I think that I completely agree with you. That's why I said before, we won't call it a CRM system. It'll be something branded that people know that this is our way of communicating with the school division about issues or. questions and things that we have. So I think we will have to come

265up with something like that. But I am completely in agreement with you. We want people to remember what we're talking about. And sometimes, you know, as I know, this is very common in school divisions because we have lots of jargon and education ease that we use. And so I completely understand that that's something that we have to have to do better with. And so I will take that to back to the team and we'll continue to work on that. In terms of the express, I think. One of the challenges that we have, so this is what we hear, well, I didn't get that information. We're like, we put it in express, right? But it is a lot to digest and a lot to think about. So one of the things that I have actually talked

266to the outreach team with Tanika, and we have our new community outreach specialist starting next Monday, which I'm really excited about. Spanish speaking, so she'll be able to really work with that community as well, work with our family liaisons. But what's really exciting is that between the two of them, they have a great expertise, not only in addressing the last question they asked about making sure we reach those hard to reach communities. So they'll be working, of course, very closely with the FACE team. But one of the things that I have actually spoken to Tanika about that would be really important for the team, and I know that. Helen actually has also spoken to her about this, is how do we create those bite-sized messages for those communities, especially that just cannot digest all this

267information at one single time. I mean, I have to review Express every week and sometimes have to take a deep breath before I read it because there's so much, you know, and then you're looking at links and all these things. So I completely understand how communities feel, but at the same time, I feel like We need to be able to provide the information. Then we have the website. So that's sort of like a whole nother, right? That's sort of the, that's the snack, you know, if you will, right? You can go on there and get these pieces of information. The Express is the whole meal. If you really want to be really hungry, you get all the information. But then the text messages and the WhatsApp messages and so forth, so on and so forth.

268Those are the bite-sized pieces. I know the FACE team has also been talking about, I mean, they've done some sort of these webinars for families to sort of take those pieces of information and be able to. to share them. And so what we've talked to them about, and actually it's interesting you asked this question because Helen and I talked to them last week about this, was taking the top three super duper important messages from Express. They're already translated. How do we get them in those bite-sized pieces to families on a weekly basis? So I completely agree with you. We've been talking about how do we do that in a better way so that we are... ensuring that we have the information out, especially the really key pieces. You know, it's always hard to prioritize what's

269more important than the other, but I think, you know, on a weekly basis, the two to three key things that are the must-knows, we can definitely do a better job with that, and we're definitely looking at ways to do that. So I hope that answered your question, but it's something that we're looking at very, very closely. Okay, next, well, we did have a question from Ms. Lorber, but I think her battery died. I'm here. Oh, you're there. Oh, your hand wasn't up again. Okay, go ahead, Ms. Lorber, sorry. My battery died. I guess this meeting's going on a little too long, but I just got plugged back in. And thank you very much for the presentation. It's fascinating. I'm really interested in our communications. My question actually follows up a little bit on Dr. Reif's.

270I was wondering in terms of new hires, are we paying attention to hiring staff who speak some of the languages that are popular in our school system, such as Spanish, American Arabic, for starters? It would be fabulous if we could have some staff out of your office that are out of Helen's office, I should say, that have that ability. So, for example, when that when you're talking about staffing the line, the. consumers, whatever, I can't remember. The helpline, the virtual plus helpline. Oh, the CRM, yeah, okay. Having staff who speak other languages would be good. And also in terms of the bite snack or whatever, the messages going out to the community. I'm guessing that working with our community partners, we could reach, at first I was going to suggest, well, why don't we get

271every school newsletter to include those little digested pieces, but actually many of, not all of the families in the schools have access to that newsletter either. And so looking for the community organizations that really do communicate with, which we work with them all now. So it's just a matter of. preparing the item and then getting it into their hands. And I know our face people, you know, are involved in that way too. But I just think more staff with that ability would be, I'm curious if that's on the agenda to do, to hire. Yes, thank you. I almost feel like you guys have been watching our meetings on Zoom or stuff because these are a lot of things that we've been talking about. So, of course, you know, I will make a plug since you

272asked. We, like our Amharic bilingual family liaison is a half-time person who does a tremendous job. We're continually having to bring him in with COVID-19. He's been really helping us with our helpline and really reaching that community. We would love to make that a full-time position. It is much, much needed. Our Arabic speaking. Staff, same thing. She's half time as well. So I'll put it out there since you asked. We do need that staff. We also, Alex Berdwan, who is our new admin assistant, she speaks Spanish. Daniela Bravo, who is our new community outreach specialist, she also speaks Spanish. So we've been very careful about hiring staff that speak other languages to help us, especially sometimes we need emergency communications. And so we need to have those staff on hand to be able to do

273that. Luckily, we've been able to work with Bethany and her team on translations, but there will come a time when we need that emergency translation, especially when we're back in the buildings and things are going on overnight. So I completely agree with you. I would love to be able to do that. With the helpline, we've been utilizing a lot of our staff across the school division that speak other languages who've been helping to do that. So I will say that, you know. thanks to the principals and some of our central office staff of administrators who have given us the ability to work with their staff to staff the helpline that speak a lot of other languages. So it's been wonderful, but that's what we're going to continue with the helpline. Actually, we're going to be

274staffing it through at least January at this point. So we've been able to identify the funds and the staff to do that, repurposing some things. So that's, you know, in a nutshell, that's one of the ways that we've been doing that. But we also have... As I mentioned before about the two to three nuggets from the express, that's exactly what the FACE team is doing. Because we have that information already translated, they're able to share it with those communities because they already have it. So repurposing information that we have and that's already translated. So right to your point. And I feel like there was one other question. Maybe, yeah. No, I don't think so, but you made me think of something else. Just to fill it in. It isn't just when I say, I hope

