001Susan, thank you. Okay, good afternoon, everyone. This is the virtual school board meeting for December 17 2020. And I'm calling the meeting to order at 4.02pm. And I'll do we'll start we'll start with roll call. Cindy Anderson here, Veronica Nolan. Here. Megan Alderton. Here. Rami Jandri. Here. Jacinta Green. Here. Margaret Werber. Here. Michelle Reeve. Here. Christopher Suarez. Here. Heather Thornton. Here. We are all mine, present, and accounted for. So we're now going to have a moment of silence. Okay, now may I have a motion to adopt the agenda for today's meeting, please? I move we adopt the agenda for today's meeting. Second. Okay, I heard a tie for a second. So we'll give it to Ms. Green. I think I heard her first. Ms. Lorber made the motion and Ms. Green seconded the motion to
002approve the agenda for today's meeting. I will call for a vote on that item. And Cindy Anderson, yes. Veronica Nolan? Yes. Megan Alderton? Yes. Rami Jandri? Yes. Jacinta Green? Yes. Margaret Lorber? Yes. Michelle Reif? Yes. Christopher Suarez? Yes. Heather Thornton? Yes. And now, I'm sorry, but I have to ask the clerk, do we need to amend this agenda, Ms. Nielsen? We do. Did you receive the script by any chance? There is a motion in there. There we go. Okay. Thank you. All right. We need to do that before we vote, right? On this one. We have to vote on the amendment before the whole thing, right? Correct. And I know- Apologies, everyone. So Ms. Nolan, did you get today's script? Because we need to add December personnel action to the consent calendar. So actually, if
003we could just back up and if someone could make a motion to add a personnel item for the December personnel item. to the consent calendar. And we all have received information about what this is about. I can do that, Cindy. Oh, go ahead. Did you want to bring me? Okay. Apologies. Let me, I have it right. I just had it up. My apologies, everyone. Okay. So, Madam Chair, I move to add the agenda item, December personnel action to the consent calendar. I can't. Okay, Miss Green is quick on the second. So we have Miss Green seconding Miss Nolan's motion to add the item December personnel action to the consent calendar for today. So my apologies, we're going to have a vote on the amendment. And starting with Cindy Anderson saying yes. Veronica Nolan? Yes. Megan
004Alderton? Yes. Amy Gentry? Yes. Jacinta Green? Yes. Margaret Werber. Yes. Michelle Reeve. Yes. Christopher Suarez. Yes. Judith Wharton. Yes. So that's 9-0 to amend. And we now have to vote on the thing. And we have to do it again for the agenda, the adopted as amended. And so Cindy Anderson, actually, we need another. We had the motion before, but let's do it again. Madam Chair, I move that we adopt the motion as amended. adopt the agenda as amended second okay miss gentry seconds miss alderton's motion to adopt the agenda as amended and so cindy anderson yes veronica nolan yes megan alderton yes maybe gentry yes jacinta green yes margaret werber yes michelle reef yes christopher suarez yes heather thornton Yes. Okay, there we go. 90. Sorry, people. I was on another meeting until 357. So
005I forgot until we were in the middle of that. All right. So 90, the amended agenda is adopted. A lot of A's there. Now we're on to communications and addresses to the board. And we're going to start out with public comments. We have. We have nine speakers today. And for the speakers, if you would raise your hand if you're in the audience so that the clerk can see you. And for everyone to know, every speaker gets three minutes or less. And you can also submit. The clerk will have a timer, but it may not be loud enough, so she may have to verbally tell you when your time is up. I did bring the loud one today. Oh, you brought the loud one. Okay. All right. So listen for the timer. And you may also
006submit your comments and writing, either the ones that you delivered or extended ones. And for people who want to sign up for future regular meetings, we have public comment at the beginning. But you need to sign up at noon the day before the meeting. So the first speaker we have, let me see, is everybody raising their hands? Our first speaker is Jennifer Nichols. Good afternoon. I'm going to start by saying thanks for serving on the school board. It's a challenging job in the best of times. I also want to acknowledge the incredible work that kids. were the recipients of at Charles Barrett last spring. The teachers must have worked all weekend to be ready for live instruction after school was abruptly closed in March. My daughter's teacher hit the ground running that Monday and persevered
007through the end of second grade. Ms. Kaplan even found the time to have lunch bunches with my daughter as an extra layer of motivation. However, online learning this year has been a challenge and I am extremely disappointed by the lack of urgency conveyed by the ACPS leadership to return students to in-person learning. Given that daycare and recreation programs are operating safely in school buildings, students should be in actual classrooms with teachers. Indeed, my daughter attended recreation safely all summer. I'm very disappointed that ACPS has moved so slowly to return students to in-person learning. Students are losing so much learning this year. It's heartbreaking. While I have not watched every board meeting, I have watched several, and I do not feel any urgency from the superintendent. or members of the board to return kids to school.
008I beg you, bring our kids back. Find a way to open the buildings, use every available space as soon as possible. Distance learning is a horrible substitute for in-person learning. An example, my daughter's teacher presented a wonderful lesson on reading nonfiction text. She was kicked out of the lesson multiple times, ultimately missing it. There were no recordings. There's no way for her to experience or capture that learning. Another example, my daughter often participates in small group for math instruction. She's generally pretty introverted, a quiet kid. The other kids in her group are not. Learning is highly impacted how often the other students talk. This also happens in in-person learning, but teachers are so much better able to... minimize those sorts of interruptions and ensure all students are learning when teaching in person. Our kids need
009to be in the building. One solution to technology problems, please consider having teachers record the whole group lessons for the main academic areas and posting those files. I've asked for that, but have been told there are privacy concerns. Please reconsider that decision for whole group lessons. I appreciate there are privacy concerns, but really, students are already required to have their cameras on all day, so we have a window into the homes of all of my daughter's classmates already. I have some requests I hope you'll consider. Please make no changes to the school calendar again. Please do not make early release days completely synchronous as happened in November. If students cannot have in-person learning, they must have live instruction. For the week of early releases in November, elementary students had one day of live instruction that
010entire week. Please, ACPS must offer summer instruction for students again. We need as much instruction as possible for our kids to recover from this school year. Please, another request, do not take precious live instructional time away from teachers and students as occurred a few weeks ago. when the superintendent and a doctor held sessions with students about how to wear masks and wash hands. Teachers and parents are well-equipped to teach students that sort of thing. Thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts with the board. Thank you, Ms. Nichols. One last thing I forgot to say about speaking is that the board does not speak back to speakers. That was one more thing that I usually say and I forgot to say. Our next speaker is Ms. Dawn Lucas. Okay. Good afternoon, Chair Anderson, Vice
011Chair Nolan, school board members, Dr. Hutchings, and student representatives. My name is Dawn Lucas, and I'm the president of the Education Association of Alexandria, EAA. I'm also a special education teacher in the Alexandria City Public Schools. Today, I speak on behalf of the EAA Board of Directors. At our November meeting, the board voted to issue a public statement of support for the approach Dr. Hutchings is taking by giving educators a choice about returning to in-person learning and not requiring them to return to in-person learning. We are grateful that Dr. Hutchings did not issue an ultimatum, like some other school superintendents have done, by telling educators to either return, resign, retire, or take unpaid leave. For me, it brings to mind a quote by Maya Angelou. I've learned that people will forget what you said. People
012will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. I believe our members feel better knowing that they were given a choice and not an ultimatum. Some EA members have expressed sincere appreciation about being given a choice. They appreciate not having to choose between their profession and their health and safety or the health and safety of their families. Each educator's decision about whether to return in person or not is deeply personal to them, and it is reassuring to know that their decision will be honored by our school division. EAA stands in support of our members and their right to choose what option is most appropriate for them and their families. We look forward to continuing our dialogue with Dr. Hutchings and central office leadership about ways to support both students
013and staff during these unprecedented times. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I wish everyone a joyful holiday season. Thank you, Ms. Lucas. Next up, we have Mr. Bill Pachek. Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to address the board this afternoon. My name is Bill Patchak. I'm the father of a second grader in ACPS and I'm also an essential worker. I'm very happy to see that planning is occurring for the concurrent teaching to start in January. Seems obvious this could have started back in September on day one, but nonetheless, it's a positive step. I was, however, particularly concerned when Dr. Hutchings said on the December 9th transition planning meeting that, quote, the metrics won't let us open or that, quote, metrics will be driving when our doors open. Because this approach to
014me seems completely useless if we're not setting targets that we have to achieve. Are we waiting for a downward trend? Are we, quote, safe if we're in the orange zone? See, relying on metrics falls apart if the people who are briefing to us don't have these answers. or worst case scenario, they're unwilling to give them. So no doubt, I believe we're headed for several more months of stalling, dissemblance, obfuscation, and half or no answers. And all the while, our children are suffering from the failures of Virtual Plus. Now, so many of us in the community are experiencing these failures. Of course, there are examples out there where teachers or students have adapted successfully, and that's great for them. But as Dr. Hutchings pointed out on the 9th, you can always find an example to fit
015your narrative, and that clearly is the administration's narrative. Now, deep down, I would hope that all of you have ran for a school board because you wanted to help the kids, not who don't need it, but the ones who do need it, the ones who are at risk of being left behind. Like the six kids with special needs in November that the administration couldn't have the courage or creativity to find a solution for, all while private schools, rec centers, and daycares continue to operate on a daily basis. Or how about the kids with teachers who frankly haven't adapted effectively? Or those who can't learn virtually despite the fact that they're not diagnosed with special needs? These are the kids like my daughter. Now, I beg you, school members, take the decision-making control out of the
016administration. Please set target metrics and hold the administration accountable so that we can finally get out of this endless cycle of surveys, PowerPoints, focus groups. And when you do, please consider the variety of risks, not just the health ones, in particular, the risk of losing an entire year of learning for some of these kids. The CDC guidelines are meant to be a tool for you all as decision makers. They don't speak for themselves. For example, red is only red because it's above orange, right? It has to be a balance against a whole array of risks. So as I mentioned, I'm an essential worker. I have to expose myself every day to COVID. And I always assumed that educating our children was an essential service. Now, maybe the school administration wants to be on record for
017saying it's not. In that case, we can all go home, right? We don't have to worry about anything. Forget it if the kids aren't learning how to read. Forget if they have crippling anxiety from social anxiety and alienating from people. But I don't think that's the case, and you know it's not the case, right? We know that educating our kids in an equitable way to ensure that their needs are met is an essential service, and it can't be done entirely through the screen, not for many of these kids. So please, no more leeway, no more room to ignore our survey results, where twice the majority of the community selected hybrid. Please set metrics, hold them accountable, get those kids back in school who choose to do so, allow them to be back in school whenever
018they can. And we should have done this from the beginning. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Pacek. Next up, we have Ms. Kiersey Chavez. Ms. Chavez, can you please turn on your microphone? Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thank you so much. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Sorry about that. Oh, good. Go ahead. Thank you. I want to speak about mental health, what it's doing to our children during this time. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Sorry. I had two girls. They're 9 and 12. I have a 9-year-old that has suicidal thoughts. She has expressed to the rec center, Patrick Henry, that she's thinking about jumping off the balcony. She has severe anxiety, anxiety attacks. She has never experienced that ever. She's been a happy child,
019learning really good. Now she's just having panic attacks, she's crying, she's missing her friends, she said she feels abandoned. She said I can't learn online, she has dyslexia. She feels like she's not getting the help at the Peg Henney Rec Center because they're not teachers over there so she does even worse being there right now. I have a 12 year old that is not speaking to me anymore, she has stopped talking, she's locked up in her room. The teacher has given her F because she's got into middle school and she needs help going from elementary to the middle and the teacher is not helping her. She asked her several times, I need help. She gave her one minute to get assignment and she cannot return assignment in one minute. So Jasmine has gotten Fs and
020she has completely given up now. She said, you know, I'm done. I'm done. I'll try my best. I'm not getting the help. I cannot do this. I need help from a teacher. I think this is really wrong. I'm having the children being home for one year. I'm from Sweden. The kids are going to school every day because they know what it does for kids to be home for this long. It's not good for their mental state. And I shouldn't, I don't think they should say that teachers are having fear of going back to school. My daughter has fear of being home. I have fear for my daughter being home, that she's going to kill herself. If teachers have fear, they can take anxiety pill, but I can't give anxiety pill to nine-year-old, make her take
021antidepressants and so forth. So she needs to be in school. Thank you, Ms. Chavez. Thank you. Thank you. Next up, we have Hakan Ozenkak. Can you hear me okay? Yes. First of all, I want to thank the amazing teachers and principals and others in our school system who have been helping our kids extensively. We'll be eternally grateful for them. I'm speaking on behalf of my 11-year-old daughter in fifth grade who has special needs, who has been failed by ACPS extensively. The fact that you wanted her to go to a different school, first of all, is a non-starter. The fact that you won't even provide for her aid to help her out personally is a non-starter. She has suffered extensively from virtual learning. She's basically checked out. She's basically on YouTube half the time. I can't
022blame her. She needs the help that she deserves, that she actually was given in her IEP. This system doesn't work. Our second daughter, who is five, who always loved school, is now hating school. Every day is a struggle. Every day is a struggle for her. Every day is a struggle for my wife. who has to balance life between our two kids. I was really happy to hear from our second speaker that they were given a choice by Dr. Hutchins. That's great. What about a choice for us? Why haven't we been given a choice, a proper choice in nine months? I don't want to ever hear about a work-life balance only for teachers. We're in this together. We need to deal with this issue together. None of us want our children and our teachers to get
023sick. Having said that, the lack of planning, the lack of transparency, and the lack of vision has hurt us all. We're not better off nine months later. How come other countries, Ms. Chavez mentioned this before, with Sweden and others, have managed this process better with minimal cases, recurring cases? We have to restore trust. We have to work on this issue together. Our children are suffering the consequences. We already were failing behind in education as a country, especially in STEM. How can we justify failing them emotionally, mentally, and physically even further? It is time to come together. No more excuses. No more slides. No more PowerPoints. Just a very clear vision on what can be done. Don't come to us with what can't be done. Come to us with what can be done, and you'll have
024allies and partners so that we can get it all together. Let's work on it together to find the solution. Please, I want to reiterate this point. Do not come to us with excuses on why you can't open these schools in a safe manner. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Next up, we have Ms. Zion Bezu. Ms. Bezu, can you turn on your microphone? Dear board members. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you for giving me a chance to speak today. I am asking you to add in your budget a separate counselor for honor, AP, and TAG students that focuses on the student's mental well-being. I recognize and understand the work you do for our students. I know that our students' safety is a priority for you. I have been part of ACPS for
025close to a decade. To be honest, it's hard when I first tried to register my kids to attend John Adams because the experience was very unpleasant and isolating. The representatives were unhelpful and the service I was getting was absurd. Now though, I am happy to say that ACPS staff members are welcoming and considerate. The change has been noticed and appreciated because I know that building the relationship with the parents can only benefit the students more. The progress in TAG and ACPS is remarkable. I watched it grow from zero to 100 in a matter of years. The academic field in ACPS has a bright future and is only going to soar. Unfortunately, there is another issue that has made me more... but impacts the students in a big way. I am expressing my concern for the
026emotional and psychological support specifically for our honor and TAG students. It seems as though we have all deluded ourselves into believing that just because our students are making the grades and passing the test that they are all right. They are not. And each one of you is taking a toll on every single student and most of them are not getting the support they need because they know that even if they go to seek any counseling, however great they might be, they know that unless it is to further their academic career. Whether it is to change their current classes or choose their classes for next year, the counselors would much rather pay more attention to the students who have separate set of grades or behavior paths. I'm not trying to belittle the other students' needs, but
027if this was an issue that I could fix myself, I would. But I'm reaching out to you because I want my children and their friends to be able to trust others and know that it is okay to feel overwhelmed and be able to know how to handle it. I realize that the counselors have been providing presentations on a number of different topics, including mental health during ruler time, but I do not see any positive effects. In fact, I hardly believe that it works at all. I advise that there is a separate counselor for our honor. AP and TAG students that focuses specifically on the student's mental well-being and does not have anything to do with their academics at all. While there might be arguments that as long as it does not affect the student's grades,
028it does not matter, but it does. The student's grades and performance can only get better when they are not miserable. I feel like this can help a lot of students and have a positive impact on not only themselves, but the people that they surround themselves with. Learning about their emotions and being able to face them instead of burying them under their workloads will lead to a better chance at success. I'm asking this because just because they make good grades does not mean that your jobs are done. These students spend countless hours at school, virtual or not, and expect that you keep them safe and take care of them. Take care of our kids and help them in a way that we parents don't know how. Please, thank you for your consideration. I wish you a
029Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you, Ms. Vezou. We have the next speaker is Ms. Lee Abbott. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thank you. Thank you to the board members and Dr. Hutchings and any other representatives that are here representing the children and the schools. I'd like to start. I'm sorry for the background noise. I'd like to start with a question, which is. why will you not provide the community with the specific metrics that you want to use in order for the children to go back to school? So I'd like to say that again, what is the reason why we, the community, have not been provided the metrics that we're going to be adhering to in order to open the schools? I'm an assistant teacher at a private school wherein
030we haven't had one case of COVID since August. We have safety protocols in place and we were given an addendum to our policy manual before returning to work related to such measures. Our employer has provided us with new policies, guidelines, new cleaning solutions, masks for adults and children, gloves. and new classroom arrangements. We have been given ample opportunities to get questions answered. Our employees have made us feel safe in our workplace and my fellow teachers and I are grateful we are able to be in person and helping our children every day. The Virginia Department of Health reached out to our school administrators to guide them in preparing to open. They have since been available and responsive. It is the job of the ACPS administrators to provide their staff with pertinent information, specific plans for cleaning,
031sick leave, the COVID Care Act information, PPE measures, etc. This plan can be found on the Virginia Department of Health and the CDC websites. Children are not the super spreaders of this pandemic. This has been reinforced by the CDC, UNICEF, the WHO, and even Dr. Fauci, the private schools and daycare centers, which do not have a cap on the amount of children that are in one room, are open and operating under the guidelines mentioned above. As was said already, private schools are a perfect example of how this can be done. My children have to wait until mid-February to start school and only two days a week at that. that not full time and not in January. I am concerned that this board and the ACPS administration may try to push this date back further and
032further as they have done to the children with special needs many times this year. My children are struggling. I would like to make a shout out for the kids that do not have special needs. I am not disparaging them in any way, but they are also important. I have strong, resilient children, and they are suffering. My younger son in seventh grade actually has a 504 plan, and I haven't heard anything. Ms. Abbott, I'm sorry, your time has expired. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Abbott. You could send us more information if you would like to, but thank you. Our next speaker is Ms. Kirsten Dowry. Great, thank you. Can you hear me? Yes, yes, we can. Thank you. Hi, good evening, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Kirsten
033Doherty, and I'm an Alexandria resident and parent. I'm also a member of OpenACPS, a group of nearly 700 parents, students, teachers, and community leaders who are advocating for a safe return to school as soon as possible. First, I'd like to thank the members of the board who've been willing to meet with and interact with us over the last few months. I know you didn't choose or expect to be in these positions of leadership during a global pandemic, and I appreciate that you're trying to do what's best for children and for the staff. Additionally, I want to thank ACPS for moving forward towards a January or February open date for returning children who need it most to school buildings. It is encouraging to see movement finally towards public school reopening in this community. And of course,
034I want to take a moment to publicly thank our ACPS teachers. I am blown away every day by the monumental amount of work being done by teachers across the city. Teachers are working twice as hard to make virtual learning work for our children, constantly working long hours, sorting out tech issues, fighting against learning loss, and not to mention dealing with child care and trauma related to the pandemic in their own households. Our ACPS teachers are one of our most valuable resources in this community, and we want to do all we can to protect them and, most importantly, make them feel safe. In my limited remaining time, I would like to encourage the board to set community safety COVID metrics for reopening. At each meeting, we are directed to a screen share of Dr. Herring's CDC
035dashboard as he instructs us where we are. While this is helpful, it tells us very little about what the Alexandria Health Department and ACPS consider as safe or unsafe for reopening. Last month, six children with special needs were kicked out of school before Thanksgiving due to the community spread, yet no metrics were established for exactly what community spread we had exceeded, which caused these children no longer to be receiving the in-person instruction they desperately need. At last week's DTT meeting, the superintendent repeatedly stated that ACPS will not be returning children to the buildings until it is safe. While I respect this sentiment, we all want it to be safe, I would like to know what is defined as safe or unsafe according to ACPS. What is the level of community spread that is acceptable? What
036is the level of spread that means we won't be opening in January as planned? This will help parents, teachers, and community leaders prepare and will help us unite as a community to get rates down. We know that there is significant data to show that schools can be safe places even with considerable community spread as long as proper mitigation strategies are in place. However, if the new barrier for reentry in January and February is that it is not safe, we respectfully ask for ACPS to provide community health metrics as soon as possible, ideally before the holidays. I believe the people of Alexandria, and I believe we can work together to get our community spread down with a common goal. Please don't wait until January or February to set metrics. We need our public health, education, and
037city leaders to show us the pathway forward to make sure our children and the children who need it most can get back to school. I appreciate the leadership and service of each of you during this time. Thank you. Thank you. Our next and final speaker for today is Ms. Sarah McElrath. Sorry if I have that name wrong. Can you turn your microphone on? Can you hear me okay? Yes, thank you. Okay, great. Good afternoon. My name is Sarah McElrath. I'm a lawyer, military spouse, mother of two elementary age boys in second grade and kindergartner. an involuntary homeschooler. I'm a strong supporter of public schools. We moved to Alexandria specifically because of the public schools. We had to temporarily disenroll from ACPS because of virtual learning this fall, but want to come back. However, if ACPS
038does not open soon, we are going to have to come up with a permanent alternative. My husband and I both exclusively attended public schools and support equal access to education, regardless of socioeconomic status. As a military family, we have made a choice two years ago to live in the ACPS school district because of the diversity and quality of the schools. My husband and I managed our jobs and virtual learning in the spring. However, my husband is gone for the 2021 school year. And once it was decided that schools would be totally virtual in fall 2020, we made the difficult decision to pull our kids in homeschool. There was no way I was able to keep my job and facilitate virtual learning on my own. While we have managed, As a public interest attorney, I'm very
039concerned about those in our community that do not have the ability or resources to facilitate virtual learning. While all children are struggling, I fear that those most vulnerable will be left behind. It is disappointing that after almost six months, ACPS was not able to come up with a workable solution to get elementary school kids back in school September 2020. The main benefit to looking back on how things were handled is to plan for the future. Most will agree now is not the best time to open schools. However, schools, particularly elementary schools, should be open in the near future. Allowing only five to six children in each classroom two days a week will not adequately address this issue. Elementary schools across the country and abroad have successfully opened with more than five to six children in
040the classroom. We should do the same. We also need a plan for a full opening in September 2021. Now that there's a vaccine, what will be the policy for teachers and staff to get vaccinated? Is there a plan for those teachers and staff who do not want to get the vaccine? The Washington Post recently published an article that the window for getting kids vaccinated for the 2021 school year is closing, if not already closed, due to the lack of trials on children under the age of 12. I sincerely hope that this will not be used as a reason not to fully open schools, since all adults will have had the opportunity to be vaccinated by then. If schools do not fully reopen by fall 2021, my family and many others will have no choice but
041to relocate to another school district, and those with resources to do so may leave the public school system entirely. Again, I'm a strong supporter of public schools. We moved here specifically because of the public schools. The only reason that we took our kids out was because I couldn't manage doing virtual learning. The recesses weren't at the same time and I would not be able to keep my job. Thank you for your time. Thank you. And that concludes our public comments for today. We do have one written comment associated with today's meeting. And that is also something that you can do for future meetings so that they're actually viewed, able to be viewed by the public, which is different from just sending an email to the board. And so now we have our student representative reports.