275you're thinking about hiring folks who speak some of our principal languages. I'm not even only thinking of that in terms of outreach to those communities as much as I am thinking about the diversity of our staff and the fact that if you look at our information office, you don't see. anybody but English speakers. I mean, at a certain level. Anyway, so I just wanted to complete that. Absolutely. And I think I've told Dr. Hutchins too, that I have a very soft spot for that too. I think I'm always looking for and encouraging people that are from, you know, making up a diversity candidate pool that that's important for us to have that's reflective of our community. So certainly a proponent of that. And we definitely have had included some of that language when we were

276doing some of our recent hiring about bilingual staff preferred and, or just, you know, from other nationalities. Thanks. Great. Thank you for that presentation. I don't see that we have any more questions. So thanks very much. And we will go on to our next topic, which is the full membership report. Dr. Hutchings. Yes. Thank you, Madam Chair. And we are going to ask for Mariah Runkle. I see her coming in. And this is like Miss Nolan's favorite. you know, presentation of all time. But this is going to be a very interesting presentation. It is, it is. I was trying to get off mute and I accidentally put my video, but it is. It's my favorite. Ms. Runkle, you know your presentation is my favorite. She was telling, when we were rehearsing her presentation last week,

277she was like, this is going to be Ms. Nolan's favorite one. So she gave you a shout out last week. But today, you know, we are going to, you know, share some more information, of course, because of this global pandemic. It does impact our enrollment in ways that have never happened before. So we do still get the wonderful Mariah Ronkel to share all of this impactful information. And she's also going to share information of how this global pandemic has impacted our enrollment as well. So I'm going to turn things over to Ms. Ronkel. to provide our presentation. Good evening, everyone. Thumbs up that you can hear me and you can see the presentation, please. Excellent. Thank you. All right. Good evening, Chairperson Anderson, Vice Chair Nolan, distinguished school board members, Dr. Hutchings, and everyone who

278was on the Zoom this evening. My name is Mariah Runkle, and I'm one of the directors of technology services. My responsibilities are around business and education system application support, which for the purposes of this presentation involves the storage, care, and validity of our student data. This evening, I'm presenting the school year 2020 to 2021 fall membership, transfer, and student ratio report. This report fulfills both requests by the board and requirements according to Virginia statute. The 29-page report provided to the board has lots of rich data, both current and historical. I've pulled out aspects of the memo that ACPS staff believes are most relevant to the board's work and also fulfill their requirements in the Virginia statute. The first slide provides an overview of our full-time membership as reported on the fall student record collection, which

279I'll refer to moving forward as our state report. We submitted this to the Virginia Department of Education at the beginning of October, as does every school division in Virginia. And this report is a snapshot of the students who were part of our membership on September 30th, 2020. This year, as you can see, our full-time membership is 15,588 students. And approximately 37% of our students self-identify as Hispanic. Another 28% self-identify as white. And approximately 26% self-identify as black. Those are our three major groups that are represented. However, you can also see that we do have 145 countries of birth and 132 different languages are spoken in ACPS, which speaks to the diversity that Ms. Lorber was speaking of and that Ms. Burgos was speaking to. It is something that it makes ACPS the wonderful place that

280it is and also presents us with our own unique challenges and responsibilities to our community. Please note that the number of students that are listed here as eligible for free and reduced meal, this currently is what is on our state report. I am required to tell you this as per statute. However, I do want you to know that this number is going to be smaller in reality. And let me explain why. The School Nutrition Services Group oversees our free and reduced meal data. The report... excuse me, the applications for free and reduced meals from our families were due at the end of October. And every year, my board report is given just a few weeks shy of when school and nutrition services send out their data. We believe it will be somewhere and as it

281has been before, which is typically our reporting number is 56%. So I do want to just highlight that as something that would not be seen as a misrepresentation. It would be seen as two specific data points. one of which is required for me to tell you by statute, and the other is a federal requirement. So I wanted to be clear about the differences that you will see when those numbers are released coming forward. This next slide here is one of my personal favorite slides because it highlights the work that the people do in the division that support registering our students. It's a three-year historical snapshot of our fall membership versus our projections. In addition, it also highlights the grade area bands in which we are seeing our enrollment shift. I would like to just take

282one small moment and thank all of the ACPS registrars, because the number 15,588 is because our registrars were out in... on the front lines in person with families from July, August, September, and continuing now. We had centralized registration sites, which my team and the registrars across the division all staffed. It was an incredibly successful thing that we did. And I'm very, very grateful to the registrars who have given their time. connecting students with their school is essential to a virtual environment and of course in an in-person environment and the registrars were on the front line and we do owe them a significant amount of gratitude. In addition, the second table down here below you will see is our projection to fall membership table. I would like to be clear that this 95 percent, yes our

283enrollment is down I'm going to say three percent even though it's down 95 from projection. It's down 5% from projection. It's down 3% from last year's fall enrollment number, making sure we're clear about the data sets we're speaking to. So for our projections, Erica Gulick, of course, who you will hear from in just a moment, our Director of Capital Programs, Planning, and Design, and the Joint City Schools Planning Commission have been essential in allowing ACPS and the City of Alexandria to create budgets and approve budgets that will meet our students' needs. We added this slide for a particular reason this year because I think that, actually, excuse me, not just myself, the entire ACPS staff believes that this is information that will help the board members and also the public to be speaking from the

284same data set. There has been much discussion about who's attending ACPS this year, who's left because of virtual or not because of virtual or any of those things. So I'm here to present a clear data picture from year to year as why students would be enrolled in June and then did not return in September. ACPS has a very transient population. We're turning over approximately up to anywhere up to a third of our students at TC just alone every single year. So I just want to walk you through this year's current data column. I won't go through all three of them as you can see the comparisons as I walk through. So here I'd like to start with the fact that there are 16, 1650 students who were enrolled on June 19th, 2020 that did not