042So take it away. I don't know who is first. I don't think Lorraine is here, so I'm just going to. Oh, okay. There are too many squares. I can't keep track of everybody. So take it away, Ashley. Good afternoon, everyone. So today's report is a couple of events that have been going on in the past few weeks. So in the week of December 7th, students had the ability to submit thank you notes or videos to teachers thanking them for their hard work. during this virtual learning, which can be difficult. Last week, we had Evergrey, but we had the opportunity to participate in a lunch, a Zoom lunch during our break, during our hour break to discuss class initiatives and upcoming events and just to engage and just talk with our classmates and then to finish
043off the week. of classes in 2020, we are ending it off with the winter break spirit week for today and tomorrow. And Lauren and I have been ensuring as part of the identity project that we're emphasizing student participation in the selection of name processes. We've been reaching out through email mostly right now. to students that have expressed their concerns with name suggestions so we're making sure that they have the opportunity to submit their recommendations for it. And we're also going to begin utilizing our social media platform, the student rep social media platforms. So the Instagram and Twitter to just make sure that student voice continues to be at the center of this very meaningful project. And after we come back from break, we're going to begin meeting with the middle school student representatives to just
044discuss with them any plans that they have. for their middle schools and how that we can help them in the system in that process. Great. Thank you for that report. Next up, we have our consent calendar. So if I could get a motion to approve this consent calendar, that'd be great. Madam Chair, I move that we approve the consent calendar for this meeting. Second. Ms. Loeber seconds Ms. Gentry's motion to approve the consent calendar. Is there anything to be pulled by anyone from the consent calendar? Okay, hearing no one, I will call for a vote on it now. Cindy Anderson, yes. Veronica Nolan? Yes. Megan Alderton? Yes. Ramey Gentry? Yes. Jacinta Green? Yes. Margaret Larber? Yes. Michelle Reif? Yes. Christopher Suarez? Yes. Heather Thornton? Yes. So that's 9-0 to approve the consent calendar. Now we're
045on to old business. And today, I just want to say that we're going to, some board members have submitted questions before this meeting, and we're going to have, we have actually time limits that are sort of associated with different subjects on the agenda. So we're going to try to stick within those. There are additional questions. Those can also be answered after the fact, after the meeting, if they're submitted to the superintendent. So I will now turn it over to Dr. Hutchings for the adoption of the CIP budget. Thank you, Madam Chair. And before we go into our adoption of the CIP, I just want to congratulate our newest Executive Director of Facilities and Operations, Dr. Alicia Hart. We are just so thankful and grateful for her leadership. She stepped into this role this past July.
046And I mean, what a whirlwind. You talk about challenges coming into facilities. We have one of the largest capital improvement. programs in the history of Alexandria City Public Schools with the growth that we've had in all of the buildings that we're planning to do over the next 10 years. And then we had a transition of our chief operating officer and you're coming into a global pandemic and it was the summer. And I just wanna say that you have done it with such grace and leadership. You talk about leaders show up during a crisis, you really showed up. And I know that the board has seen this and I've seen it as well with just how our reports and how our work is more efficient. And it's been very effective even during this global pandemic. So
047I know a lot of that is your team, of course, but you are leading the way and you're doing it very well. So just thank you, Dr. Hart, for your leadership. And thank you for saying yes to ACPS. Congratulations. So much. I appreciate that. Sincerely, Dr. Hutchings. Thank you so much. So in regards to our CIP, as you all know, we've been talking about it for a little while now. And I know that there's a motion that has to be made. I don't know if there's anything that Dr. Hart or Ms. Erica Gulick would like to say before we pass things back to our Madam Chair in regards to our CIP. I'm just wanting to continue to thank not only Dr. Hutchings, but the board for your support of our capital improvement program and for
048hopefully tonight moving forward with the recommendations that have been made by myself, Ms. Erica Gulick and our wonderful CIP team. I'm not sure if Ms. Gulick wants to say anything. No, I don't have anything to add to that. Just thank you all for your support and thanks to the team and everybody who contributed. It's a lot of work, including our partners in financial services. Okay. With that, Ms. Nolan, do you have the motion for the budget motion? There it is. There it is for you. Yep. Thank you so much, Chair Anderson. Madam Chair, I move that the Alexandria City School Board adopt the fiscal year 2022 to 2031 capital improvement program budget and the total amount of $551,483,000 with $55,199,200 in fiscal year 2022. The superintendent is granted the authority to make the necessary minor
049changes to comply with the school board. Second. Okay, Miss Alderton seconds Miss Nolan's motion to approve the capital improvement program budget. So I will, I don't know that anybody, we have discussed this. If somebody has something that they need to say before we do so, but otherwise I'm going to call for a vote. I don't see anyone. So Cindy Anderson, yes. Veronica Nolan. Yes. Megan Alderton. I think you're muted. Yes. Oh, sorry. There you go. Rami Gentry? Yes. Jacinta Green? Yes. Margo Gerber? Yes. Michelle Reif? Yes. Christopher Suarez? Yes. Heather Thornton? Yes. Okay, so there we go. 9-0. We have a CIP budget. Yay! Good job, everyone. And it was a great process this year. So thank you. Even though we would always like to have more money. The next step, we have our enhanced
050continuity of learning 5.0 update. So I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Hutchings again. Thank you, Madam Chair. And before we get started to our presentation today, I just want to say thank you to all of our staff. You know, I've heard some of the comments earlier today and people acknowledging the hard work of our staff members, and they have done a phenomenal job and very trying times. I mean, these are totally unprecedented times for all of us. And it has been a challenge trying to educate our young people, keep our mental health intact and still having to do. I know all the things that our staff. members are forced to do at home because they are working from home. So I just want to thank them for all of their hard work. I
051also just want to say that, you know, as we're transitioning into bringing our students back into our school buildings, I think it's so important for us to keep in mind that, you know, for us to make. many of these decisions. We are following community health metrics and we're also looking at the school impacts to determine whether our doors open or not. And I really do appreciate the insight and the guidance that Dr. Herring and his team in the Alexandria Health Department has provided us throughout this entire process. One thing that is definitely... definitive in regards to the work that we do, the board as well as the superintendent, you know, we are experts in the educational world, but we are not experts in the health world. And we do have to rely on our health
052professionals and some of the insight that they bring to the table. And then we use our educational expertise to determine what is going to be most feasible for us in regards to our schooling. And we have provided those metrics. And one thing that we are striving to do is to make sure that we have more of like a visual for our community so they can see when we get back from the winter break, like what will prevent us from not opening those doors. We're working through those logistics right now to make it more visually stimulating for everyone so that it's not something that has to be explained by a conversation like I'm having with you all right now. The two main things that we look at. in regards to our community metrics. We're specifically looking
053at the number of positives per 100,000 in the city of Alexandria. We also have to look in our surrounding areas. Only 30% of our staff actually live in the city of Alexandria. So our staff are coming from all over the Northern Virginia region. Some as far as Richmond, Virginia, believe it or not, that travel to Alexandria for work. So we have to look at that. We also have to look at our positivity rate within the city of Alexandria. And these are the main two metrics that the city athletic, I'm sorry, the city. The Alexandria Health Department, I want to say athletic all the time, but the Alexandria Health Department provides us with the updates that Dr. Herring provides, which he'll be providing today as well. But those are the two main components from the community
054health metrics that we use. On the school side, and this is where our educational expertise comes in, we look at the school impacts. We're specifically looking at, okay, let's look at our staffing. Are we equipped to be able to operate efficiently within our schools with the appropriate staffing within our buildings? We are, once we get our finalized numbers for our student, you know, choice and our family choice forms, we're going to be looking at our transportation. and how that is going to have an impact on opening of our schools. And we're hoping that our families will assist us with trying to, you know, bring in their kids instead of them riding the bus at times, if they're capable or able, because we still do have to follow those CDC guidelines on our buses in that
055transportation component. We then have to look at how is our building functioning and operating? Is it able to operate efficiently? within our buildings. And that's another factor that we have to put in place. So those are kind of the school impact areas that we look at. And then we make a decision based on that information. What I've said in the past is that our community health are our first priority. So that is the first step that we look at in regards to determining whether or not we're going to open our school doors. And when we decided to close them, back before November the 30th, right before the Thanksgiving break. The reason for that was the information we received from our health professionals was that many people were not going to, you know. follow the CDC
056guidelines. Many people would travel out of the area. Many people would visit family members without wearing face coverings and things of that nature. And that this entire country, including the city of Alexandria, would see a spike in regards to positives. I'm grateful for that insight and I'm glad that we reacted to that because we actually did see a spike the week after we got back from our Thanksgiving break and we're continuing to see it right now as we go into another winter break in a couple of days. So we are going to continue to stay in contact and stay in collaboration. with the Alexandria Health Department throughout this process. And I just wanted to preface that before we got into our presentation today, because I think it's important information for you all to know. But
057we will have a visual that we can use in regards to our matrix of return when we get back on January 4th. So please be expecting that, board members, really soon. And we'll be able to share more about that at our next update at our January 7th meeting. So today let's go right into our presentation and look at our central questions and what we are planning to cover for the board. We want to talk about our guidance and the health data, of course, and talk about our hybrid learning model. We want to be able to talk a little bit about the updated timeline and why we've chosen the instructional model and schedules that we're going to share with you all today, as well as some of the professional learning opportunities we're going to be providing
058our staff members in regards to concurrent teaching. And I'll be talking more about that later on today. We always like to revisit kind of our guiding principles. And that's our next slide. I'm not going to go into these specific details. It's just something to remind the board as well as our community that these are guiding principles that helps us to really navigate this work and this very complicated work that is forever changing, it seems, these days. Next slide. I also just wanted to revisit our revised pre-entry plan. You know, one thing that is so important for us right now, we do have a plan to return our students back into our school buildings beginning on January 19th through February the 16th. And it's so important for us to not dive into sending all of our
059kids back right away. Having... this staggered or phased-in approach, it really is going to allow us to be as efficient as we go back into this transition as possible. It will also allow us to get some lessons learned along the way with smaller groups as we grow into these larger groups and get routines and things in place. And then it also allows us to follow the prioritization structure. that we set up this past summer, where we focus specifically on our students with special needs, and then our English learners, and then our early learners, and then we move into our secondary learners. And we're still staying true to that, that we adopted back in July and August in regards to our prioritization. Next slide. I want to give you all an idea of where we are.
060I mean, we're using sprints, of course, because there's so much to get done quickly. But this really is a marathon, right? And I don't know if anybody has ran a marathon before. I've done a half marathon. I haven't done a full marathon. But I can tell you. Oh, go ahead, Ramey. Ms. Gentry, I love that you've done two. That is amazing. Well, I can tell you, I haven't finished a full one yet. This is a marathon that we're in right now, but we have several sprints. And this is the same concept that we used with our 4.0 and how we were going into this year as well. And we're now on our sprint number three. And this is the time that we are beginning to develop our schedules for our in-person learning and our virtual
061days. We're finalizing all of our phased in re-entry plans. We're working directly with our principals. We're engaging our community to get those family choice forms in. going to be pivoting into this transition of in-person learning for families who have chosen to come back when we get back from the winter break as early as January the 19th. Of course, this is all contingent on the community health metrics and the school impacts that I talked about just a few minutes ago, but that is where we are at this point. And today we want to be able to share just some of the solidified information that we've gathered over the past several weeks. Next slide. So I want to turn things over this time to Dr. Herring so he can give some insight about where we are with
062our health mitigation indicators. And as I spoke about before, those core indicators are the two areas that help us with the transitioning back in school. Those secondary indicators he can talk to, but we really focus on the core indicators when we're looking at our transition back. But Dr. Herring, I'm going to turn things over to you. Good evening, Dr. Stephen Herron, Director of Alexandria Health Department. Thanks, Dr. Hutchings, for having me here, and thanks for the relationships, partnerships that ACPS has with the health department. As you note on this upper part of the slide, this is the range of the risk of transmission in schools. And the CDC, if you'll note, does what we do in public health. We can't necessarily say something is safe or unsafe. What we do is we talk about risk.
063And there are these five different categories of the lowest all the way up to the highest risk. When you look at the CDC stratifications of this, to be in the highest risk of transmission within the school setting, that would be a level of 200 of new cases per 100,000 in the prior 14 days. And as you can see, the 568 is close to triple what it would take to actually be in the highest risk of transmission. Then you look at the next one where it's in the higher risk and it's 9%. I should note that there are three Alexandria zip codes that are actually greater than 10%, and it's that 10% that would actually be in the threshold for the highest risk of transmission. There are the other metrics that Dr. Hutchings noted as secondary
064indicators for risk of transmission within the school setting. But as Dr. Hutchings had talked about before, we're also looking at a lot of other data. We look at what's happening in Fairfax and Arlington and Prince William in Washington, D.C. We also consider the rolling average of the number of new cases. And right now, we're higher than we've been at any time during the pandemic. We watched the number of hospitalizations, which is about twice as the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations, which is twice what it was just about three or four weeks ago. It's not quite as high as it was at its peak. We watched the number of ventilators. We watched the EMS runs. And one of the things we watch is our deaths. We have, in the past two weeks, have had about eight deaths.
065And that's as many as we've had since the beginning of June. So we are in dire situation right now. It might not feel like that for people who are going out to restaurants and going out to cafes. I know it feels like that for the ACPS families. It feels like this for the health department. We're telling people, stay at home. We're talking about all the other things, but we are not in a good situation right now. And I'm really imploring and really begging people. to stay at home unless it's absolutely necessary to be out. That's it from my presentation, Dr. Hutchings. Thank you. I'm going to turn things over to Miss Burgos to talk about our family choice forms and the extension from this week. Thank you, Dr. Hutchings. And first, I just want to
066start out by saying that I really applaud the efforts of our schools and our family and community engagement team, specifically the helpline. We have been talking to a lot of families this week, and we want to thank our families, too, for taking our calls and working with us to complete the family choice forms. As we all know, as I shared in the last meeting, that the community meetings that we had We were able to answer a lot of questions and then we launched the form on December 2nd and we've been hard at work in working with families to get that information. And actually... As of this morning, actually as of Wednesday morning, we had over 11,000 forms completed. I mean, we have about 72% of our families who completed our forms, which is really pretty
067remarkable. We had extended the form till this Friday. So Friday at midnight is the deadline for completing the form because we hadn't heard from many of our families last week. But what's really remarkable is that this is a large increase in participation over the last week at this time when we were closer to 50%. of participation. So we've been really pounding the pavement, especially at our schools. Even our principals are on the phone calling families. Our teachers have been encouraging families to participate in the forum as well. So I just really want to thank everybody for their efforts in doing that. One thing I do want to note is that we're seeing lower rates of completion among our secondary schools, ranging from 57 to 70 percent by school. And we use the last few days
068to really do all we can to send you the right thing. 57 to 70% by school. And we're using these last few days to do all we can centrally and at the school level to have all families complete the form by the deadline. I can't stress enough that this information is super important for us to receive from families, which is why we extended the deadline to tomorrow at midnight. Our principals really want to gather this information to be able to basically match it up with our intent to reform. intent to return form data that we received back in November so that we can really see what our each school profile looks like in terms of how many staff are returning, how many students are returning, and really planning ahead. We continue these planning efforts, and
069this information is really, really critical. So we're continuing to work. I don't know what the numbers look like today, but I know that the staff was working really hard. I will tell you that The average calls that we were getting to the helpline daily were about 700 to 800 calls. So our families are engaged and working with us to get this information. So thank you all to everyone. Thank you to everyone who's been helping us get this into the system. It's back over to you, Dr. Hickman. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Burgos. And really, I want to talk a little bit about the timeline for our staff, because as we transition into our in-person learning or hybrid learning, starting on January the 19th. We want to make sure that staff are able to get into
070our buildings and to get prepared for our students to return, as well as to be a part of some of the professional learning that we're going to need to conduct for concurrent teaching and some of the required health trainings that they need to be a part of. Some of the simulations that are going to need to occur at our different school sites to prepare them for like instruction and internal logistics that they'll have to do. Because one thing that we do know. getting back into our schools whenever we transition back. You know, the goal is we're transitioning on January 19th, contingent upon our community health metrics and school impacts. However, when we transition, school is not going to be how it was when we came before March 13th. And I think we have to keep
071that in mind. I'm not saying that to make an excuse. I'm not saying that to deter people from wanting to come back into our schools. I'm saying that to give a reality check. that when we get back into our buildings, they're not going to be all of our students in one class at one time. They're going to have face masks. They're going to have sneeze guards in their chairs. They're going to not be able to go all around the classrooms like they typically do. So that learning environment is going to be very, very different than it typically is. And we also are going to have some kids who are still virtual, and we are going to have some teachers that are also virtual. So this transition is more about the social and emotional needs of
072our kids and less about the academic component. We are trying to work through the academics with our students through our virtual plus learning that's happening right now. When students return back into our schools, many of our kids, they're experiencing issues with socialization. And this is going to give them the opportunity to be in a classroom around some of their peers. But it's still going to be a lot of restrictions that are going to be a part of that space. So I want to say this to our families so that you can understand that it's not going to be the experience that everybody is accustomed to. It's going to be another new experience. And that's a disruption that happens to kids. And it's going to have to happen no matter what, because at some point we
073are going to have to go back into our buildings. Right. But I just wanted to make that clear. We will start having our staff come into our buildings beginning January 11th. We're going to use Mondays because Mondays are already designated as professional learning days, days for staff to do lesson planning and things of that nature. So we want to use our Mondays so that we're not taking synchronous days away from our students. But we want to use those Mondays starting January 11th to allow for our staff to begin to set up classrooms and do professional learning. And you're going to hear. hear from Dr. Hart later on today about some of the setups that are occurring because we're not expecting our teachers to set up their classrooms with the six foot distancing. We're doing that
074for them. So all of that work is actually going to happen over the winter break. We're almost done with that. It'll be completed December the 28th because we're doing every classroom in the whole school division that we are working through with the same amount of staff that we had, you know, prior to this global pandemic. by the way, and they're doing a remarkable job. So thank you to our maintenance crew out there. But I wanted to give you just a quick overview about that. Next slide. So Dr. Mann, if you can talk about some of the key takeaways from our teaching, learning, and leadership meetings. Yes, thank you, Dr. Hutchins. Good evening, school board and everyone on the panel. As Dr. Hutchins indicated, we are still meeting with our teaching, learning, and leadership team every
075Monday. And so on December 7th, we had the group together and we talked about the ideas and getting them feedback on scheduling and instructional models. And we took that information and all their questions and actually developed a frequently asked question document. And at the end of the meeting, we asked a survey question. We had 124 respondents. And what we noticed here, one question that was paramount was their comfort level with concurrent teaching. And we mostly had ones and twos, which said that they weren't that comfortable. And then most of their questions centered around classroom safety and technology and supports and routines. And so. We again went through a process of answering all their questions and started to prepare for what the next Monday, which was the 14th, what that survey would look like. And so
076we tried to preview for the teachers again what the scheduling would look like and which we'll go over in a couple of slides, but also what does concurrent teaching mean and defining that for ACPS. Next slide. And so also on that day, we put them into breakout rooms and we had them to really start to build out ideas. And so for instruction, engagement, logistics, and I can hear Dr. Mozingo now, checks for understanding, formative assessment. We know we did the map screener, but we also know that the VDOE is also asking us about how we are assessing our students. And so we wanted the group to really think through. These four areas, but specifically checks for understanding because it's the public speakers, Dr. Hutchins and others have mentioned we need to assess our students are
077doing. And so this information went into a broader playbook, which we are going to turn over to our principals and their teams to start mapping out. But it also informs some of the work of our professional learning team as far as what we need to focus on to help our teachers get ready for concurrent instruction. Next slide. And so this past Monday, what did we do? And so this time we had over 270 people in the room. This included teachers, assistant principals, principals, and district leaders. And so again, getting updates to them from Dr. Herring, from Alexandria Health Department, but also their feedback and ideas. And so we really wanted to brief the group where we are. going into this last week before winter break. And so again, just as Ms. Burgos went over the
078intent to return form, we went over our sprint plan, again, defining concurrent teaching, what does that mean for ACPS, our schedule, but also a huge reminder on our health and safety, what we're going to do for health mitigation indicators. And then lastly, a preview of our professional learning, which Dr. Hutchins indicated would begin January 11th. Next slide. Next slide. And we did the same survey on the 7th and the 14th. And so you'll notice here on the left, the results as I indicated on that slide that we had mostly ones and twos, but their comfort level of implementing concurrent teaching. And we saw in just one week's time with our various meetings providing the group's information, a slight transition that we saw more threes that people were starting to feel more comfortable with concurrent teaching,
079which is positive. We know that this is a new. way of teaching for all of us. And so all of us getting comfortable with this idea of what this may mean, whether we're in the classroom or whether we're at home. And so again, this will inform our work for professional learning, which we will go over later in the presentation. And next slide. And I'm now turning it back over to Dr. Hutchins. So this goes to the reason for us really implementing or advocating for the concurrent teaching model. As Dr. Mann had mentioned, we've been working with our teaching, learning, and leadership team for several weeks, several months now. It seems like weeks, but it's been months now. And some of the key themes that we got from not only our staff, but also our families
080is that as we transition into some form of hybrid learning, we want to keep our students with their teachers. We want to have the least amount of disruptions. We want to make sure that whatever schedule we implement, that it's a schedule that doesn't require a whole lot of maneuvering and changing around in regards to making it be efficient and effective. So we came to the conclusion that we were going to need to have the concurrent teaching model, and we were going to need to make some modifications to that so that we're customizing it for what ACPS needs, not only for our students, but also for our staff members. The concurrent teaching model is going to, you know, one, allow us to try to not have all of the disruptions that could occur with some of
081the other learning models that are out there. It's not going to require us to have to, you know, adopt a new schedule. We can actually implement the virtual schedule that we currently have in place that all of our students are currently accustomed to. And we can also modify it so that we're not setting up a situation where our staff have to create a lesson for an in-person schedule and a lesson for a virtual schedule. We're going to try to maintain that virtual schedule component and make some adjustments and tweaks so that it can also resonate and teach our kids for those individuals that are in person. We also focused on the two days per week and the three days virtual. So two days per week in person, three days virtual. This came out of the
082conversation that we had with the board. One day was just not enough. We're able to look at specifically, you know, what that number, what those numbers are going to look like without having our family choice forms in right now, because we know how many classrooms we have within our school building and us trying to keep our. our students with their staff members or with their current teachers, we know how many classrooms we have to accommodate these students. So the goal is for us to keep that two days per week because one day per week was not going to be sufficient based on the conversation we had back in November with the school board. Through this process, we developed a common definition of what in-person concurrent teaching looks like. And specifically, what concurrent teaching is, it's
083in-person and its virtual schedules will remain the same in ACPS. Teachers will deliver instruction and they're going to deliver instruction simultaneously for students that are actually in that classroom and for students that are having their learning experience virtual. And the teacher can also deliver this instruction either in the classroom. or virtually, because some of our teachers, as we stated at several of our meetings, they do have situations that are preventing them from coming into our buildings, whether it's a medical condition, whether they're 65 or older, whether they have someone in their household that has a medical condition, or that they have child care issues or needs that need to be addressed and that they're not able to address at this time. And we're working through that 12% of our staff who are still experiencing solely
084fear and anxiety. We're still working through that list as we speak. Some of the common elements that comes out of this concurrent teaching model is that it is a hybrid learning model. It is the one that we believe will allow us to allow those staff members who are unable to come into our buildings to still be able to teach their students. It will allow us to be able to keep that virtual schedule in place so that we're not pivoting and shifting to a whole new schedule for everybody and changing all of our student schedules around, especially that we're this far into the school year. And we also are aware that with this, we're going to have to provide concurrent teaching, professional learning on concurrent teaching for all of our staff members. And that is going
085to begin when we get back in January on a weekly basis. And this is something that will be continuous throughout this process. Next slide. So Dr. Mann, I know you're going to talk about some of our current school schedules. Yes, as Dr. Hutchins indicated, concurrent teaching gives us the ability to replicate our current school schedules. Here you'll see our early childhood elementary, the comprehensive middle school schedule, and then also our high school schedule. We know that if we still have students who are virtual, that they'll still need those screen breaks, but we also will build in breaks. Those breaks would be also in place for students that are in the building. And so part of our professional learning will be helping teachers understand what would you do with students who are in your classroom while
086students are on a screen break. And so how do we figure out ways that we can still engage our students that way? We know at our high school, Mr. Ballas and his team are already working on this, that the current high school schedule, their first period, they'll have to make some adjustments. But for the most part, our schools would be with small tweaks, be implementing their current schedules in the hybrid model when we return in January. And so, again, this just affords us that flexibility, whether rates go up, we can flip back to virtual, but also we can bring students and teachers back into our buildings. And at this time, I'm turning it over to Dr. Mazzinco to go more in depth about this student and teacher schedule. So good evening, everyone. Thank you for
087this opportunity. But I'd like to begin by just first just saying kudos to our school leaders. They are really jumping in and really planning and developing these schedules. We just had a great meeting, planning meeting today, as well as yesterday with the principals. So they are, as Dr. Mann said earlier, that team, whether it's the principals, assistant principals, counselors, key staff. developing and designing these schedules. And this isn't, I want to go through the schedule that will be implemented within the school division. What you see here is that the students will be divided in terms of the hybrid into three cohorts, A, B, and C. What's important is that for the A group, as Dr. Hutchins has already indicated, but this is just an illustration, the A group that is hybrid will spend two days
088face-to-face in person. So that's Tuesday and Wednesday. That same A group will maintain their virtual schedule, which is Thursday and Friday. Then for the B group of students, it's just the opposite. They will have virtual maintaining as much as they are going through right now in teaching and learning on Tuesdays and Wednesday. Then those students will be in the face-to-face in-person. on Thursdays and Fridays. The C group at the bottom are those would be those families who have decided to remain virtual. So Tuesday through Friday, 100%, those are families that have decided as a part of the family choice form to remain virtual. And we do have some families that are choosing to remain virtual. On Monday, as Dr. Hutchins indicated earlier, we are going to stay committed to what the teachers are already experiencing
089and doing on Mondays, as well as our students. It will remain as an asynchronous day for students. It has to remain as a professional planning day because they will need that time to continue to plan, as he indicated, lessons and projects and others for our students. And later on, you will hear about the professional learning that's essential, particularly as we are moving to this concurrent instruction and there is professional learning in other areas also. But this is a day for the educators to still learn and grow. And lastly, Mondays will still be dedicated for office hours, whether it's for teachers, for parents, for students to check in. But what you have is a picture and a schedule for the students. and the teachers here in Alexandria. And this is what our schools are. It's a
090mammoth kind of a task, but they're working on it. They've got key information to be able to put this schedule together effective January 19th for the first group of students that are scheduled to return, contingent upon those factors. So next slide, please. I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Harg. Thank you so much, Dr. Mozingo. And so I just want to start off with reiterating our commitment to health and safety. And what specifically does that mean? That does mean our commitment to maintaining the six foot social distancing within our classroom setups and really throughout our facilities, continuing to. designate or at least illustrate where that instructor safe space is in each one of our classroom setups. Again, that's just as a guide to be able to help our teachers when they return to the
091classrooms understand where six foot of distance is from the front row of desk. Additionally, mask enforcement, excuse me, enforcement will be of utmost priority. But that will take in all hands on deck approach. So our safety and security officers will help support enforcement throughout the day. However, teachers, staff and others that are in the building, we really are going to need that support to help us make sure that individuals and our students are wearing their mask appropriately, correctly and throughout the day as well. Our wonderful custodial staff will continue to do an enhanced level of cleaning. What does that mean? That's for our classrooms, our offices, and our common areas. But there will be a need for limited support from... all staff, and that includes teachers, instructional staff, nurses, bus drivers, and others to help
092us really mitigate the spread of COVID within our buildings. That means for their support in cleaning, you know, after students get off of the bus, cleaning in between classroom transitions, and just really helping us as a team make sure that we are keeping our facilities in our classrooms safe. I want to continue to stress and share that PPE is readily available. We have been stocking and really making sure our staff has had the necessary PPE since March. You know, we have a warehouse right now that is pretty much stocked with, you know, masks and gloves and other items. But again, we've been preparing for a return to school for many months now. So PPE is not an issue. And we do have more of this information and our specific plans really housed with what we
093call our facilities and operations comprehensive guide for the return to school that is readily accessible on our ACPS webpage, as well as the facilities and operations specific page. Next slide, please. I also want to give an update on our capacity exercises today. As Dr. Hutchings alluded to, the team has been hard at work to make sure that we can adequately and safely fit the most number of students back within our facilities. And so we've actually completed all of our field verification exercises. We have our classroom setups really planned to be completed for all of our schools by tomorrow, with the exception of a few rooms at a few schools, because we do have ongoing construction. And some of those construction activities will impede our ability to have those rooms set up by the 28th. We
094will also have our final capacity figures by school and by classroom to principals by December 28th. We know that this is a vital tool for them to have for planning. And I wanted to just really be able to speak to some of the key takeaway and points in regards to why we did the field verification exercises. First and foremost, we wanted to make sure we did those exercises to really... get the most accurate capacity for our classrooms and for our facilities, not just looking at solely square footage, but really taking into account the design of all of our classrooms. We also needed to do field verification exercises to make sure we had an example of how to set up our classrooms. As Dr. Hutchings alluded to, our custodians and our building engineers are really supporting
095that effort, and we needed to give them real-life examples of how to set up those spaces. Additionally, we wanted to make sure that we were taking representative samples of our smallest rooms and our largest rooms, and the field verification exercise allowed us to do that. Next slide, please. So here are some more picture examples of some of our setups throughout the division, showing two elementary schools, one being George Mason. And in this example, seven student desks were able to fit in this room. We're also showing an illustration of Patrick Henry Elementary, and eight student desks were able to fit in this particular room. Next slide. We wanted to give secondary examples as well, and we chose labs for these examples, the first being a lab at George Washington Middle School. In this particular picture, six
096students can fit in this room, and those six students are represented by the chairs that are on top of those particular tables. For TC Williams High School, in this particular lab, there were three student desks that are at the front of the room. And then there are also two chairs that are at each of those unmarked student labs, or excuse me, lab islands within that particular picture. Next slide, please. And then I want to conclude my updates with also speaking to our HVAC progress and just what we've been doing in general. We have received a lot of questions about it, so I want to continue speaking on it to make sure that we are answering our parents and our community and our stakeholder questions. Wanting to give a more, a deeper level of specificity of
097what we've done in regards to preventative maintenance. As I've shared before, we have been doing filter replacements since March, and that includes both MERV 8 and MERV 13 filters. And the difference in filters really is dependent upon our system. As shared before, some of our older systems will not be able to handle the MERV 13 filters, and we do not want to install them knowing that that could overall impact the operation efficiency of those particular older systems. Some additional preventative maintenance activities we've been doing are changing actuators, sensors, cleaning air coils, and making some module replacements where needed to make sure that our systems are properly functioning to make sure that, again, our facilities are safe for return. A few specific HVAC system updates that were planned prior to the pandemic but are currently ongoing.