285come back to ACPS in September on September 8th, 2020. As you can see, although it is more, it is not an overly-whelming large difference between our previous years of the turnover that we see. Now remember, we have students that leave, but we also have students that come to us that are either new or oftentimes returning. So if we take the number of students who did not re-enroll from June, and we add in the new students that we have, we have a difference of 474 students, which translates to approximately 3% of our enrollment, which is where the numbers came from from the previous slide. I also broke this down by the reasons that families gave to us understand that they are for what the families tell us that they have left for. So as you can

286see on par with other years, 622 students went to another Virginia public school. There are public schools in different states, students who leave to go back or to return or to newly become go to school in other countries. And then we have our private school non-religious, our homeschooling students, and our private school religious students. These are the three groups of students who may have made some choices based upon the current global pandemic and what is best for their families. As you can see, the numbers have increased from previous years, but they certainly have not increased by, I can't think of an enormous amount. They certainly have. This one has doubled, as you can see, and our homeschooling has absolutely increased, as has our private religious school. But I do want to note that there are

287reasons that students leave for these codes every single year. Looking at our reasons unknown, which is a great amount of work that our social workers, our counselors, and TC Williams most specifically, does a lot of work around making sure we know where all of our students have gone. So this number is actually less than the year before of our quote unquote no-show students who we have a certain number of time to find. I will be happy to take questions for this at the end if there are any, but we did want to make sure that we were transparent in this data, both to allow the board to make as effective decisions as possible, but also to ensure that our public is aware of what our data shows. The next two slides were enacted three or

288four years ago. It's actually probably longer than that because I've lost all perception of time and space in COVID. But a few years ago, when we embarked on the redistricting journey, we included these tables to be able to provide information on redistricting and transferring students and various other things. I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that there is a column that is not present for this year's table. Excuse me. I'd like to say that due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, ACPS made the decision not to capacity transfer students. And in addition, we did not grant programmatic transfers into or out of Tucker because of their modified calendar, as Tucker is following the traditional academic calendar for this current school year. So we've had 144 students that have transferred or actually. more correctly are

289not attending their boundary school and then there are reasons for this. I will use Charles Barrett as an example for this table and for the next one. Charles Barrett here you can see there are nine students that transferred out of Charles Barrett's boundary so they live in Charles Barrett but go to another school for a programmatic reason. That is because Charles Barrett's not a programmatic school. That reason would be to attend a programmatic school. Given Charles Barrett's proximity to Mount Vernon, I'm pretty sure these are nine students who chose to attend the dual language program in Mount Vernon. I will also draw your attention to the 22 students at Mount Vernon who are programmatic. That means that they have opted. out of Mount Vernon. They do not wish to be in the dual language school

290and they have gone to other schools. And what you're actually going to see is you will see on this next table that these are the reasons that students are attending a school that is not their boundary school. So three of the students that left Mount Vernon for to opt out of the dual language program have are attending Charles Barrett, which is what this three means. I'm happy again to answer questions for clarification if necessary. You'll see down here that the 33% excuse me, 33 Mount Vernon students. These are the number of new students who opted into Mount Vernon's dual language program this year. These next slides are designed to provide data around ratios of students to various types of staff members. This particular slide provides information that is required by Virginia statute. The table divides

291the numbers, excuse me, divides the membership reported as of September 30th by the number of instructional staff as defined by the statute. And it displays the average number of students per instructional staff over here on the right-hand side. It is important to point out the various the variations in the average numbers in this final column over here on the right can be contributed to several factors, including the presence of citywide specialized education programs, Title I funding, enrollment, and many other factors that are meant to promote and be focused on the equity of our students. This next table outlines the average class sizes in grades K to 5 at each school. It takes the enrollment, the entire enrollment K to 5 for each school, and it then divides it by the number of homeroom teachers. So

292those are the teachers we would typically think of as my child has so-and-so for a teacher. They are the homeroom teachers. Again, please note that these variations over here are for many of the reasons that we just, that I just mentioned. So in order to provide some level of comparison to the elementary school's average class size, I've created two tables, the next two slides, that are intended to provide a picture of class sizes and ratios at the secondary level. The first table here enlists the concept of each teacher of record in comparison to the membership of the fall. A teacher of record is the teacher who's certified to teach the course at the secondary level and is the teacher who's legally responsible for attendance and for providing a student's grade. In addition to the factors

293present for their elementary counterparts, secondary ratios are also affected by student course selection, upper level specific interests, for instance, high level AP classes, maybe Latin 4 or 5 or German 4, and also for, excuse me, an IEP requirements and various other things. This table can't provide the whole picture as to the student experience, nor is that what it's intended to do. Finally, this presentation goes from the macro to the more micro level. This final slide provides information about the student experience while still hovering at around 30,000 feet. For this table, I looked at the number of students who are in one room, please forgive the language as I know we are virtual, so I will say one Zoom, one class, one room, for during a period and therefore are being taught together. The data is

294organized to display in bands of period enrollment to provide a snapshot of the number of any students in any given class at any given time. As with the previous slides, factors around instructional programs, enrollment demographics, and many more contribute to the variations across schools and core subjects. Finally, the bottom table shows the largest number of students in each subject in any class period at one time. So each of these in this bottom one just represents the largest number of students that you may find in any period at any given time. Those are the highlights. As I said, for anybody who is interested that is listening and has not yet looked at the report, it is a 29-page report that takes us through a significant number of data and data points. I did just highlight the

295major points here and would open it up according to whatever Madam Chair Anderson would like to do moving forward. Okay. I'm looking for questions. Ms. Gentry? Thank you. I'm not going to let Vice Chair Nolan take all the enthusiasm because I too... look forward to this especially since we got to see a lot more of Ms. Runkle in the time period when we were doing redistricting so we got to see many many of your charts I just wanted to thank you very much I think you anticipated well the fact that there would be questions around the impacts of you know possible impacts about you know the delivery the the instructional delivery and you know we've definitely been hearing different reports and other divisions. I've actually, if memory serves, I've been hearing sometimes as much as