098I'll speak to Lyles Crouch Traditional Academy. We are replacing 16 rooftop units at that facility, and that is anticipated to be completed in February. Matthew Mori, we are replacing some select rooftop units and that is anticipated to be completed in January of 2021. And for William Ramsey, we've actually completed some rooftop unit replacements and that project has already been completed. And now I am turning it over to Corey Kapowski. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk a little bit about professional learning. As you can see, and as Dr. Hutchings mentioned, the school that teachers are walking back into is not the same one they walked out of on March 13th. And so we want to be mindful of that with our professional learning in terms of the messages that
099are sent to teachers. And one of the big messages that we want to send to teachers is that what has been working in virtual, completely virtual instruction, will continue to work with this new hybrid model, this concurrent teaching. And so we've really put our... our areas of focus into three different buckets. We've got the technical, the personal, and the instructional. And the technical will likely come first. These are things like plugging in your new technology. understanding how you can move around your classroom, health and safety protocols, and really making sure that teachers feel safe and confident walking back into the school buildings. From there, we'll look at instructional and personal. Instructional being collaboration strategies between students that may be in-person or virtual, engagement strategies, equity, formative assessments, and really the big pieces of instructional planning
100and delivery. What kinds of accommodations will teachers need to make now that they've got some students that are going to be in the building and some students that are going to be virtual? And we'll also be focusing on differentiation of learning specifically for English language learners, students requiring specialized instruction, and talented and gifted students. We want to make sure that the experience for these students is as seamless as possible, whether they are virtual or in person, and looking at those interventions that are in place. Next slide, please. We also want to pay attention to delivery methods. So teachers are telling us over and over again that they are feeling overwhelmed and that the best people to deliver this instruction is going to be the people that are closest to those teachers that have built those
101relationships through the years. So we'll be making sure that teachers are working closely with their PLCs, with their school-based coaches, and with teaching, learning, and leadership specialists. We also want to make sure that teachers have choice in how they're engaging with this professional learning. So we're going to be making sure that there's a lot of asynchronous learning. Resources that are available, asynchronous learning that can be done whenever the teachers are prepared for it, whether it's in a PLC meeting, in a staff meeting with a group of people, or on their own in the evening or on the weekend when they're able to focus on it. We also have a division-wide session that's going to be on March 5th that will also focus on the personal and the instructional side of things. And again, really making
102sure the teachers have the option to do self-paced, asynchronous, or work with someone that is closest to their classroom, to their school, and to their students. Now I believe I'm passing it over to Dr. Hoover to talk a little bit about technology. Thank you, Corey. Yes, so we will be providing teachers additional tools to support teachers in this concurrent teaching model. We have ordered web cameras with many desktop tripods, as well as a second monitor. We are scheduled to receive those the first week of January. I'd like to add a caveat that I do not really trust shipping schedules these days. But I am going to remain positive for 2021 and hopeful that they will come in when they're predicted to. Once we receive them, we will inventory and deliver them to buildings and we
103will start working on our professional learning for our teachers with these schools. And I have the pleasure of the next to last slide and just want to share with you and the public that as you are already aware, our principals have received the staffing information. They are also in the midst of reviewing the information from the family choice form, particularly as it is located in Power School. As Mrs. Burgos indicated earlier, the family choice form. families have until tomorrow night, midnight. But the schools are already in the midst of looking at all of that and beginning to, you know, identify teachers and students and what's virtual, what's hybrid. So there is, it is a huge puzzle with a tremendous amount of. logistics, but they're working on that. You will receive, Mr. Page, I think is
104in the process with others preparing, and a brief for you for the school board that relates to how our students have performed, particularly a kind of a status regarding attendance and grades, as well as strategies in place to provide support. And the presentation is scheduled for later in January, but you will receive a brief. I think on tomorrow. Also, we have started outlining a timeline for hybrid learning. There are some deliverables that need to occur met with the school leaders today. And just again, as Dr. Hutchins indicated earlier, certain kind of non-negotiables, if we would say, do everything possible to keep siblings together, try to design these schedules where, you know, teachers are working with their same kids. So really trying to give them some guidance. make sure that as you redo your this hybrid
105schedule, schedule students with disabilities, schedule those students first. So we had a great planning session today with our school leaders related to this area. And lastly, you just heard from Corey regarding the professional learning and supports in the real commitment to make sure to ensure that there is a smooth transition for professional learning. and that our staffs can be successful as they take on some of these new experiences. And now we have the last slide. I will turn this presentation back over to our superintendent, Dr. Hutchings. And before I turn it over to Madam Chair to open the floor for questions, I just want to thank all of our staff today who were able to present. I mean, it is apparent that this is a huge task on everybody's part. It is very complicated. But
106saying the complication is not making an excuse. It's just being reality, sharing the reality that this is the work that we didn't sign up for, but we're doing because this is on behalf of our young people. on behalf of our staff. And I have to tell you that as you look at just some of the planning that's just happened now, when you want to engage. all of our stakeholders, meaning our staff members and our leaders in this process, it does take time. And I appreciate the fact that, you know, our team has taken the time to try to get it right, knowing that there are still so many uncertainties that come along with this. You know, you can have a fancy plan that you show everybody all over the world that this is what we're
107going to do. And COVID hits, but just like it just did, right? And community spread continues. And it does have an impact on your planning process. We are aware of that and we understand that and we're going to be able to pivot whenever we need to. But we are staying true to the fact that we want to provide our community with the best plan in this circumstance that we are currently in. And I just wanted to finally just thank our team again for their hard work. So Madam Chair, I want to turn things back over to you. Thank you very much. I see Ms. Luerber has a question. my internet messed up for a minute. Well, first let me say thank you. What an amazing presentation. I want to thank all those who presented and
108I've just been very impressed with the whole response to virtual education and I know how challenging all of this is. And my only, the only question I continue to have has to do with air quality. And I wondered when I was just wondering how difficult it would be for staff to eventually over the next month or so provide us with a list of each school and how we're handling the treatment of the air quality in that school. Because right now, tonight, when Dr. Hart was discussing this, she said, you know, some of the schools can't handle certain of the filter systems. And then also mentioned that. air conditioning, the HVAC system in one of the schools will be ready in February. And so I just, I want to get a good idea because it seems
109to me that the latest things that I've been reading is that the sanitation and cleanliness is not as important as the air, the transmission through the air. circulating fresh air. And so yes, the sneeze guards, those kinds of things are, you know, stopping the transmittal of things. But again, I think that the air purification, I would really be grateful for a little more detailed information school by school. And I think in the end, this will help us long term because we've had challenges with air quality in some of our schools. And clearly, it's very challenging for some of our schools. to enhance air quality. So that's my only question. Otherwise, I see how hard we're working and I feel that we're as ready as we can be given the realities of the COVID. Thank you.
110Thank you so much, Ms. Lorber, for that question. So just to clarify, the three systems that I highlighted tonight are still operational. These were just upgrade plans that we had already in progress or had planned for prior to the pandemic. I just wanted to highlight those specifically because to show that we have not stopped really our construction process or our project process throughout this entire pandemic time. And I know that... We've gotten certain inquiries about a few schools and just wanting to highlight the fact that on top of our general projects that we're doing, we are focused on some of our HVAC updates as well, but their systems are still functional and it's not. For instance, with Lyle's Crouch, it's not that the system is non-functional, will be functional in February. It's functioning now. We're
111just doing some upgrades to the rooftop units at that particular facility. And in regards to the filters, I also want to make sure that I'm being very clear as well, is that the general design of facilities, HVACs, are to operate for schools and not necessarily hospital grade. I think that there's also some level of expectation that... Our school HVAC systems are supposed to be at the same level as hospital grade. And I never want to give that expectation out to the public or to our teachers or to our staff because that's not how our systems are built and that's not how they are intended to operate. But with that said. The addition of the MERV 8 and the MERV 13 filters really do help with, you know, just air quality in general, as well as
112making sure that we are maintaining, which we have been since March, a preventative maintenance schedule. The overall... efficacy of your system is what's really going to make sure that your air quality is at the best that it can be. As well as certain schools to what you alluded to, we have had some indoor air quality issues in the past, and we've been dealing with those doing some mitigation efforts. And hopefully within the next few weeks for some of those specific schools, we'll be able to give an update via board brief. So you all know the specific items that have been done for those particular schools where we've had noted IAQ issues. If there is still a desire for us to provide specific... details by school, my team and I can definitely get something together and
113send it to Dr. Hutchings to share with the board. Thank you very much, Dr. Hart. Next up, we have Ms. Nolan. Thank you so much, Chair Anderson. Chair Anderson, I have two questions. Do you prefer us to do them one at a time and go back into the queue? Yeah, let's just do one. Yep. Okay. So, Dr. Hutchings, my first question is that I know that we're surveying both parents and we're surveying both families in terms of their intention to return. What do we do in a situation if parents were interested in coming in person only to then find out that they're... child's individual teacher is no longer or is not is not planning on coming in and that sort of changes their mind like what is the what is the plan of action for
114that in terms of like how families are making decisions based on the more detailed specific information that's happening with their specific children. Yeah, so we are still going to allow for our families when we release that information because we'll have all this finalized on January 4th in the classroom and the teachers and all those things finalized. Teachers, I mean, families will be able to make a change to. their intent to return for them if that were a particular case or situation. It is easier for us to transition or to have to accommodate a change of a student not coming into the building than students coming into the building. So it's a lot more of a simpler task if a family opts. Like right now, they may say that we're returning. Then they discover the teacher's
115not there. Now they say we're not going to return. That transition is going to be a lot easier than us trying to now accommodate more students later after we have put systems in place for the number of kids that we're going to have in our school buildings. So to answer your question, we will be able to or families will be able to make. a change. Now, we can't have this as a continuous thing. So it's not like we're going to say families can change from now until eternity. When we get back in, as we release some more information on January 4th, we're going to need to give some families an option if they need to do that. If I may just, thank you so much, Dr. Hutchings. Am I under the correct assumption that if
116a family does not fill out the intent to return form, that the assumption is that family is going virtual? Is that accurate? Well, we're contacting the family. So we're calling and we're not making assumptions yet. So we're going to just keep calling them like we're doing text, phone calls, email. Some people have gone to homes to get people to respond. So we're going to try to do every attempt that we possibly can to try to get a hold of our families. But I think that we will. at some point have to default those families that we just can't get a hold of or who just won't return calls back. We're going to just have to default to a virtual option. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Hutchings. Next, we have Ms. Green. Thank you, Chair Anderson,
117and thank you, everyone, for your work on reopening plan as usual. Dr. Hutchings, can you tell me and... There's been communication around this in the community for a while now, and it's around communications of the plan. As you know, people can't follow the school board meetings like we do, and there's a lot of information involved in this. Will we be putting together a simpler version of this communication, something very concise and to the point? so that people know exactly what we're doing, maybe one-sheeter style, but keeping it very simple, bare bones. This is what we're doing, concurrent learning model. This is when it starts, X, Y, Z type of thing. I think it would be very helpful for everyone moving forward. So yes, Ms. Green, and we're working through that. I love to hear that
118there's too much information out there, right? Because for many years we heard there wasn't enough, right? Now it's too much. Now it's overwhelming, right? So that's good. That's good news for us. That means we're putting out a lot of information out there to our community. But we are working on a more digestible way of capturing, you know, as you said, Ms. Green, what... the parameters are for us. Specifically, what we're working through to share out when we get back from the winter break is what our matrix is for returning. Like, what is our matrix to open the doors or not? And the two specific areas that we're looking at are the community health metrics. That's one specific area. And then the other is school impact. And there are indicators for both. And we want to
119have a visual that, you know, the layperson could see. and understand how we're making that determination on opening up doors or not. We also are going to provide, and we have some information out there, and we'll need to just like re-present this out to our community that will give like a diagram of when we return concurrent teaching using the virtual schedule is going to be replicated. Keeping kids with their teachers, having two days per week for like, so it gives you kind of like an overview. of or a snapshot of what this hybrid learning model looks like for ACPS starting on January 19th. So this will give what you're speaking to and what the community is asking about kind of like that one pager or that snapshot. It goes back to the whole bite, snack,
120and meal, that concept that we had from our communications audit that occurred last year. So yes, to answer your question. Those documents are in progress right now. It is trying to take all of the information that we do have to make it concise. And I think that because this information is so complicated, it's hard to make it easy to just, you know, to read without having some form of explanation around it. But we're working through some of those challenges and we'll have more documents out that are more concise. Thank you. Next up, we have Dr. B. Thank you so much for the presentation, Dr. Hutchings and team. I'm going to be honest, like I'm a little, I'm feeling a little like, I don't know if we are going to be able to meet the timeline
121for reentry. Just listening to the presentation, just thinking about the cameras having to be ordered and installed, the assignments still needing to be made. And I was... You know, I was kind of curious about also the staff access to the building on January 11th. And you mentioned that on the 7th, which is our next board meeting, and it's the only board meeting we have before the reentry timeline is really starting. that you're going to present like kind of like the health metrics, the kind of matrix for decision making. And I was just wondering if you could speak a little bit more about that, because I know we had a lot of public speakers tonight who've been raising this. I know we have talked about it in a previous board meeting. And I know that Dr.
122Herring is on the line, too. And I'd really like to get his kind of feedback about this. But I think, you know, the advantages of I just want to. I want to make sure like I understand what's coming on the 7th. If it's just kind of some kind of graphic that explains what we've already said, or if it's going to be a little bit more specific in terms of how we're going to make our decisions. Because I know that I think, you know, the advantages of something like that is that it really creates a common understanding for our community and it helps to manage expectations. And it also. help staff and families to plan. And I understand it's a pandemic and things are changing every day. But that said, like, I think, you know, that
123that's that would be a real advantage. On the other hand, I have seen, you know, other school divisions have created these matrixes and they've had to make adjustments to them. You know, their community is still in disagreement about them. And. I was kind of interested to hear from Dr. Herring a little bit more about this because I know when he talked about it last time, he said, you know, that like the CDC indicators for decision making, I think those are, those have been very helpful, but they're, they kind of, they have their limits, you know what I'm saying? And he talked about how, Dr. Herring, you spoke about how, you know, you have to look at the context and there is like this kind of art of public health that has to be considered. And
124so I'm just, I'm wondering, you know, What are we going to expect? Should we be having this really specific matrix for deciding when we're going to go back in person versus not? And, you know, and if you could just speak a little bit, Dr. Herring, to like why, you know, school divisions in Virginia, you know, have not received a little bit more clear guidance around that. Because I certainly understand that every school division's ability to mitigate is, you know, is contingent upon the size of their school buildings, the size of their enrollment and that kind of thing. But as far as if you can meet those mitigation strategies. Why isn't there a little bit more clear guidance about the safety of when you can go back into the school building? So if you could just
125speak to that, I'd appreciate it. Dr. Herring, I just wanted to answer the first part of the question, which was specifically around the timeline, because this was one of the reasons why we wanted to have a transition beginning on January 19th through February 16th. We got to keep that in mind. All of our students, every grade level is not... I would agree with you Dr. Reif if everybody was expected to return on January 19th we wouldn't be ready but we are first focusing on our city-wide students in K-2 who will be transitioning on January 19th and as you know the expansion continues thereafter so we have given ourselves the amount of time that we're going to need to transition all of our staff. different groups of staff are also going to be transitioning and being
126trained as well. Not everybody all at one time. So keeping that in mind will help you understand how it is possible for us to live up to the timeline that we've set for us. Dr. Herring, if you can talk to the mitigations component, that'd be great. Sure. Thanks, Dr. Reif, for this question. You should know that, or maybe I'm reminding because there's so many things going on, that Commissioner Oliver and Dr. Lane actually issued some guidance back in July, I believe it was, related to openings. And in that, they gave recommendations for phased reopenings and subsequent to that, and much more recently in October, the Virginia Department of Health. also issued some interim guidance related to the mitigation strategies within the K-12 school settings. And so those are actually just talking about lowest, moderate, and
127highest risk. And I think what you'll see is by combining that concept with, as Dr. Hutchings described, school impact, it actually gives a better concept, visual. of a framework from which to operate. So one of the things I should also make note of is an historical note, if you will. Back in, I think it was March, and even in February, we were talking by phone, and then we were... by in-person meeting. And in consultation with Dr. Hutchings, the leadership at ACPS was actually saying at that time, we need to stay open. And that's when many other regional jurisdictions were closing. And at that time, the science was saying, you know, there's really no reason to be opening at this point. And subsequent to that, the governor made a decision based off of things that were
128happening at different levels to close schools universally. And, of course, then the science, the awareness of the transmission of the virus and the impact it's had on our communities has drastically changed over the past eight months. But I just wanted to make note that in back at that time, there were a lot of people that were giving considerable heat about why is ACPS not closing. So I do want to highlight that, that the schools have been working very closely. And I anticipate things will be changing. And even the matrix that is under development right now isn't going to be something in stone. It'll be something that I'm going to recommend that we actually change as. we know more about how we can address this virus as the community transmission decreases. Thank you for that. Sorry,
129just one other point I wanted to make to add on to what Dr. Herring stated, but I know before we go back to Madam Chair, is we have to make it very clear that there are health and safety metrics that we did release, and they are available. You know, the top three metrics, and we shared this with the community and the board, and we made it more succinct than. I think people may not have what they... want and sometimes but we are adjusting as we move along we've had metrics and we've had guidance since June. that we continue to follow. We have posted and sent the information in ACPS Insider, and it's not a long document. We made it minimal so that it said metric one, metric two, metric three. And that was what we
130were consistently working with that we sent out. And that hasn't changed. Now, us trying to present it in a different way, which we're continuously trying to do is to present it in a different way, but we're not reinventing new metrics or coming up. with another, you know, we are making these decisions not haphazardly or just Dr. Hutchings wants to close schools. We're making decisions based off of the metrics that we've already displayed, the three metrics, and using the VDH guidelines. And specifically, it states in the VDH guidelines that were released back in July, and I think they were most recently revised maybe in October or November. that it states when school divisions are at the highest risk, they're recommending that you do virtual. So we're using some guidance already that has been created and adopted
131by the governor's office to help us with our decision-making. So I just wanted to make it clear to our community. I don't want people to think we're now reinventing something or we're now just creating metrics. We've been making decisions based off of metrics all along. That's not something... that is foreign or new to us. Thank you. If I could just related to that though, when I understand that there are the indicators, but if we have staff having access to the building on January 11th, which is the second week after we get back from the break, when would we make a determination like yes or no, based on the health metrics that we can go forward with that? Yeah, so we'll be making determinations. We look at, we meet every week to talk about our metrics
132and to, we actually look at daily, but we meet as a team each week. So every week we're going to know where our metrics stand as a community. What we're monitoring, like we're doing now, even now, even though we're not in person, we're still monitoring. Are we continuing to see this spike in these increases or are we seeing a decline? And that is something we're consistently doing. So we're going to keep keeping you all informed about that. And we'll make those determinations, you know, and when we get back in January, but we're looking at it every day, every single day. We look at our metrics, but we come together as a team once a week. Ms. Gentry? Thank you. I appreciated the questions about the metrics. I would say that I have really, I've really
133appreciated Dr. Herring coming and speaking and just understanding that I know, I certainly wish that there was one metric and one line. And if we were over this line, it would be no go. And if it was below this line, it would be go. And that's simply just not the way it works. we i suppose we could do something like that but i i don't think actually people would like the result um if we did um i i just wanted to um i actually don't have a question i i have some remarks um and i i i just want to take a minute to do this uh i'll i'll try to be brief i just wanted to say that normally um you know this last meeting of the year i'd be wishing the staff a
134restful and rejuvenating winter break um and while i certainly hope our staff gets some rest uh clearly this is not going to be a restful winter break in the typical sense because when I see these dates and all of these things that will need to be ready by the end of December and into early January, clearly they are going to be very, very busy, still working on plans for reopening. And it's this knowledge that I feel so strongly about this that I really feel like I need to take a minute to talk about this. And I apologize if I get a little emotional, which is not. typical for me for remarks. I can certainly identify with the challenges and the frustrations that have been shared by people that have sent us emails or maybe spoken
135to us at meetings, but I have to tell you I had a very visceral and, like I said, emotional reaction when people say that ACPS staff has been somehow late or deficient in their planning or that they've been making excuses regarding reopening. I really need everyone to hear this. Our staff has been been working absolutely incredible excessive hours and all that time they've been working at peak highest intensity. I've never seen anything like this level of effort for such an extended period of time. I hope I never have to see it again. But to suggest that the staff doesn't care. about in-person learning for the kids or that they're pushing this aside. It's really untrue and it's hurtful for me to hear it. I can only imagine what it must be like for these people
136that have dedicated their lives to children to hear people make these kinds of assumptions. People can certainly have different opinions, and you may disagree with the particular approach that ACPS is taking. You're certainly, you know, it's certainly any individual's right to do that. But please understand that everyone has been working very, very hard to get our kids back in the schools, really ever since the day we closed back in the spring. I also want to say that it's very frustrating to hear some of the comparisons to comparing ACPS to other entities that we're not comparable to. We are not a private school. We're not a single building or a smaller building, you know, in a private school setting. We're also not a school in another country. We're a school in the United States of America.
137And we've had to grapple with the way that coronavirus has been handled in our country. The circumstances, supports, resources, and regulations that dictate those other entities are not comparable to what we have been dealing with. I think it's maybe more relevant to compare us to neighboring school divisions and I would actually encourage people to make those comparisons because when I look at some of the neighboring school divisions I see that despite what people have been predicting all the way back in the spring that with the colder weather, there would be another big surge. There were some schools that were still trying to maybe push the envelope. Maybe they were feeling the pressure to return to in-person. And in the last several weeks, did make some attempts to go back to in-person, only to have to
138go right back to virtual. And this... led to some real disruptions for families. In these cases, these are kids that maybe only got to go back for literally four days of in-person learning. And what we know about young learners and what it's like for them in terms of the need for them to have consistency and routine, I would ask you to think about that. So I would just say, I would just say that I really think these are all important things to keep in mind. And then the other thing I just, my closing note on this is I really appreciate that everyone has praised the teachers, that even when people have been frustrated, they've praised, frustrated with the virtual plus, they've praised the teachers and said, what a great job. And I certainly couldn't agree
139more with that. But I want you to understand that when you are praising these teachers and respecting their work, the teachers. are also praising the approach that ACPS has been taking. You actually heard from one of their representatives this evening, and we've been hearing from them. So if you respect our teachers and if you want to keep our teachers, I hope you will continue to support the plan that ACPS is laying out. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to talk. Thank you, Ms. Gentry. We have Ms. Nolan up next. Thank you. I certainly don't want to follow that. That was incredible, Ms. Gentry. Thank you so much for acknowledging the hard work, which has been just awe-inspiring of our staff. And it should also be noted as well that, you know, while
140our staff is working so hard, like people are going through very real situations in their own lives. You know, we've had staff members who have had, you know, situations with their family or personal or their own children that they're... they're dealing with. So I just think, again, like, it really is incredible. Not only are they really fighting through a pandemic, but also while, you know, navigating their own lives and having to deal with things that are going on with them. So we really do sincerely appreciate each and every staff member and their hard work during this time. My question actually already had gotten answered. So it was funny. I was going to actually just send to ask the, you know, about the one pager, because Dr. Hutchings, I think you are right in that, you
141know, we have had a lot of communication. And I just think And I can only fathom, like, I think it's so hard for staff because you guys are so in it. that you're just like, how is this not clear? And I just think, again, it's just, it's challenging when people are trying to figure out with, you know, again, with their own lives, what's going on. So I do think that the continued dedication to get that one pager out there that is, you know, very visual that, you know, someone of a limited literacy level can understand. I really appreciate the commitment to that because I think that will clear up a lot of understanding, misunderstanding of what is it going to take to get people in. And then, so that was actually going to be my
142question, but I also want to acknowledge that I appreciate Ms. Reef's question as well in terms of the part about how are we doing with this timeline? Because I do want to make sure it's going to be challenging with folks with this timeline. And so we just, I think, have to continuously being as transparent as you are, Dr. Hutchings, about what's possible. Because I know you're saying that this is the hope, but there are some barriers that could potentially interrupt that timeline. So I think as long as we continue to say that and be transparent about that, that's going to be important because there's so many. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr.
143Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Okay, I just want to thank you, Mr. Lin. I just want to do a little time check here. We have used up a lot of time for this. Plus what we some of what we see from the last agenda item, but we still have about 10 minutes to be even between the two of them.
144So I see Mr. Suarez has a question. Yeah, and thanks so much, Chair Anderson. I'll try to be mindful of the time. Just briefly, I would like to ditto just a lot of the things that Ms. Gentry said, and I appreciated her comments in that regard. Just to sort of add to that, in dittoing all the things about staff and the fact that, you know, we really need to be mindful of the fact that our staff does have the best interest of all the students at heart, and we shouldn't be casting aspersions. toward our staff when we're talking about the very intense planning efforts they did. And I did appreciate the thoroughness of the presentation today and the trajectory we're going on towards this phase and approach. And I also would echo that. I think
145the phase and approach is the right way to go. I think it's a thoughtful approach. And I want to reiterate something I said before, which is that No matter what we do, not everyone's going to be happy. This is just a very difficult situation. And, you know, there's a lot of tough choices that have to be made. And there are school divisions, such as Richmond, for example, that have already decided to completely cancel in-person learning for the second half of the year. And so, you know, this is a thoughtful effort on part of ACPS. And I know the staff and teachers are working very hard to implement it. I would just put in a plug for transparency, kind of along the lines of what Dr. Reif was talking about. And also, what Ms. Gentry alluded
146to in terms of, I understand that there's no hard and fast cutoff we could set in terms of the health metrics, but I think it's going to be really important that we're transparent with the community about sort of, you know, with respect to, for example, cases per 100,000 metric, like if that goes above a certain level, when are we going to start thinking about pulling things back and things like that? So I think the more we can be transparent about some of those health metrics and like where the cutoffs are for that in our decision making process, I think that would just be helpful to foster community conversation because as Ms. Gentry alluded to, maybe the community is not going to like some of the result, but I think the more transparent we are, the
147better about that. But my question is actually about, I'm curious because I too, you know, hope we're able to maintain the timeline to the extent possible with the understanding it's going to be a phased in approach. And my question is about the vaccinations. Obviously, there's been a COVID-19 vaccination that's been launched. Earlier today, I was perusing the Virginia Department of Health website, and it talks about how in Virginia we have a Phase 1A, which is for the essential health care employees, but then right under that's Phase 1B. which says that the vaccination is going to be going to teachers and school staff. So this is maybe partly for Dr. Herring, partly for Dr. Hutchings. I want to understand if we have a sense of the timing for teachers to get teachers and school staff to
148potentially be offered vaccinations and how will that timing come into play with the reopening plan and what do we anticipate in that regard? So, Dr. Hutchings, I will start. In terms of the timing, we're all hoping, and the health department as much as anybody is hoping, that it is soon. One of the things that we really don't know is the winds. We have been asking from the local level and the regional level, and Virginia Department of Health has been asking from the state level, what does the pipeline look like after we get this initial dose, or not initial dose, the initial supply that is going to cover all healthcare workers and all residents in long-term care facilities? And we're not getting that answer yet. We are hopeful that that starts sometime in January, depending on...
149But there's lots of dependencies. There's dependencies on the Virginia, excuse me, the Vaccine Administration Management System. That is a CDC management system that has to be in place. The number of vaccinators that we're able to bring on board in addition to what we already have, as well as EMS vaccinators and our MRC volunteers who are vaccinators. the amount of space that we can acquire and that's one of the things that schools have been really helpful with in our partnership in terms of assuring us certain space and certain time. And then there is the vaccine itself. So we're working toward everything that we can control. And we're ready to go in January to 1B. But we have to do our 1A first. And our throughput for 1A will require us to get some time into January
150to be, and it might even be February. It's really hard for me to know without knowing the volume that we're going to get. It would not surprise me if at some point, based off of experience with other vaccines, if at some point this becomes very widely available, that it's not just through the hospital systems, the long-term care facilities, and the health departments, but that you'll get it at any pharmacy, you'll get it at your doctor's office, you'll get it at minute clinics, all those sorts of things. And so that will be a big game changer as well. Can I ask just a quick follow-up on that? So within 1B, is there tiering? So is Alexandria administering 1B locally, and there's sort of a tiering within 1B? And if so, were teachers and school staff falling
151within that? Thanks for asking that question. There's actually tiering within 1A. And when we looked at the volume of persons in 1A here in Alexandria, we realized that we didn't have to split the hearers. to get all the 1A together. So when we're sending things out, we're not prioritizing one sort of healthcare worker, say a home health. agency healthcare worker over a physical therapist over a dentist. We're able to say all healthcare workers are welcome to come to any of our initial points of distribution. When it comes to 1B, that's much wider. That includes what's called critical infrastructure and it's police, it's fire who are not EMS. It's virtually every city employee and of course all the ACPS employees as well. It's utilities, so it's much broader. And what we will do is we'll follow
152what the Virginia Disaster Medical Advisory Committee, they come up with a list of the tierings, and they approve it. It's a committee that includes immunologists, infectious disease, people, experts in ethics, and they make recommendations to VDH, and then VDH decides what those tierings are. I know that one of the things that you know clearly uh police and fire will be up there but I anticipate that educators will also be at the very top tier of that because of the impact that it has on society. Okay great thank you. Okay um we have time for one more question uh Dr. Reif. All right, thank you. And I just want to echo some of the comments I've heard from my colleagues. You know, I will agree that I know staff have been working so hard and many
153of them are experiencing the challenges that all of our families here are facing during this pandemic. And I really, you know, want to thank them for all the hard work that they're doing. And I also want to acknowledge, you know, the speakers that spoke tonight and that. I know that some families are just really experiencing real challenges at home too. People talked about the mental health issues or having to give up their employment. So there's a lot happening for all of us. And I just, we are really all in this together. And so I just wanted to kind of say that as well. But my last question was about the issue. I was curious how we were able to determine that we could do the two day. concurrent model, the two days of in-person for
154students when initially, you know, looking at the building capacity, we were only sure about being able to do the one day. And especially when I look at, you know, at least the last building capacity update we had, some of our schools are so much like our elementary schools, some are so much bigger. And the social distancing capacity is much, you know, smaller percentage of the population. So Can you just talk about how you were able to, without, like, since we haven't gotten the family choice information back from people, how have we determined that we're able to do the two days for the concurrent model? Yeah. So what we're looking at is just trying to get. the we know how many staff members are well we know how many staff members we were going to need
155meaning how many classrooms we were going to need available and what we had to do was was look at uh the the fees not the feasibility the facilities Dr. Hart, what did you call it? I always get the name wrong. Facilities verification. I got it. Facilities verification for our buildings to determine the wide range of class sizes that we have in each of our buildings. we know that 100% of our kids are not going to return, right? So having 100% of our kids come back, that would absolutely not work. We're not going to be in a case where 100% of our kids are going to want to return into our building. So as long as we can keep our numbers down from 100%, then we are going to be able to accommodate, you know, two
156days for each of those cohort groups into our classrooms. And that is what we're using at this point. Now, when we get our actual numbers in and we, to our surprise, have 100% who want to return, we're going to have to have, you know, some further discussions about that because now we're having a capacity issue. And we've always talked about we could have building capacity issues, we could have staffing issues, we could have, you know, community health issues. And we would have to go and look at that particular metric if we're in that case. But we don't believe that 100% of our students are going to return into our buildings. Okay. Thanks for all the great questions and comments. We are now moving on to the next question. The next item, which is the, which
157is, where am I in my, I had it ready, and now I'm, it's getting dark in my room here. The area of focus update. Thank you. It's on the screen now. Dr. Hutchings. Thank you, Madam Chair. So yes, we are. Thank you for one, the board suggesting that we have these area of focus updates because it does allow us to talk about some of the other work that we're doing in addition to addressing this global pandemic in the city of Alexandria and also in ACPS. Today, our focus is around our academic disparities in regards to our advanced level courses and our talented and gifted programs within ACPS. And I'm going to turn things over to Dr. Mann to begin this presentation. And we have several of our staff members here today to talk through. where
158we are with our academic disparities, where we're planning to go moving forward, and what some of the expectations are and outcomes that we are seeking from this work. So Dr. Min, take it away. Thank you, Dr. Hutchings, and good evening again, board. It's my pleasure to introduce the team this evening, but I'd like to also thank a couple of people who may not be speaking, but played a pivotal role in preparing the presentation this evening. And that's Mariah Runkle, who pulled all the data for us for our middle school and high school. Also, Yamari Ortiz-Gutierrez, who is running a point for us on the PowerPoint, but in the background helping. And then also Clint page verifying our data and then also Suzanne if you trail our curriculum specialist for secondary math. This evening we have
159Miss angered by them or principal Patrick Henry Peter ballast TC Williams principal Tiana Dominic or intimate interim coordinator for talented and gifted. We also have Darryl Simpson, our executive director of student support teams prep Peters Francis the hammer principal. Jody Peters, our AVID district coordinator in college readiness. And then last but not least, Jesse Mazur. And I forgot one person who was a thought partner in this, and that's Dr. Sims. And so we go to our central questions. We have four questions for you this evening. And so what does the data tell us about our disparities in our advanced programs? Excuse me. What can we learn from advanced, from AVID? advancement via individual determination and supporting students in advanced classes and then what structures and supports exist and what will we expand to ensure equal
160access to advanced programming and then again our last question is how will ACPS support students in advanced classes and go to the next slide. And so as Dr. Hutchings mentioned in our strategic plan, the board has identified several areas for disproportionality for us to examine. And so this evening brings the last of our focus areas. And this one is focused on disparities in our advanced classes. I won't read this slide to you. But again, this brings us to a close. And before we dig into our data in our next slide, just so the board understands, we've rounded the numbers. So you're not going to see any decimals. And then also just we're going to start with our CAG program and then roll all the way through middle school and high school. We go to our
161next slide. And so as we think about our first slide here, this shows our TAG enrollment at each school. It's ranked from highest to lowest. So in your left column, you see GW at 30% of the enrollment there is TAG. And then you also notice down at the bottom, our division level percentage is 15. But in our right-hand column, we also put the percentage of white students enrolled at each school. And you'll notice that At the top of the list, the highest percentage of TAG students. Also, they have the highest percentage of white students enrolled. You'll notice at the bottom of the list, you'll see that most of those schools are on the west side of town. And this is a theme that you'll see throughout all of our data slides. And so at this
162time, I'm going to turn it over to Tiana Dominick to walk us through the rest of our TAG data. Thank you, Dr. Mann. So as we look at the next slide, thank you. We are comparing the percentage of total student enrollment by racial ethnic groups to that of TAG-identified students of those same racial ethnic groups. And this chart shows that over a three-year period. And so as a result, the data indicates that the program has identified a substantial amount of white TAG students. in comparison to non-white TAG students. Next slide. Okay. And so the data that we see here, this chart is talented and gifted identified students special programs. The data indicates that the percentage of TAG identified students in our special programs has an average increase of about one to two percent. And this
163is evidence that follows, which you can see on the chart, 20 to 23% of TAG-identified students are of low income, 11 to 12% of TAG-identified students are L learners, and 2% of our TAG-identified students receive special education services. And so next we have Ms. Perrette Peters, who will share information on the honors data at Francis C. Hammond. Thank you, Mrs. Dominick. We will now transition from talented and gifted data to reviewing school-based honors data. Francine Hammond Middle School is a very diverse school. Approximately 85% of Hammond's student population consists of minority students, while only 14% of our student population consists of white students. Recognizing that there's always work to do as we move him into higher levels of academic achievement, we have areas where progress is being made, but also areas where intervention is still
164occurring. As a school, we have committed to ensuring that we identify and capture students ready for the rigor of honors courses. Looking at our data through the lens of academic disparities, 48% of our Black students in eighth grade are accelerated in math. Looking at that same data set, we recognize that while Hispanic students make up 44% of our student population, we must continue to address that only 9% of our Hispanic students are enrolled in accelerated courses in eighth grade math. Next slide, please. I will also be presenting the Jefferson Houston data on behalf of Dr. McCain. Similar to Hammond, Jefferson Houston is extremely diverse at the middle school level. Specifically reviewing Jefferson Houston's demographic data, approximately 83% of Jefferson Houston's middle school population consists of minority students, while white students make up 16% at the
165middle school level. Ensuring consistency with the larger comprehensive middle schools, Jefferson Houston also works to ensure that previously unidentified students are identified for enrollment in honors courses. As an area where consistent growth is being made, between a range of 47 to 51% of Jefferson Houston Black students at the middle school level are enrolled in honors courses for language arts, math 8, science, and social studies. We also recognize that consistent action steps are being implemented to address the 0% of Hispanic students currently enrolled in eighth grade math acceleration courses. Now we will have Ms. Bynum who will share Patrick Henry data. Good evening, everyone. So at Patrick Henry, we are just as diverse as our counterparts and we're very proud of our diversity. At our school, We are also proud that our participation and honors mirrors
166our demographics. So, for example, if you look at our black population, our black population is 46% of our middle school and our honors data mirrors that as well. They're all in the 40s. Same thing with our Hispanic data. and our multiracial data and our white data and our Asian and Pacific Islander data. One thing that we are very proud of is the fact that we start very early with young scholars in our school and shifting the mindset of children so that they do realize that they can access advanced academics. And we are also very proud of the fact that we have children who are taking geometry and algebra at an early age in our school as well. And now I'd like to pass it on to Mr. Mazur. Good evening, everyone. Along with the theme,
167and as you can see from our school demographics, GW is an extremely diverse middle school. White students make up 39% of the total population, followed by our Hispanic population, accounting for 36% of the student population. Black students make up 18% of all students, followed by 5% multiracial and 2% Asian Pacific Islander. While GW is extremely diverse, we remain a racially segregated school within the honors context. Efforts have been underway to change this pattern, reducing disproportional representation of diverse students in honors, and it remains an important school-wide goal. And the data certainly supports this. As you can see, whites, while 39% of the population, are overrepresented within the honors setting, while Black and specifically Hispanic students remain underrepresented in each content area. As you analyze the data, the numbers are important and clearly illustrate the need
168for continued work and inquiry that asks, why do we have such a significant gap in course placement between whites and other populations? We know the tag identification drives some of this data. However, continued inquiry is needed to understand this phenomenon in course-taking patterns. And in future slides, we will discuss some positive strategies that are in place. And now, on to Mr. Ballas. Good evening, everyone. And as you see on our top line there, our school demographics, we of course also are a wonderfully diverse school. We are a majority Hispanic school at 42%, followed by our Black population, 27, our white population at 25, and multiracial, 2, Asian Pacific Islander, 4, and American Indian, 0.3. The data that you see here in the slide points that there's a show in a move of some positive directions,
169but also highlights some major disparities in terms of our enrollment in advanced courses. As you can see here, one of the most glaring disparities identified by the data is the advanced placement or AP course enrollment. While our white population only makes up 25% of our total school population, this same subgroup makes up almost 60% of our AP enrollment. This percentage is still two times above the combined enrollment of Black and Hispanic students in AP. While we always celebrate the diversity as a major strength in our high school, this diversity seems to slip away to segregation when students report to their classrooms, especially in AP. This same data disparity can be seen in our STEM cohorts that begin at Minnie Howard in grade nine. I do believe it should be noted that the high school has
170been recognized for various movement and data. regarding underrepresented groups. In 2018, TC Williams High School was awarded for increasing females in AP computer science and also recognized in 2018 for expanding AP enrollment across all subgroups. So there has been some movement in the right direction, but we still have a lot of work to do. And if you draw your attention to the dual enrollment courses, which are college level and college bearing courses, the data begin to look a bit more reflective or perhaps balanced regarding the overall school population. So as we look at dual enrollment courses and the dual enrollment data, there are different entry requirements and end of course differences from AP that could account for some of these differences. And I will now turn it back over to my colleague, Jesse Mazur. Thank
171you. This particular slide discusses the history, context, and systemic barriers that have developed over time across ACPS. It highlights a particular practice that sees students assigned to different levels of the same course or to a course with a different curriculum that is either more or less rigorous. This is important because it speaks to the resegregation of schools through racial ethnic segregation practices that have been underway since Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954, this according to experts on class segregation. And in evaluating the lineage of class segregation practices, Experts cite false ideas about groups of people that have long been proven untrue, yet continue to promote stereotypes about intelligence and capability, often based in bias. Experts believe that class segregation and one's location and mobility remain so fixed that one could regard students in
172disparate classes based on class segregation as following unalterably separate paths. Class segregation practices in ACPS represents a systemic barrier that has long determined student outcomes and access to secondary and post-secondary opportunities. From the extensive research of Doug Reeves, we know by the early 70s, the ACPS Gifted and Talented Program began to grow rapidly, resulting in separate pull-out classes for identified white students. And Reeves notes that very few diverse students were included in the Gifted and Talented Program. Fast forward to 1991, the middle school honors and general education program began as a pathway to advanced classes at T.C. Williams High School. It's important to note that in some instances, not all, but some, the historical and descendants of class segregation by race are mirrored in our current data practices. And now over to Ms. Peters. Thank
173you, Mr. Mazur. So now we'll transition us to look at specific programming that is in fact showing a positive impact on minority students who enroll in rigorous courses, and that's through AVID. Connecting back to our essential question, here's what we can learn from AVID. The AVID Center College and Career Readiness and Elective Curriculum focuses on opportunity knowledge, rigorous course preparation, and student agency. What our AVID teachers and site teams specifically do is break down barriers, insist on rigor, advocate and believe in the AVID-supported best practices. But the work doesn't stop at just being enrolled in these classes. The AVID elective also provides the necessary supports that students may need. These supports include explicit learning strategies for how to approach rigor and self-management, requirement of tools for mental, physical, and time organization. In-class tutors, 40% of
174the week, who work through students' point of confusion from their rigorous courses. And this serves as the Tier 1 and Tier 2 supports that our students need. Commitment to Abbott over time also creates what we like to call a posse effect. And this is when students learn together, struggle together, collaborate together, and even especially when they may feel like they are the underrepresented population in some of these classes. So what else can we learn? We can apply the AVID school-wide framework that you see here in the picture, where we have the same high expectations and equity for all. By examining and creating cultures and beliefs and equity through relational capacity, growth mindset, goal setting, and a continuation of SEAL lessons that focus on self-management. through including school-wide collaborative study groups as a tutorial model that
175can happen in the content area spaces, and by including AVID leaders in leadership decision-making where AVID lays the foundation and supports the school improvement plan and goals through systematic alignment, and by embedding regular training in rigorous instructional practices for staff. Our work lies in expanding the AVID elective, but also focusing on the domain indicators noted in the AVID school-wide model captured here in this image. And I'll now pass it over to Mr. Sampson, who will speak about academic advising. Thank you. So when we think about, you know, why we have open enrollment in ACPS. We have programs like the AVID elective that support students in their success. So a question that we may still have is why do we continue to see these disparities over time? And I really think that one of the key
176components is really this concept of academic advisement. You know, we do typically think about this as something that is supported by school counselors in the spring as they help students select their classes for the upcoming school year. But really, academic advisement starts the minute a student sets foot into a school or a classroom when they're being provided with messages about if they belong, where they belong. And if they feel like people are invested in them and they are invested in their ability to be successful in rigorous coursework. So not only does this really involve messages that are sent by administrators and school counselors and teachers, but it's also a collaboration with parents and students. And we have to think about it from multiple lenses. So access is one area where do we have a wide
177variety and bevy of opportunities and courses for students so that they can find something that they can dive into where they feel excited and passionate about going into a topic with maybe some deeper focus than they would in a standard level course. Then it's about the opportunity. So are we providing students with that personalized advisement? And that's certainly school counselors in those conversations, but it's also the messages and conversations that teachers have when they provide feedback to students and administrators so that they feel like they're getting information. that leads them. to be, you know, that they can see themselves and envision themselves in a course. And then lastly, we're looking at student achievement. So how are we supporting students to be successful in these courses? And that could be, you know, within the course itself.