29610% of an impact on enrollment in some of our neighboring jurisdictions. So I really appreciated that data. I was just curious if you could just one more layer on that. Were you noticing in any particular in terms of the students that are leaving? Is it particular grades? Were you seeing a higher number in particular grades? And specifically, At kindergarten, were we seeing a significantly lower number of people enrolling in kindergarten? And maybe, you know, you could talk a little bit about what you think that might mean in terms of a challenge for us in terms of thinking about projecting for next year. Absolutely, absolutely. So the first thing is that I will say that the majority I want to be careful of the words, not because I'm trying to not say anything. I just want

297to make sure I'm clear and communicate very clearly that more students that did not return came from the K-6 grade group. then did the 7th through 12th. Now in ACPS, we divide K-5 and 6-12, and so I was very specific about including 6th grade in with the K-6 data. So I just wanted to make sure that when we look across the division, it is the younger students who those families have, because I did look, I anticipated there would be questions, I did look at each of those private, the students who went to private school or who opted in for homeschooling, and the majority of them are from K-6. Now, there are some students from 7 to 12 that did make those, or some families that have students in 7 to 12 that made those choices.

298And to answer your question about kindergarten, we are 232 kindergartners down from our kindergarten projection, which... I think I have a very unique perspective because I see that as amazing, given that we are in a global pandemic and we are trying to connect with every community possible. I think that it shows a lot of work on ACPS staff, including the projection team, to be able to get that close. While others may, of course, look at that and say 230. However, of those 475, the difference, half of those. It doesn't work this way exactly if you analyze the data, but if we're talking 475 minus 232, that makes approximately half that are in that age range that are because kindergarten is not compulsory in Virginia. You do not have to attend. You can opt out. You

299have to give something to the school system that says you're opting out of kindergarten, but you may do so. And so Dr. Crawford's office manages those opt outs and the homeschooling requests and various other things. has worked through all of those requests. Thank you. And so just again, do you, it sounds like because you've made those connections, you, I'm wondering how you feel like that will impact the projections for next year, whether, you know, are, are we getting, are we going to have a huge bumper crop of first graders, what that might mean for kindergarten, just any, any thoughts along those lines? So I will look to see if Erica is, I'm sure, I know she's here, but there she is. So because Erica and I are yin and yang, I do want to make

300sure that I allow her to answer that projection, that projection question. Good evening, and I apologize. I was staying off screen tonight, so I'm a little casual. But so as far as projections go, it's definitely something we're working with some of our neighboring jurisdictions to see what they're doing. It's something we're going to have to monitor throughout the year because as what we're doing changes, so may some of our families' decisions. But overall, I think we could expect to see it be an impact. We'll certainly have to treat this year as an outlier year, so we won't be. calculating formulas in the same way that we do, but certainly won't go back to what the original 22 to 20 or 21 to 22 projections were. So that's still something we're kind of working through and

301talking with colleagues about what the most appropriate methodology will be. And I will say, I'm sorry, Ms. Gentry, I did not mean to interrupt. No, I was just going to thank you. But if you have another thought, please, please. I just wanted to say one more, two more sentences that just said that. I wanted to also point out, as Ms. Gulick mentioned, that as we change what our environment is, I believe our enrollment will change. I don't pretend to understand, to know exactly how, because it will require some families to leave and some to come back. I don't know. But I will say that as we move to different learning environments, we will also want to keep continuously monitoring. Great. Thank you. Thank you, both of you. In addition to what Ms. Runkle as well

302as what Ms. Gulick had shared, we have to keep in mind, we have to be very careful to not respond too quickly in regards to staffing and those numbers because, you know, right now we saw that this trend of a decrease happened when school buildings were closed. you know, if school buildings open, we might see an increase. If we were to do some form of de-staffing of staff members and based on the numbers today, we would see kids come back in a few months and then we don't have the staff, you know, so we just have to be very, very careful. with just following these. And we do meet regularly with our enrollment to look at like these patterns and trends so that we're not being impulsive is the biggest thing for us to not,

303you know, make a decision off of these numbers for tomorrow. We can't do that right now. Okay, next up I have Ms. Nolan. Thank you so much, Chair Anderson. Thank you so much, Ms. Gentry, because that was one of my questions. So I only have one left now. So we're efficiently being a team together. And I agree with you, Dr. Hutchings, that I, in fact, I have the opposite thinking that we might have a situation next year where, you know, significantly more kindergarten and or first graders will be coming to the system. So completely agree with that line of thinking. Ms. Runkle, I would be remiss if I did not add yet again, this is one of my favorite presentations every year. I love the data and the information we get as a result and

304how. thorough you are with presenting it. So thank you so much for, again, such a phenomenal presentation as always. My question actually, Dr. Hutchings, is that, and this I think, I believe was brought up last year, but there was, one of the things that data points out is sort of the discrepancy between how many more larger classes there are in GW classroom sizes versus their middle school counterpart. And I know I try to stay away from comparing Hammond to GW because even though they might be the same age development wise, they are two very different schools. But is there any thinking around how to potentially reduce some of the class sizes at GW? It does seem to be a discrepancy as to how many more larger class sizes that school is experiencing versus its middle

305school counterpart. Ms. Nolan sounds like she was in our meeting last week. And it sounded like my voice, though, saying the same thing you just said, which is funny, because I said, I know somebody's going to ask this. So one big thing, and Ms. Runkle, I'll start and you can finish the conversation or the response. But it really is difficult to compare the two. And we have to be careful not to, just because they do serve. very different populations. Totally agree. Yep. And one major thing, which I thought was telling about this data is that a lot of school divisions, they don't provide equitable resources to different schools based on the populations they serve. Our data is showing that we are, and that's a plus. That is huge, you know, because a lot of times

306you see equal. in regards to number of staff and schools who serve very different populations and one has more needs than the other and those needs come in various ways from low income to EL populations to you know the demographics in that particular school and this is why we'll see some of those very significant differences. We have to keep in mind too that we do have an international academy at Francis C. Hammond that is intended to serve a smaller population or a smaller class size in a part of that program. That's a part of the program's culture and philosophy. So that is something that we have to factor in as well. So Ms. Nolan, spot on with that question. It was very glaring, you know, and I was reminded about it, you know, it's like,

307Dr. Hutchins, it was like that last year. And I was like, oh yeah, but I just, I want to ask again, what is the reason? You know, because it does show that way. each year, but I think it is important for us to explain that every time we release those data points. Great. Thank you, Dr. Hodgins and Ms. Runkle. Thank you so much. Next, we have Dr. Reeve. Yes, thank you for the presentation. It was really interesting. And thank you for touching on the transient nature of the population in ACPS, because I always think that's just such an interesting thing for people to be aware of, that we have upwards of 30% turning over in a year, you mentioned at the high school. And when you think about things like SOL assessments from year to

308year to year, you're not even comparing the same group of kids, folks. So that's just something to keep in mind. And I'm wondering if there's a way we can capture that transient rate in some of the data we share out, because I would be really interested in seeing it even by school to see if we have schools where we're seeing a much higher transient rate. And then that got me wondering if you're still seeing a lot of transient. students with our enrollment numbers this year. Like, are we still getting, you know, a lot of turnover right now? Are we still bringing in a lot of new students? And then this is probably getting a little bit too far ahead, but it got me thinking, you know, how student enrollment will work in a hybrid model

309where we have to keep some, you know, where there's like a choice model and we're basing it, you know, on how much space we have determines like who we can bring back. So. So if you could talk about some of those things, that'd be great. Absolutely. Thank you, Dr. Reif. The first thing about the transient population, excuse me, the transient numbers currently, I'll first address that, yes, I will. I just wrote it down. I will bring it back to the enrollment committee group and to speak with Dr. Hutchings and superintendent leadership team on ways that we can put out that data that talk about more specifically by grade bands and by different things that I think will provide the board some additional information. So I have written that down. As far as. if we're seeing

310transient, the percentage of transiency the same, I will say that it has slowed down, but it has certainly not stopped. Our EL office is doing just the incredibly. amount of work, so much work to screen our EL population and make sure that our EL families are connected and getting into schools and doing things. And they are busy every day in person, making appointments, using their social distancing. That team is really working hard. In addition, all of the registrars in schools are doing the same thing. So I don't have any hard data to answer the question. I certainly will pull that together and submit that to the board through a brief in the next chunk of time. At the same point in time, we have slowed down, so we're not seeing thousands and thousands, and we

311still are seeing new students every day just continuing to enroll in ACPS. As far as how enrollment is going to affect our capacity and what's been a discussion this evening as far as capacity numbers, and it really highlights the interconnectivity of all of the aspects of ACPS. Dr. Hart's facilities team. has worked with us very closely and we have provided this fall membership data to her team and to Ms. Gulick's team to be able to look at their numbers and be able to make their social distancing numbers and recommendations on very solid numbers. Those numbers in PowerSchool are updated and in real time and able to be available as they're updating their models. So yes, enrollment will affect how many we're able to bring in. And I do feel confident that we are able to

312provide real-time up-to-date numbers whenever requested and will continue to do so. I think that answered all of them, but if I missed a question, Dr. Reif, please let me know. Okay, it seems like that was it. I don't know anything else. Dr. Reif, are you still there? Let's see. Ms. Green's hand was up. Yeah, Ms. Green now. Yeah, but okay. Ms. Green. Okay, thank you, Chanderson. Ms. Rangel, I've always wondered, and maybe Dr. Hutchins can help with this, those students that come from countries in Asia that don't necessarily consider themselves Asian, they're still like ELL learners, they're still in that same pie, because I've seen some interesting testing numbers when that Asian category comes up. So I was just wondering, how does that work when it comes to testing or doing? You know that information.

313Oh, and also, I appreciate your presentation every year too. I think we all appreciate you. So I just wanted to put that out there. Thank you. You're going to, my head's going to get big. No, I'm just kidding. Dr. Hutchings, can I take this first? Is that okay? Okay. So. There's every everything about race and ethnicity is self-identified, self-reported. So a student who in the Asian category, it's a code two in PowerSchool, code two, the Asian category, it breaks out. We also have a specific Pacific Islander population that's different. And so the federal guidelines outline some different, very specific countries and areas which students. you know, would come from and then be put in what the federal government has decided is the correct data bucket. So the students, and as far as the answering the

314question about the testing, what I will say, and then I'll ask for clarification if I did not answer it, what I will say is the students are identified when they register, and so they unless they let us know that they would like to identify as something different, whether it would become a person who would like to identify as coming from multiple races and ethnicities versus maybe just the one they put at the beginning. If they let us know, we change that. Otherwise, that is a designation that, you know, through our data kind of sticks through that data. The Asian population, I will say in ACPS, in order to be reported on as a subgroup within SOL testing and other assessments, we have to reach a certain benchmark of a percentage. Otherwise, they will just, the

315symbol will just say, you know, not enough students to meet that. I cannot remember off the top of my head what the threshold cutoff is for. for those right now, and so I don't want to misspeak, but frequently, except for the three populations that I highlighted, the students who identify as white, black, or Hispanic, those other populations fall below that reporting threshold, and so they are not considered to be subgroups that have to make certain benchmarks to meet VDOE standards, but that is based on this exact report, which is one of the reasons it's in the statute for us to report that out. Ms. Green, please help me if I didn't answer your question. I tried. No, you did. Thank you so much. Thank you. That helps. Great. Thank you. I don't see any more