178So again, are we providing them with the scaffolds and the supports that they need in class? Or do we also have opportunities like the AVID elective or other small group opportunities where students really can get additional support that really helps them to be successful in those classes. Next slide. So we do have a number of current initiatives and efforts within ACPS to really support these students. And you'll see on this slide a number of support programs such as boot camps and mentoring that we make available. I did want to highlight here that we also really try to look at data to find those students that really have the potential for an honors class or an AP or a dual enrollment course, but that they have not yet taken advantage of that. Are we making sure
179that we're identifying those students? and really trying to have those targeted conversations to support them in really exploring that based upon the data that we have. Next slide, please. And then over here, again, we have some additional information about interventions, but I also want to highlight a connection really to Mr. Mazur's slide where we really have to think about, you know, if this is our history and this is our background with... these courses and being used as a potential tool for segregation as a system, then we also need to continue to try to provide education and opportunities for our own school division staff about bias and about how some of our own practices may reinforce. these different levels of courses and different groups of students accessing them. So really, you know, through our Office of
180Equity and Alternative Programs in collaboration with professional learning and our school leaders, trying to make sure that we continue to provide these equity trainings so that school staff have opportunity to really explore those biases and think about how that impacts our practice with students. Okay, thank you. So next slide. Here we go. Action steps. So the question is, how will we use the data to drive our decision making? Well, through our action steps. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to very quickly go through each action step and sort of give you sort of an example of what that's going to look like. So our first action step, modifications to the current talented and gifted identification process as it relates to identifying underrepresented groups. Well, we are currently seeking alternative identification pathways,
181and we're looking for strategies that are research-based to identify and capture these underrepresented groups. We will incorporate these ideas, these research-based ideas, into the revised local plan, and we're looking at things such as building norms, talent search teams, etc. Our next step, incorporate research-based checklist items that focus on learning characteristics of students from underrepresented groups. Well, in addition to professional learning on the matter, this could serve as a possible tangible norm item or a classroom look for in our schools to guide teachers in properly recognizing talent and minimizing teacher bias, which the research shows is often what prevents teacher referral. Okay, so here's our next action step. Improving community outreach procedures. Well, that's pretty self-explanatory, but I'm still going to give you a little bit on that. Going to where the parents of our most
182needed groups are. So we give a lot of meetings and parent nights in our home base at our schools. But what about going out to their community centers, going where they pick up their kids for after school programs and have a presentation already ready to go. Meeting people where they are, in addition to utilizing the technology that we have available. utilizing brochures, pre-recorded webinars, and so forth. Okay. Update the TAG plan to address pushing, pull out, and flexible grouping as ways to address differentiation. Well, continuing the work of the differentiation task force that we did start, and it was delayed due to COVID, including this work in the local plan, featuring it, focusing on best practices, strategies related to differentiated instruction through professional learning. Creating an alternative pathway for young scholars and AVID program candidates.
183Well, recruiting fifth grade young scholar students into AVID at the middle school level, doing that through information nights and so forth. Regular and ongoing professional learning for teachers and administrators. connecting to professional learning, to rectify the challenges that we just shared in the presentation. Just making sure that professional learning is relevant to where our needs are and not just representing something that we like to do. And last, identify gifted students from underrepresented groups, excuse me, such as English learners and twice exceptional students. So identifying those groups. Well, that kind of ties back to my very first point, revising our local plan, not lowering the expectations, but creating alternative pathways and modifying so that we can pass down that a bit wider and capture those underrepresented groups. Thank you. So we want to make sure that
184we have supports in place to ensure that we are supporting both our students and families with access to information and opportunities around our honors programs. So we will ensure there are honors information nights starting in our elementary middle grades. So starting as low as third or fourth grade so that we can start fostering the mindset that honors does exist and that there are advanced academic programs that our students can easily become a part of. And we also would like to reach our underserved parents about the program of studies and the courses of rigor and pathways information by providing opportunities for them to access nights and cultural parent groups and parent coffees through the FACE Center so that information is provided to families. The honors information nights, we will also host at the middle school level
185as well so that students do understand that. And we'll do it in conjunction with other nights. But so students and families do understand that honors can be accessed at any time. In addition to that, we are ensuring that we are intentional about the matriculation process for our students and soliciting teacher feedback regarding work ethic. mindset of students and also showing children that they can access advanced academics. It's just all about hard work and mindset. It doesn't matter how smart you think you are. It's all about mindset and hard work and working to ensure that we are fostering the mindset very early through our young scholars pipeline into middle school. also through our AVID pipeline while we have students in AVID starting in sixth grade, ensuring that they have the information and access to advanced academics
186as well. And now back to Mr. Sampson. Thank you. So we're also continuing to work on our academic advising practices and professional development with our school counselors in particular. And we really focus on equity and moreover, really this idea of not just thinking about how your conversations and recommendations to students, you know, what your intention is behind. those discussions, but it's also really about, well, we need to be concerned about how those might be perceived by that student on the other side of the desk or the screen, because we want to make sure that the message that we're conveying is received in a way that shows that we support that student, that we believe that they can be successful in more rigorous courses and that we want to find ways to support them both in
187the class and perhaps with additional supports to be successful in those classes. We really also want to work through the program of studies and we've worked with Teaching, Learning and Leading to Make sure that those the program has these pathways that students can access and see whether it's an English or whether it's in career technical education. And we will make sure that we're really communicating that to our community so that they're able to dive into the program of studies to get information for themselves and see the wide variety of classes and levels of rigor that are available to their children. And then finally, we're going to make sure that we're. refining and continuing to refine our academic and career planning process. We're working closely with tech services to make sure that we can put our
188academic and career plans within PowerSchool, as well as making sure that during our current seal time that we are providing curriculum that will allow students to do some work on academic planning as well as career exploration. And I'll turn this over to our two middle school principals. Thank you, Mr. Sampson. Transitioning to action steps that the middle school will implement at the secondary level, Mr. Mazur and I will discuss middle school action steps that will take place at Hammond GW, as well as Patrick Henry and Jefferson Houston. Mr. Ballas will speak to high school action steps on the next slide. The implementation of a summer honors boot camp will provide a strong start to middle school, as well as an introduction to honors for rising sixth grade students and students new to honors courses. Professional
189learning provides rich opportunities for school staff to develop and enhance their professional knowledge and practice. To that end, professional learning for staff on equitable instructional practice for minorities and honors courses will enhance the quality of teaching and learning, promote a safe classroom environment, and foster rising student achievement. In ACPS, we recognize the value of continuous professional learning to promote a culture of improved achievement and innovation. As a result, continued and ongoing professional learning for all teachers to include content and elective teachers on true differentiation, not only for honors courses, but also on promoting rigor in standard classes as well. And now I will pass this on to Mr. Mazur, who will continue the rest of our action steps. Thank you. Educating parents on the academic process as well as students. It really begins as students
190step foot in our school and parents as rising sixth graders. And we share with students that we believe that if they have an interest in the History Channel or current events, Shark Week, or creative writing and solving problems, that there is an honors class that is perfect for them. And that is our belief. And we share this with families and students. Also, throughout this pandemic, we've learned some really important lessons around outreach, and we've had some significant and strong virtual turnouts to a number of events for underrepresented populations. And in some instances, parents were unaware of our programmatic opportunities at our site and this new feature or format. platform allowed us to reach new audiences. So we will continue to partner with the FACE Center, combining our resources and continue to explore new outreach platforms,
191such as Facebook live streams and Zoom webinars. And we look forward to continuing to grow with these platforms because they're effective in reaching families that can't always make it to our sites. So as far as growing AVID Excel and AVID school-wide practices, we recognize that AVID is special. Regardless of life circumstances, AVID and AVID Excel students, they continue to overcome obstacles and achieve success. Students in AVID enroll in honors classes. They continue along a very rigorous path. We know from Ms. Peters that they go on to high school and take rigorous courses and they graduate and they attend college at a higher rate. Equally important, our AVID students are capable of critical thinking collaboration, and they set high expectations for themselves as learners. And we see these characteristics in our AVID students as they are
192prepared for increased academic rigor. And AVID also advances a strong social-emotional component rooted in collaboration and advancing the concept that all students have this intense desire for connection, safety, trust, belonging, and developing these social-emotional skills is really important work for students as they enter challenging environments. At our sites, I think we all agree that we continue to advocate for the expansion of AVID programs. Lastly, honors information sessions during advisement for our students. Once students are enrolled in our sites, our professional school counselors play a really important role. Students participate in academic planning, and this includes a career exploration piece that allows for goal setting, and then goal setting leads to discussions around interests, and this supports course selection. Again, we always look to support our students in making choices that challenge them in rigorous environments.
193And at the site level, we have processes in place that encourage professional school counselors, teachers, and other staff to recommend students for placement in the honors track. And this is based off of a number of look fors, including an assessment of a student's work, maybe test scores from universalist screeners, or perhaps the SOLs. But there are robust ways to view students to ensure that we're making, to ensure that they're taking rigorous courses within our sites. Thank you. Okay, and in continuing and expanding on some of the secondary action steps on this slide, you will see some essential actions that will be in place for addressing these disparities, including ramping up early parent and student communication about the benefits of advanced courses and the high school experience and their implications in your post-secondary plans. Also continuing
194and expanding our summer opportunities to support students in AP and advanced courses, especially for those students who are taking an advanced course or an AP course for the first time. We'll obviously continue to collect and analyze data about which students are dropping or wanting to drop from advanced courses and why and do some action planning around that. We also want to expand the number of teachers who are able to teach advanced courses. And specifically, what we want to do is ensure that sections of AP courses are taught by teachers that also represent the wider population of our student body. We want to continue to recruit additional students for the AVID elective to maximize the 12 plus sections and expand beyond. And as you already heard about AVID and the work that Ms. Peters leads is
195to explore and expand AVID schoolwide practices that we know work within the elective models to be schoolwide. And finally, work with student groups and organizations like the many that we have at TC to increase agency, advocacy, and training needs of our students and staff. And this brings us to our closure slide. So this is the end of our presentation on academic disparities and AP, TAG, dual enrollment and honors. And so on behalf of the group, I'd like to thank you all for providing us the time and venue to share on this important topic. But before I turn this over back to Dr. Hutchings, I would like to thank Dr. Mann, even though he opened us up here. I would like to thank him for his leadership here. And I also must thank Dr. Mozingo for
196her guidance, leadership, and tireless efforts for ACPS and in the development of this presentation, as well as our subsequent action steps. And now back over to Dr. Hutchings. Thank you, Mr. Ballas, and thank you all for a wonderful job today. I know it was a lot of information to share, and I know that you all are probably burning with questions. One point I just want to make before we get into the Q&A is that, you know, it is disheartening to see the fact that, you know, a lot of the data that we saw for several years in ACPS in regards to the academic disparities that is still prevalent today. And the way that we tackle changing the narrative and doing something different is by exposing what's wrong. And sometimes it's very tough to do because
197when you expose what's wrong, you got to do something about it. And that's why a lot of people don't want to expose what's wrong because then you have to act on it. But we are well already in to trying to develop our action and action has already occurred thus far, but we still have a lot more to do moving forward. But I just wanted to thank the board for adopting a strategic plan that. specifically states that we tackle academic disparities. This is one of our areas of focus. This is not just something we decided to present to the board. The board is saying, this is where your focus needs to be and what we need to be working towards to dismantle the systemic racism that we know is prevalent in Allentown City Public Schools. So
198with that said, I'm going to turn things over to Madam Chair to open the floor for questions. Thank you. Ms. Alderton is up first. Thank you, Madam Chair. I think I'll start off by saying one of the components of the presentation that I was excited to see was this notion of like really thinking about expanding AVID. I've always, you know, there's... I think anybody who's been in education for a while and been in ACPS for a while has seen like, you know, so many different initiatives roll through. And AVID is one that I feel like has really stuck and it has grown and been very successful. And so I've actually wondered lately. you know, why aren't we just avidizing all the schools? You know, like using that model as like the framework for how we
199do school, period. So I'm glad to see that. I really appreciate that. I think that's an excellent approach moving forward. My question is about students with disabilities because I think You know, often our kids with disabilities, you know, we have the data that tells us that they are actually usually performing above average and high average in their intelligence. But for some reason, we're not able to get that out of them based on whatever. they're experiencing as a result of their disability. So I'm just wondering, you know, what are our thoughts on increasing participation for kids with disabilities in, you know, higher level courses? Because, and I even hate saying higher level courses, but I would say rigor, because we already know that we have some disparities within that group. And so, you know, how have
200we thought about or have we thought about, you know, kind of creating a merge there, like, you know, merging the work with a little bit of a focus on that as well. And I'm sorry if that's a super big, broad question, but. Well, first of all, I was still thinking about the whole advertising, the whole school division, because I know that Ms. Peters was like, yes, Ms. Alderson, you are spot on about that one. And we've had several discussions about it. But now we honestly, we have data to support, you know, how it works and how it can impact the lives of black and brown children. Like we now have data to support that. Whereas we started this avid work. when I was here in 2010 to 2013. So kudos to Ms. Peters because she
201has been the constant with that work. I'm going to turn things over to Dr. Mozingo to chime in to assist with your questions, all of a sudden. Thank you so much for that super big question, for sure. And we certainly agree with you about AVID. We are all definitely proponents of AVID. And it is, we talked yesterday about this. It is a support system that can ensure the success of kids. And there's tremendous evidence of that here in Alexandria. I think the other question or the comment I would make is. The reason that we brought this presentation was, Ms. Alderton and others, was really to begin to illustrate that there are groups of children, like our students with disabilities, some of our English learners, that have not had some of the opportunities, whether it's in
202Young Scholars, whether it's to even to be identified and to receive the support. So a part of this plan and an action step is to begin to unpack that and identify ways in which Those groups of students can be identified and can get the support that they need in order to be successful. Your question actually is like a national question because this is a phenomenon everywhere. Honestly, that students with disabilities and as well as English learners are not always identified. So the first is the identification. And Tiana mentioned this tonight. One of the goals is to develop. modify our identification process, not to lower the standards, but to modify the process to make sure more students have the opportunity for advancement. Last week, the TAG Act group brought in, some of you will remember Dr.