316hands up. So I think we're... We're ready to move on to our next topic, which is the CIP budget. And just before I turn it over to Dr. Hutchings, just a reminder for those who are watching and board members that we hear the presentation of the budget, but we don't ask questions until our work session. And we have one on Monday. So Dr. Hutchings, take it away. Thank you, Madam Chair. And it is now 837. So we're going to make it through this presentation. I am going to have Dr. Alicia Hart join me in this joint presentation regarding the superintendent's proposed CIP budget. So I don't know if... Who's bringing up this? Okay, thank you. Because I was like, I don't have it. I'm not prepared to bring it up on my screen. So first

317and foremost, I just want to start off by saying that, as you all know, We are all experiencing an economic downturn right now in regards to this global pandemic and COVID-19. And we have to make sure that we're being fiscally responsible as we enter this CIP budget. I think this is going to be, you know, decisions that we're making very different from what we would have done last year, what we would have done if everything was back to normal. prior to March 13th. But unfortunately, we are where we are. And it is our responsibility to make sure that we're following what the city budget looks like and that we are pivoting and making the necessary kind of changes so that we're adjusting our budget so that they're aligned with the work and also the economic

318downturn is impacting them. So I want to go into what we're going to discuss with the board today. Specifically, we can go to the next slide. These are the essential questions. As you all know, we should do everything in regards to planning based on our school board's priorities. So we're going to just go through the school board's priorities with our FY22-31 capital improvement program budget. We're going to talk specifically about the factors that were considered while we developed the proposed CIP. And then also what are the majority capacity as well as non-capacity projects that are going to be covered over the next 10 years. We have a significant focus on FY22 because that is the upcoming fiscal year. So we're going to provide some specific details in regards to that. Next slide. So we always

319want to start with the school board's priorities. And as you all recall, we made sure that this year, as well as last year, that we were aligning our CIP budget priorities with the ACPS 2025 strategic plan. Specifically, you know, these five goals are so important because systemic alignment, instructional excellence, student accessibility and support, strategic resource allocation, and then finally, the family and community. engagement. And it is so important that everything that we do, whether it is dealing with our CIP, which is the Capital Improvement Program budget, or our operating or combined funds budget, that they are aligned with the board's approved strategic planning goals. So we are always ensuring that that alignment is there. Next slide. So I want to talk specifically about some of the factors that had to be put into consideration while

320we were developing our CIP budget. You know, last year we took capacity and non-capacity. We made them two separate categories. Our capacity, you know, constraints or capacity considerations, they typically deal with anything that relates to enrollment projections. We just had that wonderful presentation by Ms. Runkle. Well, When enrollment impacts ACPS, then it does have an impact on our capacity and how we are able to provide services to our students. As you all know, we have always had capacity issues. in spite of the global pandemic we still have capacity issues that has not gone away and we are going to have to continue to address them. So with this CIP we were looking specifically at the high school project and making sure that we made the necessary adjustments to the estimates based on the recent cost

321information. So we had to put that into consideration with the CIP. In regards to our Minnie Howard displaced fields, as we're building the new structure at the Minnie Howard campus of our high school. There are going to be some increases in regards to how we need to upgrade other fields across the city of Alexandria to accommodate the displacement of our field because that is going to happen when we get to the stage of having to rebuild the new structure at the Minnie Howard campus. We also had to put into consideration the evaluation of co-location opportunities. As you all know, we are working collaboratively with the city of Alexandria to ensure that we are providing any co-location opportunities when we're doing new projects, such as the high school project, such as, you know, George Mason, Douglas

322MacArthur, in the future, Matthew Morey and Cora Kelly. So it's important for us to always consider. the co-location opportunities and evaluate those co-location opportunities when developing our CIP. Updating our elementary modernization projects was another consideration that we had to put into play for developing the CIP budget. And specifically, as I mentioned earlier, we are having an economic downturn in the city of Alexandria and across the world, really not just across the country, but across the world. And we're trying to make sure that we're preparing for that. So you will see in the proposed budget that we are pushing George Mason and the Cork Kelly projects back or pushing them out by one year. As well as the new school that we had in the budget, we pushed that out by two years. Matthew Morey, as

323well, is another project that we pushed out by two years for this 10-year CIP. We had to do this in order to make sure we're being fiscally responsible with... you know, responding to what the city budget is looking like for the FY22, you know, fiscal year 22, we needed to make some adjustments and put that into consideration with the CIP. So we, you will see that and Dr. Hart will talk more specifically about that later on in the presentation. We also had to put into consideration the elementary swing space consideration. Given the fiscal climate, it is unlikely that we can support a permanent new swing space location or other interim options will need to be pursued to make sure we're able to provide the appropriate swing space for any of the elementary projects moving forward.

324So we had to put that into consideration. And then finally, in regards to our capacity, we had to look at deferring the transportation project for the Witter Wheeler study. And this is a part of the collaboration that we're having with the city. We're still working through that study. We're still waiting for the final recommendations to determine what will be done with this particular campus. So because we don't have that information and that data as of right now, we wanted to make sure that we were pushing or deferring the transportation project. for the Witteweeler study. In regards to our non-capacity, so these are all capital improvement program projects that are unrelated to capacity. So that's why they are non-capacity. So, and specifically, we wanted to consider the Patrick Henry completion funds. And these were funds to

325demolish the old Patrick Henry building, as well as to complete the intended fields and parking lot per the approved DSUP, as well as the use of the swing space for Douglas MacArthur on a temporary basis. All of that had to be put into consideration in the UCIP budget. We also had to look at the major system assessments. So these are, you know, we take actual reports and field assessments that indicate some of the most critical needs that we have in our buildings. This is including like our HVAC, our security, our roofs. We had to put all of those recommendations into consideration in this CIP. And then we also had to put into consideration updating the kitchens and the playground projects. As you all know, these are projects that we want to pursue in the future.

326Hopefully they can continue to be a priority for us. But, you know, we still have to be fiscally responsible and there could be a situation in the future that may not allow us to do these projects in the immediate year of the CIP. So we did push some of these projects out further into the 10 year span. And then finally, we had to reevaluate and confirm some of the projects that we already had. in our CIP. This is updating like our cost analysis, our scope of work, which is captured in the CIP. So for example, the GW HVAC needs are greater than anticipated last year, as well as our technology needs. They're greater than anticipated last year. So we had to put all of those things into consideration with the non-capacity CIP budget items. Next

327slide. So I'm going to turn things over to Dr. Hart to give some more specific details about FY22 and to also go into some more specific details with the 10-year capital improvement program budget. So Dr. Hart. Thank you so much, Dr. Hutchings, and good evening again, board members. And so I'm wanting to start off tonight just giving a quick highlight summary of our FY22 CIP budget. And so what you'll be able to see is that this budget, specifically for FY22, is in the tune of $55,199,176. And this includes $30 million for high school project funding. $2 million is also proposed in FY22 to fund city requirements in relation to our Douglas MacArthur project, and those requirements include our underground utilities and our solar panels. We are continuing down the path of completing multiple renovations and

328repairs based off of our targeted facilities assessment prioritization model, most specifically with focus on priority two items. As Dr. Hutchings alluded to earlier, we're making sure we're including funding for our textbooks and technology modernization, as well as just a general acknowledgement of our current fiscal climate. So this budget for FY22 would create an immediate savings of roughly $28.6 million from last year's city approved and FY22 to be spent in future years. Next slide, please. And so as part of this update, we also wanted to speak specifically to two of our capacity projects, the high school project and Douglas MacArthur. So I'll start with the high school project. And this slide just kind of shows the three different phases for the high school project and wanting to speak to what each phase included, as well as

329the budgeted amount for that phase. So beginning with our planning phase, which started back in 2018 through the 2019 fiscal year. That was $5.2 million. And that included just our educational visioning process, our A&E planning, our educational design team support, as well as support from contracted staff. For 2019 through 2021, so we are in the tail end of this particular phase, which is the design phase, that budget was approximately $15.3 million. And that included our A&E pre-design and design contracts, as well as continued staff support. And then finally, the third and final phase would be our construction phase for this project, which will encompass the years of 2022 through 2024. And that includes our phase construction and program integration, our funds for our displaced fields, and also school programming. So the total budget for the

330high school project rounds out to be $195,571,394. Next slide, please. And before I get into the details of this Douglas MacArthur update, I would be remiss if I did not publicly thank Ms. Erica Gulick and her team for the tremendous and significant work that she has done over the past two months to really close this funding gap for Douglas MacArthur. And so just as a quick highlight, back in September of 2020, we were mentioning that we had a potential $5 to $7 million shortfall for the Douglas MacArthur project. As of this month, we've been able to reduce that gap to the tune of about $3 to $4 million. So now our potential gap has shrunk to $2 to $4 million. We've utilized a number of strategies to get us to this point, but it is

331important to note that we are not utilizing any strategies that would request any additional funding from the city to support completion of this project. Some of the strategies we have been using and will continue to use to close this gap include refining our contingencies, revising our space needs for the extending learning spaces, investigating options for our furniture procurement, as well as updating the site layout. So schedule in regards to Douglas MacArthur, a few updates is that we will have an informational update and pre-construction meeting during the week of 1130. And in regards to our construction schedule, we are continuing to finalize our utility disconnects. We are working with the city on issuing our demolition permit, and as well as the demolition contract will be issued in early December. And we will provide more detail at

332the 1116 work session. Next slide, please. Thank you. And so, wanting to speak to this particular slide, which covers our FY22 through FY31 CIP budget summary. I think it's important for us to note here just some of the shifts that we made in our projects in order to not only create some of the fundings that we've noted for FY22, but really also to what I would call right size our project budgets. You will see that through the outer years, we have shifted some projects to include moving George Mason and Cora Kelly out one year. We have moved the new school project out by two years. And we've also moved Matthew Morey out by two years. But by that movement from Matthew Morey, you will no longer see it in this particular 10-year CIP budget program.

333Next slide, please. And I'm sorry, I skipped over some of the reasons why we did that. And I just want to make sure that I do acknowledge the deferral and why we made some of those decisions. So first, again, wanting to reiterate that the team and I wanted to definitely acknowledge the current fiscal climate and the projected fiscal climate for FY22. So wanting to be conscientious of that, as well as wanting to be able to provide the team. the time to review and really update the estimates for our projects as needed in the outer years. The one thing that I do want to stress is that the team and I are really looking at lessons learned from some of our previous projects and wanting to make sure that we are planning and strategizing in a

334way that we are not repeating some of the lessons that we learned through some of our previous projects. And so to conclude tonight's presentation, just want to quickly cover some of the upcoming major events and activities in regards to the CIP. Back in October, we covered the FY22 combined funds and, excuse me, FY22 combined and CIP budget. We had our public hearing back in October. In November, we actually have five key activities. The first being tonight's presentation of the superintendent's proposed CIP budget. We have a school board work session on the 16th. We have our Joint City Council school board work session on the 17th. And then we have two activities on the 23rd to include our public hearing on the CIP budget, as well as our second work session on the CIP budget. And