203Jonathan Plucker, who spoke to our high school group. What he talked with the TAG Act group about was that there are actually more students within any school division that should be identified than you typically identify. So a goal going forward is to, as Tiana has indicated, and some of the work that Jonathan is doing, is to review and revise. And that was in the audit. The identification process. The other is that, which was a great idea that our superintendent had was this notion of a talent team. We have to get this team formed that can go in our schools and to help us identify those kids with this potential and provide them the support that they need. So to make a long story short, I think that this presentation illustrates an awareness, it illustrates and
204a commitment to that. The other last piece though is once you identify the kids and you provide the support, you have to put in place a monitoring system to make sure they're still getting access and the support that they need to be successful. But it is a commitment to identify more of our English learners and students with disabilities, even as twice exceptional. It's a long response, but a passionate commitment to that. Can I add something, Dr. Hutchings? Ms. Alderton, as your question, I think it's a combination of the two. We know specifically at the middle school, we've seen an increase in co-taught honors classes for our special ed students. I think it may be a combination of avid elective for some of our special education students if they need that as support. And so we
205think about, as Ms. Peters, I think is drilled into all of our heads who have known her for a while, that that AVID elective is a crucial part of the support for those students. So do we think about, so now that we are beginning to have more and more co-taught honors classes, what do the levels of support look like? Not every student may need that, but that may be something that we think about moving forward as we continue to explore and look at our data and what our next steps may be. Okay, thank you. Next up, we have Ms. Gentry. Thank you. It's my great regret that I... didn't have AVID because I could have used Cornell notes in college. So I yeah, so yay AVID. I'm also very happy to see that our school
206board representative has got her hand raised because I'm really looking forward to hearing from her and I know I trust the staff is talking to our students because I've been so impressed with the insight that they've given about their experience you know going through and some of the you know at different moments whether you know they've They have these very clear memories in elementary school or middle school or high school. And so I know that will be an important piece of the information that you're gathering. I just wanted to highlight one thing that I heard in this very thorough, really great, exciting presentation that I was happy to hear, which was the idea about... um really increasing and intensifying the the differentiation not only in the honors classes but also in our our standard level
207classes too i think that's a really um i think that's a really important idea for us to hold on to and you know Of course, a lot of this was talking about the AP classes and the honors classes or the dual enrollment classes. But I do think part of what might need to happen in order to help us change some of the percentages that we're seeing on some of those slides is for people to I think there might be some misperceptions out there or maybe this is just a thing that we need to work on. you know, if we can show that we're providing the right level of rigor for a kid when they're in a standard class, if for that particular subject at that particular time, that's where they need to be. I think
208that can be really, I think that can be helpful and valuable. And where I'm going with this is, and I really don't expect an answer to this. I'm actually throwing out this question for all of us. as we go through the next, you know, several years of this strategic plan, to think about what kind of ultimate goal are we going for? Because, you know, I think it's very easy for us to say, well, obviously, we want the percentages to go up for some of these, you know, for, you know, we want the percentage of Black students in tag identified to mirror their percentage in the school or we want the percentage of, you know, of Black students to measure, you know, the percentage of, you know, we want that comparability. But if we want that
209across all of them, then I think we, you know, we're going to have to think about what does that mean in terms of what we're offering you know, what kind of expectations are we and do we have for the students when they're in these classes? Because I do think historically these classes have maybe been used in different ways that are not necessarily tied to a student trying to achieve rigor. So I guess what I'm just saying is all of the things that we're talking about right now, I think are great and absolutely the steps that we need to take. because we need to make sure that some of these underrepresented populations are more represented. But ultimately, I think we as a group need to think about what kind of percentage do we want to see?
210What's that success number we're looking for across all of our groups? I think when you get into, and I know Mr. Page is not on this call tonight, but I think one thing that when we're looking at our data, we're going to know that we're being successful is when we look at TAG and advanced placement data. And when you look at the percentage of that population for the school, that you can see a representation in those areas as well. So for example, when I was looking at the high school data, right? And when you see that there's 27% of Black students at T.C. Williams, and when you look at one of the specific areas in honors, that was one of the categories, you also saw 27%. That means that that is a comparable representation. That
211is a good sign, you know, for us. We want all of our data to look like that, because that then demonstrates that we're able to find you know, those students who are meeting these, you know, guidelines to be in these upper level courses or to be in TAG or whatever that situation is from these multiple groups. So that really is the success rate for us. And one thing that we do want to prevent ourselves from doing is And a lot of school divisions across the country do this, and it kind of gives false hope. They change their program so that everybody's in AP and everybody's in AP saying we went from zero to 100, right? When you really didn't go from zero to 100, you know, overnight, because then when you pull the actual data,
212you're seeing that students are scoring ones and twos, you know, on those AP exams. And some can argue that. that experience is valuable even if they fail the course. But we have to think about the social and emotional. state of students too. That is not valuable if you're working hard and you keep getting ones and everybody else around you has fours and fives. Like that's not going to make you feel good about yourself. So we want to make sure that we're setting a foundation. And this is why we can't wait to high school to start changing these numbers. We have to tackle this at the elementary level with our talent search teams and identifying those students, whether they have a special ed background, whether they have an EL background, whether they are from a low-income
213family, whether they are underrepresented, you know, just because some of these students may have different, you know, experiences or upbringings doesn't mean they don't have the ability to do more rigorous courses. So I don't know if that completely answered your question, Ms. Gentry, but I hope it gave you some insight to where you're headed. No, that's great. Like I said, I'm not sure this is an answerable question for the evening, but yeah, thank you. Thank you. Next up, we have Ms. Sanchez Villafara. Hi. I just wanted to say some comments about the presentation. I just want to say thank you so much for this presentation, and it was absolutely wonderful, especially the action steps moving forward, because I do feel that the academic disparities that we see from pre-K through 12 is something that we
214definitely need to change, and it's just, it inhibits our success from, you know, wanting to say that we have equity at the center of everything when that's one of the biggest things that hinders us from doing so. And I am just a living testament to how great AVID of a program is because I started AVID when I was in ninth grade and I've been in AVID since then and it's just been a program that has helped me so much throughout my high school career. And it just, it's helped me with, you know, taking these rigorous courses and it's just provided me that support that I especially need, knowing that I'm, you know, one of the few students of color in those spaces. And I just like to think of AVID as a program that fights
215against marginalization because it's just something that helps students and ensures that they have other options and, you know, they don't have to. that they can build their own path, their own narrative and just be successful in whatever way possible. So I just wanted to say that, you know, AVID is great. And I think it's a program that we should definitely implement and try to systemically align with the policies that we already have, because it's just something that can really shift that, those disparities that we see and help us achieve that goal of being more equitable as this entire school division. But that was it. So thank you again for the presentation. Well, thank you for your comments. That's really makes it much more powerful, the presentation. Next up, we have Ms. Lorber. You're still muted
216somehow. Yeah, you're still muted. Maybe. Oh, there you are. Okay. Okay. Yeah. This presentation just means a great deal to me, having been in our school system for so many years. And I really appreciate it. I think one of the reasons. I, as a board member, was very interested in hiring Dr. Hutchings is because I knew that this was a priority of his. And I also know that a number of those who spoke tonight, it's a priority of theirs. And it does have two parts. It's on the one hand, I'm extremely interested in the whole issue of self-esteem, you know, students doing what's right for them. because they're the issue of expectations and self-esteem, which I think is critical. The other piece, I think we didn't talk quite as much about, but I saw a
217presentation by some of the teachers at GW Middle School about it got into the issue of content. and making the content of the coursework more appealing to different groups of students. And I thought that was fascinating. And I think it's conceivable we could have pushback in the community around when we decide, gee, what do kids really need to know? And how well have we been teaching the content of our course to make it appealing? So to me, I just find the whole thing very exciting. we're going to be moving in the right direction. I appreciate Ms. Alderton's question about the thinking about where the students with disabilities fit in. I also very much appreciate Ms. Genfrey's point about don't we really want all of our classrooms to be, to have rigor, have something that attracts
218every student, even if you're so-called not moving into, you know, my goal, I guess, ultimately would be, I guess that's, was it Megan, did you say that? It was Avidyze, it was Avidyze the school system. But my hat's off to you all. I mean, this is a very exciting time and despite COVID and... you know, we'll move ahead and I think we're going to make incredible progress in the school system. So thank you. Thank you. Next up we have Dr. Reif. Yeah, I just want to echo what my colleagues have said. You know, this is really exciting. I think this is such an important initiative that we're all really committed to. And so I want to thank everyone for working on that. I think, you know, we always talk about the value that we have
219because we're a diverse school division. But I think the internal segregation that ACPS continues to have, it really is harmful to children. And I know you all know this, but I just, I feel the need to say it too, that, you know, childhood is a time of racial identity development. And when we have these disparities starting in elementary school, we're really teaching all of our children to internalize systemic racism, particularly if we do nothing about it or say nothing about it, as Dr. Hutchings alluded to. And, you know, this problem is not unique to Alexandria, but, you know, we do have a very diverse school division and the disproportionality that we see here is very significant. I wanted to, I have a question, but I wanted to make a couple observations about the data first.
220One is that I noticed, and if anybody wants to comment on this one, I'm done, that would be great, that the K-8 schools, the disproportionality seemed smaller in the K-8 schools, and I thought that was interesting, and I was kind of wondering, you know, about this. this line of discussion about how, you know, starting at the elementary and building up. And so presumably, you know, some of the students within the K-8 schools, they have been there for a longer period of time. So that's kind of interesting. On the flip side, we have a lot of turnover in our school division because of the transient kind of nature of our community. So also in the middle school, I noticed that math, the greatest disproportionality seemed to be in the math. which I thought was also interesting.
221And then at the high school, it would have been, I would like to see a breakdown by subject area. I think that would be really interesting to take a look at. But as far as the action steps, I guess, you know, I also really liked when Ms. Alderton, you know, talked about the avidization of our school system, because I think, you know, so many students can benefit from that, you know, the help with the executive functioning skills and the time management and all of those those different things. And I also I also was kind of curious about the student voice. What in what ways you all are reaching out to students to get feedback? And we just heard from Ms. Sanchez-Viafara who talked about, you know, how how significant AVID has been, but what In
222what ways are you getting feedback from the students to help find solutions to these challenges? And then kind of my last thing, which I kind of hear other people maybe moving in this direction, but should our goal be to have an honors for all model at some point in the future? That's what I would really like to know if we can get to that point. So those were a number of questions, Dr. Reif, in those comments. But just to quickly answer a couple of them, I'm going to turn things over to Mr. Ballas because he can talk to how we're engaging our students and getting some insight. We did conduct equity audits last year with our secondary students. And a lot of this information comes out of that. Our climate surveys and things of that
223nature. Students, they consistently share experiences that they're having, whether it's similar to how Ashley is experiencing it at the high school level with not feeling welcomed in upper level courses or just feeling that way. people asking, are you in the right class? Or, you know, are you sure this is the class you want to sign up for? Things of those, things of that nature, that does have an impact on the psyche of our kids. And many of our students feel, why should I even try to prove myself in this particular course when I'm walking through the door and you already don't believe in me? So us being able to hear the student voice in that way allows us to be as unapologetic as we are right now with what we need to change, right? Because
224that's That ends up being some black and brown children who go out into the world feeling as if they're not good enough and they never can be. That's what happens in society, unfortunately. So what we're trying to do is build not only them up. socially and emotionally, but also making sure that they have that academic foundation. So when they choose to do these advanced level classes, they are also successful and they can say, see, I told you I can do it too. That is when you have the biggest impact and it can shut people down so quickly. That's why I love that I graduated from William & Mary to say, I shut you down, right? You thought I couldn't do X, Y, and Z, but I went to one of the best colleges in the
225Commonwealth of Virginia, really across the country. a doctorate, the highest degree possible. Now you shut up, right? That's what I want our kids to be able to do too. And I'm that passionate about it because I know how it feels growing up in Alexandria. And unfortunately, the same issues that our kids that I talk to have today, I had when I was here, which is sad. I graduated in 95 and they're still having the same problems, right? So I know from firsthand experience that a lot has not changed. in regards to these experiences. But Mr. Ballas, if you want to talk to some of the student engagement, that can be helpful. Yeah, sure. Of course. I think, you know, you did capture a lot of it. And of course, no one says it better than
226Ashley. But we do get feedback from our students, especially students who, when they're in AP classes, we do engage with them about their experience. And we, for example, when, as I was alluding to earlier in the presentation, if students are perhaps wanting to drop the class. We look at, obviously we're engaging, is that a support issue? Is that a not feeling welcome or feeling part of the class issue? Is that I look around the class and I don't see anybody who looks like me type of thing. So there's a lot of time that we spend before we were just to get to an end of dropping a kid from a class. So we do get a lot of their feedback. And they do give us a lot of their feedback. And I also think that,
227you know, as kind of the gate, you know, we take a look at what we can control in terms of the setup and support of our AP classes and who are teaching them. And we're the, you know, bunch that the teachers and the administrators are the gatekeepers there. And we have to do what we can to remove any barriers or obstacles. And we get a lot of that information from the feedback as well. I just wanted to add. Dr. Reif, when you mentioned the AP data, we had to cut off the presentation at some point. We had way more data. And Dr. Hutchins would have said, the whole night's not this presentation. So we stopped. But we do have those datas by course at all levels. And then also, you mentioned honors for all, and
228you mentioned the math data. We know that at middle school, that really is a gatekeeper course all the way through. from middle school all the way, well, actually starting from fourth grade all the way through you graduate from T.C. Williams. But there's a proposal at the state right now that would change that gatekeeping course, that it would be, can students take the same math course, essentially I'm paraphrasing here, but from kindergarten to 10th grade. So there's no more algebra one, geometry, sixth, seventh grade math. They've come up with an entirely different concept. And so. That has huge implications for us as a school division well before the state board votes on it because the current students are actually in third grade now. And so as we think about some of the things for our local
229tag plan, as we think about creating equity in our classes that we're saying everyone's going to take a math class and all of our math classes from kindergarten through 10th grade are rigorous. That's a different conversation for us and will be a different one for our community moving forward. And then lastly, in our planning for these, we did discuss our K-8 data. And I think Ms. Bynum's data is very unique because she's had her students from kindergarten to eighth grade. But at Jefferson Houston, we also talked about how these data will look in several years as we know the lower grades at Jefferson Houston are. wider than they are at the middle school level. And so those middle school metrics on their slide were just the middle school. And so would we see a change
230in the next three to four years as the younger grades move up? And so that's something we'll continue to look at. But I just wanted to, and you mentioned middle honors for all. The state, I think, is ahead of us by saying we're just going to wipe out acceleration ahead of time before people even go down that road. I did want to say one thing that has been a plus for us, and I know I can speak for Priyan Johnson as well, the principal of Polk, is the Young Scholars Program. providing children the opportunity to have, you know, advanced academics at a very young age, starting in kindergarten and first grade, and then continuing and fostering some of the Abbott principles as well with the Young Scholars principles. So kind of putting them together in
231a little sandwich. It really does work. It really is all about mindset, and it goes along with the concept of self-confidence. and really building the soft skills that the kids need in order to remain resilient. So when they stumble, they pick themselves back up and they keep going. And that's something that has really worked for our school. When I first arrived to Patrick Henry, we had a very small, small number of children who were accessing advanced academics. And we purposefully worked to grow. that number, especially with children of color, because they're, you know, they can do the work too. And they have the drive. You just got to foster. You have to tap into the potential that the children have. And so I really would, you know, just speaking from being one of the pilot
232schools, along with Priyan Johnson and Polk, for young scholars, I really would love to see young scholars push ahead as well and to be in all of our schools. Great. So I'm trying to do a time check because we're trying this out and we're getting behind. I'll just admit that we're behind. So we do have three more people with their hands raised. So we will go through there and then we'll see if we can move on to the next topic. I have Ms. Nolan up first. Thank you so much, Chair Anderson. Given the time constraints, I'm just going to share my question and then maybe it's a response that Dr. Hutchings, you can just share with the board later on, maybe via email or in a later discussion at the board. So anyways, I just
233wanted to say, first off, thanks so much. I have to say that it's just such a talented group of people that we have are so fortunate to have such as leaders. I mean, to have, you know, Principal Bynum, Ballas, Mazer, Peters, like you're just such exceptional school leaders. And we're so fortunate to have you. And I'm definitely I'm trying to become president of the Jody Peters fan club. I don't know if it'll ever happen because there's so many people vying for that. You know, and also, Mr. Sampson, we're so fortunate to have you. So if there's ever going to be a group. folks who are going to you know make this and ensure that this is a priority for the school division and really has not only the the intelligence the competence but also the
234passion for this topic like we couldn't be in better hands as a division so again just want to thank each and every one of you sincerely from the bottom of my heart um my question again just um in the essence of time let's let's discuss it at a later time but i just want to put a pin in it i think I think we, like I said earlier, we have the people in place. It's really those on the ground, like the folks I just mentioned that are going to know the right path and the right plan. So I just feel like our job as a board is to make sure that we're providing the resources necessary for, to implement the plan. So what I'll be curious about down in the future is to know the
235cost associated, you know, with these. programs that, you know, we've seen what works, we've seen what needs to be course corrected. So I'll just be interested to keep my eyes open for what is going to be the budget implications that we as a board can then really back this up and make sure we're getting behind this talented team and their plan. So that's all, again, for a later discussion. But thank you all, everyone, for the presentation. Thank you. Mr. Suarez? Yeah, I didn't have a question. I just wanted to commend the staff for this presentation. I really thought it was thoughtful in terms of not only the team approach to the presentation, but also just in terms of really owning this data, some of which is, you know, troubling, but, you know, the fact that
236we're owning it and we really want to tackle it head on is exciting and really speaks to the, you know, the sort of character and the goals of the division and that you all want to move forward with all this. So that's just really exciting to me. So I just wanted to thank you for that. And also thank you for. talking about the historical piece too and some of the historical roots of these segregationist type of tracking tactics. And I appreciated the sort of nod by Dr. Hutchings as well to the notion that there are school divisions that have kind of tried to rip the bandaid off with this out of principle because of the segregationist nature of some of these types of policies, but that we need to do this in a thoughtful way.