335in December, we have three major activities. Two of those activities are add delete sessions with the board on December 9th and December 15th, respectively. And then on December 17th, we will have the adoption of our FY22 through 31 CIP budget. And all of the items highlighted with an asterisk just indicate activities that allow for public participation and direct community participation. Next slide. And so as we conclude, again, I just want to make sure that I'm able to provide a public kudos to my team and to the CIP group that really worked hard to put this together. That includes Ms. Erica Gulick, Director of Capital Programs, Planning and Design, Mr. John Finnegan, who is the Acting Director of Educational Facilities, and Ms. Tracy Armagh, who is our Financial Analyst on the Facilities and Operations side, as

336well as thank my colleagues over in Financial Services Department for their support to include Mr. Turner, Mr. Robert Easley, and Ms. Lauren Walker for their contribution to tonight's presentation. And so Dr. Hutchings, turning it back over to you. And I just want to thank Dr. Hart. Let me just tell you what a phenomenal leader. I have to keep saying it. And I know Dr. Hart, I tell you this all the time, but I'm going to say it publicly. So it's recorded. But you really have stepped into this role as our acting executive director. You have been side by side, providing us with guidance, insight, and making sure that you're making decisions in the best interest of Alexandria City Public Schools. And I just wanted to personally. Thank you for one saying yes to being in

337this role because it was a huge challenge, right? But you have done this job with such grace. And I just truly appreciate everything that you're doing for the organization. I also want to thank all of our team, Dr. Wilkins, as well as Mr. Turner, who provide guidance and support throughout this entire process. And, you know, overall. The board, you all are going to, you will receive the presentation, of course, the PowerPoint presentation, but also the superintendent's proposed capital improvement program budget. And it's the full overview. So you can have full details that you can read through prior to our work session on Monday, which will give you a lot of information for the overall proposed budget of a little over 550. $551 million is what the total amount is. And I know Dominic is going

338to say you need to do every single dollar amount, but Dominic, I don't have in front of me right now, but I know it's 551, a little over $551 million. He can probably quote the actual number if he's on here, but I can't see you. Where are you, Dominic? Go ahead and say the number, please. I can't hear you. Am I the only one who can't hear him? I was saying 551 million sounds like a nice round number to me. And you're absolutely right, Ms. Green. I was on mute. Yes, thank you. So I got it right. That means you all train me well and educate me well throughout this process. But I do appreciate your hard work. And I'm looking forward to our robust discussion this Monday so we can talk specific details. And

339then after this, I know next week we're going to have our joint session with the city. as well. So we'll have a lot of time to talk about CIP projects next week. Great. Thank you, Dr. Hutchings and everyone else who was part of that. So you sort of took my announcements and in terms of, yes, we're going to be talking budget next week on Monday and Tuesday, our first work session on Monday and then with the council on Tuesday. So that is my report. And now, Dr. Hutchings, do you have anything else? I don't have anything else other than to say that we have asked, but we have collaborated with the organization Open ACPS. And I think it's important for me to put that out there that we're looking forward to that collaboration. Two of

340their members are going to be joining our division team starting next week. We were able to reach out to them. today, Ashley Lombardi. She will be joining us as well as Catherine Grassmeyer. And both of them have a background and expertise that I think will be an asset to our team. Catherine, her background is in pediatric physical therapy. And she'll be able to share some information around how we may be able to better serve some of our students who receive occupational therapy and speech therapy and all those other forms of therapeutic services that many of our students receive. And then Ashley, she has a background in education and also a parent here. in ACPS. So she's going to be able to bring a teacher perspective and parent perspective to the table. So we are really

341looking forward to some of that collaboration. And we hope that people will continue to tune in to our division team meetings because they are recorded and they are posted with the slides. And we have some really deep conversations. I think people have forgotten that all these are recorded at this point, but it's important for our community to know. that we're trying to be as transparent as possible throughout this transition process. So thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. Any announcements from board members? Madam Chair, I have one. Yes, go ahead, Ms. Green. Thank you, and I'll make it really quick. I just love highlighting accomplishments and wonderful things that our ACPS students are doing. And recently I heard in local Alexandria news that our young ACPS activist, Naomi Wadler, is in an exhibit that is in

342the Smithsonian. She had a mural. She has a mural there in the Smithsonian. American History Museum. And it's in commemoration with the 1920, the, you know, women's suffragette movement. And so just wonderful display. I actually got to see it. And I just think it's, you know, it's so powerful that our ACPS students, the things that they're doing and each and every day, you know, they make us very proud. But to see that the whole world knows how wonderful our students are is just, it's remarkable to me. should definitely go and see that exhibit. It's called Girlhood. And like I said, it commemorates the 1920, the women's suffrage movement. Madam Chair, you know, in the same vein, I think I should mention that our student, Ms. Sanchez is going to be, our student rep is going

343to be the George Washington Middle School is sponsoring with the Northern Virginia PTA an anti-racism webinar tomorrow. at three o'clock from 325 to 430. And I know I'm signing up, but I just didn't know there was an email today. So I think most of you got that information, but I think it might be something very well worth listening. Is it tomorrow or it's Saturday, I think? Is it Saturday? Saturday, Saturday, Saturday. It's Saturday. Our meeting has gone long, but not quite that long. If we had our normal time, we would be into Friday. But I just wanted to make sure about that. But thank you for that as well. If I see no one else seems to have an announcement. So now all I'm looking for is a motion to adjourn. Madam Chair, I move

344we adjourn. Great. Ms. Green seconds Ms. Lorber's motion to adjourn and I'll call for a vote on it. Cindy Anderson, yes. Veronica Nolan. Sorry, yes. Okay. Megan Alderton. Yes. Rami Jantri. Yes. Jacinta Green. Yes. Margaret Lorber. Yes. Michelle Reif. Yes. Christopher Suarez. Yes. Heather Thornton. Yes. Okay, that's 9-0. We are adjourned at, say, 9-0-3, five hours after we started.