237to ultimately maybe build to a situation where, as Dr. Reif alluded to, we don't have to have these sorts of tracks because if we can set high expectations for all learners, perhaps we can get to a point where that's not necessary. So I just wanted to commend everyone for their thoughtful presentations and owning all of this data that is tough to talk about sometimes. Great. Thanks. Ms. Alderton? Sorry, I'm last. And thanks for letting me go again. I just wanted to put a plug in around the growth mindset piece too, because that is so important. I've been doing, I've been immersed in a lot of reading and math intervention work and all of the good programs now actually start with growth mindset. Like you don't even get into the actual, you know, skills of math
238or reading without starting with a couple of sections on growth mindset. So it just made me, it came to mind to just highlight that as also to, you know, I'm glad it's important. I've actually heard it happening in the SEAL during the SEAL time, which is really cool. I've heard the teachers talking about it amongst themselves, which is very cool. And also I think it relates to, I just wanted to relate that to what Ms. Ruth brought up about the math. I think applying that concept to try to sort of strengthen kids, just confidence with math could go a very long way. And finally, there's a lot of research as well that talks about how teachers' attitudes about math. affect student outcomes about math. So that may be something to explore too and sort of
239strengthening, especially at the elementary levels usually where, you know, teachers aren't specialized in math. So just throwing those things out there, it's other things to think about because math is a difficult area. Great. Thanks. Yes. On that last point, I've heard that, you know, parents saying that, you know, when a teacher says, oh, well, we just have to do math. We'll just get through it. You know, like, no, math is fun. That's what we need. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So great. All right, everyone. We're on to the next topic, which is the program of studies. Dr. Hutchings. So at this time, I'm going to turn things over to Dr. Mann to talk about the program of studies. Thank you, Dr. Autis. I do have one question. Ms. Nolan, will you start my fan club since you
240can't be her president? I absolutely will, especially since we always get to talk about alternative programming when we connect. So huge fan. Okay, thank you. I'll email you offline about that. It comes with a membership card and everything. Yes. Thank you again. This will be the last time you hear from me tonight. As most of you are well aware, there's no presentation with this, but I'm glad we always have a time for us to go back and make sure we didn't miss anything. And I can't believe I'm embarrassed to mention this, but I'm glad between all the people who helped review this that we did miss one class, which is important for our dual language class, our dual language program to continue to roll up. And that is the dual language Spanish U.S. History II
241class. And so that's the only addition. That's important. We had the other class listed last week, not last week, two weeks ago when I did the actual presentation. But that's the only update to the program of studies for the board. And so, Dr. Hutchins, I'll turn it back over to you. Madam Chair. Yes, thank you. So this is something that's for action. So if there, so we have questions or at some point we need a motion. Ms. Gentry? I'm ready to make a motion, Madam Chair. I move that we adopt the program of studies. Second. Mr. Suarez seconds Ms. Gentry's motion to adopt the program of studies. I will call for the vote on the item. Cindy Anderson, yes. Veronica Nolan, yes. Megan Alderton, yes. Amy Gentry, yes. Jacinta Green, yes. Margaret Lorber, yes. Michelle
242Reif, yes. Christopher Suarez, yes. And Heather Thornton, yes. Okay, that's 9-0 for the program of studies. That felt good. We caught up some time then. Okay, so next up is legislative agenda, which I sent an email saying that we already did vote on the legislative agenda, but after the legislative breakfast in Arlington, or virtually with Arlington, there was a request by one of the... Arlington delegates about DACA students and we had had similar things. We had had something actually for in-state tuition but they made that a law so kids are getting in-state tuition now. There seemed to be something about the grants. We tried to get more details from the representative, but he did not respond. But this is what Lilla Wise said would cover what he was asking for. So I don't know if
243anybody has some. Some of you were at the breakfast. I know. So if there are no questions or if we can also just get a motion to add this in, if no one has a problem. Ms. Gentry? I'm sorry, do we need to make a motion or do we just need to adopt because now what we're looking at has this piece in? Yeah, I think we need to, because it's an alteration to it. So I think we need to adopt this amended one. But I mean, we don't need it. It's not two votes. It's one vote, too. Oh, it's one vote. Yes. Yes. Okay. Just approve it the way it is now. Right. Okay. So I'll do that. But really quick, as long as I've got the mic, I just want to thank Dr. Reif
244for helping organize an opportunity for board members to speak with. our delegates and senators that, state senators that represent our areas. I think it was a really great opportunity for us to have some school specific one-on-one time with them. And I really enjoyed the opportunity to do that. So thank you very much, Dr. Reeve for that. And I think they will now. read this legislative agenda that we're about to approve and carry with them the memory of our discussions. So with that said, Madam Chair, I move that we adopt the legislative agenda. Second. Ms. Lueber seconds Ms. Gentry's motion to approve the legislative agenda. I will call for a vote. Cindy Anderson, yes. Veronica Nolan. Yes. Megan Alderton? Yes. Rami Gentry? Yes. Jacinta Green? Yes. Margaret Lorber? Yes. Michelle Reif? Yes. Christopher Suarez? Yes. Heather
245Thornton? Yes. Okay, that's 9-0 for the legislative agenda. Next up, we have the school board meeting calendar. And is that, Ms. Nielsen, are you going to speak to that? I'm not sure who's going to... Actually, our next item is the CIP quarterly report. Oh, my goodness. Well, so sorry about that. No problem. Thank you. Yes, the CIP quarterly report. There it is. Dr. Hutchings. Oops, sorry, pushed the wrong button. Sorry, I didn't mean to turn off the camera. I want to turn things over to Dr. Hart, who's going to go into our quarterly report. And just to keep in mind that our first quarter report is from July through September. I just wanted to make that point in regards to our CIP and just know that we're still rocking and rolling, even though we're in
246a global pandemic. So Dr. Hart, I want to turn things over to you. Thank you so much, Dr. Hutchings, and good evening again, board members. Today, I'm actually going to turn it over to Mr. John Finnegan. He is the acting director of educational facilities and has been instrumental in making sure that our projects continue on the non-capacity side of the house. So, Mr. Finnegan, you can take it away. Thank you, Dr. Hart. Good evening, board and visitors. Going through the presentation tonight, we will be answering the essential questions that we usually do. What constitutes a CIP? What progress was made during the last quarter? What funds remain? And what progress is anticipated in FY 2021 second quarter? Susan, if you could move on, please. The CIP is constituted by the facilities, curriculum, technology, transportation, and
247safety and security programs. Susan, if you could forward, please. So this is our current quarter spending progress for Q1 of 2021. You see a lot of large million-dollar items on here for different schools. I would like to point out that a couple of those, Douglas MacArthur is for the current modernization. That's $10 million that you see there. A lot of the other schools have a couple million dollars here and there. That is due to some of the... programs that we undertook for roof and HVAC, which are typically more expensive items. And then just reminding everyone that we were able to consolidate and move forward the schedule on some of the phase twos. So that's why you see some of the large dollar values there with a grand total of a little over $68 million. Susan,
248if you could forward, please. And here is the breakout. That's the total fiscal year budget with the rollover and then the expenditures through the end of the quarter. giving us the $68 million total. Capacity project updates. The high school project, the design is ongoing. That continues to move as well as the Douglas MacArthur modernization. That is still in the planning phases. They are refining the documents, but that is still in progress moving forward. Susan, if you could forward, please. Just to go into a little bit more detail of some of the projects that we are working on and some of them that we completed in the quarter. First of all, FT Day Elementary School, the elevated gym. As you can see from these photos, the steel is up. We are further along now. Most of
249the framing is complete. The roof is 90% complete. Vapor barrier, 90% complete. And windows are about 80% complete. So we will have that structure fully enclosed and watertight within the next few weeks. And the anticipated completion is early spring. George Washington Middle School. This is to recap, this was flooring throughout the school. So in the A wing, which is the oldest section of the school, we did remove the VCT, which is vinyl composite tile. That is very old tile that was in there. There are a couple of layers and it had asbestos mastic underneath. We were able to remove all of that, all of the hallways, stairwells. in some other outlying areas including some workrooms, offices, etc. And we did put down nicer flooring which is luxury vinyl tile. And one nice aspect of that
250is to free up some time for our staff. These floors do not need to be waxed, they just need to be swept and wet mopped. And then in anticipation of quarter two, we are moving forward with some additional spaces around the school to continue some of that flooring while we have the empty building. John Adams Elementary Kitchen and Cafeteria, this project is complete. The kitchen is actually functioning now and it is being used to support school nutrition services meal program. Susan, if you could go forward. Lyles Crotch, there's a drainage study going on at that school that has been a continual problem. We did get an engineer on board. They have assessed the site, historical documents, and city files, as-built, etc. And basically, the drainage issues have been outlined. We do know the sources of
251the issues. An engineering plan is being developed. Currently, and the next step will be to do some asphalt borings, which will take place over the holiday break. That will give us an exact understanding of the depth in the status of the soils underneath the parking lot. And then we will finalize the improvement plan and go in for permit submission early next year. After that, we will go out for an invitation to bid to make the actual corrections. Suzanne, if you could go forward. William Ramsey, we replaced all of the roof on that building. It was one of the phase one and phase twos, which phase one was this summer. Phase two, we did advance from next summer to this fall. Phase one is complete. Phase two is substantially complete. We are working on punch lists
252that just includes a few skylights and some metal flashing around the parapet walls, but that will be finishing up in January. If you could. Okay. Key ongoing and upcoming projects. Again, we've got a handful of roof projects here. Francis Hammond Middle School. We are currently working on the D wing, which is on the far east side of the school. The section that is accessed through the skywalk. The new roof is on. It's substantially complete and we're also working on the music and band section just off the auditorium which would be on the far north side of the school. The punch list is ongoing in both of those areas will be complete in early January. George Mason Elementary School, this was a roof repair. We had leaks throughout, but we did a little bit different approach
253here to gain some extra life out of this building while recognizing that it is our next modernization project. So what we did is we actually did a liquid applied membrane over the existing membrane to get another 10 or so years of life out of that structure. As of last week, it was substantially complete and the punch list is ongoing. Matthew Morey roof replacement. This is a phase two. We did a phase one last summer. This year, we basically did over the kitchen cafeteria as well as all of the classrooms on the north section of the school. We are getting close to substantial completion and that project will be finished at the end of January. And then finally, Mount Vernon, the kitchen and servery and cafeteria upgrades that is ongoing. The design is nearing completion. Design
254documents are done. Construction documents are about 90% done. Recently, we added some services for the architects so that we could do some clear story windows to allow some more light into the cafeteria and outline some of the asbestos issues in that space. We will be going in for permit submission in January. And Susan, if you could go on. So in summary, that is a lot of what was finishing up in this quarter. Things obviously are still progressing. We have been doing a handful of other things to take advantage of the empty buildings and keep construction moving. It actually has been a benefit to us to be able to take advantage of that. And we will, of course, use the data to drive these priorities and expenditures. We are using some innovative approaches to the CIP
255and saving taxpayer dollars by doing a more comprehensive look at some of the issues on these sites. You know, sometimes these buildings have had additions and additions and additions over the years to where you've got a school that is really five separate buildings. So we're trying to make sure we take a more holistic approach to some of the issues. And again, at the end there, we are... being aggressive with our timelines, we are advancing a lot of things and getting these aged facilities into a much better state because some of these issues, even on the outside of the buildings, ripple into the inside with water intrusion and possible mold, et cetera, et cetera. So indoor air quality is another big thing that we have been addressing. Are there any questions? Okay, with no questions. I
256think there's, yes, Dr. Reif. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation, Mr. Finnegan. And I love your background, by the way. That's pretty awesome. I just, I have a question, but first I just wanted to comment about the Douglas MacArthur project. I was talking to Dr. Hutchings about this. We, you know, we're continuing to hear from people in the community who are really concerned about not wanting to lose those parking spaces and, you know, not wanting to lose the learning area or the community room. I mean, some of those. those things that I think will really benefit the community. You know, whereas I think the design has a lot of neat features, I mean, I just think the community would rather see some scale back in those areas versus losing, you know, something as critical
257as parking that's really going to have the long-term impact that we're going to have to deal with. And I know you all are working on that. My question was about around communications. I think, you know, like looking at the facility's website, it's been really great the way, you know, the different projects are broken down in each school. It links to each school's website and talks about the different projects that are going on. And my question was just if you have the resources you need to keep like updating. those web pages. And then also if you are in addition to like doing the updates, kind of flagging some of these things for the school community, because I know I had been contacted by some Lyles Crouch parents about the drainage issues. And I don't recall seeing
258anything like in their newsletter about this work that's been happening. So just kind of wondering in addition to like the things you might post online, like how it's being shared out for the school communities. Before you jump in, Mr. Finnegan, I'm not sure if Ms. Gulick is still on the line, if she can address. We have just hired a new CIP communications specialist, Ms. Erin Metcalf. And part of her work program will be to help us with our communication process and protocols specifically around our capital improvement program. Erica, I'm not sure if you want to speak a little bit more to Ms. Metcalf's work program. Sure. Thank you. And thanks, Dr. Reeve, for the question. So as you may know, Mr. John Finnegan and I kind of share the CIP. And so we recently just
259hired a CIP communications specialist, which is a really great support that we've added, been able to add to our CIP budget. She will be working primarily on just the projects that our two offices are responsible for. And that will include ensuring the websites are updated, ensuring our community meetings are notified publicly and that we're able to be really transparent through those projects. It's a new position, so it's not really something that we've had that full-time capacity for before that we think will be a great support. She just started Monday, so we need to give her some time to catch up and learn all the standards and processes that we have, and of course collaborating with our communications and face teams, but we are looking forward to her work and do think we'll see a significant
260improvement in the next few months. That's exciting. That's yeah, that's exciting. We've been waiting for that for it was in a budget, I think along the first year on the board, maybe for some of us. Yeah. I'm sorry, Mr. Finnegan. So yes, that's exciting that she was just hired and that will help us on the website. You know, we were doing updates. We started this endeavor over the summer when, you know, we're very busy doing 80 to 85% of our work through the year. So we were able to get some updates on there with some photos, etc. But now that we have this new position, it will be a little more robust and it will allow us to update a little more often and be in constant contact with the community. as well as doing
261some other outreach on certain projects with PTAs, et cetera. Thanks. The website, it looks really good. So thank you. Thank you. Any other questions? I don't see it. I don't see any. And this is something that we're being asked to really accept. Madam Chair? Yes. I move that we adopt the CIP quarterly report or accept the CIP quarterly report. I can't. Ms. Alderton seconds Ms. Gentry's motion to accept the CIP quarterly report. I will call for a vote on it. Cindy Anderson, yes. Veronica Nolan? Yes. Megan Alderton? Yes. Rami Gentry? Yes. Jacinta Green? No. Oh, maybe you're muted. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Margaret Lorber? Yes. Michelle Reeve? Yes. Christopher Suarez? Yes. Heather Thornton. Yes. Okay, that's 9-0 for accepting the CIP quarterly report. Madam Chair, can I just make a little off-the-cuff comment? Sure, Ms.
262Lillard. We're under such pressure to not take extra time, but I feel like that report was excellent, just so impressive. And so I just wanted to say that because it's delightful to see that kind of progress being made in facilities, and we really appreciate it, especially as older old-timers. So thank you very much. Thank you. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Okay. Now, now we are onto the school board calendar, the school board meeting calendar. So Ms. Nielsen. Okay, good evening everyone. So every year we do plan for the following school year's calendar and this is a list of the school board meeting dates that we have and I'm just going to also share a visual view of the calendar, which is actually a better way to look at it. So basically, we have it scheduled so
263that we do start September 9th, which is a little bit earlier than we sometimes start. But because our school year is starting earlier, we're able to fit that in earlier in September. And then we basically meet about every other week. However, this upcoming year, we do have an election on the 2nd of November. So we've given a little grace before that week and that week of November. second so that board members and perhaps new board members don't have to scramble from an election on one day. Well, we wouldn't have new board members joining that day, but but not have to scramble to have an election and then show up at a meeting two days later. And then we go back to every other day or every other week, excuse me. And then in January, we
264have an org meeting on the 4th and that is on a separate night than normally. The one we're having coming up this January is on the same night as a meeting. So we have it combined. But in January, we actually have so much going on at the org meeting. and it's at another location and it's a ceremony, it's not just a meeting. So that is separate than the regular meeting which will happen on the Thursday of that same week. And then the only other real change is when you get to March. We have sort of an extra week in between the meetings at the beginning and end of the month in March. because we tried to avoid the 17th, which is Purim. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that correctly. So, which is one of those
265holidays that some people want and want to care about, and some may not care as much about. But we know that staff members might have children who might really want to celebrate that day. It's not one of the high, holy. holidays, but it is one that I think is important for families. And then when we get to the end of this calendar, it's a lot more complicated. I don't normally have to explain so much, so I apologize for that. But then we begin again after the spring break because we want to end in the third week of June, not the fourth, because our school year does end earlier this next year due to the early Labor Day start. That would just, I think, work out better for staff and perhaps even families who want to
266tune into our meetings. So does anyone have any questions? I guess not. I think thank you for the presentation. If there aren't any questions, I'll go ahead and make the motion. Well, I think this is just on for info. Oh, it is. I'm sorry. I apologize. This gets adopted at the organizational meeting. And if you're on a roll, I was trying to get things done. If you do have questions, feel free to email them to me. And thank you very much. Yeah, so it's good to have more eyes on. So look through and see because then the next, you know, next month we'll vote on it. But sometimes, you know, these calendar things can be tricky because as you're trying to avoid one thing, then you end up. Okay, so just to clarify, I do
267think maybe I didn't refresh or something. I think it says, I think on the agenda, it says action for the calendar. Oh, does it? Yeah, it does. I will correct that. My apologies for that. Sorry, I have too many things. I have like the- That's okay, it makes me feel better for- I have the printed one that Susan gives me and then I have the one from the e-board somewhere, but then I keep opening too many things. All right, yes. It says action, but we're- I will fix that on the agenda. It hasn't been in flow yet, so next time it will be action. All right, so- Now we are to, it says report from chair. I don't really, I don't have anything, but I do want to say the next meeting is on January
2687th. And that's when there's the board leadership election, the presentation of the combined funds of budget. And then we're going to have work sessions for the budget on the 14th and the 28th. So. That's it. But I do hope that everybody has some break. I know there's going to be a lot of working maybe done over the holiday, but best to all the board members and the staff and parents who are still watching for a happy holiday and a happy new different year. We all want that. All right. So now we're on to Dr. Hutchings' report. I don't have anything to report other than just happy holidays to everybody. And, you know, we really are fortunate to have so many talented staff members. who work so hard on behalf of our young people every single
269day. And they really don't complain. They come to work and they give 100%. And we are very, very grateful for that. I also just want to thank the board too. I know as we're going into this new year, I mean, we've accomplished so much in 2020 in spite of this global pandemic that we're all in. Just look at all of the wonderful things that are happening in Alexandria City Public Schools and look at all of the courage, our courageous and bold. decisions that have been made in regards to renaming T.C. Williams, Matthew Morey, adopting a strategic plan that says racial equity is the heart of our work. The fact that we're still moving forward with Douglas MacArthur and we're on time. We still have a high school project that we're working through and we're still
270on time. And the list goes on and on and we're still addressing all of the challenges that come along with this global pandemic. So just hats off to you. You all deserve a break too, just like we do. So I hope that you get some time to just rest and relax and to spend time with your family and friends in a safe manner, of course, socially distanced and with a mask. But happy holidays to you all as well. And any board member announcements? I don't see any. So now all we need is a motion to adjourn. Madam Chair, I make a motion the meeting be adjourned. Second. Ms. Alderton seconds Ms. Lorber's motion to adjourn the meeting. I will call for a vote on it. Cindy Anderson, yes. Veronica Nolan, yes. Megan Alderton, yes. Amy
271Gentry, yes. Jacinta Green, yes. Margaret Lorber? Yes. Michelle Reif? Yes. Christopher Suarez? Yes. Heather Thornton? Yes. Okay, 9-0. We are adjourned at 7.52.